On the morning of January 11, 1944, a young German fighter pilot climbed into his Messerschmitt and took to a cold, blue sky over central Germany. He had done this many times before. He knew exactly how the day would unfold. The American bombers would come. Their small escort fighters would run low on fuel and turn back, and then he and his squadron would strike as they had for two years.
He was wrong. That morning, for the first time in the war, the American fighters did not turn back. They kept flying all the way to the target, even to Berlin if necessary. And one of them, a single Mustang with two Chinese words painted on its side, would do something no one had ever seen a fighter pilot do in the air.
This is the story of the day German pilots looked up and understood they had lost the war.
The sky over Schweinfurt turned black on the afternoon of October 14, 1943. Not from clouds, but from burning bombers. 291 B-17 Flying Fortresses had crossed the German border that morning. 60 of them would never come home. Another 142 returned with holes in their fuselages, damaged engines, and wounded or missing crew members.
In a single afternoon, the United States Eighth Air Force lost the equivalent of an entire combat wing. The men called it Black Thursday.
At his headquarters in High Wycombe, Lieutenant General Ira Eaker read the loss reports and understood something terrible. His entire theory of air war was falling apart. For two years, the Americans had believed in something the British no longer did. They believed a heavily armed bomber flying in a tight formation could defend itself. That formations of B-17s, packed with .50-caliber machine guns, could break through enemy fighter defenses in daylight, hit precision targets, and return safely.
Schweinfurt proved this was impossible. The math was ruthless. At a loss rate of 10 percent per mission, the statistical chance of a bomber crew surviving 25 missions was almost zero. The airmen knew this. They flew the missions anyway, but they knew Eaker had no answers left.
The bombers needed fighter escort all the way to their targets. But no American fighter had that range. The P-47 Thunderbolt was a beautiful aircraft, powerful and fast. But even with extra fuel tanks, it could barely reach the German border before its fuel gauges were in the red. The P-38 Lightning had greater range, but there were too few of them, and most were fighting in the Mediterranean and the Pacific.
Beyond the point where fighters had to turn back, the bombers flew unprotected. That was where the Luftwaffe hunted them.
On January 6, 1944, a small plane landed at Bushy Hall, west of London. A compact man with sharp eyes stepped out. Jimmy Doolittle. Race pilot, aeronautical engineer, doctor of science from MIT, and the man who had led 16 B-25 Mitchells off the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet to bomb Tokyo on April 18, 1942. He was here to replace Eaker.
The change of command was announced quietly. Eaker was sent to the Mediterranean. Doolittle took over the Eighth Air Force. Officially, it was a reorganization. Unofficially, it was a message. The old theory had failed. Someone new would try something different.
Doolittle had five days before the next major mission. He would need every one of them.
Four years earlier, on the other side of the world, in the spring of 1940, a British purchasing commission walked into a hangar in Inglewood, California, and asked North American Aviation for something impossible. They wanted fighters immediately, hundreds of them. The Battle of Britain was coming, and the Royal Air Force needed every aircraft it could get.
The commission asked North American to build Curtiss P-40 Warhawks under license. James Kindleberger, the company president, said no. Instead, he offered to design something better. From scratch, in 120 days. The British agreed. They had no choice.
102 days later, an unpainted airframe rolled out of the North American factory. It had a paper-thin fuselage, a laminar-flow wing never before put into mass production, and a radiator intake under the belly that engineers said would fail. It was called the NA-73X. On October 26, 1940, it flew. The British called it the Mustang.
For the first two years of its existence, almost no one in America wanted it. The problem was the engine. The Mustang carried an Allison V-1710, a 12-cylinder inline engine that produced good power at low altitude and lost it catastrophically above 15,000 feet. The United States Army Air Forces looked at the aircraft, saw a beautiful airframe coupled to the wrong engine, and shrugged. They ordered a small batch for ground attack and reconnaissance. They gave it a lukewarm designation. They moved on.
