Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (10 page)

In an August 1 memo, General Ira Eaker wrote that his VIII Bomber Command had as its role the “destruction of carefully chosen strategic targets, with an initial subsidiary purpose [of determining its] capacity to destroy pinpoint targets by daylight accuracy bombing and our ability to beat off fighter opposition and to evade antiaircraft opposition.”

In other words, the secondary mission was to prove that the primary mission was
possible
!

The airpower historian Arthur B. Ferguson of Duke University writes in “Origins of the Combined Bomber Offensive” in Volume II of
Army Air Forces in World War II
, “These early missions were less important for what they contributed directly to the Allied war effort than for what they contributed indirectly by testing and proving the doctrine of strategic daylight bombing. In either instance it was as difficult and dangerous to strive for quick results as it was natural for observers, especially those at some distance from the scene of operations, to look impatiently for them.”

These missions, beginning with the one on the fourth of July, marked
a timid beginning for a strategic offensive, but even this was about to be interrupted by Operation Torch.

The only major American ground offensive operation against the Germans that was on the drawing boards for the foreseeable future, Torch was the centerpiece of Allied offensive actions against Germany in the second half of 1942. General Erwin Rommel’s German Afrika Korps had proven itself to be as successful as the blitzkrieging German armies in Europe in 1940. He controlled Tunisia and Libya, and—in victory after victory—he had pushed the British deep into Egypt. Meanwhile, in his rear, Morocco and Algeria were safe and secure, controlled by the Vichy French, Germany’s nominal allies. Planned for early November, Torch was designed to land Allied troops in Morocco and Algeria, and to relieve Rommel of his secure rear.

General Eisenhower, who was in overall command of Torch, and the highest ranking American officer in Europe, was keen to concentrate maximum American firepower in support of this operation. This included the bombers of the Eighth Air Force. He let it be known that he was seriously considering the idea of suspending the Eighth Air Force campaign when it had barely started, in order to concentrate all of the Eighth’s bombers under Twelfth Air Force command in the Mediterranean Theater.

While understanding and recognizing the strategic goals of Operation Torch, Spaatz naturally argued in favor of continuing his strategic campaign. Every distraction of Eighth Air Force assets meant a postponement of the validation of the strategic concept that Spaatz and his air commanders sought most feverishly. As Arthur Ferguson recalls, “The delay was the more vexing because from an early stage in war planning the bomber campaign against Germany had been conceived as the first offensive to be conducted by United States forces.”

The disagreement between Spaatz and Eisenhower over the use of airpower was more practical than theoretical. Eisenhower may have come from the ground forces, but he understood the potential of airpower. This is why he wanted as much of it as possible to be part of Torch. Spaatz, the airman, wanted no interruption to his aspiration to continue demonstrating airpower’s strategic potential. The argument came about because in the autumn of 1942, there were not yet enough USAAF aircraft in Europe to please both men.

It was only because of the fact that Eisenhower was quite fond of Spaatz personally that the strategic air campaign was not suspended indefinitely in September 1942. “From the time of his arrival at London in July [1942] he was never long absent from my side until the last victorious shot had been fired in Europe,” Eisenhower recalls in his wartime memoir,
Crusade in Europe
. “On every succeeding day of almost three years of active war I had new reasons for thanking the gods of war and the War Department for giving me ‘Tooey’ Spaatz. He shunned the limelight and was so modest and retiring that the public probably never became fully cognizant of his value.”

Indeed, Spaatz was able to argue the case of the strategic operations convincingly, and on September 5, Eisenhower agreed—but only to allow Spaatz to continue Eighth Air Force heavy bomber operations. Eisenhower diverted personnel, as well as the Eighth Air Force fighters, smaller tactical bombers, and two heavy bomber groups, to the Torch operations. Even the VIII Air Force Service Command was being asked to support aircraft assigned to Operation Torch.

Spaatz’s narrow victory was almost pyrrhic. He had won the right to continue his campaign, but he had too few bombers to make it more than a token effort. The loss of half the fighters previously assigned to the VIII Fighter Command also put the VIII Bomber Command in a position of having to become more dependent on RAF Fighter Command for fighter escorts.

