Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (11 page)

Hughes appealed to both General Spaatz and General Eaker in an attempt to “get these useless attacks abandoned.” However, so serious was the U-boat threat that the attacks continued past the successful completion of Operation Torch. It was not until June 1943, by which time the threat had been curbed by more effective naval escorts, that the campaign against the submarine pens was finally discontinued as a priority.

After the premature euphoria of September and early October, the winter brought a maze of difficulties for the Eighth Air Force. The weather, which caused some missions to be canceled, also caused about 40 percent of the missions launched over the ensuing three months to be aborted. This was mainly manifested in targets obscured by cloud cover, which the weather reporting teams had failed to predict. The weather also resulted in mechanical failures. Aircraft taking off in mud and rain often found themselves with frozen guns or with flight deck windows encrusted in frost. According to the Eighth Air Force Operational Research Section (ORS) day raid reports, malfunctioning bomb bay doors were such a problem that some crews took to removing them.

The weather, combined with the inexperience of the crews, also made for navigational errors and impacted bombing accuracy. Sometimes, this involved bombs missing their targets with disastrous results if the bombs hit French civilian residential areas instead of submarine pens. Other times, the errors verged on the almost comical. On November 18, for example, one bomber formation bombed the submarine pens at Saint-Nazaire under the erroneous notion that they were attacking the pens at La Pallice, a hundred miles away.

The ORS reports also indicate that the mounting tempo of battle damage was putting heavy demands on a still-meager maintenance depot infrastructure, which kept a growing percentage of the bombers off the mission-ready list. In September, 13 percent of the aircraft flying missions came back with damage, which could be repaired. In October, this increased to 38 percent, and by December it was above 42 percent. However, the fact that the damage
could
be repaired was only half the story. Hampered by shortages of trained personnel and parts, the depots fell behind to the point where half the fleet was in the shop and any moment.

The issue of damage done to the targets by the bombing eclipsed all other matters, consuming a great deal of the time of the Operational Research Section. The precision that had been promised by the theorists had yet to materialize in 1942. Indeed, when the ORS “crater-counters” studied post-strike photoreconnaissance imagery, they identified the impact points of only about half of the bombs that were known to have been dropped. The other half had either been duds, or bombs that had
missed their targets by so wide a margin as to not even appear in the aerial photographs. This raised the obvious concerns about errant bombs striking French civilians.

Of course, in 1942, the art of post-strike analysis was still in its infancy. It was not until after the start of 1943 that a routine for systematic analysis was developed. As with everything pertaining to the as-yet unproven doctrine of strategic airpower, there was a steep learning curve.

Enemy interceptor attacks were second only to bombing accuracy among the operational concerns for the Eighth Air Force planners. Defensive armament aboard the bomber served as a partial deterrent, causing the attackers to adjust their tactics, such as to make quick passes, rather than sustained attacks. A heavy bomber without tail guns, for example, was a doomed airplane. A smaller airplane could have tried to outmaneuver a fighter, but a heavy bomber would be susceptible to having a fighter come up behind and almost leisurely chew it apart.

At the same time, the gunners also claimed their share of downed fighters. Out of the October 9 strike package, gunners aboard the 69 bombers attacking Lille destroyed 21, probably shot down another 21, and damaged 15 German interceptors. The gunners had initially claimed that they shot down 102 German fighters, which would have been more than 15 percent of the estimated Luftwaffe fighter strength in Western Europe. On further scrutiny, it was determined that there were a huge number of multiple claims in which gunners from multiple bombers were shooting at the same fighter.

What this illustrates, other than the obvious need for more careful debriefing of gunners, was the importance of having the gunners from multiple aircraft laying down interlocking fields of fire, thus creating a mutually beneficial defensive zone.

A study conducted by the Eighth Air Force Operations Analysis Section concluded that large numbers of bombers flying in formation would give one another decent protection against fighters. While such a tight formation would then be more susceptible to antiaircraft fire, this would be only in the vicinity of the target, and therefore it would be for shorter duration than the fighter attacks, which took place over a longer duration.

