Category German Jets, 1944-1945

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

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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

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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.

While much of the credit for the 9 March raid against Tokyo went to LeMay, in reality he simply implemented a strategic design set in motion by the Committee of Operations Analysts, approved by Arnold, and pushed forward by Norstad. Arnold endorsed area attacks because they offered the best prospect for rapid, tangible results—results that he also believed would prove decisive in end­ing the war. LeMay’s low-level tactics and stripping armament and gunners from his B-29S conserved fuel and doubled the bombs that his aircraft could carry. Yet the key decisions—the choice of targets and the type of ordnance to drop on them—came from Arnold and Norstad. As Michael Sherry notes, LeMay “had the illusion of making his own choices. . . because the details were left to him. LeMay would also sincerely believe that he made the command decision.”118 Arnold and Norstad were content to have him believe it. LeMay demonstrated that he could achieve the de­struction that they demanded and continued to display that ca­pability in the raids that followed. After returning to Washing­ton dc in mid-March, Arnold addressed his letters to LeMay as “My dear Curt.”119

LeMay’s low-level, night campaign continued against Japan’s major urban areas. More than three hundred B-29S attacked Zone I in Nagoya on n March and burned down two square miles of the city. Two nights later 274 Superfortresses torched the heart of Osaka and wiped out eight square miles. On 16 March 307 bomb­ers attacked Kobe, destroying three square miles. Finally, on 18 March, 290 B-29S again bombed Nagoya, wrecking another three square miles and completing the series of incendiary attacks on Japan’s four most populous cities. Combined, the five raids incin­erated nearly thirty-two square miles of urban real estate—which equated to 4 г percent of the destruction inflicted on German cities by the Army Air Forces during the entire war. The devastation re­quired less than i percent of the total bomb tonnage dropped on Germany, and it cost twenty-two B-29S and their crews.120 From the progressive perspective—as it had evolved among American airmen by 1945—LeMay’s series of five incendiary attacks marked the epitome of efficient destruction.

Arnold and Norstad now focused on how others would per­ceive that destruction—and how rapidly it would translate into decisive results. Banner headlines in many newspapers announced the devastation of Japanese cities. While grateful for the attention, Arnold cautioned LeMay and Norstad that “editorial comment [is] beginning to wonder about blanket incendiary attacks upon cities therefore urge you to continue hard hitting your present line that this destruction is necessary to eliminate Jap home industries and that it is strategic precision bombing.”121 Norstad continued that mantra in a 23 March press conference after he returned to Washington dc. Resorting to statistical analysis, he noted that the Tokyo raid alone resulted in “1,200,000 factory workers made homeless [and] 369,000 square feet of highly industrialized land… leveled to ashes.” Incendiary bombing was just “the econom­ical method of destroying the small industries in these areas. . . of bringing about their liquidation.” When asked if any change had occurred “in the basic policy of the Air Forces in pin-point bombing [and] precision?” Norstad replied, “None.”122

Many American newspapers accepteci that explanation and stressed the “precise” nature of attacks “to cripple the enemy’s war potential.”123 Yet Norstad and fellow Army Air Forces lead­ers knew the all too obvious truth—that LeMay’s bombers killed tens of thousands of Japanese civilians in some of the most hor­rible ways imaginable. Moreover, intelligence reports stated that most Japanese factories lacked the necessary resources to oper­ate them, and that cottage industries now made a meager contri­bution to the limited amount of front-line war production that remained.124

Still, the message that Army Air Forces commanders presented— both to themselves as well as to the rest of the world—was one highlighting their progressive faith in efficient precision bombing to wreck Japan’s industrial web. For the n March raid against Nagoya, Twentieth Air Force headquarters described the city as “home of the world’s largest aircraft plant.. . with the Mitsubi­shi aircraft engine works exceeding in size our own Willow Run plant,” even though the Mitsubishi factory was not in the target area and received only “minor damage” during the attack.12’ Like­wise, the XXI Bomber Command report summarizing the raids on Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe observed: “It is notewor­thy that the object of these attacks was not to bomb indiscrimi­nately civilian populations. The object was to destroy the indus­trial and strategic targets concentrated in the urban areas of these four cities.”126

Such internal statements demonstrated the depth of the convic­tion among Army Air Forces leaders to their progressive ideals. Indeed, for some, the vision had become reality—they saw no dis­tinction between the theory of precision bombing against specific industrial targets to achieve rapid, efficient results, and the reality of area attacks on residential districts to achieve the same goal. Colonel Cecil E. Combs, a member of the XXI Bomber Command staff with both Hansell and LeMay, wrote his former boss: “With­out abandoning the concept of precision destruction of priority targets the Twenty-first [wings] have been experimenting with in­cendiary missions and the results. . . indicate the high degree of vulnerability of Japanese industry as a whole.”127 After the war LeMay added: “Japanese targets being largely inflammable, we hit vulnerable areas with firebombs. Let me emphasize that this was not a deliberate deviation from precision to area bombing. We hit only areas when enemy war-making capacity was spread over large areas, as in the ‘cottage industries’ surrounding facto­ries or when weather forced us into radar bombing, visual preci­sion being impossible.”128

LeMay’s postwar comment was disingenuous, for at the time he knew that his four-city series of attacks had targeted Zone I in each—the densest area of population that also contained the least amount of industry. Norstad wrote him on 3 April with a new list of targets, noting that those assigned in March “were selected on the basis of a compromise between industrial importance and susceptibility to fire,” but that new areas “represent more nearly the top industrial areas. They also appear to be most susceptible to fire attack, but they do not represent any compromise.”129 Like Tooey Spaatz, his counterpart in Europe who had unleashed savage area attacks against German cities, LeMay hoped that his raids’ intensity would pay dividends with a quick end to the war. “The destruction of Japan’s industry by air blows alone is possible,” he declared on 15 April in a comment that drew a reprimand from Norstad for openly predicting victory through air power.130

While Spaatz did not announce that prospect, he harbored the same hope, and both he and LeMay could claim that their bomb­ing had a tangential connection to industrial capability. Yet Spaatz knew that his radar-directed area attacks missed most of the fac­tories that he targeted, and LeMay knew that his low-level area raids hit the parts of Japanese cities contributing the least to the war effort in terms of industrial production. For both, achieving rapid results had become the overriding concern, and brute force became the methodology to assure speed.

