Sometimes called the ‘masters of the air’, American bomber crews faced terrible conditions to win the air war over occupied Europe
On 17 August 1942, Major Paul Tibbets led a formation of 12 United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) Boeing B-17E Flying For tresses into a bomb-run over Rouen, France. Better known as the first pilot to drop an atomic bomb, on Hiroshima three years later, Tibbets was also the first pilot to fly a USAAF aircraft to bomb Nazi-occupied Europe. It would be the first of nearly 1,000 missions totalling over 600,000 sorties before the end of the war.
At the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the USAAF strategic bombing arm was small but growing. America’s geographical and political situation (both isolated and isolationist) precluded building an expensive strategic bombing force in the 1920s and 1930s. Although a solid core of its officers desired an independent long-range bombing arm, the Army Air Corps (as it was until June 1941) was firmly part of the US Army. They thought primarily in battlefield terms: investing in short-range tactical aircraft. Changes in naval policy in the early 1930s allowed the bomber supporters to develop a long-range heavy aircraft for maritime reconnaissance and, potentially, attacking enemy fleets. The result was the Boeing B-17. Only in 1938, with war looming in Europe, did US President Franklin D Roosevelt start a programme to expand America’s military. This led to the development of the Consolidated B-24 Liberator, an arguably more advanced type but with similar range and speed, although a smaller bomb load. By December 1941 only around 200 B-17s were in service, while the Liberator had just entered service that summer. Curiously, while the RAF progressed through ‘generations’ of bomber types, the USAAF would keep the same two basic bombers throughout the war over Europe, albeit with various modifications.
Aircraft were just the first of the limitations with which the expanding USAAF bombers had to deal. The outbreak of war brought expansion at an astonishing rate; it was a massive task in administration and training, often relying on personnel with little or no experience themselves. A pilot
might find himself rapidly going from simply commanding his own aircraft to suddenly forming and training an entire squadron from scratch. Most
