Looking ahead to Thursday, Dr. Irving Krick asserted that good weather was sure to be in store again, and Fred Anderson sent orders to Doolittle to prepare accordingly.
“For us, this was the ‘make or break’ of the whole air war,” Dick Hughes said enthusiastically, “and we were determined not to let a single Eighth Air Force bomber sit around as long as this fantastic freak of weather lasted.”
As Krick promised, the “fantastic freak” was back, and it was time to resume the maximum effort program.
For five combat wings of the Eighth Air Force 1st Bombardment Division, Thursday would be an opportunity to make up for its aborted maximum effort against Schweinfurt on Tuesday. When the curtain over the operations map came up, lines of red and blue yarn come together deep in the heart of Hitler’s Reich. It was like a metaphor for the pit of your stomach, which is where the crews took it, and took it hard.
For most of the men in the 1st Division, the idea of “making up” for the aborted Schweinfurt mission did not sit well. They would have been happy to have seen the mission scrubbed permanently. Even if they had not been in England in October, they all had heard of Black Thursday. The mere mention of the word “Schweinfurt” conjured up a dark sense of foreboding.
The idea of two coordinated attacks in the southern part of the Reich, which had been planned but failed to materialize, on Tuesday was back on the agenda for Thursday. This time, as the Eighth Air Force 1st Division would attack Schweinfurt, the Fifteenth Air Force would return to Steyr, their objective of the previous day.
George Webster of the 92nd Bombardment Group wrote in his memoir, Savage Sky, that when the intelligence captain at Podington pulled back the curtain covering a map of Europe, the crowd of flyers gasped and groaned.
“I see faces go pale,” Webster recalls. “A nearby flight engineer bows his head and begins to pray. The red line goes deep into central Germany to the city of Schweinfurt, a name that strikes fear in the flyers of the Eighth Air Force. The target is crucial because factories at Schweinfurt manufacture ball bearings that are vital to German military production. If we knock out ball bearings, we deal a big blow to production of planes, tanks, trucks, and machinery. The Germans know it and are ready to defend the city furiously.
“The Eighth Air Force fought its way to Schweinfurt twice before. In August of 1943, our bombers smashed the ball bearing plants, but the Germans shot down 36 of our bombers. Germany rebuilt the plants in record time, requiring a mission in October of 1943. Our bombers again destroyed the ball bearing factories, but at a cost of an astounding 60 of our bombers destroyed. That is equal to three bomb groups. Six B-17s from the 92nd Group were lost in that raid, so combat veterans fear a Schweinfurt mission. It’s a death sentence for some of us. Everyone looks grim. Some are obviously frightened. A fellow next to me covers his face and mumbles that he wishes he’d written to his wife last night.”
While most of the 1st Division aircrews had never seen Schweinfurt, Major George Shackley of the 381st Bombardment Group had been to Schweinfurt on the Black Thursday October 14 mission—and on the August 17 mission.
Today, he would be making his third trip to the capital of ball bearings and suffering. He would be leading 32 Flying Fortresses of the 381st out of their base at Ridgewell, one of five groups tasked with the Schweinfurt mission.
Shackley was flying right seat to Lieutenant George Sandman, the pilot of Rotherhithe’s Revenge. A brand-new B-17G christened just ten days earlier, its namesake was an illustration of the hellishness of the war and why the Allies—especially the British—were so single-minded in pursuing the Combined Bomber Offensive.
Rotherhithe was a community in the London borough of Southwark, located on a promontory on the south bank of the River Thames, near the Surrey Commercial Docks. In September 1940, during the London Blitz, the fire that swept through the area was described by Peter Stansky in his book The First Day of the Blitz as the most intense single fire ever seen in Britain. Rotherhithe was bombed repeatedly by the Luftwaffe throughout the Blitz and the remainder of the war, losing its old town hall in the process. The commemorative bomber was christened by city fathers, using a bottle of locally brewed ale.
As the 1st Division bombers passed over the Netherlands, there were a higher than usual number of aircraft dropping out of the formation for mechanical reasons. Maybe it was nerves, or maybe they were hearing sounds inside those Wright Cyclones that made them worry about something other than the Luftwaffe emptying the bunks tonight.
Jesse Pitts called it “the point of no return. For those in our wing and in our division who had discovered deficiencies in their ships that made the mission a losing gamble, this was the time to turn back home.”
A couple of the gunners aboard Penny Ante told Pitts and the pilot, Herschel Streit, that they thought they heard something in the engines. The pilots listened but could not hear anything wrong. Penny Ante pressed on.
