When Linda A. Dewey of Glen Arbor was a young girl, her father liked to tell her bedtime stories.

Captain William R. Dewey piloted one
of only 10 B-24 bombers that returned to
England from the Kassel Mission.

The stories often involved people doing heroic things, like knights saving princesses.
One tale stuck with the girl. One night when Linda was six, her father told her about his experiences in World War II. The story told of a daring bombing run over Nazi Germany in which his bomber group became separated from the main body and dropped their payload not far from the main target, the city of Kassel.

“The story he told was he was in this terrible battle, that his plane had a three-foot wide hole in it and that he and his crew really had to hang on to get back to England,” Dewey said.

It turned out that her father was part of a little known aerial battle that became known as the “Kassel Mission” in which his bomber group was decimated when 150 German fighter planes engaged the 35 B-24 bombers that made up the 445th Bomber Group. According to her father’s written account, in a matter of a few minutes, 25 B-24s and 29 German fighter planes and one American fighter plane were lost. Some 118 Americans died.

The Mission

Dewey’s father was First Lt. William “Bill” R. Dewey, a 21-year-old B-24 bomber pilot based in Tibenham, England. On Sept. 27, 1944, Dewey and his crew, part of the 701st Bomber Squadron of the 445th, joined up with more than a 1,000 whose mission was to knock out Kassel, an important transportation and communications area for central Germany.

Linda Dewey

Enroute to Kassel, the 445th became separated from the main body when the lead plane for the bomber group apparently made a navigational mistake. According to an account of the Kassel Mission by George Collar, a bombardier with the 702nd Bomber Squadron, Maj. Donald McCoy, commander of the 445th, decided to have the bomber group drop its payload on a near-by city, Gottingen, rather than try and correct the navigational mistake.

The problem, as Linda Dewey described it, was that by leaving the main bomber group, the 445th also left its fighter escort. After the 445th dropped its bombs on Gottingen, the German Luftwaffe responded with 150 fighter planes. The rest, as they say is history.

Dewey and his crew were one of one of just 10 American bombers that survived the battle, and one of four that made it safely back to the base. Two gunners on the plan were severely injured during the battle and the back half of the B-24 received substantial damage.

He had to make an emergency landing near Tibenham, but everyone survived from his plane and the bomber was actually rebuilt and put back into service. In addition to the 118 Americans killed during the Kassel mission, 96 more became prisoners of war when their planes were shot down over Germany.

Unlike many World War II veterans, Dewey talked to his family about his war experiences, including the Kassel mission. Dewey and his wife, Marilyn, raised their family in Oakland County and vacationed in Leelanau County.

Linda Dewey said her father became a little distraught later in his life when there was very little information written about the mission written.

To help gather information about the botched run, Dewey formed the Kassel Mission Memorial Association in 1989 to honor the men who lost their lives, and to organize survivors. Linda Dewey said at the time of the mission, its outcome was hushed up for “morale” reasons. She said it is the largest loss by a bomber group in any single day in any single battle in history.

“It should be in the history books right there next to Custer’s Last Stand. These men deserve to be honored, not forgotten,” she said.

The Kassel Mission Memorial

Dewey said one can’t tell the story of the Kassel Mission Memorial Association without telling the story of Walter Hassenpflug, a 12-year-old boy when American bombers flew over his hometown, Ludwigsau, in central Germany. He was also a member of the Hilter Youth movement.

When the Luftwaffe started shooting bombers out of the sky and bomber crews were parachuting into his town, Hassenpflug and his friends helped “capture” the American airmen as they landed.

“Walter said later in his life he was haunted by the bombings and he wanted to find out about pilots and crew from both sides,” Dewey said. Hassenpflug placed an ad in the Eighth Air Force Newsletter in 1983 stating he was looking for information on the Americans he turned in, especially one man. “He said he was looking for one man in particular. One of the Americans he helped capture he had to lay on top of him until the local police could take the man,” Dewey said.

That man was 1st Lt. Frank Bertram, a navigator with the 702nd. When Bertram saw Hassenpflug’s ad in the newsletter, he contacted the man who had turned him in to the German authorities. Hassenpflug had already contacted many of the German pilots involved in the air battle, and researched every crash site around his hometown.

During this time, Bill Dewey continued his search for people who were involved with the 445th and the Kassel Mission. In 1987, the Deweys went to England for a reunion of the Second Air Division. Linda Dewey said her mother overheard a man talking about having met a German who set up a meeting with some of the German pilots involved in the battle. “Mom said she went over immediately to Dad and it turned out the guy speaking was Frank Bertram. Later on in life Dad would say, ‘God blessed me that day,’ in finding Bertram,” Dewey said.

A year earlier, Bill Dewey had asked the editor of the Eighth Air Force newsletter to ask for people to submit stories about the Kassel Mission. There was such a response that the editor devoted an entire issue of the newsletter to the mission. Those stories and interviews were taken by Dewey and made into a book, The Kassel Mission Report.

With the stories in print, Dewey, Bertram and Hassenpflug worked with U.S. and German authorities, as well as the local community of Ludwigsau, to create a German-American Airmen Memorial at the site of the battle. The memorial was dedicated in August 1990. Linda Dewey said many airmen from both sides attended, including the Dewey family, with government and military officials.

Bill Dewey died in March 2007 at the age of 84, some 13 years after he helped form the Kassel Mission Memorial Association. The group is now known as the Kassel Mission Historical Society.

Linda Dewey said her purpose in promoting the society and its work is keeping her father’s dream alive. “Dad wanted people to know about this battle, that he owed it to the guys who died on both sides. He felt that if he had been born in Germany he would have flown for the Luftwaffe and that he was blessed to have been born in the United States,” she said.

Linda Dewey is one of seven people who give presentations about the battle. She lives in Glen Arbor and said the historical society may soon be based there. The PBS series History Detectives premiere episode for the upcoming season will feature a story about one of the men involved in the Kassel Mission. The episode will be broadcast on WCMU Public Television Monday, June 30 at 9 p.m.

For more about the battle, those involved with it and the historical society, visit to www.kasselmission.com.