The bomber crews of the US Eighth Air Force were far from home, and from familiar comforts. In the famous pamphlet entitled ‘Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain’, the men were told that their host nation was ‘smaller than North Carolina’.1 The consideration of cultural differences was good manners, but cannot have been of much help when it came to the raw fear of bombing missions. In those extremities, the US airmen had only one another to turn to. And although the mortality rate did not match that of their British counterparts, none the less, by the end of the conflict some 26,000 American airmen had died on European missions – and a great many of those who lived had seen close friends hideously killed. For some, that was even more frightening than the prospect of their own death. When these men returned from operations, having been subjected to ferocious anti-aircraft fire and sub-zero temperatures, and sometimes having been starved of oxygen and suffering from frostbite, they were obliged to try to recover physically and mentally under unfamiliar skies, and in dark-soiled countryside, flat and fretted with ditches and black streams. Lincolnshire, Rutland, Norfolk and Suffolk were rich in pubs with a thickly accented clientele, but came up short on the urban neon lighting and comfortable movie theatres that were the signifiers of their own land. Such details, so trivial sounding when Europe was awash with blood, were actually of great importance. On around 200 airfields across England, great efforts were made to ensure that the near half-million American airmen and their ground crews who had been sent to aid the Allied war effort felt at home.
Among those who would find themselves carrying out a daylight swoop over Dresden just hours after the British bombardment were young men like Morton Fiedler, who was twenty years old.2 Fiedler was born and brought up in the tough steel-producing city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; he had signed up as an aviation cadet and by the age of nineteen was a second lieutenant. Serving with 18th Bomb Squadron, 34th Bomb Group, Fiedler found himself transplanted from the thick industrial air and clamour of Pittsburgh to Mendlesham, a tiny village in Suffolk. The tour of duty was originally to be twenty-five missions; Fiedler was to fly thirty-two. It was his own free choice.3
Gordon Fenwick was born in 1923 in the small city of Sault Ste Marie at the northernmost tip of Michigan, just across the water from Canada and more or less in the middle of the Great Lakes.4 This was a town dominated by shipping, and the 1930s Depression had hit it hard. As a boy, Fenwick took himself out into the country to hunt and fish to put food on the table. He was bright, and after he left school he studied engineering at the University of Michigan before he, like Fiedler, signed up for the war. His eyesight was insufficiently sharp for the role of pilot but he was snappy with Morse, and so it was that he came to England, based with 401st Bomb Group at Deenethorpe, Northamptonshire: a thatched pub, a grand stately home and small loamy fields bordering the base and its wide, flat concrete runway. From his very first missions, Fenwick understood immediately the proximity of death. On one flight, he recalled, ‘a piece of flak sliced through the radio room and missed my head by about a millimetre’.5 On another, his plane, Mary Alice, was so ferociously attacked by enemy fighters, with so many parts of the fuselage shot away, that it barely managed to cough its way back over the English Channel and make an emergency landing just a little beyond the white cliffs of Dover. He would also be called upon to serve as a nose gunner; in the B-17 bombers, the nose gunner occupied a transparent blister at the very front of the plane, equipped with either guns or auto-cannons. Like the pilot situated above him, he could see the defensive storm that the plane was flying into. Possibly this position made each mission a tiny fraction easier in psychological terms; on those daylight flights, a view of what one was flying towards rather than the view from a position on the side or at the rear of the craft could give a small illusion of agency or traction. The nose gunner would sometimes also conduct navigation duties.
And there were so many other serious young recruits: men such as Wendell Tague, twenty years old, born and raised in Iowa; Willmore Fluman, twenty-two, who hailed from Virginia. They came from a wide range of domestic backgrounds across a vast continent; sharp, smart and deeply committed. Yet ‘commitment’ is hardly adequate as a description, for these men, and their British counterparts, must also in a sense have felt themselves to be sacrificial warriors who had pledged their very lives to the cause. How else could it have been psychologically possible for Morton Fiedler, among others, to complete his tour of duty and then challenge death directly by volunteering for more?
After America came into the war in December 1941 following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the initial build-up of American air power on British soil was slow, but by 1944, and the tumultuous days following D-Day and the invasion of Europe, there was an entire parallel culture to be found among the villages of eastern England. The ubiquity of the American presence led it to be dubbed ‘the friendly invasion’.6 There was also, unmistakably, from the start, a sense that the Eighth Air Force was perhaps a shade more considered and careful in its approach when compared to Arthur Harris’s Bomber Command. There was, at least for the aircrews, the feeling that their missions were highly specific; rather than area bombing, they were instead concentrating on knocking out particular factories and railway junctions. The fact that such raids caused what was then termed ‘spillage’ and today would be called ‘collateral damage’ was seen as regrettable but inevitable.7
The morning briefings at all those airbases were times of silent tension. The airmen awoke early, had a good breakfast and then assembled for their meeting. Behind a blue curtain was the map that would show that day’s objective. When the curtain was pulled back, any operation involving a surgical strike on German movements within France or the Low Countries was greeted with a sense of relief; when the unveiling revealed an operation deep into Germany, there were groans from some, while others were too depressed and too frightened even to make that small protest.
Continual efforts were made to ease this psychological stress by creating a happy and relaxing on-base atmosphere. The aircrews were always well fed, and on some bases there were specialized bakeries providing them with the varieties of bread that they were used to back home.8 Many airmen took to the village pubs with a mix of lively curiosity and good humour, while in the larger towns there were attempts in dance halls to bring seriously enthusiastic jazz to the local and by then largely female patrons. In the village of Lavenham in Suffolk – an absurdly pretty half-timbered vision of medieval English architecture, complete with a fourteenth-century church – the residents had since the start of the war been accustomed to RAF officers in the local pub, the Swan; by 1943, with the base one of the first to be turned over to the Americans, this bar, with its low ceilings and open fireplaces, had become the haunt of fascinated USAAF officers instead.9 Here was an England that seemed almost defiantly caricatured: warm ales instead of cold lagers, whiskered locals, darts. It became a tradition for the US visitors to sign one of the bar’s whitewashed walls. Their signatures remain today.
There were some reports from the Mass Observation project (civilian participants in which submitted regular diaries to the relevant department) that these new arrivals were considered to be brash and boastful, and that they seemed neither respectful towards nor interested in local matters or people. Yet this is possibly an impression created by a generation gap: the older inhabitants of east-coast villages and towns might have resented what they saw as boorishness and vulgarity, but for many younger people it was a source of hypnotic fascination. Children were gripped not only by the sight of B-17s and B-24s taking off and coming in to land; they were also mesmerized by the ephemera that these airmen were supplied with – the bottles of Coca-Cola, the tubs of Brylcreem. All these children had been raised on Saturday-morning cinema shows: westerns, science-fiction serials, films with gangsters. Here was an impossibly distant and exciting world somehow made real.
Similarly, when the band leader Glenn Miller came to play for American airmen, young British women who had volunteered for the Women’s Royal Navy Service (Wrens) scrambled to attend these concerts too.10 Of course, there were innumerable romances and not only, as was so waspishly observed by many then, because American airmen could procure invaluable silk stockings and mouth-watering tinned chicken. For young people, wartime always carries a sharpened erotic edge.
Away from their missions, US airmen were sometimes granted three days’ leave. London was the obvious lure. Gordon Fenwick recalled travelling down from Northamptonshire not just to gaze upon the soot-besmirched landmarks but to sample the capital’s pubs. Its antiquated and cramped saloon bars appear not to have dismayed him, and he remembered with some pleasure the friendly joshing from English soldiers at the counter repeating that familiar line about the Americans being ‘oversexed, overpaid and over here’. The Tommies were amazed, Fenwick remembered, when they heard the American comeback about the English for the first time: ‘Under-paid, under-sexed – and under Eisenhower!’11
In some cases, the lightness of their demeanour masked a rather more reflective outlook. American airmen were often more religious than their British counterparts and represented many different Christian denominations as well as having a sizeable Jewish contingent. Among the serving chaplains at the US airbases was the fondly remembered (and distinctively named) Major Method Cyril Billy, known to the airmen as ‘Brother Billy’. Navigator Eugene Spearman recalled: ‘We … taxied out to the end of the runway and awaited our signal for take off. Standing there during most of my missions even in rain or snow [was] Bro Billy, holding a Bible. His being there was such a blessing for me. Just knowing someone was praying for me made me feel better.’12
As with their British counterparts, an unquantifiable amount was being asked of the US airmen, and on-base psychiatrists were closely examining all the most common symptoms of combat stress. This was partly compassionate and partly practical, the authorities anxious that it might become progressively more difficult to ask, persuade or force men into battle. One airman recalled watching a plane disintegrate in mid-air and pieces of what he assumed were fuselage hitting the windscreen in front of him. With horror, he realized that he was seeing not metal but flesh; fragments of a dead airmen, blood and muscle, which became fused in the freezing air with the glass, meaning that those in the cockpit had to gaze upon these mortal remains all the hundreds of miles back to base.
It was such events that prompted the nightmares: airmen dreaming that they were trapped in burning planes, thrashing desperately, and even injuring themselves as they fell out of bed. Doctors monitored crew members as they neared the end of their tour, noting how these young men had aged in the space of a year to look fifteen years older or more. On the days when they were not flying, some were silent; others were prone to lightning outbursts of intense anger. Others exhibited a feverish desire for sex. As with their British counterparts, almost all were united by the greater fear of not being able to go on; of letting down their country and their fellow crew members.
The actor James Stewart – the most famous of those Americans who made a new home in Tibenham, a tiny community deep in the heart of rural Norfolk – was the commander of 703 Squadron and flew many B-24 missions over France and Germany, always with very specific targets for the bombs. Although remarkably fortunate himself, his plane yawing back and forth amid the red-hot ferocity of anti-aircraft guns but getting through, Stewart saw a number of other planes atomized and often returned to base to learn of the fiery deaths of friends.13 For a time, he later revealed, he went ‘flak happy’ and was sent to a ‘flak farm’ to recuperate. He, too, visibly aged; after the war, upon his return to Hollywood, he was obliged to start portraying older men, and in the Hitchcock psychological thriller Vertigo (1958) he gives a powerful performance of a man in deep trauma. But despite all the mental turbulence, there was no change in Stewart’s determination to fight the war to the end.
In a curious way, it is possible that American pilots and crew were shielded by a stronger sense that their actions ultimately were a moral good. Since the 1930s, as Americans set to work building up a more powerful air force, there had been certain orthodoxies established, one of which was the belief that ‘daylight precision bombing’ could be mastered to such a degree that collateral injuries and fatalities could be kept to a minimum. Pilots learning their skills at the Army Air Corps Tactical School in Montgomery, Alabama, were still being taught that ‘terror bombing of civilians would provoke public outrage’.14 Similarly, by 1940, it was understood by all within the US Air War Plans Division that there was ‘no historical evidence that aerial bombardment of cities, towns and villages has ever been productive’.15 They would have been watching, among other examples, the British in the 1930s using such bombing techniques in Trans-jordan and Palestine in efforts to quell local insurgencies.
However, by the winter of 1944, and the Battle of the Bulge, some layers of fastidiousness had been stripped away from the USAAF. Though there was still the conviction, in contrast to Bomber Command, that a mass raid carried out over a city in broad daylight would allow for very specific targeting, there were now occasions when the city itself would be the target. The reason was this: it seemed – bafflingly to many in senior command – that the Germans, who ought to have been on the edge of collapse, were somehow managing to regroup. That they were largely spent was clear to see, yet the Nazi leadership seemed to have inspired a terrible tenacity in those forces they still had. There were senior American commanders who feared that the war could go on for another year. This meant that the targeting of certain German cities had a practical purpose other than simple Vergeltung, or retribution. In the early days of February 1945, US bombers launched a daylight attack on Berlin: it did not aim for factories or railways but for the city centre itself.
Broadly, General Carl Spaatz, who had overall control, and General Ira Eaker, who oversaw all squadrons, tried to resist the gravitational pull exerted by Bomber Command when it came to targeting civilian districts. As the American ambassador to Tokyo had put it a few years previously: ‘Facilis descensus averni est’ – the descent into Hell is easy.16 None the less, like their British partners, they believed that the most effective way to decapitate resurgent German forces was ever more ferocious attacks from the air.
Dresden had earlier been identified by the USAAF as a useful location to hit not long after D-Day, and on the afternoon of 7 October 1944, a tight formation of B-24s had flown deep into eastern Germany with a very specific aim indeed: Dresden’s main railway marshalling yards, north-west of the main station. This raid was about causing deep disruption: not only severing the railway artery running all the way from Berlin to Prague but also setting scarce industrial materials ablaze. The raid was considered a success, yet it also says something about the nihilism of that late stage of the war that the figure of 270 Dresden citizens killed somehow seemed unremarkable. Indeed, the Nazi-run newspapers – local and national – did not even mention the death toll (or, indeed, the bombing).
On 16 January 1945, the Americans flew over once more. One of the intended targets that day was a synthetic-oil plant about forty miles north of Dresden in a little town called Ruhland. There were innumerable difficulties; many of the bombers ended up striking an industrial plant at the nearby town of Lauta. This, however, was considered highly advantageous as well: the plant in question was producing aluminium. Once more, however, Dresdeners that afternoon realized that the air-raid sirens were no longer howling out only false warnings. Many of the bombers, having missed all their targets, made for the clearer certainty of the designated secondary aiming point: those Dresden railway marshalling yards. This time the death toll from the raid was 376 people. In among the high explosives dropped were 18,000 incendiaries: this was a foretaste of the fires to come.
At the time, ‘miracle weapons’ were a frequent topic of conversation among German civilians, and they were an idea that was genuinely feared by the Allies. The summer and autumn of 1944 had seen the Nazis aiming their V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets at London (the V stood for Vergeltungswaffen, ‘reprisal weapons’): automated death whispering across the Channel. But there had been intense speculation in the Air Ministry about even more apocalyptic armaments. There was a real anxiety, for instance, that the Nazis would refine the technology further to deliver not just explosives but lethal poisonous gases such as Sarin. The Americans were anxious too: they suspected that it would not be long before a feral Führer launched biological warfare, raining down toxins that could cause fatal embolisms among thousands within hours. In addition to all this was the development of the Messerschmitt Me 262, Germany’s first fighter jet.17 How long would it be before these extraordinary aircraft – which had a flight endurance of up to ninety minutes and streaked through the firmament at unmatchable speeds of almost 550 miles per hour – were refined further?
This was why the American focus on any German industry – and especially that buried deep within the east of the country – had a genuine urgency. Draining the morale of the civilians below might have been counted as a bonus but the real aim, in fixing upon everything from aluminium works to railway lines, was to try to draw some of the venom of an unceasingly ingenious Nazi war industry.
The crews on these raids were sometimes airborne for close to eight or nine hours; many were simply blasted out of the sky, others developed engine troubles and had to crash land in or bail out over enemy territory, facing the prospect of permanent injury and disability or worse if they made it to earth alive. For all the careful images of insouciance and bravado – young Americans grinning and shrugging next to the nubile women who featured almost invariably as their nose-cone art – the reality was that sometimes crews returning to eastern England would descend from their planes and find themselves helpless with tears.
When the British bomber crews were briefed on the afternoon of 13 February 1945, and when their American counterparts saw behind that blue curtain the following morning what their target was to be, the first reaction among many was about not the city of Dresden itself, but its location so far east, further than most of them had ever flown before. Even targets in the west of Germany invoked dread; this one sparked a trepidation that was deeper yet. All these young airmen – Leslie Hay and Miles Tripp with the RAF, Morton Fiedler, Wendell Tague and his colleague Howard Holbrook with the ‘Mighty Eighth’ Air Force – contemplated their own deaths: men who knew that their blazing destruction might be necessary for victory.
The name Dresden may have meant as little to these men as Pforzheim or Magdeburg – they were just cities, after all, with Nazi soldiers and armaments factories. This was a form of warfare so relentless, and so nihilistic, that even the most thoughtful and sensitive airmen became numbed to their targets. As Gordon Fenwick recalled: ‘There was a today, maybe a tomorrow. That was it.’18