by Oliver North
We were flying at about 250 miles an hour, minus-50 degrees temperature outside—and we had to complete the mission. We went over the target, dropped our bombs, and came back. That first brush with death in an airplane sobered me up in a hurry.
Our base in Italy was cold, windy, and wet a great deal of time—lots of rain in southern Italy, where we were. But our living conditions were a lot better than the soldiers fighting at the front north of Rome.
In December of ’44, we were speeding down the runway when, just as we were about to lift off, the right tire blew to smithereens. I had to make a quick decision—should I hit the brakes and try to stop the plane before the end of the runway, or should we yank it into the air? I chose the latter. I pulled up and we skimmed the ground for a long ways before we finally got up enough airspeed to climb. We missed the trees at the end of the runway by inches.
After we got some altitude, I called the tower and told them what happened. And they said, “Yes, we saw the blow-out.”
I asked, “What do you think I should do?”
The tower replied, “Well, Lieutenant, that’s up to you, but there are several options. You can head your plane out towards the Adriatic and bail out with your crew. Or you can go on the mission, drop your bombs, and when you get close in on your way back, bail out over the Adriatic. Or you can go on the mission, drop your bombs, and then try to land when you come back. We’ve had bombers come back on one wheel and land.”
Since we were already in the air and getting into the formation to go attack Wiener Neustadt, in Austria, I decided to go ahead with the mission. I told the crew, “We’ve got a seven- or eight-hour mission ahead of us. When we get back, I’m going to land this plane. If any of you guys want to bail out before I try, you’re welcome to do so. You have plenty of time to think about it and let me know.” They all decided to stay with the plane.
When we got back, as I approached our field, I slowed the plane to just above stalling speed and touched down right at the end of the runway. As it turned out, it was the best landing I made during the war.
Our worst mission was probably over the Skoda Ammunition Works in Pilzen, Czechoslovakia, on our eighteenth mission in January ’45. We lost an engine on the way into the target and so I advanced the other three engines to stay in formation. But over the target, right as we dropped our bombs, we got hit hard and lost another engine and got a number of flak holes in the fuselage.
On two engines we headed back to our base in Italy, but just as we reached the Adriatic—over the coast of Yugoslavia—we lost a third engine. We started losing altitude fast. I didn’t want to ditch in the Adriatic because there were fifteen- to twenty-foot waves that day and figured if we hit one of those waves, the airplane would break to pieces and we’d freeze or drown in the water.
I asked the navigator, “Is there any place we can land this airplane?” He looked at the chart and said, “There’s a 2,200-foot runway at the Isle of Vis, off to our left. Can you land this plane on twenty-two-hundred feet?”
I said, “Well, it’s better than no feet. Let’s do it.”
As I lined up with the runway, I could see the carcasses of other bombers that had smashed into a hill at the end of the strip. Well, we put that plane down right at the end of the runway and my co-pilot and I both got on the brakes as hard as we could press. We were up out of our seats, jamming the brakes all the way down. She ground to a halt just a few feet from the end of the runway.
The crew was very appreciative—and gave me accolades for my skill as a pilot. It was the only time I saw that crew leap out of the plane and bend down and kiss the ground. But when you walk away from a landing like that, you don’t worry too much about who gets credit for it—you’re just glad to be alive. The next day they sent in a DC-3 in to pick us up.
There were two things that kept me steady during the war. One was the knowledge that every minute we were in the air, taking off, or landing, there were ten young lives that depended on me—and all ten of us would die if I failed or made a mistake.
I won’t tell you that I wasn’t afraid. I was afraid a lot of times. Anybody that tells you that they flew thirty-five combat missions over Germany in World War II and they never had a moment of fear, they’re either crazy or they’re prevaricating.
The average crew with the 15th Air Force only got to complete seventeen missions, so you can tell the casualties were heavy. We weren’t fully aware of that at the time. We would see a couple of planes go down. Maybe a week later we’d see three or four more go down. What we didn’t fully comprehend was how cumulative the losses became. Over a period of thirty-five missions, which was the quota for a crew, we had a casualty rate of around 50 percent.
