Armageddon (65 page)
All heavy bomber crews found it a strange experience, creating a special kind of strain, to drink one night in a pub in rural Lincolnshire or Norfolk, then to be thrown next day into a battle that might end in a PoW camp or in death. Most men’s loyalties became fiercely focused upon their own crews. “Other people in the squadron were just acquaintances,” said Sergeant Bill Winter, a Lancaster wireless-operator. “The crew was everything—you slept together, drank together, ate together, went on leave together—and fought together. My biggest fear was of being sent on a trip as a ‘spare bod’ with a strange crew.” On the ground, little was asked of bomber aircrew save that they should rest, attend briefings, check and test equipment. At Winter’s 106 Squadron, there was intense resentment when, during a period of poor weather which permitted little flying, aircrew were ordered to muster for a morning jog around the airfield perimeter track. There was even greater fury when they were issued with shovels and told to help clear snow off the runways. They believed, not unreasonably, that enough was asked of them over Germany to merit forbearance on the ground.
If there was a common strand among young men of the wartime generation, whether American, British, German, Russian, it was their passion for flying. They were seized by the romance of escaping from the earth. The air corps was first choice of assignment for millions of disappointed conscripts who finished up in armour, infantry, artillery. Richard Burt, a Liberator gunner from Utah, found that flying above cloud “made you feel as if they had cleaned up the earth . . . it has a peaceful, mind-washing effect on me.” Until he met the enemy, he simply gloried in the aesthetic beauty of the sky.
“I thought a lot about our guys down there on the ground with the army,” said another B-24 gunner, Ira Wells. “We had all the glory. I realised how fortunate we were to be in the air.” Wells was a dentist’s son from Staten Island who volunteered for the air corps in 1943, but realized during training on Piper Cubs that he would never make the grade as a pilot. His crew formed in Lincoln, Nebraska, a wonderful amalgam of Americans at war. There were two Jews, two Catholics and five Protestants. The pilot was from Michigan, the bombardier from Iowa, the top turret gunner from Illinois, waist gunners from Oklahoma and Massachusetts, tail from Ohio; the other three were New Yorkers. “We were the Lindbergh generation,” said Harold Dorfman, their navigator. “I wanted to fly like I could taste it.” The only one among them who seemed less than enamoured with their Liberator was the pilot. Before being drafted, he had been an inspector on a B-24 production line. “I know all the things that are wrong with these aircraft,” he announced gloomily. “I’m more frightened of them than any of you.”
They joined the 448th Bomb Group at Seething, a remote Norfolk airfield, in September 1944. They slept two crews to a Nissen hut, and found themselves moving into the beds of men who had gone down the previous day. Their surviving roommates had done fifteen trips. The newcomers quizzed them about what it was like, and were told: “pretty scary.” Wartime bomber crews were mere passing visitors on their bases for the few months of their tour, amid a huge permanent population of ground staff and maintenance personnel. The only exception at Seething was George, a cook who had been there since the base was built, and suddenly volunteered to reclassify as an air gunner. George had made himself so cosy that he spent most of his off-duty time in the cottage of villagers who lived at the end of the runway, whose daughter Daphne was “just a little bit pregnant” by him.
Wells’s and Dorfman’s crew made their first trip on 13 September, a milk-run to a marshalling yard. Their second trip was more hazardous. They flew at 200 feet over Arnhem, pushing out supplies to the beleaguered British paratroops, glimpsing the Dutch waving and the German tracer slashing up at them. “We dropped our supplies in the right place,” said Harold Dorfman, “right on the Germans, of course.” Dorfman was a passionate amateur photographer and snatched some remarkable images from the cockpit during their tour, not least those of Liberators disintegrating in mid-air. “I stood at the window and cried as I photographed our wingman breaking up,” said Dorfman. His own crew was lucky. They trusted each other—“Sometimes I think we were too young to be as scared as we should have been,” said Corporal Wells. He himself felt no great animosity towards the Germans they were bombing. “We knew Germany was the ally of Japan. That was enough. In those days, people were just patriotic. It never occurred to us to ask ourselves whether what we were doing was right.” But Harold Dorfman said: “I’m a Jew. I knew what was going on. I had no sympathy whatsoever for the Germans.” Likewise the RAF’s Bill Winter, who said: “We never thought about what was underneath—if you saw a lot of fires you just thought: ‘We’ve really given them a pasting tonight.’ ”
Sergeant Jack Brennan, a B-17 radio-operator/gunner in 200th Group, belonged to an unhappy crew. They neither liked nor trusted their pilot, “a phoney . . . There was a real personality problem. We got hit just about every trip. Mostly, we survived thanks to the skill of our navigator. None of us was in the mould of heroes.” Brennan was a twenty-two-year-old baker’s son from Staten Island, and his family were furious when he volunteered in 1942. They had been confident of getting him a deferral. As his pilot blundered through the skies over Germany, hardly a day passed when Brennan did not regret his eagerness to join the Air Corps. His only consolation was that he felt very conscious of how much better they lived on their base at Royston in Hertfordshire than did GIs on the ground in Germany.
