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

by Donald L. Miller

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.

For Eaker and his group, it was a shock to be in a country under siege; none of them had realized how pinched life had become in Great Britain. Meat, fish, vegetables, jam, margarine, eggs, condensed milk, breakfast cereal, cheese, and biscuits were severely rationed, along with clothing, soap, and coal for home heating. No one was starving, but rationing had reduced everyone to a monotonous, starchy diet that sapped vitality.

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 fourth year of the war would the Germans kill more British soldiers than British women and children.

In 1943, there were over 20,000 major accidents at Army Air Forces bases in the continental United States, with 5,603 airmen killed. Over the course of the war, some 15,000 airmen became fatal casualties at training bases in the States and abroad.

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.

We knew that many of us would die, and still we wanted the battle to begin.” Better to get it over with and not have to go through the agony of preparation again the next day.

In a press conference in London, General Harold George, one of the original Bomber Mafia at Maxwell Field, claimed that the loss of sixty bombers was worth the damage inflicted on the enemy. But he failed to mention that this was almost a fifth of the attacking force, and that another hundred bombers were permanently lost as a result of battle damage, a total loss of approximately 40 percent of the force sent out from England. In one afternoon, the Eighth had lost almost as many bombers as it had in its first six months of operations.

When shown fantastic Allied production figures for 1943—151,000 aircraft to the Reich’s 43,000—Hitler refused to believe them.

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.

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. The Luftwaffe had shot down ruinous numbers of bombers in October—an average of twenty-eight bombers per mission—but not a single Eighth Air Force raid had been turned back, and the home-front fighter command was paying a hellish price for tactical victories, 248 fighters lost in October alone. This amounted to 17 percent of Germany’s total fighter force in the West. Luftwaffe commanders were also concerned about the enhanced range of America’s fighter escorts.

Most of the boys headed for London, which was a different place than Capt. Robert Morgan and his Memphis Belle crew visited in the winter of 1943. Back then, there were only 47,000 U.S. airmen in England and, with no replacements in sight, leaves had been given sparingly, making Yankee flyboys a rare sight in the war-bloated city. By the end of the year the number of Air Force personnel on the island had ballooned to over 286,000. These airmen comprised only a quarter of the strength of an immense and ever-increasing American troop buildup in preparation for the cross-Channel invasion. In the last three months of 1943, over 413,000 American troops disembarked at English ports, bringing the number of U.S. service personnel in Great Britain to over 773,000. On D-Day there would be a million and a half American soldiers in the U.K., 28 percent of them—nearly 427,000 men and women—members of the AAF.

It was rare for American and British fliers to socialize together. “The major cause of this,” speculated George Orwell, residing in London during the war, “is the difference in pay. You can’t have really close and friendly relations with someone whose income is five times your own.” There was also the feeling among the British troops that the Americans had a clear physical advantage over them. They were “generally taller, bulkier, and handsomer then we were. Many were blond giants, with hair cut short in ‘combat crops.’ . . . Their uniforms and their insignia were showy, beautifully fitting, of excellent material and smart. . . . As far as appearance went, they outclassed us.”

For men so inclined, there were plenty of street whores. The easiest place to find them was in the darkened doorways of the shops around Piccadilly Circus. Even with the police around, the women were brazenly aggressive; Piccadilly Commandos, everyone called them.

In the hard bargaining of Piccadilly Circus, the flick of a cigarette lighter—giving the soldier his first glimpse of the woman’s face—could make or break a street deal. If some boys got too rough, the Commandos were capable of handling themselves. The French women walked with growling Dalmatians on leashes, and almost all streetwalkers carried switchblades. Vertical sex, a wall-job, as it was known, could be had for £2, about $8; a “quickie” in a shabby hotel room was prorated according to service rank. Most Commandos preferred wall jobs—Marble Arch style was their term for it.

By the end of 1943, there was a venereal disease epidemic in the U.K. A New York Times correspondent reported that VD rates among GIs in England were over 25 percent higher than they were at home, and that perhaps half of the cases were contracted in Piccadilly. Soon the American Red Cross was operating prophylactic stations in its clubs, and the Army finally built up a sufficient supply of condoms. The early ones, supplied by the British, were found to be “too small.”

