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

by Donald L. Miller

Even today, no country’s synthetic oil industry comes close to Germany’s peak wartime production.

Wartime Germany was a chemical empire built on coal, air, and water.

The British and the Americans did not come to a full realization of the organic relationship between Germany’s synthetic oil and chemical plants until after the war, when their agents interrogated German ministers and businessmen. This is one of the most dismaying intelligence failures of the war,

After the war, Speer told American interrogators that a full-out offensive against the synthetic plants by the combined air armadas of England and America—closely spaced raids, night and day, without cease—could [alone] have brought about Germany’s surrender . . . in eight weeks.” That is unlikely. This war, like almost all others, had to be won on the ground, but earlier and more sustained attacks on oil would surely have shortened the war on the Western Front by several months.

With enough Luftwaffe fighters stationed nearby to put up determined, if only sporadic, resistance, Leuna became the most heavily defended industrial target in Europe.

Flak was a grossly inefficient defensive measure. On average, it took 8,500 rounds from the newest version of the 88mm gun to down a single bomber. Yet it was a devastatingly effective psychological weapon, designed to unnerve the aircrews and impair bombing accuracy.

an airman still stood more than a one-in-three chance of being killed or captured before his tour ended. The only consolation was that more frequent missions put more men closer to going home.

Postwar Air Force studies would show that the two most difficult industrial targets to hit in the European Theater of Operations were the two largest: synthetic oil plants and oil refineries. Only 29 percent of the bombs aimed at Leuna on clear days landed inside the plant gates; on radar raids the number dropped to 5.1 percent.

This was how the German oil industry was eventually disabled for good: by relentless carpet bombing that caused simultaneous damage to a number of plants.

An Air Force created for precision bombing won its greatest victory by carpet bombing.

The most unfortunate thing for America’s moral reputation is not that Auschwitz was not bombed—people of conscience are on both sides of the issue—but that the War Department never asked the Air Force to study the feasibility of the operation.

” These reckless charges had fueled Arnold’s concern that the recent landings in neutral countries were a symptom of a greater problem: a dangerous deterioration in crew morale brought on by fatigue and heavy losses. Even before he had written Spaatz, Arnold had set in motion three independent investigations: two of them to interview interned crews and examine American aircraft being held by the Swedes and the Swiss; the other, conducted by a member of headquarters staff, to study combat crew morale in the entire European Theater of Operations.

Only extraordinary Allied diplomatic pressure and the realization that the Allies would win the war persuaded the government of this 700-year-old democracy to reverse its economic policy in February 1945 and stop the exportation of war-related products to the Third Reich.

Unknown to the airmen, Legge, under pressure from the State Department, had begun negotiating for the mass repatriation of all American internees, and constant escapes were hindering his efforts. Late in the war, he also made several formal protests to the Swiss government about the deplorable conditions at Wauwilermoos, where dozens of American airmen were being held incommunicado without trial for indefinite periods.

Running this freedom line took money, a lot of it for bribes, but Sam Woods had a steady supply of funds, courtesy of Thomas J. Watson, the founder and president of IBM, who channeled cash to Woods through his company’s European office.

The report would conclude that, with the exception of only one or two planes, every American bomber that came down in Switzerland had been either heavily damaged in combat or was dangerously low on fuel.

It was called the Sturmbock, or Battering Ram. Flying in Sturmgruppen, waves of up to forty planes, this eight-ton “flying tank” became for a short time the most lethal bomber destroyer of the war.

After scoring a hit, a Storm Group pilot would dive straight down and head for home to avoid being caught and killed by the faster Mustangs.

If a Sturmbock pilot failed to score a direct hit on an enemy bomber he was bound by a solemn oath to ram it. But with pilots desperately scarce in the Reich, Storm Group volunteers were instructed by their local commanders to bail out immediately before or after impact.

The new Storm Groups delivered—and took—frightful casualties. In just two days, September 11 and 12, they lost thirty-eight pilots. Barely reinforced, Vorberg’s unit flew on September 27 against over 300 Liberators of the 2nd Bomb Division. The combatants—an air force that had never been turned back and one sworn to protect its home soil—collided in the skies over central Germany. For Jimmy Stewart’s old Liberator group, the 445th at Tibenham, it was the blackest day of the war. It suffered more losses than any single combat unit sustained in the history of American aerial warfare.

Twenty-five four-engine bombers had been destroyed in six minutes of focused fury. Only four Liberators made it back to Tibenham.

On October 12, Chuck Yeager, flying escort for a formation of Liberators, destroyed five Me 109s over Bremen, making him an “ace-in-a-day.”

After returning to England from Spain the previous May, Yeager had begun a fight with his base commanders over the War Department regulation that prohibited airmen shot down over occupied Europe from returning to combat duty. “German intelligence kept dossiers on most of us, and knew who had been shot down before; they’d go right to work on your fingernails if you were shot down again,” trying to extract information on the French Underground. “[But] I was raised to finish what I started, not slink off after flying only eight missions. Screw the regulations.” The brassy West Virginian had taken his protest up the chain of command to Eisenhower himself, who finally relented after the Allies landed in France and the Maquis began operating in the open.

