Inferno - Max Hastings [300]
In the second half of the war, the Western Allies produced superb planes in vast numbers, but the Germans introduced only two good new types—the FW-190 and the revolutionary Me-262 jet fighter. Numbers of the latter were too small and pilot skills inadequate to avert the Luftwaffe’s eclipse in the sky. The Japanese Zero, which so daunted the Allies in 1941–42, became wholly outclassed. It has been described as “an origami aircraft”—light, graceful, superbly manoeuvrable, but frail and offering negligible concessions to pilot safety; for instance, it lacked cockpit armour. Cmdr. David McCampbell, the U.S. Navy’s top-scoring air ace of the war, said: “We learned very early that if you hit them near the wing roots, where the fuel was, they would explode right in your face.” The Japanese army and naval air forces posed no significant challenge to the Allies in 1944–45 except through kamikaze attacks, an expedient of desperation.
Allied airmen, once deployed to operational fighter or bomber squadrons, until the last eighteen months of the war confronted a statistical probability of their own extinction. Romantic delusions faded as they learned to anticipate a destiny as a bloody jam of crushed flesh and bones, or surmounting a petrol-fuelled funeral pyre. To be sure, their daily lives on the ground were privileged; they were spared the mud and discomfort to which foot soldiers were subjected. But they were less likely to survive; Ernie Pyle wrote: “A man approached death rather decently in the air force. He died well-fed and clean-shaven.”
More than half the RAF’s heavy-bomber crews perished, 56,000 men in all. The USAAF’s overall losses were lower, but among 100,000 of its men who participated in the strategic offensive against Germany some 26,000 died, and a further 20,000 were taken prisoner. “You were resigned to dying every night,” said a British Whitley bomber pilot, Sid Bufton. “Before setting out you looked around your room: golf clubs, books, nice little radio—and the letter to your parents propped up on the table.” Unsurprisingly, Allied casualties were proportionately heaviest when the Axis dominated the war, and fell steadily once the tide turned. From 1943 onwards, it was the turn of German and Japanese airmen to do most of the dying: less than 10 percent survived until the end.
The Allied air chiefs’ principal preoccupation was strategic assault on Germany—the offensive against Japan began in earnest only in March 1945—by which they aspired to win the war on their own. The RAF was obliged to abandon daylight bombing after a bloody initiation in 1939–40. Thereafter, its squadrons mounted a night offensive, which made little material impact on Germany until 1943: they lacked mass as well as navigational and bomb-aiming skills. The first British bombs which fell on Berlin at the end of August 1940 inflicted only random damage, though they shocked the capital’s inhabitants and killed a few civilians. One young mother retired to a shelter when the warning sirens sounded, but was reluctant to disturb her two sleeping children, whom she left in bed: they perished when the house received a direct hit. After that story was published, Berliners took more heed of sirens.
An RAF squadron commander described Bomber Command’s early operations over Germany as “groping.” This was exemplified by the experience of Sgt. Bill Uprichard, who flew a Whitley of 51 Squadron on a mission against oil refineries at Politz on the Baltic in poor weather on the night of 29 November 1940. Outbound, after spending two and a half hours in thick cloud over the North Sea, suddenly the sky opened to reveal a brilliantly lit city below. Uprichard and his crew realised they must be passing neutral Sweden, and hastily reset