Category German Jets, 1944-1945

The August coa study went not only to Arnold, but also to Han – sell, the Twentieth Air Force’s Chief of Staff. As an early disciple of high altitude, daylight, precision bombing, Possum Hansell took its progressive message to heart. He had taught strategic bomb­ing theory at the Air Corps Tactical School during the 1930s; he was a principal architect of awpd-i and the primary architect of AWPD-42, both of which called for precision bombing offensives to forestall an invasion of Europe and knock Germany out of the war; and he had put theory into practice as commander of Eighth Air Force’s First Bomb Wing from 1 January to 30 June 1943. He had also served as de facto commander of Twentieth Air Force when Arnold had been incapacitated with his third heart attack. Arnold’s selection of Hansell to lead XXI Bomber Command from the Marianas came as no surprise. When he landed on Saipan at the controls of Joltin’ Josie, the Pacific Pioneer on 12 October, Hansell prepared to initiate the main в-29 offensive against Japan that Arnold had long counted on to produce decisive results.

From the Marianas, XXI Bomber Command could attack most of Japan’s major cities, but Hansell faced an array of problems before a raid against them could occur. Tokyo was the obvious choice for the first attack, and the coa had designated the Naka – jima aircraft engine plant at Musashino, in the northwest part of the capital, as the initial target in a series of raids designed to de­stroy the aircraft industry. Hansell, though, possessed only one partially finished runway on Saipan while Army engineers strug­gled to complete complementary airfields on Tinian and Guam. The prospect of constant long-range, high altitude attacks in for­mation also presented challenges. In stateside practice missions, flown from Kansas to Batista Field in Cuba (the same 1,400-mile distance as from Saipan to Tokyo), engines had caught fire after exhaust valves burned out, and the gunners’ plastic viewing bub­bles had frosted over above twenty-five thousand feet. Hansell had asked to fly his bombers from the United States to Saipan in for­mation to gain additional experience. Air Transport Command denied his request, he later observed, “on the grounds that the air­plane lacked the range to fly from Sacramento to Hawaii in for­mation, even without a bomb load and in good weather. The dis­tance was 2,400 miles. We would have to fly 3,200 miles, with a bomb load, in the face of enemy fighters, without weather report­ing or navigation aids.”51

Besides the difficulties encountered in long-range formation fly­ing, Hansell faced a dearth of target information, plus he also had to deal with crews and aircraft unprepared for the missions ahead. His initial orders were to destroy Japan’s aircraft industry, but he had no target folders to guide his mission planning. “Our strate­gic air intelligence was simply non-existent in regards to Japan,” he recalled.52 Not until the 1 November arrival of two B-29S spe­cially modified for photographic reconnaissance did Hansell ob­tain the needed targeting clues; the aircraft took seven thousand photographs from thirty-two thousand feet, beyond the range of

Japanese flak.53 More reconnaissance missions followed. Han – sell and his staff then had to review the photographs and prepare for the first raid, which Arnold wanted by the middle of Novem­ber.5’1 Hansell scheduled it for the seventeenth. In the meantime, the Seventy-third Wing, originally slated for General Wolfe’s XX Bomber Command in China and trained in radar bombing at night, had begun arriving at Saipan at the rate of two or three aircraft per day. Japan’s aircraft factories were precision targets that demanded visual bombing with the Norden bombsight. The Seventy-third’s B-29S had APQ-13 bombsights designed for radar attacks and ill-suited for precision bombing.55 Limited time was available for training, and with the first mission looming, several crews would fly against Tokyo without any practice flights in the combat theater at all.

Arnold’s impatience for a rapid start to the Marianas offensive stemmed in part from high-level developments in the orchestration of Allied strategy. At Quebec’s Octagon Conference in September 1944, the Combined Chiefs of Staff foreshadowed an invasion of Japan’s home islands by stating that the Allied mission in the Pa­cific included seizure of “objectives in the industrial heart of Ja­pan.”36 Once the invasion began, Arnold would lose his chance to score “decisive” results with air power in the Pacific. He knew that the clock had begun ticking for the B-29S to achieve indepen­dent success—much as it had for Eighth Air Force in May 1943 after the Combined Chiefs of Staff selected a projected date for Overlord. Three weeks before Hansell took XXI Bomber Com­mand from its training location in Colorado Springs to the Mar­ianas, Arnold wrote him:

As you well know the original conception of the в-29 was an air­plane that would carry tremendous loads for tremendous distances. We have not to date fulfilled this promise. We have flown great dis­tances but we have not carried any sizeable bomb loads. In fact we have not carried any more bombs and in most cases considerably less than the B-24S and в-17s carry. One of the greatest factors in the de­feat of Japan will be the air effort. Consequently every bomb that is added to each airplane that takes off for Japan will directly affect the length of the war. . . .

1 know that you, in your position as commander of one of our great striking forces, will do your utmost to help accomplish the ear­liest possible defeat of Japan. This can only be done by making the best possible use of the weapon at your disposal.57

In November, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a tentative plan for invading Kyushu in September 1945. Hansell’s race against the clock had officially begun.

On 24 November hi B-29S took off to attack Tokyo’s Naka – jima aircraft engine factory, responsible for an estimated 30 to 40 percent of all Japanese combat aircraft engines.58 Brigadier Gen­eral Emmett “Rosy” O’Donnell, the Commander of the Seventy – third Wing, led the mission, with Major Robert K. Morgan, who had commanded the famed Memphis Belle in the European the­ater, flying as his co-pilot. Vile weather had compelled Hansell to cancel the mission five times. Shortly before it finally occurred, he received a portent that it might not go well. O’Donnell, a Brooklyn native who had commanded а в-17 squadron in the Philippines after Pearl Harbor, and who had also served as a favored colo­nel on Arnold’s Advisory Council, came to Hansell with a hand­written letter. It concerned the forthcoming mission and warned that “the hazards and the lack of training produced risks which exceeded the limits of prudent military judgment.” O’Donnell thought that the raid could produce a “disaster,” and urged Han­sell to forego a daylight attack and instead bomb at night “until the command had a chance to build up its competence.”59 Han­sell thanked Rosy for his views, and then burned the letter in his presence to prevent misinterpretation if the raid succeeded.

The attack was far from successful, though not for the reasons that O’Donnell had suspected. Only twenty-four B-29S bombed the engine factory, while another sixty-four dropped their bombs on the city and its docks. An additional seventeen aborted en route to the target, and mechanical difficulties prevented the re­mainder from bombing at all.60 The chief problem encountered was unforeseen—jet stream winds of more than 150 mph that whipped through the high altitudes above Tokyo and tossed the bombs randomly across the city. Out of more than one thou­sand bombs dropped, only forty-eight landed within the Naka – jima plant’s boundaries.61 Two bombers were lost, one to a Jap­anese fighter that rammed it, and the other ditched after running out of fuel on the trip back.

On 27 November eighty-one bombers again took off for the Nakajima factory, but clouds obscured the target and none hit it; on 3 December seventy B-29S attacked it, again with dismal re­sults. Hansell’s crews had few answers for the jet stream, which pushed the Superfortresses along at a staggering 445 mph over the ground—much too fast for the Norden bombsight to compensate for its effects.62 If the crews flew perpendicular to the winds, they still could not correct for the wind velocity. If they flew into the winds, they risked flying so slowly that they would become easy prey for antiaircraft batteries. Hansell tried flying upwind during a 13 December raid against the Mitsubishi aircraft engine factory at Nagoya and had thirty-one bombers damaged by flak, although bombing accuracy showed marked improvements.63

Providence soon handed Arnold the opportunity to map out a wartime strategy based on strategic bombing. The new Chief of the aaf quickly formed an “air staff” that resembled the Army’s General Staff. He asked forty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Harold Lee George, who commanded the Second Bombardment Group and its B-17S, to leave Langley in early July 1941 and come to Washington DC to establish an Air War Plans Division (awpd). George agreed and notified Arnold that his division was open for business on 10 July—with a grand total of four people.61 The pre­vious day, the president had sent a letter to the Secretaries of War and the Navy requesting their estimate of production requirements if the United States fought the Axis. To George, the president’s re­quest was a godsend. He asked Arnold to obtain permission for the Air War Plans Division to draft the air portion of the plan.

Arnold agreed that the time was ripe to make a concerted bid for the independent application of air power. He convinced Brig­adier General L. T. Gerow, chief of the Army War Plans Division, that George’s office was the best suited to determine Army Air Forces requirements. The significance of Arnold’s action was not lost on those around him. “We realized instinctively that a ma­jor milestone had been reached,” recalled then Major Haywood Hansell, who joined George’s group from the office of Strategic Air Intelligence. “Suddenly, without anywhere near the opposi­tion we expected, we found ourselves able to plan our own fu­ture. How well we would plan and what success we would have in getting that plan past the Army General Staff remained a mat­ter of uncertainty, but for the moment one of our fondest dreams had been realized.”62 On Monday, 4 August, Lieutenant Colonel George informed his officers that they would develop a plan for a prospective air war against Germany and Japan—and that they would complete the plan in nine days.

To guide the effort George assembled an extraordinary group of talented men. Lieutenant Colonels Orvil Anderson, Max F. Schneider, and Arthur W. Vanaman, and Majors Hoyt S. Vanden – berg and Samuel E. Anderson were among those who worked on developing the plan’s eighteen separate tabs.65 Yet the responsi­bility for the most important of those tabs, analyzing such top­ics as “Bombardment Operations against Germany” and “Bom­bardment Aviation Required for Hemispheric Defense,” went to George himself and the three men whom he handpicked to guide the plan’s development: Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth N. Walker, Major Haywood Hansell, and Major Laurence Kuter. George, Walker, Hansell, and Kuter knew each other well. All had taught at the Air Corps Tactical School, and all were stalwart disciples of the school’s strategic bombing theory. “We had one valuable asset going for us,” Hansell recalled. “We embraced a common concept of air warfare and we spoke a common language.”64

The red-haired Hansell, who bore the nickname “Possum” be­cause of a scoop-shaped nose and a pointed chin, had already be­gun analyzing Germany’s industrial web. As an officer in Arnold’s Strategic Air Intelligence office since 1940, his job had been to gather information about the economic structure and air forces of Germany and Japan. After receiving minimal help—and even active resistance—from individuals in the War Department’s In­telligence office, he turned to specialists from the civilian commu­nity who had recently entered the military in the wake of Hitler’s aggression.65 Hansell relied on “the services of a PhD in industrial economics and an expert in oil” to pinpoint the vital links con­necting the German war machine.66 He also benefited from the suggestion of Major Malcolm Moss, a former international busi­nessman who knew that American banks had provided the Ger­mans with most of the capital to construct their electric power system, and thought that those banks might possess drawings and specifications of the German facilities. The hunch proved correct, and also yielded diagrams of oil refineries. Using those materials, as well as information from scientific journals, the advice of his experts, and his own detailed knowledge of production require­ments, Hansell prepared target folders for the German electric power and petroleum systems.

The “abc” discussions between British and American military staffs in early 1941 triggered a summer visit to Royal Air Force (raf) intelligence offices in Great Britain. While there, Hansell ex­changed information on German targets. He found that his stud­ies on oil and electric power were superior to the raf’s but that the British information on transportation, aircraft production, and Luftwaffe organization eclipsed his own findings. The British allowed him to take copies of their reports, and Hansell eagerly did so. He departed in mid-July with a collection of target fold­ers weighing almost a ton, which he crammed into an American bomber. Upon returning to the United States, he joined George’s Air War Plans Division.

Ken Walker’s operational expertise, and Laurence Kuter’s staff work, complemented Hansell’s bent for technical data. A quick­tempered chain smoker from Cerrillos, New Mexico, Walker barely missed combat in World War I, earning his wings nine days before the war ended. His work in developing formation tactics at Lang­ley convinced him that defenses could not deter a well-orches­trated bomber attack, and he instilled this belief in his classes at Maxwell. After leaving the Tactical School faculty, he flew bomb­ers in California and Hawaii. George considered him “one of the most brilliant and far-sighted officers in the United States Army.”67

The restrained Larry Kuter provided a stark contrast to Walker’s nervous intensity. Kuter also possessed considerable experience in bombers and had followed Walker as operations officer for Lang­ley’s Second Bombardment Group. After his assignment to the Gen­eral Staff in the summer of 1939—as the sole Air Corps officer in the Operations and Training section—he worked on tripling the size of the Air Corps into a 5,500-plane force adequate to defend the Western hemisphere. Walker deemed his expertise essential to designing a viable plan for a potential air war, and persuaded Spaatz—now Arnold’s chief of staff and a brigadier general—to obtain Kuter’s temporary relief from the General Staff.68 Kuter arrived for duty in the War Plans Division on 4 August—the date that George notified his staff of their nine-day deadline.

George’s group accomplished their marathon planning session in the recently constructed penthouse on top of the eighth wing of the old Munitions Building, located on Constitution Avenue be­tween the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial. Hastily constructed during World War I as a temporary facility, the three – story, steel-and-concrete structure contained cramped offices sep­arated by numerous partitions and concrete pillars. The daytime temperature in Washington DC that August hovered near ninety, and the penthouse absorbed the heat.69 Oscillating fans did little to relieve the oppressive conditions. Hansell later described the penthouse as “intolerably hot,” and recalled that “literally, when you put your hand down on your desk, your papers would stick to it.”70 Despite the heat, the short deadline kept George and his staff working in the penthouse until nearly midnight every night, and on two evenings they did not go home.71 The heat and the long hours frayed nerves and led to angry confrontations. On one oc­casion Walker railed at George that he could no longer work with Hansell, precipitating a similar outburst from Hansell/2 George smoothed the ruffled feathers, and throughout the nine-day or­deal he worked to promote harmony through a mixture of hu­mor, aplomb, and dogged determination.

According to President Roosevelt’s directive, George and his staff were to determine Army Air Forces requirements that would guide American industry if war occurred between the United States and the Axis powers. The only restriction given George was that his proposal had to conform to rainbow 5, the overall war plan agreed to by the British and American staffs in May 1941. rainbow 5 designated Germany as the major Axis threat and stated that Anglo-American efforts would focus on defeating Germany first while maintaining a strategic defensive against Japan. Like Nap Gorrell in 1917, George realized that he could not estimate the number of aircraft needed without first determining bow air power would he used. In that regard, he faced a dilemma. Although he and his staff were convinced that strategic bombing could inde­pendently defeat Germany, they also had to submit a plan that was palatable to the Army hierarchy.

Just as Pershing had expressed concern over the airmen’s em­phasis on independent air operations in World War I, Marshall, while favorably disposed toward strategic bombing, was likely to reject a plan making no reference to air support for the ground forces. The Chief of Staff had recently called for twelve groups of “Stuka-type” dive bombers in a proposed air expansion to eighty – four groups.73 Accordingly, George listed the American air mis­sion as: “To wage a sustained air offensive against German mili­tary power, supplemented by air offensives against other regions under enemy control which contribute toward that power; to sup­port a final offensive, if it becomes necessary to invade the con­tinent; in addition, to conduct effective air operations in connec­tion with Hemisphere Defense and a strategic defensive in the Far East.”74

By stating that an invasion of continental Europe might not be required, George acknowledged the planners’ faith that strategic bombing would eliminate the need for it. Yet George also acknowl­edged that air power would be available to guarantee an invasion’s success if the need arose. Six years earlier, as an Air Corps Tacti­cal School instructor, he had asked his students whether air power could achieve a solo victory in war. He now aimed to construct an air campaign that answered that question with a resounding yes. The progressive notions of Tactical School theory formed the plan’s underpinnings; the challenge was to translate accepted be­liefs, based on hypothetical applications against generic enemies, into a specific design against an enemy that was very real. Ger­many—a “modern” nation waging “modern” war—appeared to be an especially apt choice for testing Tactical School principles. If the test proved successful, the bomber offensive would yield vic­tory—and serve as a vindication for air force autonomy.

