Hell Above Earth: The Incredible True Story of an American WWII Bomber Commander and the Copilot Ordered to Kill Him

PROLOGUE

1943. Werner has the world by the tail, or perhaps vice versa.

As a new pilot, he has one of the most dangerous training assignments in the army. Fifteen thousand fellow aviators, kids mostly, will die in stateside accidents without ever seeing combat, but somehow he’s sure that won’t happen to him. He is a Goering, born to command men in the air as his uncle Hermann did in WWI. But now, Hermann Göring is Werner’s personal enemy.

The army has just tossed the nineteen-year-old former slacker, who barely graduated at the bottom of his high school class, the keys to a new 4800-horsepower warplane that tops out at 302 miles per hour and can obliterate an entire postal code. His B-17 heavy bomber carries two and a half tons of explosives and cruises at altitudes three times higher than a man can breathe at—almost a mile higher than the tip of Mount Everest—where wisps of clouds form pearly shrouds that will permanently envelop 120,000 Allied airmen in the European theater during this war.

He is responsible for the lives of ten highly trained youngsters, a ton of intelligence and signals data, a top-secret Norden bombsight, and a hell of a lot of firepower. A winged, righteous avenging angel with a personal grudge, commanding the world’s most sophisticated weapons system: for the tall, handsome, squeaky-clean, blond, blue-eyed Mormon son of German immigrants, this is as good as it gets. His faith and the military have imbued him with ideals delivered in familiar noble words: sacred glory, salvation, duty, sacrifice, war against evil, peace on earth. Less clear are images of insanity, drowning, burning, freezing, dismemberment, or quietly spiraling from the heavens, like Icarus, into an inferno he has ignited. For Werner, it’s not just good versus evil; it’s about a young kid reclaiming the family name and fighting an evil warlord in his own arena—the skies over Germany. Werner, on the side of light, proudly wears hard-earned silver wings on his puffed-out chest. He is going to war, the biggest, bloodiest war humanity has ever fought, a war in which strategic airpower—his chosen specialty, his only art—is the key factor.

The world is tearing itself apart, yet Werner fears no evil since he believes, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that his Lord and Savior cradles him in the hollows of his bloody hands.

*   *   *

Given the odds he faced, Werner needed divine protection. He was about to join the war’s longest continual battle. Army-issued Colt .45 pistols held seven rounds. If a man were to play Russian roulette with one round in the magazine, he’d have about a 14 percent chance of dying—almost the same odds as a Mighty Eighth WWII-era bomber crewman had on any given day. On some days in some units, more than 40 percent were lost; on others, none, yet of those who flew in the Mighty Eighth, more than 12 percent died in ways too varied and horrible to imagine.

The Luftwaffe captured, repaired, studied, and flew dozens of B-17s, and their fighter command quickly discovered its Achilles’ heel; early Flying Fortress models lacked adequate forward-firing capability. Despite having a dozen .50 caliber Browning machine guns, none could be pointed dead ahead, so German pilots simply engaged them head-on at closing velocities that approached the speed of sound.

*   *   *

Commanding Ruthie II in 1943, en route to bomb Hanover, pilot Robert L. Campbell, Ruthie’s husband, and copilot John C. Morgan had just made landfall over the continent when they were attacked head-on by a BMW-powered 1700-horsepower Focke-Wulf 190 fighter, described by its designer as a cavalry horse as opposed to a racehorse. A machine-gun burst from the fighter blasted through Campbell’s windshield, splitting his skull, but not killing him instantly. Campbell collapsed forward over the control column and clasped his arms tightly around it so the copilot, Morgan, had to use brute force to work the controls on his side to keep the bomber under control. The striking six-footer Morgan needed all of his 200 pounds to overcome the crazed strength of the dying pilot, as Campbell, out of his mind, attacked his friend Morgan and tried to wrest the controls away. The dying pilot, streaming blood, punched the copilot in the face, knocked some teeth loose, and blackened both eyes as Morgan fended off the blows with his left fist while keeping his roundhouse right firmly on the yoke. The shock of the awful injury and unexpected life-or-death struggle in the cockpit went unnoticed by the eight other men whose lives depended on the outcome. Morgan hollered for help over the plane’s interphone but got no reply. The same burst of fire that mortally wounded Campbell also struck the top turret gunner, severing Sgt. Tyre C. Weaver’s left arm just below the shoulder. During a cockpit emergency, it was usually the navigator or the top gunner—the men closest to the cockpit—who came to assist. Weaver slid down into the rear of the nose compartment and slumped onto the floor behind the navigator, Lt. Keith J. Koske, who immediately went to his aid. Since the interphone was inoperable, the horrific drama under way in the cockpit continued for more than an hour, unknown to the other crewmen, who were initially fighting off waves of Luftwaffe fighters.