The enormous bomb tonnages, aimed at urban areas, ably sup­ported the overarching political objective of unconditional surren­der, while against the Japanese, the desire for retribution further condoned area attacks. As long as the Japanese (and the Germans) refused to yield, they would pay an indelible price. Roosevelt be­lieved that memories of such destruction would help dissuade the Axis populations from pursuing future war.131 Against the Japa­nese, American airmen generally reflected the sentiments of most Americans and felt little compassion for an enemy that they in­creasingly viewed as treacherous.132 By early 1945, the American public had learned of atrocities that the Japanese had commit­ted against captured American troops in the Philippines, which heightened the hunger for revenge that had emanated from Pearl Harbor.

Kamikaze attacks that began at Leyte Gulf in October 1944 also intensified the call for retribution. Arnold, who visited the Philippines in June 1945, noted in his diary: “There is no feeling of sparing any Japs here, men, women or children: gas, fire, any­thing to exterminate the entire race exemplifies the feeling.”133 Rosy O’Donnell wrote LeMay a week after the war ended that his service in XXI Bomber Command “gave me an opportunity, not only to repay the humiliating experience which I suffered at the hands of the Japs in the early days of hostilities, but also to put in a lick for the many fine men who were not so fortunate in get­ting out of their clutches.”134 The priority on quickly ending the war to save Allied lives meshed well with the desire for revenge. Yet even without the yearning for retribution, the emphasis on achieving rapid results with air power, when combined with the goal of unconditional surrender, virtually guaranteed the devas­tation of an urbanized, militaristic society that viewed the war as a righteous endeavor.

Accurate bombing on a large scale is a new science and requires the entire time and study of the man who is to shoulder the responsibility for success or failure during the coming year. • LT. COL. EDGAR S. GORRELL, 2 JANUARY 1918

One of those chanting was Edgar Staley Gorrell, a diminutive nineteen-year-old “yearling” from Baltimore. Gorrell’s small stat­ure and boyish features had earned him the nickname “Nap” from his classmates, and Nap was mightily impressed by the spectacle. From the day he viewed Curtiss’s flight—which arrived in New York City after two hours and forty-six minutes of air travel—Gor­rell determined that he too would become an aviator. Assigned to the infantry after graduation, he transferred to the Signal Corps’ Aviation Section in 1914 and then completed flight training. Two years later, as one of eleven pilots in the First Aero Squadron, he helped track Pancho Villa’s hand of outlaws across northern Mex­ico. He became the first American to fly an aircraft equipped to take automatic photographs, the first to fly an aircraft while con­ducting radio experiments, the first American Army officer to vol­unteer for a parachute jump, and one of the first officers to fly at night. He also developed the first plan for an American bomber offensive against an enemy nation.2

The objectives that Eaker now sought did not exactly match those touted by airmen before the war. The limitations of his force and the unforgiving environment in which it operated altered the pros­pects for “efficient” results within the time constraints set by the Trident Conference. Anderson acknowledged Eaker’s problem: “There are unavoidable conditions, not immediately correctable, which preclude present attainment of the desired results and which necessitate acceptance of less than maximum efficiency.”96 The premium was on fast results, and fast did not necessarily guar­antee efficient. Moreover, the overall war aim did not lend itself to rapier thrusts of air power; bludgeoning with bombs better suited Roosevelt’s goal of “unconditional surrender.” That objec­tive called for speed, but only from the standpoint of ending the war quickly to save Allied lives. It also demanded enough destruc­tion to erase the future desire for war from the collective psyche of the Axis populations. Roosevelt and Churchill—as well as Jo­seph Stalin—intended not only to wreck Germany’s war-making capability and will to fight, but also to destroy the Nazi philos­ophy that fostered the German war effort—and to assure that a similar world view never again materialized. “Practically all Ger­mans deny the fact that they surrendered in the last war, but this time they are going to know it,” the president would tell journal­ists in summer 1944. “And so are the Japs.”97

To the Commander of RAF Bomber Command, the April 1943

Combined Bomber Offensive plan ably reflected the ideals that he believed should guide an air campaign. Air Marshal Arthur Har­ris had directed the raf’s bombing of Germany for more than a year, and had staged his first “thousand plane raid” in May 1942 against Cologne. He thought that the opportunity to employ two “highly specialised and well equipped” bomber forces in tandem simply made sense, plus it offered the chance to achieve maxi­mum efficiency. “There is no difficulty in achieving our object at minimum cost in life, material and effort,” Harris remarked to Eaker in April 1943. “There is difficulty only in convincing those in whose hands lies the power to grasp the opportunity.” Having received the blessing of Combined Chiefs in May, Harris set out to achieve aerial effects in concert with his American ally that he believed would “decide all.”98

In actuality the Combined Bomber Offensive, officially desig­nated “Operation Pointblank,” provided few instances of genu­ine cooperation between the two bomber forces. Their distinctive targeting philosophies, exemplified by the raf’s night bombing aimed at morale and the Army Air Forces’ daylight effort aimed at industrial production—along with the intense American desire to demonstrate independent success to bolster the bid for service autonomy—led to largely separate air campaigns.99 A notable exception occurred at the end of July when Harris turned his at­tention to Hamburg. For more than a week, the raf and Eighth Air Force pummeled the city, with the American raids occurring on 25 and 26 July against naval installations and an aircraft fac­tory. Army Air Forces crews had difficulty seeing their targets be­cause of the thick smoke created by raf attacks after midnight on 25 July, when 733 bombers had unleashed 2,290 tons of bombs, almost half of which were incendiaries. One-third of the 147 b – 17s dropped incendiaries as well.100 The series of raids ultimately produced a massive firestorm; 42,600 German civilians perished, and 75 5,000 more lost their homes.101 Harris deemed “Operation Gomorrah” a success, and colored away the city’s burned out sections in the “Blue Books” he kept that displayed aerial photo­graphs of Germany’s major urban areas.

