Air Fronts: Theaters of Operation - European Theater of Operation: Target Germany - Twelve Feet of Concrete

TWELVE DAYS after the air battle at Lille the bombers attacked Keroman, a small fishing port on the French coast not far from Lorient. The quiet little harbor, sheltered by the long arm of the Brest peninsula, was peaceful no longer. The Germans had turned it into one of the most important U-boat bases in Europe.

These Atlantic bases--at Brest, at Lorient, at Saint-Nazaire, at La Pallice, at Bordeaux--were considered by the Germans one of the chief prizes of their conquest of France. Their experts had always maintained that possession of them in 1917 would have tipped the balance in favor of the U-boat campaign that came so close to strangling Britain. If those comparatively crude submersibles operating from distant bases in the mine-infested North Sea had nearly won the war for the Kaiser, it seemed reasonable to suppose that Hitler's wolf packs would prove irresistible once the Biscay ports were in Nazi hands. German propagandists crowed--and the German people were only too eager to believe--that "Britain's RAF holds Germany by the wrist, but Germany's U-boats hold Britain by the throat!"

In the autumn of 1942 it looked for an ugly moment as if that boast might be justified. Sinkings, which had dropped off from a peak in March, rose sharply in October. ln November they jumped to a terrifying level. From a shipping standpoint, November was the blackest month of World War ll.

There was a variety of reasons for this : winter weather, with stormy days and long nights, made air patrol less effective; submarines with remarkable speed and range were roving the seas in unprecedented numbers; thanks to the African expedition they were finding more targets for their torpedoes. But undoubtedly one of the main factors was the possession of the Atlantic, bases. It was estimated that at any given moment one hundred U-boats operating from the Biscay bases were at sea, with another seventy-five in port. At Lorient alone twenty U-boats were believed to be in the harbor on any given day, most of them the large 750-ton type capable of operating in the Caribbean.

The idea of stamping out these hornet nests from the air was not new. In 1941 the RAF had dropped almost 400 tons of bombs on Lorient, causing great damage to the port area and the town itself. But the Germans had not been idle. With typical Teutonic fondness for massive construction they had built a series of U-boat shelters that were--according to the proud announcements of German propaganda agencies -- completely bombproof.

From four miles up, these shelters resembled cardboard shoeboxes. From the ground they looked like enormous square-jawed railroad tunnels. They squatted on dry land with ramps leading down to the water. Entering U-boats were hauled up in cradles and shunted into any one of twelve individual pens. There, protected from direct bomb hits by an eleven-and-a-half foot overhead layer of reinforced concrete, sheltered from blast by side walls more than eight feet thick, the raider was made ready for its next foray against the shipping lanes.

All around the shelters themselves were smaller buildings containing workshops, transformers, power stations, offices, living quarters, torpedo sheds, and other installations directly connected with the servicing of U-boats. At Lorient, when the Americans made their first attack, there were two blocks of shelters in operation. A third was being built almost on the water's edge; construction of the roof was proceeding rapidly. Close by were floating docks, camouflaged moorings, merchant vessels, supply ships, and sub-marines awaiting servicing. It looked like an ideal target for daylight precision bombing.

Eventually the aerial assault of the VllI Bomber Command against the U-boats was to combine three distinct phases of attack : smashing the U-boats still in the construction yards, harassing them in their turn-around ports, and killing them at sea. But in October the Command had neither the numbers of planes nor the combat experience required for penetration to the shipyards of Germany. Nor could it well afford the expenditure of flying hours that patrolling the convoy lanes demanded. The logical place to strike the U-boats at that stage of the game was, as the C.G. put it, "in the nest."

Home again. This is how the concrete submarine pens at Saint-Nazaire look to the crew of a returning U-boat.

Actually, it was a good place to begin. Despite fourteen missions, the Americans were still in the freshman class. They had many things to learn : what combat formation offered best defense against fighters, what evasive action was best against antiaircraft fire, what bombing techniques were most effective, what modifications had to be made in the planes. Still unproved was the ability of the Forts and Libs to bomb targets and to defend themselves if unescorted by fighters-and the submarine bases lay, for the most part, just beyond fighter range.

Then there was the question of time. It was obvious that the appearance of American bombers over Germany could not be long delayed. The schooling necessary to hasten the day had to be done quickly. The speediest solution was to make the Germans provide the school-and the instructors--whether they liked it or not. Classes would be held four miles up over Brest,

Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, La Pallice, and Bordeaux.

