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September 17 - October 5, 2024
Allied planes dropped a total of 71,000 tons of bombs on the French railway system, the equivalent of seven times the explosive power of the uranium bomb that would turn Hiroshima into nothing.
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 airborne assault on D-Day.
“Our answer,” Arnold suggested to Eisenhower the next day, “must be to hit the factories where critical parts are made.”
Bradley came up with another plan, which unexpectedly turned into one of the supreme military achievements of the European campaign. Operation Cobra would begin with a cataclysmic bombing by the Eighth Air Force. In one hour, over 1,000 heavies would drop 50,000 iron bombs into a tight rectangle just south of a long, straight road that separated the American and German armies in Normandy, near the crossroads town of St.
This became Lt. Gen. George Patton’s show. The apostle of armored warfare was flown in from England, where he had acted as D-Day decoy, building up a phony force of cardboard tanks and planes that had convinced the Germans, into late June, that the main Allied landing would be in the Pas de Calais. Patton took charge of the newly activated Third Army and began an all-out drive across France at a rate of fifty miles a day, moving with furious resolve from the seaside bluffs of Avranches, into the Brittany peninsula, and then eastward to help destroy the German Seventh Army.
It was one of the most astonishing achievements in the history of mobile warfare, and it was made possible by close coordination among tanks, troops, artillery, and the fighter-bombers of the Allied air forces, which acted as fast-moving aerial artillery for the army.
The slaughter at Falaise ended the eighty-day-long Battle of Normandy, the most decisive battle on the Western Front. The Germans lost over 400,000 combatants—killed, wounded, or captured—and the Allies suffered over 225,000 casualties, two-thirds of them Americans, among them 8,536 airmen killed and missing. The battle was a prelude to the liberation of Paris and the triumphant Allied drive across France to Germany’s western border, a campaign joined by Allied forces that landed on the coast of southern France on August 15.
After June 1944, German production of aviation fuel for the remainder of the war was 197,000 tons, little more than a month’s supply in the period before the raids. And by September, oil imports from Romania had been stopped.
In May 1944, Nazi leaders in Hungary, led by Adolf Eichmann, head of the “Jewish section” of the SS, began to round up and ship to Auschwitz the entire Jewish population of the country. The Nazis had already murdered over five million European Jews, and Auschwitz was one of only two killing camps that remained in operation in Poland. Information about the Hungarian deportations, along with the summary of a detailed report of conditions inside Auschwitz compiled by two recent escapees, reached London and Washington in June and early July. This led Jewish and resistance groups with offices in
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By the first week of July, 434,000 Hungarian Jews had been sent to Auschwitz and nearly 90% of them had been murdered. An aroused Churchill, who considered Hitler’s Final Solution “the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world,” instructed his Air Staff to look into the feasibility of bombing the gas chambers.
If the raids had begun in July 1944—the earliest feasible time they could have begun because of Allied airpower’s complete commitment to the Normandy invasion and the time it would have taken for the American government to reach a decision and have its airmen develop a plan of attack—the Fifteenth would not have been able to complete the job until sometime in September.
By then, all the Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz had been murdered.
With Auschwitz, however, there was the sensitive issue of killing innocents. The writer and Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel wrote that when the camp was hit by stray American bombs on September 13, 1944 “we were not afraid. . . . Every bomb that fell filled us with joy.” But other survivors said they owe their lives to the Allied decision not to bomb.
“It was like the Civil War,” said Eighth Air Force navigator Paul Slawter. “Winning was more important to Lincoln than anything else. When slaves were freed, it was almost always in the course of strategically important military operations in enemy territory. And that’s how the Nazi killing camps were found and the survivors freed.”
The new Storm Groups delivered—and took—frightful casualties. In just two days, September 11 and 12, they lost thirty-eight pilots.
“That night when we returned to the village, we left the wagons containing the bodies at the cemetery . . . and we were taken back to the jail and brought a loaf of bread. . . . It was the last white bread we were to eat until we were liberated in May 1945.”
Even so, these were tremendous air battles in which the Luftwaffe lost a staggering 348 pilots. “The flying in November 1944 was the toughest I encountered during the entire war,” reported a German fighter commander. “The odds against us were 20 to 1 and sometimes even 30 to 1.”
For forty years, Glenn Miller’s death remained an unsolved mystery. In 1984, two members of an RAF bomber crew—the navigator and pilot—came forward with an explanation. On the afternoon of December 15, their four-engine Lancaster was returning from an aborted daylight mission to a marshaling yard in Germany. After their bomb-aimer jettisoned the bombs over the English Channel, the navigator, Fred Shaw, said that he and a gunner—who died in 1983—saw a Norseman aircraft fall from the sky, the victim, apparently, of the concussion created by their discarded bombs, one of them a 4,000-pound
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“The rear gunner, who was looking around all the time, saw it tip up and go into the sea,” Victor Gregory, the pilot, told a New York Times reporter. When Gregory was asked why he had not disclosed this information sooner, he said he had forgotten about the incident until Shaw contacted him, and had failed to connect it with Miller’s disappearance, which had not been reported for nine days after he left England. Fred Shaw said his curiosity was first aroused in 1954 after seeing the Hollywood film of Glenn Miller’s life, starring Jimmy Stewart.
Shaw checked his wartime logbook and realized the downed Norseman might have been Miller’s plane. For years, his story was discounted by reporters, historians, and Glenn Miller enthusiasts, until it was corroborated by aviation historian Roy Nesbit, who conducted an exhausti...
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On Christmas Day, Gen. Hasso von Manteuffel’s 2nd Panzer Division, having passed St. Vith, ran out of gas only three miles from the Meuse, where it was pilloried by a column led by Gen. Lawton Collins, the hero of the St. Lô breakthrough. The next day advanced columns of Patton’s army broke the siege of Bastogne.
From January 1945 on, German armies on both the Eastern and Western fronts would experience severe shortages of both fuel and weapons, the direct result of the bomber war.
“Three factors defeated us in the West,” said von Rundstedt. “First, the unheard of superiority of your air force, which made all movement in daytime impossible; second, the lack of motor fuel—oil and gas—so that the Panzers and even the remaining Luftwaffe were unable to move; third, the systematic destruction of all railway communications so that it was impossible to bring [a] single railway train across the Rhine.
party functionary named Hugo Gruner testified that he had received orders from the local Nazi leader, Robert Wagner, to “execute any Allied airman taken prisoner.” Gruner carried out this command with ruthless resolve, discharging a machine gun burst into the back of each airman. The limp bodies were then “dragged by the feet and cast into the Rhine.”
Finally, on March 15, 1945, a month after the firebombing of Dresden, Hitler issued a blanket command that all downed terror fliers were to be shot or lynched on capture. This was, in his demented mind, not just
When a B-24 Liberator was shot down over Mecklenburg on June 21, 1944, all nine crewmembers were executed on the pretext of “attempting to escape.”
In another documented incident, the Gestapo was marching six American fliers through the town of Rüsselsheim, which they had bombed the previous day, when workers from a local factory came pouring into the street, demanding that the Americans be lynched. According to witnesses, two women began screaming, “There are the terrorizers of last night, kill the dogs! We can’t have pity!” One of the women threw a brick and the mob soon joined in, pelting the airmen with stones and beating them with farm tools until they collapsed and died—one airman pleading before he took a fatal blow, “Don’t kill
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pilot Hank Plume said long after the war, “If I had known I was going to be a POW I’d have done a better job preparing for it.”
It was the duty of captured Anglo-American officers to do everything in their power to escape. Escapes—although not successful ones—were common, and prisoners who were caught were sent to the “cooler,” a grim solitary confinement lockup, for a period of roughly ten days.
