Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

by Donald L. Miller

He was a bomber boy; destruction was his occupation. And like most other bomber crewmen, he went about his work without a quiver of conscience, convinced he was fighting for a noble cause. He also killed in order not to be killed.

In the claustrophobic compartments of the heavy bombers, in the crucible of combat, Catholics and Jews, Englishmen and Irishmen, became brothers in spirit, melded together by a desire not to die.

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.”

You drive everything else out of your mind. You’re frightened, but there’s a difference between fear and panic. Panic paralyzes; fear energizes.

The high-spirited language matched the confidence of the crews, American boys too young and untested to be afraid.

Col. Budd J. Peaslee, one of the legendary commanders of the Eighth, has argued that few great air leaders are recognized by historians because they rarely exercised command once their forces were airborne, and because a general’s decision never produced a decisive victory.

In modern warfare there are two main types of aerial bombing—strategic and tactical.

American airpower was born in World War I and Billy Mitchell was its prophet.

“I was sure that if the war lasted, air power would decide it,” he wrote later.

Douhet insisted that future wars would be short, total, and “violent to a superlative degree.” They would be won from the skies with vast fleets of long-range bombers, with the winning side the one that attacked first and without cease, gaining command of the air, not primarily by destroying the enemy’s air force in combat but by destroying its airbases, communications, and centers of production.

There was no place for morality in the new warfare; it would be swift slaughter without mercy or sentimentality.

War,” he wrote, “has to be regarded unemotionally as a science, regardless of how terrible a science.”

Both Douhet and Mitchell were convinced that civilians lacked the fortitude to stand up to vertical warfare waged

To Douhet and Mitchell, quick wars meant reduced casualties. In becoming more terrible, warfare would actually become more humane. Better to decide a war by terrorizing the population

Air supremacy achieved by fighter aircraft was the prerequisite for a successful bombing offensive.

never learned anything when I was talking,” he would tell people.

Republicans and Democrats, interventionists and isolationists, labor and capital, closed ranks, and the nation moved from peace to war with a unity that it had never known before in time of crisis.

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.

“Few men who are thought of as industrial giants ever put a major organization together as fast as the Eighth was formed,” wrote Eaker’s aide, James Parton.

England had the look of a country fighting for survival.

Not until the fourth year of the war would the Germans kill more British soldiers than British women and children.

There was also a difference in intent. Germany’s aim was conquest, England’s survival.

It was to be terror bombing, a fulfillment of the ideas of Douhet and Mitchell. Only it was an act of desperation, not of original military purpose. The new bombing policy was endorsed by Churchill,

Good workers, he would tell Eaker, took longer to produce than good machines,

And the prime minister had no moral reservation, then or later, about unrestricted air warfare. After the war, he wrote to a former officer in Bomber Command: “We should never allow ourselves to apologize for what we did to Germany.”

Harris was convinced that the American experiment would fail and that Eaker would eventually be forced to retrain his crews, reequip his bombers, and join the RAF in its night raids. “God knows, I hope you can do it,” he told Eaker, “but I don’t think you can. Come join us at night. Together we’ll lick them.”

The next day, Ambassador Winant sent an urgent message to President Roosevelt. “England is the place to win the war. Get planes and troops over here as soon as possible.”

It was more than a matter of delay. Arnold saw Operation Torch as a threat to the very existence of the Eighth Air Force. Before it was completed, the depleted Eighth might be absorbed into the Royal Air Force’s night campaign. This is the reason Arnold pressured Spaatz and Eaker to get their crews into combat before they were properly trained.

The gunners were inexperienced, miserably trained, and anxious to prove themselves—a catastrophic combination. Most of them did not set out to deceive. In the fog of battle, as many as a dozen gunners might be firing on a single German fighter plane. If that enemy aircraft was shot down, five or six gunners might make individual claims, each believing his claim was legitimate.

Another factor led to inaccurate claims. German pilots, boring in on the gunners’ sights at closing speeds of over 500 miles an hour, flipped their planes belly-up after firing a burst, and as they plunged straight down, their exhausts emitted trails of thick black smoke. Many gunners mistook the smoke and evasion maneuvers for fatal damage inflicted by their .50 caliber machine guns.

