)
Major Robert ‘Rosie’ Rosenthal flew 52 missions as an Eighth Air Force bomber pilot in World War II, was awarded 16 decorations, and survived being shot down twice. When the war in Europe ended, he volunteered to fight in the Pacific. And when the Japanese surrendered, Rosenthal decided to use his law degree to prosecute Nazis at Nuremberg.
Robert Rosenthal had just started his first job as a lawyer when he heard that the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941. The next day, the 25-year-old quit his law firm and enlisted with the Army Air Corps.
Offered noncombat duties, he insisted on fighting and, in August 1943, was sent to England to fly combat missions with the 100th Bomb Group at Thorpe Abbotts, Norfolk in East Anglia.
‘I couldn’t wait to get over there,’ he later said. ‘When I finally arrived, I thought I was at the centre of the world, the place where democracies were gathering to defeat the Nazis. I was right where I wanted to be.’
‘I had read Mein Kampf in college and had seen the newsreels of the big Nazi rallies in Nuremberg. The entire nation had gone mad. It had to be stopped.’
Rosenthal was Jewish, but his animosity toward the Nazis wasn’t personal. Hitler ‘was a menace to decent people everywhere.’
On his third bombing mission on October 10, 1943, over Münster, Rosenthal’s plane The Royal Flush and the other 12 planes in the group were attacked by 200 German fighters. Within seconds, they were engaged in what one air commander called ‘the single most vicious air battle of that war, or of all time.’
As the German planes decimated their ranks, Rosenthal executed a number of evasive manoeuvres to break free.
‘In a situation like that you don’t think about dying. You focus on what you have to do to save the plane and crew… You’re frightened, but there’s a difference between fear and panic. Panic paralyzes; fear energizes… Truthfully, the only fear I ever experienced in the war was fear that I would let my crew down.’
The Royal Flush limped home, with two engines dead, the intercom and the oxygen system non-functional, and with a large, ragged hole in the right wing. Of the 13 B-17s that flew that day he and his crew were the only one that returned.
‘I didn’t feel relieved,’ Rosenthal said. ‘I felt guilty. Why had I lived when all those other good men died?’
Robert Rosenthal (second left, front row) with his crew on ‘Rosie’s Riveters’.
‘ Gale Cleven and John Egan gave the 100th its personality,’ wrote Harry Crosby. ‘Bob Rosenthal helped us want to win the war.’
In March 1944, Rosenthal’s crew, nicknamed ‘Rosie’s Riveters’ after their plane, completed their 25-mission combat tour and returned to the United States, but Rosenthal extended his tour, eventually flying a total of 52 missions.
On D-Day, June 6, 1944, he led the 100th on the third bombing mission of the day.
‘I briefed the crews and I had never seen such a reaction from them,’ Rosenthal recalled. ‘They stood and cheered and roared. This is the day they had been looking toward.’
They went out at dusk. ‘We had a rule. No one could talk on the intercom unless it was absolutely necessary. But as we passed over that vast armada and headed over the beaches, a member of our crew started to say a prayer for the people below and we all joined in. It was one of the most emotional moments of my life.’
In September 1944, Rosenthal’s plane was shot down over German-occupied France, and he broke his right arm and nose. He was rescued by the Free French and returned to duty as soon as he had healed.
On his penultimate mission on February 3, 1945, Rosenthal led a mission to bomb Berlin. Although his B-17 was in flames from a direct hit, he continued to the target to drop his payload, then stayed with the plane until after the rest of the crew had bailed out, just before it exploded at an altitude of only about 1,000 feet.
He fractured the same arm and was rescued by suspicious Soviet soldiers who thought he was a German until Rosenthal shouted: ‘Americanski! Coca-Cola! Lucky Strike! Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin!’
Seconds later, the Russian was holding Rosenthal in a bear hug and kissing his cheeks.
He was passed back through the lines to Moscow where, as a guest of the American Ambassador, he sent a message back to Thorpe Abbotts telling them to reserve a plane for when he returned. ‘The Rosenthal legend was kept alive,’ wrote one of his colleagues. ‘It was a real legend, made up of the following ingredients: that he could have stopped flying and that he couldn’t get killed.’
The uniform of Major Robert ‘Rosie’ Rosenthal, at the 100th Bomb Group Memorial Museum, Thorpe Abbotts.
Rosenthal was on leave in England’s capital at 3pm on Tuesday, May 8, 1945, when the news broke that the Nazis had surrendered. ‘London simply went crazy,’ he later recalled. ‘I’d be walking through a throng of people with a pretty girl on my arm and all of a sudden she was gone, replaced by another one. It was a madhouse, a beautiful, beautiful madhouse.’
‘We had an airman with us who had taken the pledge; never had a drink. We lost him for an hour or so and then found him dead drunk in the gutter.’
After the war, Rosenthal served as an assistant to the U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials and interrogated major Nazi figures like Hermann Göring, commander of the German air force, and Wilhelm Keitel, a top German general. For him, it was greatly satisfying to see men like these brought to justice.
‘Seeing these strutting conquerors after they were sentenced – powerless, pathetic and preparing for the hangman – was the closure I needed. My war was over.’
Only then, when ‘justice had overtaken evil,’ he said, did Rosenthal return to civilian life.
