Chapter 1: Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

The Bomber Mafia

“The bomber will always get through.”

BRITISH PRIME MINISTER STANLEY BALDWIN

Grafton Underwood, August 17, 1942

The first of the dozen Fortresses to clear the runway was Butcher Shop, piloted by twenty-seven-year-old Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., of Miami, Florida. The finest flier in the 97th Bombardment Group, Major Tibbets was leading the opening assault of what would become the biggest American bombing offensive of the war. Three years later, on August 6, 1945, he would fly from a remote island in the Western Pacific to Hiroshima, Japan, and drop a single bomb that would help bring to a terrible climax a six-year-long war that destroyed the lives of sixty million people worldwide.

Eighth Air Force commander Maj. Gen. Carl “Tooey” Spaatz was on hand to watch the 97th take off, along with skeptical observers from the Royal Air Force and almost three dozen British and American reporters. “It would have been a hell of a time to blow a mission,” Tibbets said later. Tibbets was not flying his regular airplane, Red Gremlin, or with his regular crew, which included two of the men who would accompany him to Hiroshima on the Enola Gay: bombardier Thomas Ferebee and navigator Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk. His pickup crew had been chosen by the man sitting across from him in the cockpit of Butcher Shop, Col. Frank A. Armstrong, Jr., the 97th’s iron-willed commander. Armstrong’s crushing discipline had sharpened the fighting efficiency of the hastily trained crews that had been rushed to England the previous month. After the war, his friend Lt. Col. Beirne Lay, Jr., the air commander and popular writer who would make Buck Cleven famous for his courage under fire on the Regensburg mission, used Armstrong as his model for the lead character in Twelve O’ Clock High!, Gen. Frank Savage. In the novel and in the Hollywood film based on it, Savage, played by Gregory Peck, eventually cracks under the strain of command, but Armstrong never did. The men of the 97th both feared and idolized him. They called him “Butcher” and the truculent commander turned this into a compliment, naming his plane after his reputation.

At the briefing for the mission, Armstrong had told his crews that they were beginning a daylight bombing offensive that would steadily build in strength until it shattered the enemy’s will and ability to make war. This must have struck British observers in the room as empty bravado. At the time, the Eighth had fewer than a hundred bombers in England and their entry into the war had been delayed for seven weeks until Armstrong, under mounting pressure from Washington to get Americans into the fight, had finally pronounced his crews ready. They were not, and he knew it, but they would have to go. The Luftwaffe had been dropping taunting messages on the Eighth’s two tiny aerodromes at Grafton Underwood and nearby Polebrook, asking: “Where are the American bombers?” “Now they will find out,” Armstrong had told his fliers before sending them to their planes. “Stay close together up there and right on my tail and I assure you we’ll hurt the Hun and get back safely.” No one in the room doubted him.

Butcher Shop lifted off the runway at about three-thirty in the afternoon. Right behind it, in the lead plane of the second element of six Fortresses was Yankee Doodle. Seated in the plane’s radio cabin was Brig. Gen. Ira Eaker, head of the Eighth Air Force Bomber Command. A sharp-featured Texan with a winning smile, he had set a fistful of aviation records as a fighter pilot in the peacetime Army Air Corps but had never seen combat. His old friend and poker pal Tooey Spaatz had wanted to lead this historic mission, but he had been briefed on ULTRA, the code word used to identify the highly secret intelligence produced by decrypting enemy communications, and the Allied high command thought it too risky to send him over enemy territory, especially after what had happened the previous month.

On July 4, six crews from the Eighth Air Force’s 15th Bomb Squadron, a light-bomber outfit that had been sent to England in May to train on British planes, had joined an equal number of RAF crews on a low-level sweep of heavily defended German airfields in Holland. The raid had been ordered by Lt. Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces, and had the enthusiastic support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.¹ Arnold thought the Glorious Fourth would be an ideal day for America to strike its first blow against the Nazis, but Spaatz had no planes in England in the first week of July. The Independence Day crews had flown American-made Douglas A-20s that had been sold to the RAF and renamed Bostons. Two of the twelve Bostons with American crews, and one with a British crew, had failed to return, and USAAF Capt. Charles C. Kegelman had barely made it back in his badly shot-up aircraft.

Although this had technically been the Eighth’s first combat strike, it was, in Spaatz’s view, a propaganda stunt triggered by pressure exerted by the American and British press, who believed the home front in both countries needed a psychological boost. “The cameramen and newspapermen finally got what they wanted—and everybody seemed contented,” Spaatz had written sourly in his diary after pinning the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second highest award for gallantry, on Kegelman.

The Tibbets mission was different and far more important. The four-engine heavies, the heart of the Eighth’s bomber force, were going out for the first time, and at high altitude. This would be the initial test of the new form of warfare that Arnold, Spaatz, and Eaker had helped to develop. Air Corps strategists had been plotting and planning for years, and practice missions had been flown in the States, but now “[our] theory that day bombardment is feasible is about to be tested when men’s lives are put at stake,” Eaker wrote Arnold before the mission.

The target was a railroad marshaling yard near Rouen, the city in northwestern France where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. It was a “milk run,” a shallow penetration mission with fighter cover from British Spitfires going in and coming back, but Spaatz was concerned. Churchill had been pressuring Roosevelt to disband the newly established Eighth and have its bombers join the RAF in its night raids on the factory cities of the Ruhr. If the bombing was not good and Armstrong lost planes, the prime minister might get his way.

Standing with Spaatz on the observation deck of the control tower at Grafton Underwood, RAF officers looked on apprehensively. Flying in daylight on earlier strikes, their Wellington and Blenheim bombers had been shredded by German fighters. And the twenty Fortresses the Americans had sent the British the previous year had performed abysmally in combat. Spaatz, however, thought this an unfair test of a potentially war-winning weapon. For security reasons, the British Fortresses had not been equipped with the highly secret Norden bombsights, nor did they have the defensive firepower of the newest model B-17. And the British had flown them at excessively high altitudes to avoid flak, guaranteeing poor bombing accuracy and mechanical problems in the paralyzing cold above 30,000 feet. Still, the British remained unconvinced of the plane’s combat potential. As the twelve American Fortresses disappeared into the clouds above Grafton Underwood, an RAF flight lieutenant, a portly Scotsman, turned to the American officer standing next to him and said, “Laddie, ye’ll be bloody lucky if ye get one of them back!”

