Hell Hawks!

The Untold Story of the American Fliers Who Savaged Hitler's Wehrmacht

Robert F. Dorr, Thomas Jones

• Publisher: Zenith Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780760338254
• eBook ISBN: 9781616739843
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Hell Hawks sets a new standard for histories of the tactical anti-war in Europe. Veteran authors Bob Dorr and Tom Jones combine masterfully crafted veteran interviews with the broader picture of the air war fought by the Thunderbolt men. You gain a new appreciation of just how tough their deadly task was, and the courage needed to fly close air support against the Nazi fighters and flak. This outstanding book raises the bar on aviation history as it brings alive the true story of an aerial band of brothers." - Colonel Walter J. Boyne, National Aviation Hall of Famer, former director of the National Air & Space Museum, and best-selling author

Hell Hawks!is the story of the band of young American fighter pilots, and their gritty, close-quarters fight against Hitlers vaunted military. The "Hell Hawks" were the men and machines of the 365th Fighter Group.

Beginning just prior to D-Day, June 6, 1944, the groups young pilots (most were barely twenty years old and fresh from flight training in the United States) flew in close support of Eisenhowers ground forces as they advanced across France and into Germany. They flew the rugged, heavily armed P-47 Thunderbolt, aka the Jug. Living in tents amid the cold mud of their front-line airfields, the 365ths daily routine had much in common with that of the G.I.s they supported.

Their war only stopped with the Nazi surrender on May 8, 1945. During their year in combat, the Hell Hawks paid a heavy price to win the victory. Sixty-nine pilots and airmen died in the fight across the continent. The Groups 1,241 combat missions -- the daily confrontation of sudden, violent death -- forged bonds between these men that remain strong sixty years later. This book will tell their story, the story of the Hell Hawks.

Chapter One
Hell Hawks over Normandy

HEADING EAST, LOW OVER the English Channel, four P-47D Thunderbolt fighter-bombers streaked toward the French coast. It was late in the day, well past 7:00 p.m., and the spring light softened as a high cirrus filtered the last hour of sun. Good light for bombing, thought Capt. James G. “Jimmy” Wells Jr., one of the four pilots in the formation. The sun will be in their eyes.

The enemy coast—the Pas-de-Calais—was visible ten miles ahead as the formation nosed over into a shallow dive. Wells was one of the Hell Hawks, the 365th Fighter Group, a Thunderbolt outfit based in England as part of the Ninth Air Force. Their specialty wasn’t dogfighting, although they had already taken the measure of the Luftwaffe. Instead, their job was close-in ground attack, where you put your bombs right on top of your enemy, then circled back with machine guns and chewed up anything that still moved. From mere yards away you looked into the eyes of the German gunners, who hurled white-hot metal at you until you killed them—or they you.

All day on May 3, 1944, back at the Hell Hawks’ base in Beaulieu, England, near Southampton, mechanics and armorers had swarmed over the pilots’ Thundberbolts: heavy, bottle-shaped fighters with eighteen-cylinder power plants turning thirteen-foot propellers. Each plane carried a 108-gallon belly tank of high-octane gas, a pair of thousand-pound bombs slung under the wings, and eight heavy .50-caliber machine guns, commonly called “fifties.” The P-47, believed the Hell Hawks pilots, was a flying tank.

Golden sunlight flickered off the green sea as Wells leveled off with Capt. William D. Ritchie, the flight leader, just a hundred feet above the waves. The beach flashed under the four olive-drab fighters, the pilots dropping back to either side of Ritchie as he picked up the final run-in heading to the target, an inconsequential French village named Vacqueriette, twenty miles inland. Just outside the hamlet was a military compound clustered around three narrow reinforced-concrete buildings, each with a curved end. In aerial photos the three bunkers resembled skis, viewed from their sides. Close by was a 160-foot-long concrete ramp, its long axis pointed straight at London. The mysterious installation was a nest for a flock of V-1 Buzz Bombs.

Allied intelligence knew that the V-1, a pilotless flying bomb with a 1,870-pound warhead of Amatol high explosive, was close to becoming operational. This suspected launch site, and others for the still-mysterious V-2 rocket, were called Noball sites; they were at the top of priority bombing lists as D-Day approached. Bombing raids from high and medium altitude on this and other V-1 sites had failed to destroy the installations. Ritchie, Wells, and their fellow Hell Hawks were ordered to knock them out from ground level.

