Men Who Killed the Luftwaffe: The U.S. Army Air Forces Against Germany in World War II

499 Pages·2010·7.71 MB·English

by  LtCol (Ret) Jay A. Stout

Jay A. Stout

Preface ..................................... vii
Introduction ..................................ix
Chapter 1 Building an Air Force ........................... 1
Chapter 2 The Nazis and Eaker ........................... 23
Chapter 3 Spaatz and Eaker Go to England ................. 43
Chapter 4 First Mission and the Move to North Africa ......... 53
Chapter 5 Casablanca and Fighters in North Africa ........... 69
Chapter 6 Romance, Submarines, and Sicily ................ 91
Chapter? TIDALWAVE ..................................111
Chapter 8 The Gunners ................................ 131
Chapter 9 Black Thursday and Long-Range Fighters ......... 143
Chapter 10 Doolittle, Phased Escort, and Freedom for the
Fighters .............................. 169
Chapter 11 Big Week, Interns, and Flak .................... 187
Chapter 12 Pilot Training ............................... 205
Chapter 13 Ground Attack and Bomber Bailouts ............. 223
Chapter 14 The Oil Plan ................................ 241
Chapter 15 D-Day ..................................... 251
Chapter 16 Fighter-on-Fighter Combat ..................... 259
Chapter 17 The Men Who Made It Possible ................. 277
Chapter 18 FRANTIC .................................... 287
Chapter 19 Mishaps, Miscues, and Near Things .............. 303
Chapter 20 Jets, Rockets, and Tante Ju ..................... 319
Chapter 21 More Fighters and G's ........................ 337
Chapter 22 The Big Blow That Wasn't ..................... 351
Chapter 23 The General Falls ............................ 359
Chapter 24 Bodenplatte ................................. 369
Chapter 25 Deadly to the End ............................ 383
Conclusion ................................. 395
Afterword .................................. 398
Notes ...................................... 402
Bibliography ................................ 411
Acknowledgments ............................ 416
Index ...................................... 417
pring 1934. Fourteen-year-old William Heller settled himself into the
"cockpit" of his homemade glider and took one last look at the lath-and-wire
contraption. It seemed sufficiently airworthy. Its wings, sheathed in linoleum
tablecloths, looked large and sturdy enough to lift him airborne.
He squinted up at his friend "Squee" Miller who sat at the wheel of the
pickup he had taken from his parents' nursery. A sturdy rope ran from the truck
back to where Heller sat. He gave Squee the prearranged signal, and the pickup
whined and bucked and lurched forward. The rope snapped tight and snatched
Heller and his makeshift craft across the grass at a quickly accelerating rate.
Heller's heart beat fast as the glider scraped and bumped and careened along
the ground. Finally, the nose pointed skyward for just a brief instant before one
of the wings dipped, caught the ground, and cartwheeled the little plane into a
disintegrating ball of wire and wood and linoleum sheeting.
It was not too long before Mr. Heller arrived with a pair of dikes and set
about cutting the bloody boy out of his ill-considered dream. Finished, he stood
his son up, looked him in the eyes, and declared: "Next time you fly, you better
have an engine!"
Heller would eventually fly with four engines, and rather than bump along a
Pennsylvania cow pasture, he would deliver bombs deep inside Hitler's
Germany. Although none of them knew it that spring of 1934, tens of thousands
of his peers from around the nation would be flying with him.
o period in the history of air warfare is a more fertile field for writers and
scholars than the fighting that raged over Europe during World War II. It was
remarkable not only because of its its magnitude, but because the stakes were so
high. The air war against Nazi Germany had to be won before Europe could be
liberated. Beating the Germans in the air was a gargantuan effort made up of
hundreds of major elements, any one of which deserves book-length treatment.
In fact, hundreds of books have been written about the fight against the
Luftwaffe, the German air force.
Capturing every component of that air war in a single work is impossible;
there is simply too much material. Likewise, there are too many key personages.
What I aim to highlight here are the experiences of individual airmen, mostly
unknown, who were representative of the enormous numbers of young
Americans who made up the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) during the air war
over Europe. Accordingly, in order to maintain a sharp focus on these airmen, I
have purposely refrained from mentioning the literally hundreds of outstanding
leaders without whom the fight might have been lost.
By the time of my childhood in the 1960s, most of these unheralded airmen
had long before hung up their uniforms and made civilian lives for themselves.
They piqued my schoolboy interest with an occasional story or offhand
reference. I was struck that these men who seemed so unremarkable were the
ones that had fought the war over Europe. But now, older and with a military
flying career of my own fading into memory, I understand and appreciate these
men in a way that I could not when I was a child. And I want to honor them.
Accordingly, I have crafted a framework of strategy and doctrine, of tactics and
equipment, of time and place, of well-known leaders to showcase how they beat
the Luftwaffe-since it was mostly the USAAF that defeated the Luftwaffe.
But what about Great Britain's Royal Air Force, the RAF? How can I justify
crediting the killing of the Luftwaffe to the United States? First, there is no doubt
that Great Britain, America's dearest ally, played a major role in the defeat of the
Luftwaffe. I will declare up front that I am a great admirer of the RAF's airmen,
and I will further offer that had the men of Fighter Command not turned back the
Luftwaffe in the skies over England during 1940, the Nazis might have taken the
British Isles and subsequently won the war. But instead, Great Britain's airmen
saved not only their nation, but also the base from which the United States later
launched its crippling air campaigns. Those raids ensured the destruction of the
Luftwaffe, guaranteeing that Hitler's armies never had a prayer of surviving the
war, much less winning it.
Furthermore, the quality and professionalism of the RAF's aircrews was
superb; throughout the entire war, Great Britain fielded perhaps the best trained
airmen of all the belligerents. Moreover, its equipment was good, technically
sound and of high quality. Its night-bombing campaigns burned German cities to
ashes and forced the Luftwaffe to commit significant resources, especially night
fighters, that could have been useful elsewhere. Its tactical operations, just like
many of the USAAF's tactical operations described in this book, had a chronic, if
not fatal, effect on the Luftwaffe.
On the other hand, the RAF's leadership did not have a plan for destroying
the Luftwaffe. Terror bombing aside, the most the RAF could hope to achieve
beyond its own shores-certainly before the United States arrived in strength-was
to establish local air superiority above a given battlefield. But even that never
happened with certitude when it was really important. The RAF only barely
covered the evacuation of Dunkirk, was badly handled during the Dieppe raid,
and was never able to push the Germans out of North Africa by itself.
Bomber Command did take the war to Germany, but it did not put together
an effective or coherent campaign to target the industries that supported the
Luftwaffe. Rather, following a dreadful savaging by the Luftwaffe during a brief
and utterly ineffective attempt at daylight bombing, it turned to night raids.
Those operations early in the war were simply too inaccurate to deliver the sorts
of effects that were required. Consequently, the decision was taken to simply
strike Germany's cities in order to terrorize, kill, and "dehouse" the population.
Even after Great Britain pioneered night-bombing devices-radar among them-
that enabled it to strike with more accuracy, it generally chose to continue flying
area-bombing raids rather than hitting specific war-related targets.
Accordingly, after the Battle of Britain, the RAF and the Luftwaffe never
really engaged in anything more than a tit-for-tat series of engagements that did