McGovern knew their names, ages, and hometowns, but he had not yet met them.
Meanwhile he and Eleanor had a bit of a chance to enjoy married life. One thing, though: she wanted to get pregnant. He asked her, "Eleanor, don"t you think that it would be better to wait until the war is over?" He was going into combat. He thought he would have thirty-five missions to fly and that there was a good chance he might not come home.* There was also a chance that he might, but considering the casualties the Eighth Air Force was sustaining, which were growing alarmingly close to nearly one half of the combat crews, it was a shaky proposition. In addition, her father had told George he hoped the two of them were not thinking about bringing a child into the world when George was going into combat. But that same point was a motivation for Eleanor. As he said a half century later, "If there was any doubt at all about my coming back she wanted to be sure that she had a child, a part of me."
To Bob Pennington, McGovern wrote that "Eleanor"s never even breathed a whimper or complaint of any kind. I"ve never known a person like her. She will never stop going up in my estimation. I love her more every time another day goes by. I really believe we"ll be more in love and more romantic on our golden wedding anniversary than we are now. Ain"t love grand?"14 Then he thought, Well, if that is what she wants, why not? She has followed me to every post I"ve been at, every time I moved she"s been willing to be there and if this is what she wants, so be it. She said it was what she wanted and that now was the time to do it. He decided to go ahead, and it was done. McGovern wrote Pennington after Eleanor became pregnant, "I"m proud of the prospect of being a dad, Bob. It"s one of the warmest and best feelings I"ve ever had. Eleanor is happier than I"ve ever seen her before."15 Lt. Walter Shostack, like McGovern, learned to fly a B-24 in Liberal, Kansas, then went on to Lincoln, Nebraska, to meet his crew. They consisted of a tail gunner from Lubbock, Texas, Bob Brewer; an engineer named Jack Keppo from Roswell, New Mexico; a radio operator, Alexander Dubbets, from Akron, Ohio; an ex-Canadian pilot named Charles C. Shrapshire III as the belly gunner; a navigator from Illinois, Lijo Strander, Jr., who insisted on being called Joe; a bombardier from Dover, Delaware, named Edward "Eddie" Rider; and a co-pilot from Windsor, Connecticut, named Joseph Delinski. Shostack was a 33 Russian immigrant. Wherever they came from, they were all in the AAF now, and that fact was paramount. They, and other airmen, struck Shostack as "a cross section of the United States. They were good and bad and stupid and bright and immoral and moral, each slice of humanity." But, he added, "the one lesson we all learned was that you took care of your buddy because he was going to take care of you." They trained together with McGovern and his crew and hundreds of others at Mountain Home, Idaho. It was during this training that Shostack lost one of his high school cla.s.smates, Richard Schorn, when Schorn flew his B-24 into the side of a mountain, a not-uncommon hazard.16 Lieutenant Roland Pepin, the navigator, joined his crew at March Field in Riverside, California. The men came from all parts of the country. From the time they got together, "we lived, slept, ate, worked, and played together. We would share our lives until death or the war"s end." Nineteen-year-old Pepin was the youngest member.
Lieutenant Duncan was twenty-six years old. To Pepin that seemed "ancient," but the two men formed a close bond. "Duncan liked to drink," Pepin recalled, "and I didn"t, so I made sure he kept out of trouble." They flew training missions all around the California coast and out over the Pacific. All the crew practiced their individual skills, bombing runs, takeoffs and landings, air-to-air gunnery, navigation, radio work, and whatever else it took to make them combat-ready. After some months of this they got orders to go to Europe. First, though, they had a ten-day leave. Eight of them pooled their money and went to a resort at Lake Arrowhead, where Pepin said they "had a first-cla.s.s bang-up time. We lived as kings and crammed all the pleasures one could have into our last fling before joining the battle. Duncan, who had a lot of manly experience, rewarded his young watchdog (me) by making sure I learned about life quickly. I fell in love at Lake Arrowhead. I fell in love several times in California before it was time to say goodbye to Chris, Susan, Lori, and Amy."17 It was critical for each crew to develop and maintain a close bond.
They lived together, sergeants in one place, the officers in another. Irritating habits could magnify and ruin their relationship, things like their accents, the music they liked, the curse words they used, their taste in women and liquor and books or comics, their politics, their bragging or their being unusually modest, their way of washing or brushing their teeth, the way they wore their clothes, the packages they received from home, how they played sports or which sport they liked, their jokes, what made them laugh or cry, anything and everything. They were on their way to being men at war. They would need to have a closeness unknown to civilians, no matter what the civilians did. Their lives would be at stake. Every one of them had to depend, absolutely, on everyone else doing his job right. They had to not only get along with one another but also to have unquestioning faith in each other. Yet they were thrown together.
Before being a.s.signed to their crew, most if not all of them had never known anyone else in their airplane.
All they had in common was being in the AAF, an unquenchable desire to fly, a never or seldom spoken patriotism, and - overwhelmingly - being young. Most were twenty-two years old or younger. Lt. Donald Kay, a bombardier, met his crew at Biggs Field, El Paso, Texas, in April 1944. The co-pilot a.s.signed to the plane was a married man but "he was trying to set a record for s.e.x in his first week and scared the h.e.l.l out of the rest of the crew." The sergeants got together and came to Kay and the navigator to ask them to tell the pilot that the co-pilot had to go. They gladly did so and shortly thereafter he was replaced. One of the waist gunners was an alcoholic "and we dumped him too." The crew, as finally a.s.sembled, came from Kansas (pilot), Illinois (co-pilot), Indiana (navigator), Connecticut (Kay, the bombardier), and the sergeants from Wisconsin, Mississippi, New York, West Virginia, and New Jersey.
Of the seventeen original crews that began training when Kay"s crew did in May 1944, only six finished the war. In Europe, his 465th Bomb Group lost thirty-five crews. His was the only one of the four crews that arrived in Europe on July 22, 1944, to finish. Of the other three bombardiers, two were killed in action and the other became a POW.18 Lt. Walter Baskin had hoped to be a fighter pilot, but to his dismay was a.s.signed to a B-24 as a co-pilot. Beginning in January 1944, he trained at the air base in Blythe, California. His letters home reveal how tough it was. January 3: "We have been flying this B-24 day and night since we got here and they keep us pretty busy. It"s 9:00 P.M. now and I have to go to Link from 10 to 11 tonight. Then get up pretty early in the morning so you can see that sleep doesn"t mean anything around here. All you do is work and if you don"t work there"s nothing else to do so you 34 just work."