It was a smooth run to the big marshaling yard on the Seine, cloudless skies and no German fighters. On the return, the Fortresses ran into a few Messerschmitts, Me 109s, fast, powerfully armed single-seat fighter planes, but the Spitfires, their equals in combat, drove them off. Only one Me 109 came within range of the Forts and was nicked by a spray of machine gun fire from Birmingham Blitzkrieg. The enemy fighters “evidently had been reluctant to engage our Fortresses at close quarters,” Eaker would tell a credulous correspondent from Life magazine. “I can understand why. They had never seen our new B-17s before and the sight of big guns bristling from every angle probably gave the Nazis ample reason to be wary.”

Back at Grafton Underwood, Spaatz searched the skies for the returning planes. Any losses would be a setback, but the loss of one or both of his top commanders, Eaker and Armstrong, would be calamitous. Shortly before seven o’clock, black specks could be seen in the distance. Spaatz counted them: there were only eleven—but then a twelfth came suddenly into view. They were all back.

As the bombers swept low over the tiny, box-shaped control tower where the brass had regathered, the bombers’ freshly painted names were clearly visible on their nose sections: Baby Doll, Peggy D, Heidi Ho, Johnny Reb—great names for great planes. The high-spirited language matched the confidence of the crews, American boys too young and untested to be afraid. When the Fortresses touched down, the ground crews of the 97th rushed onto the field to greet the Rouen raiders. “Everyone was yelling, jumping like kids, slapping everybody else on the back,” recalled Air Force public relations officer William R. Laidlaw. Even the Scots RAF officer fell into the mood. “By God, what’d I tell ye!” he shouted from his perch on the tower. “No boogery Yank’ll ever miss his deener!”

When Yankee Doodle nosed onto its hardstand, Eaker slipped out of his flying clothes, lit a cigar, and went to meet the press. “One swallow does not make a summer,” he declared, but the big grin on his face told it all. He was clearly pleased with the results and happy, as well, to finally fly a combat mission. “Why, I never got such a kick out of anything in my life!” After reviewing the aerial photographs of the damage, he pronounced the bombing “exceptionally good” for untried crews. Colonel Armstrong was more exuberant. “We ruined Rouen,” he told reporters, thereby setting a standard of exaggeration that would mark official Air Force bombing reports for the remainder of the war.

Only one Fortress suffered flak damage and there were only two casualties, both of them caused by a single pigeon. It collided with the Plexiglas nose of a Fortress from a small formation of bombers sent out that same afternoon to divert German fighters from the main force. The impact shattered the Plexiglas nose, slightly injuring the navigator and the bombardier. Their surface cuts were the first blood spilled by American heavy-bomber crews in a campaign of nearly a thousand days that would result in the deaths of some 26,000 Eighth Air Force crewmen.

After their intelligence debriefing, the crews, still wearing their heavy flying clothing, met with reporters, reliving the mission “like a happy football team.” That night there was a “ ‘Saturday after the big game’ atmosphere on the base,” with the hero of the hour Staff Sergeant Kent West, the ball turret gunner of Birmingham Blitzkrieg, who was given credit for shooting down a German fighter. His claim was later changed to “damaged,” but Eaker would still send for his twin guns and mount them, like a deer’s antlers, on the wall of his headquarters at Wycombe Abbey, a converted girls school on an old estate in the town of High Wycombe, just west of London.

“It was a cakewalk,” said tavern keeper’s son Walt Kelley, who flew in Heidi Ho. “We were cocky when we took off and more so when we landed. There was lots of hoopla and queries from the press. Several planes buzzed the runway before landing.”

It would never be the same. A month later, when the Americans pushed beyond the range of the protecting Spitfires, enemy fighter pilots would begin blowing Eaker’s bombers out of the sky with alarming regularity. And some of the exuberant boys who had stood in the slop of “Grafton Undermud,” as they called their miserably drained base, toasting their first success, lay cold in their graves. Exactly a year to the day after the Rouen mission, five times as many American bombers and airmen would fall from the skies over Regensburg and Schweinfurt as had flown on that first strike from Grafton Underwood, the small airfield named after its neighbor, a Midland village of ninety-nine souls.

But in one important way, Rouen did turn out to be a harbinger. With this raid, the young men in the planes took over the burden of the American bomber war from the generals and their support staffs on the ground, the brass who picked the targets and plotted the missions. Before every raid, aircrews were exactingly briefed on the weather, on enemy defenses, and on the location of the targets, but once in the air the crews were in another world, on their own. “The most perfect plan could not succeed in the face of their failure,” said William Laidlaw.

Beginning in the early fall of 1942, American bomber crews learned to fight the air war by experience and experiment, every mission a learning exercise. It was a special kind of experience, different from that of the ground forces. Once sent into combat, bomber boys could not report back to headquarters with intelligence that might reconfigure the battle plan. The killing was too quick for that and too distant from central command. And there were no reinforcements; almost every mission was a maximum effort. The men who went in had to fight their way out. In the air the crews were alone, forced to make their own decisions if the mission’s master plan broke down, as it almost always did in the blinding chaos of combat. As Colonel Laidlaw wrote, “In a strategic air campaign, no military man—not even the most experienced air commanders with the best air staff on earth—could mark out the targets alone.” The weather, the mechanical condition of the planes, the weight of the opposition, the training and mental stability of the crews, and at least a dozen other variables determined what would be bombed and who would die, on the ground and in the air.

