Isaiah's Eagles Rising: A Generation of Airmen

By Bernard Thomas Nolan

They came in waves from the schools, factories, farms, and city streets, some driven by patriotism, but most with a dream. Bernard Nolan was one of the nearly 200,000 pilots who earned his wings during World War II.

Nolan relates the journey of a boy with a passion for flying airplanes: how an uneducated kid from a fractured home environment weaseled his way into the Armys aviation cadet program and how his deliverance through flying threatened to unravel in the cold, lethal skies over Europe in 1944.

The author has imbedded his experiences within the context of the history of the air battle over Europe in 1943 and 1944. He explores why the Eighth Air Force lost a battle of attrition with the Luftwaffe in 1943, and how and why it eventually triumphed in mid 1944. In the cockpit realism and little known details are provided in discussions of evolving technology, formation assembly and flying, ever changing tactics by both sides, prospects for surviving aerial combat, what it is like to be shot down, and excellent comparisons of the two pivotal aircraft, the B-24 and B-17. Nolan flew both in combat.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 24, 2002
• ISBN: 9781465330680

Bernard Thomas Nolan

Nolan the airman – spent a lifetime in aerospace activities. Nolan’s Air Force career spanned 22 years during which he flew combat missions in the air campaign in Europe in 1944 followed by ten years as a transport pilot flying North Atlantic routes. After leaving the Air Force Nolan joined NASA where he was active managing an airborne research program and several satellite projects. He is the author of the book Isaiah’s Eagles Rising. Young the lawyer - served as both a prosecutor and defense counsel as a Navy Judge Advocate before serving in a variety of legal positions in private life. This is his first foray into fiction reaching deeply into life’s experiences for material. He lives in Alexandria and Louisa County, Virginia. The airman and the lawyer collaborate to bring you Wild Blue Murder.

Book preview

ISAIAH’S

EAGLES

RISING

A Generation of Airmen

But they that wait upon the Lord

shall renew their strength;

they shall rise up with wings as eagles.

                                                            Isaiah 40:31

Bernard Thomas Nolan

Copyright © 2002 by Bernard Thomas Nolan.

Second Edition 2012.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2002091190

ISBN:     Hardcover   978-1-4010-5309-3

               Softcover     978-1-4010-5308-6

               Ebook          978-1-4653-3068-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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Contents

1-PROLOGUE

2-SEEDS

3-CHILD OF THE THIRTIES

4-ASTORIA

5-TO FLY

6-THE BRONX

7-ISAIAH’S EAGLETS

8-CARNAGE OF 1943

9-THE WIZARD WAR

10-SHAFTED

11-EAST ANGLIA

12-SPRING 1944: THE COMBAT SCENE

13-THE FORMATIONS

14-THE UNFRIENDLY SKIES

15-BAPTISM BY FIRE

16-JUNE 1944: INVASION SUPPORT

17-LONDON AND THE V-1

18-JULY 1944: FLAK BAIT

19-CONVERSION TO THE B-17G

20-AUGUST 1944: TARGET—GERMANY

21-SEPTEMBER 1944: DUSSELDORF

22-THAT DREADED LAST MISSION

23-HOME

24-EPILOGUE

25-AIRMEN DON’T PARADE

26-THE GIRL WITH THE GREEN EYES

27-A LAVENHAM RETROSPECTIVE

APPENDIX 1-RESEARCH SOURCES

APPENDIX 2-FOOTNOTES BY CHAPTER

APPENDIX 3-B-24 VS. B-17

DEDICATION

To Sunny, truly one of God’s sunbeams—

she has illuminated my life for over 50 years.

For Pam, Tom, Jacquie, Christine

and the cat Tami

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I am deeply grateful to so many who helped me assemble a workable manuscript that has finally made its way into book form. I am especially indebted to: my editor, the Reverend Mary Jayne Ledgerwood, recently ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church, whose abundant editorial talents aided in shaping the book and guiding my output. To my editorial review committee—comprised of my wife Sunny who read every sentence and every change to every sentence. Sunny caught my gaffs and encouraged me to keep going every time I put the project aside. Editor Mary Jayne and her husband Brian worked with us in weekly critiques. It was Brian who always asked the right questions. My daughter Pam with her gift of words—she can really turn a phrase—and the Ph.D. engineer—musician Tom, my son, whose literary acumen helped me structure paragraphing and chapter relationships in reaching a final product. He also pulled me through the pratfalls of Microsoft Word and other computer disasters. Tom’s lovely wife Jacqueline converted my crude drawings into presentable graphics.

Jim and Sharon Burke are also part of my team. Jim is a Vietnam veteran who holds the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts. The Burkes are neighbors; they own a printing firm in Alexandria, Virginia. Jim was one of the first to read my book. He has printed out manuscripts for editing and converted my photographic collection to transparencies for my lectures. Last among my team, but certainly not least, are Richard (Dick) Thompson, former Marine Corps helicopter pilot and his wife Jeanette (Jeanie)—she nudged me on in so many meaningful ways, and Dick, another computer wizard, digitally scanned my photograph collection in adapting it for publication.

I acknowledge and thank those who took the time to review my work. In particular, the following gave me insights and inputs into various dimensions of the story and enough encouragement to persist: Rudolph (Rudy) de Harak, friend from boyhood and recognized master of the graphic arts in this country as well as world wide. He is also a master of survival. Rudy fought as an infantryman with the U.S. Army’s 4th Division in every campaign from D—Day plus three until February 1945. His survival quotient is about ten times the life of a lucky cat. Another survivor-Colonel Charles W. (Bill) Getz, former Air Force colleague and a veteran B-24 pilot who also flew P-51s with the 8th Air Force. Not many 8th Air Force veterans have that distinction. Bill is a prolific author in his own right. Dr. Richard (Rick) Cothern, eminent physicist and fellow parishioner at Christ Church, Alexandria, Virginia: Rick led me to a key research source and helped me fill a prominent gap in my work.

Very special thanks go to Keith Ferris, master painter of aviation art who has graciously allowed me to use a print of his painting Real Trouble for my cover illustration. Keith’s murals in the National Air and Space Museum are recognized worldwide. Along with Real Trouble, his mural on the wall of the museum’s World War II Gallery depicting a B-17 raid on Wiesbaden, Germany in August 1944 are superb impressions that capture the visual essence of the combat environment in the skies over Western Europe during World War II.

The sum of all this is what follows.

1

PROLOGUE

The prime emotion was fear,

and my mindset from day to day

can be summed up in one word—survival.

It was a perfect day for a museum visit. Rain had begun to fall that day in 1987 as I made my way across the Mall toward my office in the Capital Gallery building on 4th Street in Washington. The National Air and Space Museum lay across my route and beckoned with the offer of shelter and an opportunity to check out the latest exhibits. This national treasure, devoted to the evolution of air and space technology in the United States, has been a familiar haunt for me since it opened its doors during the Bicentennial Celebration in 1976. In fact I served there as a volunteer docent for several years when I was working directly across Independence Avenue in NASA Headquarters.

But this day was different. I found myself wandering into the gift shop toward the bookshelves that I knew would be crammed with aviation literature of every description. A book I had never seen practically jumped at me from its display perch. On the cover of the book that I was soon grasping in my hand was a color photograph of a pilot’s view of the cockpit of a B-24. I studied the photo for some time noting that everything was exactly where it should be—the throttles, propeller controls, compasses, rudder trim control knob, automatic pilot control panel, and all the flight instruments. Some of the engine instruments were visible along the right edge. The photo seemed of recent origin, but peeling paint on visible interior surfaces suggested that the subject was a survivor of the World War II scene. Superimposedover the cover photo was the title: One Last Look, Kaplan and Smith’s fine work on the Eighth Bomber Command. I opened the book, and there on the first overleaf plate was a color photo of a street in the Suffolk village of Lavenham, the site where my air base was located during the war. I felt compelled to go on. I began leafing through the pages and embarked on a strange personal journey into my past, which I find extremely difficult to explain.

Weeks later my wife Sunny presented me with a copy of that book. As I read through the personal accounts of combat experiences offered by surviving crew members, it seemed as though the cobwebs were being swept away and I was on a journey to episodes in my life that lay dormant for over 40 years. As it evolved, my journey into the past would be much more than one last look—perhaps a deep look would be a better way to express it. Deep, seemingly without a bottom, and in many ways it would be unfulfilling.

In any case a floodgate had opened and I was soon engulfed in the process of trying to discover who I really am. When I finally allowed myself to face the past, I would find much of it painful and unrelated to the brief wartime experience that remolded my persona. The years leading up to the war had as much to do with shaping my personality and thought patterns as any other factor. I would see in reflection that the decade preceding World War II defined my entire generation.