By the winter of 1942, the Mustang was on its way to becoming a footnote. Then, on April 30, 1942, a Royal Air Force test pilot named Ronald Harker climbed into the cockpit of a Mustang Mark I at RAF Duxford. Harker tested fighters professionally for Rolls-Royce. What he wrote in his report after that single flight would change the outcome of the air war over Europe.
The airframe, he said, was fantastic. The visibility was excellent. The handling was among the best he had ever experienced. But the engine choked everything the airframe could do. Give this aircraft the Merlin, he wrote. And you will have the best fighter in the world.
The Merlin was the same engine that powered the Spitfire, the two-stage supercharged high-altitude engine that had won the Battle of Britain. Within months, the marriage was made. A Packard-built Merlin was coupled to a Mustang airframe. The prototype flew in November 1942.
The performance figures came in and silenced the engineers in the room. 6,000 meters in 5.9 minutes. 700 km/h at high altitude. With drop tanks, it could reach anywhere in Germany and return. The aircraft that had nearly been discarded was suddenly the most important fighter in the American arsenal.
Production of the new variant, the P-51B, began in June 1943 in Inglewood. By November, the first squadrons were forming in England. They only needed pilots.
In a city called Canton on the south coast of China, a boy was born on April 8, 1913. His father was an American eye surgeon teaching at Canton Christian College. His mother spoke fluent Chinese. The boy grew up between two worlds. He learned Mandarin as a child. He watched Chinese soldiers march past his parents' home during the warlord conflicts of the 1920s. He grew up with an understanding most American boys did not have. That war has a face, and that empires can collapse. That distance from the fighting does not mean safety.
His name was James Howell Howard. He came to the United States for high school. He attended Pomona College in California. He joined the U.S. Navy and earned his wings in Pensacola. By 1941, he was a naval fighter pilot on the wooden deck of the aircraft carrier Enterprise.
Then, in the spring of that year, an offer came. A retired army captain named Claire Chennault was recruiting American pilots for a secret mission. They would fly for the Republic of China. They would fight the Japanese. They would fly a fighter called the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk. The pay was good. The survival odds were not.
The unit's name had not yet been made public. The world would come to know them as the Flying Tigers.
Howard resigned from the Navy and shipped out for the Far East. Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, he was already flying combat missions over Burma. In the skies above his birthplace, James Howard shot down six Japanese aircraft. He learned that a fighter pilot's most important weapon was not his guns. It was his patience. He learned to see the enemy before the enemy saw him. He learned to fire in short, controlled bursts and break away before the counterattack came.
When the Flying Tigers were disbanded on July 4, 1942, Howard returned home. He accepted a commission as captain in the Army Air Forces. He was promoted to major. And in the summer of 1943, he was given command of the 356th Fighter Squadron, part of a brand-new unit forming in the American Midwest. The name was the 354th Fighter Group.
In November 1943, when the 354th arrived at their new base in Boxted in southeast England, they were told what they would be flying. They would be the first American unit to take the P-51B Mustang into combat.
But there was something the 354th did not know. Something almost no one spoke of in the confusion of a rapidly expanding air war. They were not part of the Eighth Air Force. The Eighth was strategic. It flew the heavy bombers, the four-engine leviathans that struck deep into Germany. The Eighth had more need for long-range escort fighters than any other unit in the American army. They had been begging for Mustangs for months.
The 354th Fighter Group belonged to the 9th Air Force. The 9th was tactical. Its mission was ground support, close air support for the invasion of Europe everyone knew was coming. It flew fighter-bombers and medium bombers. It supported the infantry. According to American air force doctrine, it was not supposed to escort B-17s over central Germany.
But the 9th had the Mustangs and the Eighth did not. So a quiet agreement was made. The 354th would remain on paper under the 9th Air Force. But operationally, in the air, for the missions that mattered, they would answer to the Eighth Fighter Command. They would fly bomber escort until the Eighth had its own Mustang groups. Everyone assumed that would be within weeks.
The first American unit to take the P-51B Mustang into battle over Europe was, in a sense, the wrong unit from the wrong air force, loaned out for a mission it was never designed for.
