All Hell Let Loose (77 page)

Meanwhile, Axis forces contributed their own share of slaughter. A squeamish soldier of the Italian Alpini wrote: ‘After we had been at Podgorica for a couple of days, we all set off together to a nearby pass where the partisans have come off best in an attack on one of our columns. Thirty-eight vehicles have been destroyed, the drivers and escorts massacred – all of them! The bodies are mutilated. An order goes out: two days of carte blanche. We destroy or rather are present at the destruction of anything we meet. Our veterans are the chief perpetrators. We are shocked and appalled by the yells of soldiers and the terror of the hapless inhabitants … This is the first, unforgettable confrontation with a reality that shames us as men.’

The partisans were amazed that Italy’s surrender in September 1943, which removed the principal prop of Croat domination, prompted no lessening of the Ustaše appetite for slaughter. When Tito’s men taunted captured fascists that they had lost the war, the doomed prisoners shouted back, ‘We know, but there’s still time to rub out a lot of you!’ Condemned Croats sang, ‘Oh Russia, all will belong to you/But of Serbs there will be few.’ Djilas wrote: ‘This was war with no quarter, no surrender, no letting bygones be bygones.’ He reflected in Tolstoyan terms on the fates that drove the struggle: ‘Why were doctors from Berlin and professors from Heidelberg killing off Balkan peasants and students? Hatred for Communism was not sufficient. Some other terrible and implacable force was driving them to insane death and shame. And driving us, too, to resist and pay them back. Perhaps Russia and communism could account for this to some extent. Yet this passion, this endurance which lost sight of suffering and death, this struggle for one’s manhood and nationality in the face of one’s own death – this had nothing to do with ideology or with Marx and Lenin.’ The partisans often found themselves obliged to abandon their own casualties, or to dispatch the most gravely wounded. Djilas described how one husband acceded to the pleas of his desperately injured wife to finish her off, choosing a moment when she was dozing. A father did the same for his daughter: ‘He survived the war, withered and sombre, and his friends regarded him as a living saint.’

The Western Allies were bitterly disappointed in 1945, when the support of the Red Army enabled Tito to secure control of Yugoslavia. The German invasion had unleashed domestic forces that the Anglo-Americans proved powerless to control. Even if they had denied arms to Tito, the Red Army’s arrival in 1944 would have ensured that a communist regime was installed in Belgrade. Tito was one of the major figures of the war: he exploited Allied support with notable diplomatic skill, and secured lifelong mastery of his country. But his claims to have played an important part in overthrowing Nazi tyranny are more questionable. Yugoslav partisans were the most numerous and pestilent of the insects buzzing about the open wounds of the Axis in its decay, but their role was slight alongside that of the Allied armies.

1
BOMBERS

Young men of all nations perceived romance in playing their parts in the war as knights of the air. ‘I saw myself as something like a gladiator of old,’ wrote Ted Bone, who in 1941 became a nineteen-year-old volunteer for RAF aircrew service. ‘Not for me the horrors of hand-to-hand combat with a rifle and bayonet – I would be firing at another fighter plane.’ Young men of ‘the Lindbergh generation’ exulted in the notion of flying fast and nimble single-engined, single-seat aircraft, which granted pilots a power over their own destinies unusual among twentieth-century warriors. It was ironic, therefore, that many such dreamers found themselves instead committed to aerial bombardment of cities, one of the more barbarous features of the conflict; Bone himself became a Lancaster gunner. Bombing killed well over a million people in Europe and Asia, including many women and children. Some of the bravest, best-educated and most highly trained scions of their societies became rivals in a struggle to devastate their enemies’ centres of civilisation.

Neither they nor their commanders saw the mission in such terms, of course. Aircrew thought not of victims on the ground, unconsidered because rarely visible, but instead about their own destinies above. In exchange for a passage to the sky, they accepted an enhanced risk of death, as well as a responsibility to shoot, bomb and strafe. Geoff Wellum, who flew a Spitfire for the first time as an eighteen-year-old on the eve of the Battle of Britain, described the sensation: ‘I experience an exhilaration that I cannot recall ever having felt before. It’s like one of those wonderful dreams, a Peter Pan sort of dream. The whole thing feels unreal … What a pity … that an aeroplane that can impart such a glorious feeling of sheer joy and beauty has got to be used to fight somebody.’

