Chapter 2: Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

Eaker’s Amateurs

“It is summer and there is war all over the world.”

BERT STILES, PILOT, EIGHTH AIR FORCE

Washington, D.C., December 1941

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor “shook the United States as nothing had since the firing on Fort Sumter,” wrote historian Samuel Eliot Morison. Republicans and Democrats, interventionists and isolationists, labor and capital, closed ranks, and the nation moved from peace to war with a unity that it had never known before in time of crisis. On December 8, President Roosevelt appeared before a joint session of the Congress to ask for a declaration of war against Japan. Congress responded with only a single dissenting vote. Three days later, Germany declared war on the United States, a decision more calamitous for its cause than its invasion of Russia the previous June.

At the Arcadia Conference, a high-level Anglo-American meeting convened at the White House that December, Churchill and Roosevelt endorsed the “defeat Germany first” strategy they had tentatively agreed to earlier and called for an immediate buildup of American airpower in Britain. The following month, Hap Arnold created the Eighth Air Force and appointed Spaatz to head it and Eaker to command its bombardment force. The three friends would run the European bomber war that they had been preparing for since the Munich crisis.

Spaatz—a West Point graduate, decorated combat flier, and Arnold’s closest friend—was a predictable choice. Eaker was a surprise. The son of struggling Texas sharecroppers, he had entered the Signal Corps in 1917 after graduating from Southeastern Normal School in Durant, Oklahoma, too late to see combat. Although he had flown a number of record-smashing Air Corps test flights in the 1930s, his experience was solely with fighter planes. But he was Arnold’s protégé and co-author, and Arnold knew he would strike at the enemy like a pit viper. “I want . . . the fighter spirit in bombardment,” he told Eaker on giving him his new command.

A short, square-jawed, balding man, Eaker spoke so softly he could barely be heard, but he was ferociously ambitious and had advanced on his own merits in the smothering culture of West Point favoritism. He was an accomplished writer and speaker; and with his courtly manner and soft Texas accent, he was a born-to-the-saddle diplomat, a skill he would need in sensitive dealings with the Royal Air Force. The British had seen their own, and Germany’s, daylight bombing effort fail, and wanted either to absorb the Eighth Air Force into their Bomber Command’s night force or have the Americans send them bombers to be flown by England’s own battle-seasoned crews. Eaker had served briefly in England in 1941 as an observer of RAF operations against the Luftwaffe and had built close friendships with British flight officers and government ministers. He knew how persuasive the British could be, but he was sworn to keep the Eighth an independent command.

Haywood Hansell and his fellow air war planners had warned General Arnold that America would not have the planes and personnel needed to begin sustained strategic bombing until late 1943. And Spaatz cautioned Gen. George Marshall, America’s chief war strategist, not to commit the force Eaker would be building in England before it was able to deliver decisive blows. But in early 1942, with Japan sweeping through Southeast Asia and the lightning-quick German army driving deeply into Russia and across North Africa toward the Suez Canal, it “looked,” Arnold wrote later, “as if the Allies were losing the war.” So Marshall ordered Arnold to immediately send what heavy bombers he had available to Britain. They were not expected to undertake the all-out assault on the German war machine that the Bomber Mafia envisioned. Their mission was to help prepare the way for a cross-Channel invasion of Nazi-occupied France. This was to occur in the fall of 1942, if Russia collapsed, but more likely the following spring. General Marshall, the most passionate proponent of an Anglo-American invasion of northern France—“our shortest route to the heart of Germany”—told Eaker that his bombers and fighter escorts had one year to achieve air supremacy over Northern Europe. “I do not believe a cross-Channel invasion of Europe will ever be possible until the Luftwaffe is destroyed,” he said. “Do your plans provide that?” Eaker assured him that they did and that the skies over the invasion beaches would be swept clean of German planes if he was given men and machines sufficient to the task.

On February 4, 1942, Ira Eaker and six staff officers left for their new assignment in England. Carl Spaatz stayed behind in Washington to oversee the preparation and dispatch of the first planes and crews of the Eighth, including its Fighter Command, headed by Brig. Gen. Frank “Monk” Hunter, a decorated World War I ace. When they were ready to be shipped out he would accompany them to England. This left the task of building an entire air force on foreign soil to a newly minted forty-five-year-old general whose largest command up to then was a fighter unit of 1,500 men. Eaker’s charge was daunting: to establish a headquarters operation, secure airbases and work closely with the RAF to assemble the airpower infrastructure essential to Eighth Air Force bombing operations. Eaker would increase the size of the Eighth Air Force in England from seven men and no planes in February 1942 to 185,000 men and 4,000 planes by December 1943.

