At the beginning of 1944, Hap Arnold, commanding general of the Army Air Forces, had issued a directive citing the German Air Force as “an Intermediate objective second to none in priority.” Specifically, General Arnold told his commanders, “Destroy the enemy air force wherever you find them, in the air, on the ground, and in the factories.” Simply put, the situation in the skies over Europe was grim. Production of enemy aircraft was increasing despite steady bombing day and night, and German fighters continued to knock heavy bombers out of the sky with alarming regularity. Most important in a strategic sense, the Allied invasion of northwestern Europe, code name Overlord, could not begin until the Luftwaffe had been rendered ineffective.
Talk of something called Operation Argument filtered down to Tibenham in January and hung in the air beneath the unrelenting cloud cover of winter in East Anglia. Operation Argument was designed to be a one-week, maximum-effort Eighth Air Force bombing campaign of German aircraft manufacturing and assembly plants. The last such campaign into the heart of Germany to face a gauntlet of flak and Luftwaffe attacks had been labeled afterward as Black Week for the hellacious casualties it produced, so pilots and crews didn’t exactly look forward to the launch of Operation Argument, and winter weather over Europe kept delaying the campaign through January and into February 1944.
Major Stewart heard only the vaguest of rumors about some crazy meteorologist who was watching the skies, waiting for weather to be right to unleash the resources of the Eighth Air Force on the birthplaces of the Bf 109s, Fw 190s, and Ju 88s. To make Argument operational, bomber command needed a week of clear weather, which just didn’t happen in European winter. Except that in mid-February 1944 it did. Suddenly, the Eighth Air Force consulting meteorologist, thirty-seven-year-old Dr. Irving Krick of the California Institute of Technology, announced that high pressure was building over the Continent and creating what he called “a good-looking sequence.” Another in an endless string of Argument alerts went out to all bases, although such alerts were met with open derision because they had all had been false alarms up to then. Besides, the East Anglia bases had been blanketed in snow from a rare storm that had hit the entire island. How could 1,000 bombers take off on ice-coated runways? The men now waged war in snowball firefights that broke out across the sprawling Tibenham base as crews hardened by more than two months of aerial combat sought any hint of home.
Of immediate concern to Jim was the loss of another pilot. Emmett Watson of Texas, one of Jim’s most senior pilots at twenty-seven, had crash-landed a couple of days earlier outside Manston in one of the original ships, Kelly, and he had come back to Tibenham shaken up physically but his brain had locked up too, and he’d been sent off for evaluation. Stewart responded by giving copilot Otis Rhoney the left seat. Rhoney would take over Watson’s crew, but Otis was one of the ex-fighter jocks, and who knew if he could handle the job. Look what had happened to another of the P-40 guys, Don Hansen, when attempting to take the pilot’s seat. It was yet another command decision, and they always came with second-guessing, especially for a guy like Jim who worried endlessly about making a wrong move with so much on the line.
As the freezing cold of a Saturday night tightened its grip on the base, the latest Argument go signal sent fuel and bombs into the Libs of the 445th. The ground crews had performed these tasks before only to turn right around and drain the tanks and remove the bombs when weather scrubbed the Argument kickoff mission. Major Stewart went to bed knowing something was up and, like everyone else, believed nothing would come of it and he would arise in six or seven hours not having been nudged awake to fly.
But at Second Bomb Division headquarters, discussion centered around the Second Combat Wing for the first mission of the big week of Operation Argument, which had been dubbed, fittingly enough, Big Week.
General Hodges, Second Division commander, asked General Timberlake, wing commander, “Who’ve you got leading tomorrow?”
“Stewart,” said Timberlake.
“I’ve got so I don’t worry much when Stewart’s leading,” said Hodges. “We always have a pretty good day.”
At 3:00 a.m. the door of Jim’s quarters at Site 7 opened and his bed was jostled. “Mission today, sir.”
Son of a gun. Stewart jumped to his feet, dressed, and shaved for mission number nine, heart thudding in chest. A few had been true milk runs, but that term implied routine and how could any mission be called routine when it meant responsibility for his squadron, flight at 22,000 and forty below, flak, and the danger of fighters whether they materialized or not? Planes dropped out of the sky every day without a shot being fired because electrical systems went dark, a spark ignited gas fumes, engines conked out, or pilots made errors. “Milk runs” were so dubbed only in hindsight and only because the plane and crew had performed successfully, with the Germans conveniently not showing up.
