War Stories III (21 page)

On 14 April 1945, the day that Bob Dole was wounded, the 10th Mountain Division breached the German defensive line and opened a hole for other Allied troops to pour into northern Italy. But it came at a terrible cost. Of the 19,734 soldiers who served with the 10th Mountain Division in Italy, nearly 5,000 were casualties—nearly a third of them on the day that 2nd Lt. Bob Dole fell. His regiment lost 370 men killed in action, 1,427 wounded, and three who were captured and made POWs. But the seven-day offensive reached its goal, breaking the back of German resistance in Italy.

 

10th Mountain Division in Italy.

Thanks to the courage of the Mountaineers, the Allies were able to cut off a German retreat into Austria and sweep through to Trieste, Yugoslavia—where Mark Clark's army met the advance force of Marshall Tito's Yugoslav army. By then, the man responsible for so much death and destruction in his homeland of Italy was dead. On 28 April 1945, Italian Communist partisans captured Benito Mussolini, his mistress, and a dozen other fascists near Lake Como, as they were attempting to flee to Switzerland. They were all promptly executed.

The twenty-two-month-long battle for the boot had tied up—and eventually destroyed—more than a score of German divisions. Though the bloody Anzio-Cassino battles would turn out to be the most costly killing field in the European theater, the Germans who fought there could otherwise have been used against the Allies in France or later on, in Germany.

CHAPTER 8

WAR IN THE SKIES 1941–1945

I
n the summer of 1939, when World War II began in Europe, the entire United States Army Air Corps consisted of fewer than 1,200 combat aircraft, and the U.S. Navy had less than 900. These planes—fighters, transports, bombers, and patrol aircraft—were spread from the Philippines to the U.S. East Coast. That same summer, Adolf Hitler's Luftwaffe massed more than 4,000 combat aircraft for the attack on Poland.

The disparities in air power had been growing since Hitler came to power. By 1935, Germany's reinvigorated armament factories were turning out modern, low-wing fighters and multi-engine bombers. During the Spanish Civil War, from 1936 to 1938, hundreds of German pilots gained valuable combat experience that would benefit the Luftwaffe when war in Europe began.

U.S. military planners were not ignorant of these realities. Air power advocates were simply unable to convince isolationists in Congress to appropriate sufficient funds for building a modern air force. In the midst of the Great Depression, expenditures for military aircraft and training pilots was problematic even though the employment of aircraft in World War I—first for reconnaissance and observation, then as a means of
supporting armies on the ground with bombs and guns—had galvanized the imagination of strategic thinkers around the globe.

In Italy, Giulio Douhet postulated in 1921 that future wars could be won by airpower alone, employing massive bombing attacks—not against an adversary's front lines, but against the enemy's cities and war production centers. British, Japanese, and German aircraft designers, military officers, and political leaders seized on Douhet's theories to start modernizing their respective air forces.

In the United States, the most outspoken proponent of air power was U.S. Army Air Corps Brigadier General Billy Mitchell. In July 1921, with scores of politicians and military brass looking on and cameras documenting the event, Mitchell's aircrews—flying WWI-era aircraft—bombed a group of obsolete American and captured German vessels anchored off the Virginia Capes. Though the “unsinkable” battleship
Ostfriesland
went to the bottom, the demonstration failed to convince opponents that America needed a large, independent air force.

Two years later, in a 1923 report that he described as “the masterpiece” of his career, Mitchell predicted—nearly two decades
before
Pearl Harbor—that a Pacific war would begin with a naval and air attack on Pearl Harbor at 7:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning! He was off by just twenty-five minutes.

But Billy Mitchell's unwavering and assertive manner made him more adversaries than allies. He resigned from the military in 1926 after being exonerated in a court martial for insubordination. He died ten years later—still advocating the need for a modern, independent Air Force.

Throughout the 1930s, opponents of military expenditures in the midst of the Great Depression pointed to the two vast oceans that protected the continental United States from attack by enemy bombers. But as Europe and Asia edged closer to conflagration, Roosevelt was able to convince Congress to start building small numbers of more modern fighters and bombers. That also required that pilots, aircrews, mechanics, and aircrews be trained to fly and maintain them.

By the time Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, new designs for modern fighters and bombers were coming off the drawing boards and U.S. aircraft
companies were being granted small contracts for prototypes to be tested by the Navy and the Army Air Corps. Equally important, thousands of young American men were enrolled in government-subsidized civilian pilot training.

Many of those who sought to fly before Pearl Harbor were inspired by the accomplishments of solo pilots like Charles Lindbergh and the heroic exploits of World War I pilots. Articles, books, and movies about Erich von Richtoffen—Germany's “Red Baron”—and America's leading “ace”—former race car driver Eddie Rickenbacker—captured the imagination of millions.

Those who flew small, one-seat, single-engine fighters were depicted as modern incarnations of ancient knights—doing battle one-on-one. Instead of four-legged steeds, these warrior-pilots had sleek, lethal machines, powerful engines, and the ability to twist, turn, climb, and dive through blue sky.

For tens of thousands of young American men, these were alluring images in the midst of the privations of the Great Depression. Nearly all of those who volunteered—and could pass the demanding physical and eyesight requirements for pilot training—knew that Rickenbacker had twenty-six “kills” and that the Red Baron had eighty. Though few would admit it at the time, most of them nurtured the idea of becoming an “ace”—and knew that such a designation required five air-to-air kills.

In 1939 and 1940, several hundred young aviators left the United States for England, China, and Canada—not to
avoid
the war, but to test their proficiency and courage against the Germans and Japanese. Americans serving with the RAF “Eagle Squadron” and Claire Chennault's “Flying Tigers” quickly learned that the enemy aircraft and pilots they went up against were tough adversaries. Becoming an “ace” turned out to be a lot tougher than some had thought.

Robin Olds was a second-year cadet at West Point when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The son of a WWI ace, he had heard of his father's exploits in open cockpit aircraft over France—and had long ago decided to become a pilot. Second Lieutenant Olds arrived in England in May 1944, after graduating with honors from the military academy and flight school.
His first assignment was to help protect the Normandy landings from German air attack. Olds dutifully attacked ground targets, but he was at heart a fighter pilot, and looked forward to the challenge of meeting the enemy in air-to-air combat.

The competition in the skies to rack up “kills” was fierce. All claims of air-to-air victories were supposed to be verified—either by another flyer who witnessed the enemy airplane go down, or by gun cameras that provided a permanent visual record of hits and kills. The squadron intelligence officers who tallied the scores would often say, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

But not all gun camera film could be recovered. Charles “Chuck” Yeager had such an experience over France. Yeager was, by his own description, “just a West Virginia farm boy.” Born in 1923, he never even got close to an airplane until he was eighteen. His first flight didn't go very well.