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

by Bill Yenne

  It would be nice to say that the price paid at Ploesşti on August 1 was worth the results, but the massive complex of multiple refineries there suffered minimal damage, and this was repaired within weeks.

  Black Sunday cast its shadow across the other three clusters of pins on the map and added to the sense of despair at Berkeley Square. Still, those charged with the remaining missions in this maximum effort inside the Reich pressed on, knowing that they were, as Dick Hughes had said, damned if they did, but doubly damned if they did not.

  The idea was for the other three targets to be attacked on August 7, with a week’s delay to allow the Tidal Wave crews, tasked with the Wiener Neustadt mission, a chance to rest. However, bad weather that blew in over Britain effectively grounded the Eighth Air Force, and the plan to coordinate the three missions was scrapped.

  The Ninth Air Force went ahead with a one-two punch against Wiener Neustadt on August 13 and 14, using Liberators that had survived Tidal Wave, including sixty-one of its own the first day and another sixty-one comprised of those on loan from the Eighth Air Force on the second. The attack reduced the output from the facilities of Wiener-Neustadter Flugzeugwerke AG, a Messerschmitt subcontractor, by about a third, but the factory was far from being put out of business.

  In the meantime, the Eighth Air Force was refining its battle plan for its deepest strikes yet into Germany.

  On August 16, the crews were briefed for the mission the following day, which was the first anniversary of the first Eighth Air Force heavy bomber mission over continental Europe. The Regensburg strike force, led and commanded by LeMay personally as 4th Bombardment Wing commander, consisted of seven bombardment groups totalling 146 Flying Fortresses. They were to take off at 5:45 A.M., fly 430 miles into Festung Europa, bomb their targets, cross the Alps, and continue on to the fields in North Africa.

  Heading to Schweinfurt simultaneously would be the 1st Bombardment Wing—formerly commanded by Laurence Kuter and Haywood Hansell, now led and commanded by General Robert B. Williams—which was comprised of a force of 230 Flying Fortresses. They were to take off immediately after LeMay’s force, attack targets 320 miles inside Europe, and return to England.

  As Hughes recalls, “The weather reports over Germany were satisfactory, but those over England were not so good. General Anderson, however, decided to carry out the attack and things immediately got off to a bad start.”

  All of East Anglia was blanketed by a thick ground fog, which delayed the takeoff for LeMay’s contingent by ninety minutes. Knowing that further delay would put them over Algeria in the dark, LeMay ordered an instrument takeoff, something for which Williams’s crews had not trained. Delayed for five hours, Williams did not get his bombers airborne until LeMay was practically to Regensburg.

  The delay meant that two elements of the original plan were no longer possible. First, Williams had planned to strike his wing’s targets from east to west with the sun at their backs, but when they arrived at nearly 3 P.M., he reversed direction, causing some measure of confusion.

  Second, the idea of overwhelming the German interceptor force with two simultaneous attacks had obviously not worked out. The Luftwaffe fighters that attacked LeMay in the morning had the opportunity to land, refuel, and even to eat lunch, before Williams arrived.

  On top of this, among the three hundred interceptors that met the Schweinfurt strike force was the Luftwaffe’s Jagdgeschwader 11, whose Bf 109G-6 fighters had coincidentally just been armed with Werfer-Granate 21 air-to-air rocket launchers.

  “Scarcely did one group of enemy fighters withdraw before another took its place,” Arthur Ferguson writes. “The Luftwaffe unleashed every trick and device in its repertoire…. In some instances entire squadrons attacked in ‘javelin up’ formation, which made evasive action on the part of the bombers extremely difficult. In others, three and four enemy aircraft came on abreast, attacking simultaneously. Occasionally the enemy resorted to vertical attacks from above, driving straight down at the bombers with fire concentrated on the general vicinity of the top turret, a tactic which proved effective.”

  As Thomas Coffey writes in his book Decision Over Schweinfurt, so many Flying Fortresses were shot down so quickly that some American airmen thought that their whole wing would be annihilated before anyone reached a target.

  The losses at Schweinfurt were not quite this severe, but they were sobering to say the least. LeMay’s force lost twenty-four aircraft, fifteen of them before they reached the target, while Williams lost thirty-six, twenty-two before reaching the target. The total losses amounted to sixty aircraft and more than five hundred crewmen, the highest number of losses suffered by the Eighth Air Force in a single day thus far. The 100th and 381st Bombardment Groups each lost nine Flying Fortresses, nearly half their complements.

  “The very essence of my plan to reduce losses had been nullified to a large extent by those fogged-in fields,” Dick Hughes lamented. “Under the circumstances I consider the whole operation should have been postponed, but that decision, of course, was entirely out of my hands, and in fact, up at Eighth Air Force headquarters I did not know until several hours later that everything had not gone as scheduled.”

  However, the Eighth Air Force could take some solace in knowing that at Regensburg, the six primary aircraft factories were destroyed or seriously damaged.

  At Schweinfurt, even accounting for the confusion resulting from the change in direction, the results were good. Thomas Coffey reports that the two largest factory complexes, Kugelfischer and Vereinigte Kugellagerfabriken, took eighty direct hits and that 380,000 square feet of factory structures were destroyed.

  Albert Speer, the Reich’s armaments minister, estimated a 34 percent loss in production, forcing the German war machine to fall back on reserve stocks of anti-friction bearings of all types. Production dropped from 140 tons in July to 69 in August and 50 in September.

  Commenting on the Regensburg-Schweinfurt dual mission from a tactical perspective, Speer was disparaging—albeit thankful—that the Eighth Air Force failed to launch a near-term follow-up attack on Schweinfurt, which he’d expected and which would have been devastating to German bearing production.

  “We barely escaped a further catastrophic blow on August 17,” the armaments minister recalls in his memoirs. “The American air force launched its first strategic raid. It was directed against Schweinfurt where large factories of the ball bearing industry were concentrated. Ball bearings had in any case already become a bottleneck in our efforts to increase armaments production. But in this very first attack the other side committed a crucial mistake. Instead of concentrating on the ball bearing plants, the sizable force of 376 Flying Fortresses divided up—146 of the planes [by German estimates] successfully attacked an airplane assembly plant in Regensburg, but with only minor consequences. Meanwhile, the British air force continued its indiscriminate attacks upon our cities. After this attack the production of ball bearings dropped by 38 percent…. We were forced back on the ball bearing stocks stored by the armed forces for use as repair parts. We soon consumed these, as well as whatever had been accumulated in the factories for current production.”

  Apropos the ongoing debate between the Anglo-American partners over area bombing versus precision targeting, one statistic stands out. Compared to the 42,600 civilians believed to have been killed in the RAF area raid on Hamburg three weeks earlier, 203 civilians were killed in the precision attacks on Schweinfurt.

  As for the aftermath of the Regensburg mission, it turned out that Dick Hughes had been correct when he surmised that General Arnold would like to have LeMay’s force bomb something on their way back to England, and he had sent word to Eaker to that effect. Eaker then called Hughes in and sheepishly ordered him to pick out a target and fly down to Telergma with maps and briefing materials.

  “I chose the easiest target in France which I could possibly select—and yet have some semblance of a military target,” Hughes recalls, realizing that this was a last-minut
e addition to the program and bombs had not been stockpiled in Algeria for a major effort. “It was the Fw 200 airfield outside Bordeaux [from which these aircraft attacked convoys in the Atlantic]. This meant that the force could fly over the Mediterranean Sea, cut across the narrow neck of southwest France just east of the Pyrenees, bomb the airfield, and then fly sufficiently far out over the Bay of Biscay to be safe from German fighter interference all the way back to England. In their 12-hour flight they would be exposed to the possibility of fighter attack for about one hour, and information showed that there were few German fighters based in the Bordeaux area.”

  As Hughes collected his maps for the trip south, he asked Eaker for permission to fly with the strike force. This time, the Eighth Air Force commander acquiesced.

  When Hughes reached Telergma with news of the Bordeaux mission, LeMay told him to wait at Spaatz’s headquarters in Tunis until the weather over the target was suitable. Informed of Arnold’s desire for the Eighth Air Force to undertake more “shuttle” missions like the present one, LeMay, who was standing at Telergma watching fuel being hand-pumped into his bombers, disagreed.