In 1942, the largest American corporation was General Motors, with 314,000 employees in 112 production plants. Eaker’s job was comparable to building this gargantuan automobile enterprise from scratch in less than two years. “Few men who are thought of as industrial giants ever put a major organization together as fast as the Eighth was formed,” wrote Eaker’s aide, James Parton. “And there was the added element of inspiring the crews to risk their lives; it was not just getting a large factory ready to make and sell automobiles.”

Hap Arnold didn’t make Eaker’s task any easier, keeping the best minds in the Air Force on his own Washington-based staff. “You assemble some bright young civilians . . . and train them and I will commission them in any grade you ask,” he told Eaker. “You can take a smart executive and make a fair Army officer out of him in a few months. You can never take a dumb Army officer and make a good combat leader out of him.”

Only two of Eaker’s initial staff was regular Army: Lt. William S. Cowart, Jr., a young fighter pilot who had served under him in the 20th Pursuit Squadron, and Col. Frank Armstrong, Jr., an old and trusted friend who became Eaker’s executive officer. Three staff members were plucked from the Army reserves: Beirne Lay, Jr., a Yale graduate who had retired from the Army Air Corps in the 1930s to pursue a full-time career as a writer, and two executives from the Sperry Gyroscope Corporation, Harris B. Hull and Hull’s friend Frederick W. Castle, a West Point graduate and, like Hull, an experienced pilot. The final member of the staff was a freshly commissioned Major, Peter Beasley, a Lockheed Aircraft executive.

Later, Hull and Castle did some recruiting of their own, almost entirely from civilian ranks: journalists, lawyers, businessmen, editors, and newspaper and publishing executives, among them Eaker’s editor at Harper’s, an editor at the Saturday Evening Post, and Parton, a Time magazine editor and executive who would join Eaker in England that spring. Dubbed “Eaker’s Amateurs” by their doubting RAF hosts, they formed a surprisingly capable headquarters staff, and two of them, Armstrong and Castle, became excellent combat commanders.

The original seven almost didn’t make it to England. With no Air Force planes available, they flew first to Portugal, a neutral country, on the Pan American Clipper, a four-engine Boeing flying boat. From there they planned to travel to England on a transport operated by the Dutch airline, KLM, now under the control of the Netherlands government in exile in London. Landing in Lisbon, they saw Luftwaffe planes parked wingtip to wingtip on the runway, and the city was swarming with Nazi undercover agents. “We had been warned [about this],” Eaker recalls. “We were sent in civilian clothes and told to carry no papers of any kind. . . . All of our directives were in our heads.” Before leaving the Metropole hotel for dinner, Eaker’s group rearranged the contents of their suitcases. When they returned to their rooms that evening, they discovered that their luggage had been searched, probably by Gestapo agents. Two days later, at five o’clock in the morning, a Dutch pilot led them aboard a KLM DC-3 transport. Everyone was on edge, knowing that the waters of the Bay of Biscay were being heavily patrolled by German warplanes. The Gestapo knew they were in Lisbon, heading for London. Would Hermann Göring’s airmen be ordered to shoot them down?

A half-hour after takeoff, the Dutch pilot made an unscheduled landing at Porto, in northern Portugal. Calling Eaker to the cabin, he informed him that a German plane had been shadowing them. After waiting an hour or so, he took off. Flying far out on the Bay of Biscay to avoid detection, he again summoned Eaker forward and pointed to a German bomber bearing in on them. The Dutch pilot “jockeyed slightly from one side to the other in an effort to throw off the aim of the German if he opened up on us,” Frank Armstrong recalls. “At that opportune time Lady Luck took a hand in the affair. One engine of the German plane belched a blob of smoke,” and when the pilot cut off the engine he was thrown off course. “The fighter bomber passed under us at about 800 yards and headed for land and a place of safety. Our pilot came out of his compartment, turned his coat collar up high under his eyes and peeped at the passengers. For the next few seconds everyone was silent—silent in prayer of thanksgiving.”

