The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 (12 page)

Despite its early failure to live up to its promises, the AAF conducted an extensive propaganda campaign. One writer who took part was John Steinbeck, who was working for the AAF when he produced Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team in November 1942.Steinbeck wrote that the men of the AAF sprang from the frontier tradition of the “Kentucky hunter and the Western Indian fighter.” He presented the airman as both individualist and a joiner, a relic of the past and a harbinger of a new era, a free spirit and a disciplined technician, a democrat and a superman, “Dan’l Boone and Henry Ford.”

That same month, British and American forces invaded North Africa, and many of the bombers stationed in England were diverted to that battlefront to support the ground troops with tactical bombing. Nevertheless the Eighth continued to grow and to bomb. It was taking stupendous losses, but the commitment to strategic bombing continued, to the point that it almost seemed the AAF found it preferable to bomb badly rather than not at all.  The British thought the Americans mad to continue daylight bombing. The Americans thought the British were almost criminal in their insistence on night bombing. Both sides continued their own methods anyway, so desperate were they to hit at the Germans some way, somehow. On the ground, until mid-1943, except in North Africa, no American soldiers were firing their rifles at German soldiers. Red Army soldiers were inflicting huge casualties on the German army while suffering terrific losses. In July, the Western Allies invaded Sicily. In September, they invaded Italy. These invasions were supported by the Twelfth Air Force based in North Africa.

The Eighth Air Force’s heavy bomber offensive was an impersonal sort of war, monotonous in its own peculiar way. Day after day, as weather and the available force permitted, B-17s and B-24s went out, dropped their bombs, and returned to England. The immediate results of their missions could be photographed and assessed by intelligence officers. The bombers were scored in categories that sound like high school grades - excellent, good, fair, poor. But missions, or a series of them, were rarely if ever decisive, in large part because the Eighth Air Force didn’t have enough bombers, but also in part because of enemy reaction. The Germans could repair damage almost as fast as Civil War troops could repair railroad tracks torn up by the enemy, and they could - and did - decentralize their industry. So for the airmen there was little if any visible progress, nothing like the gains that could be shown on maps when the ground forces pushed Erwin Rommel’s Africa Korps across and then out of North Africa.  Eighth Air Force bomber crews went back time and again to hit targets they thought they had already demolished. Drama there was with each sortie, and plenty of it, as the American public was never allowed to forget, but as for the big picture there was none. Indeed, the 1942-1943 offensive from the air was flat, repetitive, without climax. Arnold’s claims were hollow. The bomber crews felt no sense of accomplishment, at least until they had flown their twenty-fifth mission and were allowed to go home. There was no enemy surrender, hardly any diminution in the firepower of his army or in the size of his air force or ack-ack defense.8 In their official history of the AAF, editors Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate and their team describe what it was like for a pilot: “A nineteen-year-old boy takes off with his crew. He must fly from his base, often at great distance from the target, through weather which frequently makes precise navigation difficult and through opposition from fighters whose passes are incredibly swift. He arrives over the target at as nearly the set minute as possible and performs his deadly task. . . . Even without the emotional strain of the battle, the boy would find it impossible on his return to give to his interrogating officer an accurate and detailed report of his own experiences, and the story of a large mission must be compounded of hundreds of such imperfect individual reports.”9 Losses to enemy defenses mounted, to the point that it was widely speculated that the high casualty rate suffered by the Eighth Air Force might deprive the United States of the elite of its youth in much the way that Ypres and Passchendaele and other World War I battles had done to England. For those in combat, the risks were higher in the AAF than in the American ground forces. In total the AAF, about one third of the U.S. Army, took about one ninth the battle casualties of the entire Army, but most AAF men were mechanics or command and staff officers, staying on the bases in England that were relatively safe, especially as opposed to the foxholes of infantry soldiers. But the AAF had a far higher proportion of officers in action than did the Army as a whole - including fighter pilots, about half of all flying personnel were officers - and twice as many AAF officers died in battle than in all the rest of the Army. On average, almost 4 percent of the bomber force were killed or missing in action on each mission. The mean number of missions completed for the Eighth Air Force was 14.72, meaning more than half its crews never got much past the halfway point in compiling the twenty-five missions required to go home.  Many crew members, including pilots, were wounded even though their planes got back to base. They were hit by flak or German machine guns. When flight surgeons talked to one squadron commander who “flopped on us” after some brutal missions, they learned he “was not worried about himself. He had not gone yellow; he was perfectly willing to see himself expended. But he simply couldn’t bring himself to the point of taking another crew into combat, and then losing some of them.  It had happened too often.” This came about because the men were so close to each other, “so bound together by a common purpose and a common fate.”10 For British bomber crews, a sense of helplessness destroyed the airman’s hope that he would gain mastery of his fate as he accumulated skill and experience.  Something similar happened to American crews, but at least by late 1943 they had the satisfaction of a declining loss rate as they gained experience. Further, there was the possibility that half of their number could successfully bail out of a stricken bomber on its way down. Still, they had to keep flying until completing their quota of missions. One Eighth Air Force doctor saw his task as “to help the men carry on to the limit of their capacity, and then perhaps fly a few more missions.” AAF psychiatrists acknowledged that among the crews “a hair divides the normal from the neurotic, the adaptive from the nonadaptive.”11 The strain was compounded the more missions were flown: the role of blind chance when attacked by fighters or by flak; the inherent danger of flying wingtip to wingtip in formation; the loss of comrades; the cumulative impact of repeated missions, often over the same target; the sense of helpless confinement whether on the flight deck or in a ball turret.

Danger began at takeoff. The aircraft were so heavily loaded with bombs and gasoline that the slightest mechanical or human failure could abort a mission or destroy the plane and kill the crew. Then came the long flight, the success of which depended on the most careful calculations of altitude, speed, and fuel consumption, plus avoiding or driving off enemy fighters. The conditions inside the plane added immeasurably to the danger. More men were disabled by frostbite than by combat wounds. They would come on board wet or sweaty, or perspire heavily when under attack, or urinate in their suits, causing their hands, feet, and other body parts to freeze. Anoxia from shortages of oxygen compounded the threat of frostbite and posed a serious danger in and of itself. The pilot and his crew also had to cope with damage to or malfunctions of the plane, or unpredictable changes in weather.

Even so, the pilots and crews had the strongest possible attachment to their airplanes. “He loves them for their strength and beauty,” one commentator wrote of a pilot in 1944. “He looks upon them as extensions of his ego, or friends whose temperaments are more vivid than those of most human beings he knows.”12 But in 1943, despite all the effort the Americans put into the air war, there was little sense of progress.

On August 1, 1943, the Eighth Air Force carried out what its official historians later called “one of the outstanding air operations of the war.”13 Those who participated in it could not agree. It came about because of the frustration of the AAF generals, who felt certain that if they could just find and destroy the key German industry, the one on which everything else depended, they could win the war. They tried electrical generators, ball bearing plants, aircraft factories, and other targets, but nothing seemed to work. Then they came up with the idea of hitting Germany’s fuel refineries. Surely without gasoline the Germans would have to quit.

The prime target was Ploesti, in Romania. The oil refineries there produced 60 percent of Germany’s crude oil and crude oil provided two thirds of Germany’s petroleum resources. In April 1943, General Arnold ordered the Plans Division of Headquarters, AAF, to study Ploesti and prepare an attack. Col. Jacob Smart originated the idea of a minimum-altitude, mass attack to be flown from the recently captured airfield near Benghazi in Libya. In early June, General Eisenhower, in command of the Allied forces in the Mediterranean, approved Smart’s plan. The code name was TIDALWAVE. The bombers would be B-24s, with two groups coming to Libya from the Eighth Air Force, three from the Twelfth Air Force. A group usually consisted of six bomb squadrons of six bombers each, for a total of thirty-six bombers. The B-24s would carry both 1,000-pound and 500-pound demolition bombs, a total of 311 tons, plus 290 boxes of British-type and 140 clusters of American-type incendiaries. The planes would be equipped with two auxiliary bomb bay tanks, giving each bomber a fuel capacity of 3,100 gallons.

