U.S. FIGHTER PILOT REPORTS AFTER BERLIN RAID. Lieutenant Walter E.

U.S. FIGHTER PILOT REPORTS AFTER BERLIN RAID. Lieutenant Walter E. Mimnaugh of Sterling, Connecticut, (right), reports to an intelligence officer, Captain Felix D. Williamson of Cordele, Georgia, how he destroyed two German fighter planes and damaged another in his P-47 Thunderbolt, during the Eighth U.S. Air Force noon-day raid on Berlin, February 3, 1945. Lieutenant Mimnaugh's total was brought up to 14 planes destroyed and damaged. More than 900 Thunderbolts and Mustangs left the Eighth U.S. Air Force bases to escort 1,000 B-17Flying Fortresses which dropped about 2,500 tons of indendiaries and high explosive bombs in a 45-minute attack on military and communications objectives in Berlin. As German refugees streamed into Berlin in flight before the Russians, the tremendous 300-mile long American air Armada attacked in two great waves. The first ships started such conflagrations that billowing smoke hid the targets and the following formations had to bomb by instruments. The fighter escorts strafed ground objectives, shot down 21 enemy planes and destroyed 14 on the ground. Only 35 U.S. members and five U.S. fighters were officially reported missing from the operation. Stockholm reports January 4, 1945, said that complete chaos reigned in Berlin following the raid and that German deserters and slave-labor workers were terrorizing parts of the city. Later, Nazi censors imposed a complete blackout on news of the attack and Swedish newspaper correspondents were forbidden to make any reference to events in the Reich capital.