Winning a war - at a deadly cost

I was saddened to read about a new book dealing with the loss of HMS Dasher, a Royal Navy escort aircraft carrier, during World War II. The Herald reports:

Nearly 400 navy personnel drowned or were burned to death when HMS Dasher exploded off Arran in March, 1943. There were 149 survivors but, in spite of a high-level inquiry, they were never told what caused the disaster.

. . .

Dasher began life in 1941 as the Pennsylvania-built merchant ship, Rio de Janeiro, but when heavy losses of allied shipping in the Atlantic compelled the Admiralty to seek extra aircraft carriers to protect the convoys, it was turned into an aircraft carrier and renamed HMS Dasher.

HMS Dasher

The Dasher crew had concerns over their new ship’s safety from the beginning. There were persistent reports of a smell of petrol in the hangar where the aviation fuel pumps were stored.

On March 27, 1943, Dasher set off on a U-boat hunt, with 75,000 tons of diesel, plus fuel for its aircraft.

“At 4.40pm, when Dasher was five miles off the isle of Cumbrae, there was a horrendous explosion,” said Steele. “The hangar was an inferno and the intense heat caused the anti-aircraft gun bullets to explode.”

The ship took just eight minutes to sink. Men jumped into the Clyde but many died a fiery death as pools of diesel and aviation fuel caught fire. Those rescued by vessels in the area were warned by a senior navy officer never to talk about what had happened.

“The bereaved families were never made aware of what had happened,” Steele added.

A secret board of inquiry found there had been an inch-diameter hole between the shaft tunnel and the main petrol compartment, and that it was not known whether a “slow drip” from a starboard petrol tank had been fixed.

There's more at the link. The picture that emerges is of a navy so desperate for effective anti-submarine vessels that it was prepared to run the risk of pressing Dasher into service, despite her known defects. Her crew basically had to take their chances, because the need for Dasher at sea was so urgent that it overrode the requirement to take the ship out of service for repairs.

There are those who may think this callous and unfeeling. I daresay, if I were one of the servicemen placed at risk by such a decision, I'd feel the same way! However, this is one of the tragic responsibilities of high command: to weigh up conflicting demands in the scales of war priorities, and make the hard choices that must be made. Sometimes those choices are terribly costly to one's own side . . . but they still have to be made. There were many occasions during World War II when the armed forces of the United States had to make similar judgment calls, with similarly disastrous consequences for some of her own service personnel. Sometimes those consequences were repeated over and over again.

A good example is the deployment of strategic bomber aircraft from the US Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces (and Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force) to support ground operations following the invasion of France in 1944.

USAAF B-17 Flying Fortresses over the European battlefield

They did good work in destroying German defenses, but they also caused serious disruption to the Allied advance by blocking transport arteries with the wreckage of buildings, and flattening French towns (and killing many of their civilian residents whom the Allies had ostensibly come to 'liberate'). Also, there were frequent problems with mis-identification of ground units, leading to 'friendly' air forces attacking their own troops, or bombs falling short of the 'bomb-line' and hitting Allied forces. In one well-known incident, the most senior US officer to die in Europe during World War II, General Leslie J. McNair, was killed by stray US bombs during Operation Cobra. Whether or not the advantages of using the heavy bombers for this work was worth the cost in Allied lives is still debated by historians.

Another, less well-known, but equally cold-blooded example is the B-29 Superfortress program. This was regarded as critically important by the USAAF, so much so that they ordered hundreds of the bombers before a single prototype had even flown! There was immense pressure to get the B-29 into combat: but this resulted in many of the problems that would normally have been sorted out during development being carried over to the production line. One article describes them as follows:

There were problems with the huge, 16½' Hamilton Standard propellers which caused "run-a-way" engines, problems with the 4 remote controlled gun "barbettes", problems with the "fire control blisters" where gunners were stationed to aim the barbettes; the blisters sometimes blew out when the craft was pressurized and flying at high altitude. (Gunners were advised to wear a safety line in order to avoid being blown overboard if a blister popped). There were problems with booster controls for the rudder and problems with the radar.

The most relentless problem was the 2,200 hp Wright Cyclone R-3350 twin row radial engine. It had a persistent inclination to overheat, swallow valves and even catch fire in flight. In an effort to produce more horsepower from a lighter engine, the crankcase was made of magnesium, a very light, very strong metal. The problem was magnesium is also a flammable metal. When that was combined with the additional problem of a fuel induction system, which tended to catch fire and burn long enough to catch the magnesium afire, it became a very serious situation. "Band-Aid" treatments such as air baffles to direct more air to the rear row of cylinders and propeller cuffs to force more air through the engine helped, but it would be many moons before the problem was solved.

. . .

Eventually, Senator Harry S. Truman (who would later become President Truman) headed a committee looking into the problems of the Wright R-3350 Cyclone radial engine. The committee found Wright Aeronautical at fault for letting quality go by the boards in favor of quantity. Equally at fault, according to the committee report, was the USAAF for putting too much pressure on Wright to speed up production of the R-3350.

. . .

