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November 23, 2023 - January 21, 2024
The technology needed to fight a prolonged, full-scale bomber war was not available until the early 1940s and, by the closing days of that first-ever bomber war, was already being rendered obsolete by jet engine aircraft, rocket-powered missiles, and atomic bombs.
In this incredible war, a boy of nineteen or twenty could be fighting for his life over Berlin at eleven o’clock in the morning and be at a London hotel with the date of his dreams at nine that evening.
From this point until the end of the war, all Eighth Air Force bombers were either Fortresses or B-24 Liberators, the only American bombers designed for long-range, high-altitude strikes.
Three thousand of America’s best and brightest airmen were cast aloft by each mission, ten to a ‘ship,’ every ship with a characteristic nickname,
Jimmy Stewart was a bomber boy and so was the “King of Hollywood,” Clark Gable.
There were ten men in the crew of an Eighth Air Force heavy bomber. The pilot and his co-pilot sat in the cockpit, side by side; the navigator and bombardier were just below, in the plane’s transparent Plexiglas nose; and directly behind the pilot was the flight engineer, who doubled as the top turret gunner. Further back in the plane, in a separate compartment, was the radio operator, who manned a top-side machine gun; and at mid-ship there were two waist gunners and a ball turret gunner, who sat in a revolving Plexiglas bubble that hung—fearfully vulnerable—from the underside of the
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American and British bomber boys had the most dangerous job in the war.
In October 1943, fewer than one out of four Eighth Air Force crew members could expect to complete his tour of duty: twenty-five combat missions.
Only 14 percent of fliers assigned to Major Egan’s Bomb Group when it arrived in England in May 1943 made it to their twenty-fifth mission. By the end of the war, the Eighth Air Force would have more fatal casualties—26,000—than the entire United States Marine Corps. Seventy-seven percent of the Americans who flew against the Reich before D-Day would wind up as casualties.
Saturday Evening Post story of the Regensburg Raid by Lt. Col. Beirne Lay, Jr., later the co-author, with Sy Bartlett, of Twelve O’Clock High!, the finest novel and movie to come out of the European air war. The Regensburg-Schweinfurt mission of August 17, 1943, was the biggest, most disastrous American air operation up to that time. Sixty bombers and nearly 600 men were lost.
Beirne Lay was flying with the Hundredth that day as an observer in a Fortress called Piccadilly Lilly,
When Cleven arrived there on Sunday morning, October 23, there was a reunion of the Hundredth, which by the end of the war would have nearly a thousand of its fliers in German prison camps. Half of Cleven’s original squadron were prisoners at Sagan;
no nation had ever fought a full-scale bomber war prior to World War II.
Eaker would increase the size of the Eighth Air Force in England from seven men and no planes in February 1942 to 185,000 men and 4,000 planes by December 1943.
The Eighth Air Force would never find a way to bomb with maximum precision and maximum protection. This threw it into a conundrum that led irrevocably to carpet bombing,
In this air brawl between German fighters and unescorted American bombers, Eaker was confident that the Eighth would prevail. It was one of the largest mistakes of the war.
Rooney went to Thurleigh with the 306th; Cronkite went to Molesworth with the 303rd; and two reporters flew with LeMay’s 305th.
The nose art on the bombers was one of the first things that had caught his attention on arriving at Bassingbourn. Neither the Nazis nor the British had anything like it, and Marine Corps and Navy regulations forbade it.
favorite subjects of the amateur nose cone artists were voluptuous girls in pinup poses popularized by the work of commercial artists George Petty, Gil Elvgren, and the Peruvian Alberto Vargas. Coyly seductive and impossibly beautiful,
Even Hitler knew Gable was in England. Hermann Göring offered his fliers a reward equaling $5,000 to bring him down. Gable,
“We were all on the same side, then,” Walter Cronkite explained later, “and most of us newsmen abandoned any thought of impartiality as we reported on the heroism of our boys and bestiality of the hated Nazis.” As Andy Rooney noted, “the worst kind of censorship has always been the kind that newspaper people impose on themselves.”
Tex McCrary found them “the best that ever came out of America; they are the richest harvest of all American history,” he told a friend in a wartime letter from England. “The challenge of total war revealed the same high qualities that have always been beneath the skin of the American people when the time of great testing has stripped them lean.”
