Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (8 page)

Indeed, it was as of that date that there were only
two
Eighth Air Force Flying Fortresses on hand in England. This was, of course,
only
just the beginning.

In May 1942, Richard D’Oyly Hughes returned to England.

He came back from America, where he had gone after he departed from his service to His Majesty’s army. Today, Hughes’s is an unfamiliar name in the roll call of men who were involved in the American strategic air campaign, but among the obscure and forgotten, there are few names
more
important than that of Dick Hughes.

The names of the great airmen of that time—Hap Arnold, Tooey Spaatz, and Ira Eaker—were already household words. They were public figures, and they were quoted in the press. Men like Dick Hughes occupied such shadowy corners of the momentous work of the Eighth Air Force that even today few people know of them. The London headquarters of General Eisenhower, and the Bushy Park headquarters of the Eighth Air Force, would be featured in the datelines of newspaper articles. Nobody aside from a very select few ever knew what happened at 40 Berkeley Square.

The growing number of USAAF heavy bombers, spread out across a growing number of East Anglia airfields, took wing in execution of a doctrine of strategic airpower handed down by Billy Mitchell and nurtured by men like Arnold, Spaatz, and Eaker. They were flown into battle by tens
of thousands of heroes from the “Greatest Generation” who comprised the largest strategic air force in history.

However, when the bomb bays opened and the five-hundred-pound bombs tumbled out, the
where
,
when
, and
why
were the work of Richard D’Oyly Hughes and the other mystery men of Berkeley Square.

Walt Whitman Rostow, who worked under Hughes at Berkeley Square, and who emerged from the shadows to serve as a national security advisor to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, called Hughes “one of those selfless men of high intelligence, integrity, and dedication who play important roles in great enterprises but… leave little trace in the formal records.”

In February 1941, Dick Hughes was managing St. Albans Farms near St. Louis, leading a comfortable life, reading the headlines and wishing that the great global events were not passing him by.

It was that month, as the Germans were remaking the map of Europe to conform to Hitler’s vision of a Third Reich to last a thousand years, that two men had appeared on Dick Hughes’s doorstep. He knew Malcolm Moss, though he was more used to seeing him in a business suit than in Air Corps khaki. Moss introduced Hughes to Haywood Hansell. The two men, destined to be star players on the Air War Plans Division dream team, explained that they needed Hughes’s expertise. He had always enjoyed his informal discussions with Moss about world affairs and military matters, and he asked to hear more.

They got to the point and asked Hughes if he would consider joining the Air Corps as a staff officer. For “security reasons” they explained that they couldn’t tell him exactly what his duties would entail, but if he would accompany them to Washington, they would provide more detail and fast-track him for an Air Corps officer’s commission. The mysterious nature of the invitation was intriguing, and with World War II raging in Europe, Hughes could easily read between the lines.

“This was the kind of chance I had been waiting for,” he recalls in an unpublished typescript memoir. “I at once agreed to their proposition.”

Hughes arrived in Washington to find the Air Corps still crammed into a pigeonhole of an office. He described Hap Arnold’s pre-USAAF staff as “a minute organization, completely dominated, suppressed, and
hardly permitted to exist, by the Army. For instance, it was not supposed even to have an intelligence department of its own, and was under orders to request any intelligence information that it might require from the Army Intelligence Department G-2.”

As he walked into the office, he discovered that the airmen were not taking this paternalism lying down.

“Certain far-sighted Air Corps officers were in active revolt against this stupid edict,” he recalls. “Hansell and Moss had been instructed quietly to organize the nucleus of an independent Air Corps intelligence department, carefully concealed, to begin with, from the jealous eyes of the Army. I was one of the first three invited to work with this small group.”

The newly minted Captain Hughes turned management of St. Albans Farms over to his bookkeeper, brought his wife Franny and their children east from Missouri, rented a house in Falls Church, Virginia, and went straight to work.

