First Fortress Failure

The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, was, by any measure, one of the outstanding aircraft of World War II, especially in the air war over Europe. However, the first use of the redoubtable Fortress by the RAF in the summer of 1941 was a disaster.
With the signing of Lead Lease agreement between the United States and Great Britain in March 1941, the Fortresses, the latest US strategic bomber, were at the top of the RAF’s “wish list.”

The RAF was very familiar with the B-17, though not always positively. British Air Commodore Arthur Harris, later in charge of the RAF Bomber Command and nicknamed “Bomber” Harris, had visited the U.S.  in 1938 and had seen a very early B-17. He had been highly critical of the defensive armament of the Fortress, suggesting it was “more appropriately located in an amusement park than in a war aeroplane.” He also noted the bomber did not have self-sealing fuel tanks.

Despite Harris’ comments, the U.S. Army Air Corps (Trivia Point: the U.S. Army Air Corps became the U.S. Army Air Forces on June 20, 1941)  saw a chance to have their newest bomber evaluated in combat and agreed to send twenty of the first thirty-eight B-17Cs to the RAF in the spring and early summer of 1941. In return, the RAF agreed to provide extensive and detailed data on the combat operations.
The RAF gave the aircraft the name “Fortress I” and, after a delay to fit self-sealing fuel tanks (still not a AAC requirement), the first Fortress arrived in Britain on April 14, 1941. The others in the batch arrived over the next few months and upon arrival they were fitted with radios and other gear common to the rest of the RAF.
But, while the RAF crews had been trained in the U.S., the RAF had decided not to use the Fortress the way the AAC planned, in tight formations for mutual protection and flying at less than 25,000 feet. Instead, to avoid interception, the RAF began to operate its Fortresses at 30,000 feet in single ship bombing raids.

 Part of the reason for this was that the Fortress was hardly that, with an armament of only four singly mounted, manually operated .50 caliber machine guns, one each in top, ventral and two open waist positions. The guns were very hard to manipulate in the slipstream of a 200 mph aircraft, the gunners had limited visibility from their positions and, even worse, the positions were open to the frigid air – minus 31 degrees Fahrenheit at 30,000 feet. The cold took a toll on the crews and also iced over the windows, froze the guns and caused problems with the Fortress’ Cyclone engines.

Despite the problems, the Fortress Is went into combat, flying their first mission on July 8, 1941 when three were sent individually to bomb the naval barracks in Wilhelmshaven. Frozen equipment made the mission a fiasco, with one bomber turning back and the other two scoring no hits, though the German fighters had as many problems with the high altitude and cold as the British and failed to intercept.
On July 23, three Fortresses were sent to bomb Berlin, but the city was clouded over and the bombers returned without attacking. After  several more high altitude missions the  RAF decided to reduce the operating altitude to 22,000 feet for better bombing accuracy and to reduce the mechanical problems encountered in the high altitude operations.

The result was that encounters between the Fortresses and Luftwaffe interceptors began in earnest. The single Fortresses proved very tough but also vulnerable to mass fighter attack. One was shot down by seven Bf-109s over Brest, France on Aug. 16 and the worst was yet to come.

On Sept. 8, four Fortresses attempted to bomb the German pocket battleship “Admiral Scheer,” docked in Oslo, Norway. One of the bombers was shot down, another disappeared, and a third was so badly shot up that it had to be written off after returning to base.

 By Sept. 12 the Fortresses had flown 39 sorties against 22 targets. Of those sorties, 18 had been aborted and two had bombed secondary targets. Nineteen had bombed their primary targets, but only two 1,100lb bombs actually hit their target. In that period four were lost in combat and four more in accidents — eight of the twenty aircraft lost in two months of action.

Although improvements were made during the course of operations, it was clear the Fortress I/B-17C was not ready for combat. Its defensive armament especially had proven inadequate and the bomb load was modest for an aircraft of its size (the main weakness of the B-17 for its entire career). Both of these shortcomings were apparent a few months later when the Pacific War began.

The Fortress Is were withdrawn from combat operations at the end of September 1941, and the RAF’s  Coastal Command took over the aircraft or anti-submarine patrols over the Atlantic. Indeed, a limited number of more modern Fortresses served in the RAF throughout the war, notably with No. 100 Group for electronic jamming missions and by Coastal Command, where they were credited with sinking 11 German U-boats.

The performance of the Fortress reinforced the ideas of both the RAF, who thought that no daylight bomber could operate safely against the German air defences, and the U.S. Army Air Forces, who believed the RAF had operated the Fortresses under conditions for which it had not been designed and by crews who were not well trained for such operations. The AAF proved the point with daylight Fortress operations over Germany from 1943 to the end of the war.

(For questions or comments, contact Dr. Michel at marshall.michel@
spangdahlem.af.mil.)