Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (23 page)

Meanwhile, the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces (MAAF) were created as a successor to MAC and as an umbrella organization for all American
and
British tactical air forces in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations (MTO).

In the musical chairs shake-up of the USAAF command staff in the ETO and MTO, as Spaatz went back to England, General Eaker went south to command the MAAF and General Doolittle was transferred from command of the Twelfth Air Force in the Mediterranean to replace Eaker as commander of the Eighth Air Force in England.

General Fred Anderson, formerly commander of the VIII Bomber Command, became Spaatz’s deputy commander for operations at USSTAF. While USSTAF was theoretically a “supervisory and policy-making” organization, Anderson would become the most influential operations man within the new strategic air command.

“Just before departing [for his new post at MAAF], General Eaker asked me whether I would accompany him to the Mediterranean Theater and take charge of his new plans division there,” Dick Hughes recalls. “I thankfully, but respectfully, declined the offer.”

Eaker now commanded a
tactical
air organization, and for the time being, Hughes was anxious to continue what he had started with respect to the
strategic
air war against the Reich.

Indeed, while the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces had been building up their strength and flying relatively limited endurance missions through
most of December, the next phase of that strategic campaign had been shaping up on drawing boards from Bushy Park to Berkeley Square.

On November 29, 1943, the Combined Operational Planning Committee (COPC) of the Combined Bomber Offensive had issued a highly classified memo describing the general outlines for the maximum effort code-named Operation Argument. Essentially, Operation Argument was to be the intensely focused capstone of Operation Pointblank, the climactic moment in the campaign against the Luftwaffe and the German aircraft industry that Peter Portal had complained was behind schedule.

Ironically, while there had been numerous arguments about strategic airpower policy over the preceding year, as November faded into December, those on the COPC were of like mind over the singular objectives of Operation Argument.

Though specific details bounced back and forth between Berkeley Square and Bushy Park through December, the general plan for Argument called for a
weeklong
series of daylight precision bombing missions against high-priority aircraft industry targets in southern and central Germany—such as Augsburg, Leipzig, and Regensburg—that would have an immediate effect on frontline Luftwaffe fighter strength.

As had long been envisioned by Dick Hughes, Charlie Kindleberger, and everyone who had understood the German economy as an integrated organism, the plan called for a systematic assault not merely against final assembly plants, but on component plants and, once again, ball bearings. In a conversation with Arthur Ferguson a month later, Dick Hughes gave a series of examples.

He explained that attacks on the Erla-Maschinenwerk GmbH plant in Leipzig, which assembled Messerschmitt Bf 109s, would be complemented by strikes on factories in the Leipzig suburb of Heiterblick where components and subassemblies were manufactured. The Junkers Flugzeug-und-Motorenwerke AG factory at Bernburg, which assembled Ju 88 aircraft, would “share” an attack with the Ju 88 fuselage works at nearby Oschersleben and the Ju 88 wing plant at Halberstadt.

The huge Messerschmitt plant at Augsburg contained both subassembly and final assembly in one complex, but at Regensburg, the final assembly was done in the suburb of Obertraubling, and subcomponents
were made in another suburb, Prüfening. Hughes said that both targets would get equal consideration from the Eighth Air Force.

Operations would be coordinated between the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces, with the RAF attacking the same areas on many of the intervening nights during this weeklong effort. The Ninth Air Force, recently relocated to England to manage all the tactical bombing operations in France ahead of Overlord, would cooperate with the heavy bomber units by running diversionary attacks over northern Europe with fighters and medium bombers. The idea would be to lure the Luftwaffe into dividing its forces, pulling fighter strength away from its strategic mission.

Because of this coordination between several commands and separate air forces, Fred Anderson would be integral to planning for Operation Argument. Indeed, the operational direction of Operation Argument would be Anderson’s responsibility in his role as Spaatz’s deputy for operations.