This came at the same time that RAF Bomber Command was steadily increasing its ability to conduct strategic missions against Germany, something that the Eighth Air Force had yet to do. While RAF Bomber Command could now muster strike forces of a hundred or more bombers for their nighttime missions against Germany, the Eighth Air Force lagged far behind. As Arthur Ferguson reminds us, “The basic concept of a combined bomber offensive presumed complementary operations of RAF night bombers and AAF day bombers.”

However, the two forces were still far from complementary. Most of the Eighth Air Force August missions involved a dozen or fewer Flying Fortresses. As late as mid-September, Spaatz noted in a memo to General George Stratemeyer, Hap Arnold’s chief of staff, that the British were in a position to speak with authority on bombing operations and that at the
time, the RAF was the only Allied entity persistently engaged in “pounding hell out of Germany.”

During September, as the 91st and 301st Bombardment Groups became operational and began flying their first missions, Spaatz and Eaker were able to muster at least 30 aircraft for several missions, but there just weren’t as many as they needed. Though 328 Flying Fortresses and 105 Liberators had been deployed overseas by the end of August, preparations for Operation Torch, as well as requirements in the Pacific, had syphoned off much of the flow of equipment that Spaatz might have like to see go to the Eighth Air Force.

On October 9, the Eighth Air Force was at last able to launch more than 100 bombers on a single day. Including two dozen Liberators from the newly operational 93rd Bombardment Group, the Eighth sent out 108 heavy bombers, of which 69 hit their primary target—the industrial complex around the French city of Lille.

Calling the Lille mission a “minor climax,” Arthur Ferguson writes enthusiastically that it was “the first mission to be conducted on a really adequate scale and it marked, as it were, the formal entry of the American bombers into the big league of strategic bombardment. Then, for the first time, the German high command saw fit to mention publicly the activities of the Flying Fortresses, although they had already made thirteen appearances over enemy territory. Lille’s heavy industries contributed vitally to German armament and transport.”

However, Ferguson gives low marks to the bombing precision achieved, noting that it “did not demonstrate the degree of accuracy noticeable in some of the earlier and lesser efforts,” although he goes on to say that “despite a scattered bomb pattern and numerous duds, several bombs fell in the target area—enough, in any event, to cause severe damage.” He reports Spaatz saying that the “bombing had been accurate in relation to European [RAF] standards rather than according to any absolute standard.”

Nevertheless, referring to the VIII Bomber Command study entitled
The First 1,100 Bombers Dispatched
, Ferguson writes that “by early October, the first fourteen missions had been on the whole very encouraging. Targets had been attacked with reasonable frequency, especially during the first three weeks, and hit with a fair degree of accuracy. During the first nine missions, the Germans had evidently refused to take the day bombing
seriously. The American forces had been small and the fighter escort heavy, and so the Germans had sent up few fighters, preferring to take the consequences of light bombing raids rather than to risk the loss of valuable aircraft. And when the German fighters did take to the air, they exhibited a marked disinclination to close with the bomber formation.”

Citing memos from Eaker to Spaatz, and from Eaker to Hap Arnold, Ferguson goes on to say that “the bombing had been more accurate than most observers had expected. Indeed, it was a tribute of sorts to the accuracy of the Americans that after the ninth mission enemy fighter opposition suddenly increased. And it was a source of satisfaction to the AAF commanders that the B-17s and the B-24s appeared more than able to hold their own against fighter attacks.”

RAF Bomber Command planners, who had always been skeptical of the USAAF precision daylight bombing doctrine, were now willing to give the Yanks some measure of credit. As Arthur Ferguson puts it, “British observers in September and October were at least ready to admit that the AAF day bombers and the policy of day bombardment showed surprising promise.”

Peter Masefield, the popular aviation journalist and air correspondent for the
Sunday Times
, had written adamantly in August that “there is no doubt that day bombing at long range is not possible as a regular operation unless fighter opposition is previously overwhelmed or until we have something too fast for the fighters to intercept.”

