Desperate Days Over the Reich

WWII Bomber War

by Timothy J. Kutta

By the beginning of 1944, Nazi Germany found itself being invaded by 20,000 enemy soldiers a day. The aircraft that carried them could not stay for long but the mere presence of such enormous bomber fleets and escorts was a mortal danger. Destroying American bombers was a key element in the Luftwaffe's strategy to defend the Reich. However, destroying them was more difficult than it appeared.

Shooting down the Boeing Flying Fortresses and Consolidated B-24 Liberators was difficult and dangerous. Both bombers were famous for their rugged strength and durability. They could sustain frightening damage and still stay in the air. The bombers also packed an awesome defensive punch. Each carried between ten and thirteen .50 caliber machine guns. These guns had a rate of fire of 350 rounds per minute and a range of more than 6 kilometers.

The Americans enhanced this heavy defensive firepower by grouping the bombers into "box" formations. Squadrons of bombers flew in tight formations to optimize the coverage of the machine guns. Each squadron formation was also part of a bomber group formation. Groups of bombers were then stacked on top of one another and echeloned to provide maximum coverage for the machine guns. An American bomber box would normally be several kilometers high and be spread out along several kilometers of sky.

Any enemy aircraft trying to attack an American bomber would be exposed to the fire of several dozen American heavy machine guns. The Luftwaffe pilot would literally have to fly through a blizzard of lead. This was a cause of great concern for the German pilots. Almost any hit on the fragile German aircraft would cause great problems. Fighters were designed to be fast and thus had little armor plate to protect vital components.

Luftwaffe pilots were forced to dodge the hail of machine gun bullets, line up for an attack and shoot down a heavy bomber, all in a matter of seconds. It was a daunting task. Although a number of bombers were being shot down by the Germans, the Americans were, by 1944, giving as good as they got.

The Germans had been working to find a better way to destroy American bombers since 1943. Several unique and innovative tactics were adopted. The Germans tried lobbing rockets and dropping bombs into the tightly packed bomber formations in order to scatter the Americans. Both were effective when they worked but the success rate of either was never very high.

The Luftwaffe aces developed a new tactic to knock down the bombers. Instead of climbing above the bombers and diving through the formation, the fighters started their attack from in front of the bombers. These head-on assaults were both frightening and deadly.

The gambit took advantage of, first, the relatively smaller number of American guns configured to face a frontal attacker, and, second, the greater vulnerability of critical parts of the aircraft from this angle. Primary targets were the pilots, cockpit and bombardiers. If these crewmen were killed, the ability of the bomber to perform its mission was negated.

Unfortunately, these attacks had two distinct disadvantages. The closure rate between a German fighter going 640 kph and an American bomber going 480 kph was difficult to judge. Pilots had only a few seconds to get in position for an attack, pick a target and fire at the bomber.

Once the attack was over the pilot had to find an escape route. Unfortunately for the Luftwaffe Pilots, the frontal attack deposited them directly in the middle of the bomber formation. Crashing into a bomber or being blown out of the sky by machine-gun fire were better-than-average possibilities. The tactic was extremely dangerous and few made a practice of using it.

The Luftwaffe sent hundreds of fighters into the air every day to meet the American bombers. Despite their numbers the Luftwaffe fighters were not shooting down enough bombers. Hermann Goering publicly questioned the courage of his fighter pilots. He expected each pilot to bring down a bomber every time they engaged an American formation.

Unfortunately, the German pilots only engaged on their terms. If the American escorts were too numerous or the discipline of the bomber formation intact, they would simply avoid the whole matter. Living to fight another day was much wiser than being killed in a futile attack with no chance of success.

The Luftwaffe High Command realized that they had to find some way to destroy the American bombers. If they could not do it with tactics, then perhaps they could build a "bomber destroyer". This concept had been tried before. Twin-engine aircraft such as the Messerschmitt Me-110 and Junkers Ju-88 had been modified to carry armor plate, heavy guns and lots of ammunition. The theory was that these heavily armed and armored aircraft could simply shoot their way into the bomber formation, destroying scores of Americans as they went. Unfortunately, the twin-engine aircraft were slow and easy kills for the escorting American fighters.

Desperate Days Over the Reich

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