The Bomber Boys: The Great Bombing Raids and the Men Who Flew Them in the 20Th Century

By Mona D. Sizer

At the beginning of World War I, the English were more fascinated than frightened by the gigantic, silently floating Zeppelins. Using their flashlights they sought them through the fog unthinking that they were guiding them to drop bombs over London.

At Pearl Harbor the Japanese samurai damaged or destroyed all the ships on Battleship Row almost destroying the harbor's usefulness for the duration of the war.

Over Ploesti, Rumania, the American Fifteenth Air Force never did succeed in destroying Hitler's primary source of oil for his tanks.
Colonel Paul Tibbets pulled the Enola Gay back on her tail and aimed her skyward to take off from the carrier Hornet to bomb Tokyo.

THE BOMBER BOYS is the story of all those raids and more. Author Mona Sizer is noted for her exciting scenes and careful research.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475967098

Mona D. Sizer

Mona D. Sizer, a seasoned author of 36 works of fiction and non-fiction incliding biography, history, memoir and short stories. She has contributed to several anthologies including TALES TOLD AT MIDNIGHT ALONG THE RIO GRANDE. She is a noted story-teller, teacher, and conference speaker.

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Copyright © 2013 Mona D. Sizer.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-6708-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-6709-8 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 12/26/2012

CONTENTS

About The Author

Chapter 1    Mr. Lincoln’s Aeronaut

Chapter 2    Graf Von Zeppelin’s Giants Of The Air

Chapter 3    The Hindenburg

Chapter 4    The Samurai Path To War: Pearl Harbor

Chapter 5    Doolittle’s Tokyo Raiders

Chapter 6    Admiral Nagumo Encounters The Thach Weave At Midway

Chapter 7    Bailing Out

Chapter 8    Dowding Vs. Göring In The Battle For Britain

Chapter 9    They Didn’t Bail Out

Chapter 10  In 1933

Chapter 11  The Eighth Air Force Vs. The Third Reich

Chapter 12  Bombs Without Bombardiers

Chapter 13  Oil—The Lifeblood Of Machine-Age Warfare

Chapter 14  Gerstenberg Vs. The Fifteenth Air Force

Chapter 15  Their Planes Died Too

Chapter 16  Atomic Fire In The Samurai Twilight

Chapter 17  They All Had The Right Stuff

Chapter 18  The Last Bombardiers

Suggestions For Further Readings About The Bomber Boys

DEDICATED

WITH LOVE AND GRATITUDE

For my cousins and uncles

And my father Fred

Who went when their country needed them

Most of them had never been more than a few miles

From their hometowns in Arkansas and Texas–

Oslin, Arch Y. and Clarence Allen Jack Damron

George E. Lusk and Charles Patton Pat Lusk

William R. Bill Bevens

Frederick Ransom Fred Young

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

"My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty,

Of thee I sing…

Land where my fathers died…"

Little Mona Dean Young almost never saw her father again. Once World War II began, she almost never saw her Uncle Jack, his brothers Oslin and A. Y., or her uncles George E. and Charles Patton.

In an ever-widening circle they left their little farms and dairies in Arkansas and Texas. They left their jobs with the railroad, the post office, the mercantile stores. They boarded ships of war in the Pacific. They marched away to the battlefields of Germany. They climbed into cold metal planes and flew them over the Atlantic Ocean to Europe and across the even wider Pacific to Asia and Japan. They left behind them lost dreams and hopes and marriages. They left children and wives, mothers and fathers.

What she had in place of all those handsome young men, whom she never really knew, was patriotism… a will and determination to support them, to think of them, to scan the newsreels in the movie theatres hoping that she might see one of them.

And never to forget them

The opportunity to write this book about a few of these extraordinary men

fulfills one of the dreams of a lifetime.

Mona D. Sizer

Harlingen, Texas

CHAPTER 1

Mr. Lincoln’s Aeronaut

THE FIRST MEN IN THE AIR

A dip of the wings should be made to the first men in the air, at least in fable.

According to the ancient myth, one was Daedalus, in myth the first King of Athens and later the brilliant and talented Greek designer of the Labyrinth. He and his son Icarus were imprisoned in a tower too far above the ground for their words to be heard below so the secret of the maze would never be revealed. Clever Daedalus invented a means to escape from the tower and take his son with him. He created wings of feathers, string, and wax and fastened them to their backs.

Daedalus, like every concerned parent, warned the boy to fly neither too close to the sea where the feathers would get wet nor too close to the sun where the wax would melt. They were successful in their flight, thus making Daedalus the first man to fly. Of course, Icarus flew too high, the wax melted, and he fell into the sea where he was the first man to die in a crash.

