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

by Bill Yenne

  Production of both Flying Fortresses and Liberators increased greatly in 1943, although, for most of the year, operational numbers had lagged far beyond the number being produced. Factory acceptances of Flying Fortresses increased from 1,412 in 1942 to 4,179 in 1943, and of Liberators from 1,164 to 5,214. However, as the aircraft flowed into the global USAAF, the numbers on hand in the ETO were reactively smaller. Flying Fortress inventory increased from 175 at the start of 1943 to 907 in October. For Liberators, the number increased from 39 to 197. By the end of 1943, the Eighth Air Force possessed 1,307 Flying Fortresses and 308 Liberators, while the newly formed Fifteenth Air Force had 289 Flying Fortresses and 268 Liberators. One Eighth Air Force heavy bomber group had been added in November, but four were activated in December, bringing total strength to twenty-five groups by the end of the year.

  And then there were the fighters. By December, there were more than 1,200 P-47 Thunderbolts in the European Theater, double the number that had been present in August. Meanwhile, the remarkable P-51 Mustang had started to reach the Eighth Air Force fighter groups. In August, there had been none. By December, there were nearly 300, and this number would double during January.

  The increase in aircraft was one thing, but another part of the story was the increasing numbers of crews who were arriving in Britain.

  As typical as any among these men were David and Archie Mathies, the brothers from the coal patch town of Finleyville, Pennsylvania. Archie had enlisted at the end of 1940, when the USAAF was still the Air Corps. David, being four years younger, joined the USAAF on June 20, 1942, half a year after Pearl Harbor, and wound up going overseas as part of the Eighth Air Force buildup while Archie was still stateside. By the spring of 1943, David had been in England for a year as a ground crewman with the 4th Fighter Group at Debden in Essex, while Archie was still a flight engineer attached to the 28th Bombardment Squadron of the 19th Bombardment Group at Pyote Field in Texas.

  Anxious to get overseas, Archie volunteered for aerial gunnery school at Tyndall Field in Florida, but was still trapped in a “hurry-up-and-wait” career track while David was in Britain drinking warm beer and sleeping in cold, drafty Quonset hut temporary barracks.

  The bomber crews assigned to the Eighth Air Force were generally formed and trained as a crew in the United States, then assigned a bomber, which they would, in turn, fly to England. By October 1943, Archie Mathies was at Alexandria Army Airfield, near Alexandria, Louisiana, assigned as part of a bomber crew.

  The pilot and aircraft commander was Second Lieutenant Clarence Richard Nelson Jr. from Riverside, Illinois, who had enlisted in the US Army as a private and had been a pilot only since May 1943. Second Lieutenant Joseph Martin from Burlington, New Jersey, was the bombardier, and Second Lieutenant Walter Edward “Wally” Truemper had joined Nelson’s crew as the navigator in September. Like Nelson, Truemper was twenty-four years old, and from Illinois, specifically Aurora. Also like Nelson, he had enlisted in the regular US Army but had applied for flight school and wound up in the USAAF.

  The copilot was Flight Officer Ronald Bartley, from Underwood, North Dakota. The vast majority of the men with a pilot’s rating in the USAAF were officers, but enlisted men who had completed flight training could be assigned as “flight officers,” noncommissioned pilots with a rank equivalent to warrant officer. Though the lowest ranking men on the flight deck, they were also the most experienced. In 1942, Bartley had flown his first tour of duty with the 12th Bombardment Group in North Africa as a radio operator aboard a B-25 medium bomber.

  Ron Bartley had come home, married his girlfriend, Bernice, and signed up for flight school. Having earned his wings at the end of August 1943, he volunteered to go back overseas to fly with the Eighth Air Force.

  There were six sergeants assigned to Nelson’s crew. Working just aft of the flight deck were the radio operator, Joe Rex, from Defiance, Ohio, and Carl Moore, from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, the flight engineer. An Arkansas-born Texan named Thomas Sowell was the left waist gunner, while Russell Robinson, from Springfield, Colorado, stood across from him at the right waist position. Robinson had been in the midst of flight training when he had his twenty-seventh birthday. In those days, the USAAF required that pilots earn their wings at age twenty-six or earlier, so Robinson became a gunner.

