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September 17 - October 5, 2024
In the spring of 1944 . . . we were masters in the air. The bitterness of the struggle had thrown a greater strain on the Luftwaffe than it was able to bear. . . . For our air superiority, which by the end of 1944 was to become air supremacy, full tribute must be paid to the United States Eighth Air Force. WINSTON CHURCHILL, Closing the Ring
There was a consciousness always of the presence of his comrades about him. He felt the subtle battle brotherhood more potent even than the cause for which they were fighting. It was a mysterious fraternity born of the smoke and danger of death. STEPHEN CRANE, The Red Badge of Courage
The Eighth Air Force was one of the great fighting forces in the history of warfare. It had the best equipment and the best men, all but a handful of whom were civilian Americans, educated and willing to fight for their country and a cause they understood was in danger—freedom. It’s what made World War II special. ANDY ROONEY, My War
The actor Jimmy Stewart was a bomber boy and so was the “King of Hollywood,” Clark Gable.
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.
In March 1944, American factories poured out over 9,000 military planes, over twice the number Roosevelt had requested in 1940, an estimate that was considered “fantastically impossible” at the time by both Hitler and most of the president’s advisors.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor “shook the United States as nothing had since the firing on Fort Sumter,” wrote historian Samuel Eliot Morison.
On December 8, President Roosevelt appeared before a joint session of the Congress to ask for a declaration of war against Japan. Congress responded with only a single dissenting vote. Three days later, Germany declared war on the United States, a decision more calamitous for its cause than its invasion of Russia the previous June.
At the Arcadia Conference, a high-level Anglo-American meeting convened at the White House that December, Churchill and Roosevelt endorsed the “defeat Germany first” strategy they had tentatively agreed to earlier and called for an immediate buildup of American airpower in Britain.
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.
German air raids had already killed nearly 43,000 British civilians. Not until the fourth year of the war would the Germans kill more British soldiers than British women and children.
Churchill was at the White House to try to engineer a major change in Allied war policy. He wanted to get American troops and bombers into the fight as soon as possible in order to restore Allied morale, relieve pressure on the Russians, and reinforce Britain’s beleaguered desert army in North Africa.
The strategy worked. That July, Roosevelt agreed to an Allied landing in French North Africa, a controversial and hotly contested change in policy. It meant postponing indefinitely a cross-Channel invasion of Nazi-occupied France,
Dwight Eisenhower, the untested general Roosevelt picked to command Operation Torch, as the North African campaign was code-named, bitterly opposed the plan, but Churchill was right.
“The Battle of the Atlantic,” said Churchill, “was the dominating factor all through the war. . . . Everything happening elsewhere, on land, at sea, or in the air, depended ultimately on its outcome.”
“The only thing that really frightened me during the war,” Churchill said later, “was the U-boat peril.”
The defeat of the U-boat “[is] one of the basic requirements to the winning of the war,” Eisenhower told the commanders of the Eighth.
“The interior of a B-17 was like a lightweight aluminum cigar tube,” observed waist gunner Jack Novey. The plane’s closely spaced aluminum ribs, held in place by thousands of rivets, gave it aerodynamic strength and durability, but the aluminum skin the ribs supported was so thin that you could poke a hole through it with a screwdriver. The Fort’s hundred-foot wingspan made the plane look large, but the ten-man crew was crowded together in a claustrophobic space that was tighter than the inside of a submarine. The backs of the waist gunners nearly touched when they stood and fired through
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Forward of the entrance to the ball turret, a bulkhead door led to the radio room. This was the only sealed and self-contained cabin on the bomber. The radio operator sat at a small desk facing the front of the plane. Above him, in an open slot, was his handheld .50 caliber machine gun, pointing rearward. In later model B-17s equipped with radar guidance systems for bombing through overcast, the radar navigator sat just forward of the radio operator. The bomb bay, the belly of the whale, was just ahead, through the radio room’s other bulkhead. Bombs were stacked in racks from floor to ceiling
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“When a crewman was killed but his plane returned, most of us decided that funerals were not for survivors,” a navigator recalled. “I never attended a funeral. . . . We memorialized them by painting the names of those we lost on the barracks walls, with their hometown and the name and date of their last mission.”
Dr. Sheeley described the excruciating ordeal of a navigator whose oxygen mask was perforated by a flak blast that blew open the nose of the plane. With his oxygen supply impaired, he lay unconscious for a full hour. “Six weeks later, his hands, feet, ears, nose were amputated, his frozen eyeballs had been [removed], necrotic tissue was dropping from his cheekbones. He is still alive.” Unknown numbers of men died because their crewmates lacked either the medical knowledge or equipment to save them. When a tail gunner on a B-17 had both cheeks of his buttocks blown off by cannon fire, his
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“Many men seen in the hospital will not return to duty for months—if ever.”
“It’s altogether too easy to have a leak in your mask or hose, or anywhere else in the line, and to be totally unaware of the problem,” a navigator described a typical mission at 25,000 feet. “Without oxygen at this altitude, you’re unconscious in thirty seconds. After two minutes you’re dead.”
In 1942, three-quarters of the flight surgeons assigned to England had no aero-medical training and only 10 percent of the medics had any medical training at all.
“The water looked cold, and I remember thinking it also looked hard,” Swenson recalled. There were fifteen-to-twenty-foot-tall whitecaps, “and I had heard that when you land on water and hit a wave the effect is very much like flying into a stone wall. “It was. We laid her in a belly landing, as slowly as we could, with the tail well down. But even at that we hit so hard that it threw the crew all over the ship.”
Flying over Belfast, Nutter gave the pilot a direct course to Prestwick. As they climbed out of the plane, friendly townspeople surrounded them. “What took you so long?” a Scotsman shouted. “We’ve been waiting for you Yanks for nearly two years!”
The men didn’t accept him at first, seeing him as a pampered Hollywood hotshot, but Gable set out to prove them wrong. His overseas flying pay was $320 a month; he had made a hundred times that playing Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind. And he surprised everyone by going out with the crews on some of the toughest hauls.
Even Clark Gable, who flew only occasionally, came close to breaking down. He would drink himself to sleep, and every now and then disappear from the base for a day or two to find refuge in a cottage near Windsor Castle owned by his friend, the actor David Niven.
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.
On the eve of the invasion, General Eisenhower had assured his troops: “If you see fighting aircraft over you, they will be ours.”
As the landing boats carrying the troops headed toward the beaches in the heavy chop, General Kuter’s concern disappeared. The air was full of Allied fighters and “columns of Flying Fortresses stretched back to England as far as the eye could follow.” There were no signs of German fighters. The “Hun never showed up,” Kuter wrote later. “He couldn’t because he had nothing left.” On this world-turning day, the Luftwaffe flew fewer than 250 sorties against the most powerful invasion force ever assembled to that time. The
The infantry battle—the breakout from the beaches and the fight to clear the enemy from Normandy—would not be won for another seven weeks, but command of the sky had already been secured in six weeks of withering aerial combat.
There would also be new tactics. In the past, every big bombing mission launched by the Eighth had included elaborate diversionary raids to confuse the defenders. This time there would be no deception, no feints. The American air commanders would send in the bombers on predictable routes. Placing the bombers at extreme risk would be part of the design. With great numbers of long-range Mustangs arriving in England just after Big Week, Anderson, a hard-minded advocate of total warfare, was spoiling for a fight. Prepare yourself for big losses, he warned Hap Arnold in late February. The Eighth
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Just when casualties began to rise tremendously, the bomber crews received another dose of bad news. Under prodding from Hap Arnold, General Doolittle extended their tours of duty from twenty-five to thirty missions (and later to thirty-five).
“We fly the first twenty-five for America and the next five for Jimmy,” the crews complained.
Berlin would be the toughest target the Eighth ever attacked. Doolittle’s crews would be meeting a reconstituted Luftwaffe, with over 70 percent of its fighters based within range of Berlin.
