Category German Jets, 1944-1945

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.

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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.”

Tooey Spaatz, now wearing four stars and in Washington DC en route to the Pacific to command the United States Strategic Air Forces there, agreed with the ussbs representatives when he met with them in late July. Arnold had yielded control of Twentieth Air Force to Lieutenant General Nate Twining, and Eighth Air Force would reconstitute on Okinawa, commanded by its former European commander, Lieutenant General “Jimmy” Doolittle, while Spaatz oversaw both organizations as usstaf Commander, with LeMay serving as his chief of staff. Yet when Spaatz arrived on Guam at the end of the month, he continued the incendiary campaign in addition to attacking precision targets. Indeed, on the night of i August, B-29S burned Hachioji, another town of roughly sixty thousand people.

Spaatz also arrived on Guam with written orders to drop the atomic bomb. He was uncertain that such a device was necessary to induce Japanese capitulation. After examining the post-strike photographs from LeMay’s raids, he sent a message to Arnold that “unless the Japanese were intent to commit national suicide they would surrender under the present strategic bombing.”153 When they might surrender, though, remained the great unknown. LeMay believed that the bomb offered the chance to end the war but was skeptical that it would work as advertised. “I knew we had a big bang coming,” he later recalled, “but it really was a little be­yond my comprehension how big a bang it was going to be.”154 In planning the Hiroshima raid, LeMay determined that the mission would attract less notice from the Japanese if it appeared as a typi­cal attempt to gather weather information. Accordingly, only three B-29S participated on 6 August, with the bomb-laden Enola Gay flown by Colonel Paul Tibbets Jr.—the same officer who had pi­loted the lead aircraft in the Eighth Air Force’s first heavy bomber mission against Hitler’s Europe. Once over Hiroshima, the care­ful Tibbets polled his crew to verify that he was indeed above the target city, and then began the bomb run.155

Between seventy thousand and eighty thousand people, mostly civilians, died from the bomb dubbed “Little Boy,” though many others would later perish from burns and radiation sickness.156 Norstad’s thoughts on the attack revealed just how far his commit­ment to air power’s progressive ideals had taken him. In a private message to Spaatz on 8 August, he noted that he wanted pictures of Hiroshima released showing the aiming point in the city’s cen­ter so that “the accuracy with which this bomb was placed may counter a thought that the Centerboard [atomic bomb delivery] project involves wanton, indiscriminate bombing.”157 Spaatz dis­played a different mindset and tried to prevent a second atomic attack on an urban area. After Hiroshima, he called for dropping the second atomic bomb outside a city as a show of force.158 His plea went unheeded, and on 9 August at least thirty-five thousand people died instantly in the atomic raid against Nagasaki.159 On 14 August, with peace negotiations ongoing, 449 B-29S attacked Japan that day and 372 that night.160 Arnold “wanted as big a fi­nale as possible” and aimed to guarantee in no uncertain terms that air power played the decisive role in ending the war.161

Following Hiroshima, Spaatz informed reporters that the atomic bomb probably precluded an invasion of Japan and that a sim­ilar bomb against Germany could have shortened the European war by at least six months—remarks that drew the ire of George Marshall.162 After Nagasaki, had the Japanese failed to surren­der, Spaatz now wanted to drop a third atomic bomb on Tokyo to compel a rapid end to the war.165 Most American air command­ers agreed that the atomic attacks broke Japan’s will to fight and saved an enormous number of Allied lives.164

Allied political leaders reflected those sentiments as well. Tru­man claimed after the war that Marshall had estimated an inva­sion might cost five hundred thousand American lives,165 though in the 18 June 1945 meeting with the Joint Chiefs (that Arnold had missed), the president had received conflicting projections. Marshall’s calculation of thirty-one thousand casualties in the first thirty days of fighting on Kyushu was among the lowest totals, but that estimate omitted potential Navy losses and did not proj­ect when the fighting would end; Admiral William Leahy antici­pated Kyushu losses exceeding two hundred thousand.166 Ultra in­telligence intercepts in the month after the meeting indicated that triple the number of estimated Japanese troops actually defended the selected Olympic invasion beaches, and Marshall likely noti­fied Truman of the update in late July.167 The impetus to obtain a rapid, inexpensive victory—from the American perspective—led Truman to approve the atomic attacks even if his numbers were indefinite. Yet he framed the first atomic raid from a progressive perspective resembling Norstad’s and noted on 9 August that Hi­roshima was “a military base. . . because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”168 Brit­ish Prime Minister Winston Churchill provided a similar progres­sive view of the atomic bomb’s utility—with questionable num­bers as a rationale—in his typically vivid prose:

