The
BloodyHundredth

The week opened with a return to Bremen. Intense flak and swarming fighters. Seven of the 100th's B-17s were shot down. They had already limped home from this target once. This time the defenses were even heavier.

The next day — no rest — they flew again. This time to the Focke-Wulf factory at Marienburg in East Prussia, one of the deepest penetrations yet. The exhausted crews gathered for briefing before dawn.

The third consecutive day. The target shocked them: Münster's city center. For the first time, the 8th Air Force was targeting a civilian population center rather than military or industrial installations.

Two hundred to two hundred and fifty German fighters massed to intercept the bomber stream. They hit the low group first — the 100th Bomb Group.

Of the thirteen aircraft that reached the target, twelve were shot down.

The week ended with the second Schweinfurt raid. The 8th Air Force lost 60 bombers that day. By 14 October — exactly 109 days after their first mission — 27 of the original 35 crews of the 100th Bomb Group had been lost.

The Bloody Hundredth legend was born.

Not every mission was a bloodbath. In November 1943, the 100th led a bombing raid on the heavy-water plant at Rjukan, Norway — a facility central to Germany's atomic research program. The mission was credited with delaying Nazi efforts to develop a nuclear weapon. It was the kind of strategic strike that reminded the crews why they were there.

Operation Argument — known as Big Week — launched on 20 February 1944. For six consecutive days, the 8th Air Force hurled every available bomber at aircraft factories across Germany. The 100th struck at airframe plants, engine works, and assembly facilities. Losses were heavy on both sides, but the combined assault crippled German fighter production and forced the Luftwaffe into a war of attrition it could not win.

The 100th flew multiple missions during Big Week, bombing enemy airfields, industries, and marshalling yards. V-1 missile launch sites in France were added to the target list. The tempo was relentless. Crews flew mission after mission with barely a day's rest between.

Then came Berlin. On 4 March 1944, the 8th Air Force launched its first daylight raid on the German capital — the most heavily defended target in Europe. Ring after ring of flak batteries. Swarms of fighters. The 100th was in the thick of it.

On 5 March, Colonel Harding — the beloved commander who had held the 100th together through its darkest hours — was hospitalized with gallstones. Lieutenant Colonel John Bennett assumed command. His first full day in charge was 6 March 1944. The target: Berlin again.

The 100th lost fifteen bombers that day. Half the group.

On 19 April 1944, Colonel Robert Kelly arrived to take permanent command of the 100th. Eleven days later, Kelly was killed on his first combat mission. Bennett assumed temporary command once more. In May, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas S. Jeffrey — a veteran of the 390th Bomb Group who had flown Black Thursday at Schweinfurt — chose to command the 100th over the more prestigious 95th. He saw the harder challenge and took it. Jeffrey would lead the group through D-Day, the Russian shuttle missions, and the long grind to victory.

In the predawn darkness of 6 June 1944, the crews of the 100th Bomb Group were roused from their bunks for a briefing unlike any other. The room fell silent as the curtain was pulled back from the mission map. The coast of Normandy. This was the day.

The 100th flew three separate missions on D-Day — hitting coastal gun positions and fortifications ahead of the ground assault. They bombed through solid overcast, guided by radar, dropping their loads just minutes before the first wave of infantry hit the beaches. By evening, the crews were exhausted. Three missions in a single day. But the invasion was on.

Two weeks after D-Day, the 100th embarked on one of the war's most extraordinary missions. Under Colonel Jeffrey's command, the group attacked an oil refinery at Ruhland — south of Berlin, north of Dresden — and then instead of turning back for England, continued east. Across Poland. Across the vast expanse of the Soviet Union. They landed at Mirgorod in Ukraine, completing the first American shuttle bombing mission from England to Russia.

Colonel Jeffrey had loaded thirty cases of bourbon aboard the lead aircraft to reinforce the goodwill gesture. The crews received Russian identification passes and pocket dictionaries. After eleven hours in the air, the relief of landing safely was overwhelming. Everyone saluted everyone else and shook hands in a confusion of American sergeants and Russian soldiers.

A second Russian shuttle mission followed in September 1944, this time striking targets in Poland and Hungary before landing at Soviet bases. The 100th also flew two low-level supply drops to the French Maquis — resistance fighters operating behind enemy lines — earning the French Croix de Guerre with Palm.

Through the second half of 1944, the 100th turned its attention to Germany's lifeblood: synthetic oil. The refineries at Merseburg, Ruhland, Politz, and Hamburg became regular targets — and regular killing grounds. The Germans defended their oil installations with a ferocity that matched anything the 100th had faced over Berlin.

Merseburg alone became synonymous with dread. The flak over the Leuna synthetic oil works was some of the most concentrated in Europe. Crews who had survived twenty missions would go pale at the word "Merseburg" during briefing.

The ground war pushed east through France, through the Ardennes — where the 100th supported Allied forces during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 — and into the German heartland. The group struck at marshalling yards, bridges, factories, and docks. On New Year's Eve 1944, the 100th went to Hamburg and lost twelve aircraft — one of the group's worst single-mission losses of the entire war.

But the 100th had one more mission — perhaps its most important. In the final days of the war, the group participated in Operation Chowhound, dropping food supplies to starving Dutch civilians in the occupied Netherlands. The same bomb bays that had carried high explosives over Bremen, Berlin, and Merseburg now carried crates of rations to a desperate population on the edge of famine.

The B-17s flew at rooftop level — two hundred feet — over Dutch cities, with German anti-aircraft crews standing beside their guns under a fragile ceasefire. Dutch civilians flooded into the streets, waving, weeping, climbing onto rooftops to watch the bombers that had once filled them with terror now bringing salvation. Crews who had steeled themselves against the sight of cities burning found themselves overcome at the sight of a city being fed.