Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II

by Bill Yenne

  When Spaatz moved his headquarters out to Bushy Park, Hughes and Berliner opted to remain in London, establishing the EOU headquarters in the nondescript building at 40 Berkeley Square in London’s fashionable Mayfair area, not far from Hyde Park and a short walk from the embassy itself. Though the facility was officially associated with the embassy, it remained separate, and indeed secret, from the embassy. Winant was one of the few civilians, other than those who worked there, who knew that the unit existed, and he, along with a handful of Eighth Air Force people, were the only outsiders who had access to the place.

  The EOU was as strange as it was mysterious. The arrangement defied precedent and thumbed its nose at correct and established procedure. Who could have guessed that behind the great bomber offensive there was to be a gaggle of mid-level USAAF and OSS officers and academics working together in an anonymous building maintained by the Department of State in an upper crust neighborhood in London?

  “Except for the quality of the people on each side, such a military-civilian, bastard set-up could never have worked,” Hughes admits. “Because of this quality, however, it worked better than any formally, logically constituted body.”

  Two of the “quality people” ranked most highly by Hughes among the EOU team were the whiz-kid economists Charles Poor “Charlie” Kindleberger and Walt Rostow. Both had already been recruited by Bill Donovan for the OSS when they were transferred to the EOU. Kindleberger had earned his PhD from Columbia University in 1937, and Rostow had earned his in 1940 from Yale—the school from which he had earlier graduated at age nineteen. Like Rostow, Kindleberger was a high achiever, having been named to the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in his twenties and to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System at age thirty.

  Rostow joined Hughes in September, along with two other transferees from Donovan’s OSS, economist Rosaline Honerkamp and Chandler Morse, also from the Federal Reserve. Having previously been assigned to the OSS Military Supplies Section, Kindleberger arrived on the last day of February 1943, replacing Morse.

  In a paper entitled Waging Economic Warfare from London, presented at a 1991 OSS historical symposium, Rostow writes that “as a professional product of Wellington and Sandhurst, [Hughes] had long been trained in the principles of concentration of effort at the enemy’s most vulnerable point and of prompt and maximum follow-through when a breakthrough was achieved. The members of EOU were, mainly, trained as economists, reflecting the assumption that the broad objective of the strategic bombing offensive was to weaken the German war economy. Our task was to develop and apply criteria for the selection of one target system versus another, one target within a system versus another, and, if the target was large enough and bombing precise enough, one aiming point versus another…. EOU was the child of Air Corps Colonel Richard D’Oyly Hughes.” [Author’s italics.]

  Rostow went on to describe the early days of the EOU, explaining that “Hughes took a little time to size up the small but overactive young crew he had evoked from Washington at long distance—a bit like a colonel in the field trying to figure out a batch of lieutenants sent from headquarters. He initially put EOU to work on a narrowly focused and painstaking task: aiming-point reports. These were analyses of particular German industrial plants or installations designed to establish the most vulnerable point of attack. The aiming-point reports were an invaluable education, requiring, among other things, visits to the nearest equivalent plants in Britain. They also required exploitation of virtually all the intelligence London could provide about the plant itself, the economic sector of which it was a part, and the role of that sector in the German war effort.”

  Inside the undisclosed location in Mayfair, such esoteric conclusions, calculated by scarcely more than a dozen people, would guide the actions of tens of thousands in the biggest air campaign in history.

  Virtually no one knew they were there, or knew the source of the material that issued forth from 40 Berkeley Square over the course of thirty-two long months. Though the shroud of secrecy has long since been drawn back, the quiet anonymity of the mystery house on Berkeley Square still endures today.

