January 1944
Mission Summaries > January 1944
By 01 Jan 44 the 445th Bomb Group had flown 7 missions and had "seen the elephant" (a statement that means they had seen up close and personally the horrors of aerial warfare and had been forever changed). They had met the Luftwaffe on their turf and found that if they flew a good tight formation, the enemy fighters wanted nothing to do with them. Flak would continue to be a problem, more from the frustration that the bombers couldn't strike back at the flak gunners.
The start of a new year marked a turning point in the conduct of the war. Operation TORCH, the landing of Allied forces in North Africa, marked the end of German and Italian control of North Africa. Soon the opening of a new front in occupied western France, attacks through Italy and the southern coast of France, and the Russian attacks from the east spelled doom for the Third Reich.
But before that could happen, the air arm of the allied forces needed to destroy the industrial might of Germany, especially the Luftwaffe. Everything hinged on the Allies having air superiority over the invasion beachheads. This could only be done by destroying aircraft production factories and oil refineries. Without gasoline to power the Luftwaffe, it didn't matter how many planes the German's built. Targeting aircraft engine production factories would have a greater detriment factor than just hitting airframe factories due to the amount of fine milling work that had to be done on engine components.
Britian was still being strangled by the U-Boats of the Kriegsmarine so the first few missions the 445th Bomb Group flew was against submarine production and repair facilities as well as torpedo manufacturing facilities.
But on the horizon is a new threat - the V-1 "Buzz Bomb", the first iteration of a cruise missile. The Vergeltungswaffe 1 (or "Vengeance Weapon 1") was designed by Robert Lusser and Fritz Gosslau. Erhard Milch, a German Field Marshall, oversaw the development of the Luftwaffe after the end of World War I. He made the decision to proceed with the development of a "robot flying bomb" and awarded three contracts - Argus for the pulsejet engine, Fiesler for the airframe, and Askania for the guidance system. These units were designed to inflict terror on the people of London. Just the sound of the buzzing made by the pulsejet engine was like fingernails on a chalkboard. And when it stopped, you'd better find cover. The guidance system consisted of pitch and roll pair of gyroscopes and a magnetic compass to control the flight of the missile. A mechanical timer would determine when to cut off the fuel to the pulsejet motor once the missile was over the target area. The warhead packed almost 2,000 lbs. of high explosives, more than enough to take down a large structure.