The US 8th Air Force Prepares for Chowhound
From 1943 to 1945, the US 8th Air Force had its English wartime headquarters outside the town of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. Surrounded by rolling green fields and trees, Daws Hill Lodge had previously been a posh girls’ school and, prior to that, part of the estate of the Marquess of Lincolnshire. The ivy-clad buildings now housed the quarters and offices of Lieutenant General James “Jimmy” Doolittle, commander of the 8th in 1945, and the officers and men who planned and sent the fighter and bomber aircraft of the 8th on their missions each day.
General Doolittle was famous for his daring and his can-do attitude. Prior to the war he had gained fame as an air racer, winning numerous international air race trophies and holding an air speed record at one time. Doolittle had conceived and, in April 1942, led, the first US bomber mission against the Japanese mainland, the famous Doolittle Raid. Doolittle’s sixteen Mitchell B-25B medium bombers had struck Tokyo and four other major Japanese cities after launching from an aircraft carrier in the North Pacific, with most landing in China after surprising the Japanese with their audacity. Once Doolittle returned to the United States, President Roosevelt presented him with the Medal of Honor for the raid.
General Doolittle and his 8th Air Force planners had specified that the major American contribution to the Dutch food airlift be known as Operation Chowhound. As far as Doolittle was concerned, if his aircrew was putting their lives on the line for the Dutch, those airmen had to know, from the get-go, what they were doing and why.
It was agreed with SHAEF that Chowhound drops were to take place between 7:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. each day. For their first day of drops, the 8th Air Force would use the same four drop zones as the RAF—Valkenburg airfield near Leiden, Duindigt Racetrack, Ypenburg airfield at The Hague, and Terbregge airfield outside Rotterdam—following the path established by the first two days of drops and taking on board the lessons learned during those early sorties. Importantly, by simply upping the number of aircraft flying the now established corridors to the first four drop zones, the Allied air forces were less likely to spook nervous Germans on the ground.
Over successive days, the USAAF would expand its operations to take in half a dozen drop zones. The additional DZs were mostly Dutch airfields. The best known was Schiphol Airport at Amsterdam, which, prior to the war, had been Holland’s premier international aeronautical gateway, as it is today. Its wide runways were pitted with bomb craters as a result of Allied air raids over the past five years, which made the airfield nearly useless to the aircraft of both sides. The other new DZs were Vogelenzang airfield at Haarlem on the North Sea coast; IJmuiden airfield, the most northerly of the regular drop zones, eleven miles north of Haarlem, which also served Bergen farther to the north; Hilversum, the most easterly drop zone; and at Utrecht around the Lage Weide on that city’s fringe. As decreed by mission planner Andrew Geddes, all locations were flat, clear and easily accessible to the civilians who would collect the food once it was dropped. And with most being established airfields, they offered low-level flight paths to approaching aircraft.
The British bombers flying Operation Manna would also have their own drop zones in the latter days of the operations; they would add to their existing list Gouda, famous for its cheese, and the former Dutch military airfield of Waalhaven outside Rotterdam. According to this plan, with some 900 heavy bombers ultimately in the air each day flying the food-drop missions, there would be little possibility of accidents with bombers from different Allied air forces crossing paths as they flew to the same DZs. Locations for food drops for 8th Air Force aircraft would vary each day of the operation. Too much food dropped at too few locations would cause distribution problems and delays on the ground. By the same token, too many drop zones would also cause distribution problems.
By the end of the operation, American bombers would be dropping at up to seven different designated locations each day. Some B-17s would also be permitted to drop their loads on “targets of opportunity”—smaller locations where food was needed but that had not previously received drops—and decided by pilots on the day subject to weather and other considerations that might preclude individual aircraft from reaching their original designated targets. But first, the B-17 crews had to master the tricky technique of dropping food from a low altitude in tight protective formation. There was no time for trial runs for each crew. They would have to learn as they went, with their superiors hoping that not too much food would be lost or damaged in the process.
