Armageddon (66 page)
Earlier in the war, many squadrons had suffered serious problems with airmen who “Section-A’ed”—succumbed to combat fatigue. But nobody at Seething did so in the final months, though a pilot once panicked and bailed out over Germany, leaving the rest of his crew to bring the plane home. Wells and Dorfman flew their last mission to Berlin in March 1945, awed by the vast armada of which they formed a part. Their designated targets were usually bridges or marshalling yards, but that day they were told explicitly that they were hitting the centre of Hitler’s capital. On their return, they exultantly buzzed the control tower at Seething to celebrate their own survival. The pilot, alone among them, volunteered for a further tour of operations. Everybody else went gratefully home.
There sometimes seemed a peculiar bloodlessness about the routine of massed bomber operations in the final months of the war. The fliers tripped their switches 21,000 feet above Germany, and those who had not suffered misfortune or disaster went home to see that night’s movie or to head for the huge dance hall in London’s Covent Garden that was their favourite rendezvous. Meanwhile, far beneath, flame and death engulfed a chosen tract of Hitler’s shrinking empire. “We just wanted to get it over with,” shrugged Ira Wells. “If we could bring the end closer by dropping bombs on Germany, that was fine by us. We were kids.” It was ironic that the surviving bomber crews went home to their loved ones without ever having seen at close quarters the land upon which they had wreaked such havoc.
FIGHTERS
T
HERE WERE SIGNIFICANT
gradations of pleasure and pain about flying combat operations in different types of aircraft. Both USAAF and RAF fighter pilots pitied their counterparts in the heavy bombers, as a man in a sports car might condescend to a trucker beside him. More than a few fighter pilots actively enjoyed the experience of war, in a fashion denied to most bomber aircrew. Yet, in fighters as in bombers, much hinged upon the luck of a man’s assignment. Ground attack was infinitely more hazardous than flying escort missions. In both roles, men continued to die until the very end. In Squadron-Leader Tony Mann’s RAF Typhoon wing, two squadron commanders were shot down and killed over Holland in the last week of the war. Not every pilot found fighter operations tolerable. A man who joined the same group as Marvin Bledisloe quit after three missions, because he preferred the humiliation of being stripped of his wings to going on. A few pilots seized upon any mechanical excuse to abort a mission.
Bledisloe had spent almost two years as an instructor in California before being drafted to a P-47 Thunderbolt squadron in England late in 1944. This made him an exceptionally experienced flier, and thus more likely to survive. But as a married thirty-year-old, he came to combat flying with no heroic ideal, merely a determination to fly the 300 operational hours necessary to complete a fighter tour, and get home to his family. He was taught at the outset that the job of an escort fighter was not to pursue Luftwaffe fighters to destruction, but to stick close to the bombers. On Bledisloe’s first mission, he was shocked to see one of his group’s most experienced pilots blown out of the sky by flak. Luck, as well as skill, played a critical role in survival. The Thunderbolt was a much heavier and stronger aircraft than the Mustang, but also a poorer performer.
The gravest crime for a “fighter jock” over Germany was to hog the radio, sacred for the passage of split-second word about the enemy. One day, a new pilot suddenly burst into a monologue across the airwaves: “Hey, this is Jerry! My coolant is haywire. The indicator is in the red. What’ll I do? This thing is liable to quit on me any minute. Where are we? What’ll I do if my engine quits?” “Jerry” faced the rage of the entire group when he got home. In air combat, at collision speeds with enemy aircraft of 700 or 800 m.p.h., seconds were vital. The strain of flying long single-seat missions over Germany told on most men. By autumn, as Bledisloe neared the end of his tour, “my nerves were on edge, I was fidgety, eating little and not getting enough sleep. My butt was killing me from sitting on the hard raft. I was hollow-eyed and weak from the diarrhoea that hit me after every briefing. My weight was down from my normal 160 pounds to 130.” Halfway to Germany on his last trip, he was ordered to abort and escort home an aircraft with mechanical failure. He embraced the break. He was simply happy to finish alive. He returned to California after flying seventy missions in 103 days.
