Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (41 page)

“I was just absolutely shattered,” David recalled grimly. He’d had no idea that this had happened. “I don’t think I slept a wink that night, but the next day, I got an emergency Red Cross leave and I went up to Polebrook.”

When David was ushered in to meet Colonel Eugene Romig, the commander of Archie’s 351st Bombardment Group, the first thing the colonel said was that he was recommending Archie for the Medal of Honor.

David next visited the base dispensary, where he was introduced to three of the men who had broken their legs bailing out of
Ten Horsepower
over Polebrook.

“When it was my time to go,” Tom Sowell told him, “I looked forward. Archie was in the seat flying, and for some reason or another, he turned around to me and he gave me Winston Churchill’s famous ‘V for Victory’ sign. He thought he could make it, but I’m afraid the odds were stacked against him.”

David was then taken down to the barracks where they kept the personal effects of the men who would never come back. Archie’s billfold was there, as was his gold US Army Air Forces ring with the single-bladed propeller across the top.

“I kept that ring for 27 years until my son Archie came of age,” David recalled a half century later, with a lump in his throat. “I gave him that ring. There’s never a day goes by in that fellow’s life that he hasn’t got that ring on his finger.”

Back at his own barracks in Debden, David wrote home to their mother, explaining what had happened. He figured that the letter would
reach her sometime after the official War Department telegram—
that
telegram, the one like the ones that were received by four hundred thousand other American mothers during World War II—but his letter arrived first. As he put it, “Maybe it was apropos that my mother learned of her oldest son’s death from her youngest son.”

On July 23, four months after Archie’s death, his posthumous Medal of Honor was presented to Mary Mathies. Wally Truemper’s mother received his Medal of Honor on the Fourth of July.

Rather than traveling to Washington, DC, Mary Mathies elected to receive Archie’s medal at the Presbyterian church in Finleyville, the same church that Archie had attended, often under protest—because Sunday morning followed too closely on the coattails of Saturday night—and always at his mother’s insistence.

Fredericka Truemper received Wally’s medal while seated in a rocking chair on her font lawn in Aurora, Illinois. Wally’s father, his sister, and his two brothers were also present that evening.

In 1976, at the age of eighty-four, having outlived her oldest son by more than three decades, Mary Mathies was on hand for the dedication of one of the Pittsburgh Coal Company mines, renamed in Archie’s honor. In 1987, the noncommissioned officers school at RAF Upwood, an installation operated by the US Air Force in Cambridgeshire, near Molesworth, not far from the field in which Archie Mathies died, was formally rededicated as the Archibald Mathies NCO Academy.

Bill Lawley, the only man to earn the Medal of Honor during Big Week and survive, received his medal from General Spaatz personally on August 8, two weeks after Mary was given Archie’s. He had gone on to fly fourteen additional combat missions after Big Week, with his last coming in June, as Operation Overlord was in full swing. He remained in the US Air Force after World War II, served in a number of locations, including the Pentagon, the US Air Attaché’s office in Brazil, and at the Air University at Maxwell AFB in his home state of Alabama. He retired as a colonel in 1972.

Ralph Braswell was one of the gunners aboard
Cabin in the Sky
, the heavily mauled Flying Fortress that Bill Lawley had brought home against all odds on the first day of Big Week. He went to see his pilot shortly before
Lawley’s death in 1999. Lawley apologized to Braswell as they greeted each other, because his battle-scarred hands were crippled with arthritis.

“After I shook his hands,” the former gunner recalls, “I said ‘They’re beautiful. They saved my life.’”

Joe Rex, the radio operator who repaired the intercom wiring aboard
Ten Horsepower
so that Archie could communicate with Wally as Wally communicated with the Polebrook tower, remained in the radio business. He went on to a long career—made possible by his life having been saved by Wally and Archie—during which he enriched the lives of generations as a popular newscaster on radio station WMBD in Peoria, Illinois.

