Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (22 page)

Rostow’s ideas represented those of the Americans at the EOU. Arthur Harris governed the direction taken by RAF Bomber Command.

During the summer, Harris had run a five-day series of area attacks against Hamburg. Now he took the war home to Germany’s symbolic target number one, in what he would call the “Battle of Berlin.”

The German capital had been bombed before, but Harris now planned to take the “maximum effort” approach, involving four-hundred-plane raids on the nights of November 18–19 and November 22–23.

The second mission proved to be the most damaging against Berlin to date. Even Albert Speer recalled it in his memoirs. In his objective assessment of the strategy, he was critical of the British having deviated from the practical objectives of the strategic mission, but personally, the attack absolutely got his attention.

“Instead of paralyzing vital segments of industry, the Royal Air Force began an air offensive against Berlin,” Speer writes. “I was having a conference in my private office on November 22, 1943, when the air-raid alarm sounded. It was about 7:30
P.M.
A large fleet of bombers was reported heading toward Berlin. When the bombers reached Potsdam, I called off the meeting to drive to a nearby flak tower, intending to watch the attack from its platform, as was my wont. But I scarcely reached the top of the tower when I had to take shelter inside it; in spite of the tower’s stout concrete walls, heavy hits nearby were shaking it. Injured antiaircraft gunners crowded down the stairs behind me; the air pressure from the exploding bombs had hurled them into the walls. For 20 minutes, explosion followed explosion…. My nearby Ministry was one gigantic conflagration…. In place of my private office I found nothing but a huge bomb crater.”

Arthur Harris famously remarked about the Battle of Berlin, “It will cost us between 400 and 500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war.”

Harris was wrong and Albert Speer was right. The war would be won, not through frightening Berliners but through paralyzing vital segments of industry. Indeed, historians have also often pointed out that the Luftwaffe had erred strategically in 1940, when it shifted its target priority from attacking RAF fighter bases to the less practical, more spiteful, Blitz of London.

For the Eighth Air Force, on whose shoulders rested the primary responsibility for taking down the German industrial economy, November and December were a time of building up to fulfill potential, rather than of the dramatic action of more deep penetration missions.

The Eighth put 350 bombers over Bremen on November 26, and 154 over the same city three days later. On December 11, 437 heavy bombers hit factories near Emden with 15 losses. Two days later, port facilities farther east were targeted, with 171 heavies hitting Bremen again, and 379 bombing Kiel. The Eighth was also flying against easier targets in France and the Netherlands, but deep penetration operations against Pointblank targets, the backbone of German aircraft production, were deferred for the time being.

However, the buildup was evident in how fast the numbers of bombers had been growing in December. Whereas the Eighth had managed to launch 400 bombers only once prior to the second Schweinfurt mission, they were now beginning to send out forces in excess of 600 heavy bombers. On December 13, the Eighth launched 710 heavy bombers, of which 649 bombed Bremen, Hamburg, and Keil, while 658 bombed Ludwigshafen on December 30.

American industry, with its almost limitless potential, was gearing up to unprecedented levels as a resource of weapons and aircraft. In 1942, American industry had rolled out 47,836 total warplanes. In 1943, that number would be 85,898, and for 1944, even higher.

Production of both Flying Fortresses and Liberators increased greatly in 1943, although, for most of the year, operational numbers had lagged far beyond the number being produced. Factory acceptances of Flying Fortresses increased from 1,412 in 1942 to 4,179 in 1943, and of Liberators from 1,164 to 5,214. However, as the aircraft flowed into the global USAAF, the numbers on hand in the ETO were reactively smaller. Flying Fortress
inventory increased from 175 at the start of 1943 to 907 in October. For Liberators, the number increased from 39 to 197. By the end of 1943, the Eighth Air Force possessed 1,307 Flying Fortresses and 308 Liberators, while the newly formed Fifteenth Air Force had 289 Flying Fortresses and 268 Liberators. One Eighth Air Force heavy bomber group had been added in November, but four were activated in December, bringing total strength to twenty-five groups by the end of the year.