Yet Major Jack Ilfrey of the 79th Squadron believed that morale was always higher among the fighter pilots than among their bomber counterparts. Losses were lower, “and we did not have death brought so close. When a fighter was lost, he just failed to come home. But many times crippled bombers returned to base with one or more dead on board, and the men got a first-hand view of death.” Ilfrey, a twenty-four-year-old Texan, had an extraordinary and by any standards heroic war. He started out flying P-38 Lightnings in North Africa, then moved to England, committed to four- or five-hour bomber escort missions. In the summer of 1944, he took over command of a squadron deployed on ground support. On 11 June, he bailed out over the German lines after being hit, but successfully evaded capture and rejoined his squadron in nine days. He was temporarily demoted a rank for the riotous celebration which followed.
On 20 November, Ilfrey’s wingman Duane Kelso was hit while they were attacking German positions near Maastricht. Kelso set down on a German runway, amid heavy flak. Ilfrey made a split-second decision: “I thought of several instances that my comrades had saved my life.” He landed his own Mustang alongside Kelso’s crippled aircraft, stopped, jumped down on the wing, threw out his dinghy and parachute, then pushed Kelso into the seat. He climbed in on top of his wingman and gunned the engine for take-off before the astounded Germans could react. With four legs in the cockpit, Ilfrey could not operate the rudder, so crossed his own and let Kelso work the pedals. The other pilot was understandably shaken. “For Christ’s sake, Kelso, don’t get a hard-on and send me through the canopy!” exclaimed Ilfrey from his lap. They landed safely back in England. A month later, Ilfrey was posted back to the U.S., after flying 142 combat missions.
Most pilots who gazed down from their cockpits upon the battlefields of Germany reckoned that their lot was enviable alongside that of the fighting soldiers far beneath them. “The landscape looked just like Passchendaele,” wrote an RAF Typhoon pilot of 197 Squadron, Richard Hough, staring down on the Reichswald early in 1945, “amid the splintered trees and countless shell-holes, the zig-zag of never-ending trenches, the long columns of lorries snaking up towards the front line, the sparkle of guns from the east.”
The RAF’s Typhoon pilots expected to fly two missions a day of an hour apiece, though in emergency this might extend to four. Most pilots flew a hundred such operations before being relieved, though a flier who was showing the strain could be grounded sooner. Their aircraft normally carried two 500
-
pound or even 1,000-pound bombs, in addition to their cannon, on a variety of ground-attack missions exotically codenamed Ramrods, Lagoons, Jim Crows, Roadsteads, Rhubarbs. In the last months of the war, “anything that moved on the road was fair game, as only the military had petrol. But sometimes military traffic mixed in with the refugees in their horse-drawn vehicles. I saw open trucks crammed with infantry, with innocent ox-drawn carts in front and behind. Of course we killed civilians—we couldn’t help it.” Hough, like most pilots, acknowledged that it was much easier to overcome scruples if the consequences of one’s own actions were invisible. “You sometimes saw too much with ground strafing. At the same time, with the hunter’s instinct, the heart lifted with excitement at the sight of a target below, and the hunter’s blood ran faster as you pushed down the stick, opened the throttle wide, made a quick intercept calculation, switched on the sight and slipped the shield from the gun button.” Every ground strafer hated flak gunners as personal enemies, and would take extraordinary risks to get in a shot at them after bombing a target.
An age ago, in the innocent days of 1940, a British fighter pilot in France was appalled to see the Luftwaffe’s “knights of the air” machine-gun refugees on the roads. “They
are
shits after all,” Paul Richey observed in shocked dismay in his officers’ mess. Yet by 1945 few of the leaders of the American and British air forces found anything to trouble them in their orders for Operation Clarion, an assault on German communications links which was unleashed on 22 February. Clarion was allegedly designed to inflict a massive blow on the remaining German transport net, by striking with 9,000 American and British bombers and fighters across the widest possible area. The bombers, as usual, were deployed against railroads and bridges, but their attacks also covered many small towns. All those concerned with Clarion’s planning recognized that, whatever the targeting pretext, its real purpose was explicitly terroristic—to demonstrate the power of the Allies to strike at will into every corner of the Reich. General Ira Eaker of Eighth Air Force expressed concern that Clarion would demonstrate to the Germans “that we are the barbarians they say we are, for it would be perfectly obvious to them that this is primarily a large-scale attack on civilians, as, in fact, it of course will be.” General Charles Cabell, an adviser to General Arnold, scribbled bitterly on a copy of the Clarion proposal: “This is the same old baby-killing plan of the get-rich-quick psychological boys, dressed up in a new kimono.” Clarion went ahead anyway. Allied fighters were committed to attacking road movements of every kind. “CLARION hit people who had never been bombed before,” notes a German historian. “The psychological effect was very great.” The civilian casualties inflicted by the operation were never documented, but certainly ran into thousands. For the rest of the war, Allied pilots attacked German civilians with growing promiscuity. Who could blame them, after the lead Clarion had given them from the top?