On October 18, after the Lille mission, he qualified his stance somewhat, asking in the
Sunday Times
, “Can we carry day air war into Germany?”—which had hitherto been answered in the unqualified negative but was now subject to a new assessment…. “The Americans have taught us much; we still have much to learn—and much we can teach.”

Originally, Spaatz and Eisenhower had agreed that the loaning of Eighth Air Force assets to Operation Torch would leave the VIII Bomber Command mission substantially intact, but by October, this command had been asked to part with two heavy bomber groups, 1,098 officers, including pilots and navigators, and 7,101 enlisted men.

According to minutes of an Eighth Air Force commanders meeting on November 1, Spaatz had been heard to quip wryly, “What is left of the Eighth Air Force after the impact of Torch?”

In response to this, one might ask, “What might have happened to Torch without the impact of the Eighth Air Force?”

Whatever the answers to these hypotheticals, the fact is that Torch succeeded. Indeed, November 1942 provided a welcome turn of events for the Allies in North Africa. On November 4, the British finally broke Rommel’s momentum with a victory at El Alamein, just sixty miles from Alexandria, Egypt, and on November 8, Operation Torch put a one-hundred-thousand-man, mainly American, ground force ashore in Algeria and Morocco against quickly fading resistance. The landings were a big boost to American morale both at home and among the troops overseas.

For the Eighth Air Force, however, November brought only bad weather and a reorienting of its priorities. In late October, Eisenhower ordered another change of direction. The Eighth had not had to relinquish all of its heavy bombers to support Operation Torch directly, but they were now directed to use their range and payload capacity to support Operation Torch
indirectly
.

Eisenhower understood strategic airpower well enough to know that a key principle is cutting off a threat at its source, rather than in the field where it becomes a threat. He had a threat that was in need of being clipped at its source.

One of the most aggravating vexations for Allied planners throughout the war thus far had been the German U-boat campaign. While Britain’s Royal Navy had successfully won its campaign against the surface fleet of the German Kreigsmarine, multiple “wolf packs” of submarines lurked beneath the surface of the Atlantic. Since the beginning of the war, they had proven to be the one German naval weapon that most worried the British. They had long been one, preying upon the convoys supplying the United Kingdom from its overseas dominions, and now they were a serious threat to the convoys bringing American men and materiel to the island nation.

As Timothy Runyan and Jan Copes write in their book
The Battle of the Atlantic
, the U-boats sunk 607,247 tons of Allied shipping in May 1942, the month that Dick Hughes came back to England. This was part of the reason that he came by air. The following month, the total tonnage lost was 700,235, and in October, the German submarine fleet sent 619,417 tons to the bottom.

Recognizing that Operation Torch depended on safe passage of troop ships from the United States, Eisenhower ordered Spaatz to use the Eighth Air Force against the U-boat pens, which the Kreigsmarine had constructed along the Atlantic coast of France, at places such as Saint-Nazaire and Lorient, as well as at Bordeaux, Brest, and La Pallice. Because nighttime area bombardment would be ineffective against reinforced concrete submarine pens that required precision strikes, the job could not be done by RAF Bomber Command.

Eisenhower had told Spaatz pointedly that he deemed the reversal of the U-boat threat “to be one of the basic requirements to the winning of the war.”

When the Eighth Air Force came to Berkeley Square for a plan, Dick Hughes was pessimistic, telling the generals that “with the size of force and the types of bombs available to us, we could do very little damage to these massive structures, and that I doubted that by such attacks the Eighth Air Force could appreciably affect the outcome of the submarine war. I also pointed out that the anti-aircraft defenses around each of these bases were extremely heavy, and we would probably pay a heavy price for conducting what were virtually training operations over such targets.”

Hughes was right. Ultimately the attacks were ineffective against reinforced concrete, and the losses suffered by Eighth Air Force crews were high.

“The crews themselves quickly got onto the fact that the small amount of damage they were doing… was in no way affecting the outcome of the war,” Hughes writes. “We were proving our point to the British that, with fighter escort, we could operate in daylight over enemy territory with acceptable casualties, but the unfortunate air crews were not, personally, as interested in proving this point, with their own lives, as were the generals, and crew morale began to become a serious problem.”