by Lynne Olson
Such failures, however, were kept a closely guarded secret. Informing reporters that the raids had been a success, Eighth Air Force publicists released “grossly exaggerated reports of Nazi fighter losses and the tonnage of our bombs that hit German targets,” a veteran American navigator recalled years later. An inflation of bombing results would be a hallmark of both American and British air campaigns throughout the war.
Despite the early missions’ disappointing results, which included a sizable loss of aircraft, Arnold demanded more and bigger raids. As U.S. bombers thrust deeper into enemy-occupied territory, finally penetrating Germany without the protection of long-range fighters, their losses mushroomed. The Reich’s defenses were far more sophisticated and massive than American planners had envisioned. German antiaircraft flak proved to be extremely accurate, and its fighter strength was overwhelming. In response to the intensifying Allied assault on Germany’s key industrial centers, Luftwaffe leaders had shifted hundreds of crack fighter pilots and planes from the Russian front to protect their homeland. The pet theory of Arnold and his men—that enemy aircraft and ground gunners could not stop the high-flying, heavily armed B-17s—turned out to be a supremely costly illusion.
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for the Eighth’s pilots and crews to realize that, in coming to Britain, they had been handed one of the most dangerous jobs of the war. U.S. Army Air Forces casualties, particularly in the Eighth, were astronomically greater than those in either of the two other military services. According to conventional wisdom, a crew member’s chances of completing his normal tour of duty—twenty-five missions—were less than one in four. In its first ten months of operation, the Eighth lost 188 heavy bombers and some 1,900 crewmen; those numbers would skyrocket over the next year and a half. By the end of the conflict, the U.S. air operations in Europe would suffer more fatalities—26,000—than the entire Marine Corps in its protracted bloody campaigns in the Pacific. “To fly in the Eighth Air Force in those days,” recalled Harrison Salisbury, “was to hold a ticket to a funeral. Your own.”
The savagery of the air war was not due solely to the ferocity of German defenses. Early in the war, when the Air Force brass in Washington were touting the advantages of high-altitude flying, they failed to realize that the extreme atmospheric conditions experienced by the crews could kill as effectively as a Messerschmitt or Focke-Wulf. “There are apparently little things that one doesn’t think about prior to getting into operations,” commented Dr. Malcolm Grow, the Eighth’s chief medical officer. Little things like oxygen deprivation, which could cause unconsciousness and death in a matter of minutes, or extensive frostbite, caused by several hours of exposure to temperatures of 50 to 60 degrees below zero. Until early 1944, more airmen were hospitalized for frostbite than for combat injuries.
As the war progressed, “bomber bases were damn depressing places to visit,” recalled Andy Rooney. “Death was always in the air.” Struggling with the knowledge that their chances of escaping injury or death were slim, a sizable number of pilots and crewmen suffered physical and mental breakdowns. “With deeper penetration raids into enemy airspace, casualties rose, and with no replacements on the horizon, men began to see the situation as hopeless,” historian Donald Miller wrote. “Many airmen began to feel conflicted about their country: willing to fight for it, they also felt abandoned by it.”
Yet, as the pressures on Allied crews intensified, so, too, did the bombing campaign. At the Casablanca conference in January 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill authorized Operation Pointblank, an all-out aerial offensive against the German aircraft industry, to take place before the cross-Channel invasion. For an assault on the Continent to have any chance of success, the Allies had to gain unquestioned supremacy in the air. To accomplish that, the leaders believed, Allied planes must not only clear the skies of existing Luftwaffe aircraft but destroy aircraft production facilities in Germany.
It would be another four months before American planes and crews started arriving in Britain in large numbers, yet, thanks to their top commanders, U.S. airmen now were committed to achieving this staggering goal in little more than a year. Acutely aware of Churchill’s stepped-up requests to Roosevelt for American participation in night bombing, Eaker, who had replaced Tooey Spaatz as head of the Eighth, insisted that daylight bombing would have no trouble doing the job. Both Eaker and Harris promised that German planes would be swept from the air by the time of the Allied invasion. “My personal message to you—this is a must—is to destroy the enemy air forces wherever you find them, in the air, on the ground, and in the factories,” Hap Arnold wrote to Eighth Air Force commanders.