Planning for Chowhound depended on supplies being on hand, and thousands of tons of US Army “ten-in-one” ration packs—called K-rations—were trucked to the airfields of the bombardment groups assigned to the operation and stored prior to being loaded aboard the bombers. K-rations had been developed in the United States in the early 1940s, initially for specialist assault troops such as paratroopers operating behind enemy lines. By 1942, K-rations were being produced for all US troops in the line, with the contents changing over the next few years as the government’s food experts experimented with various combinations before settling on the contents in use by 1945.
Between 1942 and 1945, Heinz, Patten Food Products and the Cracker Jack Company mass-produced millions of K-ration packs in the United States to strict US government guidelines. There were three different packs—one for breakfast, one for dinner, and one for supper—and between them these three were intended to deliver the American soldier between 2,830 and 3,000 calories a day. By 1945, the breakfast pack consisted of chopped ham and eggs in a circular flat can with a twist key, sixteen crackers in two eight-cracker packs, a dried fruit bar, premixed oatmeal cereal, instant coffee, cubed sugar, Halazone water purification tablets, a pack of four cigarettes plus a box of matches, and a pack of Dentyne or Wrigley chewing gum.
The K-ration dinner pack by the time of Chowhound contained cheese in a can, sixteen crackers in two packs, five caramels, a pack of salt, cubed sugar, a powdered grape beverage to be added to water, four cigarettes and a box of matches, and chewing gum. The supper pack contained beef and pork loaf in a can, the omnipresent sixteen crackers, a two-ounce chocolate bar, a bouillon cube or grape beverage powder, a pack of toilet paper tissues, the cigarette four-pack and matches, and the gum.
K-rations were designed to be used no more than fifteen times consecutively—breakfast, dinner and supper for five days. But in the Far East, particularly in remote parts of Burma, American troops fighting the Japanese often had to exist on K-rations for months at a time. This prolonged use exposed the lack of protein in K-ration pack makeup. Men using K-rations for extended periods lost many pounds in weight, and some US servicemen in these circumstances would refuse to use K-rations after a time. Some were known to vomit at the sight of K-rations when that was all that was available after many months. However, for starving Dutch civilians in Holland’s major cities and towns—who had not seen meat or cheese or crackers or salt or sugar in a year or more—K-rations would represent a veritable feast in a cardboard box.
For transport around the world, the manufacturers of the K-ration packs in the United States uniformly packed them into crates made from wood or cardboard, with thirty-two K-ration packs to a crate—a mixture of breakfast, dinner and supper. Each loaded crate weighed between forty-one and forty-three pounds. These crates turned up at the B-17 bases throughout eastern England in the last days of April 1945 in tens of thousands and were stacked ready for loading aboard the Flying Fortresses of the 8th Air Force. It now fell to the ground crews to figure out a way to load as many crates as possible for an efficient drop.
The order from above was to fill each aircraft’s bomb bay with K-ration crates and simply open the doors and let the loads fall on the targets. When some pilots became concerned that their drop speed might be too great to make accurate drops, many an ingenious crew chief at one base or another came up with ways of roping the crates in place and releasing them with a tug from a single rope, allowing the bomb bay doors to be opened in advance of the drop zone, creating drag that slowed the B-17’s approach speed and permitting, in theory, a more accurate drop. Some aircrew would also worry about hitting civilians with their loads. After all, a forty-three-pound crate, dropped from 400 or 500 feet and hitting someone on the ground on the head, would be sure to seriously injure or kill them. But there was no alternative.
