One of Thousands: A Navigator In the European Air War

By Frederick Fooy

Jules “Julie” Lasner volunteered for service after the United States entered World War II, and he was trained as a navigator in a B-17 Flying Fortress.

Lasner flew twenty-seven missions over occupied Europe during the final phases of a strategic bombing campaign against Germany, dodging the Luftwaffe’s anti-aircraft defenses in the cold, wintry skies.

Based on interviews with Lasner as well as his wartime correspondence, this book offers a glimpse into his experiences as a member of the 8th Air Force.

Along with thousands of others, he pounded the Third Reich around the clock in a four-engine bomber over the last eight months of the war. This account offers an insider’s look into the state of the German air defenses as well as some of the effects of the strategic bomb offensive.

Lasner’s story shows that one person’s experiences and decisions affect many people, and it also reveals how he was affected by total war. Go beyond the statistics that so often dehumanize conflict with One of Thousands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Apr 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483429144

Book preview

ONE of

THOUSANDS

A Navigator in the European Air War

FREDERICK FOOY

Copyright © 2015 Frederick Fooy.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-2915-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-2914-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015905097

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 04/01/2015

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

1    Background

2    Training With The Air Corps

3    Flying In The B-17 Flying Fortress

4    Formation Flying And Ordnance

5    The Strategic Air Campaign

6    Targeting Europe

7    The Nuthampstead Bomber Base

8    The First Mission

9    The German Defenses

10    Bombing With Radar

11    Allied Countermeasures

12    Combat Fatigue

13    The Missions Of October

14    The Missions Of November

15    The Missions Of December

16 TRAINING FOR LEAD NAVIGATOR

17    The Missions Of January

18    The Missions Of February

19    The Missions Of March

21    One Mission In April

22    Armistice, At Last

Bibliography

Published Sources

About The Author

Endnotes

This book is dedicated to the airmen who flew in the skies of Europe during the Second World War as well as the men and women on the ground who faced the consequences of Total War.

FOREWORD

I was always particularly close with Uncle Julie. When I was but a toddler, his mother, my Great-Grandma Sarah, gave me a chess set and I learned to play, and I remember Uncle Julie’s house always had an extravagant art-deco table-top chess set among its swinging 1970s décor and we would occasionally play. As I got a little older, I developed a strong interest in military history, and Uncle Julie encouraged my interest. Among my school-age military history books by the likes of CB Colby were ones of World War II aircraft. I remember climbing up on to the sofa with him, and he would look at the pictures, especially of the Flying Fortresses and provide commentary. I remember seeing that one, he would declare, looking at a picture of a Fort that defied all odds and made it back to base despite battle damage that should by all rights have rendered it as airworthy as a chipped brick. Lieutenant Jules Zlasner, as he was known during many a crowded hour (with apologies to Col. Theodore Roosevelt) nestled over a small table in the nose of a B-17, firmly established himself in my mind as my hero.

One day my mother surprised me with some pictures of Julie in the war. There was one portrait, a head and shoulders shot as they’re called, and two pictures of him with his crew. For years, those pictures were above my bed, alongside the head and shoulders shot of my other hero, Tom Seaver, only Tom Terrific was in a Mets uniform.

Time passed, I left home and went off to college, and like many of my older relatives, Julie and his wife Anita moved to Florida. After college, in a fit of boredom, I joined the Army. The next time I really remember sitting down and having a heart to heart with him again was in 2004. By this time, I had gone to OCS, been commissioned, and at the time was an Infantry Major. We discussed the possibility of my being send to Iraq or Afghanistan. While there seemed to be a rumor every few months that the Guard unit that I was providing Active Duty support for was shipping out, no orders were forthcoming. Finally, he looked at me to close out the conversation and just shrugged with a knowing and resigned half-smile and said, Well…… No hopes for good luck. No lament that I would likely soon find myself at war. No cliché words of wisdom. We’d both been around long enough to know that there really is no point in any of that. Rather, he was very much an old soldier talking to a then 37-year old Major and basically offering an understanding, fatalistic sentiment very similar to shit happens. World-wise soldiers have said that to other soldiers in many a varied form from time immemorial. It was probably one of the most meaningful connections I’ve ever felt in my life.

I did finally get orders for Iraq in early 2007. By then I was a Lieutenant Colonel, and was deploying as the exec for an Infantry Brigade. I started a journal as we headed out the door, and would normally send it as a five-page email to a small list of friends and family. My mother forwarded the journal to Uncle Julie, and he and I began an email correspondence which we maintained throughout my tour.

As I went through my time in Iraq, I felt that I was able to maintain a discussion with Uncle Julie on a level which transcended that with which I could share with others, with little exception. I remember after I had sent an email which described a particularly severe rocket attack, he responded with memories of when his airbase at Nuthampstead would occasionally come under attack from German V-1 rockets.

The other relative with whom I felt a similar kinship was my brother-in-law, Frederick Fooy, then a Captain in the Swedish Army. Frederick came upon his military career through a similar path as I, a childhood interest in the military which developed into a passion for history with a specialty in military esoterica and minutiae. I used to chide my sister about her husband, with his specialization in belt buckles of German World War II armored train troops, but the joke was born of self-recognition, as I could just as easily rattle off the specs for the Davey Crockett nuclear-armed recoilless rifle and other tactical nuclear trivia. When I had visited Sweden as a young Captain, Frederick arranged for a briefing for me by some of his counterparts, and when I was a Company Commander, I hosted him at one of my company training meetings. Suffice to say, we hit it off quite well, and I truly enjoyed our shared camaraderie. Frederick had spent his own crowded hours among the first international troops to enter into the Balkans in the 1990s seeing the many and varied cruelties that man can impose on his fellow man, and he and I corresponded pretty regularly while I was in Iraq. He would never mention Iraq in his emails to me, rather in his shorthand Iraq was that silly place, a homage to Monty Python and not altogether inaccurate in a darkly humorous sort of way.

As I began to amass a rather long monologue in the form of my letters from overseas, about 200 pages worth, I began to wonder how much better the family would know of Uncle Julie’s World War II service if he could have kept a similar journal. By virtue of some of the emails he’d written to me, it was clear that his memory was incredibly sharp, and I began to realize that Julie, who at that point was in his mid-80s, was a treasure in the family and that one day, when he reported for his final formation, all of those memories would be lost. I resolved to capture that history when I came home. And there was no one I’d rather do it with than my brother-in-law.

About six months after I returned from overseas, Frederick and I flew to Del Ray Beach, Florida, to meet with Uncle Julie. We stayed in a nondescript little hotel about a ten minute drive from the condo where he and Anita lived. We had bracketed out the discussions into about five two-hour sessions. We’d come up with some general themes we wanted to discuss in each session, but also let the conversation go where it may. Frederick and I were well steeped in the big picture history of the Mighty Eighth Air Force, and Frederick had numerous areas of expertise, especially Axis strategy and weapons. I had a lot of the family history as background, as well as my own areas of esoteric interest. For instance, I recall my disappointment that Julie didn’t recall the life raft which hung above the bomb bays, but far be it from me to begrudge a man in his 80s his failure to recollect such a detail.

I remember as we started our interviews, Julie grabbed a beat-up leather briefcase and plopped it down on the dining room table with a loud thud. In it was every piece of paper he had been given in the military. Everything. From his awards, to his various transfer orders, to a commemorative yearbook from his aviation cadet period, and even to the clothing record showing his initial issue of wool socks, it was all there. There were postcards they used to sell on his base in England - Christmas greetings from the 398th Bomb Group. It was a veritable treasure trove. Frederick and I made several trips to a nearby Staples to get photocopies of some of these items. I retired from the Army in 2009, and even my personal archive is not as complete as his. It did give me the insight that although many of the Greatest Generation, maintain a dignified, quiet humility about their service, to them it is an extremely significant period in their lives. And clearly Julie even knew back then how much it would mean. He didn’t need to say it. The briefcase did.

It literally took me years to transcribe the interviews. The quality of the recording was not particularly good, and generally to transcribe five minutes would take an hour of more. However, as I transcribed them, I sent them along to Frederick, who began compiling it as a narrative of Julie’s life as a member of the 602nd Squadron of the 398th Bomb Group (Heavy) spliced into the overall history of the World War II air war over Europe.

As Frederick finished chapters, he forwarded them to me to look over and I was very pleased – it appealed to the military history buff in me (he captured all of the belt buckle aspects that I roundly rib him for), but more importantly it captured what I set out to capture when I originally reached out to Uncle Julie: The journey of a poor Jewish kid from Brooklyn into a global inferno which was far larger than him. I learned about his period-appropriate fatalism – he chose the Air Corps in 1942 because he decided it would be quicker death than dying in the mud with the Infantry or on the ocean with the Navy. I learned about this distinguished aviator’s return home, reconnection with Anita, the beautiful girl he left behind, and marriage.

I owe much of my own military career to Uncle Julie. He was my hero as a kid, and I always felt I was following a lost family tradition, primarily a 1940s one, of going into the military. But equally, what I wanted to know from him coming home from Iraq was how to be a war vet. Things change. Perspectives change. How do you wear something so much larger than yourself, those moments of fear, those moments of boredom in a foreign land, those crowded hours, and incorporate them into who you are? Perhaps I expected more of Uncle Julie in this regard than he could provide. What did Uncle Julie do with his experiences over Europe? Where does it all go? Other than the piece of shrapnel he pulled out of his oxygen mask during one mission, there was very little else he could put in a box. What of the reams of paper, the bureaucratic footprints representing his time in the Army Air Force? Well, that could get stuffed into an old leather briefcase. The rest of it? It takes on a life of its own. They’ll attach themselves where they decide to, and you live with it. His inability to describe that was a wise lesson in itself. Or perhaps let me simply say, with a resigned half-smile, Well……….

Lieutenant Colonel Lance Allen Wang (US Army, Retired)

March 30, 2015

INTRODUCTION

In 2007, PBS showed Ken Burns’ series The War. In the breaks between the episodes, Burns encouraged veterans as well as friends and relatives of veterans to submit recollections of serving in the Second World War to the Library of Congress. My wife’s great-uncle, Jules Julie Lasner¹, had served as a navigator with the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) on a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress during the war, and in 2008 I took a trip down to Boca Raton, Florida together with my brother-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) Lance A. Wang and a small recording device. We had rooms in a particularly musty hotel not too far from Julie and Anita’s apartment in Boca Raton, and after an initial dinner with Julie and Anita we retired to the hotel bar to sit down amidst rather loud soca and reggaethon music to review the questions we were going to ask Julie over the next two-and-a-half days.

We spent a most fascinating and pleasant weekend discussing and recording conversations with both Julie and Anita as well as going over a number of documents and photographs pertaining to his service in the Air Corps. In 2012 I finally got the opportunity to write down Julie’s recollections in a format that would include more of the events that took place during Julie’s missions, whether it be around him in the air, on the ground or back at the headquarters of the 8th Air Force.

There has been much written about the U.S. contribution to the strategic air campaign, but Julie Lasner’s experiences more than deserve to be added to the range of personal accounts, unit histories and various analysis that have been written and produced since 1945. It is a story of one person’s experience, but it also a story of how one person’s experiences and decisions affect many people, and how he was affected during the unique circumstances of total war. In the vast amount of men and women that contributed to World War Two, it is easy to lose track of the individual, and when warfare becomes mere statistics, we are well on our way to de-humanizing human conflict.

Although the interviews with Julie Lasner well as his correspondence during his years in the Army Air Corps constitute the key elements of this account, it remains a third person account to a considerable degree. It does indeed deal with the day-to-day activities at the bomber base and the stress of flying combat missions, but also aspects of the strategic bombing campaign that Julie Lasner weren’t aware of at the time, such as the prioritizing of targets, the overall outcome of the missions, and the experiences of some of the other crews that shared missions with the young navigator. There are also chapters on some of the tactical and technical aspects of the strategic air campaign as well as some insights into the experiences of the Germans that fought or were affected by the Allied air campaign against Germany in 1944 and 1945. However, it is difficult, if not impossible to provide full insight into his experiences and those of his fellow members of the 398th Bombardment Group (Heavy) as they deployed overseas and in Julie’s case flew twenty-seven missions over occupied Europe during the Second World War. The passing of time and our own cultural and social perceptions change continuously, and especially with the end of conscription in many countries, warfare has been separated from mainstream society. Even with military experience from the 1990s and 2000s, it is difficult to comprehend the effects of mobilization of entire societies and extensive periods of high casualties in both men and materiel.