Hamburg also made a distinct impression on American polit­ical and military leaders. Roosevelt saw the raids as “an impres­sive demonstration” of what American air power might accom­plish against Japan.102 Fred Anderson, who flew aboard an raf Lancaster bomber over Hamburg on the night of 27 July, offered that the raids showed the German populace “that we can hit any place in Germany anytime we propose to do so.”103 Hamburg por­tended that bombs might break German morale, much like the 19 July attack by Spaatz’s bombers on marshalling yards in Rome that Arnold believed “had a deep psychological effect on the Ital­ian people” and led to the overthrow of Benito Mussolini.104 Ar­nold’s perspective downplayed the impact of Allied landings in Sicily the previous week and conformed to his belief that bombing could achieve independent success. Indeed, the Army Air Forces Commanding General had asked the coa in March to determine what targets air power could destroy “to knock Italy out of the war,” and requested a similar study on Japan.105

Arnold further envisioned three uses for incendiary bombs by Eighth Air Force: “burning down suitable precise industrial ob­jectives; starting fires by day in the densely built up portions of cities and towns to serve as beacons for the R. A.F. to exploit at night; [and] burning down the densely built-up portions of cities and towns by day attack alone when the occasion warrants.”106 Al­though he emphasized to his commanders in June that the bomber, “when used with the proper degree of understanding, becomes, in effect, the most humane of all weapons,” Arnold had relayed a very different message to his air staff two months earlier: “The way to stop the killing of civilians is to cause so much damage and destruction and death that the civilians will demand their govern­ment cease fighting. This does not mean that we are making civil­ians or civilian institutions a war objective, but we cannot ‘pull our punches’ because some of them may get killed.”107

Arnold condoned ruthlessness only as long as it did not tarnish the image of the Army Air Forces. He returned to progressive ide­als in specifying the message that he wanted Eaker and the Eighth Air Force to convey to the American people: “It is very important, for whole-hearted public and official support of our Air Forces in their operations, that the people understand thoroughly our Air Force’s precepts, principles, and purposes,” he wrote. “Still more, it is important for the people to understand that our prime purpose is destruction of the enemy’s ability to wage war, by our planned persistent bombing and sapping of his vital industries, his transportation, and his whole supply system. And finally, it is im­portant for them to realize that this takes time, as well as money and planes and planning and work—but that it will win the war and save perhaps millions of lives which otherwise would be sac­rificed in bloody ground combat.”108 As the Eighth Air Force pre­pared to attack Hamburg, he told Eaker to guarantee that post­raid press releases stressed “the mission aiming point rather than the city or town in which the aiming point is located.”109

Eaker appreciated Arnold’s concerns, but the Eighth Air Force Commander placed his emphasis on assuring that his crews could actually drop their bombs in the vicinity of the aiming point. The weather in summer 1943 had turned especially nasty, with clouds covering Germany during the months that should have provided ideal daylight bombing conditions. The British had developed various methods of radar bombing that allowed them to bomb at night, and Eaker wanted to use those devices to enhance the Eighth Air Force’s daylight efforts during periods of poor weather. “We are looking for a considerable degree of accuracy, sufficient at least that we can dump our bombs in the heavily built-up in­dustrial areas,” he informed Arnold—a far cry from the notion of precision bombing that he had espoused less than a year be­fore.110 The best of the British instruments was his, a ground map­ping radar that the raf employed with great effect against Ham­burg. The British were reluctant to provide their allies with it for the same reason that American airmen refused to share the Nor – den bombsight with the raf—they feared that a downed bomber might reveal its secrets to the Germans. At the end of July, Air Chief Marshal Portal relented, and Eaker reported that he would soon have a squadron “ready to go with one of these gadgets” in the lead aircraft.111

In the meantime, whenever the weather cooperated, Eaker re­mained true to the principles that had guided the development of an American bombing force. In August Eighth Air Force partici­pated in two dramatic raids against perceived linchpins of the Nazi industrial web. The first occurred on i August against the com­plex of petroleum refineries at Ploesti, Romania, which refined 60 percent of Germany’s crude oil needs. Eaker had mentioned Ploesti in his brief to the Joint Chiefs in April, and the coa had long had it on its list of targets. Eighth Air Force contributed two groups of B-24S for the raid, plus another slated for the Eighth, and the remaining two groups came from Spaatz’s Northwest Af­rica Air Force. They took off from the Libyan base at Benghazi and flew across the Mediterranean at only one hundred feet to avoid radar detection.

Chance disrupted the plan from the start. The aircraft carry­ing the lead navigator mysteriously crashed in the sea on the way to Ploesti, and the bomber with the deputy mission navigator de­veloped mechanical problems and had to return to base. Mission navigation devolved to a new second lieutenant; two of the bomb groups refused to trust his skills and mistakenly flew to Bucharest when the lieutenant had correctly called for a turn to Ploesti. By the time the B-24S arrived in staggered disarray over the target, German defenses were primed and downed 41 of the 177 bombers dispatched. Other factors claimed an additional 13, and 55 more suffered major damage. Although the raid wrecked 42 percent of the refineries’ total capacity, the Germans had operated them at only 60 percent, which meant that Ploesti suffered a long-term loss of only 2 percent in production capability. Within weeks it refined oil at a higher rate than it had before the raid.112

Eaker’s own dual attack on 17 August against the Messer – schmitt factory at Regensburg and the ball bearing complex at Schweinfurt met a similar dismal fate and produced similar mea­ger results.

Ploesti, Regensburg, and Schweinfurt exemplified the carnage that Luftwaffe defenses inflicted on Eighth Air Force throughout the summer and early autumn of 1943. Eaker tried to offset the losses by increasing his total of bombers and crews. He possessed almost 700 bombers by July, allowing him to launch some raids with as many as 300 aircraft, but he still lacked the numbers to do so on a consistent basis, plus his crew totals remained insuffi­cient.113 Production problems in the United States left him short 240 bombers, and the diversions that had plagued him during the spring continued.114 At his April briefing to the Joint Chiefs, he stated that he would likely need to replace a third of his force each month because of attrition,115 but loss rates often neared xo percent on the missions flown against Germany in August. Losses among new crews were higher still—four new groups that arrived in April averaged a loss of 21 aircraft in eighteen missions, while four experienced groups on the same missions averaged 9.116 Eaker told Arnold that new crews needed at least two weeks of train­ing to make them mission ready and that several losses occurred because “the formations are not always flown as instructed.” Yet he also acknowledged that part of the losses stemmed from “the unusual ferocity of the defense put up by the German fighter over his homeland as contrasted with the defense put up by him over occupied territory.”117

