This was probably the most dangerous time for the Americans. If they wanted to drop their bombs correctly they had no choice but to stay in formation and fly straight and level towards the target. Evasive manoeuvres to avoid the flak were prohibited because even a small deviation could send the bombs off course. During this critical couple of minutes, they were effectively sitting ducks. Even after the bombs had gone they were obliged to keep straight

and level until they had taken their target photographs. Only then could they follow the group leader in his gentle weave across the sky to avoid the flak.

However, that day there was another problem, one that had not been anticipated. As they approached the target it became clear that it was not only the sky that was filled with smoke, from the flak shells: there was smoke across the ground too. Some of the American airmen assumed that it must be a deliberate screen, set by the Hamburg authorities to obscure the city centre. As the 303rd BG’s group leader said to the press office when he returned home: ‘There must have been a million square miles of smoke screen.’ (In his official report he reduced this claim to about fifty square miles.) As a consequence, he went on, ‘the bomb results were unobserved’. ²⁰Others, like the ball gunner of 384th BG’s Doris Mae, thought that the Americans must have unwittingly created the screen: ‘The preceding group’s bombs had sent up a lot of smoke. If they hit the target, we did too for I followed our bombs right down into the centre of the mess.’ Unknown to this eyewitness, there had been no previous group: the 384th BG was the first to drop its bombs. ²¹

In fact, the smoke was coming from the fires started by the RAF the night before. It is ironic that the success of the British raid threatened to prevent the Americans following it up, but that was what happened. A westerly breeze was blowing thick black clouds across the target area, making it almost impossible for the Americans to see where to drop their bombs. The Blohm & Voss shipyards were on the edge of the huge smoke cloud, but the Klöckner factory was in the middle of it, so it began to look as if neither wing would find its target. In an effort to salvage the mission, two of the Klöckner groups decided to head for Blohm & Voss instead, in the hope that it might be easier to see. The third group, the 381st BG, was still too far behind the leaders to realize what they were doing and carried on with their planned route above the smoke.

So it was that five Bombardment Groups, instead of three, headed towards the U-boat yards on the banks of the Elbe. They still did not know whether or not they would be able to bomb it, and for a short while the mission hung in the balance. But as the bomber formations made their final approach, by a piece of great good fortune a gap opened in the smoke clouds. Blohm & Voss was still obscured but the quays and buildings of Howaldtswerke, one of Hamburg’s other shipyards, were clearly visible. As they got closer the smoke began to close over the target area once more so, without wasting any time, the 384th BG opened their bomb bay doors and unleashed 44,000 pounds of incendiaries on the dockyards. They were followed at roughly one-minute intervals by the 379th, the 303rd, the 351st and the 91st BGs, dropping wave after wave of high-explosive and incendiary bombs on to the buildings below. ²²

Meanwhile, the 381st was still struggling to keep up with the rest of the force. Unable to see what the other Klöckner groups had done, the group leader decided to cut the corner off the designated route to save time, but as he flew across the south of the city he and his group found themselves alone. From there on he stuck to the planned route, heading eastwards over the smoke, but it soon became obvious that he would never find the Klöckner factory – the smoke was too thick. With the mission looking like a lost cause, the group held on to its bombs and decided to seek out a target of opportunity on the way home. They settled on the railway marshalling yards at Heide, which they bombed at ten past five, half an hour after the other groups had got rid of their loads. Then they hurried to close up with their fellows for the hazardous journey home.

By now all six groups were looking more than a little ragged. Of the 123 Flying Fortresses that had started out this afternoon, fourteen had aborted the mission before even reaching Germany, almost half of those that remained now had flak damage of some sort or another, and many more had been hit by cannon fire from the ever-present fighters. ²³Those American planes with major damage were now in serious trouble. If an engine had been hit, or any of the vital controls, it would become more and more difficult for the pilot to keep up with the others. And stragglers knew that they would face a doubly dangerous journey home: not only would they be the first to be targeted by the German fighters, but they would have to face those attacks alone.

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* * *

As the bombers struggled to stay close together the Luftwaffe appeared in force around them. Fighters from Heligoland, which had been first to contact the invading force, had refuelled and were coming in for a second attack. They were joined by others from Deelen, Husum, Jever, Nordholz and Oldenburg. ²⁴Some American groups reported seeing as many as a hundred, two hundred or even three hundred fighter planes over the next hour or so. At times they seemed to fill the sky, attacking in waves from every conceivable angle; there was nothing the Americans could do but abandon all other duties and man the guns. ²⁵

With such huge numbers of fighters coming in at them, it was only a matter of time before the Flying Fortresses started to go down. Survivors of the two Hamburg wings unanimously claimed that the German fighters were far more ferocious than usual, pressing home their attacks with terrifying determination. ²⁶The Luftwaffe had not yet learned that the best method of attack was to dive at the bombers head on, and break up the formation – but this happened anyway. The largest number of attacks came from below at the rear, and in general they were not by single fighters but by groups of three or four at a time.

The lower groups took the brunt of this ferocity, particularly the stragglers. The worst hit was the 384th BG, which by now was limping on with several disabled planes, their normally tight formation looking more and more ragged as the afternoon wore on. Some individual planes in this group were attacked more than twenty times, yet somehow, miraculously, stayed airborne. ²⁷Others could not take the punishment. Brad Summers was one of the co-pilots with 384th BG:

Before we got to the target we had one hit, knocked all the glass out of the top turret. The engineer, who managed the turret, I think his oxygen mask protected his face quite a bit. There were some little splinters in his neck and shoulders, but he went back to his gun. He couldn’t put his head out because of the wind blowing through the turret, so he huddled over down inside trying to [aim] by the tracers (the gun sight was also destroyed), which is not a very accurate way to shoot…

We proceeded on and got several other hits. I recall seeing a flash out of my window and I looked and there was a rip in the skin on the top of my wing. It must have been about eight or ten feet long, opened about four or five inches wide. The skin was peeled back where apparently a 20mm shell from a fighter plane had gone in and ripped it out. As I looked, I saw another hole open up. The only thing I could figure was, an 88mm shell had gone right through the wing without exploding. ²⁸

It was around this time that the tail gunner had a direct hit on his turret. The concussion from the explosion lifted and threw him into the body of the plane, but he crawled back to see if the tail guns were intact. One was still working, so he went back to firing it until a second direct hit blasted him through the doorway again. This time his guns had been blown out of the back of the aircraft. With no top turret, and most of the back of the plane blown away, Summers’s Flying Fortress had become an easy target for the fighters. First an aileron went. Then some hits in the tail knocked out the trim tabs so that Summers had to lean forward on the stick to hold down the nose of the plane. Finally the stabilizer was blown away, leaving the two pilots powerless to fly the plane. There was nothing to do but bail out. Summers continues: