The English climate was what got them down the most. The bomber boys of the U.S. Eighth Army Air Force who arrived here to join the war against Germany could never stomach the rain, the fog, the cold — and, most of all, the unpredictability.
In their letters home, they cursed England for its lousy weather. For men trained for combat in the clear blue skies of Texas and Kansas, it made the flying harder, the dying more likely.
A U.S. government guide book issued to the tens of thousands of American airmen sent to England from 1942 onwards slid over this little local difficulty: it promised that the English climate was no different from Boston’s or Seattle’s and that newcomers would get used to it ‘eventually’.
Great swathes of eastern England became Little Americas as the U.S. fed its military might into a total war against the Nazi Third Reich. Pictured, Masters of the Air Callum Turner, left, and Austin Butler
Kai Alexander portraying Sgt. William Quinn in ‘Masters of the Air’
Like its predecessors, it singles out a small unit of fighting men and follows their war, through hell and high water, death and survival. Austin Butler and Callum Turner in ‘Masters of the Air,’
But many never did. Warm beer they could, and did, learn to live with — and even what they saw as the lack of personal hygiene of unwashed English girls, in a land where soap was rationed. But not the cold, wet, cloudy, horrible weather.
Sergeant Eddie Picardo, tail gunner in a B-24 Liberator bomber, recalled waking up to a brilliant sunrise at his airfield — one of scores of U.S. bases covering 40,000 acres of East Anglia — only for the clouds to roll in an hour later.
‘Every imaginable weather system could blow in and out of that island in a 24-hour period,’ he complained.
Captain Billy Southworth, a pilot, scribbled despairingly in his diary: ‘It has rained every day since we’ve been here. Mud a foot deep in places. Cold, wet and black nights, wind stinging your face while your feet just have that dead cold feeling.’
It was just over 80 years ago that the Yanks arrived in Britain, America’s youth flooding across the Atlantic in their hundreds of thousands.
Great swathes of eastern England became Little Americas as the U.S. fed its military might into a total war against the Nazi Third Reich.
They brought with them their fleets of B-17 Flying Fortresses and Liberators, all with pet names like Jolly Roger, Honey Bucket and ‘GI Jane’ painted garishly on their sides alongside cartoon figures (often nude women) and insignia.
It was just over 80 years ago that the Yanks arrived in Britain, America’s youth flooding across the Atlantic in their hundreds of thousands. Austin Butler in Masters of the Air
Their courage and their comradeship, as well as their contribution to the ending of the war, are recognised in a spectacular new nine-part television drama, Masters Of The Air. Pictured, Anthony Boyle
The staid British gawped. Who were these brash, bright incomers, flashing their smiles, their dollar bills, their crazy music, their jitterbug dances?
At first they derided the gum-chewing Yanks as ‘overpaid, over-sexed and over here’, but then welcomed them as brothers in arms.
Their courage and their comradeship, as well as their contribution to the ending of the war, are recognised in a spectacular new nine-part television drama, Masters Of The Air, which launched on the Apple TV+ streaming service yesterday.
Created by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, it comes from the same stable as their memorable Emmy Award-winning epics, Band Of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010).
Like its predecessors, it singles out a small unit of fighting men and follows their war, through hell and high water, death and survival.
In this case, it is the crews of the 100th Bomb Group, who flew from the airfield at Thorpe Abbotts, four miles from the town of Diss in Norfolk, and were nicknamed The Bloody Hundredth because of the high number of casualties they took on their bombing raids.
Based on a book of the same name by American history professor, Donald L. Miller, Masters Of The Air is a riveting re-enactment of what those brave boys — which is what many of them still were, some barely out of their teens — were.
It captures vividly the experience of being inside the primitive, rattling, shaking tin can that was a World War II bomber — a far cry from the remotely controlled drones and lasers that make up much of air warfare today.
In stunning battle scenes, we see and feel the claustrophobia, the fear, the desperation and the raw courage of flying through a sky full of bursting flak (anti-aircraft fire) as far as the eye can see and then trying to ward off Messerschmitt 109 fighter planes, all guns blazing, in head-on attacks.
Based on a book of the same name by American history professor, Donald L. Miller, Masters Of The Air is a riveting re-enactment of what those brave boys — which is what many of them still were, some barely out of their teens — were. Pictured, Rafferty Law and Samual Jordan
Austin Butler as Major. Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven and Callum Turner portraying Major. John ‘Bucky’ Egan
The horror of seeing one of your squadron, with your friends on board, bursting into flame and nose-diving to the ground, and the dread that you are next. Then, if you survive, having to find the steel inside you to do it again and again.
It is horrific and uplifting at the same time. It is also, to my mind, an authentic account of the bomber war, a subject I am well grounded in, as co-author of Tail-End Charlies, a history of the Allied bomber onslaught on Germany in the final two years of the war.
From which vantage point I have one niggle with Masters Of The Air. A voiceover at the start claims they had come ‘to bring the war to Hitler’s doorstep’.
Not quite true. The RAF — the boys in blue as opposed to the boys in brown of the USAAF — had been battering away at Adolf’s backyard for more than two years before the Yanks turned up.
Masters Of The Air is a U.S.-made film series by Americans, about Americans, and from what I’ve seen so far the RAF gets barely a look-in, except as the occasional butt of derision and a punch on the nose.
Yet, night after night, beginning in August 1940 with a raid on Berlin, British bomber crews in Blenheims and Lancasters had taken the battle to Germany.
They did so on prime minister Winston Churchill’s instructions — after every other country had given up.
Tens of thousands of RAF airmen lost their lives letting the world know that Britain had not hunkered down behind its sea defences and giving hope that one day the Nazis would be defeated. When the Americans arrived in the spring of 1942 that holding strategy could be turned into a winning one.
The two air forces had different tactics. The RAF bombed at night, under cover of darkness, its commanders believing that attacking Germany in the daylight was suicidal.
The RAF — the boys in blue as opposed to the boys in brown of the USAAF — had been battering away at Adolf’s backyard for more than two years before the Yanks turned up. Pictured, Austin Butler and Callum Turner
Masters Of The Air is a U.S.-made film series by Americans, about Americans, and from what I’ve seen so far the RAF gets barely a look-in, except as the occasional butt of derision and a punch on the nose. Pictured, Rafferty Law
The RAF’s Bomber Command sent 125,000 men into battle over Germany; 55,000 of them never came home, the worst attrition rate of any single Allied unit. Pictured, Callum Turner in ‘Masters of the Air’
The Americans preferred daylight missions, grouping their bombers into vast fleets which, by sticking together in close formation, could hold enemy fighters at bay with their superior fire power, like circled wagons in the old West.
Both methods had merits — and flaws. Bombing in the dark gave you cover but made hitting your target much harder, leading to accusations that the attacks were indiscriminate.
Bombing in daylight made targeting easier but left you a sitting duck. Shootouts in the air, eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations between gunners from the Bronx and fighter pilots from Berlin, were the norm.
Either way, both air forces took staggering numbers of casualties, huge cohorts of young men with everything to live for dying in terrible ways — shot, burned, drowned, blown to pieces in the sky.
The RAF’s Bomber Command sent 125,000 men into battle over Germany; 55,000 of them never came home, the worst attrition rate of any single Allied unit.
Meanwhile, 25,000 American young men were killed. What makes their sacrifice even more remarkable is that they died not defending their homeland, as the British were.
The shores of the U.S. had not been in danger of invasion; their land had not been blitzed by the Luftwaffe.
They had come to a strange country far away from home and from their loved ones to fight an enemy who threatened freedom. They died in that cause. They deserve to be honoured.
Survival was a lottery, as 20-year-old Jim O’Connor knew only too well. Not so long ago he had been in high school in Chicago sweating for his English Lit exams.
