November 4-25, 1943
TWO DAYS AFTER the Wilhelmshaven raid the 303rd took part in another PFF attack under the protection of P-38 and P-47 escorts. The target was Gelsenkirchen in the Ruhr, home of Happy Valley’s notorious flak.
The Group sent 19 B-17s out of 374 from the First and Third Divisions, while 118 B-24s from the Second Division launched an attack against Münster. All 303rd ships made it to the target, dropping their incendiaries with unobserved results due to industrial haze and a smoke screen. “Intense and accurate flak” damaged 15 Group ships and one, Ramblin Wreck, B-17F 41-24565, fell to fighters. She was a veteran 359th Squadron Fort on her 28th trip and was flown by one of the crews who had praised the P-38s for their work on the previous mission: Lt. Ambrose Grant’s, now on their eighth mission.
Lt. Carl Fyler saw Grant’s ship go down: “I flew No. 483 [Red Ass] leading the second element in the top squadron. There was lots of flak. The ship on my right wing had been hit. The trailing edge of his left wing was on fire. Red flames ate along the wing towards the gas tanks. I waved for the pilot, Lt. Grant, to leave formation and bail out. He was determined to get to target. They never made it.”
Ramblin Wreck fell out of formation on the bomb run and followed 400 yards below and behind the formation on the return trip. It was last seen under fighter attack about forty miles from the enemy coast at an altitude of 12,000 ft. Four parachutes were reported.
Sgt. Ed Sexton, the radioman who made the sign of the cross so often on Black Thursday, was wounded in the foot by shrapnel. Killed on his third raid was Sgt. J.J. Hauer, the replacement right waist gunner for Sgt. “Woody” Greenlee, who had been hit in the face by the exploding 20mm shell on October 14th. Shot down on his 23rd trip was Sgt. H.A. Kraft, a fill-in at the left waist gun for Sgt. Robert Jaouen, who was grounded for tonsillitis. (Jaouen ultimately completed a tour of 30 missions, flying his last operation on D-Day.) The others in Grant’s original crew spent the rest of the war in POW camps, but all came home unharmed.
Shortly after this mission the 303rd and 41st Wing were taken off operations to test a new weapon that Bud Klint remembers “was supposed to revolutionize daytime bombing. We received a shipment of so-called ‘glide bombs’ for a secret program called ‘Project Grapefruit.’ They were built like miniature P-38s, with a 2000-pound bomb as the fuselage. They had a glide ratio of nearly six to one and were supposed to permit us to hit heavily defended areas from outside of flak range.”
The Group tried the weapons, officially known as the GB-1, against some small uninhabited islands in the Irish Sea. At the time Klint quickly concluded: “These glide bombs aren’t infallible. Their accuracy is pretty poor, and the added difficulties they present to formation flying have to be ironed out,” and he recalls now that “When they were released they went in all directions, some spinning in, some doing loops, and very few going anywhere near the target.”
The way they were supposed to work. This photo shows GB-1 “Glide Bombs” being launched from a B-17E during weapons development and testing at Eglin Field, Florida (officially known as the Valparaiso Bombing & Gunnery Base) in 1942. Operational conditions in the ETO in 1943 doomed “Project Grapefruit” (the code name for use of these weapons) to failure. It is believed that this is the first time this photograph has ever been published. [Photo courtesy National Archives (USAF Photo 32348 AC).]
Merlin Miller remembers them as “just one big fiasco. I felt we were in more danger getting hit by one of those things than we were flying through flak on a mission.” Ultimately the whole program was cancelled—to everyone’s relief.
The 303rd returned to the mission roster on November 11th, when Pinetree organized a strike by the First Division against Wesel, Germany, and a simultaneous attack on Münster by the Third Division.
The Münster mission got through, but the Wesel operation was abandoned. Elmer Brown wrote: “We started out on a raid to Wesel. To be pathfinder at 27,000 feet. We were recalled within two miles of the enemy coast. We were at 29,500 feet and our lead and low groups were still heading into dense clouds.”
Two days later the Group went out on another effort stymied by weather. This time Brown wrote: “We started out for Bremen, but could not rendezvous the Wing, so we were recalled at the English Coast.”
