Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (6 page)

On a sober morning after, the United States went to war.

Before a joint session of Congress on December 8, 1941, as Franklin Roosevelt described the previous day as “a date which will live in infamy” and asked a joint session of Congress for a declaration of war, they were picking up the pieces at Pearl Harbor. Among those pieces were the fragments of a B-24 and eight B-17Ds that had once belonged to the 5th Bombardment Group at Hickam Field. On that same day, most of the nineteen Flying Fortresses based at Clark Field near Manila in the Philippines were also destroyed.

On December 21, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and high-ranking British military officers arrived in Washington, DC, for the Anglo-American summit conference designated as Arcadia. The purpose was to sit down with President Franklin Roosevelt and his top brass—including Hap Arnold and Carl Spaatz—to plan a strategy to defeat Germany and Japan, both of which, at that moment, appeared unbeatable.

The Arcadia Conference was not without precedent. Though the United States did not formally declare war on Germany until December 11, there had been overt as well as covert cooperation with Britain since
the beginning of the year. The most overt example of an Anglo-American alliance had been the Lend-Lease Act of March 11, 1941.

When the war began in 1939, British arms buyers came to the United States to buy everything from Flying Fortresses to tommy guns. By the start of 1941, though, His Majesty’s government was running out of money. President Roosevelt feared Hitler as much as the British did, and he knew that the United States was not, despite his buildup for national defense, ready to fight the German war machine. He wanted to keep the British fighting, and he desired very much to keep the fighting British
between
Hitler and the United States.

Perhaps the second to last thing that Roosevelt wanted to see was Britain running out of money to
pay
for all the materiel they had ordered during 1940—so he came up with a plan. The plan was called Lend-Lease. The idea was that the United States would “sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of” weapons and materiel to any government whose defense the president deemed vital to the defense of the United States. The way it worked was the United States government purchased the weapons from the manufacturers and then delivered them to the Allies.

Payment for the Lend-Lease goods, or their return to the United States, was to be made after the war. In fact, few of the goods that survived the war were actually returned, and repayment was delayed. Britain finally settled up its bill, at a deeply discounted rate, at the end of 2006.

On the covert side, American officers had already met secretly with British and Canadian military leaders between January and March in the “ABC-1” (First American-British-Canadian) staff conferences to discuss strategy for “if” the United States entered the war against Germany. Indeed, elements of the ABC-1 plan had been incorporated into AWPD-1, specifically the part about the implementation of a joint Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign against Germany.

The seeds of a wartime working relationship had sprouted earlier, in August 1941, when Roosevelt and Churchill themselves met at sea off Newfoundland to announce an optomistic postwar cooperative agreement, which came to be known as the Atlantic Charter. The Arcadia Conference in Washington that winter was both a confirmation of previously understood cooperation, and a nuts-and-bolts planning session for specific
collaboration toward what should be and
could be
done next—now that the two parties had become wartime allies.

In the dark days of December, what
could be
done next was summarized as not much. What
would be
done next was up to the British and American officers who knew they faced an uphill climb.

In the Pacific, in the previous two weeks, the Japanese had used airpower to decimate the United States Pacific Fleet and sink two of Britain’s biggest warships. They had landed in the Philippines and were headed for Manila, washing over American and Filipino defenders with ease—and with air superiority. While the Arcadia conferees were in the midst of their talks, the Japanese captured the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, even as the Germans were banging on Moscow’s door.

With 20/20 hindsight, we know that the German failure to capture the Soviet capital in December 1941 was a watershed moment, but at the time, the only hindsight available told the planners that since their invasion of the Soviet Union six months earlier, the Germans had captured more territory faster than any army in history. In addition to dominating virtually all of continental Europe, they occupied an area of the Soviet Union more than twice as large as Germany itself.

At their historic December meeting, the American and British leaders created a “Combined Chiefs of Staff” (CCS) to direct the war effort, and they decided on a strategy. They decided to put their principal military efforts in the war against Germany, while attempting to contain the Japanese offensive.

They knew that one day, they would have to fight a major land battle against the German Army that had defeated France in a couple of weeks and
appeared
to have defeated the Soviet Union in a few months.

There was not an American in the room who did not get a nervous lump in his throat when he thought of having to fight the blitzkrieg. The British knew that their expeditionary force
had
fought the blitzkrieg in France in 1940—and they barely escaped with their lives. In the meantime, the Germans were turning the continent into their
Festung Europa
(“Fortress Europe”), fortifying the coastline opposite Britain into an impregnable citadel.

Though the failure of the Germans to capture Moscow in December
was touted by the Soviets as a great victory, the Arcadia conferees interpreted it merely as a minor setback for an army that had thus far proven invincible. They based their planning on the correct assumption that the Germans would try again to crush the Soviets in the spring of 1942, and the very plausible fear that the Soviet Union could be knocked out of the war before the Anglo-American Allies could launch any kind of land assault on
Festung Europa
.

The Soviets, naturally, shared this fear. As a consequence, they demanded, and continued to demand at every opportunity, that the Americans and the British launch a “second front” against the Germans sooner rather than later. No one knew better than the Arcadia conferees that this would be impossible in 1942. Instead, they agreed to Operation Bolero, the buildup of forces necessary to launch a second front against
Festung Europa
in 1943. The date for this invasion of Europe by way of northern France, code-named Operation Roundup, was originally set for April 1943.

As the German army seemed all-powerful, in the air the Luftwaffe commanded an equivalent fear and respect. Even though the Royal Air Force had challenged them successfully in 1940 over Britain, they still controlled the skies over Europe.

That which concerned the men most about Germany—the elephant in the room, so to speak—was the might of German industry that had made all this possible. There was no way that the Anglo-American Allies could challenge Hitler’s mighty war machine on the ground in Europe so long as the mighty German industrial machine continued to churn out the tanks and aircraft that had thus far proven unstoppable.