On November 23, the heavy bombers of the Eighth Air Force first met the man who would become their deadly nemesis.

Oberleutnant
Egon Mayer was a twenty-five-year-old pilot who was born on the shores of Lake Constance in the penultimate year of World War I. He had joined the Luftwaffe in 1937 and first flew in combat with Jagdgeschwader 2 during the Battle of France in June 1940. Flying against the RAF over southern England, he became an air ace four times over by August 1941, scoring twenty aerial victories, most of them against pilots flying the RAF’s best fighter aircraft, the Spitfire. For this, he was awarded the Iron Cross. Within the next year, the young Luftwaffe ace increased his score to fifty, then added two more—both Spitfires—on August 19, 1942, his twenty-fifth birthday.

In November, he was named
Gruppenkommandeur
of III Gruppe of Jagdgeschwader 2. In the meantime, Mayer had studied Eighth Air Force defensive tactics and had observed a critical point of weakness in the Flying Fortresses and Liberators.

On November 23, Egon Mayer first approached the heavy bombers of the Eighth Air Force with the fruits of his observations, and the bombers met Egon Mayer
head-on
. While gun barrels protruded from the top, the bottom, the rear, and the sides of the bombers, their front was their Achilles’ heel. Some of the B-17Es and B-17Fs had a single .30-caliber handheld gun, firing through one of four eyelets just off-center of the nose, while B-24Ds had a single .50-caliber center nose gun that was mounted to fire below horizontal only. Both had .50-caliber side-firing nose guns, but all the bombers had a blind spot in front.

As the bombers approached Saint-Nazaire that day, Mayer led III Gruppe up to meet them. His newly developed tactic of attacking the lead aircraft head-on worked to deadly effect. He personally shot down two of the Flying Fortresses and one of the Liberators that the VIII Bomber Command lost that day.

Because of the rapid rate of closure in a head-on attack, it demanded great skill on the part of the fighter pilot, but in the right hands—such as those of Egon Mayer—such a tactic could be deadly. Soon, Luftwaffe pilots across Europe were following Mayer’s lead, while in the United States, Boeing and Consolidated engineers responded with the inclusion of powered nose turrets with twin .50-caliber machine guns. These would become standard in the B-17G, as well as the B-24G, B-24H, and B-24J,
but these aircraft would not reach the Eighth Air Force in significant numbers until the latter part of 1943.

The legacy of Egon Mayer’s brainstorm would be with the Eighth Air Force through to the end of World War II. However, Egon Mayer would not. He was shot down and killed by Lieutenant Walter Gresham, flying a USAAF P-47 fighter, while escorting Eighth Air Force bombers, on March 2, 1944. By this time, however, Mayer had claimed 102 Allied aircraft, 26 of them Eighth Air Force four-engine bombers.

November 1942 brought big organizational changes at the upper levels of command of American forces in Europe. In the wake of the dramatic shift in the strategic situation in North Africa, Eisenhower moved south from England to become commander of the North African Theater of Operations, US Army (NATOUSA), and later commander of the joint Anglo-American Allied Forces Headquarters (AFHQ), the operational command staff for the Mediterranean Theater of Operations (MTO).

When Eisenhower moved, he took Spaatz with him. The man who, as Eighth Air Force chief, had resisted transfer of heavy bombers to the Twelfth Air Force became commander of the Twelfth Air Force in December 1942. Four months later, as Eisenhower became the supreme Allied commander in the Mediterranean, Spaatz was named as commander of the joint Allied Northwest African Air Forces (NAAF), which included the Twelfth Air Force, and which was later a component of the Mediterranean Air Command, headed by RAF Air Marshal Arthur Tedder.

“I had left General Spaatz in England and now I called him forward to take on this particular task,” Eisenhower writes in
Crusade in Europe
. “We merely improvised controlling machinery and gave General Spaatz the title of ‘Acting Deputy Commander in Chief for Air.’ Initially, the commander of the American [Twelfth] Air Force in North Africa was Major General James Doolittle, who had sprung into fame as the leader of the raid on Tokyo. He was a dynamic personality and a bundle of energy. It took him some time to reconcile himself to shouldering his responsibilities as the senior United States air commander to the exclusion of opportunity for going out to fly a fighter plane against the enemy. But he had the priceless quality of learning from experience. He became one of our really fine commanders.”

