FTV: The Wild Blue
In the summer of 1999, author Stephen Ambrose was having dinner with his old friend George McGovern. Having been an acquaintance of the former 1972 presidential candidate, he knew of his previous service in the Army Air Force during World War II. Over dinner, McGovern mentioned he had recently sat for several interviews with a reporter who wanted to do a book about his WWII service. McGovern told Stephen that he wished he was writing the book but Ambrose was reluctant to jump on a project another author had already started. At the former Senator’s suggestion, Ambrose approached the reporter to see if he would allow him to do just that. The reporter agreed and even handed over the notes from his previous interviews. Stephen’s editor (who also represented McGovern) liked the idea but thought the book should be expanded to include information about the men with whom he had served. Thus the groundwork was laid for what became The Wild Blue – The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany (Stephen E. Ambrose, 2001 – Simon-Schuster).
George McGovern was the pilot of a B-24, a bomber with twin tails, a nose wheel, and a crew of eight. It could reach a speed of 303 miles per hour with a cruising speed of 200 mph. A B-24 was armed with ten .50 caliber machine guns and could carry 8,800 pounds of bombs. It was one of the five types of bombers the United States flew during WWII. The others were the B-17, B-25, B-26 and the B-29 which joined the action in 1944. Unlike its forerunners, the B-29 was pressurized and could fly above 30,000 feet at a top speed of 365 mph with a maximum range of 5,830 miles. The other three models were similar to McGovern’s aircraft so the conditions on board a B-24 applied to them also, but the greatly improved B-29 was a superior aircraft.
If one watches enough movies and TV shows about the bombers of WWII, one tends to get the idea that it was all flyboy glamour. The early 1960s TV series 12 O’Clock High (based on a 1948 book and movie of the same name) starred Robert Lansing as Col. Savage. It was a great show, but certainly a sanitized version of what life aboard a WWII bomber was truly like.
I will let Ambrose set the stage with his description of the B-24s that McGovern and so many other crews manned: “The B-24 was built like a Mack truck, except that it had an aluminum skin that could be cut with a knife. It could carry a heavy load far and fast but it had no refinements. Steering the four engine airplane was difficult and exhausting, as there was no power (steering aids) except for the pilot’s muscles. It had no windshield wipers, so the pilot had to stick his head out the side window to see during a rain. Breathing was possible only by wearing an oxygen mask – cold and clammy, smelling of rubber and sweat – above 10,000 feet in altitude. There was no heat, despite temperatures that at 20,000 feet and higher got as low as 40 or even 50 degrees below zero. The wind blew through the airplane like fury, especially from the waist gunner’s windows and whenever the bomb bay doors were open. The oxygen mask often froze to the wearer’s face. If the men at the waist touched their machine guns with bare hands, the skin froze to the metal.
There was no aisle to walk down, only the eight-inch-wide cat-walk (running beside the bombs and over the bomb bay doors) used to move forward and aft. It had to be done with care, as the aluminum doors, which rolled up into the fuselage instead of opening outward on a hinge, had only a 100-pound capacity, so if a man slipped he would break through. The seats were not padded, could not be reclined, and were cramped into so small a space that a man had almost no chance to stretch and none whatsoever to relax. Absolutely nothing was done to make it comfortable for the pilot, the co-pilot, or the other men in the crew, even though most flights lasted for eight hours, sometimes ten or more, seldom less than six. The plane existed and was flown for one purpose only, to carry 500 or 1,000 pound bombs and drop them accurately over enemy targets.” Life aboard a B-24 was anything but glamorous and the crews needed to survive 25 missions (later raised to 35) in order to be sent back to the states.
The other part of the story that seems to be forgotten is the brutal training the crews had to make it through before being sent on actual missions. Most of the bombers were crewed by young men between 18 and 21 years of age and if one happened to be over the advanced age of 25, they were called ‘the old men’. To run an effective bomber campaign, the Army Air Forces needed to train thousands of pilots and tens of thousands of ground crew members. The AAF became the largest educational system in the country with more trainees than they had the facilities to handle. It was a delicate balancing act to keep the new recruits moving forward, not to mention the effort needed to build enough aircraft to keep the war effort rolling.
