Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (2 page)

This was the fear that had haunted Allied planners when they imagined the great battle now taking place in Normandy. It had kept them awake at night, and it had caused chills to run up their spines and nest in the bases of their skulls like icy rodents.

“If I were the German operations officer and Providence had promised to allow me to select the weather in which to make my defense, these were the conditions I would have chosen,” Kuter thought as he looked beneath him. “A solid bank of overcast covered the Normandy coast and extended to mid-Channel. The top was at twelve thousand feet and the bottom down to thirteen hundred. Here was perfect concealment for German airmen. They could dive out of the dense cloud on the packed Channel below, bomb or strafe any ship and climb back into the protecting clouds in a matter of seconds. They could come and go before a gun was brought to bear or any of our thousands of fighters were able to intercept. I was apprehensive more than I would care to admit.”

With his Clark Gable mustache and his energetic demeanor, Major General Laurence Sherman Kuter was one of a group of young men who had helped form and define the US Army Air Forces. One week from his thirty-ninth birthday, Kuter was the youngest general in the US Army when he was promoted in 1942, and the first man since William Tecumseh Sherman to receive a “jump” promotion to general without having served as a colonel.

In 1929, the young officer from Rockford, Illinois, was two years out of the US Military Academy at West Point and serving as a coast artillery officer in Monterey, California. Soon, however, he had transferred to the Army’s Air Corps and earned his wings in the skies over Texas. By the time that Hitler’s armies were subjugating Europe, he was in Washington, DC, as part of that cadre of brilliant young officers who clustered around their revered chief, Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold, to form this service that would become the largest air force in the world,
and
to formulate the strategy that would use this weapon to win World War II.

“The cloud bank could be swarming with Germans,” Kuter observed. Left unsaid was the phrase “the cloud bank
should
be swarming with Germans.”

Everywhere he looked, the skies over the English Channel, and as far away as he could see with his high-powered binoculars, were full of airplanes. Yet everywhere that he looked, the airplanes were marked with stars or roundels. Nowhere did Kuter see the black cross and swastika of the Luftwaffe.

“We kept watching and gradually it became clear to us that if an air battle
was
taking place, it must be an extremely compressed affair, because few aircraft ever burst through the top of the cloud and those few were friendly,” Kuter later recalled. “Not only that, the radio produced none of the usual German air controller’s battle directions. We knew then that we were right. The air was full of American and British fighters. Columns of Flying Fortresses stretched back to England as far as the eye could follow. We had over 1,800 ‘heavies’ over France that morning. The Hun never showed up. He couldn’t because he had nothing left. His bluff had been called.”

This book is the story of how events were molded to create the week in which that bluff was called.

Big Week was a watershed moment in World War II, and in the military history of the twentieth century. It was the point after which nothing would be as it had been before. After a long and difficult gestation, it marked the birth of strategic airpower as a means of effecting the outcome of military action.

A year and a half earlier, when British armies achieved their first important ground victory against the Germans in three years of war—at El Alamein—Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, delivered one of his most memorable wartime speeches.

“We have a new experience. We have victory—a remarkable and definite victory,” Churchill said. “The Germans have received back again that measure of fire and steel which they have so often meted out to others. Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Big Week
was
the beginning of the end.

It was not so much a turning point as it was a
tipping
point.

As defined by the physicists, a tipping point is a threshold, the point at which an entity is displaced from a position of established balance into a new equilibrium significantly unlike what has existed previously. A tipping point is a moment of critical mass.

The threshold was the last week of February 1944. The entity that was about to be displaced from its established balance was the economy and war-making capacity of the Third Reich. The critical mass that was
achieved that week was in the number of heavy bombers that comprised the strategic airpower of the USAAF Eighth Air Force.

Between February 20 and 25, 1944, the US Army Air Forces began running massive raids against the economic heart of Hitler’s Germany. It was a battle of epic proportions on a three-dimensional battlefield.

In six days, the Eighth Air Force bombers based in England would fly more than 3,300 missions and the Fifteenth Air Force based in Italy more than 500. Together they dropped roughly 10,000 tons of bombs on targets that accounted for 90 percent of German aircraft production. The British Royal Air Force Bomber Command flew more than 2,350 nighttime missions against the same targets during Big Week.

Big Week had been a long time in the making.

Indeed, it had its origins in World War I, when forward-thinking strategists looked at airpower and saw its
big
picture. From this evolved the theory that in wartime, airpower could be used, not just as a
tactical
weapon near the battlefront, but as a
strategic
weapon that could profoundly and decisively affect the outcome of the war.

Strategic airpower had many fathers, but none more outspoken and influential in United States military circles than William Lendrum “Billy” Mitchell, the man who had commanded the aviation component of the American Expeditionary Force during the First World War.

“The world stands on the threshold of the ‘aeronautical era,’” Mitchell wrote in his 1925 book,
Winged Victory
. “During this epoch the destinies of all people will be controlled through the air. Airpower has come to stay. But what, it may be asked, is airpower? Airpower is the ability to do something in or through the air, and, as the air covers the whole world, aircraft are able to go anywhere on the planet. They are not dependent on the water as a means of sustentation, nor on the land, to keep them up. Mountains, deserts, oceans, rivers, and forests, offer no obstacles. In a trice, aircraft have set aside all ideas of frontiers. The whole country now becomes the frontier and, in case of war, one place is just as exposed to attack as another place.”

Mitchell died exactly eight years, to the day, before the eve of Big Week, but his words and his ideas had a profound and consequential effect on the men who planned it.

Mitchell died three years before the start of World War II, the first war in which airpower would be decisive, but he had a profound effect on the American air officers who were the founding fathers of the concept that the USAAF could make airpower decisive. These men were led by General Hap Arnold, the commanding general of the USAAF throughout World War II, who gathered around him the men who won the war in the air.