To quell the Japanese resistance man by man and conquer the coun­try yard by yard might well require the loss of a million American lives and half that number of British…. Now all this nightmare pic­ture had vanished. In its place was the vision—fair and bright in­deed it seemed—of the end of the whole war in one or two violent shocks. … To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands upon its tor­tured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions, seemed, after all our toils and perils, a miracle of deliverance.169

Pershing’s failure to approve the proposal caused Mitchell to re­double his efforts. In August 1917 he asked the aef Intelligence branch to provide information on strategic targets in Germany, and later received a list of industrial targets in the Ruhr from the French.28 He also created a staff to explore the possibilities of bombing Germany in more detail. To direct the Air Service’s Technical Section, Mitchell picked the twenty-six-year-old Gor – rell, who had just completed his work with the Bolling mission. Gorrell’s job for Mitchell would be similar to his former work for Bolling: to determine Air Service requirements, including the various types of aircraft needed. In trying to estimate the correct number of bombers, Gorrell considered the prospects of strategic bombing, and ultimately produced America’s first plan for a stra­tegic air campaign. He developed this plan in relative splendor, for Mitchell chose the Chateau de Chamarandes, a magnificent hunt­ing lodge built by Louis XV, as his headquarters. Located within a mile of Pershing’s headquarters at Chaumont, the chateau pro­vided both living quarters and office space. It continued to serve as Air Service headquarters after Mitchell left in October to be­come Air Service Commander in the Zone of the Advance.29

Besides Mitchell, a variety of individuals helped Gorrell develop his plan. Gorrell stayed in contact with Bolling, who remarked in early September that the importance of “bombing operations with direct military ends in view” could not be overestimated.30 In addition, veteran pilots Harold Fowler and Millard F. Harmon, both Air Service majors, assisted Gorrell.31 Fowler flew with the Royal Flying Corps before America’s entry in the war, while Har­mon was an Air Service pilot in the Philippines before the conflict. Gorrell also received a large measure of support from three indi­viduals uniquely qualified to help develop an air campaign plan: Wing Commander Spencer Grey of the Royal Naval Air Service (rnas), Gianni Caproni, and Major Hardinge Goulborn Tiver­ton, a British Lord and, like Grey, a pilot with the rnas. Grey was a liaison officer attached to Air Service headquarters and had participated in raids against German inland targets from the rnas base at Dunkirk, plus he had helped develop a 1,650-pound bomb. Gorrell considered him the “world’s greatest authority on questions dealing with aerial bombardment” and relied heavily on his expertise.32

Caproni, whose bomber was slated for American production, met frequently with Gorrell in the autumn of 1917. Besides pro­viding Gorrell with a list of Germany’s major industrial targets,33 Caproni also sent him an English-text copy of a new book, Let Us Kill The War; Let Us Aim at the Heart of the Enemy, by the Italian journalist Nino Salveneschi. The book was a compilation of Caproni’s major thoughts on how air warfare could achieve an independent victory, and Gorrell embraced its message enthusias­tically. “I have read with great interest your book entitled ‘Let us Kill the War; Let us Aim at the Heart of the Enemy,’ which you so kindly gave me,” he wrote Caproni on 31 October. “May I ask you to let me have half a dozen copies of this book and I will guarantee to spread the gospel in all directions.”34

Salveneschi’s book—an unabashed endorsement for Caproni’s Tri-motor bomber—contained a number of perceptions that reap­peared in Gorrell’s plan. The Italian argued that victory in the cur­rent conflict meant destroying the enemy’s army rather than occu­pying his country, and that the key to destroying his army was to take away its means to fight. The Allies could thus obtain victory in one of two ways: by exceeding the enemy’s armament produc­tion, or by wrecking the factories that built the weapons.35 Out­producing Germany’s enormous industrial capacity would be dif­ficult, Salveneschi asserted. Air power, however, offered the means to destroy the factories, which were the “heart” of the enemy war effort. Stabbing the heart would in turn kill the war.36

