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FACUTLY: EXPERT
Donald L. Miller
Bomber Boys
Clark Gable, Hollywood actor and Eighth Air Force gunner, with the crew of
Delta Rebel No. 2 (91st Bomb Group) after returning from a mission.
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London, October 9, 1943
Maj. John Egan’s private war began at breakfast in a London hotel.
Egan was on a two-day leave from Thorpe Abbotts, an American bomber base some ninety miles north of London and a short stroll from the Norfolk hamlet that gave it its name. Station #139, as it was officially designated, with its 3,500 fliers and support personnel, was built on a nobleman’s estate lands, and the crews flew to war over furrowed fields worked by Sir Rupert Mann’s tenant farmers, who lived nearby in crumbling stone cottages heated
by open hearths.
Thorpe Abbotts is in East Anglia, a history-haunted region of ancient farms, curving rivers, and low flat marshland. It stretches northward from the spires of Cambridge, to the high-sitting cathedral town of Norwich, and eastward to Great Yarmouth, an industrial port on the black waters of the North Sea. With its drainage ditches, wooden windmills, and sweeping fens, this low-lying slice of England brings
to mind nearby Holland, just
across the water.
It is a haunch of land that sticks out into the sea, pointed, in the war years, like a raised hatchet at the enemy. And its drained fields made good airbases from which to strike deep into the German Reich. A century or so behind London in its pace and personality, it had been transformed by the war into one of the great battlefronts of the world, a war front unlike any other in history.
This was an air front. From
recently built bases in East Anglia, a new kind of warfare was being waged—high-altitude strategic bombing. It was a singular event in the history of warfare, unprecedented and never to be repeated. The technology needed to fight a prolonged, full-scale bomber war was not available until the early 1940s and, by the closing days of that first-ever bomber war, was already being rendered obsolete by jet engine aircraft, rocket-powered missiles, and atomic bombs. In the thin, freezing air over northwestern Europe, airmen bled and died in
an environment that no warriors had ever experienced. It was air war fought not at 12,000 feet, as in World War I, but at altitudes two and three times that, up near the stratosphere where the elements were even more dangerous than the enemy. In this brilliantly blue battlefield, the cold killed, the air was unbreathable, and the sun exposed bombers to swift violence from German fighter planes and ground guns. This endless, unfamiliar killing space added a new dimension to the ordeal of combat, causing many emotional and physical problems that fighting men experienced for the first time ever.
For most airmen, flying was as strange as fighting. Before enlisting, thousands of American fliers had never set foot in an airplane or fired a shot at anything more threatening than a squirrel. A new type of warfare, it gave birth to a new type of medicine—air medicine. Its pioneering psychiatrists and surgeons
worked in hospitals and clinics not far from the bomber bases, places where men were sent when frostbite mauled their faces and fingers or when trauma and terror brought them down.
Bomber warfare was intermittent warfare. Bouts of inactivity and boredom were followed by short bursts of fury and fear; and men returned from sky fights to clean sheets, hot food, and adoring English girls. In this incredible war, a boy of nineteen or twenty could be fighting for his life over Berlin at
eleven o’clock in the morning and be at a London hotel with the date of his dreams at nine that evening. Some infantrymen envied the airmen’s comforts, but as a character in an American navigator’s novel asks, “How many infantry guys do you think would be heading for the front lines if you gave them a plane with full gas tanks?” Sold to the American public as a quicker, more decisive way of winning than slogging it out on the ground, the air war became a slow, brutal battle of attrition.
John Egan was commander of a squadron of B-17 Flying Fortresses, one of the most fearsome killing machines in the world at that time. He was a bomber boy; destruction was his occupation. And like most other bomber crewmen, he went about his work without a quiver of conscience, convinced he was fighting for a noble cause. He also killed in order not to be killed.
Egan had been flying combat missions for five months in the most dangerous air theater of the war, the “Big Leagues,” the men called it; and this was his first extended leave from the fight—although it hardly felt like a reprieve. That night, the German air force, the Luftwaffe, plastered the city, setting off fires all around his hotel. It was his first time under the bombs and he found it impossible to sleep, with the screaming sirens and the thundering concussions.
