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By Root 1365 0

I realised how fortunate we were to be in the air. I was more frightened in London during the V2 rocket attacks than in the air on missions.” Dorfman and Wells were relatively unusual, because few bomber airmen enjoyed their work in the way that many fighter pilots did. This was not because they agonised much, or at all, about the fate of those who died beneath their bomb doors; it was because flying for eight or ten hours either in daylight formation amid flak and fighters like the men of the USAAF, or through lonely darkness, as did those of the RAF, imposed relentless strain and frequent terror. They were denied the thrill of throwing a high-performance fighter across the sky. The monotony of bombing missions was shattered only when crews encountered the hellish sights and sounds of combat and bomb runs over the cities of Germany or Japan.

Although Laurie Stockwell was a sensitive young Englishman, it never occurred to him to question the ethics of his own part, as a pilot, in bombing Germany. Like almost all his kind, he simply saw himself performing, without fervour, an exceptionally hazardous role in a struggle to remove the dark threat bearing down upon Western civilisation. He wrote to his mother in 1942:

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. The 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 in the planes they flew in combat. Thereafter, however, the British and Americans trained airmen 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 nonoperational accidents 787 officers and 4,540 other ranks killed, 396 officers and 2,717 other ranks injured. Among U.S. airmen of all services, 13,000 died accidentally. Taking off and landing a fighter, designed to be inherently