Salveneschi warned that the Germans would build up their own bomber force for an offensive against Allied production centers unless the Allies first attacked German industry. He listed the major German factories as those in Essen, Munich, along the Rhine, and in Westphalia. Allied bombers did not have to destroy all of them, however, to achieve success—wrecking other facto­ries closer to the front might produce greater results. “In this war there is, among the factories, as far as the front, a mecha­nism like a perfect watch-making workshop,” Salveneschi wrote. “Enough to destroy a ‘specialized’ factory to obtain, in a short time, enforced inaction of the enemy.”37 Because the Central Pow­ers were likely to defend their key factories with fighter aircraft, the attacking air fleet needed to be as large as possible and com­

posed of sturdy aircraft (like the Tri-motor) so at least part of the bombers could hit their target. The Italian acknowledged that some bombs would miss their aim points and kill civilians, but cautioned that “one must not permit sentimentality to interfere with the destruction of factories. . . . [T]he life of every German labourer at work for the war has less value than one of our boys who is fighting for his country.”38 Yet Salveneschi did not advo­cate killing civilians to defeat the enemy. Rather, he moved past that question to assert, somewhat antiseptically, that Caproni’s dream of an aerial victory could “be converted into [the] reality of figures and formulae.”39

Salveneschi’s writings meshed neatly with those of rnas Major Lord Tiverton, whom Gorrell met in France during the autumn of 1917. While serving as technical liaison officer for the Royal Na­vy’s Air Department in Paris, Tiverton completed his own thor­ough study of long-range bombing in early September, and his analysis compared favorably to that provided by Salveneschi and Caproni.40 Gorrell found Tiverton’s views particularly compel­ling—so much so that he used Tiverton’s paper, virtually verba­tim, for the body of his own plan that he finished in late Novem­ber.41 Although Gorrell’s plan took into account Grey’s expertise and Caproni’s images, as well as Mitchell’s ideas, gleaned largely from Trenchard, about air power’s ability to destroy the German army’s means to fight, Tiverton’s notions had a telling impact on Gorrell’s thoughts. Gorrell added an introduction and conclusion to address strictly American concerns, but most of the remaining words came from Tiverton.42

Gorrell began by noting that three and a half years of conflict had produced a stalemate on the ground and at sea, and that only “a new policy of attacking the enemy” would affect the war’s con­duct.43 That new policy was “strategical bombing,” which he de­fined as air attacks on commercial centers and lines of commu­

nication to stop the flow of enemy supplies to the front. Much like Salveneschi, Gorrell asserted that “there are a few certain in­dispensable targets without which Germany cannot carry on the war.”44 The German army could be likened to a drill, whose point could continue to bore only if the shank—the German national ef­fort—remained durable. Four target groups were essential to keep­ing the shank strong: the industries surrounding Dusseldorf, Co­logne, Mannheim, and the Saar. If those vital factories and their transportation links were destroyed, the drill would become im­potent. “German shells are being fired at Allied troops and posi­tions over a large area of the Front,” he observed, “but the manu­facture of these shells and bombs is dependent upon the output of a few specific, well-known factories turning out the chemicals for them…. If the chemical factories can be blown up, the shell and bomb output will cease, to a greater or lesser degree, dependent upon the damage done these chemical plants.”45 In addition, Ger­many’s main aircraft engine factory and magneto plant were both in Stuttgart, and their destruction would severely hamper Germa­ny’s ability to sustain its air power on the Western Front.

The belief that the essence of an enemy nation’s war-making capability consisted of certain key components linking together its industrial complex was the crux of Gorrell’s proposal—and a conviction that ultimately became a central pillar of the Ameri­can approach to strategic bombing.

