Eric Ratcliffe - The Kassel Raid, 27 September 1944

THE KASSEL RAID

27 SEPTEMBER 1944

This book is dedicated to the airmen of the 445th.

27 SEPTEMBER 1944

THE LARGEST LOSS BY USAAF GROUP ON ANY MISSION IN WWII

ERIC RATCLIFFE

THE KASSEL RAID, 27 SEPTEMBER 1944

The Largest Loss by USAAF Group on any Mission in WWII

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

Air World

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire Philadelphia

Copyright Eric Ratcliffe, 2020

ISBN 978 1 52677 462 0

ePUB ISBN 978 1 52677 463 7

Mobi ISBN 978 1 52677 464 4

The right of Eric Ratcliffe to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Much has been written over the years on the causes and blame for the disastrous Kassel mission. Like most accidents, it was a set of different circumstances and errors coming together to produce the deadly end result: faulty information on wind speeds and direction caused an overshoot of the IP (initial point); a late turn onto the wrong heading, probably caused by misinterpretation of the ground radar image; the decision to stick with it rather than try to correct the course error all conspired to put the Liberators of 445th at a place in the sky where, for a brief few minutes, the German Luftwaffe ruled. Those factors combined cost the lives of 115 bomber crew and one fighter pilot on the Allied side, and eighteen Germans.

Between 13 December 1943 and 25 April 1945, the 445th flew 280 missions from Tibenham. They lost 108 aircraft in action and, during that period, 554 aircrew lost their lives. The Kassel mission alone cost more than 25 per cent of their total aircraft losses in combat and more than 20 per cent of their total human losses in just one day of bloody battle.

It is testimony to the extreme bravery of these young men that the day after the Kassel debacle more than ninety aircrew climbed into the ten serviceable aircraft left and went back to where their friends and colleagues had died a day earlier.

The group flew another 112 missions before the end of the war.

We owe them a great debt.

In the hot summer of 1975, I was invited to have a glider flight at an airfield called Tibenham. At that time I had never thought about flying, had barely heard of gliding, but decided it was an experience I shouldnt pass up. So, after a lot of driving around rural Norfolk (it was in the days before GPS navigation) I found myself being strapped into the front seat of an ASK 13 glider, hooked by tow rope to a little single-engine Condor tow-plane and then, with an instructor in the back giving the signal, we set off down one of the huge runways and into the blue sky. Forty minutes later, back on terra firma, I couldnt wipe the grin from my face. That was it! I was hooked.

Over the next 44 years a lot changed. In 1975 the airfield was owned by a local farmer, having been bought back from the air ministry in 1962, and Norfolk Gliding club rented it for its operations. It was an uneasy relationship as the NGC had little money, and the farmer was busy asset stripping, selling off the hangars, Nissen huts and starting to rip up and crush the concrete to be sold for aggregate. But in 1975 the airfield itself was still more or less complete, with the runways, perimeter tracks, hard-standings and control tower all there to be explored. During this period I became interested in the history of the place and spent the hours when not flying exploring the various areas and amassing a collection of bits of aircraft and artefacts left behind by the Americans thirty years earlier.

As the years went by, I met lots of American veterans returning either as groups for their UK reunions (including the famous Jimmy Stewart, several times) or individually, usually showing families their old base and local haunts. At one of these reunions I was tasked to look after a group of veterans at a local hotel and sat at dinner one evening next to a tall, greying gentleman who introduced himself as Reg Reg Miner, a former 445th pilot and survivor who was shot down on the Kassel raid. I listened intently as Reg and a couple of others from his crew recounted their tales and I was amazed almost spellbound and from there the seeds of this book were sown. I started to collect documents and accounts from the veterans as I met them and bought all Aaron Elsons audio CDs and that was the final motivating factor. Listening for hours to the guys I had met over the years made me open the laptop and start to type.

Tibenham itself survived the onslaught of the concrete crushers and although in that period we lost most of the buildings, including the control tower, nearly all of the hard-stands, the peri-track and the end of one runway, in 1987 the gliding club managed to buy enough of the runways to operate from. Three years later, with help from some Americans, club members and some grant aid, the club managed to acquire the remainder, thus protecting it from being ripped up like so many former airfields in East Anglia.

Our greatest assets are the three large runways but this brings with it a cost. The asphalt is mainly more than 75 years old and its starting to show its age, weeds abound on the areas that are little used and potholes appear regularly. So, for every copy of this book sold, a donation will go towards runway maintenance as a living memorial to those 554 airmen who took off from them more than 75 years ago but never landed on them again.

Eric Ratcliffe, Tibenham Airfield, Norfolk, UK, 2019

I was 6 years old when I first heard about the Kassel Mission. At that time, ten years after the mission, I only learned my dads story. I would hear many more equally dramatic stories decades later, long after I grew up.

Dad had been a B-24 pilot in the war. He often told my sister and I bedtime stories before we said our prayers each night. On this particular night, the nightstand lamp between our twin beds was turned off. Ambient light from the hallway showed his silhouette as his hands simulated airplanes flying in formation, thumbs and pinkies spread out for the wings as he spoke.

He told us about a terrible air battle when he had nine crewmen aboard and they suddenly had five enemy fighters on their tail. They were hit over and over, and some of his men were wounded before friendly fighters blessedly appeared, scaring off the enemy. The battle left his plane in tatters, and he had to drop out of what was left of the formation.