  SIX

  A STEEP LEARNING CURVE

  President Franklin Roosevelt often reviewed briefing papers as he ate his breakfast. They would arrive overnight and be brought to him by his closest advisor and troubleshooter, Harry Hopkins. On the morning of September 6, 1942, about a week before Walt Rostow and Chandler Morse joined Dick Hughes at 40 Berkeley Square, the document was entitled Requirements for Air Ascendancy, 1942, but it would be known simply as AWPD-42. The preparation of this report, essentially the sequel to AWPD-1 and AWPD-2 of 1941, had begun only eleven days earlier under the personal direction of the president. Through the spring and summer of 1942—with the exception of the unlikely but welcome American victory at Midway—the course of the war still favored Germany and Japan. Roosevelt asked Arnold what his airmen would have to do in order to have complete air ascendancy over the enemy.

  The president reviewed the report while he sipped his coffee, then picked up the phone and called Secretary of War Henry Stimson to say that he approved it. Stimson was caught off guard. He hadn’t seen the report. Nor had Chief of Staff General George Marshall, when Stimson phoned him. Nor had Marshall’s fellow members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—Admiral Ernest King (the chief of naval operations) and Admiral William Leahy (the chief of staff to Roosevelt and, since July 1942, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff)—although they all had their copies within hours.

  Roosevelt had already approved it, so this was a moot point.

  The fourth member of the Joint Chiefs, General Hap Arnold, had his copy before anyone. His was the name on the return address of the envelopes.

  When the president had ordered him to assemble the report, Arnold had recalled Possum Hansell and Malcolm Moss from England and put them in a room with Hal George, Larry Kuter, and other veterans of the earlier air war plans.

  AWPD-42 reiterated the agreements made earlier in the year, calling for the USAAF to undertake the “systematic destruction of selected vital elements of the German military and industrial machine through precision bombing in daylight.” At the same time, in accordance with their own stated doctrine, the RAF would be making “mass air attacks of industrial areas at night, to break down morale [which was expected to have] a pronounced effect upon production.”

  A dramatic thousand-plane RAF raid on the night of May 30–31, 1942, was pointed to as an example. This single mission had destroyed an estimated 12 percent of the principal industrial and residential districts in the city of Cologne.

  More importantly, AWPD-42 set out specific numbers, specific allocations of resources, to make it all happen. It called for the USAAF to have an operational bomber force of nearly three thousand four-engine bombers deployed in the European theater within sixteen months. The US Navy did not like the emphasis on allocation of resources to the USAAF at a time when they wanted an allocation of four-engine bombers to use as long-range patrol planes, but the president had spoken. In fact, he later insisted on American aircraft production being ramped up so that everyone would get the planes they wanted.

  Like its predecessors, AWPD-42 was still just a road map, an educated guess, albeit a better educated guess than AWPD-1 and AWPD-2, even though the Eighth Air Force heavy bomber offensive had barely just begun.

  Fewer than one hundred four-engine bombers were operational with the Eighth Air Force when AWPD-42 reached the president’s bedside, but the report confidently promised that if the recommended force was in place by the first of January 1944, then the invasion of Festung Europa could be undertaken by the summer of that year. AWPD-42 may have been just a road map, but it was the road map that would lead the USAAF to Big Week, and ultimately to victory.

  On August 17, 1942, six weeks after the Eighth Air Force made its Fourth of July raid with borrowed light bombers, the heavy bombers were finally ready to strike. A dozen Flying Fortresses of th
e 97th Bombardment Group took off from Polebrook in East Anglia on the first Eighth Air Force heavy bomber mission. Of the heavy bombardment groups allocated to the Eighth Air Force, only the 97th had become operational.

  Led personally by General Eaker, commander of the VIII Bomber Command, they attacked a target selected by Hughes personally—the railroad marshaling yards at Rouen-Sotteville, near the city of Rouen in Normandy. Attacking a marshaling yard would theoretically impact the transportation network by damaging the interchange of freight trains on a number of intersecting lines.

  It was a great boost to Eighth Air Force morale to know that the B-17s had finally bombed their first target, and that they had done so without losses and with greater accuracy than had been expected from fresh, inexperienced crews.

  In Washington, the USAAF Air Staff seized upon this moment to insist that the previously theoretical doctrine of daylight precision bombing had been vindicated by this first mission. In a memo to General Marshall prepared for Arnold’s signature, it was asserted that the result of the mission “again verifies the soundness of our policy of the precision bombing of strategic objectives rather than mass (blitz) bombing of large, city size areas [as the RAF was doing]. The Army Air Forces early recognized that the effective use of air power on a world wide basis equired the ability to hit small targets from high altitudes.”