That was the situation in the first week of January 1944. Doolittle had command. Howard led a squadron. The 354th flew its first test flights over France and the German coast. Across the Channel, German Luftwaffe radar operators began to notice something. A new escort fighter was penetrating deeper into occupied Europe than any American aircraft ever had. They did not yet know what it was. They did not yet know it could reach them.
But in five days, on the morning of January 11, 1944, 663 bombers would take off in the English dawn. And the men on both sides of the coming battle would learn together what the arrival of the Mustang truly meant.
The alarms went off in the dark. Across the flat farmland of East Anglia, in Nissen huts spread over more than 40 airfields, young men opened their eyes to the same ceiling as the day before. Corrugated iron, a bare lightbulb, the smell of damp wool, coal smoke, and shaving cream. It was 4:00 a.m. on Tuesday, January 11, 1944.
Mission briefings began at 5. In the officers' mess at Deenethorpe, home of the 401st Bombardment Group, pilots, navigators, and bombardiers filed in with tin cups of coffee and took seats on wooden benches. A curtain covered the map at the front of the room. Everyone knew what that curtain meant. When it went up, some would discover they were going to die that day.
The curtain went up. The red line on the map ran eastward from England across the North Sea, over the Dutch coast, and deep into central Germany. Deeper than most had ever flown. The line ended at three cities. Oschersleben, Halberstadt, Braunschweig. 160 kilometers southwest of Berlin.
The intelligence officer explained what awaited them. The AGO factory in Oschersleben was the largest remaining producer of Fw 190 fighters in the Reich. The Junkers factory in Halberstadt made wings for Ju 88 bombers. The Waggum factories near Braunschweig built Messerschmitt 110 fighters, the twin-engine killers that carried rockets under their wings and fired them at bomber formations from outside the range of machine guns.
The men in that room understood the equation immediately. They were being sent to destroy the very aircraft that would take off to kill them.
In Boxted, 65 kilometers to the east, the pilots of the 354th Fighter Group received the same briefing at the same hour. Their target was different. Their job was to keep the bombers alive.
Major James Howard sat in the second row and listened. He was 30 years old. He had a narrow face, short dark hair, and the quiet bearing of a man who had already survived one war and felt no need to talk about it. The other pilots in the room called him Major. A few of the older ones, those who had been with him since the group formed in the American Midwest, sometimes forgot and called him sir.
At the front of the room stood Colonel Kenneth Martin, 33 years old, group commander, a career fighter pilot who had waited most of his adult life for this moment. Martin explained the plan. 663 heavy bombers would take off in three divisions. The First Bombardment Division would attack Oschersleben. The Third would hit Halberstadt. The Second would go to Braunschweig.
P-47 Thunderbolts would escort them over the North Sea and as far into Germany as their fuel allowed. Then the Thunderbolts would turn back. At that point, at the deepest point of the mission, 49 P-51B Mustangs of the 354th Fighter Group would meet the bombers over the target. They were the only long-range escort in the entire European theater.
49 fighters. 663 bombers. The rest of German airspace belonged to the Luftwaffe.
Martin ended the briefing with something that looked like a smile. Any questions? There were none.
Takeoff began at 7:30 a.m. If you have ever stood on a runway in the English winter, you know the feeling. Mist rolls low over the grass. The taxiways glisten with frost. The engines of a four-engine bomber starting up in the cold sound like something old and enormous being woken against its will.
Now imagine 663 of those aircraft. They took off from more than 40 airfields in East Anglia. B-17 Flying Fortresses. B-24 Liberators, silver and olive green, forming up in the pale winter sky, wingtip to wingtip, climbing to 20,000 feet in slow, patient spirals.
By 9:00 a.m., the formation reached the Dutch coast. That was when the weather began to deteriorate. The forecast had promised clear skies over Germany. The reality was a closed cloud deck higher than the bombers could fly, rolling in from the northwest in unbroken layers. The lead navigators signaled back to command. The escort fighters lost sight of their charges. The bomber groups lost sight of each other.