The German capital was a 1,100-mile round trip from eastern England, which meant the bombers would be exposed over central Germany for five hours and, if the bad weather prevailed, would have to fly over a six-mile-high cloudbank that would make formation flying difficult.
Charles “Chuck” Yeager, a twenty-one-year-old rowdy from Myra, West Virginia, was shot down fifty miles east of Bordeaux, in southwestern France, by three Focke-Wulf 190s. Flying only his eighth combat mission, Yeager—who had enlisted as a mechanic—would survive the war to become the first man to break the sound barrier and the world’s most famous test pilot, the featured character in the book and film The Right Stuff. “I knew I was going down; I was barely able to unfasten my safety belt and crawl over the seat before my burning P-51 began to snap and roll, heading for the ground. I just fell
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“Cold and scared,” bleeding from wounds on his feet, and hands, and with a hole in his right calf, Yeager realized the odds of escaping the Nazi security forces were long; none of the men in his squadron who had been shot down had made it back to England.
On a night in late March, Yeager was put in the back of a truck with a group of other American airmen the driver had picked up earlier. When the truck screeched to a stop, each of the men was given a hand-drawn map and a knapsack filled with bread, cheese, and chocolate. The driver pointed to a narrow mountain path, and the airmen, on their own, began climbing into sheets of rain and gale-force winds. When the others lagged behind, Yeager teamed up with a powerfully built B-24 navigator named “Pat” Patterson.
The day after Chuck Yeager was shot down over France, the Eighth Air Force returned to Berlin and fought the greatest air battle ever. “A 15-mile-long parade of American bombers thundered across the heart of Berlin for 30 minutes today and set great fires in the stricken Nazi capital after smashing through a huge German fighter screen,” the United Press reported. The New York Times estimated that a strike of this scale engaged nearly 600,000 men and women on both sides.
This figure included 12,000 Allied airmen, almost 1,000 German pilots, 50,000 Allied and 25,000 German ground crewmen, and up to half a million Germans at antiaircraft emplacements that reached all the way from the continental coast to the capital.
New York Times reporter James B. Reston caught the significance of what Berliners would call Bloody Monday.
One of the Eighth’s finest squadron commanders was Maj. James Maitland Stewart, a Princeton honors graduate known to all as Jimmy Stewart, the Hollywood movie idol. After being drafted in 1940 at age thirty-two, the rail-thin, six-foot-four son of an Indiana, Pennsylvania, hardware store merchant had tried to get into the Army Air Force but failed to meet the weight requirement for his height, 148 pounds, by five pounds. Desperately wanting to serve (he later called the draft “the only lottery I ever won”), he appealed the decision, over the heated protests of Louis B. Mayer, his dictatorial
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After convincing an Air Force enlistment officer to give him a new test and “this time forget to weigh me,” he entered military service as a private, signing his enlistment papers just days after winning an Oscar for his role as a reporter in The Philadelphia Story. “It may sound corny,” he later explained his decision, “but what’s wrong with wanting to fight for your country. Why are people so reluctant to use the word patriotism?”
“The attitude of crew members . . . was that they would gladly let some other crew have the hottest pilot in the group . . . if they could have the man who, when in a tough spot, where a decision which might mean life or death to them had to be made, would quickly . . . make the best possible decision.”
On May 12, Jimmy Doolittle sent 886 bombers against a tightly massed complex of synthetic oil plants in central Germany, provoking a tremendous air battle in which the Americans lost forty-six bombers and the Germans over sixty fighters.
A week after the raid, Speer reported to Hitler that “the enemy has struck us at one of our weakest points. If they persist at it this time, we will soon no longer have any fuel production worth mentioning.
On a single day in May, the Ninth Air Force’s Fighter Command, headed by Maj. Gen. Elwood “Pete” Quesada, one of America’s most innovative air leaders, destroyed so many trains that the fliers dubbed the occasion Chattanooga Day, after the Glenn Miller recording “Chattanooga Choo Choo.”
