Assignment to Hell (22 page)

Finally, the valve to Owens’ air intake cut off completely; the navigator fainted, his head dropping on top of a fifty-caliber. Owens’ face, Rooney wrote, took on the pallor of an “unlovely greyish purple.”
²

Pilot Casey got Rooney’s attention and told him to come forward and grab an emergency mask from the cockpit. Rooney, who’d gotten a crash course three weeks earlier in oxygen maintenance, surprised himself by slipping the new mask around Owens’ face with a minimum of fuss. Owens’ head instantly jerked up. But now Rooney’s own oxygen was running out as he stumbled back toward the cockpit. Casey nonchalantly grabbed an extra tank and hooked it into Rooney’s mask. Within seconds, Rooney felt fine.
³

As the U-boat base loomed on the horizon, Rooney watched the bomb bay doors swing open on the B-17 flying directly ahead. Above
Banshee
, he spotted a similar scene; the bombs seemed to be “hanging by some mechanical hairpin, waiting for the bombardier to push the tiny button that sends them to the target.” His fellow air war correspondent Walter Cronkite remembered how agonizingly slow bombs fell. They seemed to “float” forever—so long that airmen in the planes below could read the graffiti the ground crew guys had scribbled: “To Hell with Hitler” or “Greetings from Mabel in Brooklyn.”
⁴

Rooney had packed a camera; despite unwieldy gloves, he was trying to get a picture of bombs falling. But he couldn’t keep his hands still enough to get a decent shot. When
Banshee
released its payload, Rooney was surprised that he didn’t feel more of a jolt.

As Rooney’s group headed home, the tail gunner, Technical Sergeant Parley D. Small of Packwood, Iowa, reported that he’d seen a B-24 Liberator spiraling downward, one wing aflame. A few minutes later, Rooney saw three Junkers (Ju) 88s jump another crippled B-24 that had fallen out of formation. After a while, the Liberator disappeared from sight; Rooney couldn’t be sure of its fate.

“After 20 minutes without sign of Jerry, things began to look more pleasant,” Rooney wrote. Casey and the crew began singing over the intercom. As England came into view, the pilot told Rooney: “I’m an Irishman, southern Ireland, but that is still the best-looking damned little island I ever saw.”

Rooney, another Irishman, was thrilled by the way
Banshee
buzzed the airdrome at Thurleigh, coming in at treetop level. When they hurtled to a stop, Rooney joined the crew in inspecting flak and fighter damage.
Banshee
had been hit in about ten different spots. There was a gaping tear a few feet from where tail gunner Small sat; the flak had seared a hole in a British penny that Small had tossed on the floor behind him. The crew had been lucky: the only wound they suffered was bombardier Phillips’ frostbitten finger.

“
Banshee
had what the crew called ‘a quiet trip,’” Rooney mused at the end.

His clinching sentence was classic Rooney, sharp and self-effacing: “I don’t want to go on a noisy one.”
⁵

R
OONEY
, C
RONKITE
, B
IGART
, B
OYLE, AND
Liebling covered more than their share of noisy bombing missions. Rooney was on the air war beat almost from day one of the Eighth Army Air Force’s operations in Britain, soon to be joined by Cronkite and Bigart. Liebling never covered the bombing war day to day, but some of his most memorable
New Yorker
pieces fêted airmen; Joe went on a B-26 mission over France in early ’44. Boyle, for his part, filed dozens of pieces about bomber boys and fighter jocks; Hal went up a number of times in spotter and surveillance planes.

The bombing campaign against Nazi Germany is, in many ways, the most controversial, least understood, and least appreciated facet of the war in Europe. In part because it was so grisly and redundant, it tends to get overlooked. Yet dominance in the air ended up being, unquestionably,
the
decisive factor in the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. Ironically, it wasn’t the damage that bombs inflicted on Hitler’s cities, factories, and bases that swung the war in the Allies’ favor. Instead, it was forcing the Luftwaffe to defend the Reich, then shooting down German fighters in such prodigious numbers that the Nazis couldn’t possibly replace the pilots or machines. By mid-1944, Britain and the U.S. had destroyed so many enemy planes that the Allies had effective control of the air from the Irish Sea to the heart of the Reich.

