Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (13 page)

“Anderson is tall, rawboned and supple, temperamentally a well-anchored man, a good talker and an easy mixer,” writes Murphy. “Only seldom will a stranger catch the gleam of purpose beneath the affability. Williamson is short and stumpy and given to long spells of moodiness.
Logical, erudite in the details of his profession, uncompromising, he is one of the foremost theoretical thinkers of the Army Air Forces.”

An odd couple who were a good fit, both with each other and in their interactions with Berkeley Square, they were both devotees of the sixth-century b.c. Chinese warrior-philosopher Sun Tzu. The author of the seminal
The Art of War
, Sun Tzu is today even more fashionable in military and business leadership circles than he was in mid-century.

One of Sun Tzu’s more memorable maxims tells the reader that “if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles…. If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose…. If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.”

Knowing the enemy was exactly why Fred Anderson deliberately cultivated a close working relationship with Dick Hughes and the EOU.

When General Ira Eaker had promised Winston Churchill a demonstration of American action against targets inside Germany by the end of January, Dick Hughes delivered the plans, Fred Anderson and Glen Williamson delivered the bombers, and the crews of the Eighth Air Force delivered the bombs.

On January 27 the Eighth Air Force made its first attack on targets within Germany, albeit with fewer than the one hundred bombers promised by Eaker. The primary target, plucked from the top item in the hierarchy of targeting priorities, the naval yard at Wilhelmshaven, would be hit by fifty-three heavy bombers while two others diverted to Emden.

Hughes and others may have been impatient with the ineffectiveness of the attacks on U-boat pens, but the strikes against shipyards within Germany meant hitting the insidious submarines at their more vulnerable source. On February 2, an attempted second attack on Germany was aborted because of weather, but the Eighth Air Force returned to Wilhelmshaven on February 26. Thus began the off-and-on campaign against the shipyards that would continue through 1943.

The German shipbuilding industry, which was in the midst of increasing the proportion of its resources devoted to U-boats, was far more
vulnerable to attack than the reinforced concrete pens. Reconnaissance photos showed that the attacks on the shipyards were reasonably effective. They were also a good example of cooperation between the Combined Bomber Offensive partners, as the RAF carpet-bombed the same areas that the Eighth Air Force struck during the day.

As the American bombers began reaching targets within Germany, they met more determined Luftwaffe resistance. While Luftflotte 3 (Air Fleet 3), charged with the air defense of occupied Belgium and France, had fewer than two hundred interceptors, attacks against Germany brought the Eighth Air Force into contact with the Luftwaffenbefehlshaber Mitte (Air Command Central), an organization with substantially greater resources for
Reichsverteidigung
(“Defense of the Reich”) operations. Inside the Reich, targets were well defended, and losses would often be heavy.

Over the coming weeks and months, Luftwaffenbefehlshaber Mitte used a variety of weapons and tactics against the bombers. The standard Luftwaffe single-engine fighters, such as the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the newer Focke-Wulf Fw 190, were encountered, but so too were twin-engined Messerschmitt Bf 110s, which were more commonly used as night fighters against RAF Bomber Command raids.

These interceptors used Egon Mayer’s head-on attack tactic, but also another method, pioneered by
Oberleutnant
Heinz Knoke in March 1943, that of dropping bombs on the bombers, even as the Americans were lining up to bomb ground targets. Indeed, the Luftwaffe’s Jagdgeschwader 11, formed in 1943 as a
Reichsverteidigung
air defense unit, routinely used air-to-air bombing with 250kg bombs. Meanwhile, larger aircraft, such as Ju 88 bombers, started attacking the Americans from beyond the range of their defensive machine guns, using Werfer-Granate 21 rocket launchers to lob 21cm Nebelwerfer 42 air-to-air rockets.

One of the simplest and most effective Luftwaffe tactics was to gang up on individual bombers. They often picked the low-hanging fruit of aircraft that had strayed out of formation, but frequently they beset the lead aircraft, ganging up on them with a dozen or more fighters, under the theory that this would disrupt the formation. Sometimes it did, but the American pilots were drilled repeatedly to maintain the integrity of their formations no matter what.