As I began my personal research, I learned immediately that Charles Eubank, the first pilot and leader of my wartime crew, died just a year earlier. Several months later, I read of the death of my navigator, Col. Francis W. Nelson in the Taps column of The Retired Officer magazine. Letters followed as more people and events unfolded in my mind. In particular, a 1988 trip with my wife to Lavenham, Suffolk, stoked the furnace of my memory, prompting me to relive this limited part of my life. Several incidents and emotions re-entered my consciousness during that two-week stay in England. Most were triggered by visual impressions, which I recorded in my journal.

For many years before 1987 my experiences in England during World War II as a pilot with the 487th Bomb Group lay locked in my memory for a couple of reasons. Journals, notes, letters, and photos of that brief phase of my life were in a footlocker that was lost during one of the many moves throughout my 22-year Air Force career. More important, I grew to dislike the experience intensely. I flew 33 missions with the 487th Bomb Group from its base in Suffolk between May and September, 1944—complete with white knuckles, wet palms, and sometimes, sheer terror. To have survived the experience was in a great sense like being reborn. The prime emotion was fear, and my mindset from day to day can be summed up in one word—survival. My action—as well as the action of the airmen around me—was in direct contradiction to my emotions. I climbed into those aluminum death cages 33 times without hesitation. Why? Why did the other nine do it? Why did Picket’s men walk up that hill at Gettysburg? Perhaps, as John Keegan suggests, one does it simply because the others do, each with the sense of not wanting to let the others down. Or another strong contender is because, in our young, inexperienced, and somewhat idealistic minds, we knew it was the right thing to do.

Stephen Ambrose, in his book D-Day, June 6, 1944, The Climactic Battle of World War II builds on the soldier’s mindset. Not many of them were there by choice. Only a few of them had patriotic passion that they would speak about. But nearly all of them would rather have died than let their buddies down or look the coward in front of their bunkmates. Of all things that the long training period accomplished, this sense of solidarity was the most important. So it was with the aircrews.

Frederick Forsyth in his foreword to the book Soldiers, by John Keegan and Richard Holmes, sums it up nicely. Men who have not gone into battle, risking their lives to cause another man to lose his, can never wholly understand what it is like; and men who have gone are never quite the same again. At 21 I was more boy than man, but I would grow up in 1944.

In many of the crew members’ accounts in One Last Look I was struck by the number who talked about just doing their jobs. I never rationalized about why I entered the Army’s Aviation Cadet program or had any illusions at all about what I was doing. I was there because of circumstances driven by a burning, life-long obsession to fly airplanes.

True, patriotic madness swept the country following Pearl Harbor, but that was not the prime motivating factor in my case. In fact, I tried to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force before Pearl for no other reason than to learn to fly, but they would not have me. People with at least some flying experience, of which I had none, were their targets.

Looking back through an aviation career spanning over 40 years, I have come to realize that my brief encounter with the Eighth Air Force had a profound effect that would follow me into my ensuing flying career. Some of it was very negative as the worst fears of combat were somehow transferred to the active USAF flying career that ensued after my tour with the Eighth. I entered my post-England world of aviation with my acquired skills and knowing a lot about combat operations, but I had yet to gain the wisdom and experience that would one day make me an old pilot. It did not take me long to realize that my piloting skills were very limited.

As a transport pilot after the war, I can remember countless occasions in C-54s in take-off position awaiting Air Traffic Control clearance for departure on North Atlantic crossings. With forty-two dependent souls behind me, I wondered why my palms were wet. I sensed anxieties as I contemplated one or more of a host of hazards that I had to deal with—penetrating the squall line that lay across my flight path, destination weather deterioration, severe turbulence, icing, engine failures, decision points en route, unreliable communications. In a sense some of these things became substitutes for the German flak and fighters I faced during my combat missions. Such sensations would rapidly evaporate as I rolled the aircraft on the active runway and advanced the throttles for the departure. Once airborne, I was a different person, focused and in command. Yet I felt as if I were on some kind of emotional roller coaster at such times.

In essence, the passion for flying that was part of my psyche as a boy and evident during my flying training evaporated in the combat experience—from the friendly skies of my youth to the very unfriendly skies of the Eighth Bomber Command. I learned to bury my fears and to cope with them; nonetheless, they were always there. An entire decade passed before I could bury them fully and reopen my mind to the pure joy of flying.