Jesse Richard Pitts, the man who had graduated magna cum laude from Harvard before flying as copilot aboard the 376th Bombardment Group Flying Fortress called
Penny Ante
, returned to academia, having formed an export business in Morocco to finance his further education. He married the daughter of French Resistance hero Claude Bonnier, received his PhD from Harvard, and became a prominent sociologist. He published numerous sociology textbooks and founded the
Tocqueville Review
, a bilingual journal studying social change.

Penny Ante
herself, the “lucky” Flying Fortress protected by the ritual of the crew chief loaning the pilot a penny before each mission, which was repaid at the mission’s successful completion, “protected” Pitts, Streit, and the original crew, who all made it through their tours safely. As Pitts writes in his memoir, the ritual was abandoned by later crews.
Penny Ante
was shot down on May 24, 1944, over Berlin.

Of the household name officers who oversaw the USSTAF and the Eighth Air Force before and during Big Week, Tooey Spaatz continued to command the USSTAF as it burgeoned into a force with more than three thousand heavy, four-engine bombers later in 1944. Spaatz received his fourth star in March 1945, and when the Third Reich was defeated, he was reassigned in July to do to Japan what he had done to Germany, as commander of the US Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific. He never had the chance. The war against Japan ended within a few weeks of his arrival.

Spaatz is recalled as having been the only general who was present at the surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945, as well as at the surrender of Germany to the Anglo-American Allies on May 7, and of Germany to
the Soviet armies on May 8 in Berlin. After the war, he succeeded his boss and mentor, Hap Arnold, as the commanding general of the USAAF, and in 1947, he became the first chief of staff of the newly created US Air Force.

Jimmy Doolittle continued to command the Eighth Air Force through the defeat of Germany and was in the process of relocating the Eighth to the Pacific Theater when Japan surrendered. After the war, Doolittle reverted to inactive reserve status as a three-star general, but undertook a number of special projects for the US Air Force through his retirement in 1955. Though he commanded the USAAF’s largest numbered air force through its greatest triumph, he will forever be best remembered for that April 1942 mission when he led sixteen bombers to Japan for a daring feat of short duration that is summarized in the title of the 1944 Hollywood movie about it, entitled
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
.

Curtis LeMay would go on to greater glory, even as many of his fellow commanders were in the twilight of their careers. In August 1944, he was reassigned to the Far East to command the first strategic bombing missions against the Japanese home islands since Doolittle’s “thirty seconds.” The weapon was the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the largest strategic bomber of the war. Half again larger than a Flying Fortress or a Liberator, it could carry triple the bomb load and fly twice as far.

When the B-29 entered service in 1944, Hap Arnold decided to use it only against Japan, and to make sure that the aircraft was used only as a strategic weapon, he retained command of the new Twentieth Air Force himself. LeMay was originally assigned to command the Twentieth’s XX Bomber Command, but he later acted as the de facto field commander of the entire Twentieth Air Force offensive against Japan.

It was after World War II that LeMay became a household word. After planning the Berlin Airlift in 1948, he was named to head the US Air Force’s Strategic Air Command (SAC). Under LeMay’s unprecedented nine years of uncompromising leadership, SAC evolved into a well-oiled war machine, operating a vast, globe-spanning fleet of B-47 and B-52 jet bombers, as well as the first generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles. LeMay eventually served as chief of staff of the US Air Force.

Haywood “Possum” Hansell, the veteran of the Air War Plans Division who served as one of the Eighth Air Force’s principal early leaders,
went on to a career marked by controversy. He missed Big Week, having been recalled to Washington after the Operation Tidal Wave mission against Ploesşti in August 1943. Here, he was back at Hap Arnold’s side as the USAAF planner on the Combined and Joint Staff as plans were being laid for the strategic air campaign against Japan. He helped to develop and deploy the Superfortresses, and he was Arnold’s original choice to be his field commander for the strategic campaign against Japan.

In the Pacific, Hansell commanded the Twentieth’s XXI Bomber Command, based in the Mariana Islands in the Pacific, while LeMay commanded the XX Bomber Command in China. When the results achieved by Hansell using daylight precision bombing were not considered effective, he was replaced by Arnold with LeMay, who was seen as a more aggressive commander who could accomplish the job of destroying the Japanese economy.

