Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (14 page)

Though breaking up the formations on the final bomb run was usually unsuccessful, the fighters always regrouped and hit the bombers again as they emerged from the target area and headed toward England. Employing the usual tactic of picking stragglers from the periphery of the formation, the interceptors harassed the formations all the way to the North Sea.

Within a month, the Eighth Air Force fighter groups were able to put up a sufficient number of P-47 Thunderbolts to successfully defend against such situations. The bomber crews came to appreciate, rely upon, and praise their “little friends,” as they called the escorting fighters. The only limiting factor was the range of the fighters. Even with auxiliary fuel tanks, the Thunderbolt could only accompany bombers to targets in northern Germany that were no farther than 475 miles from their bases, but they could always cover them on their way out or for the last leg of a trip home.

Also during May, the large influx of new USAAF crews and aircraft changed the complexion of the Combined Bomber Offensive. The Eighth was gradually beefing up its numbers in the face of RAF criticism. Whereas it had taken the Eighth Air Force eight months from its first mission to finally mount a hundred-plane mission, it took less than a month to go from that point to launching two hundred bombers on a single day. In a memo to Hap Arnold, Eaker called it “a great day for the Eighth Air Force. Our combat crew availability went up in a straight line from 100 to 215…. If the groups prove to be superior in combat to the old ones, it will scarcely be a fair fight!”

One may assume that Arnold understood that Eaker was speaking with irony.

Also worth an exclamation point by this time was the improved bombing accuracy, which had long been promised, but which had been slow to develop. Since March, the Eighth Air Force had been using automatic flight-control equipment (AFCE) to increase precision through the use of an autopilot to control the aircraft during the bomb run.

As Arthur Ferguson points out, “The few seconds immediately before the bombardier released his bombs obviously constituted the critical moment in the entire mission, for it was then that the bombardier
performed his final sighting operation. So it was essential that the aircraft should be held as nearly as possible to a steady course without slips, skids, or changes in altitude, and that the pilotage be as free as possible from the influence of flak and of attacking fighters. Perfection of this sort was impossible even with the best of pilots. With those produced by the hasty training program into which the AAF had been forced it could not even be approximated.”

AFCE had been tested in 1942 to mixed reviews, but by the spring of 1943, the bugs had been worked out. During the attack on Vegesack on March 18, a lead bombardier using the AFCE successfully led the 305th Bombardment Group to drop 76 percent of its ordnance within a radius of one thousand feet of the aiming point.

Meanwhile, even as the decision makers were finally considering the suspension of the attacks on the U-boat pens for which Dick Hughes and others had been lobbying, these targets were the recipients of hundred-plane raids during May. On May 17, 118 heavy bombers targeted Lorient, while on May 29, the Eighth Air Force ended the month with a 147-bomber mission against Saint-Nazaire.

The May 17 mission contained a milestone moment for the Eighth Air Force. In one of the B-17s flying that day was the first Eighth Air Force heavy bomber crew to complete their full quota of twenty-five missions, and hence to be qualified to return home. The aircraft was the famous B-17F commanded by Captain Robert Morgan and nicknamed
Memphis Belle
. Assigned to the 324th Bombardment Squadron of the 91st Bombardment Group, the aircraft had been the subject of a USAAF documentary film entitled
The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress
. The film was directed by William Wyler, who had just won the Best Director Oscar for the 1942 film
Mrs. Miniver
. During filming of the documentary, Wyler flew a number of live combat missions aboard the
Memphis Belle
and other aircraft, and his cinematographer had been killed when another Flying Fortress was shot down.

Morgan and his crew subsequently flew the
Memphis Belle
back to the United States, where they would participate in war bond tours, and where Wyler’s film—released in 1944 by Paramount—would dramatically publicize the dangerous work being done by Eighth Air Force crewmen.