  Magnus “Mac” Hagbo, a Norwegian kid from Seattle, was the tail gunner, and Archie Mathies rounded out Dick Nelson’s crew as the man who crawled into the tight confines of the Sperry ball turret on the bottom of the Flying Fortress.

  Having trained to fly and function as a crew, they were assigned the B-17G that they would take overseas. In World War II, nearly every bomber had a name, and this one was named Mizpah, from a biblical reference suggested to Nelson by his mother. In Genesis 31:49, Laban speaks the word “Mizpah” and says, “The Lord watch between me and thee when we are absent one from another.”

  Florence Nelson wanted her twenty-four-year-old boy to come home safely.

  The young crew flew Mizpah out of the recently completed Kearny Army Airfield in Buffalo County, Nebraska, on the last day of November, bound for England by way of Bangor, Maine, and Goose Bay, Labrador. After an icy, hair-raising midwinter crossing of the Atlantic, they reached Northern Ireland on December 16.

  It was here that Mizpah herself became the first casualty of Dick Nelson’s wartime saga. On the night before the crew was about to make the last, short hop to Britain, a winter storm blew in and the wind pushed several Flying Fortresses together, damaging their control surfaces.

  Without a plane, the crew made that last leg of their journey by boat, and the next day, Archie Mathies found himself in Scotland, the land of his birth. Within a week, Mizpah’s crew found themselves assigned to the Eighth Air Force Replacement Depot Casual Pool, waiting for further orders, and for whatever came next.

  As Christmas came and went, and as the new year arrived, these men were just ten of the tens of thousands who were accumulating in England in anticipation of the year that promised to be the make-or-break one for the Eighth Air Force, the Combined Bomber Offensive, and the realization of the full potential of strategic airpower.

  THIRTEEN

  OPERATION ARGUMENT

  Just as young Americans like Archie Mathies had come to crew the bombers, young Americans had been flooding into England by the tens of thousands also to form the waves of ground troops who would battle their way into Festung Europe with Operation Overlord and begin the long and difficult march into Hitler’s Reich. There were so many that it was almost like an invasion.

  Some British people referred, with both tongue in cheek and a certain accuracy, to the Yanks as “oversexed, overpaid, and over here.” It was a culture shock for both sides.

  Others simply, and more charitably, referred to the invasion of England by the young Americans as “the Friendly Invasion.”

  To command these young Americans, indeed to command all the Allied forces, there would be an American—General Dwight David Eisenhower.

  In 1942, the British, by right of their experience and their relative numbers, had held sway in the decision making within the Combined Chiefs of Staff. By the end of 1943, it was the Americans, by right of their growing experience and their growing numbers, who had earned the right to command Operation Overlord. As early as the Quadrant Conference in Quebec in August, even Winston Churchill had agreed.

  The Allied command structure underwent a substantial reorganization during December. On December 7, Eisenhower was formally confirmed as the supreme allied commander in Europe, heading the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) and turning over the supreme Allied command in the Mediterranean Theater to British General Henry Maitland Wilson.

  Meanwhile, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, who had previously commanded the joint Mediterranean Air Command (MAC), now went back to England to sit at the right hand of Eisenhower as his deputy supreme Allied commander, in charge of air operations for Operation Overlord. Another RAF ma
n, Trafford Leigh-Mallory, was named to command the joint Allied Expeditionary Air Force (AEAF), which was an umbrella for all of the American and British tactical air operations in connection with Overlord. This included the USAAF Ninth Air Force, commanded by General Lewis Brereton, which was relocated from the Mediterranean to England for tactical operations. Theoretically, the AEAF umbrella did not cast its shadow over the strategic Eighth Air Force—at least not for the moment.

