Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (36 page)

“On February 23, 1944, [Erhard] Milch visited me in my sickroom,” wrote Albert Speer, Hitler’s all-powerful armaments minister. Milch, meanwhile, held the post of state secretary in the Reich Aviation Ministry. “He informed me that the American Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces were concentrating their bombing on the German aircraft industry, with the result that our aircraft production would be reduced to a third of what it had been, at least for the month to come.”

When Milch came to him as the bearer of bad news—from Schweinfurt, from Regensburg, from Gotha, from Fürth, and from all those other places—Speer had been hospitalized for more than a month for exhaustion. As he wrote in his memoirs, “The nearly two years of continuous tension had been taking their toll. Physically, I was nearly worn out at the age of 38. The pain in my knee hardly ever left me. I had no reserves of strength. Or were all these symptoms merely an escape?”

Big Week brought plenty of bad news that Speer would yearn to escape, but from which he could not.

Saturday, February 26, marked the “morning after” of Big Week. A low pressure area had moved into Europe on the seventh day, and the curtain fell. It was the metaphorical curtain, brought down on an epochal
operation made possible only by the “strangest freak” of a window in the weather
and
by the men who were in a position to exploit it.

It was also a literal curtain, brought down by a bleak weather system that would cloak the continent in clouds for the better part of a month. The maximum effort officially designated as Operation Argument had come to an end.

In the American media of February 1944, Big Week was overshadowed by great land battles—the Battle of Anzio and the marine landing on the Pacific atoll of Eniwetok were ongoing simultaneously, and Overlord was on everyone’s mind. In the coming months, though, Big Week would come to be recognized as a significant crossroads on the highway to victory in World War II. Albert Speer and Erhard Milch were already seeing the handwriting on the wall of Speer’s sickroom.

Big Week did not destroy the Luftwaffe, nor the German aircraft industry, but it did destroy the complacency that had come to Speer and Milch from possessing air superiority and assuming that certain targets in certain regions were essentially untouchable by Allied strategic airpower.

Big Week, like Gettysburg eight decades earlier, did not herald a conclusion to a bloody war so much as it marked, in retrospect, a high water mark. Never again after Gettysburg would Robert E. Lee threaten to take the Civil War onto northern soil. Never again after Big Week could the Luftwaffe truly claim to possess and exercise air superiority over German soil.

With postwar access to German data, the Strategic Bombing Survey later concluded that Big Week had “damaged or destroyed 75 percent of the buildings in plants that at the time accounted for 90 percent of the total German production of aircraft.” Production recovered, and faster than Allied analysts realized at the time, but it did so under the hardship of the time and expense of dispersal, and under the cloud of knowing that wherever it was dispersed, it was now potentially vulnerable.

As Arthur Ferguson writes in the official history of the USAAF in World War II, “The German authorities, whose plans had hitherto rested on unduly optimistic foundations, now apparently for the first time showed signs of desperation…. The February bombings did deny many hundreds of aircraft to the enemy at a time when they were badly needed and could
probably have been brought into effective use against the Allied invasion of Europe. The fact that the Germans suffered only a temporary setback in their overall program of aircraft production is less important than that they lost a significant number of planes at a critical point in the air war and that, at the same critical juncture, they were forced to reorganize and disperse the entire industry.

“According to the US Strategic Bombing Survey, the February campaign would have paid off even if its only effect had been to force the enemy into an intensive program of dispersal. For that program not only accounted indirectly for much wasted effort and production loss; it also left the industry vulnerable to any serious disruption in transportation. The dispersal policy did, in fact, defeat itself when Allied bombers subsequently turned to an intensive strategic attack on transportation.”

After the tipping point, the tide had not simply turned, it was running out.

It has often been asked how
big
the week had really been. It was, indeed, the largest sustained maximum effort by the Combined Bomber Offensive to date. The Eighth Air Force flew more than 3,300 sorties, and the Fifteenth Air Force flew more than 500, while RAF Bomber Command contributed more than 2,350. The ten thousand tons of bombs dropped by the Americans were roughly the equivalent of what the Eighth Air Force had dropped in its entire first year of operations.