As they reached the Initial Point, five hours out of Kimbolton, the number three engine sputtered to a stop. It had prematurely run out of fuel. Pitts cranked up the other three so that Penny Ante could keep pace with the rest of the formation, as Streit started transferring fuel and scolding Pitts for not paying attention.
Penny Ante would bring her crew home that day as she always had. The aircraft had gotten its name from a ritual that had been started by the ground crew chief, in which he loaned the pilot a penny at the start of the mission, which was repaid upon the aircraft’s safe return. As long as the pilot carried the penny, and the responsibility of repaying the debt, the aircraft would always return. This gave the plane an aura within the squadron of being a “lucky ship.”
For three combat wings of the 2nd Bombardment Division, Thursday would involve a return to Gothaer Waggonfabrik in Gotha. The 3rd Bombardment Division, meanwhile, would send five combat wings to the FockeWulf complexes located in the northeast corner of the Reich.
The clear weather that materialized in Thursday’s predawn hours allowed the Eighth Air Force to coordinate the activities of its three divisions with almost textbook precision. The 1st Bombardment Division successfully launched 231 Flying Fortresses, which headed south and east. With them for most of their penetration of the Third Reich were 238 2nd Division Liberators.
Leading the 2nd Division bomber stream to Gotha on Thursday was 14th Combat Wing, in turn spearheaded by the 579th Squadron of the 392nd Bombardment Group. The green flare shot from the tower was seen at 8:30 A.M. and the Liberator pilots, led by the crew pilot, Lieutenant Jim McGregor, began their takeoff roll. The thirty-one aircraft of the 392nd took off at thirty-second intervals and formed up at twelve thousand feet.
“Turning to the southeast towards Gotha, the white snow-covered landscape four miles below looked cold and lifeless; only large communities, rail lines and an autobahn stood out in relief,” wrote Lieutenant Myron Keilman, also of the 392nd Group’s 579th Squadron, in the 392nd Bombardment Group oral history anthology 20th Century Crusaders, compiled by Ian Hawkins. That day, he was flying deputy lead on Jim McGregor’s wing. At their altitude, the ambient temperature was forty degrees below zero, but there was hardly a cloud in the sky.
“The gray and white landscape 21,000 feet below looks cold and wintry,” George Webster writes, echoing Keilman’s description of the landscape that they saw so clearly from far above. “It seems quiet down there, but I know that air raid sirens blare in towns, and people hurry to hide in underground shelters. I see a countryside of dark forests and white fields dotted with cities and villages, all connected by roads and rail lines. While I fill my log with everything that I see, I gaze at the Rhine River, spanned by dozens of bridges, and lined with cities pouring smoke into the air from factories. The sky is brilliant blue, but it is filled with myriad white trails high overhead. They twist and circle as our fighters battle what looks like an immense number of German attackers. I tremble from cold and fright. My headache is back, and it’s killing me.”
To again cite Glen Williamson’s metaphor, the Luftwaffe erected a substantial wall to protect Gotha and Schweinfurt from the other divisions, hammering the Eighth Air Force bombers almost continuously to and from the targets, and giving their fighter escorts a serious run for their money. Over Schweinfurt, the escorts lost ten of their own while downing thirty-seven Luftwaffe interceptors. The 1st Division lost eleven Flying Fortresses, but the 2nd Division paid a steeper price on the Gotha mission, losing thirty-three Liberators.
“The fighters’ wings blink as their many guns fire,” George Webster remembers. “Orange streams shoot toward the bombers like fire from hoses and smash into a B-17. Pieces of the unlucky bomber fly off in a cloud of smoke. Gunfire hits the Plexiglas dome of a bomber’s top turret, and it explodes in a white cloud that turns red with blood from the gunner’s head. The first bomber catches fire, then the second, each trailing a long stream of orange flame. Both B-17s wobble as blazes engulf them in seconds. No one gets out. The men are burning alive in there. In thirty seconds, the bombers are flaming torches, totally enveloped in fire. The blazing planes tip over and fall, trailing long tails of flame. Fighters wheel around and race back from the rear toward the hapless formation of bombers. Red tracers from bombers stray out toward the fighters. Orange fire spews from the fighters’ wings. It hammers a B-17, hitting wings and engines. Smoke and fragments erupt from the bomber. Fire spurts from its engines, and the big plane dissolves in a mass of flames.”
Meanwhile, over Osnabrück, on the approach to Gotha, the Liberators of the 2nd Division were also under attack, and flying without fighter support because they were ahead of schedule.
