Hit The Target: Eight Men who Led the Eighth Air Force to Victory over the Luftwaffe - Hardcover

Yenne, Bill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0425274179 ISBN 13: 9780425274170

Verlag: Penguin Putnam Inc, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Selected for the Chief of Staff of the Air Force Reading List

From Bill Yenne, author of the military histories Big Week and Aces High, comes the stirring true story of the Eighth Air Force in World War II.

Less than a month after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Army formed its first air force designated to operate overseas, the Eighth. Within four months, they had set up base in England. Three months later, they were bombing German targets in occupied Europe.

The Eighth was the first bomber command on either side to commit to strategic daylight bombing. It was a major change in tactics—and the men of the Eighth paid the price in both lives and blood. But it was that very sacrifice that led the Allies to victory.

Hit the Target introduces readers to those who made the Eighth Air Force the formidable juggernaut it soon became. Men of all ranks, from General Tooey Spaatz, the hard-driving founding commander, to Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, the hero who led the first air raid on Japan, to Maynard “Snuffy” Smith, the irascible first airman in Europe to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, and Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal, who survived his time with the “Bloody Hundredth,” which lost airmen at a horrifying rate, and who went on to serve as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.

The story of the Mighty Eighth is told through these men, whose careers paralleled the early history of aviation  and who helped  to revolutionize airborne warfare and win World War II.

INCLUDES PHOTOS

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bill Yenne is the author of more than three dozen nonfiction books, especially on aviation and military history, including Big Week and Aces High. He lives and works in San Francisco, California.

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EIGHT OF THE EIGHTH

NOTE ON ORGANIZATION

The Eighth Air Force was one of 16 numbered air forces that comprised the US Army Air Forces (USAAF) during World War II. Numbered air forces were composed of “commands,” defined by function and typically designated with a Roman numeral that was the same number as that of the air force. The Eighth was composed of the VIII Bomber Command and the VIII Fighter Command—long-range heavy bombers and the fighters to escort them—as well as the VIII Air Force Base Command to manage its base infrastructure. The VIII Air Support Command was added to operate medium bombers in a tactical role, but was later peeled off to form the nucleus of the Ninth Air Force.

Within the USAAF table of organization, the “group” was the basic building block, and was contained within the commands. Groups initially contained three squadrons, although larger organizations, such as the Eighth Air Force, later added a fourth squadron to many groups. As the numbers of groups increased in 1943–1944, “wings” were activated to contain multiple groups, and “divisions” were later activated to contain multiple wings. Both wings and divisions were technically contained within commands, although, beginning in 1944, those within the Eighth Air Force answered directly to the Eighth Air Force headquarters.

INTRODUCTION

The Eighth Air Force is not the subject of this book but the stage upon which the climactic act of eight stories takes place. It was the wartime home of these eight individuals, whose lives intersected beneath its roof.

These are eight parallel lives chosen from among those of around 350,000 men who were part of this unique organization during a crossroads of world history. These eight came from widely varied backgrounds, in a dozen states, from North Carolina to Alaska (then a territory).

Tooey Spaatz, Ira Eaker, and Jimmy Doolittle each served as commander of the Eighth Air Force during World War II, but their careers were much more than their time with the Eighth. Their aviation careers were closely intertwined with one another and with the early evolution of American aviation and American airpower.

Curtis LeMay and Hub Zemke were also accomplished prewar military pilots, and they became important leaders in the middle tier of command at the Eighth. With LeMay commanding bomber units and Zemke commanding fighters, both led large numbers of men, but both also flew combat missions themselves.

Maynard “Snuffy” Smith, an anomaly among the eight, was the only enlisted man. He was the first living airman in the European Theater to receive the Medal of Honor, but his medal was a shining island in a lifetime of mischief and failure. Recalling Smith’s life is like looking at a train wreck. Though it is unsettling to watch, we cannot avert our eyes. Yet he is an icon of the Eighth who is not forgotten, and who symbolizes how service with the Eighth brought out the very best in even the most unlikely people.