When the USAAF Fifteenth Air Force was created in 1943 to become the strategic equivalent of the Eighth Air Force in the MTO, Doolittle became its first commander.

The plan had been for Eisenhower and Spaatz to return to England after Torch in anticipation of a cross-channel invasion of
Festung Europa
from the United Kingdom. However, as further actions in the Mediterranean that were planned for 1943—specifically the invasions of Sicily and Italy—required their attention, the return would be delayed.

Meanwhile back in England, the post-Torch command shuffle brought Ira Eaker up from VIII Bomber Command to head the entire Eighth Air Force, while Major General Frederick Lewis Anderson Jr., previously Deputy Director of Bombardment at USAAF headquarters, who had been Hap Arnold’s representative “on bombardment matters” in the ETO, was named to head the VIII Bomber Command. As Henry Berliner, Dick Hughes’s immediate superior, became incapacitated with spinal meningitis, Hughes was promoted to full colonel and took charge of the Eighth Air Force G-5 (operational planning section) and, as such, became an assistant to Eaker.

It was not a marriage made in heaven.

“General Eaker’s personality and characteristics were very different from those of General Spaatz,” Hughes recalls. “General Spaatz’s interest had always been intimately concerned with the conduct of operations, and he very largely delegated day to day administrative problems to others. General Eaker kept even the most minute administrative details in his own hands, and seemed to have very little time, or inclination, for discussing operational plans. For the ensuing year and a half the decision as to which targets our strategic bombers should attack fell squarely upon my shoulders. With no sympathetic intellectual support, or understanding, from my commanding general it was a difficult and heavy burden.”

On the other hand, Hughes has high praise for the new chief of VIII Bomber Command.

“Fred Anderson completely understood the problems with which I was confronted, and whenever I was near the breaking point I would drive down to Bomber Command, unburden all my cares and worries on this truly great man, and return again to Eighth Air Force Headquarters, and strong enough to continue ordering out [young American airmen] to their deaths.”

Throughout 1942, the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff had continued to adhere to the strategic airpower principal that had been agreed on at the Arcadia Conference. With regard to the strategic air campaign against Germany, the RAF would continue to fly its nighttime area bombing missions, while the USAAF would endeavor to undertake daylight raids against targets requiring precision attacks.

However, as the year came to a close, the Eighth Air Force heavy bombers had achieved little, despite having been in action since August. Several of the raids on industrial targets had showed promising results, but the attacks on the submarine pens, which had been the primary mission of the American bombers since October, had been a disappointment.

Both Air Chief Marshal Charles “Peter” Portal and Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris of RAF Bomber Command accepted the idea of the Americans pursuing their daylight precision bombing doctrine, but they did so with serious skepticism. Some British officers who had admitted in October that the American approach had shown “surprising promise” noted in December that the promise was going unfulfilled, and the RAF began to insist that it was time to terminate the American “experiment.”

Air Vice Marshal John Slessor wrote in a December 1942 memo to
Archibald Sinclair, the British secretary of state for air, that Americans, like other people, “prefer to learn from their own experience. If their policy of day bombing proves to their own satisfaction to be unsuccessful or prohibitively expensive, they will abandon it and turn to night action. They will only learn from their own experience. In spite of some admitted defects—including lack of experience—their leadership is of a high order, and the quality of their aircrew personnel is magnificent. If, in the event, they have to abandon day bombing policy, that will prove that it is indeed impossible.”

The showdown on this issue would come in the new year when Prime Minister Winston Churchill met President Franklin Roosevelt face-to-face on January 14, for the first time since the Arcadia Conference in Washington a year earlier. The place of their meeting, Casablanca in Morocco, was high on symbolism because the city had been in Allied hands for barely two months—and because the fact that it was in Allied hands was directly attributable to the success of Operation Torch, the first major operation planned jointly by the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff.