20. A Deep Raid So Bad it Made American Commanders Hit Pause for Five Months
The force sent against Schweinfurt was further jinxed by weather. High cloud masses forced its B-17s to fly at lower-than-usual altitudes. There, they were extra vulnerable to German fighters. Over 300 Messerschmitt Bf 109s and Focke-Wulf FW-190s fell on the B-17s with a ferocity never seen before, and the violence of their attacks mounted steadily as the bombers penetrated more deeply into Germany. By the time the raid reached the outskirts of Schweinfurt, German fighters had already destroyed 22 bombers. The Luftwaffe defenders then returned to their airfields to refuel, rearm, and wait for another go at the bombers on their way back home. The Schweinfurt group lost 36 B-17s shot down that day. All in all, the double raid cost the US 60 bombers destroyed, and another 95 were heavily damaged.
Many of the damaged B-17s were from the Regensburg mission that flew on to North Africa, where the worst-hit bombers were never repaired. The targets suffered significant damage, but German industry was sufficiently resilient to soon make up the production shortfall. Ultimately, what the double raid demonstrated, particularly the Schweinfurt portion, was that daylight bomb raids deep inside Germany without fighter escorts were too hazardous and led to unsustainable losses. US Eighth Air Force commanders did not fully grasp that, however, until another raid against Schweinfurt two months later resulted in even more catastrophic losses: 60 out of 291 B-17 were destroyed. Deep penetration attacks into the Third Reich were suspended for five months until long-range fighter escorts finally became available to escort the bombers to their targets.