It had taken a while for Charles to realise this. ‘To begin with it was all kind of a lark and I didn’t really think of the dangers,’ he admits. But back in early February, Charles had been flying as wingman to his flight leader. They were flying at around 300 mph, just 200 feet above the ground looking for anything to strafe. Charles had been looking around – behind him and either side, and then suddenly had turned back and seen his flight leader in a steep dive. A second later he had exploded on the ground. ‘It was a shock,’ admits Charles. ‘I just couldn’t believe it.’ In a state of numbed confusion, he had circled over several times, calling for him on his radio, but then there had been flak all around him and he had managed to pull himself together and head home. Later, it had been concluded that the flight leader had been hit in the head by a freak rifle shot. ‘That’s when you realise this is a pretty serious business,’ says Charles, ‘and you start getting a bit mad and you realise you’re only going to survive if there’s nothing else alive to shoot at you.’
From La Moure, in north Dakota, Charles had had, like many of those growing up in the 1920s and ’30s, a tough childhood. He was the third of four children, two girls and two boys, although his younger brother had tragically died at birth. Despite this, the 1920s were his family’s ‘happy time’, with father and uncle running a successful drugstore business and the family living comfortably. The tide would soon change, however. In 1930, his father died of cancer; the business had to be sold and Charles and his mother and sisters moved to Fargo. For the next few years, with America in the throes of the Depression, she did her best to keep the family by running a small lingerie business, but then she also contracted cancer and died. An orphan at fourteen, Charles was sent to live with his uncle, who looked after him and ensured he went to good schools. It paid off because after leaving high school, he went to North Dakota Agricultural College.
Charles had, however, always had a passion for aircraft, and in his second year at college, in 1941, he was given the chance to learn to fly. This was thanks to Roosevelt’s Civilian Training Program, a scheme designed to speed up the rate at which pilots could be prepared for war, and Charles enrolled even though he was against America joining the war. By January 1942, he had his civil pilot’s licence; six months later he had joined the US Army Air Force. A little over a year later, he was on his way to Italy.
Charles had joined the 27th Fighter-Bomber Group the previous November and since then had become one of the most experienced pilots in his squadron, although he was yet to lead a mission himself. ‘I was relatively small,’ he says, ‘and I looked like I was perhaps nineteen. I always looked younger than my real age. The senior guys in the squadron always used to think of me as a bit of a kid brother.’
His part in Operation STRANGLE came to an end on 24 April. Loaded with fuel and armed with six 20lb fragmentation bombs and a 500-pounder strapped underneath, he taxied his P-40 Kittyhawk over to the runway as normal. But there was a strong crosswind and as he sped down the runway a heavy gust blew him sideways towards the left of the runway where a trench had been dug. Giving the engine some emergency boost he felt the undercarriage lift off the ground, but unfortunately his tail wheel had snagged into the ditch as the front of his plane lifted into the air – and this took away just enough speed to prevent him from climbing further. In a trice, his Kittyhawk began roll to the left. ‘It’s amazing how quickly you think in an emergency like this,’ says Charles. ‘I remember thinking, if my left wing-tip clears the ground, I’ll land on my back. If it doesn’t, I’ll cartwheel. Either of these seemed a sure death. So I pulled back the mixture control and killed the engine. The plane straightened up and slammed to the ground, wiping out the landing gear.’
It was nonetheless a heart-stopping moment, especially with seven live bombs strapped underneath. The aircraft tilted to the right, tearing off much of the wing as it dug into the ground. As the plane slewed heavily, the bombs fortunately rolled away from underneath him, but the pierced-steel plating runway bowed upwards with the force of the crash and slammed against the rear of his fuselage, knocking the tail ninety degrees from the cockpit. Incredibly, Charles walked away with nothing more than a scratched thumb, but his commanding officer felt the time had come to give him a break. The next day he was sent to the American rest camp on Capri for a week.
By that time, however, Eaker and Slessor had realised that Operation STRANGLE had not fulfilled its objective of making it impossible for the Germans to remain south of Rome. On paper the interdiction policy was sound, because the railway system in Italy was highly vulnerable to aerial attack, with its multitude of tunnels, bridges, viaducts and embankments. The limiting Italian terrain also meant the Germans were predominantly using only three main rail routes – the western, central and eastern – all running roughly north–south down the leg of the country.
Early results had been promising. By 4 April, Kesselring’s Army Group was receiving just 1,357 tons of supplies per day, rather than their minimum daily requirement of 2,261 tons. From 22 March, the eastern route was almost entirely impassable, while large parts of the central and western routes were also almost continuously blocked. By the end of April, the central route was cut in sixty-nine places, and by the end of the first week of May, 155 more had been added. When STRANGLE officially ended on the eve of the battle on 11 May, 22,500 tons of bombs had been dropped – more than during the entire London Blitz.
Yet despite this the Germans had not withdrawn. With the kind of efficiency and improvisation that prompted awe from the Allies, the Germans managed to repair large parts of track and numerous bridges, while also making good use of lesser roundabout routes and moving goods between trains across damaged parts of track. Overseeing this work was a ‘General with Special Responsibility for the Maintenance of Rail Communications in Italy’ newly appointed by Kesselring. German engineers provided the skills; the Organisation Todt, the German military labour force made up of mostly press-ganged Italians, provided the workers. It also helped that Kesselring had ensured that considerable stocks had been built up at the front during the winter, and that, with a stagnant front, he was using up little of his stocks of fuel and ammunition. As Slessor recognised, German troops seemed to be hardier than many of the Allies. ‘He doesn’t worry about ENSA shows or V cigarettes,’ he noted, ‘Coca-Cola or chewing gum, the masses of motor vehicles, or all the luxuries without which it is assumed that the modern British and American soldier cannot wage war.’ Germans, it appeared, could survive four or five days on the same tonnage the Allies consumed in a day. Furthermore, they had managed by moving greater volumes of traffic by road and by sea, using coast-hugging lighters at night, and taking what they could from the land. ‘The fact is,’ noted Slessor in a report written on 16 April 1944, ‘if you don’t care a damn about the civilian population and are prepared to use all the transportation resources to hand (and, incidentally, forced civilian labour) for purely military purposes,’ then only a small proportion of a transport potential needed to be used to achieve a minimum requirement.49
These were important lessons and were duly noted – both in Italy and by those preparing for D-Day. Air power alone could not destroy the enemy in the field. Alexander, on the other hand, was delighted by the efforts of the air forces in the weeks before his offensive had been launched. ‘I never felt,’ he said, ‘that these air attacks would force the Germans to withdraw.’ Rather, he had hoped they would be able seriously to hamper German supply and reinforcement. In this aim, STRANGLE had been an unquestionable success.
Air power had played an integral part in the Allies’ success in both North Africa and Sicily. It would continue to do so in Italy – but it could never do the job of the men on the ground.
* The word ‘flak’ is a German abbreviation of Flugabwehrkanone,