January 14-20, 1944
THREE DAYS AFTER Oschersleben, the Eighth’s leaders sent 552 bombers plus 645 fighters to strike 21 V-l “buzz bomb” sites in the Pas de Calais area of France. The 303rd’s target was a site at Le Meillard, and Bud Klint’s crew was one of those tapped for the raid. The effort wasn’t much, Klint felt.
“On January 14th we had another mission to fly. A few weeks ago we could put up 40 airplanes for a maximum effort, but on this day we did good to get 18 off the ground. We bombed from 12,000 feet. The Kraut gunners liked that—they knocked one ship out of our Group and put a wide assortment of holes in most of the others. We bombed in formations of nine ships with excellent results—all our bombs were in the target area.”
The missing ship was another veteran that Hullar’s crew had flown: Wallaroo, on her 35th raid. She was said to have “gone down before the target after being hit by A/A gunfire,” and “from three to ten parachutes were reported.” Her crew was a green one from the 358th Squadron; it was only the second mission for Lt. A.R. Arimdale and most of his men, but their Instructor Pilot was Captain Merle Hungerford, who had flown with Lt. John Henderson’s crew on the day Forrest Vosler won the Medal of Honor. Hungerford was, Bill McSween recalls, “among our best pilots.”
Overall losses for the Eighth were light: two B-17s, one B-24, and three missing fighters.
Several more missions were scheduled over the next five days but all were scrubbed. “Normal routine duties” were the rule, while at Molesworth an event of no small significance was brewing. But Brown, Hullar, Rice, and Hoyt were unaware of it as they took off on an errand with Major Ed Snyder and another officer, Lt. Knutson.
303rd Bomb Group Mission Route(s): Le Meillard, January 14, 1944. (Map courtesy Waters Design Associates, Inc.)
Brown wrote: “January 19, 1944, Wednesday. We went to Langford Lodge, which is just east of a big lake that is about 18 miles west of Belfast, Northern Ireland. At takeoff the ceiling was about 800 feet and visibility less than a mile. We flew in soup (clouds, light rain) with barely wingtip visibility all the way to the Irish Sea. It started breaking. Over the Isle of Man and Ireland there were just a few scattered clouds.”
George Hoyt remembers that “when we got over Ireland the visibility was good, and Bob flew in at low altitude, giving us a ‘Cook’s tour’ of the magnificent Irish countryside. It was overpoweringly green—even the ocean rocks at the coast were green, covered with algae—and as we went inland we saw the thatched huts that brought alive the geography lessons we had all had in school as kids. When you see Ireland this way for the first time, you know why they call it ‘The Emerald Isle.’ It was all unbelievably quaint. I felt like I was flying over a movie set for a fairy tale.”
The clear sky over The Emerald Isle was fleeting. Foul weather rolled in off the ocean. Brown wrote that “They would not clear us back to our base because of the weather, we had to spend the night in Belfast. It was after dark that we got to Belfast and we got up before daybreak, and as the town was blacked out I didn’t get to do any sightseeing. From what I could observe, it is similar to any English city. They do have a lot of streetcars here; some of them are double deckers. While in London, busses are about all that is available. We slept in a Red Cross Hotel. Major Snyder and Hullar had to sleep in one double bed, Knutson and I in another, all in one tiny room.” Hoyt and Dale Rice shared similar accommodations.
The next morning the airmen got down to the business at hand. “The reason for going to Ireland,” Brown recorded, “was to bring a plane of ours back that Coto [an officer in the Group] had to leave up there.” Hullar, Brown, and Hoyt flew her back while Snyder, Knutson, and Rice returned in the B-17 that had brought them there.
While both bombers were returning to Molesworth, the men discovered a crowd at the field. The scene was one worth recording and Elmer Brown wrote:
“We got to our home base about 1400 Thursday, January 20. We were surprised to see practically all personnel of the field out by the runway. We soon learned that Hell’s Angels was about to take off on the first leg of its trip to the States. Everyone that could painted their name on the ship, for it was covered with names. It was a thrilling sight to see everyone’s hand raised practically in unison waving goodbye to them as they took off.”
Hell’s Angels on her way home. “It was a thrilling sight to see everyone’s hand raised practically in unison waving goodbye to them as they took off.” (Photo courtesy National Archives (USAF Photo)
Hell’s Angels’ reputation had been firmly established in the States long before her return home. She was one of the original bombers the 303rd’s crews had taken to England in late October 1942, and on May 14, 1943, she was the first Fortress in the Eighth to complete 25 missions against the Reich. Though this fact was obscured somewhat by the earlier return of the 91st Group’s Memphis Belle (the Belle was first Fortress to fly home with a crew that had completed a 25-mission tour), Hell’s Angels soldiered on, establishing a record of reliability unequaled during the early, grim months of the air war by any other bomber in the ETO: 40 straight missions without an abort.
In 1943, wartime security measures still precluded use of the numerical designations the Eighth’s units carried, and the public came to identify with the 303rd through the many news items that featured the Group’s most publicized ship. The name stuck when, after what The First 300 calls “several weeks of suggestions, debate, and argument,” the Group decided to make the bomber’s name its own.
Hell’s Angels flew her 48th and final combat flight on December 13, 1943, when she was withdrawn from frontline service. She had, in all her raids, established another remarkable record: Not one of her crewmen was ever killed or wounded in action. Now, while the 303rd replenished its ranks with brand-new bombers and crews, Hell’s Angels would show the American public that the Group bearing her name was far from finished. Individual ships and men might fall, but the Eighth would carry on until the job was done.
The raids ahead would show the tide of war beginning a slow turn against the enemy. With each day the fighter pilots and flak crews of the Luftwaffe would find themselves increasingly unable to counter the hardwon experience of the Eighth’s veteran crews when combined with the ever-growing weight of American manpower and matériel.
The next two raids were cases in point. Elmer Brown never flew a better sortie than the one he was slated for the day after Hell’s Angels departed. And the mission after that, led by all of Hullar’s crew, would show off the Eighth in all its waxing strength.