Having determined that strategic bombing would be the es­sence of America’s air effort, George and his planners worked to identify those parts of Germany’s industrial web that contributed the most to Hitler’s war effort. Hansell’s studies while assigned to the Strategic Air Intelligence office were invaluable in this en­deavor. Using them, planners concluded that the electric power, transportation, and oil production systems were the key compo­nents of the German economy. They decided that those systems could be wrecked by destroying 124 vital targets—fifty electric power plants, fifteen marshalling yards, fifteen bridges, seventeen inland waterway facilities, and twenty-seven petroleum and syn­thetic oil plants. This bombing would not only destroy German war-making capability, but also the “means of livelihood of the German people.” George’s group noted that civilians might also be attacked directly once their morale had weakened due to sus­tained suffering and a lack of faith in Germany’s ability to win the war. “However, if these conditions do not exist,” the planners cautioned, “then area bombing of cities may actually stiffen the resistance of the population, especially if the attacks are weak and sporadic.” If the industrial web theory was correct, German mo­rale would crack without targeting residential districts.75

George and his planners realized that the destruction of Ger­many’s industrial apparatus would be no easy task. German air defenses—which now included radar—were formidable, causing the group to list “neutralization of the German Air Force” as an “intermediate objective, whose accomplishment may be essen­tial to the accomplishment of the principal objectives.”76 With­out achieving control of the air, the ability to wreck German war­making capacity remained problematic; moreover, an invasion of France could not occur unless the Allies first obtained air superi­ority. George’s planners determined that air control through at­trition was unlikely. Many industrial targets lay beyond the range of escort fighters, requiring bomber squadrons to rely on Walk­er’s formation tactics as they fought their way across Germany. “We knew that defensive firepower in the air would not suffice to defeat the Luftwaffe,” Hansell recalled/7 Neither would attack­ing German air bases, which were well dispersed and heavily de­fended. As a result, planners decided to attack the Luftwaffe be­fore it left the assembly line. They designated eighteen aircraft factories, six aluminum plants, and six magnesium plants as es­sential to aircraft production, and added them to the list of vital centers earmarked for destruction.

Until negated, German air defenses would likely hamper bomb­ing accuracy, and accurate bombing was essential to wreck Ger­many’s industrial web. Marginal weather also threatened to dis­rupt the precision bombing effort. Based on studies that Hansell obtained from the British, George’s group estimated that an av­erage of only five days a month would be suitable for daylight operations over the Reich.78 The best weather occurred between

April and September. The prospect of stiff defenses and poor fly­ing conditions, combined with George’s own experience from Ab­erdeen Proving Ground, caused planners to predict that raids on Germany would be 2.25 times more /«accurate than peacetime practice bombing.79 George demanded that bombers had to attack each target in sufficient force to achieve a 90 percent probability of destroying it—the same percentage deemed acceptable in sim­ilar problems at the Air Corps Tactical School.80 In addition—as Gorrell had pointed out in 1917—bombers would have to attack many targets more than once to prevent the Germans from repair­ing the damage. The planners anticipated that the Germans could repair most targets other than electric power facilities within two to four weeks; power plants would take longer to restore.81

George’s group next calculated the number of bombers required to guarantee a 90 percent level of destruction to the 154 key tar­gets selected, given the expected accuracy and the need for re­peated attacks. They determined that 1,100 bombers were nec­essary to ensure a 90 percent probability of destroying a single hundred-foot-by-hundred-foot target under combat conditions.82 A like number of aircraft would have to return to that target in two weeks to keep it out of action. Planners quickly realized that the aaf needed an enormous number of bombers to destroy the German war effort through constant pounding. George thought that dismantling German industry required at least six months of non-stop bombing, and planners anticipated an April-Septem – ber offensive to coincide with the most favorable flying weather. Given weather, maintenance, and crew rest limitations, they esti­mated that a bomb group containing seventy aircraft could send thirty-six of its bombers against Germany eight times a month.83 Thus, to wreck the 154 key targets in a six-month span would re­quire ninety-eight bomb groups—or 6,860 bombers—at the start of the offensive.

Those bombers would consist of ten groups of B-25S and B-26S, twenty groups of B-17S and B-24S, twenty-four groups of B-29S, and forty-four groups of B-36S. Planners noted that the ideal type of bomber for the offensive was the в-29, a recently designed four-engine marvel; two-engine в-25 and в-26 “medium bomb­ers” would suffice “only because they were available.”84 The vast numbers would swamp airfields in Great Britain, which would serve as home base for the B-17S, B-24S, B-25S, and B-26S. B-29S would operate against Germany from Northern Ireland and the Middle East. The в-36, a proposed behemoth with a four-thou­sand-mile range, could fly from Newfoundland, Greenland, Af­rica, India, or the northeastern United States. George’s staff antic­ipated that each group engaged in combat would lose 20 percent of its aircraft (and 15 percent of its flying personnel) per month, creating a requirement for an additional 1,272 bombers.8:1

Although the estimate of bombers needed to assault Germany dwarfed previous aircraft projections for the entire Army Air Forces,86 those bombers were by no means the only airplanes George and his planners envisioned. The massive air offensive against the Third Reich required fighters to defend air bases and support aircraft. Moreover, substantial numbers of fighters and bombers were needed to defend the Western Hemisphere, and the teeth of the strategic defensive in the Pacific would consist of B-29S and B-32S operating from bases in Alaska, Siberia, and the Philip­pines. All told, George’s group calculated that 239 groups and 108 observation squadrons were necessary to defeat the Axis—a grand total of 63,467 airplanes. If the United States began fighting, as an­ticipated, in the spring of 1942, planners thought that the nation would be hard pressed to produce such an armada before the end of 1943.87 Still, they believed that a land invasion of Germany in less than three years was unlikely, thus giving air power a chance to achieve an independent victory.88 A limited air offensive would start as soon as America entered the war, and the six month aer­ial pounding of the Reich would occur from April to September 1944. Charged with estimating manpower requirements, Kuter determined that by the start of the offensive the Army Air Forces would have expanded from its authorized limit of 152,000 men in August 1941 to 2,164,916, which was a half million more men than were in the entire Army at the end of 1941.89

On the afternoon of 12 August 1941, an exhausted Hal George delivered a copy of “awpd-i: Munitions Requirements of the Army Air Forces” to the Army War Plans office. The plan’s appearance reflected the rushed nature of the project. “It was not an impres­sive looking document,” Hansell remembered. “The pages were typed and mimeographed. Corrections were made in ink. The charts were black and white, hastily prepared and crudely pasted together.”90 Nevertheless, despite sweltering conditions and flar­ing tempers, George’s group completed their task on schedule.

Next came the job of persuading civilian and military leaders that the proposal was sound. George submitted the plan to the Army War Plans office without having it approved by Arnold, who was attending the Argentia Conference in Placentia Bay, but he knew that Arnold would have no qualms in endorsing it. Sterner chal­lenges were on the horizon. In the following month, the planners briefed awpd-i to Robert Lovett (the new Assistant Secretary of War for Air), Army Chief of Staff Marshall, and Secretary of War Stimson. Lovett received the briefing on 13 August, accompanied by General Gerow from the Army War Plans Division and General Spaatz. A World War I Navy pilot and an outspoken air power advocate, Lovett avidly supported the proposal. Arnold heard the briefing with General Marshall on 30 August. The Army Chief of Staff said nothing until after the presentation was over and dis­cussion had ceased. Then he commented that the plan had merit, and the next day scrawled “Okay, G. С. M.” on the cover of his copy.91 Andrews could claim a measure of credit for that signa­ture. Like most Army generals, Marshall believed that air support for ground troops was essential, but Andrews had opened his eyes to the potential of independent air power. This impetus, coupled with Marshall’s practical nature, helped him endorse awpd-i. He realized that the invasion of Europe could not occur immediately if war came in early 1942, and Germany could not go unscathed during the buildup for the ground offensive. If strategic bombing could topple Hitler and eliminate the need for a risky amphibi­ous assault, Marshall was willing to give it a try.

George’s staff culminated their “selling” of awpd-i on the af­ternoon of 11 September and the morning of the next day, when George, Walker, and Kuter briefed Secretary of War Stimson in his office in the Munitions Building. Stimson accepted the plan as “a matter-of-fact statement of the air forces required to defeat the Axis.” He cautioned, however, that the enormous number of men and planes necessary to implement the scheme “depended entirely upon the nation being in a war spirit or at war.”92

With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, America obtained the martial spirit that Stimson thought necessary to spur the large-scale production of combat aircraft. The turmoil created by Pearl Harbor canceled a scheduled briefing on awpd-i to the president, and Hansell later termed the lost opportunity “a cruel disappointment” because he believed that it prevented bombing advocate Roosevelt from fully understanding the value of a con­centrated air offensive.92 Yet the seemingly inevitable march to­ward war in the late summer of 194г, with the Japanese defying Roosevelt’s oil embargo as they advanced across China, and the Germans threatening Atlantic sea lanes while they plowed toward Moscow, was likely a key reason that both Marshall and Stimson endorsed awpd-i without complaint. As historian Michael Sherry has observed, “Strategy, then, along with Roosevelt’s wishes about

how to fight the war, made the War Department amenable to a vision of air war that would have seemed repugnant and fanciful a few years earlier.”94

Although advocating strategic bombing, air planners under­stood that their proposal could not neglect the air needs of Army commanders, most of whom were skeptical of air power’s ability to achieve victory alone. Just as Gorrell had worked to convince Pershing that his plan for bombing Germany would not deny air support to ground forces, awpd-i specifically noted that air power would support an invasion of Europe if such an invasion proved necessary. Some airmen viewed the obligation to demonstrate that they would support their parent service as genuflection.95 Yet air planners could not ignore the concerns of the theater commander or Chief of Staff, who had to consider the possibility that indepen­dently applied air power might not prove decisive. That airmen received the green light to conduct strategic bombing was a trib­ute to the Andrews-inspired vision of George Marshall.

Marshall’s approval of awpd-г on the eve of Pearl Harbor guar­anteed that the Army Air Forces would use it as a blueprint once war began, but the blueprint was not balanced. Air planners paid a great deal of attention to Germany—the designated primary en­emy—and scant attention to Japan. In keeping with the tenor of the industrial web theory, they brushed aside such characteristics of the German state as its totalitarian government and Nazi ideol­ogy to focus almost exclusively on a mechanistic economic analy­sis. They also provided meager allowances for the unexpected— what Prussian military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz called “friction”—and the impact that such elements as chance, uncer­tainty, danger, and stress might have on an air offensive.96 The Ger­many that they depicted had mobilized completely, with its indus­try running at full bore in the wake of the assault on the Soviet Union. George and his group believed that the taut nature of the

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German economy would increase its vulnerability to a precisely aimed air offensive, because no reserve capacity would be avail­able to make up for the damage caused by bombing. The plan­ners, especially Kuter, were painfully aware of America’s failure to flex its economic muscle in World War I. They believed that American industry would not allow them to wage total war for two years, and they knew that the Germans were already waging war on a global scale. The logical conclusion, it seemed, was that German factories must be producing at peak capacity.

Awpd-i’s analysis of Japan’s war machine paled in comparison to the mountain of data accumulated on German industry. “The allowances for defensive measures in the Far East were skimpy, to say the least,” Hansell later observed. “It was presumed that the U. S. Navy would be the primary agency for this requirement.”97 While working in the Strategic Air Intelligence section, Hansell had tried to identify Japanese vital centers, but the attempt proved fruitless. “The Japanese had established and maintained a curtain of secrecy that we found absolutely impenetrable. There were not even any recent maps available,” he recalled.98 The lack of infor­mation on Japanese production capabilities plagued air leaders throughout the war, and Hansell would learn that frustration first­hand as commander of XXI Bomber Command in late 1944.

Though far from perfect, awpd-i marked the culmination of American air power thought from Billy Mitchell through the Air Corps Tactical School. Much of the plan—like much of the Tac­tical School theory that spawned it—was based on faith. “Op­portunities for reality testing were few”; most airmen dismissed the air power applied in Spain and China as too primitive,99 while the one concrete example of a modern air force attacking a mod­ern nation—the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain—did not con­form to American bomber technology, tactics, or strategy. Thus, the faith instilled by Mitchell, refined and dispensed by his Tacti­cal School disciples, and blessed by air leaders sharing his vision provided the fundamental underpinning of American air power convictions.

Several articles of faith stood out above the others: the concept of a generic industrial web theory, with its presumed ties between a nation’s war-fighting capability and will to resist; the presumed vulnerability of those ties to bombing, and the presumption that severing them would result in surrender; the belief that a prop­erly executed bomber offensive could not be stopped; and, finally, the progressive notion that a victory through air power would be quicker, and cheaper, than one gained through any other medium. At the same time, most airmen thought that an air power victory would vindicate an independent air force. The airmen subscrib­ing to those beliefs were both sincere and pragmatic. They ear­nestly believed in air power’s ability to win a war single-handedly, and in its ability to do so efficiently, yet they realized that with­out proof for their claims they were unlikely to obtain an auton­omous air force. Their faith in an independent air victory melded to their desire for an independent air service until the two became inseparable, as demonstrated by awpd-i.

In the end, individuals, as well as ideas, were the key elements producing a uniquely American bombing philosophy before Pearl Harbor. The distinctive backgrounds of Gorrell, Mitchell, George, Walker, Kuter, Hansell, Andrews, Spaatz, and Arnold—and count­less others—contributed directly to an American approach to air war that manifested itself against Nazi Germany and Imperial Ja­pan. Two years and eight days after the completion of awpd-i, the man who had found the Rex would lead more than one hun­dred B-17S in a dramatic raid against one of the major industrial targets of Hitler’s Third Reich. Curtis LeMay would play a key role in the effort to validate awpd-i’s progressive notions in both the European and Asian skies.

i. British Gen. Sir David Henderson pins the “Companion of the Distinguished Service Order” on twenty-eight-year-old Army Air Service Col. Edgar S. Correll in France,

April 1919. Relying extensively on British bombing proposals, Gorrell had authored America’s first plan for strategic bombing in 1917. (U. S. Air Force)

2. William “Billy” Mitchell spurred the development of progressive air power notions that guided a generation of American airmen. (U. S. Air Force)

3- Mitchell poses beside his command aircraft, the Osprey, a DeHavilland DH-4 from which he directed the bombing of the Qstfriesland in July 192.1. (U. S. Air Force)

4- Billy Mitchell’s bombers attack the Ostfriesland off the Virginia Capes, 2i July 1921. (U. S. Air Force)

j. Air Corps Tactical School students tackle mapping exercises during the 1930s at Maxwell Field, Alabama. (U. S. Air Force)

6. Maj. Gen. Frank Andrews, commander of the ghq Air Force, sits in the cockpit of the first в-17 to arrive at Langley Field, Virginia, 1 March 1937. (U. S. Air Force)

7. ghq Air Force B-17S intercept the Italian liner Rex seven hundred miles from New York City, 12 May 1938. (U. S. Air Force)

8.