All through the latter half of October the weather was bad. During the month eleven missions were canceled. Only three were carried out, the Lorient attack on October 21 being the third. And bad weather almost nullified that. At 22,000 feet, the altitude specified in the combat order for bombing, there was solid overcast over the target. Three of the four attacking Groups turned back. The fourth--experienced, cocky veterans of the first raid on Rouen--pushed on without fighter escort, hunted for a hole in the clouds, found one, swooped down to 17,500 feet, and bombed the target--a feat which earned them a commendation from the C.G. and cost them three Fortresses shot down.

Enemy fighter opposition was ferocious and skillful. Yellow-nosed FW 190's attacked from the rear in such a way that the high sweeping tail fin of the Forts screened them from the fire of the radio hatch and top turret. Two wing ships were shot out of the rear Fortress element which lagged behind, and the No. 3 plane of the second element dropped out of formation with its wing enveloped in flames. The remaining Americans recorded several bomb hits directly on the submarine installations, claimed ten enemy fighters destroyed, four probably destroyed, and three damaged. They came home exhausted and depressed by the most serious losses suffered by any Group at that time, but pleased with the way in which they had out-witted the weather and proud of the initiative and daring displayed by their Group Leader.

It was just as well that they took a crack at the sub pens while they had a chance. Three weeks later that Group was fighting over another continent. The African invasion had claimed them.

To trace the profound effect of the formation of the Twelfth Air Force upon the Eighth it is necessary to go back to July, when at a meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff it was decided to open the second front in Africa and give it every priority. It was a momentous decision, and subsequent events more than proved the wisdom of it. ln early September the Twelfth Air Force was activated and given first call on men, supplies, aircraft, and transportation. Eighth Air Force personnel, well aware that the Twelfth was being formed, but completely in the dark as to its eventual use or destination, nicknamed it "Junior," and the phrase "You can't have that; it's for Junior" became a standing joke.

Movement of all Twelfth Air Force units and personnel from England by air was handled by the Eighth. The amount of work and organization involved was staggering. Medium bombers, destined from the start for the Twelfth, arrived in England to be trained in the British system of Flying Control before being moved down to Africa. Fighter groups, just becoming battle-tested, joined the tide of air strength flowing south.

From the Vlll Bomber Command two Fortress Groups were sent--the oldest and hence the most experienced in the theater. Later on, part of a Liberator Group was to join them. The Liberators came back, after three months in the desert, for another whirl in "the Big League." The Fortress Groups became a permanent part of the Twelfth Air Force.

The climax of these preparations came on the night of November 4, when a special train carrying General Eisenhower, General Mark Clark, General Doolittle, and various high-ranking British officers left London under conditions of strictest secrecy, arriving at a south coast town at 0200 hours the next morning. There the party.

This is how they look to an American bomber crew

or "bodies" as they were referred to in official orders was transferred to a motor convoy and driven through guarded roads to an airdrome where several aircraft of one of the Fortress Groups were waiting. Pilots identified their passengers, signed the manifests, and took off at dawn for Gibraltar. The plan was to arrive just at dark and all planes made the run on schedule except the Fort carrying General Doolittle, which developed faulty brakes at take-off and was delayed until the next day.

That night, November 5, a careless enlisted man talked too much in a local pub about the events of the day. He was immediately arrested, charged with a most serious violation of security. The need for such security was graphically illustrated next day when General Doolittle's plane was attacked in the Bay of Biscay by four Ju-88's. It succeeded in escaping only after a sharp running fight. Three days later the Allies landed in North Africa.

The loss of two Groups of heavy bombers was bound to make itself felt in subsequent operations of the Vlll Bomber Command unless replacements were prompt in arriving. The demands of global warfare were such that replacements could not be sent. For the next

Emergency landing. This extinguisher foam saved  Stormy Weather when it came down with one engine afire.

few months the American combat strength, instead of moving sharply upward, barely held its own. Missions were curtailed not only by weather but also by the replacement rate, since the C.G. was determined not to allow his small force to become still further reduced. More than once he referred to it as a "token" air force. But the press, quick to sense the drama in the stories of extraordinary individual heroism that accompanied almost every mission, painted such vivid pictures of the American attacks on the sub-marine bases and the factories and harbors of Occupied Europe that the casual reader was almost certain to exaggerate the size and effectiveness of the effort.