By now, the Air Corps was in the process of re-forming itself into the autonomous USAAF and shedding its afterthought status within the army bureaucracy. Tasked with creating an air intelligence branch out of whole cloth, Hughes and his colleagues were stepping into virgin territory. Intelligence gathering to date had been a hit-and-miss affair. The US Army, the US Navy, and the State Department maintained separate, poorly organized intelligence operations that almost never communicated with one another. The army depended on military attachés in foreign embassies, who were, as Hughes described them, “of very uneven quality and seldom appointed for their analytical brains.”

Prior to World War II, espionage had yet to earn its James Bond caché and was even considered a tad bit sordid. The State Department had once maintained a small code-breaking section, but this had been dismantled a decade earlier by Henry L. Stimson, then the secretary of state in the Hoover Administration, who famously said, “Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail.”

In 1940, Stimson had been brought out of retirement to serve as secretary of war, the cabinet officer in charge of the US Army. Presumably, he now understood that those in Hitler’s government and war machine were not gentlemen in the context of his earlier statement.

The situation with intelligence activities on a national level was appalling, and exasperating even to President Roosevelt. When he realized how completely inadequate the entire disjointed intelligence apparatus was, Roosevelt did not order it fixed, but called on New York lawyer and world traveler William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan to start from scratch and set up an entirely
separate
intelligence apparatus. No stranger to war, Donovan had served as an officer with the 69th Infantry Division in World War I and was awarded the Medal of Honor for gallantry under fire.

In July 1941, at the same time Dick Hughes was getting his feet wet in his new office in Washington, Roosevelt brought Donovan back into uniform as a general and named him as his coordinator of intelligence (COI), a position analogous to today’s director of national intelligence. A year later, Donovan set up the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. Many of the men with whom Hughes would work at Berkeley Square, including Rostow, came to him via the OSS.

In the meantime, the intelligence officers of the fledgling USAAF were in need of practical intelligence and getting almost nothing of value from US Army G-2—where the emphasis was almost exclusively focused on ground forces and ground operations.

However, across the pond an independent RAF intelligence apparatus was up and running, and developing useful and valuable information throughout the 1930s. Now, with the prospect of a wartime alliance with the Yanks on the horizon, they were in a mood to share. Indeed, Hansell traveled to Britain in the summer of 1941 and came back with a footlocker full of encyclopedic files on the entirety of German industry.

Hansell knew that, even within the USAAF, intelligence was not yet regarded as more than a second-tier priority. As described in earlier chapters, the foremost concerns of the Air Corps men prior to June 1941 had been divorcing themselves from the US Army, acquiring significant numbers of aircraft, and developing a strategic operational doctrine—pretty much in that order. Men such as Hansell and Moss understood that in order to implement the latter, they needed to develop a clear picture of where, when, and how to apply strategic airpower.

This is the place where Richard D’Oyly Hughes fit into the jigsaw
puzzle of the USAAF. He came aboard just as the newly created Air Staff had tasked the new Air War Plans Division with writing the report that became AWPD-1, and his presence was why AWPD-1 focused on operations, rather than on procurement.

“Over the coming months we slowly built up the size of the target planning section,” Hughes recalls. “[We] endeavored, from the best mass of British intelligence material which was at our disposal, not only to bring ourselves up to date with what was going on in the world… but also to hammer out in our brains a common sense, logical target selection process.”

Hughes and Moss dug into the raw intelligence data provided by the RAF and went to work calculating the number and types of aircraft, the number of missions, and the tonnage of bombs that would be necessary for a sustained and effective campaign. Working backward, they came up with the number of bomber crews that would have to be trained, the number of training bases, the number of bomber bases in England, and so on. The plan even extrapolated the requirements for the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. Still nine months short of its first flight at the time of the Arcadia Conference, the Superfortress would go on to be the largest strategic bomber of World War II.