Generals George Marshall, Frank Andrews, “Hap” Arnold, and Oliver Echols pose beside a glider at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, early in World War II. Marshall provided key support to Andrews and Arnold and their plans for a heavy bomber force. (U. S. Air Force)

9. (Opposite top) Hap Arnold and members of his air staff in 1941. Left to right: Lt. Col. Edgar P. Sorenson, Lt. Col. Harold L. George, Brig. Gen. Carl Spaatz (chief of staff), Maj. Gen. Henry H. Arnold, Maj. Haywood S. Hansel! Jr., Brig. Gen. Martin F. Scanlon, and Lt. Col. Arthur W. Vanaman. George and Hansell played key roles in designing awpd-i, the Army Air Forces plan for bombing Germany, while Spaatz would attempt to bring that plan to fruition as Eighth Air Force commander in 1942 and the commander of U. S. Strategic Air Forces in 1944-45. (U. S. Air Force)

10. (Opposite bottom) Ira Eaker directed VIII Bomber Command in t942. During 1943, he led Eighth Air Force in the desperate battles for air superiority over Europe. (U. S. Air Force)

її. (Opposite top) Brig. Gen. “Possum” Hansell, First Wing commander, Eighth Air Force, and Col. Curtis LeMay, 305th Group commander, stand beside a B-17 at an airfield in Britain in spring 1943. Two years later LeMay, a major general, replaced Hansel! in the Pacific as the commander of XXI Bomber Command. (U. S. Air Force)

12. (Opposite bottom) The Boeing B-17 “Flying Fortress” was the workhorse of Eighth Air Force. This “G” model sported a chin turret to ward off frontal attacks from Luftwaffe fighters. (U. S. Air Force)

13. (Above) The Consolidated B-24 “Liberator” was one of the two main heavy bombers for the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces in Europe. It could carry a larger bomb load than its counterpart, the B-17. (U. S. Air Force)

14- The crew of the в-17 Memphis Belle at an air base in Britain on 7 June 1943 after completing twenty-five missions over enemy territory. For many bomber crews in 1943-44 the outcome was not as fortunate. (U. S. National Archives)

t5. (Opposite top) Luftwaffe defenses claim а В-Г7. The heavy bomber crews of Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces paid a steep price to win the daylight air superiority needed to launch the Normandy invasion. (U. S. Air Force)

16. (Opposite bottom) Bomb release in an Eighth Air Force raid on a ball-bearing plant and an aircraft engine repair facility in Paris, 3 r December Г943. Following the costly raid against Schweinfurt on 14 October 1943, Eighth Air Force primarily attacked targets within range of escort fighters. Improvements in the P-47 “Thunderbolt” and P-51 “Mustang,” plus the addition of external fuel “drop tanks,” enabled bombers to have escort fighters to targets deep in Germany in early 1944. (U. S. National Archives)

17- A fighter pilot in World War I who shot down three German aircraft, “Tooey” Spaatz commanded Eighth Air Force in 1942 and then transferred to North Africa. He returned to Britain in 1944 as a lieutenant general and commander of the new U. S. Strategic Air Forces, with a mission to secure daylight air superiority over Europe to facilitate the Normandy invasion. (U. S. Air Force)

18. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Tooey Spaatz, and Maj. Gen. Lewis H. Brereton, the Ninth Air Force commander, at an airfield in Britain, May 1944. A month earlier Spaatz had turned over control of his heavy bombers to Eisenhower, and Eisenhower kept control of them until September to assure invasion support. (U. S. Air Force)

19- (Opposite top) Fifteenth Air Force B-24S pound Ploesti oil refineries in summer 1944. Despite the emphasis on supporting the Normandy invasion, Spaatz convinced Eisenhower to let him begin a concentrated attack on oil installations. (U. S. Air Force)

20. (Opposite bottom) The Messerschmitt factories at Regensburg, Germany, remained targets long after Curtis Lemay’s B-17S first attacked them on 17 August 1943. Flere, B-17S attack the complex on 18 December 1944. (U. S. Air Force)

21. (Above) Eighth Air Force B-17S unload incendiaries and high explosive bombs over Dresden on 14 February 1945 following a massive area attack by the RAF on the city the night before. Cloud cover obscured the American crews’ target, a rail junction near the city’s center, and most of their bombs fell on Dresden’s main residential district. (U. S. Air Force)

22.

B-17S from the 398th Bomb Group proceed to Neumunster, Germany, on 13 April 1945. By this point in the war the American portion of the Combined Bomber Offensive had devastated much of Germany’s industrial capacity and transportation network, but the cost

had been high for the attackers as well as the German populace. (U. S. National Archives)

23. (Opposite top) Frankfurt-am-Main in the aftermath of the Combined Bomber Offensive. Bombing wrecked most of Germany’s cities. (U. S. Air Force)

24. (Opposite bottom) Henry H. “Hap” Arnold became Commanding General of the Army Air Forces in June 1941 and soon led the mightiest air armada yet assembled. A driven, demanding leader, Arnold suffered four heart attacks during World War II. His first combat command came when he took charge of Twentieth Air Force in early 1944, and he directed the B-29 assault on Japan from his office in the Pentagon. (U. S. Air Force)

’ 5- (Opposite top) The Boeing в-2.9 “Superfortress” was the epitome in bomber technology, sporting pressurized crew compartments plus four gun turrets remotely controlled via General Electric analog computers. The aircraft was World War IBs most expensive weapon system, with a three-billion-dollar price tag. (U. S. Air Force)

z6. (Opposite bottom) Brig. Gen. Haywood S. “Possum” Hansell, XXI Bomber Command commander, briefs B-29 air crews before a mission to Tokyo in late 1944. His steadfast commitment to prewar progressive notions about bombing contributed to Arnold’s decision to replace him with LeMay. (U. S. Air Force)

27. (Above) Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, far left, replaced Brig. Gen. Possum Hansell, center, as XXI Bomber Command commander in January 1945. LeMay, who had previously commanded XX Bomber Command in China, was replaced in that job by Brig. Gen. Roger M. Ramey, far right. (U. S. Air Force)

28.
Brig. Gen. Lauris “Larry” Norstad, who served on Hap Arnold’s advisory council as a colonel in 1943 before becoming a staff officer in North Africa and Italy, replaced Possum Hansell as Twentieth Air Force Chief of Staff in summer 1944. Norstad wielded considerable power in that position, especially after Arnold suffered his fourth heart attack of the war in January 1945. (U. S. Air Force)

29. The Etiola Gay dropped the atomic bomb “Little Boy” on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. (U. S. Air Force)

30. By June 1945 most of Kobe, one of prewar Japan’s four most populous cities, was in ruins. (U. S. Air Force)

31.

(Opposite top) Twentieth Air Force devastated Tokyo. (U. S. Air Force)

32. (Opposite bottom) Coi. Paul Tibbets’s Enola Gay is prepared to upload the atomic bomb for Fliroshima. (U. S. Air Force)

33. (Above) Nagasaki following the atomic strike on 9 August 1945.

(U. S. Air Force)

34- In the post-Vietnam era Col. John A. Warden III emerged as heir to the progressive notions that had sparked Billy Mitchell and Air Corps Tactical School instructors. Many of Warden’s ideas underpin current Air Force bombing doctrine. (U. S. Air Force)

Meanwhile, the invasion clock continued ticking, and Arnold grew increasingly frustrated. The Japanese had responded to the at­tacks on their homeland by launching two night raids from Iwo Jima against Saipan that wrecked four B-29S, left three more un­serviceable, and damaged six more.64 Hansell remained commit­ted to the high altitude, daylight, precision attacks. “I considered that the whole concept of strategic air warfare as a war-winning strategy, carried out by unified air command, was hanging in the balance,” he later wrote.65 At the suggestion of his chief of staff, he had attacked Tokyo with twenty-four bombers in a night raid at lower altitudes on 29 November with incendiaries—his B-29S had dropped high explosive bombs on the other raids—though the results remained disappointing. “I still feel that our primary effort should be by visual bombing, when possible, because it is always inherently more accurate,” Hansell wrote Arnold on 16 December, “but with the improvement in radar bombing, I feel that our efforts can be directed against our primary target every time and that it will not be necessary to waste our bombs on large city areas as a secondary effort.”66

Arnold likely never saw this bit of reasoning. Across the top of Hansell’s letter, he scrawled: “Gen. Norstad summarize for me— hha.” Brigadier General Lauris Norstad had replaced Hansell as Twentieth Air Force Chief of Staff when Hansell took over XXI Bomber Command. Norstad had been one of Arnold’s “fair haired boys” as an Advisory Council colonel in early 1943, and had served in staff positions in North Africa and Italy before returning to Washington DC in summer 1944. He observed Arnold’s impa­tience when Hansell delayed the initial в-29 raid against Tokyo, and watched the frustration mount as the poor bombing results from XXI Bomber Command arrived at the Pentagon. Norstad encouraged Hansell to send his problems to him, rather than Ar­nold. “If there are really serious major problems which you feel absolutely must be brought to his attention, don’t hesitate to do so,” he wrote Hansell on 7 December, “but I think the normal run of difficulties will only be an annoyance to him and can be better handled by me anyway.”67

Larry Norstad had developed his own ideas about how to ad­dress HanselPs difficulties, and many of those notions stemmed from observing targeting deliberations that continued among coa members. In September 1944, soon after he became Twentieth Air Force Chief of Staff, Norstad attended coa meetings regarding target priorities for Japan. Once more, the analysts considered the utility of attacking “urban industrial areas” and focused on the prospects of area bombing Zones I and II in Japan’s six most populous cities. Colonel John F. Turner remarked, “We have been intrigued with the possibilities.. . of complete chaos in six cities killing 584,000 people.”68 Turner noted that “successful” raids might produce even more casualties and that Japan’s industrial production would drop roughly 15 percent. Later calculations in­dicated that a drop of only 11 percent would occur, mostly from the output of machine tools, because Zones I and II contained fewer industries than originally thought.69

The analysts also considered the psychological impact that such raids might have. While their expert on Japanese culture thought that the panic and fear of fire might cause civilians to demand polit­ical reorganization, he did not believe that the Japanese would ac­cept unconditional surrender until the arrival of American troops.70 The coa members suggested that an “experimental” incendiary raid from Saipan or China against a densely populated area of a city would provide data from which they could make more accu­rate estimates. In the meantime, they agreed that aircraft factories, especially those producing engines, were priority targets and that the Saipan force should attack them, while XX Bomber Command in China should continue to attack steel production.

The coa’s September conclusions underpinned the 10 October 1944 report that they submitted to Arnold—their last formal prod­uct of the war. In it, the analysts culled the target systems that they believed would have the most telling impact on Japan’s war effort to three: the aircraft industry, urban industrial areas, and ship­ping. The analysts deemed that the U. S. Navy’s sea-control cam­paign had “checked the expansion of the Japanese economy and rendered the attack on steel through coke much less important,” and the same logic applied to other materiel resources.71

Most of the report focused on the forthcoming operations of the Marianas-based XXI Bomber Command. The committee mem­bers recommended that attacks begin against Japan’s five major aircraft engine plants, followed by “an attack upon the indus­trial areas of Tokyo, Yokohama, Kawasaki, Nagoya, Kobe and Osaka.” Such raids would “burn out all housing in Zones I and II” and likely “increase and prolong losses effected by precision attacks on war industries.”72 Still, the analysts noted that area bombing would minimally impact Japan’s “front-line strength” because of “the apparent existence of considerable stocks of air­craft components and of excess manufacturing capacity in tanks and trucks.”73 They recommended that area attacks “should be postponed until they can be delivered in force and completed within a brief period.”74 B-29S could also assist in isolating Japan by mining sea lanes.

The committee members further stressed flexibility in adopting their proposed program. They noted that once bombing began from the Marianas, it might reveal “that Japanese fighter defense is so ineffective that attack upon the aircraft industry should not be given precedence over a mining campaign or attacks on urban industrial areas.” The analysts further called for a “trial attack against an industrial area on Kyushu or Honshu” during the ini­tial phase of XXI Bomber Command operations before the force had built up to full strength.75 The target priorities listed in the re­port became the priorities sent to Hansell in November.76

Norstad in particular was impressed by the coa report and thought that its recommendations offered the best chance for air power to make a rapid—and decisive—contribution to victory. On 17 November he wrote Major General Lawrence Kuter, Ar­nold’s assistant chief for plans who frequently oversaw coa activ­ities: “The work of this Committee as represented by its report, was superior. Conclusions reached have been the subject of seri­ous study by this Headquarters and have lead [sic] directly to the directive covering the operations of this command for the next three months.”77 That same day Hansell was to begin bombing Japan’s aircraft industry from the Marianas, in accordance with the coa outline for operations. While those raids produced mea­ger results, they also showed that Japanese fighters offered fee­ble resistance to the в-29 force. Arnold remained impatient for bombing success, and Norstad deemed that the time had come to test the prospects of urban area attacks. On 18 December he sent Hansell a message to attack the main residential district of Nagoya with one hundred B-29S dropping the new м-69 gaso­line gel incendiary bombs.

Hansell responded to Norstad’s directive within hours. “I have with great difficulty implanted the principle that our mission is the destruction of selected primary targets by sustained and de­termined attacks using precision bombing methods both visual and radar,” he answered. “The temptation to abandon our pri­mary targets for secondary area targets is great and I have been under considerable pressure to do so, but I have resisted so far. I am concerned that a change to area bombing of the cities will undermine the progress we have made. However, I am accepting your No. s-18-2 [message number] as an order from you and a change in my directive and I will launch this operation next.”78 Norstad replied that XXI Bomber Command’s primary mission remained the destruction of Japanese air power, but the requested strike was a “special requirement resulting from the necessity of future planning.”79

Hansell did indeed attack Nagoya next. Yet he did so with forty – eight B-29S, not one hundred; his crews aimed at the Mitsubishi aircraft factory, not the city’s residential area; and they dropped м-76 incendiaries, not the M-69S that Norstad had requested— the five-hundred-pound м-76 could penetrate brick and concrete structures (like the roof and walls of the Mitsubishi factory), while the lightweight м-69 could not.80 On 27 December the bombers returned to Tokyo once more to attack the Nakajima factory with high explosive bombs, and once more the results were meager. That same day an exasperated Arnold, mindful of the impression that в-29 operations made on an American public eager for suc­cess against Japan—and retribution for the Bataan Death March and Kamikaze attacks—admonished Hansell:

To oversimplify our basic operating policy, it is our purpose to destroy our targets. For this reason we have avoided announcing in advance what we propose to do and we have carefully screened our news re­leases to avoid the public’s becoming overoptimistic. We want to let the results speak for themselves. However, we must accept the fact that we have a big obligation to meet. To fulfill this we must in fact destroy our targets and then we must show the results so the public can judge for itself as to the effectiveness of our operations. .. .

To me the best evidence of how you are getting along is the pic­tures of the destruction that you have accomplished against your pri­mary targets.81

On 28 December, Hansell’s press statement assessing his first raids against Japan appeared in several American newspapers. Despite praising the excellence of the в-29 and its crews, he also noted that “we have much to learn and many operational and other technical problems to solve.”82 Arnold decided that he had heard enough. He told Norstad to head to the Marianas and no­tify Hansell that he had been relieved from command.

