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

by Bill Yenne

  Nevertheless, referring to the VIII Bomber Command study entitled The First 1,100 Bombers Dispatched, Ferguson writes that “by early October, the first fourteen missions had been on the whole very encouraging. Targets had been attacked with reasonable frequency, especially during the first three weeks, and hit with a fair degree of accuracy. During the first nine missions, the Germans had evidently refused to take the day bombing seriously. The American forces had been small and the fighter escort heavy, and so the Germans had sent up few fighters, preferring to take the consequences of light bombing raids rather than to risk the loss of valuable aircraft. And when the German fighters did take to the air, they exhibited a marked disinclination to close with the bomber formation.”

  Citing memos from Eaker to Spaatz, and from Eaker to Hap Arnold, Ferguson goes on to say that “the bombing had been more accurate than most observers had expected. Indeed, it was a tribute of sorts to the accuracy of the Americans that after the ninth mission enemy fighter opposition suddenly increased. And it was a source of satisfaction to the AAF commanders that the B-17s and the B-24s appeared more than able to hold their own against fighter attacks.”

  RAF Bomber Command planners, who had always been skeptical of the USAAF precision daylight bombing doctrine, were now willing to give the Yanks some measure of credit. As Arthur Ferguson puts it, “British observers in September and October were at least ready to admit that the AAF day bombers and the policy of day bombardment showed surprising promise.”

  Peter Masefield, the popular aviation journalist and air correspondent for the Sunday Times, had written adamantly in August that “there is no doubt that day bombing at long range is not possible as a regular operation unless fighter opposition is previously overwhelmed or until we have something too fast for the fighters to intercept.”

  On October 18, after the Lille mission, he qualified his stance somewhat, asking in the Sunday Times, “Can we carry day air war into Germany?”—which had hitherto been answered in the unqualified negative but was now subject to a new assessment…. “The Americans have taught us much; we still have much to learn—and much we can teach.”

  Originally, Spaatz and Eisenhower had agreed that the loaning of Eighth Air Force assets to Operation Torch would leave the VIII Bomber Command mission substantially intact, but by October, this command had been asked to part with two heavy bomber groups, 1,098 officers, including pilots and navigators, and 7,101 enlisted men.

  According to minutes of an Eighth Air Force commanders meeting on November 1, Spaatz had been heard to quip wryly, “What is left of the Eighth Air Force after the impact of Torch?”

  In response to this, one might ask, “What might have happened to Torch without the impact of the Eighth Air Force?”

  Whatever the answers to these hypotheticals, the fact is that Torch succeeded. Indeed, November 1942 provided a welcome turn of events for the Allies in North Africa. On November 4, the British finally broke Rommel’s momentum with a victory at El Alamein, just sixty miles from Alexandria, Egypt, and on November 8, Operation Torch put a one-hundred-thousand-man, mainly American, ground force ashore in Algeria and Morocco against quickly fading resistance. The landings were a big boost to American morale both at home and among the troops overseas.

  For the Eighth Air Force, however, November brought only bad weather and a reorienting of its priorities. In late October, Eisenhower ordered another change of direction. The Eighth had not had to relinquish all of its heavy bombers to support Operation Torch directly, but they were now directed to use their range and payload capacity to support Operation Torch indirectly.

  Eisenhower understood strategic airpower well enough to know that a key principle is cutting off a threat at its source, rather than in the field where it becomes a threat. He had a threat that was in need of being clipped at its source.

  One of the most aggravating vexations for Allied planners throughout the war thus far had been the German U-boat campaign. While Britain’s Royal Navy had successfully won its campaign against the surface fleet of the German Kreigsmarine, multiple “wolf packs” of submarines lurked beneath the surface of the Atlantic. Since the beginning of the war, they had proven to be the one German naval weapon that most worried the British. They had long been one, preying upon the convoys supplying the United Kingdom from its overseas dominions, and now they were a serious threat to the convoys bringing American men and materiel to the island nation.