The AAF did not have enough B-24s for the demand. February 10: "When we are scheduled to fly we have trouble getting an airplane that will fly. There are plenty of planes here, but they are old and over half of them are always on the ramp being repaired. We had a nice scheduled cross country flight all fixed up to go to Santa Maria yesterday, but one of the engines was throwing so much oil that we wouldn"t take it up." Still the crew kept busy. February 11: "Every third day we go twenty hours straight and the two days in between are seventeen hours long. . . .We fly every day and sometimes we don"t get home "til 3 A.M. but we still get up and go again. I believe combat will be a rest after this." On March 2 he wrote: "We are winding up our training here and the last part will be almost entirely devoted to formation flying. When you get to combat if you can"t fly formation you are just a "dead duck."" As Consolidated, Ford, and the other makers of the plane began to turn them out in record numbers, Baskin"s craft improved. He was glad to tell his parents, "This ship is brand-new and has just twenty-eight hours of flying time on it. It is going to carry us a long way and then bring us back, so it gets first consideration in all cases." He liked his fellow officers. Baskin came from a Mississippi cotton farm. The pilot, Lt. Russell Paulnock, was the son of a Pennsylvania coal miner. Baskin described Paulnock as "a good boy and a cautious pilot." The bombardier was Lt. James Bartels, from Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a preacher. He was married and his wife was at Blythe with him. The crew had been practicing dropping bombs and Bartels was "a right good bombardier." The navigator was Lt. Earl Ba.r.s.eth. "He is from New England and a typical Yankee," Baskin wrote. In mid-March, Baskin"s B-24 made cross-country trips. He wrote his parents on March 13, more or less unbelievingly, "Last week we flew over the Grand Canyon and Boulder Dam and that is really a beautiful sight. We flew for hours over stretches of desert and waste land wheren.o.body lives." In one letter, Baskin declared that "this B-24 is not my dream ship," but he confessed "it certainly packs a wallop."
In April, his training completed, Baskin joined McGovern at Lincoln, Nebraska, where his plane was weathered in for a few days. Then in the middle of the month the sky was clear, so it was off to Florida in formation with his bomber group on its way to Europe. Co-pilot Baskin was flying when the plane pa.s.sed over his farm near Vaiden, Mississippi. Baskin pealed his Liberator out of formation and buzzed the place. He scared the wits out of all the chickens, cows, pigs, and mules and saw his dad standing in the backyard, puffing on his pipe, watching. Then he buzzed his school, practically at window level, to give Bobby, his little brother, a big h.e.l.lo. Bobby, hearing the plane roar, jumped up from his desk saying, "That"s my brother," and ran out to the playground to wave goodbye to his big brother as Baskin flew off on his way to combat. The chickens didn"t lay and the cows went dry for a week, and Bobby got suspended from school. For Baskin it was fun, but it wasn"t like being the pilot of a fighter airplane. As he wrote his parents, "This co-pilot job is not what I was raised to be."19 Ken Barmore had his first look at and ride in a B-24 on December 30, 1943. He was a co-pilot. His pilot was Lt. Jim Connelly, from Texas, "who was just the greatest guy." Riding with them at first was an instructor who was an American but had joined the Royal Air Force before Pearl Harbor and flew a Wellington bomber over Europe. After America entered the war he came home to join the AAF, and Barmore felt "we were real lucky to have him, he was a neat guy." To Barmore"s discomfort, he didn"t get to do much of the flying: "They just threw the co-pilots in the right seat and learn as you can." He tried and tried again to move over to the left seat, but he had not gone through transition school so his chances "were practically nil."
He did a lot of formation flying and bombing practice. "I got to feeling pretty comfortable in the airplane"
but Connelly would seldom allow him to take off or land.20 Radioman Sgt. Robert Hammer met his fellow crew members at Mitch.e.l.l Field, New York, then went with them to Georgia for flight training on their B-24. Formation flying for his pilot and indeed all the other pilots was difficult. Much of the air time was devoted to learning how to do it, despite a high accident rate. Three B-24s were lost during practice, killing thirty men. On one occasion while flying in formation, Hammer was sending blinking signals from the waist window to the radio operator in the plane to the right. He had just signed off when another plane was sucked into that plane by the prop wash. It tore the fuselage in half. Hammer saw 35 men, including the radio operator he had just communicated with, flying in one direction and their parachutes in another. All ten were killed, but the other plane managed to land safely. After Hammer"s plane landed, and just before debriefing, his pilot came up to him with tears in his eyes. He asked if Hammer didn"t think they were making the planes fly too close together. After the debriefing his pilot was grounded for his emotional response. Other men were lost, including the originally a.s.signed navigator, who took the plane into a gunnery area on the East Coast on a night mission. Hammer commented, "We had been shot at before even getting out of the States." With the replacements, the crew flew to New Hampshire, got a new B-24, and flew it to Gander Field, Newfoundland, then off to Europe.21 Sgt.
Howard Goodner, a radioman, was sent to Buckley Field, Colorado, to be a.s.signed to a crew. There he took refresher courses in communications, target identification, and first aid, but they were mainly to kill time. In June 1944, his orders arrived, sending him to Westover Field, near Springfield, Ma.s.sachusetts, a long train trip. There he met his fellow crew members. Goodner"s pilot was Lt. Richard Farrington, from St. Louis, a tall man who exuded self-confidence. Farrington had enlisted when he was nineteen years old and had not yet reached twenty-one. The co-pilot, Lt. Jack Regan, was twenty. From Queens in New York City, he was nicknamed Abe because of his deep voice and uncanny resemblance to the young, beardless Lincoln. The bombardier, Lt. Chris Manners from Pittsburgh, was twenty-three. The sergeants came from all over and ranged in age from eighteen to twenty-eight. Eighteen-year-old Albert Seraydarian, an Armenian-American, was from Brooklyn. His "dem"s" and "dose"s" and other Brooklynese were so thick the southern-born Goodner could barely understand him. His nickname, unsurprisingly, was "Brooklyn." Another gunner was eighteen-year-old Jack Brennan from Cliffside Park, New Jersey. The nose gunner was Harry Gregorian, like Seraydarian an Armenian-American, but from Detroit. The flight engineer, Jerome Barrett, twenty years old, came from New York City. His father owned a chemical company that occupied two entire floors of Rockefeller Center and his next-door neighbor was Broadway star Ethel Merman. Goodner liked him at once - the two boys, one from Central Park West, the other from Cleveland, Tennessee, hit it off at once. Bob Peterson, the ball turret gunner, was the "old man," married with two kids. In this way Americans from all over the country, from far different backgrounds, got to know one another. For every one of them, as for McGovern and his crew, or Baskin and his, or Barmore and his, it was a broadening experience. As was the war, which had taken them to various parts of the United States in travels most of them never thought they would have, and was about to take them off to Europe.22 Except for the pilot and co-pilot, most members of the crew had never before been in a B-24, and they had much to learn. The crews found that just entering their B-24 was difficult. The bombardier, navigator, and nose turret gunner were forced to squat down, almost on hands and knees, and sidle up to their stations through the nose-wheel well of the ship.