And then there were the fighters. By December, there were more than 1,200 P-47 Thunderbolts in the European Theater, double the number that had been present in August. Meanwhile, the remarkable P-51 Mustang had started to reach the Eighth Air Force fighter groups. In August, there had been none. By December, there were nearly 300, and this number would double during January.

The increase in aircraft was one thing, but another part of the story was the increasing numbers of crews who were arriving in Britain.

As typical as any among these men were David and Archie Mathies, the brothers from the coal patch town of Finleyville, Pennsylvania. Archie had enlisted at the end of 1940, when the USAAF was still the Air Corps. David, being four years younger, joined the USAAF on June 20, 1942, half a year after Pearl Harbor, and wound up going overseas as part of the Eighth Air Force buildup while Archie was still stateside. By the spring of 1943, David had been in England for a year as a ground crewman with the 4th Fighter Group at Debden in Essex, while Archie was still a flight engineer attached to the 28th Bombardment Squadron of the 19th Bombardment Group at Pyote Field in Texas.

Anxious to get overseas, Archie volunteered for aerial gunnery school at Tyndall Field in Florida, but was still trapped in a “hurry-up-and-wait” career track while David was in Britain drinking warm beer and sleeping in cold, drafty Quonset hut temporary barracks.

The bomber crews assigned to the Eighth Air Force were generally formed and trained as a crew in the United States, then assigned a bomber, which they would, in turn, fly to England. By October 1943, Archie Mathies was at Alexandria Army Airfield, near Alexandria, Louisiana, assigned as part of a bomber crew.

The pilot and aircraft commander was Second Lieutenant Clarence
Richard Nelson Jr. from Riverside, Illinois, who had enlisted in the US Army as a private and had been a pilot only since May 1943. Second Lieutenant Joseph Martin from Burlington, New Jersey, was the bombardier, and Second Lieutenant Walter Edward “Wally” Truemper had joined Nelson’s crew as the navigator in September. Like Nelson, Truemper was twenty-four years old, and from Illinois, specifically Aurora. Also like Nelson, he had enlisted in the regular US Army but had applied for flight school and wound up in the USAAF.

The copilot was Flight Officer Ronald Bartley, from Underwood, North Dakota. The vast majority of the men with a pilot’s rating in the USAAF were officers, but enlisted men who had completed flight training could be assigned as “flight officers,” noncommissioned pilots with a rank equivalent to warrant officer. Though the lowest ranking men on the flight deck, they were also the most experienced. In 1942, Bartley had flown his first tour of duty with the 12th Bombardment Group in North Africa as a radio operator aboard a B-25 medium bomber.

Ron Bartley had come home, married his girlfriend, Bernice, and signed up for flight school. Having earned his wings at the end of August 1943, he volunteered to go back overseas to fly with the Eighth Air Force.

There were six sergeants assigned to Nelson’s crew. Working just aft of the flight deck were the radio operator, Joe Rex, from Defiance, Ohio, and Carl Moore, from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, the flight engineer. An Arkansas-born Texan named Thomas Sowell was the left waist gunner, while Russell Robinson, from Springfield, Colorado, stood across from him at the right waist position. Robinson had been in the midst of flight training when he had his twenty-seventh birthday. In those days, the USAAF required that pilots earn their wings at age twenty-six or earlier, so Robinson became a gunner.

Magnus “Mac” Hagbo, a Norwegian kid from Seattle, was the tail gunner, and Archie Mathies rounded out Dick Nelson’s crew as the man who crawled into the tight confines of the Sperry ball turret on the bottom of the Flying Fortress.

Having trained to fly and function as a crew, they were assigned the B-17G that they would take overseas. In World War II, nearly every bomber had a name, and this one was named
Mizpah
, from a biblical reference
suggested to Nelson by his mother. In Genesis 31:49, Laban speaks the word “Mizpah” and says, “The Lord watch between me and thee when we are absent one from another.”

Florence Nelson wanted her twenty-four-year-old boy to come home safely.

The young crew flew
Mizpah
out of the recently completed Kearny Army Airfield in Buffalo County, Nebraska, on the last day of November, bound for England by way of Bangor, Maine, and Goose Bay, Labrador. After an icy, hair-raising midwinter crossing of the Atlantic, they reached Northern Ireland on December 16.

