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likely to die than to survive. Throughout the war, both the RAF and USAAF periodically varied the number of operations a crew had to complete before being relieved. In the worst days, American fliers had to fly twenty-five missions. By the winter of 1944, with the progressive collapse of the German defences, this had risen to thirty-five. Yet throughout the war fliers based in England were cosseted by their commanders, as befitted men called upon to perform extraordinary tasks and live with exceptional strains. After seven trips, Wells’s crew was sent for a week’s “R & R” in delicious comfort at “the flak house,” a country mansion near Salisbury maintained specially for U.S. bomber aircrew. They felt they needed it.

Earlier in the war, many squadrons had suffered serious problems with airmen who “Section-A’ed”—succumbed to combat fatigue. But nobody at Seething did so in the final months, though a pilot once panicked and bailed out over Germany, leaving the rest of his crew to bring the plane home. Wells and Dorfman flew their last mission to Berlin in March 1945, awed by the vast armada of which they formed a part. Their designated targets were usually bridges or marshalling yards, but that day they were told explicitly that they were hitting the centre of Hitler’s capital. On their return, they exultantly buzzed the control tower at Seething to celebrate their own survival. The pilot, alone among them, volunteered for a further tour of operations. Everybody else went gratefully home.

There sometimes seemed a peculiar bloodlessness about the routine of massed bomber operations in the final months of the war. The fliers tripped their switches 21,000 feet above Germany, and those who had not suffered misfortune or disaster went home to see that night’s movie or to head for the huge dance hall in London’s Covent Garden that was their favourite rendezvous. Meanwhile, far beneath, flame and death engulfed a chosen tract of Hitler’s shrinking empire. “We just wanted to get it over with,” shrugged Ira Wells. “If we could bring the end closer by dropping bombs on Germany, that was fine by us. We were kids.” It was ironic that the surviving bomber crews went home to their loved ones without ever having seen at close quarters the land upon which they had wreaked such havoc.

FIGHTERS

THERE WERE SIGNIFICANT gradations of pleasure and pain about flying combat operations in different types of aircraft. Both USAAF and RAF fighter pilots pitied their counterparts in the heavy bombers, as a man in a sports car might condescend to a trucker beside him. More than a few fighter pilots actively enjoyed the experience of war, in a fashion denied to most bomber aircrew. Yet, in fighters as in bombers, much hinged upon the luck of a man’s assignment. Ground attack was infinitely more hazardous than flying escort missions. In both roles, men continued to die until the very end. In Squadron-Leader Tony Mann’s RAF Typhoon wing, two squadron commanders were shot down and killed over Holland in the last week of the war. Not every pilot found fighter operations tolerable. A man who joined the same group as Marvin Bledisloe quit after three missions, because he preferred the humiliation of being stripped of his wings to going on. A few pilots seized upon any mechanical excuse to abort a mission.

Bledisloe had spent almost two years as an instructor in California before being drafted to a P-47 Thunderbolt squadron in England late in 1944. This made him an exceptionally experienced flier, and thus more likely to survive. But as a married thirty-year-old, he came to combat flying with no heroic ideal, merely a determination to fly the 300 operational hours necessary to complete a fighter tour, and get home to his family. He was taught at the outset that the job of an escort fighter was not to pursue Luftwaffe fighters to destruction, but to stick close to the bombers. On Bledisloe’s first mission, he was shocked to see one of his group’s most experienced pilots blown out of the sky by flak. Luck, as well as skill, played a critical role in survival.