Air Fronts: Theaters of Operation - European Theater of Operation: Target Germany - Full Stride

THE LAST WEEK of July, 1943, was not a good one for European dictators. To one it brought political annihilation, abrupt and ignominious. To the other it brought the greatest sustained aerial offensive yet mounted by the VIII Bomber Command.

The month had begun auspiciously for the Fortresses with the three-pronged attack on Le Mans, Nantes, and La Pallice. Three more missions followed, one strike on the aircraft repair and assembly shops at Villacoublay being particularly successful. But it was in the last seven days of July that the Fortresses showed what day-light bombing could accomplish--given the planes and given the weather.

Out in force five times, they hit sixteen major industrial targets. They made their longest flight -1900 miles--when they attacked the German U-boat base at the Norwegian port of Trondheim, not far from the Arctic Circle. They achieved their deepest penetration into Germany when they struck an aircraft factory at Oschersleben, only eighty miles from Berlin. In those seven climactic days they claimed 296 enemy fighters destroyed. Eighty-eight Fortresses were lost.

This was big business. To the earth-bound men on the individual bomber stations the change was not so apparent. Their planes went out and fought and bombed, and some came back and some did not. But the fliers could tell the difference, by the length of the flights and the frequency of them, by the increasingly desperate German resistance, by the losses on both sides. At headquarters the growing scope of operations was even more evident. Instead of dispatching four carefully husbanded Groups against a single target, the Bomber Commander was able to think in terms of striking forces of a hundred or more planes over two or three objectives at once.

Out of the cyclonic air battles that studded the month of July came stories of heroism on the part of the air crews and stamina on the part of the planes that bordered on the fantastic. A badly hit tail gunner crawled back into the waist of a Fortress, not for protection or first aid, but merely to demand more ammunition. Shot down into the North Sea, a wounded navigator left the comparative safety of a dinghy to swim back to his sinking plane, fight his way into the radio room, and drag out an unconscious gunner pinned under heavy equipment.

Coming back from bombing an airdrome on July 14, a Fortress met a nose attack by three FW 190's with a blast of fire that destroyed two of the fighters and evidently killed the pilot of the third. It crashed head-on into the No. 3 engine of the Fortress with an impact that tore off the propeller and knocked the bomber completely out of formation. The German fighter did a cart-wheel over the Fortress, cutting half-way through the wing and a third of the way through the horizontal stabilizer. Top and ball turrets on the bomber jammed; radio equipment was smashed; all the instruments, according to the copilot, "went crazy." Pieces of metal from the disintegrating Focke-Wulf hurtled through the fuselage. A gun barrel buried itself in the wall between the radio room and the bomb bay. Other crews in the formation later reported that the Fortress had blown up as a result of the collision. It had not. On the contrary, it pulled itself together, shot down one more fighter, limped back under a canopy of sympathetic P-47's, and made a belly landing at an English base. None of the crew was scratched.

"Blitz week," as it came to be known, began on July 24 when for the first time the Americans turned their attention to German installations in the conquered but still defiant land of Norway. The most important target was the big new magnesium and aluminium factory at Heroya, built by I. G. Farben-industrie, the German chemical trust, and completed barely three weeks before precision bombing destroyed it. Another target was the U-boat base at Trondheim. It too was savagely mauled; workshops were gutted, a sub-marine was sunk, and a destroyer damaged. A third target was cloud-covered; disappointed crews, unwilling to bomb indiscriminately over Norway, brought their missiles back to base.

Weather to Norway: Heavily loaded bombers took off through overcast, flew across the North Sea over solid cloud layer, bombed the targets, returned through same conditions. Round trip to Trondheim: 1900 miles.

Two years to build, four minutes to destroy. Bombs fall on huge German magnesium plant at Hero ya, Norway. Attack was timed to strike between shifts, reducing Norwegian casualties. Arrow marks aiming point.

The Norwegian attacks apparently took the enemy completely by surprise. Air resistance was slight. The only Fortress lost, of more than three hundred dispatched, was hit by flak and made a forced landing in Sweden, where the crew was interned. One of the most interested observers of the raid was "Skipper," black cocker spaniel with more than three hundred flying hours to his credit. He spent most of his time in the radio room, with occasional visits to the cockpit or the bombardier's compartment. Since the long over-water approach to Norway was made at relatively low altitude, Skipper required no oxygen mask.

