One of LeMay’s pilots, Beirne Lay, wrote an article for the Saturday Evening Post a few months later, describing the Regensburg raid. And it’s harrowing.
A shining silver rectangle of metal sailed past over our right wing. I recognized it as a main-exit door. Seconds later, a black lump came hurtling through the formation, barely missing several propellers. It was a man, clasping his knees to his head, revolving like a diver in a triple somersault, shooting by us so close that I saw a piece of paper blow out of his leather jacket…Now that we had been under constant attack for more than an hour, it appeared certain that our group was faced with extinction. The sky was still mottled with rising fighters. Target time was thirty-five minutes away. I doubt if a man in the group visualized the possibility of our getting much farther without 100 percent loss.
Lay describes another plane in his group: it was hit six times. One twenty-millimeter cannon shell penetrated the right side of the airplane and exploded beneath the pilot, cutting one of the gunners in the leg. A second shell hit the radio compartment, cutting the legs of the radio operator off at the knees. He bled to death. A third hit the bombardier in the head and shoulder. A fourth shell hit the cockpit, taking out the plane’s hydraulic system. A fifth severed the rudder cables. A sixth hit the number 3 engine, setting it on fire. This was all in one plane. The pilot kept flying.
The attacks went on for hours before they reached Regensburg. The only solace they had was the thought that they were making life easier for the real attack—the one poised to cripple the Nazi war machine.
Except: the carefully constructed decoy mission turned out not to be much of a decoy at all. LeMay’s pilots had been able to take off in the soupy fog of that August morning because he’d trained them for just that challenge. He had drilled them, takeoff after takeoff. Use your instruments only. Act as if you can’t see anything outside. But no other group commander did what LeMay did. The flight crews were exhausted from their long runs into Germany, devastated by the loss of their comrades. They were sleepless, anxious, spent. Do you know how hard it is for a commander to turn to his crews and say, “This morning, at 6:00 a.m., we’re going to practice blind takeoffs because of the possibility of fog on some future mission”？
Only LeMay could do that. He was relentless, a stickler. He didn’t care if his men were grumbling as he pushed them on what must have seemed like a pointless exercise. Meanwhile, was Haywood Hansell paying attention to this detail? No. He was back in Washington, thinking loftier thoughts.
So that morning the bombers of the First Bombardment Wing were stranded on the tarmac until the weather cleared. They were supposed to take off ten minutes behind LeMay. They actually took off hours behind LeMay, which gave the German defenders time to regroup and launch the same ferocious assault on the Schweinfurt raid as they had a few hours earlier on the Regensburg raid.
In the end, there were two bloodbaths that day.
As LeMay recalled, “I had 125 airplanes, and I lost twenty-four, I think, which is not bad. But we only had a one-way trip. I think the First [Bombardment Wing], coming in an hour later—the German fighters were landed and back up again in force, and they had to fight coming in and going out, too. They lost about fifty or sixty airplanes.”
Those are staggering losses. An air force that launches raids like that on a regular basis would quickly put itself out of business.
Even in its official histories, the Air Force could not hide the disaster. The narrator of The Air Force Story put it like this:
G?ring’s Luftwaffe unleashed every trick. The B-17s suffered the most savage blows since the war began…Battles lost us more men and aircraft in a single day than then Eighth Bomber Command had lost in our first six months of operations over Europe. We who carried the war five hundred miles to the enemy’s industrial heart knew better than anyone how expensive it was.
As we began to run into flak, our gunners could feel the entire German Air Force warming up. Flying in enemy territory, we felt like goldfish in a bowl, waiting for the attack.
Each bomber was now committed. No more evasive action until “Bombs away.” At this time, the formations were most vulnerable to attack. It didn’t matter. We had a job to do on Schweinfurt. We had four hundred tons of high explosives to deliver.
But at least the mission took out the ball-bearing plants of Schweinfurt, crippling the German war effort—right? Well, not really.
In the film, the bombardiers peer into their sights. The bomb-bay doors open. The bombs fall in cascading waves. Then we see Germany, far below, erupting with explosion after explosion. The narrator continues: “After getting eighty hits on the two main ball-bearing plants, we could defend ourselves again. At least to the extent of [taking] evasive action against flak and fighter attack. But the main idea now was to get home fast.”