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Major Harry Crosby was Group Navigator with the Hundredth Bomb Group at Thorpe Abbotts in the East of England, responsible for assembling as many as 2000 war planes from airbases across England, leading them to their targets and safely home.
He is remembered for one of the war’s strangest decisions because of a love of Beethoven, and wrote movingly of Operation Chowhound, the mission to drop food supplies to the starving Dutch in Spring 1945, in his personal memoir about the 100th, ‘A Wing and a Prayer’.
A week after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, Harry H. Crosby left his Master of Arts programme in writing at the University of Iowa and joined the Army Air Corps, training as a navigator, and arriving at the 100th Bomb Group, Thorpe Abbotts in Norfolk, East Anglia, England in June 1943.
Told he would be flying B-17s, the first time he saw one land, it crashed, killing everyone on board.
He had an inauspicious start to his time in England, as the navigator of the only B-17 Fortress of the 100th that failed to make the journey safely to Thorpe Abbotts, via Iceland.
Crosby made an error and the plane, piloted by John Brady, missed England. After almost flying into Nazi-occupied France, they changed course, eventually crash-landing on a runway in the west of England. None of the crew were injured. Not even their new mascot, Meatball, a Husky they had kidnapped in Iceland. They finished their journey by train to Diss, a market town a few miles from Thorpe Abbotts.
Crosby’s luck improved and he became Group Navigator, serving with the 100th for the entire twenty-two months it was operational in World War II. His role had the responsibility for assembling as many as 2000 bombers in the skies over England and the North Sea before leading them on their combat missions over Nazi-occupied Europe and safely home again.
After a full tour of 25 missions, he remained in England for seven more, serving until the end of hostilities on May 9, 1945, leaving with the rank of Lt. Colonel and medals including the Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star and Croix de Guerre.
Despite a brilliant mathematical turn of mind, the sensitive, even mercurial, Crosby was a romantic – which lead to his leading role in one of the strangest decisions of World War II.
Auxilaries watch as planes leave Thorpe Abbotts on a daytime mission.
On August 12, 1943, the 100th was dispatched to the Ruhr to bomb various military targets in that flak-laden industrial heartland, with Crosby’s plane leading.
‘As we flew eastward with the entire Ruhr Valley on our left we could see that the Ruhr would be completely obscured and in those days before blind bombing we had to have visual reference to the ground or we could not find our target,’ Crosby remembered.
Other targets were under heavy cloud as well, freeing the squadrons to bomb a ‘window of opportunity’, a euphemism for any place where bombs could be unloaded against the enemy.
Seeing a large German city through a clearing in the clouds, Crosby gave the OK sign to the pilot. As he heard the bomb doors opening, he looked at his map and realised the city was Bonn.
‘It just happened that the night before, after I had been given a pre-briefing, I had returned to my quarters and was playing some records on a gramophone,’ said Crosby.
The records were Beethoven’s Third Symphony (Eroica) and the complete Fifth Symphony. ‘As I played the records I rather idly read the inscription on the inside cover of the album. I noticed without paying much attention that Beethoven had been born in and had gone to school in Bonn.’
He immediately hit the intercom button: ‘We can’t bomb Bonn.’
‘Why not?’ replied the pilot.
‘That’s where Beethoven went to school!’
The pilot went along with Crosby and the entire Eighth Air Force in the air that day, more than 60 Flying Fortresses, passed over the city, some with their bomb doors still open. Minutes later, they found a marshalling yard in Cologne and obliterated it.
By early 1945 it was clear the Allies were going to win in Europe, but the bombing was relentless. One air operation though was controversial. Operation Clarion was ‘widespread simultaneous attacks’ by waves of American and British warplanes on targets that had previously escaped bombing. The objective was to create shock among millions of Germans. With the Luftwaffe unable to defend them, the mission was merciless.
‘In long, late-night talks,’ remembered Crosby, ‘we wondered what was happening to us. Were we machines? Were we avengers?’
Dropping humanitarian aid to starving Dutch on Operation Chowhound.
The last drop by the bombers was humanitarian: food for starving Dutch. Shortly before the war’s end, fanatical Nazi commanders in the Netherlands cut off food supplies and opened dykes, flooding much of the country’s low-lying farmland. By the Spring of 1945 more than 12,000 Dutch had died of starvation and another four and a half million were malnourished, resorting to eating tulip bulbs. ‘Unless a gift comes from heaven,’ wrote a Dutch woman, ‘we will soon die.’
Airdrops of food supplies were organised: a lifesaver for the Dutch and a psychological boost for the American bomber crews after years of destruction.
Food parcels dropped to the ground in the Netherlands for Operation Chowhound.
On May 1, the day the world heard of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s suicide, the Eighth became, in Crosby’s words, ‘a different kind of air force…’, not strategic or tactical but humanitarian.
By agreement with the Germans, Operation Chowhound allowed the Eighth to fly their planes, without gunners, over Holland and release their cargo, including boxes of Army rations and sacks of potatoes donated by English farmers, in open areas marked with huge red crosses.
‘I felt better about Chowhound than I did about Operation Clarion,’ said Harry H. Crosby.
