July 7, 1944
For the USAAF 8th Air Force crews, it was just another mission in the continuing bombing campaign against the industrial heartland of Nazi Germany. For the Luftwaffe fighter pilots, it was another day striving heroically against overwhelming numbers of enemy aircraft to stem a seemingly unstoppable tide of bombing raids against their homeland.
Coasting out from England and crossing into the European mainland on the morning of Friday July 7, 1944, was a huge aerial column of USAAF 8th Air Force heavy bombers, almost 100 miles long, consisting of 373 Consolidated B-24 Liberators and 956 Boeing B-17 Fortresses—a total of 1,329 bombers. The fighter escort for this phalanx of bombers totaled 756 long-range fighters—P-38s, P-47s, and P-51s—over 2,000 aircraft in all. What a daunting sight that must have been for any defender! The bombers’ targets were the synthetic oil plants at Böehlen, Leuna-Merseburg, and Lützkendorf; aircraft assembly plants and engine factories in the Leipzig area; airfields; and railway marshalling yards, all deep in the German heartland. As the bomber formations droned toward their targets, they were tracked by the Luftwaffe’s sophisticated and well-practiced air defense command and control system.
The USAAF bomber crews were hardened to mass fighter engagements, especially on these deep penetration missions, and they had recently been subjected to multiple head-on attacks. They did not know however, that today the Luftwaffe was about to unleash a new tactic, utilizing its new Gruppe of heavily armed and armored Sturmböcke Focke Wulf Fw 190s in a large battle formation or “Gefechtversband.” (Sturmböcke translates as “battering rams.”)
The plan was that IV.(Sturm)/JG 3, a of about 36 Fw 190 SturmbÖcke, led by the Gruppe Kommandeur, Wilhelm Moritz, would attack the bombers in a mass formation from the stern, their strength of numbers minimizing the amount of return fire that each fighter could be subjected to by the bombers’ gunners. The heavy Fw 190 Sturmbock lacked maneuverability and would be easy prey for the USAAF P-47s and P-51 escort fighters, so they were to be protected by two similarly-sized Gruppen