Toward the end of the year, the American press picked up on this. “In recent months it has become increasingly obvious that the people of Britain are annoyed by the free-spending, free-loving, free-speaking U.S. troops,” Time magazine reported that December. Time claimed that many Britons thought the American GI was “sloppy, conceited, insensitive, undiscriminating, noisy.”

Observation investigators conducted polls and sociological surveys all over the U.K. and enlisted 1,500 “correspondents” to keep “diaries of their daily life” that recorded cultural changes in their communities. Asked in 1942 how they felt about Americans, 47 percent of those polled said that they had “favorable” impressions. The following year this fell to 34 percent—at a time when the notoriously arrogant Free French troops received a 52 percent favorable reaction. Asked to specify their main reasons for disliking Americans, “boastfulness,” “immaturity,” and “materialism” topped the list. “They irritate me beyond words,” observed a British housewife. “Loud, bombastic, bragging, self-righteous.” Another correspondent complained of their “arrogance, Teutonic massiveness, and lack of courtesy and common decency,” along with their brazen assumption that they were winning the war by themselves. “How can one help resenting the full-fed, candy-pampered, gum-chewing swagger of our invaders?”

Even Englishmen favorably disposed toward Americans said that the qualities they found most attractive in them were those ordinarily associated with children: their “childlike desire to talk,” their vigor and impulsiveness, their open-handed generosity and friendliness, and their “amusing” lack of inhibitions. “I like them,” said a young Mass-Observation correspondent, “but not in the way I like the French—as an equal—but in the way a fond parent likes his children.”

British males responded with humor. “Heard about the new utility knickers? One Yank and they’re off.” But resentment lasted until the Yanks were finally gone.

Here and elsewhere, the Yanks were wonderful with children. “Tough, gum-chewing, girl-chasing, hard-drinking GIs—let one small child cross his path and he is lost,” remarked one woman. “Your Yank is always a sucker for kids.”

This, he thought, would help foster among black troops “a definite feeling that they are contributing to the combat effort.” The aggressive commander of the new Combat Support Wing, Col. George S. Grubb, weeded out seventy-five incompetent and racist white officers, upgraded base recreational facilities, and began using racially mixed MP patrols. Morale and performance improved markedly and both court-martial and VD rates dropped dramatically. Like Eaker, Grubb, who was white, believed that most racial incidents were “provoked by white troops,” and that “in general, negro troops are more courteous and well mannered than the white troops.” • • •

When the war began, Britian was a racially homogeneous country with not more than 8,000 black residents, most of them concentrated in London and several other port cities. The vast majority of towns and villages did not contain a single black resident, and many English people had never encountered a person of color. England was overwhelmingly white by design and the government wanted to keep it that way. It forbade “coloured British subjects” of the empire from settling in—for them—the inaptly named mother country. Nor had the government wanted black American GIs. When America entered the war, the British Chiefs of Staff, fearing racial friction, had requested that African-American GIs not be sent to England to build airbases. It would be better, they said, if white engineer units were assigned the task.

To the surprise of both the American and the British governments, the African-American troops were warmly welcomed and well treated. They,

English people drew a line between the races on only one sensitive issue—interracial dating—but opposition to it was not universal. “The white American airman on the base couldn’t understand why a British girl would go out with a black American. To us, it really didn’t mean anything,” recalled a resident of Thorpe Abbotts.

The Air Force had a long-standing policy of institutional racism. At the beginning of the war, Eleanor Roosevelt joined black leaders to pressure her husband to integrate the historically all-white Army Air Corps and to put black pilots into combat. Hap Arnold grudgingly established an all-black fighter unit, the famous Tuskegee Airmen, named for the Alabama base where they trained. These pursuit pilots served with distinction in the Mediterranean Theater, but the Air Force drew the line on integrating bomber crews, insisting that blacks and whites—especially Southern whites—could never operate efficiently as combat teams.

The most rigid form of Jim Crow was practiced in East Anglia, where blacks were needed to perform essential work on bomber bases as truck drivers and ordnance workers. Blacks were stationed at segregated facilities near the bomber stations, but for both races the main nightlife was in larger towns like Ipswich, with its 150 public houses. With their smaller numbers, blacks were restricted to only eight Ipswich pubs, one dance hall, and a segregated Red Cross club. In East Anglia, the inappropriately named River Dove was the designated color line. All villages and towns east of the river were out of bounds for black troops. Blacks found in “white towns” were arrested by military police.

In an average winter month, there were only two or three days when visual bombing was possible. In the winter of 1943–44, Pathfinder bombers led forty-eight raids, among them the only missions the Eighth conducted over Germany in November and December. Begun as an experiment, radar bombing soon became routine procedure. Throughout the war, only about half of the Eighth’s heavies bombed visually. In the winter of 1943–44, it was 10 percent.

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 Luftwaffe’s technical office in 1936; shortsighted military planning at the highest level; and a deep national commitment to craft, not mass, production.

In 1944, Germany aviation factories would put out an impressive 40,000 planes, but that same year, the United States alone would produce 96,000 aircraft, and Allied total aircraft production would outpace German production by 400 percent.

In late 1943, Galland reported to the German high command that his fighter aircraft “had no instruments for blind flying, no de-icing of the cockpit, no safety arrangements for navigation or automatic pilots.” And most of his pilots “had no knowledge of instrument flying or bad-weather methods of landing.”

Winter weather was brutally difficult for fliers on both sides. After completing high-altitude missions in poorly heated cockpits, American fighter pilots were sometimes so frozen and weak that they had to be pulled from their planes by medical teams. Ice two inches thick built up on the windscreens of fighters and bombers, causing accidents. Fliers also had difficulty relieving themselves. There were only two toilet facilities on a four-engine bomber, a tin can and a “relief tube.” Between the waist compartment and the tail there was a can with a lid on it, but as Jack Novey noted, “when you put your butt down on the toilet, the frozen metal would take part of your skin with it. So we just threw the damn thing out of the airplane.”

The relief tube, a funnel with a rubber hose that dropped out though the bottom of the plane, was located in the bomb bay. Novey explained, “You were supposed to make your way across this narrow catwalk with bombs hanging on both sides, unzip yourself in this extreme cold, aim into the funnel, and urinate.” If someone had already used the tube, it was almost certain that his urine had frozen and that “your pee [would] splash . . . right back up in your face.” So crew members simply urinated on the floor. When under fire, they had no choice but to relieve themselves in their pants.

Few airmen were trained to cope with the insidious dangers of icing. A treacherous combination of high humidity and freezing temperatures would cause “clear ice” to build up on the bomber’s surface “so rapidly,” one pilot described the phenomenon, “that the craft became too heavy to fly. When this happened there was no recovery.” Under the intolerable weight of gas, bombs, and ice, planes would begin spinning wildly until they fell apart.

Electrical suits continued to malfunction with such frequency that many fliers stopped using them, preferring to wear extra layers of clothing. The cold penetrated “with an intensity that was the same as pain,” causing some fliers to take strange precautions. Navigator and novelist Sam Halpert described how he used to tie a string around his penis so he could “find the goddamn thing” when he felt the urge.

Casualties from flak and cannon fire had been reduced by the introduction of body armor or “flak suits,” as the men called them. The combat body vest was made of overlapping manganese steel plates sewed into a canvas covering. An apron of the same material hooked onto the vest, protecting the groin and upper thighs. The complete suit weighed twenty-two and a half pounds and, though cumbersome, could be shed quickly in an emergency by the pull of a cord.

There was something else at stake. Since arriving in England, the Eighth Air Force had taken on three major target systems: submarine repair facilities, ball bearings, and aircraft production, and had failed to knock out any of them. “On the record,” an American reporter wrote, “the American daylight attack was in doubt.”

In its testing and training programs the Air Force looked for different qualities in fighter and bomber pilots: physical strength, judgment, emotional stamina, dependability, team play, discipline, and leadership in bomber pilots; rapid hand-eye coordination, aggressiveness, boldness, individuality, and a zest for battle in fighter pilots.

But the Eighth Air Force had already done its indispensable duty. In the five-month battle for the air supremacy that made the invasion possible, the American Air Forces in Europe lost over 2,600 heavy bombers and 980 fighter planes and suffered 18,400 casualties, including 10,000 combat deaths, over half as many men as the Eighth lost in all of 1942 and 1943. These airmen deserve an equal place in the national memory with the approximately 6,000 American soldiers killed, wounded, or missing in action in the amphibious and airborne assault on D-Day.