Now he was sweating in the co-pilot’s seat of a Flying Fortress over Berlin as part of a 1,000-bomber assault on oil refineries and factories.
He felt like a medieval knight heading into battle, ‘knowing that the ultimate gamble was at hand, the throw of the dice that would determine life or death’. That day it was an aircraft close to his in the formation that lost the bet.
From his cockpit, he watched it explode as its oxygen tanks were hit by the same flak that put a handful of harmless holes in his aircraft.
He and his men made it home. The other crew went on the list of 250 men missing that one day. They knew the odds were stacked against them.
Tail gunner Eddie Picardo recalled arriving at a base just outside Norwich and being approached by an old hand who pointed at a bullet-ridden plane on the runway and said: ‘It got a direct hit in the tail.
They’re sucking out what’s left of the tail gunner.’ He told himself that wasn’t going to happen to him but on more than one occasion he muttered ‘Good night, sweetheart’ to himself as the flak exploded around him.’
Getting back to base was ‘like being granted a reprieve from a death sentence’. It never lasted, though. ‘It was never long before you had to return to face death.’
In the meantime he would let his hair down, telling any English girls he met — and there were plenty — that he came from Hollywood. It did the trick with one girl over a drink and a game of darts in a pub in London — ‘a real tomato, with a great figure!’
He was even ready to risk being late back to his base in Norfolk for her. He might be punished, ‘but what could they do to me anyway?
There wasn’t anything worse than being in the tail of a B-24 and flying over Germany!’
For thousands of airmen, there was a fate that seemed to worry them almost as much as dying — being shot down and falling into enemy hands.
Nearing the target, an oil refinery deep in the far east of Germany, bombardier Dean Whitaker was lying in the nose cone of a B-17 named ‘Knockout’ as it flew into a huge black cloud — the flak from hundreds of anti-aircraft guns.
Ahead of him, B-17s were spiralling out of that cloud, some on fire, others missing a wing.
‘It was our turn to run the gauntlet. What chance did we have?’ As they slowed for the bomb run, they were hit.
‘I smelt burning metal. A shell exploding directly in front of us sent bits of steel through the nose.’
They managed to drop their bombs, then wheeled away into clear blue sky, but the relief was momentary: ‘bandits’ — enemy fighters — swooped in.
The tail was shot off. The rear gunner was dead. The aircraft nosedived and all they could do was jump.
More than half the crew parachuted straight into the hands of German troops. They at least were safe. Four others were not.
They drifted down near a small village, whose police chief enlisted the help of other Nazi thugs to slaughter them on the spot.
On that day 50 American airmen held up their hands in surrender and went into captivity, Whitaker among them. He saw out the war, as did thousands of his fellows, in a prisoner-of-war camp.
In the end, the Americans did their bit to break Hitler’s hold on Europe, their contribution recognised by the head of Britain’s Bomber Command, Arthur Harris.
‘The Americans,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘gave us the best they had, and everything we needed. We could have had no better brothers in arms.’
Austin Butler, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks at the world premiere of ‘Masters Of The Air’
Sawyer Spielberg, Callum Turner, Steven Spielberg, Austin Butler, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman attend the world premiere
At the end of the war, though, the experiences of the two air forces diverged sharply. The men of the Eighth Army Air Force went home truly as masters of the air, to a nation that heralded them as heroes. It was not so for the British airmen.
The relentless area bombing of Germany and the huge loss of civilian lives in firestorms at Hamburg and Dresden laid a pall not only over those cities but over the men who flew the aircraft that attacked them.
Unfairly, the job they did was denounced as shameful, unnecessary, criminal even. They were made to feel shame, treated as pariahs, their great achievements and conspicuous bravery lost in clouds of controversy.
Yet they were every bit as heroic as the bomber boys from across the pond. But is there a home-grown Tom Hanks or Steven Spielberg out there to mark the fact?
- Tony Rennell is the co-author (with John Nichol) of Tail-End Charlies: The Last Battles Of The Bomber War 1944-1945.