In reality, the first successful balloonists were Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier of Annonay, France. On June 4, 1793, they filled a paper-lined silk balloon with heated air. Joseph climbed in and became the first man in the history of the world to make an ascent into the air. Not only did he go up, but up, up, up to the astounding height of 6,562 feet, more than a mile high. When the balloon then began to descend, neither man really knew why. They as yet had no concept that the reason for the descent was that the air was cooling and therefore losing its ‘lift." Maintaining and controlling lift is the primary challenge of every aerialist to the present day.

Of course, the balloon was tethered to framework on the ground. Otherwise, an errant wind might have carried it over the River Rhone, where it might have fallen into the waters. Still, Montgolfier became a name in the annals of flight because he rode the balloon to its majestic height and came down unscathed.

People in France as well as other countries marveled and the word spread of the amazing feat. In countries with warlike intentions, the possibility for use in war was considered and then discounted. Of what possible use could a tethered balloon of silk and paper be?

ON THE BANKS OF THE CHICKAHOMINY

T. S. C. Lowe is all but forgotten today, but he was of major importance to Abraham Lincoln in July 1861 when the President appointed him the Chief Aeronaut of the Union Army Balloon Corps. The appointment was well deserved, for as a chemist Lowe had invented a process of extracting a substance he called Water Gas. Using steam and large amounts of charcoal, Lowe was able to divide common, ordinary water, one of the simplest chemical compounds. In his process two atoms of hydrogen detached from the larger atom oxygen. He then directed the separated gases into two large carefully sealed tanks.

Hydrogen, the gas he had succeeded in extracting, was the lightest element in the universe, many times lighter than air, which is after all a mixture of many elements and compounds. It was quite harmless when released into the atmosphere where it immediately sought to re-unite with oxygen into water vapor. It represented no threat to the Union troops who came in contact with it, since it recombined almost immediately.

It did, however, have one property that made it problematical. It was highly flammable. A single accidental spark would cause it to burst instantly into flame. A large amount would explode into a deadly fireball. Even so, though there was considerable danger with glowing charcoal so near, this war was one the Union was determined to win.

Despite the real possibilities for disaster—such as, fire, leaks in the balloon, sniper fire from enemy soldiers, sudden strong gusts of wind—Lowe proposed that he himself ride up a sufficient height to view the battlefield and report the opposing forces’ relative strengths and movements—two elements of vital information when planning any sort of engagement. President Lincoln approved the idea…anything to end the war with fewer lives lost among young American men and boys.

Lowe himself directed the extraction as well as the piping of the volatile gas into an aerial balloon he named the Intrepid. Tethered to a basket, which, in turn, was tethered by cables held by teams of several strong men at four squared points, the invention was ready for lift off.

Midway through the War, General McClellan’s part of the Union army was stalled, unable to cross the confounded Chickahominy River in a dangerous flood stage. Was it worth the danger to try to cross? Was his battlemate Brigadier General Keyes on the other side? Were the Confederate Armies under Longstreet on the other side as well? Where? In what strengths? Were there possibilities of reinforcements? Was a crossing even possible?

Lowe seized the chance to prove the balloon’s worth. He transported his tanks behind the lines of the Union Army at the battle of Fair Oaks. At least two photographs exist of the event. (Could famed Civil War photographer Matthew Brady have made them on the riverbank that fateful day?)

The first photograph is of the metal tanks and the flexible piping carrying the hydrogen to the partially inflated balloon. The second is of Lowe himself aloft in a frock coat and a top silk hat standing in the small basket, his left arm uplifted in a salute. The tether lines are clearly visible as he rises above his men, above the trees, into the sky to observe the swollen river and the army’s location and strengths on the other side.

Lowe was well-respected as a scientist by the time he made his contributions although not always respected by the generals whose battles he directly affected. Worse for the history of flight, Lowe himself was unlucky that day. During the time he spent in the rain in the muddy wallows on the Chickahominy, he contracted malaria from which he suffered periodically for the rest of his life. His zest for balloon warfare was drowned forever.

While resting and recuperating, he was introduced to a young German who had been waiting for him on the ground. Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a member of German royalty, was barely twenty-four years old. He was mad for a ride in one of Lowe’s wonderful machines, but General McClellan had put all balloon ride-alongs off limits. Impressed by the young man’s obvious enthusiasm and intelligence, Lowe turned Von Zeppelin over to John Steiner, his German assistant aeronaut. Their time spent together must be regarded as one of the great head to head meetings of history. Steiner sent the young man home to Germany with his head full of ideas that would be expanded exponentially.

