In November of 1998 I met Jack Morgan, a retired USAAF pilot who is now a member of the Confederate Air Force. In WWII Jack flew the P47, escorting bombers in Europe. Recently Jack agreed to write a personal reflection on the relationship of fighter pilots to bomber pilots.

In all my years as an Army Air Force pilot in World War Two, I do not ever remember hearing a fighter pilot say, “Darn, I wanted to be a bomber pilot and they stuck me in these doggone fighters.”

On the other hand, I remember scores of bomber pilots who would have given up all four of those engines on his B-17/B-24 to fly behind the one on a P-51, a P-47, or the two on a P-38.

Now, there were a few bomber jocks that preferred the heavies and were happy to be surrounded by kids his own age flying in those terribly dangerous skies over Germany. I think it may have been because misery loves company...and believe you me...those bombing raids over Germany (or anywhere else, for that matter) were miserable.

But a great many of the ones who wound up in the multi-engine training bases were those who were just too large framed and too tall to fit in the confines of the fighters, or else they were just victims of the numbers game. You see, there were always more requests for single engine than there were slots open...and guess where the overage went!

And, oddly enough, once these men became pilots in their respective categories, their personality began to take on radical changes.

The fighter guys became the ones with the crushed caps, silk scarfs, and devil-may-care attitudes. They were loud, obnoxious, and God’s gift to women (and in those days with all the home-town boys gone to the military - they were!).

The bomber pilots, however, were more serious, more methodical, more aware of their responsibilities to their crews and the bomber formation around them.

The fighter pilots flew formation and practiced a method of taking care of one another's backsides, but when the enemy arose to challenge them, it was quite often every man for himself with planes all over the sky.

The bomber boys (and most of them were boys in those days) had to fly, and hold formation within hundreds of bombers in spite of the holocaust around him. They had to push blindly through thousands of antiaircraft explosions, fight a losing battle with whatever enemy fighters managed to get through our own fighter escorts, and hold course, altitude and airspeed in the last few minutes of the bomb run - making them sitting ducks to the antiaircraft guns below.

Then they had to go right back through it all to get home! Do you get the picture?

B17 starting engines.

I think both sides were just a little disdainful of the other. The bomber guys thought of the jocks as conceited little show-off sob’s, and the fighter kids called the big bird pilots “bus drivers.” But that was mainly stateside - before those kids went over to become men in combat. Once they had a few missions under their collective belts they began to gain a new respect for each other, and their respective missions. In mortal combat they were all fighting for “keeps” and didn’t have time for petty differences.

Not only that, they quickly came to realize how much they depended upon one another.

Early on, in planning for daylight strategic bombing, the planners believed the enormous firepower of ten 50 caliber machines guns from each bomber, multiplied by the number of bombers in the formation, would be enough to stave off enemy fighters. They soon found out, however, that they were sadly mistaken.

Combat experienced German fighter pilots were knocking our bomber out of the sky in alarming numbers. As losses mounted, the planners decided to send escort fighters along for bomber protection, and suddenly the two factions, the fighter pilots and bomber pilots, were together as a team.

The concept worked out well, utilizing the only fighter in great enough numbers to accompany them, at that time, which was the P-47 Thunderbolt. The “Jug” pilots were happy - after all they were downing Me109’s and FW 190’s all over the skies of eastern Europe. But that was just it...they were relageted to that area of Europe because the Thunderbolt’s range was not great enough to allow them to follow the bombers deep into Germany where the great amount of targets were located.

And so it was, the bombers were still suffering untenable losses on the long range missions. Then, providentially, along came the P-51 Mustangs with their astounding range that could carry them all the way to Berlin and back with the “bus drivers.” And that was when things began to change in the air war over Germany. The bomber force still suffered heavy losses, some even to enemy fighters that managed to penetrate the protective screen of escorts, but mainly it was just to antiaircraft fire, now.

So the bomber pilots began to see the fighters in a different light. Oh, they still considered them arrogant sob’s, but at least they were their sob’s, and they dearly loved to see (what they had begun to call their “little-bitty-buddies,”)making crisscrossing con trails above their mighty formations.

So the climate between the two factions had begun to change. Where before there was almost “bad blood” between them, the bomber crews would often seek out fighter pilots at the officer’s club and buy drinks for the “sob’s.”

B17 and P51 from B17 II

Conversely, the fighters were glad to return the favor because they knew the odds were high that the generous bomber pilot would not survive to complete his 25 missions. Having seen the hell that the bomber crews went through to get their bombs on target made our fighters extremely determined that no enemy fighters get through to make it worse, so they fought like tigers to protect them. They didn’t get ‘em all, but they so decimated the enemy interceptor force that, as time went on, that force became less and less formidable.

Now this was not all due to the fighters shooting down the enemy, because there were other factors to consider. All these raids made by the bombers, raids on aircraft factories, oil refineries, ball bearing factories, and others, had a great deterrent effect on the numbers of replacement aircraft produced, and how much fuel was available for those planes they did have.

Another factor was in that as our fighters shot down the enemy, many of their experienced pilots were killed and their replacements tended to be low-time pilots with little or no combat experience - easy pickin’s for our experienced “sob’s.”

So, with each passing mission, the enemy fighters, which had been such a great force in our bomber losses before, became less and less of a factor in their losses.

But, on the other hand, the respect that had grown up between the bomber and fighter pilots, and their emerging desire to coordinate their activities for the common cause, became a great factor in the ultimate victory in the air war over Europe in World War Two.

Long live the memories of the days of the “Bus Drivers,” and the “SOB’s.”

For more on the history of these aircraft and pilots visit our Military History index.