To Kingdom Come

by Robert J. Mrazek

  Our let down continued and at 10,000 feet we yanked off our oxygen masks, grinned at each other and shook hands with a heartfelt warmth, and lighted cigarettes.

  At the English Coast the setting sun had turned west into a glorious mass of color shading from the pale pinks to the deeper reds, purples and blues, as though to welcome us home safely to a green peaceful countryside which lay beneath us and seemed well worth fighting for.

  Oschersleben might be classed as just one of many such battles fought by the 8th Air Force, but there was something a little special about this mission. It was the turning point in the battle between our forces and the Focke-Wulf. Up to that time, if anything, the Germans actually had a slight edge on our fighters, but never again after January 11 was he able to put up large opposition to any of our missions.

  Our route across Germany into the target and back was well marked with tragic reminders of the conflict. It was a steady and unbroken trail of crashed airplanes, white parachutes, and dead soldiers, both from our forces and the Germans.

  Once and for all we proved that the American lad has the guts and the determination to reach his goal, regardless of the opposition; and the spirit exemplified on January 11th at Oschersleben is the same spirit which will win this war and keep America victorious so long as she keeps the principles of our free land high like a torch and our flag unfurled.

  (General Travis’s letter appears courtesy of Gary Moncur. It was first published by the 303rd Bomb Group Association.)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The principal source of inspiration for To Kingdom Come was my friend Martin “Andy” Andrews. I first met Andy when I was a college student looking for a summer job. By then, he was an accomplished independent filmmaker. After he hired me as his gofer, we spent many hours together traveling from one film location to another.

  Over that summer, I learned that he had been a B-17 pilot during World War II, and had flown some of the Eighth Air Force’s most harrowing missions in 1943 with the famed 306th Bomb Group, the unit that served as the model for the book and motion picture film Twelve O’Clock High. While always self-deprecating about his own accomplishments, Andy’s stories about the bravery of his fellow pilots and crew members instilled a sense of awe in me. Andy became an important role model in my life.

  In the course of researching To Kingdom Come, I had an opportunity to travel across the country to meet the pilots and crew members whose stories I hoped to tell. Researching and writing this book has been one of the most rewarding professional experiences of my life.

  The men whose stories are in this book were not unique. There were tens of thousands of young Americans just like them who put their lives on the line flying the early deep-penetration raids into Germany when the Luftwaffe fighter command was at its peak strength.

  It was my goal in this book to ennoble their sacrifice by focusing on a small group of men who flew one of the many tough missions. Through their eyes, I thought, the reader would have a chance to understand what it might have been like for many of the airmen in those perilous times.

  In order to tell this story, I reviewed more than twenty-five hundred pages of official documents specifically related to the Stuttgart mission. A compendium of the military sources I found is catalogued in the bibliography section of this book. Studying these documents, along with the cables and communications of the senior commanders before and after the battle, enabled me to develop a reasonable understanding of why this mission was ordered, what happened during the course of the battle, the results of the mission, and the impact of those results on the prosecution of the air war against Germany.

  The challenge in finding some of these answers was complicated by the fact that the Stuttgart mission was the most calamitous defeat sustained by the Eighth Air Force in the war. Military historians who have commented on the mission have referred to it as a “fiasco” and a “disaster.”

  The two missions to Schweinfurt in August and October 1943 may well have been more savage air battles, but in both those cases most of the pilots and crews located their intended targets and achieved significant success in destroying them.

  Not one of the 338 Fortresses that set off to bomb the industrial targets around Stuttgart on September 6 was able to find its mark. It is not surprising that the Eighth’s senior commanders initially attempted to cloak the disastrous results from General Hap Arnold. Not only were their jobs at stake, but so was the fate of daylight precision bombing itself.

