The war had come home to the young Americans in a way none of them had prepared for. They had flown through flak and fighter packs over Germany, dropped their bombs, and turned back for England believing the worst was behind them. But on the night of April 22, 1944, a different kind of enemy lay in wait over the misty fields of East Anglia, and it would send dozens of bombers crashing into their own bases before the night was over. The day had begun with an enormous American raid against the marshaling yards at Hamm, the largest rail center in Germany.
Those yards processed up to ten thousand freight cars each day, handling everything that moved between the Ruhr and northern and central Germany. Eight hundred and twenty-four American bombers took part in the strike, most of them flying from bases of the Eighth Air Force scattered across Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Cambridgeshire. They dropped 1,581 tons of bombs on the target, killing 230 people on the ground, while another 109 died in the city of Koblenz when B-24 Liberators hit it as a secondary target. The Germans would repair the railway lines quickly, but for the moment the damage was severe.
German anti-aircraft fire and fighters cost the Americans thirteen bombers and thirteen escorting fighters. But the real surprise was still ahead. For years, the Luftwaffe had used a tactic called infiltration against England. They sent small numbers of bombers, sometimes single aircraft, along the flight paths of returning British bombers, following them home and striking as they came in to land.
During 1940 and 1941 the results against RAF Bomber Command had been mixed, and the Germans lost heavily. Yet the psychological toll on British airmen had been unmistakable: many crews believed their bases were unsafe, and landing accidents multiplied as exhausted pilots tried to get down too fast. Hitler had ordered the tactic stopped in October 1941, preferring instead to destroy British bombers over German soil for propaganda reasons. By 1944, three years of round-the-clock Allied bombing had changed the equation.
Radar-equipped German night fighters were butchering RAF bomber streams, as they had done during the costly Berlin campaign of the winter of 1943–44, when 569 British bombers were lost. The Americans were taking heavy casualties on their daylight raids from flak and German day fighters. The Luftwaffe decided the time was right to revive the infiltration attacks against England itself, hoping to disrupt the massive Allied bombing effort by hitting the American bombers as they came home. The first major success came on the night of April 22–23, 1944, directly against the bombers returning from the huge raid on Hamm.
The unit chosen for the attack was the 51st Combat Squadron. Between twelve and twenty aircraft of the Messerschmitt Me 410 Hornisse, the Hornet, took part, drawn from two squadrons under the command of twenty-three-year-old Major Dietrich Puttfarken, a Knight’s Cross holder. The Me 410 had entered service in 1943 as a successor to the older Me 110 twin-engine fighter. It carried a crew of two and had been used as a reconnaissance aircraft, a destroyer of bombers, and a night fighter.
Over England it was nearly untouchable: the high-speed aircraft proved extremely difficult for British night fighters to intercept. As a daylight interceptor over Germany it had been less impressive, outmaneuvered by single-engine Allied fighters like the P-51 Mustang and the Spitfire. But when the order came to employ the whole Me 410 fleet as heavily armed bomber destroyers, the Hornet was perfect for night raids on England. Its armament was savage.
It carried two forward machine guns, two MG 151/20 cannon with 350 rounds each, two more with 250 rounds each in the bomb bay, and two MG 131 13mm machine guns with 500 rounds each mounted in remotely controlled barbettes on the fuselage sides. The Messerschmitts took off from bases in Holland and France, planning to intercept the returning American bomber waves over the North Sea, off the coasts of Norfolk and Suffolk, and then press their attacks as the fuel-starved Liberators descended toward their airfields scattered across Norfolk. The Hornets crossed the North Sea at an altitude of only fifty meters to stay below British radar coverage, their own radar and radios sweeping the darkness for targets and listening to the chatter of the American bomber streams. When they reached the English coast, they received orders to climb rapidly to 14,000 feet to join the bomber formation.
As the huge number of American bombers approached the shore, the ground radar screens became flooded with returns. Controllers could no longer distinguish friend from foe. The sky over eastern England was suddenly full of German fighters wearing the shape of British night, and the Americans coming home were exhausted, low on fuel, and convinced they were safely over friendly soil. One of the first victims was a B-24 Liberator of the 453rd Bomb Group, named CG2.
The bomber was approaching the English coast near Southwold in Suffolk, running with its lights on, as all bombers did during the landing phase to avoid collisions. A Hornet stalked it from behind and ripped the left wing with cannon fire. The wing burst into flame. The crew fought to keep the burning bomber level.
None of them wanted to bail out over the black North Sea, which at that time was almost certainly a death sentence, so they struggled to reach land. As they crossed the coast, several crewmen jumped. The pilot, First Lieutenant James Munsey, and his co-pilot, Second Lieutenant Robert Okerblom, stayed at the controls, fighting to hold the blazing aircraft steady. Five men parachuted and survived.
The other five died when the bomber exploded. Near the village of Kesingland, a Liberator of the 448th Bomb Group, named Rebulser, was caught by German cannon fire and crashed into marshy ground. All ten crewmen aboard were killed. At Hethel, the main base of the 565th Bomb Squadron, part of the 389th Bomb Group, a B-24J was hit while coming in to land.
