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June 28 - October 23, 2023
In the end, they formed an effective, if less than amicable, team: the dreamer and the doer. The thing that cut the friction between them was that they were both deeply courageous men.
Note the positive outcome of the difference in mindset between an respected theorist (Hansell) and a seasoned veteran (LeMay)
During his seven to ten minutes over the target, the lead bombardier became, for those few moments, the Eighth Air Force. The other bombardiers complained of being reduced to button pushers, but bombing accuracy, while still erratic, tripled.
Example of the importance of statistical analysis to improve bombing accuracy without the need for further training, equipment, etc.
It was combat realities, not prewar theory, that led the Eighth inexorably in the direction of Bomber Harris’s indiscriminate area attacks.
In their writings, Douhet and Mitchell had tried to swing the advantage to the attackers, but as long as the Luftwaffe’s flak and fighters remained formidable, the defenders always compromised bombing accuracy.
Giulio Douhet had prophesied a new form of warfare based on annihilation rather than attrition. He failed to foresee the kind of warfare—close-fought, brutal, and prolonged—that would be necessary to gain command of the air. LeMay never read him. That was fortunate for the Army Air Forces in England.
This was Armstrong’s reward for taking over the decimated 306th earlier that month and restoring discipline and morale, the central story of the novel Twelve O’Clock High!
Nonetheless, with this modest beginning, America, with its tremendous productive power, joined Britain in what would build to become the greatest campaign of urban and economic devastation in the history of warfare.
But we didn’t realize until the top boys in the Eighth cleared the idea that we’d have to attend gunnery school for a week. If we were going to be on a bomber in battle, we were told, we’d better know how to shoot a gun in case we got into trouble.” Eight reporters were granted permission to fly.
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.
Contrary to his position on American youth just a few years before
Great numbers of fliers began to experience one or more of the symptoms of emotional disintegration: insomnia, irritability, sudden temper flashes, inability to concentrate, withdrawal from friends, nausea, weight loss, dizziness, blurring of vision, heart palpitations, Parkinson-like tremors, sexual impotence and aggressiveness, binge drinking, and terrifying battle dreams, nightmares so alarmingly vivid that men screamed and shook, and a few of them fell out of their top bunks and shattered legs and arms.
A later CME study found that virtually every flier who completed a tour of combat duty suffered from one or more of the symptoms of combat fatigue.
“Bomber bases were damn depressing places to visit,” Andy Rooney recalled.
Men were willing to face death, but no one knew how many times they would have to do it.
Most of the men suffered from anxiety states that Air Force psychiatrists placed into two broad categories.
Flying fatigue and operational fatigue
Most men who had been temporarily removed from flying by their commanders never appeared in Air Force statistics. Their bomb group or squadron commanders grounded them, usually on the advice of flight surgeons, and when they “recovered” after a brief period of rest and treatment on the base, they were returned to flying status. Only the most severe cases were referred to the CME psychiatrists for treatment, and, as a result, became statistics.
Example of how statistics can often be misrepresentative/skewed
the Eighth Air Force did not keep reliable statistics on emotional casualties, nor did Air Force doctors ever establish a clear and consistent definition of a psychiatric casualty.
Given sufficient stress, even the best men broke down. A fighting man’s reservoir of courage, his ability to adapt to fear, was limited.
“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.”
Crewmen on heavy bombers were susceptible to a special kind of fear. They experienced what psychiatrists called phobic states,
From believing that “nothing can happen to me,” these airmen became convinced that “some disaster must happen to me.”
As Freud wrote, “the essence of the traumatic situation is the experience of helplessness.”
“In the presence of danger,” Lord Moran observed, “man often finds salvation in action.” There was no such salvation in a flak field.
Stover realized that the burden of detecting combat fatigue fell primarily on him, and that to spot it and diagnose its severity, he had to know his men.
The most puzzling question in warfare is how fighting men stay the course.
As the war correspondent Eric Sevareid observed, “War happens inside a man. It happens to one man alone.” Because he was alone in his fear, the man needed to be sustained by friends fighting the same inner battle.
If he was afraid, and said so, it did not matter, for all fighting men knew that fear is not cowardice. Cowardice is “something a man does. What passes though his mind is his own affair,” Lord Moran wrote.