Since January 1943, as William Wyler had been gathering footage for his film, the Eighth Air Force was building up its strength and testing the waters of operations inside Germany. They had been doing so under the general outlines of the preliminary Combined Bomber Offensive targeting plan that was contained in the Casablanca Directive. Meanwhile, the Combined Chiefs of Staff had been developing a more formal plan that would succeed the Casablanca Directive and be implemented on June 10, marking the “official” beginning of the Combined Bomber Offensive.

The origins of this official plan dated back to December 9, 1942, when Hap Arnold decided to have someone in his office come up with a document that went beyond AWPD-42 in addressing the issue of strategic targets, and which addressed targeting scientifically and systematically.

Arnold had ordered Colonel Byron Gates to empanel a “group of operational analysts under your jurisdiction to prepare and submit to me a report analyzing the rate of progressive deterioration that should be anticipated in the German war effort as a result of the increasing air operations we are prepared to employ against its sustaining sources. This study should result in as accurate an estimate as can be arrived at as to the
date when this deterioration will have progressed to a point to permit a successful invasion of Western Europe.”

Originally called the Advisory Committee on Bombardment, it was later known more vaguely as the Committee of Operations Analysts (COA). Its form and function were similar—arguably duplicative—to those of Hughes, Kindleberger, Rostow, and the EOU team, but while the EOU was in a secret location in London, the COA was located within reach of Arnold’s own headquarters. While the EOU existed for ongoing operational requirements, the COA theoretically existed to provide Arnold with a onetime single USAAF plan that could ultimately be integrated into the joint directive succeeding the temporary Casablanca Directive.

The function of the COA, like that of the EOU but more general in nature, was to identify “industrial targets in Germany the destruction of which would weaken the enemy most decisively in the shortest possible time.”

The form of the COA was modeled after the EOU paradigm insofar as civilian analysts, in this case mainly bankers and industrialists, were brought in to study the goals of a strategic air campaign against Germany. The most prominent were Edward Earle, of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan & Company, and investment banker Elihu Root Jr., of the New York firm of Root, Clark, Buckner, and Ballantine and the son of the former US senator and secretary of state to Theodore Roosevelt. Also included were Fowler Hamilton from the Board of Economic Warfare, Edward Mason of the OSS, and Boston attorney Guido Perera. Malcolm Moss represented the EOU.

The COA also tapped the expertise of OSS, the Bureau of Economic Warfare, and the State and Treasury departments—as well as the War Production Board, roughly America’s equivalent to Albert Speer’s Armaments Ministry. At the end of January 1943, members of the COA even flew to England to meet with the British Ministry of Economic Warfare and to visit 40 Berkeley Square.

The COA had submitted its report to General Arnold on March 8, 1943, six weeks after Casablanca. “It is better to cause a high degree of destruction in a few really essential industries or services than to cause a small degree of destruction in many industries,” the COA concluded, echoing
what Hughes had previously determined. “Results are cumulative and the plan once adopted should be adhered to with relentless determination.”

As Edward Earle told Arthur Ferguson in November 1945, the committee “refrained from stating a formal order of priority for the target systems considered… for reasons of security…. But it is clear from the arguments presented that the systems were listed in descending order of preference.”

With this understanding, the first “system” on the COA list was the German aircraft and aircraft engine industry, which had been third on the priority list in AWPD-1 and second in the list contained in the Casablanca Directive, and which had been Charlie Kindleberger’s assignment at the EOU since March. The petroleum industry also made the top four on all the lists.

The reason that aircraft production—especially single-engine fighter aircraft production—moved up the list was certainly the fact that Eighth Air Force operations were now being seriously impacted by Luftwaffe opposition. It was now clear to all that in order to work through the other items on the list, something would have to be done to lessen Luftwaffe effectiveness.

The notion that the Combined Bomber Offensive should concentrate against the Luftwaffe over all other targets, was underscored by the planners on the Combined Operational Planning Committee (COPC). In an April 9 memo, the British planners summarized this by declaring that “the most formidable weapon being used by the enemy today against our bomber offensive is his fighter force—his single engined fighters by day and his twin engined fighters by night—and the elimination or serious depletion of this force would be the greatest contribution to the furtherance of the joint heavy bomber offensive of the RAF and AAF.”

