Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (40 page)

The Fifteenth Air Force, meanwhile, restricted to sending fewer than 200 bombers over the Reich a year earlier, was now capable of launching 600.

The 1,359 bombers launched by the Eighth on February 22 were supported by a fighter force that flew 822 effective sorties. In was also a sign of the times that the Luftwaffe countered this vast effort with only around 70 interceptors, and they flew mainly ineffective sorties. Only seven bombers
were lost to flak or fighters that day, and the jets were still rarely seen. Indeed, by February, Luftwaffe interceptors of any kind were becoming a rarity. Some missions were even going unchallenged by fighters, although the flak was as ferocious as ever.

As Fagg writes, it was during February that “the strategic air forces destroyed any serious possibility that Germany might unduly protract the war. The heavy bombers expended their greatest efforts since June 1944. Although flying conditions in the first half of the month were the worst ever experienced and 80 percent of the missions were blind attacks, the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces each carried out large-scale operations on twenty days during the month. The results were impressive in every respect. The oil campaign, into which USSTAF and Bomber Command poured 24,800 tons during the month, remained well under control with complete victory coming into view. The Germans failed utterly to make anything out of the program for underground plants, largely because of the breakdown in transportation.”

RAF Bomber Command, meanwhile, was routinely launching in excess of a thousand four-engine bombers on each mission. On March 17 and March 18, Bomber Command put out two consecutive missions against industrial and petrochemical targets in the Ruhr that averaged 1,094 heavy bombers dropping an average of more than 4,800 tons of bombs, record numbers for the RAF. Because of the general absence of Luftwaffe opposition, the RAF was now frequently flying daytime raids.

The Strategic Bombing Survey notes that in February 1945, coal deliveries, partly through the loss of Silesia and the Saar, fell to 25 percent of normal. In March they fell to 16 percent and, by the end of the month, to only 4 percent of normal. Indeed, coal shipments were scarcely adequate even for the needs of the railroads themselves. The survey goes on to remind us that Germany’s raw material industries, her manufacturing industries, and her power supply were all dependent on coal.

German boys a generation younger than Archie Mathies were on the threshold of experiencing rounds of bleak seasons with fewer, if any, trestles and coal trains than there had been a few years earlier.

However, in the coming dark, cold winter, there would no longer be skies filled with bombers, and cities no longer would be gutted with fire.
Those boys would grow to manhood with neither war nor Hitler and with a determination that their nation would be never again benighted by his kind.

It was in March, while steam locomotives were running out of coal, that the large scale jet fighter menace finally—and so very belatedly—revealed its full potential. The world’s first all–jet fighter wing, Jagdgeschwader 7, had been formed in January under
Oberst
Johannes Steinhoff, a veteran Luftwaffe ace with more than 150 aerial victories when he took command. However, lack of fuel and materiel delayed its entry into combat until February, and into large scale operations until March 3, when the wing flew twenty-nine missions and claimed eight bombers.

On March 18, after two weeks of relatively light Luftwaffe opposition, Hitler’s dream—and Spaatz’s nightmare—was in full swing. Had the events of that day been routinely repeatable, or if they had occurred a year earlier, the story of the strategic air campaign against the Third Reich would have been much different.

Jagdgeschwader 7 attacked Eighth Air Force aircraft over Berlin with 37 Me 262s, shooting down a dozen bombers and a fighter, while losing three of their own. It was a four-to-one victory for the Luftwaffe. Had this occurred during Big Week, it really would have been worthy of the kind of serious reappraisal that Fred Anderson had feared was necessary in January.

However, the Eighth had launched 1,251 four-engine bombers that day, so the losses amounted to just 1 percent, and Jagdgeschwader 7 was in no position to put up the numbers of jets that had any hope of slowing, much less turning, the tide.

By March 18, the United States Ninth Army had been across the Rhine for more than a week, other American and British units were following suit, and the Soviet armies were closing in on Berlin from the east.

On April 7 and April 10, the Luftwaffe managed to muster nearly sixty jets, but on the latter date, the nineteen bombers and eight fighters lost by the USAAF cost the Luftwaffe twenty-seven Me 262s and sixty Bf 109s.

