The second force was smaller – just three bomb groups, or about sixty planes – and was bound for the U-boat yards at Kiel. It would fly across the North Sea with the Warnemünde wing, and also turn northwards, then suddenly switch back on itself. Again, this was designed to confuse the Germans, conceal the true aim and draw out the Luftwaffe fighters too early.
About forty minutes behind those forces there were two combat wings, bound for Hamburg. The first was to bomb the Blohm & Voss shipyards, while the second was to attack the Klöckner aero-engine factory. By this time, so the planners thought, the Luftwaffe would be back at their airfields refuelling, thus giving the Hamburg force time to get to the target relatively unmolested. After the city had been bombed, both combat wings would join up with the Kiel force, and they would fly home together. By now the Luftwaffe would be back in the air, and it was safer to fly
in larger numbers. The Hamburg and Kiel wings would look out for each other on the way home.
The final piece of the jigsaw was a pair of diversionary flights, well to the south. A small force of fighters and light bombers would attack occupied Holland and northern France, making believe that they were the main danger. The idea was to hold down German fighters in these areas, and prevent them reinforcing the defences in northern Germany. 7
It was an ambitious plan, fraught with danger. If the various diversions did not work, the planes bound for Hamburg would find themselves the focus of all the combined fighter defences of Germany, Holland and northern France. If either the Warnemünde or the Kiel force aborted its mission the Hamburg force would be isolated, and if the Hamburg and Kiel forces failed to meet up on the way home they would be more vulnerable to attack. The USAAF was taking a huge gamble in splitting up its force into four smaller units: unless the plan worked perfectly, any one of them might end up facing the full force of the Luftwaffe alone.
That the Americans believed they could attack a target as strong as Hamburg with a divided force, in broad daylight, without fighter cover, was perhaps an indication of how green they were. It is important to remember that, for them, this was still early in the air war, and they had not yet had a chance to learn from their mistakes. General Anderson had been at his post for a mere three weeks, and his staff had planned only a handful of missions to Germany on this scale before. The bomber groups were just as inexperienced. None of the six groups that took off for Hamburg that afternoon had even existed when America joined the war, and four had been in England for a matter of weeks. 8In the past eight months they had been created, trained, transported across the Atlantic, accommodated in a foreign country and thrown into the thick of the air war. By any standards, this was a baptism of fire.
It is easy to criticize the naïvety of their plans, but they had not yet had the opportunity to accrue long years of experience as the British had. That they were able to bomb Germany at all in the summer of 1943 is little short of a miracle.
* * *
The RAF watched the Americans plan their missions with a degree of curiosity. Despite superficial similarities, it had become obvious by now that the USAAF was a very different air force from the RAF. The contrasts existed at every level – strategic, tactical, even down to the design of the aeroplanes. In the end it boiled down to one basic difference: the British bombed by night, but the Americans bombed by day.
I have already touched on some of the practical and ethical reasons why the USAAF was determined to fly bombing missions in daylight, but that they believed they could succeed in this hazardous enterprise, at which the British, and the Germans before them, had been forced to give up, was down to the quality of their planes. While the British and Germans had tried to fly through swarms of enemy fighters in outdated, poorly equipped bombers, the Americans had something much more suited to the job: the Boeing B-17 – easily the best daylight heavy bomber of the Second World War.
The B-17 was not nicknamed the ‘Flying Fortress’ for nothing. It was equipped with bullet-proof windows round the rear gunner’s position, armour plating throughout, and it bristled with machine-guns. The B-17F, the model in operation during July 1943, had up to sixteen 50-calibre Browning machine-guns: four in the nose, two in the tail, four on the roof, two in the belly, and two on either side in the waist. When it was under attack, every member of the ten-man crew, except the two pilots, had something to shoot with. And, most importantly, unlike the bombers of other nations, the B-17F had no blind spots.
A single American bomber was therefore a pretty formidable opponent for any fighter. However, unlike the British at this stage of the war, the Americans did not fly one by one but in groups of twenty or so, in close formation. Each group of twenty would be accompanied by two others: one group would fly in the lead, the next slightly higher and to one side, and the last slightly lower and to the other side. Any German fighter pilot who dived through the middle of a formation like this was either extremely brave or extremely foolhardy: with anything up to a hundred guns firing at him, there was little chance that he could have escaped unscathed.
To protect it from flak, the B-17 had been built to fly at heights of 30,000 feet and higher. This was 5–6,000 feet higher than a pilot of heavy bombers in the RAF could dream of. It flew at speeds of just under 300 m.p.h., which, again, was considerably faster than any RAF heavy bomber. True, it could carry less than half the bomb load of a Lancaster, but the Americans reasoned that they did not need to carry such huge numbers of bombs. Their philosophy was built on dropping a few accurately placed bombs on specific targets – not, as with the RAF, on plastering the whole area with bombs. They were happy to sacrifice their bomb capacity for the ability to fly higher, faster and more safely than any other air force in the world.
The only problem with the theories was that they didn’t quite work – at least, not yet. No matter how high or fast the American bombers flew, they were no match for the German fighters, and probably would not be until the introduction of long-range American fighter escorts later in the war. The USAAF was certainly not strong enough to commit to several targets at once, and seriously underestimated the strength of the Luftwaffe. Their British counterparts warned the Americans of what they would face and could not understand why they refused to listen. To the British, it looked as though the USAAF was determined to repeat the mistakes they themselves had made.
The late Pierre Clostermann, one of the Allies’ greatest fighter aces in the Second World War, once described to me the first time he ever saw a USAAF officer: he was wearing a cowboy hat, a revolver on his hip and ‘swaggering like he had just stepped out of the Wild West’. 9The American air force at that time was brash, confident in its abilities to the point of arrogance, and determined to live by its own rules. Eventually the brashness would be vindicated – indeed, many have argued that it was only by forcing the Germans into a long-term, daylight gun battle that the Allies finally gained air superiority – but in the meantime some harsh lessons had to be learned.
* * *
If there were close links between the RAF and the USAAF at command level, there were fewer between the airmen. The Americans had separate air bases, and rarely had the opportunity to meet their British counterparts. When they did meet, however, there was a strong mutual respect between them. Walter Davis, of 91st BG, remembers a conversation he had in the summer of 1943 with an RAF man he met in a London pub. The British airman insisted on buying him a drink with the words, ‘You wouldn’t catch me going over Germany in daylight!’ In reply, Davis simply said, ‘Well, you wouldn’t catch me going over there in the dark!’ 10
To a certain degree, Davis was being generous to his RAF drinking partner. Of the two air forces, the RAF men unquestionably had the better deal – at least at that stage of the war. Of course, the Americans did not have to take off or land in the dark, they had their squadron colleagues around them as they flew, and they could see danger coming. But without the cover of darkness they were little better than sitting ducks, and their rigid adherence to formation flying meant that when the guns started firing they could not take evasive action. As one US veteran cogently put it, ‘We were ordered to fly in an aluminum crate, carrying two thousand gallons plus of 100-octane gasoline, with a six-to-eight-thousand-pound bomb load, in tight formation, straight and level, while people shot at us.’ 11