In the rear of the plane, the waist gunners, radio operator, and tail gunner had all fallen unconscious from lack of oxygen since the plane’s onboard oxygen system had been knocked out. They were in mortal danger. Koske, wearing a portable oxygen unit, tried to tie off Weaver’s arm with a tourniquet, but there was not enough of a stump left. He also tried to give the turret gunner a shot of morphine, but the syrette, likely frozen, malfunctioned. Realizing Weaver would never survive the four-hour return flight, Koske strapped a parachute onto Weaver and was dragging him to the escape hatch when Weaver, in shock, jerked the chute open with his remaining hand while still inside the howling cabin. Koske bundled the billowing silk under Weaver’s sole arm and shoved him into space. Unaware of the gruesome struggle under way in the cockpit, he then went aft to find out why the guns were silent and rendered aid to the unconscious and badly frostbitten gunners. Almost two hours had passed since Campbell had been shot in the head when Koske finally moved forward to find Morgan still flying with one hand while keeping the still-struggling Campbell off the controls. Morgan, not hearing his plane’s guns firing, assumed that most of his crew had bailed out. And, despite his ordeal, had continued on and completed his Hanover bombing run. With Koske’s help, they were finally able slide the pilot out of the cockpit, where the navigator held him to prevent him from slipping through the open hatch. After the successful bombing run, Morgan returned to England and landed at the first RAF station he saw and became a Medal of Honor recipient. Weaver, the one-armed turret gunner, survived his ordeal as a POW. The army memoralized the incident for propaganda purposes in a heroic cartoon that can be seen on YouTube, at Medal of Honor—with One Hand.

Soon, a new Fortress model was introduced, the B-17G, which featured forward-firing machine guns mounted in a Plexiglas chin turret that the bombardier operated.

Another 1943 mission gained the dubious distinction of the biggest fiasco of the year. As 338 B-17s rumbled toward Stuttgart, cloud cover was heavy and fighter opposition was scarce. In the opinion of historian Roger Freeman, both were indicators that the attack should have been called off. The Germans, using cloud-penetrating radar, had figured out the target and were marshaling their forces over Stuttgart. As the bombers reached their target, several fighter groups approached the formation from the eleven o’clock and twelve o’clock positions. At twenty-second intervals, entire squads of fighters attacked the formation and rolled out for another pass; thirty-one Fortresses and 310 men were lost in short order. The 563rd bomb squadron … was completely wiped out.

And again, on the afternoon of October 14, 1943, remembered today as Black Thursday, before long-range P-51 Mustangs were available to escort the bombers, the Mighty Eighth lost sixty Flying Fortresses: 600 men were missing or dead, and another 47 dead or wounded were unloaded from the lucky stragglers that managed to return from an attack on Schweinfurt’s ball-bearing production center. The loss incurred … amounted to more than double the ten percent of force figure that the Eighth Air Force considered prohibitive.… Morale at bomber bases was at a low ebb and … the Fortress crews were … incurring a casualty rate higher than any other branch of the U.S. Forces.

1

NOW TERROR, TRULY

The thundering ships took off one behind the other. At 5,000 feet they made their formation. The men sat quietly at their stations, their eyes fixed. And the deep growl of the engines shook the air, shook the world and shook the future.

—John Steinbeck, 1942

Perhaps it was the scale, as well as the horror of it all, that still boggles the mind. Before WWII no one had seen anything like the terrifying spectacle of hundred-mile-long armadas of 2,000-plus bombers and fighters regularly and methodically razing the continent. Day after day, night after night, airmen took flight over Europe, bombing and strafing factories, ports, and cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in the process.

