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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday April 7, 2003 Volume V Number 15 |
FOCUS - Twelve O'Clock High
When General Frank Savage went to England to replace Colonel Davenport as commander of the 918th Bombing Group in 1942, he faced a squadron of young pilots discouraged and battered by long terrifying flights and too many casualties.
Top brass concluded that Davenport was too soft, too full of human empathy to lead effectively. The men didn’t need a leader who connected with human frailty and sensitivities. They needed a man on a mission, a man willing to detach himself from the fears and doubts that plague a man of war, stay focused on the task, demote or eliminate whiners and complainers, and promote and energize leaders who show true grit; a fearless warrior who would inspire others to be willing to sacrifice and captain those airships to victory over a tough and determined enemy.
By1942, the United States was fully committed to the Alliance against Hitler’s Axis. To fight along with the Brits, American troops and military hardware were shipped to Britain across the Atlantic in the greatest relocation of manpower and machines in the history of warfare. Airplanes, tanks, jeeps, troop carriers, cannon, weaponry, were all ferried across, frustrating German submarines which attempted destroy them all in transit. They made their way in the bulky steel hulls of transatlantic ocean liners and cargo ships. Airbases, established in the south of Great Britain, mushroomed, and from those extended runways, giant, heavy aircraft lumbered down the concrete, radial engines roaring, loaded with fuel and guns and bombs and crew, lifting off and headed for Germany, to return the destruction inflicted by German bombs over London in 1940 and 1941. The English cheered from below as bombers thundered overhead, then across the English Channel into enemy territory to unleash a rain of metal missiles, impacting in fiery blasts, exploding below the soaring crafts like popcorn, firecrackers in a chain event, down the row of industrial centers and railroad yards and across bridges and airports.
They called the giant
bomber the Flying Fortress, because it was. Seventy five feet long from nose
to tail, standing over twenty feet tall, it’s wing span over a hundred feet.
When the first Boeing war machine lifted off the runway in 1935, just as Hitler
was preparing Berlin to host the Olympic Games, it crashed - Boeing’s first
test flight a failure. But engineering won out, and the B-17 was born. By the
time the United States entered the war, its four radial Wright motors, each
with fourteen cylinders that developed over a thousand horsepower on take-off,
could take over thirty thousand pounds of cargo - fuel, crew and weaponry - off
the ground and carry it over two thousand miles without a fuel stop. It was a
marvel of human ingenuity, and it’s makers and a watching world would scratch
their heads in wonder, uttering “My, my, my…” as the magnificent flying machine
passed overhead.
Over eight hundred of the bombers lined up and down the runways of southern England, poised to empty their bomb bay compartments on mission after mission over enemy territory. To frustrate the attacks, the Germans developed anti-aircraft artillery, capable of shooting the equivalent of an intact hand grenade high into the sky, nearly ten thousand feet, and then at a predetermined altitude explode in a black cloud sending shards of metal, sharp steel bits, in every direction at high speed like a shot-gun blast. The American GIs called it “flack.” Cruising toward it’s targets, a squadron of B-17s in tight formation behind enemy lines could see it coming. It was the crew’s worst nightmare. Little puffs of black smoke in the air meant trouble. The flack could knock an entire airplane out of the sky, or penetrate the thin outer shell of the fuselage and take out a crew member or two or three. All in a terrifying instant.
Initially, the bombing raids took the B-17s to nineteen thousand feet, often at night, well above the range of artillery flack.
But General Frank Savage was told that these high flights in the dark were ineffective. Targets could not be seen from that altitude, and the only real damage to the German war machine would occur if these powerful airplanes flew in the day time, at a lower ten-thousand feet, where bomb would hit targets pinpointed by Army Intelligence with deadly precision. Right there at the level of flack.
Savage took the job. But his crews were exhausted, suffering discouragement and battle fatigue.
He was chosen because his superiors knew he would take the hard line.
* * * * * * *
The war in Iraq this weekend comes to Baghdad.
Already, the difference between this war and the war to liberate Kuwait is becoming apparent. The 1991 conflict, which lasted barely a week, required simply that Hussein’s occupation come to an end. That mission, also authorized by the United Nations, did not include a regime change in Baghdad. People speak of that conflict, and the undone business of our current President’s father, as though it was some shortsightedness, or failure of nerve, or lack or resolve on his part.
