American bomber losses in 1944 and 1945 were largely due to antiaircraft fire or accident, 1,829 against 626 credited to fighter interception.107 Not for nothing was Joseph Heller’s antihero in Catch-22, a novel of the American air experience in Italy, afraid of the “goddam foul black tiers of flak . . . bursting, and booming and billowing all around.”
