B-17s over Holland at 400 Feet
Operation Chowhound got underway shortly after dawn on May 1 with four B-17 Flying Fortress bombers and a single P-51 Mustang fighter of the 8th Air Force taking to the air over East Anglia and heading for Holland. These five aircraft were the weather scouts for the bomber force of 392 B-17s that would soon be lifting off—weather permitting.
The lead weather scout pilot was David A. Mullen from the 3rd Air Division’s 3rd Scouting Force. Since September 1944, this specialist unit had been based at Wormingford, six miles northwest of the coastal town of Colchester in Essex, just a little south of the bases of the bombers slated to fly Chowhound. After Mullen checked the weather from high altitude that morning, he dropped his stripped-back airplane down to fly as low as the bomber force was expected to fly to check the visibility on their flight routes. He knew that the bomber pilots would be briefed to make their drops from 400 feet, but to be on the safe side, Mullen went down to a hundred feet. Scudding low over one of the designated drop zones, he found cattle grazing on the abandoned Dutch airfield where crates of K-rations were expected to be landing soon, so Mullen circled the airfield until a farmer appeared on the scene and herded the cattle away from the DZ.1
The information from the weather scouts formed part of the briefing that the aircrews were to receive in their dispersal rooms that morning. The weather over England and the North Sea was not good—heavily overcast with thunderstorms on the way. As for the bombers’ targets in Holland, they were today in the areas of Rotterdam and The Hague. The weather scouts reported thick cloud above 1,000 feet over The Hague, but below that, visibility was six to ten miles over the targets—ideal for low-level drops. Chowhound was “go.”
At ten USAAF bomber bases in East Anglia, yawning crews from forty squadrons were being awakened in the dark by orderlies with flashlights and crawling out of their beds to dress and shave. Aircrew were permitted to grow mustaches, which were relatively popular, following the example of Hollywood stars such as Clark Gable. To some young airmen just out of their teens, a mustache made them look older, more mature. But beards were banned—they didn’t permit a snug fit when oxygen masks were donned by aircrew and could cost them their lives.
Dressed and shaved, it was off to a hot breakfast in the combat mess hall before crew members headed for their mission briefings for the day at the group operations building. There, up on stage, each group’s intelligence officer pulled a cloth from a display board, and aircrew saw a red line tracing from their base to their squadrons’ target for the day in Holland. And they heard about Operation Chowhound for the first time. Aircrew were told, too, that none of them was being ordered to fly on Chowhound; General Doolittle only wanted volunteers for this mission. But once they knew what it was about, although many had reservations about this low-level op, very few chose to opt out. Navigators and pilots received their weather briefing and details of the courses they were to fly in order to stay within the flight corridors agreed on between SHAEF and the Germans—courses designed to get them to their targets and back without being fired upon. And then the crews were taken out to their waiting bombers in jeeps, or they rode out on bicycles to the concrete hardstands where their airplanes stood ready and waiting with fuel tanks full and bomb bays packed with K-ration crates by their ground crews two days earlier.
In the crew briefings that morning, all aircrew were told of the plight of the starving Dutch and the vital nature of the Chowhound flights. At Framlingham in Suffolk, Sergeant Ralph DeSpirito, a twenty-year-old radio operator and waist gunner with Maiden Prayer, a B-17 of the 390th Bombardment Group, listened as this information was imparted in typical military fashion without any emotion or elaboration. Still, DeSpirito, a native of Brooklyn, New York, came away from the briefing believing that the mission was important—although he and his fellow crew members seemed blissfully unaware of the dangers ahead, taking their officers’ word for it that the Germans would not fire on them.2 They were in the minority that morning.
At Debach in Suffolk, nineteen-year-old Technical Sergeant Bill Richards, a B-17 radio operator with the 493rd Bombardment Group’s 863rd Squadron, listened to the morning’s briefing with dismay. Up to this point, Richards had flown twenty-three combat missions over heavily defended German targets; after seeing so many comrades fail to return to Debach, he had secretly come to wonder whether his luck would soon run out and he too would end up dead or a prisoner of the Germans after being shot down. Now he and his fellow crewmen were being told that they were to drop food to the Dutch from a low level with the Germans supposed to hold their fire.
“The Germans would know our route, our arrival time, and pretty well everything else,” Richards would later say. “That was pretty scary, and we didn’t trust this at all.” Worse to Richards and his crewmates was the fact that their squadron was one of those ordered to leave its air gunners behind for their May Day Chowhound mission. Just three other crewmen joined radio operator Richards climbing into their ship at Debach for their Chowhound initiation. “I felt terribly vulnerable without our gunners,” Richards would say.3
Meanwhile, at Snetterton Heath in Norfolk, under a heavily overcast sky, 96th Bombardment Group pilot Max Krell dismounted from a jeep with three other crew to find his five gunners already at their ship and busy preparing their guns for action. Krell’s was another of the squadrons whose commanders had decided to leave their air gunners behind. But as this mission was open to volunteers, Krell’s gunners had volunteered to come along anyway, and no one could prevent them. Krell and his comrades weren’t unhappy about that. They all felt it wise to take the gunners along. Despite the claim from their superiors that the Germans had agreed not to fire on Chowhound aircraft, Krell and his crewmates felt that no chances could be taken with “the Krauts.” Krell looked at the sky. Rain had swept the airfield earlier, and there was still thick cloud cover over the base. At their briefing, 96th BG crews had been assured that the sky over the target was clear, but as Krell clambered up the metal ladder into his B-17, he wondered whether the mission would in fact get off the ground.4
At Framlingham in Suffolk, base of the 390th Bombardment Group, not a word was exchanged as pilot Haven P. Damer and his nervous crewmates of the B-17G named No Credit climbed aboard their aircraft and took their places well before 7:00 a.m. Their briefing that morning had sent a chill up every spine as they were ordered to fly over Holland at 400 feet and drop food to the Dutch. They had been assured at the briefing that the British had flown their Lancasters over this sector on the previous two days without any problems. But what if the Jerries were waiting for the USAAF to take up the mission? What if Operation Chowhound proved to be a massive trap, designed to lure hundreds of 8th Air Force B-17s down to 400 feet before they were shot from the sky? This mission seemed insane!5
One by one, forty 390th BG bombers of the 568th, 569th, 570th and 571st Squadrons took their turns to run down the strip and lift into the sky, and at 7:15 a.m., in the midst of this one-way traffic, No Credit took off from Framlingham. Pilot Damer took the bomber up to 1,000 feet and circled the field as his squadron, the 570th, took off and then the group assembled. Looking toward the Continent to the east, Damer and his crew could see that the sky was darkly overcast. The met briefing had been for thunderstorms en route, so once the group had assembled, the formation’s lead aircraft took the bombers down to between 500 and 600 feet to cross the North Sea.
The 569th Squadron occupied the group’s lowermost position, scudding across the wave-tops—or so it felt to 569th top-turret gunner Bernie Behrman. All the gunners of his ship were aboard, but Behrman was smarting over the fact that his guns, and all the guns aboard his bomber, were empty, as ordered by his squadron commander. Behrman’s only comfort was the automatic pistol he’d holstered on his hip that morning as he pulled on his flying gear. In a flash, Behrman’s B-17 was flying over an Allied convoy with the ships’ astonished deck crews looking up at them and seeming to Behrman to be as close as the distance from one street corner to another.6
Higher in the formation, Haven P. Damer’s No Credit led the 570th Squadron’s uppermost element. Through the thinning cloud, Damer and his crew caught glimpses of hundreds of B-17s from other 8th Air Force squadrons; the sky seemed to be filled with them. The crew tensed for the flak bursts that always greeted them as they crossed the Dutch coast, but today not a single shell was fired at them. Down to 400 feet dropped No Credit, keeping tight formation with the rest of the squadron. In Damer’s ears came the voice of his navigator, giving him landmarks to navigate by. No Credit and the 390th BG flew on toward their target, Valkenburg airfield at Utrecht in the center of Holland.7
