Bryant and Bean looked at one another. What was next? Zipper factories?
“Bomber Command tells us that this is the most important target ever attacked by aircraft. This is the big deal, gentlemen, as you can see.”
He pointed to the board, as if there were something further to emphasize. “Now this is a revolutionary way of employing the strategic bomber, and you men are the first to be a part of it; we will mount a sustained attack against one especially vital industry, rather than spreading ourselves thin over a number of targets. Schweinfurt is what we call a bottleneck target, gentlemen. Nazi fighters — and a whole hell of a lot of other things in Germany — run on ball bearings. Hundreds of ball bearings, thousands in one plane alone. Seventy-six percent of those ball bearings, seventy-six percent of all the bearings in Germany, come from Schweinfurt. Get Schweinfurt and you get seventy-six percent of the bearings that make the Focke Wulfs and Messerschmitts go. I suspect that that is an item of personal interest to you men.”
“Ha, ha,” someone said from the back of the room.
The major continued.
“There will be, simultaneously, a mission against the Messerschmitt factory at Regensburg.” He pointed.
“Probably the second most important target ever attacked,” Piacenti whispered.
“The second most important target ever attacked by aircraft,” the major said. A sheet was pulled back from a second smaller board and the Regensburg mission was outlined. The men stared. The number of planes now involved in this joint mission was staggering.
“The Messerschmitt factory produces some three hundred fighters a month, a full thirty percent of the total. The idea, gentlemen, is to break the Luftwaffe fighter arm. To break it for you men, and to break it in preparation for the planned invasion of Europe.” He paused. “I don’t think I’m giving too much away to tell you men that,” he said.
“Couldn’t we just keep going after airfields, like Le Bourget?” Piacenti asked quietly.
The screen came down. They were shown photo blow-ups. They were given details of the three targets. The impossible German names for the factories they shortened to KGF, VKF 1, and VKF 2. They learned that Kugel meant spherical in German.
They felt worse receiving elaborate explanations. It seemed un-military and un-Army for their commanding officers to be so willing to confide in them. They did not expect to know precisely why they went on missions. There was not going to be a vote. They nursed the possibility that they went on some of the missions because somebody somewhere simply felt like sending them. The major spoke again of the critical concentration of ball bearings.
“We got ’em by the colones,” Piacenti said.
“Have you ever heard such dog shit in all your life?” Lewis said. “After we do this, all the machines stop. Germany surrenders.”
But they were incompletely focused on the importance of the targets. What most interested them was the length of yarn line. Their fighter escort range, drawn in an arc through the Netherlands with a blue pen, covered a forlorn fifth of the distance.
The line-up of formations and squadron positions was still concealed. It made a great deal of difference in the defensive boxes whether they were in the center, or on the leading or trailing edges, where the heaviest casualties were.
The crews were waiting for that unveiling. They had quieted and sat in orderly rows and everyone behind Bryant looked too young. The crew of Murder, Inc. had that stenciled over their left front pockets. Bryant was reminded of a school assembly.
One of the Murder, Inc. gunners, a skinny Polish guy named Skink or Strink or something like that, caught Bryant’s eyes with his own. “It just goes to show you,” he said, across the intervening row, “how important the little ball bearing is to our mechanized world.”
Bryant stared at him a moment longer, and turned back around.
“Who is that guy?” Lewis asked.
“Now we’ll talk about the opposition,” the major said.
He pointed to concentrations of black X’s — their symbols for German airfields — lining the yarn route, little visible manifestations of bad news. “Men, we’re going to be straight with you. There’s no hiding the fact that these raids are going to be hazardous.”
“That’s why you’re going to be straight with us,” Snowberry said audibly and bitterly.
“Mission planners have been able, as you can see, to choose routes avoiding the worst of the flak areas, and both targets have never been attacked before, so they’re believed to be lightly defended.” He indicated the blank spaces at the bottom of the map surrounding Regensburg and Schweinfurt. “In addition, Bomber Command has planned diversionary raids on German airfields at Bryas, Lille, and Poix, and the railway yards at Dunkirk and Calais. We’ve never even flown this far into Germany before, so they’re obviously going to be surprised.” His pointer stopped and tapped along the yarn up near the Dutch border. “The problem is that fighters are obviously going to be the danger of the day. I’m not going to mince words. We’re going to be flying through the most heavily defended sectors of the German Air Defense and deep into their homeland.”
“Oh, mince, mince,” someone said.
“And the length of the mission prevents any elaborate zigzagging or avoidance of these areas.”
“Some fucking colonel thought this one up,” Lewis breathed. “Some fucking desk-bound colonel of a bastard.”
“The Regensburg force is not coming back. They are going on to temporary airfields in North Africa. We, on the other hand, are going to turn around, and come back through those same defenses.” The crews were noisy with anxiety again. “The expectation is,” the major said, getting louder, “that the Regensburg people, going through before us, will catch most of it going in. And that we’ll catch all of it going out.”
The men sat. This was worse than they could have imagined. Bryant absorbed the information that followed with less than perfect concentration.
“We’ll be routed through that part of the German fighter belt with the greatest density of units, all capable of immediate or near-immediate response.” Snowberry bit his lip and winced. The sound carried. “Now the German units likely to come into action first will be the Gruppen of Jagdeschwader 1 and JG 26 stationed in Holland and northern France. There’s also evidence of the recent movement of units into this area—JG 2 and JG 11. There’s further evidence that JG 3 was pulled recently from the Russian front. We haven’t been able to locate it.” Bryant swept his hair back with both hands, both palms. “Now we should expect trouble from these airfields: Woensdrecht. München-Gladbach. Deelen. Leeuwarden, and Schiphol. We believe they won’t be at full strength, and we believe they won’t be well coordinated. They’ll use up valuable flying time, besides, trying to establish a height advantage and an up-sun position for attack. Gunners should be ready for the head-on stuff, and the stuff out of the sun. And pilots remember: they always look for the group with the loosest formation. They look for the raggedy-ass guys. You fly like assholes and they’ll shoot you a few more.”
He paused, and a few people coughed. “The toughest opposition should be between here and here — the coast and a point halfway to the target. After that, you should run into only a few twin-engined jobs, night fighters pressed into day work. It’s hoped that the interior will be largely empty of fighters.”
Bryant and Lewis looked at one another in amazement.