Big Week Page 4
By October 1943, Captain Don Gentile was a flight commander in the 336th Fighter Squadron and had some fifteen months of operational flying under his belt. Many of the 4th’s pilots were similarly experienced, yet Gentile knew he was still not the finished article and had much still to learn. He had become a flight commander only at the end of September when the previous commander, Captain Spike Miley, had finished his tour and headed home. Before he left, Miley had taken Gentile to one side and said, ‘All right, you’re red hot and it’s natural you should want to be a fire-cracker over here.13 But you’ve got boys following you now who have things to learn before they get red hot. They’re going to follow you wherever you take them. Remember that whenever you take them anywhere. It’s not only your brains that are going to get knocked out, but the brains of the kids who are depending on you.’ It was good advice, and Gentile knew it. He was determined he was going to look after the men in his charge and help them develop.
By the autumn of 1943, VIII Fighter Command was turning itself into a very impressive organization. It had highly motivated pilots of increasing skill and experience, and fine aircraft with which to fight. The weeks ahead promised them an opportunity to hone their skills yet further. In fact, the only missing ingredient was an aircraft that could take them deep into enemy territory. Although the pilots and aircrew knew little about new technological developments, the powers that be were working on it. When that conundrum was successfully resolved, VIII Fighter Command was going to prove itself a truly formidable outfit.
CHAPTER 2
Flying for the Reich
IN SHARP CONTRAST to the Americans, the Luftwaffe’s fighter arm was increasingly short of training, fuel and even aircraft that could keep pace with the Allies’ latest fighters. Like all aspects of Germany’s war effort, the air force was feeling the pinch, and badly so. No part of the Wehrmacht – the German Armed Forces – had been so overused and, frankly, under-appreciated. The Luftwaffe had come into being in 1935 and had emerged as a symbol of the new military dynamism of the Third Reich, with glistening new fighter aircraft, bombers and dive-bombers. Its pilots were Nazi pin-ups and during the early years of the war the Luftwaffe had led the way: screaming Stuka dive-bombers and lithe, feline, deadly Messerschmitt 109s had been among the primary symbols of the so-called Blitzkrieg, bringing a new brand of shock and awe as they swept over their enemies.
The Luftwaffe had been expected to continue this dominance and crush the RAF in the summer of 1940, then hammer British cities throughout that winter and the spring of 1941. It also had to spearhead the attacks on Malta, in the Balkans, against Greece and then against the Soviet Union. There had been no let-up. More and more was expected of the pilots and aircrew, with no defined regulations about tours of duty or even regular rest of any kind. Meanwhile, production of aircraft, despite Germany’s head start over other nations in the 1930s, had slowed and then become mired in bureaucracy and the hubris of many of the leading designers and manufacturers. The air force had also been forced to play second fiddle to the army when it came to allocations, while when things went wrong, as had been happening for the past two years, the Luftwaffe had often received the blame. The blazing spearhead had become the scapegoat.
Up until the summer of 1943, the Luftwaffe had maintained its presence over the front line wherever its ground forces were in action, which in the summer months of that year had been the Eastern Front and the Mediterranean. In early July, the army had launched Operation ZITADELLE to close off the Kursk salient in the Soviet Union, but even before that battle began, many of the air forces had already been transferred to the Mediterranean. The Eastern Front might have been where the bulk of the army’s divisions were fighting, but it was the Mediterranean where much of the Luftwaffe was operating. This had been catastrophic for them. Between June and September, the Luftwaffe had lost 704 aircraft over the Eastern Front but a staggering 3,502 in the Mediterranean, most of them in a vain effort to save Sicily and keep Italy in the war. This kind of effort simply could not be maintained and with RAF Bomber Command attacking German cities by night, and now with the American heavy bomber force increasingly attacking by day, the focus for the Luftwaffe had to be the defence of the Reich.
At this stage of the war there was absolutely no doubt about the outcome. This had been clear to the Allies back in January 1943 when the American and British Chiefs of Staff as well as President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister, had met at Casablanca to plan for victory in Europe. At the time, the Germans were suffering a terrible reverse on the Eastern Front, while it was expected the British and Americans would secure all of North Africa by May, in what was their first joint land campaign since the USA’s entry into the war.