At High Wycombe, on the edge of London, the staff of the Eighth Air Force made a decision. The recall order was broadcast over the radio. The Second Bombardment Division, heading for Braunschweig, turned around and began the long flight home. The Third Bombardment Division, heading for Halberstadt, did the same.
The First Bombardment Division did not.
At the head of the First Division flew a B-17 carrying 39-year-old Brigadier General Robert Frederick Travis. Travis was a tall, tough Georgian, a West Point graduate and one of the youngest generals in the American air force. He had led combat units in North Africa and England. He was known as a man who led from the front lines. Today, he was leading from the lead aircraft of the deepest penetration mission the Eighth Air Force had ever undertaken.
The recall order reached his radio operator. Travis read it. He looked through the cockpit windows at the 238 bombers flying behind him through the winter sky. He calculated the distance to the target. He calculated the distance back to England. He weighed the risk of turning a massive formation around within German airspace, breaking the defensive box, and exposing every bomber to the Luftwaffe.
Then he made his decision. He would continue.
Historians have debated that decision for 80 years. Some called it brave. Others called it reckless. What is certain is this. When Robert Travis decided to continue to Oschersleben on the morning of January 11, 1944, 238 American heavy bombers went with him. 60 of them would not return.
Below them, on the frozen airfields of northern Germany, the Luftwaffe was taking off to intercept them. From bases at Deelen, Rheine, Wunstorf, and Jever, the fighter groups of the German air defense rose. Jagdgeschwader 1, Jagdgeschwader 3, Jagdgeschwader 11, Zerstörergeschwader 26. Messerschmitt Bf 109Gs, Focke-Wulf 190As, and the twin-engine heavy fighter Bf 110.
The Bf 110 was clumsy and slow, but it was armed with something the American bomber crews had learned to fear. Rockets. The Werfer-Granate 21, a 21 cm mortar shell in a tube under each wing, fired from outside the range of the bombers' .50-caliber machine guns. One well-placed rocket could split a B-17 in two.
The German plan had not changed in months. Wait for the escort fighters to turn back, then strike. Fire the rockets from long range. Watch the American formation fall apart. Send the single-engine fighters through the wreckage field to finish off the survivors.
It had worked at Regensburg. It had worked at Schweinfurt. It had worked again and again during the terrible autumn of 1943. There was no reason to believe it would not work today.
Right on schedule, the American P-47 Thunderbolts began their return home. They had reached the limit of their fuel. One by one, they peeled off and dove toward the west, leaving the bomber formation unprotected. The Bf 110s of Zerstörergeschwader 26 flew 10,000 feet above the bombers, opened their rocket tubes, and prepared to fire.
That was the moment the escort arrived.
49 Mustangs dove through the cloud deck and cut straight through the German attack formation before the German pilots even realized what they were seeing. Colonel Kenneth Martin led the 354th into the fight. He picked out a Bf 110, approached from behind, and opened fire. The German pilot made a sharp turn. Martin followed.
The fight took place over the town of Halberstadt at 25,000 feet. What happened next has never been fully clarified. American witnesses reported that Martin's Mustang approached too fast and he could not pull out in time. His aircraft and the Bf 110 collided in mid-air and disintegrated together in a fireball a mile wide.
Some accounts suggest it was deliberate. That Martin, seeing his target would escape, chose to ram it rather than let it live to attack the bombers. That is impossible to know.
Martin survived. He bailed out at high altitude, floated down through the icy German air, and was captured by local police within hours. He would spend the next 16 months as a prisoner of war at Stalag Luft on the Baltic coast near Barth.
The first American unit to take the P-51 Mustang into a major battle over Germany had just lost its commander. No one in the American formation knew it yet.
The battle spread across 100 miles of sky. Individual Mustangs, separated from their leaders in the chaos, hunted individual German fighters. Some dove after Bf 109s trying to escape at low altitude and discovered for the first time in the war that an American fighter could keep up with them. Others climbed after Focke-Wulfs and outran them in the thin air above 30,000 feet.