It was not until Tuesday, November 16, 1943, that the 303rd was able to get another operation off. The mission was a long overwater flight to Norway, a country the Eighth had bombed only once before—on July 24, 1943, when the B-17s were sent to attack a nitrate plant at Heroya and the ports of Trondheim and Bergen. This time the Third Division was to hit a hydroelectric plant at Rjukan suspected of providing power to a German “heavy water” nuclear research facility. The Second Division was to bomb an aircraft repair depot at Oslo-Kjeller, and the First Division was to strike a molybdenum mine in southern Norway near the town of Knaben. The mine was a pinpoint objective on the side of a mountain, whose importance lay in the fact that it produced practically all German supplies of this vital steel-hardening mineral.
The 41st CBW led the Division, and the 303rd was low group in the Wing with the 384th as lead and the 379th high. Major Ed Snyder led the Group with Captain David Shelhamer in Mr. Five by Five. For Shelhamer this trip was special; it was his 25th raid and the end of his tour. With him was Lt. Paul Scoggins as lead navigator.
Hullar’s crew took the No. 4 slot in the lead squadron, and today they were a mixed bag. Mac McCormick was not aboard, nor was Bud Klint, who had been bumped out of the copilot seat by a Lt. Colonel Culbertson visiting from VIII Bomber Command. Klint “tried to talk Operations into letting me go as a waist gunner in place of Marson, who was in the hospital with his wrenched knee, but no luck. This put me one mission behind most of the other crew and two behind Brownie.”
Klint didn’t miss much. The only thing novel about the raid was the ship the crew drew: The Flying Bitch, B-17F 42-29795. She was one of the few B-17Fs equipped with the new Bendix chin turret (which was standard on the B-17G), and she was the first they had ever flown with this armament.
303rd Bomb Group Mission Route(s): Knaben, November 16, 1943. Route unknown. (Map courtesy Waters Design Associates, Inc.)
Mr. Five by Five got off three minutes behind schedule at 0718, but the 303rd soon caught up with the other two groups of the 41st Wing, falling in trail of the 384th Group and climbing to 20,000 feet to get over the weather and clouds while crossing the North Sea. Hullar’s crew settled down to what Sampson remembers “sure was a long, long, long trip,” with Brown noting that “we had to go up to 22,000 feet about halfway to Norway to get above some clouds.”
The one most agitated by the flight was George Hoyt, who recalls that “On the way our No. 2 engine was throwing oil very badly. I reported this to Bob Hullar, and he said to keep an eye on it. The stream of dirty black oil was running back over the top of the engine nacelle from the cowl flap openings, back over the top of the wing and off the trailing edge into the slipstream. We were losing oil way too rapidly from this leak, and my anxiety mounted by the minute.”
After nearly four hours the Group crossed the Norwegian coast. Hoyt “held my breath waiting for flak and fighters as we approached the jagged, mountain-scarred coast of Norway at our briefed altitude of 12,000 feet,” and Sampson “wasn’t happy about going in at this altitude at all,” but nothing happened.
Lt. Scoggins couldn’t fix his position. There were, he reported, “cloud layers at the Coast and scattered…cloud over the snow-covered hills…the shapes and sizes of the Fjords were hard to distinguish and there were too many lakes for accurate pinpointing of any one.”
As a result, Brown wrote, “We flew all over southern Norway trying to find the target. We split up into groups and there were B-17s all over the sky trying to find the target.”
The mission became a hit-or-miss proposition for all the bomber formations. Both the 384th and 379th Groups found the target and bombed it successfully, as did most of the First Division groups. But the Division’s 91st Group ran into the same kind of navigational problems the Hell’s Angels encountered, and the Second Division’s B-24s were unable to locate their target at Oslo-Kjeller. Three Liberator groups joined with the Third Division’s B-17s to make a successful strike against the hydroelectric plant at Rjukan, and 12 more B-24s bombed a chemical works there, causing major damage. Only two heavy bombers were lost.
Shortage of fuel forced the 303rd to abandon its search and head west. The Group crossed the Norwegian coast above the port of Stavanger, which gave Lt. Scoggins a chance to get his bearings, but “we didn’t have enough fuel to return to the target area after our position was established.” Then the enemy briefly came to life.
“At this point we noticed a couple of bursts of flak from a couple of ships there,” Brown wrote, but the only thing they achieved was to provoke one of the few disagreements Shelhamer and Snyder had during their service together in the war.