For reader’s interested in the outcome of the battle of Fair Oaks, it was indecisive. McClellan is remembered in history for his failure to engage the enemy time and again. President Lincoln is supposed to have spoken of McClellan satirically, remarking that if McClellan were not going to use the Army of the Potomac, would the general lend Lincoln the troops, as the President was sure he could make better use of them.

On the Confederate side, General Joe Johnston, a great favorite among his men was gravely wounded. At that time, he was replaced by General Robert E. Lee of Virginia, unquestionably the best general on either side to emerge during the Civil War.

No one could imagine that the war at that time would go on for another three years before the Confederacy surrendered at Appomatox, barely a hundred miles from banks of the Chickahominy where such momentous meetings evolved in ways no one could have predicted.

A dozen years later in 1874 Ferdinand von Zeppelin, now bearing the title of Graf or Count returned to interview Lowe on all of his aeronautic techniques. Only the most aware had any inkling of what those exchanges of information would mean to Europe.

CHAPTER 2

Graf Von Zeppelin’s Giants Of The Air

THE BACKGROUND

In 1914 in Europe, kings were everywhere, and almost all of them were related, a catastrophe of blood that would soon be too, too evident to both allies and enemies. Queen Victoria in the previous century had been a fertile grande dame passionately in love with her German Prince Albert of Schleswig-Holstein and determined to do her duty for the royal family. Unknown to her or to anyone else at the time, she carried a gene that had the potential to infect her heirs. Before the tragic results of this anomaly became evident, she had become the grandmother of Europe.

Of her nine children at least three of the princesses passed the English Queen’s genetic trait to their male heirs. The disease is never present in daughters who may never learn if ever or until too late that they are carriers. Even as Europe began to recognize what was going on, the trait had produced hemophilia in sons in several royal families across the continent. The particularly unpleasant disease prevented the blood of these princes and grand dukes from coagulating normally if at all. Leading a normal childhood was impossible…as was leading a normal life. As the word spread, it became known familiarly as the royal disease.

The most famous of Victoria’s great grandchildren, the Czarevich of Russia, was known to be constantly threatened by the condition. Before Easter in 1913, he slipped and fell against an oarlock on a boat from which the family was disembarking. For a normal child, such a fall would probably have elicited a few tears or more likely a quick show of bravado to assure everyone that he was too tough to be hurt. Instead, within hours, his leg and hip joint had begun to swell as blood filled the cavity and forced the leg into a bent position. He was never able to straighten it to walk again. He was carried everywhere thereafter by a huge Cossack attendant on the Royal Family.

Within a short time the condition and the story behind it spread among the Royals of Europe. The four Grand Duchesses, the Czarevich’s older sisters were quickly perceived to be unmarriageable into other royal houses of Europe. The royal family Romanov was in disarray. In desperation, the Czarina turned to a holy man, possibly a hypnotist, named Rasputin. Unpleasant rumors spread as the entire family was regarded with doubt.

Tragically, the compulsively autocratic attitude of the Tsar did nothing to deny or confirm the rumors. Nor did he attempt to foster support among the powerful nobles in his own aristocratic coterie. His people did not know him. By the time the Revolution burst into flame, precious little was left of the Russian royal family for the Communists to sweep away.

Royal lineages in Spain and Portugal were also affected as royal heirs were noted and remarked about as being unable to participate in sporting activities. One prince walked away from relatively minor automobile accident without a scratch on him, but died hours later in great agony from internal bleeding.

The people came to regard their princes as weak. Whether the family lines were truly weakened or whether the lack of understanding of the disease merely gave that impression, the people lost faith and listened more to political parties among them the anarchists, the socialists, and the communists who were purposely fomenting revolution.

When people have no faith in the strength of the royal line or of any royal or noble person, they are easily convinced to have little faith in their governments as a whole. Spurred by misunderstandings of the royal disease, as well as a general desire to more self-determinations, Europe saw several decades of forced abdications and bloody revolutions that brought about the overthrow of other monarchies as well.*

*Author’s note: The following twelve direct or indirect heirs to European royal houses were married to Victoria’s direct heirs: King Ferdinand of Romania; Grand Duke Louis of Hesse; Prince Alfonso of Spain; Duke Charles Edward of Saxe, Coburg and Gotha; Emperor and Kaiser Frederick II of Prussia, King Gustav Adolf VI of Sweden, King Haakon VII of Norway, Czar Nicholas II of Russia, Prince Ernest of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Prince Louis of Battenburg, Duke John Campbell of Argyll, Prince Andrew of Greece.