It will be remembered that in the wake of the debacle of Black Thursday over Schweinfurt in October 1943, Ira Eaker had wired Hap Arnold with the absurd characterization that the Luftwaffe was done for, when
in fact it was at the very apogee of its prowess. In his words, Black Thursday had been the “last final struggle of a monster in his death throes.”

Now, eighteen months later, the men of the USSTAF really
were
watching the almost theatrically spectacular, and jet-propelled, “last struggle of a monster in his death throes.”

Had Eaker held his colorful characterization, he would have been right on the mark. Of course, by April 1945, even the most pessimistic of Allied leaders could see that the end had come.

In the meantime, the Luftwaffe had been collapsing from the inside. A growing number of experienced pilots, fed up with Göring’s erratic leadership, were speaking out. Among them was Adolf Galland, who was fired from his post as inspector general of fighter aviation for his impertinence. He promptly returned to flying status and organized an all–jet fighter squadron known as Jagdverband 44. To staff his new organization, Galland recruited most of the top scoring aces in the Luftwaffe. It was a dramatic gesture, but it was too little too late by a wide margin. As with Jagdgeschwader 7, Galland’s dream team might have impacted the air war significantly if it had appeared a year—or even half a year—sooner.

“The fate of Germany was sealed,” Galland wrote in his postwar memoir
The First and the Last
. “On April 25 the American and the Soviet soldiers shook hands at Torgau on the Elbe. The last defensive ring of Berlin was soon penetrated. The Red flag was flying over the Ballhausplatz in Vienna. The German front in Italy collapsed. On Pilsen fell the last bomb of the 2,755,000 tons which the Western Allies had dropped on Europe during five years of war. At that moment I called my pilots together and said to them, ‘Militarily speaking the war is lost. Even our action here cannot change anything…. I shall continue to fight, because operating with the Me 262 has got hold of me, because I am proud to belong to the last fighter pilots of the German Luftwaffe…. Only those who feel the same are to go on flying with me.’”

Galland flew his last mission the next day—against American medium bombers.

Four days later, in his bunker deep below a Berlin that had been bombed almost beyond recognition, Adolf Hitler killed his dog and entered into a suicide pact with Eva Braun, his wife of less than forty hours.

By now, the strategic air war had come to an end, and the Luftwaffe was a defeated relic. The Luftwaffe was ridiculously outnumbered at every turn and could essentially do nothing. As John Fagg writes, “Lavish fighter escort flew with the [Allied] bombers even when operations were a matter of roaming over the prostrate Reich looking for targets. This escort was available to a high degree now that Doolittle had taken his fighters off strafing tasks lest friendly troops or prisoners be killed. Most of Germany was not enemy territory any longer.”

On April 7, RAF chief Peter Portal had suspended large scale bombing operations, expressing concern that “further destruction of German cities would magnify the problems of the occupying forces.”

About a week later, on April 16, from his headquarters in Reims, Spaatz sent a personal memo to Jimmy Doolittle at the Eighth Air Force and Nathan Twining at the Fifteenth, which read: “The advances of our ground forces have brought to a close the strategic air war waged by the United States Strategic Air Forces and the Royal Air Force Bomber Command.

“It has been won with a decisiveness becoming increasingly evident as our armies overrun Germany. From now onward our Strategic Air Forces must operate with our Tactical Air Forces in close cooperation with our armies.

“All units of the US Strategic Air Forces are commended for their part in winning the Strategic Air War and are enjoined to continue with undiminished effort and precision the final tactical phase of air action to secure the ultimate objective—complete defeat of Germany.”

In its conclusion, the Strategic Bombing Survey summarized the climax of the Allied strategic air campaign by stating that “as in most other cases in the history of wars—the collapse occurred before the time when the lack of means would have rendered further resistance physically impossible.”

By the time that collapse came, Germany’s once invincible war machine had little in the way of means, and virtually nothing in the way of a will, to continue fighting.

“The German economy,” Albert Speer had written in his March 15 report, “is heading for an inevitable collapse within four to eight weeks.”

