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The U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II

REFLECTIONS

AND

1REMEMB IRANCEES

Veterans of die United States

Army Air Forces

Reminisce about World War II

Edited by

William T. Y'Blood, Jacob Neufeld,

and Mary Lee Jefferson

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14. ABSTRACT

On August 7, 1995, a National Day of Recognition of the U.S. Army Air Forces, the Air Force History and Museums Program staged

a series of commemorative events. These included speeches by the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Air Force. Combat veterans of

the air war in Europe and in the Pacific reminisced about their wartime experiences.

73 pp., photos

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a. REPORT b. ABSTRACT c. THIS PAGE ABSTRACT OF Richard I. Wolf

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Foreword

n anniversary gives us the opportunity to recognize the deeds

of our predecessors, take pride in our heritage, show gratitude

for our victories, reflect on our losses, and review the past with

the benefit of the longer perspective of history. Each generation tends

to see the past in terms of its own experience. History both illuminates

what has lain hidden and reinforces what we know.

For its 1995 observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of

World War II, the Air Force History and Museums Program sponsored

a series of commemorative events. One, a National Day of Recognition

for Veterans of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), held on

August 7th in the Washington, D.C. area, was celebrated at three locations. First, at the Pentagon's center court, Secretary of the Air Force

Sheila E. Widnall and Chief of Staff of the Air Force General Ronald

R. Fogleman, praised the veterans' numberless contributions to Allied

victory in the war. The Air Force Historian, Richard P. Hallion, read a

congressional resolution marking the day and then Lieutenant Colonel Donald S. Lopez, USAF, retired, spoke on behalf of all World War

II airmen. A flyover by vintage USAAF aircraft capped the festivities.

During the afternoon in a symposium at the National Archives

and Records Administration, eleven USAAF veterans, in separate sessions covering the conflicts in Europe and Asia, reflected on their own

wartime experiences of half a century ago. They spoke with clarity and

authority and in remarkable detail on such topics as military preparedness, leadership, training, racial segregation, the treatment of

American prisoners of war, military technology, the Allied invasion of

Japan, and the use of atomic weapons. Historians Richard G. Davis

and William T. Y'Blood presented overviews at the respective sessions.

That evening, the Daughters of the American Revolution gave a

reception in honor of the symposium participants and opened Constitution Hall for an outstanding musical tribute, which was performed

before a packed house by the United States Air Force Band.

Dr. Hallion, joined by General Bryce Poe, II, president of the Air

Force Historical Foundation, hosted the symposium. Reminiscences

and remarks are faithfully preserved herein.

liii
Table of Contents

Forew ord ............................................ iii

U.S. Senate Proclamation ......................... vii

Remarks at Pentagon Center Court

Dr. Sheila E. Widnall, USAF Secretary .................... ix

Gen. Ronald R. Fogleman, USAF Chief of Staff .............. xi

Lt. Col. Donald S. Lopez, USAF, retired ................... xiii

Reflections on the Air War in Europe

Overview

Dr. Richard G. Davis ................................. 1

Introductions

Gen. Bryce Poe, II .................................. 10

Panelists

Gen. Jacob E. Smart, USAF, retired .................... 13

Maj. Gen. Lewis E. Lyle, USAF, retired .................. 16

Lt. Col. Woodrow W, Crockett, USAF, retired ............. 19

Lt. Col. Harry H. Crosby, USAF, retired ................. 23

Col. Harold D. Jefferson, USAF, retired .................. 27

Maj. Gen. Ramsay D. Potts, USAF, retired ............... 34

Reflections on the Air War in the Pacific

Overview

Mr. William T. Y'Blood ............................... 39

Introductions

Dr. Richard P. Hallion ............................... 48

Panelists

Col. Edwin A. Loberg, USAF, retired .................... 50

Maj. Gen. John R. Alison, USAF, retired ................. 53

Lt. Col. Donald S. Lopez, USAF, retired .......... 58

Maj. Gen. John P. Henebry, USAF, retired ................ 62

Gen. Bernard A. Schriever, USAF, retired ................ 66

V
National Day of Recognition for

United States Army Air Forces

Veterans of World War II
PROCLAMATION

104th CONGRESS, 1st SESSION

Recognizing the contributions of the United States Army

Air Forces to the United States victory in World War H.

IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES

July 26 (legislative day, July 10), 1995, Mr. Thurmond submitted the

following resolution, which was referred to the Committee on Armed

Services

RESOLUTION

Recognizing the contributions of the United States Army Air

Forces to the United States victory in World War II.

Whereas in World War II, the United States Army Air Forces

played a decisive role in turning the tide of war both in Europe and

the Pacific.

Whereas the price for this role in victory was high, with more

than fifty thousand Army Air Forces personnel killed in combat.

Whereas the strategic air campaign of the Army Air Forces in

Europe during World War II successfully crippled the industrial and

economic infrastructure and communications and transportation networks of Germany.

Whereas the Army Air Forces supported ground forces and

gained air supremacy in the skies over the beaches of the D-Day invasion of Europe, an operation that set the stage for the downfall of the

Third Reich.

Whereas in August 1942, the Army Air Forces commenced air

operations that established air supremacy in the Southwest Pacific,

thereby contributing significantly to victory in the battles for New

Guinea and the Philippines.

Whereas the Army Air Forces supported the strategic and tactical thrusts of the Armed Forces across the central Pacific, the

Aleutians, and the China-Burma-India Theater:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, THAT THE

SENATE

(1) recognizes the courage, sacrifice, and devotion to duty of the

personnel of the United States Army Air Forces in World War II; and

(2) recognizes the outstanding and critical contribution of the

Army Air Forces to the worldwide victory of the United States in

World War II.

vii
National Day of Recognition for

United States Army Air Forces

Veterans of World War II

Remarks at Pentagon Center Court

August 7, 1995

The Honorable Sheila E. Widnall

Secretary of the Air Force
Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests. There are seventyeight battle streamers attached to our Service flag. Forty-two of

them, more than half, were won in combat in hostile skies during World War II. Those battle campaign streamers are continuing

reminders of the sacrifices of so many airmen who knew that the price

of freedom was high, yet stepped forward to do their duty.

Today, we reflect on what we asked of the nearly two and a half

million young men and women who joined the Army Air Forces during

World War II. These were ordinary people asked to perform extraordinary tasks. They came from their homes, farms, and factories. They

were asked to become pilots and bombardiers, gunners and radio operators, typists and teachers, mechanics and engineers. They were asked

to put their futures on hold-to leave their loved ones, their families,

their friends-and take up arms in the defense of freedom. They were

asked to fly in harm's way so that future generations wouldn't have to.

In just four years of war, over places with such names as Anzio,

Ploesti, Guadalcanal, and Luzon, over fifty-two thousand of those airmen lost their lives. We must never forget that we prevailed because

of the selflessness, the courage, the talent, and the immense personal

sacrifice of so many airmen serving alongside their comrades of the

Army, Navy, and Marine Corps.

We look back with admiration at the accomplishments of this

generation of Americans. They earned our lasting respect and set a

lasting standard for those of us who've followed in their footsteps.

Since World War II we've added thirty campaign battle streamers to our Service flag. Our nation has called on other young Americans to be vigilant guardians of freedom. And like their comrades

from both World Wars, they were willing to sacrifice all for the cause

of freedom.

Today, we carry the torch handed on by generations of airmen.

The men and women of today's Air Force share their determination to

keep the flame alive, to bear the standard of freedom, and to guard

this nation's skies.

Today, America's airmen are again being tested around the world

in Bosnia, in Iraq, in the Persian Gulf. They are as professional and as

well trained as any force in our nation's history.

We must never forget, however, that their skills and capabilities

are a direct result of lessons learned from those who came before,

lessons paid for with blood and sacrifice in a thousand battles, in a

thousand fiery skies. To the men and women who made these sacrfices fifty years ago: We salute you.

ix
National Day of Recognition for

United States Army Air Forces

Veterans of World War II

Remarks at Pentagon Center Court

August 7, 1995

General Ronald R. Fogleman

United States Air Force Chief of Staff
t's a great pleasure for me to join Secretary Widnall in opening

today's activities in honor of U.S. Army Air Forces veterans of World

War II. As the Secretary indicated, we all are deeply indebted to the

brave American airmen who risked their lives in defense of democracy

during that fateful time. Your tremendous courage and unwavering commitment contributed enormously to Allied victory fifty years ago. You

established your fame in the war-tom skies over North Africa, Europe,

Asia, and the Pacific.

Despite the odds, you pressed the attack repeatedly and eventually won the day. The heroic efforts of the U.S. Army Air Forces in World

War II demonstrated that air power can have a decisive impact on the

outcome of a battle, a campaign, and even a war. You confirmed Giulio

Douhet's prediction: "Aerial warfare will be the most important element

in future wars." You provided compelling justification for the creation of

an independent United States Air Force. The U.S. Army Air Forces vividly demonstrated the inherent flexibility of air power.

You bolstered America's morale with the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo,

while landing a crushing blow on the Japanese psyche. You opened a second front over occupied Europe long before the invasion of Normandy,

while tying up enormous enemy resources with your persistent attacks

in an aerial offensive that mortally wounded Nazi Germany. You leveled

Japanese industrial centers with bomber raids from distant bases. You

swept enemy air forces from the skies, securing the air superiority that

was so crucial to the success of ground and naval operations.

You worked closely with Allied ground forces, supporting their operations with overwhelming firepower from above, even protecting General George Patton's right flank as he drove across northern France. The

U.S. Army Air Forces conducted devastating interdiction campaigns that

denied the enemy the critical resources and mobility needed to counter

Allied offensives.

You cooperated with Allied naval forces to eliminate the German Uboat threat, to decimate Japanese supply convoys in the Southwest

Pacific and to bottle up Japanese shipping with aerial mining. You transported millions of tons of supplies over "the Hump" in the CBI [ChinaBurma-India] theater and delivered paratroopers, glider troops, and infantry directly into battle. All the while, your innovative ground crews

"kept 'em flying" despite harsh conditions and limited resources. Finally,

you delivered the atomic bombs that forced Japan to surrender and

brought World War II to a triumphant close.

Half a century ago, you, the men and women of the U.S. Army Air

Forces wrote a glowing volume in the annals of air power history. Your

enduring legacy is a free world and an independent U.S. Air Force. For

these, our nation and our service owe you an eternal debt of gratitude.

Thank you, and God bless.

xi
National Day of Recognition for

United States Army Air Forces

Veterans of World War II

Remarks at Pentagon Center Court

August 7, 1995

Lieutenant Colonel Donald S. Lopez

United States Air Force, retired
ood morning, ladies and gentlemen. I have the great and somewhat humbling honor to represent the U.S. Army Air Forces

members who served so well in World War II. Led by experienced veterans of the pre-war Army Air Corps, most were young men

and women from all walks of life who'd never been out of the country

or, in many cases, out of their home states. Despite that, they responded immediately to our country's needs and, in less than a year after

entering service, many were engaged in combat all over the world

under most difficult conditions. They fought in the deserts of North

Africa, the ice of the Aleutians, the oceans and jungles of the Pacific,

the obscene weather and even more obscene flak of Europe, and, in my

case, the mountains of China. They overcame these obstacles with

courage and skill and went on to defeat tough enemies in all theaters

of the war.

Survival was not guaranteed; many lost their lives or were badly

wounded, others spent agonizing years in prison camps. Those who

survived the war put their experiences to good use. Their leadership

skills, work habits, and toughness developed in the Army Air Forces

paid off in the post-war world. Some stayed in the service and, with

the aid of the G.I. Bill, became the nucleus of the United States Air

Force. Some went into the airlines and helped in their expansion. Still

others became leaders in business and government. All can look back

with justifiable pride on their wartime service.

The exploits of the aircrews are well remembered, as they should

be. The fighter pilots, the bomber, troop carrier, and air transport

crews, and those with the most dangerous job of all, the flight instructors, have all received their share of glory.

However, equally important to the war effort and probably more

hard working, were the ground crews and other support personnel: the

mechanics who spent long hours in freezing cold or broiling heat to

ensure that the aircraft were ready, the armorers who struggled to

load heavy bombs, the parachute riggers, radiomen, and many others

who made the accomplishments of the aircrews possible.

The aircrews had a well-justified faith in the ground crews, confident that their aircraft would carry them safely above hundreds of

miles of enemy territory. I flew over a hundred missions in China and,

although my heart skipped many a beat, my engine never did.

The public may not know or may not remember how important

the ground crews were to the aircrews, but we aircrews know and we

remember. We always will.

xiil
National Day of Recognition

for

United States Army Air Forces

Veterans of World War II

Reflections

on the

Air War in Europe

Panelists

Gen. Jacob E. Smart, USAF, retired

Maj. Gen. Ramsay D. Potts, USAF, retired

Maj. Gen. Lewis E. Lyle, USAF, retired

Col. Harold D. Jefferson, USAF, retired

Lt. Col. Harry H. Crosby, USAF, retired

Lt. Col. Woodrow W. Crockett, USAF, retired

Introductions

Gen. Bryce Poe, II, USAF, retired

Overview

Dr. Richard G. Davis
The Air War in Europe

Gen. Poe: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the European portion of the World War II symposium on this national day of recognition

for the United States Army Air Forces veterans of that war. I'd also

like to give a special salute to those of you of any service in any theater who made those sacrifices to win that fight.

I'm General Bryce Poe, U.S. Air Force, retired, and president of

the Air Force Historical Foundation. I'm very honored to be asked to

participate today. Our time is limited, so we'll move right on with a

quick look at the air war in Europe, presented by a recognized expert

on the subject.

Richard Davis, with more than fifteen years as a key member of

the Office of Air Force History, earned his Ph.D. from George Washington University. In addition to many articles and monographs, his

books include the most recent and authoritative book on General Carl

Spaatz. Dr. Davis also supports plans and operations on a daily basis

for today's Air Force. For example, he's the author of a high-level Air

Force-Army study on joint operations. I've been told that the Air Force

is involved today in thirty-eight joint operations around the world.

Also, he's written a classified monograph on strategic bombing in the

Gulf War. He's presently working on a biography of General Henry

"Hap" Arnold. We're delighted to have you here, Rich.

Dr. Davis: I understand I have ten minutes to tell you all about

the air war in Europe and the Mediterranean during World War II.

Let's get on with it.

U.S. air operations fell into two distinct fields of effort. They consisted of a strategic air campaign against the German war economy,

and tactical air support of American ground forces. In 1945, the leaders of the U.S. Army Air Forces in distinguishing between the two

forms of air power said, "If your enemy needs milk, the tactical move

is to kick over the milk pail; the strategic move is to kill the cow."

In the strategic sphere, the AAF believed that bombers without

escort fighters could attack and destroy German war industries accurately and in daylight while suffering sustainable losses. In the tactical sphere, using methods based on British combat experience, the

AAF developed a scheme of command and control of tactical air power

that placed airmen in control of their own forces. Tactical air operations required the cooperation and understanding of two armed services, each with a unique perspective of ground operations.

The initial ground campaign in Tunisia demonstrated the difficulties inherent in orchestrating ground and air efforts. At the outset,

neither land nor air forces understood the Army's air support doctrine.

Both were forced untested into combat. As a result, problems, such as

the lack of radar for early warning and the fear by ground units of air

attack, hampered cooperation. In mid-February 1943, the placement
Reflections and Remembrances

of all Anglo-American tactical air under an experienced air officer, Air

Marshal Arthur Coningham, coincided with reinforcements and solutions to logistics problems to enhance air's effectiveness.

It's interesting that in early April 1943, General George Patton,

who commanded the only American corps in Tunisia, complained that

he wasn't getting enough air support. The British, incidentally, had

four corps at the time. A distinguished delegation of airmen went to

talk to Patton, to try and convince him that he was getting his fair

share. They were a British four-star, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder,

who commanded all Anglo-American air power in the Mediterranean;

Major General Carl Spaatz, who commanded all Anglo-American air

power in Tunisia; and Brigadier General Laurence Kuter, the senior

American officer in the tactical air force in Tunisia.

No sooner had the airmen gotten out of their car than two German FW 190s strafed Patton's headquarters. It was a tremendous

scene, a big hurrah as Patton fired away with his .45. This is the scene

that opens the movie, Patton; it was so good that Hollywood couldn't

make it any better and just copied it. When it was over, Patton looked

up at the Germans and said, "If I could catch up with those SOBs, I'd

give them each a medal." One of the airmen, who shall remain nameless, turned to the other two and said, "Well, you told me he was a

showman, but how in bloody hell did he manage that?"

In the end, tactical air contributed greatly to the defeat of the

Axis on the ground in Tunisia, assisted in repelling Axis counterattacks against the beachheads on Sicily, and maintained air superiority throughout the Mediterranean.

In winter 1943 and 1944, tactical air aided the fruitless Allied assaults on Cassino and the Rhine and the defense of the Anzio beachhead. In spring 1944, the Twelfth Air Force undertook Operation

STRANGLE to interdict German supplies in support of the planned Allied spring offensive. Although recent research has revealed that the

operation didn't achieve the success claimed for it, it, nevertheless,

placed added strains on an enemy already stretched to the limit. In

winter 1944 and 1945, tactical air in Italy followed the same pattern.

Meanwhile, in the European theater, the AAF had established

the Ninth Air Force in Britain in October 1943. By June 1944, under

the command of Lieutenant General Lewis Brereton, it had become

the most powerful tactical air force in World War II. Initially, it's fighters flew escort for strategic bombers attacking Germany. However, by

March 1944, as the needs of the Anglo-American invasion forces increased, the Ninth switched its emphasis to air-ground training and

particularly to attritional air attacks on Belgian and French transportation systems. The Allied high command expected these attacks to

hinder the post-invasion movement of German reinforcements and

logistics to oppose the beachhead, which they did.

2
The Air War in Europe

On the day of the landings in Normandy, the Ninth's medium

bombers struck the invasion beaches. Its fighters provided air cover

while troop transports delivered the bulk of Allied parachute forces.

Allied fighter-bombers made daylight movement by German ground

forces almost impossible, while entirely thwarting the operations of

the German air force. After assisting in the breakout from the beachhead on July 25, 1944, the Ninth worked closely with the U.S. 12th

Army Group by assigning a tactical air command to each of its armies.

Pilots literally rode in the turrets of the most advanced American

armored spearheads in order to call on air power when it was needed.

In August, American heavy bombers also flew much-needed gasoline

to the continent to help supply Patton's spearheads. With the invasion

of southern France, the AAF established the First Provisional Air

Force to help the U.S. 6th Army Group.

In the winter of 1944-1945, the Germans purposely launched an

Ardennes counteroffensive in poor flying weather in hopes of negating

Allied air power. Their ploy ultimately failed. Tactical air pushed back

the counteroffensive and then assisted the Allied drive into Germany

in the spring, easing the way for the ground forces in victory.

On an increasing scale from mid-1942 through May 1945, U.S.

strategic air operations contributed to the defeat of Germany. Bombing constituted a second or third front for the enemy, which was forced

to disperse aircraft and ball bearings industries, devote two million

men to air defenses, skew aircraft production toward interceptors, and

divert high-velocity artillery and vital communications equipment to

homeland defense. This drain, which increased throughout the conflict, constituted a significant, if somewhat intangible, achievement of

strategic bombing.

U.S. strategic air operations began with a raid of twelve B-17s on

the Rouen marshalling yards in France in August 1942. On January

27, 1943, fifty-five aircraft made the first American strike in Germany

on the naval base at Wilhelmshaven.