The slaughter at Falaise ended the eighty-day-long Battle of Normandy, the most decisive battle on the Western Front. The Germans lost over 400,000 combatants—killed, wounded, or captured—and the Allies suffered over 225,000 casualties, two-thirds of them Americans, among them 8,536 airmen killed and missing. The battle was a prelude to the liberation of Paris and the triumphant Allied drive across France to Germany’s western border, a campaign joined by Allied forces that landed on the coast of southern France on August 15.

Oil is the blood of machine-age warfare. No modern state can wage war successfully without a sufficient and secure supply of petroleum products, both fuel and lubricants. Germany began the European war with a precarious fuel situation and within two years it was fighting an energy colossus. America had begun the transition from coal to oil early in the twentieth century and by 1939, oil accounted for half its total energy. In that year, the United States produced twenty times more oil than Germany would at the peak of its wartime production. California alone produced more oil than the Soviet Union, the largest petroleum producer in Europe.

The multiple raids on Berlin and Dresden in February and March of 1945 were part of an immense acceleration of the air war. By the end of 1944, almost four-fifths of German towns with over 100,000 inhabitants had already been destroyed; and that was before Allied bombing operations peaked. In the first four months of 1945, the Anglo-American air forces dropped over twice the tonnage of bombs on Germany that the RAF had dropped in all of 1943.

In March the military bombing reached a wartime peak; a monthly high of almost 170,000 tons of bombs was dropped on Germany, 102,000 of them by the Americans. That month the Eighth Air Force sent out bombers on twenty-six days, dispatching a thousand or more of them on twenty of those missions.

“Everyone is so overcome by his own personal worries that he no longer cares about the fate of Germany,” one woman expressed the prevailing mood. “It is far more important that one gets something to eat, that shoes will last a little longer, and above all whether there will be an air raid. Will we have a roof over our heads tomorrow, or even be alive?”

Before Alling’s disoriented gunners could swing their heavy weapons around fast enough to track it, another jet made a swift pass from eight o’clock and claimed a fifth Fortress. This was Dead Man’s Hand, piloted by Lt. Robert F. Glazener and flying, as many bombers did at the end of the war, without its usual complement of two waist gunners. The aircraft, on its 111th combat mission for the 447th Bomb Group, was the last Eighth Air Force heavy bomber lost to enemy fighters in the war. Alling and his men saw no parachutes, but learned later that seven of the eight crewmen managed to escape the flaming plane and were later liberated by American troops.

By early April, there was little left to bomb in Germany.

In February 1945, the Wehrmacht had amassed up to 1,500 tanks to stop the Red Army’s drive into the Upper Silesian coalfields, but could not properly deploy them because of fuel shortages.

By early April 1945, the Allied air forces’ transportation campaign had also achieved its major objectives. Germany’s river and canal network had been disabled and its rail system was in ruins, and with it, the coal industry that powered the economy.

Allied airpower’s slow strangulation of rail and river systems was probably the greatest single cause of Germany’s economic collapse.

“Even a first-class military power—rugged and resilient as Germany was—cannot live long under the full-scale and free exploitation of air weapons over the heart of its territory,” the framers of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report would conclude. For the first time in modern history the economy of a world power had been utterly destroyed, and along with it, all of that country’s major cities.

these air armadas released over two million tons of bombs on the Reich. The cost in lives lost was appalling. The Eighth Air Force, the largest aerial striking force in the war, sustained between 26,000 and 28,000 fatalities, roughly one-tenth of the Americans killed in World War II. Taking the lower number, this was 12.3 percent of the 210,000 Eighth Air Force crewmen who flew in combat. Of all branches of the American armed forces, only submarine crews in the Pacific had a higher fatality rate: almost 23 percent. In addition, an estimated 28,000 Eighth Air Force crewmembers were shot out of the sky and became prisoners of war. If they and the estimated 18,000 men who were wounded are added to the casualty list, the number of those lost in operations, not including untold numbers of psychological casualties, is at least 72,000, over 34 percent of those who experienced combat. This is the highest casualty rate in the American armed forces in World War II.