John R. Bruning - Bombs Away!: The World War II Bombing Campaigns over Europe

The World War II Bombing Campaigns over Europe

John R. Bruning

For AlliLee:

No matter what happens, no matter who we become or where our lives take us, your unbridled heart and inspiration gave me the strength and passion to stay true to this journey.

First published in 2011 by Zenith Press, an imprint of MBI Publishing Company, 400 First Avenue North, Suite 300, Minneapolis, MN 55401 USA

Copyright 2011 by John R. Bruning

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Digital Edition: 978-1-61060-259-4
Softcover Edition: 978-0-76033-990-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bruning, John R.

Bombs away!: the World War II bombing campaigns over Europe / John R. Bruning.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7603-3990-9 (hb w/jkt)

1. World War, 1939-1945--Aerial operations. 2. World War, 1939-1945--Campaigns--Western Front. I. Title.

D785.B78 2011

940.5442094--dc22

2010042590

Maps by: Philip Schwartzberg, Meridian Mapping

All photographs are from official U.S. archives and authors collection unless noted otherwise.

On the cover: A Fifteenth Air Force B-24 drops its payload.

Printed in China

While the British bombed at night, the USAAF remained committed to daylight attacks over Germany. Bomber Command switched to night raids after suffering heavy losses during the opening months of the war. The USAAF took huge losses at times, but solved that problem with the introduction of long-range escort fighters and drop tanks. Better protected from German interceptors, the USAAF ended the war with a lower loss rate than Bomber Command, despite operating throughout the war in daylight. Here, a group of curious RAF airmen receive a lecture from a USAAF officer on the Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress during an inter-service exchange late in the war.

SEVEN DECADES AGO, battles raged across Europes flak-torn skies. That epic clash consumed tens of thousands of aircraft born from the factories of a dozen nations. Riding them down to their final, fiery resting places were men of passion, vision, and dedication. They died horribly, trapped in the machines that bore them aloft as flames engulfed them. Few deaths can ever reach that level of pain and misery.

Visit the battlefield at Verdun and the shell-torn land still harbors wounds even a century has not healed. Not so with the titanic struggle to control Europes skies during the six years it took to defeat Nazi Germany. Those skies are empty now; there are no telltale scars to be found among the clouds. Time and the nature of the fighting have swept away every vestige of what will probably remain the largest air war in human history.

A few signposts of this clash remain here and there, off the beaten path ready for those who seek them out. An old Eighth Air Force bomber station, its runways now cracked and weed-riddled; local museums chocked with aircraft or memorabilia of an age that now exists only in fading memories of the final few who lived itthese fragments are all that is left. They cannot tell the total story of what occurred in the skies during those six years of World War II. It is just too massive, the forces engaged so large as to prevent most minds from grasping the enormity of the national commitments to such a new form of warfare. Instead, those museums and memorials, those airfields that once thundered with the sounds of hundreds of engines but have long since fallen into disuse, at best can provide mere hints of the magnitude of the struggle.

Some of those who fought in it survived to write their memoirs. Those are only tiny representative threads of a vast tapestry that ultimately claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, civilian and military.

It all started with a dream, a vision of how the next war could be fought without the stalemate of the Great War. The theorists posited, and the air crews put those ideas to practice with mixed results and a staggering casualty rate. Strategic bombing, the solution to static, attritional warfare, ultimately itself became a war of attrition and national resources. In trying to avoid more Sommes, more Verduns, the theories espoused before the war created new versions of them in the sky. In the process, cities burned and civilians died right alongside the servicemen sent either to protect or destroy them. If Verdun consumed a generation of French, American, and German warrior sons, the inter-war solution of strategic bombing resulted in the mass destruction of Europes most beautiful and culturally rich urban centers.

The Allied strategic bombing campaign virtually destroyed Germanys urban centers. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died in the rubble and the firestorms created by the RAFs incendiary attacks. The morality and the effectiveness of such raids have sparked one of the most enduring controversies to emerge from World War II.

Home for the night. An exhausted Eighth Air Force crew brings a B-17 down on final approach over an airfield in East Anglia.

This book tells the story of that unique and exceptionally violent campaign through the photographs taken by noncombatants who rode into battle with the sole purpose of trying to capture these events for succeeding generations. Hundreds of these photographers died in the line of duty, killed when their bombers were shot out of the sky by flak or fighters. At wars end, tens of thousands of those photos were simply dumped on office floors in Eighth Air Force units all over East Anglia. Some of the men saw the value in those photos and scooped up some of these precious and historic images. They took them home as coveted treasures of the most difficult, and meaningful, time in their lives.

Most of those images never survived, and that is a significant tragedy given the level of sacrifice the photographers took to record them. The comparative few that do exist today survived an Air Force archive that bounced around among stateside offices, the Air and Space Museum, and finally the National Archives. In the process, they were stored improperly, and many have degraded to the point that they are no longer useful. America has never been past-centric; we have short memories. and the future is what matters to us as a people and a culture. In some respects, this is good. Some cultures cling so caustically to their histories that centuries-old wounds continue to affect their social dynamics. That is not the American way. We experience, then move on.