Throughout the strategic war, air power would be the focus of intense political, diplomatic, military, and bureaucratic pressures. Prewar plans specified that the U.S. air force in Britain, the Eighth, would

be the AAF's largest overseas contingent and would have the task of

conducting an offense against the German war economy. However,

shifting priorities slowed the Eighth's rate of growth, leaving it to test

pre-war doctrine under strength, and that doctrine, after much spent

blood, showed serious shortcomings.

By the second Schweinfurt raid of October 14, 1943, the Eighth

had failed to gain air superiority over Germany. Its short-range fighters were unable to accompany the bombers deep into Germany, where

the bombers suffered crushing losses. European weather allowed only

a slow rate of operations. Also, wartime crew training was unable to

3
Reflections and Remembrances

produce sufficient personnel capable of duplicating pre-war bombing

accuracies. Until the fall and winter of 1943, the Eighth inflicted no

permanent damage on the German war effort.

But, by the end of February 1944, the force's fortunes reversed.

In November 1943, the Eighth had introduced the H2X radar bombing device. It permitted the bombing of large targets through clouds

and, consequently, allowed a far greater increase in operations. Longrange escort fighters with drop tanks, P-51s and P-38s, arrived in

large numbers, while a tactical change by the Eighth's new commander, Lieutenant General James Doolittle, required American fighters

to attack German aircraft from cloud top to tree top, rather than to

passively protect the bombers. Constant combat increased the attrition of experienced German pilots to catastrophic levels. In addition,

an influx of new groups almost doubled the Eighth's bomblift, while

the creation of a new strategic air force, the Fifteenth in Italy, opened

new areas of attack to spread German air defenses.

Just as the Eighth was gaining air superiority over Germany, a

dispute arose in London over how best to use the heavy bombers in the

coming invasion. Lieutenant General Spaatz, commanding the U.S.

Strategic Air Forces, the Eighth and the Fifteenth, wanted to attack

German synthetic oil, while General Dwight Eisenhower favored attritional hits on Belgian and French rail systems. However, he allowed

two raids against oil targets in May 1944. Their success was confirmed

by the ULTRA organization in some of its most significant intercepts of

the war. They revealed the Germans moving anti-aircraft guns from

the Eastern Front and fighter aircraft factories to the oil plants. The

Allies knew that the Germans wouldn't have done so, especially for

unimportant targets, had they not been hurt. However, the strategic

air forces' chief success in the Normandy invasion was their elimination of the German day fighter force, which mounted no air opposition

during or after the invasion; most of its aircraft had been shot down.

Drop tanks to the rescue. Affixed to the Lockheed P-38 twin-boom

Lightning, eft, and the North American P-51 Mustang, right, auxiliary

fuel carriers gave the fighters greater range, enhancing them as strafers

and bomber escorts.

4
The Air War in Europe

For the rest of the war, that is, from the summer of 1944 on, synthetic oil was the primary strategic target. The AAF had, since beginning its wartime operations, been interested in oil, and one of its chief

targets was the Romanian oil complex at Ploesti, Hitler's prime source

of natural oil. If the complex was knocked out, he had to fall back on

synthetic oil. If synthetic oil was knocked out, he had nothing else.

A year before this, on August 1, 1943, the AAF launched a very

low-level attack on Ploesti in one of the most courageous and daring

missions in air power history. The forces lost one-third of their planes,

but they shut down Ploesti's production for a while. A story of the atack illustrates the wry humor of some of the American aircrews participating in that remarkable action.

One group, by mistake, had started to cross at a 90-degree angle

to another. Now, the two groups were crisscrossing at a closure speed

of four hundred miles an hour. That was very dangerous and very unplanned. One among the amazed German anti-aircraft gunners happily shooting at the groups supposedly exclaimed, "Wow, those guys

are well trained. Our people could never do that!"

By September 1944, bombing temporarily halted enemy oil production entirely in a campaign that deprived the German air force of

flight and training time, severely hampered the mobility of ground

forces, and even limited the supply of U-boat fuel. It was U.S. strategic bombing's finest achievement, the destruction of a vital compact

target system with minimal damage to civilians.

However, the harsh winter of 1944-1945 rendered the refineries

invisible even to radar. Consequently, the Eighth devoted a majority of

its effort to hitting the German rail transportation system, especially

after the Battle of the Bulge. Key to the rail system were the marshalling yards, typically located in the midst of or close to German

urban areas. Given its inaccuracy through cloud cover, the bombing of

rail yards inevitably created havoc among civilians living nearby. The

Eighth furthered its destruction of the German rail transportation

system by employing large numbers of incendiary bombs.

At the end of January 1945, strategic bombers began an offensive

against eastern Germany to aid Soviet ground advances and to demonstrate the seriousness of Allied solidarity. They dropped leaflets to

show the Germans that the Western Allies were still cooperating with

the Russians and followed with strategic raids on Berlin and other

cities, including the controversial target of Dresden on February 14th.

Ironically, transportation bombing achieved its aim. By the end

of February 1945, it had ruined the enemy's rail system and shattered

his ability to sustain a war economy. However, the speed and thoroughness of his collapse had overshadowed this final accomplishment.

In all, air operations were decisive in the defeat of Germany. Thank

you very much

5
The U.S. Army Air Forces in the Skies over Europe

The Eighth Air Force, based in England, conducted heavy bombing missions against

oil refineries, aircraft and weapons manufacturing plants, ports, roads, bridges, railways, and other startegically vital targets supporting Hitler's war economy. USAAF

bombers faced flak, foul weather, and, on early missions, limited-range fighter escort in

perilous daylight raids over enemy territory. Clockwise from top, left: In Germany,

Eighth Air Force Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses making their way home after hitting

dockyards through solid cloud cover over Wilhelmshaven; the Wilhelmshaven dockyards hit by those Fortresses-note the capsized ship; B-17s boring through a wall of

bursting anti-aircraft artillery-flak-to their prize target, Berlin; a roofless Berlin

ammunition production factory battered by their bombs; the approach and strike on

enemy aircraft at a Luftwaffe airdrome registered in three frames by an Eighth Fighter

Com-mand strafer's wing-mounted camera.

6
A

From Egypt, the Ninth Air Force participated in Allied drives across North Africa,

the Tunisia campaign, and the invasion of Sicily. From England it became the tactical

air force for the invasion of continental Europe. Clockwise from top, left: Consolidated

B-24 Liberators braving the heavily defended Romanian oil refining complex in Ploesti,

Hitler's principal source of fuel, in the low-altitude raid of August 1, 1943, a deadly and

costly mission to the attackers; a Martin B-26 Marauder overflying German troop concentrations in the D-Day assault on Normandy beach; a Douglas A-20 Havoc unloading

its bombs on marshalling yards in Damfront, France, where enemy transportation targets were high on the Ninth's priority list; a freight train and rail span over the Moselle

River, and a bridge over the Rhine River in Cologne showing the destruction wrought

by tactical air power.

7
The U.S. Army Air Forces in the Skies over Europe

The Italy-based Fifteenth Air Force conducted strategic bombing in the Air Offensive

for Europe and in campaigns for Naples-Foggia, Anzio, Rome-Arno, Normandy, France,

Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, the Balkans, Northern Appenines,

and Po Valley. Clockwise from top, left: Waves of Consolidated B-24 Liberators pounding Ploesti's oil plants on May 31, 1944, in one of many missions from higher altitudes,

which afforded no protection from anti-aircraft fire; Ploesti's Concordia Vega facility in

ruins (the destruction of the huge complex and the denial of its oil to the Germans was

significant to their defeat); a B-24 hitting the Otopeni Airdrome in Romania; other

B-24s releasing their bombs over Obertraubling airdrome in Regensburg, Germany;

1,000-pound bombs from Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses making a perfect pattern on

Pancevo Bridge across the Danube River in Belgrade, Yugoslavia; an Italian marshalling yard rendered unusable by Fifteenth Air Force bombs.

8
ilie

With the Northwest African Air Force and the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces, the

Twelfth Air Force served in the Algeria-French Morocco, Tunisia, Sicily, Naples-Foggia,

Anzio, Rome-Arno, Southern France, North Appenines, and Po Valley campaigns. In

England, it participated in the Allied Normandy invasion. Clockwise from top, left:

Bombs from North American B-25 Mitchells heading for a rail line across the Brenner

Pass in Operation STRANGLE; the San Michele rail bridge, a key link on the TrentoBolzano Brenner Pass feeder line and object, although obscured by smoke pots, of a

direct hit by B-25s above; a B-25 and two P-47s flying low to inspect damage done to

the Brenner Pass rail line by Twelfth Air Force bombers; the island of Pantelleria, an

Axis stronghold between Tunisia and Sicily, under one of many assaults by Twelfth Air

Force bombers in a crucial show of air power in May and June 1943; a northern Italian

industrial complex under attack by Republic P-47 Thunderbolts in winter 1944.

9
Reflections and Remembrances

Gen. Poe: Thank you, Rich. I'd now like to introduce to you the

members of our panel. We're privileged to have six veterans of that air

war in Europe. My great grandfather, a Civil War soldier, lived to ten

me some of his stories. I'm sure that what he'd say to me about the veterans here today is that they'd all "seen the elephant." They experienced a war that very few other veterans have.

The Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces carried the war to the enemy with skill and courage, but they paid for their success in blood.

Forty thousand airmen in the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces were

killed in action. Put into perspective, those losses are more than the

terrible losses suffered by the entire U.S. Navy or Marine Corps worldwide in that conflict. In addition, fifty thousand airmen were shot

down and made prisoners of war. Even pre-combat training was costly. In just three years, 1942, 1943, and 1944, over twelve thousand of

our airmen trainees died in flying training accidents here at home.

I feel most humble to be the company of our panelists. While I

qualify as a veteran of their war, when they were over at Ploesti or

Regensburg, I was grinding around Oklahoma in a Stearman biplane

learning how to fly.

In our distinguished company we have, first, General Jacob

"Jake" Smart. He's a 1931 West Point graduate, with a distinguished

thirty-five-year military career. He played a key part in every facet of

World War II aviation, beginning as chief of flying training in the AAF.

He was a planner for the Casablanca, Washington, D.C., and Quebec

Conferences. Later, in combat, he commanded the 97th Bomb Group.

He was wounded, shot down, and captured on this twenty-ninth mission and spent the rest of the war in prison camp. It's fortunate that

the Germans never learned that he knew about the atomic bomb project and where the Normandy invasion forces would land; otherwise

his terrible prison life might have been even worse than it was.

Yet, that war wasn't enough for General Smart. He went on to

the Korean War and was wounded again. Thereafter, he continued in

many key assignments to his final post as Commander in Chief, Pacific Air Forces. Since retirement, he has contributed generously his

knowledge and time in supporting both our Air Force itself and Air

Force history.

Major General Ramsay Potts, a 1931 University of North Carolina graduate, in 1941 and went directly into the AAF as a second

lieutenant. He went on to fly B-24s, rising to lead two different Eighth

Air Force groups into combat, including one of the groups in the famous low-level bomber attack on Ploesti that we've just heard about.

He rose to be director of bomber operations for the Eighth Air Force

while continuing to fly combat missions throughout 1942, 1943, and

1944. Not many people did that, as the decorations that he wears

show so very clearly.

10
The Air War in Europe

After serving in the post-war United States Strategic Bombing

Survey, he went on to earn a Harvard law degree, and is now a senior

partner in one of Washington's most prestigious law firms. He has continued to serve the nation as an advisor to Presidents, chairman of the

Air Force Reserve Policy Commission, and a lecturer at the Smithsonian Institution and the Air War College. General Potts is an author, a

trustee, and former president of the Air Force Historical Foundation

as well as publisher of its professional journal, Air Power History.

Major General Louis Lyle has had a long and distinguished

career in the U.S. Air Force, serving his country in World War II and

on through Vietnam. During World War II, he piloted B-17s as a member of the 303rd and 379th Bomb Groups, participating in the two

Schweinfurt missions that will always be remembered. He flew seventy missions in all, in four as lead bombardier. Also, he commanded

the 379th Bomb Group until the defeat of Germany. General Lyle is

one of the few men who flew with both the Fifteenth and Eighth Air

Forces. He also served as General Ira Eaker's command pilot to the

Casablanca Conference, where Generals Spaatz, Eaker, and Doolittle

and their staffs put together the Eighth Air Force position on daylight

bombing from the United Kingdom. Eaker was selected to make the

case at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943. He convinced the

Combined Chiefs of Staff, President Roosevelt, and Prime Minister

Churchill that bombing by day and night was the best strategy

After the war, he went on to serve with distinction in Strategic

Air Command [SAC]. I can remember in those days, whenever General LeMay had a problem, he'd send General Lyle to straighten it out.

General Lyle served with both Second Air Force and SAC staffs and

commanded units equipped with the RB-45, B-29, B-47, and B-52,

and was combat qualified in each. He also commanded units equipped

with ICBMs, including the Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman, and he was

rated a senior missileer. No one has done more to document and preserve the history of the Eighth Air Force. He's president of the Eighth

Air Force Heritage Museum in Savannah, Georgia.

Colonel Harold Jefferson, early in the war, served on the

headquarters staff of the 15th Bomb Wing as armament and gunnery

specialist and wing bombardier, passing on the combat training and

readiness of newly-formed heavy bombardment groups. We heard earlier about how important and difficult that training was. He went on

to fly combat in B-24s of the Fifteenth Air Force's 450th Bomb Group,

serving as squadron armament officer and staff bombardier of the

723rd Squadron. Colonel Jefferson flew as lead bombardier, was shot

down on his thirty-seventh mission over Vienna, and wound up as a

prisoner of war in the infamous Stalagluft III north compound, the

site, you may remember, of "the Great Escape" in Germany. With the

approach of the Red Army, over 10,000 prisoners were forced from

11
Reflections and Remembrances

Stalagluft III through cold and blizzards to Spremberg on foot and to

Nuremberg and Stalag XIII-D by boxcar. Later, they were marched to

Stalag VII-A at Moosburg, where 110,000 Allied prisoners were finally liberated by General Patton's 14th Armored Division.

Colonel Jefferson became a career U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, right after the war helping to exploit German scientists and serving as a senior targeting officer in Headquarters, SAC. He flew combat missions in and served as Director of Targeting, Far East Air Forces Bomber Command in the Korean War. He also served as Director

of Target Intelligence, Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff, Intelligence,

and Acting Deputy Chief of Staff, Intelligence, at Headquarters, Fifth

Air Force. Two tours in Headquarters, U.S. Air Force Intelligence, in

the Pentagon, a special assignment to organize and manage a new element of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and a tour as Director of

Intelligence, Headquarters, Military Airlift Command, rounded out

his Air Force career. In the service, Colonel Jefferson earned a Master's Degree and completed extensive Ph.D. studies in geopolitics and

international relations at Georgetown University. Active in the National Organization of Ex-Prisoners of War, he's served two terms as

president of the Northern Virginia chapter and one on the board of the

Virginia state organization.

As a fighter pilot, I was always overwhelmed by bomber people

telling me what to do and where to go, so it always gives me great

pleasure to introduce a fellow fighter pilot, in this case, Lieutenant

Colonel Woodrow Crockett. He began his military service with the

artillery, but noticed the considerable advantage in pay in the AAF.

After flight training, he was assigned to the 332nd Fighter Group,

arriving in Italy in February 1944. In June, the group was transferred

to the Fifteenth Air Force to fly bomber escort missions. All in all,

Colonel Crockett, who moved right up in that outfit, flew 149 combat

missions. He became high man for the famous outfit that could brag

that it never lost a bomber to enemy air. One of those missions was the

Fifteenth's only raid on Berlin, where its Mustangs tangled with the

new German Me 262 jets and shot down several.

Colonel Crockett was a safety officer in atomic testing in 1951.

He then went off to combat again in the Korean War, flying forty-five

missions in the F-80 Shooting Star jet. I frown a little when I look at

you, Colonel Crockett. I imagine you're probably one of those people

who blew up and burned everything with that aircraft, and then I, a

reconnaissance pilot, came along with only cameras. Everybody was

furious at us, when all we wanted to do was take pictures.

Colonel Crockett was assistant test director for the F-106, earning that Mach 2 card that few aviators have. In addition to his many

combat decorations, he's the only airman I know to win two Soldier's

Medals for pulling pilots out of burning aircraft-the first time out of

12
The Air War in Europe

a Mustang in Europe and another time out of an F-80 in Korea.

Colonel Crockett was selected by his home state of Arkansas for a

place of honor in their Aviation Hall of Fame. You may have seen him

on television recently, leading both the President and Prime Minister

Major to the site in England where they were to honor the fallen airmen of World War II.

Lieutenant Colonel Harry Crosby served in the 100th Heavy

Bomb Group with the unfortunate name of "the Bloody 100th," from

its first combat mission in June 1943 to its last in 1945. Although Colonel Crosby admits that he never went on a mission without an air

sickness bag, he, nevertheless, flew over thirty combat missions, including the first raids on Schweinfurt and Berlin in March 1944. On

both occasions, the 100th received distinguished unit citations.

During his service, Colonel Crosby rose from crew navigator of

the squadron to navigator of the group. After the war, he taught rhetoric and writing at the University of Iowa, Boston University, and

Harvard University. He also helped to establish the original curriculum of the Air Force Academy. Currently, he devotes most of his energy to Air Force history. His most recent book on his wartime experiences, which I highly recommend is, A Wing and a Prayer: The 100th

Bomb Group. It's been praised as one of the best personal memoirs on

the air war in Europe, and I can vouch for that.

Let's begin with some questions and then, time permitting, we'll

open the floor for the rest. First, a question for General Smart. Very

early in the war, you served with AAF Headquarters. Can you give us

an assessment of that top leadership? How did it appear to you as you

went on to combat in Europe?

Gen. Smart: I assess the military leaders of World War II in

Washington to have been among America's ablest citizens. They mustered courage and prodigious talents to overcome military unpreparedness, to direct and oversee the building of military forces that could

engage successfully in global war, and to meet the demands of the

times in many other ways.

I was brought into Headquarters, U.S. Army Air Corps, from a

pleasant existence in the Flying Training Command in Texas. I can

assure you that was quite a shock. The area of responsibility and the

roles we played in the Air Training Command, we thought, were quite

complex. But I'll tell you, they were child's play compared to the area

of responsibility at headquarters and the roles that were played by the

Chiefs of Staff in Washington, for whom I found myself working, with

little or no preparation.

I worked with General Arnold, Commanding General, U.S. Army

Air Corps, who was responsible for the development and deployment

of forces to fight the war in the Pacific and European theaters. He had

13
Commanding and Arming the Air Forces

America's military services in World War II were led by extraordinarily dedicated

and talented officers. C ,,ter lA Gens. Henry "Hap" Arnold and George Marshall were

responsible for building up the air and ground forces. Arnold, cen spurred American

industrialists to "go all out" producing the weapons for what became the greatest air

armada ever. Manufacturers churned out aircraft as fast as production permitted. Filling their factory floors are Lockheed P-38 Lightnings, top, k and Consolidated B-24

Liberators, botfio,/ eft. USAAF chiefs were experienced and practical. C ,ut, right,

Arnold's top airman, Lt. Gen. Carl Spaatz, Commander, U.S. Strategic Air Forces in

Europe, is decorated by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander. Thp,

right, Spaatz confers with two of his chiefs, Nathan Twining, Fifteenth Air Force, to his

left, and Ira Eaker, Mediterranean Allied Air Forces, and, bottom, right, with another

chiet Jimmy Doolittle, center, Eighth Air Force, while debriefing aircrews.

14
The Air War in Europe

additional duties as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were

responsible for, in General Marshall's case, the development of Army

forces, and, in Admiral King's case, for the development of Navy forces.

Jointly, these men were responsible for the military direction of mobilization.

Some of you in this audience who are old enough can recall that

we Americans tried diligently to avoid becoming involved in World

War II. Many people thought that we could, so we delayed developing

our own military forces. Equally important, we delayed developing the

industrial base that was necessary to support our war effort and that

of our Allies. We played a very long and difficult game of catching up.

Uppermost in the minds of the Chiefs of Staff, I think, was the matter

of combat operations, how the war was going. You're well aware of the

fact that the war was going quite badly for our side during the first

eight to ten months. Eventually, however, we began to turn things

around. During the difficult days and during the more prosperous

days, the Chiefs of Staff were primarily interested in maintaining an

understanding of what the conditions were on the battlefronts in both

Europe and the Pacific and in the Battle of the Atlantic.

The Army Air Forces maintained a situation room in which maps

were displayed. In each battle area the routes by which the forces

were supplied were clearly identified and the sizes of the competing

forces were listed. General Arnold visited this room at least daily to

get an update concerning the situation on the fighting front. Equally

of interest to him was the progress of units being transferred from the

United States to augment the strength of those fighting the war. During the initial months of 1942 and, in fact, throughout 1942, the flow

wasn't very great, indeed, not nearly as great as it needed to be.

The Chiefs of Staff were confronted with unbelievably difficult

decisions. There was the matter of allocating basic resources between

the construction of aircraft, the construction of naval vessels, the construction of the forces needed for the Army and, of course, the construction required for the growth of an industry that supported these

military forces. There was also the matter of deciding which theater

would get what forces, and the agreed-upon strategy provided that

Europe would enjoy first priority in the allocation of resources. It was

our hope and expectation to win the war in Europe and then mass the

forces of the United States and its Allies against Japan.

But, having helped make the decision to give Europe priority, the

Chiefs of Staff still had the problem of determining how much in the

way of resources went to Europe, how much went to the Pacific, and

how much was devoted to the Battle of the Atlantic, which, many of

you will recall, was indeed a disastrous experience.

From 1942, I believe, statistics show that we lost ships to submarines faster than they were being built in the United States and

15
Reflections and Remembrances

faster than they could be replaced. So there was a great demand for

air forces for anti-submarine work as well as air forces for engaging in

combat against the Japanese and the Germans. May I have one minute for an anecdote?

Among the problems faced by the people who worked in Washington was that of responding to political interests. There was a phenomenon at that time known as "gangplank fever." A large number of

Americans who were drafted, the parents of Americans who were

drafted, and some volunteers didn't want our young men to go overseas. The young men moved heaven and earth, even got sick from time

to time, to avoid going over. In contrast, many Americans just couldn't

wait to get overseas. Among those who wanted to go were World War

I veterans, but for one reason or another, many of them weren't privileged to do so. They also attempted to employ their political friends to

enable them to go.

One such man, who was turned down by everybody short of the

President, came to me and thanked me for my help in trying to get

him back into the Army Air Forces. He said, "Since I can't go, I want

to do a favor for you. I want to give you the name and address of the

loveliest little girl in all of France." Apparently, it never occurred to

the man that this woman was a grandmother and possibly had sons of

her own fighting the war. So the message is: In time of war, one could

experience all sorts of things. Thank you very much.

Gen. Poe: General Lyle, you flew combat missions with both the

Eighth and the Fifteenth Air forces and saw the war from the viewpoint of both the individual pilot and the commander who had the

responsibility for leading large formations in combat. Could you discuss the kind of motivation and leadership that resulted in almost

daily successes against tough resistance that carried heavy losses?

Gen. Lyle: Well, I had an easy time during the war. All I had to

do was to fly combat in a B-17. I've just finished reading Richard

Davis' book about the hazards that General Spaatz, his staff, and all

of these senior officers had during the war. I never dwelled on what

was going on at that level. All I had to do was to take the field order

and do my best to carry it out.

I was lucky, because I was an "old man" when the war started; I

was twenty-four years old when I graduated from flying school. Prior

to that, I'd been checked out in an airplane and taught to fly by a cotton duster named "Booger Red," who gave me good basic training.

I went overseas with the 303rd [Bomb Group] to Molesworth.

We'd originally been scheduled to be one of the first groups over there.

We flunked the operational readiness inspection, the ORI, and were

broken up. Eventually, I got to Europe in September 1942. I stayed

16
The Air War in Europe

with the 303rd and then the 379th for the entire war and flew combat

the whole time to May 1945, flying over seventy missions.

Trying to keep people motivated, trying to give them the will to

fight and the ability to fight is tough. My feeling all along was that if

you wanted people to be motivated in the first place, they first had to

be well trained. They not only had to be well trained, they also had to

have decent equipment and to understand how to use it. Then you had

to have leadership. All of those subjects are controversial in many

respects. I was fortunate to be an older guy with a lot of experience. I

had over six hundred hours in B-17s when we got to England-a lot

more than anybody else in my group.

My experience was with the crews themselves, in training them.

During the entire period that I was in England, I spent practically all

of my time in training. Although there were a lot of people who were

afraid, including myself from time to time, the people who did the best

job in my opinion were those who were well trained and had tremendous confidence in themselves.

Early in the war, I can remember, a lot of people felt that they

weren't going to make it. After briefings, when we had a few minutes

to wait, some guy would say, "You know, I just don't believe I'm going

to make it through this war." It's uncanny, but a lot of the guys who

didn't make it had predicted that they wouldn't. I decided to claim

that I wasn't going to get shot down and I worked toward that end. I

tried to pass that same feeling to the rest of the troops.

The worst thing I could have done was to make a liar out of myself and get shot down. Well, that didn't worry me. But I did have a lot

of missions early on, and that was a big help to me because somebody

who'd survived a lot of missions had a certain amount of respect. As I

said, I spent most of my time in training, not only with my squadron

but also with the group.

Something else that helped me as I tried to motivate people was,

meeting all of the senior people, and others, in the bomber command.

It was mentioned that my crew had the privilege of taking General

Eaker to the Casablanca Conference. That was right after he took

command of the Eighth. It was for a prior meeting in December that I

took Eaker and his whole staff down there, and I had an opportunity

to be with them for three weeks. They were very nice to me and took

good care of me. I enjoyed sitting around and listening to them talk.

I had a big advantage. I knew what I was fighting for. There were

a lot of stories about fighting for home and country. And, in the big picture, that's important, but the real business of fighting boils down to

this: You're fighting to save your own soul and your crew and your outfit. What motivates you is the people you're fighting with.

Overall, then, the key to motivation is preparation--of yourself

first and then of those you're fighting with or flying with so that they

17
Training the Bomber Crews

With the sudden onset of war for the United States and the induction of millions of

new recruits, the armed services stepped up training programs on an unprecedented

scale. Deadly combat from formidable enemies required advanced aircraft and rigorously prepared air and ground crews. For those who manned and maintained the bomb-

'ers, cooperation was essential. Clockwise from top, right: A seasoned aircrew grouping proudly around its Consolidated B-24 Liberator "somewhere in England"; a Douglas B-18--the first aircraft usually encountered stateside by air trainees; flying cadets

receiving instruction in formation flying;, a bombardier hitting his target in a practice

run-two more bombs drop between his aircraft and the target "deck*; a student bombardier testing the supersensitive Norden bombsight; student navigators, loaded with

equipment preparing to demonstrate their skill. Mathematics dominated the work of

both navigators and bombardiers.

18
The Air War in Europe

can be good at their business. They must have confidence in themselves and have a leader that they can trust. I did my best to be one.

I have to tell you that it was a sad day for me when the war was

over because I really enjoyed it. I stayed over there the whole time

without any rest at home or any other relief. Early on, I got to fly a lot.

Later on, I could only go on selected missions. So that was the toughest part of the war-sitting around waiting while the other guys were

out fighting.

Gen. Poe: Well, in no small measure everybody at the table here

could say that "the old man's" been there. He's up there today in many

instances and may have been the number one factor in any kind of

motivation at all. He told us what was going on and what to do.

Colonel Crockett, the role of fighters was key to the success of the

deep penetration of Germany, and you paid for it. Some four thousand

Eighth and Fifteenth Air Force fighters went down. They had skill and

courage. However, black airmen and their support crews had "Jim

Crow" to deal with as well. Could you tell us what effect this had on

unit and individual combat performance?

Lt. Col. Crockett: In my case, I'd spent a couple of years in the

field artillery, the blacks' first field artillery in the regular Army. At

that time, there were only the 24th and 25th Infantry Regiments and

the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments.

I'd dropped out of school, out of junior college. I thought that I

was the best math student in my high school and junior college up

through differential equations and integral calculus. My math teacher

went to the dean and principal and got me to teach classes for a couple of weeks. So that was a big plus. Everybody needs a little pat on

the back now and then.

Going to the field artillery enabled me to put my math into practice. The lieutenants-in an all-black outfit with white officers-would

pick me up on the weekends, and we'd go and work out all of the firing problems for the week. They'd just double check.

But, a private in 1940 was making $21 per month. For my little

blond lieutenant, the basic pay was $125 a month. The Army Air Corps

lured me in by placing a sign up in the order room that said, "Be a

pilot, bombardier, and navigator and earn $245 per month." That got

my attention.

I spent two years with the field artillery. Incidentally, I was a

model soldier in my regiment. I was in the twelfth class at Tuskegee.

But I'd read a book written by Generals Hap Arnold and Ira Eaker

that mentioned that the wash-out rate for flying cadets was 75 percent. Since I bivouacked for a couple of years, I was properly motivated to be in the top 25 percent of my class. I was criticized for not going

19
Reflections and Remembrances

to the town of Tuskegee for six months, but I wasn't there to go to

town. I had another mission.

General Benjamin Davis was in the first class that graduated on

March 7, 1942. Two of the five people in that class are still living. One,

Lem Custer is up in Hartford, Connecticut. The next class only had

three people in it. I believed what I'd read. In my class, we moved up

fifteen people who'd had experience in civilian or military life, to increase the people they were sending to primary training every four

and a half weeks from twenty to thirty-five. We lost twenty of those

thirty-five people in nine weeks in primary. So I put my nose a little

closer to the grindstone because I wanted to make the program. I was

in the twelfth class, out of almost a thousand blacks who went through

Tuskegee; and, incidentally, leaving the field artillery, I was unaware

of the fact that the Army Air Corps had said that blacks couldn't learn

to fly, that they didn't have the courage to fight in combat.

So, after I arrived at Tuskegee, which was the only place blacks

could go, a student, Yancy Williams, from Howard University, finally

sued the War Department to allow blacks to get into the Army Air

Corps after a lot of pressure by the black press and other people, including Eleanor Roosevelt. She came down and got a thirty-minute

flight. After her ride she said, "I guess blacks can fly."

Tuskegee Institute had its own field, Moton Field. It had a contract with the Pentagon to furnish the entire primary flying course for

all of the black cadets. We had about forty-five or fifty instructors. We

lived on the campus and ate at the dining hall.

For basic and advanced training we went back to the air base. We

had only white instructors, because there were no blacks in the military with any experience. I understand that the instructors were volunteers. My instructor was Captain Robert Boyd. He was a former airline pilot and base operations officer. He was very, very good. Most of

the instructors, I think, were interested in the students.

Moton Field was designed for flying PT-17s. Then, you had basic

PT-13s, AT-6s, and P-40s. That mix of traffic wasn't very good. It created safety hazards. We finally moved out to Shepherd's Field, and

that was a real haven. We had the airfield to ourselves. We also had a

gunnery place.

We trained in the P-40. Replacement pilots went overseas with

forty hours of training-twenty hours of transition time and twenty

hours of combat crew-type training. I finished in March 1943, just before the 99th Fighter Squadron was shipped to North Africa the next

month. We finished just before the 99th left. The 100th Fighter Squadron, the 301st, and 302nd comprised the 332nd Fighter Group. I

accumulated a lot of flying time. Before I went overseas in January

1944, I'd accumulated 145 hours in the P-40 and another 125 in the

P-3, so I felt that I was pretty "red hot" when I hit Naples.

20
Creating a Legacy

Burdened by the stresses of racial prejudice and segregation, blacks who wished to

become military aviators during World War II were trained apart, at Tuskegee Institute

in Alabama. Commanded by Col. Benjamin Davis, Jr., Tuskegee airmen flew fighter and

bomber escort missions with the Twelfth and Fifteenth Air Forces in North Africa and

Europe. The much-decorated 332nd Fighter Group's "Redtail Angels" served with great

distinction, never losing a bomber to enemy fire. Clockwise frm top, left Col. Davis receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross from his father, Brig. Gen. Benjamin Davis, Sr.;

332nd pilots gathered before a North American P-51 Mustang, Tuskegee cadets performing morning exercises; student aviators pondering navigational calculations; 332nd

P-51s buzzing their home base; basic and advanced students briefed on the day's mission; AT-6 trainers at Tuskegee standing ready for practice runs.

21
Reflections and Remembrances

The 99th was attached to the 709th Fighter Group when we arrived in Naples and it had had good luck over Anzio. The Anzio beachhead was established on January 22nd while we were still on the high

seas. On January 27th, I believe, the 99th shot down eight aircraft one

day, and four or five on the next day. So it had very good luck. It was

almost sent home from North Africa because it wasn't shooting down

any aircraft, but it was on strafing and escort missions and didn't see

any fighter aircraft.

As we flew into Naples, the outfit we relieved, around Salerno

and Montecorvino, was the 81st Fighter Group. Fifty missions was the

normal tour of duty, but I flew 107 missions in only four months. There

were no black replacement pilots, and I continued to fly. We knew that

we were part of an experiment and we, both pilots and ground crew

personnel, weren't going to let it fail.

We moved to the Fifteenth Air Force. I was very happy to leave

the Twelfth. We were flying a lot of coastal patrols. We'd fly three to

five missions a day. And we'd sit one-, two-, or three-minutes alert in

the airplane at Capodichino, a big dirt field. Once a flight took off, it

was so dusty that the next one had to wait for five minutes. I remember taking off with sixteen P-39s abreast on training missions at Capodichino, all at one whack.

On the first of June, we transitioned to the P-47. Its short range

restricted it to something like 430 miles from base. We couldn't even

get to Budapest from the Adriatic. We only flew it for one month but

did score some kills. We sank a German destroyer in Trieste Harbor

with machine gun fire only. There was a question until gun camera

film was processed and two fellows were given credit.

But, on the thirtieth of June, we flew our last mission in the

P-47. Three days later, on the fourth of July, we went out fifty-four

strong in the P-51 Mustang, my dream airplane. We normally carried

a 75-gallon tank under each wing. We flew from southern France all

the way around clockwise to Ploesti. I had three escort missions to

Romania, Albania, and Greece.

I'd like to mention one mission where the pilots usually get most

of the credit. On the twenty-fourth of March, General Twining wanted the Germans to know that he could hit Berlin from the south. I

received a call in operations at half past ten that evening from Major

Gleed, the group operations officer. He asked, "How many aircraft do

you have equipped with the big tanks?" I said, "Three."

The missions were getting longer and longer. I'd already equipped my airplane. He canvassed all three squadrons and passed the

information on to the ground personnel, some of whom went to Foggia,

Italy, about forty miles distant and picked up some tanks. They were

armed. They'd heard that there were 110-gallon tanks on a train going

north. They held up the train in what they called "the Great Train

22
The Air War in Europe

Robbery." Some guys still don't talk about it. They took everything necessary, went back to base that night, and installed the 110-gallon

tanks after removing the 75s from the aircraft. Some of the hardware

didn't fit, but they had to make it fit because they had to take off at

eight o'clock the next morning.

At approximately eight o'clock the next morning-for a max effort mission to we didn't know where-we had approximately six P-51

Mustangs equipped with 110-gallon tanks ready to go on this important mission. It was our longest mission, 800 miles from home base.

We picked the bombers up at Brucks, about 630 miles from base going

north. We took the 5th Bomb Wing, a B-17 wing, to the IP [initial

point] at Berlin. There were four B-24 wings, plus the B-17 wing. One

of the fighter units to offer cover at Berlin was late. We had the big

tanks and elected to stay another thirty minutes.

To that date, two Me 262s had been shot down by American

pilots. We shot down numbers three, four, and five. We lost one man

and returned all the way home. I take my hat off to the ground personnel. I said the pilot gets all of the glory. But also now, in a fighter

unit, the pilot's the only guy who gets shot down!

I flew two more missions after Berlin. As General Lyle said, the

squadron command slowed me up in flying combat. Flying once a

week or three times every two weeks isn't quite enough. You get a little skittish. So they finally let me come home.

But, we liked the combat record we had. We shot down and damaged 409 German aircraft, and 111 of those were out of the air. We

paid the price, losing sixty-six pilots due to all causes, not just combat.

Thirty-two who got shot down became prisoners of war. I believe most

of those guys got back. I have a friend, Alex Jefferson, in Detroit. When

he was shot down over southern France, he was treated as an officer

and a gentleman, "better than I was treated back home," he said. I

think my time is about up. Thank you very much.

Gen. Poe: Dr. Crosby was a senior navigator and a survivor of

the 100th Heavy Bomb Group, that unit that was singled out for special attention by the Luftwaffe to earn the name "the Bloody 100th."

Would you speculate as to why some units experienced hard luck, and

some didn't?

Lt. Col. Crosby: I suppose I am the one to field this question

because when I went overseas with the so-called "Bloody 100th," only

14 percent of the group I went with finished the war. The other 86 percent went down, and they went down in a hurry. IIl suggest that any

one group gets hit not because of a vendetta against the Luftwaffe or

the wheels-down story you've all heard. If you ever really want to get

some research on that, read Martin Middlebrook's The Schweinfurt23
Reflections and Remembrances

Regensburg Mission and Edward Jablonski's The Double Strike. Members of this panel have already told me that several other groups, not

just the 100th, were suspected of the so-called "surrender," and then

shooting down the escort the Germans set out. There's just nothing to

that. Actually, there is something to it, but a number of groups were

involved.

But, the main thing is, I've talked to any number of German

fighter pilots and leaders, and asked if they singled out the Bloody

100th, with the big square D on the tail. They'd never heard of the

story. They told us that they were coming at us at a closing speed of

several hundred miles per hour and they didn't have time to pick out

an LP on a fuselage or a square D on a tail.

The question is: Was it possibly dumb bad luck that caused our

group and some of the other groups to be hit rather badly? There was

something to that. In retrospect, we can see that the Luftwaffe had

many techniques for hitting us. Sometimes the best way for it to hit

the Eighth was from the tail. It was hitting from the tail when the

100th was "Tail End Charlie" on the August 17th double strike on

Schweinfurt and Regensburg, on to Africa for us, and we got hit.

I remember when Curtis LeMay was up in the front plane. We

were, I think, Fireball Able that day, and he called, "Fireball Able, pull

your group together." Jack Kidd, in the command seat, said, "We are

together. This is all of us that there are!" So we felt good about that,

but we got down.

Then the Luftwaffe switched from tail-end attacks. It realized

that the place to hit an Eighth Air Force formation was from the front.

That was where the command pilot was; that was where the lead bombardier was; and that was where the lead navigator was. If you could

knock out the leader, there'd be a real debacle, a real catastrophe.

