Wolfpack at War

After ‘Hub’ Zemke whipped them into shape, the P-47 pilots of the 56th Fighter Group went on to score 992 1/2 confirmed kills.

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By Don Hollway

As the survivors of the 56th Fighter Group straggled back in over the British field, their commanding officer came down out of the control tower to meet them. Lieutenant Colonel Hubert “Hub” Zemke had listened in helplessly to the radio chatter as his men met the enemy over German-occupied Holland for the first time. It was April 1943, and the Luftwaffe was still a formidable fighting force; from the confused radio traffic Zemke could tell the combat had not gone well. Missing from the running commentary was the voice of Major Dave Schilling, the 62nd Squadron commander to whom Zemke had entrusted the mission. Now, as Schilling’s plane put down, Zemke took a jeep over to find out what had gone wrong.

The major’s fighter, Hairless Joe, had taken some hits. But the radio, Schilling explained, had gone out before the group ever reached the Dutch coast. Rather than abort, the dashing but impetuous Schilling had retained command and, upon sighting a pair of bandits, had led the 62nd’s attack. Scoreless, ambushed by Messerschmitt Bf-109s and Focke-Wulf Fw-190s, they and the group’s two remaining squadrons, the 61st and 63rd, belatedly escaped back over the English Channel. Many of the missing pilots, their aircraft running low on fuel, had simply set down at the first English airfields they came across, but two did not return. It had been, as Zemke later recalled, “an ignominious combat debut.”

Another commander might have taken it as an indictment of his own leadership skills. Zemke had joined the 56th only the previous year, a 28-year-old lieutenant with experience only as a combat observer in Great Britain and as a fighter pilot instructor in Russia. Zemke’s uncle had died flying for Germany in 1916, and two cousins were killed on the Russian Front while Zemke was in Moscow. In the rapidly expanding U.S. Army Air Forces, however, promotion came easily, and he had risen quickly to captain, then major, and ultimately, as a lieutenant colonel, was placed in command of the group. That the 56th had lost 18 men even before shipping for England he attributed to the combination of inexperienced, gung-ho flyboys and a brand-new, trouble prone fighter–Republic’s P-47B Thunderbolt, the “Jug.”

“The pilots were all eager young fellows who thought the Thunderbolt was a terrific fighter simply because they had flown nothing else,” said Zemke. Above 20,000 feet the P-47 was capable of speeds up to 400 mph and the quickest roll rate of any fighter in the U.S. inventory. But even with a turbosupercharged Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp radial engine capable (in later models) of 2,800 hp, the plane required almost a half-mile run just to get 50 feet off the ground. Zemke noted that the aircraft “accelerated poorly and climbed not too much better from a slow airspeed” and that “overall the P-47 was a big disappointment.”

In England, the 56th took over an ex-RAF (Royal Air Force) grass strip at Horsham Saint Faith, Norfolk County. (When he was turning over the airstrip to Zemke, Schilling, and pilots Goldstein, Shiltz and Altschuler, the Royal Air Force station chief grinned, saying, “Sounds like I’m handing over to the Luftwaffe!”).

Equipped with new P-47Cs, they joined the 4th Fighter Group on a couple of “rodeos”–fighter sweeps intended to lure the Luftwaffe into combat, but Zemke had to abort because of an oxygen system malfunction. And on the group’s first “ramrod”–a bomber escort mission for which the P-47, with its blunt, high-drag nose and resultant short range, had never been designed–his own radio went out. (Because of faulty ignition systems, early model P-47s suffered from inordinate radio static.) His men bounced some bogeys over Walcheren Island and knocked one down–realizing too late the fighters were British.

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