To Kingdom Come (3 page)

Ira

Wednesday, 1 September 1943
Royal Air Force Base
Prestwick, Scotland
0730

M
ajor General Ira Eaker stood at the foot of the ramp as Hap Arnold emerged from the C-54 Skymaster and came down the steps to meet him. They shook hands and greeted each other without genuine warmth.

Outwardly self-assured, Eaker privately viewed Arnold’s inspection tour with foreboding. The two generals had been openly feuding for the previous three months, and it had seriously eroded a bond of mutual trust and friendship that went back more than twenty years.

Eaker thought that Arnold might be coming to relieve him of his command. It was the most important combat command in the air force, and he had come to relish its myriad challenges. He was prepared to do everything in his power to keep it, short of acceding to orders he was convinced could lead to its destruction, along with the destruction of the lives of thousands of young men whose fate rested on his decisions.

Arnold and Eaker enjoyed a complicated relationship.

Born in 1896, Ira Eaker began life in a six-family rural settlement in southwest Texas. His father, Y. Y. Eaker, was a proud and hardworking farmer, but continuing droughts in Texas made economic survival for the family a constant challenge.

Like Hap Arnold’s father, Y. Y. Eaker was remote and uncommunicative. In Ira’s case, it led him to seek out more responsive father figures as he grew older. His mother became the chief influence on his life.

Possessing only a grade school education herself, Dona Eaker was somehow convinced that of all her children, Ira was destined to accomplish great things. Early on, she imbued him with the drive to aim high in his goals.

In 1914, the family moved to Durant, Texas. It was their first home with electricity and running water. After Ira finished high school, his mother encouraged him to enter a nearby teachers’ college, where he subsequently achieved the highest grades of any student who had ever attended the school.

Fastidious in his personal habits, he always dressed for classes in a suit. It was the only one he owned, and each night he cleaned and pressed it before going to bed. He made no time for a social life, although he did join numerous athletic teams and extracurricular clubs, excelling in every activity. It was as if he had embarked on a lifelong mission to succeed. In what, he didn’t know, although his mother hoped he would someday become a distinguished judge.

On April 6, 1917, the United States entered the First World War. On the following day, Ira drove with friends to Greenville, Texas, and enlisted in the army. Because he was about to graduate from college, he was sent to an officers’ training camp.

At twenty-one, he was not an impressive physical specimen, standing five feet eight and weighing 115 pounds, but he met all the physical and mental challenges. After completing officers’ training, he was commissioned a second lieutenant and received orders to attend flying school.

The war ended before he earned his wings, but in the years afterward he came to love flying and became a gifted pilot, setting a number of flight endurance and distance records while also serving in a variety of staff and operational posts.

In 1922, he married the high-spirited Leah Chase, the daughter of an aerial flight surgeon. The marriage lasted only seven years. Like Hap Arnold, Eaker was devoted to his career. Leah Eaker found her pleasure in an active social life.

In the 1920s, Eaker served on the staffs of two senior generals in the air service, having an almost father-son relationship with each one as he continued his rise up the promotion ladder.

The ultimate father figure in Eaker’s life appeared in the form of Hap Arnold.

Eaker first met Arnold while serving under him at Rockwell Field in San Diego. Arnold was impressed with Eaker’s brains and grit. Eaker admired Arnold’s willingness to risk his career to build an independent air force, and signed on as an eager protégé.

In the years that followed, Eaker persevered to help Arnold achieve his goals. Like his mentor, Eaker came to believe in the sacred doctrine that daylight precision bombing alone could defeat any of America’s future enemies.

In 1942, Eaker had been Arnold’s first choice to command the Eighth’s heavy bomber force, and to prove its value in the skies over Europe. When the first bomb groups arrived in England in the summer of 1942, Eaker broke them in by attacking lightly defended military targets in France. He led the first mission himself.

On each succeeding daylight mission, American and British fighters escorted the Fortresses to and from the targets, defending them from enemy fighters. The losses in planes and crews averaged less than 3 percent, which Eaker considered acceptable.

