While the British bombed at night, the USAAF remained committed to daylight attacks over Germany. Bomber Command switched to night raids after suffering heavy losses during the opening months of the war. The USAAF took huge losses at times, but solved that problem with the introduction of long-range escort fighters and drop tanks. Better protected from German interceptors, the USAAF ended the war with a lower loss rate than Bomber Command, despite operating throughout the war in daylight. Here, a group of curious RAF airmen receive a lecture from a USAAF officer on the Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress during an inter-service exchange late in the war.
SEVEN DECADES AGO, battles raged across Europe’s flak-torn skies. That epic clash consumed tens of thousands of aircraft born from the factories of a dozen nations. Riding them down to their final, fiery resting places were men of passion, vision, and dedication. They died horribly, trapped in the machines that bore them aloft as flames engulfed them. Few deaths can ever reach that level of pain and misery.
Visit the battlefield at Verdun and the shell-torn land still harbors wounds even a century has not healed. Not so with the titanic struggle to control Europe’s skies during the six years it took to defeat Nazi Germany. Those skies are empty now; there are no telltale scars to be found among the clouds. Time and the nature of the fighting have swept away every vestige of what will probably remain the largest air war in human history.
A few signposts of this clash remain here and there, off the beaten path ready for those who seek them out. An old Eighth Air Force bomber station, its runways now cracked and weed-riddled; local museums chocked with aircraft or memorabilia of an age that now exists only in fading memories of the final few who lived it—these fragments are all that is left. They cannot tell the total story of what occurred in the skies during those six years of World War II. It is just too massive, the forces engaged so large as to prevent most minds from grasping the enormity of the national commitments to such a new form of warfare. Instead, those museums and memorials, those airfields that once thundered with the sounds of hundreds of engines but have long since fallen into disuse, at best can provide mere hints of the magnitude of the struggle.
Some of those who fought in it survived to write their memoirs. Those are only tiny representative threads of a vast tapestry that ultimately claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, civilian and military.
It all started with a dream, a vision of how the next war could be fought without the stalemate of the Great War. The theorists posited, and the air crews put those ideas to practice with mixed results and a staggering casualty rate. Strategic bombing, the solution to static, attritional warfare, ultimately itself became a war of attrition and national resources. In trying to avoid more Sommes, more Verduns, the theories espoused before the war created new versions of them in the sky. In the process, cities burned and civilians died right alongside the servicemen sent either to protect or destroy them. If Verdun consumed a generation of French, American, and German warrior sons, the inter-war solution of strategic bombing resulted in the mass destruction of Europe’s most beautiful and culturally rich urban centers.
The Allied strategic bombing campaign virtually destroyed Germany’s urban centers. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died in the rubble and the firestorms created by the RAF’s incendiary attacks. The morality and the effectiveness of such raids have sparked one of the most enduring controversies to emerge from World War II.
Home for the night. An exhausted Eighth Air Force crew brings a B-17 down on final approach over an airfield in East Anglia.
This book tells the story of that unique and exceptionally violent campaign through the photographs taken by noncombatants who rode into battle with the sole purpose of trying to capture these events for succeeding generations. Hundreds of these photographers died in the line of duty, killed when their bombers were shot out of the sky by flak or fighters. At war’s end, tens of thousands of those photos were simply dumped on office floors in Eighth Air Force units all over East Anglia. Some of the men saw the value in those photos and scooped up some of these precious and historic images. They took them home as coveted treasures of the most difficult, and meaningful, time in their lives.
Most of those images never survived, and that is a significant tragedy given the level of sacrifice the photographers took to record them. The comparative few that do exist today survived an Air Force archive that bounced around among stateside offices, the Air and Space Museum, and finally the National Archives. In the process, they were stored improperly, and many have degraded to the point that they are no longer useful. America has never been past-centric; we have short memories. and the future is what matters to us as a people and a culture. In some respects, this is good. Some cultures cling so caustically to their histories that centuries-old wounds continue to affect their social dynamics. That is not the American way. We experience, then move on.
The incredible stress and psychological pressure repeated missions over Germany produced are more than evident on Tech. Sgt. Vernon Lindemayer’s face in this photograph. Just back from another mission as a B-17’s top turret, this image was snapped before he even had a chance to shave. Those who returned home after their tour in Europe did so as different men, branded forever by what their experiences in the air war.
But here, within these pages, I would like to return you, gentle reader, to a time when thousands of aircraft darkened Europe’s skies. It is a time when a generation of idealistic young men, steeped in the lore of flight through pulp magazines and movies like Dawn Patrol and Hell’s Angels convinced them that glory awaited among the clouds. What they discovered instead was a thousand ways to die, a thousand terrors whose effects on the survivors of the campaign would last a lifetime, nestled in their nightmares and shared only with loving spouses—or at least the ones who stuck it out with them upon their return.
There was no help for them and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) as there is now for America’s warriors. They were simply expected to return home, pick up their old lives, and press on. But trauma and the human mind have an unpredictable relationship. The damage was done, and the effect of the air war on those who fought will linger until the final aviator from that long-lost age breathes his last. The war did not end in 1945; it simply changed form.
The bomber crews developed their own rituals and traditions, such as this one. When a crew member flew his final mission, he received a dunking upon return. It is a tradition that carries through in some U.S. aviation units to this day. Here Maj. Jim McPartlin gets the treatment in front of an Eighth Air Force B-17.
Damaged bombers limping back to England often crash-landed and burst into flames. The USAAF developed the most sophisticated and well-equipped fire-fighting crews in the world to help save lives in such situations. Here, a team of fire fighters in asbestos suits hold chemical sprayers and await the call to action.
A 401st Bomb Group B-17G sits on an airfield in East Anglia after limping home with an engine afire after a mission in March 1944. As the fire crews sought to contain the flames, they burned through the top of the cowling. The engine’s weight caused the cowl to snap and sag to the ground.
This book is an homage to these young men, those who died and those who returned hollow and spent by their combat experiences. The photos tell the story better than any words I will ever be able to put to paper, so they will take center stage on every page. Riding a B-24 to Berlin armed with nothing but a camera was no small feat of courage in 1944, but there were men who stepped forward and proved willing to do it. Their surviving work paints a vivid picture of the human experience that defined a generation of aviators.
In the myriad books written on the strategic bombing campaign, that human element seems all too often suborned to the technical aspects of the machines and weapons used to fight it. Book after book can be found with aircraft specifications: the number of .50-caliber machine guns in a B-17F or how to tell the difference between a B-24D, J, or M. There will be some of that in the pages that follow, but the focus will be on the men who flew the machines and the civilians on the ground who endured the fall of their bombs. Ultimately, history is not defined by how much horsepower a Wright Cyclone engine could produce; it is composed of human experience.
A few gallant writers—journalists and novelists whose patriotism drove them to England or Italy—rode into battle aboard these bombers in hopes of capturing that human experience. MacKinlay Kantor, a Civil War novelist, was one of those dedicated few who was rejected for military service due to his age. He found a way to serve his country and share his words with a nation eager to understand what its sons were doing in Europe. He flew the flak-filled missions, taking notes that formed the basis of his stories. And when he came home, he saw the struggle these vets experienced as they tried to readjust to civilian life. He wrote about that quiet and desperate battle back here in the States in his brilliant novel Glory For Me, which became the basis for the movie The Best Years of Our Lives. In it, Fred Derry, a bombardier with the 305th Bomb Group, serves as one of the three main characters. His words humanized the experience of a generation of aviators, and they will be quoted in the pages that follow.
As a kid, I would sneak into my father’s den, which was filled with the beautiful and accurate models of the aircraft used in the strategic bombing campaign. He’d arrayed in one cabinet P-51s, P-38s, Focke-Wulfs, and Messerschmitts. I’d stare at them, fingers pressed to the glass, and let my imagination roam. Next to those cabinets, stored with military-like precision in stout bookshelves were hundreds of books and folios related to World War II aviation. Not allowed to touch them, they became my forbidden fruit. As soon as I was old enough to read, I would tiptoe inside Dad’s den and pilfer a book or two, read it as quickly as I could and return it. Somehow, he always knew, and more than once I got busted. Nevertheless, from those stolen moments grew an abiding love of aviation history and the air war in Europe. Someday, I wanted to have the opportunity to write such volumes so that they may sit on Dad’s shelf as well.
The 549th Bomb Squadron returns from a mission to find coffee and donuts waiting for them, care of the Red Cross. Such gestures helped sustain the morale of those doing the flying and fighting. Through 1944, the Eighth Air Force’s commander, Jimmy Doolittle, tried his best to give his airmen passes into the local English towns and cities so they could relax and unwind. Such consideration for his men landed Doolittle in hot water with his superiors, who were determined to ruthlessly prosecute the air war no matter how worn out the crews became.
My childish and naïve view of the air war vanished in the 1990s when I interviewed hundreds of veterans of the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces. Through my time with them in their last few years, I saw their lingering pain; I heard their stories of friends trapped in jammed turrets that they were forced to leave behind as their bombers plunged broken and burning for the earth five miles below. In their words, in their tears for long-fallen comrades, and in their eyes I saw the true meaning of what took place during those seminal years seven decades ago. As a result, this book has been both a privilege and a passion to write—one of those projects that defines my own accomplishments in life. I hope every page honors their experience by staying honest to what they endured and why.
That is my gift to those men who took the time to trust me with me those jagged memories and open their wounded hearts to a young historian who knew nothing of the true nature of combat. Those moments, shared in their homes, shaped who I became and gave me purpose to my own life. This is their story, the view from their cockpits and turrets, told with all the raw honesty I gleaned from their words.
And the fighters rolled into the tracer like rabbits,
The blood froze over my splints like a scab—
Did I snore, all still and grey in the turret,
Till the palms rose out of the sea with my death?
And the world ends here, in the sand of a grave,
All my wars over? How easy it was to die!
—Randall Jarrell, Gunner
Home safe. Come dawn, they’d have to fly again.