“My log records the first continuous opposition in the Osnabrück area at 1200 hours, noon,” Wright Lee of the 445th Bombardment Group reports. “Here we turned south, deeper into Germany. We were eleven minutes ahead of schedule now and still had no fighter assistance. As we looked out of the windows, we saw enemy fighters coming up in droves. Bf 109s, Fw 190s, Ju 88s, and Bf 110s came zooming into our area and the individual attacks began. A B-24 blew up behind us and I logged it for the record. This was the first of five bombers which our 445th Group lost around noon within six minutes. It was later estimated that we had been attacked by 150 German fighters. It was impossible to individually log all of this activity but I did my best.”
As the 445th Bombardment Group was passing northeast of Osnabrück, Lee could watch the fighters taking off from their bases far below.
“Outside of the greater Osnabrück fighter defense sector, I looked down and it almost made me sick to see what more was in store for us,” he continues. “The fighters were taking off in pairs, one twosome after the other, and all circled and climbed to get into the fight. They were all around us and still we had no help, all because we were ahead of schedule.”
Another 2nd Division, 14th Combat Wing Liberator outfit, the 392nd Bombardment Group, reported that the fighter escort caught up with the bombers as they neared the target, and as Luftwaffe activity increased.
“Fighter attacks became more persistent,” Myron Keilman writes of the 392nd’s approach to Gotha. “By the time we reached our Initial Point to begin our bomb run, the sky around our three squadrons was full of busy P-38s and P-51s fending off the enemy fighters. Our little friends dived down past our lead ship, chasing the Bf 109s and Fw 190s which were making head-on attacks. Our gunners got in a lot of shooting, too. The staccato of the turrets’ twin .50s vibrated throughout the airplane. It was really frightening.”
As the 392nd Bombardment Group made a gradual left turn over the IP, red flares from McGregor’s Liberator were the indicator that it was time for the bombardiers to open their bomb bays. In the noses of the Liberators, the Norden bombsights were uncovered, gyroscopes were stabilized, and bombing switches turned to the “on” position.
“I’ve got the target!” Keilman recalls of the lead bombardier’s words. In the crystal clear air, this came as no surprise. How could he not?
“Lieutenant Good’s target folder didn’t contain a snow-covered, wintry view of the Messerschmitt Aircraft Plants,” Keilman writes in Hawkins’s anthology. “He had to use his keen judgment and trained skills in locating the briefed aiming point. Only his one eye, peering through the bombsight optics, could determine where to place the cross-hair. He gave a running commentary to the command pilot and crew of what he saw and what he was doing in steering the lead B-24, and the following formation of bombers, to the bomb release point. But only he, the lead bombardier, knew for sure what was viewed through the bombsight.”
“On airspeed, on altitude,” lead pilot McGregor replied, handing control of the Liberator to the bombardier at 160 mph and eighteen thousand feet. “You’ve got the airplane.”
“The bombs were smack ‘on target,’ but the battle wasn’t over,” Keilman continues. “No sooner had the 14th Wing left the target’s flak than we were again attacked by enemy fighters…. The interphone was alive with excited calls of enemy action. Head-on and tail attacks, in singles and ‘gaggles.’ Rockets, 20mm cannon shells, and machine gun fire were all encountered as the battle progressed. Seven of our B-24s were shot down and many of us were shot up.”
Meanwhile, the 2nd Combat Wing suffered a snafu over the target when the lead bombardier passed out from an oxygen system failure and accidentally began dropping bombs on the wrong target. The Liberators following him proceeded to do the same, but the 445th Group lead bombardier noticed the error and led his group to the correct target.
“The upcoming target was clear and easily identified,” Wright Lee remembers. “The Bf 110 factory buildings were snow covered but stood out clearly. The interphone suddenly crackled and over came, ‘Bombs Away’ from the pilot. I hit the salvo handle and away they went at 1:19 P.M. from 20,000 feet. I leaned down over the glass bottom of the nose and watched as our bombs fell toward the target, both of us moving forward at about the same speed. Then they hit the buildings which seemed to disintegrate and fly into the air. Black smoke and flames accompanied the explosions. For a second I thought that what I was seeing was flak bursting and jumped back. Then I realized that it was the target ‘exploding.’ Lieutenant Cassani, bombardier in our lead plane, had done a great job.”
The 445th Bombardment Group would receive a Distinguished Unit Citation for this mission because of its having deviated from the erroneous target to the correct one.
