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

by Donald L. Miller

Thorpe Abbotts is in East Anglia, a history-haunted region of ancient farms, curving rivers, and low flat marshland. It stretches northward from the spires of Cambridge, to the high-sitting cathedral town of Norwich, and eastward to Great Yarmouth, an industrial port on the black waters of the North Sea.

And its drained fields made good airbases from which to strike deep into the German Reich. A century or so behind London in its pace and personality, it had been transformed by the war into one of the great battlefronts of the world, a war front unlike any other in history.

East Anglia, a new kind of warfare was being waged—high-altitude strategic bombing.

John Egan was commander of a squadron of B-17 Flying Fortresses,

Egan was attached to the Eighth Air Force, a bomber command formed at Savannah Army Air Base in Georgia in the month after Pearl Harbor to deliver America’s first blow against the Nazi homeland.

a year after the first men and machines of the Eighth had begun occupying bases handed over to them by the RAF—the Royal Air Force—whose bombers had been hammering German cities since 1940. Each numbered Bombardment Group (BG)—his was the 100th—was

A combat wing was one small part of a formation of many hundreds of bombers and fighter escorts that shook the earth under the English villagers who spilled out of their cottages at dawn to watch the Americans head out “to hit the Hun.”

Jimmy Stewart was a bomber boy and so was the “King of Hollywood,” Clark Gable. Both served beside men and boys who had washed office windows in Manhattan or loaded coal cars in Pennsylvania—Poles and Italians, Swedes and Germans, Greeks and Lithuanians, Native Americans

The Far Eastern and Pacific empires of the English, the Dutch, and the French had recently fallen to the Japanese, as had the American-occupied Philippines.

The Royal Air Force’s fighter boys had won the Battle of Britain the previous summer, and England had stood up to the Blitz, the first long-term bombing campaign of the war, but since the evacuation of the British army at Dunkirk in May 1940, and the fall of France soon thereafter, Germany had been the absolute master of Western Europe.

How to hit back at the enemy?

The purpose was to set annihilating fires that killed thousands and that would break German civilian morale. The bombing was wildly inaccurate and crew losses were appalling. But killing Germans was wonderful for British morale—payback for the bombing of Coventry and London, and England had no other way to directly hurt Germany.

The Eighth Air Force had been sent to England to join this ever accelerating bombing campaign, which would be the longest battle of World War II. It had begun combat operations in August 1942, in support of the British effort but with a different plan and purpose. The key to it was the top secret Norden bombsight, developed by Navy scientists in the early 1930s.

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.

“What happens to your body when you fall 25,000 feet?” a flier asked himself as he watched men he knew drop through the clouds. “Do you die on the way down, or are you conscious . . . screaming all the way down?”

“Suddenly all the lights went out. The people—mostly women and children—huddled together like sheep in the slaughterhouse, praying, crying and shrieking in terror. Some were mute with fear.” “It was an inferno,” recalled a German soldier who happened to be changing trains at Münster. “All around me I could hear injured people screaming who were trapped under demolished and burning houses. Almost all of the city center had been flattened to the ground and the main railway station had been heavily damaged.”

“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.

Nearly 700 civilians were killed in Münster on October 10, 1943, most of them residents of medieval town houses in the vicinity of the marshaling yard.

On July 4, six crews from the Eighth Air Force’s 15th Bomb Squadron, a light-bomber outfit that had been sent to England in May to train on British planes, had joined an equal number of RAF crews on a low-level sweep of heavily defended German airfields in Holland.

The infantry and Navy had centuries of accumulated experience to draw from in plotting battle strategy. Although primitive bomber aircraft had been employed by both sides in World War I, and although Japan, Germany, and Italy had used dive-bombers to terrorize cities and villages in China, Spain, and North Africa in the 1930s, no nation had ever fought a full-scale bomber war prior to World War II. As the novelist John Steinbeck wrote in 1942, “Of all branches of the Service, the Air Force must act with the least precedent, the least tradition.”

In modern warfare there are two main types of aerial bombing—strategic and tactical. “Strategic bombing,” as defined by the Air Force, “strikes at the economy of the enemy; it attempts to cripple its war potential by blows at industrial production, civilian morale, and communications. Tactical bombardment is immediate air support of movements of air, land, or sea forces.” The Eighth Air Force would conduct both kinds of bombing, but at the start of the war its leaders hoped to commit it almost exclusively to strategic bombing.

use airpower to strike the Germans behind their lines, knocking out airfields and sources of supply. Here was a way to use “the airplane for the [William Tecumseh] Sherman strategy of carrying war to the enemy’s economy and people,” wrote historian Russell F. Weigley.