Between 1940 and 1945, the United States, with the help of more than 3 million workers hustled onto assembly lines, produced 296,000 airplanes at a cost of $44 billion—more than a quarter of the war’s $180 billion munitions bill. The gross national product soared 60 percent from 1938 to 1942. Five million new jobs were created. GM employed half a million persons and accounted for a tenth of all wartime production. At the peak, Boeing was making sixteen new Flying Fortresses a day, and its 40,000 employees literally worked around the clock. Boeing lost $3 million in the five years before 1941 but enjoyed net wartime profits of $27.6 million. Ford alone produced more military equipment … than Italy.

Across Nazi-occupied Europe, a calculated mixture of incendiary and high-explosive bombs obliterated buildings that had stood for centuries. Fire-driven, oxygen-sucking winds whipped flames into pyres of biblical proportions; some were hundreds of feet high and as wide as city blocks—convenient homing beacons for subsequent waves of bombers. Automobiles and streetcars melted in temperatures above 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Asphalt ignited and flowed like lava. People who sought safety in water towers, ponds, and fountains were trapped and boiled alive. Others, who sought safety belowground, suffocated from a lack of oxygen.

In 1945, Newsweek, referring to civilian bombing, published an article entitled Now Terror, Truly. Dresden historian Marshall De Bruhl wrote that in less than fourteen hours, the work of centuries had been undone. The scene was similar in all major German cities. Most of Berlin was demolished. Toward the end, it was ceaseless: almost three-quarters of all the Allied bombs dropped on Europe fell during the final twelve months of the war. By May 1945, up to 80 percent of most of Germany’s urban centers were wiped out and up to 650,000 civilians lay dead, 16 percent of them children. Another 800,000 were wounded. In France, 70,000 civilians died, in Italy another 50,000. England, by comparison, suffered 60,000 civilian deaths at the hands of the Luftwaffe. During the war, the Allies killed two or three German civilians by bombing for every German soldier they killed on the battlefield. It was literally hell on earth.

The air battle over Nazi-occupied Europe was a different kind of fresh hell. It lasted about three years for the Americans and about double that for the English. It was the longest battle of the war, during which an average of about 115 Allied airmen died daily, as did about 650 civilians, including women, children, pensioners, and slave laborers, most of who died following the United States’ entry into the war.

In his 1942 book, Bombs Away, Stanford University dropout John Steinbeck neatly summed up the challenge facing bomber crews and their commanders.

Of all branches … the Air Force must act with the least precedent, the least tradition. Nearly all tactics and formations of infantry have been tested over ten thousand years.… But the Air Force has no centuries of trial and error to study; it must feel its way, making its errors and correcting them.

The errors and corrections were recorded in blood. About 26,000 men and women died in aircraft accidents during the war. In the British-based U.S. Army’s Eighth Air Force alone, another 26,000 Americans, or 12.3 percent of the third of a million men who flew, were killed in action—more than the total U.S. Marines death count for the entire war. Only the United States’ Pacific submariners suffered higher fatality rates—more than 20 percent. Yet in total numbers, the Eighth Air Force alone lost more than seven times the global number of U.S. submariner fatalities. The Mighty Eighth suffered 26,000 combat deaths out of its 350,000 officers and men who flew. By comparison, the U.S. Navy suffered 37,000 deaths out of the 4.1 million who served in the WWII Navy. The battle also cost the British Royal Air Force 56,000 dead. If wounded and captured airmen totals are included, the Eighth Air Force had the highest casualty rate in the American Armed Forces in WWII.

Allied saturation bombing shattered not only Nazi Germany’s industrial spine but also American notions of isolationalism in a rabid war. It washed away all naivety regarding the human and moral costs of industrial war in which the cogs of the machine are not only soldiers but also the civilians supplying their material needs. Air war was, in large part, about the substitution of capital for labor—of machinery for men. A single crew of trained fliers could hope to kill a very large number of Germans even if they flew only twenty successful missions before being killed or captured themselves.

