More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 26 - April 15, 2024
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.
One replacement crewman arrived at Thorpe Abbotts in time for a late meal, went to bed in his new bunk, and was lost the next morning over Germany. No one got his name. He was thereafter known as “the man who came to dinner.”
Later, Rosenthal learned from the ground crews that there had been an unexploded cannon shell rolling around in one of Royal Flush’s wing tanks. A member of his crew speculated that a slave laborer, working in a Nazi munitions factory, had sabotaged the shell.
Not until the fourth year of the war would the Germans kill more British soldiers than British women and children.
Some bombers flew so close together that they put dents in each other’s fuselages.
“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.”
loosely called a “cure”—making the man well enough
If this ability to hold together in the face of peril can be called courage, what exactly is courage? “Courage,” Lord Moran shrewdly observed, “is a moral quality; it is not a chance gift of nature like an aptitude for games. It is a cold choice between two alternatives, the fixed resolve not to quit; an act of renunciation which must be made not once but many times, by the power of the will. Courage is will power.”
By early May, a number of Fortresses and their regular crews were closing in on “25.” Hell’s Angels, Delta Rebel II, Jersey Bounce, Connecticut Yankee, and Memphis Belle. 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.
But the Eighth Air Force had already done its indispensable duty. In the five-month battle for the air supremacy that made the invasion possible, the American Air Forces in Europe lost over 2,600 heavy bombers and 980 fighter planes and suffered 18,400 casualties, including 10,000 combat deaths, over half as many men as the Eighth lost in all of 1942 and 1943.
These airmen deserve an equal place in the national memory with the approximately 6,000 American soldiers killed,
wounded, or missing in action in the amphibious and airborn...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
We had a rule. No one could talk on the intercom unless it was absolutely necessary—radio discipline. But as we passed over that vast armada and headed over the beaches, a member of our crew started to say a prayer for the people down below and we
all joined in. It was one of the most emotional moments of my life.”
on Sundays, church
services were offered by courageous chaplains who had volunteered to parachute into Germany to be with the prisoners.
Kurt Vonnegut, an American infantryman captured in the Battle of the Bulge, had been moved to Dresden several days before the bombing to be part of a forced
work detail.
these air armadas released over two million tons of bombs on the Reich.
The Eighth Air Force, the largest aerial striking force in the war, sustained between 26,000 and 28,000 fatalities, roughly one-tenth of the Americans killed in World War II.