War, no matter how it may be glorified, is unspeakably horrible in every form. The bomber simply adds to the extent of the horror, especially if not used with discretion; but when used with the proper degree of understanding, it becomes the most humane of all weapons.

• GEN. HENRY H. ARNOLD, JUNE 1943

I am concerned that you will not appreciate the tremendous damage that is being done to the German morale by these attacks through the overcast, since we cannot show you appreciable damage by photographs________________ Just imagine for yourself bombs hitting Wash­

ington and the Pentagon Building through a thick snowstorm. What will it do? The Ger­man people cannot take that kind of terror much longer."

• LT. GEN. IRA C. EAKERTO ARNOLD, NOVEMBER 1943 17 August 1943

Thirteen minutes after the last of 139 B-17S from Eighth Air Force’s Fourth Bomb Wing had crossed the Dutch coast, the first German fighters appeared. Instantly, the bomber crews knew that their mis­givings about the mission against the sprawling Messerschmitt factory at Regensburg were justified. The daylight raid would mark the deepest penetration into Germany yet for an Ameri­can bomber force, and would occur in tandem with an assault by 222 B-17S of the First Bomb Wing against the ball bearing plants at Schweinfurt, responsible for almost 50 percent of Germany’s output. Both the Regensburg and Schweinfurt formations would proceed to their targets largely unescorted despite sixteen squad­rons of Spitfires and eighteen squadrons of P-47S that accompa­nied them across the English Channel, because no Allied fighter possessed the range to fly beyond the German frontier.

Eighth Air Force planners, though, had devised a scheme to get the bombers to their targets and back relatively unscathed. The Fourth Bomb Wing would depart for Regensburg fifteen minutes before the First Wing followed it for Schweinfurt, which would prevent German fighters from attacking both formations on the way to their targets. The Regensburg mission would initially draw the Germans’ attention, and by the time the First Wing’s bombers approached Schweinfurt, the German fighters would have landed to refuel and rearm, which would allow the Schweinfurt force to proceed to its target unhindered. In the meantime, after the Fourth Wing bombed the Messerschmitt complex at Regensburg, it would avoid further combat by flying south across the Mediterranean to land in North Africa. The Schweinfurt bombers would then bat­tle the rearmed German fighters on the trip home to British bases. If everything worked as planned, the Germans would suffer ma­jor damage to two of their most important war-making facilities, and the American bombers would inflict that pain at minimal cost to the attacking force.1

Yet the plan that appeared so appealing on paper turned out to be lacking in practice. To succeed, it required near-perfect weather, crisp coordination between multiple layers of command, and zero mishaps as two large formations of heavy bombers took shape in the skies over East Anglia. Those demands were a lot to ask for from a bombing force that had never flown so far across hos­tile territory. Pre-mission briefers told crews to expect “negligi­ble” opposition, but the airmen had routinely flown missions that summer that produced loss rates approaching 10 percent, and ex­pected the worst. Their fears increased when dense fog shrouded their British bases that morning. “The mission itself started under a cloud of doubt and we didn’t know until the last minute whether it would be scrubbed or not,” Colonel Curtis LeMay, the Fourth Bomb Wing Commander, said afterward. “Finally, 26 minutes be­fore the take off, we received word from Bomber Command that the mission would go on.”2

The delayed notification plus the thick fog produced a cor­responding delay in getting the bombers airborne. LeMay had trained his crews extensively in instrument take-offs, but even he called the assembly of his seven groups of B-17S “miraculous” given that they had to climb through two dense layers of over­cast.3 The formation finally departed for Regensburg ninety min­utes behind the time originally scheduled. Meanwhile, LeMay’s counterpart commanding the First Bomb Wing, Brigadier General Robert Williams, did not receive the take-off order until almost an hour and a half after LeMay got the word—which resulted in a departure for Schweinfurt five hours later than the originally scheduled time and almost four hours after LeMay’s Fourth Wing had left. Rather than cancel the Schweinfurt part of the mission, the Commander of VIII Bomber Command, Brigadier General Frederick Anderson, determined that the importance of the tar­gets justified the risks involved in dispatching the two bomb wings individually.4 As a result, almost three hundred Luftwaffe fight­ers were available to attack both formations for the duration of their time over the Reich.

Unlike the dismal weather in Britain, German skies were crys­tal clear, making them ideal for bombing—and for fighter assaults against the bombers. LeMay’s B-17S formed a stream fifteen miles long at staggered intervals from sixteen thousand to twenty thou­sand feet. A Messerschmitt Me-i 10 quickly positioned itself along­side the formation, out of range, and relayed information to wait­ing German fighters. Colonel Beirne Lay Jr., who flew as a copilot in the bomber stream’s last squadron, later wrote: “I had the lone­some foreboding that might come to the last man about to run a gauntlet lined with spiked clubs.’” An enormous aerial melee soon engulfed the bombers. Lay described what transpired:

Swinging their yellow noses around in a wide U-turn, the 12-ship squadron of Me-i09’s came in from 12 to 2 o’clock in pairs and in fours and the main event was on.

A shining silver object sailed past over our right wing. 1 recog­nized it as a main exit door. Seconds later, a dark object came hur­tling through the formation, barely missing several props. It was a man, clasping his knees to his head, revolving like a diver in a triple somersault. I didn’t see his ‘chute open.

А в-17 turned gradually out of the formation to the right, main­taining altitude. In a split second, the в-17 completely disappeared in a brilliant explosion, from which the only remains were four small balls of fire, the fuel tanks, which were quickly consumed as they fell earthward. …

1 watched a B-17 turn slowly out to the right with its cockpit a mass of flames. The copilot crawled out of his window, held on with one hand, reached back for his ‘chute, buckled it on, let go and was whisked back into the horizontal stabilizer. I believe the impact killed him. His ’chute didn’t open.6

The hellish fury continued incessantly for an hour and a half, and abated only after the German flak intensified as the bomb­ers approached the target. Lay estimated that the formation had suffered more than two hundred individual fighter attacks, and took grim satisfaction in seeing a column of smoke rising from the Messerschmitt factory once the B-17S headed for the Alps.

The costs of the double strike on Regensburg and Schwein – furt were staggering. LeMay’s Fourth Wing lost 24 B-17S—each carrying ten men—and abandoned almost 60 of the aircraft that made it to North Africa because of heavy damage. Williams’s First Wing, which suffered through a barrage of fighters that met them on both the inbound and outbound legs to Schweinfurt, lost 36 bombers, with another 27 of those that made it back written off. All told, in terms of aircraft shot down, written off, and aban­doned, the missions to Regensburg and Schweinfurt cost Eighth Air Force 147 bombers—40 percent of the attacking force.

For their efforts the American airmen shot down forty-eight Ger­man fighters (they claimed in excess of one hundred), with another twelve too damaged to fly again.7 The Messerschmitt complex at Regensburg, responsible for half of Germany’s fighter production, lost three weeks of output, or roughly one thousand Me-io9S. The attack on Schweinfurt achieved meager results. While damaging three of the five ball bearing factories, Williams’s bombers had lit­tle impact on the machine tools that produced the bearings. The Germans negated the destruction that had occurred by turning to reserve stocks and buying additional bearings from Sweden. s

Despite his heavy losses and the limited damage inflicted, Ma­jor General Ira Eaker, the Eighth Air Force Commander, still con­sidered the industries in Regensburg and Schweinfurt worthy ob­jectives for his bombers. The balding, forty-seven-year-old Eaker was fond of late-night poker games with his staff, but to him Re­gensburg and Schweinfurt were not gambles—they were exactly the types of targets that would hurt Germany’s war-making ca­pability the most. Though a fighter pilot for most of his career, he was well-versed in the principles of high altitude, daylight, precision bombing and had graduated from the Air Corps Tacti­cal School in 1936. Hap Arnold had chosen him as coauthor for two books promoting air power during the late 1930s, plus Ar­nold had also made him Chief of Air Corps Information. With a degree in journalism from Southern Cal, a charming smile, and a tremendous ability to convey his ideas (his promotion of the Rex intercept was just one example), Eaker had been an apt choice to help carve the American public’s image of air power. Arnold believed him well suited to lead Eighth Air Force after its initial commander, Tooey Spaatz, departed England in late 1942 to take a command in North Africa.

Eaker had previously led VIII Bomber Command, the bomber component of Eighth Air Force, and had no illusions about the challenges of serving as the Eighth’s overall commander in 1943. Bombers, as well as air crews, arrived slowly in Britain, but Eighth Air Force was, at the time, the only American combat unit capa­ble of attacking Germany. Dismayed by the losses from Regens­burg and Schweinfurt—German defenses had shot down 15 per­cent of his attacking force—and disappointed that he could not accompany his crews in the air (his knowledge of the Normandy invasion and the cracking of the German “enigma” codes pre­vented him from leading the Schweinfurt raid),9 he had no inten­tion of slowing his air campaign’s momentum. He was convinced that the destruction of Germany’s vital centers would hasten the war’s end, and ultimately yield a victory less costly in Allied man­power than a war without strategic bombing. In the meantime he would continue his appeals for more bombers and crewmen while he continued his effort to deal a mortal blow to the Nazi war machine.

LeMay was Arnold’s choice for a successor. With the establish­ment of bases in the Marianas, the offensive from China had lost its urgency, and Arnold directed his staff in late September to study the implications of withdrawing the B-29S from Chengtu.83 A month and a half later he told LeMay to prepare to take XX Bomber Command to a new location. Arnold added, “I cannot at this time tell you where you will go or when your bases will be ready” and thus LeMay would likely have to stay put “for a mat­ter of months.”84 HanselPs dismissal changed the equation. More­over, Hansell was a brigadier general, LeMay wore two stars, and LeMay was а в-29 commander who was in-theater and avail­able.8” Arnold ordered LeMay to proceed to Guam, the new site of XXI Bomber Command, and to arrive there immediately after Norstad. Once Norstad conveyed the news to Hansell, Arnold wanted LeMay available to discuss operations with the man that he would replace.

Hansell accepted his relief with a minimum of complaint, though his ten-page, typed letter to Arnold on the eve of his departure from Guam—a highly detailed discussion of problems that he had faced leading XXI Bomber Command—typified his commu­nications with his boss. At the end of his report, Hansell stated: “I feel, on reflection, that I have erred in not passing on to you my problems in more detail. I have felt that my first consider­ation should be to solve my problems as best I could, rather than to send complaints to you. Perhaps I have overdone this concep­tion.”86 Ironically, such lengthy explanations of why he had failed to achieve success probably contributed to Hansell’s relief. In con­trast, LeMay had provided short, pithy summaries of his results directing XX Bomber Command. Those synopses usually con­tained bomb tonnages along with the amount of damage inflicted to the target—“hard” data that Arnold could show his Joint Chief counterparts to justify his control of Twentieth Air Force and its expensive bombers—and that Arnold could himself use as sol­ace that his B-29S were on their way to achieving decisive results. “Statistics of tons of bombs dropped and of sorties flown are eas­ily compiled, seem factual and specific, and are impressive. Pho­tographs of burned-out cities also speak for themselves,” Han – sell later remarked.87

LeMay fully appreciated the desire for tangible results in Wash­ington dc, but his selection to lead XXI Bomber Command stemmed as much from his flexible attitude, especially his willingness to try new bombing methods, as it did from the numbers that he actu­ally produced. The initial bombing by XX Bomber Command, in­cluding several raids after LeMay had taken charge, was partic­ularly poor. A December 1944 study of the command’s first ten missions revealed that only 269 bombs out of 5,554 fell within one thousand feet of the aiming point, followed by the comment: “A look at planes lost on these missions brings the realization that it cost us one в-29 to place twelve 500 G. P. [General Pur­pose] bombs within 1,000 feet of the target.” Arnold underlined that sentence and wrote in the margin beside it, “Oh, Lord!”88 The numbers improved as a result of LeMay’s rigorous training policies, yet LeMay—like Hansell in the Marianas—stressed pre­cision attacks against specific industrial targets.

Not until an 18 December mission against the Chinese city of Hankow did LeMay conduct an area attack. He initially opposed the raid, but ordered it in response to requests from Lieutenant General Albert C. Wedemeyer, commander of American forces in China, and Major General Claire Chennault, Commander of Fourteenth Air Force, to attack the city that was a key staging area for a Japanese offensive. Eighty-four B-29S dropped 511 tons of incendiaries that burned down half of Hankow and produced a smoke cloud that billowed three miles high.89 Even though Ar­nold had not ordered the raid, he wrote Secretary of War Henry Stimson that it provided a valid test of the “efficacy” of firebomb­ing and was significant “from a long range as well as an immedi­ate viewpoint.”90

Arnold was always looking ahead, because he knew that he had limited time to affect the outcome of the Pacific War. Hansell later reflected upon the overriding importance of achieving rapid results: “‘Time’ had become an obsessive compulsion—the time for the invasion of Japan. Washington placed great stress upon the end of the war, emphasizing that this carnage must not go on a single week longer than necessary to achieve victory.”91 The pro­gressive vision had indeed become an obsession for Arnold, who realized that the в-29 offensive from the Marianas was the Army Air Forces’ last, and best, chance to secure the ideals espoused by his friend and mentor Billy Mitchell—which included service in­dependence. “I am still worried,” he wrote Norstad on 14 Janu­ary. “We have built up ideas in the Army, the Navy, and among civilians of what we can do with our B-29S. . . and yet. . . our average delivery rate against Japan is very, very small. . . . Unless something drastic is done to change this condition soon, it will not be long before the в-29 is just another tactical airplane.”92 Three days later he collapsed with his fourth heart attack of the war. The pursuit of decisive results with air power would continue, but, during its key phase in the Pacific War, the newly minted five-star Commanding General of the Army Air Forces would no longer appear at the forefront of the в-29 campaign. Instead, the stan­dard bearer of the Twentieth Air Force’s effort to score a knock­out blow now became its Chief of Staff, Larry Norstad.

LeMay and Norstad had communicated frequently during LeMay’s tenure with XX Bomber Command, and both shared Ar­nold’s views about the b-29’s importance to the war effort as well as to future force structures. “I think we all agree that the compo­sition and size of our post war Air Force depends a great deal on the в-29 performance in the Pacific,” LeMay wrote Norstad on 16 November 1944.95 Norstad concurred, telling LeMay after his assumption of command in Guam: “I am convinced that the XXI Bomber Command, more than any other service or weapon, is in a position to do something decisive.”94 Those perspectives mir­rored Arnold’s, and his guiding hand never truly left Twentieth Air Force as he read mission reports and message traffic from his recuperation bed in Coral Gables, Florida. Still, Arnold could not actively lead the force that mattered most to him, and he would have to count on Norstad and LeMay to make his vision of rapid success a reality. “General Arnold was absolutely determined to get results out of this weapons system,” LeMay recalled.95 The new commander of XXI Bomber Command did not intend to dis­appoint his ailing boss.

LeMay soon realized that satisfying Arnold—and Norstad— would not be easy. LeMay was especially upset with the staff that Hansell had left him, which he described to Norstad as “practi­cally worthless.” He further told Norstad that Rosy O’Donnell’s Seventy-third Wing was “in bad shape” and that “you better start warming up a sub for Rosy in case we have to put him in. … I get the impression from Rosy on down they think the obstacles too many and the opposition too heavy to crash through and get the bombs on target.”96 Much as he had with XX Bomber Com­mand, LeMay started an intensive training program for his crews in the Marianas. Yet he discovered that training alone would not cure the problems that had plagued Hansell.