For the German pilots, something was happening that had never happened before. They tried to break off the fight. They rolled away. They dove. They broke into the sharp, sudden climbs that had allowed them to escape P-47s and P-38s for two years. The Mustangs stayed with them.
An Oberleutnant of Jagdgeschwader 11, one of the pilots who rose that morning to attack the bombers, later wrote that his squadron had been briefed to expect the usual American escort. He said his flight made the interception confident that the fighters above were the shorter-range Thunderbolts. When the first Mustang approached his wingman and kept up with him during a full high-speed split-S, he understood immediately that everything the Luftwaffe believed about the range of American fighters was wrong. He was one of those who survived to write about it. Many did not.
In the midst of all this, one Mustang lost its group. James Howard had made his first attack on a Bf 110 climbing toward the bombers. He closed to 200 meters, fired a short burst, and saw the German aircraft roll onto its back and fall away, trailing black smoke. His first victory of the day.
Then he pulled up hard and looked for his wingmen. They were gone. In the swirling chaos of the dogfight, Howard had climbed above his squadron. Below him, he saw contrails and tracers, aircraft turning in tight circles, but he could no longer distinguish friend from enemy. The radio was one wall of overlapping voices. His fuel gauge was already below half.
He looked 6,000 meters below him at a long, glinting line. The B-17s of the 1st Air Division were still flying east toward Oschersleben. He looked closer. From the north, German fighters were approaching in loose formations. Not two or three. Not five or six. He started counting and stopped. Thirty or more. There were no other American fighters in the air.
At that moment, Howard understood what was about to happen to those bombers. He pushed the stick forward and dove.
The B-17 he descended toward was flying with the 401st Bombardment Group. The pilot was named Allison Brooks. He was leading the mission for the 401st that morning. A tail gunner in one of his aircraft saw the Mustang come out of the sun and screamed a warning over the intercom. Then the gunner realized what he was seeing.
A single P-51 Mustang diving into the swarm of German fighters. Without turning away, without asking for help, Howard attacked. He picked out a Focke-Wulf 190 preparing an attack on the lead bomber. He closed to firing range and pulled the trigger.
Two of his four machine guns fired. The others did not. He did not know it yet, but he had just encountered the great flaw of the early Mustang. The .50-caliber machine guns in the wings of the P-51B were mounted at an angle to fit the thin wing profile. Under the stress of a high-G maneuver, the ammunition belts jammed in the feed chutes. Two of Howard's four guns were already out of action.
He kept firing anyway. The Focke-Wulf broke off its attack. Howard turned inside another aircraft and fired again. This time three guns worked. He hit the German fighter in the engine. Smoke poured out. The pilot bailed out.
Two victories. Howard pulled up and looked around. The bombers were still being attacked. New German fighters were coming from all directions. His own were falling out one by one.
For the next 30 minutes, James Howard did the only thing he could think of. He kept flying at them. He climbed, picked a target, dove in, fired whatever still worked, and pulled away again. When his guns were empty, he still made the attack motion. The German pilots saw an American fighter coming at them and broke off. They did not know his guns were empty. They only knew they could die if they did not get out of the way.
For 30 minutes on the morning of January 11, 1944, one man kept the Luftwaffe away from a formation of American bombers by making one attack run after another. Some attacks had ammunition. Some did not. None of the German pilots knew which.
Inside the B-17s of the 401st Bombardment Group, gunners, bombardiers, and navigators watched through their scratched plexiglass. They saw the lone Mustang against everything, turning sharply through the German formation. They saw him climb, dive, fire, and climb again. They did not know his name. They could not reach him by radio. They could see two words painted in bright yellow on the side of his aircraft.
Dinghao. It was an expression Howard had picked up in China. It meant roughly "very good." It was written in the language of the country where he was born.
Below them, the target came into view. The Focke-Wulf factory at Oschersleben. The factory that built the very fighters attacking them spread out under a thin layer of winter haze. The bombardiers leaned over their Norden bombsights. The bomb bay doors opened with a groan. The bombs fell.