In the last ten days of July the five groups were pulled out of operations in Sicily (invaded by the Allies on July 10) to undergo intensive training near Benghazi. The B-24s flew and bombed from minimum altitude. They hit a dummy target laid out in the Libyan desert that looked like Ploesti. They hit it again and again, until one crew member decided “we could bomb it in our sleep.”14 They kept a tight formation. They studied great quantities of data dealing with the route to be flown, enemy defenses, and the dozens of other items that had to be clearly understood and appreciated. On July 28 and 29 the entire task force participated in two mock missions. According to the experts, the bombers “completely destroyed” the targets in less than two minutes.  Shortly after dawn on August 1 the 177 bombers, carrying 1,725 airmen, took off, passed the island of Corfu, then swung northeast - across the mountains of Albania and Yugoslavia. But dumb luck struck - towering cumulus clouds destroyed the task force’s unity. Radio communication might have restored it, but orders were for radio silence to preserve surprise. The initial point was sixty-five miles from Ploesti. The planes dropped down to 500 feet. They encountered severe fire from ground defenses and from enemy fighters. In spite of the opposition, the B-24s dropped down to 100 to 300 feet. At anything less than 1,000 feet the bombers were in danger of being turned wrong side up by the tremendous updraft from their own bombs exploding. They came over the target badly mixed up and after the first group the remainder had to drive straight through intense flak, explosions from the ground, flames, and dense black smoke that concealed balloon cables and towering chimneys. Turning away and heading home, they were jumped by enemy fighters. Their attacks continued even when the Liberators got over the Adriatic.

The AAF generals judged the Ploesti attack a success. Photographs apparently showed that 42 percent of Ploesti’s refining capacity had been destroyed. But by no means was this decisive, because the Germans made up for the lost refining capacity by activating idle units at Ploesti and by speedy repairs to damaged plants. And not until the late spring of 1944 was Ploesti hit again, this time from high altitude.

American losses were so heavy that the final judgment must be that the Germans won the battle. Fifty-four planes were lost, almost one third of the attacking force. Lost too were 532 airmen. Not all were dead; some had bailed out of their B-24s as the planes went down. Most of them became POWs. News of the raid and the losses the AAF had sustained spread, even across the Atlantic. McGovern was in training at the time and discussed it with his fellow air cadets. “It aroused anxiety on the part of every pilot,” he said, “because we realized this was an enormously costly mission. We knew we had to fly twenty-five or thirty-five missions and guys were saying, ‘How are you going to survive if you have to go up thirty-five times against that kind of thing?’”* On August 13 the surviving bombers on loan from the Eighth Air Force participated in a mission against the airplane factory in Wiener Neustadt - another key target. On August 17 the Eighth Air Force from England flew a mission to the Schweinfurt ball bearing plant and another to the aircraft plant at Regensburg. Both targets were in Germany. In what proved to be a fantasy, the AAF considered them “key” targets that, if destroyed, would force Germany to sue for peace. Instead, the Germans downed even more B-17s and B-24s and managed to recover from the damage.15 It was because of Ploesti, and the heavy losses on many other raids, that the AAF sped up the training time for McGovern and his crew and all the others preparing to enter the battle. By the late summer of 1943 American industry was producing enough planes but there was a bottleneck: not enough combat crews. The Eighth Air Force had nowhere near enough pilots to fly the B-17s and B-24s available in England. General Arnold noted, with great concern, that not even by December 1943 would the AAF be able to provide replacements and reinforcements enough to allow the Eighth to operate at full strength. Neither could the other air forces, in the Pacific or North Africa. Planes without pilots and crews were as useless to the AAF as runway behind a landing airplane.  Progress was being made on the ground. After the Allies had taken Sicily and in September had invaded mainland Italy, the American Fifth Army was moving north along the west coast after some frightfully rough going at Salerno, while the British 1st Airborne Division had taken Taranto and Brindisi on the east coast and quickly captured Bari on the Adriatic. The British Eighth Army meanwhile was driving north. By October 5 the Americans had captured the port at Naples while the British had taken Foggia, which was surrounded by now defunct German and Italian airfields. Italy, after overthrowing Mussolini, had surrendered, but the country was immediately occupied by German troops, who used Italy’s rivers and mountains to form a formidable defense across the country.  Still, southern Italy was in Allied hands. That opened opportunities for the AAF. From the airfields around Foggia, American bombers could participate in the Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO). Italian-based bombers could hit targets in the Balkans, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and southern and eastern Germany. Ploesti’s oil, the Danube River supply route, Wiener Neustadt’s industries, and others would be within range of B-17s and B-24s. Along with fighter aircraft, the heavy bombers could support Allied ground armies as they continued their drive north up the peninsula.