“You don’t start hating till you been hurt,” Mark said. “Me, well, I’ve been hurt. So I hate the Germans. I wish we bombed their cities instead of just their factories.” Mark Mathis was killed leaning over his bombsight on his next mission.
By the late winter of 1943, LeMay’s 305th had lost nearly half its crews, and the other three pioneer Fortress groups were down to 20 percent of their original personnel.
England’s Lord Moran—later Churchill’s personal physician. “How is courage spent in war?” Moran asked in The Anatomy of Courage, his classic treatise on the subject, which was not available in print until 1967. “Courage is will-power, whereof no man has an unlimited stock; and when in war it is used up, he is finished. A man’s courage is his capital and he is always spending.”
Walter Cronkite told Harrison Salisbury when he first took him on a bomber base: “Don’t make friends with the kids. . . . It’s too much when they are lost, and most of them, you know, will be.”
In its first ten months of operations, the Eighth lost 188 heavy bombers and approximately 1,900 crewmen, not counting those dead and wounded who returned to England in their battered ships. Approximately 73 percent of the combat fliers who had arrived in England in the summer and fall of 1942 failed to complete their tour of duty. Fifty-seven percent were killed or missing in action, and another 16 percent had either been seriously wounded, killed in crashes in England, or permanently grounded by a serious physical or mental disability.
The first of these to do it was Hell’s Angels, on May 14. But Willy Wyler, with connections to the top, made sure that the Memphis Belle got the most notice when its crew finished its tour of duty three days later.
In 1938, the Army Air Corps had only 21,000 officers and enlisted men. In the period of its greatest growth, from the day after Pearl Harbor to the beginning of Pointblank, it grew from 354,000 to over 2.1 million men, an increase of 520 percent.
In 1943, there were over 20,000 major accidents at Army Air Forces bases in the continental United States, with 5,603 airmen killed. Over the course of the war, some 15,000 airmen became fatal casualties at training bases in the States and abroad.
Almost 40 percent of the cadets who entered the pilot instruction program during the war—over 124,000 men—washed out or were killed in training exercises.
The Queen took eight days to make the crossing, changing course every three minutes, the eyes of watchmen glued to their binoculars as they searched the dark waves for periscopes. The ship’s zigzagging movement caused eruptions of seasickness in the cramped, foul-smelling quarters below,
The fire storm, the first ever created by bombing, was a deliberate act, achieved by a lethal combination of high-explosive and incendiary bombs. Enormous 4,000-pound blast bombs were then dropped into the inferno to blow craters
It was suffering and loss never seen before in a bombing raid. Forty-five thousand bodies—mostly women, children, and the elderly—were recovered from the ruins, and at least 10,000 more bodies remained buried or were obliterated by the flames, according to Hamburg fire authorities. Nearly 60 percent of the city—an area of almost thirteen square miles—was totally burned out, leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless.
The Eighth took appalling losses on these strikes—eighty-eight heavy bombers—and the Hundredth was decimated, losing almost 200 men, nearly half its airmen. On the day after Rosie Rosenthal’s crew returned alone from Münster—where in twelve minutes the Hundredth lost twelve of thirteen planes—five of the group’s original leaders, John Egan, Gale Cleven, Frank Murphy, Howard “Hambone” Hamilton, and John Brady, were in German stockades.
The Hundredth had arrived in England four months before Münster with 140 flying officers; after Münster, only three of them remained on flying status.
In the fall of 1943, neither the Germans nor the Allies had gained air mastery over Northern Europe, so there was no air mastery to lose. The battle was in the balance.
the grim calculus of total war, it was considered far better to lose a few hundred unprotected bombers than to have entire divisions slaughtered on the beaches of northern France.
By whatever name, radar bombing was an unacknowledged admission by the Eighth that the air war could not be won by precision attacks alone. Another pillar of prewar bombing doctrine had collapsed.
In 1944, Germany aviation factories would put out an impressive 40,000 planes, but that same year, the United States alone would produce 96,000 aircraft, and Allied total aircraft production would outpace German production by 400 percent.
frostbite on men’s faces from wind-blast remained a major problem until bombers equipped with Plexiglas waist windows began arriving in England in early 1944. Until then, more men continued to be hospitalized for frostbite than for battle wounds.
Col. Malcolm Grow, chief surgeon of the Eighth Air Force. In research conducted at the Central Medical Establishment, he had discovered that 80 percent of combat wounds were caused by low-velocity missiles—flak splinters or fragments of cannon and machine gun shells.
