A Falling Of Fortresses: The Schweinfurt Raids

Seventy years ago today the US Army's Eighth Air Force conducted a raid on three ball bearings factories in Schweinfurt, Germany.  That raid, the second on the factories (the first taking place on August 17, 1943) became known as "Black Thursday" and temporarily brought the US air offensive against Germany to a halt.

Today, much of the writing about the allied air offensive against Germany is often focused on the results, the destruction of cities, including the dramatic burning of Hamburg and Dresden as well as the destruction of Japanese cities (see Downfall), and discussions of the effectiveness and morality of that effort.  But the Allied raids also took a heavy toll on the bomber crews, particularly in 1943 and the first half of 1944.  The Army Air Force in Europe suffered 36,000 dead during the war (13% of all US combat fatalities) while Royal Air Force Bomber Command had 55,000 deaths (44% of the 125,000 men who served in its crews).  Although the crews were thousands of feet above their targets this was not war at a distance as they faced heavy fire from flak guns and unrelenting attack from German fighter planes for hours on end.  The Schweinfurt raids are just one, though one of the most dramatic, examples of the bravery and self-sacrifice of these men.

The British began their large scale raids in 1941 in retaliation for the German "Blitz" (see London Calling).  The American build up in England began in the summer and fall of 1942, with the first large scale raids in early 1943. The Americans believed they could accurately bomb military targets, including factories and rail yards and chose to do so with daytime raids even at a risk of greater losses.  The British preferred area bombing of cities and usually struck at night.  In truth, the advocates of air power had oversold its effectiveness and the bombs often missed their targets by large margins whether day or night.

Two factors combined to make bomber losses heavy during this period.  The first was that until early 1944 the bombers had to fly much of the way without fighter escorts.  Allied fighters such as the P-47 and the Spitfire simply did not have the range to accompany the bombers deep into Germany.  This left the bombers with the task of defending themselves unaided against the skilled German Air Force (the Luftwaffe) fighter pilots.  The second was that as the Allied bomber threat grew, the Germans began to withdraw their best pilots and planes from the Eastern front to bolster the defense of German cities.  Among the events prompting the change in German strategy was a series of British night raids on Hamburg in July 1943 in the course of which the first bombing-induced firestorm was created destroying much of the city and killing over 30,000 people.  By the time of the second Schweinfurt raid, the Luftwaffe could muster over 1,000 fighters against the American armada.  It was only with the large scale introduction of the long-range P-51 fighter in early 1944 that the tide changed.  In the first six months of that year the Luftwaffe was effectively wiped out. 

The bombing workhorse of the American air force in Europe was the B-17, a four-engine bomber with a cruising speed of 170 mph, carrying a crew of 10 or 11 along with 5,000 pounds of bombs and capable of cruising at 27,000 feet in formation.  The most significant aspects of the B-17, which became known as The Flying Fortress, are described by Martin Caidin in Black Thursday (1960):

"It featured extraordinary structural strength, and its ruggedness meant that the airplane would return from the combat missions even when slashed to ribbons by enemy fire.  Its one great fault lay in its susceptibility to fire . . . In firepower, nothing like this airplane had ever before been seen.  As many as thirteen .50-caliber machine guns, firing from hand-held gun positions plus power turrets, gave the B-17 an unprecedented field of defensive fire . . . No matter what its position in the air, a fighter could be subjected to a withering blast of fire from the many guns of the bomber; often several gun positions could bring their weapons to bear on a single airplane . . .  The Fortress was not only rugged and superb on the controls, but it was the steadiest flying platforms ever built.  This was of vital importance in maintaining tight defensive formations, where the crisscrossing field of defensive firepower, plus the controllability of the plane and its ability to absorb staggering punishment, often meant the difference between acceptable losses or an outfit's being cut to pieces and scattered."  

The industrial effort it took to build the American air force from scratch is well told as part of Arthur Herman's recent book, Freedom's Forge.  But what of the other raw material, the men needed to crew the bombers?  In 1941 America did not have the thousands of pilots and tens of thousands of air crews available to man the bomber fleets (by the end of the war some raids were so large that 15,000 men would be in the air at one time).  It required thousands who had never been in the air before (my father was being trained as a bomber radio man and waist gunner before becoming ill during the war) and teaching them flying, navigating, bombing and gunnery techniques.  The planes were not heated (temperatures reached 60 below zero in the plane) or pressurized so the crews had to fly 6 and 7 hour missions in heavy flight suits to keep warm and breath through oxygen masks.  Day to day the crews based in England did not know what they might be doing the next day.  They might fly missions on three consecutive days and then not again for a week or two.  On a mission they could face up to three hours of flak guns and enemy fighters on their approach and then, under heavy fire, to maintain a steady straight course in the last leg to the target to ensure accuracy of bombing, followed by perhaps another three hours of combat as they flew back to England.  You can see footage of B-17s in action here and here.

The crews were also aware of the daunting math against their survival.  Arranged in squadrons of about 18 planes (180 men) if they lost 2 (20 men) on a mission the survivors would come back to the empty beds in their barracks, a constant reminder of lost friends and of their own mortality. At that point in the war, a serviceman had to fly 25 complete missions before being rotated home.  If they took off and had to abort because of mechanical problems before hitting the target, as regularly happened to 10% of more of the planes, the mission did not count.

Let's do some of that math.  If your unit lost, on average 5% of its planes on each mission (and as we'll see, mission losses in 1943 often greatly exceeded that figure) after 14 missions your chances of not being on a bomber that was shot down with you likely killed or captured was only 48%.  The chance of you completing the 25 missions was only 27%.  Put yourself in that position and imagine what you would be constantly thinking about.  (Damaged B-17 returns)

The Air Force command faced the same math problem.  If the missions incurred too high a cost in bombers and men it would prove impossible to sustain the planned intensive bombing campaign.


How this math played out as a practical matter is shown by the experience of  Elmer Bendiner who survived his 25 missions (one of only five of his original ten man crew to do so) and was one of the few airmen to fly on both Schweinfurt Raids.  Writing in his memoir, The Fall of Fortresses (1980), Bendiner recalls realizing during the briefing for the second Schweinfurt raid that only 4 of the 18 crews from the first raid were still around only two months later and then comments that 6 of the 17 bombers from his squadron that took off that day on the second raid failed to return.

Two of Bendiner's non-Schweinfurt missions show the routine dangers faced by the fliers.  Two weeks before the first raid, Bendiner's plane, the Tondelayo, was badly shot up during a mission to Kassel.  One of the crew was wounded and the the two waist gunners, cut of from their oxygen supply in the chaos, became disoriented and parachuted from the bomber, never to be seen again.  On returning to England, the badly damaged bomber was examined by the ground crew which found 11 unexploded 20mm shells in the gas tanks.  If even one had exploded the entire plane would have blown up.  The mystery was solved when the shells were opened up and none had explosive charges but inside one was a rolled piece of paper on which, scrawled in Czech, was a note reading "This is all we can do for you now".
(The Tondelayo)
In a raid on Stuttgart, in between the two Schweinfurt missions, the Tondelayo was shot up so badly by German fighters that it eventually had to ditch in the English Channel on its return flight.  All the crew members survived but the plane was lost.  The crew members were simply given another bomber and ended up flying it on the second raid.

The Allied bombing campaign was based upon the idea that the air forces could destroy the industrial and transportation structure of Germany and lower civilian morale enough to accelerate the end of the war.  Both Churchill and FDR supported this effort, diverting resources in both industrial production and manpower (leading eventually to a shortage of infantrymen on the Western front in the fall of 1944) to build up the huge air fleets required for the strategy.
  (B-17 returns after tail sheared by collison with German fighter)
Schweinfurt, located in central Germany near Nuremburg, was the center of the German ball bearing industry with three factories in the city accounting for 40-50% of all German production.  The Nazi military effort required large numbers of specialized ball bearings which served the purpose of reducing friction in applications where low horsepower-weight rations must carry heavy loads at high speeds.  Weapons of all types required these bearings - for example, one engine on a medium German bomber required 1,056 bearings.  Army Air Force intelligence believed that if these factories could be disabled it would disrupt the production of military equipment and lead to a collapse of Germany's war effort.

The first raid was on August 17, 1943 and was directed against ball bearing factories in Schweinfurt and Regensburg.  It was the deepest penetration into Germany so far in the war and by the largest bomber fleet the Americans had assembled but the mission was a failure.  Of 376 bombers that took off, 60 were lost  (16%) and another 55 to 95 so badly damaged they would never fly again.  552 crew members did not return.  Caidin writes of the German attacks:

The attacks were constant; no sooner did one wave of fighters tear through the bomber formations, than a fresh force screamed in to fire.  The fighter pilots went wild; they attacked in vertical dives and climbs, rolled through the formations, closed to point-blank range.  On several occasions entire fighter squadrons struck in javelin-up formation which made it difficult and often impossible for the Flying Fortresses to take evasive action.  They lobbed heavy cannon shells and rockets at the bombers, and even dropped parachute bombs to drift downward into the massed formations.

(B-17 hit by flak)
This was Elmer Bendiner's experience on that flight to Schweinfurt:

I do remember looking down somewhere after Eupen and counting the fitful yellow-orange flares I saw on the ground.  At first - so dense am I - I did not understand them.  Here there were no cities burning.  No haystack could make a fire visible in broad daylight 23,000 feet up.  Then it came to me as it came to others - for I remember my headset crackling with the news - that these were B-17s blazing on the ground.

The afternoon was brilliant, but, as I remember it the earth was somber, smudged, dark green and purple.  In the gloom those orange-yellow fires curling black smoke upward were grotesque.  I was as incredulous as I had been when first I saw a fuselage red with the blood of a gunner's head blasted along with his turret.  As I followed that trail of torches it seemed unreal.  I see it now as a funeral cortege with black-plumed horses and torches in the night.