In one of Mitchell’s hair-raising scenarios—the bombing of New York City—deadly gases released by bombs fill the air and seep into the subways, triggering a massive evacuation of the city. When the refugees of New York and other large American cities that have been bombed are unable to obtain the essentials of life, the government is forced to capitulate.

To Douhet and Mitchell, quick wars meant reduced casualties. In becoming more terrible, warfare would actually become more humane. Better to decide a war by terrorizing the population with “a few gas bombs,” Mitchell wrote, than “the present methods of blowing people to bits by cannon projectiles or butchering them with bayonets.” Mitchell even suggested that future wars might be fought, not by large armies, but an elite cadre of aerial warriors, the modern equivalent of “the armored knights in the Middle Ages.” This, too, would save lives. And the very threat of total annihilation, he argued in anticipation of the Cold War proponents of nuclear deterrence, would prevent war from breaking out. “Air power has brought with it a new doctrine of war . . . and a new doctrine of peace.”

For over a century, military theorists in the Western world had been under the spell of the Prussian writer Carl von Clausewitz, who argued that the supreme objective of warfare is the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces. Mitchell and Douhet challenged this iron dictum. A contemporary military observer has nicely encapsulated their thinking. “The history of civilized mankind shows us but three . . . revolutionary military inventions, or discoveries: discipline, gunpowder, and the airplane. . . . The airplane for the first time in the . . . history of human conflict, has given to warfare the means of striking . . . directly at the seat and source of [the enemy’s] power—at his citizenry, at his capital city, at his industrial, commercial, and political centers—without first having to overthrow the armed forces with which he seeks to protect them.”

They fashioned their new “philosophy” of warfare even before the Air Corps began secretly testing the invention that made it possible. This was the Norden bombsight, America’s most important secret weapon before the Manhattan Project. It was first developed in 1931 for sea-based naval aircraft by a reclusive Dutch engineer, Carl L. Norden. His wife teased him, calling him a “merchant of death,” but Norden claimed he was trying to save lives by making bombing more precise. Two years after the Navy began testing the bombsight, the Army ordered it for aircraft engaged in coastal defense, eventually spending approximately $1.5 billion—65 percent of the cost of the Manhattan Project—to purchase 90,000 of them.

Air supremacy achieved by fighter aircraft was the prerequisite for a successful bombing offensive. In the coming European war, it would take American Air Force leaders more than a year and near paralyzing loss rates to absorb this lesson. But the Bomber Mafia did work mightily in the late 1930s to encourage the development of something overlooked by both Mitchell and Douhet—a military-industrial complex committed to the production of staggering numbers of warplanes.

In May 1940, with France about to fall to the Nazis, Roosevelt called for an annual output of 50,000 planes, imploring the aircraft industry to expand its normal capacity of 2,000 a year to more than 4,000 a month. Congress quickly provided the funding. In Arnold’s words, “In forty-five minutes I was given $1,500,000,000 and told to get an air force.” At the time of the Munich crisis, the American air force, with 1,200 combat aircraft and 22,700 officers and enlisted men, was twentieth in size in the world. By December 1941, it had almost 340,000 officers and enlisted personnel and almost 3,000 combat planes. The newest of them was the B-24 Liberator, which flew faster, further, and carried a larger bomb load than the more rugged and maneuverable B-17. By 1944, mass production and mass education—areas in which this country had long led the world—would give the United States the greatest air force on earth, with 80,000 planes and 2.4 million fliers and support personnel, 31 percent of total Army strength.

Haywood Hansell and his fellow air war planners had warned General Arnold that America would not have the planes and personnel needed to begin sustained strategic bombing until late 1943. And Spaatz cautioned Gen. George Marshall, America’s chief war strategist, not to commit the force Eaker would be building in England before it was able to deliver decisive blows. But in early 1942, with Japan sweeping through Southeast Asia and the lightning-quick German army driving deeply into Russia and across North Africa toward the Suez Canal, it “looked,” Arnold wrote later, “as if the Allies were losing the war.” So Marshall ordered Arnold to immediately send what heavy bombers he had available to Britain. They were not expected to undertake the all-out assault on the German war machine that the Bomber Mafia envisioned. Their mission was to help prepare the way for a cross-Channel invasion of Nazi-occupied France. This was to occur in the fall of 1942, if Russia collapsed, but more likely the following spring. General Marshall, the most passionate proponent of an Anglo-American invasion of northern France—“our shortest route to the heart of Germany”—told Eaker that his bombers and fighter escorts had one year to achieve air supremacy over Northern Europe. “I do not believe a cross-Channel invasion of Europe will ever be possible until the Luftwaffe is destroyed,” he said. “Do your plans provide that?” Eaker assured him that they did and that the skies over the invasion beaches wou...