Exiting the target area, however, the 445th once again was piled on by the Luftwaffe.
“We passed over the town of Gotha and made a sharp right turn,” Wright Lee remembers. “Fighters resumed their attacks with a vengeance. As I looked out of the window at our lead plane not more than 100 feet from us, I saw its nose suddenly light up with a blinding flash… then nothing, no explosion. The plane’s bomb bay doors opened and the landing gear was lowered as they continued in formation. After a few seconds the plane’s wing wagged, the signal for the deputy lead to take over. The injured ship gently moved to the left and our ship moved with it…. A tense drama was unfolding in the lead ship, [which was] now aborting…. The blinding flash which I saw was a 20 mm shell exploding in the cockpit, injuring Major Evans, the pilot and our Squadron Commander, but missing Captain Bussing, the copilot. With all of this confusion, Major Evans gave the order to ‘lower the wheels… we’re going down.’ The lowering of the wheels was an International Code that the plane was surrendering in the air and would fight no further and would make a landing. Opening the bomb bay was a precaution in case of an explosion and to allow any man to leave the plane via parachute.”
As Lee watched, the 389th Bombardment Group, flying forward and right of the 445th and leading the 2nd Combat Wing, took the brunt of the Luftwaffe attack. “Men were bailing out randomly from all positions in these planes, nose to bomb bay to tail,” he writes. “Some chutes opened right away but other men fell free, arms and legs dangling as they dropped in the sky. Some came very close to our planes, perhaps one hundred feet, but I didn’t see any hit. The sky was a mass of parachutes and I estimated that twenty-five were all around us…. Out in front at ‘twelve o’clock high’ I watched as ten Bf 109s lined up ready to attack. Down they zoomed, heading straight for us, and I could almost feel the bullets hit me, but by some miracle they missed and [the German fighters] sped by to our side and under us, so near that I could see the black crosses clearly and the pilots’ faces looking out of the cockpits.”
Among the faces of the Luftwaffe fighter pilots bedeviling the 1st and 2nd Divisions on Thursday were those of several aces whose toll of Eighth Air Force bombers was already in double digits, such as Hermann Staiger of Jagdgeschwader 26, whose eventual score of sixty-three victories would include twenty-six four-engine bombers. On Thursday, he downed a 1st Division Flying Fortress south of Quakenbrück-Rheine near Münster.
The Gruppenkommandeur of Jagdgeschwader 11’s III Gruppe, Anton “Toni” Hackl, credited with thirty-four heavy bombers during his career, took out a B-17 straggler late in the afternoon, fourteen thousand feet over Glückstadt in Schleswig-Holstein.
“The sky around us filled with fighters slashing through bomber formations, and bomber gunfire spurting toward fighters,” George Webster writes, painting a hellish portrait of a hellish bomb run. “Bombers catch fire, and fighters trail smoke as they fall toward the earth. A fighter pilot jumps from his stricken fighter and opens his parachute. A bomber’s tail gunner fires a long burst at him. The pilot’s body jerks and hangs limply from his parachute. Fighter pilots must have seen the killing, because two Fw 190s attack the tail gunner’s bomber. Their guns smash the tail gunner’s position to shreds and hit the engines until the B-17 explodes in another ball of fire.”
Another Luftwaffe ace, who had been with Jagdgeschwader 26 for about a year, Oberleutnant Waldemar “Waldi” Radener caught the Schweinfurt mission both coming and going, downing one bomber on the way south plus another bomber and an escort fighter over Wetzlar in Hesse about two hours later.
Oberleutnant Rüdiger von Kirchmayr of Jagdgeschwader 1, who had destroyed a 2nd Division Liberator over the Dutch coast on Monday, claimed another over Westphalia on Thursday. These were two of an eventual ten heavy bombers that he claimed. The total of twenty-six heavy bombers credited to Oberfeldwebel Anton-Rudolf “Toni” Piffer of Jagdgeschwader 1 would include a 2nd Division Liberator that he shot down on Thursday over Diepholz.
The man who did the most damage to the Eighth Air Force on Thursday was Walter Dahl, flying a Bf 109G-6, armed with a 30mm MK 108 cannon. He was the Gruppenkommandeur of Jagdgeschwader 3’s III Gruppe, which was reassigned to Reichsverteidigung duties from Kursk on the eastern front during the summer of 1943. Dahl had shown an aptitude for battling bombers and had led the III Gruppe to intercept the USAAF offensive against Schweinfurt and Regensburg on August 17.