“They asked for volunteers for a special mission,” Wells said later. “I was foolish enough to stick my hand up and get picked, and they took us in and they told us about the buzz bomb. They had gotten hold of plans for an emplacement where they launched them, and these concrete buildings were about forty feet square and they were three-foot-thick reinforced concrete. But they really weren’t sure just how they were used. The buzz bombs themselves—they weren’t sure whether they were controlled or had an automatic timer or what on them.” All Wells knew was that “they said we had to be going over 450 miles per hour when we released the bombs so that they would penetrate those concrete emplacements.”

Those were the tactics. Wells followed Ritchie in his descent, throttle wide open, guns and bombs armed. One and a half miles from the village the four pilots were at deck level, the steeple on the village church visible above the trees. Wells picked out his assigned dull gray “ski” site and eased his speeding Thunderbolt lower.

Closer now, airspeed 450 miles per hour out of the dive, that big 2,430-horsepower Pratt & Whitney up front howled with emergency water-injection thrust. Wells triggered the first burst from his .50-calibers at a flak pit that was blasting what looked like glowing white coals past his canopy. More tracers came ripping up from gun positions and a flak tower ringing the site. Ignore them. What Wells couldn’t ignore was what he’d seen in the recon target photos: a string of telephone poles around the target’s perimeter. “We didn’t know what it was, if it had antennas on it, or what.”

Wells was at thirty-five feet, flattening barley fields and bending small trees in his wake, when he discovered the reason for the telephone poles—and the tough steel cables strung between them. They were there to kill him.

No time to evade—the four went under, or tried to. “I’d say we were at twenty-five feet; and then you had to pull up to keep from running into the target!” recalled Wells. “All of us made it under, except Captain Cornell. He ripped off the top of his rudder.”

Wells let go of his bombs and screamed over the concrete buildings while the semi-armor-piercing thousand-pounders punched through the reinforced walls and detonated seconds later on a delayed fuse. Smoke, dust, and debris shot skyward, boiling up from the launch installations and gun emplacements. Chunks of concrete ripped across the compound, lacerating vehicles, buildings, and men.

Shooting up a flak tower and gun pits, Captain Ritchie was at fifteen feet when he hit a cable set twenty feet or so off the ground. He ripped through some telephone wires and sheared off a row of tree tops, denting and crumpling his P-47’s air scoop and fuselage. Ritchie hugged the ground and turned west, into the setting sun, trailing behind a long length of phone wire that thrashed and slapped against the fuselage and tail.

Off the target, Wells rejoined his element leader and stared into the adjacent cockpit. Capt. William H. Cornell’s face was covered in blood. “Some shrapnel came in and hit him in the head . . . blood was coming out, and he pulled his helmet off and started calling ‘Mayday!’ on the radio,” said Wells.

The four Thunderbolts headed for Beaulieu (pronounced “Byew-lee”), medical help waiting alongside the runway. Cornell landed first; the medics leaned into the cockpit to find his uniform slick with blood from his scalp wound. “Turned out it just scratched him,” said Jimmy Wells, “but he didn’t know it.” Stitched up, Cornell was back flying a few days later.

The post-strike photos showed that each Hell Hawk Thunderbolt, throwing a ton of bombs against each V-1 target building, had inflicted as much damage as the 1,947 tons per target dropped by the heavy bombers in the last two weeks of April. Jimmy Wells was satisfied with his single Noball mission: “I only did that one,” he said. Once was plenty.

Wells was awakened at 1:00 a.m. on June 6, 1944, in his Nissen hut at Beaulieu. “This was it! We had known the invasion was coming soon,” remembered Wells. To help friendly gunners tell friend from foe, ground crews painted all Allied planes with alternating black and white stripes on wings and fuselage. “I helped paint the stripes on myself,” said the Houston native.

The intelligence officer briefed the pilots on the airborne drops, already underway across the Channel, and of their role that morning. The Hell Hawks were to hit crossroads, bridges, and gun emplacements—targets that would knock out German defenders and impede their ability to bring up reinforcements. “We took off at 4:00 a.m.,” said Wells, “into a coal black sky.” The weather was overcast but clear enough to do the job. It was D-Day: the real reason for the Hell Hawks’ existence. Their work was about to begin in earnest.

Wells couldn’t believe the sight of the invasion fleet crowding the Channel. “We got down and it was just getting daylight, and I was looking down, and I don’t know whether it was a battleship or a cruiser . . . they were firing at the coast. But, oh!—When they let that broadside go with the flames and smoke, it looked like the ship exploded.” Only when the second broadside tore through the darkness did Wells realize what he was seeing.

From the cockpit of his own P-47 Thunderbolt, Lt. Col. Robert Lewis Coffey Jr. looked down at a sight few men would witness and all would remember forever. It was about 5:50 a.m. on June 6, 1944, still almost dark, a gray, murky daylight beginning to define itself off Coffey’s left shoulder high over the English Channel. Coffey was looking down at thousands of ships and boats in the armada, the main thrust of the Allied invasion of France, already underway. From the roomy cockpit of his robust fighter, leading forty-seven planes into battle, Coffey took in the size and scale of the armada. He did not see the fighting that was now unfolding on the shores ahead, where 176,000 Allied troops were pouring ashore at five Normandy invasion beaches: Juno, Sword, Gold, Utah, and Omaha. In fact he had little time for reflection. He was more pragmatic than philosophical anyway, and his job for the moment was to lead his big fighters, nicknamed “Jugs” because of their portly contours, to attack three targets that lay just inland, ahead of the invasion.

Coffey commanded the 388th Fighter Squadron, one of three in a group that would soon be in the middle of the war on the European continent, a fight both bloody and very personal. Later in his brief life Coffey would be a politician, and he looked the part, “a pretty sturdy guy with black hair and a mustache,” a fellow pilot recalled later. “He was a good pilot. He was aggressive.” Another pilot called Coffey “suave” and “debonair,” and he was married to a beautiful Puerto Rican girl whom some of his buddies had met, admired, and maybe fantasized about. Coffey was just twenty-six years old but had been in uniform for almost two years before the United States entered the war. He was older and more mature than his fellow Hell Hawks, who were mostly younger men plucked from civilian life shortly after Pearl Harbor. Coffey was a leader. Today was the show.

Coffey was busy monitoring his formation, correcting his course, performing routine cockpit tasks, keeping his eye on fuel flow and RPMs, and listening to the throb of his eighteen-cylinder Double Wasp radial engine. He must have been too busy to think much about the greatest invasion in history, apart from his own role in it. Coffey’s focus as he “coasted in” over Utah Beach on D-Day, one of the great days of history, was on his set of targets: a railroad bridge southwest of St.-Sauveur-de-Pierre-Pont, a culvert at Couperville, and an embankment at St.-Sauveur.

One pilot in Coffey’s flight, 2nd Lt. Robert L. Saferite, recalled that the stormy weather of the day before had cleared late, when Saferite returned from a mission at dusk and glimpsed the invasion fleet below. Now, flying with Coffey, Saferite looked down at Utah Beach, where GIs rushing ashore faced only a fraction of the resistance turning the water red at Omaha. Utah was near Cherbourg on the Cotentin Peninsula; the beach itself was backed by numerous small villages, but Saferite was searching for the enemy, in the darkened fields below, and in the murky sky. “There were plenty of German guns ready for us there,” said Saferite. “Our job was air-to-ground, but we were also looking around alertly for German aircraft in case we’d have to fight them.” But his flight was seemingly alone in the sky. “We did not see a single German aircraft.” Saferite and the rest of Coffey’s flight bored in toward their targets.

Coffey may have been in command of all the Hell Hawks in the air that morning, but the Group’s 387th Fighter Squadron had already left the formation. The 387th was on the deck, barely 250 feet off the surface of the Channel, its dozen Thunderbolts headed inland under the command of the squadron operations officer, Capt. Arlo C. Henry Jr. He was as experienced that morning as any man in a P-47 cockpit. One of his fellow pilots called him a “daring flier” who smoked a cigar on takeoff, against the rules. Another said simply that Henry was “stocky, but not fat, laid-back, with a round face” and that he “kind of ambled along.” Henry also had nightmares and sometimes screamed out from his bunk in the darkness, but the group fielded no bolder, better-skilled fighter pilot. He dubbed his plane Turnip Termite, now in its final twenty-four hours of existence as a flying machine.

Henry’s Thunderbolts each carried two one-thousand-pound bombs, one under each wing. Other Hell Hawks in the air that day were hauling three five-hundred-pounders, the additional bomb hung on the fuselage centerline.