From his base at Knettishall in Suffolk, Frank W. Rone was piloting a B-17 of the 388th Bombardment Group’s 562nd Squadron on a Chowhound mission that morning. Rone and his crew were all volunteers for this mission, but none of them trusted the Germans to hold their fire as they flew at just a few hundred feet over Holland. Rone’s young crew had such little faith in the agreement that was supposed to underpin Operation Chowhound that they had changed the name of their airplane—to Sitting Duck. Rone’s B-17 and forty others from the 388th BG had Ypenburg as their target, and Rone tensely flew the route in tight formation with the B-17s around him. Despite his forebodings, apart from his aircrew, Rone had brought along passengers on this flight—ground crew, hard-working men who never got the opportunity to see anything of Europe. Ten of them. If Rone and his crew went down, the “tourists” would go down with them.8
A second bombardment group, the 96th, was sharing Ypenburg airfield with the 388th as its target on this first day of Chowhound. The 96th Bombardment Group’s senior officers had even less faith in the German promise not to fire on aircraft flying Operation Chowhound than did Frank Rone and his 388th BG crew. They decided that three of the group’s B-17s would take off from their base at Snetterton Heath in Norfolk before the remaining thirty-eight 96th Bombardment Group bombers assigned to the day’s mission and would make their drops at Ypenburg before the main formation. The plan of 96th Group HQ was that if the three lead aircraft were fired upon by the Jerries, they were to radio the remainder of the group, which would be over the sea by that time, and those aircraft would turn back, aborting the mission, and return to base.
All the 1200-horsepower Wright engines of the 96th’s Flying Fortresses burst into life at once, and then the forty-one bombers began the crawling taxi to the head of the runway before they received the green light and, one by one, lumbered down the strip and into the air. The three lead aircraft took off first and, without waiting to assemble with the other B-17s, made a beeline for Holland, line abreast. Meanwhile, the remaining aircraft of the group assembled at 1,500 feet. Max Krell, one of the pilots in the main 96th BG formation that day, was to find that this low-level assembly proved much more difficult than assembling at 10,000 or 12,000 feet, the usual height for putting together formations for a bombing mission.9
When the thirty-eight B-17s of the main formation were in their places, like a giant flock of birds they wheeled east and flew out over the sea, bound for southern Holland. As it turned out, fears of being fired upon had been unfounded. The three lead aircraft from the 96th BG made their drops at Ypenburg without meeting any German resistance, and the B-17s of the rest of the group arrived over the target a little later. Lowering wheels and flaps, the group’s aircraft made their drops at 130 miles per hour, from 400 feet, also without incident.
Frank Rone and the pilots of the 388th Bombardment Group likewise successfully completed their drops at Ypenburg that day without encountering any form of resistance. Rone took his Fort down to a little above 300 feet for his drop, after which the by then exhilarated pilot continued to fly low, descending to between 200 and 100 feet to let his passengers and crew see the Dutch residents of The Hague who had come out to wave to them. Rone was enjoying the low-level buzz so much that, almost too late, he saw a high stone tower loom up directly ahead. Realizing that he had to rapidly gain at least 80 feet to clear the top of that tower, and that he was only doing 165 miles an hour, Rone pushed the throttles of all four of his engines forward at once and pulled the stick back hard into his stomach. The straining bomber gained height, and missed the top of the tower by inches, narrowly avoiding becoming Chowhound’s first casualty. Looking around, Rone saw the white faces of his terrified passengers. Rone would comment, “None of them offered me a drink after the flight.”10
At Framlingham in Suffolk, the USAAF’s Norman Coats was standing sentry duty on May 1. He was guarding the massive stockpile of K-ration crates that had been created at his airfield for Operation Chowhound. A ball-turret gunner with the 390th Bombardment Group, Coats watched as aircraft from his group taxied and took off that morning for their first Chowhound run. Three hours later, he counted the B-17s of the 390th as they touched down at Framlingham again—all forty returned safely to base.