So far, 1943 had proved the optimism of Casablanca had not been misplaced. In February, at Stalingrad on the Eastern Front, the German Sixth Army had been surrounded and annihilated, a defeat that had prompted deep shock at home. Twenty months after Hitler’s great gamble to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941, its failure had been dramatically laid bare. Then, in May, as predicted at Casablanca, the joint German–Italian forces in North Africa had been forced to surrender with the loss of even more men than at Stalingrad and considerably more aircraft, tanks and other materiel. That had been swiftly followed by ZITADELLE and the Germans’ last counter-attack in the east; a few days later had come the invasion of Sicily – the first Allied land attack on European soil – and by mid-August the island had fallen. By the end of July Hitler’s fellow dictator and ally, Benito Mussolini, had been overthrown. On 8 September, Italy signed an armistice and the following day Allied forces landed at Salerno, just south of Naples.
Germany simply could not compete with the industrial output, technological advances and vast global reach of the Allies, nor with the immense reserves of manpower and burgeoning war industry of the Soviet Union. By the autumn of 1943, Germany was short of just about everything, but especially of manpower, food and oil, the three requirements needed above anything else for a long attritional war.
The Nazi leadership continued to cling to the belief that wonder weapons would come to their rescue, but this was a vain hope; their atomic programme, such as it was, had been taken off any priority list and, in any case, was riven by the kind of rivalries and splintering of effort that was all too common within the Third Reich. Instead, hope rested with their missile programme – the V1 and V2, both currently still in development – with new-generation submarines and advances in airframes and jet power. The V1s and V2s, although brilliant technological breakthroughs, lacked any kind of accuracy, while the Type XXI U-boats had been developed far too late to be decisive. Finally, new jet engines had been hurried and were not as good or advanced as those now being developed in Britain. In other words, despite the fantasies of Hitler, none of these developments had the slightest chance of turning the war in the favour of the Germans.
However, Hitler’s expectations for the Luftwaffe remained enormously high. German aircraft production – and that of fighters especially – might have been on the rise, but there could be no escaping other shortages and, of those, fuel was the one that was hurting the Luftwaffe the most. There was simply not enough of that precious fluid for training or even for practising. Training was being cut and pilots were being sent to front-line units with only 150 hours or fewer in their logbooks – around half the hours of an American. Even once attached to an operational unit there was little opportunity for pilots to build up their skill levels or add hours to the logbooks outside operational flights.
Luftwaffe fighter pilots were expected to operate at an intensity that was utterly unsustainable. They would often be required to take off, meet the enemy, land back down, then, after refuelling and rearming, take to the skies again. There was no 24-hour pass each week and 48-hour pass every three weeks as there had been in RAF Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain. German fighter pilots were expected to keep flying. On and on, relentlessly. More often than not, the only w
ay out of this cycle of endless operational flying was by getting shot down and wounded or, more likely, by being killed.
This rather undermined the inherent advantage of flying over home soil, where the distances flown tended to be less and where if a pilot was shot down and bailed out safely, he could return to the action right away. Furthermore, because German fighter pilots did not know when they would be attacked, they had to be on standby all the time, which, in turn, meant there were fewer opportunities for practice. American and British fighter pilots, in contrast, with their plentiful supplies of fuel and aircraft could practise pretty much whenever they liked, weather permitting.
Unsurprisingly, the rate of attrition in Luftwaffe squadrons was horrendous, and not just in new pilots. The Luftwaffe were treating their prized asset – the pilots – with the same lack of due care that both the Luftstreitkräfte and Royal Flying Corps had demonstrated in the First World War. It hadn’t done either side much good then and it wasn’t doing the Luftwaffe any favours now. But it could not be helped – not unless Germany brought the war to a swift end. Every nation is always bound to defend its homeland above all, and with Allied bombers pounding Germany’s cities there was an imperative that the Luftwaffe meet this threat as forcefully as they possibly could.
