The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 (11 page)

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 assigned 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 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 screwing 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 unsurpassed 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 space.” 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 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, “nobody 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 passenger 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 classes, 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 Japan’s surrender. He stayed in the Air Force and became a colonel.

The number of required missions was raised to thirty-five from the twenty-five originally assigned.

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 participated, 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 massive, 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 space of time. 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” Mitchell 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 arsenal, 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 principal 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 cumulative 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 airspace.