It was here that
Mizpah
herself became the first casualty of Dick Nelson’s wartime saga. On the night before the crew was about to make the last, short hop to Britain, a winter storm blew in and the wind pushed several Flying Fortresses together, damaging their control surfaces.

Without a plane, the crew made that last leg of their journey by boat, and the next day, Archie Mathies found himself in Scotland, the land of his birth. Within a week,
Mizpah
’s crew found themselves assigned to the Eighth Air Force Replacement Depot Casual Pool, waiting for further orders, and for whatever came next.

As Christmas came and went, and as the new year arrived, these men were just ten of the tens of thousands who were accumulating in England in anticipation of the year that promised to be the make-or-break one for the Eighth Air Force, the Combined Bomber Offensive, and the realization of the full potential of strategic airpower.

Just as young Americans like Archie Mathies had come to crew the bombers, young Americans had been flooding into England by the tens of thousands also to form the waves of ground troops who would battle their way into
Festung Europe
with Operation Overlord and begin the long and difficult march into Hitler’s Reich. There were so many that it was almost like an invasion.

Some British people referred, with both tongue in cheek and a certain accuracy, to the Yanks as “oversexed, overpaid, and over here.” It was a culture shock for both sides.

Others simply, and more charitably, referred to the invasion of England by the young Americans as “the Friendly Invasion.”

To command these young Americans, indeed to command
all
the Allied forces, there would be an American—General Dwight David Eisenhower.

In 1942, the British, by right of their experience and their relative numbers, had held sway in the decision making within the Combined Chiefs of Staff. By the end of 1943, it was the Americans, by right of their growing experience and their growing numbers, who had earned the right
to command Operation Overlord. As early as the Quadrant Conference in Quebec in August, even Winston Churchill had agreed.

The Allied command structure underwent a substantial reorganization during December. On December 7, Eisenhower was formally confirmed as the supreme allied commander in Europe, heading the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) and turning over the supreme Allied command in the Mediterranean Theater to British General Henry Maitland Wilson.

Meanwhile, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, who had previously commanded the joint Mediterranean Air Command (MAC), now went back to England to sit at the right hand of Eisenhower as his deputy supreme Allied commander, in charge of air operations for Operation Overlord. Another RAF man, Trafford Leigh-Mallory, was named to command the joint Allied Expeditionary Air Force (AEAF), which was an umbrella for all of the American and British
tactical
air operations in connection with Overlord. This included the USAAF Ninth Air Force, commanded by General Lewis Brereton, which was relocated from the Mediterranean to England for tactical operations. Theoretically, the AEAF umbrella did not cast its shadow over the strategic Eighth Air Force—at least not for the moment.

Concerning this arrangement, Arthur Ferguson later wrote that “General Eisenhower had expected Spaatz to manage heavy bomber operations for Operation Overlord, and he was a little surprised that Tedder, who he had hoped would serve as his ‘chief air man,’ was in a vague position as officer without portfolio in air matters while ‘a man named Mallory’ was titular air commander in chief [for Overlord air operations].”

With respect to American air operations, the USAAF announced, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff approved, the creation of a new
strategic
air command, the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe (USSAFE, later USSTAF and referred to as such herein), as an umbrella organization for both the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces. To command this new organization, and as the highest ranking American air officer in Europe, Hap Arnold picked Tooey Spaatz.

Spaatz then returned to his former headquarters, and that of the
Eighth Air Force, at Widewing (Bushy Park), near London, which now became the headquarters of the USSTAF. Technically, the Eighth was redesignated as the USSTAF, and the VIII Bomber Command was then redesignated as the “new” Eighth Air Force, with its headquarters still at the air base at High Wycombe, west of London, that also served as headquarters of RAF Bomber Command.

As had the Eighth previously, the USSTAF would coordinate its operations with RAF Bomber Command through the Combined Bomber Offensive organization. In a somewhat confusing arrangement, the USSTAF would also maintain administrative control of the Ninth Air Force, while operational control of the Ninth for Overlord rested with the AEAF.