The effectiveness of the Trondheim attack was confirmed unofficially by a cheery telegram from the RAF's photo-reconnaissance fliers. "Please convey heartiest congrats to air crews and all concerned for wizard bombings July 24. We like to see and photograph such work. Press on more of it soon, please."

The Americans wasted no time in pressing on wizard bombings. Next day, sighting through the smoke of the RAF's fires at Hamburg, they hit the enormous Blohm and Voss shipyards, representing eighteen per cent of Germany's entire shipbuilding production. At the same time other formations hammered shipyards at Kiel and the German Air Force training school and airdrome at Wustrow. At Hamburg, enemy aircraft were observed endeavoring to lay a smoke screen over the target. Enemy fighter opposition was intense. Forty-four were claimed as destroyed. Nineteen B-17's were lost.

One of the lost crews spent all that night and most of the next day in rubber dinghies, floating so close to the German coast that they could see the pall of smoke that covered Hamburg and the glow of their own fires at Kiel. The pilot of Happy Daze told the story afterward: When the fighters hit us, the wing swelled up like a balloon and then burst into.flames, and we went into a dive. I didn't give the order to bail out because I thought we might pull out of it. I got it under control only 150 feet above the water, just in time to ditch.

The landing was not much worse than a normal runway landing, but the waves knocked the ball turret up through the plane, and as the ship settled it broke in half. Two men escaped through the radio hatch; the rest simply walked out where the fuselage was split. They had fifteen seconds to inflate the dinghies before Happy Daze went down.

We tied our dinghies together and then started worrying. We were a long way from home, and closer to Germany than any other land. We were afraid the Germans might pick us up. We not only watched Kiel burn that night, but we actually sat out there in the water and had a grandstand view of the RAF bombing the German coast. We could see the flak bursting and the fires started by the RAF blockbusters.

About noon the next day a British plane spotted us. He dropped three big dinghies and then hung around to protect us from possible attack by a Ju-88 that hovered in the distance. Soon another RAF plane joined him, then three more, then three Forts joined up. It looked like the combined Allied air force above us.

One of the RAF planes dropped a launch by parachute, It was a sight to see that boat come parachuting down, settling right beside us. It was all closed, with the hatches sealed. We opened it up and there were sleeping bags, food, water, gasoline, and directions for running the thing. I had an idea I might get the boys to head for New York...

Tire Trouble. Smoke from the largest tire factory in Germany rises 20,000 feet during the attack on Hanover.

Next morning, steering bravely westward, they were picked up by fishermen, who delivered them safely to an Air-Sea Rescue motor launch. The work done by Air-Sea Rescue during Blitz week was phenomenal. On one day, July 26, they picked up sixty-five American airmen.

This was the day the Fortresses chose to attack the great Continental Gummiwerke A.G. Vahrenwalderstrasse at Hanover, largest tire factory in Germany. Photographs taken during the last phase of the attack showed a tremendous explosion with a column of smoke towering 20,000 feet into the air, blanketing the whole city. Flak was heavy. Altogether, sixteen bombers were lost at Hanover. Eight more went down over Hamburg and secondary targets which were attacked by other Fortress formations. Sixty enemy fighters were destroyed.

One of the returning bombers brought back a story which, for grim fortitude, was without parallel in the records of the VIII Bomber Command. Going in over the German coast the Fortress was attacked by enemy fighters. As the navigator told the story: On their first pass I felt sure they had got us, for there was a terrific explosion overhead and the ship rocked badly. A second later the top turret gunner fell through the hatch and slumped to the floor of my nose compartment. When I got to him, I saw that his left arm had been blown off at the shoulder and he was a mass of blood. I first tried to inject some morphine, but the needle was bent and I couldn't get it in. Then I tried to apply a tourniquet, but it was impossible as the arm was off too close to the shoulder. I knew he had to have the right kind of medical treatment as soon as possible and we had almost four hours of flying time ahead of us, so there was no alternative.

I opened the escape hatch and adjusted the chute for him and placed the rip-cord firmly in his right hand. But he must have become excited because he pulled the cord, opening the pilot chute in the updraft. I managed to gather it together and tuck it under his right arm and toppled him into space. I learned somewhat later from our ball-turret gunner that the chute opened O.K. We were at 24,500 feet about twenty five miles west of Hanover. Our only hope was that he was found and given medical attention immediately.