New Yorker Harold Dorfman, who survived a tour as a B-24 navigator over Germany, said later: ‘I would not trade the experience for anything in the world.’ At a USAAF base in England Corporal Ira Wells, a B-24 gunner, read accounts of ground fighting and thought with pity of Allied soldiers: ‘We had all the glory. I realised how fortunate we were to be in the air. I was more frightened in London during the V2 rocket attacks than in the air on missions.’ Dorfman and Wells were relatively unusual, because few bomber aircrew enjoyed their work in the way that many fighter pilots did. This was not because they agonised much, or at all, about the fate of those who died beneath their bomb doors; it was because flying for eight or ten hours either in daylight formation amid flak and fighters like the men of the USAAF, or through lonely darkness, as did those of the RAF, imposed relentless strain and frequent terror. They were denied the thrill of throwing a high-performance fighter across the sky. The monotony of bombing missions was shattered only when crews encountered the hellish sights and sounds of combat and bomb runs over the cities of Germany or Japan.

Although Laurie Stockwell was a sensitive young Englishman, it never occurred to him to question the ethics of his own part, as a pilot, in bombing Germany. Like almost all his kind, he simply saw himself performing, without fervour, an exceptionally hazardous role in a struggle to remove the dark threat bearing down upon Western civilisation. He wrote to his mother in 1942:

Stockwell died over Berlin in January 1943. Randall Jarrell, an airfield control tower operator who became a poet of the USAAF crews’ experience, wrote:

Most young men conscripted for war service wanted to fly, but few achieved their aspirations. Air forces picked only the brightest and fittest adolescents for probable death. RAF navigator Ken Owen, a Welshman, said, ‘Perhaps a quarter of our sixth form at Pontypridd grammar school became aircrew; more than half of them were killed.’ Yet those accepted for flying duties exulted in their status as an elite: they received a popular adulation unmatched by any other breed of warrior.

In the first year of Britain’s war, circumstances forced the RAF to rush new pilots into the line, sometimes with no more than twenty or thirty hours’ experience of the planes they flew in combat. Thereafter, however, the British and Americans trained aircrew requiring the highest skills – pilots and navigators – for up to two years before committing them to action. Instructors ‘washed out’ many candidates, but despite intensive tuition, wartime pilots often killed themselves because their skills were inadequate to handle high-performance aircraft, even before engaging the enemy. Youth and the mood of the times encouraged recklessness. In the course of the war, the RAF lost in non-operational accidents 787 officers and 4,540 other ranks killed, 396 officers and 2,717 other ranks injured. Among US aircrew of all services, 13,000 died accidentally. Taking off and landing a fighter, designed to be inherently unstable, required meticulous care. Misjudgement was often punished by death – in the first two years of the war 1,500 Luftwaffe trainees were killed learning to fly the Bf109. Managing a bomber was little easier, especially if it suffered a technical mishap.

An aspect of the conflict common to warriors in all three dimensions was that navigation was a life-or-death science. A British Army training report noted that soldiers would forgive almost any fault in their officers except incompetent map-reading, which at best wasted energy and at worst got them killed. Ships were sunk by straying carelessly into minefields. Airmen who lost their way, especially over the sea, often died when their fuel ran out. Anti-submarine patrol duty, roaming far out over empty oceans, was a wearisome task, demanding special navigational care: errors killed as many crews as enemy action or mechanical failure. Even when electronic aids and beacons were introduced, a dismaying number of planes fell into the sea because inexpert airmen flew reciprocal courses, or were unable to fix their positions in poor weather.

The Germans, Italians and Japanese entered the conflict with highly trained pilots, and until 1942 most of the Luftwaffe’s aircraft were superior to those of the RAF or USAAF; the Japanese and Italians also had some good types. ‘With the start the Germans had, it was a miracle we ever caught up,’ said British bomber group commander Edward Addison. The Luftwaffe’s close support for the Wehrmacht was a key factor in German victories between 1939 and 1942. Goering’s squadrons failed, however, as a strategic bomber force. Before the blitz on Britain, senior airmen of most nations were imbued with a mystical faith. They deluded themselves that societies would succumb to panic in the face of the mere fact of assault from the air; moral collapse would provoke industrial disintegration, and thus defeat. The destruction of Guernica by the Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War, along with the bombing of Nanjing, Warsaw and Rotterdam, promoted delusions about the vulnerability of civilian populations. More protracted experience disproved these, however. ‘[A] vital lesson – one that has taken even air specialists by surprise,’ wrote Major Alexander Seversky, a leading American air strategist, in 1942,

