Yet what did the men of the Bomber Mafia do after the disaster of Schweinfurt? They tried again. In the fall of 1943, the Eighth Air Force hit Schweinfurt a second time.
A few years after the war, a movie came out called Twelve O’Clock High. It was based on a book written by Beirne Lay, the pilot under LeMay. Twelve O’Clock High starred Gregory Peck as the leader of an attack on a ball-bearing factory. It’s worth watching because it perfectly captures the persistence of the Bomber Mafia’s vision. The men had failed the first time, but it didn’t matter. They would try again. Whatever evidence was slowly gathering about the limitations of the Norden bombsight didn’t faze them. The dream was alive.
As the character General Pritchard, modeled after Ira Eaker, says in the film,
There’s only one hope of shortening this war. Daylight precision bombing. If we fold, daylight bombing is done with. And I don’t know. Maybe it means the whole show. We could lose the war if we don’t knock out German industry.
You can smell what’s coming, Frank. I’m promising you nothing except a job no man should have to do who’s already had more than his share of combat. I’ve got to ask you to take nice kids and fly ’em until they can’t take it anymore. And then put ’em back in and fly ’em some more.
What the movie doesn’t do is follow the actual sequence of the first and second Schweinfurt raids—for obvious, Hollywood reasons. Because the second Schweinfurt raid was only marginally more successful than the first. It did more damage, but the German aircraft industry didn’t grind to a halt that time, either. Not even close. And how many planes did the Eighth Air Force lose in that second raid? Sixty outright; seventeen damaged so badly that they had to be mothballed; 650 airmen killed or captured. Nearly a quarter of the crews on that mission did not come home. Shortly thereafter, Ira Eaker—the leader of the Eighth—was reassigned. He was shunted over to the Mediterranean theater, which is the military equivalent of being sent to your room without dinner.
The year 1943 was a dark time for the Bomber Mafia. Every one of its ideas crumbled in the face of reality. The team was supposed to be able to put a bomb inside a pickle barrel from thirty thousand feet. That now seemed like a joke. And the bomber was supposed to fly so high and so fast that no one could touch it. Are you kidding me? US airmen of the Eighth Air Force were required to fly twenty-five missions to complete their tours of service. And if you were part of that second Schweinfurt mission, in which a quarter of the crews didn’t come back—well, you do the math. Fly twenty-five missions like that, and what are your odds of making it through the war alive?
There are dozens of interviews from World War II airmen remembering those desperate months. One of those men, George Roberts, a B-17 radio operator with the Eighth Air Force, recalls:
We were assigned to a squadron, [the] 367th Bomb Squadron. And I noticed a big sign out there. It said this: HOME OF THE 367TH CLAY PIGEON AIR FORCE. Boy, and I thought, what a funny name, to call an outfit “clay pigeons.” But…I was to find out later that “the clay pigeons” was a pretty good name for that squadron.
A clay pigeon is the name given to the targets used for shooting competitions: disks made out of clay, so that they shatter on impact, and colored fluorescent orange so they’re hard to miss. That’s not an encouraging name for a bombing squadron.
As the war over Europe dragged on, the pressure on the Bomber Mafia grew. The British became more contemptuous of the Eighth Bomber Command. Meanwhile, the brass back in Washington tried to push the air war in a new direction. They called for a different raid on Germany, an attack on the German city of Münster. Only Münster wasn’t an industrial center. It didn’t have an aircraft factory or a ball-bearing plant or an oil refinery. It was just a charming medieval town full of German civilians.
One pilot who flew the mission, Keith Harris, recalled,
We took off before the 390th on a mission to Münster, in Germany. It was on a Sunday, nice sunshiny day, beautiful day. Beautiful fall day. And the target was the built-up section of Münster. I thought it was rather inappropriate that these large set of steps in one big building in Münster was picked out as the aiming point.
He’s talking about the Münster Cathedral. The Eighth Air Force was being directed to bomb a church on a Sunday at midday, as people were coming out of Mass.
At the preflight briefing, the airmen had been in shock. This wasn’t what they had signed on to do. It wasn’t what the Eighth Air Force stood for. One navigator—who had been raised in a strict Methodist household—went up to his commanding officer and said he couldn’t do it. This was British-style area bombing, not American bombing. The navigator was told he faced court-martial if he didn’t fly the mission. So he did. And you know who else was in that briefing room, trying to wrap his head around what was happening? Haywood Hansell. One of his airmen later wrote simply: “General Hansell was aghast.”