Schweinfurt - Witness-Reports
"Could recognize the first anti-aircraft gun weakly and unclearly at Woensdrecht at 10.07 hours. A couple of minutes two Fw 190 appeared in one o'clock later and shot by the formation in a frontal attack through in front of us and then dived behind us in half a roll away. At her maneuver they had two caught B-17 at the wings. A smoke trail climbed at the two B-17 almost simultaneously but they stayed into position. When the interceptors dropped in near to us, we took her under fire. The sharp smell of burned powder filled the cockpit and the recoil of the machine-guns in the bow and below at the trunk let lift up the B-17. I saw how out of the wing of this fighter pieces broke before I lost her from the eyes.
The gunners reported three minutes later that interceptor the B-17 of our squadron fired - the sky was traversed by shining trace storeys Fw 190 and Me 109. of everybody for gun from all directions high scores, single and in a twosome, in. Both sides suffered losses in this battle: Two Fortresses of our lower echelon and one from the squadron flying in front of us fell out burningly of the formation while the gunner bailed out. Quite a number of interceptors fell away into flames and sailed her pilots behind this with dirty yellow parachutes slowly to the ground. I noticed a Me 110. outside our range to our right hand you followed us the whole way up to our aim apparently to notify opposing echelons which already waited for us of our position.
When twelve Me 109 came toward us in a twosome and in a foursome with her yellow noses in a far sweeping turn between twelve and two o'clocks, the battle already was under way, too..
A silverly shiny object sailed over our wing. I stated a door of the main exit. A dark object passed rolled by the formation, only just the propellers seconds later. It was a man with the head drawn to knees, this one like a tower jumper in a triple somersault moved, before his parachute opened.
Pulled a B-17 out of the formation slowly to the right, however, remained on the same level. She changed into a shining fireball of which only four smaller light balls, fuel tanks, were left which immediately burned when they fell on the ground in the fraction of a second.
I saw how a B-17 changed course slowly to the right, her cockpit was one single sea of flames. The Copilot hangelte held himself with a hand tightly from the window, himself arrived in to fetch his parachute strapped him on, could be fallen, and bumped against the tailplane once again. I hoped that he would survive the impact.
For ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes passed and the taps went on undiminishedly. The interceptors stood virtually in line to finish us. Every second brought us a storey from a board cannon.
The permanent fire from our 12.7 mm MG shook our B-17 intensely and was the air in the aircraft smoke impregnated. It was cold in the cockpit but when I looked to the pilot, I saw how the sweat of his forehead dripped on the oxygen mask. He left the steering wheel to me for a while. It was an actual relief to concentrate on having left on position instead of the continual attacks of the German interceptors follow with that. This way one was turned away at least. Suddenly, the gunner then didn't let any half meters off loose, that in the weapon tower on the roof over my head a salvo I had the feeling, a shell exploded in the cockpit. I must have hopped about twenty centimeters of my seat highly !