Big Week had been as successful as it was big. Based on the experiences of the earlier Schweinfurt and Regensburg missions, the USSTAF planners and leadership had braced themselves for the probability of losing 200 bombers each day. In fact, the Eighth Air Force lost just 137 for the week, the Fifteenth lost 89, and the week cost the RAF 157 heavy bombers.

The force of USAAF escort fighters lost around 30 of their own, but total claims of Luftwaffe interceptors, both by the fighters and by the bomber gunners, was more than 500. The Oberkommando Luftwaffe (Luftwaffe High Command) itself recorded a loss of 456 fighters in February, including 65 night fighters. Assuming the majority of the daytime losses for the month occurred during Big Week, the ratio was in the vicinity of ten to one in favor of the Americans.

Not all the damage done to the Luftwaffe during Big Week was done
by the bombs. As Glen Williamson mused, “The wall [of Luftwaffe fighters] which had been so difficult and dangerous, shrank each day [following Big Week]. It was wonderful how fast we got along after we broke down that wall.”

Or, as Ferguson puts it, “There is reason to believe that the large and fiercely fought air battles of those six February days had more effect in establishing the air superiority on which Allied plans so largely depended than did the bombing of industrial plants.”

Big Week had also marked the turning point in terms of one critical component of Luftwaffe doctrine—pilots. The supply of this vital element of earlier Luftwaffe successes was now seen to be precariously finite. As John Fagg of New York University writes in the official USAAF history, the problem of a continuous flow of top quality replacement pilots “calls attention to the importance of the air fighting during the spring of 1944. It was as a result of the air battles, especially those of the Big Week, that the Luftwaffe was for the first time forced to admit defeat…. By March the ability of the Luftwaffe to defend the Reich and engage in combat on anything like equal terms with Allied bombers and fighter forces had passed its marginal point and was steadily deteriorating whereas the capabilities of the Allies were improving.”

Adolf Galland, the Luftwaffe’s own inspector general of fighters, was driven to comment that Big Week had cost “our best Squadron, Gruppe and Geschwader commanders. Each incursion of the enemy is costing us some fifty aircrewmen. The time has come when our weapon (the Luftwaffe) is in sight of collapse.”

The erosion of German air superiority was due to a number of factors, including the burgeoning size of the Eighth Air Force and the substantial damage done to the Luftwaffe and the German aircraft industry during Big Week.

If any specific American weapon were to be singled out as critical to the success of Operation Argument, it would be the P-51 Mustang escort fighter, which had made its debut in significant numbers in January and had proven itself indispensable during Big Week. With 108-gallon external fuel tanks, the P-47 Thunderbolt, which had long been the mainstay for Eighth Air Force bomber escort duty, had the combat radius to accompany
bombers about 475 miles from British airspace. The Mustang could do this without external tanks.

Equip a Mustang with two 75-gallon wing tanks, and its radius was extended to 650 miles. With 108-gallon tanks, the P-51 could function as a “little friend” to bombers flying 850 miles from their bases. This meant that the Mustangs could fly to distant targets such as Schweinfurt and Regensburg—or
Berlin
—and be prepared to do battle. The number of Luftwaffe fighters shot down, for the much smaller number of Mustangs lost, is indicative of how well the new American fighter was able to function in those battles—
and
in the air battles over Germany from Big Week to the war’s
final
week.

By the end of March 1944, the Eighth Air Force had its 4th, 355th, and 357th Fighter Groups fully operational with the Mustang, and in addition the Ninth Air Force’s 354th Fighter Group. The veteran 4th Fighter Group, commanded by Colonel Don Blakeslee, had entered Big Week with around 150 total aerial victories, and by the middle of March, the number had topped 400.

With its range, plus its speed and high altitude maneuverability, the P-51 had not only quickly dominated the aerial battlefield, it gave the Eighth Air Force leadership the confidence to plan missions to even the most heavily defended targets in Germany.

