by Oliver North
“The Tuskegee airmen rose from adversity through competence, courage, commitment, and capacity to serve America on silver wings, and to set a standard few will transcend.”
The men flying the fighters—no matter what color they were—quickly learned that there was plenty of excitement but far less romance to flying than they had imagined when hearing about it before the war. Those who flew the bombers knew that right from the start.
When America was thrust into war in 1941, the U.S. had but a handful of modern bombers. The twin-engine B-25s that Jimmy Doolittle’s crews flew to raid Tokyo in April 1942 were good medium bombers, but they were limited in range and payload. The only “heavy,” long-range bombers in production on the day that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor were the B-17 and the B-24.
Built by Seattle-based Boeing Corporation, the four-engine B-17 weighed twenty-seven tons, had a range of 1,850 miles, and could cruise at 170 mph at an altitude of 35,000 feet carrying a payload of 8,000 pounds. The B-17 bristled with thirteen .50-caliber machine guns, prompting a newspaper writer to describe it as a “Flying Fortress.” The moniker stuck. Capable of absorbing incredible punishment and still remaining aloft, Flying Fortresses would drop over a million tons of bombs over Axis targets in Europe from 1942 through mid-1945.
Consolidated Aircraft Corporation in San Diego, California, was producing America’s “other” heavy bomber at the start of the war—the high-wing, four-engine, twin-tail B-24 “Liberator.” First tested in December 1939, the B-24 had a range of 2,900 miles, cruised at 175 mph, and carried an 8,800-pound payload. By the end of the war, 19,256 of them—more than any other aircraft in U.S. history—would be built and flown by every branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. Though there were twenty-two variants of the B-24 produced in five separate facilities between 1941 and 1945, most were equipped with eleven .50-caliber machine guns that proved lethal to attacking fighters. By 1944, the Ford production line at Willow Run, Michigan, was turning out a new B-24 every fifty-eight minutes.
With America in the war, production of B-17s and B-24s ramped up immediately. So too did the training of aircrews. Since most B-17s had a crew of thirteen and B-24s had ten, hundreds of thousands of men had to be trained to fly, fight, man, and maintain these fleets of planes.
Few of these young Americans had ever gone more than a few miles from home when they joined the Army Air Corps. Hardly any of them had ever seen an airplane close up, let alone flown in one before. Many didn’t even have a driver’s license.
It didn’t matter. If they passed the tests to get in the Air Corps, they could be trained. And they were. Within weeks of Pearl Harbor, scores of new air bases were being built to accommodate the bombers coming off the production lines—and the aircrews that would spend nine months to a year learning all they could about these flying behemoths. Then, those assigned to the European theater would usually go to England for their final stages of training. There, most of the bombers and crews were assigned to the newly formed 8th Air Force.
On 17 August 1942, the Americans flew their first daylight bombing raid across the English Channel—striking German positions near Rouen, France. All eighteen B-17s returned safely.
On 20 August, a thirty-plane daylight attack was flown against the Luftwaffe base near Abbeville, France, in an effort to support the disastrous Allied amphibious raid at Dieppe. Once again, all the American B-17s returned safely.
Then, on 10 October, 100 USAAF B-17s launched an attack in the afternoon on German positions around Lille, France, near the Belgian border. The British followed up with an equal-sized nighttime raid on the same installations. In the Allied attacks, more than ninety German aircraft were destroyed on the ground and in the air, but only one British plane and two U.S. bombers were lost.
The success of these early attacks validated a strongly held thesis in the USAAF: that daylight bombing attacks were more accurate—and could be conducted with minimal losses. Officers in the British Bomber Command, having abandoned daylight raids almost a year earlier because of horrific losses, counseled otherwise. Over the next thirty-three months, the American “Bomber Boys” would pay a terrible price for their leaders’ insistence on daylight bombing.
By the summer of 1943, American B-17 and B-24 bomber crews based in England and North Africa were striking near daily at Axis targets in France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, and Germany itself. Army Air Corps planners, convinced that strategic bombing could shorten the war, decided to try a massive raid to destroy Hitler’s principal source of oil: the Ploesti refineries in Romania.
Operation Tidal Wave called for a 180-plane formation of B-24s to launch from airfields in North Africa and head north across the Mediterranean and over the Aegean Sea. After clearing the Balkans, the bombers were ordered to descend to an altitude of 500 feet or lower to avoid German radar. The B-24s would then drop their bombs on specific targets within the Ploesti oil fields and refineries, taking out the fuel supply for the Third Reich’s war machine. The nearly 2,000-mile round trip was to be conducted in radio silence to preserve the element of surprise.
The challenges for the bomb groups assigned to the mission were formidable. In addition to the extremely long-range and low-altitude requirements, the American aircrews also had to avoid German fighters, hundreds of anti-aircraft guns, and barrage balloons over the target. Captain Richard Butler of San Diego, California, was a twenty-one-year-old B-24 co-pilot on the mission. Though he had already seen plenty of action over France and Germany, he volunteered to go on the Ploesti Raid.
CAPTAIN RICHARD BUTLER, USAAF
44th Bomber Group
Bengazi, Libya
4 August 1943
We arrived in England in the spring of ’43 and our first few missions were diversionary flights out over the English Channel. We would take off in a large formation and try to get the Germans to come after us so that a group doing a real raid would have a better chance. Several times yellow-nosed German Focke Wulf 190s out of Abbeville, France, intercepted us before we ever got to the French or Belgian coastline. They were very aggressive.
On 14 May ’43 we flew our first real mission over France, where we lost a couple of airplanes. Then we were sent to bomb the submarine pens at Keogh, Germany. The mission was a disaster because B-17s flew over the target ahead of us and higher than our B-24s. So their bombs fell right through our B-24 formation and a couple of them hit our airplanes.
The B17s were also dropping incendiary bombs—clusters of four-pound sticks of explosives. As the incendiaries drop out of the airplane, bands around the bomblets break loose and all these sticks—there were about 100 in a bundle—fall and spread out. One of those incendiary sticks came through my windshield, and landed on the flight deck. Our radio operator picked it up with his leather flight jacket and threw it out the bomb bay—before it had a chance to ignite. According to the intelligence, our raid on the submarine pens put them out of commission—at a cost of seven of our airplanes.
In June of ’43 we started practicing low-level flying in England—though we weren’t told that we were going to North Africa until later in the month. When we got to Libya, we flew some missions over Sicily, in support of the invasion there, and several over Italy.
When we weren’t flying actual missions, we practiced low-level attacks—out over the desert—flying at 500 feet or less—in formation. A couple of B-24s actually scraped the desert during those runs. Thankfully, we didn’t lose anybody.
A few days before the Ploesti attack we were briefed on the mission, assigned specific targets, and told what we could expect. For example, we were told that the German 88 mm anti-aircraft guns couldn’t be lowered enough to hit us at 500 feet or less because supposedly they were designed for shooting at planes at high altitude. And they told us that we didn’t have to worry about enemy fighters—that if any came up, inexperienced Romanian pilots would be flying them. Most of this proved to be wrong.
On 30 July, the day before the mission, a general from Washington sa
id, “If the mission is successful and the refineries are destroyed—but every one of our airplanes is lost—it would still be worthwhile. It can shorten the war by at least six months.”
The morning of 1 August we were all up well before first light. Our group commander, Colonel Leon Johnson, said, “If anybody doesn’t want to go—they don’t have to go.” But everybody went.
I was the co-pilot of our B-24 and Walt Bunker was the pilot. Walt was anything but a religious man, so I was surprised, as we were going out across the Mediterranean, to see Walt pull out one of the small Bibles we were issued and start reading it. I always carried mine with me and I got it out and read some Psalms. I had read from the Good Book on other missions, but I had never seen Walt reading a Bible. That kind of gives you an idea about how serious we were taking this mission.
Once we got across the Mediterranean and up the Aegean to the coast of Greece we had to pull up to clear the mountains in Greece and then Bulgaria. By the time we got over Romania, the skies had cleared, but some of the bombers in this long formation had gotten separated and off course in the clouds. Because we were flying on radio silence, some of them actually over-flew Bucharest, Romania.
Instead of hitting our targets in one long, continuous stream of bombers, we ended up with different groups of B-24s coming in over the refinery from different directions. The Germans must have known we were coming because they were ready.
As we approached our target we dropped down to about 300 feet. All of a sudden, there were all kinds of opposition. Haystacks swung open, and guns inside started firing at us. Off to our right, a train with guns on it was firing at us. We flew over a building that had a big red cross painted on top of it—and the guns on its roof opened up at us. Our B-24s were so low that the gunners were actually engaging anti-aircraft batteries on the ground.
Then, just about a mile from our target, German fighters appeared. An Me-109 came up behind our wingman on the right and blasted him out of the sky. A few seconds later, our bombardier, Henry Zweicker, called out: “Left! Left! Left! ”—because he could see our aiming point, the boiler house for the whole Ploesti refinery. Our bomb bay doors were already opened or we would have over-flown our target. As it was, we hit it dead on.
Just as we crossed over the target, we hit a barrage balloon cable. We caught it right between the fuselage and the number three engine. The cable broke—fortunately. We lost number three engine and we also lost all of the instrumentation for number four engine.
Lloyd Neeper, our flight engineer, was in the upper turret. He said that our right wing came within twenty feet of scraping the ground. Well, we had one engine shut down, and some damage, but no one was injured. So we climbed on out of there and headed back to Libya. We didn’t have any trouble knowing the way out. All we had to do was keep the enormous column of black smoke and fire behind us as we headed south. In a matter of minutes it was already rising thousands of feet into the air.
We had to fight the controls all the way home but we made it back to our field at Bengazi. When we landed, our fuel gauges were all reading “empty.”
Richard Butler and his aircrew were among the favored few. Of the 178 B-24s that launched on Operation Tidal Wave, forty-one were lost during the raid, two collided en route home, and eight landed in Turkey and had their crews interned. Of those that made it back to Libya, many were too damaged to ever fly again. Five Medals of Honor were awarded to the men who flew this mission.
The attack on Ploesti was expected to destroy 75 percent of the refinery’s capacity. Yet within two months, Hitler’s engineers had restored it to full production.
Despite the loss of so many aircraft—and 481 American airmen dead or missing in action—proponents of “precision daylight bombing” continued to press their case. While the British maintained their “area night bombing” policy, the U.S. Army Air Corps mounted increasingly heavy daylight raids aimed at strategic industrial targets.
For example, on 13 August 1943, the U.S. 9th Air Force attacked the Messerschmitt aircraft plant in Austria. On 15 August, B-17s attacked the heavily defended ball-bearing plant at Schweinfurt, Germany. On 17 August 1943, 146 American bombers hit an aircraft plant at Regensburg, Germany.
A second raid on the Schweinfurt ball-bearing plant on 14 October was so bloody that the Army Air Corps dubbed it “Black Thursday.” Sixty B-17s were lost, many more damaged, and 594 men were listed as killed and missing in action.
By January 1944, the Allies had wrenched southern Italy from the grip of Field Marshal Kesselring and the 15th Air Force moved to airbases in Foggia and Cerignola. Among the pilots at Cerignola was a twenty-one-year-old, South Dakota-born 1st Lt. George McGovern, who piloted a B-24 assigned to the 741st Squadron, 455th Bomb Group.
LIEUTENANT GEORGE MCGOVERN
741st Squadron, 455th Bomb Group
Cerignola, Italy
20 March 1945
In April of ’42—four months after we were at war, ten of us who had been in the Civilian Pilot Training program decided to volunteer for duty as military pilots. We thought we were ready for combat. We’d all had thirty-five hours of CPT instruction and soloed in a single engine aircraft. Our only question was whether to be Navy flyers or Army flyers. We borrowed a car from the college president and another one from the dean of the school, and took off for Omaha—all ten of us.
The Army and the Navy had recruiting offices there for our area. After we got to Omaha, one of the guys picked up a rumor that if you signed up with the Air Corps, they’d give you a complimentary ticket to a cafeteria near the recruiting office. So, on the strength of that unsubstantiated rumor—for a meal that was probably worth about a dollar—all ten of us joined the Army Air Corps. That was the scientific basis we used to decide we wanted to be Army flyers.
