More than eleven thousand young American airmen arose to eat breakfast when the sunrise of the first day of Big Week was still hours away. It was biting cold that morning, but that was nothing new. This was February in East Anglia. Every day, in the wee hours of the morning, was monotonously cold in February. What made this Sunday different was that the weather was supposed to be clear over Germany.
Nobody got to sleep in.
“The week of good bombing weather was over Germany,” Derwyn Robb of the 379th Bombardment Group recalls of Big Week in his memoir, Shades of Kimbolton. “In no way could anyone say that about the weather conditions in England during the same period of time. Snow covered the ground, runways were sheets of ice, and the wind whipping across the base froze everything and everyone in its path…. It all started on the dreary afternoon of the 19th when Division sent down the usual alert with the usual notation ‘maximum effort.’ Again the planes were loaded with bombs, again the gas was put in, and again completely readied for a mission. Cooks again prepared chow and S-2 again prepared the briefing. No one really expected the mission to go out but preparations went on anyway with the usual griping.”
But Big Week had already started. At about 3:15 A.M., as the Yanks were mustering for breakfast, 921 bombers from RAF Bomber Command were beginning an hour-long bombardment of Leipzig, Germany’s fifth largest city.
When General Fred Anderson said “Let ’em go,” the Eighth Air Force would proceed to launch more bombers than it ever had. For the first time, more than a thousand bombers wearing American stars would be headed toward Germany.
At Eighth Air Force bases all across East Anglia, those eleven thousand young American airmen, nearly four times the number who mustered here on Black Thursday, finished their coffee and headed for their briefings.
Held simultaneously in dozens of Quonset huts all across East Anglia, the briefings were always a dramatic affair, whether it was your first, or your twenty-fifth—and last. The temperature went from the cold and damp of the night outside to hot and muggy as dozens of warm bodies crowded inside, each sweating his immediate future.
The briefings were the unveiling of “your target for today,” which was a little like waiting for your name to be drawn in a lottery. The men who had been through the Selective Service lottery understood this well. Until the target was announced, there could only be guesses.
“More than one pair of sleepy eyes popped open when they saw the routes stretching into Germany to twelve different targets, and heard that over a thousand heavies with fighter escort would be crowding the skies on this one mission,” Derwyn Robb recalls of the briefing at the 379th that morning.
“There probably will be icing conditions at altitude, and you may have a little difficulty with contrails,” the briefing officer cautioned.
“This remark was generally made for every mission during the winter months,” Robb explains. “It was usually a very gross understatement.”
“A neat major steps on the platform at the front of the room and begins roll call,” recalls Colonel Bud Peaslee, who had led the 384th Bombardment Group to Schweinfurt in October. “He sings out only the names of the plane commanders. Each answers for his crew. There is some screwing around in the front rows as a few commanders turn to scan the faces in the back for their men. All are present. The major moves to the rear of the platform and rips aside a black curtain hanging against the wall. A large-scale map appears with the usual length of black yarn crossing it. There is no noise now as all lean forward, looking at the eastern end of the yarn.”
The black curtains were drawn back, and at RAF Polebrook, about sixty-five miles northeast of London, Second Lieutenant Dick Nelson of the 351st Bombardment Group, took in the eastern end of his piece of yarn. It was Leipzig, the same target that the RAF was just finishing as the Americans watched the curtain.
The 351st was part of the 1st Bombardment Division, which would have the biggest role to play on Day One of Big Week, and they would go the deepest into Hitler’s Reich. About 80 miles southwest of Berlin, Leipzig is around 527 miles from East Anglia, farther than Regensburg or Schweinfurt.
This morning, Dick Nelson was about to embark on his second combat mission. He glanced around at the officers in his crew—Joe Martin, the bombardier; Wally Truemper, the navigator; and Flight Officer Ron Bartley, his copilot. Their attention was on the yarn, the destination, and the lecture being delivered by the briefer.
After having lost their first Flying Fortress, Mizpah, in mid-December, Nelson and his crew had passed their first month and their first Christmas overseas, biding their time in the Replacement Depot Casual Pool, before going to the 1st Training and Replacement Squadron, all the while waiting to be given a home, and an airplane to fly.
On January 19, they had finally been assigned to the 510th Bombardment Squadron of the 351st Bombardment Group, based at Polebrook.
Nelson’s whole crew, minus Ron Bartley, flew their first mission on February 6, against German targets near Caen in northern France, with Nelson flying copilot to Harold Peters, a pilot with seven missions under his belt. Their aircraft was a nearly new B-17G named April Girl II. Bartley had sat out the mission so that Nelson could fly with a more experienced pilot on his first outing.
The briefing officer explained that Operation Argument was all about the German aircraft industry, and Leipzig was the home of the Junkers Flugzeug-und-Motorenwerke and the Erla Maschinenwerke. The Junkers factories were where they made the versatile, twin-engined Ju 88, which was used by the Luftwaffe both as a tactical bomber—mainly on the eastern front—and as a rocket launching interceptor against the Eighth Air Force. Erla, meanwhile, built components for Messerschmitt aircraft, and they were also one of the principal final assembly sites for the Bf 109G fighter, especially the newer, enhanced-range Bf 109G-10 variant.
The crews were told that Leipzig was ringed by twelve hundred antiaircraft guns, and the city would be ferociously defended by the Luftwaffe.
Most of the 1st Division’s Flying Fortresses were tasked with the Erla and Junkers plants in the Leipzig suburbs of Heiterblick and Abtnaundorf, as well as at Leipzig’s Mockau airfield, which was home to the Junkers engine works, where they made Jumo 213 engines for Fw 190s. In addition to the Erla and Junkers facilities, the galaxy of targets arrayed around Leipzig also included numerous aircraft component subcontractors, including Allgemeine Transportanlagen Gesellschaft (ATG). A smaller number of 1st Division B-17s were assigned targets among the Junkers facilities at Bernberg, about fifty miles northwest of Leipzig.
Like the flight crew, the sergeants were up at around three-thirty for breakfast, and the gunners picked up their guns. These they loaded into trucks along with their flak suits. As described by Wright Lee of the 445th Bombardment Group, the suits were “cushioned, steel panel enclosed jackets covering the front and back of your body from neck to groin.” The suits weighed more than twenty pounds and were awfully uncomfortable, but they served a definite purpose. If they had extra flak suits, crewmen sat on them to protect themselves from beneath. For additional protection, the men also often wore regular M1 GI steel helmets over their aviator’s helmets.
The flak, like the Luftwaffe, was greatly dreaded, but the antagonist most feared by the men in bombers was the cold, the searing, painful subzero cold.
The crewmen, officers, and sergeants alike dressed in sheepskin-lined leather, from their jackets—of the style known to this day as a “bomber jacket”—to their ungainly sheepskin-lined flying boots.
Russell Robinson and Tom Sowell, the waist gunners on Dick Nelson’s crew, picked up their .50-caliber Brownings and caught a lift to the flight line. In combat, they had the dangerously cold and unenviable task of aiming their single machine guns through open windows in the frigid stratosphere where a man could lose his fingers to frostbite. They wore thick, lined gloves, tight-fitting leather helmets, and leather pants. With their goggles, and the oxygen masks they wore at high altitude, no skin was exposed to the air—although the rubber of the oxygen mask was hardly adequate protection. Contemporary descriptions often referred to the waist gunners as looking like “men from Mars.”
As Jerry Penry recalls in his memoir, Sunrise Serenade, named for his 452nd Bombardment Group Flying Fortress, the ambient temperature above twenty thousand feet was often around forty degrees below zero, which made it very difficult for the airmen to function inside the unheated planes.
“The airmen wore heated flying suits, but they were not able to keep every part of their body covered to avoid getting frostbite,” Penry explains. “One area that was susceptible to frostbite was the face, particularly the cheeks. A bare hand touched against the side of any metal surface would adhere itself to the metal at these extreme temperatures. The instinctive reflexes needed by the gunners to shoot at enemy fighters were considerably slowed due to the often bulky clothing. Under the large gloves worn by the gunners was a nylon glove that closely fit the contour on the hand. These gloves allowed the gunners to work on their equipment without getting their hands stuck to the bare metal. Often the guns turned white due to the extreme cold temperature. Many airmen realized that it was indeed possible to both freeze and sweat at the same time during a tense mission.”