Like his predecessor, LeMay believed in the merits of high alti­tude, daylight, precision bombing against specific targets essential to enemy war production. That faith could not overcome the ob­stacles of wind, clouds, and distance. Jet stream winds continued

to scatter bombs, clouds frequently obscured targets, and 1,600- mile flights to and from cities like Tokyo and Nagoya tested the limits of the b-29’s range, often leading to ditchings on the way back to the Marianas. From his 20 January assumption of com­mand through the first week of March, LeMay conducted six precision raids, and all produced miserable results. A 27 January attack by seventy-six B-29S on Hansell’s nemesis, the Tokyo Na- kajima aircraft plant, placed no bombs on the target at a cost of nine Superfortresses.97

While writing a work based to a substantial degree on historical records may appear to be an individual project, it is not—it re­quires a tremendous amount of assistance from many other people. Moreover, such an endeavor also requires a substantial amount of time. Accordingly, I must first thank Major General Robert Steel, usaf, and the staff of the National War College for providing me with a sabbatical year that allowed me the necessary time to com­plete a project that has long occupied my attention.

Archival collections provided many of my sources, and I must make special mention of some of the archivists who gave me in­valuable assistance. At the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, Ms. Lynn O. Gamma, Dr. James H. Kitchens, and Mr. Joseph D. Caver all were tremen­dously helpful. Joe in particular was wonderful, tracking down answers to questions that I had, and finding many of the photo­graphs used in this book. At the Air Force Office of History at Bolling Air Force Base DC, Dr. Roger Miller and Ms. Mary Lee Jefferson also provided many excellent photographs, several of which I had never before seen. Mr. Jeff Flannery and Ms. Jennifer Brathovde at the U. S. National Archives offered essential guidance as I plowed through manuscript collections. In the Special Col­lections branch of the U. S. Air Force Academy Library, I received considerable help from the masterful archivist (now retired), Mr. Duane Reed, as well as from Dr. Edward A. Scott, the Director of Academy Libraries. The superb staff at the National Defense University Library, including Ms. Carolyn Turner, Ms. Rosemary Marlowe-Dzuik, and Ms. Kimberley Jordan, graciously and ex­peditiously responded to my many requests.

I must also thank the “it gurus” of National War College, Mr. Anthony Muschelli and Mr. Peter Pettigrew, who kept me “logged in” to the National Defense University network throughout my sabbatical. I could not have written this book without their tireless efforts. National War College’s Dr. Chris Bassford, who also has a considerable amount of it expertise (besides being our Clause – witz guru!), graciously gave much of his time to refine many of the photographs that I selected.

For suggestions, advice, and consultation, I am grateful to many people as well. Ms. Heather Lundine and Ms. Bridget Barry at University of Nebraska Press provided me with a multitude of use­ful tidbits that I would never have considered and made this book much better than it otherwise would have been; I also appreciate the sage advice of Ms. Sarah Steinke, the copy editor. Dr. David Mets, a dear friend and outstanding historian who taught with me at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, provided a critique of the first two chapters that I took to heart. Professor Emeritus Gerhard Weinberg—the historian of the Second World War—also provided me with an invaluable critique of my chap­ter drafts. Students from the National War College and Industrial College of the Armed Forces in my “Air Power and Modern War” class during the past decade never failed to challenge my thinking, as did Air Force Colonel Peter Faber—a wonderful air power his­torian—who twice taught the class with me. Air Force Lieuten­ant Colonel Rondall Rice, author of the excellent book The Pol­itics of Air Power: From Confrontation to Cooperation in Army Aviation Civil-Military Relations, read the manuscript and pro­vided me with sound recommendations. Rondall, a fellow North Carolinian, was one of my advisees when I taught at the Air Force Academy, and his assistance is a classic case of the student instruct­ing the teacher. My next-door neighbor, Dr. (and physicist) Les­lie Cohen, gave me many useful insights in frequent discussions. Former students at the University of North Carolina—and current

Air Force officers—Chris Holland, Sheila (Johnson) Baldwin, Jes­sica Rice, Bob Champion, and Wendy (Williams) Walker provided continued encouragement and advice. Air Force Colonel “BA” Andrews, who has taught at both National War College and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, provided invaluable sug­gestions, both in terms of research and structure.

Professor Peter Maslowski, who has served as my mentor since 1982 when I became one of his graduate students at the Univer­sity of Nebraska, provided continual support and a tremendous critique of an early draft of this work. I never cease to be amazed by his continued drive for excellence and his absolute commit­ment to making his students better people—in all facets of life. Pete has been my definition of the ideal teacher for as long as I have known him, and he is the example I have tried to emulate throughout my teaching career.

This book would not have occurred without the guidance pro­vided by two key people in my life—my father-in-law and my fa­ther. My father-in-law, Dr. David Maclsaac, wrote the definitive study of World War II’s U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey, and taught me when I was a senior cadet at the Air Force Academy—long be­fore his daughter Donna caught my eye. He was a rigid disciplinar­ian when it came to historical scholarship then, and nothing has changed in almost thirty-five years since. He read an early draft of this work and took me to task on many parts of it, and the result­ing product is far better than it would have been without his com­ments. I cannot thank him enough for his help—in this endeavor and many others—and I dedicate this book in part to him.

My dad—Walter Allen Clodfelter Jr.—is a part of Ameri­ca’s greatest generation, and served in a control tower on Tin­ian during the early morning of 6 August 1945 when the Enola Gay took off on its fateful mission to Hiroshima. His stories of what it was like in the closing stages of the war—to include talk­ing down a squadron of Mustangs through a solid overcast over

Tinian’s runway—planted the seed that got me interested in the Air Force and air power, and I’m sure were instrumental in my decision to attend the Air Force Academy. Fie also read an early draft of this work and, as the most meticulous proofreader I have ever seen, pointed out errors I would not otherwise have caught, as well as asked me “big picture” questions that I had not consid­ered. He is a continual source of inspiration, and I dedicate this book in part to him.

Despite the considerable advice and assistance that I have re­ceived, the responsibility for all that is written is mine alone, and my work does not necessarily represent the views of the National War College or any government agency.

I have already mentioned the role that my father played in help­ing me craft this work, but I must also mention Mom as well, for together my parents provided an unceasing amount of guidance and support. I also cannot fail to mention Donna, for without her this project would never have happened. She never doubted my instincts, constantly encouraged me through difficult peri­ods, plus gave me that greatest of all commodities—time—and she never laughed too much when I came bursting through the door after a run on the GW Parkway Trail and madly scrambled to find a pen and paper.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge Coach Roy Williams and the National Championship North Carolina basket­ball team of 2008-9. As a die-hard Tar Heel who will have part of his ashes scattered at the Old Well, I was consistently thrilled and inspired by the exploits of Tyler Hansbrough, Ту Lawson, Wayne Ellington, Danny Green, Deon Thompson, and company as they brought back a fifth ncaa Championship to Chapel Hill. I can’t guarantee that it helped the quality of my research and writing, but I’m certain that it didn’t hurt.

M. C.

Mount Vernon, Virginia

ХІІ

SOURCE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Portions of chapter 2 previously appeared in “Molding Airpower Convictions: Development and Legacy of William Mitchell’s Stra­tegic Thought,” in The Paths of Heaven: The Evolution of Air – power Theory, ed. Philip S. Meilinger, 79-114 (Maxwell Air Force Base al: Air University Press, 1997).

Portions of chapters 2 and 3 previously appeared in “Pinpoint­ing Devastation: American Air Campaign Planning before Pearl Harbor,” Journal of Military History 58, no. 1 (1994): 75-102.

Portions of chapter 5 previously appeared in “Aiming to Break Will: America’s World War II Bombing of German Morale and Its Ramifications,” Journal of Strategic Studies 33, no. 3 (June 2010): 401-35.

Portions of chapter 7 previously appeared in “A Strategy Based on Faith: The Enduring Appeal of Progressive American Airpower,” Joint Force Quarterly, no. 49 (2008): 24-31, 150-60.

In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, most American air­men could not foresee the savage war of attrition that would soon transpire in the skies above Germany. Instead, as they prepared to mount an air campaign against Adolf Hitler’s “Fortress Europe,” most embraced the progressive views espoused by the Air Corps Tactical School and reflected on paper in awfd-i. Air leaders like Eaker and Spaatz intended to demonstrate that high altitude, day­light, precision bombing was not only the correct way to apply air power against an enemy nation, but also that its decisive ef­fects justified an autonomous American air force.

In June 1942, Spaatz arrived in Britain as the commander of Eighth Air Force, and he quickly shunned the night “area bomb­ing” campaign against German cities started by Air Marshal Ar­thur Harris and raf Bomber Command earlier that year. Spaatz had observed firsthand the German attempt to break British mo­rale with bombs during the Battle of Britain. He disdained the Brit­ish approach because he thought it much less efficient than the Americans’ precision efforts in daylight. “It wasn’t for religious or moral reasons that I didn’t go along with urban area bombing,” he later confided, but instead because precision attacks “could win the war more quickly.”10

Brigadier General Haywood “Possum” Hansell, a key archi­tect of awpd-i who twice commanded an Eighth Air Force Bomb Wing, agreed. “We preferred to avoid mass killings of civilians and we thought there was a better way to ‘fatally weaken’ an industrialized modern state,” he reflected.11 Hansell noted that “selective strategic air attack served to keep the losses of land war in Western Europe in World War II far below the levels they would have reached if decision had rested entirely upon victory on the battlefield.” American air commanders preferred “selective targeting” rather than area bombing to cripple “the entire war­supporting activity of the enemy nation, not simply making the Army’s task feasible and easier.”12

Hansell’s observation blended the notions of efficiency and effectiveness with the other great goal of American airmen—to achieve an independent air force. Hansell was not afraid to state that desire openly, and others did as well. Billy Mitchell’s former confidant, Frank Andrews, had worked hard for service auton­omy as commander of General Headquarters (ghq) Air Force before the war, and he continued his campaign once the war be­gan. As the Commanding General of Caribbean Command in July 1942, he implored Army Chief of Staff George Marshall’s deputy, Fieutenant General Joseph T. McNarney: “We must go further and place air power on an entirely equal footing with the

Army and Navy—and do it soon; a united Air Force entirely and completely coequal with the other two services, with one com­mander for all three.”

Andrews knew that his line of reasoning found a sympathetic audience. While ghq Air Force Commander, he had befriended Marshall and given him a favorable impression of air power, es­pecially air power in the form of heavy bombers. In addition, Mc – Narney, Marshall’s deputy, was an Army Air Forces pilot who had directed much of the St. Mihiel air offensive for Billy Mitchell in World War I. “I am firmly convinced that we must fight this Air Force question out now,” Andrews continued. “We are obliged to put our own house in order before we can win this war and you know as well as I do that our leadership in the Air Force is uncer­tain and worried and continually upset, and will remain so until this problem is solved.”13

Hap Arnold—the man at the pinnacle of the Army Air Forces pyramid—was indeed concerned about the status of the organi­zation that he led. Receiving his third star a week after Pearl Har­bor, he intended for the Army Air Forces to make the decisive con­tribution to victory over the Axis.14 To Arnold, the best way to achieve a telling impact was a bomber offensive against the Axis homelands. He wrote Robert Lovett, the Assistant Secretary of War for Air, in October 1942 that the mission of the Air Forces was “to destroy the capacity and will of the enemy for waging war,” adding that “no other offensive effort open to us can bring us this success.”15 Arnold emphasized air power’s ability to achieve “independent” results through strategic bombing, rather than its role in supporting ground or sea forces, not only because he be­lieved that strategic bombing could yield victory, but also because he thought that the success of the independent mission could lead to service autonomy. He told his commanders in June 1943: “Air power is still but an infant among the arms, and its useful growth

is dependent upon proper handling now. This is particularly true of heavy, long-range bombardment aviation which comprises the main striking power of air forces and which, alone, lifts an Air Force from the status of an auxiliary arm to that of an equal with arms which serve in other mediums.”16

Arnold worked relentlessly to assure that the strategic bombing mission spurred air force independence. No detail was too small to avoid his attention, and his intensity often rattled those who worked with him—one materiel officer fell dead from a heart at­tack after Arnold berated his performance early in the war.17 The non-stop parade of seven-to-seven days ultimately took its toll, and Arnold would have four heart attacks of his own in a twenty – three-month span from February 1943 to January 1945. As a re~ suit, Lovett and others close by, including relatively junior offi­cers like Lauris Norstad, Jacob Smart, and Hoyt Vandenberg, who served on Arnold’s handpicked Advisory Council, would some­times speak on Arnold’s behalf.18 All of them understood—and accepted—the Commanding General’s unwavering commitment to wrecking the Axis with air power—and to accomplishing that goal in such a way that air power’s contribution to victory would provide an unmistakable impetus for an independent air force.

Marshall did little to curb Arnold’s zeal. After becoming Chief of Staff, Marshall had added the study of air power to the Ar­my’s Command and General Staff College curriculum.19 Following Pearl Harbor he emphasized his “desire to impress upon higher commanders especially their responsibility for taking all measures which will contribute to our control of the air.”20 Andrews’s pre­war overtures influenced Marshall’s favorable view of the Army Air Forces, but so too did a shared strategic vision with the aaf Commanding General. The Army Chief of Staff seldom overruled Arnold during the war, and in many respects the Army Air Forces had already obtained the autonomy that so many of its leaders

ш

sought.21 Arnold was free, for the most part, to direct his air com­manders as he thought best, and he kept especially close tabs on those like Spaatz and Eaker who controlled heavy bombers. Mar­shall commented after the war that he had intended to make Ar­nold “as nearly as I could Chief of Staff of the Air without any restraint,” but added that Arnold was “very subordinate” and complemented Marshall’s strategic inclinations.22 Indeed, Arnold once confided to Eaker, “If George Marshall ever took a position contrary to mine, I would know I was wrong.”23

Marshall’s support proved insufficient, though, to give Arnold and his cohorts a true appreciation for the magnitude of the task they faced at the start of their air offensive against Hitler’s Eu­rope; moreover, they could not envision how the momentum gen­erated by a war against an equally committed foe would trans­form their progressive notions about bombing. The men who had crafted awpd-i’s requirements had done so based on their faith in a uniquely American approach to applying air power, but had no empirical evidence to back their claims. They largely dismissed pre­vious examples of bombing because those episodes did not corre­spond to the theory, equipment, and techniques that they deemed essential for a successful air campaign.24 Instead, as they began to assemble a bombing force in England, they did so with the be­lief that their precision air offensive would quickly and efficiently wreck German war-making capability—and hence its will to re­sist—in contrast to the raf’s bludgeon aimed directly at German morale. They were reluctant to heed their British counterparts who sported more than two years of bombing experience, including a disastrous daylight effort against Germany in r939-40.25

In July 1942, Eighth Air Force finally received its first comple­ment of 180 aircraft, which included 40 в-17 “Flying Fortresses.”26 Those B-17S were “E” models and differed significantly from the “C” models that the British had acquired in 1941. Unlike its pre-

decessor, the “E” model boasted increased fuel capacity that ex­tended its combat radius to four hundred miles with a five-thou- sand-pound bomb load, plus it had an armament of eleven.50 caliber machine guns, many in electric-powered turrets, that of­fered far more protection than the “C” model possessed.27 The protection was vital for a bomber force that would rely on self – preservation rather than fighter escort to survive its most grueling missions during its first year and a half of existence.

The fighters that initially arrived as part of Eighth Air Force did so to protect friendly bomber airfields from German attack; awpd-i’s designers had intended them for that purpose, not to protect bombers in flight.28 Although Hansell and a few others argued before the war that pursuit aircraft (fighters) would prove useful as bomber escorts, their pleas fell on mostly deaf ears, and those who listened did not believe that a suitable single-seat fighter could be built with sufficient range to accompany bombers to tar­get.29 The в-17 and the в-24 (the other four-engine bomber that comprised Eighth Air Force’s “heavy” bomber force) would have to fight through the toughest German defenses alone, as would two-engine “medium” bombers such as the в-25 and в-26 that also were a part of the Eighth.

Spaatz, for one, expressed little concern about the challenges ahead. One week after the Eighth Air Force’s first bombing raid of the war, a 17 August 1942 attack by 12 B-17S against a marshal­ling yard near Rouen, France, he wrote Arnold that with 1,500 heavy and medium bombers, plus 800 fighters to defend his air­fields, he would have “complete aerial supremacy over Germany within a year, with the resultant insurance of her rapid defeat.” He added: “The force listed above is considerably less than that proposed in awpd-i. However, the experience so far in this the­atre and our experience in the Far Eastern theatre indicates that contrary to the assumption in awpd-i, bombing accuracy does

m

not diminish under fire, but rather increases. As a result the force set up above, plus what the RAF may have, will in my mind ac­complish the objectives set forth in awpd-i.”30

The Rouen attack belied Spaatz’s optimism. He and Eaker, then Commander of VIII Bomber Command, had carefully selected the relatively friendly confines of French airspace for Eighth Air Force to make its first strike, and they had also picked their top crews to fly the mission. The pilot of the lead aircraft was one of the best in the Army Air Forces, Major Paul Tibbets Jr., and the gifted commander of the Ninety-seventh Bomb Group, Colonel Frank Armstrong Jr.—who would serve as the model for “Frank Savage” in the novel and movie Twelve O’Clock High!—flew as copilot. Eaker was also aboard one of the aircraft, despite having been stung by twenty-seven hornets while hunting the previous day.31 The target chosen was one that endangered few French ci­vilians, the weather was superb, and 108 Spitfires escorted the 12 “Flying Fortresses” to and from Rouen, which was well within their range. Yet, despite the fanfare resulting from America’s first bombing raid in Europe, few bombs hit the target, and the over­all results were marginal, though no bombers were lost.

Four similar missions against French targets followed, again with no bombers lost. When Arnold received Spaatz’s glowing assessment of the Eighth’s first week of activity—which claimed that fifty-eight of seventy-two B-17S had hit their targets, drop­ping 107 tons of bombs at twenty-two thousand feet—the aaf Commanding General proudly announced to a gathering of the Combined Chiefs of Staff in early September: “I realize that these operations were too limited to permit the drawing of definite con­clusions but the following statements are of interest: (1) Precision bombing can be conducted against the continent with B-i7’s from high altitudes. (2) These operations lend encouragement to a belief that daylight operations may be extended into the heart of Ger­

many, with or without fighter protection—if the proper size force is used.”32 Arnold aimed his ebullient declaration to mollify Brit­ish colleagues skeptical about the prospects for daylight bombing and eager for Americans to join the raf’s night campaign against Germany proper. Still, he wanted to see more such updates, which he considered tangible revelations of progress.

As the first week of Eighth Air Force operations drew to a close, President Franklin Roosevelt asked for an estimate of the num­ber of combat aircraft that the United States and its Allies should produce in 1943 to have “complete air ascendancy over the en­emy.”33 Arnold turned to Possum Hansell to provide the answer. Hansell, who served in England as air planner for Eieutenant Gen­eral Dwight Eisenhower, relied on his expertise in crafting awpd-i after he returned to Washington DC along with Eaker. Ten days later, Hansell and a small staff produced AWPD-42.

Much like awpd-i, AWPD-42 estimated America’s air needs in broad terms that went beyond the scope of the original request, and it also hearkened to the progressive notions that had guided the earlier plan. Hansell concluded that the United States would need to produce 139,000 aircraft in 1943, which the Army Air Forces would require 63,000 combat aircraft, organized into 281 groups. In the Pacific, defensive operations would dominate, but in Europe Hansell envisioned that 78 groups would fly from Great Britain, and many of those would begin a bomber offen­sive against Germany. That campaign would destroy German war­making capability in six months of constant bombing once the at­tacking force reached maturity.

AWPD-42 “contemplated a degree of destruction of internal Ger­many which would make invasion feasible and relatively inexpen­sive in terms of U. S. lives,” Hansell reflected.34 The destruction of the Luftwaffe again received emphasis as “an intermediate objec­tive with overriding priority,” followed by submarine yards, trans­

portation systems, electric power facilities, oil installations, and aluminum and rubber plants. The U-Boat scourge during the Bat­tle of the Atlantic dictated second billing for the submarine yards, but the remainder of the list differed little from awpd-i’s priori­ties. Hansell estimated that forty-two groups of heavy bombers, composed of 48 aircraft each and totaling 2,016 aircraft, would arrive in the United Kingdom by 1 January 1944, along with 960 medium bombers. The plan estimated 2,500 fighters as well, but did not consider them as bomber escorts. “Our heavy bombers are far superior in fire power and capacity to absorb punishment to the bombers used by the Germans,” AWPD-42 observed. “Our daylight penetration of German defenses has up to this time in­dicated a relatively low attrition rate to our bombers and a rela­tively high attrition rate to German fighters.”35

Despite awpd-42’s optimistic appraisal, prospects for bomb­ing Germany were dim, and the Rouen raid set the pattern for the next five months of Eighth Air Force operations. Spaatz never came close to receiving the 1,500 bombers he had mentioned in his prediction to Arnold and was unwilling to risk his meager force against targets in Germany. President Roosevelt had spurred bomber production with his May 1941 order to build 500 “heav­ies” a month, but it took time for assembly lines to gear up for that total. By March 1942 American industry topped the 4,000 mark in monthly aircraft production, yet 40 percent were train­ers, and transport aircraft and fighters consumed a sizable chunk of the rest.36 In October, just as the Eighth Air Force had gained four more groups of heavy bombers, each containing 35 aircraft, Spaatz received word that he had to surrender 1,250 airplanes and their crews to help create Twelfth Air Force for the invasion of North Africa.37 Eighth Air Force would have only seven “heavy” groups remaining, and of those, only two were fully operational at the end of October.38

Moreover, many crews arriving in Britain had minimal training in the types of missions they would have to fly. Most bombardiers trained at “high” altitudes of twelve thousand feet, rather than at the twenty-thousand-foot level they would frequently use for com­bat.39 Gunners arrived without having fired at tow targets. Pilots arrived with no experience in formation flying, essential not only for mutual protection, but also to assure concentrated bombing patterns. Not until LeMay appeared with his 305th Bomb Group in November 1942 did Eighth Air Force truly begin to solve the problems of formation flying. After several days of directing train­ing missions from the top turret of his в-17, he devised the “com­bat box” formation that massed three squadrons of six aircraft each to form a combat group of eighteen aircraft.40 Two or more combat groups formed a combat wing.

LeMay further took his best pilots, navigators, and bombar­diers, and made them “lead” crews who dictated by radio when the entire group formation dropped its bombs. Most B-17S had their bombsights removed and replaced by a machine gun in the aircraft’s Plexiglas nose. The resulting “pattern bombing” tech­nique ultimately became standard operating procedure for Eighth Air Force. “At one stroke you raised the accuracy of the whole Group from the common denominator to the level of your best man, and navigation improved accordingly,” he later remarked.41 LeMay also mandated that his crews fly “straight and level” two minutes prior to target to allow the gyro in the Norden bomb – sight to stabilize while the lead bombardier fed in ground speed and cross-wind information. Though initially apprehensive about the inability to take evasive action on the bomb run, crews found that their loss rate to German flak actually declined with a steady approach to target. LeMay had already reached that conclusion by using the artillery manual from his Ohio State rotc course to calculate that each piece of German antiaircraft artillery would have to fire 273 rounds to score one hit on а в-17.42

Yet LeMay’s innovations could not instantly—or entirely— erase the difficulties of bombing factories or rail yards from four miles up while under fire, and after five months of attacking targets in occupied Europe, Eighth Air Force’s loss rate inched upward, with little to show for the effort other than increasing claims of German fighters shot down.43 British concerns for merchant ship­ping losses mandated that many missions went against German submarine pens in French ports, but the sub pens were relatively small structures with thick concrete ceilings that were difficult to hit and more difficult to damage.44 In December, Spaatz left Eng­land to take command of Twelfth Air Force in North Africa, and Eaker took charge of the Eighth, with Brigadier General New­ton Longfellow taking Eaker’s former job as Commander of VIII Bomber Command. Eaker soon found himself on the defensive from the British, led by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who contended that the Americans should abandon daylight bombing and join the rap’s night campaign against German cities.

On the evening of 13 January 1943—while hosting his first dinner guests after becoming Eighth Air Force Commander— Eaker received a telephone call from General Eisenhower, order­ing him to report at once to Casablanca, where Churchill would meet Roosevelt in top-level strategy discussions. Arnold and the rest of the Combined Chiefs of Staff would attend as well, and Arnold wanted Eaker to dissuade the prime minister from recom­mending American night bombing to Roosevelt. Eaker needed lit­tle persuasion. Three months earlier, after comparing British and American bombing methods, he had written Spaatz: “I believe it is clearly demonstrated that the efficiency of day bombardment over night bombardment is in the order of ten to one.”45 Churchill had spoken favorably of Eaker in the past, and Arnold believed that he had the best chance to change Churchill’s mind. Eaker would return to the notion of efficiency to do so, but his version of efficient was one that maximized the experience of each force. When the prime minister appeared before the Eighth Air Force Commander in the uniform of an raf air commodore, Eaker was ready with a one-page memo stressing the persistent nature of a “round-the-clock” offensive that would give the Germans no re­spite from air attack. Churchill found the notion appealing and relented, though his change of mind also came at a price—Eaker promised the prime minister that the Eighth Air Force would be­gin bombing Germany before the end of the month.46

Yet at Casablanca it was a statement made by Roosevelt, not Churchill, that had the greatest impact on future American bomb­ing. The president and the prime minister had both determined well before the conference that they would pursue a policy of com­plete surrender for the Axis powers; Roosevelt believed that the failure to crush the German regime in World War I had spawned the stab-in-the-back theory that facilitated Hitler’s rise, and af­ter Pearl Harbor he contended that total victory was necessary to erase the threat of future militarism from Germany, Italy, and Ja­pan.47 At Casablanca, following the November 1942 North Afri­can landings, Roosevelt and Churchill aimed to assure their do­mestic publics—and their Soviet ally—that the Anglo-American forces would not make deals with German collaborators, nor would they make a separate peace with the Germans.48 As a re­sult, on 24 January 1943, the president announced to a group of reporters that the war aim sought by the Allied powers was the “unconditional surrender” of the Axis nations, which called for “the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and subjugation of other people.”44 He repeat­edly emphasized that objective for the war’s duration.’0

The ramifications of Roosevelt’s declaration were profound for

a bomber force that had yet to bomb the homeland of its stron­gest foe. On one hand, if American political and military leaders adhered to the guidelines of awpd-i and AWPD-42, and those es­timates proved correct, then the American air offensive against Germany should result in an efficient air campaign that eviscer­ated the Third Reich six months after intensive bombing began. On the other hand, if political and military leaders deviated from those guidelines—and Eaker’s promise to Churchill and the high demand for bombers in North Africa and elsewhere guaranteed that the Eighth Air Force would begin its portion of the “Com­bined Bomber Offensive” (сво) with less than the desired num­ber of aircraft—then the time required would take far more than half a year. Moreover, the six-month estimate assumed (1) a high degree of bombing accuracy on a consistent basis, (2) the bomb­ing force would prevail against German defenses in a reasonable amount of time, and (3) the Germans would yield as a result of destruction rendered. Those premises were thin reeds at best, and “unconditional surrender” made the final notion especially prob­lematic. Roosevelt’s declaration now defined German defeat not only as military loss, but also as the eradication of the Nazi re­gime. Using bombs to sever the delicate strands of Germany’s in­dustrial web might not suffice to cause the Germans to throw in the towel.51

The bleak production dismayed LeMay, Arnold, and Norstad, who all searched for alternatives to achieve success. Three days before he had taken charge of XXI Bomber Command, LeMay asked his friend Major General Fred Anderson, the Deputy Com­mander of Eighth Air Force Operations, for information on night photography that could assist in night bombing missions. “This weapon [the в-29] has tremendous possibilities, and I do not be­lieve that we have more than scratched the surface of new devel­opments, modifications, and methods,” LeMay stated. “Certainly, I will never permit the operations of a Command to which I am assigned to become routine and if there is a means of getting more bombs on to the target I propose to find it.”98 Arnold revealed similar thinking in his scribbles on a 30 January memorandum brought to him by his deputy, Lieutenant General Barney Giles. Giles noted that Japanese fighter opposition had increased in in­tensity over Tokyo and Nagoya, and wrote: “To offset this appar­ent concentration of fighter strength, we are instructing LeMay to direct his efforts at more widely dispersed targets and to engage in night fighter operations until our long-range fighters are avail­able for employment, which should be in the latter part of Feb­ruary.” Arnold marked out the second use of the word “fighter” and put parentheses around the word “night,” and then wrote “ok” across the sentence."

Norstad’s answer to overcoming the lack of precision was the same that he had provided Hansell—area attacks on the densely populated centers of Japanese cities. He had failed to get Arnold’s endorsement for his plan to commemorate Pearl Harbor’s anni­versary with a fire raid on the emperor’s Tokyo palace, though Arnold’s response indicated that he opposed the target, not the concept of incendiary attack. “Not at this time,” Arnold wrote on the proposal. “Our position—bombing factories, docks, etc., is sound. Later destroy the whole city.”100 He had not demurred earlier when Norstad directed Hansell to attack the center of Na­goya with incendiaries, which Arnold could convey to the press and the public as an attack on Japan’s cottage industry.

That rationale still applied, Norstad surmised, after the change at the top of XXI Bomber Command. Norstad suggested firebomb­ing the most densely populated part of Kobe, and LeMay com­plied. On 4 February—one day after almost one thousand B-17S targeted government buildings in Berlin’s main residential district with 2,279 tons °f bombs—sixty-nine B-29S attacked the cen­ter of Kobe with 159 tons of incendiaries.101 Norstad deemed re­sults of the raid “inconclusive” after reconnaissance photographs showed fire damage covering 0.15 square miles of the city and three of twelve industrial targets damaged.102 Eight days later he told LeMay to prepare to create a “conflagration that is beyond the capacity of fire-fighting control” in Nagoya.103 The following week LeMay received a directive stating that aircraft engine plants remained his primary objective, but “selected urban areas for test incendiary attack” were now second in priority.104

On 20 February Norstad requested a maximum effort, telling LeMay to choose between Nagoya and Tokyo and send as many aircraft as possible from the 73rd, 313th, and newly arrived 314th

Bomb Wings. LeMay countered that he needed additional time for training. Norstad responded that “circumstances beyond our control” dictated the mission, which historian Michael Sherry suspects was the savage fight for Iwo Jima then underway. Simi­lar logic had helped persuade LeMay to firebomb Hankow, and now the effort would support his own force—the capture of Iwo Jima would eliminate Japan’s ability to attack the Marianas and would provide an emergency landing field for battered B-29S that could not make it to the Marianas after a raid.