Early in the war, the Royal Air Force found their bombers were easy targets for the German fighters and anti-aircraft batteries. The massive losses they endured pushed the Brits from precision daylight raids to night bombing. The less-than prescission night raids caused more damage to civilian targets and populations than daylight bombing did. When the United States entered the picture, the command structure refused to take the easier route of night bombing and focused their precision daylight runs on military targets. The Germans began scattering and hiding their manufacturing plants. For a long time, it seemed they were rebuilding their destroyed infrastructure as fast as the Allied bombing raids destroyed them. Bombing the enemy was supposed to be more effective than the trench warfare both sides had engaged in during WWI. Early on, the Allied airwar results seemed to make no more headway in WWII than the troops who held the enemy at bay in front line trench standoffs of the previous war.
Training was dangerous enough especially when these large beasts of the air were expected to fly in close formation. Night flying was even more dangerous. Many planes and crews were lost during training flights long before they ever saw combat. Once they were given orders, some flew to Europe or North Africa but many more endured a month-long voyage aboard cramped ships. The bomber pilots were all officers and the rest of the crew were given the rank of sergeant. Crews from the Eighth Air Force who had bailed out and were captured were held in Stalags run by the Lutwaffe. The head of the Luftwaffe, Herman Goring, considered airmen to be ‘knights of the sky’, probably from his history during the early days of air combat in WWI. Airmen taken prisoner were treated differently than infantry. Officers and sergeants were treated differently than privates and corporals so it was decided that all bomber crews would be officers and sergeants.
Upon graduating from flight school, George McGovern was dispatched to Liberal, Kansas to train as a B-24 pilot. He and his new wife Eleanor lived a Spartan lifestyle while he was in training. She became, she said, “A camp follower. Ten weeks here, twelve weeks there.” Eleanor would hold up in a rented room during the week when George was on base and be together with him on the weekends.
Of the 317,000 men who entered the AAF pilot training program, 193,400 graduated and the other 124,000 washed out. Those who did not make it through the rigorous pilot training program would end up training for the other roles needed to crew the plane. My father left the State Police to join the AAF but his second round of training in Florida got him sent home. The heat and humidity triggered his emphysema to the point they gave him a medical release and sent him back to the MSP. His discharge probably prevented him from ending up as a B-24 gunner.
After WWI, Orville Wright said, “The aeroplane has made war so terrible that I do not believe any country will again care to start a war.” Obviously, Wright was wrong and as WWII showed, the air war, no matter how terrible, would turn out to be a deciding factor in the next round of global conflict.
The Eighth Air Force were first deployed from bases in Britain in 1942 but they would not effectively pierce German airspace until 1943. The Eighth’s bombing campaign focused on German industrial complexes, marshaling grounds, and oil refineries. Once the Allied forces invaded North Africa, the Eighth Air Force expanded their campaign to support that front as well. The force was growing but taking heavy casualties. When the invasion of Sicily (July 1943) and Italy (September 1943) opened the front in the northern Mediterranean, the AAF began building 45 airfields in southern Italy to house planes moved in from the Eighth and Twelfth air group that previously operated out of Libya. The new Fifteenth Air Force was established in October of 1943 under the command of Gen. Nathan Twining. The Fifteenth moved into their new headquarters in Foggia on December 1, 1943 with the bombing of industrial, railway facilities, and bridges in northern Italy commencing on the same day.
In the back and forth raids of 1944, the Fifteenth took heavy casualties (a loss of 318 heavy bombers in July was their worst month) while inflicting much damage on German refineries and manufacturing facilities. With unlimited slave labor from occupied central Europe, the Germans were producing more aircraft than ever but the strain on their Air Force began to show. American pilots were entering the war with 360 hours of flight training. As manpower and fuel sources dwindled, the German Air Force were putting more and more inexperienced pilots into combat. Between June and October of 1944, the Luftwaffa losses of combat personnel rose from 31,000 per month to 44,000 per month. Both sides were taking heavy losses, but the airwar began to turn the tide in the Allies favor.
Nazi production czar Albert Speer said in his own book, “I could see the omens of the war’s end almost every day in the blue southern sky when the American Fifteenth Air Force crossed the Alps from their Italian bases to attack German industrial targets.” According to Ambrose, “Strategic bombing was paying off, which helped ward off proposals for the Americans to terrorize the Germans into capitulation by engaging in night bombing of cities.”
McGovern disembarked from his seafaring transport in September of 1944. He joined the 741st Squadron, 455th Bomb Group operating out of San Giovanni Field near Cerignola, Italy. Pre-war, Cerignola was a fertile farming area known for grain production (the term ‘cereal’ is a derivation of ‘Cerignola’). During the rainy season, the fliers lived in a muddy mess in tents set up in an olive grove. Overtime, the tents would be improved with concrete or wooden floors. There were separate officer’s and sergeant’s clubs but the flight crews used them interchangeably. The AAF boys employed the locals to do a lot of the construction work and women in the nearby towns were glad to take in laundry for pay.
Part of the training involved McGovern flying as the co-pilot with an experienced captain on his first five flights. When he finally flew with his own crew, he was five flights into his 35 required when they saw their first combat. There were periods of slack time between missions but when they flew, their day began at 4 am. Breakfast was followed by briefing meetings and weather reports before they were delivered to their aircraft. Once queued up to fly, one plane would be taking off with the next halfway down the runway. When they reached the halfway point, the third plane began rolling. Takeoffs and landings could be just as hazardous as the flak they encountered over targets. McGovern was considered a great pilot and he took care of his crew – it was his voice they heard directing all the action. George took his duty to bring his crew home seriously and his crew rated him as one of the very best pilots.
The danger from the German fighters lessened as 1944 carried on. The Germans began concentrating their anti-aircraft batteries around their marshaling yards and industries. The B-24s crews liked the ‘milk runs’ where there were few defenses but the heavy flak they took over some sites made them nervous. They had no choice but to fly into the barrage and hope for the best. Deaths from combat were formidable but throughout the war, 35,946 accidental deaths occurred from planes crashing on take off or from flying tight formations. The flyers were often more afraid of their own planes than they were of the flak they flew through over targets.
George McGovern flew his 35th and final flight on April 25, 1945. The target was the much hated refineries around Linz, Austria which were heavily fortified with flak batteries. Flak put 110 holes in the Dakota Queen that day, one punctured the navigator’s map, another hit the hydraulic lines. This mangled the hydraulic system beyond repair as the blood red fluid leaked from the shattered lines. Gunner Sgt. William ‘Tex’ Ashlock was hit with a piece of flak that traveled up his leg from his knee to lodge in his butt. The number three engine was damaged and the prop was ‘feathered’ to lessen the drag. With only three working engines, the plane lost speed and altitude. Their best option was to limp home the best they could. McGovern told the crew they could bail out near Cerignola and he would land the plane himself but they all elected to stay with him.
With no hydraulic fluid, they had to hand crank the wheels down. To compensate for the lack of brakes, McGovern had the waist gunners attach parachutes to their gun mounts and upon touch down, they tossed them out the gun ports to help slow the plane down. They came in a bit high and faster than they should have and ended up with the nose wheel in a ditch at the end of the runway. “It wasn’t one of my better landings,” George said later. Ashlock was put in an ambulance and another crew member had a sprained ankle from the hard landing. Otherwise, they survived one of the worst flights in their time there. McGovern was done so he was not scheduled to fly the next day, April 26. In fact, no one flew on April 26, 1945 as the war was over for the flight crews. Germany would finally surrender unconditionally on May 7, 1945.
The B-24s that dropped so many tons of bombs turned their attention to distributing the food they had stockpiled to the many towns in the war torn country. They began their own version of the Marshall Plan. None of the excess rations would be going back to the states so the air crews transported them to the towns and villages in need of aid.
Some still argue about which service made the biggest impact on the war effort – Army, Navy or Army Air Force. In truth, defeating the Axis required all three working in concert. Captured Germans would testify that air power was a major factor in the fall of the Third Reich, but General Eisenhower knew that it took all three of his commands to do the job.
George McGovern returned to the states, his wife, and their baby daughter who was born when he was in Italy. Ambrose always thought McGovern could have used his war experiences to better effect when he ran for president, but those who knew him best knew that just wasn’t George’s way.
Top Piece Video: Iron Maiden – Aces High seemed appropriate. Congrats to Nico McBain on his retirement from touring with IM.