How much did Joseph Heller’s combat experiences as a B-25 Mitchell bombardier with the 340th Bomb Group in Italy inform his later writing of a literary classic?
The night of 22 May 1944 was pleasant on Corsica, located well north of the bloody combat around Monte Cassino. There, south of Rome, the Allies had tried and failed three times since February to batter their way through the Gustav Line, where German paratroopers and Panzers made them pay in blood for every advance, as Field Marshal Albert Kesselring had assured Adolf Hitler he would do.
At Alesani airfield, home of the North American B-25 Mitchells of the four squadrons that made up the 340th Bombardment Group (Medium), moonlight silhouetted their twin rudders after a long day flying in Operation ‘Strangle’, the XII Air Force’s battle to isolate the Cassino battlefield. Around 22.00hrs, pilot Capt Bill Thomas and three of his friends in the 488th Bomb Squadron interrupted their bridge game when they heard distant explosions to the north. They quickly realised it was a ‘show’, an air raid, though none knew it was just the opening act.
Ninety Junkers Ju 88A-4 bombers of the first and second Gruppen of the famous Lehrgeschwader I, led by Oberst Joachim Helbig, crossed out of northern Italy at sea level, avoiding Allied radar on Corsica. Their target was Borgo- Poretta airfield at the northern tip of the island, home of the 15th Air Force’s 1st Fighter Group and the 57th and 324th Fighter Groups of the XII Air Force, as well as RAF and Free French squadrons. They dropped fragmentation bombs and incendiaries from 6,000ft, resulting in widespread destruction.
With the excitement over, the bridge players returned to their game, finally slipping into their cots shortly after midnight. They and everyone else at Alesani were roused at 02.30 by explosions on the field. The Germans had returned to their base to refuel and rearm, after which Helbig led them back to Corsica along with 60 Ju 88s of Kampfgeschwader 76. Surprise was complete. A pilot from the 488th remembered, “We had all these nice new shiny silver ships, and they reflected the light from the fires so well that the Germans had no trouble spotting where to drop their bombs”. They were the last attacks made by the Luftwaffe in the Mediterranean theatre.
The next morning, the survivors surveyed the damage. It was bad: 65 B-25s were destroyed; only 20 were flyable. The 340th had taken a roundhouse punch two months earlier after losing all its aircraft in the eruption of Vesuvius, which precipitated the move to Corsica. The 487th Bomb Squadron’s war diarist wrote, “Picks and shovels were at a premium throughout the area all during the daylight hours while those who didn’t have a slit trench dug one and others improved upon theirs”. In a gesture of defiance, the 340th bombed the railroad tunnel at Itri, north of Anzio, with the surviving aeroplanes the next day.
On 20 May, everyone was busy painting the upper surfaces of the surviving bombers and the new replacement aircraft with green paint cadged from the French at Ghisonaccia. No-one paid attention to the Douglas C-47 that landed with replacement airmen. The next day, three second lieutenants, a non-commissioned warrant officer, and three sergeants among the replacements were assigned to the 340th’s 488th squadron. The warrant officer bombardier was Flt Off Francis Yohannon. He was accompanied by another bombardier, a skinny Jewish kid from Brooklyn who dreamed of being a writer and had just celebrated his 21st birthday on 1 May. 2nd Lt Joseph Heller hadn’t graduated high enough at Santa Ana Army Airfield in southern California to qualify for training with a specific crew and arrived on Corsica as a replacement bombardier.
A week before, Heller had written in his diary that he was ready to see action. He wanted to see “skies full of flak, and fighters screaming past in life and death duels high in the clouds”. Four days later he flew his first mission. In the next six months he would find all the action he could have wished for during his time on Corsica with the 57th Bomb Wing.
Activity came fast and furious during the summer of 1944. The three groups each flew two major missions a day, with two squadrons in each taking the morning mission and the other two the afternoon sortie. Flak was deadly; losses were frequently higher than the five per cent Army Air Forces leaders considered ‘sustainable’. The tour was 50 missions.