Bert Stiles. After flying thirty-five bomber missions, Stiles had requested a transfer to a fighter outfit. “I want to fly a real plane,” he told an English friend. “I want to feel the wind blowing across my face—to climb, dive, soar, be free.”

Strategic bombing was the furthest thing from a science. It was founded more on faith than fact—on incomplete or erratic data, most of it gathered from photoreconnaissance conducted over a part of the world that lay under perpetual cloud cover for great parts of the year. Everything about the strategic bombing was new and untried.

Unlike the other military services, the bomber commanders and their advisors had neither precedent nor experience to fall back on.

While some airmen killed without remorse, studies conducted by Eighth Air Force psychiatrists found that most men on heavy-bomber crews could not “tolerate well the guilt of killing,” despite the fact that the victims were “remote, almost abstract.”

But in Operation Baseplate the Luftwaffe fighter arm lost over 400 piston-engine aircraft and 237 pilots, including fifty-nine of the force’s commanders. It was the greatest single catastrophe the Luftwaffe would suffer.

In January 1945, the U.S. Army suffered more battle casualties—over 39,000—than in any other month in the fight for northwest Europe. The best friends the GIs had in the final weeks of the battle were the Allied air forces.

The Battle of the Bulge was almost entirely an American fight, the biggest and costliest in lives ever fought by the U.S. Army.

January was the climax of the Allied air campaign against Hitler’s war economy. The Reichsbahn was damaged beyond hope of recovery; with this, the coal famine turned into an irreversible energy catastrophe.

Listening to the thunderous discharges of Soviet artillery, airmen at Stalag Luft III grew concerned about their approaching fate. As prisoners, they had felt a strange sense of security. Despite the hardships, their lives had not been endangered unless they had tried to escape; they were actually safer in a German stalag than in an American bomber over the Reich.

Unlike most infantrymen who were captured by the Germans, airmen were apprehended alone because they came out of the sky alone, which made it impossible to determine how many of them were beaten or killed. There are, however, dozens of documented cases of the murder and brutal mistreatment of the reviled Terrorfliegers (terror fliers), bomber boys as well as fighter pilots.

Göring had issued instructions early in the war that captured enemy airmen were to be protected by Luftwaffe police from the inflamed wrath of the German citizenry. A famous World War I flying ace, Göring believed in the universal kinship of fliers, Knights of the Sky. He also wanted to ensure that his own captured airmen were treated humanely by their Allied “comrades.”

There are no reliable records, but in the entire war probably less than 2 percent of American prisoners attempted to escape German camps and an unknown number made it to freedom.

During the war, thousands of American infantrymen feigned insanity in order to be removed from the line and sent to a field hospital and then back home. No one feigned insanity in a stalag. Conditions in the camp hospitals were as appalling as they were in the barracks, and the Germans refused to repatriate prisoners suffering from mental disorders.

In Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya alone, the areas leveled (almost 100 square miles) would exceed the areas destroyed in all German cities during the entire war by the Anglo-American air forces (approximately seventy-nine square miles).

Thunderclap, the plan’s code name, was to be an apocalyptic Anglo-American air assault on Berlin—a continuous four-day blitz designed to deliver a “coup de grâce to German morale” by killing and maiming over a quarter-million people and demolishing the administrative center of the Nazi government.

Why did Carl Spaatz agree to a plan that was in direct violation of his long-stated policy against targeting civilians? Heavy pressure from Hap Arnold to end the war quickly was a major factor.

Doolittle was that rare Eighth Air Force commander who opposed terror bombing on both military and moral grounds.

Early estimates by the Eighth Air Force and Swedish reporters put the number of dead at around 25,000, while a respected German historian has recently arrived at a much lower figure, approximately 3,000. If correct, even this suspiciously low figure represents the most Berliners killed in a single raid in the entire war, during which the city was bombed 363 times, with a total loss of 50,000 citizens. What is known for certain is that an astounding 120,000 people were made homeless by the February 3 bombing.

The coldly anonymous nature of bomber warfare made it possible for some human beings to deal out death without the slightest sense of personal responsibility.

Others saw the bombing as justifiable retribution.

These were the extreme reactions of airmen: moral indifference and righteous revenge.

thermite-filled incendiaries, which the Germans wrongly called phosphorous bombs, were the great killers of the night, causing over five times more damage and death than conventional iron bombs.

Seventy percent of Dresden’s fire victims succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning released by combustion; many of them died swiftly and painlessly without a burn on their bodies.

Dresden had not been specially marked for immolation. There was nothing exceptional about the raid except the unexpected magnitude of the devastation.

Dresden was a routine incendiary mission that happened to go exactly right.

But the two commanders, Doolittle and Harris, employed different bombing techniques. One air force tried to kill an urban rail system, the other tried to erase an entire city.

To compensate for inaccuracy caused by imprecise radar equipment, weather, German resistance, equipment malfunction, and human error by men who were asked to do a precise, high-pressure task while under enemy fire, American bomber crews frequently carpet bombed, said Fifteenth Air Force radar navigator-bombardier Milt Groban.