As the reader will note, many of these houses no longer exist and almost all still in existence are merely figureheads retained for form’s sake as the titular heads of people’s governments. As her duty in the royal household of England, Victoria bore two sons Edward VII and Alfred. They were unaffected by the disease because it is genetically present only in the female line.

As kingdoms sought to unite their efforts in common interests to protect their people and to restore faith in the abilities of their monarchs, two alliances were formed. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and the Third Republic of France formed a diplomatic alliance they called the Entente Cordiale. Later they were joined by Russia in what became known as the Triple Entente.

Not exactly in opposition, but certainly for insurance, Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and later Italy signed treaties to form the Triple Alliance. In case of a threat, the agreement was that all members of the Alliance and of the Entente would go to the aid of the countries signatory to the separate treaties.

Of the six, Prussia was by far the best prepared and equipped. Besides a large standing army, the country was rich and its people were well-educated with a prosperous middle-class. In 1867 shortly after the American Civil War ended, the powerful state had taken the lead in conjoining neighbor principalities with a shared language and history into the North German Confederation. Its politics and ambitions would dominate European history for more than seventy-five years.

In 1871 it declared itself to be the German Empire…the Deutsche Reich.

Still all might have been well, had not the old institutions and alliances begun to give way. Between 1892 and 1914, Europe began an arms race as the separate countries built weapons of war to protect themselves from each other.

In the midst of all these seismic shifts, the United States tried to maintain strict neutrality while at the same time maintaining a balance of trade with all these rich nations that wanted and needed America’s limitless raw materials.

Unfortunately, the European monarchs and as well as the men who were their advisers understood almost nothing about the processes by which a state grows prosperous or becomes impoverished. Simplistically, the rulers looked upon their people as sources for the taxes they collected as the royal right. Unschooled in the science of economics—the social science of production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services—they had no thought about how the unconsidered collection and raising of taxes could make their countries’ populations poorer rather than richer.

Poor men with families to feed and clothe had little recourse since the government was essentially the King. As they became poorer and their families hungrier, they became more belligerent and less enthusiastic at the sight of their monarchs, sumptuously dressed and accompanied by resplendent retinues. Naturally, they became more willing to listen to the promises of men whose aim was to establish a state that promised to support the poor as well as the rich.

In June 1914, on a street in Sarajevo, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated along with his wife, who was of common blood. Their assailant was a radical nationalist who wanted independence from the Kingdom of Austria-Hungary to form a Serbian state as part of a new country to be called Yugoslavia. The tragic deaths were examples of the irony with which Nineteenth Century Europe seemed cursed. The Archduke had been a liberal who had defied his aging father Emperor Franz Joseph.

The liberal-thinking Franz Ferdinand had favored the creation of Yugoslavia.

The unthinkable act was immediately deemed an act of war. The kingdom of Austria demanded reparations as rumors of plots and counterplots filled the world news. Turmoil spread as Prussia was compelled by the terms of the Triple Alliance to aid Austro-Hungary in whatever fashion was required by her angry, grieving emperor. The other nations were soon made to choose sides against one another. Some did so because of ancestral ties and ancient treaties while some did so out of economic necessity. Both the Entente Cordiale and the Triple Alliance were forced to prepare for war by the very treaties they had hoped would keep them safe.

In July 1914, King and Emperor William II, set about consolidating the power of the German Empire…the Deutsche Reich.

He claimed himself to be the descendant of the Roman Caesars, assumed the title Kaiser and installed himself as the head of a new Germany. He was also a grandson and had heirs by a daughter of Victoria. (Neither of the sons from this marriage was affected by the gene.) He was a cousin of the King of England George V as well as a cousin of the Czar of Russia Nicholas II with whom he carried on a famously cordial correspondence.

The highly personal telegrams exchanged between the Czar (whose title also was an allusion to the Roman Caesars) and the Kaiser remain as evidence of their supposed affection on the eve of the war. As war moved eminently closer, the disillusioned and desperate Czar Nicky clung to the hope that his Cousin Willy would remain his friend and a friend to Russia. Then the German army began to move to avenge the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. Russia was a signatory of the Entente Cordiale along with Great Britain and France. The two cousins were on different sides in a Europe headed straight into a war. As Nicholas recognized the betrayal, his bewilderment and growing anger appear in the letters.

History records this collected correspondence as the Willy/Nicky telegrams. The tone of the Kaiser’s telegram on the eve of his army plunging into Russia is stern but unequivocal. The Czar’s tone is still placating, but increasingly hopeless. Obviously, the war is eminent. Still he clings to the hope that his cousin, his own blood, will not unleash such an undeserved and unlooked for war on Russia.