Heller’s baptism of fire came on 23 May, bombing the railway bridge at Poggibonsi. He later wrote, “Poor little Poggibonsi. Its only crime was that it happened to lie outside Florence along one of the few passageways running south through the Apennine Mountains to Rome… as a wing bombardier, my job was to keep my eyes on the first plane in our formation, which contained the lead bombardier. When I saw his bomb-bay doors open, I was to open mine. The instant I saw his bombs begin to fall, I would press a button to release my own. That was the theory”. Distracted by what he saw below, Heller froze when he saw the bombs fall from the lead Mitchell and was a few moments late dropping his load, blasting a hole in a mountain several miles from the bridge.
The Allied breakout took place on 27 May, when the Poles took Cassino on their third try. The plan was that VI Corps would break out of Anzio and advance south of Rome to meet the British Eighth Army.
The German Tenth Army would be surrounded and forced to surrender. Unfortunately, Gen Mark Clark, recently placed in command of the Fifth Army, had grander plans. He ordered VI Corps to advance to the north and open the road to Rome. Clark’s grandiosity was such that he requested Eisenhower delay the Normandy invasion two weeks to “allow time to celebrate the liberation of Rome”. Incredulous, Eisenhower declined.
On 4 June, two days before Normandy, the Fifth Army entered Rome, which the Germans had left as an ‘open city’. While Clark’s troops marched past the ruins of imperial Rome, the Germans retreated around the Eternal City and broke out of the trap. The Eighth Army pursued them up the Italian peninsula for the next six weeks, 225 miles to Perugia, where the Tenth Army linked up with the Fourteenth, then made a fighting withdrawal to the formidable Gothic Line in the Apennines. The war in Italy would grind on for another 11 months, the result of Mark Clark’s ego. Heller and the rest in the 57th Wing would see more war than any had expected.
The 57th Wing commander was Brig Gen Robert D. Knapp, a man involved with aviation since he met the Wright brothers at age 10, when they stayed with his family for 10 days in 1907. Commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army Air Service in March 1918, he held US pilot’s licence number 187 and had flown for longer than most of his young aircrews had been alive. In 1919, he served with Capts ‘Hap’ Arnold and Ira Eaker, no less, on the US-Mexico border. Four years later he pioneered the southern air mail route from Montgomery, Alabama, to New Orleans. As chief of primary flight training at Randolph and Kelly Fields in 1929, he was responsible for all US Army Air Corps flight training. In 1937, he led a 98-aircraft formation of advanced flight training graduates on a national tour to recruit Reserve Officers’ Training Corps students into the air corps.
Knapp organised the first six B-25 groups during 1941, and trained three: the 310th, 321st and 340th, which would become the 57th Wing. He was appointed as commander of the 321st, despite being considered “too old for combat duty”, taking it to North Africa in February 1943. At the age of 45, Knapp flew lead on 40 tough missions including the first bombing of Rome, a strike on an Axis convoy protected by German and Italian fighters — for which he was awarded the Silver Star — and the attack on Athens, which led the 321st to receive its first Presidential Unit Citation. He was promoted to brigadier general and became commander when the 57th Wing was formed in January 1944. He was remembered by those who flew with him for never asking anyone to do anything he had not done first.
Replacements like Heller didn’t know Knapp as the leader who flew ‘the tough ones’. For them, he was ‘the general’, a hard taskmaster who kept upping the number of missions required to go home, unaware of his work to get timely replacements in competition with the air forces ‘fighting the real war’ in north-west Europe. The men benefitted from his largesse at their dinner tables, unaware that they made their deals from Naples to Cairo to Tunis and Casablanca under his protection since he didn’t ‘toot his horn’. Gen Robert Knapp was the polar opposite of Gen Dreedle, the caricature he would become in the most famous war novel of the 20th century.