(B-17s over Schweinfurt, from Wikipedia)
The raid had mixed results.  While some damage was inflicted it was quickly determined that more raids were needed.  The problem was the losses were so great it would take some time before a follow-up could be undertaken.  It proved to be two months before the next raid on October 14, 1943.

But all was not quiet in the interim.  Here is Bendiner writing of the ten days before the second raid:

On Monday morning we went to Frankfurt  . . . The Eighth Air Force lost 160 men [16 bombers] on that trip  . . . On Friday there was a mission to Bremen and then on Saturday one to Anklam . . .  Some three hundred men [30 bombers] were lost over Bremen and another 280 [28 bombers]  . . . On Sunday we were at Munster, where another three hundred men [30 bombers] went down to death or capture.  On Wednesday we rose at the usual gray hour, had ourselves briefed, circled above The Wash for an hour and a half and then were given the message that our mission had been scrubbed.

The last three raids in this sequence had a cumulative loss rate of 9%.  At that rate an airman's 50% survival chance arrives by the 8th mission and the chance of surviving all twenty-five is 9%.
 
On Thursday morning, Bendiner learned he would be going back to Schweinfurt that day.
 
By the time of the second Schweinfurt raid the Luftwaffe response system and capabilities was at its height.

That day, the Germans were able to mobilize over 1,000 fighter planes against the American bombers and many of those fighters would be able to attack on the bomber's approach and on their return.  For six hours, from the time the bombers crossed onto the Continent until they reached the English channel on their return, they were under fire.
(Crew of Yank, Schweinfurt Raid)
That day, 291 Fortresses attacked Schweinfurt.  Sixty were lost (22%) along with 600 men.  Seventeen others were so damaged they would never fly again and 121 had some type of damage.  The mental state of at least some of those who flew that day is shown in the debriefing of a B-17 pilot who survived the mission:

I had accepted the fact that I was not going to live through this mission.  It was as simple as that.  I was calm; It was a strange sort of resignation.  I knew for certain that it was only a matter of seconds or minutes.  It was impossible for us to survive.

Mission Commander Bud Peaslee told Caidin:

The opening play is a line plunge through center. The fighters whip through our formation, for our closing speed exceeds 500 mph. Another group of flashes replaces the first, and this is repeated five times, as six formations of Me-109s charge us …. I can see fighters on my side … their paths marked in the bright sunlight by fine lines of light-colored smoke as they fire short bursts. It is a coordinated attack … their timing is perfect, their technique masterly.

  (Bud Peaslee)
Carl Abele, a navigator who parachuted from plummeting B-17, spending the rest of the war in a POW camp, summed it up more simply:

The fighters were unrelenting; it was simply murder

Caidin tells of the word spreading upon the return of the survivors:

From the first plane to land word trickles back. 'Those goddam rockets!  They hit a plane and it just disappears.  Seventeens blowing up all around.  Never saw so many goddamned fighters in my life, the sky was saturated with 'em'.

And then there is the airdrome at Chelveston, home of the 305th Group.  Sixteen bombers took off.  One aborted . . . Fifteen Fortresses went on.  Two bombers returned on schedule to land at Chelveston,.  Where are the others?  Have they landed elsewhere?  Where are they?  There are no others . . . 12 fell in flames before the crews ever saw Schweinfurt.  Another made its bombing run and then plunged earthwards, torn to pieces by a salvo of rockets.

In the midst of this carnage, Caidin tells of an amazing story of survival.  In early December, six weeks after the raid Sergeant Pete Seniawsky walked into the operations room of his squadron.  Seniawsky was a waist gunner on a B-17 that had gone down over Alsace (which Germany had annexed in 1940) on its return from Schweinfurt.  After parachuting and reaching the ground, he began walking west.  Eventually making contact with the French resistance he was able to travel by train to southern France and was helped to cross the mountains to Spain where he ended up interned by the Spanish who notified the American counsel who obtained his release.  He made his way to Gibraltar and from there back to England.  From another source, I found that Seniawsky received

While the second raid caused further damage to the ball bearing factories, the losses were so severe the Air Force had to curtail the deep penetration raids into Germany and would not return to Schweinfurt for four months.  As the official Army Air Force History acknowledges:

"The fact was that the Eighth Air Force had for the time being lost air superiority over Germany."

It was only with the continued build up of bomber capacity and the introduction of the long-range fighter escorts that air superiority would be re-established.

So take a moment today to remember the men of the Schweinfurt raids and what they and the other bomber crews of 1943 endured and to appreciate their gallantry and sacrifice.
In 1998, members of the Second Schweinfurt Memorial Association and survivors of the German flak batteries jointly erected a monument in Schweinfurt in the memory of the casualties on both sides during the raid.  More details and pictures of the raid and the factories can be found at this site.