On arriving in London, Eaker’s party was taken on a drive through the battered but defiant metropolis. The German Blitz, eight months of fire and fear in 1940 and ’41, had killed some 30,000 Londoners and left another 50,000 injured. And on far fronts, the war was going disastrously for the Allies. In Libya, British forces had been soundly defeated by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s desert army; in Russia, the Red Army had been pushed back to Moscow and Leningrad; and in the Philippines, a starving, undermanned American force under Lt. Gen. Douglas C. MacArthur was making its final stand in the mountain jungles of Bataan. On February 15, five days before Eaker arrived in London, Singapore, the bastion of Occidental power in the Far East, fell to the Japanese.

The Butt report led to a marked change in bombing strategy. With precision bombing impossible at night, England would now do what Churchill had sworn it would never do: deliberately bomb noncombatants. The targets of the new British air campaign were the built-up areas of German cities, the residential centers where most of the workforce lived. Fifty-eight cities of over 100,000 people were put in the target list. The objective: to destroy “the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular, of the industrial workers.”

For the planning and direction of combat operations, the Eighth’s Bomber Command was organized into combat wings. Each wing was comprised of three bomb groups, which met in the skies over their neighboring bases and flew into battle together. Each combat wing, in turn, belonged to one or another larger organization, called, initially, a bombardment wing, and later an air division. These were the equivalent of infantry divisions, big organizations to fight big battles. In 1942, there were only two bombardment wings, the 1st and the 2nd. Each had its own commander and headquarters building, where bombing strikes requiring close coordination were plotted and organized.

American and British commanders of Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa.

In 1942, twelve U-boats based along the Bay of Biscay each sank more than 100,000 tons of shipping. No American submarine in the Pacific sank more tonnage than that during the entire war.

Dönitz made these ports the U-boats’ main operational base and set up his headquarters in a château outside Lorient, at the head of a long peninsula that sheltered what had formerly been a lazy fishing port. Standing on his sweeping terrace, he could see the largest of the concrete pens that Nazi engineering crews were building to shelter his boats. Fifteen thousand slave laborers were working on three colossal enclosures, each with a twenty-five-foot-thick reinforced-concrete roof. When completed in January 1943, these were among the most imposing defensive fortifications in the history of armed conflict, and the entire project was one of the greatest construction feats of World War II, requiring three-quarters of the concrete used to build the Hoover Dam.

A German fighter pilot later explained the effectiveness of these frontal attacks. Because of the concentration of fire from the massed bombers and the density of the cone of fire, the most dangerous distance for the attacker was between 1,000 and 600 meters. “Once you are nearer than that . . . the smallest [aiming] error . . . will cause the whole cone of fire to miss you . . . and you have a chance of bringing them down. . . . You can kill the crew straight away [or hit] the engines and the [fuel] tanks.” On subsequent missions, as German fighters pressed their nerve-rattling attacks to within a hundred yards of the bombers, and as losses to fighters continued to mount, some forward-facing crewmen began to develop nearly disabling fears that a Focke-Wulf carrying a dead pilot would smash directly into them. Of the original crews assigned to the 306th Bomb Group, which flew its first mission in early October 1942, 30 percent of the pilots and co-pilots were killed in action. A morale-building poster was put up on a bomber base in East Anglia. Under the face of a grinning pilot was the challenge, “Who’s afraid of the new Focke-Wulf?” An airman pinned a piece of paper on it, with the words, “Sign here.” Every flying officer in the group, including the group commander, put his signature on it.

When available, the new electrical suits were notoriously undependable. They shorted out and sent electric shocks through the hands, feet, and testicles; and after a few missions, they tended to burn out, usually because the men were not told how to take proper care of them. After a mission, exhausted men wrapped them in a ball with their other flying clothing and stuffed them into lockers or barracks bags, damaging the fragile heat elements.

Anoxia, or oxygen deprivation, was part of the “aero-medical nightmare” that afflicted the Eighth. Saliva or vomit from airsickness would get into the men’s molded rubber face masks and freeze, blocking the hose and causing men to pass out or even die. Throughout a mission, the navigator would call out oxygen checks every few minutes on the plane’s interphone. If a crewman failed to answer, another was sent to investigate, and, if needed, perform artificial respiration or administer oxygen from a portable walk-around bottle. “It’s altogether too easy to have a leak in your mask or hose, or anywhere else in the line, and to be totally unaware of the problem,” a navigator described a typical mission at 25,000 feet. “Without oxygen at this altitude, you’re unconscious in thirty seconds. After two minutes you’re dead.”