The infantry and Navy had centuries of accumulated experience to draw from in plotting battle strategy. Although primitive bomber aircraft had been employed by both sides in World War I, and although Japan, Germany, and Italy had used dive-bombers to terrorize cities and villages in China, Spain, and North Africa in the 1930s, no nation had ever fought a full-scale bomber war prior to World War II. As the novelist John Steinbeck wrote in 1942, “Of all branches of the Service, the Air Force must act with the least precedent, the least tradition.”

Col. Budd J. Peaslee, one of the legendary commanders of the Eighth, has argued that few great air leaders are recognized by historians because they rarely exercised command once their forces were airborne, and because a general’s decision never produced a decisive victory. In the Air Force, it was the skill and courage of small combat teams that made the difference in battle. “They had,” Peaslee wrote, “power and authority far beyond their age, rank and experience.”

“The attack on Rouen,” Gen. Hap Arnold announced the very next day, “verifies the soundness of our policy of precision bombing of strategic objectives rather than the mass (blitz) bombing of large, city-size areas.” He was getting ahead of himself. Daylight precision bombing would have to be proved on tougher missions, in vile weather and against determined opposition. The history of the American air war against Germany is the story of an experiment: the testing of a new idea of warfare that had been spun into dogma long before Paul Tibbets arrived in the United Kingdom. “The first bomb mission was little more than a gesture,” Budd Peaslee remarked, “yet it carried with it the hopes and dreams of two decades of American airmen.”

Command of the Air

In modern warfare there are two main types of aerial bombing—strategic and tactical. “Strategic bombing,” as defined by the Air Force, “strikes at the economy of the enemy; it attempts to cripple its war potential by blows at industrial production, civilian morale, and communications. Tactical bombardment is immediate air support of movements of air, land, or sea forces.” The Eighth Air Force would conduct both kinds of bombing, but at the start of the war its leaders hoped to commit it almost exclusively to strategic bombing.

Arnold, Eaker, and Spaatz were disciples of the late William “Billy” Mitchell, the founding father of American airpower. In 1927, when twelve-year-old Paul Tibbets made his maiden flight in an open-cockpit biplane piloted by a stuntman wearing a dashing white silk scarf and a tight-fitting leather helmet, Billy Mitchell was writing and lecturing about a terrifying, world-changing idea—bomber warfare. It was an idea that would lead to the theory of strategic bombing that Major Tibbets would first test in the skies over Rouen.

American airpower was born in World War I and Billy Mitchell was its prophet. He was the first American airman to arrive at the Western Front and fly over enemy lines, and the first of his countrymen to fully appreciate the destructive potential of bomber warfare. The son of a United States senator from Wisconsin and the grandson of a Gilded Age railroad king, Mitchell was a press agent’s dream—handsome, fearless, and flamboyant, a championship polo player who spoke flawless French and wore high cavalry boots and expensively tailored uniforms. He had quit college at age eighteen to fight in the Spanish-American War, and a decade later was writing exuberant reports urging the horse-drawn army he had served with in Cuba to develop a modern air arm. In 1916, the year he learned to fly at the late age of thirty-six, he was appointed chief of the U.S. Army Signal Corps’ tiny Aviation Section, the first American air force. Two years later, as a brigadier general, he organized and led the overseas section of the U.S. Army’s new Air Service, the larger organization that replaced the Aviation Section and was the predecessor of the even larger Army Air Corps, formed in 1926. In France, Mitchell would become a crack combat leader, audacious and innovative—and idolized by young fliers like Carl Spaatz, whom Mitchell would recommend for the Distinguished Service Cross after he downed three enemy planes. But it was as an advocate of new ideas about airpower that Mitchell would achieve his greatest fame.

His first experience in the war was the transforming event of his life. Living in the trenches with the infantry, he had an opportunity to fly over the enemy’s positions with a French pilot. “We could cross the lines of these contending armies in a few minutes in our airplane,” he wrote, “whereas the armies had been locked in the struggle, immobile, powerless to advance, for three years.” As Mitchell saw it, “the art of war had departed. Attrition, or the gradual killing off of the enemy, was all the ground armies were capable of.”

When Gen. John J. “Black Jack” Pershing arrived in France as commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, Mitchell approached him with a daring proposal: use airpower to strike the Germans behind their lines, knocking out airfields and sources of supply. Here was a way to use “the airplane for the [William Tecumseh] Sherman strategy of carrying war to the enemy’s economy and people,” wrote historian Russell F. Weigley. At first, Mitchell got nowhere with Pershing, who saw the infantry as the Queen of Battle and his pitifully small air force as a scouting and support arm of minimal military value. But in the last months of the war, when American airpower had been built up from nothing to something of consequence—750 planes, fully 10 percent of the Allied effort—Pershing allowed him to use massed Allied fighter and bomber forces to support two major infantry offenses at St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne. “The air offensive which Mitchell laid on in the Meuse-Argonne in September [1918] was the greatest thing of its kind seen in the war,” Hap Arnold wrote in his memoirs. “Until then, the air fighting had been chiefly between individual pilots. . . . [This] was the first massed air striking power ever.”

Arnold only wished he could have been there to see his friend pull it off. He had desperately wanted to be in the war. A West Point graduate, he was one of the Army’s first four licensed pilots, having been taught to fly by the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, at their Dayton, Ohio, flying school; and in 1912 he had won the highly prized Mackay Trophy for the outstanding military flight of the year. But as part of the Air Service’s headquarters staff, he had been considered too valuable as a war planner to send overseas. Friends called him “Hap,” short for Happy, because he had an enigmatic smile permanently fixed on his face, but that benign countenance hid a volcanic temper and a crusading desire to advance the cause of American military aviation. He was one of the first and most enthusiastic of Billy Mitchell’s supporters.

Arnold and Mitchell were both strongly influenced by Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard, the Royal Air Force’s founding father and first commander. World War I was preeminently a fighter pilot’s war, but Trenchard was a deep believer in bomber warfare, which he perceived as the future. When the Germans bombed London first with dirigibles (Zeppelins), then, in 1917, with twin-engine Gotha bombers, killing almost 1,400 people, Trenchard sent four-engine Handley Page bombers to attack Rhineland cities. In conversations with Trenchard at the front, Mitchell became convinced that America should have what the British had created after the bombing of London—an autonomous air force, equal in stature and power to the two other military services.