The experience of being attacked by the Luftwaffe was hellish. As one Flying Fortress pilot mentioned in a debriefing, “The German fighter raked us the length of the Fortress’s belly. It was like sitting in the boiler of a hot-water heater and being rolled down a steep hill. The right wing was shot to hell. There were holes everywhere. A lot of them were 20mm cannon holes, and they tear a hole you could shove a sheep through. The entire wing was just a goddamn bunch of holes.”

At the same time, anti-aircraft fire from the 88mm long-range guns in flak batteries near the targets in both France and Germany was improving in its accuracy and effectiveness, and also began exacting a toll on the bomber formations, which strictly maintained their tight box formations during their bomb runs. While the close formations made the bombers easier targets for the flak batteries, they actually served to protect the bombers from interceptors by allowing the bomber gunners to use interlocking fields of defensive fire against the Germans. Bomber pilots frequently used the phrase describing the black puffs of exploding shells as a carpet “thick enough to walk on.”

During March, there were further raids against the shipyards in Wilhelmshaven, as well as in Vegesack, a northern suburb of Bremen, forty miles to the south, on the Weser River, both of which built U-boats.

These missions continued to alternate with strikes against the facilities in France that housed and serviced the U-boats. Though electricity and water supply into the U-boat pens was interrupted, the damage done in the latter attacks was primarily to the surrounding cities, impacting the French civilian population and the workforce employed at the pens, rather than the pens themselves.

As the Kreigsmarine’s Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, the man in charge of the U-boat operations, told a meeting of the
Reich Zentrales Planungsamt
(Central Planning Office for War Production) on May 4, “The Anglo-Saxons’ attempt to strike down the submarine war was undertaken with all the means available to them. You know that the towns of Saint-Nazaire and Lorient have been rubbed out as main submarine bases. No dog nor cat is left in these towns. Nothing but the submarine shelters [into which all essential facilities had been moved] remain.”

During the first five months of 1943, American bombers put 70 percent
of their anti-U-boat tonnage on yards rather than pens, inflicting serious damage on the yards in seven out of a dozen major attacks. Post-strike analysis of the effectiveness of the raids showed that they had cut the monthly output of the shipbuilding industry from sixteen U-boats to fewer than eight, although the shipyards were able to repair the damage more quickly that the photo interpreters realized.

When weather obscured the U-boat targets, the Eighth Air Force alternated with attacks on the rail network across northern France and northwestern Germany. These were not done in sufficient volume, with large enough numbers of bombers, to do any lasting damage, but they did disrupt rail transportation for short periods of time. Though construction crews were able to repair the damage and get trains running within a few days of the attacks, the work did tie up considerable manpower, which could not be used elsewhere. Naturally, any locomotive or railcar that needed to be replaced would divert resources away from building tanks or other vehicles.

Despite apparently good results, the Eighth Air Force was still not operating up to the levels that Eaker had promised at Casablanca. They were still unable to put one hundred bombers out on any given day during February or March. The numbers of mission-ready aircraft were not increasing as quickly as anticipated. Through April, the Eighth Air Force operated six heavy bombardment groups, four of Flying Fortresses and two of Liberators. Meanwhile, two Flying Fortress groups, the 2nd and the 99th, which had been earmarked for the Eighth Air Force, were diverted to the Twelfth Air Force, while the Liberators of the 308th Bombardment Group were sent to the Fourteenth instead of the Eighth.

The total number of Flying Fortresses and Liberators listed as being on hand in the ETO in February were 186 and 69 respectively. Because of combat losses and other damage, the numbers of B-17s was actually less than the total of 234 that had been on hand in October 1942. At the same time, the average daily combat strength of the Eighth Air Force stood at only 74 “operating combinations” (combat crews and aircraft).

Naturally, the number of crews was as important as the number of aircraft, and even the limited operations during the dead of winter had taken a toll. Through January, only twenty replacement crewmen arrived to take the places of sixty-seven who had been lost, and at the same time
the Combined Bomber Offensive was taking the Eighth Air Force into Germany, some of the heavy bombardment groups were reporting that attrition had reduced their total crew strength by half, a fact that had a detrimental effect on operations—as well as on the morale of other crews.

As General Anderson wrote in a March 2 memo to General Stratemeyer at USAAF headquarters, until the total number of heavy bombers and crews reached six hundred, the best that the VIII Bomber Command could do was “nibble at the fringes of German strength.”

The RAF still viewed the sluggish buildup of American heavy bombing capacity with as much, or more, alarm as their Combined Bomber Offensive partners. In a series of memos to Hap Arnold, Air Chief Marshal Portal tactfully described the Eighth Air Force operations as having been “strikingly successful,” but complained in an understated way that “my one fear is that their efforts may be curtailed or even brought to a standstill by lack of numbers.”

Numbers not seen by Portal, or indeed by most operational people at the front-line fields in East Anglia, were the huge numbers of aircraft entering the pipeline at the source. The American aircraft industry was growing exponentially, and the flow of new aircraft was on the verge of suddenly becoming a torrent. Having produced 1,412 Flying Fortresses and 1,164 Liberators in 1942, Boeing, Consolidated, Douglas, and Vega would build 4,179 and 5,214 of these respective heavy bombers in 1943. This flow would hit East Anglia in early summer and become a tidal wave by the end of the year.

As Arthur Ferguson points out, “It was not until May that the Eighth Air Force began to acquire the strength appropriate to its mission.” The total of six heavy bombardment groups that were operational with the Eighth Air Force doubled by the end of May. During that month, the arrival in England of the 94th, 95th, 96th, 351st, and 379th—and the reversion of the 92nd from training status—greatly enhanced to Eighth Air Force’s ability to get large numbers of aircraft over the target. The total number of heavy bombers in the ETO increased from 255 in February to 705 by the end of May.

At the same time, the numbers of fighter escorts also increased. Through most of April, only the 4th Fighter Group, flying Republic P-47
Thunderbolts, had been available, but two additional groups were on line by the end of the month and capable of routinely escorting the bombers.

On April 17, the Eighth Air Force had finally been able to put more than one hundred heavy bombers over Bremen. This mission marked a milestone of another sort as well. By May, the wheels were in motion for a major shift in strategic direction, specifically a gradual refocusing of the Combined Bomber Offensive from the U-boat campaign to the German aircraft industry.

When he went to work at the EOU on Berkeley Square in March, Charlie Kindleberger’s primary function had been to study the German aircraft industry and to plan missions against it. The April 17 Bremen mission targeting the Focke-Wulf Flugzeugbau facility was significant insofar as the Eighth Air Force had sent its largest mission to date to target the aircraft industry.

It was also with a certain irony that the specific product being targeted was the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter, when the mission saw the bomber force badly mauled by those same German fighters. Though the bombers left the enemy factory half-destroyed, the Eighth Air Force lost sixteen aircraft shot down and forty-six damaged.

The heavy American losses on April 17 stemmed from the enemy’s having come to expect Bremen as a repeat target, and from improved coordination and intensity of defensive action, both on the ground and in the air. Initially, Luftwaffenbefehlshaber Mitte put up as many as 150 interceptors, flying through their own anti-aircraft fire to attack the American lead bombers head-on in an effort to break up the formations as they entered the target area.

When it came to fighting the heavy bombers, the Luftwaffe assigned points to fighter pilots for disrupting the formations. While only the actual destruction of an enemy aircraft, an
abschuss
, counted toward a fighter ace’s aerial victory tally, points assigned for breaking up a formation, a
herausschuss
, and for
endgueltige vernichtung
, the “final destruction” or “finishing off” of a damaged enemy aircraft, also counted toward awards and decorations. A pilot might receive a single point for the
abschuss
of a fighter plane and three points for shooting down a four-engine bomber. It took three points for an Iron Cross First Class, and forty points for a Knights Cross.
Under the practice that existed in 1943, but which was phased out later, a
herausschuss
involving a four-engine bomber netted two points.