World War II: The Autobiography (55 page)

In about an hour I heard that more troopers were coming, and at six o’clock I heard that Lieutenant Harold H. Swingler and quite a few troopers from Regimental Headquarters Company were on the road. Swingler had been a former intercollegiate boxing champion; he was a tough combat soldier. He arrived about seven o’clock. In his wake appeared half a dozen of our own Sherman tanks. All the troopers cheered loud and long; it was a very dramatic moment. The Germans must have heard the cheering, too, although they did not know then what it was about. They soon found out.

By now no more wounded were coming back. A heavy pall of dust and acrid smoke covered the battlefield. I decided it was time to counterattack. I wanted to destroy the German force in front of us and to recover our dead and wounded. I felt that if I could do this and at the same time secure the ridge, I would be in good shape for whatever came next – probably a German attack against our defenses at daylight, with us having the advantage of holding the ridge. Our attack jumped off on schedule: regimental clerks, cooks, truck drivers, everyone who could carry a rifle or a carbine was in the attack. The Germans reacted, and their fire increased in intensity. Just about two hundred yards from the top of the ridge Swingler crawled up on a cut through which the paved road ran and saw a German Tiger tank with the crew standing outside looking at it. He dropped a grenade among them and killed them, and thus we captured our first Tiger. There were several bazooka hits on the front plate with holes about the size of one’s little finger, but they went in only about an inch or so. The sloped armor on the Tiger was about four and a half inches thick. Soon we overran German machine guns, a couple of trucks, and finally we captured twelve 120-mm. Russian mortars, all in position with their ammunition nearby and aiming stakes out. They were obviously all ready to fire. Apparently our men had either killed, captured, or driven off the German crews. The attack continued, and all German resistance disappeared, the Germans having fled from the battlefield.

That same night, learning that the Germans had completely withdrawn from the action at Biazza Ridge, I moved my command post from the top of the ridge back about a half mile under the olive trees. I deployed the troopers for the night, expecting an attack from the direction of Biscari to come into our right flank, probably at daylight.

HOME FRONT: FIRESTORM IN HAMBURG, 27 JULY 1943

Else Wendel, housewife

From early 1942, RAF Bomber Command – soon to be joined by the United States Army’s Eighth Air Force – began a strategic bombing offensive against Germany. The targets for this offensive were military, industrial – and civil. A four-day bombing raid on Hamburg in July 1943 caused a“firestorm” which burnt down 80 per cent of buildings and killed 40,000 people, a fifth of them children.

On the Tuesday night, 27 July, the bombers came back. In that raid over 45,000 [An overestimation: see above] people in Hamburg died. Mama and her friends went down into their cellar. The air warden stored sand and water and piled up tools ready for any digging that might be necessary.

It was the worst raid Mama had ever known. For hours they huddled there, with bombs crashing nearer, and the ceaseless rumblings of falling masonry. Then there was the loudest crash of all. The air warden ran out. He came back, his face grey. “Leave the cellar at once!” he called. “A phosphorus bomb has fallen at the entrance door. Quick, all of you …”

An indescribable panic started. Mothers grabbed children and rushed madly away. People fell over each other and Mama was separated from her friends. She didn’t see them again. Out in the street people just rushed blindly away from the bomb, thinking of nothing else. An old man came near Mama, who was now standing dazed and alone. “Gome with me,” he said. She picked up her suitcase and followed him. It was unbearably hot in the street.

“I can’t go through this. There’s a cellar there not burning, I shall go down there,” she told him.

“Don’t be a fool,” he said. “All the houses here will catch fire soon, it’s only a matter of time.”

A woman with two children joined them. “Gome on,” said the old man. “This looks the clearest way.”

There were walls of flame round them now. Suddenly into the square came a fire engine drawn by two startled horses. They swerved aside, and one of the terrified children rushed down a side street. The mother followed, leaving her boy behind. As the first child reached a burning house, some blazing wood fell near her, setting her clothes alight. The mother threw herself on top of the child to try and smother the flames, but as she did so the whole top floor of the house opposite crashed down on the two of them.