I came back in ’45, and went back to school, finished my B.A., and then went to Northwestern and got a Ph.D. After that I taught history and government for five years. I went into politics full-time in ’56, ran for Congress, and to everybody’s surprise, I got elected.
My friend Tom Brokaw talks about my generation being the Greatest Generation. I don’t know about that. I don’t think we were any greater than your generation, and others that have come along. It’s just that we triumphed in a war that the country was behind.
The strip on the Isle of Vis, where Lt. McGovern landed his “Dakota Belle”—nicknamed for his bride, Eleanor—was less than half the length of a B-24 runway. For his skill and courage in completing the mission and safely landing his crew, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. George McGovern went on to be elected senator from South Dakota and was the Democratic Party candidate for president in 1972.
By the time the war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945, more than 40,000 American airmen had been killed in action—a higher casualty ratio than that of any other branch of service in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II. Another 80,000 were wounded in action, or in accidents or training—25,000 of them in the United States. Over 65,200 U.S. aircraft were destroyed by enemy fire, accidents, and mishaps. Nearly half of those who took off from bases in England, North Africa, and Italy to take on the Axis didn’t make it back.
Though the idea that a war could be won by air power alone was invalidated during World War II, the contest did prove that air superiority was absolutely essential to victory. Whether they flew fighters, bombers, or transports—the pilots and aircrews who served in the European theater from 1941 to 1945 forged a legacy that persists to this day: that the United States could never again afford to be without the most advanced air force in the world.
CHAPTER 9
WAR AT SEA 1941–1945
It began on 3 September 1939, a little more than eight hours after Britain declared war on Germany. At 7:30 that evening, 250 miles northwest of Ireland, the German submarine U-30 torpedoed MV Athenia—a British-owned passenger liner, killing 118 of the 1,400 passengers and crew. They would be the first of tens of thousands to perish in what Winston Churchill called the “Battle of the Atlantic.”
When Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939—the event that precipitated World War II in Europe—he had only fifty-seven U-boats. They were under the command of Admiral Karl Dönitz—one of the most fervent acolytes in the Nazi cause. Within the span of a year, the number of U-boats at sea and attacking Britain’s Atlantic lifeline would double—as would Allied shipping losses.
On 29 November 1939, Hitler issued Führer Directive Number 9, authorizing unrestricted attacks against vessels attempting to support the economy or military of Germany’s adversaries. From then until the end of the war, Britain’s 4,000-ship merchant fleet—the largest in the world—would be under attack from aircraft of the Luftwaffe, surface vessels of Germany’s navy, the Kriegsmarine (small torpedo-firing and mine-laying E-boats), and armed merchant raiders. But the greatest threat of all came from Unterseeboots—U-boats.
The crew of the USCG cutter Spencer watching explosions sink a German U-175.
Hitler’s goal was simple: to strangle Britain into submission. And it was not beyond the r
ealm of possibility. The British Isles required nearly 60 million tons of imported products annually to support a peacetime economy. Food, raw materials for production, oil, non-ferrous metals, high-tensile steel, fabric for clothing, leather for boots, rubber for tires—all arrived in England via more than 10,000 shiploads per year. Karl Dönitz told the Führer that if he had 300 U-boats, Britain could be blockaded into capitulation. Hitler set out to give his loyal subordinate what he wanted.
To contend with the threat, the British first turned to the colonies of the United Kingdom—and then the United States. Even before Winston Churchill became prime minister on 10 May 1940, the Roosevelt administration was quietly doing what it could to help. Despite restrictive neutrality laws enacted by Congress, and just days after war began in Europe, FDR authorized the sale of munitions to Canada—though it was an open secret that Ottawa would simply transfer whatever it received to Britain.
U.S. convoy en route to England.
