37

NO-NONSENSE MEN

The 453rd Bomb Group at Old Buckenham, designated as Station 144, had been operational just six miles up the twisting roads from Tibenham since February 5. The 445th had benefited from luck and some early milk runs, but that same luck had eluded the 453rd. In mid-March, Col. Joe Miller, group commander, was shot down leading a mission to Friedrichshafen, Germany. Said Andy Low, assistant operations officer, “Colonel Miller had been with the group since its inception on June 29, 1943. He had watched and aided its growth from a fledgling organization into a full-grown, hard-hitting bombardment group. This was his fourth mission and his loss was an unexpected and hard blow.”

Soon thereafter, Maj. Curtis Cofield, the group operations officer of the 453rd, went down in France. The loss of two air commanders in a month reinforced how dangerous the job was and how much harm to morale could be dealt, because now the 453rd was a ship without a rudder.

The 453rd hadn’t been shot up more than the 445th down the road, but they had been shot up worse and lost their commanders. In fact, attrition had caught up fast with the battle-hardened, month-and-a-half surviving veterans of the 453rd; some were flak happy while a few others had run out of steam for a fight. To fill the leadership void, Lt. Col. Ramsay Douglas Potts, Jr., assumed command of the 453rd.

Potts hailed from Memphis, Tennessee, and earned his wings four days after Pearl Harbor at the age of twenty-five. Potts had been in on the ground floor of the Eighth Air Force, with a baptism of fire October 9, 1942, in a raid by his 93rd Bomb Group against the steelworks at Lille, France, that cost Potts his best friend and many other fliers in the group.

He had participated in the top-secret 1943 raid against the Nazi oil fields of Ploesti, Rumania, which resulted in the awarding of five Congressional Medals of Honor. Potts didn’t receive one of the medals, but he had been proven to possess exceptional piloting and command skills.

A pilot in the 453rd, Lt. Bob Bieck, assessed the group’s new C.O. by saying, “Potts was a no-nonsense man and his presence was felt at once. He was one of the most dynamic officers I have ever known. He was like a caged tiger chafing to be released.”

In taking up his new post, Potts requested from headquarters of the Second Combat Wing a group operations officer to replace the late Major Cofield, and by a convergence of circumstances, the man chosen was Maj. James Stewart.

Jim’s reputation now preceded him. He didn’t always bring everybody home, but his numbers were extraordinarily good in a combat environment where losses were high and morale sometimes wobbled. His “luck” was based on precise flying and on smart decisions large and small, decisions that a man in his mid-thirties made more often than a younger, less-experienced lead pilot. And it didn’t hurt that the major had been a success at the business of motion pictures, where he had dealt with executives of the caliber of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg—two of the major generals of Hollywood.

All that was on the one hand. On the other hand, Major Stewart had flown a dozen missions, most of them rugged, in three-anda-half months. He took his new assignment to be a mixed blessing. One of these days, his number would be up, especially when he began to second-guess himself in the air. He couldn’t argue with Terrill that he needed to be spelled from duty as air commander. Maybe Jim had accomplished his goals too well. He had arrived in Tibenham as a combat officer, and he had flown his fair share of missions. He had taken on enormous responsibilities, the kind that usually fell on the shoulders of career West Pointers. He was a flier who had led a mission over Berlin, and it was after this one that he learned of his new assignment. But the move wasn’t something to accept without some big thinking because he did not come to England to push papers as “Ops.” He came to fly bombers in combat. He was an older guy and everyone looked up to him, but he knew his brains were scrambled at least a little bit and that could jeopardize the lives of the men behind him. He had seen too many fliers overextend themselves in his four months at Tibenham, and so after some soul searching, he decided he would go by the book now.

Then, there was the viewpoint of Second Division Bomber Command. If anything, the career of Stewart’s MGM stablemate Clark Gable, a captain flying as a waist gunner in B-17s while making a combat documentary for Gen. Hap Arnold, had affected thinking about Stewart. It seemed pretty evident to all that Gable had a death wish ever since the passing of his wife, Carole Lombard, after Pearl Harbor. The army had no use for fliers who wanted to die, but Gable had managed to get in the air with such a publicity flourish that Adolf Hitler had put a bounty on the king’s head. The situation gave the Air Corps a headache and got high command thinking about how wise it was for movie stars to fly over enemy territory. Movie stars didn’t belong in the ETO—Stewart knew this was the prevailing sentiment and he had battled it all along.

Jim liked Clark Gable—who could do anything but? He was a down-to-earth guy with enormous magnetism. But from Jim’s superiors he had learned what a genuine distraction Gable was because Gable knew he was the king of Hollywood and loved to play the part wearing an authentic U.S. Army-issue uniform. He had wined, dined, and led around an entourage of hangers-on, and the army had found it easy to ship him home after five combat missions to finish his documentary. Gable had earned a lot of press and gotten his photo republished many times, but he hadn’t made a dent in the fight against fascism. Stewart, on the other hand, damn that Stewart, he possessed command abilities, and his men loved him.