So the Luftwaffe switched, as we apparently now know, around

the first of October. Wouldn't you know it, the 100th, with me in one of

the planes, was leading the whole Eighth Air Force on October 8th,

and the Luftwaffe just knocked out our whole front end. We were one

of the last big missions not led by the B-17G, which had, of course, the

front target, the front double guns. Once the Luftwaffe realized that

we weren't vulnerable from the nose, it stopped.

Then, I think, the real selection process began to be clear. That

was (a) to hit the stragglers and (b) to hit the worst formation. I don't

suggest that the 100th flew the worst formation, although there certainly have been plenty of comments about that for cause.

I'm going to demonstrate something here. How many veterans of

the 100th Bomb Group are here? Raise your hands. Okay. And our historian, too. So all of the 100th, raise your hands. Apparently, some of

us got through. Not very long ago, I ran into somebody with a big

insignia. I said, "Gee, I'm glad to run into somebody from the Eighth."

24
Facing Aerial Combat

In the fierce struggle for air supremacy in Europe, particularly Germany, vanguard

Eighth Air Force bomb groups such as the 100th, whose Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses

are pictured, top, in noted aviation artist Keith Ferris's painting, Fortresses Engaged,

suffered grievous losses in early missions from anti-aircraft artillery and Focke-Wulf

FW 190, center, lf and Messerschmitt Bf 109, bottno, kA fighters, the two best types

in the enemy's arsenal. In early operations, Eighth aircrews were inexperienced and

hurriedly trained. Crew replacement rates were appallingly high. Fighter-escort, when

available, was valiant, but had only limited range. An Eighth Air Force Consolidated

B-24 Liberator, cmnt, righ4 is blasted apart on its way to the submarine yards of Kiel

and Hamburg. A flaming Eighth Air Force B-17, bottom, righ is ripped from its formation over a synthetic oil plant in Merseberg.

25
Reflections and Remembrances

He looked at my little lapel pin and said, "I'm glad to see somebody

from the 100th who's alive." The 100th always shows up at everything.

Somebody once said, "Yeah, the 100th always sticks together." But

then somebody else said, "Yeah, except during formation."

I'm about to suggest that there were several other groups that

lost many more than we did, but they all lost one or two or three.

When the 100th lost, it lost big. Only three of us really got to Africa.

Some more finally trickled in. On the Bremen mission we lost six or

eight. Our historian could tell you more. Over Berlin, we lost a batch.

Over Ruhland we lost a batch. Over Minster, only one plane came

back. In other words, when we lost, we lost big. A group can stand an

attrition of one or two, because they've already got some new planes

ready to go. When we lost a whole squadron at once, we got a whole

squadron at once, and they'd be flying the very next day.

One of our most famous stories is about "the man who came to

dinner." A fellow named Grenier didn't unload his bags. He went to the

Officers' Club, went to bed, was awakened the next morning, and was

shot down that day. He didn't even get to unpack his bags.

So, we got hit hard. Because of a kind of Hollywood glamour that

the 100th perhaps was particularly notorious for, I think I learned to

swagger, because you had to learn to swagger or you really weren't a

member of the 100th. We had the nice, white scarves; we had 100th

mission crushes, and I was never in Texas but, of course, I wore cowboy boots. When we were asked to go off formation after we got hit

very badly one time, our group commander said, "The 100th never

goes off ops." We should have gone off ops. We should have slowed

down, learned formation, trained our crews, so that when we went up

next time, we weren't clearly the new kids on the block.

It takes time to learn and, then, we finally got superb leaders.

One of the miracles of the war for me was what two great group commanders, John Bennett and Thomas Jeffrey did. I'm sure almost of all

you know both of them. When they took the 100th, they made it into

a disciplined group.

John Bennett said, "I don't want new pilots to be fighter pilots, I

want them to be bus drivers," and, as a navigator, I gloried in that

because that's what I wanted. I wanted beady-eyed bus drivers holding single needle-width turns at 150 miles and really flying good formation. So I think it wasn't dumb luck. There was some part of fate

involved. But I think the main thing is that our leaders knew at that

time that good formation and really good air discipline made a group

as safe as it could be.

Gen. Poe: Colonel Jefferson was one of over fifty thousand AAF

personnel who were shot down over Europe and became prisoners-ofwar [POWs]. As a former POW, what was your chief day-to-day con26
The Air War in Europe

cern in the camp, in keeping up your spirits? Also, since we both flew

in Korea, I wonder what thoughts might have been in your mindwhen you went north of the 38th parallel--of how you might have

been treated had you been captured by the Chinese or North Koreans?

Col. Jefferson: I certainly hoped that would never happen. But

if I may, I'd like to tell you about how I became a POW. I was commissioned a second lieutenant on the day after Pearl Harbor, at Lowry

Field, in Denver, Colorado. The timing was accidental. I was immediately sent to MacDill Field, near Tampa, Florida, to the 29th Bomb

Group. It had a few B-17s and B-24s and was commanded by Colonel

Bob Travis. He soon became a brigadier general and I served under

him at the squadron, group, and wing levels, establishing a bombing

training program.

This meant that I sort of backed into the flying business unofficially. I "washed out" of pilot training class 41G, and I guess I've ever

fully recovered from that. Most of us were sent home if we didn't get

through pilot training, but I was sent to Lowry Field to the Air Force

Technical Training School and trained in armament equipment maintenance. A few of us were also selected for training in the maintenance, operation, and calibration of the supersensitive Norden bombsight and related automatic flight control, or auto pilot, equipment.

To get this training we had to be investigated by the FBI. We

weren't permitted to take notes and had to receive our instructions behind an eight-foot chain-link fence. In addition to bombsight maintenance and calibration routines, we learned all of the mathematics involved in the solution of the bombing problem. So when I arrived at

MacDill Field, I was actually the only officer in the 29th Bomb Group

who knew anything about the Norden bombsight or related auto pilot

equipment. The Lowry armament course had also included dry-run

practice bombing missions so that we could better understand the concerns of the bombardiers who'd be operating the equipment in the air.

At MacDill, I was busy at first checking out pilots of the 723rd

Squadron in the adjustment and operation of the automatic flight control system. General Travis learned of this and asked me to come to

his office and brief him. He explained that he had only a few pilots, copilots, and maintenance personnel and that he had no bombing capability within the 29th Bomb Group. He assigned me to train his enlisted bombsight maintenance personnel to function as bombardiers. He

seemed not to notice the fact that I was a maintenance officer, not a

rated flying officer. He wanted bombing capability within the group as

soon as possible and since I knew how to bomb, he directed me to

begin a bombardier training program immediately. I said, "Yes, Sir."

The 29th Bomb Group in January 1942 was given the task of

forming, training, and sending to combat new bombardment groups.

27
Reflections and Remembrances

In June 1942, it was transferred from MacDill Field to Gowen Field,

in Boise Idaho, where its task was accelerated. General Travis was

assigned from the group to command the 15th Heavy Bomb Wing in

Boise. He brought me to the wing headquarters and had me supervise

the training of bombardiers, aerial gunners, and armament personnel.

The program for which I'd been responsible in the 29th Bomb Group

was instituted at bases all over northwestern United States, at Sioux

City, Iowa, Spokane, Washington, Wendover, Utah, and a number of

bases in between. The few dry-run practice missions we'd been required to fly in B-18s-I guess everyone here remembers B-18s-at

Lowry Field had taught me how to bomb. So General Travis's request

had put me, a non-rated ground officer, back in the flying business,

training bombardiers. When they started arriving from the training

command, they joined an already functioning, smoothly-running system and they went through it without a hitch.

During this period, General Travis was selected for a new assignment and Colonel Hugo Rush succeeded him at the 15th Bomb Wing.

In a few months, Colonel Rush was selected to go to Italy to command

the 47th Bomb Wing, a new organization. I was one of the officers assigned to go with him. There, I was sent to the nearby 450th Bomb

Group, where I could get some combat time. Colonel Mills, the group

commander, told me that I couldn't be assigned to fly combat because

I had no aeronautical rating. I insisted strongly that I was qualified to

fly. There I was, among dozens people whose training I'd supervised

and inspected. I just couldn't be denied permission to fly. For two years

we'd been forming, training, inspecting, and certifying as combatready, twenty-four hours a day, an endless flow of new heavy bombardment groups. Most groups made it but some didn't. For example,

we held back the 100th Bomb Group for additional training.

Lt. Col. Crosby: We never forgave him.

Col. Jefferson: Colonel Mills said: "All right, well hold a flying

evaluation board. If we find you qualified, you may fly, but, we can't

order you to fly because you have no aeronautical rating. Youll have

to volunteer." I was found qualified and I volunteered.

My first mission was the first attack of the war on Bucharest and

my second the next day was the first high-level attack on Ploesti. I

was in the "Tail-End Charlie" aircraft in the lower left-hand box-in

the lowest and farthest back aircraft of any in the 450th formation.

The second mission almost turned out to be my last. Just after "bombs

away," a fighter on our tail started firing. From the bombardier's window I could see his tracers coming through dead center and inches below me. The group lost six aircraft that day, but Lieutenant Barbetti

got us home on three engines.

28
The Air War in Europe

From then on, I was the squadron bombardier and flew as a lead

bombardier. I flew half a tour of combat without flying pay or aeronautical rating. I applied for my rating, which I learned could be issued by

Fifteenth Air Force Headquarters, since we were in a combat theater.

General Rush, 47th Bomb Wing commander, hand-carried my request

to General Twining, Fifteenth Air Force commander, who issued me a

rating based on my combat record. By the time my aeronautical rating as a bombardier was approved, I already had the Distinguished

Flying Cross; but my flight orders weren't made retroactive, so I lost

the hazard pay for the combat I'd already flown. I never got it.

Now, to the POW experience. We were shot down on my thirtyseventh mission. To complete a combat tour, we had to fly fifty missions. Then, we became eligible to return to the States. I had only thirteen missions to go and was optimistic about finishing them and going

home, but that was not to be. Our target that day was the Winterhofen

oil storage and refinery area, along the Danube River in the northeastern sector of Vienna. The 450th Bomb Group was leading the attack, and I was the lead bombardier. We were shot down by flak. Three

crew members were killed-our radio operator, one of our waist gunners, and our tail gunner.

I salvoed the bombs and then I bailed out and landed northeast

of Vienna, short of the target area. We'd been told to delay our parachute openings because German fighters would strafe high-hanging

chutes and just blow defenseless men out of their harnesses. So I was

fairly close to the ground when I opened my chute. I don't remember

hitting the ground

When I regained consciousness, I discovered that I'd landed in a

long, flat sugar-beet field between two flak batteries, but I couldn't remember how I'd gotten there or what had happened to me. Apparently I'd had a severe concussion. I suffered terrible headaches for a

number of days. German soldiers were there with guns pointed at me,

and I put up my hands.

The first thing I realized was that I knew almost nothing about

being a POW. We'd lacked any escape and evasion or, as it's now called,

survival training. None existed until after World War II. We knew very

little about the Geneva Convention and were unprepared in a general sense about possible treatment or interrogation by the enemy or the

tricks he might use to get information. The survival briefing the day

we were shot down consisted of one statement: "If you can't make it

back, head for Czechoslovakia; it's rumored there are Partisans there."

We couldn't do much with that.

I was taken to a small antiaircraft battery command post, where

I was questioned. I gave only my name, rank, and serial number and

wasn't pressed for any more information at that point. Almost immediately, I was taken to a Luftwaffe base northeast of Vienna, where I

29
Surviving Captivity

e& g VHAphotwewurtesy CoL Hi)Jelkwi USAF(Ret)

Airmen who survived being shot down in combat and seized by the enemy had to

survive being prisoners of war. American and Allied POWs suffered terrible privation at

the hands of guards who paid little heed to the Geneva Convention's provisions for the

treatment of captives. In Europe, a Fifteenth Air Force Consolidated B-24, &/ ekA

faces a flak-filled sky. Exploding anti-aircraft shells, delivered by German 88-millimeter flak guns, centereft, brought down thousands of aircraft and created thousands of

POWs. Pictured are Americans at Stalag VII-A in Germany. Clockwise from top righ4

tbottom, etft& The main gate; one of several gun-equipped watchtowers, constant reminders to kreigsgefangenen-POWs-of danger and confinement (stalag is an abbreviation of stammlager, main camp); a latrine building whose wooden siding has been

stripped off by POWs and burned for warmth and cooking fuel; just-liberated prisoners

posing behind multiple thicknesses of barbed wire at the perimeter of the camp; other

prisoners displaying a swastika-decorated flag as a souvenir.

30
The Air War in Europe

found some members of our crew being detained. We were subjected to

further questioning and given the only food we'd had since our capture. After about three days, we were taken into Vienna in the middle

of the night and at a major railway station put on a train for Budapest, where we were placed in a city prison. There, in October 1944, I

saw prisoners with the yellow Star of David on their clothing.

Very soon, you begin to learn what it's going to be like to be a

POW. By the end of the first day, you're hungry, probably for the first

time in your life. After two or three days, you haven't shaved-no disrespect to people who don't shave.

By the end of the first week, you can't stand your own company,

because you don't know when, if ever, you're going to get a bath or a

shower. You have no idea of what your treatment by the enemy will be

or of how long your POW status may last. You have almost no hope of

escape, so you can become deeply discouraged and depressed.

In late October, the Russians made an unexpected advance toward Budapest. We could hear the fighting. The Germans moved us out,

and we ended up riding boxcars all the way from Budapest to Stalagluft III at Sagan, which was then in Germany but is now in Poland.

When we got to the camp, we were assigned to the north compound. It

housed mostly British prisoners, but a number of Americans were

there, too. Americans who'd been there prior to "the Great Escape" had

been moved out to another compound.

Overwhelmingly, as new prisoners, we were concerned with food.

By the time we got to Stalagluft III, we were already starving. We'd

had almost no food after leaving Budapest. We were jammed into boxcars with no facilities whatsoever, no open doors, no food, no water,

nothing. That created sanitation problems that I won't describe, but

that you wouldn't believe. When we entered the compound, I met experienced POWs. I didn't realize it at first, but I had things they wanted-an A-2 flight jacket, a good pair of shoes, a watch, a pen, and a

sweater. Within the first two or three days, people were tempting me

with food, but they always wanted something I had. To those who

hounded me, I finally said: "You can have what I have, but you'll have

to wait 'til I don't need it any more. Then, you may take it off my carcass. 'Til then, it's mine. Don't bother me any more." And they didn't.

The Germans had taken most of my uniform items, except my

A-2 jacket and my shoes. Many POWs didn't have shoes that fit-a

special disadvantage on forced marches. We couldn't keep clean, had

no way to shave or bathe. We couldn't wash our clothes because the

weather was cold and we had to wait until they dried before we could

put them back on. Frequently, we'd take them off to shake the insects

out of them. Also, we were short of bedding. We slept on "mattresses"

that were body bags stuffed with wood shavings and shaped like European-style coffins. We estimated that our diet equaled one-sixteenth of

31
Reflections and Remembrances

a Red Cross parcel per day per man. I was the senior American officer

in our building; the British called it a "block." There were twelve of us

in a room and some always appeared too eager to grab the largest portion of food. So we made a deck of cards. Each card had a name on it.

No one touched any food 'til the cards were shuffled and put down on

the table. Then, each man went to the food where his name came up.

The Germans gave us three thin slices of dark bread per day and

something we called "green death soup" almost every day. It was made

from a sort of fodder and was always full of dead insects. The bread

was partly sawdust; it caused digestive and related problems.

For Christmas 1944, the Germans gave us half an animal for

dinner. Its head was gone and its feet and tail were gone. A POW

who'd worked in his father's butcher shop concluded that it was half a

dog, cut along the backbone, fore to aft. We ate the dog and kept the

bones. We made soup from them several times until they disintegrated. Sometimes, we were given small, withered potatoes. We always ate

the potato skins. We were told later that they were important to our

survival because of their vitamin B content. When we were lucky

enough to get a Red Cross parcel containing a box of prunes, we

always saved and cracked their seeds and ate the pits that were inside

them. By the end of January 1945, most of us had lost around forty

pounds.

There was no real disciplinary problem through all of this. The

disciplinary training we'd had as part of our military indoctrination

came to our rescue. When someone started hanging around his bunk

too much, we got him out to do "circuits," as the British said, around

the area. Keeping active always seemed to help.

In late January 1945, the Russian advance drew close enough to

Stalagluft III that we could hear the fighting. After several days of

rumors, the Germans forced us out of the camp into the bitter cold of

a blizzard on a march to the west. It started in the middle of the night

on January 29, 1945, and it was an awful ordeal for everyone. Newspapers in the states labeled it "the Atrocity March." We got frostbitten

feet, hands, and faces. We had no food and had to eat snow to get

water. There was only occasional shelter for over ten thousand POWs.

Our clothing was completely inadequate against the weather.

A few civilians along the way were helpful. They set out cans of

water and pieces of bread. When we stayed in a town or a village, the

Germans put a guard around it and got us into available buildings.

Townspeople and villagers who gave us food wanted notes from

us explaining to the advancing American forces that they'd been kind

to POWs. The march ended in the town of Spremberg, where we were

led to a concrete railroad freight-loading ramp late in the afternoon.

We had to spend the whole night outside in near-zero temperatures,

awaiting a train of boxcars. We had no protection except our clothing.

32
The Air War in Europe

I actually wondered if I might freeze to death. The next morning when

the train arrived, we were herded into boxcars with almost no room to

sit or stretch our legs, again with no food, water, or sanitation arrangements.

After a brutal ride of several days, during which we had to wait

for about twenty-four hours on a railroad siding adjacent to a humping yard, we arrived late at night at Nuremberg and Stalag XIII-D.

There, conditions were much worse. Our buildings were infested with

body insects. To heat our meager food supply we stripped most of the

wooden siding off the latrine buildings between our barracks and split

it up for fuel. At Stalagluft III we'd been permitted to go between surrounding barbed wire fences and dig stumps for fuel.

By then, we'd developed symptoms of malnutrition. I lost night

vision almost completely from lack of vitamins. If I sat in one position

for more than five minutes, the large muscles of my thighs, hips,

back, and shoulders would "go to sleep" and get numb. I awoke each

morning with my arms numb to the shoulders and my hands drawn

up this way. I'd start each day by working the numbness and stiffness

out of my fingers, hands, and arms, trying to get them to function normally.

By April 1945, the Allies were advancing from the west toward

Stalag XIII-D at Nuremberg. During April, the Germans marched us

from Stalag XIII-D to Stalag VII-A near Moosburg. We heard that

they planned to march us to Berchtesgadon and hold us as hostages.

By the time we'd walked from Nuremberg to Moosburg, the weather was somewhat warmer. The cold had been very punishing all winter. At Stalag VII-A, there were no buildings available for us, so we

were crowded into large-area tents and had to sleep on the ground.

When the rain came down outside, the water came up inside. There,

our living conditions were the worst we'd faced. We had very limited

food distribution; but I soon found that i could trade the few items I'd

saved from Red Cross parcels, such as tobacco and cigarettes, for food

with the German guards. In one transaction, I acquired half a gallon

of wheat in whole grains, just as it had been threshed. We boiled the

grain 'til it was soft. We could feel the nourishment going through our

bodies as we ate. The hope that liberation was near kept us going.

And then on April 29, 1945, it happened. The front lines passed

over us, and General George Patton's 14th Armored Division liberated us. An American tank flattened the main gate as it drove into the

camp. Some POWs cried as they saw the swastika come down and the

Stars and Stripes go up over Moosburg. General Patton visited us the

next day and gave a short, encouraging speech.