That I arrive at a point in my life where I even want to tell this story proves a profoundly moving experience. Active prompting by my wife and children has propelled me to take this retrospective journey. Truthfully, I was reluctant to do so. Yet I have so much more to tell: the retrospective insights into the psyche of my generation at that point in history, why we were there in England in 1944, the combat operations environment, our feelings and our place in history with the greatest aerial armada ever assembled in what had to be the most savage air campaign in history. Although it may be difficult for some to admit, World War II was a defining time in most of our lives.

This is the story of my journey as a young airman with the Eighth Bomber Command of the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II. In this history I have embedded my personal experiences as a bomber pilot within the context of the air battle just before and during the time I was part of it. The work is a composite of letters, memory excursions, and research sparked by a tour of Suffolk in 1988. My recollection of events has been refined for accuracy based on research of my flight records, Roger Freeman’s epic work The Mighty Eighth, numerous other books, the archives in the library of the National Air and Space Museum, and contacts with those who shared the experience with me now associated with the 487th Bomb Group Association.

2

SEEDS

On December 7, 1941,

all the barriers of publicperceptions

and factionalpolitical divisions were swept away.

America in the 1930s was beset with complex cultural, racial, and ethnic divisions. The economic excesses and social indulgences of the 1920s led to the destruction of the economy by 1930, ushering in the crippling depression that paralyzed the nation for a decade. Jobs evaporated as production ground to a halt. Morale collapsed, and crushing poverty became rampant as a helpless government could only observe the nation’s as well as the world’s descent into the morass.

Many of the programs developed by President Roosevelt in the early 1930s gave people new hope as the nation struggled to recover. By 1939, recovery began in earnest, but it was built upon the bloody gossamer base of munitions production to feed the conflagration erupting in Europe.

In the 1930s the forty-eight states were, in fact, united constitutionally and geographically, but ironically in name only. In its idyllic self-image, the U.S. was the great melting pot in which the American promise would somehow blend its diverse elements into a homogeneous national culture. But in reality, the United States was a nation of deep divisions and conflicting interests. Residual hatreds from the Civil War haunted us; the North and South still maintained their differences in religions, speech patterns, and customs that kept them separate entities within the contiguous national boundary that was loosely the Union. Racism was alive and flourishing both in the

North and South. Religious demagogues fanned the fires of hatred with their political harangues and diatribes in the name of Christianity. Ethnic divisions set people apart in hostile camps with almost the same intensity as race, and as Europe drifted toward war, ethnic sentiments tended to polarize with European counterparts. At the same time, a grassroots isolationist movement vigorously opposed any involvement whatsoever in foreign wars.

The Nazi movement among Germans rubbed off on their American ethnic counterparts in the form of a splinter group known as the German-American Bund. Before the war, in New York I watched them parade pompously in their brown shirts and swastikas preaching their message of Aryan supremacy. There were the Mussolini fascists, communists, and socialists. New dimensions in criminal activity were ushered in as the result of prohibition, regarded in retrospect as the noble experiment. If there was any unifying force at work in this ethnic olio, it was the English language. The population mix today, with Asian and Hispanic groups now among the leading players, in many ways mirrors that of the 1930s. That mirror image begins to focus further when considering today’s splinter groups of neo-fascists and self-proclaimed minutemen at war with our government and the new dimensions of violence they have brought to the American scene.

All of the divisions that defined America in the 1930s were swept aside by Pearl Harbor, perhaps the greatest miscalculation in modern times. Heterogeneous America did not disappear, but its divisions would lie festering out of sight for some time to come as the country found a unifying cause. I was swept along in the tides of that time and absorbed by the explosion of American air power.

The seeds that gave birth to the Eighth Air force were planted long before 1930. The idea of destroying a nation’s capacity and will to make war emerged with Sherman’s march through Georgia in the American Civil War. Sherman cut through the underbelly of the Confederacy and laid waste to everything in his path, forerunner of what in WWII was later called a scorched earth policy. With the advent of the airplane the idea of total warfare began to take root in a different format. World War I brought the first practical application of air power in the strategic sense with the rigid airship attacks on London. They continued with the Gotha and Zeppelin Giant aircraft when the rigids failed. These air attacks on London never even came close to achieving any positive strategic results. They were, however, pervasively disruptive, and 2,400 people would die.

