Damned to Glory, by Colonel Robert L Scott, Jr. – 1944 (Chapter: “Desert Rats”) [Lloyd Howe]

This illustration, for the chapter “Desert Rats”, illustrates the “Cape Bon Massacre” of April 22, 1943, when a force of Royal Air Force and South African Air Force Kittyhawk fighters shot down 14 Me 323 transports of Kampfgruppe zbV [“zur besonderen Verwendung” – “For Special Use”] 323.

As described by Colonel Scott…

The Warhawks of the 57th had taken a terrible toll from the enemy that day.  [April 18, 1943]  Intelligence figures showed that some fifty-eight transports and sixteen Messerschmitts had been destroyed, in addition to the three Snappers which the Spitfires had shot down.

The next day was the first anniversary of the organization of one of the South African squadrons of the 7th Wing, and Col. Doug Loftus, the Wing Commander, decided to lead the patrol.  Shortly after dawn the Springbok lads ran into another Axis convoy and practically annihilated it.  Out of some twenty transports they destroyed fourteen, and again enemy carcasses were strewn on the sea and along the beaches of the Bay of Tunis.

But this day was only a prologue for the Safricans.  Three days later, they spotted what looked like a convoy of monstrous ships –  a formation of some thirty-one giant, six-engined, six-wheeled Messerschmitt-323s, and fifteen-plus fighters, over the same spot.  The ensuing battle – if you care to call it such, for it was nothing but wartime murder – offered an incredible sight.  The huge ships looked like so many defenseless birds.

The Spits, commanded by that legendary American figure, Lance Wade of Arizona, who had fought in the Battle of Britain, in the East African campaign, and in the Western Desert, took on the enemy fighters and Lance chalked up his twenty-first confirmed victory.  The Springbok pilots were led by Major Jack Parsonson of East London, South Africa.

This enemy aerial fleet had just that morning left its base in Sicily; they were winging their way toward Tunis when the British pilots jumped them.  When spotted they were near the coast, just about fifty feet above the water.  Parsonson immediately ordered a head-on attack to break up their tight formation.  The Allied pilots dove into their ranks, and within seconds five of the huge flying locomotives hit the sea in flames.

Then the Safricans went in from all sides and hunted them down like wolves until they had destroyed every one.  It was a terrible slaughter – the sky was filled with a welter of propellers as the lumbering transports went hurtling down into the sea.  Looking over the nose of his ship, Rosie DuToit saw hundreds of enemy soldiers spilling out of their planes into the water, struggling in vain to get away from the gunfire of the Kittyhawks.

It was just like shooting pigeons, only a bit easier.  The fight had been going on for about five minutes when DuToit heard someone call over the radio: “There are three of the blighters left.  Has anybody got any more ammunition?”

Someone had.

Meanwhile the Spit boys were busy with the fifteen-plus enemy fighters, and dogfights were going on up above.  But the fight seemed to have been knocked out of the Messerschmitts, and they fought half-heartedly.  This was a big day for a number of the Polish boys flying Spits – they went after the enemy fighters with vengeance; three of them accounted for two apiece out of the ten shot down.

As DuToit and his fellow-pilots left the scene, all they could see was great patches of burning oil, and hundreds of Nazi soldiers struggling in the water.  By the flame that surrounded the wrecks the boys could tell that the transports had been loaded with gasoline; some of them might also have been carrying light tanks and other armor to reinforce Von Arnim’s ground forces.  With the transports had gone down some 60,000 gallons of badly needed gasoline – all within a few miles of the Axis panzers on the Tunisian wedge.

By coincidence, the Spitfires of No. 1 Squadron were over the nearby coastal city of Hergla at 7:55 a.m., waiting to escort Warhawks of the American 79th Fighter Group.  But the Americans were late that morning, and when the similar-looking Kittyhawks flew by, the Spitfire pilots mistook their identity and joined them as escort instead.

Off Cape Bon there was a slight mist over a perfectly calm Mediterranean.  At 8:30 a.m. about 10 miles out, a Spitfire pilot beheld a remarkable sight: 15 giant Me-323s flying in V formations made up of 11 in front with a smaller V of five tucked behind, like a chevron.  They were losing altitude rapidly, preparing for a landing on the peninsula.

Somehow the Kittyhawks missed the transports at first, so the Spitfires made a fast diving attack that downed two Me-323s.  Then, with No. 2 Squadron’s Kittyhawks joining the Spitfires to fend off a dozen Messerschmitt Me-109 and Focke-Wulf FW-190 escorts, the Kittyhawks of Nos. 4 and 5 Squadrons came around to take their turn at the transports.

I first ordered a head-on attack to break up their tight formation, and at once five of them crashed into the sea, recalled Major John E. Parsonson, leader of No. 5 Squadron.  Then we went in from all sides and hunted them till we had shot them to bits.  Amplifying on that last part, Parsonson said, we hunted them like wolves.

Since many of the Me-323s were carrying fuel, the South Africans found it frighteningly easy to set them ablaze.  One good machine-gun burst was usually all it took to set fire to the wing fuel tanks of one of the transport’s six engines, after which the flames inevitably spread to the cargo of metal drums.  Whole burning planes plunged nose-first into the sea, making enormous expanding ripples on the calm surface.  One Me-323, catching a full blast from a Kittyhawk at a 250-yard range, simply disintegrated in midair in a blinding flash.  Still others broke in half at the wing, and the two pieces spun crazily down.

The transports that were carrying troops were harder targets, and the South Africans expended a great deal of ammunition bringing them down.  Lieutenant Britten recalled that when he slew his giant it didn’t catch fire all that easily.  But when they finally did go down, scores of troops would tumble out into the water, trying to escape.

By 8:50 a.m. the massacre of the giants was over.  In that short 20 minutes, 14 of the 16 Me-323s had been destroyed.  The Germans lost 119 airmen; only 19 crew members were rescued from the waters off Tunis.  And during the encounter, Nos. 1 and 2 squadrons contributed to shooting down six of the escorting fighters, so Nos. 4 and 5 squadrons finished off the transports almost undisturbed.

It was only afterward that a few 109s and Fw-190s found their way down to our level, Britten recalled, and I clearly remember doing a head-on attack with an Fw-190.  Fortunately for both of us neither of us was able to get our guns on to each other, but the Fw-190 passed so close above that I heard his engine.

For the price of one fighter lost in action on April 22, the South African Air Force had achieved a decisive victory in the battle over supplies.  A few days later, one of the surviving Gigants was destroyed in an Allied strafing attack on Tunis, leaving only one Me-323 to return to Trapani airfield.  Kesselring was aghast when he learned what happened to his Me-323s.  He was forced to stop all daylight air convoys immediately and to switch to a smaller number of night flights.  Even those convoys, however, were subject to attack from night fighters based at Malta.

Further information about the “Cape Bon Massacre” can be found at History.net and WW2Aircraft.net, while Colonel Rosy du Toit’s obituary (he died in April, 2009) can be found at the Telegraph. 

Reference

Green, William, The Warplanes of the Third Reich, Doubleday and Company, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1972