The world community would have risen in outrage had the American troops “finished him off” back then. At the time, the United Nations set the parameters - Iraq would be left alone. The condition was clear: Saddam must be committed to a complete disarmament, and that he would do his global business under the careful scrutiny of the United Nations, complying with international law and the human needs of his own people; a process which would be monitored by UN inspectors.
It was not to be.
Now brave American and British engage in the delicate task of the surgical removal of the Iraqi regime. The troops are equipped with superior training, technology and equipment, and are limited primarily by the commitment to minimize “collateral” damage and by the Hussein strategy of hiding his most devoted forces among civilians; in civilian dress and hiding the shadows of a major city. It demands the most of a dedicated and skilled army.
The Alliance appears to be equal to the task.
* * * * * * * *
Hitler wanted more than flack. So he ordered his top Luftwaffe aeronautical engineers and machinists to develop the most powerful, agile and deadly fighter plane ever to patrol the European skies. From 1936, the Royal Air Force (British RAF) Spitfire ruled. It was incredibly fast, with a top speed of over three hundred fifty miles per hour. But it operated best on a straight line. Hitler wanted a machine that would out-maneuver the Spitfire, and blow B-17s out of the clouds before they could drop their deadly payload.
The new machine would be powered by an
eighteen cylinder BMW, and while highly maneuverable, could reach speeds of
over four hundred miles per hour. It
first met the Spitfire
in combat over the English Channel in 1941, and Hitler’s Focke-Wulf (FW) 190
immediately over-powered the British, leaving the American bombers even more
vulnerable than before. The FW 190 became a menace to the B-17s, now nearly
unprotected by Spitfires, and with all the armament of the Flying Fortress, it
made every bombing run a stroll through the valley of the shadow of death.
The B-17 posted gunners in the nose and the tail, the topside and the underside of the fuselage. Each gunner was cramped inside a rotating turret covered by a clear plastic dome enclosure with slots for the twin gun barrels, giving them a three hundred and sixty degree view; front, back, top and bottom. The pilot and co-pilot scanned the skies and reported back and forth with the others in formation. Navigator and bombardier watched the map and the terrain below as each raid took out more and more of the military targets in Berlin and surrounding cities. They dodged flack and fired twin blazing automatic guns at the Luftwaffe fighter planes on the attack. Some managed to return home to England. Others did not.
General Savage pushed hard on his men. He knew their very survival depended on their knowledge of the textbook, their focus, their brotherhood. He pushed so hard, he nearly had a mutiny on his hands. He flew with his men. He piloted the forward bomber, and coached his men through one raid and then another.
Finally, the pressure got to him, too.
But the men persevered. There were many casualties.
And the 918th Bombing Group softened up the ability of Hitler to supply his troops on the front lines. On June 6, 1944, when the Allied Troops hit the beaches at Normandy, on the march to liberate France and Belgium and Poland, Hitler’s troops were badly supplied, thanks to the work at sacrifice of the B-17s and their brave crews.
General Frank Savage was played by Gregory Peck in the 1949 classic film Twelve O’Clock High.
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader. The War continues to dominate the landscape and the news. Tomorrow we will know more about the fate of a new generation of American and British troops, once again fighting side by side. And we will know more about the fate of the Iraqi regime.
But how inspiring it is to watch the commitment and determination of our troops and our leadership. They march and fly and fight in the tradition of the 918th.
You’ve got a mission, too.
It isn’t, perhaps, quite as risky. Or consequential. Or as noteworthy. But it is a mission. There is an enemy. There is flack. There are fighter planes attacking from the front, from behind, up and down; buzzing, swooping, firing, guns ablaze. Some right there in the sun where you can’t see them, twelve o’clock high.
Vigilance is the byword. Camaraderie, the necessary ingredient. Leadership, the call sign. Offense, the best defense.
We’re in it.
A good friend and I were talking this week. Will it ever end?
Probably not.
Special thanks to my brother Roger for tipping me off on the Gerson story.
Posted in Valley Center, California
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2003
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
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