I never saw any enemy fighters. Our group was attacked by two ME-262’s near Munich but I wasn’t on the raid. According to a friend of mine who was there they made a couple of passes and then the sky was full of P-47’s and P-51’s and they disappered.
At the briefing all known flak locations were identified. Of course the guns were mobile so things could have changed since the latest intelligence reports. As we crossed the line couter-battery fire was provided if there were flak defenses in the area. Our artillery would lay down a barrage to try to keep them from shooting at us. Being at the crossing on time was vital because our artillery could very well have other firing mission so if we were late or early we might have to do without their help.
In retrospect I can now say with perfect confidence that en route flak wasn’t really all that dangerous. The group leader would take evasive action. That wasn’t just a bunch of haphazard turns but rather a carefully calculated set of turns through random angles and timed so as to try to start and finish turns at a rate that would give the flak fire control system the most trouble. And even under the best of circumstances hitting a small target like an airplane isn’t easy under the best of circustances.
Flak on the bomb run was another story. Evasive action was not possible and flight must be straight and level for about 2 minutes, a looooong 2 minutes. I found the best defense was to stare hard at the lead plane, sitting as low in my seat as possible. If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist, right? It was obviously an effective method because it worked perfectly as I never got a scratch.
This one is beyond my experience. I never flew from England having arrived in the late fall of 1944.
Yes.
Yes this was another part of my good luck. By the time I arrived in the ETO the Luftwaffe was pretty crippled and wasn’t much of a problem to us.
What aircraft did you fly? When exactly were your bombing missions?
My great uncle from Currie MN (near Tracy) flew his 25 combat missions in B17s. He was based in England from 9/43 to 4/44. His unit was 534th squadron, 381st Bomb Group, 1st Division, 8th Air Force, if that helps any. On his last mission, his Bomb Group destroyed an enemy airfield at St. Jean De Angely, France.
My dad, who was just a kid on farm near Tracy at the time, remembers Uncle John doing flyovers on some of his training flights. Dad says these flights were from Texas, but Uncle John was also flying out of Sioux City for a while.
At the end of the war, he was training to transition to B29s. In fact, he was doing one of his first solos on the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
I never knew my great uncle very well, and he’s gone now. I don’t know how willing he was to talk about his war time experiences, but I do know that he went to many reunions in his later years. One of these was at Ida Grove, Iowa, if I remember correctly.
Thanks for the answers. Did the bombers still fly with a full crew once the Luftwaffe was out of the picture? If so, what did the gunners do on the flight with nothing to shoot at?
Absolutely. All fighter attacks didn’t stop and the possibility was always there. It’s just that I didn’t happen to see any. And, by the way, that was true even when you had fighter escort.
What the gunners did was what everyone else did. They just sat there at their places.
One thing that was done on missions was to test fire the guns. If you had fighter escort you did that before they joined up or you didn’t do it at all otherwise the fighters would pull way off from you. When you had such escort they were responsible for defense against enemy fighters. Nevertheless, the gunners went along. For one thing, in case of enemy attack, the fighters would stay with the formation. If a plane was damaged or lost an engine or had to drop out for any reason it was more or less on its own, at least for awhile, since the fighter pilots were occupied and might easily not notice someone falling out of formation.
I was in a Martin B-26 group. The 495th Squadron, 344th Bomb Group of the 9th Air Force. My first mission was on New Year’s day of 1945 to Houfalise, Belgium. It was the first mission the group was able to get off during the Battle of the Bulge because of weather.
Then the weather closed in and we couldn’t fly for about 4 or 5 days. The first mission after that bad weather spell was to - Houfalise, Belgium although I wasn’t on it.
David, did you continue flying after the war? If not, why not? Had you wanted to be a pilot before joining the war effort, or was it just something you kind of fell in to.
I was 4 going on 5 years old when Lindberg made his solo New York to Paris flight so I grew up in an era when all small boys and some girls as well wanted to fly. Many towns of a decent size had their local pilot as did Cherokee. A few of us used to hang around the airport “helping out” and would get a ride now and then.
I didn’t fly for about 15 years and then I took a few lessons and got a license. We made two trips back to Iowa. On the return from the last one in 1963 we took off from Cherokee and I planned to stop for fuel at Goodland, KA. That seemed reasonable because on the flight east it had been an easy trip. However there was a pretty stiff westerly wind. When I got to McCook, NE I thought maybe I should fuel up there but the flight was bumpy and rough and I didn’t want to land under those condition. I went on to Goodland thinking it might not be so windy there (the weather reports were ambiuous about that). We weren’t making a lot of headway so about 40 miles from Goodland I throttled back and started a long letdown for landing. We landed and taxied up to the fueling pump. The Cessna Skyline I was flying had 55 gallons of useable fuel. The guy put in 51.5 gallons. I decided then and there that if I was that stupid I had no business flying. When we got home I turned in the keys, paid the man for the rent and I haven’t flown since.