To great heartbreak in the 445th Bomb Group, Major Stewart became the group operations officer of the 453rd at Old Buck. He had lived and died with the boys of the 445th at Tibenham, and they would never forget him.

Stewart reported to Colonel Potts at Station 144 on Friday, March 30, 1944, and settled in for a day before orders came down for the next mission to Ludwigshafen. Stewart spent the night digesting the orders as they came in and all the thousand details, and was able to speak in the morning briefing in his new role as Ops from firsthand knowledge of leading a formation over that particular target in central Germany, south of Frankfurt. Stewart remained on the ground as the 453rd put up a full contingent of ships to Ludwigshafen, and it was a good day: They all came back.

Weather grounded the group for a week, which allowed Potts and Stewart some time to get to know their new bunch. These men weren’t hard cases; they had been in business six weeks less than the 445th and had cut their teeth on operations like Argument. The Luftwaffe had shot them up; flak had shot them down. Colonel Miller, their previous C.O., hadn’t stressed training in tight formation flying, according to Lt. Ray Sears of the 734th Squadron, and here Jim could contribute right away because he excelled at it. A tight combat box and precision flying meant everything because it offered maximum protection against fighters and gave flak batteries on the ground a smaller target to hit.

At the beginning of April, Potts and Stewart used bad weather days over Europe for practice missions. “I made it my task to fly as soon as possible with the crews from each squadron,” said Potts, “in order to assess their proficiency and to compliment them on their skills.” Jim couldn’t do a lot to tighten up formations in that amount of time, but he could certainly make his pilots aware of the need to keep their grouping tight, to stay sharp, and to follow procedure as briefed.

Around this time, Colonel Potts asked Capt. Starr Smith, S-2 of the 453rd Bomb Group, to serve as Jim’s unofficial press officer. “This meant no publicity, no interviews, and no contact whatsoever with the hundreds of war correspondents eagerly seeking feature stories,” said Smith. “The only way Jim felt he could continue to be effective as a combat officer was to keep the press completely at bay.” It had worked so far; he would keep the streak going.

The second week of April, the war raged back. Stewart prepared the group for Brunswick on April 8, a brutal mission that cost seven ships and crews, and for Tutow and an attack on the Focke-Wulf 190 plant on April 9, which cost two more.

Tours on April 10, Oschersleben on April 11, and Zwickau on April 12 went better. Finally, Stewart flew his first mission as group commander with the 453rd on Friday the fourteenth of April, sitting behind pilot Lt. Orrie Warrington and copilot Maxie Seale as an observer in ship 210, Heavenly Body. The plane was the lead of eighteen sent from the 453rd to bomb the Dornier-Werke aircraft parts factory for the twin-engine Dornier Do 217 medium bomber along with a repair depot and airfield above Wessling, just west of Munich and by far the deepest penetration Stewart had made into Germany as a group commander. Background materials labeled the mission as “an aerial show intended for the benefit of Hitler and other German leaders in nearby Munich.”

Stewart’s 453rd led the Second Combat Wing, which flew with the 20th Wing. Jim had learned that just a day earlier, five ships of his old group, the 445th, had been lost when jumped by German fighters that had pursued them into Belgium. He hadn’t seen the list of crews that had failed to return to Tibenham, but he knew it was bad, and he knew it would break his heart when he read the names.

Jim led his wing deep into the German heartland in a long, largely quiet passage with three course changes—all in keeping with the idea of a secret mission to bomb the target near Munich. After rallying south of Friedrichshafen at Lake Constance with the Alps looming high and deeply snow-covered off to starboard, the Second Combat Wing flew due east, south of the Ammersee, a large lake of blue waters. The highway just south of the village of Traubing was the I.P., and there they turned due north for the bomb run with two small lakes to their left and a larger lake and a railroad line to their right. It was beautiful how Intelligence gathered all this info from hundreds of miles off, back in England. The pilots knew just when the flak would kick up—and there it was, right on schedule. They had been briefed to be on the lookout for German fighters painted white and coming out of the formation’s white contrails for sneak attacks.

Heavenly Body sailed ahead in skies briefly clear enough that they could see the anti-aircraft batteries firing on the ground below and count their guns by muzzle flash just off the end of the runway at the aircraft repair depot about to be bombed. The flak in front of them lay like a living carpet at about 20,000, just below their flight path, with occasional bursts snapping higher, up toward the formation.

“It wasn’t just a small-box barrage like we had seen at other times,” said Don Toye of the 445th, flying behind Stewart. “It was spread out in heavy concentration over at least a twenty-mile square,” and flak bursts were “so close together it seemed I could step out and walk from one to another.”