When the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, two days after the first squadron of American night bombers appeared at the front, Mitchell was laying plans for strategic assaults on the German homeland, using incendiary bombs and poison gas to destroy crops, forests, and livestock. “I was sure that if the war lasted, air power would decide it,” he wrote later.

Mitchell drew his ideas from many sources. One of them was the Italian air commander Gen. Giulio Douhet. Three years after Mitchell returned from the war, Douhet published his masterwork, The Command of the Air, a book that established him as the world’s leading proponent of airpower. Mitchell never read the book, but he may have read translated excerpts prepared by the War Department, and he corresponded with one of Douhet’s friends and countrymen, Gianni Caproni, a designer of bomber aircraft. Whatever the nature of the connection, Mitchell shared with Douhet a number of core assumptions about airpower. The experience of World War I was paramount; both sought to end long wars of attrition and close-quarter slaughter. They proposed to shorten war by returning the advantage to the offensive. Advances in the technology of killing—the machine gun, poison gas, and rifled artillery—had made infantry attacks on dug-in positions suicidal. The solution they arrived at independently was airpower—Winged Victory. Just as technology had swung the advantage to the defense, now it would favor the offense. The airplane, the greatest offensive weapon yet developed, would break the hegemony of the defense. At a time when German strategists, in reaction to the static war they had just lost, were secretly developing a new form of warfare based on quick-striking tanks and armored vehicles, Mitchell and Douhet were advancing ideas for blitzkrieg warfare from the skies.

Douhet insisted that future wars would be short, total, and “violent to a superlative degree.” They would be won from the skies with vast fleets of long-range bombers, with the winning side the one that attacked first and without cease, gaining command of the air, not primarily by destroying the enemy’s air force in combat but by destroying its airbases, communications, and centers of production. In Douhet’s words, “It is not enough to shoot down all birds in flight if you want to wipe out the species; there remain the eggs and the nests.” Destroying the eggs and the nests was strategic bombing, the only type of bombing Douhet favored.

Once command of the air was achieved by marauding bombers, not fighter planes, which, in Douhet’s view would be annihilated by new-age bombers, the main targets would be the enemy’s key industrial cities, not its armies in the field. Attacks on these vital centers would shatter civilian morale, destroy the enemy’s war-making capability, and produce a mercifully quick capitulation, without the need for either armies or navies. In the new warfare “the entire nation is or may be considered a combatant force,” Mitchell echoed Douhet. “War,” Douhet wrote, “is no longer a clash between armies, but is a clash between nations, between whole populations. Any distinction between belligerents and non-belligerents is no longer admissible . . . because when nations are at war, everyone takes a part in it: the soldier carrying his gun, the woman loading shells in a factory, the farmer growing wheat, the scientist in his laboratory.”

Douhet, a passionate fascist, put the case for total warfare in more implacable terms than Mitchell ever would. There was no place for morality in the new warfare; it would be swift slaughter without mercy or sentimentality. “The limitations applied to the so-called inhuman and atrocious means of war are nothing but international demagogic hypocrisies. . . . War,” he wrote, “has to be regarded unemotionally as a science, regardless of how terrible a science.” As a modern historian has written, “One senses [in Douhet’s work], the final and frightening abandonment by the soldier of any sense of responsibility for the political and social consequences of his military acts.”

For the first time in the history of modern armed conflict, civilians were singled out as deliberate military targets, not only because they were valuable producers, but also because they were easy to intimidate. Both Douhet and Mitchell were convinced that civilians lacked the fortitude to stand up to vertical warfare waged with high explosives, incendiaries, and poisonous gases, that generation’s equivalent, in terror-generating capacity, of atomic warfare. The evidence they had before them was the mass panic and terror in London and Cologne caused by World War I bombing attacks, air strikes far smaller than either of them envisioned in future wars. The new wars will be decided swiftly, Douhet argued, precisely because “the decisive blows will be directed at civilians, that element of the countries at war least able to sustain them.”

In one of Mitchell’s hair-raising scenarios—the bombing of New York City—deadly gases released by bombs fill the air and seep into the subways, triggering a massive evacuation of the city. When the refugees of New York and other large American cities that have been bombed are unable to obtain the essentials of life, the government is forced to capitulate.

To Douhet and Mitchell, quick wars meant reduced casualties. In becoming more terrible, warfare would actually become more humane. Better to decide a war by terrorizing the population with “a few gas bombs,” Mitchell wrote, than “the present methods of blowing people to bits by cannon projectiles or butchering them with bayonets.” Mitchell even suggested that future wars might be fought, not by large armies, but an elite cadre of aerial warriors, the modern equivalent of “the armored knights in the Middle Ages.” This, too, would save lives. And the very threat of total annihilation, he argued in anticipation of the Cold War proponents of nuclear deterrence, would prevent war from breaking out. “Air power has brought with it a new doctrine of war . . . and a new doctrine of peace.”

On this point, Douhet and Mitchell parted company. Douhet cast his arguments in dark Darwinian language. Warfare was in our blood and bones, part of our evolutionary makeup; peace was a pipe dream. Douhet advocated the “merciless pounding from the air [of] . . . very large centers of civilian population,” with the aim of destroying, not just factories and communications systems but all “social organization.”

For over a century, military theorists in the Western world had been under the spell of the Prussian writer Carl von Clausewitz, who argued that the supreme objective of warfare is the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces. Mitchell and Douhet challenged this iron dictum. A contemporary military observer has nicely encapsulated their thinking. “The history of civilized mankind shows us but three . . . revolutionary military inventions, or discoveries: discipline, gunpowder, and the airplane. . . . The airplane for the first time in the . . . history of human conflict, has given to warfare the means of striking . . . directly at the seat and source of [the enemy’s] power—at his citizenry, at his capital city, at his industrial, commercial, and political centers—without first having to overthrow the armed forces with which he seeks to protect them.”