Bombardier and navigator turned back to their guns. Shortly afterward the Fortress went over the target, and the bombardier got his bombs away. The navigator tried several times to communicate over the interphone with other  

Lifeboat drops by parachute to a ditched Fort's crew.

members of the crew, but could get no answer. The last I remembered hearing over it was shortly after the first attack when someone was complaining about not getting any oxygen. All this time, except for what I thought to be some violent action, we seemed to be flying O.K. It was two hours later, when we were fifteen minutes out from the enemy coast, that I decided to go up, check with the pilot, and have a look around. I found the pilot slumped in his seat, the back of his head blown off . This had happened during the first attack more than two hours before. The copilot was flying the plane with one hand and holding the half-dead pilot off the controls with the other... .

The pilot, fatally wounded, was a man of such tremendous vitality that even the impact of a 20-mm. cannon shell could not completely extinguish his will to fly the ship. Semi-conscious, he struggled wildly with the controls. He was a big man—over six feet, weighing 185 pounds. The copilot had to fight him constantly, dragging him off the control column while the Fortress plunged through the sky in what the navigator and bombardier took to be extreme evasive action. The same attack which wounded the pilot and cost the top turret gunner his arm had shattered the oxygen lines so that four of the five men in the rear of the plane passed out, leaving the Fortress undefended except for the nose and ball-turret guns. When they finally revived, these gunners were badly frostbitten. The radio equipment went dead at the same time, and the interphone was knocked out. No one would have questioned a decision to turn back. The copilot decided to go on.

Blow for blow. Two enemy fighters, one broken in half, go down under the guns of a Fortress formation.

Blow for blow. A Fortress with its entire tail shot away staggers for a moment before the final plunge

The navigator's narrative continued: The copilot told me we had to get the pilot out of his seat as the plane couldn't be landed from the copilot's seat. The glass on that side was shattered so badly you could barely see out. The copilot was operating the controls with one hand and helping me to handle the pilot with the other. We struggled for thirty minutes getting the fatally injured pilot out of his seat and down into the rear of the navigator's compartment, where the bombardier held him from slipping out the open hatch. The pilot died a few hours later.

Shifting from his own seat to the pilot's, the copilot brought the ship down to an emergency landing in England. He was subsequently recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor. His name, John C. Morgan; his rank, Flying Officer.

July 27 was a badly needed day of rest for the combat crews of the VIII Bomber Command. But on the 28th, 29th, and 30th they were out in force again. Aircraft factories were their chief targets, at Kassel, at Oschersleben, at Warnemunde. Shipyards at Kiel were hit again. Enemy fighter opposition remained strong and persistent. The three days' air battle cost the Americans forty-four Fortresses. Claims against enemy aircraft were 179 destroyed.

American losses would have been higher had it not been for the long-range support provided on July 28 and July 30 by squadrons of P-47's. On these two days Thunderbolts of the VIII Fighter Command, equipped at last with auxiliary gas tanks, made round trips of nearly 600 miles to meet the returning Fortress formations deep inside Germany and escort them to safety. In the ensuing dogfights the barrel-chested American fighters accounted for thirty .   four enemy aircraft. Eight Thunderbolts were lost. The pilot of one was saved.

The benefits of such escort to the big bombers could hardly be overestimated. With friendly fighters holding off enemy attacks over such short-range targets as Antwerp or Paris, bombing accuracy was noticeably improved and losses were held to a minimum. Even when the fighters could not go all the way to the objective, their partial escort saved the bombers precious ammunition and human fighting energy. On the way out, cripples could be protected. This knowledge helped bomber morale enormously. To a weary Fortress crew, fighting its way back to the German coast after hours of exhausting combat at altitude, the appearance of squadrons of Thunderbolts or Spitfires was the most beautiful

"Something exploded at Kassel...: "

sight in the world. Handicapped at first by mechanical difficulties that had to be ironed out, by lack of drop tanks, above all by inadequate numbers, the VIII Fighter Command demonstrated conclusively during Blitz week that the Thunderbolt was more than a match at high altitude for any German fighter. Bomber men, convinced that long-range fighter escort would play an all-important part in the battle of Germany, hoped that the Fighter Command's growth would keep pace with their own.

