The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  The B-17s were to go in at 20,000 feet, 10,000 feet lower than normal, with bomb loads one-third heavier than usual. Targets were coastal batteries and Omaha and the British invasion beaches. Each Fortress carried sixteen 500-pound bombs.

  • •

  After the briefings, at airfields all over England, the crews ate breakfast, then got into trucks for a ride to the revetments, where they climbed into their bombers. They fired their engines—on the Marauders, the Pratt and Whitney 2,000-horsepower engines sputtered and coughed and belched out smoke with fire from the exhaust—and they were ready.

  Lt. James Delong was the pilot of a B-26 in the 387th Bomb Group. He was part of a thirty-six-ship formation, two boxes of eighteen in flights of six. He recalled that “the taxi out was maddening. The takeoff was just as bad. One plane took off down the right side of the runway; another would open up the throttle as the first plane reached the halfway mark to gun down the left side. It was dark and rainy. A plane in front of me went up in a ball of fire. Was my load too heavy to get off?”

  He made it off the runway and began to climb. All around him, bombers were climbing, throttles wide open, using landing lights to avoid collisions. There were some anyway; airmen said that night assembly created a high pucker factor on each seat.

  “Even with fifty missions under my belt, my hands were wet and I felt drained of energy,” Delong admitted. His group hit a cloud bank and separated. When he emerged at 8,000 feet, the sky was clear. He could not see any of his group, so he hooked onto another group of B-26s and headed for Normandy.10 Something similar happened to hundreds of pilots.

  In his B-17, Lt. John Meyer heard the copilot on the intercom complaining about the clouds: “He was saying, ‘It’s a damn German secret weapon. Hitler’s got another secret weapon.’ ”11

  In his B-26, copilot Havener was going through “mental anguish, more so than on any of my previous twenty-four missions. I just couldn’t get the thought out of my mind of those poor devils in Holland on that low-level raid. Here we were about to do the same suicidal thing with hundreds of Marauders following us at spaced and regular intervals of only a few minutes.”12

  Lt. A. H. Corry was a bombardier in a B-26. When his plane emerged from the clouds, it was alone. In a minute “I saw a plane pop out of the clouds down below. It was a B-26. So I took my blinker light and sent the code in his direction. He responded affirmatively with the code, then pulled up and stayed on our right wing. Momentarily, another popped up on the left wing. Then more and more until three flights of six planes each were formed and took course toward the invasion coast.”13

  Capt. Charles Harris was the pilot of a B-17 in the 100th Bomb Group. He was the last to take off, at 0345. “As we were absolutely Dead End Charlie in the entire Eighth Air Force, I remember glancing back a couple of times and there was not another plane in the air behind us, but as far as we could see ahead were hundreds and hundreds of planes.”14

  • •

  As the low-flying Marauders approached Utah Beach, the sky brightened and the crews saw a sight unique in world history. None of them ever forgot it; all of them found it difficult to describe. Below them, hundreds of landing craft were running into shore, leaving white wakes. Behind the landing craft were the LSTs and other transports, and the destroyers, cruisers, and battleships. “As I looked down at this magnificent operation,” Lt. Allen Stephens, a copilot in a B-26 of the 397th Bomb Group said, “I had the surging feeling that I was sitting in on the greatest show ever staged.”15

  Lt. William Moriarity, a B-26 pilot, said, “As we approached the coast, we could see ships shelling the beach. One destroyer, half sunk, was still firing from the floating end. The beach was a bedlam of exploding bombs and shells.”16

  Lieutenant Corry remembered that “the water was just full of boats, like bunches of ants crawling around down there. I imagined all those young men huddled in the landing craft, doubtless scared to death. I could see what they were heading into and I prayed for all those brave young men. I thought, man, I’m up here looking down at this stuff and they’re out there waiting to get on that beach.”17

  For the B-17 crews, flying mainly at 20,000 feet, up above the clouds, there was no such sight. They could see nothing but other B-17s. Those that could tucked in behind a pathfinder plane carrying radar. With radar, the lead bombardier would be able to mark a general target area. When the lead plane dropped its bombs, so would the ones following. That was not a textbook method of providing close-in ground support; such bombing was clearly inappropriate to its purpose. Eisenhower had said when he postponed the invasion that he was counting heavily on the air bombardment to get ashore; he added that the Allies would not have undertaken the operation without that asset.

  Eventually, after the infamous short bombardment in late July, on the eve of Operation Cobra, Eisenhower learned the lesson that the B-17 was not a suitable weapon for tactical ground support. The testimony from the B-17 pilots and crews describing their experiences on D-Day suggests that the asset was wasted on D-Day, and that the proper use would have been to do what the B-17 was built to do, pound away at big targets inside Germany (oil refineries, train depots, factory complexes, airfields), and leave the beach bombardment to the Marauders and A-20s (Havocs).

  But not even the commanders most dedicated to the idea that strategic airpower would win the war, the ones who had opposed the Transportation Plan so strongly, ever considered for an instant not participating in D-Day. They wanted to be there, and Eisenhower wanted them there.

  • •

  At 20,000 feet, with heavy clouds below and the sky just beginning to lighten, where “there” was could be a mystery. Many pilots never got themselves located. The orders were, If you can’t see the target, or get behind a radar plane, bring the bombs home. In the 466th Bomb Group, sixty-eight B-17s took off, carrying 400,000 pounds of bombs. Only thirty-two were able to drop their bombs. Those that did dropped them blind through the clouds over the British beaches.

  Lieutenant Carden had a brother down below. “I did not know where he was, but I wanted to be accurate. We were a little bit late because of the weather, which affected the bombing accuracy of almost every group up there with us.”18 They delayed on the split-second timing so as to avoid hitting men coming ashore; as a consequence, all the bombs from the B-17s fell harmlessly two or even three miles inland.

  “It was a day of frustration,” said Lieutenant Meyer. “We certainly didn’t do as we had planned.” The good part for the B-17s was that the flak was light and there was no Luftwaffe. “It was a milk run,” Meyer concluded.19

  • •

  At Utah Beach, it was no milk run for the Marauders. They went in low enough for the Germans “to throw rocks at us.” Sergeant Lovelace recalled seeing “the first wave just a couple of hundred yards offshore, zigzagging toward the beach. We were running right down the shoreline looking for a target. We were drawing a lot of fire, not the usual 88mm but smaller rapid-fire stuff. I have this frozen image of a machine gunner set up by a barn, firing at us. For a short second I could look right down the barrel of that gun. A waist gunner or a tail gunner could return fire, but up in the top turret I felt helpless. I couldn’t bring my guns below horizontal, therefore I couldn’t fire on anything.”20

  Lieutenant Havener saw a plane in his box take a flak hit, do a complete snap roll, recover, and carry on. “Unbelievable!” he remarked. “Now we’re on our bomb run and another of our ships takes a direct hit, blows up, and goes down. Damn that briefer and his milk run. What’s with all this flak!”21

  Sgt. Ray Sanders was in Havener’s plane. “We were accustomed to heavy flak,” he said, “but this was the most withering, heavy, and accurate we ever experienced.”22

  On his bomb run, bombardier Corry was well below 1,000 feet, too low to use his bombsight. He could see men jumping out of the landing craft, guys who fell and were floating in the surf, tracers coming from the bunkers, spraying that beach. He used his manual trip s
witch, with his foot providing the aiming point. He made no attempt to be accurate; he figured “I was making good foxholes for some of those guys coming ashore.”23

  In Havener’s B-26, Sergeant Sanders “heard our ship sound like it was being blown or ripped to bits. The sound was much louder than anything I had ever heard and seemed to come from every surface of our ship. Before the terrible noise and jolting had quit, I grabbed the intercom and yelled, ‘We’ve been hit!’ And our copilot, Lieutenant Havener, came back on the intercom and said, ‘No, we haven’t been hit. That was our bombs going off.’ We were flying that low.”24

  Lt. John Robinson recalled, “The explosions really bumped my wings at that altitude. It was like driving a car down the ties of a railroad track.”25 Many others had similar experiences, a good indication of how much of the explosive power of those bombs went up in air.