In the summer of 1943, Eighth Air Force had no real answer for the German fighter force, which was responsible for the vast majority of bomber losses.118 The p-47 “Thunderbolt” and the p-51 “Mustang,” two single-seat fighters with promising capa­bilities as escorts, lacked the range to venture far beyond the Ger­man border, and German fighter pilots waited until the escorts turned back to pounce. Engineers thus far had limited success de­veloping “drop tanks” to extend the American fighters’ range. At­tempts to protect bombers with the YB-40, а в-17 that carried no bombs and sported extra turrets and machine guns, failed miser­ably—the aircraft’s performance characteristics differed too much from standard bombers to keep place in formation. Eaker believed that with more bombers he could ultimately overcome the Luft­waffe, and that his bomber crews had already inflicted substan­tial losses on the German fighter force. He surmised that more bombers and larger formations offered greater firepower to shoot down German fighters. Eaker also pressed for fighter escorts, but he did not completely dismiss the YB-40, which he thought was “a good idea but we have not quite gotten the correct aircraft for carrying it out.”119

To the pilots, navigators, bombardiers, and gunners who bat­tled the Luftwaffe, the prospects for success appeared grim in­deed. Most bomber crewmen did not focus on whether their ac­tions contributed to Germany’s demise. Instead, their definition of success was simple—survival. In January 1943, Eaker and Ar­nold gave heavy bomber crews a requirement of twenty-five com­bat missions, after which they would transfer to assignments free of combat duty. The crew of the Memphis Belle was the first to complete the requirement and departed England in May 1943 t0 fanfare that included immortalization in a classic documentary by Hollywood director William Wyler. Other crews were not so fortunate. By August 1943 the life expectancy of a typical bomber crewman had dipped to fifteen missions—and would stay at that number for the remainder of the year.120 Eaker wrote Arnold in October, “I think it is perfectly marvelous the morale we have been able to maintain,”121 but the truth was better revealed in the first stanza of a poem written by one of LeMay’s crewmen:

They call him the “Aerial Gunner.”

His hopes, they say, are dim

And his life is said to hang by a thread

That is long and weak and slim.122

The progressive tenets of the Air Corps Tactical School had forecast a bomber offensive that achieved success by minimizing crew losses instead of through attrition. Yet the longer the day­light campaign persisted, the more it resembled an aerial slugfest that would continue until only one side demonstrated that it could still respond after absorbing massive punishment. Eaker could not allow that fight to persist indefinitely, but he could see no way to avoid the slaughter in the sky given the time constraints that he faced. Indeed, based on his receipt of intercepted German mes­sage traffic, he believed that the Luftwaffe fighter force had suf­fered severe losses that threatened its ability to control the air.123 If he could break that force through continued assaults on vital centers, then he might yet achieve daylight air superiority within the allotted time. The time available, though, continued to slip away. In mid-August, the Combined Chiefs of Staff solidified the i May 1944 date for the invasion of France and reaffirmed that the successful prosecution of the Combined Bomber Offensive was a prerequisite for it.

Still, Eaker did not abandon his faith that bombing could wreck Germany’s war-making capability. He continued to attack Point – blank targets that the coa had recommended despite suffering losses that again neared ro percent for raids over the Reich in Sep­tember and the first half of October. On 14 October—a date that bomber crews would dub “Black Thursday”—Eighth Air Force returned to Schweinfurt. Of the 319 B-17S that attacked the ball bearing complex, 60 fell to German defenses.124 The magnitude of the loss caused even Roosevelt to remark that the United States could not afford to have 60 bombers shot down on a regular ba­sis.125 Arnold called a press conference proclaiming, “Now we have got Schweinfurt!” and added that losses as high as 25 percent on some missions could be expected—and accepted.126

In truth the damage inflicted on ball bearing production once again had little impact on German war production, and Eaker had to send a notice to his crews that Arnold had been misquoted about condoning such a high loss rate.127 The grim assessment of the Army Air Forces Commanding General also did not go un­noticed by Time magazine writers, who summarized Eaker’s new measure of efficiency in their 25 October issue: “Suddenly the cost of victory loomed large. . . . The price was not exorbitant: without bearings the mechanized German war machine would be helpless. But the cost was high enough to elicit a spate of ex­planation.”128

Arnold wanted an explanation as well. Eaker sent him a ca­ble in the immediate aftermath of the raid confirming the loss of sixty B-17S in combat and another five when their crews elected to bail out over England rather than attempt landing with heav­ily damaged aircraft. Eaker further noted that his crews had shot down ninety-nine German fighters, with another thirty proba­bly destroyed and fourteen damaged.129 “This does not represent a disaster,” he asserted. “It does indicate that the air battle has reached its climax.” Eaker then asked Arnold to expedite the ar­rival of additional bombers and crews, provide auxiliary fuel tanks for escort fighters, and “send every possible fighter here as soon as possible. We must show the enemy we can replace our losses; he knows he cannot replace his. We must continue the battle with unrelenting fury.”130 Arnold agreed that the Luftwaffe had also suffered much but wanted proof that its end was near. “It appears from my viewpoint that the German Air Force is on the verge of collapsing,” he cabled Eaker. “We must not (repeat) must not miss any symptoms of impending German collapse. .. . Can you send me any substantial evidence of collapse?”131

The Japanese refused to succumb to the massive March bombings, and LeMay lacked the capability to continue constant incendiary attacks. Despite the terrible toll of civilians killed and the enor­mous destruction rendered to their cities, the Japanese kept fight­ing w’ith the same intensity they had demonstrated before raids. American Army and Marine forces invaded Okinawa on i April and did not control the islands until 21 June—at a cost of almost fifty thousand American casualties, of whom more than twelve thousand were killed or missing.135

The mounting losses in the fight for Okinawa intensified the de­mand for an air power-generated victory that would forestall an invasion of the home islands. LeMay’s March attacks had expended most of his supply of incendiaries, and, with the exception of two mid-April raids against Tokyo and another against Kawasaki, no more firebombing occurred until mid-May after the Navy had re­plenished his incendiary stocks. In the meantime, he returned to precision methods with high explosive bombs to strike new tar­gets that he received from Norstad. Those targets consisted of air­craft engine plants, oil, chemical production facilities, and, after 16 April, airfields to support the Okinawa invasion.136 The B-29S also conducted extensive aerial mining operations in the Sea of Japan that severely restricted movement among the home islands and ultimately sank or disabled eighty-three ships.137

Arnold was eager to reignite the incendiary campaign, which, unlike mining, produced immediate empirical evidence of the dam­age inflicted. He urged LeMay to “put the maximum weight of ef­fective bombs on Japanese targets” and noted that the Army Air

Forces “alone are able to make the Japanese homeland constantly aware of the price she will pay in this futile struggle.” Observing that LeMay would control almost a thousand B-29S by July (he had received XX Bomber Command’s Superfortresses when Jap­anese troops threatened Chengtu early in 1945, and newly manu­factured aircraft continued to arrive in the Marianas), Arnold as­serted: “Under reasonably favorable conditions you should then have the ability to destroy whole industrial cities should that be required.” Arnold left no doubt that it would be. Yet he persisted in emphasizing attacks on industry, remarking that “it is apparent that attacks similar in nature to that against Tokyo have a most significant effect on industrial production.”1,8

LeMay returned to his incendiary campaign on 14 May with a daylight assault on Nagoya. A follow-on night attack against the city on 16 May was so successful that it no longer appeared on the Twentieth Air Force target list.139 Fire raids against Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, and Kawasaki followed, and by mid-June a total of 105.6 square miles in Japan’s six largest cities were smoldering ru­ins with an estimated 112,000 civilians in them dead.140 The dev­astation came at a price—in May alone eighty B-29S were lost, though many more made it to the emergency landing field on Iwo Jima.141 Meanwhile, the Japanese kept fighting.

