Black Thursday over Schweinfurt

On Thursday 14 October 1943 the US Eighth Air Force sent its heavy bombers to Schweinfurt for the second time – a Franconian town where a large share of Germany’s production of rolling bearings was concentrated. A total of 291 B-17 Flying Fortresses took off for the raid; according to American figures, 229 of them reached the target and bombed it. Over Germany the bombers flew without fighter escort and for more than three hours fought off attacks by several hundred Luftwaffe aircraft. Sixty Fortresses failed to return, a dozen or more were fit only to be written off when they got back, and some six hundred airmen ended up as prisoners or in graves. The American aircrews called the day “Black Thursday”.

Many summaries state that 229 of 292 B-17s reached the target and that, in view of the losses, the campaign of long-range daylight raids was suspended until the bombers could be accompanied by P-51 fighters. Most sources give 291 bombers dispatched. The word “suspended” also needs explaining: the Eighth Air Force did not halt operations, but for the next few months it did not send bombers deep into the Reich beyond the reach of escorts. That reach was extended first by drop tanks fitted to P-47s and by the new P-38s, and only from the turn of 1943 and 1944 by the P-51 Mustang.

After the August lesson

The first Schweinfurt raid, flown together with the attack on the Messerschmitt works at Regensburg on 17 August 1943, had cost 60 bombers and produced no lasting effect. American intelligence nonetheless estimated that bearing output had then fallen by about a third, and the Eighth Air Force staff concluded that the target had to be hit again before the Germans could rebuild and disperse the plants. Ball and roller bearings – without which no engine, tank, aircraft or machine tool could work – ranked second among the targets of the Allied Pointblank directive, immediately after the aircraft industry itself. At the Casablanca Conference the Allies had adopted the Combined Bomber Offensive: the RAF was to destroy cities by night, the Americans selected branches of industry by day. Since the first American raid on Germany – on Wilhelmshaven on 27 January 1943 – every mission that reached deeper into the Reich had cost more than the last.

Schweinfurt had three main manufacturers: Kugelfischer (FAG), the two plants of Vereinigte Kugellagerfabriken (VKF) – the German subsidiary of the Swedish SKF concern – and Fichtel & Sachs. By various estimates they produced between 40 and more than 50 per cent of Germany’s bearings. For adherents of the theory of “bottlenecks” in the enemy economy, which the commander of the US Army Air Forces, General Henry H. Arnold, espoused, it was an ideal target. The head of RAF Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, on the other hand, regarded such targets as “panaceas” – the illusory hope that the war could be won by a single well-aimed blow – and did not want to tie down his forces with night raids on the town itself.

Rebuilding the Eighth Air Force after August took several weeks. Its commander, General Ira Eaker, received new bomb groups and crews, and the planners drew lessons from August: this time the whole force was to strike a single target rather than split into two missions, and it was to have fighter escort on the way out and back – as far as the fighters’ range allowed.

Black Week

The second Schweinfurt raid closed the heaviest week in the Eighth Air Force’s history. After September’s missions over France and the coast of the Reich, Eaker took advantage of rare days of good weather to throw his forces against targets deep inside Germany. On 8 October the bombers attacked the shipyards at Bremen and Vegesack, losing 30 aircraft. The next day, 9 October, part of the force flew to the Baltic: against the Arado works at Anklam, the Focke-Wulf factory at Marienburg (Malbork), where Fw 190 fighters were assembled, and the port of occupied Gdynia, where Kriegsmarine warships and vessels lay. The bombing of Marienburg was later held up as a model of precision, but the day cost 28 bombers. On 10 October another 30 were lost over Münster; one group, the 100th Bomb Group, lost 12 of its 13 aircraft according to American figures.

Despite these losses, the command judged that the weather on 14 October allowed a mission to Schweinfurt and was unwilling to let the opportunity slip. According to the most commonly cited figures, in the week from 8 to 14 October the Eighth Air Force lost 148 heavy bombers over the Continent – nearly a fifth of what it had available in England.