Inside, the three men had to squeeze themselves into a cramped compartment. The bombardier squatted on a small seat right behind the gunner, where he hunched over the bombsight or simply sat on the floor.
The navigator sat at a tiny retractable stool, really too small to sit on, with the navigator"s table holding his charts in front. It was little more than a thin shelf on the bulkhead that separated the nose from the flight deck. At eye level, he could see the feet of the pilot and co-pilot. The other crew members entered the plane by crawling up through the open bomb bay doors, about three feet off the ground. Once inside they would stand upright, step onto the narrow catwalk, then move forward onto the flight deck or back into the waist. The radioman sat at a small desk facing his radio sets, just behind and below the co-pilot. The engineer stood between the pilot and co-pilot at takeoff, helping to monitor the engine and fuel gauges. In the air he took his position behind the pilot and just across from the radioman. When required, he climbed into the top turret, where he stood, his feet on a metal bar inches above the radioman"s head.
The waist gunner, the ball turret gunner, and the tail gunner used the catwalk to get to their positions. The tail gunner, standing on a tiny platform, slipped his legs into the turret. There was not enough room for him to wear his parachute. The waist gunner - two before mid-1944, one thereafter as the danger from enemy fighter planes diminished - stood. At alt.i.tude the bitterly cold wind howled through the open windows of the waist, making this position and that of the ball and tail turret gunners miserable, covering them and their guns with a thin veil of frost.
36 The ball turret was, as McGovern said, the most physically uncomfortable, isolated, and terrifying position on the plane. The gunner climbed into the ball, pulled the hatch closed, and was then lowered into position. They were suspended beneath the plane, staring down between their knees at the earth.
Although all ball turret gunners were small, few of them had enough room to wear a parachute. If a bailout was necessary, they relied on the waist gunner to engage the hydraulic system to raise the turret and help them out and into their parachutes. That is what is called trust.
Adding to the extreme discomfort, the B-24 was not pressurized and at above 10,000 feet the men had to wear their ill-fitting rubber oxygen masks for hours at a time. They wore electrically heated flight suits, plugged into rheostats, but when the system shorted out or was damaged the suits were useless. Thus the men wore in addition layers of bulky clothing, which made movement within the claustrophobic aircraft even more awkward and agonizingly slow. At all AAF bases where B-24s were involved in the training, the pace was intense, the practice flying seemed endless. Most dangerous was formation flying at night.
Sergeant Goodner told his parents, "The B-24s are nice ships, but we lose a lot of them. Since I got here we have lost seven ships." Once when the squadron commander of a night flight, a veteran of thirty-five missions over Germany, called out to the pilots in the formation,"Close it up, close it up," Lieutenant Farrington edged his plane closer and closer. Goodner heard the waist gunner mutter on the intercom, "Jesus, I can shake hands with their tail gunner now."23 A week after arriving in Lincoln, McGovern met his crew. His beard and mustache were just getting started. He was worried about "whether or not I could convince the crew that they were safe in the hands of a twenty-one-year-old pilot."24 His co-pilot, Ralph "Bill" Rounds, wanted to be a fighter pilot. "Everything about the guy said fighter pilot," one of his friends recalled.25 But the AAF decided against it and washed him out of fighter pilot training. His superiors told him that if he wanted to fly it would be as a co-pilot on a B-24. He took the option.
At first, McGovern was a bit concerned, because when Rounds had the controls "he"d try to fly that B-24 like a fighter plane. He"d whip it around and the crew was scared to death of him." But as the practice runs went forward, McGovern came to have great respect for his ability, because Rounds became "a very good formation flyer - he could tuck that wing right in there and just hold it."
On the ground, McGovern discovered just how different the two men were in their personalities. "He was a clown if there ever was one," McGovern said of Rounds. "You couldn"t be around him without laughing." Rounds was a rollicking, fun-loving adventurer, with an eye for the women. McGovern marveled at the speed with which he "could move from the air base to the business of heavy romance with total strangers." He would listen to Rounds"s accounts of his "spectacular multiple achievements in a single evening that were vastly beyond my area of experience."
Once they were in a car in town, with Rounds driving and McGovern in the backseat. Rounds spotted two young women and immediately opened the front door and jumped out of the car in pursuit. He forgot to put on the hand brake and the car continued rolling down the street. McGovern climbed into the driver"s seat and narrowly averted hitting a parked truck. By the time he got the car stopped, "Bill was back with a girl on each arm."26 Despite their divergent personalities, the two men would be living together, fighting together, and it was critical that they like and respect each other. They did. Rounds said later that "I was very pleased with everybody when our crew made up, but George was kind of a big daddy, a big brother type." Rounds got to know Eleanor. McGovern called her "Bunny," he remembered - a temporary nickname - and Rounds thought "she was just a slick little gal. We just all loved Eleanor." He was aware of their differences. "I was a single guy and sort of out on the prowl," he said. "George was never one to put a damper on a party, but I never saw him drink much." On June 27, he wrote his parents, "McGovern"s a very nice, refined, quiet man and I know that we will make a fine team."27 On September 1, 1944, McGovern also wrote to Rounds"s parents. As a rea.s.suring note, he opened, "Scarcely a day goes by that Bill doesn"t quote his dad on some subject, or voice an opinion of 37 his mother"s." Continuing, he admitted "we were all very green when we first started out here. . . .We are working with a great bunch of boys.
Our crew spirit is growing every day." As for their son, he wrote, "I couldn"t have asked for a better man to fly with than Bill. He hasn"t complained about being a.s.signed to a B-24 and was good in flying formation. I feel I have had more than my share of the luck in getting a good co-pilot." As to what lay ahead, "I guess the only way to look at the matter is to realize that the sooner we go overseas and finish our missions the sooner we"ll be back in the U.S.A. for good. That"s the thing we all want the most."28 The other officer in McGovern"s crew was the navigator-bombardier, Lt. Sam Adams. He was McGovern"s age and intended to go to a seminary after the war to study to become a Presbyterian minister. He was quiet in manner, intelligent, well-read, intense. He and McGovern hit it off immediately and they became close. "He was a very deep guy," McGovern said. "I could really talk to him." Sgt. Bill McAfee, the ball turret gunner, was happy-go-lucky by nature and already popular with the rest of the crew. Sgt. Ken Higgins, the radioman, had a wit that could deflate pomposity no matter the source. Sgt.
