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

by Donald L. Miller

For much of the war both Bomber Command and the Eighth Air Force ran a casualty rate in excess of 50 percent of crew force. In the Eighth Air Force, the pioneers of 1942–43 paid the heaviest cost. Only one in five of these fliers completed their tours of duty. Of the 110,000 aircrew in Bomber Command, 56,000 were killed, a loss rate of 51 percent, the highest casualty rate of any of the Commonwealth’s armed forces in the war.

A total of 25 million Germans, almost a third of the nation’s wartime population and nearly half its industrial workforce, was bombed heavily. And somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 noncombatants residing in the Reich, free and unfree, perished under the bombs. This is roughly twice the number of combat fatalities sustained by American forces in combat in Europe and the Pacific. (Of the 405,399 members of the armed forces who died in the war, 291,557 were killed in combat operations.) At least 800,000 other noncombatants were seriously injured. The overwhelming majority of those killed and maimed were women, the elderly, and children under five years of age; most children over that age had been evacuated to the countryside.

At least three million dwelling units were destroyed—20 percent of the housing in the country—and probably another three million were heavily damaged. By some estimates, twenty million people, 500,000 of them in Hamburg alone, were made homeless. Berlin, the victim of 310 raids, was 70 percent destroyed. Cologne’s suffering was proportionally greater. It was 80 percent destroyed.

Ninety-one percent of Germans interviewed by Bomb Survey investigators said that the bombing was “the greatest hardship” of the war for them.

not know whom to blame. Earlier in the war the tendency was to excoriate the British and scream for reprisals. But when the bombing accelerated and German bombers and vengeance rockets failed to bring down equal suffering on the English, the Nazi government began to be singled out for censure. By 1945, the party and its supreme leader became the principal targets of public frustration. “We have the Führer to thank for this,” a man from bomb-ravaged Dusseldorf had the guts to say in front of an SS soldier.

many Germans had reached the point where they were almost beyond caring. Traumatized by repeated bombing, they resigned themselves to their fate, not to death, but to defeat and persistent suffering. In Berlin, people’s fatalism was expressed in the mordant comment: “Enjoy the war while you can, folks, because the peace will be terrible.”

Lethargy, pessimism, and the retreat from social activity—clear signs of mental depression—became so prevalent that wartime German doctors described the last stages of the conflict as the “war of the vegetative neurosis.”

As the country neared collapse, some discouraged workers became, in their fear and helplessness, more dependent on authority—that of the factory boss as well as the local Nazi hierarchy. This was, after all, a society that prized obedience and discipline, character traits that helped prevent dissatisfaction from escalating into public dissent and absenteeism from rising to levels where it would have had a severe impact on war production. When crisis and character failed to sustain work discipline, the state stepped in. The SS and the Gestapo infiltrated stool pigeons into factories, and Hitler Youth fanatics turned in their own parents for speaking out against the regime. Police hunted down absentee workers, and discipline was so rigid in some munitions mills that if word reached workers on the factory floor that their neighborhood was being bombed, they were not permitted to leave until the end of their shift.

Germans of conscience, as well as those who came to their senses toward the end and admitted the futility of continuing the war, lived in a society in which complaining people were hanged from lampposts by Nazi vigilantes for the crime of “defeatism.” As one worker said, “Rather than let them string me up I’ll be glad to believe in victory.”

The bombing appeared to have changed few people’s minds about the Jews, or even about Germany’s right to seize the land and wealth of its European neighbors, conquests that were “provoked by its encirclement by enemies that meant it harm,” Germans told New York Times reporter Raymond Daniell.

It was the shocking experience of becoming “the world’s vastest ruin,” not a repudiation of the propelling impulses of National Socialism, that initially broke the link between the party and the people, smoothing the way for the slow transition to a society pledged to peace and democracy.

Approximately 1.5 million people, more than one-half of them women, were killed by bombs in World War II, as opposed to roughly 3,000 in World War I, a 500-fold increase in civilian mortality.

Before Pearl Harbor, Percy Knauth believed with Vera Brittain that the bombing of noncombatants should be made an international war crime. What he saw in the war convinced him that he had been naive. “We did not realize that war knows nothing of humanitarianism. . . . We did not realize that the bombing of military and so-called civilian targets together is the only way in which air warfare can be waged effectively—that it is impossible to separate the two.”

Both air forces had run out of strategic targets to bomb.

The last cargo dropped by the Eighth Air Force was food for starving people. In late April, the Germans still held an iron grip on great parts of the Netherlands. To blunt the Allied advance and punish persistent Dutch resistance, the fanatical Nazi commanders had cut off food supplies to the people and opened the dikes, flooding much of the country’s low-lying farmland. By the spring of 1945, over 12,000 Dutch had died of starvation and another four and a half million were suffering from malnutrition, reduced to eating tulip bulbs when stocks of vile-tasting sugar beets ran out.

On May 1, the day the world learned of Adolf Hitler’s suicide, the Eighth became, in Crosby’s words, “another kind of air force”—not strategic or tactical but humanitarian, part of a mission the British called Operation Manna, the Americans, less reverentially, Operation Chowhound. By agreement with the Germans, only skeleton crews—crews without gunners—were authorized to fly, but that order was almost universally disregarded. “Everyone wanted to fly,” Crosby recalled. Even maintenance men and chaplains boarded the heavies after loading the bomb bays with boxes of Army rations and sacks of potatoes donated by British farmers.

On the outskirts of Amsterdam, Chuck Alling’s Fortress passed over fields of brilliantly colored tulips. In one of them, the heads of the flowers had been clipped to say, “MANY THANKS, YANKS.”

Among the hundreds of thousands of prisoners held by the Germans were 95,000 Americans, 38,000 of them airmen—bomber crewmen and fighter pilots from outfits all over Europe. Hitler had wanted these fliers kept as hostages for any eventuality. One of his twisted ideas was to billet them in towns heavily bombed by the Anglo-Americans. Another was to execute them if the bombing continued. • • •