“The harbor was just loaded with ships,” David Shelhamer recalls. “We were fairly low, at about nine or ten thousand feet, and I debated whether we should open the bomb bay doors and drop the bombs, even though we didn’t know how many of the ships were German and how many were Norwegian. I wanted to drop the bombs anyway, but Snyder wouldn’t let me. I’ve always felt those ships were a target of opportunity, and that we blew the opportunity.”
Ed Snyder responds: “Our objective was to hit a pinpoint target in a friendly country, and we didn’t dare drop the bombs just anywhere. On the way out I remember seeing those ships in the harbor, and Dave Shelhamer wanting to bomb them, because there were definitely German military vessels down there. But I wouldn’t let him because I felt there was too good a chance of us creating an incident with our Norwegian friends. We weren’t briefed for this target, and I didn’t think it was worth the risk.”
Elmer Brown added that “We met enemy fighters at this point also, and they attacked us for about 30 minutes out to sea.” But he noted “only about 10 fighters, and like the few bursts of flak, they did not create much excitement.”
As Merlin Miller recalls: “They made only half-hearted passes at us. Just about the time they got to within firing range they broke away, circled around, came back, and did the same thing all over again. They were either real green pilots or afraid of a B-17 formation.”
George Hoyt remained the one most exercised by the mission:
“After the fighters left, my thoughts returned to that leaking No. 2 engine of ours. I sat at the radio room table and kept staring at it. Then my heart skipped a beat when I began to realize that the wing was accumulating ice on the top surface. ‘That’s all we need,’ I thought. The ice buildup could create so much additional weight, and alter the shape of the airfoil so much, that we could lose lift and not be able to stay airborne.
“I called Bob again, and he said, ‘Yeah, I’ve been looking at it, and it’s not good.’ The flight back seemed endless.”
Happily, the icing on The Flying Bitch’s wing got better as the 303rd made a slow descent during the return. Shelhamer reported that the bombers “proceeded back to England, letting down from 11,000 feet to about 1000 feet, coming back over the water under the weather as a single Group.
“At the English coast we encountered a bad snowstorm and broke up into Squadrons and climbed up through the low clouds. Due to gas shortage, I landed at Grimsby and the Squadron proceeded back to base.”
Elmer Brown wrote: “We hit the U.K. at Sunburn, which was quite a distance north. I believe it is in Scotland. Our lead ship had to land at an emergency field near there for fuel and I had to bring the Group home. It was a long mission as we were in the air eight hours and 40 minutes.”
Back on the ground, Hoyt remembers, “Bob Hullar had the ground crew pull the engine cowling off and check it out. Dale said there was less than two gallons of oil left in the 35-gallon oil reservoir. This engine was a license-built Studebaker Cyclone, and they were notorious oil-throwers. I wished we were back with Luscious Lady, but as things turned out we never got to fly her again.”
Paul Scoggins was understandably sensitive about his performance. Two days later he confided to his diary:
“I was lead navigator and I’m thoroughly ashamed! We flew all over Norway and didn’t find the target, because of a little weather and thousands of little lakes and fjords all covered with snow and looking exactly alike, I’m not feeling too badly about it—no one else knew where we were either.”
For David Shelhamer all such concerns were academic. His tour was over and he didn’t quite know how to take it.
“My last mission was just one big exercise in futility. I was rather mind-boggled for a few days as to whether or not to volunteer for five more, but the fact that I had a wife and a child back in the States who I hadn’t seen yet ended up being the determining factor.”
But Shelhamer did not leave right away because Major Snyder kept him on at Molesworth for 90 days ground duty, during which time he and Scoggins shared a room. Paul Scoggins now had no one left from his original crew. Two crewmates had gone down on an early mission with another crew; one had been killed in action; four had finished their tours and gone back to the States, and Captain Jake James got a transfer with the rest—“new boys, mostly” Scoggins noted—to the 482nd PFF Group.
There were many “new boys” entering the Eighth’s ranks at this time, for the Army Air Force was embarked on a huge buildup of Eighth Air Force strength designed to double the number of aircraft a bomber group could deploy. Eaker and Anderson were still committed to the offensive, and the next series of missions had as their objective a wearing down of Luftwaffe strength through massive PFF attacks on targets within P-47 and P-38 range. In short, a battle of attrition was in the offing: a series of no-quarter encounters between equally matched enemies in an arena without parallel for physical danger—the frozen air in late autumn at high altitude over northern Germany.
