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June 28 - October 23, 2023
In 1944, Germany aviation factories would put out an impressive 40,000 planes, but that same year, the United States alone would produce 96,000 aircraft, and Allied total aircraft production would outpace German production by 400 percent.
“By being able to go across no matter what the weather was and bomb with a radar sight, the H2X . . . forced the German fighter up in the air,” Carl Spaatz noted after the war. “And I am certain under those conditions that they had as many operational losses, crashes on landing after going up, as they did in the air fighting itself.” He was right.
Air Force statisticians reported to Spaatz that only 26 percent of crews beginning operations in England could expect to complete twenty-five missions.
Later, Adolf Galland would say that the day the Eighth Air Force’s fighters went on the offensive was the day Germany lost the air war. At this time, Hermann Göring was ordering his fighters to avoid the American fighter escorts altogether and concentrate on the bombers. This, Galland said later, was Germany’s “greatest tactical error” of the air war.
In less than a year, the Eighth’s Fighter Command had become virtually an all-Mustang force.
The aim of Operation Argument was nothing less than the annihilation of the Luftwaffe. The strategy: bait them and kill them. Send in the bombers—the bait—to destroy the aircraft factories and then massacre the planes and pilots that came up to defend them.
military strategists call the principle of “mass,” the application of overwhelming force. This had been the American strategy of winning wars since Ulysses S. Grant wore down Robert E. Lee.
“My lot was much easier than Eaker’s because I began to get more bombers and . . . long-range fighters,” Doolittle said in a postwar interview. “It was the Mustang that made me look good.”
War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory. GEORGES CLEMENCEAU
The air was full of Allied fighters and “columns of Flying Fortresses stretched back to England as far as the eye could follow.” There were no signs of German fighters. The “Hun never showed up,” Kuter wrote later. “He couldn’t because he had nothing left.” On this world-turning day, the Luftwaffe flew fewer than 250 sorties against the most powerful invasion force ever assembled to that time. The infantry battle—the breakout from the beaches and the fight to clear the enemy from Normandy—would not be won for another seven weeks, but command of the sky had already been secured in six weeks of
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In the end, dispersal “defeated itself.” When the German transportation system was decimated by Allied bombing and strafing in late 1944, it became impossible to keep the final assembly plants supplied with the parts to produce finished aircraft. Overrated at the time by Eighth Air Force leaders, and underrated ever since by historians, Big Week was neither a victory nor a loss for the Americans. It was merely the opening engagement of what would be the most prolonged and decisive air battle of World War II.
The American effort would be different. The main aiming points would be industrial, chief among them the great ball bearing works at Erkner, in the suburbs of the capital. And the bombers would be used primarily as bait, to bring the Luftwaffe to battle.
This time there would be no deception, no feints. The American air commanders would send in the bombers on predictable routes. Placing the bombers at extreme risk would be part of the design.
Under prodding from Hap Arnold, General Doolittle extended their tours of duty from twenty-five to thirty missions (and later to thirty-five). Why send home crews, the reasoning went, when they had reached the peak of their efficiency?
Berlin would be the toughest target the Eighth ever attacked.
It was a ragged performance, but the fact that American planes had reached Berlin in daylight was immensely significant to both the Axis and the Allies.
After the war, an interrogator asked Göring at what point he realized that Germany was doomed. “The first time your bombers came over Hanover, escorted by fighters, I began to be worried. When they came with fighter escorts over Berlin—I knew the jig was up.”
“I don’t have to be told who these guys are,” Yeager remembered his reaction. “These are the Maquis, the French resistance fighters who live and hide in these mountain pine forests by day and blow up trains and bridges by night.”
At Thorpe Abbotts, where the group had lost fifteen bombers, men cursed Spaatz and Doolittle for sending them to Berlin when the Germans knew they were coming. The men did not know it yet, but this raid was the turning point in the air war.
From now on the Allied leaders of this campaign will send their aerial artillery anywhere in Germany where the German fighters are made and to any point where German fighters will give battle.”
In the words of a German historian, “the war of attrition had reached the mortal phase when neither courage nor skill availed further.” The effects of these losses on morale are recorded in the diary of a Luftwaffe pilot. “Every time I close the canopy before taking off, I feel that I am closing the lid of my own coffin.”
While Army surveys indicated that the morale of American combat fliers remained higher than that of ground soldiers throughout the war, all these missions packed together, one on top of the other, filthy weather or fair, with the bombers as bait, worked on the men’s minds. And some of them broke.
“It may sound corny,” he later explained his decision, “but what’s wrong with wanting to fight for your country. Why are people so reluctant to use the word patriotism?”
Teamwork, however, was the key to success in fighter warfare. Classic dogfighting, mano a mano battles decided by aerial acrobatics, was rare in the European air war. Fighters fought in twos: a leader and wingman, one the attacker, the other his protector. Everything depended on finding the enemy first and surprising him—“bouncing” him—preferably from above.
But bomber pilots suffered much higher casualties than fighter pilots, and with greater responsibilities as crew commanders, they were more susceptible to mental breakdowns or combat fatigue.