Eisenhower vowed that when cross-Channel invaders saw planes in the air they could be secure in the knowledge that they were friendly; remarkably, Ike turned out to be correct.

It took two-plus years of intensive bombing and tens of thousands of Allied casualties to reach that point. Indeed, for an interminably long stretch in 1942, the only action against the Axis came in the Atlantic and in the skies over Europe. The Allies at that point had no continental army that could defeat the Germans, Churchill conceded. “But there is one thing that will bring [Hitler] … down, and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.”
⁶

Churchill’s air chief marshal, Arthur Harris, was known as “Bomber” Harris to Fleet Street reporters but “Butcher” Harris to British Royal Air Force (RAF) fliers because so many airmen died under his command.
⁷
Harris imposed what he called “area bombing,” a euphemistic term that meant systematic nighttime raids of German cities. After the Cologne raid of May 1942 decimated six hundred acres of housing and damaged 350 factories, Harris was knighted. But as was so often the case in World War II, within weeks—if not days—the enemy plants were running at near capacity.

At the Casablanca conference in January 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to coordinate air attacks: Harris’ RAF would attack German cities by night; General Carl Spaatz’ USAAF would target defense installations by day.
⁸
In a top secret memorandum, the U.S. and Britain declared that the aim of the air offensive was to not only devastate Hitler’s military and industrial power, but also to destroy his people’s fighting spirit.

Yet the combined bombing offensive, for all its notoriety, didn’t commence until mid ’43. Early in the war, RAF had experimented with daylight bombing but switched exclusively to night attacks after suffering grievous losses. The Brits also soured on the notion of so-called “precision” attacks, preferring Harris’ “area” technique.

American bombardiers and pilots, buoyed by the U.S. Navy–invented Norden bombsight, thought they could do their British counterparts one better. In the words of British historian John Keegan, “strategic bombing” combined three distinctly American characteristics: “moral scruple, historical optimism, and technological pioneering.”
⁹

In theory, strategic bombing was noble; in practice, it was something considerably less. The skies over the Third Reich—filled with clouds, smoke, flak, Focke-Wulfs, and Messerschmitts—proved far more daunting to precision bomb than the brilliant blue skies of the American Southwest, where the U.S. bomber boys had spent much of ’42 and ’43 rehearsing. The Norden bombsight itself, although a significant improvement over British technology, proved balky and overly complicated.
¹⁰

A
S 1942 WORE ON AND
the Eighth Army Air Force began to take root in and around London, American correspondents became smitten. For many, it was their only beat; they were determined to cover it with élan. Rooney later called the Eighth Air Force “one of the great fighting forces in the history of warfare. It had the best equipment and the best men, all but a handful of whom were civilian Americans, educated and willing to fight for their country and a cause they understood was in danger—freedom.”
¹¹

When United Press editor Harrison Salisbury arrived in London in early ’43, he was impressed by the former reporters, advertising executives,
and Hollywood producers that were part of the Eighth’s public relations machine. It was, in Salisbury’s words, a “high-octane outfit”—professionals who knew how to manage the press for optimal effect.

“We were all on the same side then,” Salisbury’s UP colleague Cronkite recalled, “and most of us newsmen abandoned any thought of impartiality as we reported on the heroism of our boys and [the] bestiality of the hated Nazis.”
¹²

When the convoy that Cronkite accompanied in August of ’42 arrived at Greenock, Scotland, it deposited the 820th Engineer Aviation Battalion and hundreds of tons of construction equipment. The engineers and their bulldozers made their way south to the flatlands an hour’s drive or so north of London, where they immediately began building one airfield after another. East Anglia soon became “a mosaic of aerodromes five miles apart,” remarked one British Air Ministry official.