In the view of those flying the bombers, however, there was no chance of winning this fight without long-range escorts for the Eighth’s aircraft. Until Arnold and the others understood that fact, the Luftwaffe would continue to rule the skies over Europe, and the carnage of Allied airmen would become exponentially worse. Still, the Air Force chief and his lieutenants resisted. It was then that Tommy Hitchcock entered the fray.
AS AN ASSISTANT military attaché, Hitchcock was assigned to the U.S. embassy rather than to the high-testosterone headquarters of the Eighth Air Force. His modus operandi was vastly different from that of the Eighth’s leaders: he thought it far more important to cooperate with—and perhaps learn from—the RAF than to compete with it. Drawing on his own experience as a fighter pilot, Hitchcock concluded that the British were superior to the Americans in fighter combat tactics and training procedures, as well as in many aspects of the design and engineering of fighter planes themselves. “In those days, it would kill any idea if you said to Americans: ‘British operational experience has shown …,’ ” Tex McCrary, a friend of Hitchcock’s, wrote late in the war. “Somehow, if a thing was British, two strikes were already chalked up against it in America. Tommy reversed the formula. If an idea had been tested and okayed in Britain’s battle lab, then Hitchcock called it right. He knew that the toughest air fighting in the world was over here. Anything that survived had to be good.”
Gil Winant, who held the same view, had lobbied U.S. military authorities for many months to take heed of new British developments in aircraft technology and design. “Since I have been here, I have done everything in my power to see that … American pilots are provided with every aircraft improvement that the British, through experience, have found essential,” Winant wrote to Roosevelt in January 1942. Yet, despite those efforts, “the fact remains that there is still an unnecessary time lag incorporating the latest British design changes in our production lines.” Roosevelt passed on Winant’s letter to Hap Arnold, who rejected the ambassador’s arguments out of hand.
Shortly after he arrived in Britain, Hitchcock paid a visit to the RAF’s development facility at Duxford, a few miles outside Cambridge, to observe the performance tests of a promising new fighter, produced in America solely for British use. The brainchild of a German émigré who once designed Messerschmitt fighters, the P-51 Mustang had been built by California’s North American Aviation Co. for the RAF, which planned to use it as a low-level tactical fighter-bomber.
Once the test flights began, the RAF knew it had something special. The Mustang, with its streamlined frame, was faster than the Spitfire, had a longer range, and, at medium and low altitudes, was nimbler at diving. It was, said one observer, “the cleanest and sweetest thing in the air.” But the Mustang’s test pilot and others who saw the plane in action believed that its performance could be enhanced even more if its underpowered American engine was replaced by the high-performance Merlin engine manufactured by Rolls-Royce, a British company.
RAF development officials agreed, and the Mustang airframe was mated with the Merlin. Hitchcock was stunned at the results. Observing the Mustang hybrid in the air and poring over charts and graphs outlining its performance, he realized that it was, in the words of historian Donald Miller, “the plane the Bomber Mafia had claimed was impossible to build, a fighter that could go as fast and as far as the bomb
ers without losing its fighting characteristics.” In a memo to Air Force headquarters in Washington, Hitchcock urged that the plane be transformed into a high-altitude fighter, predicting that its crossbreeding with the Merlin engine “would produce the best fighter plane on the Western Front.”
His superiors, however, were not impressed. In their eyes, the Mustang belonged to the British; that fact alone made it inferior, despite its American origins. As Hitchcock noted, “Sired by the English out of an American mother, the Mustang has had no parent in the [Air Force] … to appreciate and push its good points.” Faced with bureaucratic intransigence, he refused to give up. Throughout the summer and fall of 1942, he worked to drum up support for the Mustang hybrid, sending a flood of statistics to Washington demonstrating its sterling test performances and hosting lavish dinner parties at his elegant London flat to lobby RAF and Eighth Air Force higher-ups, as well as visiting dignitaries from the Roosevelt administration. He even took the Mustang up for a test spin himself, much to the chagrin of his nephew, Averell Clark, a USAAF fighter pilot who had flown with the RAF’s Eagle Squadron before America’s entry into the war. Standing with his uncle on the Duxford airfield, Clark exclaimed: “Look, Uncle Tommy, you’d better not fly that thing. The test pilot is the only guy who’s been up in it.” Hitchcock stared hard at his nephew. “Oh, the hell with that,” he snapped, then strode to the Mustang, climbed in, and took off. “He was right to do it,” Clark said years later. After all, “it was mainly his idea.”