“Heller wanted to see ‘skies full of flak, and fighters screaming past in life and death duels high in the clouds”
On 15 August, Heller flew his 37th mission, which he called his “most terrifying”. The target was three bridges over the Rhone River outside Avignon, France, considered “the roughest target in the theater” according to Capt James E. Nickerson, intelligence officer of the 321st BG’s 445th Bomb Squadron. The crews called them “the dreaded Avignon bridges”. The goal was blocking German reinforcements when Operation ‘Dragoon’, the invasion of southern France, hit the beaches. Heller was particularly afraid of these bridges. A week earlier, they had gone after the same target; the B-25 directly ahead of his had been hit in the bomb bay and was obliterated in the explosion. The pilot and co-pilot were his two closest friends in the squadron. “I finally admitted to myself on the way home that they really were trying to kill me. That they were trying to kill all of us was no consolation. They were trying to kill me!”
As they flew over the fields south of Avignon, the navigator —a history teacher before the war — announced over the intercom, “On our right is the city of Orange, ancestral home of the kings of Holland and William III, who ruled England from 1688 to 1702”. “And on our left”, replied the worried voice of the radio man/gunner, “is flak”. Ahead was the flak barrage, a football fieldsized apparition of yellow and orange explosions, surrounded by ominous black clouds.
“Heller bandaged the leg and gave the radio man a shot of morphine. He then returned to the cockpit ”
The bombers turned onto their final approach and Heller watched the lead ship. When its bomb doors opened, Heller opened his. When the lead aircraft dropped, he dropped his. Suddenly, the B-25 was bracketed by three flak bursts so close and loud he could hear them over the engines’ roar. With bombs gone, the pilot banked to the right. More flak exploded and the starboard wingtip was blown off. The co-pilot was transfixed in terror as a voice shrieked over the intercom, “Help me! I’m hit”. He grabbed his control yoke, whipped it over hard to the right and pushed forward. The port wing came up steeply and the aircraft banked into a wild dive.
“Help him! Help him!” the copilot cried over the intercom. The manoeuvre threw Heller around in his greenhouse and he was pinned by his head to the rear bulkhead by the g-forces, his feet thrashing the air. The pilot fought the copilot for control. The navigator tried to restrain the man. The pilot grabbed the throttles and slowed the dive. The navigator’s lucky punch knocked the co-pilot back into his seat.
The pilot pulled out of the dive, momentarily squashing everyone with the g. The terrified co-pilot fought the pilot until the flight engineer held him tight. The bomber bucked and reared as the pilot fought to prevent a catastrophe. Finally, the B-25 pulled level again. Heller steadied himself and plugged his headset back in. “Help who?”
“Help him! Help the bombardier! He doesn’t answer!” A quick onceover revealed to Heller that he was unhurt. “I’m the bombardier! I’m OK! I’m OK!” “Help him! Help him!” the voice cried. Heller shoved himself through the narrow tunnel and got to the cockpit. He squeezed over the bomb bay back to the rear. The radio man was on the floor, with a large oval wound in his thigh; there was a hole just behind the waist window, where the shrapnel that hit him had entered. Fighting nausea at the sight, Heller ripped open a package of sulfa and spread it over the wound, bandaged the leg and gave the radio man a shot of morphine. He then returned to the cockpit. Flying home, the copilot regained composure. No-one thought less of him; they’d all been there, paralysed by the fear of death. The event, which seemed to last for hours, had actually taken place in a matter of two or three minutes.
On 23 August the 340th flew the kind of mission none of the crews ever felt good about. They thought nothing of bombing railways, rail bridges, road bridges, military bases, or any war-related target. What they didn’t like was creating ‘roadblocks’. This involved bombing for the sole purpose of knocking down buildings and leaving the wreckage to slow the enemy’s movement. The B-25s bombed from 8,000ft, low enough for anyone to see the results of the words “bombs away!” The target was Ponte San Martino, a town that existed because of the Settimo road bridge, built by Julius Caesar’s legionaries in 55 BC. In 1800, Napoleon crossed it on his way to the Battle of Marengo.
