The first B-24 had its landing lights on, just like every other bomber coming back from Germany that night. It was a simple safety measure meant to prevent collisions in the crowded skies over East Anglia. It also made the aircraft a perfect target. A German Messerschmitt 410 had slipped in low over the North Sea, flying at just fifty meters to stay under British radar.
Now it climbed to join the stream of exhausted American bombers returning from the massive raid on the Hamm marshalling yards. The ground controllers were overwhelmed with contacts. They could not tell friend from foe. The Hornet stalked the Liberator near Southwold on the Suffolk coast and opened fire.
Cannon shells ripped through the port wing, igniting it in a sheet of flame. The pilot, First Lieutenant James Munsey, and his co-pilot, Second Lieutenant Robert O’Crowley, fought to keep the burning aircraft level. Nobody wanted to bail out over the dark North Sea. It was a death sentence.
Five of the crew jumped as the burning plane crossed the coast and survived. Munsey and the four others still aboard died when the bomber exploded. The intruders had been waiting for this moment for years. Back in the early war, the Luftwaffe had tried night intruder raids against RAF bomber bases.
The results were mixed, and Hitler ordered them stopped in October 1941, preferring the propaganda value of shooting down British aircraft over German soil. But the relentless Allied bombing campaign had changed the equation. German night fighters equipped with radar were taking a terrible toll on RAF bombers, and the Americans were suffering heavily in daylight. Still, it was not enough.
Something else was needed. On the night of the 22nd of April 1944, Kampfgeschwader 51 launched its Hornets. Between twelve and twenty Me 410s took off from bases in the Netherlands and France. Their orders were simple: catch the American bomber stream over the North Sea, follow it to the English coast, and hunt the B-24s as they began their final approaches to their East Anglian airfields.
The Me 410 was a fearsome machine. It carried two forward-firing machine guns and four cannon, with two more machine guns mounted in remotely controlled barbettes on the sides of the fuselage. It hit hard, and it hit fast. The British night fighters struggled to intercept it because it was simply too quick.
The Hornets reached the English coast and climbed to join the bomber stream. With so many American aircraft coming in, the radar screens were clogged with blips. The German planes were flying right through the middle of the returning bombers, and nobody could pick them out. The slaughter began.
Another Liberator, a ship named Repulsor from the 448th Bomb Group, was shredded by cannon fire near the village of Kessingland. The plane crashed into marshland, killing all ten crew aboard. At Hethel, home of the 389th Bomb Group, a B-24J was hit as it came in to land. Six men were killed, and everyone else on board was injured.
A second B-24J lost its number two engine and its hydraulics. The pilot crash-landed on the airfield and slammed into a radar building. Miraculously, the whole crew survived. Near Seething, a B-24H named Peggy Joe was wrecked by cannon fire.
The crew bailed out, and the plane crashed into a railway line close to the village of Worlingham. At Horsham St. Faith, now Norwich International Airport, the Liberator Achtung was shot down, and a B-24J called Vale Oregon crashed near the base, killing three of its crew. The Germans caught some of the bombers right in their landing patterns.
Approaching Rackheath, a B-24H of the 791st Bomb Squadron was blasted out of the sky. Three men bailed out safely. The other seven died when the bomber crashed at Barsham in Suffolk. By the time it was over, the German intruders had shot down twelve B-24 Liberators and an RAF Albemarle.
Sixty American airmen and three British aircrew were dead. Dozens more were wounded or injured in the crashes. The history books have never quite agreed on the exact numbers. Some count aircraft that made it back to base but were damaged beyond repair.
Others only count planes that went down in flames. The true tally is somewhere between those figures, but the horror of the night is beyond dispute. The Germans paid a price for their success. Two Me 410s were shot down by defensive fire from the American bombers.
One attacked a 389th Bomb Group Liberator side-on, strafing it with its barbette guns. The bomber was on fire when nose gunner Staff Sergeant J. R. Murray opened fire in return above the village of Cantley.
The crew started to bail out, but one of the Liberator’s wings came off, and the plane plunged into marshland. Murray was one of six who died. The fatally damaged Hornet crashed moments later. It hit the ground at Hall Farm, Ashby St.
Mary, and exploded, killing both crewmen. In September 1979, some of its wreckage was recovered, including a Daimler-Benz DB 603 engine. It is now on display at the Norfolk and Suffolk Aviation Museum. The second Me 410 lost that night was flown by a Knight’s Cross holder, Myo Putfarken.
He took a fatal hit from a B-24 he attacked and went down over the North Sea. Neither he nor his crewman nor the aircraft was ever seen again. The Germans considered the exchange fair. Four of their airmen had died, but they had brought down thirteen enemy aircraft and killed sixty-three Allied airmen.
More importantly, they had delivered a message. The Americans were not safe anywhere, not even over England. The night intruders would come again in March 1945, in an even bigger operation that would leave more wreckage scattered across the English countryside. But on that night in April 1944, the men of the Eighth Air Force had learned the hard way that the journey home could be just as dangerous as the mission itself.
The burning B-24s were still smoldering in the Norfolk marshlands when the first crash crews arrived at the bases. The survivors walked away from their shattered aircraft in silence, their ears ringing, their eyes fixed on the smoking wrecks of planes that had been their homes in the sky only hours before. The celebration of a successful raid on Hamm had turned into a nightmare that none of them would ever forget.