Ironically, LeMay would adopt the RAF Bomber Command tactic of nighttime area raids against Japanese cities, rather than staying exclusively with the precision tactics that the Americans had so vociferously advocated in Europe.

Hansell was reassigned, first to a training wing, and later to a transport wing, both based in the United States, and took early retirement in 1946. As this author knows from firsthand conversations with both, Hansell and LeMay continued to insist, until the end of their lives, that strategic airpower could have ultimately brought about the defeat of Japan without the use of nuclear weapons.

Ira Eaker, who left his command role at the Eighth Air Force just as the Eighth was coming into its own, served as commander of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces (MAAF) until April 1945, the eve of the defeat of Germany. Recalled to Washington by Arnold, over his objections, Eaker served on the Air Staff of the USAAF until it became the US Air Force. After his retirement in 1947, he served as a vice president at Hughes Aircraft and later at Douglas Aircraft.

Larry Kuter, the veteran of the Air War Plans Division who helped build the Eighth Air Force, went back to Washington to a staff job that returned him overseas to be present at some of the pivotal turning points in World War II. Having been Hap Arnold’s personal observer in the sky
over the beaches of Normandy, Kuter substituted for Arnold at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 after the chief suffered his fourth wartime heart attack. Like LeMay, Kuter went on to a long career with the postwar US Air Force. He was the architect and the first commander of the Military Air Transport Service (MATS) and commanded the Far East Air Forces (FEAF) command as it became the Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) in 1957.

Of the British officers who served at the top ranks of the RAF during the war, both Arthur “Bomber” Harris and Charles “Peter” Portal retired within a year of VE-Day. Arthur Tedder succeeded Portal as chief of the RAF, serving until 1950, when he retired to become the chancellor of the University of Cambridge. Portal went on to a business career, serving as chairman of British Aluminium and later of the British Aircraft Corporation.

Harris moved to South Africa to get away from growing criticism in Britain of his heavy-handed, often brutal, attacks on German cities, especially Dresden, and remained there until 1953. Both Portal and Tedder were made barons after the war, and Portal was later elevated to viscount. Harris was made a baronet, although he initially refused the title in protest over his Bomber Command’s being denied a campaign medal because of the February 1945 Dresden bombings.

Solly Zuckerman, the thorn in the side of the Americans, was also made a baron. His long career as a university professor was interrupted by his taking the post of chief scientific advisor to the British government in the 1960s. A continued interest in primates is evidenced by the titles of his two-volume autobiography,
From Apes to Warlords
and
Monkeys, Men and Missiles
.

Irving Krick, the Caltech meteorologist who became Hap Arnold’s soothsayer of weather, remained in England after his successful—some would say masterful, others “damned lucky”—prediction of the weather for Big Week. As such, he was called upon to predict the weather, obviously of vital importance, for Operation Overlord. In the weeks ahead of time, Krick insisted that the weather would be fine on June 5, 1944, the day scheduled for the invasion. However, other meteorologists working for both the British and the Americans, predicted that a major Atlantic storm would blow through the English Channel that day. Fortunately, British
meteorologist James Martin Stagg, who had once, coincidentally, studied under Krick, convinced him to go along with recommending a one-day postponement to General Eisenhower.

The storm appeared on June 5 as predicted, and blew through by June 6, and the rest is history. His having lost an argument saved Krick immense embarrassment, not to mention thousands of Allied lives. Krick was right, however, when he famously predicted sunny weather for Eisenhower’s second inauguration as president in January 1957. After the war, Krick became a commercial long-term weather forecaster and made a great deal of money providing cloud seeding services to cause rain or, in the case of the 1960 Winter Olympics, snow.

As Eaker and Kuter were headed home to Washington, and Spaatz and Doolittle were packing their bags for the Pacific—and what they expected would be another bloody, hellish year of war—Richard D’Oyly Hughes was in Wiesbaden. Only one year earlier, this city in the Reich had been on the target list of the Eighth Air Force. Now there was no more Reich and the city was home to the headquarters of the 12th Army Group, the umbrella organization of the 1.3 million soldiers of four American field armies.