56th FG Flight Operations Jan. 5th, 1945

[Nomde]

Hi Gents
Below is the Flight Operatioins for the 56th Fighter Group 60 years ago today. I will write a report each day, as they occurred, until the end of the war. I hope you enjoy reading these as much as I have.
I encourage anyone else who might have similar sources for other fighter or bomber groups to include them, then we might get an overall picture of what was happening on the same day across the European continent. Any German accounts of encounters are most welcome.

This is the Report as taken from "Beware the Thunderbolt, The 56th Fighter Group in World War II" by David R. McLaren.

January 5, 1945
VIII Fighter Command Flight Operation 1491

A thousand heavies went to Germany to bomb rail and airfield targets, while being covered by five hundred Mustangs.
The 56th Fighter Group decided to do something different for a change, high level bombing while under the control of Nuthouse. Colonel Shilling led the missioin off at 1247 and they flew to Siegen to bomb a factory through the overcast. Each P47 carried two 250 pound GP bombs, and the formation was flown in a tight diamond that was 450 yards long, 250 yards wide, and 300 yards in depth. On the first run over the target, Nuthouse sent them around because they were too far off course. On the second run, Nuthouse told them when to drop their bombs. The results couldn't be determined, as the bombs fell out of sight into the overcast. RTB'd at 1626.
This was the last mission for Major Donovan Smith, leading the 61st Fighter Squadron, as he completed his second tour of operations. Major James Carter became the final combat commander of the 61st Fighter Squadron.

[detch01]

Very cool Nomde .  A definite daily must read for me.

Cheers,
asw

[streetstang]

lol 1500 fighters........

[crims]

Great read well done  



Crims
479th Raiders

[Killjoy2]

Nomde,

Keep it coming.

[Guppy35]

OK Nomde you asked for it

4th Fighter Group -From Escort to Berlin by Jeff Ethell and Garry Fry

5 January, 1945-FO 1491A Major Fred Glover lead a Free Lance Support to the Metz area from 1005 to1520 Hours.  The P51s came in south of Dunkirk at 1045 and 18,000 feet over 7/10ths could.  Rendevous was made at 25,000 then the formation was vectored north to the Cologne area, to Koblenz, then to Mannheim and bacl to Cologne before crossing out at 24,000 feet over Walcheren at 1440.

Lt. Malmsten led 4 334 Squadron kites on a PRU escort to Hannover,Germany from 1125-1445 hours.  Heavy cloud cover prevented photos in the target area so the formation diverted to Dortmund and got a few pictures.

339th Fighter Group From the 339th FG History published by Turner Publishing

5 January 1945 Mission number 195 F/O#1491A 1122-1530

Flew a Group PTWS mission to Trier Murlenbach-Ruten, Germany.  The bombers flew very good formation but results could not be seen due to 4/10ths cloud and a solid undercast up to 7000 feet.  Large fires were seen in the vicinity of Nuenkirchen.  Four 503rd aircraft were also sent to escort a photo-recon mission but it was aborted when the photo ship lost an engine.  One 505th pilot did land with engine trouble at Merville, France but all else returned safely.

359th Fighter Group from Mustangs & Unicorns a history of the 359th FG by Jack Smith.

281 January 5, 1945 (1043-1503)
Today the 368th FS assigned escort for twelve chaff-dropping B17s.  The targets for the bombing force are an airfield at Niedermedndig and a communications center at Mechernich, Germany. Major Niven K Cranfill leads the squadron and fifteen Mustangs take off with one returning early.  Once again the bombers are not at the R/V point so the 368th provides escort for another group of bombers.  A tail gunner on one of the Forts fires on the leader of Blue Flight but misses.  No bombers are lost and it's another 'no show' for the Luftwaffe.

479th Fighter Group from The 479th Fighter Group in World War II by Terry Fairfield (Sorry if I beat ya to it Ack-Ack)

5 January 1945 Eighth AF FO 1491A
No 234 Friday.  Captain Harrel lead the group which consisted of 49 P51s on a penetration to targer and withdrawl escort for 2nd AD B24s attacking their 8th AF Mission 781 primary target, a section of railroad at Pirmasens, Germany.  Up 1003 hours., down: 1426 hours with a total of 7 early returns.