The bombers needed all the support they could get. As the pressure against Germany increased, the Nazis redoubled their efforts to stop the daylight raiders. There were complacent rumors in the press that the German pilots were losing their nerve. This was not verified in combat. Almost without exception, enemy fliers displayed suicidal recklessness in attack. They will probably continue to do so as long as they have sufficient aircraft to make a fight of it--not necessarily through affection for the Nazi regime but rather because of a certain occupational loyalty to the job which all fliers feel, an unwillingness to let the unit down.

Every sort of defensive tactic was employed by the enemy during Blitz week. Air-to-air bombing was experienced on almost every mission during July. "Intruder" B-17's were reported, the Germans apparently sending up repaired Fortresses to fly along with the American squadrons, making observations on the behavior and pattern of the formations. In one or two cases these aircraft were seen to fire on the American formations, but as a rule they

Close call. A rocket gun mounted on an enemy fighter inflicted this damage. Fragment is shown below.

Rocket fragment. This 14-inch piece of steel tore the pants off the turret gunner without hurting him.

simply followed them back to the English coast and then disappeared. Rocket projectiles more than eight inches in diameter, fired from cannon under the fighters' wings, made their appearance --the enemy aircraft standing off at considerable distance and attempting to lob shells into the Fortress Groups. The rocket installations reduced the fighters' speed appreciably. A Thunderbolt pilot, close behind an FW 190, was astonished to see one of his bullets set off the rocket under the starboard wing. The rocket soared off in a cloud of white smoke as the German fighter disintegrated under the fire of the Thunderbolt's .50-caliber machine guns.

Freak accidents occurred on almost every mission. A Fortress named Short Stride was nearly lost when the life-raft hatch in its fuselage flew open. The raft popped out and caught on the tail surfaces, jamming them. The Fort nosed up 300 feet and then went into a 15,000-foot power dive. Crew members were pinned against the ceiling. The interior of the ship became a shambles of wrecked instruments, broken glass, and scattered ammunition. The copilot saw the navigator appear twice in the blister well of the bombardier's compartment, then just as suddenly disappear. It was like a funny movie, first you saw him, then you didn't.

At 10,000 feet the pilot and copilot managed to pull the Fortress out of the dive. The strain was too much for the bomb bay; bomb shackles tore loose, bombs and bomb-bay doors fell into the sea with a loud noise. Four members of the crew bailed out. The rest decided to stay with the ship and risk a crash landing in England. They made it, with the life raft still lodged in the stabilizer.

As the ship taxied up the runway the idling propeller of No. 2 engine flew off and slashed a four-foot rent in the bombardier's compartment, which the navigator had vacated just prior to landing. "Boy," said the navigator later, "I'd have just hated to come through all that only to be conked by a flying prop!"

In August the assault against the German Air Force continued. Airfields in France were bombed again. Twenty-nine enemy fighters were claimed destroyed when the Fortresses made a daylight attack on targets in the Ruhr. But the most grievous wounds suffered by the Luftwaffe came on August 17, one year to the day after the VIII Bomber Command had begun operations over Europe.

On that day, in perfect weather, the largest armada of Fortresses ever assembled was dispatched against two high-priority industrial targets deep inside Germany. Two aerial task forces struck the factories at Schweinfurt which produced approximately half of Germany's total output of ball bearings. A third, fighting its way through fighter opposition of unparalleled ferocity, paralyzed the Nazis' second-largest Messerschmitt factory at Regensburg and flew straight on to Africa.

The claims and losses in this day's work—288 enemy fighters destroyed, sixty B-17's missing--were both an indication of the scope of the fiercest air combats since the Battle of Britain, and a warning of what lay ahead before the back of the Luftwaffe could be finally broken. As the Fortresses crossed the enemy-held coast, waves of fighters rose to oppose them. All the way in--and in the case of the Schweinfurt formations, all the way out from the target--fresh squadrons of fighters were thrown in. The Germans used everything, FW 190's, Me-109's, Me- 110's, Ju-88's, Me-210's, Do-217's, He-113's, and FW 189's. They were shot down in droves. As one navigator reported, I can't remember looking out without seeing a bunch of them falling out of the sky like big dirty drops of rain.

The Fortress formations, especially the lower squadrons, did not escape lightly. Some bombers came home on two engines. Others returned with half their crews dead or missing. Some fell in the Channel, others in the Mediterranean.