Six men aboard were killed, and the rest were wounded. A second B-24J took hits, lost its number two engine, and lost its hydraulic system. The pilot made an emergency landing on the airfield, slamming into the radar building, but fortunately the entire crew survived. Near Seething, another bomber, a B-24H named Peggy Jo of the 715th Squadron, took heavy cannon fire from an Me 410.
The entire crew bailed out, and the aircraft smashed into the railway line near the village of Wellingham. At Horsham St. Faith, now the site of Norwich International Airport and the main base of the 754th Bomb Squadron, 458th Bomb Group, a B-24H named Achtung was shot down, while a B-24J named Valle Oregon crashed near the base. Three crewmen were killed or died of their wounds.
Several other B-24s were caught during their landing approaches. Approaching Rackheath, near Norwich, a B-24H of the 791st Squadron, 467th Bomb Group, was brought down by fire from an Me 410. Three crewmen successfully parachuted. The other seven died when the bomber crashed at Barsham in Suffolk.
In all, German aircraft shot down twelve B-24 Liberators that night, plus an RAF Albemarle brought down over Lincolnshire. American dead numbered sixty, with three British dead. Dozens more were injured in other crash landings. The exact figures vary in the history books, but the scale of the loss was clear: twelve B-24s were destroyed or so badly damaged they never flew again.
The Germans did not escape unscathed. Two Me 410s were also shot down by defensive fire from the B-24s. In one engagement, a Hornet attacked a Liberator of the 389th Bomb Group from the side, using the guns in its barbettes to pump shells into the American bomber. The Liberator caught fire while Staff Sergeant J.
R. Murray, the nose gunner, returned fire over the village of Cantley. The crew began bailing out. Then one wing of the Liberator tore away, and the aircraft plunged into marshy ground at Cantley.
Murray was one of six men who died. The badly damaged Me 410 crashed shortly after the Liberator went down. The Hornet slammed into the ground at Hall Farm, Ashby St. Mary in Norfolk, and exploded, killing both crewmen.
Interestingly, some wreckage from that aircraft was recovered in September 1979, including its Daimler-Benz DB 603 engine, now displayed at the excellent Norfolk and Suffolk Aviation Museum at Flixton. The second Me 410 lost that night was flown by Major Puttfarken himself, the decorated commander, with his crew. His aircraft disappeared over the North Sea during the battle after being hit by defensive fire from a B-24 he had attacked. Nothing was ever heard of the German crew or their aircraft again.
For the Germans, losing four airmen in exchange for shooting down thirteen enemy aircraft was considered a fair bargain. The attack had come on the same night as the first raid of Operation Steinbock against London, a faltering attempt by the Luftwaffe to revive the Blitz, a campaign that was doomed to failure. The attackers would return to England one more time in March 1945, but this night in April 1944 stood as the proof that even over England, the boys who flew out against Germany could not assume they were safe until their wheels touched the ground. The fields of Norfolk and Suffolk, where the Americans were such beloved guests, became a graveyard in the dark for crews who had survived the flak over the Reich only to be cut down in the final minutes of their journey home.
The death toll among young Americans flying from Britain against Nazi Germany reached thirty thousand over the course of the war. Few know now that some of them were killed not over Germany but over their own English bases, in a bold attack that history has largely forgotten. Eighty years later, the United States Air Force still maintains a significant presence at some of the very airfields from which those bombers had flown, a quiet testament to the friendship and military cooperation between Britain and America that has endured for two and a half centuries since the American declaration of independence. For the crews of the Eighth Air Force, East Anglia had been home, a place of warm welcomes, village dances, and the kindness of strangers who shared their skies.
On that one terrible night, the war proved it could reach even there. The survivors who landed their damaged bombers in the darkness that evening understood something the training manuals never mentioned: the danger did not end at the German coast. Sometimes it waited just beyond the runway lights. The wreckage burned through the night across the fields of eastern England.
By dawn, the crews counted the empty beds and the broken aircraft. The dead were buried in the cemeteries around their bases, among the villages that had adopted them. The Me 410s went home to their bases in Holland and France. The war continued.
And the small town of Ashby St. Mary kept a memory of the night the sky fell, and of the Hornet that came to rest in the soil of Hall Farm, its engine unearthed decades later as a silent relic of a forgotten raid. The two surviving Me 410s in the world today rest in museums: one preserved at the Smithsonian, the other on public display at the RAF Museum at Cosford. They stand as reminders of a weapon designed to destroy bombers, and of the men on both sides who flew them into the dark over England in a desperate gamble that cost more than either side cared to count.
The story of that April night faded into the broader history of the bombing war, overshadowed by the enormous raids over Germany and the grand strategy of the Allied air campaign. But for the families of the sixty American airmen who died over East Anglia, and for the villages that mourned them, it was never just a footnote. It was the night the war came home.