The Psychiatric Consequences of WW2 Air Combat
For many World War Two aviators, boyhood dreams of flying were made real in the seat of a fighter plane or a crew position on a heavy bomber. Many airmen saw warbirds as powerful yet submissive machines—super toys, really—which allowed men to escape the usual earthbound limitations of time and space. Since World War One, combat fliers had been revered for their courageous daring in the face of near constant death. As a result, most fliers, by necessity, treated the prospect of death with an attitude of cavalier indifference, each man attempting to out-story his peers regarding the narrowness of their combat escapes and dogfighting prowess. For some, however, the near constant stress of combat brought about severe psychiatric debility.
One of the most widely-experienced psychiatric consequences of air combat was fear. “Fear was a relentless foe that plagued us unmercifully between battles,” wrote heavy bomber pilot, William R. Cubbins. “[It] robbed us of character.” In describing the fear that many airmen felt on the flight line, Yank reporter, Denton Scott, accurately described the sentiment felt by many heavy bomber airmen. “The doors to the bomb bays close behind you, and you know that you are a prisoner of this ship. That imprisonment can be broken only by three factors, and they are, in order: disaster by explosion and parachuting to another prison, death, or a safe return.”
Most men found ways to deal with the stressors of combat, such as the written recollections of Harry S. Hintlian who flew with the 450th Bomb Group. “On my second mission, when flak started, I was also scared [as he had been during his first mission], nervous, and extremely tense. It was as though my nerves got too tight and I snapped, just like bending a pencil ‘till it breaks. At that incident, I became a soldier: I resolved [that] my duties were primary as long as I was alive to carry them out, and my fear of dying was going to be secondary. There was absolutely nothing I could do to control my fate. From then on, I ignored everything that didn’t directly affect my duties.”
Fears developed by airmen frequently lacked common sense or logical reasoning. One outstanding fighter pilot known for making daring, low altitude strafing runs over land, refused to do the same thing over water. A number of fighter pilots refused to fly higher than 8,000 feet, even though the risk of flak attack or low altitude aviation accidents were substantially increased. One navigator who was so frightened to death of flying was ultimately shot down near enemy lines, falling in with a small group of Allied infantrymen pinned down by a much larger contingent of enemy combatants. The navigator’s joy at being on the ground enabled him to lead these desperate men out of a tense situation, in effect increasing his degree of danger due to his relief at having his feet back on the ground.
Another fear that airmen shared was the loss of friends they were strongly attached to. For this reason alone, many airmen refused to develop deep or lasting relationships with fellow airmen, limiting themselves to acquaintanceship relationships at best. Accordingly, most discussions at officer’s clubs and enlisted clubs were twofold—flying first, women second.
Witnessing the death of others had a profound effect upon airmen, increasing both their level of fear and their sense of survivor’s guilt. For instance, on June 6, 1944, Harry B. Taylor witnessed a bomber in his formation take a direct flak hit over Brasov, Romania. Three men bailed out of the camera hatch, while another two dropped out from the bomb bay before the bomber rolled over and dropped like a stone. “Watching all this, men dying,” he recalled, “falling out of the sky, it doesn’t seem real. You wonder if it is really happening. Your hands and forehead are wet with sweat and it’s 50 below zero, you have to accept the fact, that you could be dead in the next couple of seconds.”
Another time, while Taylor’s plane underwent repairs, he played cards with a fellow crewmate outside their tent, sunning themselves in shorts. As the bomber stream began to land after the day’s mission, Taylor witnessed men bailing out of a crippled bomber, which made a 3,000-foot pass over their San Giovanni airfield. “Our minds had just gone back to the card game,” he recalled. “I looked across at Paul, when I saw the blur, then we heard this loud plop hit the tent next to us about twenty feet away. We ran to the tent and looked inside, here lay an officer dead, with a large hole in the back of his head. Then we heard this crash down at the end of the runway. I ran over to a passing Jeep with two officers in it and told them about the dead man. His ripcord had not been pulled. We decided he had jumped from the bomb bay and hit the ball turret guns. For nights afterward, I could see that man falling. The crippled bomber had plowed into the ground at the end of the runway, killing the pilot.”
On January 16, 1944, while the newly-formed 376th Bomb Group stood down for a month of training, pilot Milton Reinke witnessed a horrific training accident which still haunted him during a 2007 interview. Returning to his San Pancrazio airbase, Reinke observed an echelon formation of B-24s passing over the runway at low altitude, when the No. 3 position abruptly pulled up and sheared off the tail of another Liberator. “The tail went up in the air spinning and then came down,” he recalled. “And without a tail for control, the aircraft was like a falling leaf. It stood on its tail for a minute, and slipped off on a wing, going side to side, and hit the ground with a tremendous force. The entire aircraft disintegrated. It had a forward momentum of about one hundred and eighty [mph] at the time and had the momentum of dropping. Of course, the tanks all burst and the hundred-octane fuel spewed all over the place; nobody alive in the aircraft; when they hit that killed them all. And it caught fire instantly, so nobody could approach it for quite a while.”
“I don’t know, we handled it, it was part of war,” Charles Andrews recalled when his copilot was killed on a mission. “You knew that you were risking your life, but we always thought we were going to make it through. You can’t do anything about it. If the guy’s dead he’s dead, you know. The hard part is packing up his stuff and sending it home. That’s hard. He was just a kid; big, strapping, good looking kid from Kansas. I still have his picture here.”
