All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [296]
I have never spoken to you of my feelings and thoughts about this war, and I hope I will never speak of them again. Do you remember a small boy saying he would be a conscientious objector if war came? Things happened to change that small boy’s view, talk of brutality, human suffering, atrocities, but that did not have any great effect on changing my mind, for I realise that we all are capable of doing these deeds of which we read so much nowadays. It is the fact that a few people wish to take freedom from the peoples of the earth that changed my views. News of atrocities only breeds hate, and hate is contemptible in my eyes. Why should I then fight in the war which only brings disgust into my thoughts? It is so that I might live in happiness and peace all my days with you … I am also fighting so that one day happiness will again rule the world, and with happiness that love of beauty, of life, contentment, fellowship among all men may return. You may have noticed that I have not mentioned fighting for one’s country, for the empire; that to me is just foolishness.
Stockwell died over Berlin in January 1943. Randall Jarrell, an airfield control tower operator who became a poet of the USAAF crews’ experience, wrote:
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school –
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
Most young men conscripted for war service wanted to fly, but few achieved their aspirations. Air forces picked only the brightest and fittest adolescents for probable death. RAF navigator Ken Owen, a Welshman, said, ‘Perhaps a quarter of our sixth form at Pontypridd grammar school became aircrew; more than half of them were killed.’ Yet those accepted for flying duties exulted in their status as an elite: they received a popular adulation unmatched by any other breed of warrior.
In the first year of Britain’s war, circumstances forced the RAF to rush new pilots into the line, sometimes with no more than twenty or thirty hours’ experience of the planes they flew in combat. Thereafter, however, the British and Americans trained aircrew requiring the highest skills – pilots and navigators – for up to two years before committing them to action. Instructors ‘washed out’ many candidates, but despite intensive tuition, wartime pilots often killed themselves because their skills were inadequate to handle high-performance aircraft, even before engaging the enemy. Youth and the mood of the times encouraged recklessness. In the course of the war, the RAF lost in non-operational accidents 787 officers and 4,540 other ranks killed, 396 officers and 2,717 other ranks injured. Among US aircrew of all services, 13,000 died accidentally. Taking off and landing a fighter, designed to be inherently unstable, required meticulous care. Misjudgement was often punished by death – in the first two years of the war 1,500 Luftwaffe trainees were killed learning to fly the Bf109. Managing a bomber was little easier, especially if it suffered a technical mishap.
An aspect of the conflict common to warriors in all three dimensions was that navigation was a life-or-death science. A British Army training report noted that soldiers would forgive almost any fault in their officers except incompetent map-reading, which at best wasted energy and at worst got them killed. Ships were sunk by straying carelessly into minefields. Airmen who lost their way, especially over the sea, often died when their fuel ran out. Anti-submarine patrol duty, roaming far out over empty oceans, was a wearisome task, demanding special navigational care: errors killed as many crews as enemy action or mechanical failure. Even when electronic aids and beacons were introduced, a dismaying number of planes fell into the sea because inexpert airmen flew reciprocal courses, or were unable to fix their positions in poor weather.
The Germans, Italians