What did LeMay do? He bombed the Utah anyway, raining fifty-pound water bombs down on the sailors.
As LeMay recalled, “Everybody [was] diving for the gangplanks, hatches. And we heard rumors that there were a few people hurt a little bit.”
In his memoirs, LeMay says he heard that some sailors actually got killed in the bombing exercise, and then he writes, “I remember watching the first bomb, which smashed into the deck. It sent splintered pieces of wood flying in every direction. I hadn’t realized that wood could frag like that.”
He shrugs it off. His job was to find the ship, after all. And he did. And by the way, really good to know about the physics of a bomb hitting a wooden deck.
Conrad Crane, chief of historical services for the Army Heritage and Education Center, at Carlisle Barracks, and former director of the US Army Military History Institute, calls LeMay the greatest air commander in history:
He was a dynamic leader: he shared the difficulties of his airmen. He was the best navigator the Air Force had; he was a great pilot; he could do mechanic stuff. He knew the technical as well as the leadership aspects of what he was doing. He was the Air Force’s ultimate problem solver.
But he was one of those guys that, if you gave him a problem to fix, you didn’t ask a whole lot of questions how he was going to do it.
So imagine, then, the thinking of the Bomber Mafia in the summer of 1943. The men needed to validate the theories formulated back at the Air Corps Tactical School. They needed to deal a death blow to the Nazi war machine. They needed to prove that ball bearings were the crucial choke point of the German military infrastructure. The Schweinfurt raid was their best chance to demonstrate that their way of waging an air war was superior to that of the British. Whom would you choose to plan the mission? Haywood Hansell, of course, the high priest of Maxwell Field—one of your very best. But whom would you choose to lead the most difficult part of the mission—the dummy raid on Regensburg? There really wasn’t any other option.
In a film entitled The Air Force Story, the narrator describes the scene: “Dawn, August seventeenth, 1943. England…The Eighth Bomber Command prepared 376 B-17s for the two most critical targets on their list: the ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt and the Messerschmitt aircraft factory at Regensburg, both deep in Germany.”
The airmen’s story is also told in the first person:
By the time we turned in our personal stuff, it was well understood that the projected doubleheader would bring on a large-scale and costly air battle. In chapels all over England, most of the men turned to their ministers, rabbis, or priests…And this day our double mission involved the deepest penetration ever attempted into Germany. And the largest bomber force to be dispatched to date.
Chapter Five
“General Hansell was aghast.”
1.
The orders given to Curtis LeMay on the eve of the Schweinfurt raid called for him to lead an elaborate decoy mission. He would take off first with the Fourth Bombardment Wing—a fleet of B-17 bombers. And they’d head for the Messerschmitt aircraft factories in Regensburg.
The idea was that LeMay’s group would tie up the Germans defending the Messerschmitt factories. And then they would keep going, through the Alps to North Africa, in the hopes of luring the German fighter planes as far away as possible from the corner of Bavaria where the ball-bearing factories were.
As LeMay later recalled, “We’d go in and hit Regensburg and go on out the Brenner Pass, and we wouldn’t have to fight coming out. [We] would bear the brunt going in of the German fighter force.”
Then the real bombing force, the First Bombardment Wing, would arrive.
As LeMay put it: “They would get in practically free because the German fighter force would be working against the [Fourth Bombardment Wing]…and then be on the ground reloading. But they’d have to fight going in and coming out.”
LeMay being LeMay, long before the day of the attack, he worried about the weather. He was taking off from the base in England, the land of mist and fog. So in the weeks leading up to the raid, he had his crews practice blind takeoffs, day after day.
Sure enough, on the morning of the mission, August 17, the fog was terrible. He remembered, “It’s stinking over England. As a matter of fact, we went out that morning, and they had to take lanterns and flashlights and lead the airplanes out from the hard stands at the end of the runway.”
LeMay led his men off into the gloom. Once they entered occupied France, the German fighters started to emerge from behind the clouds, and LeMay’s Fourth Bombardment Wing learned what it meant to fly headfirst into the heart of the German air defense.