  As Timothy Runyan and Jan Copes write in their book The Battle of the Atlantic, the U-boats sunk 607,247 tons of Allied shipping in May 1942, the month that Dick Hughes came back to England. This was part of the reason that he came by air. The following month, the total tonnage lost was 700,235, and in October, the German submarine fleet sent 619,417 tons to the bottom.

  Recognizing that Operation Torch depended on safe passage of troop ships from the United States, Eisenhower ordered Spaatz to use the Eighth Air Force against the U-boat pens, which the Kreigsmarine had constructed along the Atlantic coast of France, at places such as Saint-Nazaire and Lorient, as well as at Bordeaux, Brest, and La Pallice. Because nighttime area bombardment would be ineffective against reinforced concrete submarine pens that required precision strikes, the job could not be done by RAF Bomber Command.

  Eisenhower had told Spaatz pointedly that he deemed the reversal of the U-boat threat “to be one of the basic requirements to the winning of the war.”

  When the Eighth Air Force came to Berkeley Square for a plan, Dick Hughes was pessimistic, telling the generals that “with the size of force and the types of bombs available to us, we could do very little damage to these massive structures, and that I doubted that by such attacks the Eighth Air Force could appreciably affect the outcome of the submarine war. I also pointed out that the anti-aircraft defenses around each of these bases were extremely heavy, and we would probably pay a heavy price for conducting what were virtually training operations over such targets.”

  Hughes was right. Ultimately the attacks were ineffective against reinforced concrete, and the losses suffered by Eighth Air Force crews were high.

  “The crews themselves quickly got onto the fact that the small amount of damage they were doing… was in no way affecting the outcome of the war,” Hughes writes. “We were proving our point to the British that, with fighter escort, we could operate in daylight over enemy territory with acceptable casualties, but the unfortunate air crews were not, personally, as interested in proving this point, with their own lives, as were the generals, and crew morale began to become a serious problem.”

  Hughes appealed to both General Spaatz and General Eaker in an attempt to “get these useless attacks abandoned.” However, so serious was the U-boat threat that the attacks continued past the successful completion of Operation Torch. It was not until June 1943, by which time the threat had been curbed by more effective naval escorts, that the campaign against the submarine pens was finally discontinued as a priority.

  After the premature euphoria of September and early October, the winter brought a maze of difficulties for the Eighth Air Force. The weather, which caused some missions to be canceled, also caused about 40 percent of the missions launched over the ensuing three months to be aborted. This was mainly manifested in targets obscured by cloud cover, which the weather reporting teams had failed to predict. The weather also resulted in mechanical failures. Aircraft taking off in mud and rain often found themselves with frozen guns or with flight deck windows encrusted in frost. According to the Eighth Air Force Operational Research Section (ORS) day raid reports, malfunctioning bomb bay doors were such a problem that some crews took to removing them.

  The weather, combined with the inexperience of the crews, also made for navigational errors and impacted bombing accuracy. Sometimes, this involved bombs missing their targets with disastrous results if the bombs hit French civilian residential areas instead of submarine pens. Other times, the errors verged on the almost comical. On November 18, for example, one bomber form
ation bombed the submarine pens at Saint-Nazaire under the erroneous notion that they were attacking the pens at La Pallice, a hundred miles away.

  The ORS reports also indicate that the mounting tempo of battle damage was putting heavy demands on a still-meager maintenance depot infrastructure, which kept a growing percentage of the bombers off the mission-ready list. In September, 13 percent of the aircraft flying missions came back with damage, which could be repaired. In October, this increased to 38 percent, and by December it was above 42 percent. However, the fact that the damage could be repaired was only half the story. Hampered by shortages of trained personnel and parts, the depots fell behind to the point where half the fleet was in the shop and any moment.

  The issue of damage done to the targets by the bombing eclipsed all other matters, consuming a great deal of the time of the Operational Research Section. The precision that had been promised by the theorists had yet to materialize in 1942. Indeed, when the ORS “crater-counters” studied post-strike photoreconnaissance imagery, they identified the impact points of only about half of the bombs that were known to have been dropped. The other half had either been duds, or bombs that had missed their targets by so wide a margin as to not even appear in the aerial photographs. This raised the obvious concerns about errant bombs striking French civilians.

  Of course, in 1942, the art of post-strike analysis was still in its infancy. It was not until after the start of 1943 that a routine for systematic analysis was developed. As with everything pertaining to the as-yet unproven doctrine of strategic airpower, there was a steep learning curve.

  Enemy interceptor attacks were second only to bombing accuracy among the operational concerns for the Eighth Air Force planners. Defensive armament aboard the bomber served as a partial deterrent, causing the attackers to adjust their tactics, such as to make quick passes, rather than sustained attacks. A heavy bomber without tail guns, for example, was a doomed airplane. A smaller airplane could have tried to outmaneuver a fighter, but a heavy bomber would be susceptible to having a fighter come up behind and almost leisurely chew it apart.

  At the same time, the gunners also claimed their share of downed fighters. Out of the October 9 strike package, gunners aboard the 69 bombers attacking Lille destroyed 21, probably shot down another 21, and damaged 15 German interceptors. The gunners had initially claimed that they shot down 102 German fighters, which would have been more than 15 percent of the estimated Luftwaffe fighter strength in Western Europe. On further scrutiny, it was determined that there were a huge number of multiple claims in which gunners from multiple bombers were shooting at the same fighter.

  What this illustrates, other than the obvious need for more careful debriefing of gunners, was the importance of having the gunners from multiple aircraft laying down interlocking fields of fire, thus creating a mutually beneficial defensive zone.

  A study conducted by the Eighth Air Force Operations Analysis Section concluded that large numbers of bombers flying in formation would give one another decent protection against fighters. While such a tight formation would then be more susceptible to antiaircraft fire, this would be only in the vicinity of the target, and therefore it would be for shorter duration than the fighter attacks, which took place over a longer duration.

  On November 23, the heavy bombers of the Eighth Air Force first met the man who would become their deadly nemesis.

  Oberleutnant Egon Mayer was a twenty-five-year-old pilot who was born on the shores of Lake Constance in the penultimate year of World War I. He had joined the Luftwaffe in 1937 and first flew in combat with Jagdgeschwader 2 during the Battle of France in June 1940. Flying against the RAF over southern England, he became an air ace four times over by August 1941, scoring twenty aerial victories, most of them against pilots flying the RAF’s best fighter aircraft, the Spitfire. For this, he was awarded the Iron Cross. Within the next year, the young Luftwaffe ace increased his score to fifty, then added two more—both Spitfires—on August 19, 1942, his twenty-fifth birthday.

  In November, he was named Gruppenkommandeur of III Gruppe of Jagdgeschwader 2. In the meantime, Mayer had studied Eighth Air Force defensive tactics and had observed a critical point of weakness in the Flying Fortresses and Liberators.

  On November 23, Egon Mayer first approached the heavy bombers of the Eighth Air Force with the fruits of his observations, and the bombers met Egon Mayer head-on. While gun barrels protruded from the top, the bottom, the rear, and the sides of the bombers, their front was their Achilles’ heel. Some of the B-17Es and B-17Fs had a single .30-caliber handheld gun, firing through one of four eyelets just off-center of the nose, while B-24Ds had a single .50-caliber center nose gun that was mounted to fire below horizontal only. Both had .50-caliber side-firing nose guns, but all the bombers had a blind spot in front.

  As the bombers approached Saint-Nazaire that day, Mayer led III Gruppe up to meet them. His newly developed tactic of attacking the lead aircraft head-on worked to deadly effect. He personally shot down two of the Flying Fortresses and one of the Liberators that the VIII Bomber Command lost that day.

  Because of the rapid rate of closure in a head-on attack, it demanded great skill on the part of the fighter pilot, but in the right hands—such as those of Egon Mayer—such a tactic could be deadly. Soon, Luftwaffe pilots across Europe were following Mayer’s lead, while in the United States, Boeing and Consolidated engineers responded with the inclusion of powered nose turrets with twin .50-caliber machine guns. These would become standard in the B-17G, as well as the B-24G, B-24H, and B-24J, but these aircraft would not reach the Eighth Air Force in significant numbers until the latter part of 1943.