Hughes writes of a visit to General Spaatz’s residence one night, during which he and Anderson laid out the dimensions of their proposal for the specifics of the Argument operations, complete with pages of lists, and maps unrolled across the floor.

“My target list included German fighter assembly plants scattered virtually over the whole of Germany, and many called for very deep penetrations,” he recalls. “Understandably, General Spaatz was most concerned, lest this operation result in tragic casualty percentages similar to those we previously had suffered in our attacks on Schweinfurt and Regensburg.”

On everyone’s mind was the last time the Eighth Air Force mounted a
weeklong
maximum effort. That week, Black Week, had culminated in the debacle over Schweinfurt, when the attacking force had suffered the worst casualty rate of any major mission ever. Their minds’ eyes were filled with images of the faces of hundreds of young men who would never go home.

Meanwhile, everyone’s mind then turned to images of the faces of
thousands
of young men who would be coming ashore in Normandy in just a few short months, and what their lives would be like as they staggered for safety under skies filled with the vengeful wrath of the determined and efficient Luftwaffe.

As Dick Hughes explains, each man in the room knew that, as painful as it would be, Operation Argument was absolutely indispensable to Operation Overlord. Each man knew that “only from its results could we possibly determine whether or not we could gain air superiority before D-Day, and whether or not by the exercise of strategic airpower on decisive German industrial target systems, we could appreciably shorten the length of time for which the Germans could resist. Moreover, we now, for the first time, had a very strong strategic bomber force and an adequate supply of long range fighter escorts. If we failed, this time, we would probably never have any more forces than we now had, with which to succeed.”

As the Christmas decorations began appearing around London, and in the Mayfair shops Dick Hughes passed on his way to Berkeley Square, he presented Fred Anderson with the details and nuances of the specific Operation Argument objectives. As he recalls, “General Anderson agreed with me completely, and we sent the target priorities over to Eighth Air Force and told them to get ready for a maximum effort.”

It was make-or-break time for the Eighth Air Force, and indeed for the entire Anglo-American Combined Bomber Offensive, for Operation Argument was to be its climactic moment, a moment that could
not
end in failure.

Everything that the Combined Bomber Offensive, and especially the Eighth Air Force, had been
trying
to do, at least since the Pointblank Directive of June 1943, would now be funneled into this single “maximum effort” for which the Eighth Air Force now finally seemed to have the resources.

“Strategic heavy bomber groups were now piling into England at a much faster rate for the buildup for the invasion, and several [fresh] groups of long range P-51s and P-47s had also arrived,” Hughes writes of the turning point that was coming with the turn of 1943 to 1944. “In my opinion, for the first time, we finally had the real opportunity of breaking the back of the German fighter defenses, and all my time was spent planning just how to do this as soon as weather conditions became favorable for operations over Germany.”

Favorable weather conditions?

In northern Europe—in
January
?

Favorable weather conditions, in northern Europe, in January for an
entire week
?

Operation Argument could not go forward until the maximum effort could be sustained for a week. As Anderson later observed, “It was the business of getting in and out of Germany that was going to be costly. I was not prepared to accept such risks for anything less than a clear shot at the targets.”

It was not just weather over the targets that worried Anderson, it was the weather in East Anglia, where ground fog is common in the winter months. Because of the short days of winter, and the distance to the targets deep inside Germany, the bombers would be taking off and returning in the dark. Adding thick ground fog to nighttime landings with damaged aircraft was a prescription for disaster.

Until they were sure of a week of favorable weather, the Combined Bomber Offensive would just be biding time with routine missions to routine targets. The first month of 1944 began with Eighth Air Force operations on a scale that would have been impressive just four months earlier, but was
not
so impressive when it was recognized that the Eighth’s part of Operation Argument was now
four
months behind schedule.

On the fourth of January, the Eighth managed to launch more than five hundred heavy bombers, and followed with more than four hundred the next day, and again on January 7. However, as with the operations in December, the primary targets were still relatively close—the port of Keil and the I.G. Farben factory at Ludwigshafen—and attacking them did nothing toward the mission of hitting the strength of the Luftwaffe at its source.

