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

Yenne, Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425274187 ISBN 13: 9780425274187

Publisher: Dutton Caliber, 2016

Synopsis

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. 

Barely a month after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Army formed its Eighth Air Force, the first bomber command on either side to commit to strategic daylight bombing, with the goal of defeating the Third Reich from the air. The men of the Eighth paid the price in both lives and blood. 

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 Medal of Honor. 

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

“Bill Yenne scores another bull’s-eye with Hit the Target...This is a story everyone should know.”—Robert Bruce Arnold is the co-author of Wilderness of Tigers, A Novel of Saigon and grandson of the Air Force’s only Five Star General, Hap Arnold

“The story of the mighty United States Eighth Air Force is one for the ages.”—Brian Sobel, author of The Fighting Pattons

About this title

About the Author:

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

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 the five sons of a farmhand and part-time cowboy named Young Yancy “Y.Y.” Eaker and his wife, Dona Lee Graham Eaker, who was only 17 when Ira was born. As Eaker later told Colonel Joe Green of the US Military History Institute, the family was “poor by any modern standard, but we didn’t know it. We were comfortable and had plenty of food and we considered that our status enabled us to move forward and encouraged us to do so.”

The family, originally called Ecker, had emigrated from the Pfalz (Palatine) region in what is now southwestern Germany in the early eighteenth century. They originally settled in upstate New York, but later generations drifted west. Ira’s grandfather William Eaker came to Eden in Concho County, Texas, after the Civil War. Y. Y. Eaker was born there two years before his father died in 1874 at the age of 60. Ira’s father moved the family back to Eden—named for Fred Ede, not for the biblical garden—and bought a farm near the town when the eldest son was nine.

Schooling was important for all the Eaker children—Dona’s father was on the school board—but Ira’s mother always felt that he was the smartest one of her brood and urged him to set his sights beyond the horizon as viewed from Eden. Church was also an important part of the family routine, and as a small boy Ira had once aspired to be an apostle—until he was told that their ranks had been closed after the first 12. “I went to church enough before I was ten to do me the rest of my life,” he later told his biographer, James Parton.

Ira grew up, like most boys, reading adventure stories, but an exciting reality that other boys only read about in stories was not far from his door. “My earliest heroes were cowboys and Indians,” Ira later recalled. “I grew up with them. Cowboys taught me to play poker.”

—

Jimmy Doolittle was the son of a carpenter who had left Massachusetts for California to seek his fortune. Having sailed around Cape Horn to reach the Golden State, Frank Henry Doolittle settled in Alameda. It was here that he met and married Rosa Ceremah Shepherd, and where they had their only child, a little boy. On his birth certificate, he was called simply “Doolittle.” He was never to know why he was not named until later, nor why they eventually named him James Harold. He knew only that he hated his middle name.

Frank and Rosa might have remained in Alameda or thereabouts permanently, but 1896 was the year of the Klondike Gold Rush. Gold was discovered in Canada’s Yukon Territory in August of that year, and news soon reached Seattle and San Francisco that a man could gather up nuggets the size of a robin’s egg by the handful. A few hardy souls headed north immediately, despite the onset of winter in a harsh environment that most could not have anticipated. After the “Rush” of 1896 and the spring thaw of 1897, there came what was to be called the Klondike “Stampede.”

Frank Doolittle was among the thousands who stampeded northward. He was one of many who arrived after the easy pickings had been picked, but he found his carpentry skills in high demand in boomtowns such as Dawson. His gold came in a manner that he had not expected, but in a manner more reliable than staking his fate on flecks in a gold pan. While Frank was up north, young Jimmy Doolittle spent his first three birthdays back in California without a father.

Meanwhile, stories told of golden sand along the shores of the Bering Sea fired another gold rush. In 1899, Frank Doolittle reached Nome, a little village that quickly became Alaska’s largest city, and in June 1900 he sent for his family. Rosa, Jimmy, and Rosa’s sister, Sarah, were among 25,000 who arrived that summer.

As he had in the Klondike, Frank Doolittle returned to carpentry. Among other things, he built a comfortable home for his family. On the plains of Texas and Oklahoma, Ira Eaker’s family did not have electricity in their home until he was in his teens. In Nome, Jimmy Doolittle’s family had electricity before he started to school.

Once in school, Jimmy found himself the shortest in his class, and discovered that size put him at a disadvantage. “A few of the taller boys took delight in teasing and provoking the shorter boys, and since I was the shortest one around, they tried to give me a bad time,” he wrote in his memoirs. “They shoved and I shoved back. They punched and I returned their punches. . . . Since my size was against me, I decided my survival could be insured only by a speedy attack right from the start. I began to blast my opponents with a flurry of punches regardless of the consequences. The tactics worked. I found it was easy to draw blood if you were nimble on your feet, aimed at a fellow’s nose, and got your licks in early. After several antagonists went home with bloody noses, I earned a certain measure of respect.”

Though Frank rarely engaged in conversation with his son and remained distant and aloof, he did teach the boy how to work with tools. Jimmy wrote in his memoirs that he longed for a closer relationship with his loner father, but it never happened. In his recollections, the defining moment in their relationship came when Frank falsely accused Jimmy of lying—and then beat him up. The skinny little boy promised that one day he would do the same to his father, and Frank Doolittle just laughed.

Jimmy might have grown to manhood in Alaska, hunting and fishing and perhaps pursuing his father’s trade, but in the late summer of 1908, as he was nearing his twelfth birthday, his mother decided to leave Frank, and Alaska, permanently. Taking Jimmy, she sailed for Los Angeles, where she had relatives, and where she would spend the rest of her life. Jimmy wrote in his memoirs that he assumed he would see his father again soon. It would be six years.

CHAPTER 2

In 1906, Carl Andrew Spaatz (we’ll use the later double-“a” spelling for the sake of consistency) enrolled in the college prep Perkiomen School in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, but when his father was injured in a fire in 1908, Carl was called home to run the family newspaper. By the time Charles recovered, the family’s finances were stretched thin. Despite his local prominence, Charles had never become a wealthy man. Being a big fish in a 1,436-person pond had its limitations, as did the circulation of such a pond’s leading newspaper. The family, which had come to include five children—plus Charles’s mother—lived in the same building that contained the newspaper offices and the pressroom.

The family had always imagined higher education for Carl, though, as times were hard, this now seemed further and further from their grasp financially. Though the US Military Academy at West Point—like its naval counterpart in Annapolis—offered free education, it was considered as a higher education option even by families with no military pedigree, so competition was fierce, and it was extremely hard to gain admission.

Somehow, though, Carl got into West Point. David Mets notes that Charles was an acquaintance of Major Thomas Rhoads, personal physician to President William Howard Taft, and that it was he who made the suggestion and facilitated the appointment. However, a June 3, 1982, article in the Boyertown Area Times (a descendant of Charles’s newspaper, but no longer family owned) suggests that Congressman John Hoover Rothermel made a congressional appointment in exchange for Charles Spatz’s not running against him for Congress.

As with many men who went on to significant military careers, Carl Andrew Spaatz’s time at West Point was undistinguished academically and marred by fr...

About this edition

• Publisher: Dutton Caliber
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0425274187
• ISBN 13: 9780425274187
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384