The men in the room also knew that the
only
way to do anything to impact the mighty German industrial machine was with strategic airpower.

The Combined Chiefs of Staff found themselves facing the situation that Billy Mitchell had predicted.

The RAF needed no convincing when it came to strategic airpower. Arnold and Spaatz, longtime advocates of Mitchell’s strategic vision, found kindred spirits in the commander of RAF Bomber Command, Air Marshal Arthur Travers “Bomber” Harris, and his boss—and predecessor as head of Bomber Command—RAF commander Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles “Peter” Portal. It was only a matter of coordinating the effort.

The ABC-1 report from early in the year had already concluded that “US Army air bombardment units [would] operate offensively in collaboration with the Royal Air Force, primarily against German Military Power at its source.” The emphasis on “German Military Power” was reiterated in AWPD-1. The foresight of AWPD-1, which had gone beyond its mandate of merely calculating production numbers, had given the USAAF the operational framework that was so badly needed.

As for the basing of the Anglo-American strategic force, Britain was the only viable option. As with the existing and planned British bombers, the range of the Flying Fortress and the Liberator dictated that targets in the German industrial heartland could be attacked only from bases in southeast England.

Of course, in early 1942, any kind of sustained air offensive was merely theoretical, because of the small number of heavy bombers available. British production of four-engine bombers was moving at so slow a pace that the Brits were still anxious to continue receiving Flying Fortresses and Liberators from America. Meanwhile, the USAAF now had fewer Flying Fortresses than they’d had on December 6.

The USAAF was also spread very thin. Even though the Allies had adopted the “Germany first, contain Japan” approach at the Arcadia Conference, the USAAF still had commitments in the Pacific. The British, though impatient to strike a major blow against Hitler from the air, understood. The rapid movement of Japanese forces threatened their interests as well—especially Australia and their great bastion at Singapore. When the latter was, in fact, captured by the Japanese in February, it underscored the fact that, while the Pacific Theater might be secondary to the European Theater, it could not be ignored.

Indeed, it was against Japan, not Germany, that the USAAF would strike first.

Early in 1942, as the Arcadia Conference was adjourned, two schools of thought were holding court within the American military establishment. One called for a methodical and comprehensive plan of action for substantial, if plodding, steps to defeat the Axis. The other, driven by the requirements of morale-building, called for something to be done quickly.

The former was embodied in the work being done by the Air War
Plans Division. The latter manifested itself in two important actions that were undertaken in the spring and summer of 1942, well before the USAAF was anywhere near being ready to undertake truly decisive strategic air operations.

The first of the two was the heroic and iconic April 18 attack on Japanese cities led by prewar aviation pioneer and daredevil air racer Lieutenant Colonel James Harold “Jimmy” Doolittle. The sixteen carrier-launched B-25 medium bombers on Doolittle’s mission did slight damage to Japan but immensely buoyed American morale by demonstrating that the United States was
capable
of bombing the country.

The second action was the June 12 attack on the oil refineries at Ploesşti (now Ploiesşti), Romania, the Achilles’ heel of the Third Reich’s oil production and the largest refinery complex in continental Europe. Having allied itself with the Axis in November 1940, Romania had contributed troops for the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union and was providing the petrochemicals that oiled and fueled the German war machine.

The Ploesşti mission was flown by a contingent of B-24D Liberators, commanded by Colonel Harry “Hurry-Up” Halverson, which had reached Egypt en route to India, where they were intended to operate against the Japanese from bases in China. Given that the previously considered airfields were now under threat from Japanese forces, and that the Burma Road supply route had been cut, the Halverson Project (HALPRO) was diverted. They would, instead, attack Ploesşti from Egypt.

Like Doolittle’s raid, this attack on the oil refineries at Ploesşti was much longer on symbolism and propaganda value than on concrete results. As Hap Arnold wrote of the Ploesşti mission in his memoirs, “The target was not much damaged. The improbability of this two-thousand-mile round trip was its best protection, and enemy opposition was not heavy.”

It would be more than a year before Allied bombers returned to attack, Ploesşti and more than two for Tokyo, but Halverson and Doolittle had shown that “improbable” was not the same as “impossible.”

Mainly, Doolittle and Halverson proved to the American public—and to the enemy—that the USAAF was doing
something
. Of course, the people
in USAAF uniform understood that it would take time before anything substantial could be done.

For all the prior planning, the fact that the war came sooner than the Americans had anticipated required the Air Staff to play catch-up. James Lea Cate points out, in
Army Air Forces in World War II
, that “it had been presumed that at outbreak of war, or even before, a substantial air contingent should be sent to the British Isles. Now that war had come, there were more pressing needs. The British naturally were interested in the projected bomber force, but were anxious that it be provided without jeopardy to current allocation of heavy bombers [via Lend-Lease] to the RAF.”

Harris and Portal were wondering how soon that “substantial air contingent” could get into action against Germany.

As recorded in the notes of the Arcadia Conference, Arnold and Spaatz told Portal on January 1 that it might be possible to send two heavy bombardment groups to England “before too long,” but as Cate reminds us, an estimate of “about March or April [was only] a shot in the dark.”

In a Combined Chiefs of Staff memorandum of February 22, entitled
Policy for Disposition of US and British Air Forces
, it was determined that for the present the RAF would assume responsibility for the air offensive against Germany, with the USAAF joining in “at the earliest dates practicable.”

As an operational organization to join with RAF Bomber Command to execute the strategic air offensive, the USAAF created the VIII Bomber Command, which was, along with other units, an element of the larger Eighth Air Force, which was formed to control and manage USAAF assets in Britain.