Bob O"Connell, the nose gunner, showed at a poker game the night they all met that he was the gambler of the crew. "Bob wasn"t any older than any of us," one of the crew said, "but when he played poker, you would have thought he was thirty." Sgt. Bill Ashlock, Tex, the waist gunner, had a soft drawl and a competent manner. The flight engineer, Mike Valko, was the sergeant who, because of his age - thirty-three - had caused McGovern to worry about being his commander. He turned out to be not only the oldest man in the crew - by ten years - but the shortest, at less than five foot five. He had grown up the hard way in Bridgeport, where he had held a variety of jobs, including roustabout at a carnival. He claimed that he could have done better in life had he been a little taller. He had started drinking at a young age and he continued to imbibe. Still, McGovern found that "he was submissive to the slightest wish I had. He just couldn"t do enough to please me." McGovern shaved off his beard and mustache. Sgt.
Isador Seigal, the tail gunner, was the eccentric of the crew. He slept with a loaded .45 pistol under his pillow and was seen walking around the barracks with a bayonet strapped around his middle but otherwise naked. With six enlisted men crowded into one tent, such bizarre behavior was not always welcome.
In late June 1944, after a couple of weeks at Liberal, the McGovern crew went to Mountain Home, Idaho, where again their training time was cut by a month in order to get them into combat faster. They practiced formation flying, night flying, practice bombings using sandbags with a small powder charge and a detonator to indicate where they were hitting, landings and takeoffs, and flew and flew and flew. With the other planes in their group, they would go in formation to the initial point, or IP, where they would make a sharp, sometimes 90 degree, turn. The technique was used to get them over the target in a tight formation so that all their bombs - which were released by Adams when he saw the lead plane"s bombardier drop his bombs - would come down in the same place or at least nearby. A further purpose of the technique was to fool the enemy as to their destination. After departing the IP no turns or evasive maneuvers could take place regardless of weather, enemy aircraft, or ground fire. After crossing the IP and turning, Adams with his Norden bomb-sight had control of the plane - although McGovern could override him if necessary - and the requirement was to fly straight and level and wingtip to wingtip to make a good pattern. The Adams-McGovern team became proficient at it.29 Eleanor and George lived in a barracks for married men, so for the first time they had a room together. Because the formation flying was so demanding and led to so many accidents, Eleanor worried about her husband. She was right to.
Twice as many air officers died in battle than in all the rest of the Army, despite the ground force"s larger size. In addition, in the course of the war, 35,946 airmen died in accidents. That was 43 percent of all accidental deaths in the wartime Army. In 1943 alone, 850 airmen died in 298 B-24 accidents training in the States, leaving the survivors "scared to death of their airplanes." Those in training always knew that pilot error could result in death for an entire crew. Wives, girlfriends, and parents of the fliers were at least apprehensive, if not terrified, of the risks their loved ones were running. "We"d hear sirens and we always knew what they meant," Eleanor said. "There were a lot of crashes because they were training 38 these men so rapidly." She became ill - possibly morning sickness, possibly from worry - and had to be hospitalized for a few days.30 Once, while flying in formation, McGovern"s squadron was practicing warding off an attack. A two-engine B-25 dove on the B-24s. The B-24 pilots expected the B-25 to go under their formation, but instead the plane keep coming and collided head-on with a Liberator. There was an explosion that took out two other B-24s. Four bombers were just gone. Fortunately they did not have full crews in them - only the gunners and the pilot - but twenty-four men were dead. McGovern got back to his room, badly shaken, but what happened next made everything worse. Everybody at Mountain Home knew about the crash but no one knew who had been killed. The base chaplain had the duty of informing the wives of the married men. "It was just the most awful night of my life," McGovern said. The chaplain, carrying a list of the men killed, came into the married men"s barracks and started knocking on doors. As soon as the wife opened the door and saw him, she screamed. "Just these awful cries of anguish." Some of the widows were pregnant. A half century later, McGovern said "I can still hear them yet." McGovern had other problems as well, personal ones with his crew. Seigal was constantly suffering from airsickness. "I was scared every minute I was up in the plane," he acknowledged. McGovern talked to him and settled him down - some. McGovern knew his plane. "I could do a little of everything," he said. "I knew when the crew were s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up." Once Valko made a serious mistake. Standing between the pilot and co-pilot, he decided to experiment by hitting the "crash bar," which had the effect of grounding out all four engines on the plane. McGovern immediately flipped the switch back. Fortunately, the engines caught after the big plane had made a sickening lurch. Rather than chewing Valko out in front of the crew, he waited until they were on the ground before talking to him.
A few days later, Sergeant Valko reported to McGovern that the crew feared Seigal might do something drastic with his pistol. McGovern made Seigal turn it over, along with a knife, and sent him to talk to the base psychiatrist. He did and was declared mentally healthy, but from then on there was intense hostility between Seigal and Valko. Regardless of McGovern"s involvement in this matter, Seigal admired him.
"Most of your officers at the time," he said years later, "weren"t too impressive, but McGovern was mature, a person who commanded respect. From the day I first met him I liked him."31 Whatever the truth of Seigal"s judgment of AAF officers in general - and most would dispute it, especially as it applied to pilots - in fact McGovern was one of a large group of men who had been better trained for war than any other. The pilots and their crews were in training longer before being sent to war than even the men in the Navy and especially those in the infantry. Most airmen who survived combat complained after the war that they had not been properly prepared for its test - but then so did those in the Navy and the officers and men of the infantry, with better reason. Nothing can actually prepare a man for combat, the supreme test, but the AAF put more time, effort, and money into doing so than the other services could or would. McGovern and his fellow pilots, like their crews, had mastered techniques and developed unsurpa.s.sed professional skills. They were healthier than most other servicemen to begin with, and more so at the end of training. They had volunteered for combat. They regarded themselves - and were so regarded by others - as the cream of the crop.
And they were. The AAF taught them to regard themselves as technicians and professionals. AAF psychiatrists commented that whatever their shortcomings, the airmen that made it through the training were masters of "this super-toy, this powerful, snorting, impatient but submissive machine." The heavy bomber especially "enables the man to escape the usual limitations of time and s.p.a.ce." Flying created "a feeling of aggressive potency bordering on the unchallenged strength of a superman." The men of the AAF flight crews "very much enjoyed the business of flying an aircraft," which gave them "an overwhelming sense of the vastness of the universe."32 In McGovern"s case, as with his crew, as with thousands upon thousands of others, the AAF in World War II had proven itself not only the largest educational establishment ever created, but the best. Each crew thought of itself as the best of the best.
McGovern wrote to Pennington, "I"ve really got a top-notch crew. They were all pretty green at first as was their pilot, but we"re getting hot, I believe. . . . Incidentally the boys have decided that since I"m the 39 only married man on the ship we should name it after Eleanor, the "Dakota Queen." The boys seem to think a lot of Eleanor."33 In September 1944, the AAF judged that the McGovern crew was ready.