Mitchell predicted that a nation prepared to build a massive bomber force to strike hard, continuous blows at an enemy’s economy and people would end the next war before its infantry or the Navy had an opportunity to enter the fight. He did not, however, envision precision bombing. High-altitude bombing would be highly inaccurate. To hit industrial targets, bombers would have to “drop their eggs well into the center of the towns,” in Air Marshal Trenchard’s phrase, killing not just factories but innocent civilians.

Mitchell promoted his ideas with crusading fervor, inside the military bureaucracy, as assistant chief of the Air Service, and outside it, in a stream of books, articles, and public lectures. Standing at a podium, he would use his gold-headed swagger stick to drive home his points; the “Napoleon of the Air,” the humorist Will Rogers called him. When Mitchell was opposed by the brass hats of both the Army and the Navy, who saw airpower—power in the third dimension—as a mere adjunct to traditional surface warfare, he attacked them with rancor, alienating the very powers he hoped to persuade.

Mitchell’s ideas on warfare ran ahead of their enabling technology; no bomber in planning, production, or use was capable of carrying out long-range strategic bombing. As one military expert explained in 1925, a bomber “can hit a town from ten thousand feet—if the town is big enough.” But Mitchell was a modern man, a technological enthusiast; American science and engineering, he was convinced, would soon develop the bomber that would make him a prophet.

Mitchell’s ideas ran into another obstacle, what one writer has called a “moral blockade.” Toward the end of World War I, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker had ordered the Air Service not to undertake an air assault that “has as its objective, promiscuous bombing upon industry, commerce or population.” Warring on civilians, Baker believed, violated long-standing religious and humanitarian ideals. Opinion polls conducted later showed the public in broad agreement. Most Americans were also weary of war and unwilling to support large government outlays for the military. So Mitchell had to shrewdly cast his arguments for an independent Air Force in the language of fiscal restraint and national defense. A large, land-based Air Force could defend the nation’s shores and its far-off bases in Alaska, Hawaii, and the Philippines more effectively and less expensively than the Navy, he claimed—the cost of one battleship equaling that of a thousand planes.

At the time, the prevailing military orthodoxy was that an airplane could not sink a battleship. Seeing this as archaic nonsense, Mitchell pressured his supporters in Congress to force the Navy to conduct a series of tests. In the most spectacular one, in July 1921, his small air fleet used six 2,000-pound bombs to send the captured German battleship Ostfriesland to the bottom of the waters off the Virginia Capes. The Navy called the test unfair; the anchored ship, with its guns muffled, was a sitting duck. And with General Pershing heading the fight against an independent Air Force, Mitchell got nowhere with the Army. Nonetheless, he continued to press his case with such vehemence that the Army refused to reappoint him as assistant chief of the Air Service, and in 1925, transferred him to a base in out-of-the-way San Antonio, where one wall of his office was an open latrine for clerks. “Mitchell’s stay in Texas,” wrote one historian, “was a little like Napoleon’s exile to Elba. He plotted and planned to continue the fight.” But unlike the little emperor, he could not keep quiet, “even out in the sagebrush.” When he blamed two terrible military air accidents on the incompetence and “criminal negligence” of the Navy and War Departments, he provoked the court-martial that would serve as a national forum for his ideas. “He wouldn’t rest, until he became a martyr,” said Hap Arnold, who had recently become the Air Service’s chief public relations officer.

At the sensational seven-week-long trial, Spaatz and Arnold put their careers on the line by testifying on Mitchell’s behalf; and Ira Eaker, who had some legal training, helped shape the defense. All three of them revered the vainglorious air commander, despite his excesses. Airmen further down the chain of command supported Mitchell’s ideas about airpower, although a few, like Lt. James H. Doolittle, felt his stridency hurt his cause. “Like all zealots, he was intolerant of any view other than his own,” Doolittle wrote later.

Mitchell was convicted of making insubordinate public statements and was suspended from duty for five years. But his ideas meant more to him than his military career. He resigned his commission to continue his public fight for an independent, offensive-minded Air Force. Inside the corridors of power he depended on loyalists like Hap Arnold to continue to lead the “battle of ideas” that pitted younger flying officers against the entrenched powers in the War Department.

Arnold and his band of mavericks—the Bomber Mafia, as they have been called—were bound together by their devotion to Mitchell and their pure love of the air. They were aerial pioneers who made a succession of record-setting flights, widely publicized exploits that did as much as Mitchell’s writings to prove the potential of the military airplane. In 1929, Spaatz and Eaker were half of the crew of a Trimotor plane, Question Mark, which used the revolutionary technique of midair refueling to set a world endurance record, remaining airborne for over 150 hours. Seven years later, flying with a hood over his cockpit, Ira Eaker was the first pilot to make a transcontinental flight on instruments alone. This experience would make him a better bomber commander in the coming war, when his planes were forced to fly in one of the most capricious weather systems in the world.

Not to be outdone by his younger friends, Hap Arnold, at age forty-eight, led ten two-engine bombers on a 1934 nonstop flight from Washington state to Alaska and back, an astonishing feat at a time when there were almost no air routes over the trackless subarctic mountains. The next year he was promoted to brigadier general and command of the Air Corps’ chief combat outfit, the 1st Bombardment Wing, at March Field, California. All the while, he and Eaker, who had taken courses in journalism at the University of Southern California, co-authored three books on airpower, which bore the strong stamp of Mitchell’s influence. As a newspaper had predicted at the time of Mitchell’s court-martial, “ ‘Mitchellism’ will remain after . . . Mitchell has gone.”

