The Things Our Fathers Saw—The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation-Volume III: War in the Air—Combat, Captivity, and Reunion

by Matthew Rozell

  *

  In January 1943, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met in Casablanca, French Morocco, to hammer out a rough blueprint for the Allied invasion of Europe. One of the first priorities was to destroy the German Luftwaffe, and as such, a ‘Combined Bombing Offensive’ was to be undertaken, with the Americans bombing German targets during the day and the British following at night in an unrelenting bid to soften German resistance. The goals were clear—in order to bring the war to an end, the effects had to be total and overwhelming. That meant bombing not only industrial targets, but also densely populated urban centers where the working people lived; a skilled worker was more difficult to replace than a machine, and the fact was that many machines escaped destruction in the bombing raids. Euphemistically termed ‘de-housing’, British strategists in Bomber Command never denied that those efforts constituted an effort to terrorize the population.[7] Many pointed out that the Germans had begun it with their raids over London during the summer nights of 1940. In Operation Gomorrah, the repeated attacks by the Royal Air Force and the Eighth Army Air Force targeting Hamburg during the last week of July 1943, more than 45,000 people were killed and 400,000 left homeless in conflagrations that resulted in manmade ‘firestorms’—howling tornado-like updrafts which conducted superheated air skywards, drawing oxygen out of subterranean bomb shelters and incinerating human beings by literally sucking them into the flames.[8] In this one raid alone, more German civilians died than in all of Germany’s air attacks against English cities, though neither Bomber Command nor Churchill felt any moral qualms; many pointed out that the Germans had begun it with their raids over London during the summer nights of 1940. Given the brutal nature of initial German attacks and the necessity of defeating Hitler, this is hardly surprising.

  ‘Typical bomb damage in the Eilbek district of Hamburg, 1944 or 1945.’

  Royal Air Force Bomber Command, 1942-1945. ‘These were among the 16,000 multistoried apartment buildings destroyed by the firestorm which developed during the raid by Bomber Command on the night of 27/28 July 1943.’ Source: RAF, Imperial War Museum, public domain.

  More direct efforts to hit specific industrial targets fell primarily to the American air command. By the end of 1943 there were more than a million Yanks in Great Britain laying the groundwork for the destruction of Nazi Germany, with the American air bases dotting the eastern English countryside. From here, the Eighth Air Force mounted raids with her heavy bombers, the formidable B-17 Flying Fortress and the B-24 Liberator.

  Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress "Shoo Shoo Baby" at the National Museum of the United States Air Force. Credit: USAF. Public domain.

  The first mass produced model, the B-17E, was heavily armed with nine .50 caliber machine guns mounted in Plexiglas ‘blisters’ and could carry a 4000 lb. bomb load.[9] Subsequent models made various improvements and from the beginning, the B-17 ‘Flying Fortress’, was a workhorse of the American air campaign over the skies of Germany, with nearly 13,000 manufactured for the US Army Air Corps. Improvements would gain the crews of the B-17 the capacity to carry three tons of bombs to the target, up to 2000 miles armed also with 13 .50 caliber guns.[10]

  The B-24 Liberator was the most heavily produced bomber in history, with 19,000 manufactured; at one point, a mile-long assembly line at Ford Motor Company’s Detroit plant cranked out a B-24 every 63 minutes.[11] It sported a twin tail and four engines, with a top speed of 303 miles per hour, ten .50 caliber machine guns, and able to carry 8,800 lbs. of bombs. It was also used in a variety of capacities throughout the war. Complex tight bombing formations kept these bombers together to increase their accuracy and firepower against German fighters rising up to attack them, and several missions involved more than a thousand bombers carrying 10,000 or more airmen into enemy territory.

  Consolidated B-24 Liberator from Maxwell Field,

  Alabama, 1940s. Credit: USAF, public domain.

  By the time the European bombing campaign ended in mid-April 1945, nearly 10,000 of these bombers would be lost, along with another 8500 fighters and almost 80,000 American airmen.[2] Manning these planes and others, it would be up to the boys of the United States Army Air Forces to get the job done. They would come from the depths of the Great Depression, and they would become men.

  Clarence W. Dart, Tuskegee Airman.

  December, 2003. Credit: Author.

  chapter Two

  The Tuskegee Airman

  P-51 Mustang flown by the Red Tail Project. Credit: Max Haynes

  The Tuskegee Airmen, or ‘Red Tails’ as they came to be known, were a special group of airmen who trained at the airfield near the famed Tuskegee Institute in Alabama who would become the first African-American aviators in the United States military. Still segregated before 1940, the military had previously denied young black men the opportunity to fly for their country in combat. Historically, this was nothing new. The prevailing attitude that African-American recruits lacked the intellectual capacity and stamina for battlefield and leadership roles went back centuries; a mid-1920s military report reinforced age old falsehoods and stereotypes about the combat readiness of the African-American soldier. Still, as war loomed on the horizon, the training of young black pilots, bombardiers, navigators and supporting personnel began as a US Army Air Corps ‘experiment’—would these young people of color really be able to hold their own? Nearly a thousand men completed the Tuskegee advanced flight training program and went on to compile a distinguished record as the 332nd Fighter Group (eventually comprised of four fighter squadrons—the 99th, 100th, 301st, and 302nd) flying nearly 1400 combat missions over war torn Europe.[3],[12]

  Twice shot down by the enemy, Captain Clarence W. Dart managed to make it back to friendly lines safely, racking up 95 missions and receiving two Purple Hearts and the Distinguished Flying Cross with four oak leaf clusters, one of ninety-six fellow Tuskegee recipients of the DFC.[4] The Tuskegee Airmen were groundbreakers and paved the way for the ratcheting up of the civil rights movement and the eventual desegregation of the armed forces in 1948.

  I interviewed Mr. Dart on several occasions. In December of 2003, he gave me and my class a wide ranging interview that lasted several hours.

  *

  ‘I live in Saratoga Springs [New York], a couple of blocks away from the racetrack.[5] But no, to answer your question, I don’t go there; in fact, I have never been there. Well, I could tell you why I’ve never been in there. When I first came back from overseas, they used to bring the horses in on Pullman cars all padded out with running water and everything, and compare that to what I saw in Italy, and in parts of this country, I said, ‘They’re treating those horses better than people’, and I said, ‘They do not need my money’. [6] So that’s why I have not been to the racetrack.’

  *

  Clarence Dart, Tuskegee Airman

  ‘A Tough Time’

  The Great Depression was a tough time. To think of the way people had to live. People who had good jobs and lost them overnight because of the Crash in 1929, when the stock market crashed on Wall Street. Overnight, millionaires became paupers. No money, period. A lot of people, believe it or not, jumped out of those windows down there in New York City and committed suicide; the shock was just that great. To think that they were penniless overnight because they bought stocks on what they call ‘margins’. It wasn’t enough to cover or reserve when the market collapsed and so they just became penniless overnight.

  It affected everybody. People were selling apples for a nickel on street corners. My father, fortunately, didn’t lose his job because he worked on the railroad, but he kept taking pay cuts all the way through the Depression until the time it started to turn around when World War II started; I think he was down under twenty-five dollars a week, take home pay. We had just bought a house and boy, did we struggle during that time! I could take the whole afternoon telling you how we lived and what my mother used to do to keep me in clothes. My mother would buy shirts from the Salvation Army store. She woul
d turn the collars because they would get frayed. She would take the collars off, turn them and sew them back onto the shirts. It was a time when people really had to be on their own.

  I could remember especially in the winter we had what you called garters, but they were rubber boots, no insulation in the darn things. We would go out and play until we couldn’t feel anything in our feet and hands. You could come home and first thing we would put you in tepid water, supposedly to warm you up. As soon as you hit that water, you would start screaming. I don’t know if any of you have had frostbite or anything like that, from being out skiing or ice skating until your hands get so cold you don’t feel anything anymore. It lasts practically forever. Once it happens to you, you will always feel that cold. I experienced it again, so to speak, when we were flying, switched to the P-51s, at high altitudes, around anywhere from twenty-five thousand to over thirty thousand feet. There wasn’t much heat in the airplanes. The heat in the P-51s would come in on one side and that foot would get warm, but you would have to sort of cross your feet [laughs], to defrost the other foot. I’ll get to that further on to make a continuity.

  Of course, it also brought people together. There was some welfare help, but it was tough, especially in the wintertime. We kids use to go down and stand next to the railroad tracks. The firemen on the locomotives use to shovel coal off of the engines as they went by. We would pick up the coal and take it home. Of course, we burned everything; we didn’t have central heating in homes in those days. Everybody had either a fireplace or a big central furnace with one duct on the top that supposedly was to heat the whole house. We use to go out and pick wild mustards and stuff like that for food. Everyone had a garden also. There was a lot of implementation to survive.

  Real Airplanes

  When the war started in 1941, I had just turned twenty-one. I was singing in our church choir at our radio station that afternoon when they came in and said that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. I had just turned 21 on December 6th and it happened the next day. A friend and I were talking about going into the navy. But, my mother put a stop to that right quick. She said, ‘You’re not going into any army, navy or anything.’ Well, you know how mothers are; they’re still that way today.

  As a kid I always built model airplanes because I was an airplane fanatic. It was after I saw the first airplane fly then they started selling these kits. First, it was mostly these little gliders you can throw around. Then I graduated to building replicas of real airplanes. There were a lot at fairs then, not like nowadays. I can remember being angry with my mother because when I was a kid they use to have these hobby shows; kids would get prizes by being judged on their workmanship. I had built this model of a Curtiss Goshawk, a Navy fighter. There were a few mistakes in the thing, so, I didn’t want it exhibited, but my mother, she was so proud of it [laughs] she took it to the show and put it in there. I didn’t win anything, but she was proud enough that she wanted it exhibited. Anyway, I was always fascinated with flying.

  When the war started and after a lot of pressure started from politicians, Mrs. Roosevelt and other people decided they would train black pilots. I have commentary on this because in spite of what black soldiers and sailors have done in the history of this country, it was always convenient just to forget what they did, from the Revolution right on up until this day. They fight in Albany about getting the Congressional Medal of Honor for Henry Johnson.[7] It shouldn’t have happened. He did as much as what’s-his-name [Sergeant York] did in World War I. I guess he killed about ten German soldiers that had attacked his group. At the end he was fighting with a knife. He used up all of his ammunition and saved a lot of his squad.

  But when they decided to train black pilots, the assessment team came through, well, let me back up…

  After high school, there were no jobs, so I went to what they called Elmira Aviation Ground School. The state figured they would start all these training schools for people to learn how to be mechanics, machinists and radio operators. I took all the classes that I could. I figured I was set to do anything, but you go around and how things were in those days, you were rejected for one reason or another. When the assessment team from the Air Corps came around with their tests, I passed all their tests, except my medical. Most of my medical was all right, except I didn’t pass the depth perception test. That was because I was so excited I didn’t get sleep the night before! My eyesight was kind of fuzzy. In those days, the depth perception test used two sticks. One of the sticks had a line on it and you had to move the sticks until they were opposite each other. This was supposed to demonstrate your depth perception so when you came into land [laughs], you knew how far the ground was below you or something like that. But it was a rudimentary test. Anyway they told me, ‘You go back and get rested. So when we come back again will give you another test.’ That happened about eight months after that. So I came around and passed the test. They said, ‘Go home, when your class is called, we’ll cut orders and give you the oath of office. We will see you get to Tuskegee for training.’ Well, they were still building the field down there in Tuskegee, so I didn’t feel too bad about it. I told my draft board that I was going into the Air Corps.

  I guess they didn’t believe me because I was around for almost six months and next thing I knew, I got my ‘Greetings from Uncle Sam’. Have any of you heard your father or grandfather talk about greetings from Uncle Sam? Well, that’s what the letter said, ‘Greetings,’ [laughs], next thing I knew I was on a train to Fort Niagara, which was the classification center for our part of the state where they decided where you were going to go. The first thing they told us was, ‘Well, we don’t know what you can do, just tell us what you would like to do,’ and so on and so forth. I put down all the things I had learned; airplane mechanics, machinist, and radio operator.

  I didn’t get to go anyplace I asked. Next thing I knew I was on a train to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for field artillery. I said, ‘Oh my goodness, I’m not going to learn how to fly.’ But then, I committed a cardinal sin in the military. I didn’t go through channels! See, in the military, if you’re one of the lower ranks and you want to do something, you go to your squad commander and he passes it on to the company commander and if the company commander sees fit, he will forward it. I wrote this letter to the commanding general of the Air Corps! That’s against the law [laughs], I bypassed everybody, and in headquarters I think they realized I made a mistake. They wrote my father, but not to me. He told me that they had said not to worry, because they knew where I was. When the field school was finished and my class was called, they would cut orders and have me sent to Tuskegee.

  Well, meanwhile, I didn’t mind the field artillery because it was fun shooting those big guns, 155 mm howitzers. I think I shot every gun type that the military had at the time, at least the ground troops, all kinds of machine guns. They had pistols from the cavalry, the kind that you see, those long barreled pistols, in the movies. We had those kinds of pistols, and shotguns, and tank weapons. When my orders came through, they came through on a Friday evening; no, I think they came during the day. But my company commander didn’t tell me until after retreat on that Friday. I think he was kind of angry with me because I had taken a lot of math in high school; I used to aim in my section, my howitzer section. To aim those big guns, they have what they call an aiming stick which is behind the gun. There was a periscope type thing on the breech of the gun. You look through that periscope back at the aiming stick to traverse the gun. They called down the elevation that they wanted you to fire the gun at. I was made chief of section because I had pretty good math background and didn’t have any trouble with triangulating a gun.

  I turned him down on [becoming second lieutenant] because through the ‘scuttlebutt’ I had heard what had happened to second lieutenants in the field artillery—they made them forward observers! They sent them to places, especially over the Pacific. The Japanese would figure out who was calling down fire on them. They search out the forward observers and natur
ally they didn’t last long. So we knew all this stuff and I turned him down. And he was disappointed because he thought I would jump at the chance to become an officer and second lieutenant. I told him, ‘No, I am going into the Air Corps.’ Well he didn’t believe me, but I did get my orders. He waited until after retreat on a Friday, and I had to go to Oklahoma City to catch a train to go to Tuskegee.

  Tuskegee

  I had a lot of friends. They said, ‘Oh, we will help you out.’ They went up to the office and forged signatures and got me transportation to get to Oklahoma City to catch a train to Tuskegee. They of course could have gotten court marshaled for it. [Laughs] I arrived at a little town called Cheaha at about two o’clock in the morning—it was way out in the boonies. There was a telephone pole with one little light that looked like a sixty watt bulb. [Laughs] It was raining and not really a train station, but out in the boonies. Pretty soon there came about three 6x6 trucks. They put us in the trucks and took us out to the field.