As soon as his duty ended, Coats hurried to his barrack room, where he quizzed the returned aircrew as they came back from their debriefing. Like Coats, the hundreds of men of the 390th who had flown food drops to Holland that day had been nervous about the operation and about the possibility of being shot from the sky as they flew at a few hundred feet. But now they were full of high spirits—the Dutch had come out to wave to them when they made their drops, they said. And the Jerries hadn’t fired at them. Coats was due to fly a Chowhound mission the next day. Buoyed by the encouraging stories from his colleagues, he prepared to get a good night’s sleep.11
The official debriefing reports from the aircrew who had taken part in the first day of Chowhound were generally positive. They had met no resistance from the Germans, although those crews that had been told to point their bombers’ guns skyward and to expect to see the Germans with their guns pointing to the ground reported that German guns had not only pointed their way but had sometimes tracked them across the sky as they passed, making the aircrew very nervous. American air gunners would keep their guns at the ready position on future drops, just in case. The close to 400 Chowhound pilots who had flown that day reported dropping their loads from between 800 and 320 feet, and most felt they had landed their food drops on or near their targets.
Photographic intelligence following the drops was not so encouraging. All food crates had landed near their targets, but a number had ended up in canals and flooded farmland; some of the 776.1 tons of food dropped by the 8th Air Force on that day were lost. Claude Hall, ground crew with the 390th BG, was filling in as a waist gunner aboard Hotter ’N Hell, a B-17 of the 570th Bomb Squadron, when it dropped its load at Valkenburg airfield at Utrecht that day. Hall saw much of the load tumble into water channels beside the drop zone, and saw Dutch civilians dive into the water to try to save it—how successful they had been Hall could only guess.12
The word went out from 3rd Air Division HQ—–the next day, the B-17s would have to fly much lower, and slower, to ensure that every box from their food drops ended up in the hands of the starving Dutch population. Unknown to all the aircrew flying Chowhound on May 1—who had been assured by their commanders that a truce had been in place to protect them—it would only be on the following day that the food-drop agreement negotiated between the Allies and the Germans officially came into effect. While the documents that Andrew Geddes and his team of planners at SHAEF had consigned to paper and handed to Reichsrichter Schwebel on April 29 had spelled out the air corridors and the drop zones that both sides were supposed to respect, it wasn’t until late on May Day that the agreement was actually signed by the Germans, well after close to 400 American bombers had flown their first Chowhound missions and returned to base.
To get the necessary German signatures, Air Commodore Geddes and his SHAEF-appointed deputy, fellow RAF officer Group Captain John H. “Johnnie” Hill, representing General Eisenhower, were driven west into no-man’s-land by Canadian troops in a sedan bearing a white flag. The road was long, straight and cobbled and lined with tall trees. On either side of the road stretched flat green fields and untended orchards in late bloom. Geddes’s destination was the deserted Dutch village of Nude beyond the town of Wageningen, between the Allied and German lines. From low hills in the near distance, German troops kept them under observation as, arriving at four o’clock outside a ruined cottage at 118 Wageningen Road, Geddes, Hill and their Canadian escort were met by Oberleutnant Von Massow, who was accompanied by a party of Luftwaffe officers and paratroops. Geddes and Hill handed over four copies of the agreement specifying safe corridors and drop zones—two in English, two in German—and two copies of a map showing the same.
As members of the German party studied the documents and chatted with Hill and the Canadian captain commanding Geddes’s escort, Geddes invited Lieutenant Von Massow to take a stroll with him. Out of earshot of the others, Geddes and Von Massow stopped and lit cigarettes—Geddes had given his precious pouch of pipe tobacco to a member of the Dutch party at the Achterveld meeting the previous day. On first meeting Von Massow at Achterveld a few days earlier, Geddes had found him arrogant and full of self-confidence, and he was determined to pull the young German officer down a peg or two. Taking a copy of the US military journal Stars and Stripes from his pocket, Geddes showed it to Von Massow, pointing out a map that showed the extent of Allied advances into Germany.
“Propaganda!” Von Massow responded dismissively.