Bombers achieved results only in proportion to the weight of explosives they could drop accurately on designated targets; mass was critical. The Luftwaffe and the Japanese air forces had formidable capabilities for supporting their respective ground forces and navies, as well as for killing refugees and promoting terror, but their aircraft carried small bombloads. The Luftwaffe inflicted pain and destruction during the 1940–41 blitz on Britain, but nowhere near sufficient to make a decisive impact on the ability of Churchill’s nation to continue the war. Thereafter, Germany’s air force suffered a steady decline: when the first generation of Axis airmen was killed off, training of their successors languished. Both the Germans and the Japanese made a critical strategic mistake, to which fuel famine contributed, by failing to allocate resources to sustain a flow of proficient pilots. By 1944–45, Axis flying skills had become markedly inferior to those of their American and British counterparts. The Russians displayed the same ruthlessness in training and expending aircrew as in everything else. By 1943 they had some good aircraft and able pilots, but their technology was less advanced, and they suffered savage losses.

In the second half of the war, the Western Allies produced superb planes in vast numbers, but the Germans introduced only two good new types – the Focke-Wulf 190 and the revolutionary Me 262 jet fighter. Numbers of the latter were too small and pilot skills inadequate to avert the Luftwaffe’s eclipse in the sky. The Japanese Zero, which so daunted the Allies in 1941– 42, became wholly outclassed. It has been described as ‘an
origami
aircraft’ – light, graceful, superbly manoeuvrable, but frail and offering negligible concessions to pilot safety, for instance lacking cockpit armour. Commander David McCampbell, the US Navy’s top-scoring air ace of the war, said: ‘We learned very early that if you hit them near the wing roots, where the fuel was, they would explode right in your face.’ The Japanese army and naval air forces posed no significant challenge to the Allies in 1944–45 except through kamikaze attacks, an expedient of desperation.

Allied aircrew, once deployed on operational fighter or bomber squadrons, until the last eighteen months of the war confronted a statistical probability of their own extinction. Romantic delusions faded as they learned to anticipate a destiny as a bloody jam of crushed flesh and bones, or surmounting a petrol-fuelled funeral pyre. To be sure, their daily lives on the ground were privileged; they were spared the mud and discomfort to which foot soldiers were subjected. But they were less likely to survive; Ernie Pyle wrote: ‘A man approached death rather decently in the air force. He died well-fed and clean-shaven.’

More than half the RAF’s heavy bomber crews perished, 56,000 men in all. The USAAF’s overall losses were lower, but among 100,000 of its men who participated in the strategic offensive against Germany some 26,000 died, and a further 20,000 were taken prisoner. ‘You were resigned to dying every night,’ said a British Whitley bomber pilot, Sid Bufton. ‘Before setting out you looked around your room: golf clubs, books, nice little radio – and the letter to your parents propped up on the table.’ Unsurprisingly, Allied casualties were proportionately heaviest when the Axis dominated the war, and fell steadily once the tide turned. From 1943 onwards, it was the turn of German and Japanese airmen to do most of the dying: less than 10 per cent survived until the end.

The Allied air chiefs’ principal preoccupation was strategic assault on Germany – the offensive against Japan began in earnest only in March 1945 – by which they aspired to win the war on their own. The RAF was obliged to abandon daylight bombing after a bloody initiation in 1939–40. Thereafter, its squadrons mounted a night offensive, which made little material impact on Germany until 1943: they lacked mass as well as navigational and bomb-aiming skills. The first British bombs which fell on Berlin at the end of August 1940 inflicted only random damage, though they shocked the capital’s inhabitants and killed a few civilians. One young mother retired to a shelter when the warning sirens sounded, but was reluctant to disturb her two sleeping children, whom she left in bed: they perished when the house received a direct hit. After that story was published, Berliners took more heed of sirens.

An RAF squadron commander described Bomber Command’s early operations over Germany as ‘groping’. This was exemplified by the experience of Sgt. Bill Uprichard, who flew a Whitley of 51 Squadron on a mission against oil refineries at Politz on the Baltic in poor weather on the night of 29 November 1940. Outbound, after spending 2½ hours in thick cloud over the North Sea, suddenly the sky opened to reveal a brilliantly-lit city below. Uprichard and his crew realised they must be passing neutral Sweden, and hastily reset their course. They blind-bombed Politz by dead-reckoning – estimating their own time over target – then turned for home in impenetrable cloud. Without warning they found themselves facing heavy anti-aircraft fire. Uprichard wrote: