ESCORT TO THE REICH

Providing top cover escort, P-51 ‘Miss Helen’ peels away across the high squadron of Fortresses of the 384th Bomb Group, part of a large force en-route to attack enemy railway marshalling yards during the final weeks of the war, 17 April 1945. 

By April 1945, the destruction of what little remained of Hitler’s war machine continued unrelenting. Unconditional surrender had been demanded by the Allies and unconditional surrender is what they would get – eventually. For even in the dying days of what the Führer had once called his ‘Thousand Year Reich’, German armies fought on. But they had precious little to fight with. Around the clock Allied bombers had pounded enemy factories, oil facilities, and transport and communication hubs into oblivion – the American Eighth Air Force by day, RAF Bomber Command by night.

It's a moment during those final ravaged weeks of the war that Anthony Saunders has chosen for his spectacular painting Escort To The Reich in which he depicts P-51D Miss Helen and other Mustangs from the 352nd Fighter Group assigned to provide top cover escort to Fortresses of the 384th Bomb Group. Both units part of a huge force tasked with destroying any last vestiges of a large railway marshalling yard in central Germany on 17 April 1945. Eight days later it would be the same 384th Bomb Group who would drop the last Eighth Air Force bombs of World War Two. On 30 April Hitler, holed up in his besieged bunker in Berlin, committed suicide. On 8 May Germany unconditionally surrendered and the war in Europe was at an end.