These missions were the closest one could come to a Stalingrad in the sky, yet to this day they bear no name. They deserve one that will place them on a par with the other significant phases of the European air war—“Blitz Week,” “Black Week,” the “Big Week” of February 1944, and RAF Bomber Command’s “Battle of Berlin.” “The Battle of Bremen” is apt, since this German port was the Eighth’s prime target for PFF bombing, with no fewer than five attacks launched against it between November 26th and December 20, 1943.
One of the 303rd crews destined to contribute greatly to these battles was Lt. John F. Henderson’s, a replacement crew assigned to the 358th Squadron, who arrived in the ETO in early October 1943. Because of the role they play in this book, brief introductions to them are now in order. The best way of meeting the ball turret gunner, Ed Ruppel, a 27-year-old from Passaic, New Jersey, is through his memories of what happened after the crew reported in at Molesworth:
“We were supposed to be replacements for the Schweinfurt raids, but we didn’t put any combat missions in right away. They took us by truck to gunnery training at a place called ‘The Wash’ on the coast of England.
“When we got there they took us into this big room, and the man said: ‘Everything you’ve ever learned in the States, forget about it! You don’t know anything! We’re going to teach you now what it’s all about.’
“This guy says, ‘First of all, we’re going to give you how long you’re going to live.’ And he went through each gun position, and he told us how long that guy would live. I forget how long he said the man in the ball would live, but it was very short. The two most vulnerable spots were the tail and the waist guns. A waist gunner had something like two to three minutes of combat. They said that combat could be three seconds, one pass and it was all over for you. It was all very hard-core.
“At the end they explained the reason why they were telling us this. The man said, ‘All of you that don’t want to go into combat, step over on the side. Nobody’s going to holler at you, nobody’s going to knock you down or anything, I just want to know now.’
“So somebody raised his hand and said, ‘Why the hell are you so interested in that?’
“The man said, ‘I want to know now that you’re going to quit. I don’t want you to quit when you’re upstairs, and mess nine other people up. Understand?’
“Then they started to teach us what it was all about. We were out there for days, going through various stages. In the last stage we fired .50-calibers at various silhouettes that were set up. Then we went back to Molesworth to fly practice missions with instructors to show us what we were doing wrong. When we finished, they figured we were ready for combat.”
There was one member of Lt. Henderson’s crew who took the gunnery instructor’s warning to heart. The crew’s youngest member was another New Jerseyan, 19-year-old William Simpkins from Egg Harbor. As he recalls:
“Our tail gunner quit after our first mission. He just up and said he didn’t want to fly anymore. We got George Buske as a replacement. He was an experienced gunner who had flown before, and he hung around with Ralph Burkart, our right waist gunner. Burkart was from Columbus, Ohio. Our left waist gunner was a guy named Stan Moody, from Maine. He was a real gun expert, a gunsmith or something. He hunted in the woods a lot and used to fool with guns all the time. Our bombardier was Woodrow Monkres from Oklahoma—small but tough. And our navigator was Warren Wiggins, from Long Island. He could really get you around.”
The crew’s radioman was Forrest L. “Woody” Vosler, from upstate New York. Ed Ruppel remembers that “Vosler was 20 years old, and as cocky as the day is long. He acted like he had the world by the tail.
“Our copilot was a guy named Ames, who had washed out of fighter pilot training. But he wasn’t with us for the first five missions. Instead, we had Captain Hungerford as our Instructor Pilot.”
The crew’s pilot is the man the others remember best. As Forrest Vosler describes him:
“Henderson was 29 years old and had many, many hours in the air, much more than the average pilot. He started out flying civilian aircraft when he was 16 years old. He had been in the RCAF, and then he transferred into the Army Air Corps, where he had to go all through flight training again. By the time he joined us he was a seasoned, tremendously meticulous pilot.”
As Bill Simpkins recalls: “We first met Henderson when he was a staff sergeant. He had been in the Canadian Air Force, and then they made him a flight officer. Before the war he and his brothers had an airport in California. He had flown for years, and he was a great pilot.”
Henderson’s crew was slated for the next maximum effort planned by Pinetree for November 26th, as were Hullar’s crew, Captain Don Gamble’s, Lt. Carl Fyler’s, and Lt. Bill Fort’s. After the Knaben raid the Eighth had launched a number of small-scale attacks, on the 18th and 19th of November, and the 303rd had not been scheduled for them. This next operation would make up the difference; it was the mission Norman Sampson remembers as “the most scary of them all.”