  The Stuttgart mission was a turning point in the air war against Germany. It was that rare time in history when wholesale slaughter was required to force a fundamental change in a poorly conceived strategy, in this case the doctrine that unprotected Flying Fortresses could defend themselves while destroying Germany’s capacity to wage war. General Arnold would never again assert as he did at his press conference in London two days before the Stuttgart mission that Fortresses alone could get the job done.

  The Stuttgart mission was also historically important because it finally convinced General Ira Eaker that a sustained air offensive against Germany could not be carried out without long-range Allied fighters capable of going all the way to the targets and back.

  After Stuttgart, General Arnold also realized that the Eighth needed long-range fighters, and he went back to Washington determined to accelerate the production of the P-51, along with jettisonable gas tanks for the fighters already deployed.

  The difference in Eaker’s and Arnold’s conclusions after Stuttgart was that Arnold continued to believe a sustained offensive against Germany’s important industrial targets could be resumed with the assets at hand. Eaker disagreed. After Stuttgart, he ordered only one additional maximum-effort deep-penetration raid to Germany before he was relieved of his command in December 1943.

  I want to express my appreciation to the many people who assisted me in writing this book. The list begins with Andy Andrews, Jim Armstrong, Olen Grant, Jim Karnezis, Don Stoulil, Bill Eisenhart, Bud Klint, Clifford Hammock, and Wilbert Yee. I am deeply grateful to them for sharing their stories with me. Although I never met Ted Wilken and Warren Laws, I am indebted to their widows, Braxton Wilken Robinson and Elizabeth “Libby” Laws, for helping me to hopefully bring them alive again on the printed page.

  I also owe a big debt to Warren Laws, Jr., who was not only of great assistance in providing important details of his father’s story but also helped me to verify that it was Egon “Connie” Mayer who shot down Patricia six kilometers west of Troyes. Mr. Laws confirmed the site of the crash with the assistance of a local Frenchman using a metal detector, and reviewed all the evidence presented to him. Warren, a former U.S. Air Force pilot himself, has made a number of trips to Europe to follow the path his father took in escaping from occupied Europe, and meeting many of the people who helped him. Lori Sarnese, the youngest daughter of Joe Schwartzkopf, provided me with helpful information about her father.

  As all World War II students know, negotiating the labyrinth of the National Archives is a daunting challenge. I was thankful to have the assistance of an extraordinary researcher, Tim Frank, who found reports I was unable to locate at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland.

  Yvonne Kinkaid, the senior historian at the Air Force History Support Office at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., was very helpful in securing other material I needed, as was researcher Tom Berkey (Col. USAF-Ret.), who volunteers at Bolling to assist the occasionally inept through their vast trove of official records. I am also grateful to C. R. “Dick” Andregg, the Director of the Air Force History and Museum Programs at the Pentagon, for smoothing my difficulties in retrieving information on the Stuttgart mission.

  Another important source in telling this story were the many fine Eighth Air Force bomb group Internet Web sites, all of them dedicated to the men who flew in them. In particular, I would like to thank Gary Moncur, the historian and Web site designer of the 303rd Bomb Group Web site. His father, the late V
ern Moncur, delivered one of the lines I included on the epigraph page at the beginning of this book. Another important Web site was the 388th BG Database, created by Dick Henggeler, whose father was a squadron leader in that group. It was very helpful to me, along with the Web site of the 384th BG. I particularly want to thank Ken Decker, whose magnificent contribution can be found in the “Memories” section.

  I am deeply grateful to Professor Tami Davis Biddle at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for sharing with me her insights into the simmering conflict between Ira Eaker and Hap Arnold, and how the pressure on General Eaker affected the course of the air war. Along with transcripts of two important interviews conducted with General Eaker, she provided me with a lengthy excerpt of an unpublished memoir by Major Richard Hughes, who served on Eaker’s staff as the senior officer in the Enemy Objectives Unit, and whose recollections shed a good deal of light on the internal workings of target selection, as well as the pressure the Eighth Air Force was under to prove the value of daylight precision bombing.