Orders took them to Topeka, Kansas, where the AAF put them up in the Jay Hawker Hotel. Bill Rounds"s father came over from Wichita and gave them a banquet. McGovern at that time was not much concerned about domestic politics - his father was a Republican - but he was surprised at the vehemence of Mr. Rounds"s convictions. Mr. Rounds took an immediate liking to Eleanor, but because of the intensity of his feelings toward the president and Eleanor Roosevelt, he would not call her "Eleanor." He explained to McGovern that "I can"t say that woman"s name!" All through the evening, he called her "Helen."
Still, it was a happy occasion, made more so by a rumor Bill McAfee picked up from an AAF friend stationed in Topeka and spread around. It was that their group had been selected for antisubmarine patrol off the coast of New York and New Jersey. That made Eleanor "deliriously happy" because her husband would be stationed in Newark or New York. But it turned out to be the bane, the constant companion, of all men at war - just a rumor.34 Instead, orders took the crew to Camp Patrick Henry, outside Norfolk, Virginia. There they prepared for shipment overseas. There being no new bombers available to fly over - as most crews going to Europe did, via South America and Africa - they would go by ship. (Lieutenant Shostack and his crew flew a brand-new B-24 from Kansas to Gander, then to the Azores, then to Marakesh, Africa, and finally to Italy. They carried pistols and 2,500 cases of K rations.
They flew just a few feet over the ocean, "a fascinating trip," Shostack said. But when they got to Italy, "n.o.body wanted the K rations.")35 The library at Patrick Henry was a good one, with well over a thousand paperbacks - then something new in book publishing, given free by the publishing houses to the armed services - and McGovern sat in the reading room devouring all he could. He found some hardback books people had donated, including a big, thick volume by Charles A. and Mary R.
Beard,The Rise of American Civilization, another by Burton Hendrick,The Men of the Confederacy, one edited by Norman Cousins calledA Treasury of Democracy. Those books he liberated, intending to send them back after the war, and stuffed them into his duffel bag to read when he got to his overseas air base.* He was not alone - many others in the various armed services brought books with them to war, to read when they could - thus the soldiers of democracy.
The ship was a captured German pa.s.senger ship, which sounded good until the men going over saw it.
"It was basically an old tub," one of them recalled. It had perhaps 4,000 AAF men aboard, so it was crowded. There were six decks, each with six rows of bunks. A valuable cargo and then some - all these men had cost the American government a considerable amount to train for action. It sailed alone, although usually with American airplanes, operating from aircraft carriers, overhead to protect it. Still the ship took evasive action to avoid German submarines. It was the first time McGovern and most of the other men had ever been at sea. Fortunately there were no storms. Further, there were no cla.s.ses, no training of any kind. To stay in some kind of shape, the men walked around the deck, endlessly.
The ship took nearly a month to get to its destination, Naples harbor, Italy. McGovern and his crew members were going to join the 741st Squadron, 455th Bomb Group, Fifteenth Air Force, stationed on the other, Adriatic side of Italy. There the McGovern crew would meet its B-24 and the veterans and the replacements, including Shostack and his crew.
Ray pestered the AAF with requests for combat duty and finally got his wish.
In early 1945 he joined Col. Paul W. Tibbetts with the specially trained 509th Composite Group flying modified B-29s. Tibbetts had once been General Eisenhower"s pilot and had the reputation of being the best flier in the AAF. The 509th carried the atomic bombs. Ray was scheduled to be the pilot on the fifth run, had more than two been necessary to bring about j.a.pan"s surrender. He stayed in the Air Force and became a colonel.
40 The number of required missions was raised to thirty-five from the twenty-five originally a.s.signed.
After the war McGovern wrote the librarian at Patrick Henry saying he had a guilty conscience and needed to clear it by returning the three books. The librarian wrote back: "Dear Lt. McGovern. First of all, let me congratulate you on your remarkably good taste in the books you borrowed. Secondly, somewhat sadly I must tell you that the library has been disbanded and the books given away. . . . This letter is my gift to you of those books." McGovern still has them in his library.
CHAPTER FOUR - The Fifteenth Air Force.
WORLD WAR II WAS THE GREATEST CATASTROPHE in history. More people were killed, more buildings destroyed than in any previous or subsequent war. It brought terror and death to millions of civilians, women, children, old men, more millions of soldiers killed in their teens or twenties. It was airpower that made it so destructive. That airpower was the result of technological improvements in aircraft. Paradoxically it was also the result of the human desire to escape the slaughter of the trenches along the Western Front in World War I. Yet by the end of World War II airpower had brought about more destruction and death than had ever before been experienced. H. G. Wells had predicted that something like it would happen. In The War in the Air (1908) he wrote of his nightmare vision, that airpower would become both the product and the downfall of Western civilization. He gave it as his view that aerial warfare would be "at once enormously destructive and entirely indecisive." Wells was only half right. Aerial warfare was enormously destructive but it was also absolutely decisive. Far from destroying Western civilization and its greatest triumph, democracy, the war saved it. Millions of people from countries around the world partic.i.p.ated, using many different types of weapons, but none of them contributed more to this result than the airmen. At the end of World War I, one of the inventors of the airplane, Orville Wright, expressed his view that "the aeroplane has made war so terrible that I do not believe any country will again care to start a war."1 He too was wrong. Far from making war unthinkable, the airplane contributed to making it happen. The rifle, machine gun, and artillery, not the airplane, had been decisive in World War I. The four-year stalemate in the trenches was so ma.s.sive, deeply determined, and resistant to change that whatever advantage superior airpower offered was insufficient to break it. The nations at war did make efforts to win it through bombs dropped from airplanes. The Germans dropped a few bombs on Paris during the war"s first weeks, while the British struck Zeppelin sheds in Germany a month after the conflict began. In 1915 a Zeppelin bombed England.
Austrians and Italians bombed each other"s cities. The French attacked German military and industrial targets from the air. By war"s end, bombs had hit every belligerent country"s capital in Europe except Rome. None of this destruction had any noticeable effect on the course of the war, nor could it break the horrible stalemate. As the Italian soldier and prophetic airpower strategist Giulio Douhet put it, even a rare offensive success on the ground so exhausted the victor that "the side which won the most military victories was the side which was defeated."2 That is what gave air war its appeal. Douhet was its first advocate. In his The Command of the Air (1921), which was widely translated, he saw heavy bombers as a way to leap over the trenches to bring about decisive results in a breathtakingly short s.p.a.ce of time.