Later that day, they reached England. The aircraft log read, “Arrived at destination: flight uneventful.” A year later, the Germans shot down a commercial plane over the Bay of Biscay, the second reported attack the Luftwaffe had made on airliners flying out of Lisbon. The plane was carrying thirteen passengers, among them the English actor Leslie Howard. There were no survivors.

On arriving in London, Eaker’s party was taken on a drive through the battered but defiant metropolis. The German Blitz, eight months of fire and fear in 1940 and ’41, had killed some 30,000 Londoners and left another 50,000 injured. And on far fronts, the war was going disastrously for the Allies. In Libya, British forces had been soundly defeated by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s desert army; in Russia, the Red Army had been pushed back to Moscow and Leningrad; and in the Philippines, a starving, undermanned American force under Lt. Gen. Douglas C. MacArthur was making its final stand in the mountain jungles of Bataan. On February 15, five days before Eaker arrived in London, Singapore, the bastion of Occidental power in the Far East, fell to the Japanese.

For Britain, these were the bleakest months of the war. Even America’s entry into the conflict, which Churchill happily saw as an assurance that “England would live” and that Germany and Japan “would be ground to powder,” had failed to excite English public opinion. Londoners scorned America for being caught napping at Pearl Harbor and carped about it coming into the war so late.

For Eaker and his group, it was a shock to be in a country under siege; none of them had realized how pinched life had become in Great Britain. Meat, fish, vegetables, jam, margarine, eggs, condensed milk, breakfast cereal, cheese, and biscuits were severely rationed, along with clothing, soap, and coal for home heating. No one was starving, but rationing had reduced everyone to a monotonous, starchy diet that sapped vitality.

Eaker and his tiny staff had left an America that was not yet prepared for total war. England was fully mobilized, almost a garrison state. Able-bodied men and women between the ages of eighteen and sixty were required to perform national service of some kind. Childless women between the ages of twenty and thirty were conscripted for home-front military service or jobs in munitions industries, the first time this had been done in any Western nation. In no combatant country except Russia were civilians subjected to a greater degree of government regulation and compulsory mobilization. Women operated antiaircraft batteries in London, and factories all over the country worked around the clock, seven days a week, with workers putting in ten-to-twelve-hour shifts.

England had the look of a country fighting for survival. Hundreds of thousands of working-class families, 60 percent of them in London, had had their places of residence damaged or destroyed by Nazi warplanes and countless thousands of them were still mourning the loss of family and friends. German air raids had already killed nearly 43,000 British civilians. Not until the fourth year of the war would the Germans kill more British soldiers than British women and children. “This is a war of the unknown warriors,” Churchill declared. “The whole of the warring nations are engaged, not only soldiers, but the entire population, men, women and children.”

It was a people’s war, but the people were weary. “What a different London from last year, when people were keyed up by raids and threats and filled with recklessness, very gay and smart,” a British woman wrote in her diary. Families went to bed early because of crippling cuts in electrical service and coal deliveries, and at night the streetlights were left unlit and windows were covered with blackout curtains. Even when the sun occasionally showed its face, “people rarely smile.”

On the dreary Sunday that Ira Eaker and his staff made their way through London in an RAF staff car, they passed through bombed-out neighborhoods in the East End, near the city’s major docks. The American newspaperman Harrison Salisbury “didn’t understand how air power worked,” he wrote in his journal, until he took a bus to a street fair in this neighborhood, the most heavily bombed area of the city. “All around [was] the desert left by the bombers.” Salisbury had met General Spaatz in Washington and had gone to house parties where he and other Air Force generals talked far into the night about war-winning airpower. This was Salisbury’s first face-to-face confrontation with “successful bomb warfare. I understood now what Tooey Spaatz was talking about. This is what they wanted to do to Germany.”

More accurately, this is what Britain decided it must do to Germany. At first, the only thing the RAF had dropped on German civilians were leaflets urging them to rise up against their tyrannical rulers. Bombing operations were severely limited and confined largely to airfields and maritime shipping. And they were conducted in daylight by small numbers of obsolete twin-engine bombers. British leaders feared that terror bombing German cities would provoke Luftwaffe reprisal raids on London and concerned, as well, that the RAF did not yet possess sufficient bombers and crews to damage German production or morale. Better to build and conserve the bomber force for more decisive operations.

