22 Aug 44 P-47 near Tours sur Marne (nr Athis)

[rob van den nieuwendijk]

Hello all,

On 22 Aug 44 a P-47 was shot down near Tours sur Marne at 14.20 hours (German time). This happened during a low level strafing attack of Mustangs and Thunderbolts on Tours sur Marne airfield. The P-47 was hit by groundfire and crashed 4 km east of the airfield. Who can please provide more details? Thanks.

Best regards,
Rob

[udf_00]

Possible : 42-27175
http://p-47.database.pagesperso-oran...e/42-2xxxx.htm

[rob van den nieuwendijk]

Hello udf_00,

Thanks - looks like the P-47 I am after. Do you have more details on this P-47D of 358 FG/365 FS? Pilot Harry D. Bassler KIA.

Best regards,
Rob

[KM1957]

Lt. Bassler was lost in CH-B 42-27175. No MACR has been found yet, but according to the squadron write up of the mission, "The P-47 piloted by 1st Lt. Harry D. Bassler was seen to mush into the ground and crash near Chalons during the engagement with the enemy." I have a little information on Lt. Bassler if you can let me know what it is you would like.

Here is what I have found on airfields attacked this date by 9th Air Force units--not sure if Tours Sur Marne is close to any of these or not, sorry.

358 FG attacked Creil and Chalons A/D's. 367 FS destroyed one Me 410 and damaged two Me 410's and one He 111 at Creil.

367 FG hit an A/D north of Laon and destroyed an unidentified plane on the ground in the Fressabcourt area.

356 FS destroyed four Me 109's on ground in Beauvais rea.

474 FG hit A/D's near Amiens and St. Quentin. At the St. Quentin a Me 410 was destroyed and two He 111's were damaged.

For all the above claims I have the names of individual scorers if needed. Hope this helps.

Kent

[hautemarnechris]

Rob and Kent

sorry this a bit late in the day but I wonder if you can help.

I'm trying to verify a report that Tours sur Marne airfield was attacked in August 1944. The report claims that the Luftwaffe unit based there - which was I think Jg76 - suffered severe losses (the report claims the unit was "exterminated").

Rob - do you know how bad the losses were? Presumably,this was III./Jg76

Kent - you mention "the squadron write-up of the mission". I'd be really grateful if you could tell me which USAAF squadron(s) carried out the attack. And, even better, what they claimed in the way of damage to the enemy.

Thank you Gentlemen.

Chris

[hautemarnechris]

Following on from my last post. I've looked at the Ultra decrypts for this.

III./Jg76 was at Athis (sometimes called Tours-sur-Marne) airfield on 22/08/44. The following day it reported a sharpdrop in serviceability which was questioned by JagdKorps II.

On the 25/08/44 Jg76 responded saying that its "high losses" since its previous strength report a couple of days earlier were

18 a/c missing
3 a/c 100% damaged
2 Belly landings
5 Shot up

They don't sound like ground attack losses to me and, anyway, are far more severe than Kent mentions in the attack mounted by 358fg/365FS on Chalons-sur-Marne in which Brassler was killed.

Rob, may I ask what is your source for the ground attack on Athis/Tours sur Marne on the 22/8/44?

My interest is in establishing whether or not during August there was an attack on Athis in which the resident unit was wiped out. Jg76 took over Athis from II./Jg3 on 20/21 August.

II./Jg3 reported no significant losses from airfield attack during August.

Therefore, my reasoning is that if there were significant losses at Athis from air attack it must have been when III./Jg76 were there. Alternatively, if there weren't any significant losses to ground attack at Athis then my source is incorrect.

Help please - any contribution would be very gratefully received.

[drgondog]

For what it is worth there were no 8th AF claims in France 19-22 August.

The 479th had a very big day at Nancy on the 18th but the t/e aircraft were identifued as Ju-88 and He 111s.

[Larry deZeng]

Please excuse me for butting in here. I have full Allied intelligence data on all French airfields with current updates throughout the war. Among the 1,400+ listings of all airfields, landing grounds, field airstrips, dummy/decoy airfields, etc., there is no "Athis" or "Tours-sur-Marne" after summer 1940. According to this data, III./JG 53 was briefly at "Tours-sur-Marne" in mid-June 1940. Neither "Athis" or "Tours-sur-Marne" are ever mentioned again in the Luftwaffe documentation. After that date, only Épernay-Plivot is mentioned. That airfield lies less than 5 km west of the village of Athis. It was common for the Germans to call an airfield by one name while the Allies called in by another name, and that may be the case here.

Another possibility is that "Athis" is confused with Laon-Athies, which is 66 km northwest of Tours-sur-Marne.

I think this confusion needs to be sorted out before you can get an answer to your question.

BTW, I have the books on 8th AAF Fighter Command claims, both air and ground and the 9th AAF equivalent for fighter-bomber missions. Neither mentions an attack on airfields at Athis, Tours-sur-Marne, Laon-Athies or Épernay-Plivot during the second half of August 1944. That dosn't mean that one did not occur, but in an attack claiming the "extermination" of an entire Gruppe of fighters one might think it would be mentioned.