On 16 September 1939 the first large transatlantic convoy of war materiel and foodstuffs sailed from Halifax, Nova Scotia, for England. Until the U.S. entered the war, convoys of thirty to forty ships—shepherded by four to six armed escorts and equipped with “asdic” (British-invented underwater acoustic detection gear) and depth charges—would form up off Canada to make the Atlantic transit. For the next two years, convoys of ships under every flag in the British Empire, and many others “leased” by the British from “neutral” nations for the duration of the war, had to run a gauntlet of U-boats, surface raiders, and Luftwaffe attacks in order to reach or leave England.
In November 1939, Congress amended U.S. neutrality laws to permit France and Great Britain to purchase war materiel, provided that American-flagged vessels did not transport the arms. This action made essential arms and equipment more available to the democracies standing against Hitler, but did nothing to improve the delivery of these crucial provisions to those who needed them.
The problem of getting supplies to England was exacerbated even further in June 1940 with the fall of France. By July, Dönitz established submarine bases in both Norway and the Bay of Biscay—all but eliminating the problems of getting his U-boats out of the Baltic and significantly increasing their area of operations in the Atlantic. The French bases at Bordeaux, La Rochelle, St. Nazaire, L’Orient, and Brest—which Dönitz heavily fortified—halved the time it took for his U-boats to transit to their “hunting grounds.” At the same time, the British were forced to recall many of their surface ships and patrol aircraft to defend against the possibility of a German invasion and to fight the “Battle of Britain” against the Luftwaffe. As the number of armed escorts and protective over-flights for convoys dropped, merchant losses increased dramatically.
The announcement—on 3 September 1940—that the U.S. would transfer fifty “obsolete” American destroyers to Britain in exchange for leases on British bases in the Atlantic was a morale builder in London, but made the immediate situation even worse. Hitler responded on 6 September by declaring that all merchant vessels—of any nation—attempting to deliver anything to Britain would be sunk. Dönitz and his U-boats did all they could to implement the threat.
By the autumn of 1940 German U-boats deployed from France and Norway were operating in “wolf packs” of ten to fifteen U-boats against convoys to and from the British Isles. Losses of ships, cargoes, and crews exploded. In September and October 1940 more than 125 vessels—800,000 tons of shipping—went to the bottom. Had winter weather not curtailed U-boat operations in the North Atlantic, it would have been worse.
Then, in December 1940, just weeks after his re-election for an unprecedented third term, FDR set out to change the equation. Publicly proclaiming that the U.S. had to be the “Arsenal of Democracy,” he urged Congress to pass “Lend-Lease”—allowing the British to “borrow” or “buy-now-pay-later”—for arms, munitions, ships, and planes. In anticipation of congressional approval—which came in March 1941—American shipyards immediately commenced work on dozens of destroyers, destroyer-escorts, and cutters. Roosevelt also extended the U.S. “neutrality zone” east to Bermuda and all the way north to Iceland. He ordered the new U.S. Atlantic Fleet to commence escorting convoys within this zone, thus freeing up British ships for operations closer to home.
Despite these changes, by the spring of 1941 shipping losses were again on the rise. With better weather, bigger U-boat wolf packs returned—and this time, the brand-new battleship Bismarck—the pride of Hitler’s surface fleet—came with them.
When the British Admiralty discovered that the most powerful battleship in the world had sortied for the Atlantic, every available ship in the British Fleet was ordered to give chase, and merchant ships in eleven convoys scattered for the nearest friendly port. By the time the Bismarck was sent to the bottom on 27 May, the battleship HMS Prince of Wales had been badly damaged, the battle cruiser HMS Hood had sunk with all hands, and President Roosevelt had declared an Unlimited National Emergency.