The price was not too high because the bombing--particularly at Regensburg--was magnificent. At Schweinfurt results were good: considerable damage was inflicted on the ball-bearing works, an aircraft-components factory was hit, the main railroad station and communications system were blasted. At Regensburg the entire weight of bombs landed inside the Messerschmitt factory area or on the adjacent airfield. All work at the plant was stopped. Six main workshops were hit, five being severely damaged. Storerooms and administrative buildings were wrecked; a hangar presumably used for engine installation was more than half destroyed. Thirty-seven single-engined aircraft dispersed on the airdrome were probably damaged by blast.

The accuracy of the bombing, coming as it did after hours of the most violent aerial combat, high-lighted the progress achieved by the bombardiers in one year of constant experiment. When the first Combat Wing hit the target so hard that smoke obscured it from view, the second Combat Wing calmly swung around in a complete circle, made another bombing run after some of the smoke had blown away, and. scored an equally effective concentration of hits. It was precision bombing at its best.

In a Fortress named X Virgin, a waist gunner was killed. Four men deliberately bailed out so that remaining crew members would have enough oxygen to take the ship over the target. When the bomb-release mechanism failed to work, a wounded gunner loosened the shackles with a screw driver, then jumped on the bombs until they fell free. In a Fortress named My Prayer, fire broke out and the ship went into a dive. All crew members bailed out except the pilot, copilot, and the top turret gunner, whose chute was so damaged by flames that he was unable to jump. The pilot finally brought the bomber out of its dive and the gunner, painfully wounded by a shell fragment in the leg, managed to smother the blaze with the help of the copilot. The gunner then took over the nose guns, the copilot the waist guns, and they held off enemy fighters until the Fortress was down to house-top altitude and the fighters gave up the chase. We came home at 210 miles an hour, buzzing cities, factories, and airfields in Germany. It was the first legal buzzing I've ever done. We drew some fire, but I did evasive action and we escaped further damage. The people in Germany scattered and fell to the ground when they saw us coming, but in Belgium the people waved and saluted us... .

Over Belgium, the copilot started jettisoning everything that could be spared. He came across a pair of shoes and, seeing a Belgian standing in a field cheering enthusiastically, tied the laces together and dropped the shoes to him. Running low on gas and without a navigator to guide them, the three men brought their plane across the Channel and landed it safely on an RAF airdrome.

Equally harrowing was the trip of Pregnant Portia, a Fortress in the task force that bombed Regensburg. Again a life raft became dislodged and tangled itself in the elevators. In vain, members of the crew tried to shoot it off; one gunner from Texas even tried to rope it. Enemy fighters, seeing that the Fortress was in trouble, gave it their best attention. We could see the Alps in the distance by this time. Since we expected our tail to flop off any minute, we looked longingly at those mountains and prayed harder than we had ever prayed before... .

Regensburg Strike: Bombs from first Group over target land squarely on vital units of one of Germany's largest fighter plane factories. Completed planes can be seen on apron in front of hangar, lower center.

Regensburg Results : Two-thirds of this huge plant, making Me-109 fighter planes, severely damaged. (1) workshops, (2) offices or canteens, (3) unidentified buildings, (4) boiler house, (5) hangar, (6) gun-test range.

Vapor trails at 25,000. Condensation in the upper altitudes often leaves a white trail behind each plane.

Portia made it over the Alps, but halfway across the Mediterranean it became evident that her gasoline would not be sufficient. Other Fortresses were having similar trouble. One pulled out of formation, on advice of the Group leader, and struggled to a crash landing in Spain. Portia flew until the fourth engine sputtered and went dead. The ditching was smoothly executed, but there was only one five-man dinghy for a crew of ten men. The other was still wrapped around Portia's tail; it was the last thing the crew saw as their ship sank. She seemed to hate as much to leave us as we did to lose her. Honestly, the way she lunged and settled in the water, it looked as though she were a human thing, wanting to go along with us . . . I never want to spend another night like that. Five of us sat in the dinghy and five hung on outside. Don't let anyone tell you about the warm Mediterranean seas. It ain't so. The night got blacker and we got gloomier. When trails of daylight finally came up we were all half dead. With the sun, though, our spirits rose again and we took stock of ourselves. During the night every-thing we had--even the stuff in our pockets--had floated away. At eleven o'clock the little automatic radio transmitter we had went out and that is when we started praying in earnest. Incidentally, the following Sunday we attended church en masse!