The Allied fighter-bomber pilots, like those of the Luftwaffe in 1940, were very young men. Few denied the adrenaline rush that often transcended the terrors of operational flying: “I could see the cannon strikes dancing along the road like a hysterically fast fuse racing to its point of detonation,” wrote Richard Hough. “The car was packed with passengers—there must have been five or six inside, and not one with the sense to keep a look-out through the window. My glimpse of them, alive, intact, perhaps talking together and smoking, was one frame from a film, flickering like the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein’s
Potemkin
. The next frame, as the full weight of my shells tore in, was all blood and fire.” In the spring of 1945, even in rural Saxony German civilians became reluctant to go shopping because of the danger of being strafed by passing fighter-bombers. They learned to throw themselves flat on the ground whenever aircraft approached. It was so easy for a bored young man to touch his gun-button, to relieve the monotony of a patrol. “We sometimes thought the Allied pilots were playing a game with us,” said fifteen-year-old Helmut Lott, who grew weary of ditching his bike and running for the nearest cover as soon as a Jabo peeled off into a dive.
During a firing pass at 600 m.p.h. in the dive, wrote Lieutenant Jack Pitts of the 371st Fighter Group, “you feel as if you are flying the guns, not the plane. You see where the bullets are hitting, and make minor adjustments with the controls to ‘walk the stream of bullets’ onto the target.” Pitts’s Thunderbolt squadron sometimes flew three missions a day from their French bases, spending perhaps thirty minutes each time over enemy lines. On 19 December, he and his squadron were looking for “targets of opportunity” across the Rhine. He fired some 2,400 rounds of ammunition and wrote in his diary: “I really did enjoy this mission. I probably killed a lot of German civilians. Tough luck.
C’est la guerre
.” Afterwards he recalled:
I was barely 22, probably still quite immature, and didn’t take much of anything seriously except when I was flying . . . It
was
fun. Most small boys like to tear things up; the most fun with toys was not in building a windmill, but in knocking it down. Well, we had graduated from being small boys into being big boys, but we still liked destroying things, especially since that was what we were expected to do. It was great fun watching a locomotive blow up, or seeing a truckload of ammunition explode, with parts of the truck flying through the air.
Pitts’s squadron suffered few casualties. He experienced little fear, even when engaged by the Germans’ shrinking force of Focke-Wulfs. He felt: “This is what I was trained for; I’m better than they are, my plane is better than theirs; let’s get it on!” Sometimes, he sang to himself in the cockpit:
It may be in the valley, where countless dangers hide,
It may be in the sunshine, that I in peace abide
. . . If Jesus is with me, I’ll go anywhere!
The RAF’s Squadron-Leader Tony Mann, a Typhoon reconnaissance pilot, even found it in his heart to pity the plight of the Luftwaffe in those last months: “I felt sorry for the German air force because they were let down by their commanders and their industry. When the dreaded Hun just stopped turning up, you began to wonder if they were frightened or something. It was only afterwards that we realized they simply couldn’t do it.”
The recklessness of some aircrew persisted on the ground. Jack Pitts and his fellow pilots used aviation fuel for almost every purpose, including cleaning clothes. Once, the gasoline stove in the house in which they were billeted exploded, killing one pilot and severely burning several others. The house burned down. Towards the end, however, even frankly callous young fliers began to feel spasms of pity for the beaten enemy, just as Tony Mann did. “There were four men unloading some stuff from the back of a caisson,” Jack Pitts wrote in his diary on 18 March 1945. “They evidently heard me just before I fired, because they all turned round, and I could practically see a look of surprise. I squeezed the trigger and these four just seemed to melt away. The caisson burned and the horses dropped . . . All in all, I got one truck, 14 horses and six Germans. It’s almost sickening because these poor devils don’t have a chance. Oh well, they started it.”