  Concerning this arrangement, Arthur Ferguson later wrote that “General Eisenhower had expected Spaatz to manage heavy bomber operations for Operation Overlord, and he was a little surprised that Tedder, who he had hoped would serve as his ‘chief air man,’ was in a vague position as officer without portfolio in air matters while ‘a man named Mallory’ was titular air commander in chief [for Overlord air operations].”

  With respect to American air operations, the USAAF announced, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff approved, the creation of a new strategic air command, the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe (USSAFE, later USSTAF and referred to as such herein), as an umbrella organization for both the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces. To command this new organization, and as the highest ranking American air officer in Europe, Hap Arnold picked Tooey Spaatz.

  Spaatz then returned to his former headquarters, and that of the Eighth Air Force, at Widewing (Bushy Park), near London, which now became the headquarters of the USSTAF. Technically, the Eighth was redesignated as the USSTAF, and the VIII Bomber Command was then redesignated as the “new” Eighth Air Force, with its headquarters still at the air base at High Wycombe, west of London, that also served as headquarters of RAF Bomber Command.

  As had the Eighth previously, the USSTAF would coordinate its operations with RAF Bomber Command through the Combined Bomber Offensive organization. In a somewhat confusing arrangement, the USSTAF would also maintain administrative control of the Ninth Air Force, while operational control of the Ninth for Overlord rested with the AEAF.

  Meanwhile, the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces (MAAF) were created as a successor to MAC and as an umbrella organization for all American and British tactical air forces in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations (MTO).

  In the musical chairs shake-up of the USAAF command staff in the ETO and MTO, as Spaatz went back to England, General Eaker went south to command the MAAF and General Doolittle was transferred from command of the Twelfth Air Force in the Mediterranean to replace Eaker as commander of the Eighth Air Force in England.

  General Fred Anderson, formerly commander of the VIII Bomber Command, became Spaatz’s deputy commander for operations at USSTAF. While USSTAF was theoretically a “supervisory and policy-making” organization, Anderson would become the most influential operations man within the new strategic air command.

  “Just before departing [for his new post at MAAF], General Eaker asked me whether I would accompany him to the Mediterranean Theater and take charge of his new plans division there,” Dick Hughes recalls. “I thankfully, but respectfully, declined the offer.”

  Eaker now commanded a tactical air organization, and for the time being, Hughes was anxious to continue what he had started with respect to the strategic air war against the Reich.

  Indeed, while the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces had been building up their strength and flying relatively limited endurance missions through most of December, the next phase of that strategic campaign had been shaping up on drawing boards from Bushy Park to Berkeley Square.

  On November 29, 1943, the Combined Operational Planning Committee (COPC) of the Combined Bomber Offensive had issued a highly classified memo describing the general outlines for the maximum effort code-named Operation Argument. Essentially, Operation Argument was to be the intensely focused capstone of Operation Pointblank, the climactic moment in the campaign against the Luftwaffe and the German aircraft industry that Peter Portal had complained was behind schedule.

  Ironically, while there had been numerous arguments about strategic airpower policy over the preceding year, as November faded into December, those on the COPC were of like mind over the singular objectives of Operation Argument.

  Though specific details bounced back and forth between Berkeley Square and Bushy Park through December, the general plan for Argument called for a weeklong series of daylight precision bombing missions against high-priority aircraft industry targets in southern and central Germany—such as Augsburg, Leipzig, and Regensburg—that would have an immediate effect on frontline Luftwaffe fighter strength.

  As had long been envisioned by Dick Hughes, Charlie Kindleberger, and everyone who had understood the German economy as an integrated organism, the plan called for a systematic assault not merely against final assembly plants, but on component plants and, once again, ball bearings. In a conversation with Arthur Ferguson a month later, Dick Hughes gave a series of examples.

  He explained that attacks on the Erla-Maschinenwerk GmbH plant in Leipzig, which assembled Messerschmitt Bf 109s, would be complemented by strikes on factories in the Leipzig suburb of Heiterblick where components and subassemblies were manufactured. The Junkers Flugzeug-und-Motorenwerke AG factory at Bernburg, which assembled Ju 88 aircraft, would “share” an attack with the Ju 88 fuselage works at nearby Oschersleben and the Ju 88 wing plant at Halberstadt.

  The huge Messerschmitt plant at Augsburg contained both subassembly and final assembly in one complex, but at Regensburg, the final assembly was done in the suburb of Obertraubling, and subcomponents were made in another suburb, Prüfening. Hughes said that both targets would get equal consideration from the Eighth Air Force.

  Operations would be coordinated between the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces, with the RAF attacking the same areas on many of the intervening nights during this weeklong effort. The Ninth Air Force, recently relocated to England to manage all the tactical bombing operations in France ahead of Overlord, would cooperate with the heavy bomber units by running diversionary attacks over northern Europe with fighters and medium bombers. The idea would be to lure the Luftwaffe into dividing its forces, pulling fighter strength away from its strategic mission.

  Because of this coordination between several commands and separate air forces, Fred Anderson would be integral to planning for Operation Argument. Indeed, the operational direction of Operation Argument would be Anderson’s responsibility in his role as Spaatz’s deputy for operations.

  Hughes writes of a visit to General Spaatz’s residence one night, during which he and Anderson laid out the dimensions of their proposal for the specifics of the Argument operations, complete with pages of lists, and maps unrolled across the floor.

  “My target list included German fighter assembly plants scattered virtually over the whole of Germany, and many called for very deep penetrations,” he recalls. “Understandably, General Spaatz was most concerned, lest this operation result in tragic casualty percentages similar to those we previously had suffered in our attacks on Schweinfurt and Regensburg.”

  On everyone’s mind was the last time the Eighth Air Force mounted a weeklong maximum effort. That week, Black Week, had culminated in the debacle over Schweinfurt, when the attacking force had suffered the worst casualty rate of any major mission ever. Their minds’ eyes were filled with images of the faces of hundreds of young men who would never go home.

  Meanwhile, everyone’s mind then turned to images of the faces of thousands of young men who would be coming ashore in Normandy in just a few short months, and what their lives would be like as they staggered for safety under skies filled with the vengeful wrath of the determined and efficient Luftwaffe.

  As Dick Hughes explains, each man in the room knew that, as painful as it would be, Operation Argument was absolutely indispensable to Operation Overlord. Each man knew that “only from its results could we possibly determine whether or not we could gain air superiority before D-Day, and whether or not by the exercise of strategic airpower on decisive German industrial target systems, we could appreciably shorten th
e length of time for which the Germans could resist. Moreover, we now, for the first time, had a very strong strategic bomber force and an adequate supply of long range fighter escorts. If we failed, this time, we would probably never have any more forces than we now had, with which to succeed.”

  As the Christmas decorations began appearing around London, and in the Mayfair shops Dick Hughes passed on his way to Berkeley Square, he presented Fred Anderson with the details and nuances of the specific Operation Argument objectives. As he recalls, “General Anderson agreed with me completely, and we sent the target priorities over to Eighth Air Force and told them to get ready for a maximum effort.”

  It was make-or-break time for the Eighth Air Force, and indeed for the entire Anglo-American Combined Bomber Offensive, for Operation Argument was to be its climactic moment, a moment that could not end in failure.

  Everything that the Combined Bomber Offensive, and especially the Eighth Air Force, had been trying to do, at least since the Pointblank Directive of June 1943, would now be funneled into this single “maximum effort” for which the Eighth Air Force now finally seemed to have the resources.

  “Strategic heavy bomber groups were now piling into England at a much faster rate for the buildup for the invasion, and several [fresh] groups of long range P-51s and P-47s had also arrived,” Hughes writes of the turning point that was coming with the turn of 1943 to 1944. “In my opinion, for the first time, we finally had the real opportunity of breaking the back of the German fighter defenses, and all my time was spent planning just how to do this as soon as weather conditions became favorable for operations over Germany.”

  Favorable weather conditions?

  In northern Europe—in January?

  Favorable weather conditions, in northern Europe, in January for an entire week?