The old man grabbed the boy’s hand firmly. “You come with us,” he ordered.

“I’ll wait for my mummy,” said the boy.

“No,” said the old man, trying to make his voice sound harsh. “It’s getting too hot here. We will wait for your mummy farther away from the fire.”

Mama intervened quickly. “We will find the best way out, and then come back and fetch your mummy.”

“All right,” said the little boy.

They went the same way as the horses, thinking the animals’ instinct might have led them to safety. The boy fell down but got up, then fell down again.

“We can’t go on like this,” said the man, pulling them towards a cellar. “There’s water here, pour it over your coats, and we’ll put them over our heads and try that way.”

Up in the square again, the man took a hasty glance round and then grabbed the boy’s hand. “Now – come this way,” he told them. Mama grabbed her suitcase. “Put it down,” shouted the old man. “Save yourself, you can’t bring that as well.”

But Mama would not let go. She took the boy’s hand in her left hand and the case in her right. Out in the square it was like a furnace. Sweat poured down her body as they began to run. The smoke seeped through the wet coats and began to choke them. Only for a few yards could she carry the suitcase, then she dropped it and left it without another thought. The little boy ran between them, taking steps twice as fast as their own. He fell again and again, but was hauled to his feet. Were they still on the track of the horses? They didn’t know, for every moment or two they had to turn to avoid burning wood and pylons which hurtled down from the houses around. Bodies were still burning in the road. Sometimes they stumbled against them. But on they went, with the little boy’s feet running tap, tap, tap between them. A dog was howling madly somewhere. It sounded more pathetic and lost than they themselves. At last they came to a small green place, and ran to the centre of it and fell on their faces, the little boy between them. They fell asleep like exhausted animals, but only for a few minutes. The old man woke first.

“Wake up,” he said, shaking them both. “The fire is catching up with us.”

Mama opened her eyes. They were lying in a small field, and the houses on one side were now alight; worse than alight; some kind of explosive material was there as well, it seemed. A great flame was shooting straight out towards them. A flame as high as the houses and nearly as wide as the whole street. As she stared in fascination the giant flame jerked back and then shot forward towards them again.

“My God, what is it?” she said.

“It’s a fire-storm,” the old man answered.

“The beginning of one. Quick, come along, there’s no time to lose. In a minute there will be dozens of flames like that and they’ll reach us; quick, come on, we must run. I think there’s a small stream on the other side of this field.”

Mama got up and bent over the boy. “Poor little thing, what a shame to wake him.” She shook him gently. “Get up! We must run again.”

The child did not stir. The man bent down and pulled him to his feet. “Gome on, boy,” he said. The child swayed and fell again. The man sank to his knees beside the child and took his hands.

“Oh, no!” he said in a shocked voice. “No, it can’t be. My God, he’s dead!” The tears began to pour down his blackened face. He bent down lower over the little figure and began to whisper to it.

“You were a good little boy, a very brave little boy,” he said, stroking the child’s face with a woman’s tenderness. “As long as Hamburg has boys as brave as you she won’t die.” He kissed the child’s face very gently. “Sleep well, little boy,” he whispered. ” Sleep well; you got a kinder death than your mummy and sister. They were burnt alive like rats.”

Mama became nervous; another tongue of flame shot out from the side street. The roaring of the flames became stronger. The old man seemed quite oblivious now of their danger.

“Come on,” she called out. “The boy is dead. We can’t help him any more. Gome on, we must go on.”

The old man did not look up. “No,” he said. “You go on by yourself. I shall die with this little boy.”

Mama yelled through the roaring wind. “You’re crazy! Gome on!” The old man did not answer. He kissed the child’s forehead again.

In despair Mama grabbed the man in her arms and tried to pull him away. Sparks were now beginning to reach their coats. Suddenly a hot gust of wind blew their coats off their backs, sending them blazing through the air. This brought the man to life again. He jumped up and started to run. As they raced across the field, the flames crept behind them. Once they fell and then got up and ran on. The field seemed wider and wider as they raced towards the stream, but at last they reached it. Unable to say another word, they both fell on the banks and slept, or perhaps they fainted first and slept afterwards.

