By the time Estes’s plane was out over the sea he was barely able to fly it. Three of the engines had been hit, the left wing tip was shattered, and the oxygen supply to the top turret had been knocked out. When 20mm shells blasted a gaping hole in the nose the bombardier and the navigator were thrown back into the tunnel by the explosion, which ripped off their helmets and oxygen masks. Both men struggled back to their guns, but it was no use: the Flying Fortress was going down into the sea.

When this happened Staff Sergeant George Ursta was manning the ball turret, waving his guns at the attacking fighters to make believe he was still firing. He picks up the story:

I was still tracking ships when I heard an explosion and saw the number-two engine smoking. I called up the pilot and asked him if it was a good idea to get out of the ship at this time. He said I should leave the ball turret and I went up to the radio room. I saw that the gang all had ’chutes on so I put mine on… The engineer came back and told us that we didn’t need any ’chutes as we were going to ditch, so I took my harness off and threw it out of the window. The engineer started throwing out ammunition and I helped him, and we both took the right-hand gun and threw it out… After that we were told to go into the radio room and find good positions so we wouldn’t upset after we hit the water. I just sat there with my eyes closed and said a little prayer. ³⁶

As they glided inexorably downwards the bombardier, David Davis, put his head out of the escape hatch at the top of the radio room to see how close they were to the water. Unfortunately, as he was doing so six Focke-Wulf 190s came in at the plane head on, and the pilot was forced to dive to avoid them. Davis was thrown through the top hatch and only managed to prevent himself falling out of the plane by clinging to the fuselage. The others in the radio room scrambled up to the hatch and did their best to pull him back in, but there was nothing they could do. After it had fallen 5,000 feet, the plane levelled off and Davis was at last flung back into the radio room. Brute strength, and not a little luck, had prevented him being sucked out into the empty sky.

A few minutes later the B-17 hit the water. Even now the fighters continued to attack: as the shaken crew clambered out of the sinking plane 20mm shells continued to burst on the wings and the water around it. One of the fighters doubled back to make another pass, but when the pilot saw the life-rafts self-inflating he turned for home. That was the last any of the crew saw of the battle of Hamburg.

After the sharp dive, many of the crew believed that their pilot, Thomas Estes, had been killed. In fact, he was dazed but alive – he was the last to get out of the plane before it sank. The ball-turret gunner saw him crawl out of the side window of the cockpit and hauled him on to the life raft.

Miraculously all ten crew men had survived the ditching. They spent two nights trying to keep their dinghies afloat, which had been peppered with holes by exploding flak fragments, and were picked up eventually by a Danish fishing-vessel and brought back to the English coast. Against the odds, they had lived to fight another day.

* * *

German fighters carried on harassing the American planes halfway across the North Sea. Some, such as the Focke-Wulfs of I/JG I from Husum airfield, were on their third sortie that afternoon. As the Americans flew further out to sea they were eventually attacked by night fighters too – a group of twin-engined Me110s from Leeuwarden. That German fighter controllers would send these cumbersome night fighters into battle shows how committed they were to finishing off as many B-17s as they could. Night-fighter crews were not properly trained to attack formations of Flying Fortresses, and their machines were not nearly so able to zip away, should they be caught in the overlapping fields of American fire.

The radar operator of a night fighter explains what he saw as his pilot steered the Me110 towards the American formation:

It was the first time I had seen Boeings from the air. From five or six kilometres away, they looked like a great heap, like a great swarm of birds. You couldn’t see individual planes, only those at the front. We had been told that the Americans were very dangerous, that each plane had eighteen guns. We only had these little slow night fighters. When we saw a bomber at night, there was a feeling of joy but, in the day, it was a strange feeling because you knew that, instead of shooting at only one bomber, many bombers would now be shooting at us. ³⁷

Nobody expected night fighters to attack a full formation of B-17s, but their controllers had explicitly instructed them to keep a look-out for American stragglers. ³⁸Their only real advantage was that of surprise: if they headed out in front of the formation they would be hidden by the brightness of the evening sun, which by now was shining right into the American gunners’ eyes. Eventually they spotted a B-17 in the high squadron of 303rd BG that was lagging slightly behind the others and came in to attack.

Their tactics worked, but only to a degree. It was common for some of the gunners to rest easy around this time – they would take off their oxygen masks for a smoke or a few bites of the Hershey chocolate bars they kept among their flying rations. The Americans were indeed caught off-guard – their official reports refer to this last combat of the day as a ‘sneak attack’ – but their superior fire power was enough to keep the Me110s at bay. Indeed, they even managed to shoot down one of the German fighters – flown by Leutnant Eberhard Gardiewski and his radar operator Friedrich Abromeit. Both of the Me110’s engines were hit, and it crashed into the sea some twenty miles off the Dutch coast. The crew were eventually picked up by a British motor torpedo boat and brought back to England. It was the final encounter of the day: with their fuel running low, the other German fighters were recalled to their airfields in Germany.

* * *

The Flying Fortresses did not get back to their various bases until after seven thirty that evening, more than six hours after they had taken off. Battered and short of fuel, many had difficult landings – the final challenge in a mission beset with problems. Several planes were so short of fuel that they had to land at alternative airfields. Even those who made it back to their own did not have an easy time. One of 303rd BG’s planes, the Yankee Doodle Dandy, almost crashed at Molesworth airbase. The pilot found himself caught in

the prop wash of another B-17 while he was coming in to land, and the sudden turbulence tossed the plane around in the air until one of its engines ran out of fuel. As it plummeted towards the ground disaster was averted when the engineer, Stan Backiel, had the presence of mind to raise the landing gear, giving the pilot just enough lift to pull the plane back up again. ³⁹ Yankee Doodle Dandycame round again and this time landed perfectly.

A few minutes later the last of the B-17s joined it on the ground. Their hazardous mission, the seventy-sixth in the history of VIII Bomber Command, was now officially over.

At each airfield, the station commander and his staff stood out in the dying evening sunshine and anxiously counted the planes in, just as they had counted them out six hours ago. They were not the only ones waiting to welcome the men home. The ground crews, who were particularly attached to the aeroplanes and the crews, were anxious to see that both had returned safely. Most had a long night’s work ahead, trying to patch up the aircraft so that they could be used again in the morning. Intelligence officers were also standing by, ready to debrief the men and note down what had happened on today’s troublesome mission. Those airmen who had not flown were eager to find out what they had missed. And at one or two of the airfields newspaper men from Associated Press and United Press were ready to record the immediate impressions of the exhausted crews as they climbed out of their battered B-17s.