New president Harry S. Truman called a meeting with the Joint Chiefs on 18 June to determine, “Can we win the war by bomb­ing?”142 Marshall answered that the United States could not, based on the example of the European war, and outlined the plan for an invasion.143 At the gathering—which Arnold missed because of touring Pacific bases—Truman expressed his intention “of econo­mizing to the maximum extent possible in loss of American lives” and that “economies in time and money [were] relatively unim­portant.”144 Time, however, was vital to Arnold. He sent LeMay to Washington DC in his stead to brief Marshall and the Joint

Chiefs on the progress of the в-29 campaign and its prospects for eliminating an amphibious assault on Japan.145 LeMay told the Chiefs, as he had told Arnold on Guam, that by 1 October B-29S would have destroyed all Japanese industrial facilities and Japan could not continue fighting with its reserve supplies wrecked.146 Marshall fell asleep during his briefing.147 Preparations for Oper­ation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu scheduled for 1 Novem­ber, continued.

When LeMay returned to Guam he intensified his campaign against Japan’s urban areas. He began incinerating twenty-five of Japan’s smaller cities, often with as many as five hundred B-29S on a single raid. Arnold fully backed the effort, telling LeMay, “We have the Nip where we want him.”148 On 16 July Superfor­tresses attacked Oita, a town of sixty thousand that contained no industry and only “a vital naval air depot” that was not a tar­get.149 LeMay complemented his offensive in late July by having his B-29S drop leaflets that warned of attacks on potential target cities and urged surrender. The ability to announce future attacks and then conduct them made a powerful impression on the Japanese, and actually contributed to achieving the prewar progressive aim to avoid civilian casualties—many people who read the notices survived LeMay’s onslaught by evacuating the cities listed.1-50

While the B-29S mauled Japan, a debate over the viability of the incendiary effort raged in Washington DC between members of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (ussbs), a largely civilian research team analyzing the impact of American air cam­paigns, and the Joint Target Group (jtg), an intelligence organi­zation created by the Joint Chiefs in September 1944 to identify and evaluate Japanese air targets.151 Based on their examination of European bombing, the ussbs members argued that attacks on Japan’s transportation network, especially rail and watercraft traffic, would produce the most benefit, followed by raids on oil, chemical production, and electric power. They discounted the ef­fectiveness of the incendiary attacks, which they compared to the raf’s effort against German morale, and recommended that Twen­tieth Air Force return to precision bombing.152

Gorrell’s scheme for attacking Wilhelmine Germany called into question the basic purpose of an air force: whether to support the Army directly through air operations tied to the Army’s immedi­ate progress on the front lines or to conduct “independent” oper­ations, such as “strategical” bombing, that would ultimately im­prove the Army’s situation at the front but that also offered the prospect of a rapid, cheap victory by destroying the enemy’s war­making capability and will to fight. If air power could achieve victory independently of ground forces, it implied that the Ar­my’s “air” branch might deserve a measure of autonomy. Before World War I, however, such concerns were minimal, even among airmen. When Congressman James Hay proposed a bill in Feb­ruary 1913 to create an “Air Corps” equivalent in stature to the infantry, cavalry, or artillery, aviators were almost unanimous in condemning the proposal. Lieutenants Benjamin D. Foulois and Henry H. “Hap” Arnold testified that the Signal Corps’ control of aviation was satisfactory.5 Captain William “Billy” Mitchell, at that time a non-flyer and the lone Signal Corps representative on the Army’s General Staff, argued that aviation was essential to Signal Corps reconnaissance and communication. “The offensive value of this thing has yet to be proved,” he stated.4

The outbreak of war in Europe heightened interest in the air­plane’s military potential. That conflict, combined with a grow­ing rift between Signal Corps aviators and their non-flying su­periors, spurred Secretary of War Newton D. Baker to launch a General Staff investigation in April 1916 on the appropriate­ness of severing aviation from Signal Corps control. Many pilots bemoaned the “under 30, bachelor only” restrictions on flying, while many of their non-flying superiors regarded the young avi­ators as undisciplined. Baker decided that air autonomy was not the answer, but also admitted that combat in Europe had demon­strated that the air arm was more than just an auxiliary service.5 The next year, on the eve of America’s entry into the Great War, a joint Army-Navy panel recommended purchasing “a rigid air­ship of the zeppelin type” that could bomb an enemy’s homeland.6 Although the dominant focus of America’s air power vision re­mained on supporting the Army, that view did not exclude inde­pendent operations.

The failure of American civilian and military leaders to articu­late a definitive concept of military aviation likely stemmed from the paucity of military aviation available. When Congress de­clared war against Germany on 6 April 1917, the Signal Corps’ Aviation Section numbered only 65 officers on active duty, of whom 26 were certified pilots, backed by 1,100 enlisted men and 200 civilian personnel. The Army’s sole example of applying air power against an enemy was the use of eight Curtiss jnj train­ing aircraft in Brigadier General John J. Pershing’s expedition to Mexico, and all had broken down. That fiasco caused Congress to lavish appropriations of almost thirteen million dollars on the Aviation Section, but by the end of 1916 the Army possessed only 149 aircraft—mostly trainers and virtually all obsolete—while another 302 were on order but undelivered. Only twelve compa­nies were capable of building airplanes for the government, and they produced just 90 aircraft in 1916. In contrast, twenty-seven British firms built 5,716 airplanes that year. The chairman of the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics, the civilian pre­paredness agency that initially coordinated Army wartime avia­tion policy with American industry, warned: “Though millions may be available for a specific purpose in time of great need, no amount of money will buy time.”

Yet time would not be forthcoming. On 23 May 1917, French Premier Alexandre Ribot, responding to pleas from his generals for American material as well as men, cabled his ambassador in Washington dc and requested 4,500 airplanes for the 1918 cam­paign, along with 2,000 replacements per month. Given the state of Army aviation, Ribot’s request bordered on the fantastic— multiplied out for just the first half of the year, it totaled 16,500 aircraft! Moreover, the cable failed to mention what types of air­craft the United States should produce. With Foulois, now a ma­jor, serving as Signal Corps representative, the Joint Army-Navy Technical Board hurriedly sketched out a program for a 9,000- aircraft force with a reserve of 3,000 airplanes. Of those totals, the board slated 1,000 and 333 respectively as bombers; the remainder would be fighters and observation aircraft. The program’s magni­tude disheartened many members of the Army’s General Staff, who believed that the emphasis on aviation might limit the nation’s ca­pability to manufacture other needs for the service.8 Their reser-

vations led Brigadier General George O. Squier, the Army’s chief signal officer, to present the board’s proposal directly to Secretary of War Baker. Baker then took it to Congress, which appropriated a staggering $640 million to fund the entire program. President Woodrow Wilson signed the measure into law on 24 July.

Even before Congress approved the plan, an American mission departed for Europe to obtain information on the best aircraft de­signs to produce in the United States. Arriving in Liverpool on the twenty-sixth, the mission spent the next five weeks interviewing air officers and industrialists in Britain, France, and Italy. Led by Major Raynal C. Bolling, a former U. S. Steel lawyer who had or­ganized the National Guard’s first aviation unit, the group con­sisted of 105 military and civilian aviation experts. One of them was Captain Nap Gorrell, fresh out of мі г and sporting a master of science degree in aeronautical engineering.

Despite the group’s qualifications, Bolling faced a difficult task. Besides the time constraint demanding an immediate start to full – scale American production, the mission suffered from two key problems. First, it would not finish its work before the arrival of General John J. Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force (aef) staff, which would evaluate air requirements from the vantage point of the force that would do the fighting. Bolling’s mission reported to General Squier in Washington DC, not Pershing, and the mission’s conclusions would not match those of Pershing’s of­ficers. Second, the group’s departure for Europe almost a month before Congress approved the air arm’s structure compelled its members to devise a structure of their own, and doing so required making determinations about air strategy that would dictate air­craft roles and the types needed to fulfill them.9 Many of their de­cisions stemmed from the ideas of Allied airmen. For Nap Gor­rell, the insights gained would endure, and would form the basis of his plan for a bomber offensive.

и

Bolling’s group spent its first week in Britain meeting with Brit­ish Director-General of Military Aeronautics and General Officer Commanding the Royal Flying Corps, Sir David Flenderson. He suggested that the Americans concentrate exclusively on bomber production and not try to develop a balanced force of fighters, bombers, and observation aircraft.10 The first attack on London by German Gotha bombers a fortnight before the Bolling mis­sion arrived may have triggered Henderson’s recommendation. In two minutes, fourteen Gothas had dropped nearly two tons of bombs, killing 162 people and injuring 432.11 The bombers attacked in daylight and with impunity; none fell to antiaircraft fire or fighters. Many of London’s East End workers, fearing the bombers’ return, stayed away from their factories. Meanwhile, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and his War Cabinet ordered two squadrons of fighters home from France. Britain’s leaders also looked to pay the Germans back in kind. Before the Gotha assault, the British had shunned the development of an independent bombing force. In April 1917, their air strength in France consisted of twenty-seven fighter squadrons, twenty-one army support squadrons, and two bomber squadrons. After the Gotha raid, the British government’s Air Board recommended de­veloping forty squadrons of long-range bombers.12

In France and Italy, Bolling’s group also discovered a strong preference for bomber development. The French could not pro­duce enough aircraft to satisfy both the demand for additional air support at the front and the desire for bombers to attack Ger­many. They hoped that the 4,500 figure mentioned by Premier Ribot could form a strategic force—that intent had been mistak­enly omitted from the cable—and they made certain that Bolling’s mission understood their wishes.13 In Italy, the Americans found bombing operations that were more than mere speculation. The Italians had begun a long-range air campaign against targets in

Austria and were, at the time, the only Allied nation conducting “strategic” bombing. Their air offensive, sporting as many as 140 aircraft on a single raid, impressed Bolling’s group.14 The group was also impressed by the man who had molded the Italian bomber force, the designer and theorist Gianni Caproni. Gorrell in par­ticular was inspired by Caproni’s vision of air power, which par­alleled the thoughts of Giulio Douhet, Caproni’s close friend and confidant.15 Caproni maintained that for bombing to be effective it had to be “systematic, thorough, and consistent.”16 This asser­tion became a cornerstone of Gorrell’s plan.

Submitting his initial report to General Squier on 15 August 1917, Bolling called for the production of training aircraft, air­craft to support American troops in the field, and “aircraft in ex­cess of the tactical requirements of the Army in France.”17 His group had selected four types of Allied aircraft for American pro­duction: the British Dehaviland DH-4 for day-bombing and obser­vation; the British Bristol and French spad for air-to-air combat, and the Italian Caproni Tri-motor for long-range night bomb­ing. He recommended that the United States build as many of all types as possible. Bolling contended that the number of airplanes needed to support the ground forces depended on the size of the Army and would vary in proportion to it. Combat aircraft in ex­cess of those required for Army support could conduct “indepen­dent” air operations, such as night raids on Germany. He further suggested a precise apportionment of aircraft types for this inde­pendent force: 37.5 percent of its aircraft should be fighters ca­pable of escorting bombers, 25 percent should be day bombers, and the remainder should be Caproni night bombers.18 He found the prospects of night bombing especially appealing, and noted that if it were conducted “on a sufficiently great scale and kept up continuously for a sufficient time, there seems good reason to believe that it might determine the whole outcome of military operations.”19 Yet Bolling’s “third-place mention of the strategic force was apparently taken to mean that it was third in order of relative importance,”20 and bombers did not appear in the initial American aircraft manufacturing program.

One individual had no intention of allowing the notion of an American air offensive to wither away—Billy Mitchell. Since op­posing an autonomous air service four years earlier, Mitchell had come to believe that air power might hold the secret to winning wars. After finishing his General Staff assignment in June 19×6, he became General Squier’s deputy in the Signal Corps’ Aviation Section and was promoted to major. He then took advantage of a provision in the 1916 National Defense Act lifting the ban on flight training for servicemen over thirty (Mitchell was thirty-six). From September 1916 to January 1917, he paid a dollar a min­ute for 1,470 minutes of off-duty flying instruction at the Curtiss Aviation School in Newport News, Virginia.21 His flying “exper­tise” likely caused the War Department to send him to Europe as an aeronautical observer, and he arrived in Paris four days after America’s declaration of war.22 Two weeks later he spent ten days at the front lines observing French General Robert Nivelle’s disas­trous offensive and visiting French aviation units. He recalled his thoughts after first viewing trench warfare from the air:

A very significant thing to me was that we could cross the lines of these contending armies in a few minutes in our airplane, whereas the armies had been locked in the struggle, immovable, powerless to advance, for three years. To even stick one’s head over the top of a trench invited death. This whole area over which the Germans and French battled was not more than sixty miles across. It was as though they kept knocking their heads against a stone wall, until their brains were dashed out. They got nowhere, as far as ending the war was concerned.22

In May, Mitchell visited the headquarters of Major General Hugh Trenchard, commander in the field of Britain’s Royal Fly­ing Corps (rfc). Mitchell arrived abruptly, wearing an extrava­gant uniform that he designed himself, but his unbridled exuber­ance persuaded the general who was “decided in manner and very direct in speech” to give him a three-day dose of RFC operations and Trenchard philosophy. Mitchell was particularly impressed by Trenchard’s commitment to a single, unified air command that would allow him to “hurl a mass of aviation at any one locality needing attack.” For the British air leader, a tightly controlled, con­tinuous aerial offensive was the key to success, and assigning air units to individual ground commanders for defense was a mistake. Trenchard highlighted the rfc’s General Headquarters Brigade, a force designed to destroy the German army’s means of supply and reinforcement, but which possessed too few aircraft to do so in the spring of 1917. He argued that air power should attack as far as possible into the enemy’s country, and noted that the devel­opment of new airplanes with greater ranges would make Berlin a viable target. He did not, however, contend during his first en­counter with Mitchell that the quickest way to defeat the German army was through an air offensive aimed at the German nation. While others around Trenchard stressed a “radical air strategy” against the German homeland, he remained focused on using air power to defeat the German army on the Western Front. None­theless, Mitchell emerged from his initial contact with Trenchard profoundly affected by the general’s ideas and convinced that an aerial offensive was a key to winning the war.24

As a result of observing Allied operations, Mitchell proposed dividing the American air contingent into categories of “tacti­cal” and “strategical” aviation. He made his proposal to Persh­ing’s chief of staff, who arrived in France with the commanding general in mid-June. Tactical aviation would consist of squadrons

attached to divisions, corps, or armies and would operate as any other combat arm. In contrast, strategical aviation “would be bom­bardment and pursuit formations and would have an independent mission very much as independent cavalry used to have…. They would be used to carry the war well into the enemy’s country.”25 This mission, he insisted, could have “a greater influence on the ultimate decision of the war than any other arm.”26 Soon after re­ceiving Mitchell’s plan, Pershing selected a board of officers to de­termine the proper composition for aef aviation. Because Mitch­ell was the senior American aviator in Europe, the general made him chief of the newly created Air Service, which had replaced the Signal Corps as the Army’s air organization in the aef.27 Mitch­ell’s appointment did not, however, guarantee his proposal’s ac­ceptance. On 11 July, Pershing outlined a comprehensive plan for aef organization that authorized fifty-nine squadrons of tactical aircraft for service with the field armies. It made no mention of an independent force for “strategical” operations.

Arnold’s request crystallized the great dilemma for Eaker as the clock continued ticking toward Operation Overlord, the codename given for the invasion of France. Intelligence assessments indicated that his bombing—and the air battles that accompanied it—had a detrimental impact on the German war effort, yet the question re­mained—how much of an impact? Eaker could not say with cer­tainty. He could express success in numerical terms—the amount of bombs dropped, the percentage that hit the target, the numbers of enemy fighters shot down—but even with photographic recon­naissance and Ultra intercepts he could not know for sure whether the destruction that he claimed had actually occurred, or, more importantly, if the actual destruction had produced the desired ef­fect on Germany’s capability and will to keep fighting.

Eaker’s inability to divine his enemy’s response to bombing was a problem that did not lend itself to easy solutions. Besides scru­tinizing intelligence reports, he examined German newspaper ac­counts of raids to determine if the tone of articles revealed the German public’s willingness to keep supporting the war.132 Many coa members relied on their knowledge of American industry to determine the likely impact of destroying similar features of Ger­man war production. Planning for the first Schweinfurt raid typ­ified the mirror-image approach. “Industrialists think in terms of what destruction of American ball bearing plants would mean to them, and they are completely unable to suggest a method by which they could long continue in operation if this [destruction] should occur,” wrote the coa’s Colonel Guido Perera. “There is every reason to believe that the German situation is identical, for in both countries the industry has the same essential character­istics.”133

Such logic ignored actions that the Germans might have already taken to forestall production losses or that they would take after­ward to replace their capability; it also presumed that German in­dustry operated at peak capacity (it did not, and would not until 1944). Thus, determining when aerial destruction would produce tangible results remained a tall order. Regarding future attacks on Ploesti and the German oil system, coa members concluded, “It is impossible to state the precise time when the effects of such de­struction would become apparent. German military leaders would at some point realize that the future was hopeless.”134

Until they did so, Eaker would keep bombing. With the onset of winter, the dismal weather that had plagued Eighth Air Force over northern Europe deteriorated even further. Eaker had no in­tention of giving the Germans a respite from his daylight cam­paign, but the losses that he had suffered limited his ability to at­tack deep inside the Reich. In addition, Arnold stripped away replacement aircraft and crews to help create the Fifteenth Air Force that would attack Germany from Italian bases.135 The cre­ation of the Fifteenth cut deeply into an already depleted Eighth.136 To preserve his bomber force, Eaker confined most raids to tar­gets within range of his escort fighters. Dense clouds compelled his crews to use radar bombing for the majority of those missions.