Mission 115

The plan for the operation, designated Mission No. 115 by the Eighth Air Force, called for three bombardment divisions. The 1st and 3rd Divisions were to send B-17s, the 2nd Division B-24 Liberators. In the morning England lay under fog and cloud. Of the sixty-odd B-24s, only 29 managed to assemble in formation; so small a force had no chance of surviving over Germany, so it was sent on a diversionary flight over the North Sea towards Emden. Only Flying Fortresses went to Schweinfurt – in two forces, one behind the other, in the battle formations known as combat boxes. The leading force, the 1st Division, was commanded in the air by Colonel Budd Peaslee, flying in the lead aircraft of the 92nd Bomb Group.

Escort on the first and last legs of the route was provided by British Spitfires, and beyond them by three groups of American P-47 Thunderbolts. One of these, however, was diverted to cover the Liberators, and – according to some sources – the P-47s did not carry the drop tanks that day which could have extended their range. Near Aachen the fighters waggled their wings in farewell and turned back for England. Schweinfurt was still several hundred kilometres away.

Battle over the Reich

The Germans had been watching the formations assemble over England since the morning and expected a deep penetration. The bombers were engaged over the Dutch coast by fighters of Jagdgeschwader 3, and then – over the Netherlands and the Rhineland – by further fighter wings that had been brought back to the defence of the Reich in previous months from the Eastern Front and the Mediterranean. The P-47s shot down several Bf 109s, but once they turned back only German aircraft remained around the Fortresses. Single-engined Fw 190s and Bf 109s attacked from the front, where the B-17s’ defensive armament was weakest, in whole flights on a collision course. Twin-engined Bf 110s and Me 410s closed from behind and fired unguided 21 cm rockets, adapted from infantry ammunition, from under their wings. A rocket bursting in the middle of a formation tore one aircraft apart and damaged its neighbours, and scattered bombers were easier to finish off.

The 305th Bomb Group suffered worst: after trouble assembling in the clouds it failed to join its formation and flew exposed. According to American figures, within a quarter of an hour or so it lost 13 of the 16 bombers it had sent over Germany. Crews of the other groups watched burning Fortresses falling from the sky, which filled with parachutes. Airmen who survived being shot down were taken prisoner.

Over Schweinfurt

Despite the losses, both forces reached the target. According to American records, the first force bombed between 2.39 and 2.45 p.m., the second between 2.51 and 2.57 p.m. The weather over Franconia was good and the accuracy, by the standards of the time, high: according to Eighth Air Force figures, more than a hundred bombs fell within the factory grounds and several dozen struck the production halls. All three major plants were hit. Hall roofs collapsed, fires consumed some of the machinery, and water from the firefighting and rubble ruined precision machine tools that could not be replaced quickly. Bombs also fell on Schweinfurt’s residential districts; the victims included townspeople and forced labourers working in the plants.

The return journey was scarcely easier. German fighters that had landed to refuel and rearm took off again and concentrated above all on damaged bombers that could not keep up with the formation. Only over France and the English Channel did the withdrawal escort await them. England was again fogbound; several aircraft crashed on landing, and some crews baled out over their own airfields.

The toll

Of the 291 B-17s, 60 failed to return – more than 20 per cent of the force dispatched; they had been shot down over Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France or had come down in the sea. Further aircraft crashed in England or came back so badly damaged that they had to be written off – a dozen or more, up to 17, depending on how they are counted. More than a hundred other Fortresses had suffered damage of varying severity. Counting aircraft lost and written off, the mission thus cost more than a quarter of the force that had left England. The Eighth Air Force listed 594 airmen as missing, while the aircraft that returned carried several dead and about forty wounded; total casualties are usually put at about 650 out of roughly 2,900 crew members (figures from the American official history and museum studies). Of the missing, most were taken prisoner and the rest were killed.