The Bomber Mafia

When Billy Mitchell died in 1936, his reputation lived on in the lectures of the instructors at the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field, in Montgomery, Alabama. This was the first professional school for aviators and aviation planners in the world, and it became a nurturing center for the newest thinking about strategic bombing. “We are not concerned with fighting the past war,” Lt. Col. Harold L. George, the faculty’s leading bomber theorist, described the school’s mission to his students. “We are concerned . . . in determining how air power will be employed in the next war.” In their dealings with the War Department, air commanders continued to speak of the bomber as a defensive weapon, but at Maxwell Field the ideas of the offense prevailed. It was Mitchellism with a difference. Colonel George and his colleagues rejected Mitchell’s and Douhet’s idea that bombing would have a greater impact on morale than production. And while Mitchell and Douhet called for the destruction of the enemy’s pivotal economic centers, the only target they had precisely identified was a country’s aircraft industry. What were the critical strong points in a modern industrial nation’s infrastructure, and how could they be taken out? The air visionaries at Maxwell Field addressed these questions directly. In doing so, they came up with something new and expressly American: daylight precision bombing.

They fashioned their new “philosophy” of warfare even before the Air Corps began secretly testing the invention that made it possible. This was the Norden bombsight, America’s most important secret weapon before the Manhattan Project. It was first developed in 1931 for sea-based naval aircraft by a reclusive Dutch engineer, Carl L. Norden. His wife teased him, calling him a “merchant of death,” but Norden claimed he was trying to save lives by making bombing more precise. Two years after the Navy began testing the bombsight, the Army ordered it for aircraft engaged in coastal defense, eventually spending approximately $1.5 billion—65 percent of the cost of the Manhattan Project—to purchase 90,000 of them. When air crews of Hap Arnold’s 1st Bombardment Wing tested it in the clear, dry skies over California’s Mojave Desert, they were amazed by its accuracy.

Here was the technological breakthrough the faculty at Maxwell Field had been hoping for. Carl Norden’s gyroscope-stabilized instrument, which computed drift and dropping angle, would make high-altitude bombing both more effective and more humane, they began arguing in 1935, the year they learned of it. But there was a problem. The War Department envisioned the Norden bombsight as a defensive weapon; it was to be installed solely in bombers guarding the North American coastline from a naval-based invasion. The Bomber Mafia had other ideas. Cities could now be bombed with surgical precision, they argued, targeting only key economic sites such as electric power plants and oil refineries. This upended Billy Mitchell’s argument that high-altitude bombing would have to be indiscriminate. “The idea of killing thousands of men, women, and children [is] basically repugnant to American mores,” wrote Major Haywood S. Hansell, one of the bright lights at Maxwell—and later a bomber strategist and combat commander in the war. Hansell added tellingly, however, that killing civilians was also militarily ineffective. People were poor targets for bombs because they had, contrary to Douhet and Mitchell, stoic staying power. They could also be evacuated from cities or find protection in public bomb shelters, whereas industries were fragile, immobile, and virtually indefensible.² This was warfare suited to the American character. “[It] combined moral scruples, historical optimism, and technological pioneering, all three distinctly American characteristics,” wrote historian John Keegan.

Forbidden by the War Department from studying the economies of other nations, and prevented by their budget from hiring trained economists, the ascendant theorists at Maxwell—Donald Wilson, Kenneth Walker, Harold George, Muir Fairchild, and Haywood Hansell—did their own close-in analysis of the American industrial system. This led to an Air Plan based on the idea of “industrial webs,” a strategy they would later have the opportunity to implement as members of Hap Arnold’s wartime planning staff.

Modern industrial states, they theorized, were highly vulnerable to air attack because their economies formed a delicate, interconnected fabric or web. A relentless precision bombing campaign needed to hit only those industries that made products, or supplied services, essential to almost all other industries. Destroy an enemy’s “choke points”—its steel, electric power, ball bearing, oil, and railroad industries—and its entire war economy would collapse, making continued military resistance untenable.

Japan and Germany were expected to be America’s enemies in the next war, so it was important, the Bomber Mafia argued, to find bases in countries of likely allies, like China and England, from which to launch a strategic bombing campaign. This campaign would begin in the earliest months of the war and build to full strength within two years, the time it would take to fully mobilize America’s prodigious productive power. In early 1935, without a plane—or a war—to test it, the theory was pure vision and speculation. Later that year, the Air Corps got its plane. Six years later, it got its war.

In 1927, General Douhet had written that “the true combat plane, able to impose its will upon the enemy, had not yet been invented; nor does it seem likely it will be soon.” In the 1930s the Air Corps had set out to prove him wrong. Under contract with the Army, the Boeing Airplane Company of Seattle, Washington, took on a project that many aviation engineers thought unfeasible: developing an all-metal monoplane that was both large and fast, one that proved that size does not necessarily compromise aerodynamic efficiency. Boeing’s answer was the B-17 Flying Fortress (model 299). While previous American bombers had two engines, the prototype Fortress of 1935 had four 750 horsepower radial engines, which made it faster than any American fighter plane. The final production model, the B-17G, introduced in the war in 1943, had four 1,200 horsepower engines, carried a normal bomb load of 4,000 pounds, flew, fully loaded, at between 150 and 250 miles per hour at 25,000 feet, and had a combat radius of 650 to 800 miles, depending on the size of the bomb load. It was an elegantly engineered aircraft, suggesting both power and movement. Menacing-looking on the ground, it was beautiful to watch in the air.

The first silver Fortresses arrived at the Air Corps’ bombardier training group at Langley Field, Virginia, not far from the capital, in early 1937, a year after Hap Arnold returned to Washington as assistant to the chief of the Air Corps. A flexible man, more a fixer than an ideologue, Arnold’s stormy days with Billy Mitchell had taught him to be more diplomatic in his relations with the War Department, where he had built friendships with superiors, who had helped him get this position. The first time Arnold flew the new bomber, he fell in love with it. Unlike the “abstract science at the Air Corps Tactical School,” this was “air power that you could put your hand on.” In its later combat-developed form, with up to thirteen .50 caliber Browning machine guns, eight of them mounted in movable turrets, it was a fearsome war machine. Equipped with the Norden bombsight and a new automatic pilot system developed in the 1930s, it was the plane that could give weight to the Bomber Mafia’s ideas. But only if they could convince the War Department to use it offensively, and not strictly to protect America’s airspace and sea approaches.