The need to protect bombers and use radar methods limited Eaker to attacking coastal targets in Germany, where the contrast be­tween land areas and water produced the strongest radar images and the distances were short enough to provide escorts most of the way. Bomber losses declined as a result, but bombing accuracy declined as well. Eighth Air Force analysts estimated that for the twenty-seven radar bombing missions flown between the end of September 1943 and the end of January 1944, only 5 percent of the bombs fell within one mile of the aiming point.137

Yet Eaker refused to believe that he had lost his chance for suc­cess. The emphasis remained on achieving rapid results, and he believed that radar bombing could help achieve that objective. On 16 November he wrote Arnold: “I am concerned that you will not appreciate the tremendous damage that is being done to the Ger­man morale by these attacks through overcast, since we cannot show you appreciable damage by photographs. . .. The German people cannot take that kind of terror much longer.”138 If the de­struction rendered to Germany’s industrial web and its homeland fighter force failed to wreck its capability to fight in the allotted time, the radar attacks appeared to offer the prospect for quickly breaking Germany’s will to keep fighting.

Eaker understood that his radar raids resembled the raf’s night area bombing in terms of destruction, but to him they were unique— and hence more terrorizing—because they demonstrated the abil­ity to bomb a city enshrouded in a dense cloud cover.139 He knew such raids killed large numbers of civilians but was untroubled by that result. “I have always believed that civilians supporting [the] national leadership were equally responsible with the mili­tary,” he reflected after the war. “I thought, and still believe, that the man who builds the weapon is as responsible as the man who carries it into battle.”140

Although many air leaders likely felt the same way, Eaker’s de­cision to stress radar bombing revealed how the war’s momentum had altered the progressive ideals that initially guided American airmen in World War II. Eaker had not abandoned those beliefs, but he had helped transform them into notions that stressed speed over all else, including the goal of minimizing casualties on both sides. The desire for an efficient air campaign that limited losses gave way to an air offensive that produced high American ca­sualties and now condoned a direct attack on urban areas that was certain to produce widespread civilian deaths. The failure to achieve air superiority, combined with the vagaries of weather, was largely responsible for the loss of lives that occurred both in the air and on the ground from the American portion of the Com­bined Bomber Offensive, and the emphasis on controlling the air as quickly as possible led to further losses in both domains. Fast results became the sine qua non of a victory through air power, but fast did not necessarily equate to efficient, especially in terms of lives spared. The emphasis on achieving rapid success endured for the remainder of the war.

Eaker’s shift to radar bombing did not impress Arnold, who downplayed the impact of the weather on Eighth Air Force. The aaf Commanding General wanted fast results as well, but thought that the best way to get them was by attacking aircraft factories. Air Chief Marshal Portal confirmed airframe and engine plants as the top targets in Germany at the end of October, stressing that “the success of ‘Overlord’ hangs on the extent to which, by the date of the operation, we have been able to achieve a reasonable reduction of the enemy fighter forces.”141 The coa echoed Por­tal’s message, noting that Overlord placed “increasing emphasis on the need for short-term results.”142 Accordingly, Arnold di­rected Eaker on i November to conduct radar bombing, when cloud cover prohibited precision attacks, against area targets that would adversely affect the Luftwaffe fighter force.143

Germany’s aircraft factories, though, were all small, “preci­sion” targets scattered deep inside the Reich. Eighth Air Force could not hit them using radar techniques; furthermore, Eaker lacked the strength to send bomber formations across Germany unescorted.144 At the end of November, after contemplating a mission against Berlin as a part of Harris’s offensive against the city, Eaker decided against it.14’ He continued to highlight the de­struction that his radar bombing had rendered to German cities, and hence to German morale.146 He further confided to Air Sec­retary Lovett, “I think those who discount and discredit the ef­fect that our overcast bombing on German cities is having on the enemy are unrealistic and unwise.”147 Yet he also acknowledged to Major General Barney Giles, who directed Arnold’s air staff, on 13 December:

There seems to be a feeling there of great irritation that we have not attacked the fighter factories recently. The plain truth of the matter is that there has been no day since November 1 when we could see these factories well enough to bomb them visually. We have not reached a state of either technical or tactical development where we can attack fighter factories with overcast devices. These factories, as you know, are scattered and isolated and they also require deep penetration. We are not justified in striking at them unless the conditions augur for success. These deep penetrations and the impossibility of fighter es­cort will cost us 80-120 bombers. We will suffer this loss any time we penetrate in force to these targets. We must, therefore, be reason­ably certain of their destruction before we launch any expedition en­tailing such cost.148

The Army Air Forces Commanding General—who had never commanded any force in combat—failed to empathize with Eak – er’s plight. Arnold could also hear the clock ticking to produce air power results, and he did not like his chances. Even though his di­versions of bombers to the Mediterranean and Pacific had helped emasculate Eaker’s force, Arnold felt that the situation demanded a new commander for America’s bomber offensive against Ger­many. Eisenhower would soon arrive in Britain to command the forthcoming invasion and had asked that Spaatz, who had served as his air commander in the Mediterranean, accompany him. The overall Allied air commander in the Mediterranean, Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, would join Eisenhower as well, creating a vacancy that needed to be filled by an experienced airman. In addition, Arnold had long desired a single air commander for “strategic” air operations, and with the creation of the Fifteenth Air Force, he now had two bomber forces engaged in the bombing of Ger­many. His solution was to make Spaatz the Commander of the “U. S. Strategic Air Forces,” which would encompass the bomber commands in the Eighth and the Fifteenth, and shift Eaker to com­mand the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces.

Eaker, who had received a promotion to lieutenant general in September, was bitter over the transfer. He learned of it on 18 December, just as Eighth Air Force had finally begun to receive many of the bombers and crews originally promised in the сво plan, and fighters with long-range drop tanks had begun to arrive that would enable them to accompany bombers deep into Ger­many. Four days later, he wrote his friend Major General James Fechet, a former commander of the Army Air Corps: “I feel like a pitcher who has been sent to the showers during a world se­ries game.”149

Eaker, though, had done much to shape how the remainder of the “game” would be played. Spaatz and his subordinate com­manders, Lieutenant General James “Jimmy” Doolittle, the new Commander of the Eighth Air Force, and Lieutenant General Na­than Twining, Commander of Fifteenth Air Force, would adhere to the methods that Eaker had established for bombing the Third

Reich. The Air Corps Tactical School’s progressive proposition that bombing could precisely sever the strands of an enemy’s in­dustrial web to produce quick, inexpensive results had morphed into an air campaign that placed a higher priority on rapid suc­cess than it did on producing inexpensive gains. The emphasis on speed would guarantee—for the both the attacker and the at­tacked—that the American air offensive against Germany was anything but “cheap.”