In their work, the men were guided by the doctrine laid down near two decades earlier by Billy Mitchell, who had written that “to gain a lasting victory in war, the hostile nation’s power to make war must be destroyed—this means the manufactories, the means of communication, the food products, even the farms, the fuel and oil and the places where people live and carry on their daily lives. Not only must these things be rendered incapable of supplying armed forces but the people’s desire to renew the combat at a later date must be discouraged.”

Just as they were guided by Mitchell, they were also aware of the work of his contemporary, Italian General Giulio Douhet, who prescribed in his 1921 book,
The Command of the Air
, that “the selection of objectives, the grouping of zones and determining the order in which they are to be destroyed is the most difficult and delicate task in aerial warfare, constituting what may be defined as aerial strategy.”

In April 1942, Colonel Henry Berliner from the Eighth Air Force planning staff walked into Hughes’s office. He explained that General
Spaatz had sent him “to find out whether there was anybody who knew anything about the European Theater, and who had given any consideration whatsoever as to what the Eighth Air Force should do when it got over there. He had been shunted from office to office, until he finished up at my desk. From that moment began the operational planning for the Eighth and, subsequently, the Fifteenth Air Forces, which was to carry us through to VE-Day.”

Berliner had come to the right place.

As Hughes recalls, the USAAF officers whom he had gotten to know were “superlatively capable” when it came to organizing, training, arming, and equipping their forces, and in the logistics required “to get them to where they were going.” However, he notes that most of the USAAF staff officers had given woefully little consideration to the question of what to do when they arrived where they were going.

After a lengthy session with Berliner, Hughes was invited to bring his files and preliminary planning work to General Spaatz’s office the following day. The Eighth Air Force commander gave Hughes his undivided attention for several hours, listening, nodding, and saying very little. A few days later, Hughes was summoned to give his briefing to the highest of top brass—Generals George Marshall and Hap Arnold. When he was done, they turned Hughes over to their staff officers.

“None of them ever made an operational war plan before in their lives,” Hughes recalls. “None of them had had the opportunity to study the problems involved, and a more scared and nervous bunch of officers I have seldom seen. The unanimous appeal was ‘Will you please make this plan for us?’ Nothing of course could have pleased me more.”

He promised them a plan in five days, and he delivered.

“For five days and nights, I worked like a dog and produced something which I considered rather a masterpiece. It was, of course, completely phony, as only actual battle in the skies over Europe would tell us what we were, or were not, capable of doing. However, with all my special knowledge and information, I had turned out a sufficiently slick and plausible job.”

As Hughes recalls, he was asked “which industries in Germany and Japan, if destroyed by air power, would render these two countries incapable of continuing to fight a war?”

Working with Moss, Hughes came up with a list of three industrial cornerstones, without which “no country could wage modern war.” These strategic objectives were the petroleum industry, the aluminum industry, and the aircraft industry. In retrospect, Hughes admitted that this was a very preliminary evaluation of the potential strategic campaign. However, in retrospect, it is worth noting that he had included the German aircraft industry, which was to be the cornerstone of the Big Week campaign two and a half years later.

The petroleum industry, meanwhile, was an obvious inclusion. In theory, its complete elimination could have the potential to bring an economy to a halt. President Roosevelt’s Board of Economic Warfare had reached the same conclusion, and the HALPRO mission, the first American air attack into
Festung Europa
, would target the Third Reich’s petroleum supply.

However, Hughes would later be critical of HALPRO, observing that Roosevelt’s Board of Economic Warfare had convinced General Arnold of the importance of oil as a strategic target, but that neither Arnold nor the board “had analyzed and appreciated what size of air effort would be necessary to achieve, and maintain, any worthwhile damage…. The spring of 1942 was no time to launch an attack against the vast German oil industry.”

Two weeks later, as Spaatz was getting ready to transfer the Eighth Air Force headquarters to England, he asked Arnold to transfer Hughes to his staff. His first order for Hughes was for him to precede to Eighth Air Force overseas.