The introduction of the B-17 solidified the idea of the bomber’s impregnability, which had been a central tenet of Douhet’s work. But what if the enemy developed an air defense system capable of inflicting unacceptable punishment on the unescorted Fortresses? Why didn’t Air Corps planners push for the development of a long-range fighter escort? One reason was a failure of imagination. The Bomber Mafia failed to foresee that radar, then being developed by eight countries, including the United States, as a means of early warning against air attack, would soon be widely employed for military detection. Their thinking on fighter escorts went like this: with the entire ether to fly through, bombers would be almost impossible to detect before they reached their target; and near the target they would be flying at altitudes above the range of enemy ground guns, and in self-protecting formations that would be too formidable for enemy fighters to penetrate. “A well-planned and well-conducted air attack, once launched, cannot be stopped,” declared Air Corps Tactical School instructor Kenneth Walker. Haywood Hansell took a more realistic approach, at least admitting the possibility that an enemy’s air defenses might prove successful against a bomber invasion. If that happened, those defenses, he argued, would have to be broken by direct air combat and by air attacks on fighter bases, aircraft factories, and sources of aviation fuel. That meant knocking out the Luftwaffe in a brutal head-to-head confrontation, with the bombers bearing the burden of the fight, “seeking attrition through air combat.” In the contested skies over Germany, the Flying Fortress would have to live up to its name.

The bomber enthusiasts had another argument against developing long-range escorts. Since the B-17 was faster than any fighter plane in operation in 1935, equipping fighters with additional gas tanks for long-range escort duty would reduce their speed and maneuverability, making them incapable of keeping up with the bombers and leaving them unable to defend themselves against lighter, faster fighter planes. Developing a high-speed fighter with the range of a bomber was considered an engineering impossibility. “We just closed our minds to [long-range escorts]; we couldn’t be stopped; the bomber was invincible,” Gen. Laurence S. Kuter observed in a refreshingly candid postwar interview.

Money was another factor. With Congress and the War Department initially willing to order only thirteen B-17s, to push for pursuit planes would have jeopardized the bomber program that the Air Corps counted on as “an excuse for existence,” in Maj. Donald Wilson’s apt phrase.

If airpower theorists like Wilson and Kuter had studied the life and work of Billy Mitchell more closely, they might have paid more attention to the role of fighter aircraft in bomber warfare, not only as escorts but also in pursuit. In World War I, Mitchell and other air commanders at the front realized that no aerial operation—tactical, strategic, or reconnaissance—was possible without mastery of the air. “For Mitchell an air force’s first task,” historian Williamson Murray pointed out, “should be destruction of the enemy’s air force, particularly his pursuit aircraft; not until one had achieved that goal could an air force turn against other targets. Thus, the enemy fighter force was the essential target.” Accordingly, Mitchell called for a balanced air force made up of at least 60 percent fighter aircraft.

Air supremacy achieved by fighter aircraft was the prerequisite for a successful bombing offensive. In the coming European war, it would take American Air Force leaders more than a year and near paralyzing loss rates to absorb this lesson. But the Bomber Mafia did work mightily in the late 1930s to encourage the development of something overlooked by both Mitchell and Douhet—a military-industrial complex committed to the production of staggering numbers of warplanes.

Clouds of Planes

In the summer of 1937 the Air Corps was fighting desperately, often despairingly, for funds to buy greater numbers of B-17s. At the time it had only seven B-17s on the runway at Langley under the command of Carl Spaatz. One year later, Munich changed everything.

After Hitler annexed Austria, he demanded the ethnically German province of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. At the Munich conference of September 29–30, 1938, Britain and France abandoned Czechoslovakia to her fate. “[I bring you] peace with honor,” Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said famously upon his return to London. “I believe it is peace for our time.”

Less than two months later, Franklin Roosevelt, a devoted Navy man, came out for a stupendous expansion of American airpower, urging immediate action to increase production of every type of warplane, for America’s own use as well as for shipment to threatened France and England. Only thousands of bombers, he was convinced, would impress Hitler and shield America’s shores and strategic possessions, including the Panama Canal and the Philippines, from air- and sea-based attacks from Japan and bases in the Western hemisphere that Germany might seize in the near future. After the Munich capitulation, Roosevelt was “sure . . . that we were going to get into the war” and “that air power would win it,” said Harry Hopkins, his chief aide. But like most Americans, Roosevelt insisted that air war should be conducted with moral restraint. When war finally broke out in Europe in 1939, he would appeal to both sides to refrain from “ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population.” Churchill agreed, and so, treacherously, did Hitler, even as his Luftwaffe was about to begin bombing the center of Warsaw.

In the month of the Munich crisis, Hap Arnold became chief of the Army Air Corps and immediately elevated Spaatz and Eaker to positions of influence at headquarters. They had won the “battle of the White House,” he told his planning staff; now they had to win the battle of production. Arnold headed this fight with vigor and imagination. He was a fine leader “in an inspiring sense,” recalls Robert A. Lovett, the Wall Street financier who became the new secretary of war for air. “There was something flamboyant, almost boyish, about his enthusiasms.” Arnold’s guiding dictum was carved in a wooden plaque that sat prominently on his desk. “The difficult we do today. The impossible takes a little longer.” He had learned this, he told people, from the Wright brothers.

A smooth and smiling diplomat with his superiors, Arnold could be distant and brutally difficult with those who served under him. He was a driven man, “ruthlessly” impatient with failure, like his stern father, an Ardmore, Pennsylvania, physician. Arnold was famous for his withering harangues. The target at one staff meeting was Steve Ferson, a lower-level staff officer. Ferson turned crimson and began to sweat profusely as Arnold screamed in his face. Grabbing his chest, he dropped dead of a massive heart attack on the carpet in front of the general’s desk. After he was carried off, Arnold told everyone to go home for the rest of the day, but he stayed at his desk, working alone. “Most of the rest of us,” said Laurence Kuter, “went to our desks also.”