To some fliers, the “25” was the “single factor that bolstered their nerve,” but for the “25” to really mean anything, some bomber crews had to reach that number. In the winter of 1943 none of them did.
The men of ’43 had neither the time nor the inclination to take in the sights. They were there to drink and forget, almost always in the company of women.
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 Army engineer,” wrote Yank correspondent Saul Levitt, “is a gypsy-builder. He builds and then he moves.”
An American flying in a heavy bomber over Germany in these months would have the approximate chance of surviving as the victim of “a deep-seated cancer.”
Summer and fall of 1943
It was the beginning of the most mentally demanding training program in the American military. For pilots especially, selection and training had to be rigorous. They would not be handling a rifle, but a huge, highly complex weapon of immense cost and destructive capability. Before a pilot received his wings and his commission as a second lieutenant, he went through three flight training schools—Primary, Basic, and Advanced—at three separate bases, each course of instruction lasting about nine weeks (ten weeks later in the war). After that there was a ten-week postgraduate course. At this last
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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.
As it was, only 116 Romanian soldiers and civilians died that black Sunday, making Ploesti one of the only air strikes of the war in which more airmen were killed than civilians.
They were the two best combat leaders in the Eighth. No one was more responsible than Curtis LeMay for turning the Eighth into an efficient fighting force, and Williams was an experienced and audacious air commander, a dashing, one-eyed pilot who walked with a swagger stick and had test-flown the first Fortresses to come off Boeing’s production line.
Nineteen forty-three was the turning point in the war against Germany. Defeated at Stalingrad, in North Africa, in Sicily, and in the waters of the North Atlantic, Hitler’s ground and naval forces were under pressure on all fronts.
As Roosevelt told reporters, “Hitler built walls around his ‘Fortress Europe’ but he forgot to put a roof on it.”
In ground combat, for every soldier killed, three or four were wounded. In the Army Air Forces in World War II, over three times as many men were killed as wounded.
John Steinbeck wrote that every young and green soldier, scanning the frightened faces of his comrades, “sees death there.” But in his heart, he believes that he will be exempt.
according to official Air Force historians, the Eighth had temporarily lost air mastery over Germany. 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.
Put differently, their purpose was to keep men flying by keeping them from going crazy.
Flak Farms
In the unreal world airmen were thrown into “a man came to think of his plane, his flying mates and his own skill or endurance as the only familiar elements he has to hold on to,” she wrote in a report to Eighth Air Force command. “He attaches a tremendous importance to them and suffers when anything happens to them.” To forget the war completely was to forget who you had become and who you could count on when it mattered most. Not the understanding staff of a regal estate on the Thames, but nine other scared men in a Fortress under fire.
“All eyes are on the Mickey ship when we’re over the target,” a navigator described the procedure. “When Mickey drops his bombs, we drop ours.”
Radar bombing was a means of keeping pressure on the enemy during the long European winters. Germany depended on perpetual cloud cover even more than it did the Luftwaffe to keep its skies clear of American bombers.
Radar bombing was actually a form of area bombing. Precision was impossible. This was a clear break with Air Force creed, but the alternative—not bombing at all in bad weather—was unacceptable to air commanders committed to crushing the enemy. Throughout the war, there were only two factors that greatly accelerated the rate of American strategic bombing operations: tremendously increased production of bombers and crews, and widespread employment of H2X. The bomber crews called it what it was—blind bombing—but
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.
As historian Williamson Murray has suggested, the eventual defeat of the German fighter force in the late spring of 1944 “can only be understood in the context of earlier attrition rates.”
Germany had begun the war with the world’s finest combat air force and its second strongest industrial economy. In 1939, the German aircraft industry was second to none. Aeronautic engineers of staggering creativity headed its design studios, and its factory workforce was superbly trained. But even before massive Allied raids on its plants, the industry was prevented from reaching its full potential by three principal factors: gross mismanagement by incompetent Nazi administrators, chief among them Col. Gen. Ernst Udet, Göring’s World War I squadron mate whom Göring had put in charge of the
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Not until the defeat at Stalingrad in January 1943 did Hitler order full mobilization, but by then it was too late.