Each day, and several times each day, Tooey Spaatz, Fred Anderson, and Dick Hughes were not alone among the men of the Eighth Air Force who craned their necks and looked into the sky for anything favorable about the damnable winter weather. More often than not, their gaze was met with raindrops, which they knew would exist as ice and sleet at the altitudes where the Flying Fortresses and Liberators were flying.

An indication of the poor weather conditions during the month came on January 24, when 857 B-17s and B-24s were launched, but all but fifty-eight had to be recalled because of the weather.

Favorable weather conditions, in northern Europe, in January for an
entire week
?

It would not happen.

January came and went, and it had not.

Time was running out. The campaign against the Luftwaffe was another month behind, and Operation Overlord was another month
closer
.

If they looked skyward and saw the clouds part, how would they know how long it would last?

Even today, in an era of satellite imagery and computer analysis, most people still consider meteorology to be as much art as science, in which the weatherman hedges his bets with percentages. In the 1940s, weather forecasting, especially long-range weather forecasting, was much more art than science.

As Arthur Ferguson writes, during January, “Argument had been scheduled repeatedly—every time, in fact, that early weather reports seemed to offer any hope; but each time deteriorating weather had forced cancellation.”

Just as Fred Anderson was growing impatient, so too was his boss. On February 8, Tooey Spaatz told Anderson emphatically that Argument
must
happen by the end of the month.

“By February the destruction of the German fighter production had become a matter of such urgency that General Spaatz and General Anderson were willing to take more than ordinary risks in order to complete the task,” Ferguson continues, “including the risk of exceptional losses that might result from missions staged under conditions of adverse base weather.”

Just as Tooey Spaatz was growing impatient, so too was
his
boss. Finally, to aid the men of the Eighth Air Force, Hap Arnold, the commanding general of the USAAF, sent his
own
weatherman.

Arnold had first met Dr. Irving P. Krick in 1934, when he was stationed at March Field near Riverside, California, and Professor Krick had just founded the Department of Meteorology at California Institute of Technology at Pasadena. Krick had recently leapt to national attention when he explained the cause of the 1933 crash of the US Navy airship USS
Akron
. Arnold called his first meeting with the professor “unforgettable,” and, in
his memoirs, he lists numerous almost uncanny long-term predictions made by Krick.

“Naturally, I watched Dr. Krick’s work eagerly after that,” Arnold writes. “Weather is the essence of successful air operations.”

Krick’s method, which was considered unorthodox by the meteorology establishment in those days, used modeling of past events to predict the future. Krick studied weather patterns going back decades in order to determine patterns. According to Kristine Harper in her book
Weather by the Numbers
, Francis Reichelderfer, the head of the federal Weather Bureau, derided Krick as a “smug, supremely self-confident self-promoter.”

Though his “weather typing” was nontraditional, it seemed to work, and Hap Arnold believed in him. Indeed, the USAAF chief was so taken with the professor that he had him commissioned as a major and brought him into the service when the war started.

The arrival of the maverick meteorologist to prognosticate weather for Operation Argument was almost like a scene from a motion picture, and indeed, he would have been at home in such a scenario. Krick was no stranger to Hollywood. In fact, David O. Selznick had hired him to predict the weather in advance of filming the burning of Atlanta scene for the 1939 film
Gone with the Wind
.

Looking thoughtfully at the leaden overcast, Krick told Anderson and Spaatz that they would need to wait for a stable, high-pressure pattern to move in over southern England and the continent and linger for several days.

They asked him to tell them when, and he asked for historical weather maps. Fortunately, they had been creating weather maps in England and northern Europe since the middle of the nineteenth century. Sitting down with data on winter weather patterns going back to the 1890s, Krick calculated what to look for as the harbinger of such a stationary high.