Then in mid-May 1940, when the German army overran the Netherlands with shocking ease and bombed Rotterdam, killing 980 civilians, Churchill and the War Cabinet authorized Bomber Command to attack marshaling yards and synthetic oil plants in the Ruhr and the Rhineland. Their hope was that these raids would damage the sources of German military might and give Allied armies massed in northern France a chance of holding on against the Nazi juggernaut. The raids were to be conducted under the cover of darkness, since German fighters and flak were decimating the RAF’s small air fleets.

The RAF raid on the night of May 15–16, 1940, was the beginning of the world’s first large-scale strategic bombing war. Although terror was not the objective, Churchill knew that there would be civilian casualties and that the Luftwaffe would probably strike back at London, but he expected the RAF’s new radar-guided fighters to defeat the German bombers. Then in retaliation for an accidental Luftwaffe raid on London on the night of August 24–25, 1940, part of a German air campaign to soften up Britain for invasion, Churchill ordered a reprisal raid on Berlin the very next night. Damage was minimal, but Hitler was furious. Beginning on September 7, he launched a devastating bomber Blitz on London, which soon extended to other British cities with the primary aim of destroying factories and terrorizing the civilian population to the point where its support for the war collapsed. As payback for the massive bombing of Coventry the night of November 14–15, Britain’s new chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, ordered a terror raid on Mannheim in mid-December 1940, which was largely ineffective, with bombs dispersed all over the countryside around the city.

The bomber war that airpower theorists Giulio Douhet and Billy Mitchell had predicted was beginning to materialize. But for a time Britain showed more restraint. Throughout the Blitz, German attacks on British cities were continuous, night after night, and almost wholly indiscriminate. The main British bombing effort was directed at military targets, and only a small number of German civilians living within the target areas were killed. There was also a difference in intent. Germany’s aim was conquest, England’s survival. After the evacuation of its army at Dunkirk, Britain had no other way to hit back directly at Germany. In 1940, “[bombing] represented a clear example of making war as Britain must, rather than as Britain might have wished,” writes historian Max Hastings.

The results of these attacks were discouraging: both losses and inaccuracy remained high. In the summer of 1941, an alarming government study of bombing accuracy was released. Its author, a civil servant named D. M. Butt, claimed that only one-third of British planes that reached their targets that June and July had dropped their bombs within five miles of the Aiming Point. In the heavily defended Ruhr, with its permanent cloud of industrial smoke, the number was only in ten.

The Butt report led to a marked change in bombing strategy. With precision bombing impossible at night, England would now do what Churchill had sworn it would never do: deliberately bomb noncombatants. The targets of the new British air campaign were the built-up areas of German cities, the residential centers where most of the workforce lived. Fifty-eight cities of over 100,000 people were put in the target list. The objective: to destroy “the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular, of the industrial workers.” It was to be terror bombing, a fulfillment of the ideas of Douhet and Mitchell. Only it was an act of desperation, not of original military purpose.

The new bombing policy was endorsed by Churchill, who also approved the man appointed to carry it out, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, an earthy, blunt-speaking career officer who had been serving as head of an RAF delegation to Washington. There Harris had met Ira Eaker at a dinner just before both men were scheduled to leave for England, at almost the same time but on separate planes, for their new and exactly parallel commands. On February 22, the day after Eaker’s arrival in London, Harris became commander in chief of Bomber Command. Harris had not instituted the new bombing directive but he enthusiastically supported it, with one salient exception. He considered one of the goals of morale bombing—social revolution—a chimera. Douhet had predicted that a people subjected to unrelenting terror bombing would eventually rise up and force an end to the war. But even if the spirit of the German people was eventually broken by bombing, how would the suffering millions rise against the Nazi regime, with its ruthlessly efficient system of spying, torture, and repression? Harris’s paramount aim was to employ area bombing to slow down German production by destroying industrial sites and killing industrial workers. Good workers, he would tell Eaker, took longer to produce than good machines, and “in short supply would affect war production as much as loss of their factory.” Destroying workers’ housing would also disrupt production by creating anxiety and high rates of absenteeism. Retreating to euphemism, a British official called the new initiative “de-housing,” but the aggressively outspoken “Bomber” Harris, as the press began calling him, never denied that it was terror bombing.