  In undertaking this project, I received valuable advice from three superb military historians, Donald Miller, Rick Atkinson, and Brian D. O’Neill, all of whom generously provided me with important leads in finding answers to the riddles I was faced with at the start of my research.

  In the process of securing valuable information about the life of General Robert Travis, I received help from Erica Bruchko and Elizabeth Stice at the Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library (MARBL) at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

  I also want to thank Vivian Rogers-Price, the Research Center Director at the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum in Savannah, Georgia, for her assistance, as well as Nick Siekierski at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University in Stanford, California. Also at Hoover, researcher Jenny Fichmann found important information related to this story in the papers of General Frederick Anderson, Jr.

  Don Patton, who is a director of the World War II History Roundtable in Edina, Minnesota, was very helpful in locating several Eighth Air Force veterans who gave me assistance on another part of the story. Stephanie Balls at Claridge’s Hotel provided information on the formal dinner held in General Arnold’s honor on September 6, 1943.

  I want to also express my appreciation to Gary Hodges for restoring many of the photographs that had become badly faded since the war. He did an incredible job. For transcribing more than a hundred hours of author interviews, I would like to thank Dawn Ryan.

  As always, I am indebted to my gifted literary agent, David Halpern, for his continued wisdom in helping me to choose worthwhile projects. Ian King at the Robbins Office also gave me valuable assistance. Finally, I am grateful to my able editor at Penguin Books, Mark Chait, for his role in shaping and structuring the final version of the book. It is stronger for his insights and recommendations.

  SOURCES

  Prelude

  Hap

  The primary source for the events and incidents described in this chapter was General Henry H. Arnold’s personal diary, in which he chronicled his daily activities on his inspection trip to England during the first week of September 1943.

  Hap Arnold’s complete wartime diaries, which were edited by retired Major General John W. Huston and published in two volumes under the title American Airpower Comes of Age, provided the author with a host of fascinating insights into the character of this remarkable, hard-driving war leader. In the diary, Arnold is always direct, often pungent, and occasionally quite funny. His words do not spare those under his command who did not live up to his expectations.

  In recounting the contentious marital situation between Henry and Eleanor “Bee” Arnold while living in Quarters Number 8 at Fort Myer in the fall of 1943, the author relied on Thomas Coffey’s excellent biography HAP: The Story of the U.S. Air Force and the Man Who Built It. The descriptions of Arnold’s precarious health situation, his daily routines, Arnold’s early life, and his prewar career in the army were also largely drawn from incidents described in Mr. Coffey’s book.

  The account of General Arnold’s brief visit to Gander, Newfoundland, his recorded observations while there, his subsequent flight across the Atlantic, and the dramatic events that occurred at Prestwick, Scotland, when he arrived in dense fog were drawn from Arnold’s diary. The excerpts of the speech he was to deliver on September 4 appear in the final version of the statement that he read in London before an assemblage of Allied war correspondents on September 4, and which is included with the general’s papers at the Library of Congress.

  General Arnold’s unwavering views on the importance of daylight precision bombing, his unyielding commitment to making certain that the Eighth Air Force’s offensive against Germany would be pursued without delay, his efforts to counter the continued British opposition to his plans, his deft maneuvering in Washington on behalf of the air force, and his concerns about the lack of aggressiveness on the part of the senior commanders in the Eighth Air Force are richly explored by Mr. Coffey in HAP: The Story of the U.S. Air Force and the Man Who Built It, as well as in James Parton’s fine biography of Ira Eaker, Air Force Spoken Here.

  Ira

  Ira Eaker’s worries about being relieved of his command of the Eighth Air Force are documented by both Parton and Coffey. The burgeoning confrontation between the two longtime friends in 1943 resulted from the pace at which the Eighth’s daylight precision bombing campaign was being prosecuted against Germany.

