To Kingdom Come Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  THE WARRIORS

  THE MISSION

  SLIPSTREAMS

  EPILOGUE

  APPENDIX

  Acknowledgements

  SOURCES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ADDITIONAL PHOTO CAPTIONS AND CREDITS

  INDEX

  NAL CALIBER

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  First published by NAL Caliber, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, March 2011

  Copyright© © Robert J. Mrazek, 2011

  All rights reserved

  NAL CALIBER and the “C” logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Mrazek, Robert J.

  To kingdom come : an epic saga of survival in the air war over Germany / Robert J. Mrazek. p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-47592-8

  1. World War, 1939-1945—Aerial operations, American. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Campaigns—Germany—Stuttgart. 3. Bombing, Aerial—Germany—Stuttgart—History—20th century.

  4. B-17 bomber—History. 5. Bomber pilots—United States—Biography. 6. United States. Army

  Air Forces. Air Force, 8th—Biography. 7. Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks, etc.—Germany—Stuttgart—History—20th century. 8. World War, 1939-1945—Personal narratives, American.

  9. World War, 1939-1945—Casualties—Germany—Stuttgart. I. Title.

  D790.M72 2011

  940.54’2134715—dc22 2010040928

  Set in Electra

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  For Carolyn Rae, always

  Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death;

  Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland ...

  Oh, Death was never an enemy of ours!

  We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.

  —Wilfred Owen

  Apparently the Gods were with us.

  Otherwise we would have been blown to Kingdom Come.

  —Second Lieutenant Vern Moncur B-17 Pilot, Wallaroo

  This is the story of an aerial bombing mission to Stuttgart, Germany, that resulted in a shattering defeat of the U.S. Army Air Forces in the Second World War. It is told through the eyes of some of the men who fought in the battle.

  It was not lost through want of courage.

  PRELUDE

  Hap

  Tuesday, 31 August 1943

  Fort Myer

  Quarters Number 8

  Arlington, Virginia

  0530

  General Henry “Hap” Arnold awoke in darkness. It had become his habit to rise before dawn since the war began. By the time his aide Clair “Pete” Peterson arrived at the house to take his baggage to the airfield, he had bathed, shaved, and was dressed in full uniform.

  It was the fourth year of the most horrific slaughter in human history. Across the globe, more than 20 million people had died in the titanic struggle to defeat the Axis powers of Japan and Germany.

  For the past eighteen months, Hap Arnold had lived on Fort Myer’s “General’s Row,” a few doors from George Marshall, the U.S. Army’s chief of staff. Marshall had wanted all his senior officers to be quartered in the same protected military reservation. As the commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces, Arnold now led an organization of more than 2 million men equipped with fifty thousand aircraft.

  The large brick house overlooked the Potomac River and enjoyed a magnificent view of the Capitol. Its spacious rooms were quiet since his wife, Eleanor “Bee” Arnold, had left him. On the few occasions they were together in the months before she moved out, she was always brimming over with complaints. Long ago, they had shared a deep romantic bond, celebrating the date of their anniversary every month. She remained proud of her husband’s accomplishments, but had become increasingly bitter about his failure to make time for her. He understood it and regretted it.

  The morning had dawned hot and humid, the kind of Washington tropical heat that sucked the energy out of a man, especially one who was still recovering from his second major heart attack in four months.

  The first coronary occurred following an exhausting trip back from the Casablanca meetings in February 1943, after a series of tension-filled conferences with Roosevelt and Churchill over the future of his air force.

  In the wake of the attack, he refused to allow a doctor to examine him, much less go to the hospital, out of fear of losing his job. According to army regulations, no senior officer could continue to serve on active duty if he had a serious illness. Only President Roosevelt had the authority to overrule the decision, and he had done so in Arnold’s case. The general was considered too important to the war effort.

  He was fifty-seven years old.

  On this last morning in August 1943, he would leave behind the sweltering heat of Washington, as well as all the political infighting among the American war chiefs, to make an inspection tour of the Eighth Air Force command in England. The first stop on his transatlantic flight was Gander, Newfoundland, where it would be thirty degrees cooler than the U.S. capital.

