HULLAR’S CREW GOT a rude introduction to the European Theatre of Operations as soon as they landed at Prestwick. “They took our plane,” noted Brown in his diary. “Lost Winnie the Pooh,” wrote Hullar in his notebook.
“It was,” Klint recalls, “certainly a surprise when we landed at Prestwick and were told that Winnie the Pooh was to go to combat immediately and we were to go to school.* There was a real scramble as the crew tried to recover all the contraband goodies we had stashed in various parts of the airplane, such as Hershey bars, silk stockings, soap, chewing gum, and other items we heard would be in short supply once we got to England.”
The crew’s enlisted men were also affected by the loss of the airplane they had named and expected to fly into battle. To Norman Sampson, “Taking the plane away from our crew seemed to be a loss. After all, it had taken us this far.”
But Hullar’s men took this event in stride and found the pace too quick, and the excitement of experiencing this strange country too exotic for anyone to brood very long. As Elmer Brown recorded, “They shipped us out that night by rail. Caught train at Kilmarnock.”
The crew had to reach their interim destination and begin their theater training. On the railway coach, Brown further recorded that they “had first-class sleepers to London. A little compartment for each man.”
But London was not the end of the line. On July 27, 1943, Brown also wrote that they “changed trains for Hemel Hempstead, a school.” In the environs of this English village 20 miles outside London at the RAF base of Bovingdon, the crew was to pass two weeks in a combat crew replacement center.
The purpose of school was, as Klint recalls, “to spend time learning from men who had already been through combat about flight tactics, enemy tactics, flak, formation flying, and other things that were supposed to help us complete our tour of duty.”
No one on Hullar’s crew made any record while at Bovingdon that would show to what degree the crew appreciated the risks the ETO’s combat environment held for them, but another B-17 pilot on whose wing Hullar’s crew was to fly many of their missions did write down his impressions of theatre training. He was Lt. David P. Shelhamer, a professional photographer from Chicago who rushed into the Army Air Force after Pearl Harbor. He arrived in the ETO about two months ahead of Hullar’s crew. The notes Shelhamer made during his theatre training speak eloquently for every bomber crew that passed into the ETO during this period of the air war.
Element leader. Hullar’s crew flew many of their early missions as a wingman to the man pictured on the left, Lt. David P. Shelhamer. To the right is Capt. Richard P. Dubell, with whom Hullar’s crew flew their last mission. (Photo courtesy Mrs. Lorraine Shelhamer.)
“As of this writing on May 26th, some of the boys that I’d gone through training with have already gotten three or four missions, and some of them haven’t come back. But life seems to be cheap here and you can’t worry too much about the other fellow except to try to find out how he got it, so perhaps you can get out of a like situation…Frankly, as far as us getting through, this requires the completion of 25 missions. They may not seem to be very many, but when you consider how much one can be exposed to antiaircraft fire, fighter attacks, it’s quite a few trips, I guess…Looking to the future a bit and even before our first mission, I’m sure looking forward to landing after Number 25. This is supposed to be the toughest theater of operations in the world and this number of trips is a long hard haul.
“Well, as far as the rest of the crew [goes], I keep hoping we will all come through in good order, and I’ll do all in my power to see that they do all come through, but as yet I have not heard of a case where an entire crew came through their final trip without losing a man or so somewhere along the line. Well, let’s just hope that we’re the first.”
Unfortunately, Shelhamer’s crew did not make it through intact as he hoped. His tail gunner was badly hurt on a mission against Hamburg on July 25th, the very day Hullar’s men were making their transatlantic flight. The air war was heating up, and to place the Hullar crew’s arrival in context, it is necessary to see what the Eighth’s leaders were up to.
To win the daylight bombing campaign against Germany, the U.S. Army Air Force generals responsible for directing the Eighth’s fortunes had two foes to fight—the Germans and their adversaries in the Allied camp. Three men headed up the Army Air Force’s efforts in both struggles. They were General Ira C. Eaker, Commander of VIII Bomber Command and later of the Eighth as a whole; his superior throughout much of the Eighth’s air war, General Carl A. “Tooey” Spaatz; and General H.H. “Hap” Arnold, Chief of Staff of all the U.S. Army Air Forces. Their successful representation of AAF interests against the competing demands of the U.S. Navy (which favored wholesale diversion of the Allied effort to the Pacific) and RAF Bomber Command (which sought incorporation of U.S. heavy bomber resources into its night area bombing campaign) was an essential precondition to daylight strategic bombing of Germany.
The Eighth began its existence in Great Britain 11 weeks after Pearl Harbor when, on February 20, 1942, General Eaker and a small cadre of staff officers arrived in England to organize VIII Bomber Command. In the early months, Eaker had to rely heavily on Air Chief Marshall Sir Arthur Harris, Commander of RAF Bomber Command, for help in the acquisition of headquarters facilities and clerical personnel. He got on well with Harris, but his job was a delicate one; the British commander was pressing for the Eighth to join the RAF’s night bombing campaign, and Eaker’s own forces were woefully late in coming.
It wasn’t until July 6, 1942, that the Eighth’s first B-17s arrived in England, and it wasn’t until the following month, on August 17, 1942, that the Eighth launched its first heavy bomber raid against Occupied Europe. On that day Eaker flew with a tiny force of 12 B-17Es of the 97th Bomb Group that attacked the railroad marshaling yards at Rouen, France, a mere 35 miles from the English Channel.
Though this mission and the Eighth’s other early raids were generally successful, the months that followed were filled with frustration as Eaker found his slowly built-up bomber forces being siphoned off to North Africa to take part in the Allied invasion scheduled there in November 1942. In September, Eaker lost his first three bomb groups and a fourth was sent directly to Africa in exchange for four brand-new bomb groups. The first of these arrived in England early in September and the last appeared in late October. Through the balance of 1942, the Eighth was unable to launch a single mission against Nazi Germany proper, and this unhappy fact helped bring about the pivotal incident in the political battle for daylight bombing.
The crisis occurred during the Casablanca Conference on January 20, 1943, when General Eaker met privately with Winston Churchill. Eaker’s mission was to convince the Prime Minister not to press a demand that President Roosevelt had already agreed to—that the Eighth abandon daylight bombing and join RAF Bomber Command’s nighttime strategy. Sounding a call for “round the clock” bombing, General Eaker was able to persuade the English leader and save his Air Force, but it was now imperative to make daylight bombing of Germany itself a reality. On January 27, 1943, the Eighth launched its first such attack, bombing Wilhelmshaven with 55 B-17s.
Over the next six months the Eighth tested its daylight bombing theories, mounting missions gradually growing in size from under 100 up through 300 heavy bombers. Then came the seven days following July 23, 1943. Now called “Blitz Week,” they marked the first sustained aerial offensive mounted by the Eighth against important industrial targets deep in the German Reich. Clear skies were predicted over the Continent and General Eaker was fortified by the recent arrival of two new B-17 groups, giving him a total of 15 bomb groups with well over 300 B-17s. He and his new deputy, Brig. General Frederick L. Anderson, Jr., Commander of VIII Bomber Command, set the wheels in motion for the first raid of Blitz Week.
The July 24th mission saw 309 B-17s directed against targets in Norway. On July 25th, 264 B-17s were sent to bomb Hamburg and Kiel. The next day, the Eighth dispatched 303 B-17s against Hamburg and Hannover. After a day’s relief due to bad weather, on July 28th 302 B-17s were sent to attack aircraft plants at Oschersleben and Kassel. July 29th saw the Eighth sending 168 bombers to Kiel, with 81 more going to attack an aircraft factory in Warnemünde. Finally, on July 30th, the Eighth bombed Kassel again, sending a force of 186 Fortresses.
On July 31st the weather was clear, but the Eighth was exhausted. After six missions in seven days, General Eaker’s Air Force had lost nearly 1000 men: dead, missing, or wounded, and a total of 105 B-17s—88 in aerial combat and a further 17 damaged beyond effective repair, or “Category E.” Eaker’s “effective” strength had been reduced from over 330 B-17s prior to Blitz Week to fewer than 200 by its end. Men and machines were sorely in need of a rest; the last day of July and the first 11 days of August were devoted to recuperation and rebuilding.
It was at the very end of this lull, on August 11, 1943, that Elmer Brown wrote in his diary: “We left the school at Bovingdon and reported to the 427th Squadron, 303rd Bomb Group at Molesworth.” Hullar’s crew had come just in time to take part in the second stage of the Eighth’s major offensive against Germany.
Ahead lay a series of missions whose losses would far exceed those of Blitz Week, and whose results would call into question the whole concept of “daylight precision bombing” as a means of winning the air war.