The Superfortress acquitted itself well in the Pacific war in spite of mechanical and electronic problems. At first, it wasn't unusual for a mission to lose more aircraft to mechanical problems than to the enemy. But, as the Crew Chiefs became more adept at field modification the numbers slowly began to improve.

One early result of these problems was the so-called 'Battle of Kansas', an all-out effort to resolve problems with early B-29's and get them into shape for combat.

A ceremony celebrating the 1,000th B-29 produced
at Boeing's Wichita, Kansas factory, February 14, 1945

A good example of the operational effects of these and other problems may be found in this account of the wartime service of a B-29 pilot.

We griped and moaned about the P--- pool - airplanes we had to fly in training. Eight, count them, eight consecutive aborts with engine failures. I was beginning to feel that the plane was designed to fly on just three and that the fourth was a spare. I have never forgiven the engineering dept. for releasing an aircraft that we had aborted in because of an engine over heating while trying to climb to 30,000 ft. No matter what Danny tried to do it would run hot. The crew too was a little hot at me for aborting because we would have to fly it all over again. Engineering released that plane as flyable and on its' next outing it took the lives of Lt. Vince Levora and all of his crew as he attempted an emergency landing at Alexandria, La.

. . .

There is the haunting memory of the flight to Jamaica for maneuvers when we lost our number three engine just out of Galveston, TX. and I made the decision to continue on to Jamaica on three rather than try for an emergency landing at night on a strange base. We had an engineering officer aboard as a passenger and he kept insisting that we turn back, and I finally had to tell him that he knew where the back door was and he could leave any time he chose.

. . .

The time had arrived to get our flyaway. A brand spanking new Big A-- Bird to call ours. ... We had our first test flight and she would pull off to the left on take-off and there was a tussle to hold the left wing up on landing. I wrote up the problem and engineering altered the trim on it with no help. Wrote it up again and they re-rigged the trim, still pulled off to the left. They were trying to convince me that I didn't know how to fly. They didn't have to try too hard because I had learned earlier that all the great flyers had feathers, and they had more sense than we had because they knew enough to stay on the ground in bad weather. We continued on out to Kearney, Nebraska for staging and I again wrote up the strange phenomenon, and they said they had it corrected, but on take-off we proved them wrong. She still took off to the left.

. . .

... we had an engine failure and had to set down at Mitchell field on Long Island.

. . .

I again wrote up my problem, but this time we got lucky. A Major who headed engineering got a transit out and took fixes of the wing alignment. The results showed that the right wing was 3 degrees lower than the left, and the right horizontal stabilizer was 3.5 degrees lower than the left, thereby causing me to get lift on the right side first. Congratulations to Martin-Marietta for the rip-off. I guess "Rosie the Riveter" really blew the job or else was hung over that day.

A test flight was scheduled for the next day and I was to bring along only the necessary crew, radioman, engineer and scanners. We met with a full bird Colonel who was the test pilot, and as I sat in the right seat next to him, I said, "better watch her on take-off Colonel, she'll kick off to the left on you". You should have seen the look he gave me. The very silent glare spoke loudly as if to say 'don t tell me how to fly an airplane.' As we started down the runway, we were suddenly on the taxi strip and that is what we took off from, and as we became airborne we were in a bank to the left. The Colonel's startled statement was, 'Jesus Christ! This plane is dangerous!' At this point, I regained my confidence and felt I really knew how to fly and no one was going to get into my brain again.

. . .

We had made 3 go arounds when our number 3 engine began throwing oil and our prop would not feather but kept running away. We "May Dayed" the tower for emergency clearance but whoever was on the approach in front of us would not pull up and go around. There was only one thing left to do as there could be no more go arounds for us, so I put the Luvva Mike [the name of the aircraft] in a dive, flew below the cliff at the end of the island and came up in front of the other plane and we landed safely.

. . .

There was also an abort when we had an electrical fire under our flooring in the cockpit, and as we dumped our bombs on Rota and approached the base we were aware that our alternators were out and that meant no Alternating Current, no radio. We had gotten some flaps down but weren't sure of the landing gear. We buzzed the tower and got a green light to land, but we decided to come in hot in case we were without locked landing gear, if we touched rubber we would cut the throttles and get on all the brakes we had, if not, we would continue flying and find a beach to set her down on. Again the Lord was on our side, we had wheels and we sure sent the brakes to Hell and back.

There's more at the link. It's a fascinating personal memoir of the strategic air war against Japan, and well worth reading.

B-29's dropping incendiary bombs over Japan

Bear in mind that those are the recollections of only one B-29 pilot. There were thousands more such pilots, flying thousands of B-29's in service, many of which had similar problems. A lot of them crashed as a result, killing and injuring all too many USAAF aircrew (not to mention Boeing personnel, including Eddie Allen, the company's chief test pilot, and his entire crew). Yet, this was accepted by the USAAF as an inevitable, unavoidable and necessary operational cost. The B-29's contribution to the war effort was considered important enough to justify the cost in US lives that had to be paid by committing it to combat before it was ready.

Cold-blooded decisions? Yes, most certainly . . . but sadly, tragically, such decisions were necessary to win the Second World War, and defeat Nazi and Japanese aggression. Do our national leaders today have the courage to make similar decisions, if necessary? I wonder . . .

Peter