The formation turned for home. James Howard turned with them. His fuel gauge was nearly at zero. His guns were almost completely jammed. His aircraft was damaged. He did not know it, but somewhere over Halberstadt, his group commander was drifting down by parachute toward German captivity. He only knew he had to keep the bombers alive as long as possible.
He flew on the northern flank of the formation with them all the way to the Dutch coast. By the time the last Bf 109 gave up the chase, James Howard had been in continuous combat for nearly 40 minutes. He had made, by the estimate of the bomber crews who saw him, at least six attack runs. He had fired his last ammunition somewhere over the German border. He had single-handedly protected a group of B-17s that had every reason to expect they would not survive the day.
60 American heavy bombers did not return from the bombing on January 11, 1944. The 401st Bombardment Group lost four. Without the man in the Mustang, they would have lost many more.
None of them knew his name when their damaged aircraft landed on the runways of Deenethorpe that afternoon. But their commander, Colonel Harold Bowman, wanted to know. And in the week that followed, so did the entire United States of America.
The Mustang came in low over the Essex countryside just before three in the afternoon. The cowling was blackened. The fuselage was covered in oil and gunpowder residue. Along the port wing, three neat holes marked where the cannon shells of a Focke-Wulf had passed through without hitting anything vital.
James Howard set the aircraft down on the runway at Boxted and let it roll to a stop. When the ground crew climbed onto the wing and looked at him, they saw a tired man. Nothing more than that. He unbuckled his harness, climbed out, and walked toward the debriefing hut with the steady, calm stride he had used every other day of the war.
The intelligence officer asked him what had happened. Howard thought about it. He said he had become separated from his group. He said he had found a formation of bombers under attack and done what he could. He said he thought he had shot down two German fighters, possibly three. He was not sure. He asked if the bombers had made it home safely.
The intelligence officer did not know yet. Howard nodded, signed the report, and went to find something to eat.
Sixty kilometers to the north, in Deenethorpe, the surviving B-17s of the 401st Bombardment Group returned one by one. The runway lights were on before the last one landed. Ambulances waited at the hardstands. Ground crew stood in the cold watching the aircraft, subtracting the returning planes from the number that had left that morning.
When the arithmetic was done, four B-17s were missing. There should have been many more.
Inside the operations building, the pilots were debriefed. And time after time, the same story came up. There had been a Mustang. One Mustang. It had appeared out of the clouds when the German fighters attacked. It had stayed with them through the entire attack run. It had single-handedly beaten off one attack after another for more than half an hour. When it finally broke off and flew for home, the German fighters broke off too.
No one knew whose it was. No one had seen the pilot's face. But every man in that room remembered two things. A yellow marking on the side of the aircraft, and two Chinese words painted under the cockpit.
Colonel Harold Bowman, commander of the 401st Bombardment Group, listened to the reports. He had lost four crews that afternoon. 40 men. Fathers, sons, brothers, husbands. Now his surviving pilots were telling him that most of the men who had returned had been kept alive by one fighter pilot whose name no one knew.
Bowman picked up the phone. He called every fighter group within escort range of Oschersleben. He asked the same question at every base. Do you have a pilot who was alone over Oschersleben this morning in a Mustang with Chinese markings?
At Boxted, the answer came back. Yes. Major James Howard, 356th Fighter Squadron, 354th Fighter Group.
The following Monday morning, a young reporter for the New York Times named Frederick Graham arrived at Boxted with a photographer. Graham was one of a small group of American war correspondents attached to the Eighth Air Force. He had covered stories about aircrews before. He had heard, filtered through censorship, the outlines of what had happened during the mission of January 11. He had come to see the man who had done it.
Howard did not want to be seen. He agreed to the interview because his commander ordered him to. He sat on the edge of a folding chair in a Nissen hut. He answered questions in short, even sentences. When Graham asked him how many German aircraft he had shot down, Howard said he was not sure. When Graham asked him what he thought when he attacked 30 enemy fighters alone, Howard said he saw a job that needed to be done. Graham asked if he had been afraid. Howard said he had been too busy.
The story appeared in the New York Times on January 19, 1944. The headline read: "One-Man Air Force Stood Off."
