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

by Donald L. Miller

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.

Cleven liked the young replacements but worried about their untested bravado. “Their fear wasn’t as great as ours, and therefore was more dangerous. They feared the unknown. We feared the known.”

Later in the war, when he became one of the most decorated and famous fliers in the Eighth, word spread around Thorpe Abbotts that his family was in a German concentration camp. But when someone asked him directly, he said “that was a lot of hooey.” His family—mother, sister, brother-in-law, and niece (his father had recently died)—were all back in Brooklyn. “I have no personal reasons. Everything I’ve done or hope to do is strictly because I hate persecution. . . . A human being has to look out for other human beings or else there’s no civilization.” At the briefing for Münster, Rosie remembered the target being the city’s marshaling yard, not workers’ housing. “It was near the center of the town; innocent people would die, as they did in all wars.”

People were poor targets for bombs because they had, contrary to Douhet and Mitchell, stoic staying power. They could also be evacuated from cities or find protection in public bomb shelters, whereas industries were fragile, immobile, and virtually indefensible.2 This was warfare suited to the American character. “[It] combined moral scruples, historical optimism, and technological pioneering, all three distinctly American characteristics,” wrote historian John Keegan.

If airpower theorists like Wilson and Kuter had studied the life and work of Billy Mitchell more closely, they might have paid more attention to the role of fighter aircraft in bomber warfare, not only as escorts but also in pursuit. In World War I, Mitchell and other air commanders at the front realized that no aerial operation—tactical, strategic, or reconnaissance—was possible without mastery of the air. “For Mitchell an air force’s first task,” historian Williamson Murray pointed out, “should be destruction of the enemy’s air force, particularly his pursuit aircraft; not until one had achieved that goal could an air force turn against other targets. Thus, the enemy fighter force was the essential target.” Accordingly, Mitchell called for a balanced air force made up of at least 60 percent fighter aircraft.

“You can take a smart executive and make a fair Army officer out of him in a few months. You can never take a dumb Army officer and make a good combat leader out of him.”

Eaker and his tiny staff had left an America that was not yet prepared for total war. England was fully mobilized, almost a garrison state. Able-bodied men and women between the ages of eighteen and sixty were required to perform national service of some kind. Childless women between the ages of twenty and thirty were conscripted for home-front military service or jobs in munitions industries, the first time this

had been done in any Western nation. In no combatant country except Russia were civilians subjected to a greater degree of government regulation and compulsory mobilization. Women operated antiaircraft batteries in London, and factories all over the country worked around the clock, seven days a week, with workers putting in ten-to-twelve-hour shifts.

England had the look of a country fighting for survival. Hundreds of thousands of working-class families, 60 percent of them in London, had had their places of residence damaged or destroyed by Nazi warplanes and countless thousands of them were still mourning the loss of family and friends. German air raids had already killed nearly 43,000 British civilians. Not until the f...

In the Eighth’s first year of operations, 1,634 men were removed from flying duty for frostbite, over 400 more than were removed for combat wounds. Capt. William F. Sheeley, an Eighth Air Force flight surgeon, studied the problem. Arctic explorers, he reported, had long warned that a wet foot is a frozen foot. “Men who walked through the rain to their aircraft; who slept in heated suits; who played sweaty games in their flying clothes were wet when they took off. They were casualties when they came back.”

The Eighth relied entirely on the RAF and the Royal Navy for air-sea rescue, yet failed to work closely with their deeply dedicated personnel. The result: 99 percent of its fliers who went into the sea were lost. (During this same period, approximately one-third of ditched RAF bomber crews, all of them flying night missions, were rescued.) A year later, still relying on the British, but working in unison with them, the Eighth upped its survival rate to 44 percent—and to 66 percent by the war’s end.

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.

After being freed from Ravensbrük in 1945, Dédée went to work in a leper colony in the Belgian Congo. An airman she guided to freedom said of her, “Andrée de Jongh was one of those rare beings who felt the misery of the world and would not let it rest.”

Appel insisted that there was no such thing as “ ‘getting used to combat.’ Each moment of it imposes a strain so great that men will break in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure. Thus psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gun shot wounds in warfare.” In the infantry, this breakdown usually occurred after about a hundred days of exposure to combat. By that time, the body’s fight-or-flight mechanism—designed by nature for sudden emergencies—became dangerously overextended.

England’s Lord Moran—later Churchill’s personal physician. “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.”

“In the presence of danger,” Lord Moran observed, “man often finds salvation in action.” There was no such salvation in a flak field. “I can still see and hear the flak bursts as clearly as when I was in the plane,” Eighth Air Force tail gunner Sherman Small admitted sixty years after the war. “At the time, I successfully blocked out the fear by pretending that I was an actor in a Hollywood action movie. That fiction ended with the end of the war. Then the excruciating memories of the fear pulled me down and I had to be sent to an Air Force mental hospital.”

If this ability to hold together in the face of peril can be called courage, what exactly is courage? “Courage,” Lord Moran shrewdly observed, “is a moral quality; it is not a chance gift of nature like an aptitude for games. It is a cold choice between two alternatives, the fixed resolve not to quit; an act of renunciation which must be made not once but many times, by the power of the will. Courage is will power.”

When Robert Lovett, assistant secretary of war for air, returned from a tour of English bases in June 1943, he urged Hap Arnold, who had just returned to duty following a heart attack in May, his second that year, to give immediate attention to the production of a long-range escort. Arnold then wrote what one historian has called his most important memo of the entire war.

“The Army engineer,” wrote Yank correspondent Saul Levitt, “is a gypsy-builder. He builds and then he moves.”

On June 10, 1943, the European air war entered a new phase. It was the official beginning of the Combined Bomber Offensive, code-named Pointblank. This was to be the fulfillment of the pledge made at Casablanca by Roosevelt and Churchill to launch a “round-the-clock” Anglo-American bombing effort to pave the way for the great invasion. In May 1943, at the Trident Conference in Washington, the Combined Chiefs of Staff—made up of the top military leaders in Britain and the United States—had provisionally scheduled the cross-Channel invasion of Hitler’s Fortress Europe for May 1, 1944, and linked the Allied bomber campaign directly to that invasion, code-named Overlord.

Impulsive, impatient, plagued by heart problems, and out of touch with the situation on the ground in England, Arnold was, nonetheless, unyielding. He pressed Eaker to fire both his fighter and bomber commanders, who were both “playing safe,” he charged, unwilling to take big losses by sending larger formations of bombers and escorts against the enemy. With intemperate cables flying back and forth across the Atlantic, “it began to look,” recalled Eaker’s aide, James Parton, “as if generals Arnold and Eaker were devoting more time to fighting each other than to defeating the Germans.”

Eaker had other concerns. He feared that the greater losses his enhanced forces would suffer might lead to public and official pressure to dismantle the Eighth, which was consuming an ever-larger slice of American war resources, without showing commensurate results. “One of my principal worries now,” he confided to Arnold, “is that our official supporters in the highest levels, and our supporting public, may not be able to stand our losses in combat.” He then made a dead-on

on prediction. “We may as well frankly admit that it is going to be a bloody battle. The side will win which can make good its losses. In other words, the side which has the most reserve strength.” The butcher’s bill would be higher than he imagined. That summer and fall of 1943, the Eighth Air Force would sustain losses that would dangerously deplete its men and machines, shake the morale of its surviving crews, cost Eaker his command, and throw in doubt the feasibility of defeating Germany from the air. These would be the darkest months in the history of the American air arm. 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.”

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 level pilots learned to fly the machines they would take into combat and were taught “to kill, maim, burn, destroy . . . without emotion.”