In Western Europe, cloud or industrial haze was present two days out of every three, and when a bombardier was able to see clearly, the enemy could easily spot him. With hot slugs and pieces of jagged shrapnel smashing into his glass-enclosed work station, he had to remain calm and focused as he entered data into the instrument on ground speed, rate of closure, wind drift, and the estimated air resistance and time of fall of the bombs. Pilots were supposed to keep the plane as level and steady as possible on the bomb run, but as a classified Air Force report noted, excitable pilots often took violent evasive action under fire, unsetting the sensitive gyroscopes on the Norden bombsights. Some bombardiers became so nervous that they forgot to open the bomb bay doors.

But in the confusion of aerial combat, with the wind blowing fiercely at bombing altitude, no amount of care could ensure that innocent people were spared.

“The only thing that really frightened me during the war,” Churchill said later, “was the U-boat peril.”

“If it’s going to hit you, it’s going to hit you then—whatever peak of fear, anxiety, or urge to turn back, that you’re going to feel,” recalled Capt. Robert Morgan, pilot of the Memphis Belle of the 91st Bomb Group, the most famous American bomber of the European war. “Being under way is actually a relief. It’s that damn ride to the planes that nearly kills you.” The airmen had an expression, “You die on the runway, not after you’re hit.”

These wisecracking American boys who seemed to take nothing seriously would suddenly have “the solemnity and level gazes of men twice their age. . . . It was ten minds coming into acute focus.”

There was no such thing as a typical mission. Every mission was unique, a singular experience, but there was a recognizable pattern in all of them.

he looked like and was one of the most dangerous men in the world, a destroyer in charge of 5,000 pounds of explosives.

“The swearing and the violence in the sky had only brought ten men closer together in eight hours than eight years might have in that other, more normal world, such being the inevitable bonds between men who have suffered fear together and fought against it. This is perhaps the strongest of all ties among men,” said Scott.

The survivors never talked about the fallen; this was the unstated conspiracy. “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.”

The equipment of survival both tightened and symbolized this bond. Ten men were linked to the ship and to one another by hose lines and wires, hoses to keep them breathing, wires to keep them in touch with one another.

With men forced to fly “eight missions on the ground for every one in the air,” combat crews reported nearly unanimously that the letdown and depression that followed these cancellations was “far worse than actual participation in a combat flight.” Even missions that were weather-delayed, but not scrubbed, tested the mental stamina of the most stable men.

“That’s the thing that doubles the strain on your nerves—the environment in which your guts have to digest danger is unnatural,” said an Air Force officer.

When the plane landed, “I watched as they rolled his body out onto the stretcher and took him into the ambulance and a tear rolled down my cheek. I wasn’t ashamed. He was my buddy.

“Unless you have heard a man talk on the radio when he is really scared, you would not know that high-pitched vibration that edges into his voice, until he seems on the point of screaming,” an Air/Sea rescue pilot described a typical distress call.

These rescue pilots knew that there was “nothing more terrifying than the sound of a man’s fear.”

The penalty for hiding or aiding a downed Allied flier was death by firing squad for men, and concentration camp imprisonment for women, usually the equivalent of a death sentence. A British intelligence agent estimated that for every downed flier who was evacuated, one French, Belgian, or Dutch helper was shot or died under torture.

To help her identify moles—Gestapo agents posing as downed airmen—she had the owners of her Brussels safe houses interrogate airmen who approached them for help. If a flier arriving at Ann Brusselmans’s apartment claimed to be from New York, he was asked the name of the current center fielder of the New York Yankees. If he answered wrong, Brusselmans had members of the Belgian underground army take him for “a long walk in the woods.”

The Comet Line aided approximately 700 of the 5,000 to 6,000 downed Allied airmen—3,000 of them Americans—who eventually made it back to England.

A pure pragmatist, LeMay would do more than anyone else to give the dangerously deceptive ideas of Mitchell and Douhet, Hansell and Eaker a greatly needed grounding in reality. Distrustful of theory, combat was his school.

America’s bombers could not fly above enemy flak or outrun enemy fighters, as Hansell and the Bomber Mafia had argued;