Between liberation and the arrival of rescue planes about a week

later, our problems changed as some of our men became a little hard

to control and had to be protected from themselves. For example, they

33
Reflections and Remembrances

suddenly became avid souvenir hunters. They found such items as live

German grenades and ammunition belts with explosive bullets and

brought them right into our temporary shelter. So we enforced stringent rules to avoid tragic accidents. One man brought in a belt of 20-

millimeter German aircraft cannon ammunition and was pounding on

the ends of the bullets, trying to remove individual rounds. He was

ordered to leave and told that if he wanted to kill himself, he should

do so outside. Several men found and brought in live grenades, which

we called "potato mashers." The shape suggested the name. A potato

masher was a rounded, metal-encased explosive charge on the end of

a 10-inch wooden handle. The men who found them were told immediately to stop such hazardous activities. My training in armament,

ammunition, and explosives qualified me to inform them of the dangers to which they were subjecting themselves and others.

All in all, the experiences of some fifty thousand POWs, while

varying in an infinite number of details, were characterized by an unrelenting grimness. The loss of freedom and having to live at the point

of a gun created stresses and required psychological adjustments that

were different and difficult. The searchlights, the armed guards in

their observation towers and with their dogs on patrol, and the barbed

wire enclosures turned the POW's war into a fight to survive. Also, the

continuing starvation, the loss of weight, and the inescapable cold produced a reaction that was common to all POWs-a determination to

beat the enemy by surviving. But, I think that not one of the thousands of POWs who suffered this ordeal has ever been or ever will be

quite the same as he was before.

Gen. Poe: General Potts, at the height of the recent controversy

[the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution, which many

veterans and military historians believed was too sympathetic toward

Japan's militarist governmentl-I'm moving into some of the folks'

area for the following section-at the height of the recent controversy

about the Enola Gay, a very senior person at the [National Air and

Space] museum asked me, "Why in the world do I get this hubbub

from Eighth Air Force people? They were in Europe."

I wonder if we might ask you for your thoughts on that particular subject, which will then carry us over to the next session.

Gen. Potts: Let me give a little history that I believe will enable

you to place in context what I'm going to say. When I graduated from

flying school, I was assigned to fly O-52s with the U.S. Army training

observers. Later, when I was assigned to the first B-24 Liberator

group, I was overjoyed. Those of you who've flown the 0-52 recognize

that it was not only obsolete, it was also dangerous to fly. Now, unlike

General Lyle, I had only nineteen hours when I was checked out as an

34
The Air War in Europe

airplane commander, but I had a wonderful group commander named

Ted Timberlake. We trained in the B-24 Liberator and went to Europe

as the first B-24 group to go from the Eighth Air Force.

I was fortunate in that I served in practically every kind of a job

you can have as an engineering officer. I was an airplane commander, squadron operations officer, squadron commander, group operations officer, group commander, wing chief of staff, and group commander. Finally, I was sent down to Eighth Air Force Headquarters to

be on the planning staff.

Nobody down there knew anything about the B-24 Liberator, so

I was able to demonstrate to them that they could better utilize the

airplane, get better accuracy and fewer losses, by employing the B-24

at a lower altitude than they'd been employing it. I'm pleased to say

that while I was there as the director of bomb operations, bombing

accuracy improved dramatically.

I'd like to tell you about an amusing experience I had when I was

a group commander. We had an all-out maximum effort mission. I was

up in the tower on this particular day and not flying on the mission,

and a sergeant came over and said, "General Spaatz wants to speak to

you." Well, here I am at a group level. I've got a wing commander over

me, a division commander over me, an Eighth Air Force commander

over me, and then General Spaatz. So I thought somebody was being

smart and pulling my leg. But I went to the phone and, lo and behold,

a voice said, "Potts, this is Spaatz. Now, I'm down here with General

Doolittle and I see you haven't gotten your airplanes off." I'd put a hold

on because we were having a little snowstorm. I said, "That's right,

General, but I do assure you, as soon as this flurry passes, we'll get off

and we'll be in our proper places as we go out over the North Sea." He

said, "Well, Potts, let me tell you something. It's not snowing down

here. Now, get the God-damned planes off." His mind-set was worth

knowing. I did get the planes off and we did bomb the targets.

After World War II, I was put on something called the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in Europe, and then we went out to the Pacific.

I've been asked to comment on [the Enola Gay] controversy. I studied

operations in the Pacific in Japan, the bombing of Japan and, of

course, in particular, the use of the atomic bombs. And so I feel that I

have some qualification from that experience, plus the fact that,

although I'm not a historian, I trained as a lawyer. I think I understand what's relevant and what's not. I'm a student of history.

I'd like to point out several factors that some "revisionist" historians seem to have either overlooked or not given proper weight to.

First of all, it's true that President Truman was briefed by bombing

survey officials from Europe that we could end the war in Japan without invading, just by continuing with bombing operations. The Eighth

Air Force was due to be deployed out there in September 1945 and a

35
Ending the War

War's end came for Japan's intransigent leaders in August 1945, after not one, but

two, atomic bombs had to be dropped on their homeland over the cities of, first, Hiroshima and, then, Nagasaki. Clockwise from MA left The second atomic explosion towering over Nagasaki; Enola Gay, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress of the 509th Composite

Group, returning to its Tinian Island base after delivering the bomb to Hiroshima on

August 6 (a companion B-29, Bock's Car, bombed Nagasaki.); Hiroshima days after the

atomic blast; the city of Tokyo glowing through the darkness of a nighttime incendiary

raid in May 1945; a formation of long-range B-29s unloading a blizzard of bombs in a

daytime raid during the same month; a Japanese military representative signing formal surrender documents in ceremonies on board the USS Missouri, September 2, 1945.

36
The Air War in Europe

mighty force of the existing air forces, plus, the Eighth would have

wreaked absolute devastation on Japan. As a matter of fact, if we hadn't invaded and they hadn't surrendered, and we hadn't dropped the

atomic bombs, Japan would have been absolutely destroyed from one

end to the other, and its devastation would have been a lot greater

than it was through the dropping of the atomic bombs. That tends to

get overlooked. In other words, if the war had continued and we had

continued bombing, we would have destroyed everything that moved

on the face of Japan. That's item one.

Item two: The kamikaze corps had been formed with over a thousand airplanes and with pilots ready to attack our ships and landing

craft if we invaded. We knew from battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa

how ruinous that could be. We lost thirty-seven ships just in the prelude, getting warmed up for the invasion.

So I think that the people who criticize President Truman for

making that decision aren't looking at the relevant facts. Speaking of

relevant facts, there's a lot of talk about the fact that Japan was ready

to surrender and would have surrendered if we hadn't dropped the

atomic bombs. At the final conference that the Emperor held with his

advisors, in equal numbers military and civilian, they split right along

those lines as to whether they should or shouldn't surrender. It was,

in the end, the Emperor's decision that forced Japan to surrender.

Even so, his military leaders resisted his decision and came pretty

near to pulling off a military coup. His two chief military leaders both

committed harakiri because they were so disgraced.

When we asked the Japanese, "Suppose we hadn't invaded; suppose we'd just stood off and bombed you from the air," they were horrified. The military leaders of Japan were welcoming an invasion.

They wanted to fight to the death and, in effect, commit mass suicide

to prove how glorious they were in their defeat.

A great deal of discussion on the subject has gotten off on the

wrong track, and I'm absolutely convinced that the decision to drop

the bombs was correct and that it hastened the end of the war, brought

it about despite the opposition of the Japanese military. If we hadn't

had that shock treatment, we might well have been sitting there,

bombing and then invading, and we'd have lost hundreds of thousands

of Americans, and millions of Japanese would surely have died. That's

my read on it.

Gen. Poe: That's a very timely comment. We've got some very

special people here today. Our debt to them and the nation's debt to

them and their comrades in arms cannot be measured. Let's have one

more hand for them. Thanks very much, to everybody.

37
National Day of Recognition

for

United States Army Air Forces

Veterans of World War II

Reflections

on the

Air War in the Pacific

Panelists

Gen. Bernard A. Schriever, USAF, retired

Maj. Gen. John R. Alison, USAF, retired

Maj. Gen. John P. Henebry, USAF, retired

Col. Edwin A. Loberg, USAF, retired

Lt. Col. Donald S. Lopez, USA, retired

Introductions

Dr. Richard P. Hallion

Overview

Mr. William T. Y'Blood
The Air War in the Pacific

Dr. Hallion: That was a very fine session. General Poe, yours is

a very tough act to follow. We have another group of extraordinarily

interesting and very accomplished individuals. They should, I think,

make the panel on the Pacific War of equal interest to you.

The air war in the Pacific was very different from the air war in

Europe, and we'll be hearing about it in detail in a few minutes from

Tom Y'Blood of the Air Force History Support Office. What I've learned

looking at the Pacific War is that, to a very great degree, it was about

the projection of three-dimensional power against two-dimensional

forces. The fight against Japan basically involved the projection of air

and submarine power against Japanese surface forces operating in

the Pacific. Indeed, one can look at the island campaign there as an effort to seize bases from which to project three-dimensional power. The

Pacific War was also of tremendous scope, ranging from India into

Central Asia, all the way across to the Hawaiian Islands and, at times,

given our anti-submarine patrols, the American Pacific coast itself

As we did in the first session, we'll start with an overview by one

of our historians in the Air Force History Support Office, Tom YBlood,

who's very interesting in his own right. He started out in the bomber

business. From 1960 to 1966, he flew B-, EB-, and RB-47s with the

U.S. Air Force and then was an airline pilot for more than eighteen

years. He's accumulated over eleven thousand hours of flying time and

has written several official histories, including two volumes on U.S.

Air Force operations during Operation DESERT SHIELD-DESERT STORM.

He's presently writing the concluding chapters of the Air Force's

Fiftieth Anniversary history, which we'll publish in 1997, and has

written a number of very fine commercially published books, mostly

dealing with naval history. Tom, if you come up here, we can launch.

Mr. Y'Blood: Thank you, Dr. Hallion, members of the panel, ladies and gentlemen.

On December 7, 1941, the U.S. Army Air Corps had fewer than

300,000 personnel and some 10,000 aircraft, of which only 3,000 were

considered combat types. By war's end, on September 2, 1945, the U.S.

Army Air Forces totalled 2.25 million men and women and 63,700 airplanes, including over 41,000 combat types. It was the greatest air

force the world has known, but its ascent into the sparkling skies of

victory began under oily, black clouds at Pearl Harbor. The attack

there seemed a great tactical success for the Japanese, but it proved a

disastrous strategic blunder. The U.S. Navy's carriers weren't destroyed. The vital tank farm wasn't even touched. Perhaps more important, the attack brought out in the American people the steely resolve:

"Now that we're in it, we're going to finish it." And they did.

At Pearl Harbor, our Army and Navy planes were nearly wiped

out, yet a handful of airmen got airborne to put up a fight. Leading the

39
Reflections and Remembrances

way was George Welch, who shot down four of the ten enemy planes

destroyed that day by American fighters.

There was pretty much the same dismal story in the Philippines,

where it was early in the morning of December 8th when Pearl Harbor

was attacked. Word of what had happened soon reached the islands,

but, for reasons that remain controversial, the defenders there were

as unprepared as their comrades in Hawaii. The 316-aircraft-strong

Far East Air Force was decimated and, by mid-December, only eleven

of an original thirty-five B-17s survived to escape to Australia. The

first few months of 1942 saw an unbroken string of disasters for the

Americans and their Allies, as the Japanese pushed south and east.

During this time, some airmen became household names to an

American populace starved for good news. Over Luzon, Colin Kelly

sacrificed his life holding his mortally wounded B-17 aloft until his

crew could bail out, and 'Buzz" Wagner shot down five enemy planes

to become the first American ace of the war. A flying unit also gained

some attention. Its chief was a former Air Corps officer named Claire

Chennault who'd gone to China to advise Chiang Kai-Shek on military

aviation. The unit was the American Volunteer Group, the AVG, better

known, of course, as "the Flying Tigers."

They saw action only briefly, between December 1941 and July

1942, but during that spell, they wrote a shining chapter of innovation

and bravery. After the unit disbanded, its survivors joined the 23rd

Fighter Group. It later became part of the Fourteenth Air Force under

Major General Claire Chennault-not a bad promotion for one who'd

retired as a captain. Under his leadership, the Fourteenth became a

dangerous, pesky foe to the Japanese in China and Southeast Asia.

In the meantime, on April 18, 1942, Jimmy Doolittle led sixteen

B-25s off the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet to bomb Tokyo and

other Japanese cities. Their dramatic raid raised morale at home but

had a much more profound effect on the war than the little material

damage it inflicted. Japanese military leaders were embarrassed and

infuriated, but the raid was a catalyst for another of their attempts to

expand the empire's defensive perimeter. The Japanese navy had long

urged an attack on the island of Midway. The Japanese army, which

had rejected the idea, was stung by Doolittle's impudence and, finally,

agreed that Midway had to be taken.

Subsequent action resulted in the destruction of the major portion of the Japanese carrier fleet and its most skilled flyers. Although

Japan continued to advance briefly, the tide now turned, as the United

States prepared to go on the offensive.

Until that time, the Japanese navy had been contemptuous of

the AAF's high-level bombing of ships. For example, during the Battle

of the Eastern Solomons, a destroyer captain had his ship dead in the

water as he picked up survivors of a ship that had been sunk. When

40
The Air War in the Pacific

several B-17s appeared overhead, the captain ignored them and continued working until several bombs smashed into his ship and sent it

to the bottom. As he was fished, spluttering and waterlogged from the

ocean, he conceded that even B-17s could make a hit once in a while.

But George Kenney and his Fifth Air Force in the South Pacific

soon made Japan respect the efficacy of AAF planes against ships by

using both skip bombing and low-altitude delivery techniques. Also,

Kenney's technical expert, the legendary Paul "Pappy" Gunn and, a

North American aviation "tech rep," Jack Fox, came up with modifications that increased the forward firing armament of both B-25s and

A-20s, making them deadly and efficient strafers.

In March 1943, Kenney unleashed his forces against an enemy

convoy steaming across the Bismarck Sea toward New Guinea. In the

ensuing battle, AAF and Australian planes sank twelve of the convoy's

sixteen ships and killed about half of the six thousand troops on

board. Japan never again attempted to send a convoy to New Guinea.

Kenney was truly blessed with outstanding fighter pilots. Three

of his best received the medal of honor, but they didn't survive the war.

Neal Kirby scored twenty-two victories before being killed at Wewak.

Tommy McGuire bagged thirty-eight planes before spinning in during

the type of fight he warned newcomers to avoid-a low-altitude, turning, heavyweight battle. Dick Bong, America's leading ace of the war,

had forty victories. He survived combat, only to die fifty years ago yesterday in the United States, on a routine acceptance flight of one of the

AAF's new jets, the P-80.

The Fifth wasn't the only air force operating in the South Pacific.

Led initially by a future U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff, Major General

Nathan Twining, the Thirteenth Air Force or "Jungle Air Force," as its

men called it, never received the acclaim accorded the Fifth, but its

planes were involved in one of the most remarkable events of the war.

American codebreakers learned that the architect of the attack

on Pearl Harbor and one of Japan's greatest heroes, Admiral Isoroku

Yamamoto, was going to make an inspection trip to Bougainville in

the northern Solomons. The codebreakers knew his timetable and that

he was known to be exceptionally punctual. An aerial ambush was

authorized. Exactly one year after the Doolittle raid, on April 18, 1943,

sixteen P-38s met Yamamoto's entourage precisely at the place and

time called for in his schedule. Four P-38s designated as the attack

section shot down the two bombers carrying Yamamoto's party, as well

as three escorting fighters. Yamamoto's loss was devastating to Japan.

The Thirteenth Air Force eventually joined the Fifth Air Force in

the Southwest Pacific and continued its specialty, long-range bombing,

particularly to such distant targets as Balikpapan on the island of

Borneo. Until the B-29 attacks on Japan, the B-24 raids were among

the longest combat missions of the war.

41
Reflections and Remembrances

Four other American air forces flew in the Pacific and Southeast

Asia. The Seventh Air Force, commanded initially by Major General

Clarence L. Tinker, rose from the ashes of the old Hawaiian Air Force.

Tinker's time in command was distressingly short, for his B-24 disappeared during a raid on Wake Island immediately following the

Battle of Midway.

Tinker was just one of the many-too many-airmen who vanished over the ocean or into the jungles of that part of the world. Far

more than in either the European or the Mediterranean areas, operations in the Pacific placed a premium on navigational skills. Few good

landmarks existed, let alone navigational aids, and there was a lot of

ocean to fly over. There were also thunderstorms and typhoons in the

Pacific, williwaws in the Aleutians, and atrocious weather over the

Himalayas. Aircrews in these regions were put through some of the

most arduous and demanding flying of the war.

The men of the Seventh Air Force claimed they were just moving

from "one damned island after another," and it was true. Their path

across the Central Pacific usually brought them to bases after enemy

air power had been beaten down. But the Seventh wasn't just cleaning up after the Navy and the Marines. Its air units were heavily involved in close air support of ground troops, bombing missions to keep

bypassed Japanese garrisons in check, and interceptions of enemy

planes attempting to attack new American beachheads.

From Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the Seventh flew both bomber and

fighter strikes against the home islands. Then, on August 13, 1945,

one of its pilots, Oscar Perdomo, shot down five enemy planes over

Korea, becoming the last fighter ace of the war.

Lesser-known air forces operating against Japan were the Tenth

and the Eleventh. In the Aleutians, the Eleventh Air Force contended

not only with the enemy but with abominable weather as well. The

Boeing B-29 Superfortresses. At first from India and China, and,

more successfully, from the Mariana Islands, B-29s, with their great

range, size, and carrying capacity, struck at imperial Japan. In punishing firebombing attacks, they weakened it. After delivering the

atomic bombs, they forced its surrender.

42
The Air War in the Pacific

smallest of the AAF's combat air forces, the Eleventh, found itself

fighting a backwater war. Nevertheless, after Doolittle and his raiders, the Eleventh made the first strikes directly at Japan. From the

summer of 1943 until the end of the war, the Eleventh attacked targets in the northernmost islands of Japan, the Kuriles. Although

small, these raids kept the enemy worried that an American attack

from the Aleutians was always possible.

The Tenth Air Force was based in India and Burma, where it was

hot, both on the ground and in the air. The Tenth, whose aircraft

ranged across the region, attacking the enemy from eastern India to

Bangkok, was also the home of two truly unique organizations, the 1st

and 2nd Air Commando Groups, forerunners of today's Air Force Special Operations Command and of the composite wing concept. General

Alison, who's here with us today, has very intimate knowledge of the

1st Air Commandos.

It was in the realm of supply that the Tenth shone. The air supply route across the Himalayas from India to China was called "the

Hump, " and it was the Tenth's job to keep the route working. The aircrews flying this dangerous course didn't shoot guns or drop bombs,

but through heroic effort and sacrifice, they enabled the troops receiving the supplies they delivered to do so. Many courageous aircrews

were lost flying the Hump.

The youngest of the Pacific Air Forces was the Twentieth, activated in April 1944. Unlike those of the other numbered air forces, its

commander was far removed from the combat arena. The Joint Chiefs

of Staff held operational control of the Twentieth, but the executive

agent and its actual commander was General Hap Arnold.

Defining the Twentieth's goal, the strategic bombing of Japan by

B-29s so as to bring the war to a close, was simple; reaching it wasn't.

XX Bomber Command was initially based in India and China, partly

to show support for Chiang Kai-Shek, but also because, at the time,

bases in those countries were closest to Japan. Unfortunately, operations in China had to be halted because of tremendous supply difficulties as well as the inability of the B-29s to reach important targets

on the home islands.

In early 1945, XX Bomber Command was moved to the Mariana

Islands to join its sister outfit, XXI Bomber Command, which had

begun attacking Japan in November 1944. With these two organizations joined, the bombing campaign increased and intensified.

As it did so, a member of the Twentieth became the force's only

Medal of Honor recipient. Staff Sergeant Henry "Red" Irwin was dropping phosphorous smoke bombs from his B-29 when one of them blew

up in its launch chute. The burning bomb shot back into the plane,

mutilated Irwin's face and blinded him. Phosphorus smoke filled up

the plane, threatening to set it on fire. Disregarding his terrible

43
The U.S. Army Air Forces in the Skies over Asia

As the Allies followed a "Europe First" war fighting strategy, the U.S. Army Air

Forces in the Pacific held fast and took on, at great cost, ruthless and, at first, successful imperialist Japan. In far-flung island operations the Fifth, Seventh, and Thirteenth

Air Forces faced well entrenched units. The Fifth Air Force stopped enemy advances in

Australia, Java, New Guinea, and the Bismarck Archipelago and flew in the Solomons,

Leyte, Luzon, Western Pacific, China and Japan air campaigns. C/ockwise fjhm fop

Fifth Air Force North American B-25 Mitchells patrol the China coast; the New Guinea

coast at Salamaua is peppered by Fifth Air Force bombs; inland in two pictures, a

Japanese anti-aircraft gun emplacement at Wewak and Japanese fighters at But airdrome sit beneath Fifth Air Force "parafrags"--bombs slowed by parachutes so that the

aircraft dropping them can escape their blasts; off Indochina, a low-swooping B-25 goes

after a Japanese frigate; another B-25 unloads on an oil storage tank at Boela on

Ceram in the Netherlands East Indies.

44
In the Central and Western Pacific, the Seventh Air Force aided the Eastern Mandates, Ryukyus, China, and Japan air campaigns. In the Southern and Southwestern

Pacific, the Thirteenth Air Force aided the Allied drive from the Solomons to the Philippines and the Guadalcanal, New Guinea, Bismarck Archipelago, Eastern Mandates,

Leyte, Luzon, and China air campaigns. Seventh Air Force CZockwisefrwn top, left Consolidated B-24 Liberators release their bombs over Japanese installations on Mindoro

in the Philippines; in the Marshalls, enemy-held Jaluit Island bears the scars of Seventh Air Force poundings; so does a Japanese installation on Wotje Island; a bomber

crew of the Seventh Air Force sends an encouraging message to a bomber crew of the

Eighth; Thirteenth Air Force B-24s on Borneo head toward home base after hitting the

major Japanese oil producing center at Balikpapan; the Donnang Bridge leading to that

center lies split and smoking, a Japanese cruiser takes desperate evasive action in the

Battle of the Sulu Sea off the Philippines before Thirteenth B-24s send it to the bottom.

45
The U.S. Army Air Forces in the Skies over Asia

When Japan isolated China by taking Burma in the spring of 1942, two American

air forces became prominent in the struggle by the military commands of several nations against the aggressor. In the campaign to reclaim Burma, the Tenth Air Force

aided British commandos behind enemy lines and, later, when the Japanese cut off the

Burma Road, transported troops and supplies over the Himalayas from India to the Allies fighting in China. CZockwise from top left A Tenth Air Force Curtiss C-46 Commando, hauls critical materiel over the towering Himalayan Hump, from Assam in India to Kunming in China; Tenth transports prepare to move soldiers over the air route;

others await their missions in the mud of airfields soaked by monsoon rains; in Burma,

Tenth Consolidated B-24 Liberators blast a bridge on the Bilin River, others parachute

supplies to Allied troops taking part of the rail corridor near Myitkyina; and a Tenth

North American B-25 Mitchell takes off for a raid on Lashio.

46
W

The Fourteenth Air Force supported the Burma campaign and, as the American Volunteer Group, led resistance operations against Japan by the Chinese Nationalists even

before the United States entered the war. Elsewhere, the Twentieth Air Force attacked

the Japanese mainland with Boeing B-29 Superfortresses based on the hard-won Mariana islands of Tinian, Guam, and Saipan. In the harsh and treeless Aleutians, the Eleventh Air Force guarded against the enemy's northeasternmost reach. Clockwise from

top, lef In China, Fourteenth Air Force B-25s leave smoking ruins of an enemy oil storage site at Laichikok, across from Hong Kong. An enemy-held airfield's runway at

Kwansi bears a neatly cratered surface, thanks to Fourteenth B-24s. A Fourteenth

fighter captures a Japanese ship in its gun camera before sinking it off Shantung. In

the Northern Marianas, Twentieth Air Force B-29s crowd their base on Tinian, bound

for raids on Japan. The port city of Kobe lies ablaze after a B-29 attack. Eleventh Air

Force Bell P-39 Airacobras stand ready on watery, foggy Adak Airfield in the Aleutians.

47
Reflections and Remembrances

injuries and almost completely covered in flames, Irwin picked up the

bomb, carried it to the co-pilot's window, and threw it out. His comrades finally beat out the flames and saved Irwin's life, but he paid a

horrendous price for his bravery.

By midsummer, the Japanese war machine began to totter and

crumble, but it wouldn't collapse. Then, on August 6th and 9th, two

bombs exploded, one over Hiroshima, the other over Nagasaki. Less

than a week later, on August 14th, over a thousand AAF planes paid

Japan one last visit, just before President Truman announced that the

Japanese government had agreed to surrender.

An agreement was formalized on September 2nd with the signing of the surrender document, and World War II was finally over.

Most numbers, such as the 10,300 Japanese aircraft destroyed

against our 4,530 lost, half a million tons of bombs dropped and countless bullets expended, don't adequately convey the extent of the AAF's

efforts against Japan. Only one statistic does that-the 15,694 airmen

who died serving their country during the war in the Pacific. Their

sacrifices helped ensure victory in that area.

This has been but a brief overview from afar of the Pacific air

war. The gentlemen sitting on the panel today had a much closer, a

much more personal view of that war, and I'd now like to turn the discussion over to them and to Dr. Hallion.

Dr. Hallion: Well follow the same format that we did earlier,

with ten-minute presentations by our distinguished speakers today.

As I introduce them, you'll understand why I call them distinguished.

General Bernard Schriever originally held a reserve appointment in the field artillery, but he preferred to fly and so he became a

pilot in the Army Air Corps in 1932. Just prior to the beginning of the

Second World War, he became a test pilot and obtained two aeronautical engineering degrees, one from Wright Field, at the Air Corps Engineering School, and the other from Stanford University.

During the war, he flew sixty-three combat missions as a bomber

pilot throughout the Southwest Pacific. He also rose in rank from captain to colonel and in position from pilot to Chief of Staff, Fifth Air

Force. His decorations include the Distinguished Service Medal, with

Oak Leaf Cluster, and the Purple Heart.

After the war, he became heavily involved in research and development. That's one of the great understatements. He was instrumental in developing manned aircraft, such as the B-58, and the ICBM

[inter-continental ballistic missile] fleet: Atlas, Thor, Titan, and Minuteman. He headed Air Research and Development Command and its

successor, Air Force Systems Command. At Systems Command, he also directed the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program. Since retiring

in 1966, he's been a consultant on various space and missile programs.

48
The Air War in the Pacific

We're extremely fortunate to have with us today Major General

John Alison. General Alison became an aviation cadet in 1936. Folowing the beginning of the Second World War, he was an assistant air

attach6, with duty in London and Moscow. His later wartime service

was quite varied. After serving as a ten-victory ace in China with the

original Flying Tigers, he became Deputy Commander, 1st Air Commando Group, a member of the 308th Bomb Wing, and then Deputy

Chief of Staff, Fifth Air Force. His wartime decorations include the Silver Star and the Purple Heart. Following the war, he was Assistant

Secretary of Commerce for Aeronautics in the Truman administration

and a vice president of Northrop for thirty-four years-ask him about

the B-2. He's been president of the Air Force Association and is now

associated with a company designing new, advanced, high-technology

engines for aviation. There's a story I read recently-I think it was in

Bob Scott's book, The Day I Owned the Sky-about some Chinese officials who were the guests of Claire Chennault at a demonstration

flight of the P-40. Impressed by the one aircraft, they told Chennault

that they needed a hundred. Chennault said, "No, what you need are

a hundred Johnny Alisons."

Major General John Henebry, U.S. Air Force Reserve, retired, became an aviation cadet in 1940. He flew light bombers and

fighters in the Southwest Pacific, leading the first low-level attacks on

Wewak, Rabaul, and Hollandia. His 217 missions and 740 combat

hours earned him, among other decorations, the Distinguished Service

Cross and the Silver Star. Recalled to active duty during the Korean

War, he commanded a troop carrier wing before rising to Deputy Commander, Combat Cargo Command, Far East Air Forces, and then

Commander, 315th Air Division. General Henebry has served as president of the Air Force Association and is now in manufacturing.

Colonel Edwin Loberg, U.S. Air Force, retired, joined the Army

Air Corps in October 1940. He was at Pearl Harbor on December 7,

1941. So we really have here the beginning and end of the war on our

panel. As a member of the 11th Bomb Group, he flew ninety missions,

many during the Battle of Midway and throughout the South Pacific.

Later in the war, as 769th Bomb Squadron commander, he flew another forty missions in B-29s. His numerous decorations include two

Silver Stars and the Distinguished Flying Cross. After retiring from

the Air Force in 1968, he ran the Apollo Action Center for Boeing and

the Skylab Management Center for Martin Marietta. Now that he's

fully retired, if one can ever truly be fully retired, Colonel Loberg enjoys building and selling greenhouses in his spare time.

It's a great pleasure for me to introduce Lieutenant Colonel

Donald Lopez, a fighter ace who spoke at this morning's ceremony.

Don and I had the joy of working together at the Smithsonian when it

was a decent museum. He entered the Army Air Forces in 1942 and,

49
Reflections and Remembrances

subsequently, saw action in China as a fighter pilot. He scored his first

kill by ramming an Oscar. The P-40 held together; the Oscar didn't.

Among the decorations he received was a Silver Star and the Distinguished Flying Cross, with Oak Leaf Cluster. After retiring from the Air

Force in 1964, Don worked as a systems engineer in the Apollo and

Skylab programs. Long associated with the National Air and Space

Museum, he's been its Aeronautics Department chairman, its deputy

director, and is presently its senior advisor emeritus. I strongly urge

you to get hold of Don's most recent book, Fighter Pilot's Heaven, about

his recollections of flying at Eglin Air Force Base right after the war.

It's a truly remarkable book.

I'll direct my first question to Colonel Loberg, and that is, what

did your experience at Pearl Harbor on December 7th leave you with

in terms of an appreciation for air power and what influence might it

have played in your subsequent role in the South Pacific?

Col. Loberg. Well, December 7th certainly was "a day of infamy." I was up and dressed that morning, but lots of people weren't

even out of bed when the attack began. I was the Officer of the Guard

that morning and I was walking from my barracks tying my tie, getting ready to report to a major, who was the Officer of the Day, when

I heard a funny noise over at Pearl Harbor. Then, three airplanes

came down in front of me, just zipped down the street, heading toward

the club, and I could see the big red balls. I knew they were Japanese.

I knew we were at war, because I could hear the bombing. So I yelled

into the barracks, "Get out, we're being attacked by the Japanese!"

The rest of the day was really kind of wild. I was a second lieutenant and, as the Officer of the Guard, I thought I had a duty to do

something about the prisoners in the guard house. I took my car over

there, strangely enough, and parked it on a baseball field nearby. I

walked over to the Sergeant of the Guard and I told the prisoners that

they could all get out if they wished. Then, we opened the door and I

said, "If you want to go to the hospital, we're going to have injured people. You can go there." About half did. The other half stayed. A bomb

hit the guard house a little later and knocked them all out.

We tried to save our airplanes. That was strange. We tried to taxi

some that were hit. We got one engine started on an old B-18. There

just weren't any B-17s capable of doing anything. We had only one

that we could get ready to fly and that tried to take off. I think its controls locked and it didn't make it.

So, we didn't get any airplanes off Hickam Field that day. But we

worked all night and got the B-18s ready to fly, loaded them with live

bombs. There was a bit of a conflict in our minds. We'd never taken a

B-18 or any airplane off and brought its bombs back. But we were

told, "Don't you dare drop them if you're not going after the enemy.

50
Waking Up to War

As stunned survivors of the attack at Pearl Harbor on Sunday morning December 7,

1941, coped in the immediate aftermath of death and destruction, the United States formally entered World War II, vowing to hasten the buildup of its defenses and correct the

vulnerabilities that Japan had so painfully exposed. Tbp to bottom. The destroyer USS

Shaw explodes in drydock on Battleship Row. The Hawaiian Air Force as well as the

Pacific Fleet took ferocious blows. A hangar and a Curtiss P-40 Warhawk outside it at

Wheeler Field stand gutted by fire. A Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress lies sliced in half at

Hickam Field. A Mitsubishi A6M Zero heads for an unsuspecting Oahu amid cheering

carrier crew members.

51
Reflections and Remembrances

Bring them back. There's no way you can put the safety pins back in."

The next morning at five o'clock, we took off with three B-18s to look

for the Japanese fleet. Of course, we were pretty lucky that we didn't

find it. Flying at 120 miles an hour or so, we would've just been sitting

ducks and wouldn't have done any good.

The whole day was a shambles. I could, I suppose, talk about a

lot of people being injured and hospitals filling up. We didn't get any

food for about twenty-four hours. Everything was a mess. Buildings

were burned down, hangars were blown apart. Many of you probably

saw the same things at other places. I saw the same things at other

places, later on. That's basically my story of December 7th.

Dr. Hallion: What were some of your experiences beyond that,

during your early days operating bombers in the South Pacific, say

during the Battle of Midway? They must've been pretty interesting.

Col. Loberg: As I said, we started flying B-18s. How many of

you know what a B-18 is? That's quite a group. In about two weeks,

we got, I think, eight or nine B-17s from the States. Our squadron

commander brought them in. Dick Cobb-maybe some of you knew

him-brought them in, and we moved up to Wheeler Field and started flying search missions.

I was a brand new second lieutenant from the spring of 1941, and

I was flying as a co-pilot. One day the commander looked around at

the group, and he said, "Check this guy out." So I was taken out. I

climbed into the left seat of a B-17. A first lieutenant who'd flown it

probably ten or fifteen hours watched me as I taxied out, took off, flew

down over Pearl Harbor, came back, landed, and taxied around to take

off again for another shot at it. He said, "You're checked out." So after

about forty minutes of flight, I was checked out in a B-17 and flew a

search mission the next morning, before daylight, with a brand new

crew that I'd never seen. That was the kind of checkout we had. Crazy!

We flew many search missions. I really can't tell you how many.

Of course, we didn't run into anything in the Hawaii area, but we did

go to the Midway area. We flew out of Midway for about ten days with

about twenty-one B-17s, mostly searching, sometimes dropping a few

bombs. The Navy didn't give us any credit at all for being at Midway,

but we were there.

Later, in the spring or summer of 1942, we moved down to the

Solomons area, to a little base on an island called Efate, and then to

another, bigger base on an island called Espiritu Santo. We bombed

the Solomons area and the island of Guadalcanal, itself, when the

Marines and the Army were trying to take it over.

The Japanese had started building Henderson Field before we

took it over. I think I was in one of the first planes to land there. We

52
The Air War in the Pacific

called the little tower and asked, "Can we land on the base?" And we

got the answer, "Sure, come on in and try it." It sure was rough, but it

was the airfield.

We started flying from there, flew all over the Solomons area and

in and out of Port Moresby, New Guinea. We flew B-17s in that part

of the Pacific until the early spring of 1943. Then, B-24s and new

crews were shipped out, and we had a completely new situation. The

B-17s that were left were used for administrative purposes and a little bit of combat flying.

Then, after I moved into B-29s, I went to India and China and

flew another forty missions. The B-29 was a great airplane. I had the

opportunity to be a pathfinder on the first big mission over Japan,

after Doolittle, of course, had flown over it two years before.

Our food problem was terrible out in the Pacific. I should mention that. There were times when we'd go two and three weeks without anything but some Australian bread and peanut butter. We never

ran out of peanut butter. One time, we salvaged about ten dozen canned hams from a little trawler that had tipped over in the bay, and we

ate the canned ham with Australian bread. We never ran out of coffee.

We always had coffee. But we'd go for three weeks on peanut butter

and bread; that's not good.

We heard that the European theater was number one and, of

course, we certainly recognized it as such, not only for food, but for

clothing, too. We couldn't even get new shoes to replace the ones that

had rotted from our walking around in the mud. I remember going for

about four or five months with only a pair of sandals that had been

made by the natives.

Our airplanes were really in terrible shape after a while, and we

didn't have that many left. We couldn't even get parts or replacement

crews. However, things started to change in the winter of 1942 and

early spring of 1943, when the B-24s moved in. That's my story.

Dr. Hallion: Thank you very much. We turn now from the bomber dimension to the fighter dimension and other interesting aspects

of the war, with General Alison, who flew with the Flying Tigers. He

had the experience of working at close hand with Claire Chennault,

one of the legendary air leaders of the war. General Alison, I have two

questions, one on your experiences with the Flying Tigers and the

other on your later experiences with the Air Commandos.

First, how would you assess General Chennault as an air leader,

as an individual who knew and understood the uses of air power?

Second, how did your Air Commando operations foreshadow Air Force

post-1945 special operations?

Maj. Gen. Alison: People often ask whether General Chennault

was a genius. I say if someone with common sense and high profes53
Reflections and Remembrances

sional knowledge is a genius, then he certainly was one. He understood war and how to use aircraft in war, but he did some things that

I didn't understand. I was just a lieutenant fighter pilot and had no

time to study. Chennault had spent a great deal of time studying. He'd

been at the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field and had essentially written the book.

One of the many important goals in war is to get there "firstest

with the mostest." But another important goal is to know where the

enemy is before he knows where you are.

Chennault set up a warning net in China. We didn't have radar;

we had Chinese listening stations. Individuals would listen and then

would report back in to the net by radio or by telephone and say,

"Sound of many [troops] in such and such a quarter." Or, when they

saw them, they'd tell us how many But after a while, you learned how

to interpret and you knew where the enemy was and you knew where

he was going. So when he arrived, you were up above him. You had the

high ground.

Also, Chennault understood equipment. He'd say, "The Japanese

airplane is made for maneuverability. It has high rates of climb. It can

just turn on a dime. You're flying a relatively unmaneuverable airplane, a heavy airplane. But it's very durable, and you have one great

advantage. You have firepower." We had six .50-caliber machine guns

on our airplanes that fired six hundred rounds per minute. The Japanese had very poor firepower on theirs. So he said, "Take advantage of

that." He also said, "You can't maneuver with the Japanese," and he

had a little ditty, "It's better to strike and run away and live to fly

another day" Chennault was absolutely right. You couldn't maneuver

with the Japanese.

Well, I'd practiced for about four years maneuvering dogfights,

back in the States, fighting everything I could, and I thought I was the

best in the world until I met my first Japanese pilot. I tell you, Japanese pilots could get behind you so quickly and hit you, hit you on a

turn. I tried it a couple of times, and I got my share of lead, and then

I knew General Chennault was right.

I don't know where he got it, but he seemed to have intuition,

also. He knew what the enemy was going to do, and that gave us a tremendous advantage. As a result, the AVG and then the 23rd Fighter

Group, which followed, had a tremendous victory ratio over the Japanese. We were scoring victories when they were hard to come by.

Now, on to the Air Commandos. Well, I got into the Air Commandos by accident. I'd been in China, then got sent back to the States. I

had a small cadre to go to England, and I was really looking forward

to that. I had my own fighter group; I was the group commander. I was

training it. I was getting ready to go to England, when all of a sudden

a wire came: "Report to me without delay." It was signed: "Arnold." I

54
The Air War in the Pacific

asked air force headquarters there in Los Angeles, who delivered the

wire to me, "What does he want?" They said, "How in the world do we

know?"

So I reported in and walked into General Arnold's office. I don't

know how many of you have heard of Phil Cochran. He was an unusual fellow, but a wonderful guy. We'd gone through flying school together, had been in the 8th Group together, had roomed together. We were

close, personal friends. Phil was sitting in General Arnold's office and

I asked him what he was doing there. He replied, "I don't know. What

are you doing here?" I replied, "Well, I guess well find out pretty soon."

Then Arnold came in. I'd never heard of General Orde Wingate,

one of the truly charismatic characters of the war. He had a beard and

he wore a pith helmet, which was kind of his signature. He was an

expert in guerrilla warfare. He'd gone into Ethiopia and organized the

Ethiopians to fight the Italians, with tremendous success. He'd been

in Palestine and is still known as "the Father of the Israeli Army." He

was Moshe Dayan's personal mentor. Wingate was an unusual but

very skilled fighter. He didn't have much respect for superiors he

thought were incompetent, and he thought most of his superiors were

incompetent. As a matter of fact, he'd once attempted suicide by cutting his throat from ear to ear; he had a great big scar. I don't know

whether he really intended to kill himself, but my flight surgeon told

me that he really had intended to. Fortunately, he didn't.

General Arnold told Phil and me about a guerrilla fighter who'd

become a favorite of Prime Minister Churchill. Churchill had taken

him to the Quebec Conference, introduced him to President Roosevelt,

and had told Roosevelt the sad story. Wingate had developed a theory

of long-range penetration groups. He had four regiments that he'd infiltrated through the Japanese lines to attack what he called the "soft

underbelly"-the logistics system of the Japanese behind the front.

The regiments actually went through the jungle, using mules to carry

what little equipment they had. Their artillery was British one-pounders. Because they moved in silence and mostly at night, the vets cut

the mules' vocal chords so that they couldn't bray and give the regiments away to the Japanese.

Wingate had tremendous success, except when he got a man who

was wounded and not ambulatory, and he had to leave him. He said,

"You know, we leave him, we prop him up against a tree and put a rifle

across his knees and a canteen, and we say, 'Goodbye, friend.'" He said,

"I can't do that anymore. I've asked the RAF [Royal Air Force] for air

assets to rescue my wounded." He told President Roosevelt, "The RAF

doesn't have the equipment. I hope the United States air forces can do

this for me."

President Roosevelt turned to General Marshall and said, "Do

it," and Marshall turned to General Arnold and said, "Do it."

55
Reflections and Remembrances

The next thing we knew, Phil and I were in Arnold's office and he

said, "Do it." Well, he didn't tell us exactly what he wanted done. He

said, "Somebody's got to pull those wounded out, and it's got to be one

of you guys."

I said, "Well, General, you don't need me. I've spent a year fighting in China. I'm a fighter pilot. You've just given me a group. I'm a

group commander. I'm going to Europe, and I'm happy. If all you're

going to give us are L-5s, and if you want us to lift the wounded out,

you don't need me to do that."

Arnold thought a minute and he said, "IIl tell you what I really

want. You know, this guy walks through and it takes him six weeks to

get in position behind enemy lines, and when he gets there, a lot of his

men are sick; he's lost some of them en route, and they're tired. We can

move them and support them by air. IIl give you any resources that

you need to do it. Now, which one of you wants to take it?"

We looked at each other and Phil said, "Well, can we both go?" So

Arnold said, "Yeah. Alison, you're the senior, you're the commander." I

said, "No, sir, I'm not the senior. Phil ranks me by two weeks." And he

said, "Well, youll be co-commander."

Well, anybody who's been in the military knows that co-commands just don't work. It wasn't that Phil and I couldn't get along, but

nobody could understand what we were doing. So we went for about a

month and I said, "Phil, you're the commander; I'm the deputy," and

we got together an outfit.

We had C-47 tow planes. We had a hundred gliders, a hundred

L-5s, thirty P-51s, and twelve B-25s. And this was our artillery support. We moved twelve thousand men in behind enemy lines. We flew

gliders and landed with equipment, and we made air fields.

Because both Phil and I believed commanders ought to lead, Phil

said, "Well, I'm going in." I said, "No, you're not, you're the commander; I'm going in." So I flew a glider. I'd never flown a glider in my life.

I took off with fifteen fully-armed assault troops behind me at night

and landed a hundred fifty miles behind enemy lines. I was lucky. I

didn't break up. We had a lot of trouble as we landed in an open glade

in the jungle. There were some ruts that we didn't see because they

were covered with grass. When we hit the ruts, the wheels came off.

The gliders went down. They were full of equipment; they were heavy;

we couldn't move them. Other gliders behind kept crashing into the

them. At night, it was terrible.

Also, we expected to be attacked. We picked two landing areas.

We'd sent out a last-minute reconnaissance and found one field completely blocked by logs. We figured that the Japanese knew our plans.

So we decided to go into the other one. Well, the Japanese really didn't know our plans. As a matter of fact, we were so deep in the jungle

it took them three weeks to get in to find us.

56
Harrying the Japanese in Burma

The Ist Air Commandos were formed and led by Cols. Philip Cochran and John

Alison for special duty to aid the British, who wanted to safeguard India by driving the

Japanese from Burma. Although part of the Tenth Air Force, they were virtually autonomous as they hit Japanese targets and supported Maj. Gen. Orde Wingate's multinational guerrillas in incursions behind enemy lines. In March 1944, the 1st Air Commandos left Burma to fly supplies from India to China over the Hump. Their troop-carrying, supply, rescue, combat, and landing-strip building duties took them to jungles,

mountains, swamps, and river valleys. Clockwise from topIA kft A Douglas C-47 Skytrain towing a fragile troop glider-, a wrecked glider, one of many that broke up in landings and storms; grizzled commandos emerging from the jungle near Broadway Field; a

fortunately docile mule, bound for Wingate's raiders; 1st Air Commando aircraft sporting their distinctive stripes-a Republic P-47 Thunderbolt taking off on a mission and

a North American B-24 Mitchell that has just bombed an enemy roadway at Wuntho.

57
Reflections and Remembrances

I didn't know this, although I'm sure British intelligence knew it,

but as we were going over the mountains and rivers and landing behind enemy lines in Burma, the Japanese were just starting a major

offensive against India. They almost took India, but one of the reasons

they didn't was the commander of the Japanese army in Burma had

two divisions in reserve that he couldn't deploy. He couldn't because

we had one division behind them.

We fought a tough war. It was very interesting and it worked.

General Arnold formed another Air Commando Group, and before I

knew it, I was out of Burma and in the Pacific with it. I spent the rest

of the time with my friends Ben Schriever and Jock Henebry out in

New Guinea, the Philippines, Okinawa, and Japan.

Dr. Hallion: Thank you very much, General Alison. Our next

question is for Don Lopez. Don, the Fourteenth Air Force seemed to

have to do a great deal with very little. The whole logistical supply effort in the Fourteenth was a very tough one.

How did this fact impact on you in the fighter war? Fighter operations in the Fourteenth were very successful, in spite of many shortages, particularly of aircraft, and the condition of those you were operating. Also, how would you rate the capabilities of the Japanese pilots

you were up against?

Lt. Col. Lopez: Well, everything was done on a very small scale.

I was in the squadron that General Alison commanded. He'd left, but

we knew all about him. He was already a legend when I arrived.

We had a very small-scale operation in China. A typical mission

would involve just eight airplanes, all P-40s. Almost all of our missions--except when we were attacked and had to intercept or perform

escort--were ground-attack type missions, and we carried bombs on

every one. We flew to the north, mostly; the Japanese were up north of

us in the Yangtze River area. We'd fly about 150 or 200 miles to the

northernmost part of the target area and then attack coming back.

Our first four fighters would go down, drop their bombs and strafe in

whatever type of mission we flew-mostly against enemy transportation at the beginning

The Japanese hadn't started their drive yet, and we attacked

them as they moved in boats. They moved by horse a lot in China, but

very rarely in trains or trucks. As I said, our first four airplanes would

go down, drop their bombs, and strafe. When we were nearly out of

ammunition, as best we could judge-we had no way of counting

ammunition-the bottom flight would go up. The top flight would act

as top cover, up about five or six thousand feet, watching out for enemy

fighters. Then we'd switch places, expend our ammunition, and head

back to our bases.

58
The Air War in the Pacific

Sometimes we had about twenty-four airplanes, almost the equi- valent of a thousand-plane raid. "Tex" Hill, one of the original members of the AVG, was the first commander of my squadron and later

came back as a commander of the 23rd Group. He came up and another squadron joined us, and we were going to run a mission.

You've seen in the film, Twelve O'clock High, when the Eighth Air

Force was going to have a big thousand-plane raid, all of the maps and

pointers and different people giving briefings. Well, our briefing consisted of Tex Hill getting up and saying, "Y'all follow me." That was

the whole briefing; and we did; and it worked very well.

As for supplies, we were limited. Sometimes, we couldn't fly and

we'd have to sit down because we didn't have fuel and spare parts. The

airplanes coming over the Hump did a tremendous job. They lost, I believe, about three air crew members for every thousand tons they

brought over, and they brought many thousands of tons. So they had

a pretty tough job.

Because we were short of fuel we never could do any training or

practice flying at all. We just didn't have the fuel to do it. So all of our

fuel was used on actual missions or on engineering test flights and

things like that. We had no training flights for the new pilots.

But, one thing we did have that was a pretty good innovation in

India was a base called Landhi Field, outside Karachi. It was used as

a fighter replacement training base for the China-Burma-India theater. New fighter pilots coming into the theater would report there

first. They were trained by experienced fighter pilots finishing their

tours and coming home from China or India, which was very good, because they got the very latest information from people who'd just been

out there. I went to Landhi Field as a student, of course, and was an

instructor there on my way back. It was a lot nicer when you were an

instructor, I'll say that. There was a lot more food and other things for

the instructors than for the students.

Food was a real problem, as Colonel Loberg has mentioned. We

didn't even have peanut butter. We were fed entirely by the Chinese

because food wasn't brought over the Hump, just ammunition, fuel,

and other things that we needed. We were probably the only military

people in the world who would've killed for Spare. We didn't even have

that. We had bad pork almost every day, but it wasn't Chinese food as

we know it in this country. It looked like it came from a pig thrown

into a propeller. What we called "prop chops" were really weird cuts of

bad-tasting meat.

One thing we did have though and I never could figure this out

because I never saw a chicken and I never had any chicken to eat, but

we had all the eggs in the world, four- or five-egg omelets. When our

other food was bad, we'd just yell, "Egg us!" and the waiter would bring

us omelets. So we'd eat, sometimes as many as fifteen eggs a day. For59
Harrying the Japanese in China

Among the Americans trying to oust the invading Japanese from China since 1937

was retired U.S. Army Air Corps flight training chief Col. Claire Chennault, advisor to

Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-Shek and, as a brigadier general, head of the Chinese

Air Force. His AVG, the American Volunteer Group, fought in China and Burma. It was

better known as "the Flying Tigers" because of the sharp teeth painted under the noses

of its fighters. A small, feisty force of no more than 100 aircraft, the Flying Tigers were

famous for successful exploits. Chennault was recalled to active duty with the USAAF

in 1942 and led the new China Air Task Force. The Flying Tigers joined its 23rd Fighter

Group. The task force under Maj. Gen. Chennault became the Fourteenth Air Force in

1944, controlling all air units in China and resupply flights over the Himalayan Hump.

Clockwise from above, left Nakajima Ki-43 Hayabusa Oscar fighters, the Flying Tigers'

foes; a row of snarling P-40s under Chinese guard at Peishiyi; Flying Tigers leaping

into action; the AVG base at Kunming, terminus of the Hump air route; two symbols of

the Fourteenth Air Force, the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk and C-46 Commando.

60
The Air War in the Pacific

tunately, that was before cholesterol was invented. One of our

strangest missions involved food, getting it to Chinese troops surrounded in the north. Every year the Japanese would steal Chinese

rice right after the harvest from where it was grown and take it all

back home, or to wherever they were feeding their troops.

On the flight line I saw these weird-looking belly tanks on the

airplane; we always carried a 75-gallon tank under the belly of a P-40.

Our regular tanks were off and these weird-looking tanks made out of

bamboo were on. Actually, the Chinese had fixed up a way to make

them carry fuel. I don't know how they did it, but they cut the tanks'

back ends off. I asked my flight commander, "What are they for?" He

said, "The Chinese troops are surrounded. They're starving, and we've

got to drop them some rice." So we filled up the belly tanks with rice,

went up to Chang-te, came in low, and dropped them over the Chinese

troops. It it was one of those typical good news-bad news situations:

The good news was, here comes dinner; the bad news was, it's coming

at 250 miles an hour. I think it was cooked when it got to them.

We were in a very interesting theater and, as General Alison has

said, we were all very respectful and thought a tremendous amount of

General Chennault. He was a fine leader and we followed his tactics

faithfully. They paid off very well. I didn't have any really close contact with him. He was a major general; I was a second lieutenant. So

we didn't see much of each other. But he did come around and speak

to us, and we were all trained by people he'd trained.

We flew P-40s almost until the end of the war. My squadron got

Mustangs around the end of October 1944. With the Mustangs we had

supply and other problems. The other problems had already been solved in Europe, but we didn't know it. We had the Mustang B and C

models. They carried only four guns instead of six, and instead of sitting on the base as most fighters did, they were tilted, and because

their wings were thin and they wouldn't fire under any G-load when

you tried to shoot at another airplane. As soon as you pulled some Gs,

all the guns would stop and you couldn't recharge them.

In Europe, the problem was discovered early and solved with

small booster motors on the ammunition trays. We finally got the D

models, which had six guns that were mounted normally, and they

were fine. The Bs and Cs were okay for strafing, but they were no good

for air fighting because you couldn't get a lead on anybody in any type

of a turn and fire. It's very discouraging to pull your trigger and hear

a "bang" instead of the sound of a machine gun; it's very sad. You can't

recharge, so you're just a spectator from then on.

That was about it.

Dr. Hallion: Thank you very much, Don. One of the most interesting facts of the war was that land-based air attacks denied the

61
Reflections and Remembrances

Japanese the sea, particularly those attacks based on the very imaginative tactics developed within the Fifth Air Force to inflict medium

bombs and light attack bombers on enemy shipping.

The 3rd Bomb Group, of course, as the 3rd Attack Group and the

3rd Pursuit Group goes all the way back to World War I in a very long

and distinguished lineage. The 3rd Bomb Group really pioneered in

the attack business.

General Henebry, your experiences are really quite remarkable,

I think, in terms of the scope of the war that you saw, in terms of antishipping attacks in the New Guinea campaign and against Rabaul.

What are your recollections of that and of the November 2, 1943, attack that so devastated the Japanese at Rabaul?

Maj. Gen. Henebry: My first experience in shipping was with

the venerable B-18, out of Langley with the 2nd Squadron of the 22nd

Bomb Group, early in 1941, when I was just out of flying school.

We were being re-equipped with the Martin B-26, and I'm sure

you've heard about its short wings. Then, we had the Curtiss Electric

props, which didn't work very well. We couldn't get but a few to work.

We'd fly a B-26 down to Langley from Baltimore, take the props off,

put them on a railroad car, send the B-26 back to Baltimore, send the

props back to Baltimore, fly another B-26 down to Langley, take the

props off, put them on a railroad car, send the B-26 back.

Almost four years later, I landed in Japan at Atsugi Airfield,

above Yoko-hama, on the same day that General MacArthur went in,

and I was flying a Douglas A-26 at the time. Dick Ellis, you'll recall,

a former commander of SAC, and Chuck Howe and I were told to take

the A-26s up there. So we did and we got out and looked across the

airfield, and there were row upon row of Japanese airplanes with no

propellers on them. I said, "My God, the problem the Japanese had

was they were waiting for propellers from Curtiss Electric!"

We soon found out that one of the terms of the surrender agreement was that the Japanese were to remove all propellers from all airplanes because we were concerned about kamikaze pilots. So there we

were. I'd made full circle. Started out the war with no propellers to ended the war with no propellers.

Well, the B-25 and the shipping and so on are pretty directly the

responsibility of a guy by the name of George Kenney, who was an oldtime, low-level attack guy, a pilot in World War I, who became our commander in the Pacific. He took over, as a matter of fact, the conglomeration of what we had over there at that time in about July 1942, and

redesignated it the Fifth Air Force. He had a fellow working for him

by the name of Ennis Whitehead who was really his operational guy.

Whitehead commanded the Fifth Air Force Advanced. John wound up

working for him a few years before the end of the war.

62
The Air War in Europe

The Japanese were running a lot of shipping in to resupply. They

had some very fast destroyers, in addition to a few submarines and

some other types, but their principal way of getting in was by destroyers. They were large destroyers, but they were very fast. The Japanese

depended on night and weather to run them from the north coast of

New Britain to the north coast of New Guinea or down to Guadalcanal

and some other places over there. The destroyers were very difficult to

hit. They'd be all alone, running at night. We were trying to go after

them flying B-25s at medium altitude at that time, also B-17s. We

were just getting some B-24s.

In daylight, those fast Japanese ships could see our airplanes.

They could see our bombs coming down in good weather. And in good

weather was the only time we could see them and they could turn

away. We hardly ever got a hit at sea, on a ship at sea, which was able

to maneuver away from a medium or high-level airplane.

So General Kenney, being an old attack guy, got the idea to take

out the bombardier-we had the A-20. We had a few old A-20s that

the Third [Air Force] took over from Savannah, but they were running

out of gas. They were coming apart. We lost a lot of them in combat,

and there weren't any new ones coming over. Kenney resorted to the

B-25 and took the bombardier out, put four .50-calibers in the nose

and two on each side, so we had eight .50-calibers firing forward.

For minimum altitude operation and to reduce weight, he took

the lower turret out of the B-25. We had an electric power turret in

the back bottom of the B-25 that you could extend when you needed

it. He took that out and kept the top turret. By golly, he propped that

first one up. Pappy Gunn did all the engineering on the first ones. Ben

Schriever got into them later on, up in Townsville. Didn't you convert

some of them, Ben? But the first ones were converted down at Eagle

Farms in Townsville when Pappy Gunn upset the Australian economy

because he'd just write out purchase orders for all the brackets and

stuff that he needed to get the guns mounted on the airplane. Our

squadron finally got equipped. We got twelve B-25s in commission by

the time of the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, March 3 and 4, 1943. We'd

run a few missions before the battle, but just against coastal ships.

