The Man Who Flew the Memphis Belle: Memoir of a WWII Bomber Pilot by Ron Powers & Morgan USAFT Robert

Author:Ron Powers & Morgan, USAFT, Robert [Powers, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2001-05-01T05:00:00+00:00

April 17. Mission Number 21. A huge objective today—a preview of the massive, deep-penetrating missions the Eighth was about to start pouring into German airspace over the summer and autumn of 1943. Our target was the port city of Bremen on the Weser River in northwest Germany. Bremen would mark our longest journey over enemy territory thus far. Like many targets on both sides, it was a target rich in history, as I later found out. The town had been around since the first century AD. It was steeped in old Teutonic charm, and had even formed the setting for a fable by the Brothers Grimm.

What we were after on this day was no fairy tale. Besides its concentration of shipbuilding and textile plants, Bremen harbored a factory that built those hated and lethal Focke-Wulf 190s—not to mention an airfield where, as our spies and the antifascist Underground informed us, some 200 of Hitler’s best fliers and gunners were billeted.

We had no illusions about the kind of hell we would catch over this stronghold. The Germans would throw everything they could think of at us, and then some. The Intelligence officer warned us at briefing that we’d be facing 270 to 300 fighters, not to mention 100 to 150 aerial artillery guns in the target area alone. The chance to prune out some of those demon Focke-Wulfs and their personnel made the prospect bearable. Colonel Wray pumped us up with an extra-fiery pep talk. “This is the target we really want to hit, boys,” I remember him saying to us as he smacked that blackboard for emphasis. “Really hit. Really knock ’em out. We’ve really got to do the job on this one.”

In other words, give those Germans the ultimate Rigid Digit.

Thirty-two of the 91st’s thirty-six airplanes took off as the lead of four huge groups on the morning of the seventeenth, and only three aborted. The thirty-two were part of a total force numbering more than 100. We needed every ounce of the Colonel’s motivating juice.

The flak, when it kicked in, was like nothing any of us had ever seen before. To call it a carpet doesn’t begin to do it justice. The sky below us and around us was a boiling black lagoon of exploding metal. It is inconceivable to me, to this day, that any plane made it through that maelstrom without getting riddled to small pieces. A lot of them didn’t.

Then the flak stopped—always an ominous sign. It stopped to clear the skies for the fighters.

Here they came, swarms, clouds of them, every make and model you could imagine. “Goering had all his yellow-nose boys up there,” was the way one of the crew put it later. Those were the elite 190s, of course, backed up by Messerschmitt 109s; but also a few Schmitt 110s, a fighter/attack bomber we hadn’t seen too much of before. They even had some more of those JU-88s up above us, trying to drop bombs through the formation. The Germans had

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