  • •

  But by no means all of it, as Lt. Arthur Jahnke at La Madeleine could attest. As the Marauders came over, he huddled in his shelter and closed his eyes. A carpet of bombs hit the dunes. Sandsprouts geysered up in whirling pillars several meters high. One bomb landed only a few meters from Jahnke’s shelter, burying him. Wounded in the arm, he dug himself out with great difficulty and threw himself into a bomb crater. Even in Russia, he thought, I’ve never seen anything like this.

  Jahnke was at the site of the present-day Utah Beach museum. He had a flashback to a ceremony held on that spot just one week earlier. General Marcks had decorated him with the Iron Cross for his bravery on the Eastern Front. There had been drinking, feasting, and choir singing, followed by a performance by a troupe of visiting actors. The opening line of the play was “How long are we going to sit on this keg of dynamite?” Jahnke’s men had broken up laughing.

  Now the dynamite had exploded. The two 75mm cannon were destroyed, the 88 damaged, the two 50mm antitank guns gone, as were the flamethrowers. Jahnke’s radio and telephone communications with the rear were kaput. His men had survived, huddled in their bunkers; when they emerged they were horrified. The mess corporal’s assistant, an old man, came running up to Jahnke.

  “Everything is wrecked, Herr Leutnant! The stores are on fire. Everything’s wrecked!”

  Shaking his head, he added, “We’ve got to surrender, Herr Leutnant.”

  “Have you gone out of your mind, man?” the twenty-three-year-old Jahnke replied. “If we had always surrendered in Russia in this kind of situation the Russians would have been here long ago.”

  He called out a command, “All troops fall in for entrenching!” Just as they were getting into the work, here came another wave of Marauders. The men huddled in the sand. Jahnke sent a man on a bicycle to report to battalion HQ, but he was killed by a bomb.

  As the bombardment ended and the sky brightened, Jahnke could see the naval armada slowly emerging out of the dark and headed straight toward La Madeleine. The sight shattered any morale the Germans had left. Jahnke’s men had believed that La Madeleine, with its mighty cannon, was impregnable; now the fortress was destroyed and they were brought face to face with the reality of the naval forces rising up out of the sea. And all Jahnke had to oppose the invaders were two machine guns and two grenade launchers.26 The American Marauders had done an outstanding job of destroying Rommel’s fixed fortifications at Utah before the Germans had an opportunity to fire even one shot.

  Another twin-engine bomber, the A-20 Havoc, was also effective in low-level missions, led by the 410th Bomb Group (known, at least to themselves, as “The World’s Best Bomb Group,” and awarded a Presidential Unit Citation). The 410th blasted Carentan, making it all but impossible for Colonel Heydte to move vehicles out of the city into the battle.

  • •

  After making the bomb run, the bombers continued across the Cotentin Peninsula, then turned right, flew around the tip of the peninsula and then north to home base in England. That gave them another never-to-be-forgotten sight. As Lieutenant Delong described it, “Out over the French countryside, scattered everywhere, were parachutes, and pieces of crashed gliders. I don’t believe I saw an undamaged one. I had this sick feeling that things were not going well.”27

  Lt. Charles Middleton saw parachutes “everywhere, and parts of gliders scattered all over. You could see where they had gone through the hedgerows, leaving wings behind, some burnt and some still intact although not many.” Then he saw the most improbable sight: “Not far from the battle zone a farmer was plowing his field. He had a white horse and was seemingly unconcerned about all that was happening around him.”28

  By 0800, many crews were back at base, having a second breakfast. In an hour or two, they were in the air again, bombing St.-Lô and other inland targets. The RAF returned to Caen, trying to concentrate on the railroad station. The Germans in Caen, in retaliation, took eighty French Resistance prisoners out of their cells and shot them in cold blood.

  • •

  In contrast to the near-total success of the B-26s at Utah, the great bombing raids by B-17s and B-24s of June 6 against Omaha and the British beaches turned out to be a bust. The Allies managed to drop more bombs on Normandy in two hours than they had on Hamburg, the most heavily bombed city of 1943, but because of the weather and the airmen not wanting to hit their own troops most of the blockbusters came down in Norman meadows (or were carried back to England), not on the Atlantic Wall. Yet the B-17 pilots and crews did their best and in some cases made important contributions, certainly far more than the Luftwaffe bomber force.29

  • •

  At the top of the elite world of the Allied air forces stood the fighter pilots. Young, cocky, skilled, veteran warriors—in a mass war fought by millions, the fighter pilots were the only glamorous individuals left. Up there all alone in a one-on-one with a Luftwaffe fighter, one man’s skill and training and machine against another’s, they were the knights in shining armor of World War II.