Since the punishment for escape was not extreme, many of the kriegies considered it a kind of game. So on April 6 when the senior British officer, Herbert M. Massy, was informed that forty-one (the number was later changed to fifty) of his escaping officers had been shot “while resisting arrest or attempting further escape from arrest,” he was stunned. How many were wounded? he demanded to know. No one was wounded, he was told. When word reached the prisoners, they were “plunged into anger, shock, and despair,” said Loevsky. “I’ll never forget the words of our compound commander, Col. Delmar
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After the Great Escape, relations between prisoners and Luftwaffe guards deteriorated badly at all the camps,
Stalag Luft III had been opened in April 1942 as a small, high-security camp for RAF airmen. But by late 1944 its prison population had swelled to more than 10,000, with over half of the new prisoners American fliers.
A barracks building housed up to 150 men in double- and triple-decker bunks. There were from twelve to fifteen sleeping rooms of varying sizes, each furnished with a few benches, some shabby wooden lockers, and a table with a 20-watt bulb hanging straight down from the ceiling over it, exactly as it is pictured in the popular postwar film Stalag 17.
Every stalag had its central security committee. At Stalag Luft III it was called the Big X and was run by a charismatic Eighth Air Force fighter pilot, Lt. Col. Albert P. “Bub” Clark, one of the first Americans to be shot down in the war and the officer who had been in charge of security in North Compound for the Great Escape. All escape plans were to be cleared with X. If a plan was given a reasonable chance of succeeding and did not interfere with another escape plan, it could expect to receive X’s approval and active assistance. Each compound also had its own security committee to guard
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Stalag is short for Stammlager, or base camp, and is the term Germans used in World War II for prisoner of war camps for officers and enlisted men.
As the Americans flew back to their bases, a Nazi official went on the radio. “Not a single detached building remains intact or capable of reconstruction. The town area is devoid of human life. A great city has been wiped from the map of Europe.”
“The idea was to hasten the end of the war,” Vonnegut wrote in his novel. “Only one person ever got any benefit from the bombing of Dresden, and he is me,” Vonnegut said later. “I wrote an antiwar novel that made lots of money.”
Someone lowered the Nazi Swastika and ran the Stars and Stripes up the camp flagpole. Then up went the other flags the men had hidden in anticipation of this day: the Union Jack, the Red Star of Russia, the French Tricolors, and the flags of nearly every other Allied nation. The prisoners went wild. “We cheered even louder,” said airman Roger Burwell, “when a truckload of bread showed up.” It was “real WHITE bread, which tastes like cake to us.”
On May 1, George Patton arrived at Moosburg in a long Packard touring car, accompanied by an entourage of reporters and newsreel cameramen.
Striding through the camp like a conquering king, his ivory-handled pistols bouncing on his hips, he stopped suddenly to examine the pale shrunken bodies of Frank Murphy and his Sagan buddies. “I’m going to kill these sons-of-bitches for this,” he muttered in a low, cold voice.
At 2:41 A.M. on May 7, at Eisenhower’s headquarters in the cathedral city of Rheims, Col. Gen. Alfred Jodl signed the documents of the Act of Military Surrender. Under the terms, the unconditional surrender of Germany was to take effect at one minute before midnight on May 8, 1945, V-E Day. But when Stalin protested that the war was not officially over until the Germans ratified the treaty in the presence of Marshal Zhukov, the conqueror of Berlin, Eisenhower was “directed to withhold news of the first signing until the second could be accomplished.”
The German surrender, said Churchill, was “the signal for the greatest outburst of joy in the history of mankind.” London was the epicenter of that celebration, and the prime minister got caught in it on his way to the House of Commons to make the victory announcement. “Instantly, he was surrounded by people—people running, standing on tiptoe, holding up babies so that they could be told later they had seen him, and shouting affectionately the absurd little nursery maid name, ‘Winnie, Winnie!’ ” wrote London diarist Mollie Panter-Downes.
Piccadilly Circus attracted the most boisterous crowds.
The Eighth Air Force began its great movement back to the United States on May 19, 1945. The bomber boys flew their own planes;
Clark Gable, Hollywood actor and Eighth Air Force gunner, with the crew of Delta Rebel No. 2 (91st Bomb Group) after returning from a mission.
(18) An intelligence officer conducts a dawn mission briefing.
(38) Maj. Jimmy Stewart, the Hollywood film star, was one of the Eighth’s leading combat commanders.