One of those flying almost daily in defence of the Reich was Leutnant Heinz Knoke, just twenty-two years old and an ace nearly four times over, with nineteen confirmed enemy aircraft shot down. Like the Pied Piper, he was from Hamelin, a small country town lying underneath much of the air battle that raged in the skies. Knoke had begun the war full of patriotic zeal and admiration for the Führer. When still only seventeen, he had gone for a pleasure flight at a public air display and there and then had determined to become a pilot. During the last, long summer before the war he had applied to join the Luftwaffe and had been accepted; a year later, in August 1940, as the Battle of Britain raged, he had finally been awarded his wings and been posted to fighters. More training followed; in those far-off, heady days the Luftwaffe still had the luxury of training its pilots properly without cutting corners, so not until just before Christmas 1940 was Knoke finally posted to his operational unit, Jagdgeschwader – Fighter Wing – 52.
More than two and a half years later he was still combat flying and now a hardened veteran. He was married too – young men like Knoke were old beyond their years; a boyish pilot grew up fast and, as for many in wartime, with the future so uncertain it paid to take the chance of love and happiness while he could. In his case, he had been taking cover in an air-raid shelter in Berlin on a brief foray into town while stationed at Döberitz, just outside the city. After giving up his seat to a ‘strikingly attractive’ girl, he had struck up a conversation. She was called Lilo and to begin with she had been reserved and even cool, but eventually his perseverance had paid off. On 24 March 1941, his twentieth birthday, he had asked her to marry him.
This would not have pleased the Luftwaffe’s General der Jagdflieger – General of Fighters – Adolf Galland, who took a dim view of his pilots getting married. He was happy for them to sleep around and sow their wild oats, but he thought it a mistake to allow them to settle down; he wanted them thinking about flying, not worrying about wives back at home. ‘Better wait until the war is over,’ was the response of Leutnant Öhlschläger, Knoke’s senior squadron officer, echoing Galland’s sentiments.1
‘But the war may drag on for thirty years,’ Knoke confided in his diary. ‘In any case, I do not want to wait so long before learning all about love.’ Galland, who had never been shy with the ladies, would have argued that the one did not at all depend upon the other, but Knoke was of a more traditional nature. Promising they would be wed as soon as he was able, he and Lilo were parted in May that year when Knoke was posted first to France and then, in June, to the Eastern Front for the invasion of the Soviet Union. A couple of months later he was posted west once more and granted both a brief leave and permission to marry his Lilo. A short registry office ceremony on 28 August was the best they could manage. The following day he was back with his squadron and flying once more.
Over the next two years this still extremely young man had continued flying. Relentlessly, come rain, come shine. During this excessively prolonged stint of front-line combat flying, he had developed the technique of dropping a single bomb on top of American bomber formations – literally, a hit-or-miss technique – which had prompted a personal call from Reichsmarschall Göring himself. He had also been given responsibility for training new NCO pilots arriving to join the fighter group and then had been placed in command of his own Staffel. He had lost his best friend and fellow pilot, Dieter Gerhard, and many other comrades beside, and had had more close shaves of his own than he cared to remember. Youthful exuberance had given way to weary resignation. Skill and experience helped a great deal, but Knoke had learned to accept that luck played a huge part. Ultimately, it was a numbers game in which the more one flew, the greater the chance one’s luck would run out.
He had thought it had done so on 17 August 1943, when the US Eighth Air Force’s bombers first hit the ball-bearing plant at Schweinfurt, some 100 miles east of Frankfurt and deep inside Germany. The Americans had lost sixty aircraft on that mission alone, but the Luftwaffe fighter force had suffered too. That day, and now flying with 5/JG11, Knoke had shot a Fortress down in flames, but had been hit in turn. His engine had been set alight, but he had managed to put out the fire and had been on the point of bailing out when instead he had decided to try to nurse his stricken aircraft back to base. He had crash-landed at 100 m.p.h., smashed through three wooden fences, bounced into the air, then finally come to a halt. Apart from light shrapnel wounds to his upper right arm, he had survived intact. A miracle.