  However, many USAAF officers, including Ira Eaker, later commented that the comparison to the British effort was unfair and “most unfortunate,” given that those in the field wished to maintain a harmonious working relationship with the RAF.

  Two days after Rouen, twenty-two B-17s attacked airfields near Abbeville, home of Jagdgeschwader 26, one of the Luftwaffe’s most highly regarded fighter wings. The objective of this bombing was to divert German fighters at the same time the Allies made their commando raid on the French coastal city of Dieppe. According to Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, the air commander for the Dieppe operation, “The raid on Abbeville undoubtedly struck a heavy blow at the German fighter organization at a very critical moment during the operations [and thus] had a very material effect on the course of the operations.”

  Referring, no doubt, to Leigh-Mallory’s comments, Ira Eaker effused contentedly in an August 27 memo to Hap Arnold that the British “acknowledge willingly and cheerfully the great accuracy of our bombing, the surprising hardihood of our bombardment aircraft and the skill and tenacity of our crews.”

  Five additional raids were flown by the Eighth Air Force through the end of August, striking targets ranging from shipyards to airfields across an arc from northern France to Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

  As Dick Hughes observed, “It really did not matter, at this early stage, what we bombed.” The idea was that the crews needed to gain experience before flying into highly defended German airspace.

  In an August 1 memo, General Ira Eaker wrote that his VIII Bomber Command had as its role the “destruction of carefully chosen strategic targets, with an initial subsidiary purpose [of determining its] capacity to destroy pinpoint targets by daylight accuracy bombing and our ability to beat off fighter opposition and to evade antiaircraft opposition.”

  In other words, the secondary mission was to prove that the primary mission was possible!

  The airpower historian Arthur B. Ferguson of Duke University writes in “Origins of the Combined Bomber Offensive” in Volume II of Army Air Forces in World War II, “These early missions were less important for what they contributed directly to the Allied war effort than for what they contributed indirectly by testing and proving the doctrine of strategic daylight bombing. In either instance it was as difficult and dangerous to strive for quick results as it was natural for observers, especially those at some distance from the scene of operations, to look impatiently for them.”

  These missions, beginning with the one on the fourth of July, marked a timid beginning for a strategic offensive, but even this was about to be interrupted by Operation Torch.

  The only major American ground offensive operation against the Germans that was on the drawing boards for the foreseeable future, Torch was the centerpiece of Allied offensive actions against Germany in the second half of 1942. General Erwin Rommel’s German Afrika Korps had proven itself to be as successful as the blitzkrieging German armies in Europe in 1940. He controlled Tunisia and Libya, and—in victory after victory—he had pushed the British deep into Egypt. Meanwhile, in his rear, Morocco and Algeria were safe and secure, controlled by the Vichy French, Germany’s nominal allies. Planned for early November, Torch was designed to land Allied troops in Morocco and Algeria, and to relieve Rommel of his secure rear.

  General Eisenhower, who was in overall command of Torch, and the highest ranking American officer in Europe, was keen to concentrate maximum American firepower in support of this operation. This included the bombers of the Eighth Air Force. He let it be known that he was seriously considering the idea of suspending the Eighth Air Force campaign when it had barely started, in order to concentrate all of the Eighth’s bombers under Twelfth Air Force command in the Mediterranean Theater.

  While understanding and recognizing the strategic goals of Operation Torch, Spaatz naturally argued in favor of continuing his strategic campaign. Every distraction of Eighth Air Force assets meant a postponement of the validation of the strategic concept that Spaatz and his air commanders sought most feverishly. As Arthur Ferguson recalls, “The delay was the more vexing because from an early stage in war planning the bomber campaign against Germany had been conceived as the first offensive to be conducted by United States forces.”