On March 4, 1944, the Eighth Air Force for the first time bombed Berlin. Weather forced the diversion of all but 31 of the Flying Fortresses, but two days later, 658 heavy bombers reached the German capital, followed by 460 on March 8 and around 300 on March 9.

The targets included the Vereinigte Kugellagerfabriken ball bearing works at Erkner, which had long been eyed by Dick Hughes and the other American planners and considered as a target on Day Three of Big Week. Also on the target list were the facilities of Robert Bosch AG in the suburb of Klein Machnow. Now known as Robert Bosch GmbH, the company is today a world leader in engineering and electronics, but during World War II it was a prominent supplier of electrical components for aircraft and military vehicles, and therefore worthy of a place on the Pointblank target list.

Aside from the damage done to the targets—the VKF plant at Erkner
suffered mightily from seventy-five direct hits on March 8—the effect that the Berlin missions had on morale was significant. With the American public, a first USAAF attack on an Axis capital was cause for celebration. For the British, an American attack on the capital of the country whose bombers had devastated London in 1940 was seen as a gesture of solidarity. The
London Evening Standard
’s editorial page called the attacks “a sign of the unshakable comradeship” and ran a headline that read allies over berlin, rather than just americans over berlin.

For Berliners, who had been bombed before—but by the RAF at night—the sight of rows of gleaming Flying Fortresses over their city in tight formation,
and
with fighter escorts, spoke volumes about the loss of air superiority in the Reich.

For the German propaganda machine, it was a challenge to spin this new reality. Indeed, the best reaction seemed to be to just say that things were not as they seemed. The
Voelkischer Beobachter
, the official Nazi Party daily, explained to its readers on March 13 that “if occasionally they fly in a clear sky without at the moment being pursued by the dreaded German fighters, only the layman is fooled, and then only for a few minutes…. In their case the closed drill formation is not a sign of strength.”

With Big Week behind them, Allied planners were able to turn to the future of the strategic air offensive against the Reich. As Dick Hughes writes, “Now, for the first time, I was able seriously to think of the destruction of the entire Axis oil industry—the decisive target system which I had mentally selected, as far back as the summer of 1941, as being the one the destruction of which would most nearly accomplish our purpose…. By the early spring of 1944, both the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces had large numbers of heavy bomber groups at their disposal, together with the necessary long-range escort fighters. The German fighter defenses, while still containing many a sting, were no longer deadly…. At last the time was ripe to destroy the German oil industry.”

Walt Rostow writes in his OSS
War Diary
that Hughes formally presented his “Oil Plan” to General Spaatz on the evening of March 5 at Park House. Rostow added that Fred Anderson “had already read the plan and was an advocate of it.”

Rostow, who was apparently present at the meeting, explains that “discussion
began before dinner and ran into the early hours of the morning around the Park House conference table. Despite the effort to emphasize, within the plan, the will to complete the attacks on the Pointblank [target] systems, General Spaatz quickly appreciated that it was to all intents and purposes an oil plan. [Spaatz] explored at length the issues at stake, and especially the capabilities of the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces with respect to the number of targets involved, and ordered the plan completed for prompt presentation to Air Marshal Portal and General Eisenhower.”

Hughes interpreted this as the plan having met with Spaatz’s approval.

However, the Oil Plan was developing even as there was about to be a major reshuffling of the Allied command structure in anticipation of Operation Overlord, which was now imminent.

As of April 1, operational control of Spaatz’s USSTAF was to pass from the Combined Chiefs of Staff to the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), in anticipation of Operation Overlord. The idea was that control would revert back once Allied ground forces had established themselves ashore on the continent, but for the time being, the fate of the USSTAF was not in its own hands. Suddenly, as Hughes puts it, “for the first time in a long while, we were no longer free to operate as we ourselves wished.”

At the head of SHAEF was Eisenhower, the supreme commander, with whom Spaatz had excellent relations. However, directly beneath Eisenhower was his deputy supreme commander, and the overlord of Overlord air operations, RAF Air Marshal Arthur Tedder.