Although destroying German war-making capability was the focus of Gorrell’s plan, his scheme presupposed that attacks on in­dustrial targets would also break the morale of the German work force. His rationale stemmed partly from the effects of German air raids on the French factory at Pont-St. Vincent, where work­ers had been reluctant to return to their duties even though the bombs had missed the mark; he knew as well of the work stop­pages resulting from the Gotha offensive against London.4’’ Gor – rell believed that a concentrated air attack against the four enemy target groups would persuade the German populace to demand an end to the conflict, and called for one hundred bomber squad­rons to start the campaign by simultaneously attacking arma­ment works in Mannheim and Ludwigshafen for five continu­ous hours. “If immediately afterwards, on the next possible day, Frankfurt were attacked in a similar way, judging from the press reports of what has already occurred in Germany,” he contended, “it is quite possible that Gologne would create such trouble that the German government might be forced to suggest terms if that town were so attacked.”47

To Gorrell, a nation’s will to fight equated to the population’s willingness to endure the conflict. A mass revolution that threat­ened to dislodge the enemy government—and forced its govern­ment to make peace to stay in power—would certainly indicate that bombs had broken enemy morale. Yet a popular revolt was not necessary to break German will. For Gorrell, widespread ab­senteeism would suffice, and would have the same impact as fac­tories destroyed by bombs. The ultimate goal was to prevent the German army from waging war.

The enemy’s capability and will to fight were complementary objectives, and Gorrell’s offensive aimed at both. “From both the morale point of view and also that of material damage, concentra­tion of our aerial forces against single targets on the same day is of vital importance since it tends to hamper the defense and also to complete in a thorough manner the work which the bombard­ment is intended to perform,” he observed.48

Gorrell estimated that between three thousand and six thousand American bombers were necessary to carry out his plan, provided that the force received adequate logistical support and aircrew training.49 The armada would fly en masse, and concentrate on de­stroying a particular set of targets completely before assaulting a different target group. Hearkening to Trenchard, Gorrell stressed continuous, systematic bombing as the key to overwhelming Ger­man defenses while unnerving workers and preventing them from making repairs. Yet the Germans, Gorrell warned, also realized the potential of strategic bombing and aimed to launch a simi­lar large-scale effort against the Allies during the next year. Thus, the sooner the American campaign began, the better. “This is not a phantom nor a dream,” he wrote to Bolling in October 1917, “but is a huge reality capable of being carried out with success if the United States will only carry on a sufficiently large campaign for next year, and manufacture the types of airplanes that lend themselves to this campaign, instead of building pursuit planes already out of date here in Europe.”50

Gorrell submitted his plan on 28 November to Brigadier Gen­eral Benjamin Foulois, who had become Chief of the aef Air Ser­vice the previous day. The two had served together as pilots in the First Aero Squadron during the Mexican punitive expedition and knew each other well. Fike Mitchell, Foulois had changed his at­titude on the value of independent air operations since his 1913 testimony that Army aviation belonged under Signal Corps’ con­trol. He approved Gorrell’s plan in December and sent it to Gen­eral Pershing for his endorsement. Foulois also placed Gorrell— now a lieutenant colonel—in charge of Strategical Aviation in the Zone of the Advance. Persuaded that an independent bombing force would not deprive him of air support for American ground troops, Pershing approved the plan in early January. Gorrell then transferred to Pershing’s staff as the Air Service’s G-3 (War Plans and Operations) representative to oversee the plan’s implementa­tion, but he remained attuned to Pershing’s concern that the Air Service might neglect American armies.

To assuage this fear, Gorrell produced a written analysis of his plan’s impact on Army aviation for Pershing’s staff. Entitled “The Future Role of American Bombardment Aviation,” the study bor­

rowed heavily from a report that Trenchard had presented to the British War Cabinet in December 1917, as well as from a recent French bombing plan that American staff officers had translated into English.51 Yet Gorrell made certain that his paper addressed the Army’s anxiety over air support while emphasizing the great benefits of strategic bombing. He pointedly observed in the first paragraph: “The Air Service is an integral part of a homogeneous team, no portion of which, working by itself, can alone decisively defeat the enemy.”52 Gorrell then noted that air power would con­tinue to support ground combat operations by serving as a “long range gun” that could attack the enemy’s rear echelons beyond the range of fixed artillery, as well as by attacking the enemy’s front­line positions when necessary. Raids would also occur against important road and rail junctions near the front, which would prevent the flow of vital supplies and cause the enemy “grave re­sults.” Attacks against enemy industries would pay dividends at the front as well. “To successfully strike at such works, is to in­jure the source of the current which furnished the combative en­ergy of the enemy,” he maintained.53