Henry’s wingman was 1st Lt. John H. Fetzer Jr. piloting a Thunderbolt with the name The Madam emblazoned in red letters across the nose. A Louisiana boy with the distinct drawl associated with Shreveport, Fetzer remembers that the Hell Hawks took off in darkness, found murky daylight over the Channel, and were en route to Normandy to “strafe or bomb anything, any German we found, a half-track, tanks, or infantry.”

At Omaha Beach, Fetzer looked down at “vehicles and people everywhere, bodies lying all over.” The formation of Jugs continued inland at near treetop level; visible everywhere was the aftermath of the nighttime Allied airborne assault that had kicked off the invasion. Fetzer saw an American paratrooper dangling from a tree, head down, inert. He saw gliders attempting to land and others strewn across the fields and hedgerows of Normandy. “The Germans had laid tree trunks to prevent gliders from landing. There was wreckage scattered everywhere, men scattered on the ground—horrible!” Parts of the invasion had begun badly, and if the Hell Hawks and their P-47 Thunderbolts were going to help those paratroopers and glidermen, they needed to make a dent in German defenses.

Beneath the murk, in the wet greenish brown fields of France, Arlo Henry came upon a formation of lead gray Tiger tanks. That’s just what our boys on the beaches don’t need, thought Fetzer, close on Henry’s wing. If the panzers were shooting at them, Fetzer didn’t notice it; anyway, the pilots had learned by now to ignore ground fire. Fetzer maintained that you never knew when you might get hit, and there was no purpose in dwelling on it.

One of the Tigers followed a standard armor tactic—driving into a large house, a chateau, really, and allowing the structure to collapse around him, providing camouflage and cover. Other Tigers were rumbling through the nearby village, one of them clearly a communications vehicle with an antenna fully thirty feet tall. The Thunderbolt pilots briefly exchanged words and hand signals, then Henry led the attack.

“Henry dropped two bombs into the chateau and blew it to pieces,” said Fetzer. “It was an odd kind of destruction because there were two walls left standing, one at either end of the house, like bookends, but nothing but blackness and smoke in between.” Fetzer was wary of the delay fuses on the thousand-pounders; he didn’t want to get caught in his leader’s bomb blasts. He gave his boss plenty of spacing and dove, putting the panzer at the center of his gunsight. “I came in behind Henry, made my pass, and released one bomb that skipped into a field. My second bomb went off behind another Tiger tank.” Fetzer craned his head back over his shoulder in the pullout and watched in amazement the result of his drop. Sixty-three years later the memory is still vivid: “It flipped that tank over three or four times! Later in the day on my second mission, I destroyed a half-track with a thousand-pounder and nearly mushed into the tree when pulling out, but that was nothing to match the sight of a Tiger tank flipping over. That was my contribution to D-Day.”

Also airborne with the Thunderbolt pilots of the Hell Hawks’ 387th Squadron that morning was 2nd Lt. Grant Stout, a husky, athletic farm boy who had wanted to fly since childhood. Stout looked like an all-American linebacker and had a sense of humor—he kept a pet duck named Zeke—but he also had a curious habit, not typical of fighter pilots, of talking as if something bad was going to happen to him. “He seemed to have a belief in fate,” said another pilot. If Stout bel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter One: Hell Hawks over Normandy
• Chapter Two: Over the Beach
• Chapter Three: Who Were the Hell Hawks?
• Chapter Four: Hedgerow Breakout
• Chapter Five: Falaise and the Race across France
• Chapter Six: Bradley’s Aerial Hammer: Tank-Busting across France
• Chapter Seven: The War of the Regular Guys
• Chapter Eight: Stalemate over the Hürtgen
• Chapter Nine: Air-To-Air
• Chapter Ten: Thunderbolts over the Bulge
• Chapter Eleven: Death from Above
• Chapter Twelve: “That Is What Is Beating Us”
• Chapter Thirteen: Getting Shot Down
• Chapter Fourteen: Moving Up
• Chapter Fifteen: Into the Reich
• Chapter Sixteen: Fighting the Jets
• Chapter Seventeen: The Price of Victory
• Chapter Eighteen: The New Boys
• Chapter Nineteen: Reckoning
• Chapter Twenty: Final Mission
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: What Happened to Them?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page