Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
September 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 5
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
September 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 5
In December 1943, Capt. Charles L. Brown flew his first mission over Germany as aircraft commander of a battle-weary B-17. What happened that day is an extraordinary untold story of World War II. Recently I sat with Lieutenant Colonel Brown (USAF Ret.) in the leafy yard of his Florida home. His keen memory supported by a diary, he told me the tale.
The target was Bremen, Germany; the specific objective, a Focke-Wulf plant in one of the city’s outlying districts. During the preflight briefing at the base in Kimbolton, England, the intelligence officer pointed out flak areas to avoid—Bremen was protected by more than 250 guns manned by the best artillerists the Germans had- and told the pilots they’d be subject to attack by more than five hundred German fighter planes. American and Royal Air Force fighters were scheduled to be on hand all the way to the target and back.
The group combat formation was to consist of the lead, high, and low squadrons, each made up of a threeship element followed by a second four-ship or diamond element, for a total of twenty-one aircraft. Brown’s ship was to fly on the far left of the second element, or low squadron—the slot that is known to airmen as Purple Heart Corner.
After the briefing, Brown and his crew made the short, cold truck ride to Ye Olde Pub , B-17-F, Number 423167. “As I stood there,” says Brown, “I suddenly experienced a quiet, almost tranquil feeling. My thoughts wandered. I had just celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday two months before. Well, really it was my twenty-first, but to impress my crew and give them some confidence in my ability, I’d told them I was twenty-five. The tranquillity left as quickly as it had come.”
The first of a series of signal flares arched through the ground haze, indicating that it was time to start engines. “Takeoff in any aircraft is an exciting moment for the pilot, but taking off for the first few times with a full bombload and full fuel load on a combat mission is nothing short of awe-inspiring,” Brown says. “This was no training mission; the guns, bullets, and bombs were real.”
They completed takeoff by 8:42 A.M. and by 9:40 had formed the group at 8,000 feet. Two other groups completed the wing formation of sixtythree aircraft. The cloud cover over the Continent was scattered to broken, with most clouds topping at under 10,000 feet, and the friendly fighter escorts—mostly P-47s—were doing their job perfectly until Ye Olde Pub reached the jumping-off point for the bomb run at 11:32. It was at 27,300 feet. During the ten-minute run it would cover more than 30 miles in a straight line. This gave the lead bombardiers time to set up the bombsights and correct for wind drift and for smoke and cloud obstructions; it also gave the German defense units time to