The men who devastated Nazi Germany from the air are dying daily. With them dies the personal experience of setting a continent aflame. Few other men in history have deployed such devastating force for as long as the crews of the U.S. Army Air Force did over Europe: 1,042 days, from 1942 to 1945. The air battle over Europe, one of the longest and costliest of any war, heralded not only the nearly complete devastation of the world’s cultural cradle but also the controversial decision by Western democracies to engage in industrial-scale terror bombing on civilian populations. It neatly ushered in atomic-age rationale for a new corps of battle planners, such as Maj. Curtis E. Old Iron Ass LeMay, to whom the wholesale destruction of cities was a near-daily personal routine.

The men and boys, like Werner and Jack, who carried out these attacks, almost on a daily basis, weather permitting, were truly a unique breed of highly trained specialists utilizing the world’s most sophisticated weapons platforms of the era. To combat the terror in the skies they faced, and Nazi terror on the ground, they were ordered to create a literal hell on earth for enemy military, industrial and, ultimately, civilian targets.

Although they slept in clean sheets and ate hot meals every day bomber crews flew, even while training, was like D-day, exacting tremendous amounts of emotional uncertainty and trauma. Some men, like Werner, accepted this, even thrived on and welcomed the adrenaline rush. Werner knew death could come in a variety of ways: an unlucky flak burst, Luftwaffe fighters that could appear anywhere at any time, pilot error while flying less than fifteen feet apart. Even the air they breathed four miles above the earth was deadly. Others suffered more as their mission totals mounted; the risks of air combat harrowed them fiercely as they neared the magic number that would allow them to return home, duty done.

Werner was an exceptional pilot. Gifted. His nerves of steel, combined with his unwavering ability to make split-second decisions, saw his crew safely home, mission after grueling mission. But for Werner, there was an added danger: he didn’t realize that at any moment his family name could cost him his life.

2

THE BOTTOM RUNG

With the exception of the Civil War, the two greatest existential threats to the United States were the Great Depression and WWII, the latter being the greatest man-made catastrophe in human history. Hitting back-to-back as they did, anyone coming of age between 1930 and 1945 was exposed to the political equivalent of crippling childhood diseases: economic collapse and the rise of virulent, fascist militarism. The adolescent body politic, weakened by the first, was more vulnerable to the second. Like a teenager, America was headstrong, naïve, self-absorbed, increasingly muscular yet unsure, untested, and often unwise. Before heavy bombers and atomic weapons debuted in WWII, the rest of the world seemed distant, uninteresting, and dangerous to most Americans.

Even after the European war broke out in September 1939, for the first two years, most Americans had no clear picture of, and often little interest in, their nation’s unique and vital role in the preservation of democratic freedom as a political system. Let them fight their own wars, was a common sentiment promoted by those prepared to find accommodation with Hitler. The isolationists included the U.S. ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy; Nazi sympathizer and Fascist anti-semitic Charles Coughlin, who had an audience of up to 30 million listeners, about a fifth of the country; Senator Alf Landon; and, most notably for air-war planners, aviator Charles Lindbergh, who before Pearl Harbor was the influential face of nearly 1 million members of the America First Committee, probably the foremost non-interventionist [and] anti-war organization in American history. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was privately convinced that Lindbergh was a Nazi. If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this, Roosevelt exploded to Secretary Henry Morgenthau in May 1940, I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi.

Polls taken in July 1940, ten months after the European war started, showed only eight percent of Americans supported war against Germany; immediately prior to Pearl Harbor, another poll confirmed what Franklin Roosevelt already knew: more than three-quarters of Americans remained opposed to another war with Germany. The nation of immigrants, with German Americans representing a fifth of the population, hoped and prayed they’d left thorny Old World rivalries and grudges behind, and focused on securing their personal patch of grass in the vast fields of opportunity that America offered. Roosevelt was forced to resort to blatant yet, in retrospect, forgivable and essential lies about the United States’ likely entry into the war so as to secure his third term in 1940. During the run-up to the war and the all-important and unprecedented third-term 1940 elections, FDR’s ability to juggle the fears and outright opposition of isolationists, his own military, the industrialists, and his Republican opponents in Congress—all simultaneously—surely ranks among the greatest of all of the master’s political conjuring