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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
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“Medal, hell, I needed an aspirin,” he commented long afterward.
“Their fear wasn’t as great as ours, and therefore was more dangerous. They feared the unknown. We feared the known.”
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.”
As the bombers crossed the Dutch border and passed over the neatly defined towns of Westphalia, they began to run into intense antiaircraft fire, “flak,” as it was called, a contraction of Fliegerabwehrkanonen, antiaircraft artillery.
You’re frightened, but there’s a difference between fear and panic. Panic paralyzes; fear energizes.
In the Air Force, it was the skill and courage of small combat teams that made the difference in battle. “They had,” Peaslee wrote, “power and authority far beyond their age, rank and experience.”
“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.”
War,” he wrote, “has to be regarded unemotionally as a science, regardless of how terrible a science.”
“The difficult we do today. The impossible takes a little longer.”
“I never learned anything when I was talking,”
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.
“We should never allow ourselves to apologize for what we did to Germany.”
Every bomber was equipped with a $10,000 Norden bombsight. Asked if bombardiers using his sight could actually drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 20,000 feet, Carl Norden had replied, “Which pickle would you like to hit?”
But in 1942, both the German and Allied high commands saw the early Eighth Air Force campaign as pathetically ineffective.
The weather was miserable, drizzle and fog so thick “even the birds were walking,” as the fliers used to joke.
For many crewmen, that short ride to the waiting planes was the most agonizing part of the mission. “If it’s going to hit you, it’s going to hit you then—whatever peak of fear, anxiety, or urge to turn back, that you’re going to feel,” recalled Capt. Robert Morgan, pilot of the Memphis Belle of the 91st Bomb Group, the most famous American bomber of the European war.
It took every ounce of concentration and physical strength to hold the shivering planes steady and in formation. Some bombers flew so close together that they put dents in each other’s fuselages.
“The swearing and the violence in the sky had only brought ten men closer together in eight hours than eight years might have in that other, more normal world, such being the inevitable bonds between men who have suffered fear together and fought against it. This is perhaps the strongest of all ties among men,” said Scott.
“I can forgive a mistake—once anyway,” he told his men. “But God help you if you ever lie to me.”
The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear. MONTAIGNE
In this air brawl between German fighters and unescorted American bombers, Eaker was confident that the Eighth would prevail. It was one of the largest mistakes of the war.
The nose art on the bombers was one of the first things that had caught his attention on arriving at Bassingbourn. Neither the Nazis nor the British had anything like it, and Marine Corps and Navy regulations forbade it. It seemed so expressive of the exuberant spirit of the boy crews. “It was a way of holding on to our individuality, or sense of humor, in a war that was overwhelmingly vast, mechanized, and brutal,” Robert Morgan would observe later. There were cartoon icons like Mickey Mouse and ferocious fire-breathing dragons but the favorite subjects of the amateur nose cone artists were
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“The boys in the Forts over Germany have the toughest time of all—with the possible exception of the guys who go down in submarines,”
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.
“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.”
“You leave your imagination behind you or it will do you harm,”
If he was afraid, and said so, it did not matter, for all fighting men knew that fear is not cowardice. Cowardice is “something a man does. What passes though his mind is his own affair,” Lord Moran wrote.
In its first ten months of operations, the Eighth lost 188 heavy bombers and approximately 1,900 crewmen, not counting those dead and wounded who returned to England in their battered ships. Approximately 73 percent of the combat fliers who had arrived in England in the summer and fall of 1942 failed to complete their tour of duty. Fifty-seven percent were killed or missing in action, and another 16 percent had either been seriously wounded, killed in crashes in England, or permanently grounded by a serious physical or mental disability.
Combat America is a clumsily edited effort, but it is the only film on the Eighth in which the sergeant gunners speak for themselves and it has some of the finest action footage of the air war.
William Wyler, on the other hand, crafted a masterwork of war reportage and propaganda. After completing the forty-one-minute documentary in April 1944, he arranged for a White House viewing.
In May, the Allies gained supremacy in the Atlantic, sinking forty-one U-boats, more than they had sunk in the first three years of the war. The Nazis would call it Black May, and at the end of the month Admiral Dönitz pulled his boats from the North Atlantic and put them in safer waters. “We had lost the Battle of the Atlantic,” he privately admitted.
“The Army engineer,” wrote Yank correspondent Saul Levitt, “is a gypsy-builder. He builds and then he moves.”
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. Baynes was part of what was fast becoming the best-trained air force in the world.
The officers and enlisted men were like brothers. There was no such thing as rank . . . in the combat zone.”
The sun will not be seen today; The sky doth frown and lower upon our army. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, RICHARD III, ACT V, SCENE 3
There was no glory in their work and virtually no recognition; no medals were handed out for changing spark plugs. And mechanics had no blood-and-thunder stories to tell at the pubs. But everyone on base knew they were helping to win the war by “keeping ’em up there.”
As Roosevelt told reporters, “Hitler built walls around his ‘Fortress Europe’ but he forgot to put a roof on it.”
“I can’t document it but I think he was beginning to worry about [the future of daylight bombing] because the attrition rate was too high.” A month later, after a quick trip to England, the great champion of the idea of the self-defending bomber was writing to Marshall: “Operations over Germany conducted here during the past several weeks indicate definitely that we must provide long-range fighters to accompany daylight bombardment missions.”
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.
The Bells of Hell go ting-a ling-a-ling For you, but not for me
Men at war were different from men at home. Whatever they were stateside, they were more of in England. Whatever was good in them became very good; what was bad became very bad. HARRY CROSBY, A WING AND A PRAYER
After Black Thursday, a story spread through the ranks of the Eighth Air Force that, although not true in its particulars, expressed the new mood. It was about a solitary, shot-up B-17 limping home to England. Someone on the plane radioed the tower: “Hello Lazy Fox. This is G for George, calling Lazy Fox. Will you give me landing instructions, please? Pilot and co-pilot dead, two engines feathered, fire in the radio room, vertical stabilizer gone, no flaps, no brakes, crew bailed out, bombardier flying the ship. Give me landing instructions.” The reply came a few seconds later: “I hear you G
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“Staging a major air operation every day,” he said, “was like expecting land and sea forces to take the island of Sicily every day.”
In the grim calculus of total war, it was considered far better to lose a few hundred unprotected bombers than to have entire divisions slaughtered on the beaches of northern France.
London in the middle of the war was one of the most sensational places on the planet. Death and suffering had released inhibitions, and everywhere there were people in search of food, friends, liquor, and sex.
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.”
The astonishing American recovery from Black October, like the Ancient Roman army’s recovery from the humiliating defeat administered by Hannibal, showed the enemy what a technologically powerful, ferociously focused people they had warred on.
With replacement fliers still not up to planned strength, this was a crisis, one that Spaatz and Doolittle hoped to surmount not by taking fewer casualties, but by building up their force fantastically so that the percentage of losses would drop. Such is the brutal logic of wars of attrition.