Harris inherited a small, obsolete bomber force of fewer than 400 serviceable planes, only sixty-nine of them heavy bombers. But Bomber Command was already in the process of becoming greatly larger and more technically proficient. That March, British bombers began using a new navigational aid, code-named Gee (Ground electronics engineering) to guide them to targets on nonmoonlit nights, and British factories were beginning to mass-produce the four-engine Stirlings, Halifaxes, and Lancasters that would be the delivering instruments of Harris’s “city-busting” campaigns, a succession of “bomber battles” that would, Harris believed, bring Germany to its knees before a land invasion was undertaken. “I was convinced,” he wrote later, “that a bomber offensive of adequate weight and the right kind of bombs would, if continued for long enough, be something that no country could endure.”

Churchill did not share Harris’s confidence that bombing alone would bring down Nazi Germany, but in the absence of alternatives, he endorsed a bombing program of ruthless resolve, carried out by the man he called—half in admiration, half in abhorrence—the Buccaneer. (Harris’s adoring crews, whom he supported unreservedly, called him Butcher, Butch, for short.) And the prime minister had no moral reservation, then or later, about unrestricted air warfare. After the war, he wrote to a former officer in Bomber Command: “We should never allow ourselves to apologize for what we did to Germany.”

After a three-day stay in London, Eaker and his staff went out to Bomber Command headquarters in High Wycombe, a suburb in the Chiltern Hills, about twenty-five miles west of London. They were greeted warmly by Harris—now Sir Arthur—who invited them to share living and working space with Bomber Command until they established their own headquarters. Harris insisted that Eaker live in the interim with his family—his radiant wife, Lady Jill, and their two-year-old daughter—who had taken up residence in a magnificent country estate with horse barns and tree-shaded riding paths.

Eaker and Harris shared a birthday and both had faced physical hardship earlier in their lives, Harris spending part of his youth in the harsh Rhodesian bush, driving horse teams, clearing mosquito-infested land, and managing a tobacco farm. But in almost every other way, they were opposites. Raymond Daniell, a New York Times correspondent, deftly sketched them. “Harris, who had been a gold miner and tobacco planter in Rhodesia, is a hulking giant of a man—tall with shoulders to match—having a lusty, mordant sense of humor. He is bluff and hearty for an Englishman—a provocative, stimulating conversationalist. . . . Eaker is a soft-spoken Texan with an agile, athletic body. His features, like those of so many men who have devoted most of their lives to flying, have set themselves into sharp, firm lines that make one think of an eagle. He is modest and retiring almost to the point of shyness, and he has that unconsciously thoughtful courtesy usually associated with the antebellum South.”

Harris read military history and books on farming in his spare moments; Eaker exercised with religious regularity. Harris enjoyed cocktails in the evening, mixing and serving the drinks in his velvet smoking jacket; Eaker drank sparingly—some sherry, now and then—but loved poker, cigars, and hearty male companionship. Harris had “a dry, cutting, often vulgar wit,” and was outrageously, often savagely, direct. Eaker kept his passions under tight rein and, in social company, was eager to please. While Harris, the son of a Foreign Service officer, liked to poke fun at the “monocled” class, he was rigidly aloof with his staff, a cold and exacting commander. Eaker had a more relaxed style. He worked closely and informally with his staff, played volleyball, softball, and poker with them, and sought their advice. He was a man totally without pretense. Riding in the back of his limousine, he would ask his driver to stop and pick up British soldiers who were hitchhiking, heading home on leave. “British officers would never do this,” one soldier told him. And when Eaker went into town for a haircut, he would sit patiently in the barbershop with the other villagers, waiting his turn. When asked by the mayor to give an impromptu speech before a group of High Wycombe citizens, he said only this: “We won’t do much talking until we’ve done more fighting. We hope that when we leave, you’ll be glad we came.”

A ruthless taskmaster on the job, Arthur Harris was a cordial and relaxed host in his home, a completely different person than he was in the underground Operations Room at Bomber Command headquarters. He and Eaker liked each other immensely and convened every evening in Harris’s famous “conversation room,” a leather and wood study where Harris had set up a stereopticon machine that displayed three-dimensional aerial photographs of the enemy cities his crews were destroying. But their instant friendship never bridged the gap between their philosophies of bombing. Harris wished Eaker well in his upcoming experiment with daylight bombing, and did everything in his power to prepare him to succeed, sharing information on intelligence, operations, weather forecasting, and target selection. Even so, Harris was convinced that the American experiment would fail and that Eaker would eventually be forced to retrain his crews, reequip his bombers, and join the RAF in its night raids. “God knows, I hope you can do it,” he told Eaker, “but I don’t think you can. Come join us at night. Together we’ll lick them.”

In his memoirs, James Parton recounts a famous story about Harris to illuminate a moral divide between the two commanders. Driving his Bentley at breakneck speed on one of his regular runs between London and High Wycombe, Harris was stopped by a motor policeman, who politely reprimanded him. “You might have killed someone, sir.”

“Young man,” Harris snapped, “I kill thousands of people every night!”

Far from being squeamish about killing civilians, “he relished it,” writes Parton. That may have been so, but the implication is misleading. Ira Eaker never opposed Harris’s raids out of concern for people under the bombs. “I don’t believe there was any moral consideration among military men [in World War II],” he remarked after the war. “When I watched bombs falling and hitting houses and churches I had a distaste for the whole business, but they were shooting at us.” If the atomic bomb had been available in 1942, and he had had authorization to use it, he would have dropped it on Germany with no reservations, he said.

Eaker’s objections to area bombing were founded entirely upon military considerations—it was not the most efficient way of finishing off the enemy. Yet he did believe that area bombing, in conjunction with American precision bombing, would put Germany under intolerable, round-the-clock pressure, hastening its demise. He saw Harris’s operations as complementary to his own and considered him a partner, not a rival.

Harris was helpful in procuring a permanent headquarters for Eaker and his staff, which was growing by the week. Returning from one of their scouting missions through the Chiltern Hills, Eaker’s aides reported that they had found the perfect spot, the Wycombe Abbey School for Girls, a crenellated manor house on a parklike campus, its walkways lined with linden trees. With Harris’s and Eaker’s insistent lobbying, the Air Ministry was pressured to remove the students to Oxford and hand over the school to the Eighth Air Force. On the April day that Eaker and twenty other American officers moved in, they laid out a softball diamond and set up volleyball nets. That night, the duty officer heard bells begin suddenly ringing all over the manor house. Some checking revealed that beside each bed was a bell labeled, “If you need a mistress in the night, ring twice.”

Wycombe Abbey, code-named Pinetree, was only four miles from Harris’s headquarters. This facilitated communication and liaison. Working with Harris, Eaker secured eight former RAF airbases in Huntingdonshire, in the Midlands, the great central plain of England just north of London. Over a hundred additional American bases—bomber and fighter bases as well as supply, training, and repair stations—would soon be built, most of them in Norfolk and Suffolk, in neighboring East Anglia. By late 1943, the Eighth would transform these lands of tall churches and small villages into a great land-based aircraft carrier. East Anglia would become a “distinct American bomber zone,” with the RAF concentrating its bomber bases further to the north.

In May, while British construction crews were completing work on the first two Eighth Air Force bases—Polebrook and neighboring Grafton Underwood—General Hap Arnold arrived in England. On May 30, Churchill invited him and his delegation, along with Eaker and Ambassador Winant, to dinner at Chequers, his Buckinghamshire retreat. As his guests sat down to dinner, the prime minister rose and made a dramatic announcement: at that very minute, he said, the RAF was taking off on the greatest air strike in history, a 1,000-plane raid on Cologne.

Harris had already burned to cinder the historic cores of two combustible medieval cities, Lübeck and Rostock, but he needed a bigger, more convincing demonstration of carpet bombing. Late that evening, as the guests sat in the drawing room sipping port and puffing on cigars, the prime minister announced that Operation Millennium had been a staggering success. The entire center of the Rhineland city was a sea of flames. Later, it was learned that in less than two hours, nearly 500 people were killed, 45,000 left homeless, and 12,000 buildings destroyed, at a cost of only forty-one British aircraft. It had been a publicity grab as much as a military operation. Harris had been able to marshal a force of 1,046 “bombers” only by sending out 400 obsolete planes from training units, but with this raid, he became a national hero and the darling of the British press.

That night at Chequers, Hap Arnold warmly congratulated the prime minister, but in the British success, he saw a lost American opportunity. He had arrived at Chequers to sell Churchill and his RAF advisors on the future of American daylight bombing. “Of all the moments of history. . . . I had picked the night when they were selling their own kind of bombardment to the world. . . . It was plain that now there would be renewed pressure from the British to get our four-engine bombers for the R.A.F.”

The night of the Cologne raid, the Eighth Air Force had only 1,871 men in England—almost all of them ground staff—and not a single warplane. The next day, Ambassador Winant sent an urgent message to President Roosevelt. “England is the place to win the war. Get planes and troops over here as soon as possible.”

The first combat group was already on its way. On the morning of June 10, the stately Queen Elizabeth, refitted as a troopship, docked in the Firth of Clyde. On board, along with thousands of American infantrymen, were air gunners of the 97th Bomb Group; the pilots and navigators would join them a month later, after having experienced a journey over the Atlantic nearly as harrowing as Charles Lindbergh’s crossing fifteen years before.

A B-17 was a far more reliable machine than the Spirit of St. Louis, but Lindbergh was a magnificent aviator. The pilots of the Eighth flew their bombers across the same ocean with only a few months of flight training, relying on the reports of radio operators who had trouble translating dots and dashes and on the guidance of navigators who had an insecure grasp of their complex art. Soaring off the coast of Maine, fliers from heartland towns looked down on the first ocean they had ever seen. Their destination was Prestwick, Scotland, the eastern terminus of what was called the “great circle” route. Their “stepping-stones” were four large landmasses: Newfoundland, Labrador, Greenland, and Iceland. Although later groups flew nonstop to Scotland—a distance of some 2,000 miles—the first groups would find these stations indispensable, for they flew through some of the foulest weather on earth.

On the first leg of the crossing, airmen headed for one of two possible destinations: Goose Bay, Labrador, or Gander Lake in southern Newfoundland, both about 700 miles from the northern coast of Maine. Next was a perilous 700-to-1,000-mile over-water run to one of the two bases on Greenland that the United States had recently built, under agreement with Denmark. The first planes of the 97th Bomb Group, led by Paul Tibbets, made it to Greenland with ease. Then the trouble began. Flying over the island’s jagged coastal mountains, Tibbets could see an endless icecap sparkling in the sun. This was his warning that he was approaching Bluie West One, one of the most dangerous landing fields anywhere. Tibbets maneuvered his bomber into a precariously narrow fjord, twenty miles long, flanked by high, serrated cliffs, which were just off his wing-tips. There were, he remembered, “several tricky turns. A number of canyons branched off from the main fjord, and I had to watch our map closely to avoid following one of them. . . . to a dead end with no way of escape.”

When a pilot entered the fjord, he had to know what the weather was at the airfield at the end of it. There was no room to turn around, and no B-17 could climb fast enough to avoid crashing into the immense wall of stone and ice just behind the landing strip. The weather was high and clear, and Tibbets brought in his bomber flawlessly. But later American airmen would crash and burn when fog or rapidly moving storms closed in on them.

BW-1 was a forbidding place, just south of the Arctic Circle. There was a mess hall, a weather shack, a scattering of drafty huts for sleeping, and across the fjord, an isolated Eskimo village. There was no temptation to linger there. After refueling, Tibbets flew to Iceland and then on to Prestwick, 846 miles to the east. A Royal Air Force navigator met his squadron there and guided the bombers to Polebrook, where they landed on a runway that had recently been a potato patch. When the last plane of the 97th touched down weeks later, Tibbets learned how fortunate his Group had been. They had lost five aircraft, but not a single man. “These youthful crews and their aircraft proved that they had what it takes to win a war,” Tibbets wrote later.

Gen. Carl Spaatz had arrived in England a month earlier in a B-24 Liberator, and had already set up his headquarters in Bushy Park, close to London and the headquarters of the new commander of the European Theater of Operations, Maj. Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower. With the arrival of the 97th, the Eighth Air Force was ready to go to war.

It was made up of four commands. In addition to the Bomber and Fighter Commands, there was the Ground-Air Support Command, to be equipped, a year later, with twin-engine B-26 Marauder bombers, and the Air Service Command, responsible for supply and maintenance. Gen. Frank “Monk” Hunter set up Fighter Command headquarters at Bushey Hall, a country mansion in Hertfordshire, on the outskirts of northwest London, close to RAF Fighter Command. By August there would be four American fighter groups in the U.K., two of them flying British Spitfires and two flying American P-38 Lightnings.

For the planning and direction of combat operations, the Eighth’s Bomber Command was organized into combat wings. Each wing was comprised of three bomb groups, which met in the skies over their neighboring bases and flew into battle together. Each combat wing, in turn, belonged to one or another larger organization, called, initially, a bombardment wing, and later an air division. These were the equivalent of infantry divisions, big organizations to fight big battles. In 1942, there were only two bombardment wings, the 1st and the 2nd. Each had its own commander and headquarters building, where bombing strikes requiring close coordination were plotted and organized.

ORGANIZATION CHART 8^TH AIR FORCE

This organizational pattern was incomprehensible to most English farm families who resided in ancient places recently designated and renamed for wartime purposes. These tradition-bound local folk would soon have the young American fliers ignoring military terminology and calling their bomber stations, not by their Air Force numbers, but by the names of the ancient hamlets the new airfields were built near: Seething and Snetterton Heath, Wendling and Wattisham, Alconbury and Attlebridge, Thorpe Abbotts and Thurleigh.

The vast majority of American GIs who began pouring into England in the late summer of 1942 came to train for the invasion. The airmen would begin their battle at once. But as the crews of the 97th Bomb Group prepared for their first mission there occurred a major change in Allied war strategy. On July 1, the day the first B-17 manned by an American combat crew touched down in Great Britain, the German army won an electrifying victory, breaking the 245-day-long siege of the mighty naval base of Sevastopol, the final Russian stronghold in the Crimea. Ten days earlier Rommel had overrun the besieged British garrison at Tobruk, in Libya, near the Egyptian border. This double victory gave the Germans an enormous injection of confidence, while in Washington, Winston Churchill privately confessed that he was the most miserable Englishman in America since General Burgoyne had surrendered at Saratoga.

Churchill was at the White House to try to engineer a major change in Allied war policy. He wanted to get American troops and bombers into the fight as soon as possible in order to restore Allied morale, relieve pressure on the Russians, and reinforce Britain’s beleaguered desert army in North Africa. The previous April, he had reluctantly agreed to an American plan for an Allied invasion of northern France in the spring of 1943. Now he was using his famous persuasive powers to try to get Roosevelt to postpone that invasion. Recalling Dunkirk, he spoke to the president of “a Channel full of the bodies of British soldiers.”

The strategy worked. That July, Roosevelt agreed to an Allied landing in French North Africa, a controversial and hotly contested change in policy. It meant postponing indefinitely a cross-Channel invasion of Nazi-occupied France, the “second front” that Joseph Stalin was impatiently demanding. George Marshall and his protégé, Dwight Eisenhower, the untested general Roosevelt picked to command Operation Torch, as the North African campaign was code-named, bitterly opposed the plan, but Churchill was right. An adequate invasion fleet had not yet been built; German U-boats were inflicting heavy damage on Atlantic convoys; and the Luftwaffe owned the skies over Northern Europe. For Roosevelt, there were also political considerations. With congressional elections approaching in November, he was under pressure to get American ground forces into action against the Germans. And North Africa, with British assistance, was the only place the still mobilizing Americans were strong enough to take on the fearsome German war machine.

Arnold was furious. As part of the invasion plan, he was ordered to strip the fledgling Eighth to support upcoming operations in the Mediterranean, and he was not yet authorized to tell Spaatz and Eaker of these changes. The 97th and the 301st, which had just arrived in England, were to be reassigned in the early fall to North Africa, and other bombers were to be sent there directly from training bases in the States. This meant that the Air Force plan to have a thousand heavy bombers over Germany by April 1943 would have to wait—how long, Arnold did not know.

It was more than a matter of delay. Arnold saw Operation Torch as a threat to the very existence of the Eighth Air Force. Before it was completed, the depleted Eighth might be absorbed into the Royal Air Force’s night campaign.

This is the reason Arnold pressured Spaatz and Eaker to get their crews into combat before they were properly trained. The weeks prior to the November invasion of North Africa might be the American Air Force’s only opportunity in the war to prove its doctrine of daylight strategic bombing. When informed after the Rouen mission of Operation Torch, Eaker and Spaatz also became convinced that the future of Air Force operations in Europe “rode upon the outcome” of the next dozen or so missions.

“We didn’t know quite how we were going to make that offensive work at first,” Arnold admitted later. “All we knew was that we would make it work.” But Eaker and Spaatz had faith in their planes, faith in their crews, and above all, faith in the doctrine of strategic bombing. So in the late summer of the third year of the war, from small airfields in England, American boys flew into danger to test an idea about airpower that went back to the time when Billy Mitchell soared over the trenches in a flimsy two-winger built of fiber and wood.