Leuna Synthetic Oil Works at Merseburg wrecked by 8th AF and RAF
Leuna Synthetic Oil Works at Merseburg wrecked by 8th AF and RAF
German production of fighter aircraft actually increased through 1944 into 1945. The dispersed manufacturing plants were beyond our power to seriously damage. Therefore, some postwar surveys concluded that our bombing offensive was a failure. But our bombing was just good enough that the Luftwaffe fighters had to keep rising to attack us, and then they were mostly destroyed by our P-51s and P-47s. So the Luftwaffe suffered a shortage of pilots rather than a lack of planes. And thanks to our efforts at such places as Misburg and Merseburg they ran out of aviation fuel even before they ran out of pilots. Thus we gained mastery of the skies, and from D-Day on our troops knew that their enemy was earth-bound.
Heroism
Military heroism is perhaps mostly a matter of getting used to combat
as a way of life, to carrying on in a normal way in an abnormal environment.
In our B-24s and B-17s we had no way of warding off the shrapnel fired
at us. We had to sit there and take it. Some men of the 493rd could not
function in combat; they were sent home. What were the limits of our personal
endurance? What if all the missions had been like the one to Magdeburg?
We could not know our breaking point. And yet, I like to think that our
crew if ordered to fly a 50-mission tour, as did many bomber crews in the
15th Air Force out of Italy, we'd have done so with no more than the usual
number of expletive-punctuated complaints.
A Lesson Learned
In 1944-45 I didn't indulge in philosophic speculations on the turn
in from the IP. As we floated through the flak in our aluminum foxhole,
I was trying to climb up into my helmet. Nevertheless, the lesson learned
from combat is that there is a lot of luck, chance, and fortune in life.
I've been lucky.
Seldom the ghosts came back bearing their tales
Of hitting the earth, the incompressible sea,
But stayed up there in the relative wind,
Shades fading in the mind.
Who had no graves but only epitaphs
Where never so many spoke for never so few:
Per ardua, said the partisans of Mars,
Per aspera, to the stars.
That was the good war, the war we won
As if there were no death, for goodness' sake,
With the help of the losers we left out there
In the air, in the empty air.