Before chow, Stewart was summoned for pre-pre-briefing, which meant he was serving as wing or group lead from his co-pilot’s seat in Tenovus. In the tense briefing room he sat waiting with a little time to think. Too much time to think. He had already passed from rookie formation leader to old hand and now faced demons as he racked up missions. All the flight crews felt it—all the pilots, all the crews. One of these days it would be his turn to go down because quite simply, precious few cockpit personnel made it to twenty-five missions and a trip home. And that’s what it took to stop flying: twenty-five successful launches and returns. If he did get shot down and managed to float to earth in one piece, what would Hitler do with an American movie star in captivity—the one who had made The Mortal Storm back in 1940, exposing the evil of Nazism to millions of moviegoers? Parade him through the streets of Berlin? Relegate him to a concentration camp? Parole him in exchange for Hess? God only knew.
Jim made it through pre-briefing and then moved on to the pilot briefing. He would have a good group of pilots from the 703 with him in the lead squadron today. Joe Narcovich, Chick Torpey, Ralph Stimmel, and Bob Kiser, who sat in the briefing room reading them a letter from his wife, Judy, about getting a nursery ready for their first child, due in May.
The men bolted to attention by rote when the briefing officer entered the room. Then the black curtain parted and the lead pilots learned the target of the day for the 445th: Braunschweig, better known to the Yanks as Brunswick, which was most of the way to Berlin, about 450 miles from Tibenham. Northwest of the city center of Brunswick sat the Muhlenbau-U Industrie factory, which produced components for the Ju 88 twin-engine fighter bomber. Secondary target for the day would be the Neupetritor factory site.
Deep in thought, staring at the map, charting the course in his mind, Jim already knew the skies and terrain from past missions. They would head due east from Tibenham over the Dutch coast and barrel into Germany. Somewhere near Cloppenburg, he figured, they would bank right to come in over the target before reaching downtown Brunswick. This route might cut down on the flak. It might. In his ear he heard, “We will put up thirty-five ships today. Major Stewart and Lieutenant Conley will be Second Combat Wing lead ship, low. They will be in front of the 445th, 453rd, and 389th. Lead high will be Lieutenant Blomberg in front of Shurtz and Climer. Pathfinders will guide you in, led by Major Jones. Fighter support will be P-47s, P-38s, and P-51s.”
Breakfast followed—the traditional real eggs and bacon that signaled the possibility of imminent death. All knew there would be nothing more than canned juice while they were in the air, eight or nine hours. Then Stewart donned his second skin. Gear in hand, he waddled with the others out to the jeep that would take them to the farthest reaches of the base, to the hardstand where Tenovus sat, way over near cows that looked on in disdain, no doubt giving sour milk over the fuss.
Up in the bomb bay, he glanced at today’s payload: ten general-purpose bombs, 500 pounds each. Conley and Stewart completed the checklist and engines coughed to life at 0835, on schedule. Operation Argument was finally setting into motion. Taxiing on the peri track with outboard engines, he looked skyward at thick cumulus. He could only hope the weather was clear over the target, 450 miles east-southeast. The pilots knew by now: It took time to get all the planes ready for takeoff, and they waited, and waited, for the flare. Finally, at 0908 there it came. Full throttle and they were off, lugging the bomb load to the end of the runway and nudging into the morning air of February in East Anglia.
Conley slugged ship number 132 through the turbulence of cloud cover and broke through into clear blue skies at 4,300 feet. It was a beautiful day for flying. Wind nearly calm, just five miles per hour east-nor’east. At 1028 they had finally assembled, and just then, out the corner of his eye, Jim saw a swarm of B-17s to his left out of position, which forced Conley to bank right to bring his wing to starboard and south of their charted vector. Crap, swinging around to accommodate wayward Forts was going to cost them, and suddenly they were three minutes behind schedule. And schedule meant everything.