Upon his appointment as supreme commander of Overlord, Eisenhower demanded operational command of the tactical and strategic air forces of Britain and the United States.
To get Churchill and his War Cabinet to surrender control of Bomber Command was a Herculean undertaking, and Eisenhower had to threaten to resign to get his way. Unless Arthur Harris’s bombers came under his direction, he told Churchill, he would “simply have to go home.” That settled it.
The ferocity of the fight convinced Spaatz that his target planners had found the enemy’s fatal flaw. “On that day the technological war was decided,” Albert Speer wrote in his memoirs. A week after the raid, Speer reported to Hitler that “the enemy has struck us at one of our weakest points.
The Transportation Plan was even more successful. Allied heavy and medium bombers almost completely dismembered the rail network of northern Belgium and France, choking off the main supply channel that fed the German army. And fighter planes pounced on anything that moved on France’s roads and railways.
In a last-minute change in the original Transportation Plan, Allied fighter-bombers smashed the bridges over the Loire and the Seine, cutting off most of Normandy and Brittany from the rest of France. (This was the tactical plan proposed back in March by Spaatz’s target planners.) By the last week of May, all routes over the Seine north of Paris were closed to rail traffic.
Allied planes dropped a total of 71,000 tons of bombs on the French railway system, the equivalent of seven times the explosive power of the uranium bomb that would turn Hiroshima into nothing. Postwar studies of pre-invasion bombing suggest that the bridge-busting campaign by the low-flying fighter-bombers was more successful in impeding German troop movements than the destruction of French rail centers by the heavies. Using tens of thousands of slave laborers, the Germans repaired marshaling yards and tracks as fast as Allied strategic bombers destroyed them. And these high-altitude attacks
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But the Eighth Air Force had already done its indispensable duty. In the five-month battle for the air supremacy that made the invasion possible, the American Air Forces in Europe lost over 2,600 heavy bombers and 980 fighter planes and suffered 18,400 casualties, including 10,000 combat deaths, over half as many men as the Eighth lost in all of 1942 and 1943. These airmen deserve an equal place in the national memory with the approximately 6,000 American soldiers killed, wounded, or missing in action in the amphibious and airborne assault on D-Day.
It was in London that over 90 percent of the V-1 fatalities would occur.
The project was code-named Aphrodite and it was a spectacular failure. None of the two-man crews knew the objective of their mission: to destroy four large rocket sites across the Channel.
The Navy had established its own experimental drone program, code-named Anvil, for its Pacific-based aircraft carriers.
The entire Aphrodite effort had been wasted on dead targets.
The Crossbow campaign was another failure.
General Spaatz had been right all along. As Adolf Galland pointed out after the war, “The best way to fight the German V-weapon system, would [have been] to paralyze the German war industry.” In the end, infantry accomplished what airpower could not.
Bradley came up with another plan, which unexpectedly turned into one of the supreme military achievements of the European campaign. Operation Cobra would begin with a cataclysmic bombing by the Eighth Air Force.
Patton took charge of the newly activated Third Army and began an all-out drive across France at a rate of fifty miles a day, moving with furious resolve from the seaside bluffs of Avranches, into the Brittany peninsula, and then eastward to help destroy the German Seventh Army. It was one of the most astonishing achievements in the history of mobile warfare, and it was made possible by close coordination among tanks, troops, artillery, and the fighter-bombers of the Allied air forces, which acted as fast-moving aerial artillery for the army.
Without the heavies, the St. Lô breakout could have been achieved only with staggering casualties.
Quesada, one of the youngest generals in the Air Force, introduced innovations in warfare that broke down the rigid division between tactical and strategic bombing. He took his pilots, who were operating from forward bases in France, to the front lines
And in the battle for France, Pete Quesada gave them better armament—deadly 5-inch rockets—as well as new eyes and ears. He put high-frequency radio sets in tanks so tank men and airmen could talk to one another, and he placed his own airmen in radio-equipped tanks as forward air controllers, to better direct fire on German battlefield targets.
By late summer, close air support of infantry—a German innovation—became one of the salient causes of Germany’s defeat.
Passing through a corridor of horror known to history as the Falaise Pocket, the Germans were massacred by Allied air-tank battle teams.
The slaughter at Falaise ended the eighty-day-long Battle of Normandy, the most decisive battle on the Western Front.
The battle was a prelude to the liberation of Paris and the triumphant Allied drive across France to Germany’s western border,
In over a year and a half of costly bombing operations, American target planners had failed to see that oil plants were much more important than ball bearing factories, which were almost impossible to disable, or aircraft plants that had been moved to remote, cleverly camouflaged sites.
The attack on oil plants, beginning in May 1944 was, in Albert Speer’s words, the “first heavy blow” delivered against German industry.
In September 1939, the German army invaded Poland with only a two-to-three-month reserve of aviation and motor gasoline. At that time Germany was importing nearly 70 percent of its liquid fuel, an alarming vulnerability for a nation with imperial ambitions.