Most significantly, these men included General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, a veteran pilot and staff officer who headed Arnold’s Air Staff when the war began, and went on to be the field officer at the top of the USAAF chain of command in Europe when Big Week came. Among the coterie of young officers—not yet generals when the war began—were those who drafted the master plan that would turn Billy Mitchell’s vision into a war-winning reality. They included Larry Kuter, as well as Harold L. “Hal” George, Orvil Anderson, Hoyt Vandenberg, and Haywood S. “Possum” Hansell.

Among the officers in the field who would, under the watchful eye of Tooey Spaatz, execute the master plan that culminated with Big Week, were men whose names became, and in some cases still remain, as household words. They included Ira Clarence Eaker, Frederick Lewis Anderson, James Harold “Jimmy” Doolittle, and Curtis Emerson LeMay.

Burning the midnight oil to provide the specific details of the targets that made up the incomprehensibly vast mosaic of strategic aerial victory in World War II were men, and a few women, whose names
never
became household words. Significant among them was Richard D’Oyly Hughes.

Flying in the airplanes that executed the plans were the thousands of young men—of 2.4 million in USAAF uniform in June 1944—who sweated the missions, dropped the bombs, and shed the blood. These men included young airmen, barely into their twenties, like Archie Mathies, as well as Bill Lawley and Wally Truemper. Their names are not household words, but they are iconic within today’s US Air Force because of their heroism during Big Week.

Everything that came together during Big Week was about one thing—the use of American airpower to defeat German airpower in order to ensure the success of an epic campaign on the ground.

“On that first and crucial day, with our troops clinging to at least one beachhead ‘by an eyelash,’ the soldiers who were bombed and strafed were not Americans but Germans,” Kuter observed. “German airpower, far from being a factor in the final struggle for Europe, was practically nonexistent.”

As Larry Kuter pondered the scene above, around and beneath him on June 6, 1944, it was clear that the beginning of the end had come at last. The war was not over, not by a long shot, but its outcome had been assured.

It was a terrible thing, this enormous battle that spread across fifty miles of Norman coastline. By the time the sun set on June 6, the Allied casualty count had reached ten thousand young, human lives, a quarter of whom would never see the sun rise on June 7. However, the important thing was that they were still
in
Normandy. Terrible, difficult battles lay ahead, but the Allied soldiers would not step back into the English Channel, and on the first anniversary of Operation Overlord, the loudest thunder on the Normandy beaches would not be gunfire and exploding shells, but the surf—and Adolf Hitler would be gone forever.

As Billy Mitchell had written two decades earlier, “Even if hostile armies and navies come into contact with each other, they are helpless now unless they can obtain and hold military supremacy in the air.”

One day, two boys were headed home from school. It was a day like many others, a day like those that live in our memories more as a day than a date, a day whose date might have fallen in the spring, or the early summer before school let out, or even the early autumn. It might have been in the waning months of their fifth-grade year, but it was certainly
around about
that time. It was a day when the willows were leafed out, but a day on which the green leaves of the willows were unimportant, a backdrop, not a fixture. One of the boys idly grabbed a fistful of leaves, and just as idly tossed them away, as a country boy might idly pull up a long stalk of grass to chew on for a moment or two before casually discarding it.

It was one of those years that is inclined to be recalled, by those who were there as well as by those who can experience them only in their imagination, as from a “simpler” time. The year was 1929, though it could just as easily have been 1928, or even 1920. For boys who are ten or eleven, years are years, not dates in a history book. In retrospect, for those of us who were not there, and who experience them only in our imagination, these were the formative years of the Americans whom we have called, since Tom Brokaw coined the term, the Greatest Generation.

As is often the case, people destined for greatness do not know it.
Usually, it is for us who were not there, and who know them only in retrospect, to bestow the mantle of greatness.

The latterly named Greatest Generation grew up believing that they were merely the “younger generation.” Like all generations, they grew up in the us-and-them world that placed them in the shadow of that enigmatic cast of characters known as the “older generation.”

Archie Mathies and Johnny Ferelli had been friends since the second grade, sharing laughs, sharing tall tales, sharing secrets, and sharing adventures. Sharing adventures was then, as always, something that boys did. Sharing secrets was part of the age-old divide between the generations, and the punch line to the phrase “if our mothers knew half of the trouble we got into…”

For Archie Mathies and Johnny Ferelli, one of the stories that would be most often shared—though not willingly with their respective mothers—was the one that began on that day as the two boys were headed home from school in the waning months of their fifth-grade year.

Somewhere along the way, they met up with some other boys and continued on their way. Their destinations were their homes in a row of duplexes on the west side of Library, Pennsylvania. In some recountings of Archie’s early days, the town is called “Liberty,” which would fit the narrative more smoothly, but the town bore a more eccentric name. It was called “Library,” because someone along about the turn of the twentieth century remembered that a man named John Moore had set up a library in these environs way back in 1833. Before it was so named, the place had been known for years as “Loafer’s Hollow,” a name that would be even more idiosyncratic when set to the kind of serious narrative that you might want to take home to your mother.

In fact, Library was not then, and
still
is not, a town at all, but merely an unincorporated corner of South Park Township in Allegheny County, about a dozen or so highway miles south of downtown Pittsburgh. It was, in the lexicon of the Greatest Generation, “just a wide spot in the road.”

Pittsburgh was then, and for some years before and after, a steel town. Indeed, for America, it was
the
steel town. The steel industry runs on iron ore and coal, and it came to Pittsburgh because the ground under
your feet there is filled with coal. They call them “coal patches” and they are everywhere in western Pennsylvania. You cannot usually see them, but you can see the mine entrances and the former mine entrances everywhere.