  Arnold’s doctors had strongly urged him to cancel the trip. After his second coronary in May while attending the Trident meetings in Washington, he was still experiencing shortness of breath, his stomach ulcers were back, and his weight had ballooned,
the product of too many old-fashioneds and rich desserts. At five feet eleven inches, he was still stocky and broad-shouldered, but no longer the trim 185 pounds he had been at West Point.

  At the Point, he had earned the nickname “Happy,” later shortened to “Hap,” because of his seemingly perpetual grin. The grin was no more than a hereditary facial characteristic that belied his intense and often melancholy nature.

  Much of the intensity stemmed from an austere childhood. His father, Herbert Arnold, had been a humorless Baptist doctor firmly set on his personal path to salvation. A rigid disciplinarian, he had raised his five children under the ascetic principle of all toil and no play. Young Henry had been put to work for a neighboring farmer at the age of seven. He hadn’t stopped working since.

  At 0820, General Arnold’s command car arrived in front of Quarters Number 8 to take him to the airfield at Gravelly Point, a few miles down the Potomac River. His transport aircraft was waiting for him on the tarmac.

  It was a four-engine Douglas C-54 Skymaster, and had been outfitted for a general’s comfort. The plane carried twenty-six passengers in plush leather seats that were positioned in group settings. It was equipped with a full galley, as well as comfortable sleeping compartments for long ocean crossings. The president had one almost exactly like it. With a cruising speed of 200 miles per hour and a range of four thousand miles, it was perfect for the globe-trotting Arnold.

  Four army generals and several other staff officers were traveling in Arnold’s party that morning, including David Grant, the army air forces’ chief surgeon, and Arnold’s personal doctor.

  Arnold and the other passengers were given a briefing in lifeboat drill before the pilot took off from Gravelly Point at precisely 0900. Off to their left, the white dome of the Capitol shimmered in the steamy haze as they headed north along the Eastern Seaboard. Eight hours and sixteen hundred miles later, they landed at Gander, Newfoundland. It was raining and cold, with low clouds and light fog.

  Most of the buildings at the airfield were newly constructed corrugated steel Quonset huts, surrounded by vast stores of supplies and equipment set out haphazardly in mountainous piles as far as the eye could see. Small caravans of fuel trucks moved slowly around the base like weary caterpillars. The airfield’s runways, aprons, and revetments were jammed with aircraft, including B-24 Liberators, Douglas B-18 Bolos, British Hurricane fighters, and transport planes of every hue and vintage.

  Waiting to take off when Arnold arrived were several squadrons of B-17 Flying Fortresses on their way to join the Eighth Air Force as replacement aircraft. Arnold’s C-54 would be following one of the squadrons across the North Atlantic later that night.

  After an inspection tour of the military base, Arnold was scheduled to confer with Air Chief Marshal Sir Frederick Bowhill, the Royal Air Force’s commander in chief of the ferry command, to discuss safer routes for his B-17 bomber crews on their flights from the United States to England. Bowhill was flying to Gander especially to meet him.

  While the Skymaster was being refueled, Arnold embarked on his tour with the local army commander, periodically making notes in his confidential diary as they visited each installation on the post. The tone of his observations quickly became mocking.

  “More men needed for the band,” he recorded tartly at one point, and then, “Our men poach on Canadian preserves.” At the hospital he wrote, “Inspected hospital ... saw mostly injured from volley ball.”

  When he arrived for his conference with Air Chief Marshal Bowhill, he learned that the RAF commander had been briefly delayed by bad weather. Arnold waited fifteen minutes before deciding that was long enough. He ordered Captain Niswander, the pilot of his C-54, to prepare the plane for immediate takeoff to Prestwick, Scotland, their next destination.

  Impatience.

  It was the trademark of Arnold’s life, both his blessing and curse.

  He was no armchair general. In 1911, Hap Arnold had been one of the first two pilots to become a qualified army aviator in the newly formed branch of military aviation. He had been personally trained to fly by Orville and Wilbur Wright.

  In the early and dangerous days of military aviation, army pilots flying largely untested aircraft were dying every month. Arnold had survived multiple crashes in unstable crates made of canvas and wood.

  His first accident occurred in an early-model floatplane that crashed into the ocean off Plymouth, Massachusetts. Severely injured, he had been rescued by the coast guard while clinging to wreckage that was floating out to sea.

  An even more harrowing incident left him unnerved, and he refused to fly again, deciding to transfer to the infantry instead. Four years later, he was able to conquer his fear of flying through sheer willpower because of his fervent desire to return to military aviation.