Anyway, as the afternoon came on a B-26 sighted us and stayed right over us until one of those British Air-Sea Rescue launches came out and picked us up. We thought we were as hard as nails after all, we were a combat crew. But right then we,felt like ninety-year-old men.

The anniversary raids were studded with similar incidents. One pilot who had flown on the first mission one year before was forced down in the North Sea. A British seaplane landed beside him and picked up the entire crew. Unable to take off with such a load, it taxied all night toward the coast of England and was finally met by a rescue launch.

On the landing field from which the initial raid had been launched, a group of newspapermen held their collective breath as a crippled Fortress named Rationed Passion slanted in for a belly landing. It skidded safely along the runway and stopped a few feet from an old weather-beaten bomber used only for towing targets and other utility work. One of the newsmen, glancing at the faded name on the nose of the old Fort, recognized Alabama Exterminator, one of the twelve original Fortresses that flew against Rouen.

But the best picture of the terror and destruction attendant on a massed air battle such as the one that took place over Regensburg was given by an officer who served as copilot of a Fortress in the last Group of the formation, a Group that consequently was hit harder than any other:

At 1017 hours, near Woensdrecht, I saw the first flak blossom out in our vicinity, light and inaccurate. A few minutes later, two F.W 190's appeared at one o'clock level and whizzed through the formation ahead of us in a. frontal attack, nicking two B-17's in the wings and breaking away beneath us in half rolls. Smoke immediately, trailed from both B-17's, but they held their stations. As the fighters passed us at a high rate of closure, the guns of our group went into action. The pungent smell of burnt powder filled our cockpit, and the B-17 trembled to the recoil of nose and ball-turret guns. I saw pieces fly off the wing of one of the fighters before they passed .from view.

Here was early action. The members of the crew sensed trouble. There was something desperate about the way those two fighters came in fast right out of their climb without any preliminaries. For a few seconds the interphone was busy with admonitions: "Lead 'em more" . . . "short bursts" .. . "don't throw rounds away" . . . "there'll be more along in a minute."

Three minutes later, the gunners reported fighters climbing up from all around the clock, singly and in pairs, both FW 190's and Me-109's. Every gun from every B-17 in our Group was firing, crisscrossing our patch of sky with tracers. Both sides got hurt in this clash, with two Fortresses from our low squadron and one from the Group ahead falling out of formation on fire with crews bailing out, and several fighters heading for the deck in flames or with their pilots lingering behind under dirty yellow parachutes. I noticed an Me-110 sitting out of range on our right. He was to stay with us all the way to the target, apparently reporting our position to fresh squadrons waiting for us down the road. At the sight of all these fighters, I had the distinct feeling of being trapped. The life expectancy of our Group suddenly seemed very short, since it appeared that the fighters were passing up the preceding Groups in order to take a cut at us.

Swinging their yellow noses around in a wide U-turn, a twelve-ship squadron of Me-109's came in from twelve to two o'clock in pairs and in fours, and the main event was on.

A shining silver object sailed over our right wing. I recognized it as a main exit door. Seconds later, a dark object came hurtling through the formation, barely missing several props. It was a man,

After Trondheim: A flak hit left this engine smoking.

After Battle. Casualty being removed from bomber.

Debit: A Fortress goes down in flames over Paris during a daylight attack on Nazi targets in France.

Credit: Eighteen of 27 buildings are hit during attack on German aircraft factory at Warnemunde.

clasping his knees to his head, revolving like a diver in a triple somersault. I didn't see his chute open.

A B-17 turned gradually out of the formation to the right, maintaining altitude. In a split second, the B-17 completely disappeared in a brilliant explosion, from which the only remains were four small balls of fire, the fuel tanks, which were quickly consumed as they fell earthward.

Our airplane was endangered by falling debris. Emergency hatches, exit doors, prematurely opened parachutes, bodies, and assorted fragments of B-17's and Hun fighters breezed past us in the slip stream.

I watched two fighters explode not far beneath, disappearing in sheets of orange flame, B-17's dropping out in every state of distress, from engines on fire to control surfaces shot away, friendly and enemy parachutes floating down, and, on the green carpet far behind us, numerous funeral pyres of smoke from fallen fighters, marking our trail. The sight was fantastic: it surpassed fiction.