On their twenty-fourth mission, they were hit amidships by flak over Berlin. To the disgust of some of the crew, the pilot set course for neutral Sweden, a destination favoured by Allied airmen who had seen enough of the war. “We’d always known that if something happened, the pilot wouldn’t be there—and he wasn’t.” Seven members of the crew jumped over Sweden. Only Brennan, the navigator and bombardier survived. A U.S. legation representative, who came from Stockholm to visit Brennan in the Swedish hospital where he was recovering from arm and leg injuries, said anxiously: “Don’t say anything detrimental about your pilot.” The gunner observed wearily: “They had to think everybody was a hero.”
In the air, attacking in their vast formations, American bombardiers scarcely used their Norden bombsights; they simply flicked the switches to release their loads in unison with the mission leader. A combat historian asked each of Wells’s crew after their first trip what they had thought about as they approached their target. The pilot answered: his wife; the co-pilot: his baby; Dorfman, the navigator, said he was too busy to think at all, trying to see they didn’t get lost. By the end of 1944, the huge accompanying forces of escort fighters overwhelmed the dwindling Luftwaffe on most sorties. Wells never fired his guns in anger. He occasionally glimpsed German jets in the distance, but they were too far away and too fast to offer a shot. Wells retained a profound fear of having to bail out because, like his navigator, he was Jewish. But he claimed to have experienced more fear visiting his girlfriend in London during the German V2 rocket attacks than he did over Germany.
By 1945, every heavy bomber carried an extraordinary weight of high technology and skilled manpower to operate it. A B-24 Liberator contained 1,550,000 separate parts. British Lancasters required crews of seven, American Fortresses and Liberators nine or ten. The functions of pilots, flight-engineers and navigators were self-evident. It sometimes seemed debatable, however, whether a dedicated wireless-operator was necessary. The bombardier—bomb-aimer, in British parlance—was a passenger until the five or ten minutes of a bomb-run, though he sometimes operated a radar set. In American formations, where following aircraft merely released their bombs when their leader did, many men wondered whether a bombardier was required in every crew. British “heavies” carried three gun-turrets and two dedicated gunners. They learned early in the war that with their small-calibre .303 machine-guns they were most unlikely to shoot down a well-armoured German night-fighter. Some critics urged dispensing with the heavy hydraulically powered front and mid-upper turrets to improve aircraft ceilings. However, the presence of the guns was thought essential to crew confidence. The chief function of gunners was as look-outs, watching for fighters and triggering evasive action from the pilot. “Our gunners never fired in anger,” said Bill Winter. “The only time we were really plastered, we never even saw the fighter.”
Flying as a gunner imposed stresses almost equal to those facing the pilots or specialists, because a man had much less to do and more time to think. When an American daylight formation was under attack, the gunners’ purpose was to contribute to the geometrically calculated barrage, interlocking between the aircraft of a formation, through which a Luftwaffe attacker must pass. It was essential to fire repeated short bursts rather than to press the trigger continuously. The barrel of a .50-calibre machine-gun overheated and bent if it remained in action for more than eight seconds. For all their extravagant claims, only a tiny number of gunners ever hit a German aircraft. In the last months of the war, escort fighters provided the defensive capability that mattered. The two waist gunners, at least, might have been dispensed with. But the barrage generated by the Fortress and Liberator .50 calibres was thought to be morale-building. The bombers’ large crews were maintained to the end. It did not go unnoticed, however, that the most successful British aircraft of the war was the twin-engined Mosquito, which carried no guns in its bomber role, and relied solely upon speed and agility for survival. “Mossie” losses to enemy action, especially towards the end, were negligible. The Mosquito, with a crew of only two, could carry a formidable bomb-load.