Yet another reason likely caused Norstad to demand an attack. On 16-17 February, Navy fighters and fighter bombers of Ad­miral Marc A. Mitscher’s Task Force Fifty-eight flew almost one thousand sorties over Tokyo, despite taking off in rain and snow squalls for many of their missions. They claimed more than five hundred Japanese aircraft destroyed, plus they also attacked the Nakajima aircraft engine factory and damaged it severely.105 The carrier raids garnered headlines in the United States, including from the New York Times, which described them as “the most daring operation of the Pacific war to date.”106 Recuperating in Florida, Arnold noted the attention that the Navy attack received, as well as another headline announcing the one-thousandth в-29 pro­duced by Boeing’s Wichita plant. He commented to Giles that if only sixty or eighty B-29S could attack Japan at a time, “a change in management is certainly in order.”107

LeMay needed little prompting in the aftermath of the Navy’s attack on Tokyo. On 19 February he sent 150 B-29S against the same Nakajima factory that he and Hansell had bombed so many times—and that the Navy had now bombed successfully—and once again scored no hits on it, this time at a cost of six bomb­ers.108 On 25 February, in response to Norstad’s prodding, XXI Bomber Command mounted its largest mission to date with 172 Superfortresses using radar to bomb Tokyo’s Zone I with 411 tons of м-69 incendiaries.109 The B-29S attacked at altitudes of twenty – three thousand to thirty thousand feet, though most crews bombed individually because heavy cloud cover prevented attacks in for­mation. LeMay had originally wanted them to return to the oner­ous Nakajima factory, but the prediction of dense clouds over the target—along with the lack of success against it thus far—per­suaded him to condone the area attack. Despite the B-29S’ disper­sal, the raid was brutally effective, and the bombs—which fell in the midst of a heavy snowstorm—burned out one square mile of the city. No B-29S were lost to Japanese defenses.

In his report to LeMay following the mission, Brigadier Gen­eral Thomas Power, commander of 314th Wing that had recently arrived at Guam, posed a question: If the crews had attacked at a lower altitude with a larger bomb load, would more destruction have resulted? The vile weather forced Power to fly his в-29 at a low altitude to Japan before climbing to twenty-five thousand feet to release his bombs, and the lower altitude reduced fuel con­sumption by producing less stress on the engines—which could have permitted his aircraft to carry more bombs.110 In the mean­time, LeMay dispatched 192 Superfortresses on yet another pre­cision strike against Tokyo’s Nakajima factory, and once more the results were dire; cloud cover obscured the target and most bombs fell in the city’s urban areas.111

LeMay began to accept the reality that the high altitude, preci­sion bombing of Japanese targets was impossible. In early March he ordered twelve of Rosy O’Donnell’s crews to bomb a tiny is­land near Saipan at an altitude of fifty feet with delayed-fuse bombs to determine the feasibility of a low-level attack.112 He also wrote Norstad:

We have been having a hell of a time with the weather lately. … If

we put our formations on top of it going in, the bomb load drops to

practically nothing. To try and beat these weather conditions, I am going to try to assemble a formation over Japan itself. I think we can get away with it a few times anyway.

Another out is to try some night bombing. I don’t believe it is an efficient method of operation but this is another case of a few bombs on the target being better than no bombs at all.113

LeMay knew that this letter would likely not reach Norstad before he saw Norstad in person; perhaps he wanted to provide a written rationale to justify the radical approach that he planned to take. On 2 March Giles had notified Arnold, “I am sending Norstad out to the Pacific to discuss questions with LeMay that can be ironed out only through personal contact,” and LeMay received word of the impending visit.114 He had little doubt what it meant, or that its impetus came from Arnold. “General Arnold needed results,” LeMay recalled. “Larry Norstad had made that very plain. In effect, he had said: ‘You go ahead and get results with the в-29. If you don’t get results, you’ll be fired.’”115

Norstad’s directive to attack Zone I in both Tokyo and Na­goya had not changed, and area bombing—with incendiaries— offered the best means to inflict some damage to Japan’s war effort as well as provide photographic proof of the damage ren­dered. LeMay knew that the night, low-level area attacks that he envisioned were certain to kill thousands of Japanese civilians, yet, based upon his calculations of Japanese defenses, they also provided the best chance for his crews to survive. His goal now matched the cold-blooded thinking that rationalized the obliter­ation of German cities—an air power-induced early end of the war that would save American lives. LeMay aimed to achieve it by losing the minimum number of his own men in the process,116 and he viewed his action as ethical as well as laudatory. “Actually, I think it’s more immoral to use less force than necessary, than it

is to use more," he later wrote. “If you use less force, you kill off more of humanity in the long run, because you are merely pro­tracting the struggle.”117

Like his counterparts in Europe, LeMay’s logic presumed that increased brutality would hasten victory, and that fewer people would die from his incendiary campaign than would perish if he failed to initiate it. That projected outcome, though, remained un­certain, and many Japanese would reach a different conclusion.

In October 1910, former president Theodore Roosevelt was in St. Louis campaigning for the Republican governor of Missouri, Herbert Hadley. Upon learning of an “International Aeronautic Tournament” outside the city, the energetic and always inquisitive Roosevelt demanded to see it. “TR” and Hadley arrived at Kin – loch Field on 10 October by an eighty-automobile motorcade— the largest such procession St. Louis had then seen—just as one of the Wright brothers’ six aircraft landed near the grandstand. The pilot of the fragile machine was Arch Hoxsey, a pince-nez- wearing aviator who earlier that year had made America’s first recorded night flight, and who had recently set an endurance rec­ord of 104 miles by flying non-stop to St. Louis from Springfield, Illinois. Hoxsey jumped out of the Model В biplane and walked to Roosevelt’s car through an array of Missouri National Guard troops surrounding the vehicle.

“I was hoping, Colonel, that I might have you for a passenger on one of my trips,” Hoxsey said to Roosevelt.[1]

“By George, I believe I will,” Roosevelt replied. He accompa­nied Hoxsey to the Model В and, to the surprise of those who had arrived with him at the air show, sat down in the passenger seat and said, “Let her go!”

After a four-minute spectacle above Kinloch Field that included a series of climbs and dives—punctuated by “oohs” and “ahhs” from the crowd below—Roosevelt became the nation’s first pres­ident to fly in an airplane. During the flight he pointed to a Sig­nal Corps building close by and had Hoxsey pretend to attack it. “War, army, aeroplane, bomb!” Roosevelt shouted as Hoxsey

flew back and forth above the installation. Onlookers mobbed TR once he landed, despite the best efforts of the Missouri guards­men to keep them away. When the crowd finally parted enough to give him a chance to speak, he triumphantly exclaimed, “By George, it was fine!”2

Roosevelt’s flight befitted the sense of American adventurism that he embodied, and it also befitted his role as a leader of the progressive movement in the United States. Indeed, as a standard – bearer of the progressives, Roosevelt was on the lookout for ways to improve the daily lives of American citizens, and the airplane offered to do just that. The “flying machine” portended revolu­tions in transportation and communications; commerce and trade would benefit enormously from its continued development. Yet as Roosevelt’s comment to Hoxsey above Kinloch Field indicated, the airplane also offered tremendous potential as an instrument of war. A generation of American airmen would view the airplane’s military promise in progressive terms—as the key to winning con­flicts quickly, cheaply, and efficiently.

For most Americans, though, progressivism had nothing to do with war. The movement, which spanned the nation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, affected many different groups and encompassed several disparate threads. All focused on progress and reform, and included efforts to reduce inefficiency and waste in manufacturing and business practices, eliminate corruption from government and business, increase the responsiveness of government institutions, promote fairness and equality for all social classes, improve working conditions and protect workers, and enhance the public’s general well-being. At its heart, progressivism promised change that was just, rational, positive, and efficient. Roosevelt emerged as a progressive leader of the Republican Party famous for his “trust busting” and would

later break away from the Republicans to form his own “Pro­gressive Party” in 1912. Democrat Woodrow Wilson, the winner of the 1912 election, also considered himself a progressive, and worked hard to assure the success of the “individual entrepre­neur” against the perceived evils of “big business.” The progres­sive movement’s span across political party lines demonstrated its wide national appeal.

The devastation and ugly realism of World War I ended the progressive era for most Americans; the repudiation of the Ver­sailles Treaty and Wilson’s League of Nations exemplified the pub­lic’s postwar rejection of the movement’s ideals. Yet for Army Air Service officers like Edgar Gorrell and William “Billy” Mitchell, the carnage and waste that they witnessed on the Western Front sparked the beginning of a progressive effort that was unique—an attempt to reform war by relying on its own destructive technol­ogy as the instrument of change. They were convinced that the air­plane—used as a bombing platform—offered the means to make wars much less lethal than conflicts waged by armies or navies.

The airmen contended that a clash of armies, with its subse­quent slaughter, was unnecessary to fight and win future conflicts. Instead, the truly vital ingredients of modern war—the essen­tial industries that produced weapons and fuel, key communica­tions centers, and lines of transportation—were vulnerable to at­tack from the air. The loss of those installations would not only wreck a nation’s ability to fight, it would also sap the will of the populace, because the same facilities needed to wage modern war were also those necessary to sustain normal, day-to-day life. Air­craft would destroy the vital centers through precision bombing— sophisticated technology would guarantee that bombs hit only the intended targets, and few lives would be lost in the process. The finite destruction would end wars quickly, without crippling [2]

manpower losses—maximum results with a minimum of death— and thus, bombing would actually serve as a beneficial instru­ment of war.

To assure the success of their ideas, the advocates of “progres­sive air power” also called for reforming America’s defense struc­ture, with the establishment of a separate air force as a new armed service. They set out to convince the nation of that perceived need, and along the way recruited a core of like-minded officers who took their ideas and further refined them. The conviction that the “strategic bombing” of vital centers offered the solution to fight­ing and winning future wars efficiently blended with the belief that service autonomy was essential to assure the bomber’s proper wartime use against industrial targets—not against armies or na­vies. Ultimately, the two notions became inseparable—the ability of air forces to fight and win wars independently of armies and navies justified an autonomous air force—and an autonomous air force was necessary to assure that air power could efficiently achieve victory on its own.

By the eve of Pearl Harbor, Mitchell disciples like Henry H. “Hap” Arnold and Frank Andrews, and a legion of officers in­culcated with Mitchell’s notions refined by the Air Corps Tacti­cal School, combined to produce a substantial coterie of airmen who subscribed to a belief in “progressive air power.” Most would not have used such a term to describe their convictions; Mitchell himself used the term rarely. Yet they were just as committed to reforming war as the muckrakers had been to reforming indus­trial working conditions.

Collectively, the airmen subscribed to the following central tenet: air power was a more efficient military instrument than land or sea power because it offered a way to fight and win wars more quickly and less expensively (in terms of lives lost on both sides) than did armies or navies. The plan devised by former Tac­tical School instructors in August 1941 for using American air power in the ongoing European war called for strategic bomb­ing to wreck Germany’s war-making ability to such a degree that an invasion of the continent might prove unnecessary. Arnold, by then Commanding General of the Army Air Forces, approved the plan, as did Army Chief of Staff George Marshall and Secre­tary of War Henry Stimson. The promise of progressive air power had broad appeal.

The reality of war—which revealed that American bombers and their crews were rarely capable of pinpoint destruction during com­bat conditions, and included an overarching political objective of “unconditional surrender” that allowed unlimited devastation— generated a momentum of its own that undermined several of the progressive notions that had guided American airmen before the conflict. By 1945, “progressive air power” meant quickly ending the war to reduce American casualties. Still, many air command­ers continued to believe that the destruction of vital centers— despite the accompanying death and desolation—not only has­tened the war’s end, but also ultimately saved lives on both sides. As a result, the progressive mindset that guided airmen on the eve of war never really disappeared during its conduct.

The progressive notions of beneficial bombing—germinated in World War I and tested in World War II—became the basis of doctrine for an independent Air Force in the immediate postwar era, and continue to guide Air Force thought today.

On 27 January 1943, Eighth Air Force finally launched its first raid against Germany when heavy bombers attacked naval facil­ities at Wilhelmshaven. Only 91 bombers flew on the raid, and of those, only 53 located the cloud-obscured target. Still, only 2 B-24S and і в-17 were lost, and crews claimed 50 German fight­ers shot down.52 After dismal weather grounded the bombers for much of February, the Eighth attacked the submarine construction yard at Vegesack on 18 March with 91 в-17s and B-24S, record­ing many hits on the target while losing only 3 aircraft.53 When 107 B-17S raided the Focke-Wulf factory at Bremen a month later, fierce German defenses claimed 16 bombers, with another 46 dam­aged.54 Eaker tried to husband his strength in early 1943 by inter­spersing his attacks on Germany with raids on targets in France and the Low Countries, where he could count on fighter escorts. The Bremen mission indicated that stern tests awaited Eighth Air Force over the Reich.