Interestingly enough Groups that were stationed on the continent didn't fly that day because of weather.  I have the 370th FG history, the 357th FG History, the 55th FG history as well and they didn't fly from what I could find.

Dan/Slack

[GRUNHERZ]

Only 250lb bombs??

Good lord I thought they always carried the 1000lb types and a 500lb on the fuselage, and ten rockets and full ammo...

[Guppy35]

Ok some from the bomber groups that I have histories of.

447th Bomb Group From their history written by Doyle Shields.

Friday January 5, 1945 (FO#541)(195/783)

The Briefing started at 0530 hours when Colonel Wrigglesworth came into the room and we came to attention.  He put us at ease and the briefing started with some opening remarks.  The Intelligence Officer advised that our target was a communications center at Waxweiler, Germany near and east of the north end of Luxembourg.  

The planes(B17s) carried 90 tons of 500 lb GP bombs.  Captain Lagasse started the take off at 0801 hours.  A bad weather assembly was made over the field.  The wing set course for slasher beacon at Orford Ness, continuing the climb to bombing altitude of 27,000 feet.  Since our target was rather small, the radar navigators set up for a micro-H bombing run.  We had quite a bit of flak for such a small target, probably due to our proximity to the ground battle area.  Lts. Jennings and Krug landed in Belgium due to battle damage.  Lt. Shepart made it back to Racheath, a B24 base ENE of Norfolk.  Lts. Graves and Mayhes landed close together at 1551 hours to start the return to base.

The three Divisions had 893 heavies effective on Marshalling Yards, railroads, rail bridges, airfields and communications centers in support of ground operations. One B-17 was lost.  There were 537 P51s providing escort and scouting missions.  The Third Divisions escorts destroyed one enemy aircraft in the air and four more on the ground.  One P51 from first Division was lost.

91st Bomb Group from The Ragged Rugged Irregulars of Bassingbourn by Marion Havelaar.

The primary target for January 5th was cloud covered so bombing was done by PFF on the Koblenze marshalling yards.  Flak was light and the escort coverage was very good.

Dan/Slack

[Guppy35]

Found another:

10th Photo Recon Group, 9th Air Force

From Kenn Rust's "The 9th Air Force in World War II"

The day was 5 January, the weather was worsening with the ceiling being only 600 feet, and all other missions had been cancelled.(9th AF Missions)

Captain Robert J Holbury, assistant operations officer of the 10th Photo Recon Group volunteeered to fly a mission along a twelve mile route studded with some very heavy concentrations of flak.  Taking off in a Lockheed F-5 he found his way to Merzig then flew north along the Saar to the Moselle where he turned left to follow the latter for a short time to complete his coverage.  In describing the major part of this mission Captain Holbury reported:

"It occuppied my full attention to follow the river and at the same time avoid hitting obstacles.  Hills were above me on either side most of the way and I concentrated on staying down as low as possible.  Jerries were firing at me, but I was too busy to do anything but follow the river.  Suddenly red balls about three quarters the size of billiard balls, were arching towards me.  I felt several sharp impacts as the wheel tried to jerk out of my hands and the right rudder went forward.  It took heavy pressure to neutralize the controls, but they responded normally.

I flew as close to the ground as possible while I looked for the damage.  My left coolant guage began creeping past the red line.  A glance in the rear view mirror showed a stream of white vapor behind me.  I immediately feathered the prop.  By this time I didn't know where I was-all my careful memorizing of the route forgotten.

I was plenty frightened, but it soon changed to anger.  As my speed dropped off from 330 to 250 I saw several Jerries shooting at me and I would have given anything to have had some guns to dish out some lead myself.  But as they didn't hit me I didn't considter it neccesary to break away from my camera run.

After rounding a sharp bend, intense flak again arched up.  I felt my rudders jar and knew I had been hit again.  The right engine was hot; the coolant radiator had been hit three times.  I stayed on the deck to the last minute and pulled up over the hills with plenty of speed to spare.  I got a vector to base and soon was circling the field at 300 feet with visibily about 1 mile.  I landed okay-climbed out and patted the good right engine"

The Lockheed had returned with the left vertical fin shot off, the left rudder almost torn off, large holes in the horizontal stabilizer, hits all over the plane and 212 valuable photographs.  For the mission Captain Holbury earned the Distinguished Service Cross.

Dan/Slack

[Nomde]

Excellent write up Dan.

I think what i'll do when creating these posts, is to label them Flight Operations, then the date.... as opposed to labeling them specific to the 56th FG. This way, the attention won't be drawn to one group or the other, but to the overall picture.

I wonder if we could expand on this and include the German FO's for the day, and to maybe take it further still by adding any infantry reports from either side.

Maybe HT could setup another forum about the events of the day, if enough were interested and willing to write up a report about a flight group or infantry squad they were interested in. It could be seperated into Allied, Axis, Flight Operations, and Ground Operations.
My library at home is rather specific to the 56th Fighter Group, but if we could pool the resources of the entire community, I think this could work.

Any thoughts?

[Guppy35]

I'm willing to do my part.  Collecting Group histories is part of my hobby and my home library has been built over lots of years.

At this point I have all the published P38 Group histories as well as a number of P51  Groups as well as bomber histories as well as lots of RAF stuff.

I was tempted to grab the stuff from the Pacific Group histories I have for this day too as well as the MTO groups. I'm afraid I could be doing a lot of typing that way though

But I think it's important to share the wealth and the history so if you want to keep it up, I'll go along with it.  

Some general LW history here but not much specific group history stuff.

As for infantry stuff, I have a fairly extensivce section of my library devoted to Airborne stuff, 101st mostly but also 82nd that might be able to help some.

Still might want to keep it to the air war in the ETO though just to keep it focused.

Dan/Slack

[Nomde]

Dan,
Any and all information you have is greatly appreciated, but I was hoping not too make this too taxing on anyone. The more people we have doing this, the less any one person has to do. I don't want this to feel like a chore for anyone.

Man bro, sound like you have an excellent library, I have a few years of catching up.

I was going to look into some OCR software today in order to help save time in typing. There's a couple of reports which cover a page or more. I could scan the page in and let the software do the rest.

[DREDIOCK]

Found this some time ago when doing some research for my mother in law who lost her brother as a tailgunner in a B17
official 381st Bomb Group (Heavy) Memorial Association & Triangle-L Society web site http://www.381st.org/

Has the complete war diaries for the squadrons, medical unit, and air service group have been transcribed from microfilm http://www.381st.org/histories/transcriptions.html  Just pick a month and a bomber squadren


Also has the diary of the medical detachment which also provides some further insight as to how things were back then
The following is for Jan 5-6 of 45

DIARY OF MEDICAL DETACHMENT – STATION #167

5 January – Clear and cold as the very devil. Long underwear is the only slight protection. Briefing at 05.00 hrs; target, an airfield at Tours, France. Bombing altitude was 20,000 ft and outside air temperature – 26 degrees.    

The target was bombed visually with good results. There were several fighter attacks described as mild, and no flak, while one ship was shot down by enemy fighters using rockets.

MIA 532nd E/42-30676

Zeman, Jack R.
 2nd Lt
 EVD
    Montgomery, Otis A.
 2nd Lt
 POW
 
Bisagna, Frank R.
 2nd Lt
 POW
    Walker, William C.
 2nd Lt
 KIA
 
Sinquefield, John W.
 S/Sgt
 POW
    Givan, Burton A.
 S/Sgt
 POW
 
LeRoux, Harve A.
 Sgt
 EVD
    Cater, Francis B.
 Sgt
 POW
 
Chevraux, Raymond
 Sgt
 EVD
    Day, George M.
 Sgt
 POW
 

There was a meeting of 1st Bomb Division for all surgeons, equipment surgeons, and equipment officers. Their biggest beef was the number of deaths from lack of oxygen (eight from this division on one month), as against 22 in the Eighth Air Force in previous months. This poor narrator’s backside and brain became extremely weary and tired of the fat being chewed and felt as usual, that very little was being achieved.

Captain Charles L. York, from the 327th Station Hospital, an old colleague, was a visitor at the station this date.

6 January – Capt Bland and two enlisted men flew to Station 120, Attlebridge, to pick up the bodies of Lt Irving Kraut and Sgt Julius Rivera. Four of the crew members came back with them, and the other four are remaining in hospital.

[mars01]

1500 fighters, I could hear the Huns crying hordes, hordes lolh.