Neither seemed to be able or inclined to tell the other that the world outside their respective palaces has changed. They were contemptuous of other monarchs who allowed their parliaments and diets to rule and advise. These two autocrats—Czar and Kaiser with identical titles in different languages—regarded themselves as above civil law. The Kaiser was determined to lead his people into war, and the Czar had no choice but to retaliate even as he realized (perhaps dimly) that Russia would pay a terrible price.

Russia had a large army, but it was not nearly so well-equipped as Germany’s.

The majority of the people were peasants bound to their lands and their lords. They were loyal to the Czar for form’s sake, but they felt little patriotism or national pride. Cannon fodder would be the contemptuous term applied to them as they and the foot soldiers they faced died by the thousands under the cannons of the enemy in useless charges and later in the terrible trenches that would characterize the struggle the longer it continued.

Once the course was set, Kaiser Wilhelm and all of Germany gloried in the Deutsche Reich. A mythical legend that lasted well into the Twentieth Century was perpetuated and taught to the youth. They were told that they belonged to a special race of people called Aryans. The word comes from Sanskrit, a language from the Indus River Valley in Asia in approximately 1500 BCE. Certain words in its vocabulary are found in most of the European languages. The people who spoke it, the Aryans, were believed by the words in their vocabulary to have been a tribe of horse-riding nomads. Their name came to be accepted as the word for noble.

Nomads of any sort in reality provide the world they leave behind with very little reliable evidence of their civilizations—if indeed the loose patterns of their existence can be called civilized. Apart from a few artifacts of dubious authenticity, the only real evidence that the Aryans existed is in the suffixes and prefixes attached to similar roots, synonyms, and homonyms. From these similar sounds linguists and scholars have concluded that the nomadic peoples that broke into separate tribes before writing was devised were at one time part of the same tribe.

A very limited vocabulary of common words has survived. One that appears over and over in Western Europe is the word centum, cent, century, and centenarian. All are recognized to mean hundred or be part of a hundred.

However, such words are not very common. As the tribes separated their language became so dissimilar that nations in various parts of Europe even in the nineteenth century could not understand each other nor read each other’s newspapers as they were printed. Even today, some of the alphabets do not resemble each other. Even in the last century a person who had no knowledge of the Cyrillic alphabet could not read a street sign in Russia. A traveler to Greece today who cannot read the Greek alphabet cannot find a coffee shop. (This author can report the above with absolute certainty of experience.)

Yet both these great nations, as well as the rest of Western Europe, have evolved from the same group of nomads, and scraps of their spoken languages prove that to be true.

So powerful was the myth of the Aryans that it proved sufficient to propel arrogant and powerful leaders to encourage the aristocratic young men of Germany to accept the propaganda of racial superiority! They and their parents embraced the ideal. The state reared them and educated them to be highly militaristic and intensely patriotic, to actually regard themselves as a super-race.

Before World War I broke out, they had been conditioned by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s rule of Blood and Iron. In the interim before World War II, this patriotism was re-awakened by the rousing, if often hysterical, speeches of the emergent Adolph Hitler. The German Empire…the Deutsche Reich was their destiny and the destiny of Europe.

Puffed with pride as the progenitors of a master race destined to rule the rest of the inferior peoples of continental Europe, the Germans eagerly embraced their leaders’ promises. The French, the Belgians, the Norwegians, the Slavs, the Poles, and the rest became—in their eyes—inferior. Only the Germans were sufficiently racially pure to be destined to bring Europe into its Golden Age.

The European world as well as a million people who had no interest whatsoever in its politics held its breath fearing an onslaught of destruction and death. Almost no one was prepared for the technology that was swiftly evolving to kill innocents.

THE NEW WEAPONS

In 1914 on the shores of Lake Constance in Germany, the same young man who had begged for a ride in a balloon in the earliest days of the long ago American Civil War developed his ideas far beyond anything Thaddeus Lowe had ever imagined.

Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s new flying machine was unrecognizable as the progeny of the clumsy ridiculously un-useful tethered observation balloons of the American Civil War. Young, ambitious, and wealthy, he dreamed of actually traveling across the skies. So did a few young men here and there who were beginning to experiment with the use of petrol to fuel motors to equip tiny, rickety pieces of balsa wood and canvas. Thus equipped they could leave the ground and fly for short distances at treetop altitudes.

The German nobleman Graf or Count von Zeppelin had advanced so far that he had already begun to think far beyond those fragile little craft. What if a lighter-than-air ship could be built that did not need to be tethered? What if it could be big enough with enough lift to support a gondola or airboat that could carry passengers into the air? What if ordinary people, dozens, even a