41 A large bomber force, in his view, would in a few days lay waste the enemy"s cities and cause the civilian population to demand peace at once. In Britain B. H. Liddell-Hart, like Douhet a soldier in World War I, became a military critic and historian. In his Paris, or the Future of War (1925), he explained that "aircraft enable us to jump over the army which shields the enemy government, industry and people and so strike direct and immediately at the seat of the opposing will and policy. "3 In America, General William "Billy" Mitch.e.l.l tried to popularize the same theme. He suffered a court-martial for his attempts to make the Army Air Corps into the country"s chief armed service, but his appeal was nevertheless wide and deep. As Michael Sherry wrote in his magnificent work The Rise of American Air Power, "Air war, like no other weapon in the modern a.r.s.enal, satisfied yearnings for blood and punishment among peoples deeply wounded by war and deprived of decisive victories."4 Charles Lindbergh added greatly to the appeal, especially among Americans. He had been trained in the military. Although he wrote in We (1927) that he and his fellow pilots had flown only "for the love of flying," his feat involved far more than just risk taking and fun. He embodied at once the promise of the machine age and the virtues of frontier individualism, both of which appealed beyond measure to an American people who were more frontier-minded and technologically oriented than anyone else. To them, airpower carried the danger to Western civilization that Wells had prophesied but also a way for their country to act decisively in the next war without having to send millions of young men into the trenches. The airplane was both peril and promise.5 In the decade before World War II broke out, Hap Arnold and many others in the Army Air Corps strove without letup to make airpower - and especially bombing from the air - the princ.i.p.al weapon of the armed services. They failed. But when America entered the war, they had an opportunity.
Although the country hardly put its entire effort into what they called a strategic bombing campaign, after Pearl Harbor it extended itself in that direction to a remarkable degree. The B-17 and the B-24, both developed and manufactured before America"s involvement, became the sine qua non of the AAF. The B-17 got the name Flying Fortress, but that could be applied to both airplanes. They bristled with .50 caliber machine guns that were judged sufficient - when the planes flew in formation and therefore could jointly defend themselves from any enemy fighter attack - to justify the idea that the bomber would always get through. The goal was precision bombing that would destroy key enemy targets. The British tried that at the outset of the war, only to discover that daylight raids were far too costly because of German fighters, so they went over to night bombing, making German cities and their civilian population the target. Terror bombing, in short. Neither Arnold nor any other high-ranking member of the AAF was willing to adopt such a policy. They continued to insist on precision, i.e., daylight, bombing. Arnold spoke frequently on what bombers could do. He said they were so fearsome that "in 60 seconds, the c.u.mulative effort of a hundred years can be destroyed." Airpower, he declared, "is a war-winning weapon in its own right." He called bombing "cheapest on all counts," and "by far the greatest economizer in human lives."6 To make strategic bombing a reality, the AAF created the Eighth Air Force, under Gen. Ira Eaker, based in Britain. The heavy bombers of the Eighth struck the first offensive blow against the Germans in the summer of 1942, in order to show an American contribution to the European war, but they had been rushed into battle prematurely. In 1942 strategic bombing was a high priority but a distant reality. Not until 1943, and then in far smaller numbers than the AAF hoped, planned for, and advocated, were bombers from the Eighth able to penetrate German airs.p.a.ce.
Despite its early failure to live up to its promises, the AAF conducted an extensive propaganda campaign. One writer who took part was John Steinbeck, who was working for the AAF when he produced Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team in November 1942.Steinbeck wrote that the men of the AAF sprang from the frontier tradition of the "Kentucky hunter and the Western Indian fighter."
He presented the airman as both individualist and a joiner, a relic of the past and a harbinger of a new era, a free spirit and a disciplined technician, a democrat and a superman, "Dan"l Boone and Henry Ford."
That same month, British and American forces invaded North Africa, and many of the bombers stationed in England were diverted to that battlefront to support the ground troops with tactical bombing.
42 Nevertheless the Eighth continued to grow and to bomb. It was taking stupendous losses, but the commitment to strategic bombing continued, to the point that it almost seemed the AAF found it preferable to bomb badly rather than not at all. The British thought the Americans mad to continue daylight bombing. The Americans thought the British were almost criminal in their insistence on night bombing. Both sides continued their own methods anyway, so desperate were they to hit at the Germans some way, somehow. On the ground, until mid-1943, except in North Africa, no American soldiers were firing their rifles at German soldiers. Red Army soldiers were inflicting huge casualties on the German army while suffering terrific losses. In July, the Western Allies invaded Sicily. In September, they invaded Italy. These invasions were supported by the Twelfth Air Force based in North Africa.
The Eighth Air Force"s heavy bomber offensive was an impersonal sort of war, monotonous in its own peculiar way. Day after day, as weather and the available force permitted, B-17s and B-24s went out, dropped their bombs, and returned to England. The immediate results of their missions could be photographed and a.s.sessed by intelligence officers. The bombers were scored in categories that sound like high school grades - excellent, good, fair, poor. But missions, or a series of them, were rarely if ever decisive, in large part because the Eighth Air Force didn"t have enough bombers, but also in part because of enemy reaction. The Germans could repair damage almost as fast as Civil War troops could repair railroad tracks torn up by the enemy, and they could - and did - decentralize their industry. So for the airmen there was little if any visible progress, nothing like the gains that could be shown on maps when the ground forces pushed Erwin Rommel"s Africa Korps across and then out of North Africa. Eighth Air Force bomber crews went back time and again to hit targets they thought they had already demolished.
Drama there was with each sortie, and plenty of it, as the American public was never allowed to forget, but as for the big picture there was none. Indeed, the 1942-1943 offensive from the air was flat, repet.i.tive, without climax. Arnold"s claims were hollow. The bomber crews felt no sense of accomplishment, at least until they had flown their twenty-fifth mission and were allowed to go home.
There was no enemy surrender, hardly any diminution in the firepower of his army or in the size of his air force or ack-ack defense.8 In their official history of the AAF, editors Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate and their team describe what it was like for a pilot: "A nineteen-year-old boy takes off with his crew. He must fly from his base, often at great distance from the target, through weather which frequently makes precise navigation difficult and through opposition from fighters whose pa.s.ses are incredibly swift.
He arrives over the target at as nearly the set minute as possible and performs his deadly task. . . . Even without the emotional strain of the battle, the boy would find it impossible on his return to give to his interrogating officer an accurate and detailed report of his own experiences, and the story of a large mission must be compounded of hundreds of such imperfect individual reports."9 Losses to enemy defenses mounted, to the point that it was widely speculated that the high casualty rate suffered by the Eighth Air Force might deprive the United States of the elite of its youth in much the way that Ypres and Pa.s.schendaele and other World War I battles had done to England. For those in combat, the risks were higher in the AAF than in the American ground forces. In total the AAF, about one third of the U.S.