In June of 1941, Hitler invaded Russia—further complicating the maritime supply situation, and bringing the U.S. ever closer to an armed confrontation. In August, the U.S. and Royal navies began escorting convoys laden with Lend-Lease supplies headed for Murmansk. On 4 September, the destroyer USS Greer, alerted by a British patrol plane, pursued U-652, which had been shadowing a convoy. When the U-boat fired a torpedo at its antagonist, the Greer responded with a depth charge attack. Then in October, the USS Kearney was damaged, and U-boat torpedoes sank the USS Reuben James. Both destroyers were defending convoys from wolf pack attacks when the attacks occurred.
By late autumn of ’41, the weather in the North Atlantic once again curtailed U-boat operations. When Pearl Harbor was bombed on 7 December 1941, there were only a dozen German submarines operating along the British-Russian maritime supply routes. Though surprised by the Japanese attack, Dönitz quickly put together a plan for a massive U-boat strike against shipping lanes just off the American mainland. But on 11 December, the day Hitler declared war on the United States, he was directed by the Führer’s senior staff to keep the bulk of his undersea fleet close to home.
Undeterred, Dönitz devised Operation Palkinshlog, or “Drumbeat”—using only five 1,100-ton, Type-9 U-boats. On the night of 23 December 1941, the five submarines deployed from L’Orient, France, for the 3,500-mile trip across the Atlantic. A week later, in a successful effort to confound Allied convoy planners, he dispatched a six-boat wolf pack of his smaller 740-ton U-boats to the waters off Newfoundland.
The operation was a stunning success—made more so by the lack of American preparedness for such an onslaught in waters off the East Coast. In just three weeks, starting in January 1942, the Drumbeat gambit sent twenty-six American vessels, 162,000 gross registered tons of shipping, and 252 American merchant seamen to a watery grave—many times within sight of land. Some called it “the Pearl Harbor of the Atlantic.” The Germans called it “Happy Time.”
For the next ten months Allied shipping losses were devastating—particularly along the U.S. East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico—where no convoys or protective procedures of any kind had ever been implemented. By April, U-boats had sunk eighty-seven ships—more than 500,000 tons. In May, Dönitz shifted south to the Gulf of Mexico, sinking another forty-one ships, mostly tankers. And though there were never more than a dozen U-boats operating along the U.S. east coast at one time, the worst was yet to come.
U-3008 on patrol.
The warm waters of the Gulf Stream, just east of the American mainland, offered both lucrative hunting grounds for the U-boats and a welcome respite for German submariners who had been fighting in the cold waters of the North Atlantic for better than two years. One of those Germans who saw the U.S. for the first time from the deck of a U-boat was Peter Petersen. He was a nineteen-year-old diesel machinist when he joined the crew of U-518. Petersen had grown up near the Danish border and volunteered for U-boat service after he was drafted. He made three deployments to the U.S. coast s
tarting that spring of 1942.
PETER PETERSEN
Machinist Mate, Kriegsmarine
Aboard U-518
14 November 1942
I volunteered for the U-boats because the pay was better and I thought that the guys on those boats were very brave. Our mission was simply to sink ships. My U-boat—U-518—was just one of 1,154 submarines that Germany built during the war. Each of the boats our size—and there were some larger—had a crew of about fifty-five men, and each could carry up to twenty-two torpedoes.
When we got to the American east coast in the spring of 1942, it was a shooting gallery. We found it very easy for us to sink ships there, because there were no convoys, no escorts, and no patrol aircraft at all on our first deployment. The American navy was nowhere to be seen. And the merchant ships had no idea how to handle it.
We were able to swim in the Gulf Stream during the day, take the sunlight on the deck, and listen to American music on the radio. We didn’t need to operate in wolf packs because there were so many individual ships— tankers and transports—traveling up and down the east coast without escorts. We would arrive on station off an American port like Charleston, post a lookout, and just wait for the ships to come steaming out.
Unlike the cities of Europe, American cities still had their lights on at night, making it easy to see the silhouettes of our targets. Some of them even steamed with their lights on. These slow-moving merchant ships were like sitting ducks.