Don Miller met alumni in several cities around the country during a fall promotional tour. He signed books following a talk on campus sponsored by Lafayette Alumni of
the Lehigh Valley.
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Egan was attached to the Eighth Air Force, a bomber command formed at Savannah Army Air Base in Georgia in the month after Pearl Harbor to deliver America’s first blow against the Nazi homeland. From its unpromising beginnings, it was fast becoming one of the greatest striking forces in history. Egan had arrived in England in the spring of 1943, a year after the first men and machines of the Eighth had begun occupying bases handed over to them by the RAF—the Royal Air Force—whose bombers had been hammering German cities since 1940. Each numbered Bombardment Group (BG)—his was the 100th—was made up of four squadrons of eight to twelve four-engine bombers, called “heavies,” and occupied its own air station, either in East Anglia or the Midlands, directly north of London, around the town of Bedford.
For a time in 1943, the Eighth was assigned four Bomb Groups equipped with twin-engine B-26 Marauders, which were used primarily for low- and medium-level bombing, with mixed results. But in October of that year, these small Marauder units were transferred to another British-based American air command—the Ninth Air Force, which was being built up to provide close air support for the cross-Channel invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. From this point until the end of the war, all Eighth Air Force bombers were either Fortresses or B-24 Liberators, the only American bombers designed for long-range, high-altitude strikes. But the Eighth did retain its own Fighter Command to provide escort aircraft for its bombers on shallow-penetration missions into Northern Europe. Its pilots flew single-engine P-47 Thunderbolts and twin-engine P-38 Lightnings, and operated from bases located in the vicinity of the bomber stations.
When the 100th Bomb Group flew into combat, it was usually accompanied by two other bomb groups from nearby bases, the
390th and the 95th, the three groups forming the 13th Combat Wing. A combat wing was one small part of a formation of many hundreds of bombers and fighter escorts that shook the earth under the English villagers who spilled out of their cottages at dawn to watch the Americans head out “to hit
the Hun.”
“No one . . . could fail to thrill at the sight of the great phalanxes streaming away from their East Anglian airfields,” wrote the historian John Keegan, a boy growing up in England during the war. “Squadron after squadron, they rose to circle into groups and wings and then set off southeastward for the sea passage to their targets, a shimmering and winking constellation of aerial grace and military power, trailing a cirrus of pure white condensation from 600 wing tips against the deep blue of English summer skies. Three thousand of America’s best and brightest airmen were cast aloft by each mission, ten to a ‘ship,’ every ship with a characteristic nickname, often based on a song title, like
My Prayer; or a line from a film,
like ‘I am Tondelayo.’”
On the flight to the coast, “we turned on the BBC to listen to all the sentimental songs of the day,” recalled co-pilot Bernard R. Jacobs of Napa, California. Passing over the eternally green English countryside, it seemed strange to Jacobs that such a tranquil-looking land was the staging area for a campaign of unimaginable slaughter, destruction such as the world had never seen.
Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt had recently ended all voluntary enlistments, the Eighth
Air Force was still an elite outfit, made up almost entirely of volunteers, men who had signed up before the president’s order or highly qualified men who were snapped up by Air Force recruiters after they were drafted by the Army but before they were given a specific assignment. Eighth Air Force bomber crews were made up of men from every part of America and nearly every station in life. There were Harvard history majors and West Virginia coal miners, Wall Street lawyers and Oklahoma cow punchers, Hollywood idols and football heroes. The actor Jimmy Stewart was a bomber boy and so was the “King of Hollywood,”
Clark Gable. Both served beside
men and boys who had washed office windows in Manhattan or loaded coal cars in Pennsylvania—Poles and Italians, Swedes and Germans, Greeks and Lithuanians, Native Americans and Spanish-Americans, but not African-Americans, for official Air Force policy prevented blacks from flying in combat units of the Eighth Air Force. In the claustrophobic compartments of the heavy bombers, in the crucible of combat, Catholics and Jews, Englishmen and Irishmen, became brothers in spirit, melded together by a desire not to die. In bomber warfare, the ability to survive, and to fight off fear, depended as much on the character of the crew as on the personality of the individual. “Perhaps at no time in the history of warfare,” wrote Starr Smith, former Eighth Air Force intelligence officer, “has there been such a relationship among fighting men as existed with the combat crews of heavy bombardment aircraft.”