In December 1942, he was promoted to command the entire Eighth Air Force, and over the next six months he slowly began to extend the range of the bombing targets into Germany, well beyond the capability of Allied fighters to accompany them. In these deeper-penetration raids, losses grew from 3 percent to nearly 10 percent of the crews.

These results caused Eaker to slowly change his mind about the Arnold mantra that the Fortresses could reach targets deep inside Germany without the support of long-range escort fighters. He had seen the debriefing reports in which returning crews repeatedly asserted that even superb air discipline hadn’t prevented the loss of many crews to concerted enemy fighter attacks.

He began a quietly aggressive campaign designed to convince Arnold to expedite the delivery of long-range fighters, and he requested a delay in further deep attacks into Germany until his current fighters could be equipped with jettisonable belly tanks to extend their range.

Arnold, who had just suffered his second heart attack, began to privately question Eaker’s toughness. He wouldn’t be able to deliver long-range fighters for months. By then, it might be too late to save the daylight bombing campaign. How could he hold off MacArthur and Admiral King from poaching his planes if he couldn’t show positive results?

He cabled Eaker a new series of demands, including an order to replace Eaker’s senior commanders with more aggressive officers who understood the urgency of the situation. Why weren’t they sending the new groups to Germany? he demanded to know. Why were so many of them grounded due to combat damage?

Eaker cabled back his own stinging reply.

“We get nowhere with recriminations,” he wrote.

On July 25, 1943, a beleaguered Eaker announced the launching of the Eighth Air Force’s long-awaited bombing offensive against Germany. Over the next week, seven different industrial and military complexes were attacked, including Hamburg, Hannover, Warnemunde, and Kassel. The bombing results were good, but bomber command lost a staggering total of one hundred Fortresses and a thousand men in the raids, 20 percent of its available planes and crews.

Eaker suspended the attacks on Germany until new replacements arrived.

The air offensive was resumed on August 17, 1943, when 146 Fortresses bombed the Messerschmitt factory complex in Regensburg, Germany, while 230 Fortresses hit the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt, Germany.

It was the most intensely fought air battle of the war up to that time. Both targets suffered extensive damage, but the Luftwaffe shot down sixty American bombers, thirty-six in the Schweinfurt attack and another twenty-four in the Regensburg force.

Although Eaker publicly hailed the Schweinfurt-Regensburg mission as a decisive victory, he privately wondered how long they could go on taking such enormous losses. With bomber command’s morale shattered, Eaker canceled all further attacks for ten days.

Two weeks later, Arnold arrived in England.

On the afternoon of September 1, they flew together from Prestwick to London. Eaker briefed Arnold on the details of his schedule for the next five days, which included inspections of airfields, bomb groups, fighter units, maintenance facilities, military hospitals, hospitality centers, and meetings with the top British and American commanders.

On the morning of September 2, Arnold flew from London up to Eaker’s Eighth Air Force headquarters, which was located at High Wycombe Abbey, formerly a school for well-bred girls, in the Chiltern Hills northwest of London. When Arnold arrived at the castlelike grounds, a brass band was on hand to mark his arrival, and he was greeted with a formal escort of honor.

Inside the sprawling mansion house, Arnold met the officers on Eaker’s staff and was briefed on Eaker’s method of operations, the types of air formations he was using, and the number of serviceable aircraft he had available after the recent battering over Regensburg and Schweinfurt.

After lunch with the senior commanders, the afternoon was devoted to a conference in which Arnold and Eaker could “discuss the employment of the Eighth Air Force, its present status, and its ultimate objectives.”

Arnold pulled no punches.

He told Eaker that at the recent meetings in Quebec between Roosevelt and Churchill to finalize plans for the invasion of Europe, the British had taken the opportunity to strongly criticize Arnold for his stubborn adherence to daylight precision bombing. Now, General George Marshall was beginning to waver in his support for the campaign. Proposals were in the works to shift the assets of the Eighth Air Force to other theaters. Time was running out.