L.

[Larry deZeng]

One further thought. A large Front Repair Workshop was located at Épernay-Plivot in August 1944 (Frontreparaturbetrieb GL Épernay)
(FpN: L 19375 AG). It could be that Plivot was packed with a number of aircraft awaiting repairs or waiting to be picked up after completing repairs. There could be a connection here. The Allies knew where all of the FRBs were in France and usually tried to bomb or strafe them because of relatively large numbers of aircraft parked there.

BTW: III./JG 76 lost 41 x Bf 109 G-6/G-14s during the month of August to "enemy effect" - this is lost and damaged due to enemy action. The figure is not broken down by in the air and on the ground.

L.

[hautemarnechris]

Thanks so much for your responses. As usual a lot of really helpful info. I'm not sure where to start.

There definately was an airfield variously called Athis / Tours-sur-marne and sometimes Plivot - all of those names are used in the Ultra decrypts (the ones which have the intelligence appreciatin/interpretation added).

After the Luftwaffe left it was used briefly in 1944 by the USAAF and then abandoned. According to local historians modern day Epernay/Plivot a/f - a few Ks to the West - was built to replace Athis which was so badly damaged that it didn't make economic sense to rebuild it. Like most of the wartime airfields in the Chalons area - Vraux, Conentre, Vertus and others - it was returned to farmland after the war.

I was aware of Laon-Aethis and have taken the possibility of misspellings, etc into account when trying to make sense of that pesky Athis airfield.

My source describes the airfield as "Tours" by which he meant Tours sur Marne - the source was located only a few kilometers away at Bouzy so I'm quite certain he wasn't talking about the other Tours which is several hundred Ks distant.

II./Jg3 transferred there on the 10/11th August and left 20/21st August. I'm not quite sure who was there before - possibly Jg27 because it sent a signal to II JagdKorps for II./Jg3 on about the 11th saying that Athis/Plivot was cleared for landing. Jg27 (can't remember the gruppe off-hand) had been recalled to Germany and left its few remaining aircraft behind for II./Jg3 (according to Ultra)

Athis lay just across the river Marne from Tours-sur-Marne. The info about Epernay/Plivot repair shop looks like a really interesting line of enquiry. I'm beginning to wonder if Athis was, as I think Larry suggests actually Epernay / Plivot, - the a/f being moved a few Ks further west of Athis village after the war.

So far as bad weather preventing raids on the 22nd August go - I also wasn't able to trace the raid referred to by Kent. But I put that down to my amateur status in matters like this.

Like Larry I think it would be very unlikely that the destruction of a Gruppe would not go unremarked - that's probably why OKL (OberKommand Luft?) queried Jg76's 23/8/44 returns via JagdKorps II. Surely the losses they reported amount at least to the majority of a Gruppe?

I'm satisfied that II./Jg3 was at Athis/Plivot/Tours from about 10th to 20th August and that they didn't take much in the way of losses on the ground during that time. I'm also satisfied that III./Jg76 took over the same field from II./Jg3 and were there for about a week before they were withdrawn. I Imagine the a/f was then trashed as part of Model's expertise in scorched earth but I haven't got that far in the Ultra decrypts yet. A/F demolition preparations are usually recorded in the Ultra files and I'd be surprised if its not there - especially because the German High Command seemed to be getting very touchy about units withdrawing prematurely and abandoning useful equipment at that point in the break-out.

The only question in my mind is whether the losses recorded by Jg76 on the 23rd were the result of an attack on the airfield or were air combat losses. I don't know enough about this subject area to make a judgement which is why I asked. But commonsense tells me that missing aircraft and belly landings suggest air combat. Also, was the raid in which Brassler lost his life connected to the big losses reported by Jg76 on the 23rd August (Rob who started this whole darn thing off mentions a low-level strafing of "Tours-sur-Marne" airfield). It would be good to know his source because that might settle the matter.

My sole interest in this is to either verify or debunk a claim by an Allied agent working in Bouzy that he called down a raid on "Tours" airfield which "exterminated" the Udet. Obviously it's a ridiculous or at least grossly exagerated claim but there might be a bit of truth in it - for example, could the agent be referring to the losses suffered by Jg76 on 22nd August? And could that have been the raid in which Brassler lost his life?

This probably doesn't seem very important - and in a way it isn't but I'm writing a book about this individual and I have to be fastiduous about the detail before I start trashing an individual's reputation in print.

Once again thank you everybody - I never fail to be helped here by people whose knowledge and research skills is, frankly, awesome. For example, if it wasn't for Nick Beale's suggestion I would never have thought of looking at Ultra and wouldn't have known how to make sense of it. I love this forum but I'm still getting to grips with its subject matter which, as you may have grasped, is slightly tangential to my focus of interest. But I'd love to hear some more ideas - after 5 days reading Ultra decrypts I'm badly in need of stimulation!