Winant acted as Hitchcock’s partner in his Mustang crusade. Together, the two former World War I pilots peppered Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, and other administration officials with cables and memos underscoring the plane’s potential as a long-range fighter escort. According to political attaché Theodore Achilles, Winant “pushed the very daylights” out of those who might be helpful in clearing the way for the plane’s adoption. In addition to his own background as a fighter pilot, there was another reason for Winant’s intense interest in Hitchcock’s project. The ambassador’s elder son, John, had dropped out of Princeton the year before to enlist in the Air Force. Now in training to become a B-17 pilot, the younger Winant would soon head for Britain to join the Eighth Air Force—one of the multitude of young Americans who would face the full fury of German defenses during Operation Pointblank.
IN NOVEMBER 1942, Hitchcock flew to Washington to take the fight for the Mustang to Hap Arnold himself. “The word channels, like the word no, was an utterance he sometimes could not hear well,” observed Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., Hitchcock’s biographer. “He planned on going straight to the top.” When, despite Hitchcock’s best lobbying efforts, Arnold expressed little interest in the Mustang, he turned to one of Arnold’s civilian bosses, undersecretary of war Robert Lovett, for help. The two had been friends since the Great War, when Hitchcock had flown for France and Lovett had been a pilot in Britain’s Royal Naval Air Service and then in his own country’s Air Corps. The undersecretary did not need to be convinced of the quality of Rolls-Royce engines—the British planes he had flown during the war had been equipped with them—and, after considerable investigation on his own, he agreed with Hitchcock that the Air Force must push forward with adoption of the Mustang as a long-distance escort for bombers. He urged Arnold to give the matter his immediate attention.
Pressed hard by Lovett and others in the War Department, Arnold reluctantly gave in, ordering the production of an initial 2,200 P-51Bs, as the hybrid Mustangs were called. But while the order was supposed to have the highest priority, there was a lag in producing the planes, and Arnold did little to speed it up. “His hands were tied by his mouth,” Lovett noted. “He said our only need was Flying Fortresses … [that] very few fighters could keep up with them.” But, as Lovett added, “the Messerschmitts had no difficulty at all.”
With Arnold doing little, Hitchcock appointed himself the ramrod of the project, making repeated trips in early 1943 to the plants where the Mustangs were manufactured, to ensure that the planes were coming off the production line as quickly as possible. Despite his intercession, the first large shipment of P-51s did not arrive in Britain until January 1944. They came just in time to help save the D-Day invasion but not soon enough to help John Winant Jr. and thousands of other American crewmen who, during the horrific summer and autumn of 1943, flew straight and unprotected into the German maw.
BY THE TIME Operation Pointblank began in July 1943, the Eighth Air Force could count more than 100,000 airmen and 1,500 bombers on its roster. Yet, while the buildup of men and machines was enormous, so were the number of crewmen and planes lost in this massive, desperate attempt to wipe out Germany’s aircraft industry. Officially called the Combined Bomber Offensive, Pointblank was meant to be a joint operation—an around-the-clock battering of key German targets by British and American bombers. In fact, there was little cooperation between the Americans and Arthur Harris, who, while paying lip service to Pointblank, refused to switch from his strategy of smashing German cities to atoms. Harris’s operation, in the words of historian Michael Sherry, “took on almost an aimless quality, piling up vast rubble yet too dispersed in time and space to apply a decisive shock to either morale or production.”
The American effort was hardly more effective. Both Allied air forces dropped record amounts of explosives on Germany’s heartland that summer and fall, with little tangible results to show for it other than the staggering number of casualties on the ground and in the air. In the first week of Pointblank alone, the Eighth lost ninety-seven Flying Fortresses and almost one thousand crewmen—10 percent of the attacking force.
Hap Arnold, under enormous pressure to prove the efficacy of daylight bombing, was beside himself with rage. He accused Eaker and his subordinates of not sending enough bombers on missions because of the fear of large losses. For their part, the Eighth’s top command believed that Arnold, in his Washington ivory tower, did not have the remotest idea of the extraordinary physical and emotional costs exacted by all-out aerial war. “It began to look,” said an aide to Eaker, “as if generals Arnold and Eaker were devoting more time to fighting each other than to defeating the Germans.”
In mid-August, Eaker, pushed hard by Arnold, ordered the largest American raid of the war thus far—a five-hundred-bomber assault on ball bearing factories in Schweinfurt and on a Messerschmitt assembly plant in Regensburg. Both cities were deep inside Germany, which meant that the bombers would have to fly several hours without escorts before they reached their targets, which were safeguarded by some of the most fearsome antiaircraft defenses in the Reich. Yet Arnold and his lieutenants convinced themselves that, despite the formidable odds, this dual mission could deliver a blow hard enough to knock the Luftwaffe out of the conflict. As Curtis LeMay, a major in command of the Eighth’s 305th Bomb Group, observed, the honchos in Washington were trying “to find an easy way of winning the war in Europe. That’s just about like searching for the Fountain of Youth—there is no such thing; never was.”
There certainly would be nothing easy about these two missions. Hundreds of Luftwaffe fighters, the mightiest air defense force the Americans had yet seen, assailed the formations long before they reached their targets. Under their withering fire, bombers tumbled out of the sky by the dozens. More than 475 aircraft started out on the missions. Of the slightly more than 300 that reached their targets, 60 planes were shot down, and nearly six hundred men were killed. Half the planes that managed to limp back to their bases, one of which was piloted by Lieutenant John Winant, were badly damaged. It was, Nelson Aldrich Jr. wrote, “the Eighth Air Force’s Verdun. Men were on the verge of mutiny, refusing to fly into Germany without some sort of escort that could protect them … over the target.”
Though the losses were stunning, the Eighth’s commanders comforted themselves with the belief that their bombers had wreaked crippling damage on Germany’s aircraft industry. Regensburg, one general exulted, had been “literally wiped off the map.” Hardly. While the Messerschmitt
assembly plant had indeed been damaged, it was repaired and back in action within weeks. At Schweinfurt, about a third of the explosives missed their target and hit residential neighborhoods instead, killing two hundred civilians. The bombs that did strike the ball bearing factories did little damage, only briefly slowing down production. Writing about the Regensburg-Schweinfurt raids in his memoirs, Albert Speer, Hitler’s war production chief, noted that the Reich had escaped “a catastrophic blow.”
At the end of Pointblank’s summer campaign, the Eighth Air Force struggled to stanch its human and material losses. But despite the terrible costs of the offensive, there would be no letup; with the Germans still masters of the air in Europe, the meat-grinder raids must continue. On September 6, 45 Flying Fortresses were lost over Stuttgart. On October 8 and 9, 58 Forts were shot down in raids over Bremen, Marienburg, and Anklam. The following day, the bombing target was Münster, an old walled city in western Germany. As daunting as the German fighter defense had been during the Regensburg-Schweinfurt mission, the aerial blitzkrieg over Münster was even more ferocious. In wave after wave, some two hundred fighter planes—”the greatest concentration of Nazi fighters ever hurled at an American bomber formation”—attacked the Fortresses head-on, scattering them all over the sky. So many crewmen bailed out, said one pilot, that it looked like an airborne invasion. Of the 275 B-17s that set out from Britain on that crisp fall day, 30 did not return. Among them was the Fortress piloted by John Winant, who was on his thirteenth bombing mission.
That night, Air Force authorities called Gil Winant with the news that his twenty-two-year-old son was missing, shot down while returning from Münster. According to witnesses, John Winant’s plane had crashed after being attacked by three German fighters. The pilot of the mission’s lead plane was able to offer a slight ray of hope: he told the ambassador he had seen several parachutes blossom under the B-17 shortly before it went down. But the pilot and other witnesses also had seen the German fighters firing at the parachutists. No one knew if any of the crew had survived.