  A disciple of the legendary airpower advocate General Billy Mitchell, Arnold devoted twenty-seven years of his life to helping build a modern air arm; he was intimately involved at every level with the development of faster aircraft, bombers with greater load capacity, up-to-date air facilities, and improved training methods.

  Few of his contemporaries ever dreamed that he would one day command the army air forces. A maverick from the start, Arnold made a habit of leaving outraged superior officers in his wake. Contemptuous of the army bureaucracy, and unyielding in his pursuit of his objectives, he often risked his career by criticizing and opposing his more senior officers when he thought they were wrong. On more than one occasion he narrowly avoided court-martial proceedings.

  In spite of his headstrong personality, he rose steadily through the officer ranks for one simple reason. He was a man who made things happen in an organization filled with officers who avoided risk. He thought faster and he acted faster. With his single-minded focus, he could always be counted on to get things done. Above all else, he became known in the air service as a doer, an achiever, always working toward meeting his next goal. A day that passed without advancing one of them was a wasted day.

  Occasionally, he could be cajoled into playing golf or going fishing, but it was almost impossible for him to relax. One of his aides said, “His idea of a good time was to work all day, then fly all night to California, and visit five aircraft plants, telling the chief executives, ‘I need another hundred miles an hour out of your plane.’ ”

  He was a man who placed duty above all things, including family. In the summer of 1923, his two-year-old son, John, died of a ruptured appendix, leaving his wife bereft. Arnold’s other son, Bruce, lay in critical condition at the base hospital with scarlet fever.

  On that same morning, General John Pershing, the army’s chief of staff, was due to arrive for an inspection tour of Arnold’s San Diego military base. Arnold spent the day escorting Pershing around the installation.

  Wealth meant nothing to him. After twenty-seven years of military service, he couldn’t afford the down payment on a $5,000 house. Years earlier, he had turned down the presidency of Pan American Airways.

  He lived for the air force, and in 1938 he was finally given its top command, which then consisted of several hundred outmoded aircraft and a complement of less than twenty thousand men.

  With war on the horizon, his real work was about to begin.

  Arnold’s days were soon filled with a dizzying array of command responsibilities: hectoring congressional committees for larger allocations, developing new prototype aircraft, improving the existing planes, pushing the aircraft manufacturers to speed up their assembly lines, meeting new recruitment goals, building airfields all over the world, setting up training regimens and flight schools, and selecting the best officers for promotion.

  “He had enthusiasm,” said Robert Lovett, the assistant secretary of war for air. “To him, there wasn’t anything that couldn’t be done.”

  The same impatience that had served as a blessing in his professional career proved to be a curse to his physical health and his marriage, contributing to his burgeoning stomach problems and his two heart atta
cks.

  His legendary impatience had also led to the bitter estrangement from his wife. If he came home from work in time for dinner, the phone would begin ringing as soon as he arrived. He was impervious to her pleadings to cut back on his workload. Finally, she left.

  On the night of August 31, Arnold’s C-54 Skymaster took off from Gander, Newfoundland, at 2130 in a heavy rainstorm. The flight plan called for them to fly twenty-one hundred miles across the Atlantic before making landfall over Northern Ireland. As the big plane sped across the dark ocean, the generals smoked and chatted.

  Part of the time, Arnold worked on the speech he was planning to deliver in London on September 4. It would mark the recent launching of his new heavy bomber air offensive against Germany. It was the culmination of everything he had worked for in building a modern air force.

  Hap Arnold ardently believed that the quickest way to defeat Germany was to annihilate its capacity to wage war. In his mind’s eye, he could envision thirty-mile-long armadas of his heavy bombers, a thousand or more blotting out the sky, thundering across Europe to reach their military targets in Germany, where the lead bombardiers would use their top secret Norden bombsights to drop payloads with pinpoint accuracy on the enemy’s most important industrial targets, destroying the manufacturing plants that produced Germany’s planes, tanks, and heavy guns. If given a free hand, he was confident that the Allies would never have to invade Europe.

  The weapon of Germany’s destruction would be the Boeing B-17, the heavy bomber that had become known as the Flying Fortress. It was big, handsome, and lethal, the first long-range bomber with the load capacity to fully deliver on Arnold’s cherished doctrine.