Although quickly slapped together, each base was its own village, complete with a post exchange (PX), a movie theater, a baseball diamond, and separate clubs for enlisted men and officers. Apparently bottomless supplies of soda pop, candy bars, and cigarettes could be had on the cheap and sometimes gratis at the PX.

General Carl A. “Tooey” Spaatz came to London to take command of American air operations. Spaatz was a Great War hero who, in limited action, had splattered three of the kaiser’s biplanes. He and his handpicked head of the Eighth Air Force, Brigadier General Ira C. Eaker, another onetime fighter jock, were convinced that the war could be won through the brute application of air power.
¹³

The right kind of bombing, Spaatz and Eaker argued, would exact so much damage on the Reich that it would effectively preclude the need for sustained ground operations. Having witnessed practice runs in New Mexico and Arizona, Spaatz and Eaker also maintained that U.S. bombers could carry out daytime precision bombing without undue loss of life and machinery. Finally, they believed that their bombers could fly long-range missions, penetrating deep into enemy territory, without protection from fighter escorts.
¹⁴

All three theories would be sorely tested—and found wanting.

A
NDY
R
OONEY’S FIRST BYLINE ON
a bombing raid story—what would become over the next eighteen months his stock-in-trade—came in the December 22, 1942, edition of the
Stars and Stripes
. It described the toughest U.S. bombing foray yet attempted, an attack on the huge Nazi airfield at Romilly-sur-Seine, not far from Paris. Although Rooney was not permitted to identify the bomb group or its airfield, he was with the 306th at Thurleigh (pronounced “Thir-lie”) when the planes returned.

Some of them came home on two engines, with gaping holes in their wings and fuselage; some of them flopped down to pancake landings because their controls had been shot up in the fiercest fighting of the air war over Europe; some of them slithered into home base on their bellies. Six of them didn’t come back at all.

But the Flying Fortresses and Liberators and their crews who fought their way to bomb the Romilly-sur-Seine Nazi air park there to smithereens and then fought their way home again had some of the war’s best stories of sky combat to tell.

The Forts told their yarns with mute scars in the bodies, with dead engines and shattered props—and with empty bomb racks and empty ammunition belts.
¹⁵

Early in the war, northern France was full of well-stocked Nazi airfields; sixty or more German fighters harassed the Romilly-sur-Seine raiders from every direction. Thirty-seven Forts were lost or damaged that day—a figure that seemed staggering but proved minuscule as the war wore on.

R
OONEY HAD BEEN SPRUNG
free: He didn’t have to worry about early morning reveille or snap barracks inspections anymore. He was more or less on his own in wartime London. It was love at first sight.

“The whole scene in London was a constant source of interest to any young American there,” Rooney recalled. “Tens of thousands of Londoners routinely brought their mattresses, blankets, and burners with which to make hot tea down into the cavernous subway stations.”
¹⁶

It amused Rooney that SHAEF headquarters at 20 Grosvenor Square had four antiaircraft zeppelins tethered directly overhead. “They were designed to obstruct any low-level bomb run by the Luftwaffe, but in fact they made an obvious target of the headquarters building. HERE! HERE! HERE! the balloons shouted to the bombardier overhead,” Rooney joked.
¹⁷

The Bethnal Green tube station in the East End was one of Rooney’s regular stops. On the evening of March 3, 1943, air raid sirens began blaring, with Rooney located several blocks away. As he jogged toward Bethnal Green’s entrance he saw thousands of panicked people trying to jam onto its moving steps. Wary of such a big crowd, he wisely decided to take his chances aboveground. When the escalator malfunctioned, more than 170 people were crushed to death. Ironically, it turned out to be a false alarm: No Nazi bombs fell on the East End that night. War Ministry officials insisted that the location and number of fatalities be kept out of the press. Londoners learned their lesson; after the Bethnal Green tragedy, there was less pandemonium during raids. More and more Londoners stopped seeking shelter in the tube at all.