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

by Donald L. Miller

This was an air front. From recently built bases in East Anglia, a new kind of warfare was being waged—high-altitude strategic bombing. It was a singular event in the history of warfare, unprecedented and never to be repeated. The technology needed to fight a prolonged, full-scale bomber war was not available until the early 1940s and, by the closing days of that first-ever bomber war, was already being rendered obsolete by jet engine aircraft, rocket-powered missiles, and atomic bombs. In the thin, freezing air over northwestern Europe, airmen bled and died in an environment that no warriors had ever experienced. It was air war fought not at 12,000 feet, as in World War I, but at altitudes two and three times that, up near the stratosphere where the elements were even more dangerous than the enemy. In this brilliantly blue battlefield, the cold killed, the air was unbreathable, and the sun exposed bombers to swift violence from German fighter planes and ground guns. This endless, unfamiliar killing space added a new dimension to the ordeal of combat, causing many emotional and physical problems that fighting men experienced for the first time ever.

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. The statistics were discomforting. Two-thirds of the men could expect to die in combat or be captured by the enemy. And 17 percent would either be wounded seriously, suffer a disabling mental breakdown, or die in a violent air accident over English soil. 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.

“Medal, hell, I needed an aspirin,” he commented long afterward. “So I remain undecorated.”

“It was a Sunday, and many crewmen . . . had deep reservations about bombing anywhere near churches,” recalled Lt. Robert Sabel, a pilot with the 390th Bomb Group. Capt. Ellis Scripture, a navigator who would be flying in the 95th Bomb Group’s lead Fortress, The Zootsuiters, later described his reaction. “I’d been raised in a strict Protestant home. My parents were God-oriented people. . . . I was shocked to learn that we were to bomb civilians as our primary target for the first time in the war.” Ellis Scripture went to his group commander after the briefing and told him he didn’t want to fly that day.

It wasn’t just Hitler. The entire nation had gone mad; it had to be stopped.

antiaircraft fire, “flak,” as it was called, a contraction of Fliegerabwehrkanonen, antiaircraft artillery.

Prewar strategists foresaw the bomber war as a battle of machines against machines, with little human contact. But with every Eighth Air Force mission an invasion of the Reich, downed airmen like “Hambone” Hamilton met the enemy face-to-face on his own soil before a single American infantryman crossed into Germany; and air fights often approached the grim intimacy of close-quarter fighting on the ground.

“In a situation like that you don’t think about dying,” said Rosenthal. “You focus on what you have to do to save the plane and crew. You drive everything else out of your mind. You’re frightened, but there’s a difference between fear and panic. Panic paralyzes; fear energizes. You sweat—even at 50 degrees below zero—your heart pumps, you act. Truthfully, the only fear I ever experienced in the war was the fear that I would let my crew down.