Eaker faced the challenge of trying to achieve positive results with a bombing force lacking in potency, and to assist him in tar­get selection, Arnold created the Committee of Operations An­alysts (coa) in December 1942. The group was a mix of civilian professors, lawyers, industry executives, and Army Air Forces officers based in Washington DC who received intelligence infor­mation on German war-making facilities and tried to determine which ones to attack to achieve maximum impact. Major Gen­eral Muir S. “Santy” Fairchild, an Army Air Forces officer on the Joint Staff who had taught bombing theory at the Air Corps Tac­tical School, prodded Arnold to create the committee to deflect criticism from Army and Navy intelligence officers who ques­tioned the utility of Eighth Air Force bombing. Arnold directed Colonel Byron E. Gates, who oversaw the coa, to prepare a re­port analyzing how bombing could systematically wreck the Ger­man war effort and to determine “the date when the deterioriza- tion will have progressed to a point to permit a successful invasion of Western Europe.”55

In Arnold’s mind—as Flansell had likewise reflected in awpd – 42—the proper application of air power would dictate the tim­ing of the invasion, and that meant wrecking German capability and will to such a degree that the invasion would occur against minimal resistance—if any. Substantial ground forces might be needed to fight German defenders, but, if bombing did its job, they would become more important as an occupying force. “Even if we believe that Germany can be defeated by air power alone,” the coa’s Colonel Ed Sorenson wrote to Brigadier General Law­rence Kuter, the Eighth Air Force’s First Bomb Wing Commander in early January 1943, “we must concede the practical necessity of the presence of the strong ground forces of our own to take control, if not to fight, [then] to obviate the undesirable neces­sity of occupation being taken over by our allies from the farther East.”56 Kuter sent the letter to Hansell, who had just replaced him as First Wing Commander, and noted that Hansell should re­lay its contents to Eaker.57

In the meantime, the coa members divided themselves into groups examining the individual components of what they deemed Germany’s “Priority A” targets—those offering the most prom­ise in terms of wrecking German military power in 1943. Their conclusions paralleled Hansell’s earlier findings in AWPD-42. The coa initially placed aircraft, electric power, oil, rubber, transpor­tation, chemicals, and electric equipment at the top of their Pri­ority A list.58 Arnold placed enormous weight on their priorities, and directed that his commanders follow the committee’s recom­mendations in selecting targets.59 Initially skeptical of the group and prospects that it might “try to run the air war from Washing­ton,” Eaker relented after meeting many committee members, and for the remainder of his tenure as Eighth Air Force commander he frequently consulted the coa on targeting possibilities.60

Besides considering coa suggestions, Eaker also had to address Allied concerns. His success at Casablanca in preserving a day­light offensive had resulted in an official acknowledgment of day­light bombing in the “Casablanca Directive.” Issued at the con­ference by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, the directive merged the American and British air efforts in a “Combined Bomber Offen­sive” that had as its objective “the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic sys­tem and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weak­ened.”ei The directive came with its own set of target priorities, similar to those outlined in AWPD-42 and by the coa, but not ex­act. The directive’s priorities were, in order of importance: sub­marine construction yards, the aircraft industry, transportation facilities, oil plants, and other components of war industry. The directive further noted that its priorities would likely shift as the war progressed and “other objectives of great importance either from the political or military point of view must be attacked.” Ex­amples included submarine bases on the Bay of Biscay and “Ber­lin, which should be attacked when conditions are suitable for the attainment of especially valuable results unfavorable to the mo­rale of the enemy or favorable to that of Russia.”62 Also at Casa­blanca, General Marshall agreed that, until Army Air Forces air­craft outnumbered British airplanes—and Americans had proven the efficacy of daylight bombing—American bombers in Britain would remain under the operational direction of the British, who would dictate targets and times of attack, while operational pro­cedures and bombing techniques would remain the prerogative of American commanders.63

In reality, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles “Peter” Portal, Eaker’s nominal commander in the aftermath of Casablanca, did little to interfere with Eaker’s target choices, but the vagaries of weather, increasing strength of German defenses, and continued diversion of bombers to other theaters made Eaker’s successful orchestra­tion of an air campaign a thorny prospect. Dense banks of winter clouds frequently obscured targets in Germany. Meanwhile, the Germans increased their homeland fighter strength by transfer­ring units from the Mediterranean and Russian fronts to defend the Reich. Eaker had told Arnold at Casablanca that with three hundred heavy bombers per mission he could attack any target with a low rate of loss.64 He believed that a strong bombing force guaranteed an efficient air campaign and informed Arnold’s dep­uty, Brigadier General Barney Giles, that his bombers had a six – to-one kill ratio against German fighters.65 Not only were such claims excessive, but at the time of Casablanca, Eighth Air Force had still not bombed Germany, and the experience that bomber crews had thus far received did not compare to what awaited them over the German heartland without escorts. Indeed, statistics in early December 1942 revealed that Eighth Air Force bombers had a 2 percent loss rate when escorted, compared to a 7 percent loss rate without the “little friends.”66

Eaker appreciated the value of escorts to a degree, writing that “it is most important to have some fighter protection” on raids with fewer than three hundred bombers.67 His preference, though, was to increase the size of the bomber force until its own defensive firepower would suffice to protect it. On the eve of Casablanca he learned that Spaatz’s Twelfth Air Force would receive twenty – eight в-17 replacements originally slated for the Eighth. Eaker no­tified Arnold’s air staff that his average bomber group strength had shrunk from thirty-five to eighteen aircraft—the total needed to put in the air on combat missions—which meant that he now had zero bombers available for spares or as a reserve force.68 For the next four months he refused to commit more bombers and crews than he could replace with the meager numbers of aircraft and men heading his way.69

Eaker’s struggle to obtain more bombers merged with efforts to determine how best to use the force that he had. In early Feb­ruary he met with coa representatives to exchange views on tar­gets that Eighth Air Force might attack with precision bombing. Eaker offered that “no judgment could be made as to the results obtainable through precision bombing at this time inasmuch as the force requisite to put it into effect had not been available.”70 He asserted that more bombers would saturate German defenses and reduce the percent of bombers lost on a raid; with one hun­dred bombers on a mission he would likely lose 5 percent of his attacking force, while with three hundred only 3 percent would be lost, and one thousand would produce a negligible loss rate.71 Eaker’s calculations presumed that more bombers attacking would produce a corresponding increase in bombs on target and hence reduce the need to return to it; otherwise, his decreasing loss rates actually produced an increase in the number of bombers lost. The Eighth Air Force Commander initially persuaded the coa mem­bers to include a call for additional bombers in the March report that they submitted to Arnold, but that paragraph disappeared in the final draft that listed sixty key targets for attack.72 Eaker re­sponded with an angry memorandum to Arnold that proclaimed, “The current position of the Eighth Air Force is not a credit to the American Army. After 16 months in the war we are not yet able to dispatch more than 123 bombers toward an enemy target.”73 While he did not dismiss Eaker’s outcry, Arnold chose instead to focus on the prospects of an efficient air campaign portended in the coa report. Unknown to Eaker, the Army Air Forces Com­manding General had suffered his first heart attack at the end of February. Roosevelt waived the regulation that would have re­quired Arnold to leave the service, provided that the Command­ing General provided monthly updates on his health to the presi­dent. Accordingly, Arnold aimed to accent not only his fitness for command, but also the distinctive contributions of air power to the war effort. After receiving the coa report, he wrote Roosevelt’s trusted assistant, Harry Hopkins, that bombing could paralyze Germany’s war-making capability “by the destruction of not more than five or six industries, comprising not more than fifty or sixty targets.” As an example, he noted that “a stoppage, or a marked curtailment, of the production of ball bearings would probably wreck all German industry.”74

Arnold also wrote Eaker: “We know that the strength of our striking force will always be relatively limited. We must, there­fore, apply it to those specially selected and vital targets that will give us the greatest return.” Arnold added that the president, as well as the American public, was very aware of Eighth Air Force’s bombing and wanted to know its specific accomplishments. Thus, he told Eaker to provide him with bi-monthly bombing summa­ries that “will help us a great deal in defending your operations and in building up a correct picture of the results being accom­plished.”7-5

With his public relations background, Eaker appreciated the need to “sell” the air campaign, but his first priority was to as­sure that the effort had a reasonable chance for success, and that meant securing more bombers for it. His quest for additional aircraft ultimately reached the highest level. Lieutenant General Frank Andrews—who had moved from commanding Caribbean defenses to Commanding General, U. S. Forces in the Middle East in November 1942, and had also appealed for daylight bombing to Churchill at Casablanca—replaced Eisenhower as Commander of U. S. European Theater of Operations in February when Eisen­hower became Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Med­iterranean. The change thrilled Eaker because it placed an avid air power proponent in a high command position. He wrote Arnold that Andrews’s appointment “will be a big boon for us. We have been about bled to death by the African operation.”76

After arriving in Britain Andrews wasted no time in notify­ing his friend Marshall of how bomber diversions had depleted Eighth Air Force.7 The Army Chief of Staff, in turn, took that message to the president. “Up to the present time the Army Air

Forces have never been able to even approximate the technique on which they have built up the proposition of daylight precision bombing,” Marshall informed Roosevelt in March. “I might fur­ther say, without greatly exaggerating, that Army Air elsewhere in the world, except in the Australian theater, has been somewhat misused by the employment of Army planes and crews in a manner for which the planes were not designed nor the crews trained, all of which has been a constant embarrassment to the Air Corps.”78 Marshall’s blunt notice, Eaker’s continued clamor, and the real­ization among Allied leaders that an invasion of Europe could not occur without control of the air finally produced noticeable in­creases in Eighth Air Force bomber strength.

Bolstered by the rising numbers, Eaker came to Washington DC in late April to brief his plan for a Combined Bomber Offensive to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His proposal reflected extensive collab­oration with members of the coa, as well as assistance from raf analysts and commanders. Fie gave top emphasis to the destruc­tion of German fighter strength—“an intermediate objective sec­ond to none in priority”79—and then outlined a series of phased attacks on industrial centers and war-making facilities that would wreck the essential components of Germany’s ability to fight. A steady increase in bomber strength was vital to success. Eaker ar­gued that he would need a total force of at least 800 bombers to dispatch 300 on a regular basis, and ultimately he would require a force of 2,700 “heavies.” After limited debate, the Joint Chiefs concurred. They approved Eaker’s plan in early May and recom­mended “implementing it to the maximum extent practicable, consistent with aircraft production, available shipping, and cur­rent strategic commitments.”80

At the Trident Conference later that month, the Combined Chiefs of Staff endorsed Eaker’s plan as well. Moreover, they tied a cross­channel invasion—tentatively set for May 1944—to the successful conduct of the Combined Bomber Offensive.81 For American air­men, the approval of the Combined Bomber Offensive plan was a bittersweet success, because two of their leaders were not pres­ent to witness it—Frank Andrews had died in а в-24 crash in Ice­land on 3 May, and Arnold had suffered his second heart attack seven days later.82 Still, Eaker’s plan portended a significant in­crease in bomber strength for Eighth Air Force and the chance for it to have a decisive impact on the war. By the end of May 1943 Eaker wrote his British counterpart, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, that bombers and crews had begun to arrive “according to sched­ule” and expressed optimism that Eighth Air Force would receive 2,700 heavy bombers by April 1944.83

The plan that spurred Eighth Air Force’s bomber total was a masterpiece of mechanistic logic solidly anchored to progressive roots. It noted that the coa had identified sixty targets, the de­struction of which “would gravely impair and might paralyze the Western Axis war effort.”84 Eaker added sixteen targets to the mix and divided them all into six “systems,” comprising seventy-six precision targets that, once destroyed, would critically damage the German war machine. Those systems included: submarine con­struction yards and bases, the aircraft industry, ball bearings, oil, synthetic rubber and tires, and military transport vehicles. The plan linked Germany’s aircraft industry to the overriding inter­mediate objective of eliminating fighter strength in Western Eu­rope. Wrecking the associated targets would destroy 43 percent of Germany’s fighter capacity and 65 percent of its bomber ca­pacity and “produce the effect desired.”85

The plan also highlighted ball bearings, which the coa had em­phasized since early February. “The critical condition of the ball bearing industry is startling,” the plan observed. “The concentra­tion of that industry renders it outstandingly vulnerable to air at­tack.” Eaker noted that the destruction of the plants at Schweinfurt would eliminate almost half of Germany’s ball-bearing produc­tion and instantly stymie the production of tanks, airplanes, ar­tillery, and “all the special weapons of modern war.” Because of Schweinfurt’s importance, he recommended attacking it as one of two “deep penetration” raids in the first phase of combined op­erations. Yet he cautioned: “It would be most unwise to attempt it until we are perfectly sure we have enough force to destroy the objective in a single operation. Any attempt to repeat such an at­tack will meet with very bitter opposition.”86

While acknowledging the strength of German air defenses, Eaker insisted that they would not prevent effective bombing, provided that he received adequate bombers and crews. Once more he turned to statistical analysis to make his case. Eaker contended that the twenty daylight bombing missions that the Eighth Air Force had flown from з January to 6 April 1943 “definitely establish the fact that it is possible to conduct precision pattern bombing opera­tions against selected precision targets from altitudes of 20,000 feet to 30,000 feet in the face of anti-aircraft artillery and fighter defenses.” He rated twelve of those missions as “highly effective,” and added that the destruction produced by an average of eighty – six bombers was “highly satisfactory.” Thus, he surmised, “From this experience it may be definitely accepted that too bombers dis­patched on each successful mission will provide entirely satisfac­tory destructive effect of that part of the target area within 1000 feet of the aiming point; and that two thirds of the missions dis­patched each month will be successful.”87

Eaker likely knew that he had overstated his case. His First Bomb Wing Commander, Hansell, had written Arnold’s intelli­gence chief in February regarding the difficulty of discerning the number of bombs that fell in the target area and noted, “To date we have been unable to account for approximately fifty percent of the bombs which we take out.” He added that future bombing analysis should “not harp too much on small precision targets. We find they are hard to hit, particularly in the face of heavy aa [anti­aircraft] fire and determined fighter opposition.”88 Besides enemy defenses, Hansell remarked that the wind and sun also played a role in bombing accuracy. The Norden bombsight could not com­pensate for cross-wind bombing approaches when the winds ex­ceeded 80 mph, and on crystal clear days a haze developed that was “frequently literally impenetrable toward the sun.”89 The “pre­cision pattern bombing” that Eaker had mentioned in his April briefing to the Joint Chiefs was fantasy; LeMay’s technique signif­icantly increased the odds that a group formation bombed in uni­son, but even ideal conditions could not guarantee “precision.”90 Too many variables affected bombing accuracy, and Eighth Air Force bomber crews had no control over most of them.91

Eaker privately acknowledged that limitation as Allied leaders prepared to endorse his plan for the Combined Bomber Offen­sive. But he downplayed the significance of his admission by fo­cusing instead on the growing strength of Eighth Air Force, writ­ing Arnold in May 1943:

As a result of the additional force we have just received and the in­creased rate of supply of replacement aircraft and crews, we are chang­ing our operating policy. In the past as 1 told you, we have matched our rate of operation to our receipt of replacements, so that our Air Force would not waste away and go downhill. We have, therefore, in the past, waited for good days when we could be reasonably sure of seeing our targets from high altitude. We are going now on a new ba­sis when we will go out in force on days when we may not he able to bomb our exact small point targets due to more than y/ioths cloud cover, but we will at any rate be able to hit our second or last resort targets, the built-up industrial area, and what is even more important, we will be able to work on the German Air Force in combat.92

Eaker refused to allow paltry numbers, German defenses, and poor weather to halt the American experiment in daylight bomb­ing that he had fought so hard to preserve, but he could do little to improve the accuracy of his bomber force. Now, with the strength of that force increasing, he faced new challenges—to gain con­trol of the skies over Western Europe by spring 1944 to facilitate an invasion—and to demonstrate, in a year’s time, that air power could wreck an enemy’s war-making capability and will to resist. He still lacked the numbers that he felt were essential to accom­plish those objectives efficiently; the buildup envisioned in awpd – 42 had suffered substantial delays. British bombing would help to offset that deficiency to some extent, but the RAF would contribute little to achieving daylight air superiority. Still, adopting British area bombing methods during daylight might damage some vital industries on days when clouds obscured precision targets.

Eaker knew that area bombing was a bludgeon, not a scalpel, but he lacked the time and equipment to create an aerial razor. The longer he waited, the stronger his enemy grew. Intelligence reports revealed that increased production now bolstered Germa­ny’s homeland fighter force by more than one hundred airplanes each month.93 Trident, meanwhile, had started the clock ticking for air power to achieve decisive results. If the Combined Bomber Offensive defeated the Luftwaffe, air power could wreck Germa­ny’s vital centers with impunity, perhaps scoring a knockout blow that ended the war. Hansell believed that bombing could achieve an independent victory;99 so too did Brigadier General Frederick Anderson, Eaker’s new Commander of VIII Bomber Command. Anderson contended in late July: “The VIII Bomber Command is destroying and will continue to destroy the economic resources of Germany to such an extent that I personally believe no inva­sion of the Continent or Germany proper will ever have to take place with the consequent loss of thousands and possibly mil­lions of lives.”95 Provided the buildup of Eighth Air Force con­tinued, Eaker believed that his bombers might fulfill that progres­sive goal. Regardless, he had little choice in the matter—indeed, he had put himself in his current predicament with his successful arguments to Churchill and the Joint Chiefs. It was his turn to transform faith into fact.