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

combat always confounds theory.

In October 1943, fewer than one out of four Eighth Air Force crew members could expect to complete his tour of duty: twenty-five combat missions.

Only 14 percent of fliers assigned to Major Egan’s Bomb Group when it arrived in England in May 1943 made it to their twenty-fifth mission. By the end of the war, the Eighth Air Force would have more fatal casualties—26,000—than the entire United States Marine Corps. Seventy-seven percent of the Americans who flew against the Reich before D-Day would wind up as casualties.

learned to fight the air war by experience and experiment, every mission a learning exercise.

“The difficult we do today. The impossible takes a little longer.” He had learned this, he told people, from the Wright brothers.

The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear. MONTAIGNE

“the worst kind of censorship has always been the kind that newspaper people impose on themselves.”

“Courage is will-power, whereof no man has an unlimited stock; and when in war it is used up, he is finished. A man’s courage is his capital and he is always spending.”

“Courage,” Lord Moran shrewdly observed, “is a moral quality; it is not a chance gift of nature like an aptitude for games. It is a cold choice between two alternatives, the fixed resolve not to quit; an act of renunciation which must be made not once but many times, by the power of the will. Courage is will power.”

In its first ten months of operations, the Eighth lost 188 heavy bombers and approximately 1,900 crewmen, not counting those dead and wounded who returned to England in their battered ships. Approximately 73 percent of the combat fliers who had arrived in England in the summer and fall of 1942 failed to complete their tour of duty. Fifty-seven percent were killed or missing in action, and another 16 percent had either been seriously wounded, killed in crashes in England, or permanently grounded by a serious physical or mental disability.

What saved these men from despair was the life instinct, always strongest in the young, with their powerful sense of indestructibility.

The best American fighter plane of the war was built for the British and designed by a German who had worked for Willie Messerschmitt, whose Me 109s shot down more Allied planes than any other aircraft.

military strategists call the principle of “mass,” the application of overwhelming force.

But the Eighth Air Force had already done its indispensable duty. In the five-month battle for the air supremacy that made the invasion possible, the American Air Forces in Europe lost over 2,600 heavy bombers and 980 fighter planes and suffered 18,400 casualties, including 10,000 combat deaths, over half as many men as the Eighth lost in all of 1942 and 1943. These airmen deserve an equal place in the national memory with the approximately 6,000 American soldiers killed, wounded, or missing in action in the amphibious and airborne assault on D-Day.

The Kingdom of Heaven runs on righteousness, but the Kingdom of Earth runs on oil.

Oil is the blood of machine-age warfare.

Winston Churchill also opposed Thunderclap and that ended the discussion. “At the present moment, none of the German leaders has any interest but fighting to the last man, hoping he will be that last man,” he noted shrewdly.

The A-4, as the Germans called their new liquid-fuel weapon, was the world’s first short-range ballistic missile, “the grandfather of all modern guided missile and space boosters.”

America’s strategic bombing commanders were not enthusiastic proponents of interservice cooperation. It was Adm. Ernest King’s unrelenting pressure that led to the effective deployment of B-24 Liberators against German U-boats, and Eisenhower’s authority as supreme commander that forced Carl Spaatz to “divert” bombers to tactical operations that helped turn the course of the war in Europe. In the real war, as opposed to the paper war fought in the classrooms at Maxwell Field in the 1930s, the idea that airpower alone could defeat an industrialized and highly militarized nation died as fast as the concept of the self-defending bomber.

what to bomb, how to bomb, and when to bomb—under closer civilian scrutiny. The Allies had air commanders of surpassing ability, but they were given too loose a leash.

The Eighth Air Force, the largest aerial striking force in the war, sustained between 26,000 and 28,000 fatalities, roughly one-tenth of the Americans killed in World War II. Taking the lower number, this was 12.3 percent of the 210,000 Eighth Air Force crewmen who flew in combat. Of all branches of the American armed forces, only submarine crews in the Pacific had a higher fatality rate: almost 23 percent.

But as Orwell wrote: “If we see ourselves as the savages we are, some improvement is possible, or at least thinkable.”

Carl Spaatz was on the deck of the battleship Missouri for the Japanese surrender, making him the only person to witness all three major Axis capitulations.