Mission to Berlin

Between 1940 and 1945, the western Allies flew 314 bombing missions to Berlin. Germany’s capital was its largest city, the richest metropolitan center on the European continent, the sixth-largest city in the world—and a legitimate military target. It housed the headquarters of the Third Reich and the German armed forces. It had a dozen aircraft assembly plants and a similar number of factories for military vehicles. It was a vital rail and transportation hub. By any measurement, Berlin was the heart of the Reich, and it was protected to a degree befitting that status.

Berlin’s antiaircraft defenses stretched across more than forty miles of searchlights, flak batteries, and airfields brimming with German air force fighters—up to 1,600 combat-capable warplanes. Royal Air Force Lancaster crews ran this gauntlet under cover of darkness, carrying out the most sustained effort against a German city during the war. While the Britons went after cities at night, the Americans went after installations by day. Outgoing and returning bombers would sometimes pass each other in the early morning as the sun rose on the Reich.

The U.S. Eighth Air Force began its war on Berlin on March 4, 1944, followed by an all-out assault two days later, and, after a hiatus, continued from late 1944 until war’s end. The February 3, 1945, mission was the next-to-last major Eighth Air Force effort against Berlin and the largest bombing mission undertaken against a single target. Robert F. Dorr brings this mission to life through the words of official reports, airmen’s diaries, and his personal interviews of hundreds of veterans.

From acclaimed author Robert F. Dorr, Mission to Berlin takes the reader on a World War II strategic bombing mission from the airfields of England to Berlin and back. Told largely in the veterans’ own words, Mission to Berlin covers all the players in a long-range bombing run, including pilots and other aircrew, ground crew, and escort fighters that accompanied the heavy bombers on their perilous missions. Long stretches of quiet flight high above the fields of Europe were punctuated by moments of intense danger and adrenalin as flak sliced through the hull and crew alike and German fighters pounced on the Allied aircraft. Bomber crews also faced high-altitude cold, lack of oxygen, fires, and explosions of their own ordnance, as well as crash landings or bailouts that could kill them or turn them into prisoners of war. As they fought their way across Europe, hoping to beat the odds and survive the maximum thirty-five combat missions, they often thought, “I hope we get Hitler today.”



“Ten thousand American bombers fell in battle during World War II. A mighty chunk of that total consitsted of B-24s of the Eighth Air Force. In looking back on those days, when the sky was pungent with exhaust, black with exploding shellfire, and swarming with Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs, some men wondered simply how they had done it.”

—from Chapter 14