“Big Week” and Beyond
WHEN THE AMERICAN bombers and fighters returned from the raids flown against the German aircraft factory complexes on February 20, 1944, it was quickly apparent that the Eighth had scored a smashing victory over the Luftwaffe. Some bombing efforts had gone awry, but on mission after mission positive results were reported against negligible enemy opposition.
Describing the day as “the most successful operation to date” by “the largest force of heavy bombers and fighters ever employed on a daylight bombing operation,” Eighth Air Force Headquarters reported that “A total of 2218 tons—1668 of H.E. [High Explosive] and 550 of IB [Incendiary Bombs]—were dropped…Targets in the Leipzig area, Brunswick, and Bernberg [sic] were hit with excellent results; those at Gotha and Tutow through the overcast with unobserved results; Oschersleben and Helmstett were bombed as targets of opportunity with fair to good results; and other targets of opportunity were attacked with mainly unobserved results.”
There was one passage in the operation summary that said it all: “Considering the depth of the penetration into the Reich, an outstanding feature of the operation is the small loss—21 bombers and four fighters. This was due in a large measure to the excellence of the fighter escort, but it is also apparent that the GAF was surprised and overwhelmed by the large force and its employment, particularly following the large scale RAF attack on Leipzig the previous night. E/A opposition, in view of the location of the targets, was not strong or aggressive and flak was no deterrent. Total tentative claims are 126-40-66, the fighters claiming 61-7-37 and the bombers 65-33-29.” (These tallies referred to the totals claimed as destroyed, probably destroyed, and damaged.)
The Eighth’s leaders kept the pressure up over the next five days. Spaatz sensed that he was closing in for the kill and took every opportunity to send the Eighth’s bombers and fighters—and those of the smaller Fifteenth Air Force—on coordinated attacks against German aircraft factories and other key targets, including Schweinfurt. None of these was as successful as the raid of February 20th, but the net result was a definite turn of the tide.
On February 21st, the Eighth sent 861 bombers and 679 fighters back to the aircraft factory complex at Brunswick and against numerous Luftwaffe air depots and airdromes in central Germany. Bad weather prevented accurate bombing on most of these targets, but the battle of attrition continued. The Eighth lost 16 heavies and five fighters. The bombers claimed 19 enemy aircraft and the fighters 33. There was no letup that night, as RAF Bomber Command launched a large force against Stuttgart, site of other important aircraft plants.
On February 22nd, the Eighth sent 799 bombers and 659 fighters against the factory complexes in central Germany including aircraft plants at Oschersleben, Aschersleben, Halberstadt, and Bernburg. Unfortunately, adverse weather conditions over England forced a recall of the Second and Third Divisions, and in a battle reminiscent of the January 11th Oschersleben raid, the First Division pressed on to bomb its objectives against concentrated Luftwaffe opposition.
This was another bad day for the 303rd, which lost five ships: two from the 358th Squadron and three from the 360th. Thirty-eight First Division Fortresses fell, and 41 of the Eighth’s bombers were lost in all, plus 11 fighters. But 99 B-17s got through to their clearly visible targets and bombed them with excellent results. Moreover, they claimed 34 German aircraft and the fighters 59.
That same day, the Fifteenth Air Force attacked a Messerschmitt factory at Obertaubling. Poor weather prevented good bombing, and the attackers lost 14 of 183 heavies as well as 11 fighters, but the latter’s claims were impressive: 60 German fighters downed. Total aircraft claimed by the two air forces was a stunning 153.
The Eighth rested on February 23rd, but the Fifteenth Air Force sent a small force of 102 bombers to hit a ball bearing plant at Steyr, Austria, responsible for 15 percent of all German bearings. The plant was 20 percent destroyed.
February 24th saw coordinated efforts by the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces and RAF Bomber Command. The Eighth’s plan was similar to that of February 20th, with a total of 809 bombers and 767 fighters sent. Five combat wings of the Third Division flew unescorted along the Baltic coast to hit aircraft plant complexes in northeastern Germany and Poland. Three wings of B-24s from the Second Division went after Me-110 plants at Gotha, and the First Division sent its B-17s to Schweinfurt. From the south, the Fifteenth sent a much smaller force back to Steyr to attack the Steyr-Daimler-Puch aircraft factory, and that night the RAF sent a large force of bombers to strike Schweinfurt.