  Arnold was convinced that Eaker was moving too slowly with the assets he had at hand. Eaker thought that Arnold wasn’t taking into account the impact of the losses of so many bombers on the long-range missions to Germany, the time required to train replacement crews before they could be sent into battle, and the difficult maintenance challenges resulting from the severe battle damage being sustained by so many Fortresses on the deep-penetration raids.

  Also at the heart of the conflict was Eaker’s view that the bombing raids to strategic targets inside Germany could not be long sustained without the assistance of long-range fighters to protect the bombers on their way to and from the targets. Arnold disagreed.

  In writing this chapter, the author also relied on official military sources to document the increasingly bitter disagreements between Arnold and Eaker over how to employ the Eighth Air Force. In early June, Arnold began sending a series of cables demanding to know why Eaker was not aggressively pursuing the bombing campaign against Germany, and recommending that Eaker replace several of his senior commanders.

  These cables initiated a blizzard of communications over the next month in which Arnold and Eaker continued to trade verbal body blows. The author reviewed these letters and cables at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, Maryland. “We get nowhere with recriminations,” Eaker wrote back bitterly at one point. His frustration culminated in a June 29 confidential letter to Arnold in which he wrote, “I do not feel . . . that I am a horse that needs to be ridden with spurs.”

  At one point, James Parton, Eaker’s aide and future biographer, wrote, “It began to look as if Generals Arnold and Eaker were devoting more time to fighting each other than to defeating the Germans.”

  The sections of this chapter recounting Ira Eaker’s early life and his prewar career in the army’s fledgling air corps were principally drawn from Air Force Spoken Here. The increasingly close personal and professional relationship of Arnold and Eaker as they pursued their careers prior to World War II was chronicled in both HAP and Air Force Spoken Here, as were the factors that led Arnold to eventually choose Eaker to command the Eighth Air Force.

  Eaker’s change of heart about the Flying Fortress’s ability to defend itself without long-range fighter protection evolved over the early months of 1943, and is fully explored by Parton, as well as his urgent but initially unsuccessful campaign to convince Hap Arnold to make the delivery of long-range fighters a high priority.

  The author utilized official military records at NARA to relate t
he events of July and August 1943, including the launching of the air offensive against Germany on July 25, 1943, and the attacks on Schweinfurt and Regensburg on August 17.

  In describing Arnold’s arrival in England, and his subsequent visit to High Wycombe Abbey on September 2 for meetings with Ira Eaker and his senior staff, the author relied on General Arnold’s diary comments, his personal account of the meetings in his book, Global Mission, the diary of General Frederick Anderson, and General Eaker’s interview with Joe Green on January 28, 1972.

  Although in most of his interviews after the war General Eaker remained largely circumspect in describing his internal battle with Hap Arnold at this time, he was quite candid with Green in describing the pressure that Arnold put on him to resume the air offensive against Germany.

  Eaker referenced Arnold’s rhetorical demand in the wake of the Schweinfurt mission as, “Why don’t you send them out the next day?” Eaker’s rhetorical response was, “Well . . . we would have no bombers left.”

  Eaker added in the same interview, “I said to General Arnold that it was going to be my policy to conduct our operations at such a rate that we will always be growing and therefore a more menacing force. I will never operate at such a rate that I will be a diminishing and vanishing force. Well, this argument was—quite intense, quite bitter.”

  In the same interview, General Eaker commented on the fact that in private, General Arnold referred to him as “Son.” In Air Force Spoken Here, Parton documented several instances in which Eaker, whose own father was a remote figure to him, nurtured father-son relationships with other senior commanders in the army.

  His father-son relationship with Arnold was by far the most important of his professional life. But as the “son” in the relationship, Eaker never directly challenged Arnold, even when he was sure Arnold was wrong. Loyalty always overcame his better judgment. He also knew that Arnold didn’t hesitate to fire anyone who opposed him in air force matters, regardless of their personal relationship. It left Eaker in a serious quandary in the days before ordering the Stuttgart mission.