“That may be true,” Geddes replied, “but I want you to know that your brother General [Gerd] von Massow is OK and well. We bagged him near Kassel a few days ago.”13
The lieutenant’s mouth dropped open with shock at the news of his elder brother’s capture. He then turned and walked back toward his comrades, speaking to them urgently in German. Saying that he would have to take the agreement and map to his superiors, and arranging for a second meeting at 10:00 p.m., Von Massow jumped into his vehicle and was driven away at top speed. Geddes and Hill likewise returned to their own lines.
“What was the matter with that German lieutenant?” asked Group Captain Hill as they drove east toward Wageningen.
“Nothing,” Geddes replied with a smile. “I gave him his brother’s best wishes.”14
At 10:00 p.m. that evening the same parties met up again at Nude, and Von Massow handed over the two English copies of the agreement and one of the copies of the map. These had been signed by Seyss-Inquart’s deputy, Dr. Schwebel, and General Blaskowitz’s deputy, Lieutenant General Paul Reichelt. Geddes and Hill returned to their own lines with the signed documents. At 10:22, using a Canadian army telephone at the war-battered town of Wageningen inside Canadian lines, Geddes called 1st Canadian Corps HQ with the message that the agreement had been signed.
On the north side of Arnhem bridge, Geddes and Hill transferred to their own transport to run down the Rhine the eleven miles to Nijmegen. At the airfield there, a communications airplane was waiting to take Geddes to Reims to report directly to General Bedell Smith.
That same night, at 10:30, the last Nazi government radio station still operating in Germany, Radio Hamburg, announced that Adolf Hitler was dead. According to Radio Hamburg, the German fuehrer had died fighting Bolshevism in Berlin on the afternoon of April 30. In fact, Hitler, who had turned fifty-six ten days before his death, had committed suicide in his Reich Chancellery bunker in Berlin after shooting his dog, Blondie. His wife of one day, Eva Braun, had died at his side, taking poison. In his “last testament,” Hitler appointed Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, then head of the German navy, as his successor with the title of Reich president. Among other final appointments, Hitler made Arthur Seyss-Inquart the new German foreign minister, replacing Joachim von Ribbentrop, in whom he had lost faith. Ironically, Hitler, confined to his underground world in Berlin, had been blissfully unaware that the trusted and promoted Seyss-Inquart was ignoring his scorched-earth order and was disobeying his express command that subordinates not negotiate with the Allies.
Many Nazis, senior and junior, would follow their fuehrer’s example and take their own lives in the coming days. Seyss-Inquart, for his part, immediately made plans to go to Doenitz at his headquarters in Schleswig-Holstein to discuss the ending of the war in a way that ensured the preservation of his own skin. Many other Nazis would vow to fight to their last drop of blood, and Hitler’s death did not mean the immediate cessation of hostilities. The war would drag on, and thousands more would die. Operation Chowhound, with its goal of saving the starving people of Holland, was as vital as ever.
From Nijmegen, Andrew Geddes was flown to Reims, where he reported to General Bedell Smith that all was now official as far as the food drops were concerned. Two days later Geddes would be back in Brussels, and back in his office at the British 2nd Tactical Air Force HQ, resuming his old post there after two weeks’ absence doing General Eisenhower’s bidding. Geddes’s job was done. The planning was well and truly complete. From this point on, it would be up to the men and women on the ground and in the air to make Chowhound and Manna work as Eisenhower and Bedell Smith had envisaged, and Geddes turned his attention to other matters.
The agreement that had now been signed by both sides stated quite explicitly that the safe air corridors in Holland and across the North Sea were to come into effect the next day, ignoring the fact that the mercy flights had been going on for days. So it was only on May 2 that the Germans in Holland were bound to hold their fire against Allied bombers flying food-drop missions. The nervousness felt by so many American aircrew flying Chowhound on May 1 had had a sound basis in fact. As it turned out, it had been a miracle that no German gunners had fired on low-flying bombers in Holland up to this point. No official agreement had existed at that time, and nothing in the rules of war had prevented the Germans from firing prior to this.
Chowhound flights on May 2, then, should have been a walk in the park for 8th Air Force crews. As it turned out, they would be far from that for some.