War Stories III (23 page)

By war's end, Tuskegee had trained over 1,000 black aviators and many thousands of mechanics and technicians. Their aircraft flew over 15,000 combat missions, destroyed over 250 enemy planes, and never lost a bomber to an enemy fighter.

After the war, President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981 desegregating the military—more than fifteen years before the 1964 Civil Rights Act—and ensured that minorities could serve in every branch and at every level of the U.S. Armed Forces. The daring deeds of the Tuskegee Airmen helped pave the way for today's soldiers, sailors, airmen, Guardsmen, and Marines. At the U.S. Air Force Academy, the inscription on the statue dedicated to them reads:

The men flying the fighters—no matter what color they were—quickly learned that there was plenty of excitement but far less romance to flying than they had imagined when hearing about it before the war. Those who flew the bombers knew that right from the start.

When America was thrust into war in 1941, the U.S. had but a handful of modern bombers. The twin-engine B-25s that Jimmy Doolittle's crews flew to raid Tokyo in April 1942 were good medium bombers, but they were limited in range and payload. The only “heavy,” long-range bombers in production on the day that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor were the B-17 and the B-24.

Built by Seattle-based Boeing Corporation, the four-engine B-17 weighed twenty-seven tons, had a range of 1,850 miles, and could cruise at 170 mph at an altitude of 35,000 feet carrying a payload of 8,000 pounds. The B-17 bristled with thirteen .50-caliber machine guns, prompting a
newspaper writer to describe it as a “Flying Fortress.” The moniker stuck. Capable of absorbing incredible punishment and still remaining aloft, Flying Fortresses would drop
over a million tons of bombs
over Axis targets in Europe from 1942 through mid-1945.

Consolidated Aircraft Corporation in San Diego, California, was producing America's “other” heavy bomber at the start of the war—the high-wing, four-engine, twin-tail B-24 “Liberator.” First tested in December 1939, the B-24 had a range of 2,900 miles, cruised at 175 mph, and carried an 8,800-pound payload. By the end of the war, 19,256 of them—more than any other aircraft in U.S. history—would be built and flown by every branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. Though there were twenty-two variants of the B-24 produced in five separate facilities between 1941 and 1945, most were equipped with eleven .50-caliber machine guns that proved lethal to attacking fighters. By 1944, the Ford production line at Willow Run, Michigan, was turning out a new B-24
every fifty-eight minutes
.

With America in the war, production of B-17s and B-24s ramped up immediately. So too did the training of aircrews. Since most B-17s had a crew of thirteen and B-24s had ten, hundreds of thousands of men had to be trained to fly, fight, man, and maintain these fleets of planes.

Few of these young Americans had ever gone more than a few miles from home when they joined the Army Air Corps. Hardly any of them had ever seen an airplane close up, let alone flown in one before. Many didn't even have a driver's license.

It didn't matter. If they passed the tests to get in the Air Corps, they could be trained. And they were. Within weeks of Pearl Harbor, scores of new air bases were being built to accommodate the bombers coming off the production lines—and the aircrews that would spend nine months to a year learning all they could about these flying behemoths. Then, those assigned to the European theater would usually go to England for their final stages of training. There, most of the bombers and crews were assigned to the newly formed 8th Air Force.

On 17 August 1942, the Americans flew their first daylight bombing raid across the English Channel—striking German positions near Rouen, France. All eighteen B-17s returned safely.

On 20 August, a thirty-plane daylight attack was flown against the Luftwaffe base near Abbeville, France, in an effort to support the disastrous Allied amphibious raid at Dieppe. Once again, all the American B-17s returned safely.

Then, on 10 October, 100 USAAF B-17s launched an attack in the afternoon on German positions around Lille, France, near the Belgian border. The British followed up with an equal-sized nighttime raid on the same installations. In the Allied attacks, more than ninety German aircraft were destroyed on the ground and in the air, but only one British plane and two U.S. bombers were lost.

The success of these early attacks validated a strongly held thesis in the USAAF: that daylight bombing attacks were more accurate—and could be conducted with minimal losses. Officers in the British Bomber Command, having abandoned daylight raids almost a year earlier because of horrific losses, counseled otherwise. Over the next thirty-three months, the American “Bomber Boys” would pay a terrible price for their leaders' insistence on daylight bombing.

By the summer of 1943, American B-17 and B-24 bomber crews based in England and North Africa were striking near daily at Axis targets in France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, and Germany itself. Army Air Corps planners, convinced that strategic bombing could shorten the war, decided to try a massive raid to destroy Hitler's principal source of oil: the Ploesti refineries in Romania.

Operation Tidal Wave called for a 180-plane formation of B-24s to launch from airfields in North Africa and head north across the Mediterranean and over the Aegean Sea. After clearing the Balkans, the bombers were ordered to descend to an altitude of 500 feet or lower to avoid German radar. The B-24s would then drop their bombs on specific targets within the Ploesti oil fields and refineries, taking out the fuel supply for the Third Reich's war machine. The nearly 2,000-mile round trip was to be conducted in radio silence to preserve the element of surprise.

The challenges for the bomb groups assigned to the mission were formidable. In addition to the extremely long-range and low-altitude requirements, the American aircrews also had to avoid German fighters, hundreds
of anti-aircraft guns, and barrage balloons over the target. Captain Richard Butler of San Diego, California, was a twenty-one-year-old B-24 co-pilot on the mission. Though he had already seen plenty of action over France and Germany, he volunteered to go on the Ploesti Raid.

Richard Butler and his aircrew were among the favored few. Of the 178 B-24s that launched on Operation Tidal Wave, forty-one were lost during the raid, two collided en route home, and eight landed in Turkey and had their crews interned. Of those that made it back to Libya, many were too damaged to ever fly again. Five Medals of Honor were awarded to the men who flew this mission.

The attack on Ploesti was expected to destroy 75 percent of the refinery's capacity. Yet within two months, Hitler's engineers had restored it to full production.

Despite the loss of so many aircraft—and 481 American airmen dead or missing in action—proponents of “precision daylight bombing” continued to press their case. While the British maintained their “area night bombing” policy, the U.S. Army Air Corps mounted increasingly heavy daylight raids aimed at strategic industrial targets.