Eighth Mission, 15 March 1945      Target - Oranienburg, Germany

Here's a wonderful photo of the 486th Bomb Group flying during the Oranienburg raid: 

Photo of the 486th BG during the March 15th raid on Oranienburg. The 8th Air Force struck at the heart of the German nuclear materiels program. This raid was directed by BGEN Leslie Groves of the Manhattan project. Posted here with permission from the 486th BG Association.

Tony's Mission Log:

The mission date is incorrect, it should be 3-15-45. The target was the town of Oranienburg, VERY close to Berlin, so it was a long mission, and a hard mission as Berlin was heavily defended by both fighters and anti aircraft artillery. The Eighth Air Force sent 675 B-17's and 352 P-51's to cover Oranienberg and other nearby targets. It was a costly mission as 8 B17's were lost, 288 B-17's were damaged, 8 airmen wounded in action (WIA) and 66 airmen are MIA.  Tony's crew was lucky to come out unscathed but it had to be a very stressful mission, especially watching planes going down. 

Lyman Huffman, another gunner from the 486th Bomb Group left a riveting account of this mission, these are some of the details.

After take-off, the crew's trip was almost without incident until they started down the bomb run. Flak explosions rocked their plane, but they were untouched until a few seconds from the bomb release when one burst of enemy steel tore a three foot hole in their left wing, hurled the big bomber almost vertically up on its right wing and threw them out of formation.

Pilot and copilot righted their aircraft and swung back into formation in time to drop their bombs on the target with the rest of the group. Almost at that instant, SGT Huffman heard the crack of another flak burst and the sound of shrapnel hitting the fuselage like the rattle of Midwestern hail on a tin roof.

Everything happened at once. One steel fragment smashed through the top turret, leaving SGT Huffman uninjured, holding a piece of the gun sight in his hand. Another fragment zipped through the copilot's window just in front of his face and tore out through the skin of the plane a fraction of an inch behind the pilot's head.

The ball gunner felt a sudden sharp stab of pain in his arm -- and later found nine holes in his turret. The tail gunner's oxygen system was wrecked.

After they had climbed back into formation and the excitement had died down, the crew investigated the damage.

Miraculously, all four engines still droned on. The bomb bays, which had sustained the major portion of hits, were a mass of jagged holes. One tire was shot flat. The oxygen system was partially gone. Fluid poured from a severed hydraulic line, making the brakes useless.

They stuck with their formation and when back over their home base, came in for an emergency landing. With a flat tire and no brakes, they hit the runway. The pilot let his plane roll as far as possible to lessen its speed and then neatly wheeled off the concrete where the soft ground brought them to a stop.

Counting the holes in the Fort, SGT Huffman and his crewmates gave up when they reached a total of 460 in the bomb bays alone. The control surfaces and fuselage were punctured with scores of holes.

Tony's comment about "tank factory" is intriguing. I have not seen anything linking Oranienburg with tank production. BUT, there a VERY important factory in Oranienburg, the Auer-Werke, which was a chemical plant producing radioactive materials for the German Atomic Program. It is known that the chemical factory was heavily targeted, but naturally, the nature of its importance had to be kept secret. So it is possible that the "tank factory" that Tony refers to may have really been the Auer-Werke.

From wikipedia:  "In 1939, the Oranienburg plant began the development of industrial-scale, high-purity uranium oxide production. Special Russian search teams, at the close of World War II, sent Auergesellschaft equipment, materiel, and staff to the Soviet Union for use in their atomic bomb project."  The Allies also had teams (Alsos Mission, part of the Manhattan Project) searching for the members and equipment of the German atomic program, but the Russians naturally got to the Berlin area first and took what they could back to the Soviet Union. 

This photo of the Auer-Werke below was taken in January of 1945. You see the place heavily pot marked with bomb craters, and at the bottom there seems to be a marshaling yard or large railroad siding (which is what the official target for the Bomb Group). I chatted about this with Robin Thomas Smith from the 486th BG Organization, and he mentioned that the 486th Group's portion of the 8th Air Force attack on Oranienburg was to hit the Marshalling Yards, to make it harder for the Russians to get their hands on the materials and equipment of the German Atomic program. . He mentioned that he has seen a German article that described this attack as the first shot in the Cold War. 

Oranienberg has the dubious honor of being the German town with the greatest number of dud bombs buried underground. Approximately 10,000 bombs (500 and 1000 pounders) were dropped on the town. The dud rate could be 7 to 15% and they calculate that they must still have 325 bombs underground. And from time to time they go off on their own. They expect to keep digging up bombs until the year 2030.

Here's a fascinating clip about the efforts of Oranienburg to dig up their "past".