  The disagreement between Spaatz and Eisenhower over the use of airpower was more practical than theoretical. Eisenhower may have come from the ground forces, but he understood the potential of airpower. This is why he wanted as much of it as possible to be part of Torch. Spaatz, the airman, wanted no interruption to his aspiration to continue demonstrating airpower’s strategic potential. The argument came about because in the autumn of 1942, there were not yet enough USAAF aircraft in Europe to please both men.

  It was only because of the fact that Eisenhower was quite fond of Spaatz personally that the strategic air campaign was not suspended indefinitely in September 1942. “From the time of his arrival at London in July [1942] he was never long absent from my side until the last victorious shot had been fired in Europe,” Eisenhower recalls in his wartime memoir, Crusade in Europe. “On every succeeding day of almost three years of active war I had new reasons for thanking the gods of war and the War Department for giving me ‘Tooey’ Spaatz. He shunned the limelight and was so modest and retiring that the public probably never became fully cognizant of his value.”

  Indeed, Spaatz was able to argue the case of the strategic operations convincingly, and on September 5, Eisenhower agreed—but only to allow Spaatz to continue Eighth Air Force heavy bomber operations. Eisenhower diverted personnel, as well as the Eighth Air Force fighters, smaller tactical bombers, and two heavy bomber groups, to the Torch operations. Even the VIII Air Force Service Command was being asked to support aircraft assigned to Operation Torch.

  Spaatz’s narrow victory was almost pyrrhic. He had won the right to continue his campaign, but he had too few bombers to make it more than a token effort. The loss of half the fighters previously assigned to the VIII Fighter Command also put the VIII Bomber Command in a position of having to become more dependent on RAF Fighter Command for fighter escorts.

  This came at the same time that RAF Bomber Command was steadily increasing its ability to conduct strategic missions against Germany, something that the Eighth Air Force had yet to do. While RAF Bomber Command could now muster strike forces of a hundred or more bombers for their nighttime missions against Germany, the Eighth Air Force lagged far behind. As Arthur Ferguson reminds us, “The basic concept of a combined bomber offensive presumed complementary operations of RAF night bombers and AAF day bombers.”

  However, the two forces were still far f
rom complementary. Most of the Eighth Air Force August missions involved a dozen or fewer Flying Fortresses. As late as mid-September, Spaatz noted in a memo to General George Stratemeyer, Hap Arnold’s chief of staff, that the British were in a position to speak with authority on bombing operations and that at the time, the RAF was the only Allied entity persistently engaged in “pounding hell out of Germany.”

  During September, as the 91st and 301st Bombardment Groups became operational and began flying their first missions, Spaatz and Eaker were able to muster at least 30 aircraft for several missions, but there just weren’t as many as they needed. Though 328 Flying Fortresses and 105 Liberators had been deployed overseas by the end of August, preparations for Operation Torch, as well as requirements in the Pacific, had syphoned off much of the flow of equipment that Spaatz might have like to see go to the Eighth Air Force.

  On October 9, the Eighth Air Force was at last able to launch more than 100 bombers on a single day. Including two dozen Liberators from the newly operational 93rd Bombardment Group, the Eighth sent out 108 heavy bombers, of which 69 hit their primary target—the industrial complex around the French city of Lille.

  Calling the Lille mission a “minor climax,” Arthur Ferguson writes enthusiastically that it was “the first mission to be conducted on a really adequate scale and it marked, as it were, the formal entry of the American bombers into the big league of strategic bombardment. Then, for the first time, the German high command saw fit to mention publicly the activities of the Flying Fortresses, although they had already made thirteen appearances over enemy territory. Lille’s heavy industries contributed vitally to German armament and transport.”

  However, Ferguson gives low marks to the bombing precision achieved, noting that it “did not demonstrate the degree of accuracy noticeable in some of the earlier and lesser efforts,” although he goes on to say that “despite a scattered bomb pattern and numerous duds, several bombs fell in the target area—enough, in any event, to cause severe damage.” He reports Spaatz saying that the “bombing had been accurate in relation to European [RAF] standards rather than according to any absolute standard.”