In two days Arnold would be holding a press conference to proclaim the success of the Eighth’s new air offensive against Germany. What would he tell them? That they were going to attack France again?

On the previous day, Eaker had sent his Fortresses to bomb airfields near Paris.

Arnold told Eaker he would have to renew the air offensive against Germany with the assets he had. It was time to prove the effectiveness of daylight precision bombing once and for all. The Fortresses would have to protect themselves by using tight group formations. Battle cohesion would make the difference.

After serving under Arnold for twenty years, Eaker knew that the biggest mistake he could make would be to tell him that something he wanted done couldn’t be done. Instead, he tried a different approach. As long as he commanded the Eighth Air Force, Eaker said, he would conduct operations in such a way that “we will always be growing ... not diminishing.” Arnold stood up and ended the conference.

On his way back to London, he wrote in his diary, “Couldn’t take any more.”

Over the next two days, Arnold inspected the Fourth Bombardment Wing, which included many of the groups that had bombed Schweinfurt and Regensburg a few weeks earlier. He praised the performance of Colonel Curtis LeMay, who had led the Regensburg mission, and General Robert Williams, who had commanded the force that went to Schweinfurt.

Later, he witnessed a scramble of P-47 Thunderbolt fighters, and asked to meet with some of the P-47 pilots. They assured him that the plane was a match for the newer-model Luftwaffe fighters.

On the afternoon of September 4, Arnold held his press conference on the importance of the bombing offensive against Germany. More than a hundred reporters packed the headquarters of the European Theater of Operations (ETO) in London.

“It has long been our firm conviction that the way to shorten the war against Hitler is to first win the air battle with Germany,” he told them. “We weaken the punch of our enemy by hitting him directly over his heart. Cautiously, but without once wavering from our conviction that daylight precision bombing of German targets will work, the Eighth Air Force has pushed deeper and deeper into the so-called Nazi ‘Fortress of Europe.’ There were doubters of daylight bombing, here and at home in the past—but no more now.”

Ira Eaker sat in the audience, listening. He had no doubts about the potential success of daylight bombing, either, once he got the long-range fighters that were needed to protect his bombers. Without them, it would be a bloody passage.

Arnold spoke for nearly thirty minutes, talking about the bravery of the Fortress crews as they “fought through Nazi fighter and flak defenses to bomb precision targets within eighty miles of Berlin, right into the heart of Germany.” He cited the dire prospects of German fighter pilots who still attacked the Fortresses in their combat box formations. “The other day we intercepted the frantic question of one Focke-Wulf pilot ... translated, in effect what he said was: How the hell do I bust into this formation? All I can see is tracers reaching for me!”

The British and Americans were now seizing “complete supremacy in the air over Germany,” Arnold concluded before opening the floor to the assembled reporters. When the press conference was over, he wrote in his diary that he had successfully “dodged all of the embarrassing questions.”

That evening, Eaker hosted a dinner for Arnold and a dozen of his old army friends. Eaker had arranged a special event for the after-dinner entertainment. It was a newly completed motion picture in which Arnold had been filmed talking about the growth of the air force and his pride in the men who served in it.

Due to a glitch in the projector, the sound of Arnold’s voice was not synchronized with the movement of his mouth. Sometimes his mouth would move and there would be no sound. At other times, his mouth would be closed and the words would flow out.

No one laughed.

The next morning, Sunday, September 5, Eaker met with his staff at High Wycombe Abbey to plan the Eighth Air Force’s next bombing mission. There was little doubt in his mind that if he didn’t soon resume the attacks on Germany, he would be relieved of his command.

Although it was raining across southern England, the meteorological report for the following day suggested clear skies over most of Western Europe. It would be General Arnold’s last day in England.

Arnold had spent September 5 visiting battle casualties at a hospital near Oxford. Late in the afternoon, he returned to his suite at Claridge’s Hotel in London, and enjoyed a quiet dinner with two senior army commanders in the hotel dining room. He was back in his suite preparing for bed when the communication arrived.