The Allied Airmen WWII
Posted by Mitch Williamson in Air Warfare on Monday, November 7, 2011
Painting by Gil Cohen.
In World War II airplanes, crews, and the paratroopers and
gliders that they transported proved of incalculable importance. In 1940 Great
Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF) saved the nation in its heroic resistance to
German attacks on London, causing Churchill to remark, “Never have so many owed
so much to so few.” In the dark days after Pearl Harbor, an attack on Tokyo,
Japan, by a small force of American planes led by Gen. Jimmy Doolittle raised
American morale. On D day in June 1944,Allied control of the skies may well
have made the difference between the success and failure of the Normandy
invasion.
In the European theater the Allied air forces operated both independently
of and in cooperation with ground and sea forces. Independently they attacked
the enemy’s communication and supply systems. They machine-gunned trains and
bombed bridges, ports, and railroad tracks and yards. They bombed industrial
targets supplying the German military in an effort to cut off such supplies as
oil, roller bearings, and electrical power.
As the war dragged on they extended their attacks on
factories to the areas around them where their workers lived; thereby, Allied
leaders theorized, they would destroy working-class morale. Thus they justified
bombing cities, a practice earlier forsworn by both the Allies and the Axis.
This promise was first violated by Germany in repeated attacks on Warsaw,
Poland, in 1939; Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 1940; and such British cities
as London and the industrial city of Coventry in 1940. In fact in the ETO,
bombing of cities proved not to be cost-effective, inflicting extremely heavy
losses on the raiders and failing to destroy enemy morale; it also deprived the
Allies of the high moral ground important to their own understanding of why
they were fighting.
While the British bombed at night, the Americans conducted
daylight raids. These were enabled by the accuracy of the Norden bombsight and
the heavier armament that protected American bombers, theoretically allowing
them to make their raids in daytime even before fighter escorts had the range
to accompany them all the way to the targets. However, the American fliers took
such heavy losses that these raids were called off in August 1943 until
long-range escort fighters could be manufactured to protect the bombers. By the
spring of 1944 these were ready, and raids resumed with considerably more
effect. During the autumn, winter, and spring of 1944–45, between them the RAF
and the U.S. Army Air Force, strengthened by the development of new fighters, paralyzed
German economic life.
Besides these independent operations, Allied airmen
cooperated with the other services. With naval forces they attacked enemy
ships. For ground forces they mapped areas to reveal enemy presence and
fortifications; acted as spotters to direct artillery fire; attacked
communications centers and ammunition dumps; and responded to calls from the
ground to destroy machine-gun nests. One infantryman after another has attested
to the value of air support and protection.
Most airmen recognized their own good fortune in living
comfortably at their bases while the infantry trudged and battled through fair
weather and foul, often without the comfort of hot food, warm dry clothing, and
bathing facilities. On the other hand, the terrible flak (antiaircraft ground
fire, or ack-ack) along the European coasts and over the cities they bombed and
the enemy fighters that attacked them on missions early in the war subjected
them to levels of stress that could not be sustained indefinitely. Accordingly,
a system was worked out to send those who flew in the bombers back to the
United States after a certain number of missions, although the need for air
personnel more than once raised the prescribed number, from 25 to 30 to 35 to
50.52 Thereafter they were assigned in North America on noncombat duty.
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