Now that overwhelming forces of escort fighters dominated the skies over Germany, crews feared flak much more than the Luftwaffe. Each exploding shell left an image of smoke in the sky like an inverted Y ten feet high, tilting in different directions. Formations weaved to confuse the gunners until they reached their “IP”—the “initial point” ahead of the target. From there on, they were required to fly straight and level for the ten minutes of their bomb run, ignoring the hailstorm rattle of shrapnel on the fuselage, praying for the bomb release to be over. “There would be seconds when you felt your lungs would burst because you forgot to exhale,” wrote a crewman. “Instants would occur when you believed your eyes were seeing more than they could behold. There was an unreal sensation of having your body feel moist all over, and then . . . your mouth felt like it was stuffed with dry cotton . . . for no reason at all your lower jaw would quiver and you couldn’t speak.”
There were very bad days when even the Luftwaffe in its decline committed substantial forces of fighters. On 11 September 1944, a mission to the Ruhland synthetic oil-plant on the Czech border met some fifty Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitt Bf-109s. On the 1,300-mile round trip, Eighth Air Force lost forty-five bombers and twenty-one escorting Mustangs. Of thirty-six aircraft of the 100th Bomb Group, fourteen failed to return. It was often the case that once a formation had been broken open and some aircraft lost, the enemy was able progressively to cut down its survivors. Over the Ore Mountains on the Ruhland raid, ten American aircraft crashed within a six-mile radius.
On 31 December 1944, thirty-seven aircraft of the 100th Bomb Group attacked Hamburg, a coastal target which was usually considered far less hazardous than objectives inland. After making a landfall south of the Danish border, the formation turned south-west down the Elbe at 25,000 feet. “The flak was brutal. We flew through flak clouds and aircraft parts for what seemed like an hour,” said Lieutenant William Leek, from Washington State, making the twenty-second trip of his tour. Luftwaffe fighters attacked the formation as it left the target, battling into a strong headwind. Ten U.S. aircraft went down in the space of a few minutes. Leek’s first pilot, Lieutenant Glenn Rohjohn from Greenock, Pennsylvania, was manoeuvring to fill a gap in their formation left by a neighbour’s demise when there was a tremendous impact. They had suffered a disaster of a unique kind. Another B-17, piloted by Lieutenant James Macnab, was flying immediately below that of Rohjohn. Suddenly, it lurched upwards, and locked on to the Fortress above. The top turret pierced the lower fuselage of Rohjohn’s B-17. “We were like creeping dragonflies,” said Leek. The ball-turret gunner in Macnab’s aircraft cranked his turret manually until he could escape into the fuselage. The plane began to burn. Rohjohn attempted in vain to break his own aircraft free by gunning the engines. Three of the lower aircraft’s four motors were still turning. Rohjohn now feathered his own propellers and rang the “bail out” bell. His ball-turret gunner was saying Hail Marys over the intercom. The man knew he could not escape, that he was doomed. “I couldn’t help him,” said Leek, “and I somehow felt that I was invading his right to be alone.”
Ammunition began to explode as fire spread through the lower aircraft. Rohjohn told Leek to go, but the co-pilot refused, knowing that alone the pilot could not control the B-17. Shortly before 1300, they crashed into a field at Tettens, near Wilhelmshaven. On impact, Rohjohn’s plane at last slid free of Macnab’s. It ended a mad career across the grass when the left wing sliced into a wooden military headquarters building. By a miracle, both Rohjohn and Leek survived the crash. They crawled out on to the wing, into the hands of a German soldier. “All that was left of the Flying Fortress was the nose, the cockpit and the seats we were sitting on,” said Leek. Four men survived from Macnab’s plane. In all, 100th Group lost twelve aircraft that day.
Bombing Germany was never a safe activity. To the very end of the war, some crews and some missions suffered horrible experiences. But the overall rate of attrition had declined steeply since the bloody days of 1943, when a bomber crew was more likely to die than to survive. Throughout the war, both the RAF and USAAF periodically varied the number of operations a crew had to complete before being relieved. In the worst days, American fliers had to fly twenty-five missions. By the winter of 1944, with the progressive collapse of the German defences, this had risen to thirty-five. Yet throughout the war fliers based in England were cosseted by their commanders, as befitted men called upon to perform extraordinary tasks and live with exceptional strains. After seven trips, Wells’s crew was sent for a week’s “R & R” in delicious comfort at “the flak house,” a country mansion near Salisbury maintained specially for U.S. bomber aircrew. They felt they needed it.