  They lived on the edge, completely in the present, but young though they were, they were intelligent enough to realize that what they were experiencing—wartime London, the Blitz, the risks—was unique and historic. It would demean them to call them star athletes, because they were much more than that, but they had some of the traits of the athlete. The most important was the lust to compete. They wanted to fly on D-Day, to engage in dogfights, to help make history.

  The P-47 pilots were especially eager. In 1943 they had been on escort duty for strategic bombing raids, which gave them plenty of opportunity to get into dogfights. By the spring of 1944, however, the P-47 had given up that role to the longer-ranged P-51 (the weapon that won the war, many experts say; the P-51 made possible the deep penetrations of the B-17s and thus drove the Luftwaffe out of France).

  The P-47 Thunderbolt was a single-engine fighter with classic lines. It was a joy to fly and a gem in combat. But for the past weeks, the P-47s had been limited to strafing runs inside France. The pilots were getting bored.

  Lt. Jack Barensfeld flew a P-47. At 1830 June 5, he and every other fighter pilot in the base got a general briefing. First came an announcement that this was “The Big One.” That brought cheers and “electric excitement I’ll never forget,” Lt. James Taylor said. “We went absolutely crazy. All the emotions that had been pent-up for so long, we really let it all hang out. We knew we were good pilots, we were really ready for it.”30

  The pilots, talking and laughing, filed out to go to their squadron areas, where they would learn their specific missions.

  Barensfeld had a three-quarter-mile walk. He turned to Lt. Bobby Berggren and said, “Well, Bob, this is what we’ve been waiting for—we haven’t seen any enemy aircraft for two weeks and we are going out tomorrow to be on the front row and really get a chance to make a name for ourselves.”

  Berggren bet him $50 that they would not see any enemy aircraft.31

  Lieutenant Taylor learned that his squadron would be on patrol duty, 120 miles south of the invasion site, spotting for submarines and the Luftwaffe. They would fly back and
forth on a grid pattern.

  “We were really devastated,” Taylor remembered. “I looked at Smitty and Auyer and they were both looking at the ground, all of us felt nothing but despair. It was a horrible feeling, and lots of the fellows were groaning and moaning and whatnot.” Taylor was so downcast he could not eat breakfast. Instead of a knight in shining armor, he was going to be a scout.32

  The first P-47s began taking off at about 0430. They had not previously taken off at night, but it went well. Once aloft, they became part of the air armada heading for France. Above them were B-17s. Below them were Marauders and Dakotas. The Dakotas were tugging gliders. Around them were other fighters.

  Lt. (later Maj. Gen.) Edward Giller was leader for a flight of three P-47s. “I remember a rather harrowing experience in the climb out because of some low clouds. There was a group of B-26s flying through the clouds as we climbed through, and each formation passed through the other one. That produced one minute of sheer stark terror.”

  It was bittersweet for the P-47 pilots to pass over the Channel. Lt. Charles Mohrle recalled: “Ships and boats of every nature and size churned the rough Channel surface, seemingly in a mass so solid one could have walked from shore to shore. I specifically remember thinking that Hitler must have been mad to think that Germany could defeat a nation capable of filling the sea and sky with so much ordnance.”33

  Lt. Giller’s assignment was to patrol over the beaches, to make certain no German aircraft tried to strafe the landing craft. “We were so high,” he remembered, “that we were disconnected, essentially, from the activity on the ground. You could see ships smoking, you could see activities, but of a dim, remote nature, and no sense of personal involvement.” Radar operators in England radioed a report of German fighters; Giller and every other fighter pilot in the area rushed to the sector, only to discover it was a false alarm.34

  Lieutenant Mohrle also flew a P-47 on patrol that day. “Flying back and forth over the same stretch of water for four hours, watching for an enemy that never appeared, was tedious and boring.”