FIVE DECADES AFTER its last combat mission was flown in April 1945, the U.S. Eighth Army Air Force’s role in winning the Allied victory over Nazi Germany is well recognized. Historians consider it the air force that was responsible for breaking the back of the German Luftwaffe in the spring of 1944. Together with British Bomber Command, it is also credited by Albert Speer, Nazi Minister of Armaments and Munitions, with creating a “second front” in the West long before D-Day. Finally, there is no question that the Eighth crippled vital enemy war industries, especially during the “oil campaign” against German petroleum resources that ran from May 1944 through March 1945.
Significant though these accomplishments are, they do not account in full for the place the Eighth occupies as one of the most famous military organizations in the annals of armed conflict, for military greatness is measured not only by an army’s ability to win battles. When necessary, its soldiers must also show the capacity to sustain great loss and still return to the fight. Here, too, in the half-year running from mid-1943 to early 1944, the Eighth was tested and not found wanting. This was before the ascendancy of the long-range P-51 Mustang escort fighter, when the Eighth’s major assets were the ruggedness of the B-17 and the incredible courage and tenacity of its bomber crews. These crews endured bloody reversals and heartbreaking losses attempting to vindicate the concept of “daylight precision bombing” on unescorted deep penetration raids into Germany. Their perseverance was, by any reckoning, a major factor in the Eighth’s ultimate triumph. Their collective experience constitutes an epic whose heroic dimensions cannot be denied.
This is the story of one of the B-17 crews that flew during this critical time of the war. Its outline and primary source is the marvelous wartime diary of the crew’s navigator, Elmer L. Brown, Jr. Major portions of his diary are reproduced, with minor editing, just as he wrote them during the dark and difficult days of his crew’s tour in the Eighth from August 1943 through February 1944. His account of the crew’s missions is supplemented by the writings and recollections of five other crewmembers: the pilot, Robert J. Hullar; the copilot, Wilbur Klint; the radioman, George F. Hoyt; the ball turret gunner, Norman A. Sampson; and the tail gunner, Merlin D. Miller. Additional materials have been supplied by other crewmembers or their families: the bombardier, James E. McCormick; the engineer and top turret gunner, Dale W. Rice; the right waist gunner, Charles H. Marson; and the left waist gunner, Charles “Pete” Fullem.
This book also tells part of the history of the group to which the crew was assigned, the famous 303rd “Hell’s Angels” Bombardment Group (H). It contains the recollections of many individuals mentioned in Brown’s diary and the experiences of others who took part in the same battles with him and the rest of Hullar’s crew high in the skies over wartime Germany.
Through the words of these men, supplemented by the official records of the 303rd Bomb Group and other pertinent Eighth Air Force sources, you will learn first hand what it was like to take the famous Flying Fortress into combat during the worst period of America’s air war against the Germans.