Arnold would suffer five heart attacks himself, the last of them fatal. Some his staff called their fast-acting boss a “slave driver,” but those closest to him understood his urgency. The Air Corps had “to be built in time to forestall disaster in Europe and the Pacific,” said Kuter. “As the leader, no-one worked under the pressure he did. He took the brunt of the demands of the president, Harry Hopkins, and the White House staff, as well as other high outside agencies.”

To win these battles Arnold developed alliances in the business and scientific communities, in Hollywood, in Congress, and in the White House, where his old friend Gen. George C. Marshall was put in charge of building a large, modern army to meet the Axis threat. And it was comforting to him to have Carl Spaatz at his elbow, as his chief of staff. Spaatz was born and raised in Boyertown, Pennsylvania, not far from Arnold’s hometown. Though the two men remained lifelong friends, they were polar opposites. Lt. Gen. Elwood R. “Pete” Quesada, who served under both of them in World War II, compared them: “Spaatz was a . . . plotter [and] planner. . . . He wouldn’t get into trouble. Arnold, on the other hand, was a dynamic doer . . . always trying something new. . . . He had some new project every day. . . . Spaatz was a thoughtful guy, whereas Arnold was the agitating guy and that’s what made him such a marvelous chief. [Without him] we would never have had the Air Force.” But without Spaatz as a counterbalance, Arnold might never have gotten as far as he did. “Spaatz got along with people better than Arnold.” A “modest” man, “he engendered confidence because he was so damn stable.”

Spaatz loved poker, bridge, Cuban cigars, and Kentucky whiskey. At bright-spirited parties at Arnold’s home, he would get out his guitar and launch into his bottomless repertoire of risqué songs. When he was finished, he would go off in a corner and puff on his stogie. “I never learned anything when I was talking,” he would tell people. Arnold and Spaatz “adored each other,” said Quesada. “They matched each other and were a real team, even though Arnold [would] exaggerate . . . the potential of airpower, whereas Spaatz was not inclined toward exaggerating anything.” But the real difference between them, Quesada shrewdly noted, was that Spaatz “was more wise than decisive. Arnold was more decisive than wise.”

In 1938, the Army Air Corps had “plans but not planes.” In May 1940, with France about to fall to the Nazis, Roosevelt called for an annual output of 50,000 planes, imploring the aircraft industry to expand its normal capacity of 2,000 a year to more than 4,000 a month. Congress quickly provided the funding. In Arnold’s words, “In forty-five minutes I was given $1,500,000,000 and told to get an air force.” At the time of the Munich crisis, the American air force, with 1,200 combat aircraft and 22,700 officers and enlisted men, was twentieth in size in the world. By December 1941, it had almost 340,000 officers and enlisted personnel and almost 3,000 combat planes. The newest of them was the B-24 Liberator, which flew faster, further, and carried a larger bomb load than the more rugged and maneuverable B-17. By 1944, mass production and mass education—areas in which this country had long led the world—would give the United States the greatest air force on earth, with 80,000 planes and 2.4 million fliers and support personnel, 31 percent of total Army strength. It was a force larger than the entire combat army that General Pershing had commanded in World War I. In March 1944, American factories poured out over 9,000 military planes, over twice the number Roosevelt had requested in 1940, an estimate that was considered “fantastically impossible” at the time by both Hitler and most of the president’s advisors. “Never before or since,” wrote one of Arnold’s biographers, “has a military machine of such size and technological complexity been created in so short a period”; and it was built through a close partnership between business and government that was not possible in the highly militarized Nazi state. Arnold “provided the leadership, the fire, the push behind it all,” said Lovett. But the pace of production was not quick enough to manufacture a sizable bomber fleet by 1942. And with the first burst of expansion, from 1938 to 1942, came an unavoidable watering down of production and training standards that would affect crew and plane performance in the first year of combat operations.

On June 20, 1941, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson officially established the Army Air Forces; and with Arnold eventually serving on both the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and the British-American Combined Chiefs of Staff, the Air Force acquired a good measure of independence from the ground forces. With this came presidential authority to draw up its own production blueprint for the fast approaching war. In August 1941, during nine days of furious effort, four former Maxwell Field instructors—Harold George, Kenneth Walker, Laurence Kuter, and Haywood Hansell—drafted a document, Air War Plans Division-1, which “read like a Tactical School lecture.” AWPD-1 forecast with uncanny accuracy the number of men and machines it would take to win an air war against Germany, and it went beyond production planning to boldly establish the Air Force’s supreme mission in the war: “to conduct a sustained and unremitting air offensive against Germany and Italy, to destroy their will and capability to continue the war, and to make an invasion either unnecessary or feasible without excessive cost.” Predictably, Harold George and his planning team gave the development of a long-range fighter escort low priority. The escort they called for, moreover, was the wrong type—a large, heavily armed war ship, a Flying Fortress without the bombs.

When Marshall and Stimson endorsed the plan, the Army Air Forces finally gained official acceptance of strategic bombing. It had achieved what Arnold called its “Magna Carta.”

There were problems ahead, however. Air Force planners based their war-winning strategy on practice bombing runs flown in cloudless weather, at low altitudes, and without even simulated resistance. In Command Decision, his brilliant post-war novel about the Eighth Air Force, William Wister Haines, who served as a staff officer with the Eighth, wrote that precision bombing, as envisioned in 1941, “could no more end wars than a doctor can confer immortality.” It was, at best, an unproven “therapy.” More than that, it had become dogma, not just untested but unquestioned orthodoxy, a doctrine that would lead to unnecessary losses of men and planes in the first year and a half of bombing operations over the Reich, when American bomber crews experienced a type of air war unforeseen by the Bomber Mafia.

1. On June 20, 1941, the U.S. Army Air Corps (USAAC) had become the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF). To avoid awkward and sometimes confusing phrasing, I have generally used the term “Air Force” instead of the correct term, Air Forces. If it’s the formal full name, Army Air Forces, I of course leave it plural.

2. By 1943, German industry was resilient, mobile, and powerfully defended.