Now the bridge was to be destroyed to prevent two Panzer divisions using it to enter France to oppose the invasion. Eighteen B-25s attacked; the lead bombardier was off in his calculation and the bombs missed the bridge and hit the town, where people had come into the streets to look at the aircraft. The B-25 coded 8-K turned aside at the last moment and its bombs fell in an empty field. Back in Corsica, pilot 2nd Lt Clifton C. Grosskopf stated he had made an evasive manoeuvre due to flak — but there was no flak, and such a manoeuvre on the bomb run was against all procedural rules. Years after the war, lead bombardier Robert Buerger stated when he saw the target he nearly aborted the run because it was so obviously not military. The group command stated in their report that a German Panzer division was believed to have set up its headquarters in the village. Despite Grosskopf having violated the rules with his ‘evasive manoeuvre’, no-one ever questioned his act. Several officers did, however, question the order to make the attack, among them Joe Heller, who had flown the mission. He and the others were placed ‘in hack’ for their questions, then released on orders from higher authority.
Settimo Bridge was Heller’s 40th mission. The 340th BG’s war diaries show him flying a mission every two or three days after his first in late May, a schedule like everyone else. He finally left for home in January 1945, nearly five months after Settimo. In that period, he flew a total of 20 missions — one a week or so — all of which he later said were “milk runs”. That time period covers Operation ‘Olive’, the first Allied attempt to break the Gothic Line beginning in September, and a time when most crewmen in the 57th Wing were flying a mission every other day, in conditions everyone recalled as “tough”. That was followed in November by Operation ‘Bingo’, the Battle of the Brenner Pass, a campaign to destroy the railway through the Alps and cut off the German armies in northern Italy that lasted until April 1945. Nobody in the group called any of those missions “milk runs.”
When Heller left with 60 missions in his logbook, the tour had been extended from 70 missions to “the duration of the war”. How was it Heller left, when no-one else could, when men were willing to un-volunteer themselves for flight duty even if it meant a transfer to the infantry facing the Gothic Line — and weren’t being allowed to do so?
Heller’s good friend, 1st Lt Wilbur Blume, a fellow bombardier who was also group public relations officer and officer in charge of the ‘9th Photo Unit’ — an unofficial organisation created in the 340th by group commander Col Willis F. Chapman to make documentary films — was ordered by the colonel to make a film about the training programme he had established to bring new replacements up to speed before they began flying operational missions. The documentary was called Training In Combat, and Chapman hoped it would impress Knapp and serve as a model for other groups. Blume, his photographers, and a group of aircrew ‘actors’ worked on the movie for five months, starting in early September. In his diary, Blume called the project “a boondoggle for the Colonel”. Though it was never completed, Blume kept several parts that were found by his son following his death in 2009.
One of the actors in the film is Joseph Heller. He plays Pete, a replacement bombardier. Was this duty, which took him away from combat, the pay-off for saying nothing more about the events of 23 August 1944? Heller is no longer here to answer such a question, but his flight record in the war diaries is certainly out of the ordinary for the rest of the fliers in the 340th. In an interview following publication of Catch-22, Heller stated that a main theme of the work is the difficulty for an individual to make a moral choice in an institution where he has no voice or power.
In chapter 29, the men are ordered to bomb a village. Maj Danby tells them two Panzer divisions will use the road. The men protest that the village is innocent. At that point, Col Korn comes in: “‘Would you rather go back to Bologna?’ The question, asked quietly, rang out like a shot and created a silence in the room that was awkward and menacing. Yossarian prayed intensely, with shame, that Dunbar would keep his mouth shut. Dunbar dropped his gaze and Colonel Korn knew he had won. ‘No, I thought not,’ he continued with undisguised scorn. ‘You know, Colonel Cathcart and I have to go to a lot of trouble to get you a milk run like this. If you’d sooner fly missions to Bologna, Spezia and Ferrara, we can get those targets with no trouble at all’.”
The helplessness of the men as they silently acquiesce to Korn, that they are willing to bomb a defenceless village rather than fly more missions into heavily defended targets, their own revulsion at themselves for making such a choice, is palpable in the scene.
Did Joseph Heller say ‘yes’ to the offer his alter ego Yossarian said ‘no’ to? The late screenwriter Buck Henry, who worked with Heller while he adapted the novel into the screenplay for the movie, recalled Heller as “the angriest guy I ever knew”. Was he angry at himself for being what he considered a moral coward? Did he create an alternative story as a result? The circumstantial facts support such a theory.
