Memorial Day Remembers

August 1 and August 17, 1943.

On the first date, Operation Tidal Wave set out from bases in North Africa: five groups of American B-24 Consolidated Liberators -- 178 aircraft -- for a planned low-level, surprise attack on the heart of Nazi Germany's source of oil for her economy and war machine: Ploesti, Rumania. The plan was to come in on radio silence, and launch a swift, surprise attack that would sunder Axis defenses at Ploesti, and put a serious crimp in German oil production and supply.

Tensions were high on the North African runways, and one Army Air Force chaplain remembered a young gunner leaning out of his B-24's gun position, prior to take-off, calling out to him, "Make contact for us, Padre".

The "Zero Raiders", as they were called, would need it. Few among those flying this mission had any illusions about the hazards ahead. The B-24 Liberator's forte was high altitude, daylight precision bombing, not a low level "barnstorming" style of attack.

Things began to go wrong shortly after take-off, and on the 7 hour flight to the target, the Zero Raiders had no knowledge that they were flying into one of the most heavily-defended zones in the world at that time, and worse, had been detected by the Germans, who had readied a deadly reception.

The planned different-directions/different targets approach went out the window, as the Zero Raiders arrived out of sequence, and flew into a cyclone of fire from both concentrated flak and determined German Me-109 fighters.

Flying down to 200 feet of altitude, the B-24s pressed on into chaos, sewing a load of fragmentation and incendiary chaos of their own, using their forward-firing .50 caliber machine guns to deadly effect as they were able, while watching plane after plane of their squadron mates exploding and being turned into flaming wrecks, going down into the maelstrom of exploding oil tanks and sheets of fire.

The raid was over in 27 minutes; Ploesti lost 42% of its production capacity for a few weeks.

The Zero Raiders lost 54 Liberators, with only 33 of the original 178 returning from the attack mission-capable. 310 American airmen were killed; 130 wounded; and around 100 went into Axis captivity for the duration of the war.

Sixteen days later, the Britain-based US Eighth Air Force put up a "maximum effort" of its own: two forces with two separate objectives. 146 B-17s would go after a massive ME-109 aircraft factory at Regensberg, Germany, while a larger force of 230 B-17s would go for a knock-out blow against Germany's ball-bearing production center, Schweinfurt. The Eighth Air Force did not as yet have fighters that could escort the bombers into Germany (nor were all Eighth Air Force commanders convinced such were needed at this point), so the plan was that the two attack groups would take off at roughly the same time, confusing and splitting the formidable German fighter defenses (about 400 ME 109s, as well as countless flak batteries defending both targets).

Not all of the Eighth's commanders felt their slowly-growing force was ready for a mission of this magnitude; but military and political pressure from Washington demanded "a show of force".

On the morning of August 17, 1943, the weather was prohibitive to impossible over the British-based American bomber bases. Nonetheless, the Regensberg force, led by Colonel Curtis LeMay, took off and headed for Regensberg; the Schweinfurt force, led by Brigadier General Robert Williams, was delayed several hours by weather, before taking off.

The results proved a turning point in the up-to-then philosophy of American bomber warfare.

First came LeMay's force bound for Regensberg. Soon as the American fighter escort turned back near the German border (at the limit of their fuel range), about 150 German fighters slammed head-on into the Flying Fortresses, attacking in wing-tip-to-wing-tip groups, firing and diving away almost too late; LeMay's formations began to bleed bombers an hour and a half short of their objective. But the force droned on, being hurt by and hurting their attackers with cones of fire from B-17's massed .50 caliber machine guns; over Regensberg, LeMay's innovation of "bombing on the leader" was used to deadly effect, as the ME-109 plant was hit dead-on and hard. Then the force turned and headed south to an eventual landing in the North African desert, taking punishment from German fighters swarming like angry hornets, to the Swiss Alps.

LeMay's force of 146 bombers was whittled down by 24; 240 American airmen were dead or missing, with countless more wounded, and additional planes unfit for further action.

The late-taking off force for Schweinfurt paid dearly for the decision to press on in the face of the hours-long delay: as their fighter escorts turned away at the German border, the co-pilot of the B-17 Piccadilly Lily saw dozens of "yellow nosed bastards" -- ME 109s -- assembling to attack the force head-on. It was the greatest aerial battle in history to that date: one force of heavily-armed bombers -- believed by their pre-war theorists to be capable of deep penetration missions against whatever the Germans could put up -- without fighter escort of their own; and the other force of about 300 of Germany's best fighter pilots, afraid of the "flying porcupines" as some called the fearsome B-17s, but determined to attack, scatter and rout this force before it could reach whatever target(s) in Germany they were destined to hit.

The B-17s were subjected to savage, relentless fighter attacks to the target and after, with dense batteries of 88mm flak guns taking up the intervening time: flaming pyres of B-17s marked the trail from the border to Schweinfurt and back. Still, squadron commanders held their bloodied formations together, as the Flying Fortresses bulled on through, dropped their loads on and around Schweinfurt, and doggedly fought their way out.

For the survivors of both sides, it was summed up by one bombardier, looking at the empty bunks of squadron mates that night: "did we win? Did we lose?" Many of the German pilots wondered amongst themselves the same thing: Luftwaffe commanders' pleas for reinforcements of men and planes fell on deaf ears in Berlin, a foreboding, as one leader said, of the terrible things to come from the skies in the months ahead.

While Schweinfurt was hit hard that day, the damage was much less fearsome and devastating than that achieved at Regensberg.

What was accomplished with the Schweinfurt attack, was that it finally became plainly evident to the pre-war bomber theorists that the theory of heavily-armed bombers not needing fighter escorts against the Luftwaffe, just didn't hold up. The Schweinfurt force lost 36 Fortresses that day. 360 men were dead or missing in the skies over Germany and France. Countless more were wounded, and dozens of Fortresses that survived the mission, would not be mission-capable for some days, if ever again.

The Regensberg-Schweinfurt double-strike had hurt the US Eighth Air Force, and grievously so.

But these missions -- Schweinfurt in particular -- proved the 'great awakening' to American air leaders. Only a few months later, a new aircraft would appear in the skies over Fortress Europa, a plane that German experts were certain -- and many Allied experts agreed -- that couldn't be built. A fighter plane capable to taking the bomber all the way to Berlin, and slaughtering the attacking Luftwaffe there. A plane that was seminal in paving the way for an absolute necessity prior to D-Day: air superiority in the skies over Normandy, and later, Germany.

That plane was the P-51 Mustang (one of which was flown by my late uncle, with the 383rd Squadron, 364th Fighter Group, Eighth Air Force).

After the war, no less an authority than Hermann Goering told American interrogators, in answer to the question "when did you realize the war was lost?", he responded "when your bombers came over Berlin with fighter escorts".

But that was still in the future in late '43. In the meantime, the road there was bloody and a long way from a foregone conclusion: in a raid against Munster, in late '43, the 100th Bombardment Group -- nicknamed "The Bloody Hundredth" -- lost all but one of their B-17s in the air on that mission, after the attack force was hit by almost two hundred defending German fighters. More tough missions, and bloody losses, would mark the eventually victorious and key American air war against both Germany and Japan.

The US Army Air Force -- and their compatriots in the Marine and Naval Air wings -- would sustain more than a quarter of the total casualties sustained by the US Military in World War II. To those who led the way -- especially those who died, teaching as they themselves learned, in the harshest combat conditions known to Man, then or since -- we remember you this Memorial Day.