  In an August 29 memo to Fred Anderson, which was passed up the chain of command, LeMay would explain that it was “difficult to operate heavy bombers without their ground crews, especially if maintenance and base facilities were insufficient, as in Africa, where the changing nature of operations demanded that the supplies and equipment be constantly moved. Moreover, landing away from their bases put an additional strain on combat crews and affected their efficiency adversely.”

  Nevertheless, the mission was on. It had been ordered by Hap Arnold.

  On August 24, the weather cleared and the bombers took off for Bordeaux. The contingent was comprised of 84 Flying Fortresses, which had survived the aerial battle over Regensburg. Others that had been damaged would linger behind for repairs, which were slow to come. In England, the Eighth Air Force had access to an increasingly sophisticated depot network. In Africa, things were still quite spartan.

  “The runways were just dry packed dirt and the dust kicked up by the takeoff ascended to something like 2,000 feet,” Hughes explains. “As we circled, waiting for the remaining bombers to take off and fit themselves into their respective formations, it was quite impossible to see the field at all under the dust cloud. Plane after plane popped out of the dust and by some miracle all took off safely.”

  The force crossed the Mediterranean, and headed into Bordeaux at twenty-three thousand feet, with the Pyrenees under their left wings. They passed through minimal anti-aircraft fire, but noticed the contrails of German fighters high above. These attacked the rear of the formation, claiming four of the Flying Fortresses. The “easiest target in France” turned out not to be so easy for those four crews.

  As they passed over the Bay of Biscay, LeMay ordered the bombers down to five hundred feet so that they could fly under the German radar and avoid a second fighter interception.

  They returned to England late, so LeMay invited Hughes to spend the night at his headquarters at Camp Blainey. “Both of us were still considerably hopped up from oxygen [used at high altitude for most of the day] and found difficulty sleeping,” Hughes writes. “Suddenly this grim, taciturn character began to talk, and I don’t think he stopped talking for two or three hours. All the pent up feelings from his terrible raid on Regensburg, and from all the tough missions that he had invariably led, came spilling out of him in a gush. I doubt whether any person in the world, except perhaps his wife, ever heard the great Lieutenant General LeMay, presently [circa 1950s] commander of the Strategic Air Command, express himself so freely.”

  It was not until September that the Eighth Air Force undertook another maximum effort against Germany on the scale of the August 17 missions. On September 6, there were 407 bombers launched, the largest number to date, though, as on August 17, it was a split force, with 69 Liberators flying a diversionary sweep over the North Sea, while the main force flew south to bomb Stuttgart, home to Daimler-Benz, manufacturer of everything from military vehicles to the DB601 aircraft engines used in Messerschmitt Bf 109s. When they found the city obscured by cloud cover, the formations broke up and 262 bombers attacked “targets of opportunity.”

  Once again, as on August 17, and indeed on every mission flown thus far by the Eighth Air Force inside Germany, Luftwaffe interceptors took a terrible toll. A total of 45 bombers were shot down, for a loss rate of 17 percent of those that dropped bombs.

  Losses such as these, on top of the losses suffered on August 17, took a severe toll on Eighth Air Force effectiveness—not to mention the toll on morale.

  The nemesis of the bombers this day was II Gruppe of the Luftwaffe’s veteran Jagdgeschwader 27, which had redeployed from the Mediterranean in August for Reichsverteidigung operations, and which was based at Wiesbaden’s Erbenheim Airfield. Four of the bombers were claimed by Werner Schroer, II Gruppe’s leader, an ace who increased his total of aerial victories to 88 on September 6, and who would eventually shoot down 26 four-engine bombers.

  It was days like this that underscored the fact that bomber crews over Germany were more likely to be killed in action than front-line marines in the terrible fighting in the Pacific.

  In the aftermath of the September 6 mission, the Eighth Air Force initiated what amounted to a three-week intermission in Operation Pointblank, and a diversion of resources to two other activities, both over northern France—within the range of fighter escort. Of the two, Operation Starkey was part of the long-term Combined Bomber Offensive Plan, while Operation Crossbow was undertaken as an emergency measure.