With this having been agreed, Eaker delegated the operational details to General Anderson at the VIII Bomber Command and General Hansell, who would work with RAF Air Commodore Sidney O. Bufton to come up with a target list. At the EOU, Walt Rostow was assigned as a liaison to the British Air Ministry, with an eye toward making sure that the Americans and the British each knew what the other was doing with regard to the aircraft industry mission.

Second to the aircraft industry in the COA target hierarchy, and to a certain extent related to it, were ball bearings. A simple component, ball
bearings, and other anti-friction bearings, were essential not only to fighter aircraft and aircraft engine production, but to a broad spectrum of industrial production, from military vehicles to factory machine tools. Indeed, anti-friction bearings, including roller bearings and ball bearings, were seen as a “bottleneck” industry, one which, if removed from the supply chain, would negatively affect a myriad of industries.

In third place came the petroleum industry, which had topped the AWPD-1 list and had come in at fourth in the Casablanca Directive. Also considered by many to be a bottleneck industry, petroleum was downplayed by other analysts who felt that Germany had adequate standby refining capacity. Nevertheless, Ploesşti in Romania, from which the Reich derived—by some estimates—about 60 percent of its refined petroleum, would be an important future objective for Allied bombers flying from bases in the MTO.

As the postwar Strategic Bombing Survey would later demonstrate, the COA report missed the boat in downplaying the importance of Germany’s synthetic petroleum and rubber industries—but in the spring of 1943, these seemed less important than they actually were. Writing with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, Ferguson observed that the COA was “handicapped by a faulty understanding of the German chemical industry. Synthetic rubber, synthetic oil, nitrogen, methanol, and other important chemicals formed interdependent parts of a single industrial complex. The production of nitrogen and methanol, both of extreme significance in the manufacture of explosives, was heavily concentrated in synthetic oil plants. The attack on synthetic oil, when it finally came, in fact succeeded in producing, as a fortuitous by-product, a marked drop in the production of nitrogen, which in turn contributed to the shortage of explosives experienced by the Wehrmacht in the closing campaigns of the war.”

The COA report was favorably received by British authorities when it was sent across on March 23. Representatives of the Air Ministry, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and the RAF concurred with the major recommendations, agreeing that the principal targets should be related to the aircraft, anti-friction bearing, and petroleum industries.

The principal point of contention was the U-boat campaign. The Americans had greatly downgraded its importance, but the British, so fully
dependent on the safety of the sea lanes connecting the United Kingdom to the outside world, still insisted that attacks on shipyards building U-boats remain on the list for Combined Bomber Offensive operations.

Though the U-boat campaign would remain as part of the Combined Bomber Offensive Plan, the problem was being overtaken by events, as naval antisubmarine warfare weapons and tactics began to prove themselves to be a more effective solution to the problem. After victories in the North Atlantic in May 1943, it was clear that detecting and sinking U-boats at sea was far more effective than bombing submarine pens. However, as a compromise, shipyards building U-boats, which were more vulnerable than the heavily reinforced concrete pens, retained a priority on the target lists.

Although the Combined Bomber Offensive was addressed at the May 12–27, 1943, Trident Conference in Washington, the third wartime meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill, it was not a controversial issue, as it had been at Casablanca. It was now a foregone conclusion in which the basic premise had been proven. What did emerge from Trident was the understanding by Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff that the Combined Bomber Offensive was an integral and significant part of the overall strategic plan for the cross-channel invasion of
Festung Europa
. This massive operation, to be code-named Overlord, was now tentatively scheduled for May 1944.

On May 18, after considerable discussion, the Combined Chiefs of Staff approved the
Plan for the Combined Bomber Offensive from the United Kingdom
—as presented. This document, in turn, formed the basis for the detailed Pointblank Directive, which was issued on June 10.