Dahl claimed four on February 23, plus one of the escorting P-38s. As Luftwaffe records show, he shot down two B-17s in the space of four minutes around noon and two more in the space of eight minutes about an hour later—while chasing down the P-38 in between. He was eventually credited with costing the Americans as many as three dozen four-engine bombers.
As they had done on Sunday, the 3rd Division sent 236 Flying Fortresses across the North Sea, to pass over Denmark and drive south toward the Baltic coast.
The 3rd Division targets, beginning with Tutow, were all related to the production of Focke-Wulf Fw 190s. The most distant of these was the Luftwaffenfliegerhorst Kreising complex at Krzesiny, just outside the city of Posen. Known as Poznan before the war, when it was part of Poland, it would become and remain Poznan, Poland, again after the war.
As had occurred on Monday, clouds over the target prevented the bombers from dropping their bombs. Despite Hitler’s impression of the scope of dominions, the United States still considered this to be Poland, and there would be no bombing unless the Luftwaffe complex was visually identifiable.
With Tutow also under cloud cover, the entire force diverted to strike nearby Rostock, home to Heinkel Flugzeugwerke facilities.
As had also been the case Monday, the unescorted 3rd Division strike force met spirited but limited Luftwaffe resistance and was able to withdraw over open water—first the Baltic, then the North Sea—rather than having to battle its way across the German landmass for hours, as did the other divisions.
The Fifteenth Air Force would attack Steyr as they had on Wednesday, though their specific “target for today” would be different. Today it would be the factory complex of the big industrial corporation Steyr-Daimler-Puch. Formed in 1934 through a merger of carmaker and gunmaker Steyr-Werke AG and Austro-Daimler, a former subsidiary of the German Daimler company, Steyr-Daimler-Puch had been a major manufacturer of high-end automobiles before World War II and was now manufacturing weapons, military vehicles, and aircraft components. The latter earned it a place on the Operation Argument target list.
The Fifteenth launched 114 bombers, of which only 87 continued all the way to Steyr, because of the weather. The others, becoming separated from the main formation, diverted to secondary oil refinery targets in the Italian Adriatic port city of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia).
As had occurred the day before, the bombers that reached Steyr were subjected to merciless and effective mauling by the Luftwaffe. Not only were they attacked at close range by Bf 109s and FW 190s, they were targeted by twin-engine fighters firing rockets at longer range and even air-to-air bombing attacks, which had become rare over northern Germany since 1943.
The Luftwaffe went after the 2nd Bombardment Group, which flew last in the formation, with particular ferocity. The total losses for the Fifteenth Air Force that day totaled seventeen aircraft, or 20 percent of those that had reached Steyr. Ten of the seventeen losses represented the entire complement of the 2nd Group. Every last one.
Despite relentless Luftwaffe interference, Friday’s major Eighth Air Force attacks on Gotha and Schweinfurt took place under ideal visual conditions and yielded the kinds of results that men from Tooey Spaatz to Fred Anderson to Dick Hughes had craved.
At Schweinfurt, clear skies prevailed, and bombardiers were confident in their work. George Shackley, leading the 381st Group that day aboard Rotherhithe’s Revenge, observed that he could see for miles. At his later debriefing he colorfully reported that “bombs were slamming down on factories and other targets in the city for at least half an hour. Our own bombing was one of the best. This was one hell of a lot different from my first two Schweinfurt missions.”
Patting the group leader on the back, Lieutenant Thomas Sellers, the pilot of Little Duchess, wrote in his own after-action report that the Schweinfurt mission was “the best coordinated mission of any of the 20 I have flown. It showed careful, detailed planning. Major Shackley did a perfect job of leading the wing. Bombing was perfect. The town and target were plastered both by us and the wings ahead.”
Also aboard Rotherhithe’s Revenge, the 381st’s lead bombardier, Captain Lawrence Potenza, confirmed that “the bomb run was beautiful. I could see hits from our bombs right in the factory area. Heavy smoke was over the town from bombs dropped by the group ahead of us and fires were everywhere.”
Potenza had even more to be pleased about. Thursday marked his twenty-fifth and last mission with the Eighth Air Force.
While the Schweinfurt attack effectively hit and destroyed many of its intended targets, the Strategic Bombing Survey would later rank the October 14, 1943, mission to the ball bearing capital as having done more damage to the overall bearing industry, simply because it took place before major efforts were made to decentralize the industry. For example, in the four intervening months, Vereinigte Kugellagerfabriken had moved 549 machines, or 27 percent of its manufacturing equipment, out of Schweinfurt.
“Nevertheless the bearing plants suffered heavy damage in the raids,” Arthur Ferguson writes, “especially in the departments processing rings; and the ball department, already half-dispersed, lost another ten percent of its machines.”
The weather was so crystal clear over central Germany that day that the 1st Division Flying Fortresses over Schweinfurt could see the 2nd Division Liberators over Gotha in the distance. The lead navigator with the 384th Bombardment Group, Captain James Martin-Vegue, later recalled at his debriefing that he could see the B-24s, and “the smoke was piled up to 10,000 feet. We could see [the Gothaer Waggonfabrik factory complex] far off to our right, burning to beat hell. It must have been 50 miles away, but that’s how good the visibility was. It was a beautiful mission. Our target was covered by smoke from a preceding formation when we got there, and the smoke was right where the buildings were supposed to be. When we left, the whole area was on fire.”
Citing the postwar Strategic Bombing Survey, Arthur Ferguson writes that the bombing at Gotha “was especially accurate, and probably more important strategically than at Schweinfurt. Over 400 bombs, both high explosive and incendiary, fell in the target area, 93 of which hit buildings; this does not count the large number of fragmentation bombs (180 tons out of a total of 424) dropped also. Almost every building in the very compact factory area was damaged. The eastern half of the plant, where the aircraft manufacture was centered, was generally destroyed, although machine tools, the vital part of the production system, received surprisingly slight damage, considering the amount of damage to buildings. Most of the loss of machine tools resulted from fires…. Much time and labor had to be expended clearing heavy girders from the machines caught under them.”
The Strategic Bombing Survey went on to estimate that as a result of the February 24 attack, Gothaer Waggonfabrik lost about six to seven weeks’ production and compelled a dispersal of operations that placed a “heavy drain” on other factories in the Messerschmitt production network.
The damage to the Eighth Air Force in the February 24 Schweinfurt mission was nothing like the horrendous toll exacted by the Luftwaffe in October, but still, the mood was somber that night as airmen in the mess hall pondered the empty chairs of those who would never come back.
While the 1st Division had emerged from Schweinfurt with a loss rate of less than 5 percent, the Liberators of the 2nd Division had taken a hit of nearly 20 percent of their effective force.
Late Thursday afternoon, on the observation deck of the control tower at Tibenham, the home base of the 2nd Division’s 445th Bombardment Group, Colonel Robert Terrill watched and waited for his B-24s to return. Of twenty-five planes that his group had sent out, three had aborted early in the mission.
“Well, I guess this is the early bunch,” Wright Lee quotes him as having said when he had watched nine of the twenty-two Liberators land. “The others should be right behind.”
Lee reports that when Terrill was told that nine were all that remained of his group, “he almost died of shock.”
For the 1st Division, it may have seemed easy to look at the bright side and say that “it could have been much worse,” which Schweinfurt certainly could have been—but it is hard to look at the bright side when you are looking at empty bunks.
“I think they better pay us more,” 92nd Bombardment Group bombardier Ralph Ballmer said to George Webster at dinner that night, trying gallows humor to bring some lightness to a gathering of shaken flyers.
“How you doing?” fellow airman Ken Tasker asked Webster.
“I’ve never been so scared,” came the reply. They had just heard that the 92nd had lost three bombers.
The crews of the 379th Bombardment Group, meanwhile, had gone off on Thursday morning expecting the worst, but for them, at least, this failed to materialize. The group lost only one man, a gunner who had been struck and killed by a flak fragment over the target. It was like a freak accident.
“Much to the surprise of nearly everyone on the base (to say nothing of the delight of the aircrews) the Forts [B-17 Flying Fortesses] roared in late that afternoon and landed,” Derwyn Robb recalls. “Most of the planes weren’t expected back, but they all came back. None lost! At [the debriefing] crews related ‘lots of flak, and our own fighter pilots took care of most of the Jerries.’ The P-38s and P-51s picked up the formations after the P-47s left and fighter attacks against our group were meager. With the comforting closeness of the ‘little friends’ and perfect bombing weather, not a cloud within miles of the target, the lead bombardiers Joe Brown and Ed Millson took full advantage of the situation and dropped the bombs ‘with the highest degree of accuracy.’”
Robb interprets the phrase as meaning that the bombers “plastered hell out of the target.”
Late that same night, 734 RAF bombers, using as their beacon the fires still burning from the American attacks, came over Schweinfurt and continued the rain of terror on the erstwhile capital of the German antifriction bearing industry.
Said General Fred Anderson, “We did a job that day.”