Not quite six weeks later, on 27 September, he had been shot up again. On standby at 10.30 a.m., fifteen minutes later he had been checking over his brand-new ‘Gustav’ – a Messerschmitt 109G that had been polished up to brilliance by his ground crew. Ten minutes after that, the squadron had been scrambled and he was off, albeit sluggishly, as they had all been equipped with auxiliary fuel tanks and rockets under the wings, and the extra weight and drag held them back.
At 10,000 feet they had emerged out of the cloud base and spotted the Fortresses on a parallel course above them. Climbing to 20,000 feet, the Staffel had jettisoned their drop tanks – external fuel tanks – on Knoke’s orders, then dived down and head-on as the bomber formation began to split. At 2,000 feet distance, Knoke had fired his rockets and been amazed to see the warheads register a direct hit on a Fortress. The bomber exploded in a giant ball of flame; Knoke had never seen anything like it. Bits of debris began fluttering downwards as he flew on, climbing out of the fray and spotting first some twin-engine P-38 Lightnings and then some Thunderbolts. Cursing, and diving down towards them, he had then seen a lone Fortress with an equally lone Me109 on its tail, which he recognized as his friend and wingman Obergefreiter Peter Reinhard’s plane. Behind Reinhard, though, were some Thunderbolts. Warning his wingman to wake up, Knoke had hurtled after the Thunderbolts, opened fire on the nearest and saw that one of them had burst into flames too – his second kill of the day. Then suddenly three more Thunderbolts were on his tail. Pushing forward on the stick, he had dived for the cloud, but it was too late: his engine was on fire once again. This time, though, there could be no nursing it back. Pushing back the canopy, he had unclipped his leads, kicked the stick forward and dropped out in a great somersault, then remembered to pull the ripcord.
A moment later, the harness had cut into his shoulders and he jolted as the billowing parachute put the brakes on his descent. He felt as though he were standing on air and, as he drifted down, the air swooshing in the great white awning above, he had found himself rather enjoying the experience and marvelling at what a wonderful invention the parachute was. He touched down at 11.26 a.m., only thirty-one minutes after taking off.
Since he had come down not far from Jever, on the North Sea coast j
ust to the west of Wilhelmshaven, where he was now based, he had soon been back at the airfield and facing the disappointment of his ground crew over losing the new plane. Worse news followed, however. In Knoke’s squadron alone – only nine men strong that morning – Unteroffizier Rudolf Dölling had been killed and two more shot down, one of whom, Jonny Fest, had been wounded. The fourth Staffel had also lost two killed and one badly wounded, while the 5/JG11 had lost nine out of twelve, all killed, and the remaining three crash-landed or bailed out. ‘The heavy casualties on our side,’ Knoke noted, ‘are to be explained by the fact that nobody had anticipated an encounter with the enemy fighters. We were taken completely by surprise.’ It was a clear demonstration of what the Allies could achieve when their bombers were supported by modern fighters in plentiful numbers – on this occasion some 262 Thunderbolts had been dispatched, including fifty-one from the 56th Fighter Group.
Knoke might have wondered how he had managed to stay alive when so many of his colleagues had not, but he was to test his luck still further just a couple of weeks later. On Monday, 4 October, the Eighth Air Force launched a major strike into Germany to hit targets around Frankfurt and Saarbrücken. The weather was good over central Germany that day, so Knoke sensed they would soon be in action. Sitting by the hangars that morning, he had been cursing the amount of paperwork he was expected to do and listening to music over the loudspeaker, when suddenly the music faded and a voice called out, ‘Attention all squadrons! Attention all squadrons! Stand by for take-off!’2 Mechanics began running towards the aircraft, the pilots following. Up on to the wing, then hoisting himself into the cockpit, with its low-slung bucket seat. Safety harness on, manual checks, canopy hanging open to one side on its hinges. Unteroffizier Alfred Arndt, his ground chief, passed Knoke the ground telephone extension. Hauptmann Sprecht was on the line. The Americans were approaching over the North Sea coast. Knoke and the rest of the group were to make a frontal attack in close formation. Just after 9.30 a.m., one Staffel after another took off, then wheeled to the left until all were airborne and they could begin their climb together.