Because there was a shortage of instructor pilots, we didn’t get sworn in until February of ’43. When we arrived at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, we were put in the charge of a tough, old, hard-bitten Army sergeant. That was a rude awakening from life on the campus at Dakota Wesleyan University and I initially despised him—until we’d been in there a couple of weeks and came to realize he was trying to train us so we’d stay alive. We left there with a lifelong feeling of affection for Sergeant Trumbull.
After Basic in Missouri, we were sent to pre-flight training at the San Antonio Air Cadet Center, in Texas. From there we went to Southern Illinois University, where we learned navigation, meteorology, aircraft mechanics, and did a lot of physical training.
It wasn’t until we were sent to Muskogee, Oklahoma, that we flew for the first time—in single-engine, open cockpit PT-19s. We then went to Coffeyville, Kansas, and multi-engine training at Pampa, Texas. Finally, at Liberal, Kansas, I got introduced to the B-24 bomber. The instructor was Norman Ray, the guy who had gotten me into the CPT two years earlier. He’d joined the Air Force a year and a half earlier than I had—and he was my instructor on the B-24 bomber. He was really tough on me—but I’m alive today because of Norman Ray and all those other good instructors I had.
I graduated in April of ’44 and went to Lincoln, Nebraska, where I was assigned a B-24 and a crew. I was scared to death about what these guys would think. I was just twenty-one. Our flight engineer was thirty-three years old. The rest were eighteen, nineteen, and twenty.
They sent us to Mountain Home, Idaho, to the 2nd Air Force so we could all work together for six weeks—learning the plane—and how to become a team. We then went to Topeka, Kansas, for a final briefing before being shipped overseas out of Norfolk, Virginia. By the time I left for the war in Europe that summer of ’44, I’d seen more of America than I’d even heard of just two years earlier. It was like that for a lot of us in World War II.
The Liberator was a good airplane, but it was very difficult to fly. We had to use every muscle in our bodies to keep that plane on course and altitude for eight, ten, or twelve hours. You had to keep it in formation in bad weather, and with people shooting at you. Later in the war
, they added hydraulic controls. That was the equivalent of adding power steering to a Mack truck. I’ve seen 200-pound football players, solid muscle, who had to be lifted out of those cockpits after a mission—they were that exhausted. I was a little thinner and wiry, so it was easier for me to move around than some of the others. I was glad for every one of those physical fitness tests we took—because it took all of it to fly that airplane.
The B-24 wasn’t heated, so when we flew at 20,000 to 25,000 feet, the temperature outside and inside would be around 45 or 50 degrees below zero. We were on oxygen from 10,000 feet on up. We had fleece-lined helmets with goggles, an oxygen mask, sheepskin-lined boots, and flak vests over a lined, leather jacket. It was very uncomfortable—particularly in turbulent air.
The Air Force had a practice when we first went into combat—we had to fly the first five missions with an experienced crew. So I went up five times in late October and early November of ’44 as a co-pilot, with an “old” veteran pilot—he was probably twenty-three years old by then. He had circles under his eyes, and he’d flown about thirty missions. Those first five missions—one over Austria and four into Germany—weren’t too bad—we saw some flak, but encountered no enemy aircraft.
The first mission that I flew as the pilot with my crew was to hit the aircraft assembly plant in Regensburg, Germany—a very heavily defended target.
I had thought, up until that point, that, “You know, this isn’t going to be so bad. You see this flak all around you, but it hasn’t hit us. So maybe this isn’t going to be as bad as everyone said.”
We were just pulling in on that bomb run when a piece of flak—molten metal—smashed through the middle of the windshield, hit a big steel girder right over our heads, and fell to the floor. If it’d been six inches to the left or right, one of us would have been beheaded, literally, by that piece of shrapnel. Our aircraft engineer was standing behind the co-pilot and me, leaning over looking at the instrument panel, and it went maybe an inch above his head. I turned around and his face was snow white.