In the lead, Stewart heard chatter about a Liberator hit amid-ships by flak off to port and glanced out the window to watch a B-24 with pieces crumbling off just before it began cartwheeling down with fire flaming out of a wing. Another voice reported that the Lib had blown up after it was out of view of the cockpit, sobering for any air commander. Somebody reported seeing chutes, maybe two, maybe three, which was a miracle the way the ship had come apart. Jim touched his chest, as he always did at times like this. Yep, the little bundle was there, the letter and the psalm.

They pressed on, passing the small town of Wessling off to the left. Dead ahead lay the Dornier facility and fifteen miles beyond that, off to the right, Munich.

The flak continued to pound the formation long after Warrington, the pilot, had given the ship to Martin, the bombardier. About to pass under them was the southwest-to-northeast runway of the Dornier factory and aircraft facility. They had been briefed that the assembly building sat just east of the airfield and had dummy trees on the roof. Camouflage nets covered the aircraft shelters. Despite the concealment Jim could see the repair hangar, the designated mean point of impact dead ahead, sitting off the northern end of the field. He could see three dozen Do 217s parked at the northeast corner of the runway. S-2 said more than a hundred Do 217s in newly minted condition were supposed to be hidden in the wooded lands past the northeast corner of the airfield, along with two dozen or more Me 410s.

Stewart knew Martin would drop just short of the M.P.I. It was standard practice for the bombardiers to drop short knowing the few seconds’ delay in the formation dropping on the lead plane would put those bombs right down the throat of the building, around the edge of the field where the planes were parked, and into the woods where all the 217s had been hidden.

“Bombs away,” said Lieutenant Martin, and ten general-purpose bombs of 500 pounds each salvoed out of Heavenly Body with one loud click, sending it bucking higher in the sky.

“Bombs clear,” Stewart heard in his ear, and he watched Warrington rush control of the ship back with a flick of the switch, and he and Seale muscled the yoke and banked right. Stewart grabbed the bulkhead against the Gs of the maneuver. Halfway into the turn he watched the payload plow up the runway in giant explosions before clouds and smoke blocked his view.

“Right down their throat,” a voice said on the interphone. And then, “We got those planes by the runway.”

Another voice said, “And a hangar.”

“Hangar on fire,” corrected a third voice.

“Don’t get too excited,” said an unidentified killjoy. “Some of our guys hit a field a mile off the runway. What the hell were they aiming at?”

“Shit,” said someone.

“Eighth Agricultural Air Force,” said another wise guy.

Warrington eased back on the throttles at the end of his turn for the wing to rally. They headed west-southwest back toward Lake Constance, and soon calls came in of Fw 190s attacking from five o’clock low. Chatter filled the air. Machine guns rattled the ship and German fighters swarmed through.

“Somebody’s hit! Somebody’s hit!” said a voice on the interphone. Jim strained to see out to port but couldn’t make out anything and had to rely on the radio play-by-play. Where the hell are our fighters? he screamed in his own brain. He heard it was Tenovus that had been hit “bad between the waist and the tail,” but she still had four engines turning. Then came a report an engine had caught fire and she dropped out of formation, and a few minutes later the tail gunner reported she had exploded. Damn, that had been a fine ship that had always got her crews home safe, Jim included. He allowed himself a quick moment to worry about Jack Farmer and Don Toye, the day’s pilots in Tenovus, and to hope they got down safely with their crew.

Just then, the fighter screen of P-51s swooped into view and drove off the enemy over the town of Weingarten. Another B-24 was hit and had to peel off and head toward the safety of Switzerland, but other than that, the formation held together. Stewart wanted the ship number or pilot’s name, and it was Lieutenant Dooley in 629. Jim had memorized the formation like he used to memorize dialogue at MGM. Dooley, from the triangle off Warrington’s right wing in the high squadron. God speed, my friend. There were worse fates than landing a crippled Liberator in neutral Switzerland.

It remained like that through the trip back west, little friends above and around the Second Bomb Division, dogfighting their way through Germany and swatting away the Luftwaffe trying to cause trouble for the Liberators.

Stewart struggled out of the ship late in the day after more than nine hours in the air, feeling the usual frostbite and aches and pains of a long, tense flight and then stepping into the damp cold of East Anglia in what was supposed to be spring. Missions were no different here than in the 445th; yes they were, they were worse because he wasn’t even able to sit in the copilot’s seat. He was an observer now, with no control other than the issuance of a few orders. He was flying with strangers, men he couldn’t yet rely on because he hadn’t seen them in the worst of times. Meanwhile, he could only learn from a distance what went on with his boys back at Tibenham. He would reflect later that “all my efforts, all my prayers couldn’t stand between them and their fates, and I grieved over them.” But he knew they were dying for a cause, just as he was prepared to die for it. He could take hope, though, in what he saw in the air just today, with the Mustangs and Thunderbolts out-fighting those bandits. The Allied buildup in planes and pilots was adding up, and so was the damage to the German aircraft industry and the German flying corps. Success now depended on keeping the survivors focused on their jobs and getting them, and himself, home safe.