Seven weeks later, it was all over.

The end came on VE-Day, which was actually a period of about forty-eight hours, beginning on May 7, when Field Marshal William Keitel, the chief of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the German high command, traveled to Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims to sign the unconditional surrender. The following day, a similar formal surrender ceremony took place in Berlin, now in Soviet hands.

Billy Mitchell had written two decades earlier, “Air power holds out the hope to the nations that, in the future, air battles taking place miles away from the frontiers will be so decisive and of such far-reaching effect that the nation losing them will be willing to capitulate without resorting to a further contest on land or water on account of the degree of destruction which would be sustained by the country subjected to unrestricted air attack.”

The strategic air campaign that defeated the Third Reich had begun with little more than the idea promulgated by Mitchell that a major industrial power could be defeated in war from the air.

The campaign began in 1942 with a handful of aircraft, a handful of crews, and only a general idea of how to proceed. Over the course of its first year, the shape and form of the strategic air campaign gradually gained clarity. At Berkeley Square, a strategy took shape. In East Anglia, a bomber force moved toward critical mass. The dogged determination of the men in USAAF to stick with the doctrine of precision daylight attacks was questioned, ridiculed, and finally proven correct.

Big Week, as its planners had hoped, did constitute the beginning of the end. After that week, nothing was ever again the same. Albert Speer knew it and so did Hitler.

Big Week, as its planners had hoped, constituted a vindication of the strategic air campaign. Though there would be bumps in the road on the downhill slide that began that week, it was clear that Germany’s war economy had begun unraveling from that point.

Just as the Allies had found the skies over Normandy devoid of the Luftwaffe on the Longest Day, the Allies who pondered a defeated Germany saw a nation without an infrastructure.

Thanks in no small part to the men of the EOU, the complex interrelationship of the components of Germany’s war economy, such as ball
bearings to aircraft manufacturing, and petrochemicals to the entire economy, had been examined, understood, and articulated as targets.

Thanks to the tenacity of the bomber crews—and the fighter pilots and
all
the ground crews—these targets were systematically struck, then struck again, and then again, until the very foundation of the German war economy had been destroyed. The promise of which Mitchell had spoken was fulfilled.

Thanks to the heroism and the vision of all of these people, the Third Reich and the dark curtain that it had drawn across Europe and the world, like the dark curtain in an Eighth Air Force briefing room, had been torn down forever.

As had happened on the final, climactic day of Big Week, the sun had come out across Europe.

At the 4th Fighter Group field at Debden, David Mathies had known that February 20, 1944, was going to be a big day. There were sixty Thunderbolts on the flight line, with the mechanics running up the engines for a maximum effort. Overhead came the thunder of dozens of bombers, wave after wave of 91st Bombardment Group Flying Fortresses, taking off from nearby Bassingbourn.

“I understand you have a brother who’s a gunner with the B-17 outfit over there,” an armorer, who was one of David’s friends, casually remarked as they went to work that morning. He nodded to the northwest, in the general direction of Polebrook and a half dozen other Eighth Air Force bomber fields.

“Yes, that’s right,” David replied. “And I don’t mind telling you that I’m very apprehensive about it too. You can tell from all the activity that’s going on around here that this is going to be a big mission.”

In the middle of 1943, David had gotten a letter from their mother reporting that brother Archie had volunteered as an aerial gunner and was training down at Tyndall Field in Florida.

“As soon as I received that letter, I knew that Archie was on a collision course with his destiny,” David later recalled. “One of the words that he
was continually kicking around was ‘predestiny.’ It means that from the moment you’re conceived, your date and time of death is written down somewhere. I didn’t believe too much in that, and I always figured there is no sense in rushing things either… but Archie believed in it with all his heart.”

A couple of days later, near the crescendo of the Big Week activity, David Mathies went over to the Red Cross tent for his usual cup of tea and casually picked up a copy of the
News Chronicle
, then one of London’s numerous daily newspapers. On page one, there was a small picture of Archie and a recounting of his remarkable heroism on February 20.