  Operation Starkey involved a series of attacks on the road and rail transportation network across northern France. These missions had several purposes. First, they were seen as a rehearsal for the types of operations that the Eighth Air Force would be called upon to conduct immediately ahead of Operation Overlord, the cross-channel invasion of northern France. Though this was not planned to take place until May 1944, a secondary purpose of Operation Starkey was to give the Germans the suggestion that it might take place sooner.

  If the enemy were to be lured into believing this, they would divert resources to northern France from elsewhere. In turn, such a diversion of ground assets would please the Soviets, who were fighting a ground war against the Germans. Meanwhile, a diversion of Luftwaffe assets from the air defense of Germany would reduce the number of fighters that they could throw against Eighth Air Force bombers flying Pointblank missions.

  Beginning in August, and continuing into September, VIII Bomber Command heavy bombers, as well as VIII Air Support Command medium bombers, conducted extensive Starkey operations against transportation and port facilities, as well as industrial targets and Luftwaffe bases. As Arthur Ferguson writes, “No pains were spared to stage a heavy air attack and to create the illusion of an impending major amphibious assault.”

  Operation Crossbow was put together as a response to an entirely unanticipated threat. Allied photoreconnaissance aircraft had discovered that the Germans were constructing fixed launch facilities for V-1 cruise missiles and V-2 ballistic missiles in northern France. Knowing that these weapons would be used against England, Crossbow was organized to take out the launch facilities. The first of several Crossbow missions was flown by 187 B-17s against a site at Watten on August 27. Because Allied knowledge of the “V Weapons” was still classified, the target was officially referred to as an “aeronautical facilities station.”

  Attacking the sites proved ineffective because, like the U-boat pens, the V-1 sites were protected by thick reinforced concrete. Most V-2s, meanwhile, were launched from hard-to-locate mobile launchers. As it was, for reasons unrelated to Crossbow raids, the Germans would not start launching V-1s against England for another ten months, and the first operational V-2 launch was still more than a year away.

  Operations against Germany resumed on September 27 and October 2 with two major efforts involving 246 and 339 heavy bombers respe
ctively. These were not deep penetration missions like those of August. The target was the port city of Emden, the closest German target to the Eighth Air Force bases in England, and well within the range of escort fighters.

  The missions did mark the first operational use by the Eighth of the H2S airborne ground-scanning radar that had been developed in Britain for use by the RAF in night missions. The H2S provided a crude—by today’s standards—image of cities and urban areas on a radarscope, thereby allowing a bombardier to conduct his bomb drop as though he could actually see his target. First used operationally by the RAF in January 1943, the H2S system was installed in one or two pathfinder aircraft that flew ahead of each bomber formation.

  Meanwhile, the H2S concept was seen as a possible solution to the single most limiting factor in Eighth Air Force daylight bombardment operations—the weather. When a target was obscured by clouds, which seemed to have been the case more often than not, precision bombing was impossible, so bombers had to forgo an attack on their primary target to search for targets of opportunity. Though the RAF was acquiring H2S equipment as fast as it could be manufactured, the Eighth Air Force managed to get its hands on a small number of sets and began installing them in its bombers. Flying Fortresses thus equipped formed the nucleus of the 482nd Bombardment Group at Alconbury, which was specifically designated as a Pathfinder group.

  In the meantime, because supplies of the H2S sets were so limited, the USAAF decided to seek development of a homegrown H2S analog. It so happened that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radiation Laboratory, known as the “Rad Lab,” had been doing substantial research on the same technology. They were able to develop an improved variation on the H2S, which they called H2X, and which the USAAF later designated as AN/APS-15. The H2X used a shorter frequency than the H2S, and therefore provided imagery with higher resolution.

  By the third week of September 1943, the Rad Lab had installed a dozen H2X sets in a dozen Flying Fortresses, and the aircraft were on their way to England. Here, they joined the H2S-equipped bombers in the 482nd Bombardment Group. General Eaker was already making plans for a squadron of bombers equipped with the H2S, and two with the H2X system.