The next morning, James Howard was famous. Newspapers across America ran his photo. Radio broadcasts described the battle in terms that were probably too dramatic. Andy Rooney, then a young reporter for Stars and Stripes, called it the greatest fighter pilot story of the war. Letters began arriving at Boxted from parents of B-17 crew members thanking him for the lives of their sons. Howard read a few. He did not know how to answer them. He wrote back to some anyway.
Five months later, in June 1944, on the eve of the invasion of Europe, General Carl Spaatz pinned the Medal of Honor onto the uniform of James Howell Howard on a windy airfield in England. Howard was the only fighter pilot in the entire European theater to receive the medal and survive. The only other aviator to receive the Medal of Honor for aerial combat over Europe was Lieutenant Colonel Leon Vance of the 489th Bombardment Group, who received it for keeping a damaged B-24 in the air over Normandy on June 5, 1944. Vance died on his way home to the United States in a transport plane that disappeared over the North Atlantic seven weeks later.
Two men. One survived.
The recommendation for Howard's medal did not come from his own report. He had barely written one. It came from the crews of the 401st Bombardment Group. Bomber pilots, bombardiers, radio operators, gunners. Men who had watched from their windows and turrets as a single American fighter kept them alive. Their words were what General Spaatz read that morning. Their gratitude was what the medal was made of.
By the time Howard received it, everything about the air war over Europe had changed.
In late January 1944, Jimmy Doolittle walked into his headquarters at High Wycombe and issued an order that broke 60 years of military doctrine. American fighters would no longer be tied to the bombers. They would be sent ahead of the bomber stream to hunt. Bomber crews complained that they wanted their "little friends" close by where they could see them. Doolittle did not care. He had studied the math of Schweinfurt. He had studied what happened on January 11. He understood that as long as American fighters flew defensively, the Luftwaffe would choose where and when the fighting happened. As long as the Luftwaffe could choose, the Luftwaffe could survive. He would take that choice away.
Between February 20 and February 25, 1944, the Eighth Air Force flew what history remembers as Big Week. Six days of sustained attacks on the German aircraft industry. Every heavy bomber in England. Every fighter that could fly. This time the weather was on the American side, and the Luftwaffe rose to defend the Reich as it had to. The P-51s were waiting.
On March 4, 1944, the first American fighters reached the airspace over Berlin. On March 6, the first major American attack on the capital of the Third Reich saw 69 bombers lost and 80 German fighters shot down.
The Luftwaffe kept fighting. It kept dying. By the summer of 1944, 14 of the 15 fighter groups in the Eighth Air Force were flying Mustangs. The only one that was not was the 56th Fighter Group, which stubbornly held onto its P-47 Thunderbolts out of pride and ended the war with the highest victory total of any American fighter group in Europe. But they were the exception. The rule after January 11, 1944, was the Mustang. And the rule was the destruction of the Luftwaffe.
The numbers tell the story more clearly than any narrator can. In 1943, the Luftwaffe lost about 2,400 aircraft on the Western Front. In 1944, that number rose to more than 6,000. In 1943, a new German fighter pilot arriving at his squadron had between 250 and 300 hours of flight training. By the end of 1944, that number had fallen to below 100 hours. An American replacement arriving in 1944 had more than 400 hours in his logbook.
That was the equation that Adolf Galland, the general of the German fighter arm, understood better than anyone. As he wrote in his memoirs after the war, Galland was blunt about what had happened. The appearance of American long-range escort fighters, he wrote, was the decisive factor in the defeat of the Luftwaffe. Not the bombing itself. The bombing hurt, but the German aircraft industry, dispersed across forests, railway tunnels, and small workshops, actually reached its highest monthly production figures in September 1944, building more than 3,300 fighters in a single month.
The Germans did not have a shortage of aircraft. They had a shortage of men who could fly them. And the men they could fly were being killed in the skies over their own country by escort fighters that did not turn back.