Army, took about one ninth the battle casualties of the entire Army, but most AAF men were mechanics or command and staff officers, staying on the bases in England that were relatively safe, especially as opposed to the foxholes of infantry soldiers. But the AAF had a far higher proportion of officers in action than did the Army as a whole - including fighter pilots, about half of all flying personnel were officers - and twice as many AAF officers died in battle than in all the rest of the Army. On average, almost 4 percent of the bomber force were killed or missing in action on each mission. The mean number of missions completed for the Eighth Air Force was 14.72, meaning more than half its crews never got much past the halfway point in compiling the twenty-five missions required to go home. Many crew members, including pilots, were wounded even though their planes got back to base. They were hit by flak or German machine guns. When flight surgeons talked to one squadron commander who "flopped on us"
after some brutal missions, they learned he "was not worried about himself. He had not gone yellow; he was perfectly willing to see himself expended. But he simply couldn"t bring himself to the point of taking another crew into combat, and then losing some of them. It had happened too often." This came about 43 because the men were so close to each other, "so bound together by a common purpose and a common fate."10 For British bomber crews, a sense of helplessness destroyed the airman"s hope that he would gain mastery of his fate as he acc.u.mulated skill and experience. Something similar happened to American crews, but at least by late 1943 they had the satisfaction of a declining loss rate as they gained experience. Further, there was the possibility that half of their number could successfully bail out of a stricken bomber on its way down. Still, they had to keep flying until completing their quota of missions.
One Eighth Air Force doctor saw his task as "to help the men carry on to the limit of their capacity, and then perhaps fly a few more missions." AAF psychiatrists acknowledged that among the crews "a hair divides the normal from the neurotic, the adaptive from the nonadaptive."11 The strain was compounded the more missions were flown: the role of blind chance when attacked by fighters or by flak; the inherent danger of flying wingtip to wingtip in formation; the loss of comrades; the c.u.mulative impact of repeated missions, often over the same target; the sense of helpless confinement whether on the flight deck or in a ball turret.
Danger began at takeoff. The aircraft were so heavily loaded with bombs and gasoline that the slightest mechanical or human failure could abort a mission or destroy the plane and kill the crew. Then came the long flight, the success of which depended on the most careful calculations of alt.i.tude, speed, and fuel consumption, plus avoiding or driving off enemy fighters. The conditions inside the plane added immeasurably to the danger. More men were disabled by frostbite than by combat wounds. They would come on board wet or sweaty, or perspire heavily when under attack, or urinate in their suits, causing their hands, feet, and other body parts to freeze. Anoxia from shortages of oxygen compounded the threat of frostbite and posed a serious danger in and of itself. The pilot and his crew also had to cope with damage to or malfunctions of the plane, or unpredictable changes in weather.
Even so, the pilots and crews had the strongest possible attachment to their airplanes. "He loves them for their strength and beauty," one commentator wrote of a pilot in 1944. "He looks upon them as extensions of his ego, or friends whose temperaments are more vivid than those of most human beings he knows."12 But in 1943, despite all the effort the Americans put into the air war, there was little sense of progress.
On August 1, 1943, the Eighth Air Force carried out what its official historians later called "one of the outstanding air operations of the war."13 Those who partic.i.p.ated in it could not agree. It came about because of the frustration of the AAF generals, who felt certain that if they could just find and destroy the key German industry, the one on which everything else depended, they could win the war. They tried electrical generators, ball bearing plants, aircraft factories, and other targets, but nothing seemed to work.
Then they came up with the idea of hitting Germany"s fuel refineries. Surely without gasoline the Germans would have to quit.
The prime target was Ploesti, in Romania. The oil refineries there produced 60 percent of Germany"s crude oil and crude oil provided two thirds of Germany"s petroleum resources. In April 1943, General Arnold ordered the Plans Division of Headquarters, AAF, to study Ploesti and prepare an attack. Col.
Jacob Smart originated the idea of a minimum-alt.i.tude, ma.s.s attack to be flown from the recently captured airfield near Benghazi in Libya. In early June, General Eisenhower, in command of the Allied forces in the Mediterranean, approved Smart"s plan. The code name was TIDALWAVE. The bombers would be B-24s, with two groups coming to Libya from the Eighth Air Force, three from the Twelfth Air Force. A group usually consisted of six bomb squadrons of six bombers each, for a total of thirty-six bombers. The B-24s would carry both 1,000-pound and 500-pound demolition bombs, a total of 311 tons, plus 290 boxes of British-type and 140 cl.u.s.ters of American-type incendiaries. The planes would be equipped with two auxiliary bomb bay tanks, giving each bomber a fuel capacity of 3,100 gallons.
In the last ten days of July the five groups were pulled out of operations in Sicily (invaded by the Allies 44 on July 10) to undergo intensive training near Benghazi. The B-24s flew and bombed from minimum alt.i.tude. They hit a dummy target laid out in the Libyan desert that looked like Ploesti. They hit it again and again, until one crew member decided "we could bomb it in our sleep."14 They kept a tight formation. They studied great quant.i.ties of data dealing with the route to be flown, enemy defenses, and the dozens of other items that had to be clearly understood and appreciated. On July 28 and 29 the entire task force partic.i.p.ated in two mock missions. According to the experts, the bombers "completely destroyed" the targets in less than two minutes. Shortly after dawn on August 1 the 177 bombers, carrying 1,725 airmen, took off, pa.s.sed the island of Corfu, then swung northeast - across the mountains of Albania and Yugoslavia. But dumb luck struck - towering c.u.mulus clouds destroyed the task force"s unity. Radio communication might have restored it, but orders were for radio silence to preserve surprise.
The initial point was sixty-five miles from Ploesti. The planes dropped down to 500 feet. They encountered severe fire from ground defenses and from enemy fighters. In spite of the opposition, the B-24s dropped down to 100 to 300 feet. At anything less than 1,000 feet the bombers were in danger of being turned wrong side up by the tremendous updraft from their own bombs exploding. They came over the target badly mixed up and after the first group the remainder had to drive straight through intense flak, explosions from the ground, flames, and dense black smoke that concealed balloon cables and towering chimneys. Turning away and heading home, they were jumped by enemy fighters. Their attacks continued even when the Liberators got over the Adriatic.
The AAF generals judged the Ploesti attack a success. Photographs apparently showed that 42 percent of Ploesti"s refining capacity had been destroyed. But by no means was this decisive, because the Germans made up for the lost refining capacity by activating idle units at Ploesti and by speedy repairs to damaged plants. And not until the late spring of 1944 was Ploesti hit again, this time from high alt.i.tude.
American losses were so heavy that the final judgment must be that the Germans won the battle.
Fifty-four planes were lost, almost one third of the attacking force. Lost too were 532 airmen. Not all were dead; some had bailed out of their B-24s as the planes went down. Most of them became POWs.
