COUNTDOWN TO KASSEL: Jimmy Stewart Faces Fear
Photo from the book, “Jimmy Stewart Bomber Pilot,” by Starr Smith
Stewart on the Tower, waiting for the ships to return
USAAF Station 169, Tibenham, England Station
Middle of the night, February 25, 1944
After the brutal Gotha mission the day before, Jimmy Stewart’s beloved 445th was in trouble. It had lost 13 of its 25 planes in what would be the group’s worst massacre of the war, except for the Kassel Mission seven months hence.
Worse, the 445th was on alert for a mission for the next day which would be their longest flight into Germany yet.
The group needed someone inspired to get them in the air. Everyone knew Stewart was the only man to do it. But Stewart himself was still reeling from the losses of the 24th. Although he accepted that he would lead the next day’s raid, he became truly afraid that he might not survive it. If commanding officers like the 702nd’s CO and the 700th’s Operations Officer could go down like they did yesterday, anyone could.
Breaking into a cold sweat, Stewart knew that if he didn’t get hold of this fear, it would grow inside him and infect his crew members. “Fear is an insidious and deadly thing,” he said in a later interview about that night. “It can warp judgment, freeze reflexes, breed mistakes. And worse, it’s contagious.”[i] He got up, and decided to face his own fear head-on, then realized that his biggest fear was that he’d make a mistake.
Walking to the window of his room, he pulled the blackout curtains and stared into the blackest night he would ever know as a flight commander. The base was anything but quiet. Activity gave away the secret: a mission was on.
Mentally, Stewart went over every single detail that could go wrong and what he would do if it did.[ii] Above all, he wanted to be sure he was prepared for any emergency that might come up so that he would not make a mistake.[iii] What happened the next day proved this to be more than a mere exercise.
Long before dawn, the men were up. Few spoke as they trudged through the mud to the mess hall, locker room and briefing.
Stewart no doubt led the briefing. The group only had seventeen air-worthy aircraft left. They would zigzag all over Germany. One gunner, Robbie Robinson, wrote later in his book, “A Reason to Live,” (by John Harold Robinson) that he thought, “Boy, this is going to be a long day.” There would be little gas for deviation from their planned route. The flight would be 9 ½ hours; they had ten hours of fuel. It would also be their first flight with chaf, which looked like Christmas tree icicles – 10” long skinny tinsel-like bands of aluminum, wrapped in little bundles, which was supposed to keep flak from hitting their planes. The idea was that it would deflect the Germans’ radar for their flak guns. Instructions were to throw it out the windows when the flak started.[iv]
Robinson and the rest of the Wright crew jumped on a truck. Before it pulled away, Stewart climbed in to sit next to him. “Sergeant, we are going to have a mighty fine flight today,” he said to Robinson.
“Yes, sir.”
When the truck started up, it headed away from the planes. Stewart yelled, “Where the hell are you going, driver? Hey, driver!”
The truck stopped. Wright’s navigator got out and came around to explain. “Major, I told him to stop by Operations to get my charts.”
“To hell with the charts,” said Stewart. “This damned war will be over before we ever get out to the planes.” Then Stewart got out and went up to ride in the front seat, trading seats with the navigator, who got into the truck next to Robinson, saying that he didn’t need his charts anyway; he knew how to get there. Somebody else remarked on how irritable Stewart was.
Wright’s plane took off right after Stewart. Stewart led the first element (three planes), and Wright led the second 703rd Squadron element of planes behind him.
The first flak at the coast looked “like pinwheels coming up at you.” But it wasn’t flak. They were newly developed rockets fired from the ground, the first that airmen like Stewart and Robinson had ever seen.
In briefing, they had been told to get the bomb bay doors opened and closed to eliminate drag and use more fuel. The bomb bays opened.
“Jimmy Stewart had led us exactly to the spot…,” Robinson wrote later. Below, lines and lines of airplanes lay on the airfield, maybe 200 in all. It was a bull’s eye. Every bomb hit the target. Robinson thought, “That’s one bunch of enemy fighters that will never get in the air again.”[v]
They closed up their bomb bays, and Wright flew just under Stewart’s tail, about 20 feet back. The flak was still intense. Something was wrong. :As the gunners threw out the chaf, the flak became more accurate.
Suddenly, flak hit Stewart’s plane right behind the nose wheel, directly below the flight deck. Wright moved their plane forward, under Stewart’s, so they cold see. “Boy!” wrote Robinson later. “What a hole there was in the bottom of Stewart’s ship.” Out from the bottom of the ship dropped a briefcase and what looked to be a parachute pack. The chute hit the tip of Wright’s prop, then went under them.
Wright tried to contact Stewart on the radio, but Stewart wasn’t responding because of radio silence. His plane stayed in formation; it didn’t slow down. Now came the Me109s, and two 24s, burning, hit the ground. Nobody got out. A B-17 went down.
Somehow, they got beyond Germany. On their approach to the airstrip at Tibenham, several planes shot flares, indicating wounded. Those planes landed first, then Stewart’s ship landed in front of Wright. Near the end of the runway, Stewart’s plane began to smoke. Then, everyone watched as it broke into two pieces at the nose wheel. Wright, down too low to pull back up, touched down and both he and his copilot rode their brakes down the runway and turned ship to the right trying to miss Stewart’s. Just off the runway on the ramp, Wright stopped short of Stewart but unable to get by him.
Robbie jumped out waist of the waist and ran over to Stewart’s ship. With its tail sticking up in the air and nose sticking up in the air, the center down on the ground, it had “cracked open like an egg,” leaving long scars on the runway where the plane had dragged. Stewart stood near his plane’s left wingtip. As Robbie walked up to him, Stewart said, “Sergeant, somebody sure could get hurt in one of those damned things.”
“Major,” Robbie said, “we thought for a while that you had it bad.”
Stewart rubbed his chin. “I was thinking that, when I looked around and saw that big hole in the flight deck behind my seat.” He walked up to the nose.
Wright, unable to get their ship past Stewart’s on the ramp, had to leave it there. Others landed on the other, shorter runway. Low on fuel from the long mission, they couldn’t circle and wait ay longer. Robinson went back to his ship. Flak holes were everywhere.
At debriefing, Robinson told the debriefing officer that the chaf attracted flak. They had even thrown out a full box and watched it get hit.
The debriefing officer replied, “It deflects radar, sergeant.”
“By God,” declared Robbinson, “you weren’t up there today. I saw what it did.”[vi]
[i] Air Classics Magazine, May 1993 in Smith, p. 131.
[ii] Smith, p. 130
[iii] Guideposts magazine in Smith, p. 131
[iv] Robinson, pp 299-300
[v] Robinson p. 303
[vi] Robinson, pp 303-305