KRIEGIES AND GOONS by James H. Lang

Author:James H. Lang [Lang, James H.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Richard E Lang
Published: 2011-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

“For you, the war is over.” That’s what prisoners are told as they are captured.

But the war outside of our camp went on and on, and sometimes we were marginally involved, if only as spectators. During that summer of 1943, the City of Munich was a prime target for the RAF’s heavy night bombers. We would know when they were coming because we could hear distant sirens wailing the air raid alarms.

Watching from our windows, we sometimes could see the action far to the south during the midnight hours. There would be the sudden pinpricks of light as anti-aircraft shells exploded in the sky, sometimes accompanied by the flare of a stricken bomber.

Lower in the sky would be other flares of light, usually coming in a series of flares and followed many seconds later by the rumble of exploding bombs. Sometimes the ground beneath us trembled slightly.

Those raids on Munich were part of the RAF’s greatly stepped-up series of huge night raids on all of Germany’s big cities, raids that had been started on May 30, 1942, when the first of England’s saturation raids sent 1,000 planes against the City of Cologne, leaving it blazing.

Within little more than a year, the U.S. Air Force was joining the RAF, mounting its own gigantic missions in daylight hours and subjecting Germany to aerial attack around the clock.

The first mammoth American raid on Germany came on August 17, when 376 American heavy bombers aimed for the ball bearing plants at Schweinfurt and Regensburg, many miles north and east of our camp. Our first hint of the raid came when the local air raid sirens started screaming at midday.

We watched with awe as the American air might covered the skies east of our camp with vapor trails, each trail headed by a heavy bomber that appeared as a black speck to our naked eyes so many miles away.

Those traces of the air war showed us the formations of bombers on their way back from Schweinfurt. By late afternoon our underground contacts had notified us of what had happened, that Germany’s ball bearing production facilities had been seriously damaged and that many persons had died.

We were overjoyed, but sad too as many of the dead were American fliers, plus foreign workers impressed into the German war machine, working in the bombed factories.

“Home by Christmas” was the hopeful cry raised by some Kriegies, but actually we were aware that much more remained to be done first. Two Christmas holidays must pass before the war drew to an end.

With the large increase in the size of the bombing missions came a corresponding increase in casualties. Dozens of aircraft, each with some 10 men aboard, became routine losses in these raids. The USAF suffered the death of 446 of the 1,733 men who flew on the August 1 Ploesti oil refinery raid alone, for example, plus numerous others wounded and captured. Only 33 of the 178 aircraft leaving on this mission were able to fly again when it was over.

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