So when we brought up the first one that Pappy converted, the

reaction was: "Yeah, well, that's fine. Go out and fly it. Go on out." We'd

go strafe against "the Moresby Wreck," which was a freighter sitting

on a reef right out of Port Moresby Harbor. We really had fun firing

those eight .50-calibers against that perfect ship silhouette and dropping practice bombs and hitting into its side.

Finally, we had to stop the Japanese destroyers resupplying on

the north coast. Well, we'd had fun up until then. But when we ran the

Bismarck Sea campaign, as I said, we had twelve B-25s in commission. A [destroyer] leading the flotilla had come through the Vitiaz

63
Holding the Line in the Pacific

After American naval and air triumphs in the Coral Sea and at Midway in spring

1942, the Allies went on the offensive against Japanese southwestward expansion. To

protect Australia, regain the Philippines, and obtain bases within B-29 range of Japan

on Guam, Tinian, and Saipan, air, sea, and ground forces battled hard on islands made

into virtual fortresses. In such places as the Solomons, Northern Marianas, Bismarck

Archipelago, and New Guinea air power checked the enemy. Cockwisefivm top ,efl The

main Japanese air and naval base at Rabaul, New Britain, cut off and reduced by aerial bombing as shown in the painting, Simpson Harbor by Michael Hagel, of Fifth Air

Force North American B-25 Mitchells attacking sheltering enemy ships; a Japanese

resupply ship hit from the air in the Allied campaign on enemy convoys in the Bismarck

Sea; the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter, a danger throughout Asia and the Pacific; a Seventh Air Force Consolidated B-24 Liberator striking tiny but significant Iwo Jima;

B-24s and Douglas C-47 Skytrains on a strip carved out of the Carolines; airmen on ".an island paradise," one repairing a precious Allison engine, the other boiling water.

64
The Air War in the Pacific

Strait at that time. Ed Lamer, commanding the 90th Squadron, said,

"I want to take that destroyer myself You fellows have to pick your

own targets."

We watched him. He went right in broadside on that thing and

he hit it pretty good with his 500-pound bomb. We had 500-pounders,

with four-to-five-second delay fuses. He didn't sink it right then and

there, but nobody ever sinks one instantly. Lamer made the run and

we saw him make it.

A great phenomenon occurs when you get those eight .50-calibers on the deck of any ship, whether it be a man-of-war, or freighter,

or whatever. As soon as you can get your guns on their decks, the

lights go off. They stop blinking at you, and everybody gets scared to

death. [The .50-calibers don't] penetrate all the armor on the battleship, but [they] sure [splatter] around a lot. That was our second big

mission of the war.

Then, we took the lower turret out. We put four angle irons in the

back of that B-25 and slipped a square, 300-gallon welded steel tank,

which was made by another aid to the Australian economy, up into the

bomb bay and mounted it on a bomb shackle. So we got about two

hours and twenty-five minutes more of fuel than we did in a normal

B-25. We'd burn that off first and then we'd drop the tank. We had

spring-loaded doors with old screen door springs on them that closed

when the tank dropped out.

We really surprised the Japanese with a strike at Wewak on August 17, 1943. They were in bad shape over there at that time. They

were losing Guadalcanal. They weren't in trouble yet on Rabaul, but

they'd lost Milne Bay. They'd gotten out of Buna. They'd been stopped

from going through the Kokoda Pass, and they were very vulnerable

at Salamaua and Lae. They had no way to supply the ground forces

they had down there who were trying to get control of New Guinea or,

at least, get out safely.

We found this out later. The Japanese Army Air Force sent a

bunch of airplanes down to Wewak. They had four strips there: Wewak, But, Borum. I forget the name of the fourth [Dagual.

D.P. Hall was our group commander at the time. He got in there

on the deck, completely by surprise, and ran a photo reconnaissance

from about twenty-five thousand feet. I have the picture taken five

minutes before we hit them. There were 176 Japanese airplanes lined

up on three strips, wing tip to wing tip, and we blasted them. That

really broke their back and we got some confirmation. Then, they had

to move up to Hollandia, and we canceled that one out for them there.

Let me tell a little story. A friend of mine, Bill Rogers, from the

89th, lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. He's a professor of something or

other. He and his wife had two Japanese girls come over to go to school

at the University of Arkansas and live with them. The girls went

65
Reflections and Remembrances

through school, graduated, and went back to Japan. A couple of years

after that, Bill and his wife got an invitation from one of the girls' families that she was getting married and they were invited to the wedding in Japan. So they went. There they met a retired Japanese fighter pilot. He wasn't in very good health, but he'd survived the war. They

got to talking about the Wewak raid on August 17th. It so happens

that this Japanese pilot was Officer of the Day on the Wewak strip the

morning we hit them.

He said it wasn't only the strafing but General Kenney's little 23-

pound "parafrag" bombs that just raised hell with them. He said those

bombs really broke their backs and their morale. They'd wondered,

"How are we going to ever beat these Yanks? There's no way we can

possibly do it. They come up with more airplanes all the time." We ran

for two days against them and nullified them.

That was one of the biggest and most memorable of the things

you wanted me to talk about. I think our operational problems in the

Southwest Pacific were due to lack of communications, lack of navigation, lack of weather reports, and inexperienced crews, and I include

myself. But being commanded by the very imaginative and industrious General Kenney, who pulled all of those outfits together, and finally getting some equipment and the P-38 really did the job for us.

Dr. Hallion: Sir, thank you very much for that insight. We've

come now, I think, full circle, back to bomber operations. General

Schriever and General Henebry hinted at several unique aspects of

the Pacific War and some of the difficulties operating it.

Sir, from your perspective, looking at bomber operations in the

Pacific-they were quite different from those in Europe-can you

explain how you coped with the problems of range and weather, how

you coped with the kinds of aerial opposition you faced?

Gen. Schriever- First of all, the war was very different in the

Pacific theater than in the European theater. We were definitely

always number two. We had to scratch. We had to work very hard with

the Australian economy to do many of the things that were discussed

particularly well by both John Alison and Jock Henebry.

We've mentioned people like Pappy Gunn. We also had a colonel

over there by the name of Gavin who was in engineering. He was the

assistant for engineering at the Fifth Air Force level and we worked

together as a team. I'd been with the 19th Bomb Group up in Mareeba.

In June 1942, I arrived there. I'd been with the old 7th Bomb Group

prior to that in the States, so I knew most of the people with it who'd

come out of the Philippines. That was the old 7th Bomb Group. Then

finally, both the 7th and 19th were chased out of Java. One half of it

went to India and the other half went to Australia.

66
The Air War in the Pacific

I came over from Stanford University. I'm going to go back a little bit. I was at Stanford as a young captain, and the war started on

December 7th, and I had one other AAF officer there by the name of

Ralph Wassel. Both of us had gone through the old Air Corps Engineering School at Wright Field a year before.

I was the senior one there, and so I tried to get in touch with the

Pentagon. "What are you going to do with us here? We've got a war

going on and here we're going to school. What the hell is this?"

At any rate, we didn't get orders until March 1942. I was to go to

the Southwest Pacific and report in to Melbourne, Australia, where

the headquarters was. General MacArthur had just gotten out of the

Philippines in April 1942, so he'd taken over the command there of the

whole theater. I reported in and was assigned to the 19th Bomb

Group. We were in Mareeba, just outside the city of Cairns, Australia,

which is now a great fishing resort. It was just a little country town

right at the foot of the Great Barrier Reef.

That's where I first met Jock, and his co-pilot, Dick Ellis. They

arrived there, I think, in July or August 1942. So we've had a long,

long relationship. We've heard a lot now of what happened on the operational side. I might point out that I think an answer to one of your

questions is that there was great innovation in the Southwest Pacific.

I'd known George Kenney at Wright Field when I was a test pilot

there in 1939 and 1940. There wasn't a more visionary person, except

for Hap Arnold; I knew both of them extremely well.

Ennis Whitehead was a dynamic combat leader. He was under

Arnold but he was the operating head of the Fifth Air Force. So we had

the kind of leadership that required innovation on the part of everyone related to engineering, maintenance, and supply.

We had a theater, which as you've already described, covered tremendous territory. It was virgin territory to a large degree. As a matter of fact, much of New Guinea is still virgin territory. We flew over

the jungles there and didn't know what was in the mountains. The

war in the Pacific was a very, very different type of war.

Even after we moved into Hollandia and were running missions

out of Biak, General Whitehead was commander of the Fifth Air Force

at that time, stationed at Biak. I'd become what was called commander of the advanced echelon of the Far East Air Service Command.

I'd pick up the phone, and General Kenney would be on the other

side: "Bennie, when is Whitehead going to get some fuel up there?" We

often were planning missions on the basis of tankers coming in. We

had the ability, particularly there in the shallow waters off Biak, to

bring fuel in from the tankers themselves, and we made them available to the next mission coming up.

So we never had anything extra to move our operations forward

in terms of logistics. When the 19th Bomb Group went home, I was

67
Leading and Innovating for Victory

World War II was arduous for air leaders in Asia who, while Europe had top priority in men and materiel, used charm, daring, skill, and drive to get the most from their

resources. Clockwise from blp,/eftb Facing danger and bearing losses, Lt. Col. Jimmy

Doolittle stung Japan in April 1942 when he and his Tokyo Raiders, shown before taking off from the deck of the USS Hornet in North American B-25 Mitchells, bombed the

home islands. Maj. Gen. Claire Chennault led the legendary Flying Tigers who, in a sixmonth period alone destroyed over 300 Japanese aircraft in China and Burma. Cols.

John Alison, left, and Philip Cochran, right, led the 1st Air Commandos who fought with

and supplied the British in Burma to halt the Japanese push into India. Lt. Gen. George

Kenney, top Southwest Pacific air commander, worked well with General MacArthur,

his boss, as few could, overhauled area operations under the Far East Air Forces, pioneered the use of parafrags and new bombing techniques, and encouraged initiative.

One of his best airmen, Maj. Paul "Pappy" Gunn, standing, far right, improved several

aircraft types, notably the B-25, by adding a package of six .50-caliber machine guns to

increase its firepower in low-level attacks, as on the one shown.

68
The Air War in the Pacific

sent down to Brisbane to be chief of maintenance of the Fifth Air Force

Service Command. I was just a major.

Kenney called me down and said, "Bennie, you're not going home.

You've only been over here for six months. You haven't been over here

long enough. I need all of the engineering and supply help I can get."

Well, that was fine with me. So I didn't come home until after the war

in October 1945.

Let me give you an example of my relationship with General

Whitehead. At the time, I went down to Brisbane for that job. Although Brisbane was my headquarters, I'd spent most of my time up

in New Guinea, I flew up there and was making the rounds of three or

four fields. There was one flyable B-17, but it was badly shot up. I

instructed the squadron commander to send it back to Townsville for

repairs because we couldn't make them there in Moresby. Well, then

Whitehead heard about this, and sent out an alert to get Schriever. He

wanted to have lunch with me, although I hadn't met him before.

I went to the lunch, but it wasn't really a lunch, it was a "lynching." I sat there, and Whitehead just chewed me out from one end to

the other and made it very clear that he was running things up there,

and nobody had the right to order anything in the way of what an airplane would or wouldn't do. All I could say was, "Yes, sir. Yes, sir. No,

sir. Yes, sir." I didn't get any help from any of the guys around the

table. He had the whole staff there. So that was my first meeting with

General Whitehead.

A few months later, when I met him again at Townsville, we were

having trouble with P-40 engines. We were overhauling them in Australia and sending them back up to Moresby, and about three or four

hours after we installed them, they'd fail. This happened to about five

or six aircraft over a short period of time. Again, Whitehead was chewing me out unmercifully, "Hell, can't anybody do anything right down

here in Australia?" He went on and on and again it was, "Yes, sir. No,

sir. Yes, sir. No, sir."

So I sent some people up there to take a look at how the engines

were actually taken out of the aircraft after their first failure. We

found out that they were taken out and sent down to Australia, but

the oil cooler wasn't being flushed. So as soon as the overhauled engine was put back into the aircraft, the filings in the oil cooler went

through the engine. Of course, the bearings went after a short period

of time.

I got some paperwork to prove it. The next time I saw Whitehead

was in Brisbane when he came to visit the Fifth Air Force Service

Command. Well, he started chewing me out again. This time I said,

"General, look, I found out exactly where the problem is with the

P-40." I outlined it to him and you know how he snuffed. He didn't say

a word, but after that there wasn't anything I could do that wasn't just

69
Reflections and Remembrances

absolutely right. Whenever I came to his headquarters he always put

me to his right, no matter what the ranks of the other guys were. By

this time, I was a colonel. There were many guys who ranked the hell

out of me, yet I'd sit by his right side.

Whitehead was wonderful guy and a wonderful leader. Kenney

operated sort of differently. I can't explain it, but boy, he had terrific

leadership qualities. He could get you motivated, no matter what the

problem. Kenney never did it by chewing you out. He was more the

"patter on the back or the butt," you know.

Maj. Gen. Henebry: Bennie, I hate to interrupt, but let me tell

you a story about General Kenney. He loved to go and visit all of the

officers, whether they were in New Guinea, no matter where they

were. Kenney was a great talker. He'd talk, talk, talk. Sometimes, he'd

come to our outfit and have some drinks, but never very many, and he

smoked those Fatima cigarettes.

We were out flying and working all day. By around twelve o'clock

or so we'd be getting tired, and he'd be sitting over there talking and

talking. So we worked out a system - I remember - Carl Brandt and

I, and a couple of others. One guy would quietly go out and take a little nap, and then come back in and sit down and let the other guy go

out. And it didn't bother Kenney at all. He'd just sit there and keep

telling his stories. We had a rotation system.

Gen. Schriever- Well, I can go you one better. When we moved

my advanced echelon forward from Finschhafen to Hollandia, Kenney

invited me to share his complex up there at headquarters. His staff

included Red Hernel, Francis Gideon, and a couple of others. We'd designate one of us who'd sit up with Kenney until he went to bed and we

rotated. I think he knew what we were doing, but it didn't make any

difference to him, just so he had somebody to talk at, you know.

Maj. Gen. Alison: These were really wonderful characters. Both

Whitehead and Kenney were tremendously talented men, and they

made a great team. One of the great privileges of the war was serving

under them. I served as General Whitehead's A-3, his operations officer. When I was given this assignment, my former unit held a mock

funeral, because the average endurance of Whitehead's A-3s was six

weeks. I laughed at six weeks and when I got beyond that, I got to

know the old man very well.

Both Generals Kenney and Whitehead were just absolutely the

top leaders of the war. If you wanted to fight a war, you were lucky if

you had to fight with them, the European theater notwithstanding.

Gen. Schriever- I just want to say that the .50-caliber guns in

70
The Air War in the Pacific

the front of most of the B-25s weren't the only thing. For example,

when I was in the 19th Bomb Group, we didn't have any fighter cover.

We were flying B-17s during the day and were getting shot up pretty

badly. I joined them at just about the time they'd decided we'd do nothing but night missions. But, how could we do that, except in moonlight? We didn't have any real capability, so we took out the bottom

turret out of a B-17s and rigged up something inside with the help of

the Cairns handy shops around. We put flares in with bungee cords

and we flew one B-17 as a flare ship. Jack Dougherty and I were the

flare ship operators. We had a few flights but they really worked and

we continued to use flares. When we were flying our missions against

Rabaul, they were really in support of the landing on Guadalcanal.

Maj. Gen. Henebry: It was a hot target then.

Gen. Schriever: Yes.

Maj. Gen. Henebry: May I tell you a story of General Kenney's

inventiveness? He gets credit for it at least. The Australians and the

American infantry, and some artillery were over on the north shore at

a place called Buna-Gona. The Japanese were running in supplies

there because they had the crazy idea of sending ground forces over

the Owen Stanley range through the Kokoda Pass, which was over

seven thousand feet. Now, this is a tropical jungle and even at seven

thousand feet that close to the equator at night gets pretty cold.

Anyway, this terrible ground fighting was going on. It was just

awful. We and the Australians both lost a lot of people. One of our

problems was that we didn't have any ground transportation. We didn't even have a truck over there. Why didn't we get a truck over? Well,

we're not going to send a ship all the way around Milne Bay and up

the north coast up as far as Buna and risk losing it, just to carry a

truck on it.

The biggest airplane we had was a C-47 and we were told that

you can't get a truck in a C-47. But Kenney said, "Cut the sonofabitch

in half and put it in." So we took torches and cut it in half. Then, we

got a couple of C-47s, put the truck parts in it and took off. We landed on a grass strip, which later became Dobodura. We got the truck

parts out of the C-47 and welded them back together.

That may have been done at other places, too, but then General

Arnold made a remark to the newspapers back in Washington. When

somebody asked him what he thought about his commander, George

Kenney, out there in the Pacific. Arnold said, "Well, any guy who can

cut a truck in half and fly it across the mountains and put it back

together is okay."

71
Reflections and Remembrances

Gen. Schriever. Well, I did that when I moved my headquarters

from Finschhafen. I landed up there on a road and we took a jeep. But

we moved the truck the next day onto old Nichols Field, from Leyte to

Nichols Field, when we set up headquarters there, right outside

Manila, yes. While the war was still raging.

Col. Loberg- May I ask the general a question about the B-25s?

Gen. Schriever. Yes, please.

Col. Loberg- What did you do with the 75-millimeter gun on the

B-25?

Maj. Gen. Henebry: We have to bring up Pappy again. Pappy

deserves the credit for it.

Gen. Schriever- Well give him credit for it.

Maj. Gen. Henebry: You know, I flew the first one, among other

guys. They brought one over, and brought it up to us, and told us to try

the thing out. It was kind of interesting to fire, but it wasn't a good

weapon. It was very impractical. The biggest fault was, you couldn't

load it fast enough.

I ran two missions with it after we tested it. It had an automatic loading system. Do you know what the automatic loading system

was? The navigator in the back would load it. As soon as he heard you

fire it, he'd get another shell and throw it in there and hit the pilot on

the shoulder to signal that the gun was loaded again. That took quite

a bit of time. I never got more than one round in on an air-strip. The

other thing is, you had to fly it too high in order to sight it because it

fired a lot farther.

Dr. Hallion: General Alison, the B-25s were also equipped with

the 75-millimeter. What was your experience with it?

Maj. Gen. Alison: In the kind of war we were fighting, it came

in very handy, simply because we had very discrete targets. When we

attacked a supply point, it would usually be a village. We had air-toground communication and an RAF officer on the ground. He'd say,

"Do you see the house with the red door? Put a round in that." We

could fly down within five hundred feet. If he wanted one in the lefthand window, we could put it right in the left-hand window. It was a

very accurate gun. But as Jock says, it was pretty hard to load.

Maj. Gen. Henebry: If you flew five hundred feet over, you got

your ass shot off.

72
The Air War in the Pacific

Lt. Col. Lopez: In China, we had the 75-millimeter, too. The

11th Bomb Squadron was on a mission one day and a Japanese Zero

made a head-on pass at a B-25, which fired its cannon. After the

smoke, there was nothing left.

Maj. Gen. Alison: We never lost a B-25.

Dr. Hallion: We've had a wonderful afternoon. All of our panelists this morning, in the first session and in the second session, have

commented on the leadership of the time and have praised that leadership as unique and extraordinarily valuable to the war effort. The

same could be said of our panelists today, so I'd like you to give them

a big hand. Before we conclude, I'd like to single out Jack Neufeld, who

directs special projects for the Air Force History Support Office. He

played a major role in putting this meeting together. I think we owe

him a big hand, too. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all very much.

73