It may be stated that the Allies were sensing victory after breaking out of Normandy at the end of the summer of 1944. But the claiming that a war will be over by Christmas must be one of the most erroneous phrases in the history of warfare. The Western Allies were still to face the disappointment of Operation Market-Garden as well as the Battle of the Bulge. On the Eastern Front, the Soviet Forces made halt outside Warsaw and they were stopped in the Balkans before facing German counter-attacks in Hungary. As for the war in the air, the initiative remained in the hands of the Western Allies since early 1944. The incredibly costly missions to Schweinfurt, Regensburg, Ploesti, Berlin and other objectives lay in the past, but the missions of the last months of the war were still hazardous undertakings: Flak² and the occasional fighter attacks were real threats, and the effects of accidents caused by fatigue, flying in inclement weather and any number of human and mechanical errors should not be underestimated. Throughout the war, the 8th Air Force saw 1,008 days of enemy action. Of the approximately than 350,000 airmen that served in the Mighty Eighth, 26,000 were killed and many more were wounded. Another 21,000 air crew ended up in prisoner-of-war camps. 6,537 B-17s and B-24s were shot down together with 3,337 fighter aircraft. This was by far the highest casualty rate of any US military branch, although the submarine service in the Pacific had a higher fatality rate.³ The casualty figure for the 210,000 air crewmen that served was a staggering 12.38 percent, although this decreased progressively as the war drew to a close. Nevertheless, in 1945 81 percent of the Air Corps combatants flew their full 35 missions⁴, which conversely means that there was just about a one in five risk of not completing your tour. This was dangerous duty up to the very end of the war.⁵

Part of this book was written as Hurricane Sandy hit New York City. Although this relatively tame natural disaster cannot be compared to the effects of long-term strategic bombing, the impact of this event makes tangible the frailty of human urban society. The increased anxiety in the minds of the urban population is quite noticeable, and it is very different from any stresses that military personnel might face, with the civilian population having little or no training to face uncertainty and hardship.

Julie Lasner was part of the 398th Bomb Group. This bomb group may perhaps be seen a typical USAAF unit, mass-produced during the latter part of the Second World War and simply a numbered bomber group at a numbered station. Yet, the individuals of the bomb group came from all over America, and their backgrounds were equally diverse. Besides operational records, chemistry, command and a plethora of other reasons made every unit unique. That being said, the units deploying overseas in 1944 were not part of the legacy of the costly missions in 1943, and most of the survivors of the 8th Air Force’s formative year had rotated out of flying missions by the time Flight Officer Zlasner arrived.

I am indebted to a number of individuals for the assistance and support in the preparation of this manuscript. Above all I would like to thank Julie Lasner and his wife Anita for allowing us to interview him and patiently answering questions that ranged from grand scale to minutiae, and from the general to the personal. I would also like to thank Julie’s family, especially Roni Yessenow and Sara Yessenow, for sharing items and documents from Julie’s time in the 8th Air Force as well as more recent photographs. Furthermore, I would like to thank Lt. Col (ret.). Lance A. Wang for his invaluable assistance in preparing questions for Julie and interviewing him together with me as well as transcribing the interviews and examining the manuscript from a number of angles. I am also indebted to Chris Morgan, who scrutinized the manuscript extensively and provided extraordinarily helpful suggestions regarding both language in general and technical terminology as well as helping me with the photographs and photography. I would also like to thank Christian Schwinghammer, who provided input regarding German air defenses. Finally I would like to thank my wife, Marcy Wang, as well as her extended family for their unwavering support throughout the course of this project.

1

BACKGROUND

Julius Solomon Zlasner’s mother, Sarah Shulim, was from Vilno⁶, today’s Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. She came to the United States in 1908, and met her husband, Morris Zlasner, a Russian-born artist from a rabbinical family, in New Haven, Connecticut, where Sarah’s sister lived. Sarah and her husband-to-be eloped and moved to Rhinebeck, New York, and then eventually to Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The couple had five children, with Julius born in 1922 being the youngest. He was affectionately known as Julie. As the family grew,