The gunners claimed 186 German fighters shot down. According to German records, the Luftwaffe lost about 35–38 aircraft destroyed or written off that day, with several dozen more damaged. As in August, the inflated claims – the result of a dozen or more gunners firing at the same aircraft at once – allowed the command to believe that the raid had been a battle won. Arnold spoke publicly of a success and called the losses incidental, and the American press wrote of Schweinfurt’s destruction. On the German side, propaganda proclaimed a great victory for the Reich’s air defences, which, after the recent disasters of Hamburg and Peenemünde, suited the Luftwaffe command very well.

After the war, the official history of the US Army Air Forces conceded that after 14 October the Eighth Air Force had “for the time being lost air superiority over Germany”. It did not return to Schweinfurt for four months.

Was the raid worth it?

The bombs had been accurate, and the armaments minister Albert Speer recorded in his memoirs that after the second raid Germany temporarily lost about two-thirds of its ball-bearing production. At the same time he maintained that the Allies had squandered their opportunity by not repeating the attacks on bearings in the following months, when the industry was at its most vulnerable. Speer entrusted the rebuilding and dispersal of production to a special plenipotentiary. The plants were repaired within a few weeks, some of the machinery was moved to smaller towns, and shortfalls were covered from stocks scattered across the Reich, by imports from Sweden and Switzerland, and by more economical designs in which ball bearings were replaced by other solutions. The post-war United States Strategic Bombing Survey found no evidence that the campaign against bearings had appreciably reduced armaments production. Museum studies put the lasting fall in bearing output after 14 October at about 10 per cent.

A pause in deep raids into the Reich

Black Week settled a question that American airmen had been debating for months. Bombers flying in tight formations could not defend themselves unaided against an organised fighter defence, and losses of 10–20 per cent per mission meant that within a few months, statistically, every group would lose its entire complement of crews. The Eighth Air Force did not stop bombing: as early as November and December it attacked ports and towns on the Reich’s coast – Wilhelmshaven, Bremen, Kiel – increasingly through cloud, using radar. These targets, however, lay within escort range. Missions deep into Germany, beyond the reach of fighters, were practically not undertaken until the end of 1943; the autumn and winter weather over Europe was in any case a further obstacle.

Arnold pressed for long-range fighters to be delivered quickly. According to American figures, on the day after Black Thursday, 15 October, twin-engined P-38 Lightnings flew their first combat mission from England; with drop tanks they could accompany the bombers further than the P-47s. The Thunderbolts too were fitted with drop tanks. The real breakthrough, however, was the P-51 Mustang with its British Merlin engine, which with drop tanks could reach Berlin and return. The first P-51B group went into action in December 1943, and Mustangs appeared in larger numbers in the spring of 1944.

In January 1944 Eaker was transferred to the Mediterranean, and command of the Eighth Air Force passed to General James Doolittle, who allowed the fighters to break away from the bombers and hunt German fighters. In February 1944, during the so-called Big Week, American bombers escorted by Mustangs again struck deep into the Reich, including Schweinfurt – this time in conjunction with an RAF night raid on the same town.

Significance

Black Thursday was – together with 17 August – the costliest day for American bombers in Europe in 1943 and a turning point in the Allied air offensive. It overturned the pre-war belief that heavy, well-armed bombers would “always get through” on their own, and forced the command to accept what the British had known since 1940: over enemy territory by day one could fly only under fighter cover. The American answer, however, was not – as with the British – a switch to night raids on cities, but the acquisition of fighters able to take the bombers to the target and back.

For Germany, 14 October was the fighter defence’s last great victory over daylight formations. In the spring of 1944 Mustangs and Thunderbolts, attacking German fighters in the air and on their airfields, inflicted losses in pilots that the Luftwaffe could no longer make good. The air superiority over Western Europe won in this way before the Normandy landings was one of the conditions of their success. The raid on the bearing plants, meanwhile, remained a cautionary tale in the history of strategic bombing: even an accurate blow against an economic “bottleneck” produces no lasting effect if the enemy has stocks, time and the means to work around the damage.