Though not every man carried one, every combat crew member was issued a Colt .45 semiautomatic pistol, along with two clips. As John O’Neil recalls in Marshall Thixton’s anthology about the 482nd Bombardment Group, “Around this period of the European air war, US fighters began making ground-level attacks on airdromes, airplanes, trains, military vehicles and other potential targets. The Eighth fighters would do their strafing on the way back to England after escorting bombers, or as direct ground-level missions. This in effect threw out some of the unwritten ground rules under which the old air war was carried out. German broadcasts to England stated that captured Allied airmen would be dealt with as murderers. Many German civilians were attacking downed Allied airmen, if possible, before German military arrived on the scene. If an Allied airman had a firearm when captured, it could be an excuse to kill the airman on the spot. It was also never clear what a handgun could accomplish for a downed airman in any case. For these reasons and others, a number of US airmen did not carry their Colt .45s on missions.”
Mac Hagbo, the tail gunner in Dick Nelson’s crew, took his place with his twin .50-calibers in the distant rear of the aircraft. His glassed-in perch had some protection from the elements, but he had the worst of the wild gyrations of turbulence and the dubious distinction of defending against German fighters who could park themselves in the bomber’s wake and pour 20mm and 30mm cannon shells into the aircraft—and the gunner—for long durations.
Archie Mathies would be flying in the cramped position as the ball turret gunner. This would be Archie’s second combat mission, the first having been the February 6 mission to France—although on February 11, he and bombardier Joe Martin had filled in with another crew aboard April Girl II on a mission to Frankfurt that had been aborted. Having just been promoted to staff sergeant, Archie had the distinction of being the senior enlisted man aboard.
Aviation author Martin Caidin called the Sperry ball turret “unquestionably the loneliest position in the Flying Fortress—or the Liberator.”
“The turret,” wrote Caidin, “is like some grotesque, swollen eyeball of steel and glass and guns that seems to hang precariously from the belly of the B-17. It is a hellish, stinking position in battle; the gunner must hunch up his body, draw up his knees, and work [himself] into a half ball to meet the curving lines of the turret. The guns are to each side of his head, and they stab from the turret eyeball like two even splinters. Jailed in his little spherical powerhouse, the ball turret gunner literally aims his own body at enemy fighters, working both hands and feet in deft coordination, spinning and tilting and then depressing switches atop the gun grip handles to fire the two weapons. It is the most unenviable position in a bomber, any bomber, and the man most unlikely to escape from a blazing B-17 is that lonely soul in the ball.”
The sun was still not up when Dick Nelson’s crew took their places and Nelson started the engines. Launching a thousand bombers from two dozen airfields, at minimum intervals, as fast as possible, in the dark is a feat of immense precision. Every pilot had been briefed on his place in the takeoff sequence, his rendezvous point in the sky, and his place in the immense bomber stream. It was a process requiring meticulous choreography with no room for error. Dick Nelson had been assigned a place in the formation that would be number three in the 351st Bombardment Group, or on the right wing of the group leader.
Nelson was taxiing toward the Polebrook runway according to the plan, when suddenly, a jeep appeared out of nowhere. Reacting instinctively, Nelson made a hard right turn, the right main landing gear slid into the mud, and the plane became stuck. Immediate and frantic efforts by a small army of ground crew personnel tried to nudge the bomber from her sticky trap.
By some accounts, they finally freed the stuck airplane, but as Joe Rex recalls in an audio recording in the collection of the Air Force Historical Research Agency, the crew was ordered to transfer their gear to another aircraft named Ten Horsepower. By all accounts, Ten Horsepower was the aircraft that the crew would fly during Sunday’s mission. A Seattle-built Boeing B-17G with the tail number 42-31763, this bomber was one of the hundreds that had arrived since the first of the year, and it had been flown by several different crews on five previous missions since the first of February.
The snafu with the mud cost the crew its coveted position as number three in the group, as anyone who did not make his prescribed takeoff position had to wait for everyone else to go. This put them last in the air, struggling to catch up and flying the position known as “Tail-end Charlie.”
As Joe Rex points out, “The day was one of those you feel had to get better right from the start, but which keeps going downhill.”