James Howard did not stay in combat much longer. On January 30, 1944, less than three weeks after Oschersleben, he shot down another Bf 110 in a battle over Braunschweig. On April 8, 1944, he shot down a Focke-Wulf 190 over the same city. It was his sixth aerial victory of the European war. His 12th of the entire conflict, including the six he had scored in China with the Flying Tigers.
Shortly after, he was sent home to train new fighter pilots at bases in the southeastern United States. The war went on without him. His squadron mates flew escort over Normandy on D-Day. They flew over the Ardennes during the German counteroffensive in December. They flew over Berlin in the final weeks of the war and returned in the spring of 1945 to a country that had almost forgotten why they had left.
Colonel Kenneth Martin, the group commander who rammed his Mustang into a Bf 110 over Halberstadt on the morning of January 11, spent 16 months as a prisoner of war at Stalag Luft. He was liberated by Soviet troops in May 1945. He returned home, resumed his career, and eventually retired as a colonel. He rarely spoke about the war.
Brigadier General Robert Travis, the man who decided to continue the mission into Germany after the recall order, later commanded combat wings in the Pacific. He was promoted to major general after the war. On August 5, 1950, he was killed in the crash of a B-29 Superfortress at Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base in California. The base was renamed in his honor. To this day, it is called Travis Air Force Base.
Adolf Galland survived the war, wrote his memoirs, and became one of the most respected voices in postwar aviation history. He died in 1996 in Remagen, Germany.
The men Howard fought that morning, the pilots of Jagdgeschwader 1, 11, and 26, mostly did not survive. Those who did rarely spoke of it. Those who wrote memoirs, as some did, described the arrival of the American long-range fighter in almost identical terms. They understood that day that the war would be lost. Not that day, not that week, not that month. But eventually. And that from that morning on, there was no piece of German airspace where a Luftwaffe pilot was safe.
James Howard returned to the United States. He married, had children, and went into business in St. Louis and later in Florida. He worked as director of a small airport near St. Petersburg. In 1991, he published a memoir. He called it "Roar of the Tiger." It is a restrained book, written by a man who never quite understood why so many people wanted to hear his story.
He died on March 18, 1995, in Bay Pines, Florida. He was 81 years old.
His Mustang, the P-51B with serial number 43-631, the aircraft the world knew as "Ding Hao," did not survive the war. After Howard returned home, the aircraft was flown by other pilots of the 354th Fighter Group. It was eventually damaged beyond repair and scrapped for parts. None of Howard's original combat aircraft exist today.
The story survived. The aircraft did not.
Eighty years have passed since the morning of January 11, 1944. The airfield at Boxted has become farmland. The airfield at Duxford has become farmland. The town of Oschersleben, once the center of Focke-Wulf production for the Third Reich, is now a quiet market town in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Old men who were boys when the bombers came still remember the day the sky was full of contrails and smoke rose from the factory beside the railway.
Somewhere in the archives of the United States Air Force lies a report, written in the businesslike, careful language of a debriefing officer, describing the actions of Major James Howell Howard on the morning of January 11, 1944. The document covers a few pages. The word hero does not appear in it.
Howard would not have allowed it. But the men whose lives he saved that morning are the reason we remember him. They were the ones who told the story. They were the ones who described in the debriefing huts at Deenethorpe that afternoon how a single Mustang appeared out of the clouds when they no longer expected help. They were the ones who, in the years that followed, wrote letters, gave interviews, and stood at veterans' gatherings to calmly say they were alive because of a man they had never met.
That is what the medal was made of. That is what the story is made of. And that is what the sky over central Germany gave to the young men in the bombers, the young men in the fighters, and the young men who came after them on the morning of January 11, 1944.
A moment when the balance shifted. A moment when the range of an American fighter, the courage of a single American pilot, and the desperate arithmetic of a war that had lasted too long all came together in the winter sky over a factory town no one had ever heard of.
The Luftwaffe would fight for another sixteen months. But the men who flew that day understood what had happened. The hunters had become the hunted. And the American bombers, for the first time in the long, terrible history of the daylight air war, had a friend who could stay with them all the way. All the way to the target. And all the way back home.