Bob Morgan piloted the Memphis Belle, probably the best remembered of the tens of thousands of B-17 Flying Fortresses that were operated by the Eighth—and he later served under LeMay in the Pacific. Just as Doolittle led the first American raid on Tokyo in 1942, Morgan led the next mission to Tokyo in 1944.

Rosie Rosenthal flew Flying Fortresses with the 100th Bomb Group, known as the “Bloody Hundredth” for the terribly heavy losses that it suffered in combat. On his third mission with the Bloody Hundredth, Rosenthal was the only member of the group on that mission who came back. He interrupted his career as an attorney to fly with the Eighth, and then returned to Germany after the war as part of the prosecution team at Nuremberg.

Though the Eighth Air Force was only one of 16 numbered air forces within the US Army Air Forces (USAAF) during World War II, it was the largest, and today it is probably the most famous. At the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force in Pooler, Georgia, we are reminded that the Eighth suffered half the casualties of the entire USAAF during World War II.

These eight lives are representative of those of more than a third of a million men who rose to a challenge and helped wield the relentless hammer that pounded the Third Reich into submission, earning an indelible place in the annals of world history for the Eighth Air Force.

CHAPTER 1

Three of the eight were born on the cusp of two centuries, in which the paradigms that had defined the nineteenth were recognized to have expired but the defining characteristics of the twentieth were not yet known. These men, who were born when manned, powered flight was still a pipe dream, would be among the shapers of twentieth-century military aviation.

Carl Andrew Spatz came into the world on June 28, 1891, in the southeastern Pennsylvania community of Boyertown, a village of 1,436 people by the reckoning of the previous year’s national census. A second-generation American of German extraction, he was the eldest son and second child of Anne Muntz Spatz and her husband of two years, Charles Spatz, a politically active newspaperman whose own parents, Karl and Juliana Amalie Busch Spatz, had emigrated from Prussia in 1865. Karl was an accomplished commercial printer fluent in several languages; Juliana was related to the Krupp family, the powerful German industrialists.

Later in the coming century, a second “a” was added to the surname to give it a “Dutch” appearance. According to David Mets, Carl Andrew’s biographer, the second “a” was also intended to encourage the correct pronunciation of the surname (“spots”) rather than “spats,” which was synonymous with the pretentious and outmoded footwear accessory.

Karl bought the Boyertown Democrat newspaper, running it until his death in 1884, after which it was taken over by Charles, then only 19 years old. By 1891, when young Carl Andrew was born, the paper was still going strong and Charles was gaining influence in the Boyertown community.

On the editorial page, Charles expressed a sentiment for an expansionist foreign policy, such as the intervention in Cuba on behalf of its independence from Spain. Today, small-town papers usually restrict themselves to local news, but in those days—before cable news networks or even radio—people got all their world news and journalistic opinion from newspapers.

In 1896, Charles Spatz was elected to the state assembly, and young Carl Andrew joined him in Harrisburg as a page before joining the staff of the paper, now called the Berks County Democrat, where he was described as the youngest Linotype operator in the state.

—

Ira Clarence Eaker and James Harold Doolittle were both born in 1896, a year in which hints of the transition to a new age in the coming century were seen and discussed. It was the year that Henry Ford first putted down a Michigan lane in his gasoline-powered “Quadricycle,” though no one but Ford himself—and perhaps not even him—grasped the importance of this turn of events. In Dayton, Ohio, Wilbur and Orville Wright were imagining technology that was even further from the imagination of the average person than that which Ford was exploring.

Eaker was born on April 13, 1896, in Field Creek in Llano County, Texas, about 100 miles north of San Antonio, near the Old Chisholm Trail. Doolittle was born eight months later, on December 14, at the western edge of the continent in Alameda, California, a Navy town within sight of San Francisco.

Field Creek, where the post office was closed in 1976, still doesn’t appear on most maps. Ira was the eldest of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Putnam Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0425274179
• ISBN 13: 9780425274170
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 372
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar