Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (21 page)

Because of how deeply this bloody slaughter cut into the total bomber fleet—not to mention the morale of surviving crewmen—the Eighth Air Force deliberately opted against any further deep penetration raids for the time being. By the time that the force was built up through newly arrived equipment and personnel, it was December, and winter weather hindered operations. Without adequate fighter escort, the Eighth was essentially finished when it came to missions such as Schweinfurt.

“The severe casualties suffered in these successive raids into Germany, without fighter escort, convinced us all that such losses could no longer be sustained or the Eighth would cease to exist as a fighting force,” Dick Hughes laments explicitly. “Operations beyond fighter cover were sharply curtailed, and every effort was made to have long range P-51s and P-47s sent to us as soon as possible. It had been a most gallant effort, but many, too many, had paid with their lives in disproving the Air Corps pre-war theory that the Flying Fortress could defend itself, unaided, against enemy fighters.”

By the time of Black Thursday, four months had passed since the Pointblank Directive, and lamentably little had been done to impede the Luftwaffe, or to damage German single-engine aircraft production—
and
the Luftwaffe still maintained air superiority over Europe.

On August 17, ironically the same day as the first costly raid on Schweinfurt, the Combined Chiefs of Staff had sat down in Quebec for the Quadrant Conference, the fourth high-level wartime meeting involving Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. During that meeting, complaints and concerns had been aired about the slow pace of the Combined Bomber Offensive, and of addressing the Pointblank objectives. Two months, a Black Thursday, and numerous other costly missions later, the same concerns continued to be met with the same optimistic prognostications from the Eighth Air Force—and the same perceived lack of results.

On October 14, ironically the same day as the
second
Schweinfurt debacle, Hap Arnold had sent a wire to Ira Eaker, asserting that it was the opinion of analysts in
his
office that the Luftwaffe was on the threshold of collapse. The following day, Eaker wrote back, agreeing with his boss and telling him that “there is not the slightest question but that we now have our teeth in the Hun Air Force’s neck,” and that the actions of a
robust Luftwaffe over Schweinfurt had actually been “the last final struggle of a monster in his death throes.”

Upon reflection, and upon examination of the damage done to his Eighth Air Force on Black Thursday, Eaker wrote again to Arnold on October 21, telling him that there was, in fact,
no
reason for such optimism. The monster was
not
in his death throes. Not even close.

Having bubbled positively in his initial comments to the media, Arnold also did some rethinking. In his memoirs, he candidly writes of Black Thursday that “no such savage air battles had been seen since the war began. Our losses were rising to an all-time high, but so were those of the Luftwaffe, and our bombers were not being turned back from their targets. Could we keep it up? The London papers asked the question editorially. To this day, I don’t know for certain if we could have. No one does. We had the planes and replacement crews by then to maintain the loss-rate of 25 percent which I had originally determined must be faced; but obviously there were other factors. To obscure the argument forever, in mid-October the weather shut down foggily on southeast Germany for most of the remainder of the year.”

For nearly a year, certainly ever since the Casablanca Conference, air superiority over the continent had been a presumptive precursor to the cross-channel invasion. However, during that year, the Luftwaffe, far from being degraded, had actually grown
stronger
.

In the summer, Allied analysts had correctly ascertained that the Luftwaffe fighter strength for Defense of the Reich operations was more than five hundred, and by October, it exceeded seven hundred. These numbers were partly attributable to increasing production, but also to redeployment from the Eastern and Mediterranean fronts. During the summer, 30 percent of total German fighter strength was over the Reich, and by October the proportion had increased to 56 percent, although Allied planners overestimated this at 65 percent.

Just as the Luftwaffe had grown stronger, it had grown stronger
faster
than the Allies had imagined.

Indeed, the Reichsluftfahrtministerium (RLM), the German Air Ministry, had twice, in December 1942 and again in October 1943, moved to greatly ramp up single-engine fighter production. Analysts guessed that
the monthly average for such aircraft was 595 during the first half of 1943, increasing to 645 in the second half. However, the postwar Strategic Bombing Survey revealed that the figures were actually 753, increasing to 851.

“By mid-October 1943 the daylight bombing campaign had reached a crisis,” Arthur Ferguson admits, echoing the pessimism expressed by Dick Hughes. “Its cost had risen alarmingly while its successes remained problematical. The assumptions underlying it therefore came up for reexamination. The Combined Bomber Offensive had by October come to the end of its second planned phase, and it became a matter of the utmost concern to all those in charge of the operation to determine whether or not it had accomplished its objectives. It was of particular importance to examine the work done by the American daylight force, for around it there still tended to gather certain doubts and questions.”

When planners pointed to serious damage that had been done to the German industrial infrastructure—from bearings to petrochemicals—the listing and detailing of such accomplishments was always followed by the word “but.” This word was, in turn, followed by recountings of the tenacity of the Luftwaffe, and of the resilience and dispersal of German industry. Even though they were aware of this, Allied planners consistently underestimated the adaptability and resourcefulness of German industry throughout this stage of the war.

After the war, the full backstory of the great difficulties and delays faced by the Germans in doing this would be known. So too would be the grisly stories of their extensive use of slave labor. In November 1943, though, the planners focused only on the
results
of the resilience and the dispersal, and the high cost of trying to stop it.

After Black Week, it was time for reflection.

The Combined Chiefs of Staff ordered a review of the Combined Bomber Offensive. The Combined Operations Planning Committee grappled with the big picture and the future of the relationship of the Combined Bomber Offensive to Operation Overlord.

While the RAF nighttime raids were focusing on area attacks on cities and on the dense concentrations of industrial targets in the Ruhr, the aircraft factories, by their nature, required precision daylight attacks. Therefore, the entire mission of Operation Pointblank as the necessary
precursor to Overlord lay on the shoulders of the Eighth Air Force, which appeared to have little to show for all its efforts.

As Arthur Ferguson so perfectly summarized, the USAAF strategy for the ETO in the autumn of 1943 “rested upon the assumption that the full resources of the Eighth Air Force must be concentrated on the successful completion of the Combined Bomber Offensive against Germany’s war potential and particularly against the German Air Force as an indispensable preliminary to the invasion.”

To date, that successful completion was nowhere in sight. Indeed, the Combined Chiefs of Staff decision makers were starting to question whether it was even
possible
for the Eighth Air Force to achieve superiority over the Luftwaffe in the six months remaining before the scheduled launch of Operation Overlord.

The Combined Chiefs of Staff review determined that in the nine months from February through October 1943, RAF Bomber Command had flown 45,844 night sorties with a 3.9 percent attrition rate, while the VIII Bomber Command had flown 15,846 daylight sorties with losses at 4.4 percent. At the same time, it was determined that only 65 percent of the forces originally scheduled for Pointblank were on hand by that date. On December 3, the RAF’s Air Chief Marshal Charles “Peter” Portal told the Combined Chiefs of Staff in a memo that Operation Pointblank was “a full three months behind schedule.”

Nevertheless, when Roosevelt, Churchill, and their Combined Chiefs of Staff met at the Sextant Conference in Cairo in late November, there was virtually no opposition expressed to the continuation of the Combined Bomber Offensive. It continued to be an assumed part of the overall strategy for Overlord. Portal’s bleak characterization notwithstanding, the Combined Chiefs of Staff confirmed in a directive on December 6, that “the present plan for the Combined Bomber Offensive should remain unchanged except for revision of the bombing objectives which should be made periodically.”

And so, as the shadows lengthened, the days shortened, and winter overcast moved in to shroud the continent, the Combined Bomber Offensive ground on. Despite the divergence of opinions over tactics and targeting, the basic strategy to which Roosevelt, Churchill, and their respective
staffs had committed at Casablanca continued. Of course, if the Luftwaffe threat was to be muzzled before Overlord, there was
no other weapon
in the Allied arsenal other than strategic airpower that could even attempt to meet the challenge.

And the Combined Bomber Offensive was not operating in a vacuum. The Allies were fighting an increasingly extensive global war in 1943. It had been a year of expanding American operations in the Pacific, as well as a time of major Allied ground operations in the Mediterranean Theater. The Operation Husky invasion of Sicily in July–August had gone relatively smoothly, but the Operation Avalanche invasion of mainland Italy in September was meeting stiff German resistance—aided by favorable terrain—and sucking up considerable Allied resources. Indeed,
the Eighth Air Force had been called on to divert resources to the Mediterranean for these operations, just as it had been required to do so in support of Operation Torch in 1942.

However, the bitter taste of the diversion of resources to the operations in Italy also presented the Combined Bomber Offensive with an opportunity to make lemonade.

The idea of launching strategic bombing operations against Germany from the sunny Mediterranean had long been on the wish list of strategic planners, especially when they considered the long weeks in which weather interfered with missions flown from Britain. As the August mission against Wiener Neustadt had demonstrated, the Reich was at the far limit of the range of Allied bombers flying from North Africa. However, now that southern Italy was in Allied hands, the picture changed considerably.

Even as Black Week was unfolding in northern Europe, bulldozers were at work in the area between Bari and Foggia, on the heel of the Italian boot. By November, a complex of bomber bases was starting to emerge from the swirling dust. On the first day of November, the USAAF activated the Fifteenth Air Force under the command of General Nathan Twining, previously the commander of the Thirteenth Air Force in the Pacific. Within a month, missions were being flown from new bases more than five hundred miles closer to Germany than those in North Africa.

The Fifteenth Air Force offered the potential of striking targets in southern Germany and Austria that were beyond the effective reach of the Eighth Air Force. Among those on the Operation Pointblank target list that were reachable from the bases in Italy was the Messerschmitt factory complex at Wiener Neustadt, as well as the one at Augsburg that had thus far been considered too deep inside the Reich for an Eighth Air Force mission.

Amid the sweetness of the lemonade, there were, of course, certain drawbacks to operations from Italy. These ranged from the mundane issue of building up an adequate depot and maintenance infrastructure from scratch, to the dramatic difficulty of flying across the Alps, especially in the winter, or with battle-damaged aircraft.

Though the Fifteenth was able to launch a sizable mission against Wiener Neustadt on November 2, the day after its formal activation, and a 150-plane mission to Augsburg in December, weather and lack of equipment limited the Fifteenth mainly to targets south of the Alps through the end of the year.

While the Fifteenth Air Force was being organized for a prominent role in Operation Pointblank and a significant role in strategic operations over Europe, Portal and Bomber Command’s “Bomber” Harris changed gears. They veered away from Operation Pointblank to focus not on the German aircraft industry, or indeed on
any
German industry, but back on the concept of attacking German morale. Continuing to cite the theory that a collapse of morale had pushed the German surrender in the First World War, the RAF revisited the approach long advocated by Harris that the war could be won by exhausting and dispiriting the German people through the burning of their cities.

While some RAF officers continued to insist that area bombardment was directed at industrial areas rather than civilian areas, Harris was very unambiguous that area bombardment was used primarily as a weapon against civilian morale. As quoted by Henry Sokolski in a Strategic Studies Institute study published by the US Army War College, Harris famously said “the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.”

However, as Walt Rostow disagreed in the OSS Research and Analysis Branch
War Diary
, this perspective represented what the “EOU regarded as a misconception concerning the breakdown of Germany during 1918. It was felt to be important that romantic notions not be entertained about the vulnerability of the German political and social structure to internal collapse.”