Each bombardment group and squadron was given plenty of latitude regarding how they loaded their aircraft and crewed their flights. But General Doolittle required that all aircrew taking part in Chowhound missions had to be volunteers. Plus, unless they were fired on during a Chowhound flight, aircrew would not receive a mission credit for any Chowhound flight—aircrew received credit for each bombing mission they flew, and their total would determine when they could go home to the States. Despite this restriction, 8th Air Force commanders would be embarrassed by the number of men putting their hand up to take part—including senior officers with HQ desk jobs, men such as former 95th Bombardment Group commander Lieutenant Colonel Grif Mumford, who grabbed the opportunity to fly missions again in these dying days of the war to help make a difference for the Dutch.
Left to their own devices, squadrons made their own arrangements about how they would load the crates of K-rations in their bomb bays. Rules varied from squadron to squadron, too, about who could fly the Chowhound missions.
Lieutenant Henry L. “Hank” Cervantes, a B-17 pilot from Oakley, California, serving with the 100th Bombardment Group based at Thorpe Abbotts in Norfolk, found that the orders from his immediate superiors were that, as neither side was supposed to fire at the other during Chowhound flights, no gunners were to fly on his squadron’s B-17s.1 This instruction meant that only four crewmen would fly the mission—pilot, copilot, radio operator and bombardier. Cervantes was not happy about this and would confess that he felt almost naked without his bomber’s air gunners coming along.2 Gunners in some other squadrons were ordered to point their guns skyward, as a signal to the Germans on the ground that they had no offensive intent. These gunners were told that the German flak gunners would reciprocate by keeping the barrels of their guns depressed.
Hal Province, a bombardier with the 34th Bombardment Group’s 319th Squadron, based at Mendlesham in Suffolk, would be equally uneasy when his squadron received orders to leave behind all ammunition for its guns when it took off on its Chowhound missions.3 Flying with empty guns was not a welcome prospect. The crews of the 390th Bombardment Group’s 569th Squadron were also among those told to leave ammunition for their guns behind. Bernie Behrman, top-turret gunner with a 569th Squadron B-17, didn’t like this at all. He felt a little more comfortable when his crew decided to wear sidearms for their first Chowhound flight. Bernie and his comrades had heard that the Germans had signed a truce to permit them to make the Chowhound food drops, but they didn’t trust the Nazis. A pistol wasn’t going to make all that much difference if Jerry opened up on them with 88 mm and 105 mm heavy flak guns, but Bernie and his comrades felt that a little extra insurance, in the form of the pistols on their hips, couldn’t hurt.4
Ray Powell, another member of the 100th Bombardment Group—which had taken the nickname “the Bloody Hundredth”—was told that there would be no need for the B-17s of his squadron to be armed because a squadron of USAAF P-51 Mustangs would be flying escort off their port side while a squadron of Luftwaffe Messerschmitt Bf-109s would be flying escort to starboard. Needless to say, that wasn’t going to happen, but young Powell would rise from his bed on the day of his first Chowhound mission fully believing that he was going to receive an American-German escort, only to realize once he was in the air that his leg was being pulled.5
Some squadrons had very strict rules laid down by their commanders about there being no passengers aboard the aircraft taking part in Chowhound. Other squadrons were entirely relaxed about this, and their pilots would invite sightseeing passengers along from among their ground crew. In one case, a B-17 would carry ten such passengers when it took off on the first day of Chowhound.
In the end, more than forty squadrons from ten bombardment groups based between Ipswich and Norwich in East Anglia were tasked with flying the first Chowhound missions. Their bases were located closer to the North Sea and to the Continent than those of their British counterparts, but this actually worked against them in the early stages of the operation because of inclement weather. The American aircraft could potentially have joined the operation a day or two earlier than they did, but fog rolled in from the sea and covered East Anglia, grounding the American bombers, which sat with bomb bays packed with K-rations, ready to go, while British aircraft farther inland were able to take off.
The planners hoped that finally, on May 1, conditions would prove right for Chowhound to proceed. Only later would many aircrew realize that this was May Day, once celebrated as the birthday of the queen of the fairies and more recently invested with importance to organized labor and socialists as International Workers Day. The Germans too observed May Day, but as a Nazi workers day.