To their credit, the Pathfinders adjusted to Conley’s maneuver, and no one in the formation felt the need to break radio silence despite the sudden shift. It was the training, Jim knew. The way they trained, the way he taught them to anticipate, to act and react, to hold the formation together come what may; that had saved them on previous missions. It was simple, basic stuff. Stay sharp, keep your eyes open, follow your leader, hold formation.
The wing shot over the North Sea without further incident from those Forts that were now dots on the northern horizon. Ahead of Major Stewart, the vast expanse of water yawned a greeting, and at far left and far right and high overhead, he saw vivid blue giving way to pastel haze. Out the right window of Tenovus, he saw the high ships in the combat box to his right spewing broad trails of vapor, one per engine. To his left past Conley flew another grouping of three Liberators, their contrails an unbroken white ribbon trailing behind each ship.
The moments passed. Then, as they blazed at 17,000 over increasingly rugged seas, he spied the coast of the Netherlands. It was just too beautiful, too majestic for wartime.
He knew he was over the shores of the Netherlands because the flak began to snap ahead of him, at first high, then low, then dead ahead. He checked his watch: 1152.
Inland over the frozen, snow-covered Dutch lowlands, he scanned the skies with the sun directly overhead and toyed with the idea of breaking radio silence for just a moment. He groped for his microphone button but stopped himself. They knew what to do without prompting: Watch for fighters coming out of the sun, boys, he said to himself. Wilson reached forward and touched Stewart’s arm. Jim turned around and the radioman pointed at his set and then at his headset and made a slashing motion across his throat. Stewart grasped the meaning: The Germans were jamming their frequency. Damn it.
It didn’t matter. Hold formation and head east, over the snow-covered patch of land by the Dutch coast, then high above the blue-green expanse of the Zuiderzee that sprawled ahead and to the right and left of the formation. Lectures had covered the situation in Holland in case the fliers were forced to parachute in. The Dutch Resistance was strong but the SS was everywhere and civilians were starving. An American shot down had a better chance of survival in Holland than in Germany, but not much better.
Steinhauer, the navigator, battled through the muck of the interphone and reported winds were pushing them off course to the south, and he was using the Pathfinders and dead reckoning to compensate. He gave them a corrected heading and Wilson shot a message by light to the Pathfinders. In another moment Steinhauer reported they were back on course but had lost one minute.
“Good work, Manny,” said Conley.
Major Jones in the lead Pathfinder banked from east to east-southeast south of Bremen and the formation followed suit. There was nothing in the way of firing coming up from the ground, and no fighters presented themselves despite the fact that the formation painted bold streaks of white across the sky. Between the noise of 500 engines of 1800 horsepower each and the vivid contrails, there was no missing the Second Combat Wing from the ground for fifty miles all around. Maybe the Luftwaffe had been drawn to other Eighth Air Force formations streaking toward Halberstadt and Gotha to the south.
At 1304 they turned to port toward the initial point south of Hannover, and at 1310 they reached the I.P. Suddenly, flak hissed up at them and began to detonate ahead. Conley turned over control to Rankin. They flew due east straight into bursting flak that created what felt like potholes in the sky. The ship rocked left and right and left again. Per the plan developed in the briefing, Stewart gave lead bombing position to ship number 306, which was high on their right wing and piloted by Blomberg, with Lieutenant Painter the lead bombardier. Rankin would have the option of toggling on Painter’s drop, but weather was clear over the target and Rankin would be able to see what he was aiming at.
“Damn it!” said Conley as flak snapped like lightning outside his window as the ship rocked left, with bits of shrapnel hitting their windows like hailstones.
Conley and Stewart saw red flares dead ahead and a little above their eye line. Parachute flares. “Uh-oh,” said Stewart. He had heard about this tactic of signaling ground crews to stop firing by sending up flares so that fighter attacks could commence. Sure enough, immediately the firing stopped.
“I see ’em!” said an excited voice. It was Eckelberry in the top turret. “190s, eleven o’clock high.”
Stewart heard Eck firing bursts at the 190s and felt the turret spin as Eck followed the bandit past. He kept hearing play-by-play on the interphone about fighters buzzing around but didn’t see them.
“Eight, low, 109s!” came another voice. More machine guns rattled—waist guns maybe, tail guns, Stewart didn’t know—and the ship rocked and vibrated from the outbound firing.