News of the raid and the losses the AAF had sustained spread, even across the Atlantic. McGovern was in training at the time and discussed it with his fellow air cadets. "It aroused anxiety on the part of every pilot," he said, "because we realized this was an enormously costly mission. We knew we had to fly twenty-five or thirty-five missions and guys were saying, "How are you going to survive if you have to go up thirty-five times against that kind of thing?""* On August 13 the surviving bombers on loan from the Eighth Air Force partic.i.p.ated in a mission against the airplane factory in Wiener Neustadt - another key target. On August 17 the Eighth Air Force from England flew a mission to the Schweinfurt ball bearing plant and another to the aircraft plant at Regensburg. Both targets were in Germany. In what proved to be a fantasy, the AAF considered them "key" targets that, if destroyed, would force Germany to sue for peace. Instead, the Germans downed even more B-17s and B-24s and managed to recover from the damage.15 It was because of Ploesti, and the heavy losses on many other raids, that the AAF sped up the training time for McGovern and his crew and all the others preparing to enter the battle. By the late summer of 1943 American industry was producing enough planes but there was a bottleneck: not enough combat crews. The Eighth Air Force had nowhere near enough pilots to fly the B-17s and B-24s available in England. General Arnold noted, with great concern, that not even by December 1943 would the AAF be able to provide replacements and reinforcements enough to allow the Eighth to operate at full strength. Neither could the other air forces, in the Pacific or North Africa. Planes without pilots and crews were as useless to the AAF as runway behind a landing airplane. Progress was being made on the ground. After the Allies had taken Sicily and in September had invaded mainland Italy, the American Fifth Army was moving north along the west coast after some frightfully rough going at Salerno, while the British 1st Airborne Division had taken Taranto and Brindisi on the east coast and quickly captured Bari on the Adriatic. The British Eighth Army meanwhile was driving north. By October 5 the Americans had captured the port at Naples while the British had taken Foggia, which was surrounded by now defunct German and Italian airfields. Italy, after overthrowing Mussolini, had surrendered, but the country was 45 immediately occupied by German troops, who used Italy"s rivers and mountains to form a formidable defense across the country. Still, southern Italy was in Allied hands. That opened opportunities for the AAF. From the airfields around Foggia, American bombers could partic.i.p.ate in the Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO). Italian-based bombers could hit targets in the Balkans, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and southern and eastern Germany. Ploesti"s oil, the Danube River supply route, Wiener Neustadt"s industries, and others would be within range of B-17s and B-24s. Along with fighter aircraft, the heavy bombers could support Allied ground armies as they continued their drive north up the peninsula.
There were more advantages, or so it was argued among the Allied high command. Basing a large heavy-bomber force in Italy would ease the congestion in England brought on by the airfield requirements of the Eighth Air Force. Better weather conditions in Italy than in England would make it possible to strike more blows against the enemy. From Italy two of the largest German aircraft factories, which together produced 60 percent of the enemy"s fighters, would be in range. The Germans would be forced to move half of their fighters to the southern German front, thus relieving the hard-pressed Eighth Air Force. American bombers flying from Italy would enjoy the shield of the Alps against the German radio warning system. Further, a major new base around Foggia could be quickly brought into being by stripping the six groups of heavy bombers a.s.signed to the Twelfth Air Force in Libya. Those groups would serve as a nucleus for the new force, and fifteen additional groups could be diverted from current allocations to the Eighth.
Despite these points, Gen. Ira Eaker had strenuous objections to the plan. He was naturally alarmed at the prospect of losing bombers previously earmarked for his Eighth Air Force. He said sending them to Italy would violate the basic principle of concentration of force. He doubted that the necessary fields could be provided in Italy and wondered where on earth the AAF would get the ground crews necessary to keep the bombers flying. And he questioned the weather argument. He said that the critical factor in daylight attacks was weather over the target in Germany, not weather in England. He pointed out too that the Alps would const.i.tute a serious obstacle to the safe return to base of damaged aircraft.16 General Arnold ignored Eaker. In mid-October he sent Eisenhower a directive for the establishment of a new air force in Italy with a primary mission of strategic bombing. Gen. Carl Spaatz would take command of the United States Army Strategic Air Forces in Europe, while Gen. James "Jimmy" Doolittle, who had led the famous B-25 attack on Tokyo in 1942, would replace Eaker as commander of the Eighth. The new force, to be called the Fifteenth Air Force, would be commanded by Gen. Nathan Twining. Eisenhower agreed.
At the end of November, with an advanced echelon already established at Bari, on the Adriatic south of Foggia, staff officers and other supporting personnel began moving to Bari. On December 1 the Fifteenth Air Force opened its headquarters there, where it would stay until the end of the war. That fall, to prepare for the coming of the heavy bombers, engineers began the construction of heavy bomber fields around Foggia. In spite of great difficulties imposed by rain and mud, insufficient equipment and personnel, and poor transportation, plus bomb damage to the airfields previously used by the Germans, by the end of December the engineers were completing construction on more than forty-five airfields (including ones for medium bombers in Sardinia and Corsica). The work ranged from repairs and drainage to putting down paved or, more often, steel-plank runways. And they laid pipelines for aviation gasoline from Bari to Foggia.
Thus was the Fifteenth Air Force born. Initially it consisted of six heavy bomber groups and two fighter groups, but it would soon become the second largest air force in the world, behind only the Eighth in total numbers of planes and personnel. By April 1944, it had twenty-one heavy bomber and seven fighter groups.
Even on "moving day," December 1, 1943, the Fifteenth struck a blow, bombing ball bearing factories, 46 bridges, and railway facilities in northern Italy. But the next night, the Luftwaffe sent a flight of bombers to Bari. About thirty Allied ships were being unloaded and when darkness fell lights were turned on to keep the unloading on schedule. At 7:30 P.M. the German bombers struck. In twenty minutes, without loss to themselves, they left nineteen transports destroyed and seven severely damaged. Two ammunition ships received direct hits, as did a tanker carrying oil, causing an immense fire. Over 1,000 workers were killed and it took several weeks to bring the port back to full operation.17 Welcome to the war. The Fifteenth went to work anyway. Just before Christmas 1943 it carried out a mission against the Messer-schmitt plant at Augsburg. In the new year, it supported American landings at Anzio, south of Rome. In these and other missions, it used the new Sperry bombsight plus radar, which allowed the lead bomber to pinpoint the target through cloud or smoke cover - or so at least it was hoped. In February, the Fifteenth joined with the Eighth in the first coordinated attack of the U.S. Army Strategic Air Forces in Europe. It was the "Big Week," when the Eighth and Fifteenth targeted German aircraft factories and a ball bearing plant at Steyr, Austria. On the last day of the Big Week, more than 1,000 bombers, a record, from the two air forces struck Regensburg, Augsburg, Furth, and Stuttgart. The damage done was frightful to behold. So were the losses. On the record-breaking day, sixty-four bombers were lost, thirty-three of them from the Fifteenth. The week"s total cost to the Fifteenth was ninety aircraft and their crews.
Through March, April, and May the Fifteenth stayed