US BOMBERS RAID THE OIL REFINERIES AT PLOESTI, RUMANIA, 1 AUGUST 1943

Captain John S. Young, USAAF

The bombing of the Ploesti refineries, one of the main sources of fuel for the Nazi war effort, was carried out by 177 B-24s flying from bases in North Africa.

On previous missions, we had bombed whatever we could find. We had gone out with general instructions to find Rommel and give him hell. When we hit the European mainland, we had made a lot of saturation raids. But for the Ploesti mission, every plane in every element was given a pinpoint – and we had to find it. There were no secondary targets. Col. John R. “Killer” Kane, our group CO, was not being dramatic when he said, “Either we hit Ploesti or we’ll die trying.”

We examined hundreds of still photographs. We saw motion pictures taken from the air before the war, showing us exactly what the area would look like from our bombers. We attended lectures given by a former manager of one of the Ploesti plants. And we had a detailed relief map of the surrounding territory, complete with roads and even trees. Finally, a miniature model of the targets, drawn and constructed to an exact scale, was laid out on the desert, and we practice bombed it for weeks.

We ran approximately twelve missions over that replica of the oil fields, approaching, attacking, and departing exactly as we intended doing on the actual raid. Each element was given a specific dummy target which had been erected to resemble the real thing, and we practiced until we could bomb it in our sleep. When we finally did get over the real Ploesti, our movements were almost automatic. In a low-altitude raid, you have to know precisely where you are going because you don’t see your target until you are on top of it. And we knew we could only make one pass.

Our
Liberators
were modified considerably for the mission. An extra releasable fuel tank was added in the bomb bay. The top-turret guns in the lead planes were arranged so that they would fire forward, so the first ships could strafe the entire area, with the following planes protecting their rear. Extra .50s were mounted in the noses of the lead planes.

Five bomb groups made the raid. Colonel Kane and I were piloting the lead ship of the first element. The second group was on our right wing, a third on the left, another further to the left, and the fifth on the extreme left. We flew a flat V, wingtip to wingtip – no plane in the entire formation was more than twenty-five feet away from another plane.

We had forty-eight planes in our element, flying in sections of five. The first four sections had ten planes each, with an eight-plane section bringing up the rear. Each of the first twenty ships carried 1,000-pound bombs with sixty-minute delayed-action fuzes. The sixty-minute fuzes were a precaution against premature explosions damaging the last planes over the target. In practice bombings, we got the entire flight across the target within a minute and fifteen seconds, but we were prepared for the possibility that some ships might get lost on the way and reach the target late. Each plane in the last three elements carried 500-pounders with forty-five second delayed-action fuzes.

Weather conditions were perfect when we took off at 0710. We crossed the Mediterranean at 2,000 feet. At our initial point we ran into thick cumulus clouds at 10,000 feet and lowering. Over Yugoslavia, the clouds started settling in, and we had only about 1,000 feet of visibility over the 9,500-foot mountains. As we came into the Danube Valley, we dropped down to 2,500 feet and followed the Danube River to our target.

All the way across the Mediterranean and over part of Occupied Europe, we didn’t even see an enemy plane. It was like a practice mission but, naturally, we maintained radio silence. In that long ride, I don’t think anybody said a word.

About thirty-five minutes from our target, we lowered to twenty feet off the ground. And I mean twenty feet. We were coming in so low our plane actually had to pull up to avoid hitting a man on a horse. That horse probably is still running.

The fun started when we spotted a freight train sided at a railroad junction. There must have been fifty cars full of oil just inviting our personal attention. T/Sgt. Fred Leard, our right-waist gunner, and Sergeant Weckessler, top-turret gunner, were mighty eager boys. They called Colonel Kane on the interphone and asked if they could “test” their guns. They had gone through a routine test just after we left the field, and everything was in proper working order. But they wanted to make sure, and if a German oil train was sitting beneath them – well, that was just coincidental. The colonel, never a man to object to a “routine” check, gave his approval and the “test” began.