Armageddon - Max Hastings [240]
During a firing pass at 600 m.p.h. in the dive, wrote Lieutenant Jack Pitts of the 371st Fighter Group, “you feel as if you are flying the guns, not the plane. You see where the bullets are hitting, and make minor adjustments with the controls to ‘walk the stream of bullets’ onto the target.” Pitts’s Thunderbolt squadron sometimes flew three missions a day from their French bases, spending perhaps thirty minutes each time over enemy lines. On 19 December, he and his squadron were looking for “targets of opportunity” across the Rhine. He fired some 2,400 rounds of ammunition and wrote in his diary: “I really did enjoy this mission. I probably killed a lot of German civilians. Tough luck. C’est la guerre.” Afterwards he recalled:
I was barely 22, probably still quite immature, and didn’t take much of anything seriously except when I was flying . . . It was fun. Most small boys like to tear things up; the most fun with toys was not in building a windmill, but in knocking it down. Well, we had graduated from being small boys into being big boys, but we still liked destroying things, especially since that was what we were expected to do. It was great fun watching a locomotive blow up, or seeing a truckload of ammunition explode, with parts of the truck flying through the air.
Pitts’s squadron suffered few casualties. He experienced little fear, even when engaged by the Germans’ shrinking force of Focke-Wulfs. He felt: “This is what I was trained for; I’m better than they are, my plane is better than theirs; let’s get it on!” Sometimes, he sang to himself in the cockpit:
It may be in the valley, where countless dangers hide,
It may be in the sunshine, that I in peace abide
. . . If Jesus is with me, I’ll go anywhere!
The RAF’s Squadron-Leader Tony Mann, a Typhoon reconnaissance pilot, even found it in his heart to pity the plight of the Luftwaffe in those last months: “I felt sorry for the German air force because they were let down by their commanders and their industry. When the dreaded Hun just stopped turning up, you began to wonder if they were frightened or something. It was only afterwards that we realized they simply couldn’t do it.”
The recklessness of some aircrew persisted on the ground. Jack Pitts and his fellow pilots used aviation fuel for almost every purpose, including cleaning clothes. Once, the gasoline stove in the house in which they were billeted exploded, killing one pilot and severely burning several others. The house burned down. Towards the end, however, even frankly callous young fliers began to feel spasms of pity for the beaten enemy, just as Tony Mann did. “There were four men unloading some stuff from the back of a caisson,” Jack Pitts wrote in his diary on 18 March 1945. “They evidently heard me just before I fired, because they all turned round, and I could practically see a look of surprise. I squeezed the trigger and these four just seemed to melt away. The caisson burned and the horses dropped . . . All in all, I got one truck, 14 horses and six Germans. It’s almost sickening because these poor devils don’t have a chance. Oh well, they started it.”
Bradley’s aide Chester Hansen recorded a conversation among America’s top soldiers in which his chief suggested:
that it would be good to fight the Germans all the way to Berlin, to teach them the lesson of death or destruction they have carried to the world. Everyone is in hearty assent. I suggested to Bull [G-3 at SHAEF] that we bomb each town in our path, but “Pinky” protested that this was not our way of waging war. Patton promptly declared that if it was necessary to have military objectives to bomb, he would declare every switchboard in every town a military objective. The need for harsh treatment of Germany is now more apparent than ever.
TARGETS
MOST OF THE citizens of the Third Reich, great