However, the station medics were first on the scene. There were casualties in many of the planes that had returned. For example, the radio operator of Yankee Doodle Dandyhad run out of oxygen while manning the ball turret, but the battle had been so frantic that no one had been able to come to his aid for over half an hour. By the time they got him back to base he had swallowed his tongue, his eyes were frozen shut, and he was virtually blue from lack of oxygen. The co-pilot was also injured: as he was coming back to help his crewmate, the base of the top turret had revolved violently, crushing his foot in the mounting. Both men would be nursed back to health over the coming days and weeks, and the radio operator, Richard Grimm, went on to earn a DFC later in the war. 40
The crew of the Judy Bwere in even worse trouble when their plane came to a halt at Kimbolton airfield. Their pilot was dead, their co-pilot badly disabled after his ordeal in the air, and two other crewmen were almost unconscious from lack of oxygen. At Ridgewell, the home of 381st BG, there were two more cases of severe anoxia, and two men from 384th BG had to be hospitalized at Grafton Underwood because of wounds they had received.
They were the lucky ones. Of the 123 crews that had started out that afternoon, fifteen had failed to return. As the survivors were driven back across the airfield to the debriefing rooms they could see for themselves how many planes were missing. Later, when they gathered for a meal, the empty seats spoke far more eloquently than any statistics. At Grafton Underwood the atmosphere was particularly sombre: seventy faces had vanished from the mess hall during the course of an afternoon.
That night most of the men went to bed early, too exhausted to consider anything but sleep. Some were issued rations of whisky to calm their nerves, and perhaps cheer them a little. Others were offered sleeping pills to help them shut off the effects of adrenaline. 41They were emotionally and physically worn out.
They needed their sleep. Every one of those bomber groups was scheduled for another maximum effort tomorrow, and most of the men would be up before sunrise to repeat the performance.
13. The Americans Again
They know that if a flaming bullet comes through their gasoline tank it immediately becomes a burning torch and they are gone. They know that if a wing is torn off there is the same result. They know that a dozen fatal things may happen any time, and that if they fall two hundred or twenty thousand feet, existence is at an end…
Billy Mitchell 1
While the men of VIII Bomber Command slept, American intelligence officers worked late into the night analysing the information they had gathered during the various debriefing sessions. The statistics did not look good. 2To start with, fourteen of the planes bound for Hamburg had abandoned their mission before they had reached the German coast. That represented more than 11 per cent of the total force: an unacceptable figure. In the case of the wing that had been supposed to bomb Kiel the entiremission had been called off because they had been unable to assemble into a safe formation. If the average is taken for all the American forces bombing that day, more than a quarter of the B-17s had turned back before reaching Germany. Something had to be done about this problem, and soon: every plane that aborted its mission merely increased the risk of failure, and worse, for those who carried on.
The loss rate was even more worrying. Fifteen planes out of 123 had been shot down: that was 12 per cent of the total force detailed for Hamburg, and nearly 14 per cent of those who flew over the city. Losses like those were unsustainable. Half a dozen similar missions, and the entire American bomber force would be wiped out.
Another concern was the number of planes returning home damaged. Sixty-seven planes had been shot up, nine so badly that they could barely fly. To make things worse, twenty-three planes had been damaged by their own squadron companions. This was probably inevitable – the Americans flew in such close formations that it was sometimes difficult not to fire at each other – but, nevertheless, the loss rate was bad enough without adding to it by friendly fire.
Over the coming weeks the USAAF would do their best to overcome these problems. They would introduce ‘Splasher’ radio beacons to help their bomb groups find each other before they left the English coast – that way there would be less chance of them having to abandon their mission because of an inability to assemble properly. They would insist on ever-tighter formation flying to reduce the risks of being attacked by German fighters. But in the end nothing they suggested could hide the fact that they were outclassed in the skies over Germany. No matter how formidable a group of Flying Fortresses was, it was no match for the combined forces of heavy flak and swarms of Me109s.
The final piece of the intelligence picture was perhaps the most discouraging. After all the losses they had suffered, it seemed that only 60 per cent of the planes had bombed anywhere near the target. Seventy-three crews had dropped their loads on or near the docks in Hamburg, another thirteen had bombed the railway marshalling yards at Heide; the rest had been either shot down, had aborted, or dropped their bombs elsewhere. Of all the statistics, this one had to improve most urgently. If the bombers were not hitting their targets there was little point in flying to Germany in the first place.
Needless to say, these figures were highly confidential, and did not become public knowledge until long after the war. There was, however, one set of numbers that was advertised as widely as possible: the statistics for how many German fighters had been shot down. American claims for the day were huge: thirty-eight destroyed, six probably destroyed, twenty-seven damaged. 3Some bomb groups had suffered terrible casualties, but with scores like those they could at least console themselves with the thought that they were giving as good as they got.
The only problem with the figures was that they were fiction. It is understandable that the American airmen believed themselves so successful: any German fighter that dived through a formation might have ten B-17s firing on it at the same time, and if it went down every one of those B-17 crews would claim the victory. In the end, however, it was still only one fighter shot down, not ten. German records give an idea of how inflated American claims could be. They suggest that only six fighters were shot down by B-17s in totalthat afternoon, and a handful damaged. 4That is less than a sixth of the number claimed by the USAAF. American intelligence officials suspected this, but they let the numbers stand because they served as a much-needed morale boost to their men. At this stage in the war they needed it.
* * *
As morning dawned on 26 July, the USAAF crews assembled once again for a briefing on the day’s target. They did not know it yet, but they were at the beginning of a seven-day rollercoaster that would come to be known as ‘Blitz Week’: almost two thousand sorties on twenty-three towns and cities across northern Europe. 5Today was the third maximum effort in a row.
The Americans had a policy of resting one squadron in every group for each raid, so only a few of the men flying on the twenty-sixth would have been on all three of those missions. However, two-thirds of that day’s force had been through yesterday’s ordeal. Those men had had only five hours’ sleep, and were still recovering from the battering they had received over Hamburg; it goes without saying that they were hoping for an easier target now. They were to be sorely disappointed. Not only were they going back to Germany, but their mission was the same as the one that had just decimated them. Their exact targets would also be the same: the Klöckner factory and the Blohm & Voss shipyards.