The Eighth Air Force had arrived in England at the lowest moment of the war for the nations aligned against the Axis Powers: Germany, Italy, Japan, and their allies. The Far Eastern and Pacific empires of the English, the Dutch, and the French had recently fallen to the Japanese, as had the American-occupied
Philippines. By May 1942, when Maj. Gen. Carl A. “Tooey” Spaatz arrived in London to take command of American air operations in Europe, Japan controlled a far-reaching territorial empire. The Royal Air Force’s fighter boys had won the Battle of Britain the previous summer, and England had stood up to the Blitz, the first long-term bombing campaign of the war, but since the evacuation of the British army at Dunkirk in May 1940, and the fall of France soon thereafter, Germany had been the absolute master of Western Europe. In the spring of 1942, Great Britain stood alone and vulnerable, the last surviving European democracy at war with the Nazis. And the question became, How to hit back
at the enemy?
“We have no Continental Army which can defeat the German military power,” Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared. “But there is one thing that will bring him . . . down, and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.” Beginning in 1940, the RAF’s Bomber Command went after industrial targets in the Rhineland and the Ruhr,
Margarita Karasoulas ’08 is one member
of an “extraordinary team of student
researchers” who assisted Don Miller
with Masters of the Air. In a feature
review, the New York Times calls the
book “thoroughly engrossing.”
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centers of Nazi material might. The first RAF raids of the war had been flown in daylight, but after taking murderous losses, the RAF was forced to bomb at night and to alter its targeting. Since industrial plants could not be sighted, let alone hit, on moonless nights, the RAF began bombing entire cities—city busting, the crews correctly called it. The purpose was to set annihilating fires that killed thousands and that would break German civilian morale. The bombing was wildly inaccurate and crew losses were appalling. But killing Germans was wonderful for British morale—payback for the bombing of Coventry and London, and England had no other way to directly hurt Germany. Until Allied armies entered Germany in the final months of the war, strategic bombing would be the only battle fought inside the Nazi homeland.
The Eighth Air Force had been sent to England to join this ever accelerating bombing campaign,
which would be the longest battle
of World War II. It had begun
combat operations in August 1942,
in support of the British effort but with a different plan and purpose.
The key to it was the top secret Norden bombsight, developed by Navy scientists in the early 1930s. Pilots like Johnny Egan had tested it in the high, sparkling skies of the American West and put their bombs on sand targets with spectacular accuracy, some bombardiers claiming they could place a single bomb in a pickle barrel from 20,000 feet. The Norden bombsight would make high-altitude bombing both more effective and more humane, Air Force leaders insisted. Cities could now be hit with surgical precision, their munitions mills destroyed with minimal damage to civilian lives and property.
The Eighth Air Force was the proving instrument of “pickle-barrel” bombing. With death-dealing machines like the Flying Fortress and the equally formidable Consolidated B-24 Liberator, the war could be won, the theorists of bomber warfare argued, without a World War I-style massacre on the ground or great loss of life in the air. This untested idea appealed to an American public that was wary of long wars, but less aware that combat always confounds theory.
Daylight strategic bombing could be done by bombers alone, without
fighter planes to shield them. This was the unshakable conviction of Brig. Gen. Ira C. Eaker, the former fighter pilot that Carl Spaatz had picked to head the Eighth Air Force’s bomber operations. Flying in tight formations—forming self-defending “combat boxes”—the bombers, Eaker believed, would have the massed firepower to muscle their way to the target.
Johnny Egan believed in strategic bombing, but he didn’t believe this. He had entered the air war when Ira Eaker began sending his bomber fleets deep into Germany, without fighter escorts, for at that time no single-engine plane had the range to accompany the heavies all the way to these distant targets and back. In the summer of 1943, Johnny Egan lost
a lot of friends to the Luftwaffe.
Excerpted from Masters of the Air by Donald L. Miller. copyright 2006 by Donald L. miller.
reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, inc.
Lafayette faculty are experts in their fields. Interests among the 196 members range across the full spectrum of humanistic,
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