The first attack on the sub pens at Lorient was followed by another against similar installations at Brest. Bombing results were so uncertain that two days later, when the bombers went to Saint-Nazaire, a radical experiment was tried. Instead of going in at the customary 20,000 plus feet, the lead Group went over at 10,000 and the last Group flew at 8000 feet. One squadron was as low as 7000. The result was that practically every ship in both Groups was hit by antiaircraft fire.

The Germans had always prided themselves on their "flak" (Flieger Abwehr Kanonen), and that day they threw everything they had at the Americans. Light flak--20- and 37-mm.-came streaming up in the form of tracers, more spectacular than harmful at that altitude. But the heavy flak, mostly from the famed German dual-purpose 88-mm. guns, was deadly. Every Fortress but one in the lead Group was damaged, but all got back to base. Twelve Liberators bombing from around 18,000 feet, were not seriously inconvenienced. But three Fortresses in the last Group over the target were hit hard by heavy flak and went down. One shell was seen to make a direct hit and explode against the nose of a Fortress, evidence of extraordinarily accurate fusing. Bombing results were better but hardly justified the battle damage sustained. If it proved nothing else, the mission demonstrated conclusively that so far as casualties or losses from flak were concerned, it was strictly a matter of "the higher the fewer."

From then on Saint-Nazaire was known as "Flak City." As the missions went on, and the "milk run" down to the sub pens became almost an established routine, the Germans moved in great numbers of heavy flak batteries. By November they had about seventy-five guns available at Saint-Nazaire alone; later the number passed one hundred. And, as in any other form of warfare, practice tended to make perfect. Flak began to be dangerous well above 20,000 feet. As one American waist gunner put it feelingly, You always get good trouble over Saint-Nazaire; they got postgraduates at them flak guns!

For some airmen flak proved more of a mental hazard then enemy fighters. The trouble is, you never know it's there till it's there. The ugly puffs of brown smoke mushrooming across the sky, the metallic coughs of the bursts, the knowledge that although you were traveling some 300 feet per second a sliver of steel that had risen four miles above the ground might find you, that a tenth of a second might make the difference between a hit and a miss, that the position you were sitting in might determine whether you lived or died--all these things crossed the minds of the combat crews when Intelligence Officers announced at briefings that "flak is mainly a deterrent."

Actually, flak unaided was not likely to knock down a plane if proper evasive action were taken and sufficient altitude maintained. But it did cripple many, and once a Fort or Lib was knocked out of formation there were always enemy fighters waiting to pounce like crows on an owl rendered helpless by daylight. Flying with reckless courage, the "Abbeville Kids," as the RAF called them, came in so close that often it was possible to see their faces. There was more truth than humor in the threadbare bomber-station joke, "Well, I had a good look at that Jerry pilot with the red mustache again today."

In the stress of combat, crew members were likely to be called upon to display remarkable versatility. High-ranking officers, riding as observers, sometimes found themselves manning machine guns. A cameraman, one of several who went with the bombers and struggled with endless technical difficulties in an effort to record aerial combat on film, had the radio hatch gunner mortally wounded beside him and spent the afternoon spraying .50-caliber bullets down the spine of the Fortress. Bombardiers and navigators who had never flown four-engined ships took over controls from wounded pilots and copilots and brought their ships home, some-times being "talked in" to a landing. Typical was the laconic story of a radio operator who before the war had been a store manager in Salt Lake City :

I was radio gunner in a Fort called the Jersey Bounce. We were getting along all right until the flak caught up with us and a fragment sliced through the fuselage into the ankle of our navigator. The pilot called me on the interphone to come and administer first aid to the navigator, but I was too busy fighting off enemy planes that were attacking from the rear. As soon as I had a chance, I crawled forward to the nose and found the navigator sitting on an ammunition box cheerfully spotting fighters for the bombardier, who was leaping. from one side of the nose to the other, manning both guns.

I applied a tourniquet to the navigator's leg, gave him some sulfa pills, and sprinkled the wound with sulfa powder. Three times I had to stop to take a gun and help the bombardier ward off attacks from dead ahead.

Then the lead ship of our element was hit in the

Cripple. This Fortress had its nose blown off; but flew back to base. The bombardier was killed.

No. 1 engine and began to fall back. We dropped back too, holding our position on our leader's wing. Just then an FW flashed in like a barracuda, came right between the two Fortresses, and raked our ship with cannon fire. I could feel the hits slamming into us. Word came through that the tail gunner was hit, and then just afterward the interphone went dead.

The wounded navigator seemed all right, so I crawled back to the tail gunner. He was intact, but he told me that the ball turret had received a direct hit. I went back to take a look and found it completely wrecked. The gunner was crumpled. in the wreckage. I tried to do what I could for him, but it was no use. I don't think he ever knew what hit him. I reached into the turret and. fixed the broken connection of the interphone, then I went back to the nose and gave the navigator a shot of morphine to ease his pain. Then I went back to the radio compartment to man my own gun again.

That's all there was to it.

Gunner, radio operator, physician, electrician, mortician--that's all there was to it.

Hardly a mission passed without some new report of flak phenomena, or revised enemy fighter tactics. FW 190's were evidently being more heavily armored : Fortress gunners reported seeing .50-caliber tracers glance off the cowling of their radial engines. More and more the enemy was going in for head-on attacks. Bursts of antiaircraft fire that showered the formations with green and red stars were reported. Pretty pink bursts--promptly dubbed "lace-panty flak" -were seen. Huge arrows of smoke were reported that may have had significance only in the minds of the excited observers. Flak City rarely failed to put on a good show with at least one new act.

The milk runs went on with an occasional slap at Lille or Abbeville, at Romilly-sur-Seine or Rouen. There were eight missions in November -- more than the weather forecasters had considered possible. In December the weather lived up to its black reputation; time and again missions were scrubbed; four were completed.

Actually, this was all that the timetable called for, but a certain impatience began to be manifested by those who somehow had acquired the notion that an air force, to be effective, could or should fight a major engagement every other day. This illusion, fostered perhaps (like the pickle-barrel-bombing-accuracy myth) by over-zealous advocates of air power, was based on a curious blindness to the realities of aerial war-fare. People who would not have dreamed of expecting a naval squadron-or even a ground army--to fight a dozen big battles in one month, repairing combat damage and replacing casualties overnight, wondered audibly why the American bombers did not go out more often.

The problem of turning an untried theory of air warfare into efficient and deadly practice seemed to have--did have--a thousand different facets. In their trial by combat the big bombers were showing more endurance than even the experts had hoped for, but certain modifications were needed : more fire power forward, better oxygen supply for the turrets, bigger ammunition boxes, better disposal of expended cartridge cases that had an unpleasant way of falling upon friendly aircraft flying below and causing considerable damage.

There was need for better organization of the combat crew-bombardier and navigator, cramped in the plexiglass nose, were likely to get in each other's way during the heat of combat. So were the waist gunners : the windows through which they fired, designed originally so that one man could handle both guns, were too close together. A method had to be devised of making it easier for the ball-turret gunner to bail out in case the abandon-ship order was given. Better rescue, emergency, and life-raft equipment was found to be needed. By the time the first year of operations was over, bombers arriving from the States were requiring over a hundred modifications before going on combat status.

Every aspect of combat flying presented problems that demanded solution. Radio operators had to master the British system of communications and learn to recognize false German messages designed to confuse, or even recall, the American formations. Navigators had to familiarize themselves with Continental landmarks to avoid errors that might prove fatal. Late in the year, coming back from Lorient, a Fortress--probably with wounded aboard--evidently mistook the tip of the Brest peninsula for the south coast of England. It peeled out of formation, obviously intending to land, and ran into enemy fighters that shot it down before it could rectify its mistake.

But the problem that overshadowed all others was bombing accuracy. The bombers were hitting the sub-pen installations, there was no doubt of that. Letters of praise from the RAF and from the British Admiralty attested to the destruction at the bases, with the consequent lengthening of the U-boat's turn-around time. Morale of the U-boat crews was shaken. But the Americans weren't satisfied.

For one thing, experience was proving that the destructive power of a single bomb, or even a few bombs, was not so devastating as had been expected. What was needed within the target area was a concentration of bombs whose cumulative effect would be so great that repairing the damage would hardly be worth the Germans' time or effort. During the early months of 1943 this sort of concentration was to be realized, not once but many times. In the last half of 1942 the American bombardiers were still wrestling with the problem.

On virtually every mission they were hitting the sub bases with at least a few sticks of bombs. Direct hits on the shelters tore craters several feet deep in the concrete roofs. But the bases were not being knocked out. The desired concentration was not being achieved.

The first indication that a solution might be reached came on January 3 when sixty-eight Fortresses and Liberators attacked Saint-Nazaire for the sixth time. It was a diamond-clear winter day with visibility unlimited over the target. In a further effort to insure precision bombing an unusually long bombing run was ordered. The run was made into the wind, and since the wind above 20,000 feet was a 115-mile-per-hour gale, the bombers' speed was reduced by more than half. For almost ten minutes they flew practically straight and level, sitting up there, as one pilot put it, "like fish in a barrel."

As a result, the flak was particularly deadly. The Germans put up what amounted to a box barrage at the point of bomb release, and the formations had to plow through it. At least two bombers--probably three--were shot down by

The smoke was late. Smoke screen over the submarine pens at Saint-Nazaire, a common Nazi defense measure.

flak. Enemy fighters, fourteen of which were destroyed, accounted for four more bombers. It was a tough day : the loss of seven bombers was the worst suffered to date.

On that day, for the first time, the formations abandoned individual bombing and adopted the practice of dropping their bombs at the instant the squadron leader released his load. The full implications were not realized at the time, although bombing results were good. But the first long step had been taken toward a new technique of bombing that within a few weeks was to produce a concentration of bombs on a target the like of which had never been seen--at Rotterdam, or Coventry, or anywhere else.

Incredible stories of individual heroism were recorded that day. In one Fortress a 20-mm. shell entered the cockpit, killing the pilot out-right and stunning the copilot. The plane fell out of formation in a terrific power dive. Two thousand feet below, the copilot recovered consciousness, pulled the body of the pilot off the control column, and, despite his wounds, regained control and zoomed back up into formation in what the officer leading the mission described as the most remarkable feat of piloting he had ever seen.

Down on "the deck," struggling like a crippled gull over the Bay of Biscay, another Fortress participated in a wild dogfight with at least four FW 190's. Turning always into the attack to give the FW's less time to aim and fire, maintaining violent evasive action with one engine dead and another damaged, the Fortress shot down at least two of its attackers. The pilot, a bullet through his legs, brought his riddled ship back to base.

That was the day Sergeant Arizona Harris, top turret gunner, won the Distinguished Service Cross. An officer in his squadron told the story :

His name was really Arizona--they christened him that way--and he came from Tempe, which is a little desert town not far from Phoenix. He had a big leonine head and tawny hair and steady eyes and thick strong wrists, and he was one of the best top turret gunners you ever did see. He usually fired in short, quick bursts, to keep his guns from overheating, and he didn't miss-not often. He already had two FW 190's to his credit, and he had an Air Medal, too, that he was going to show to his father and his two brothers and his married sister when he got home.

He went out that day with Charlie Cramner, one of the most popular pilots in the whole group, and I think Arizona was proud to ride with him because he knew that if anybody could bring the ship back, Charlie would. Even when two engines were knocked out and the whole bottom was blown clean out of the nose, so that the bombardier and navigator simply disappeared and nobody knew what became of them-even then it looked as if Charlie would bring her back, because when the, formation finally pulled away from the enemy fighters, there was his ship staggering along with us.

Not quite with us, though. The formation came down to zero feet for protection against possible attacks from below. But Cramner didn't dare lose altitude that he couldn't regain, so he kept his ship as high as he could fifteen hundred feet, maybe-and the rest of us thought he was safe up there. As safe as you can be in a riddled ship with two engines out and most of the nose shot away. So we didn't join him.

But all of a sudden, about forty miles northwest of Brest, six Focke-Wulf 190's and a Messerschmitt 109 came hurtling out of nowhere. They spotted the limping Fortress, and one after another they made a pass at it from behind.

The other bombers were too far away to help. We saw two parachutes from the Fort flare open after the first attack, and two more after the second attack-although there was barely time for the chutes to open before the men hit the water.

We saw the Germans circle the drifting chutes, and whether or not they machine-gunned the fliers is something that can't be proved, so why think too much about it? But when the Fortress settled into the sea--and Charlie Cramner, who had stayed with his ship as a captain should, set her down as gracefully and gently as if he had four engines and a six-thousand-foot concrete runway under him--then the Germans did strafe her, and you could see the steel-gray sea boiling under the rain of bullets.

But there was something else you could see, and that was the guns in the upper turret still blazing, even as she settled. She settled fast; she lasted only about half a minute. But the top turret was still spitting as the waves closed over it. And that was the end of Arizona T. Harris, American fighting man.

The date was January 3, 1943. A few days later announcement was made that Allied shipping losses for December were less than half those suffered in November. The U-boat offensive was not dead, but its back was broken. Arizona Harris had helped break it.