Off the right wing he watched bombs away from Blomberg’s ship, and the 500-pounders unburdened the Liberator and ship 306 bucked higher in the sky. In a second Rankin said, “Bombs away,” and their carton of eggs entrained out and fell free of the ship. Conley toggled control back from Rankin and banked right over downtown Brunswick with fighters buzzing about like hornets from a nest.
“Get ’em, little friends!” they heard a voice say, one of the gunners, and there up high in front of the windscreen Jim saw P-38s streaking into view from above, and it was such a beautiful thing. It was like John Ford’s Stagecoach, when the cavalry arrived in the nick of time to save George Bancroft and Claire Trevor. Jim would say later that day, “I’ve never seen so many P-38s. You could see contrails from them and the P-47s for miles.”
The German fighters continued to attack. Low attacks, level attacks, in twos, fours; three ships presenting to draw fire, the fourth sneaking in for a strafing run. At the edge of his vision, Stewart saw a Liberator take fire from what must have been incendiary bullets because her wing caught at once and she fell from the sky. It happened too fast to think about, too fast to calculate, how the fighters screamed in at 250 or 300 miles per hour and made their fatal mark and then swerved off in a blur. He felt every bullet, cannon, and rocket hit into his ships. He tried to look for chutes from that burning Lib.
“Who was that?” he asked. “Who got hit?”
“Kiser’s ship, I think,” said a voice. Yes that felt right, the ship he had seen had been back off the starboard side, and that’s where Kiser was in the lead squadron. Dear God, Bob Kiser, Jim’s youngest pilot. Pittsburgh kid who had moved to Ohio. Married less than a year to his Texas girl, Judy, the one who looked forward to it being a boy. Maybe he had gotten out. Maybe there had been chutes.
Jim had to hand it to the German fighters—they let the survivors float down. Call it professional courtesy, from air branch to air branch.
Wright Lee in ship 146 would write in his diary, “Another plane, probably from the 453rd Bomb Group…was reported as blowing up by the tail gunner. Meanwhile, the attacks continued with the same fury as when they started, and enemy fighters shot down two from the 389th Bomb Group, a part of our wing. In contrast to the air battle’s utter horror, it was a picturesque view as we watched the many descending parachutes blend into the terrain’s snow-covered background.”
When all remaining ships reached the rally point, and Libs regrouped and offered each other comprehensive covering fire, the 109s and 190s broke off the attacks, but they had exacted a heavy price from Jim’s formation. He ordered his ships to tighten up for the flight out. On the hour-plus leg southwest to Cologne and then near two hours northwest over Brussels and Dunkirk, then the Channel and back to Station 124, Stewart had time to think. Big Week, Operation Argument, was something that would be remembered. He had been right there for the first day of it, the bombing, the air battles, the loss of good boys as their planes sank earthward. Sure it was going to cost the Germans, and it might break the Luftwaffe, but the 445th was going to feel this. It was going to hurt; it already hurt.
Back at the hardstand of Tenovus, Stewart followed Rankin and Steinhauer out the bomb bay and dropped to concrete as the light of day waned. Conley’s ground crew was already going over the ship, and saw by the number of its wounds just how hard the day had been. By No. 2 engine, Jim watched Killer Manning, a staff sergeant in the maintenance crew, put a paw around each of Eckelberry’s arms and kiss Eck a hard one on the cheek. All the tension of all the guys seemed to melt away in a gale of laughter.
Eckelberry would remember “a hell of a lot of enemy fighters,” while another pilot would call today’s air battle over Brunswick, “The roughest ten or fifteen minutes I ever spent.” Two other ships had gone down out of the 445th—Lieutenant Neal and crew in Sky Wolf and Lieutenant Owen and crew in Georgia Peach.
But it wasn’t all bad news. Word in Ops was that they had creamed the target in Brunswick, and General Hodges, commanding the Second Division, highly commended the 445th “on its splendid work. This was the most successful mission in bombing to date.”
Operation Argument was on; Big Week had begun. How big would it get, and how many ships and crews would it claim? These were the questions to ask, and how it would hurt when they learned the answers.