  The legacy of Egon Mayer’s brainstorm would be with the Eighth Air Force through to the end of World War II. However, Egon Mayer would not. He was shot down and killed by Lieutenant Walter Gresham, flying a USAAF P-47 fighter, while escorting Eighth Air Force bombers, on March 2, 1944. By this time, however, Mayer had claimed 102 Allied aircraft, 26 of them Eighth Air Force four-engine bombers.

  November 1942 brought big organizational changes at the upper levels of command of American forces in Europe. In the wake of the dramatic shift in the strategic situation in North Africa, Eisenhower moved south from England to become commander of the North African Theater of Operations, US Army (NATOUSA), and later commander of the joint Anglo-American Allied Forces Headquarters (AFHQ), the operational command staff for the Mediterranean Theater of Operations (MTO).

  When Eisenhower moved, he took Spaatz with him. The man who, as Eighth Air Force chief, had resisted transfer of heavy bombers to the Twelfth Air Force became commander of the Twelfth Air Force in December 1942. Four months later, as Eisenhower became the supreme Allied commander in the Mediterranean, Spaatz was named as commander of the joint Allied Northwest African Air Forces (NAAF), which included the Twelfth Air Force, and which was later a component of the Mediterranean Air Command, headed by RAF Air Marshal Arthur Tedder.

  “I had left General Spaatz in England and now I called him forward to take on this particular task,” Eisenhower writes in Crusade in Europe. “We merely improvised controlling machinery and gave General Spaatz the title of ‘Acting Deputy Commander in Chief for Air.’ Initially, the commander of the American [Twelfth] Air Force in North Africa was Major General James Doolittle, who had sprung into fame as the leader of the raid on Tokyo. He was a dynamic personality and a bundle of energy. It took him some time to reconcile himself to shouldering his responsibilities as the senior United States air commander to the exclusion of opportunity for going out to fly a fighter plane against the enemy. But he had the priceless quality of learning from experience. He became one of our really fine commanders.”

  When the USAAF Fifteenth Air Force was created in 1943 to become the strategic equivalent of the Eighth Air Force in the MTO, Doolittle became its first commander.

  The plan had been for Eisenhower and Spaatz to return to England after Torch in anticipation of a cross-channel invasion of Fest
ung Europa from the United Kingdom. However, as further actions in the Mediterranean that were planned for 1943—specifically the invasions of Sicily and Italy—required their attention, the return would be delayed.

  Meanwhile back in England, the post-Torch command shuffle brought Ira Eaker up from VIII Bomber Command to head the entire Eighth Air Force, while Major General Frederick Lewis Anderson Jr., previously Deputy Director of Bombardment at USAAF headquarters, who had been Hap Arnold’s representative “on bombardment matters” in the ETO, was named to head the VIII Bomber Command. As Henry Berliner, Dick Hughes’s immediate superior, became incapacitated with spinal meningitis, Hughes was promoted to full colonel and took charge of the Eighth Air Force G-5 (operational planning section) and, as such, became an assistant to Eaker.

  It was not a marriage made in heaven.

  “General Eaker’s personality and characteristics were very different from those of General Spaatz,” Hughes recalls. “General Spaatz’s interest had always been intimately concerned with the conduct of operations, and he very largely delegated day to day administrative problems to others. General Eaker kept even the most minute administrative details in his own hands, and seemed to have very little time, or inclination, for discussing operational plans. For the ensuing year and a half the decision as to which targets our strategic bombers should attack fell squarely upon my shoulders. With no sympathetic intellectual support, or understanding, from my commanding general it was a difficult and heavy burden.”

  On the other hand, Hughes has high praise for the new chief of VIII Bomber Command.

  “Fred Anderson completely understood the problems with which I was confronted, and whenever I was near the breaking point I would drive down to Bomber Command, unburden all my cares and worries on this truly great man, and return again to Eighth Air Force Headquarters, and strong enough to continue ordering out [young American airmen] to their deaths.”