The Fifteenth’s formation bombed Steyr at a cost of 17 aircraft. The First Division force hit Schweinfurt at a cost of 11 B-17s while claiming 10 fighters. (The 303rd lost two B-17s on this attack.) The B-24s hit the Gotha plants accurately against strong enemy opposition, losing 33 ships while claiming 50 fighters. The northern force was forced to bomb Rostock through 10/10 clouds, but it lost only five bombers with the B-17s claiming 23 fighters. The Eighth’s escorts claimed 38 more at a cost of 10, making this day one of the roughest yet, with 67 bombers lost. On the positive side, German losses were put at 121.
USSTAF and the RAF mounted another series of big raids on the 25th, the last day of “Big Week.” Spaatz was briefed that the skies would be clear all over the Reich that day, and he chose to concentrate his forces against aircraft plants located in southern Germany. The Eighth sent 754 bombers and 899 fighters (including 139 P-51s from three Mustang groups) to hit factories in Augsburg, Regensburg, Stuttgart, and Fürth. In addition, the Fifteenth dispatched 176 heavies on an unescorted attack against an Me-109 parts factory at Regensburg.
The Fifteenth’s bombers reached their objective despite fierce Luftwaffe opposition. They bombed it with excellent results, but lost 33 bombers. One hour later, 267 B-17s from the Third Division smashed the same Me-109 factory they had hit on August 17, 1943, claiming 13 enemy fighters for 12 bombers. The combined effort drastically reduced Me-109 output at the Regenburg factories for four months. Serious damage was also inflicted by the Eighth at the Messerschmitt facilities in Augsburg, where 196 First Division Fortresses struck, and at Stuttgart, where another 50 B-17s damaged a ball bearing plant. These two bomber forces lost 13 B-17s while claiming eight enemy aircraft.
In the meantime, the Second Division’s B-24s bombed an Me-110 parts and assembly plant at Fürth with excellent results, claiming six enemy aircraft for a loss of two bombers. The Eighth’s escorts claimed 26 aircraft against three, making a total of 53 German aircraft for 63 bombers and three fighters.
Bad weather brought “Big Week” to a close, ending the most sustained and massive aerial offensive the Eighth had ever launched against the Reich. At the time it was thought that the bombers had fatally crippled German aircraft output, scoring the kind of knockout blow Eaker had hoped to achieve against the Schweinfurt ball bearing plants in 1943. In both cases, however, many machine tools vital to production were only superficially damaged, and Albert Speer, Nazi Minister of Armaments and Munitions, was quick to implement a program of plant dispersal that returned production to earlier levels after a few hard months of seriously reduced output.
There was, however, one vital war commodity that Speer could not make allowances for: experienced combat pilots. Luftwaffe personnel losses for this week will never be known with certainty because the Germans destroyed many Luftwaffe records at the end of the war. But American claims that 505 German aircraft had been shot down were a real sign that the Luftwaffe was suffering crippling losses in the ranks of its fighter pilots. After “Big Week” the Luftwaffe was never again able to pose a serious strategic threat to daylight bombing or to Operation Overlord, the invasion of Europe that was to follow in less than four months. The massive scale of daylight bombing operations inaugurated by “Big Week” grew ever larger in the months that followed, and with it, German losses.
March 6, 1944, was a key indicator of the direction that the war was taking. On that day the Americans finally got to Berlin in substantial strength. The Eighth dispatched 730 bombers and 801 fighters to “Big B,” drawing forth a furious German response. Sixty nine heavy bombers were shot down, and there were 11 missing escorts, but 672 heavies unloaded on the German capital with the bombers claiming 97 German aircraft and the fighters 82. That it was the most costly mission the Eighth ever flew, and that the total number of German aircraft actually destroyed or damaged did not exceed 90, was beside the point. The Luftwaffe might be able to produce new airplanes, but it could not replace the veteran pilots killed in such fierce combat. The Americans could now replace both.
Not long after this, on March 19, 1944, Captain Don Gamble flew his last mission. Coming home, he “buzzed field while men shot flares from cockpit and radio room.” He was “one of the last to land—after dark” and was, he wrote, “Happy to finish.”
Unable to challenge the Eighth en masse, the Luftwaffe resorted to increasingly desperate tactics. Sturmgruppen of heavily armed and armored single-engine interceptors who were “escorted” by conventionally armed fighters were increasingly in evidence. They searched for gaps in the fighter escort cover, and for conditions where local air superiority could be achieved, but their efforts could not alter the outcome. By March 1944, P-51s equipped with twin 108-gallon drop tanks could range 850 miles into the Reich—beyond Germany all the way to places such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. And VIII Fighter Command was well on the way to reequipping all its fighter groups with the P-51. By mid-1944, Mustangs made up over half of the Eighth’s fighter escort force, and by January 1945 the only unit in VIII Fighter Command that did not fly the P-51 was the famous 56th Fighter Group, which kept the P-47 throughout its wartime service.
May 1944 saw the beginnings of the final blow to any hopes the Luftwaffe had of regaining air superiority through aircraft such as the Me-262, the world’s first operational jet fighter. In that month the Eighth flew its first missions against the one real strategic jugular the Germans had: oil. Two days after D-Day, on June 8, 1944, Spaatz; formally made oil USSTAF’s top strategic target. (“Tooey wants oil” is how Mel Schulstad remembers the call.) The Fifteenth Air Force was ordered to concentrate on the natural and synthetic oil resources the Nazis had in the Balkans, while the Eighth was to hit the enemy’s many synthetic plants in central and eastern Germany. By the time the “oil campaign” ended in March 1945, the Luftwaffe had thousands of aircraft available, but no fuel to train new pilots and precious little fuel to fly and fight. The U.S. Eighth Army Air Force had achieved total victory: The air war had been won.
Throughout the air war, the Hell’s Angels remained one of the Eighth’s premier heavy bomber groups, winning fame as the first bomb group to fly 300 missions and flying a total of 364 by war’s end, a number greater than that of any other B-17 group in The Mighty Eighth. Here the Hell’s Angels pass in review over the flag at Molesworth in the late stages of the war. (Photo courtesy National Archives (USAF Photo).
Throughout the air war, the Hell’s Angels remained one of the Eighth’s premier heavy bomber groups, building on the record they had achieved in the early days and during the crisis period when Hullar’s crew flew. Chuck Marson remained with the Group until he got his last mission in on March 19, 1944, and then went home. Mac McCormick became a Lt. Colonel and stayed with the 303rd to the end of the fighting as Group Bombardier. Hullar stayed on, too, making Major and serving as Group Operations Officer to the very end of the 303rd’s existence in the ETO. He flew nine more missions, including at least one trip to “Big B.” The 303rd won fame as the first heavy bomber group in the Eighth to complete 300 missions, and by the end, the Group’s mission tally was 364, a total greater than any other B-17 group in the Eighth Air Force.
All during the conflict, the 303rd’s bomber crews faced many of the risks that Hullar’s crew did, since the nature of the air war was always such that individual groups never knew how bad a mission would be for them. For despite a group’s experience and its ability to fly good formation, there was never a way to eliminate the role of fate. Too many things could go wrong—a recall message not received, a missed rendezvous with the fighter escort, location in the bomber stream, navigational error, and a myriad of other factors—any one of which could decimate a group on a mission from which others returned untouched.
The smile of a survivor. Pete Fullem, left, with two friends relaxing while off duty during the balance of his military service with the Third Air Force in Florida. (Photo courtesy Mrs. Rita Dispoto, Executrix of the estate of Joseph J. Fullem.)
The 303rd had two such days after Oschersleben. There was the one immortalized in “Fortresses under Fire,” the magnificent mural by Keith Ferris that graces the National Air and Space Museum’s World War II gallery in Washington, D.C.—August 15, 1944, when a Sturmgruppe snuck up on the Group over Wiesbaden and shot down nine Fortresses in short order. Then there was the bloody trip to Magdeburg on September 28, 1944, when another force of German fighters attacked the Group and sent 11 of its B-17s spinning down out of the sky.
Still, Bob Hullar got it right when he wrote a brief note to Pete Fullem in the copy of The First 300 that he sent him and the other members of his old bomber crew: “You fellows helped to make the rough part of this story.”