On we flew through the strewn wake of a desperate air battle, where disintegrating aircraft were commonplace and sixty chutes in the air at one time were hardly worth a second look.

I watched a B-17 turn slowly out to the right with its cockpit a mass of flames. The copilot crawled out of his window, held on with one hand, reached back for his chute, buckled it on, let go, and was whisked back into the horizontal stabilizer. I believe the impact killed him. His chute didn't open.

Ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes, and still no letup in the attacks. The fighters queued up like a bread line and let us have it. Each second of time had a cannon shell in it.

Our B-17 shook steadily with the fire of its .50's, and the air inside was heavy with smoke. It was cold in the cockpit, but when I looked across at the pilot I saw that sweat was pouring off his forehead and over his oxygen mask. He turned the controls over to me for a while. It was a blessed relief to concentrate on holding station in formation instead of watching those everlasting fighters boring in. It was possible to forget the fighters. Then the top turret gunner's twin muzzles would pound away a foot above my head, giving a realistic imitation of cannon shells exploding in the cockpit, while I gave an even better imitation of a man jumping six inches out of his seat.

A B-17 of the Group ahead, with its right Tokyo tanks on fire, dropped back to about 200 feet above our right wing and stayed there while seven of the crew successively bailed out. Four went out the bomb bay and executed delayed jumps, one bailed from the nose, opened his chute prematurely, and nearly fouled the tail. Another went out the left-waist-gun opening, delaying his chute opening for a safe interval. The tail gunner dropped out of his hatch, apparently pulling the rip cord before he was clear of the ship. His chute opened instantaneously, barely missing the tail, and jerked him so hard that both his shoes came off He hung limp in the harness, whereas the others had shown immediate signs of life after their chutes opened, shifting around in the harness. The B-17 then dropped back in a medium spiral and I did not see the pilots leave. I saw it just before it passed from view, several thousand feet below us, with its right wing a sheet of yellow flame.

After we had been under constant attack for a solid hour, it appeared certain that our Group was faced with annihilation. Seven of us had been shot down, the sky was still mottled with rising fighters, and it was only 1120 hours, with target-time still thirty-five minutes away. I doubt if a man in the Group visualized the possibility of our getting much further without one hundred per cent loss. I know that I had long since mentally accepted the fact of death, and that it was simply a question of the next second or the next minute. I learned firsthand that a man can resign himself to the certainty of death without becoming panicky. Our Group fire power was reduced thirty-three per cent; ammunition was running low. Our tail guns had to be replenished from another gun station. Gunners were becoming exhausted.

One B-17 dropped out of formation and put its wheels down while the crew bailed out. Three Me-109's circled it closely, but held their fire, apparently ensuring that no one stayed in the ship to try for home.

Near the I.P., at 1150 hours, one hour and a half after the first of at least 200 individual fighter attacks, the pressure eased off, although hostiles were still in the vicinity. We turned at the I.P. at 1154 hours with fourteen B-17's left in the Group, two of which were badly crippled. They dropped out soon after bombing the target and headed for Switzerland.

Weather over the target, as on the entire trip, was ideal. Flak was negligible. The Group got its bombs away promptly on the leader. As we turned and headed for the Alps, I got a grim satisfaction out of seeing a rectangular column of smoke rising straight up from the Me-109 shops.

The rest of the trip was a marked anticlimax. A few more fighters pecked at us on the way to the Alps. A town in the Brenner Pass tossed up a lone burst of futile flak. We circled over Lake Garda long enough to give the cripples a chance to join the family, and we were on our way toward the Mediterranean in a gradual descent. The prospect of ditching as we approached North Africa, short of fuel, and the sight of other B-17's falling into the drink, seemed trivial matters after the vicious nightmare of the long trip across southern Germany. We felt the reaction of men who had not expected to see another sunset.

At 1815 hours, with red lights showing on all the fuel tanks in my ship, the seven B-17's of the Group which were still in formation circled over a North African airdrome and landed. Our crew was unscratched. Sole damage to the airplane: a bit of ventilation around the tail from flak and 20-mm. shells. We slept on the hard ground under the wings of our B-17, but the good earth felt softer than a silk pillow.

Streaks in the sky. A squadron of fighters leaves vapor trails as it rides herd on a Fortress formation.