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UNIQUE HISTORICAL EVENTS AT TIME OF NORMANDY INVASION

 

Flight Lieutenant Grant McRae meets the “Night Ghost of St.Trond” in air raid over Stuttgart

By Rolf A. Piro, Mississauga, Ontario

Thanks to my personal meetings with Grant McRae and help from local war veterans and local historians in  Stuttgart, I was able to piece my own experiences of these events together as follows:

On mission to deliver a Hiroshima of smaller scale

 

Stuttgart 1944

On a warm summer night on July 25, 1944 shortly before midnight, Grant McRae and his Lancaster bomber  crew of seven left Dunholme Lodge airport near Lincoln in England for a bombing mission over Stuttgart / Germany. Grant McRae’s plane was joined by an armada of 800 bombers that exceeded 100 km in length making their way over the English Channel via France towards Germany. The fighting in Normandy became more intense and allied strategy was to bomb the German cities to shorten the war.

 

Stuttgart 1944

On the Belgian coast of St.Trond, night fighter ace, Major Heinz-Wolfgang Schnaufer also nicknamed the  “Night Ghost of St. Trond” by the British aircrews for his outstanding service as a “night fighter” waited for the inevitable call to action. As expected, a bomber formation was sighted.  Schnaufer took off with his Messerschmitt fighter, hot in pursuit of the leader of the bomber formation.

While initially flying at 15,000 ft., he was demanding the utmost performance from his ME110. He then caught  up with the bomber formation and was now flying a few meters below the squadron leader. His usual method was to head where the radar jamming was the heaviest and then search, visually making his attacks with his upward firing 20mm cannon. His intention is to cause a navigational confusion among the planes that followed the squadron leader. Schnaufer, at precisely 1:50 a.m., shoots down the squadron leader before he could reach the city of Stuttgart. Then after circling the crash site near the town of Calw, Schnaufer made another attack with his fighter’s rotating turret firing upward from a blind spot striking Grant McRae’ Lancaster’s starboard engines. In the planes muzzle, McRae looked to his right, saw flames and bailed out.

It is now early in the morning of July 26, 1944 and Grant McRae had already dropped his bomb load over  Stuttgart. My mother and my two brothers and I stayed at the Wagenburg tunnel air raid shelter, which is approx. 1,200 ft away from the Central Railway Station in Stuttgart. This air raid shelter was made up of two tunnels, one tunnel approx. 30 ft. in dia. and a smaller tunnel 24 ft in dia built earlier by Baresel Construction Co. in joint venture with other local firms interlinking both tunnels to each other. The tunnels were filled with thousand of people who had become homeless from previous air raids. Young Red Cross women provided blankets, coffee and tea for the countless people crouched on the floor, while devastating damage was done outside the air raid shelter to the substance of the inner city.

Witness to Horror

This bombing inferno revealed the most devastating sight – an event I will never forget. 

Damage to the city of Stuttgart resulted in more than one hundred thousand people to become homeless. The  inner core of the city with all its cultural places had been hit for the second time. Even the crematorium was destroyed this preventing the corpses to be cremated. A woman held the remains of her parents in her arms; they were actually mummified from the heat that reached a temperature of 1000 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Mother and children from Stuttgart

The air raids lasted on the average 20 minutes. We left the air raid shelter in the early morning hours to visit  some friends in the vicinity of Calwer Strasse. A heavy bomb exploded at the nearby Hospital Strasse and destroyed a water main that killed 64 people instantly. A Red Cross nurse whom we had met earlier in the tunnel was also there.

Paul Verry another RCAF veteran flyer that bombed Stuttgart during the war and now lives in Mississauga  stated to me in private conversation in May 2003 that he flew his Lancaster airplane right through the flak bombardment and dropped incendiary bombs with explosion delay. He could see the burning houses and streets from the air.

 

Forbidden Comments

Official policy was not to take any pictures and not to discuss the war effort.

While listening to the gut-wrenching emotions of the people an occasional statement had been made and I heard  this statement, “Why repeat the bombing of targets that had already been destroyed before”. To me as a young boy it was interesting to see what the pain and the feeling of the people on the ground were. An elderly gentlemen whom we met in the air raid shelter had the courage to mention a subject people on which people have been silent. Why do we have a dictator that initially never received more than 30% of peoples vote finally becomes elected? – Was it the desperation of the millions of people that have driven them to this? And why was democracy not given a change to prevent a war?

Here was another comment made that I never forget: “When about 90% of GNP (Gross National Product) is  war reparation from WWI, followed by desperate measures to drive millions of people into unemployment and soup kitchens and regrettably to jobs in the armament industry” it makes people to hang on to the last straw of hope to obtain employment and feed their family.  Mark Twain had made this remarkable statement:  “Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.” --- Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger, 1916, Ch9.

Mostly young people on both sides fight in the war

It seems to me that always young people fight the wars. Grant McRae was born on June 20, 1922 and Heinz-Wolfgang Schnaufer on February 16, 1922 both young men 22 years of age at that time when they fought for their country. Schnaufer had to land at Echterdingen airfield, less than five kilometres away from where we lived at the time. During the war the Luftwaffe based night fighters at Echterdingen shared the airfield with other aircraft. The fighters flew interceptions against the many Allied air attacks on Stuttgart and other targets in southern Germany. A concrete runway of 1,400 meters was cratered by the Allied bombers and eventually put the airfield out of commission. In the summer of 1945 the year I turned ten years old, I rode with my older friend on the back seat of a small motor cycle along the cratered runway only to get chased away by auxiliary security forces with guns. The details of my own experiences and those from the Echterdingen airfields helped Grant McRae to his great amazement, piece these events together. 

Schnaufer’s latest version of Bf-110’s airplane that he has flown was displayed in London’s Hyde Park after  the war. The tail section with the markings of 121 confirmed kills of British Bombers and is now on display in the Imperial War Museum in London, England, where it represents a vital part on the defining moments of English, Canadian, American and German history of WWII. Grant McRae now lives in Etobicoke, Ontario;    and when we meet we treat each other with mutual respect.