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The lead group of bombers first sighted the German coast at around four o’clock. As the navigators searched for landmarks to pinpoint their position, everyone else watched the surrounding sky. It was not long before they found what they were looking for: the distant dots of fighter planes rising to meet them. As they approached the mouth of the river Elbe, at about 4.15 p.m., the first German fighters attacked, half-heartedly at first, as if they were merely testing the Americans. But gradually the Luftwaffe was appearing in greater numbers, hovering at the edges of the formations, waiting for a chance to pounce on any B-17 that strayed even slightly from the rest. ‘You always had the feeling you were in a chicken coop,’ said a veteran of those raids, ‘and the fighters out there are foxes or weasels.’ ¹²

Darrell Gust was a navigator on one of the 303rd BG’s Flying Fortresses. In his position behind the bombardier in the nose of the plane, he could see exactly what went on around the formation:

We were hit by swarms of fighters as soon as we crossed the coastline. These guys were eager! Maybe twenty to thirty miles from the target, I looked out of the window over my navigator’s table and saw an Me 109 sitting out there out of range, but apparently flying the same course we were, and maybe 200 to 300 yards below our formation. I knew that fighter pilots sometimes did this, kind of looking us over. Then they would suddenly zoom up and ahead of us, positioning themselves for a 180-degree turn and a nose-first attack on the B-17 formations.

I thought, ‘this bastard is up to no good and I’ll keep my eye on him.’ He just kept flying parallel to us, but he seemed to be getting closer. He finally edged in to what I estimated to be about 700 to 800 yards. I grabbed the 0.50-cal above my navigator’s desk and gave him about 15 to 20 rounds. I could immediately see my tracers going behind him. I corrected my aim and gave him a burst of about 30 rounds. Suddenly, there was a plume of white smoke emerging from the Me109, and he started to drop in a vertical dive. I called to S/Sgt Virgil Brown, our tail gunner, that I had nailed an Me109 and asked him to keep his eye on it. He said he saw it go straight down and crash behind us. ¹³

This was probably the first casualty of the day, an Me109 from III/JG26 (i.e. III Gruppe of Jagdgeschwade 26 – see Appendix D): it crash-landed at Stade airfield, but the pilot escaped unhurt. Two more German fighters from this Gruppealone were also forced to land with combat damage in the next few minutes. ¹⁴It was a good omen for the Americans, but there was still a long way to go.

It might not have seemed like it to the bombers in the vanguard of the mission, but the American plan was working quite well. While the skies appeared to be bristling with German fighters, there were far fewer than there might have been. The force bound for Warnemünde, which had approached northern Germany some forty minutes earlier, had succeeded in drawing many Luftwaffe planes into the air too early, and several Me109s and FW190s that might have been there to greet them were now refuelling at their airfields. The diversionary raids in France and Holland had also worked: at least two Luftwaffe Staffelnwere sent from Schiphol and Woensdrecht airfields to deal with the attacks, which might otherwise have been sent northwards to defend Hamburg. ¹⁵(A Staffelwas roughly equivalent to a British flight or an American squadron, although the comparison is slightly contrived. See Appendix D.) In fact, the only part of the American plan that had not seemed to work was the attack on Kiel. The three bomb groups in this wing had had such a hard time finding each other, and were so dispersed across the sky, that the wing leader had been forced to call off the mission. They had returned home without dropping a single bomb on German soil. Nevertheless, the other deceptions had done their job: not a single American bomber was shot down before it reached the target; and while the Blohm & Voss wing might have had to deal with German fighters, the Klöckner wing, which came in about fifteen or twenty minutes behind them, had a virtually free run into Hamburg.

However, the German fighters were only one part of the formidable Hamburg defence line: there was nothing the Americans could do to deceive the flak guns. Indeed, as they flew through the clouds of exploding shells, there was little any of them could do to avoid being hit. Ironically, the tactics they relied on to keep themselves safe from the fighters also made them vulnerable to flak. A single B-17, weaving back and forth more than five miles above the ground, would have been an impossible target for the flak gunners. A group of twenty, forced to fly relatively steadily so that they could keep together, was a much bigger target. After the failures of the previous night, the German flak gunners must have relished the opportunity to take their revenge.

Many American aviators feared flak far more than they did fighters. Walter Davis, who was flying a plane in the Klöckner wing, was one: ‘You could seethe fighters. And we had gunners on our airplane. Whereas you can’t see the flak – you don’t know when it’s going to come. You can see it exploding, but you can’t dodge it… And they had so much of it over there…’ ¹⁶

The anti-aircraft fire began before they even reached the German coast: two flak ships in the Elbe estuary opened up on them. A short time afterwards, when the batteries of Cuxhaven also started to fire, the flak became accurate and intense – ‘So thick you could get out and walk on it,’ according to Davis. It carried on virtually uninterrupted for the next twenty minutes, but it was not until they reached Hamburg that it became really bad. ‘When we were going in to Hamburg it looked like there was a big black cloud over the city. Actually it was the smoke from the flak coming up.’ ¹⁷

This was far worse than anything the Americans had experienced before. The flak bursts seemed to create an impenetrable curtain before them, and they had no choice but to fly straight through it. As they approached the city they saw flashes in the air as the shells exploded – red or pink explosions, followed by small clouds of brown or black smoke, like thousands of firecrackers filling the sky. Some airmen found the sight mesmerizing. But there was never any doubt about the danger they were in. Some of the planes were thrown about by the sheer force of the exploding shells. According to the men of the 381st BG, flying in the Klöckner wing, the anti-aircraft fire was ‘the most intense we have ever seen’. ¹⁸

It took the Americans just twenty minutes to fly from the coast to the outskirts of Hamburg, but they were under fire for the whole journey. By the time they reached the city many had holes in their wings and fuselages, a handful had even lost an engine. Worse still, they were taking casualties. In the lead group of the Blohm & Voss wing, the Judy Bhad taken a vicious blow to the side of the cockpit. Lieutenant Charles Bigler, the nineteen-year-old co-pilot, remembers what happened:

It was five minutes before our bomb run over Hamburg. A Nazi fighter came in straight on my side and knocked out my oxygen. A shell glanced on the back of my seat and hit the pilot’s back. He slumped over and I tried to keep him up with one hand and hold the ship with the other. If I had let him slump I would have been unable to control the ship. We made our bomb run with me driving with one hand. ¹⁹

The pilot, Willis Carlisle, had died instantly. For five minutes, without any oxygen to sustain him, Charles Bigler held the dead man up, only calling for help once he had completed his bomb run. Over the next hour a desperate struggle ensued as the bombardier and the top turret gunner tried to get oxygen to Bigler, and at the same time remove the body of the dead pilot. Although he was under continual attack from German fighters, and falling almost 25,000 feet, Bigler somehow got the Judy Bhome – he was so exhausted by the ordeal that he had to be carried from the plane by the station medics.