Yet the idea of air power began to grow. Prophets like the Italian Giulio Douhet, England’s Boom Trenchard, and our own Billy Mitchell emerged in the 1920s to expound on the potential of the aircraft as the ultimate strategic weapon. The aircraft was envisioned essentially as the instrument of warfare that would deny a nation’s capability to make war by destroying its industrial infrastructure and cowing its population with psychological disruption.

In the 1930s the specter of mass destruction from the skies was savagely displayed with Japan’s indiscriminate use of air power against China and German air attacks in Spain during that country’s civil war. In the U.S. the application of strategic air power became doctrine even though the means of its delivery were still on the drawing boards. The destruction and suffering resulting from these episodes fed the literary and propaganda mills worldwide, conjuring up the image of helpless cities laid to waste. H.G. Wells’ film The Shape of Things to Come portrays a common frame of mind that consumed the Western world in that era.

The image conjured up by the concept of strategic bombing was that of the quick airborne epee thrust at the enemy’s throat with a resultant blood-letting and catastrophic destruction of his communication and production capacities. Twenty-five years would pass after WWI before the advance of technology would even permit the test of the strategic air power theory. Even when massed strategic air power was applied from 1943 to 1945, this alone would not win the war in Europe. For all the horrific destruction rained on Germany by the RAF and Eighth Air Force, German war production never ceased. Nor did its people panic any more in the fire storms that claimed so many of their cities than those of London during the Blitz, the extension of the Nazi blitzkrieg that engulfed Poland and France in 1939 and 1940. It took the atomic bomb to bring the theory to reality.

Hitler’s aggressions in the mid-1930s culminated with the invasion of Poland in 1939 and the beginning of six years of total warfare in what would be the most consuming and widespread war in the history of the world. One must bear in mind that the United States military at this time was woefully unprepared in all of its naval, land, and air components as compared with the German and Japanese war machines. The navy was perhaps best prepared in terms of readiness with 15 battleships, five aircraft carriers, 38 cruisers, and over 200 destroyers, most of the latter dating back to WWI. Our regular army consisted of 130,000 enlisted men and officers with a National Guard of 175,000 and a reserve officers’ corps of 70,000. Our army air force was pitifully weak with a strength of 1700 tactical and training aircraft and 20,000 enlisted men and officers.¹ It was on this base that mobilization of the nation would evolve in the war years facing it. Bear in mind that in 1939 there was still no strong mood for mobilization with no more wars in Europe a dominant frame of mind among the public and the basic tenet of the isolationist movement.

Blueprints for the U.S. strategic bombing campaign began to take root before Pearl Harbor as President Roosevelt reacted to the fall of Western Europe and concerned himself with the survival of Great Britain. Roosevelt was greatly influenced by Winston Churchill and his own conviction that the futures of both countries were linked by common political and cultural ties. Roosevelt had already anticipated our direct involvement in the war. Indeed, some say he promoted it. While, as I have noted, there was certainly no common public consensus for intervention on our part at the time, as Hitler triumphed in 1940 and 1941 American public opinion did begin to swing in favor of some active support for Great Britain short of full intervention.

Early in 1941 Roosevelt requested the U.S. Army’s War Plans Division to consider contingency planning in the event of our direct involvement. Thus military planners began to articulate strategic applications of American air power. Assuming Germany and Japan as the enemy, the U.S. Army War Plans Division developed the initial strategic plan for the application of air power: ²

Table 1,

U.S. Air Power Strategy in 1941,

Pre Pearl Harbor

•   Defend the Western Hemisphere,

•   Prosecute a sustained air offensive against Germany,

•   Support strategic defense in the Pacific,

•   Provide air support for the invasion of Europe,

•   Continue strategic air operations against Germany until its collapse, and

•   Concentrate maximum strategic air power to support the defeat of Japan.

War planners viewed the primary goal as the defeat of Germany by disrupting her electrical power, transportation, petroleum, and manufacturing systems.

With the advent of Pearl Harbor and Germany’s declaration of war on December 11, 1941, all the barriers of public perceptions and factional political divisions evaporated. Later that month at the ARCADIA Conference, the U.S. and Great Britain declared the total defeat of Germany as their top priority. The grand strategy was to apply all military might to that objective. At the Casablanca Conference in January of 1943, Allied air planners became muchmore definitive laying down the basic strategy for the air campaign:

2

Table 2,

Casablanca Conference,

Combined U.S.—British Air Strategy

•   Undermine the German war machine and the