As the air war in Europe progressed, the number of emotional casualties experienced by heavy bomber crews began to rise. In one twelve-month study from May 1943 to May 1944, the ratio of psychiatric distress cases suffered by airmen versus aircraft lost was 1:2. As losses mounted, an ever-increasing number of airmen began to experience signs of emotional distress, including sleeplessness, temper flareups, concentration disorders, nausea, weight loss, dizziness and a sudden withdrawal from friends. Blurred vision and heart palpitations were commonplace, along with the extremes of sexual impotence and sexual predation. Binge drinking was frequently followed by nightmares and battle dreams. Men awoke screaming as they bailed out of burning bunkbeds, oftentimes breaking bones when they collided with the floor.
The filmmakers own father, who was shot down twice aboard shot-up B-24 Liberators, suffered the same fate after he returned home to earn a Masters in virology and a PhD in microbiology. “We’d be sound asleep,” my mother told me when I was researching a book about the Fifteenth Air Force, “when suddenly he’d wake up in terror. Bail out, bail out, he’d yell out loud, and before I could get to him, he’d bail out of the bed. Many mornings he’d leave for school with a bump on his forehead.”
Fighting among airmen was another side effect of flak fatigue. Chief psychiatrist for the Eighth Air Force, Maj. Donald W. Hastings, recorded one incident where two close friends, after an evening of moderate drinking, decided they ‘needed a fight,’ prompting both men to exit their car for a punishing round of fisticuffs. After one of the men broke his hand, “they amicably climbed back in the car and drove home.” Other airmen confessed to flight surgeons and chaplains that they had “seduced women, in quantity, not for sexual satisfaction, but for the sake of subduing and conquering.”
While air leaders initially classified flak fatigue as a “lack of moral fiber,” Air Force psychiatrists began to see the condition as one of repeated and egregious over-exposure to fear, violence and loss. “What was it like—that moment of truth,” wrote air medicine historian, Douglas H. Robinson, MD. “After too many high-altitude missions over Germany, too many ‘Forts’ going down in flames with no ‘chutes opening in their wakes, too many empty bunks in the barracks on the night after a big raid, too many mutilated, bloody corpses hauled out of shattered turrets and cockpits back on the hardstands, when a man realized he had ‘had it,’ that he could take no more?”
In another example of psychiatric distress caused by combat, Hastings reported on one flier who began to suffer flak fatigue after a particularly brutal mission:
The Kiel raid was his worst. His gun was frozen and he sat helplessly watching repeated fighter attacks and heavy flak. The plane in which there was a General was on his wing and he saw it crippled and spin down through the clouds over the target. No one got out that he saw. In rather quick succession on his plane the tail gunner passed out from anoxia, all but two guns froze, the No. 2 engine was hit, and caught fire and the plane on the other wing was hit, went out of control and side-slipped directly underneath them so close that the pilot of his plane had to pull up sharply to avoid a crash. This plane then crashed into the B-17 on their opposite side; they had to do evasive action to miss pieces of B-17s that were flying in the air. He saw the ball turret knocked off and go down ‘like an apple’ with the gunner still inside. He saw another man jump with a burning parachute and fall ‘like a hunk of lead.’ Shortly after another neighboring ship did a loop and spun in. He saw another lose its wings and the fuselage go down end over end, no parachutes being seen. He saw another snap-roll and one wing came off. His own plane was badly damaged and had to be salvaged [scrapped] after this raid. On coming in to land after this raid, the plane ground looped in landing. This raid was a disastrous one for his group. Ten out of nineteen planes failed to return, the remainder were well shot up, and several including his own were wrecked on landing, the General was missing, and everyone was stunned by what had happened. The patient felt pent-up and restless during the interrogation, and after it began crying and weeping. That night in the barracks he broke down again while the clothes of his missing roommates were being packed up. He tried drinking to relieve his anxiety but it didn’t help much.
That night he had his first battle dreams, couldn’t sleep because of vivid nightmares of crashing and falling and one time woke up sweating profusely and was told that he had been screaming and yelling in his sleep. This raid marked the onset of a severe nervous state and by now throughout the day and night he was tense, anxious, tired, depressed, things seemed unreal, and he had difficulty concentrating.
Other than rest camps—relief camps, as they were sometimes called—and time off from combat duty, U.S. Air Force psychiatrists relied heavily on sleep therapy to treat severe flak fatigue. Hastings wrote, “It is… much easier to adjust to a terrifying experience with the attitude ‘It happened two days ago’ than to have to immediately face the situation with all its recent memories and impressions.”
Using knockout doses of sodium amytal, emotionally distraught airmen slept for upwards of 72 hours in sleep therapy wards, followed by supportive counseling to work through their violent recollections. In the majority of cases, well-rested airmen were able to return to combat duty, however, the most traumatized, non-responsive patients underwent further treatment by sodium pentothal or truth serum. When the patient reached a state of suggestible semi-consciousness, a psychiatric “handler” encouraged the airman to relive the specifics of his combat trauma that led to his emotional collapse. Later in the war, Douglas Bond, MD, discontinued the use of truth serum treatments, arguing that the practice of forcing airmen to relive their traumas worsened their overall nervousness and fear.
For the majority of heavy bomber crews, alcohol became the salve that at least temporarily washed away traumatic memories. “When I went into the officer’s club after a mission,” recalled Robert Morgan, “I would concentrate on the scotch in front of me. That scotch was my instrument panel through those nighttime navigations. Scotch was the only antidote I had for all those exploding B-17s that haunted my dreams.”