Besides devoting a large amount of attention to “tactical” air power, Gorrell provided ample insights on “strategical bombing,” many of them courtesy of Hugh Trenchard. Gorrell stated that such bombing occurred mainly at long distances and was integral to the air offensive on the Western Front. It was not primarily a vehicle for retaliation. Instead, its basic purpose was “to weaken the power of the enemy both directly and indirectly; directly, by interrupting his production, transport, and organization through the infliction of damage on his industrial, railway, and military cen­ters and by compelling him to draw back his [aerial] fighting ma­chines to deal with the enemy’s; indirectly, by producing discon­tent and alarm among the industrial population. In other words, it aims at achieving both a material and a moral effect.”54

Gorrell reiterated that German war production depended on a few key links in its industrial complex and that destroying them would grind the German war effort to a halt. Pinpointing those links was the essence of successful bombing. Thus far, the lack of “proper scientific knowledge” and the failure to identify “the real object” of an air offensive had prevented bombing from achiev­ing its potential.55 Gorrell claimed that the necessary expertise now existed, and he was determined to use it. Aircraft would at­tack the industrial centers earmarked in his plan, and the bombs that missed would have “the desired moral effect” by depriving the enemy of “the enormous number of man-hours that a single aerial bombardment of necessity always causes.”5* Attacks would occur throughout daylight and darkness, with day bombers flying at high altitude in tight formation to overcome enemy defenses, while night bombers flew with the impunity that he believed al­lowed them to conduct the most accurate bombing.

Implementation Problems

As Gorrell worked to sell his scheme at aef headquarters, Lieuten­ant Colonel Ambrose Monell took over in late January as Chief of Strategical Aviation in the Zone of the Advance. An ex-president of the International Nickel Company, Monell was assisted in his new endeavor by Gorrell’s former compatriots Fowler and Grey. Meanwhile, Gorrell helped create an Office of Air Intelligence in the G-2 (Intelligence) Section of the aef staff. This section con­tained a “bomb target unit,” described by historian Thomas Greer as the “prototype of the organizations which played such an im­portant role in the strategic operations of World War II.”57 The unit produced target maps, antiaircraft defense maps, and maps of key German railroads and industries, all divided into “target folders” for specific installations.

While the Americans geared up to bomb Germany, the British had already launched the assault. In October 1917, in response to

the Gotha raids, Prime Minister David Lloyd George had promised London’s citizens: “We will give it all back to them and we will give it to them soon. We shall bomb Germany with compound inter­est.”58 Limited attacks began before the end of the year, and many of them were indiscriminate. Trenchard announced at a meeting with Gorrell and French representatives on 22 December that he aimed to establish a special force for bombing German industry and asked whether the French and Americans would contribute to it. Gorrell stated that the Americans planned to begin a sim­ilar effort but that he could not pledge the Air Service to a joint endeavor without Pershing’s approval.59 In contrast to the eager­ness for bombing Germany that they had displayed to the Bol­ling mission, the French were lukewarm now that the idea had be­come a reality. They stressed Germany’s ease of retaliation against French cities, and indeed in January 1918 German bombers at­tacked Paris for the first time in two and a half years.60 The Brit­ish then confined their raids to factories and rail yards, but they did not curb their plans for a separate bombing unit. On 5 June 1918, Trenchard took command of the Independent Air Force (iaf) of the newly created Royal Air Force. The need to devote half his sorties against German airfields, and the small number of aircraft available (his force varied between five and ten squad­rons), limited the amount of iaf bombs dropped on Germany to 550 tons, which were spread over fifty towns and cities.61 None­theless, Trenchard claimed that the “moral effect” of his bomb­ing outweighed its material impact by twenty to one.62

Because Trenchard took orders only from the British Air Min­istry, the iaf effort endeared itself to neither the French nor the Americans. The French were particularly incensed, as their Mar­shal Ferdinand Foch was Supreme Allied Commander. Trenchard’s restricted chain-of-command also led the aef Chief of Staff, Ma­jor General James W. McAndrew, to prohibit American bombing with the iaf once Air Service bombardment units reached suffi­cient strength to conduct separate operations. In January 1918 Pershing had agreed that British personnel could organize, train, and equip the thirty projected American night bombing squad­rons, and British flying schools also taught some American day bombing aircrews. In all, thirty-six Americans attached to the iaf flew combat “training” missions over Germany, and half of them were killed, wounded, or captured.63 Yet just as Pershing prohib­ited American ground combat units from amalgamating with Al­lied armies, he would not condone American bombers flying to achieve British objectives, especially when American ground forces needed air support. “In making arrangements with the British it must be thoroughly understood that when our [air] forces reach a certain importance the regions to be bombed will be designated by these headquarters and that the selection of targets will de­pend solely upon their importance with respect to the operations which we contemplate for our ground forces,” McAndrew told Major General Mason Patrick, who had replaced Foulois as aef Air Service chief.64 The issue of cooperative allied air operations was a sticky one, however, and Americans would revisit it with the British in the years to come.

In the end, America’s bombing contribution to the Great War consisted of day bombers raiding targets in France, and that con­tribution was meager. Eight antiquated Breguet-14 b-2 biplanes of the Ninety-sixth Aero Squadron flew in the first American bomb­ing raid, a 12 June 1918 attack on the rail yard and warehouses in Dommary-Baroncourt. Two planes returned to base with en­gine problems, while three others ran out of gas after dropping their bombs. Because of the Breguets’ feeble engines, it took sev­eral minutes for the tiny formation to climb to its bombing alti­tude of four thousand feet. Still, some of the aircraft hit the tar­get, and they survived attacks by three enemy fighters on the way home. This first attack typified those occurring for the remainder of the war. In August the Ninety-sixth flew twenty missions and dropped forty-three thousand pounds of bombs against transpor­tation and supply targets; in September and October it teamed with the Eleventh and Twentieth Aero Squadrons to support the American ground offensives at St. Mihiel and the Argonne.65

Colonel Billy Mitchell, who directed almost 1,500 allied air­craft at St. Mihiel as Chief of Air Service, First Army, now stressed air power’s auxiliary mission rather than its independent one. In February 1918, as Chief of Air Service, First Corps, he had ar­gued that the first mission of offensive air power must be the de­struction of the enemy’s air force. Thereafter, bombing operations “should be essentially tactical in their nature and directed against active enemy units in the field which will have a direct bearing on operations during this Spring and Summer, rather than a piece­meal attack against large factory sites and things of that nature. The factories, if completely destroyed, would undoubtedly have a very far-reaching effect, but to completely demolish them is a tre­mendously difficult thing, and, furthermore, even if they were ru­ined, their effect would not be felt for a long period of time (pos­sibly a year) upon the fighting of their army.”66

Although after the war Mitchell berated Pershing’s staff for “trying to handle aviation as an auxiliary of some of the other branches, instead of an independent fighting arm,”67 such criticisms during the conflict were infrequent. All his duties after leaving the Chateau de Chamarandes—Air Service Commander in the Zone of the Advance; Chief of Air Service, First Army; Chief of Air Ser­vice, First Corps; Chief of Air Service, First Brigade; once again Chief of Air Service, First Army; and finally, Chief of Air Service, Army Group—directly supported American troops at the front. As a result, his focus changed. “The Air Service of an army is one of its offensive arms,” he stated after taking command in the Zone of the Advance. “Alone it cannot bring about a decision. It there­fore helps the other arms in their appointed missions.”68

Late in the war, knowing that the Germans could not stop the continued American ground advance, Mitchell’s focus returned to the possibilities of strategic bombing. Yet as long as the Army’s progress remained uncertain, he devoted his full energies to pro­viding it with immediate air support. Of course, Mitchell’s ego had much to do with his pragmatic approach to air power—he craved a combat command, and the only combat air commands available were those attached to Army headquarters. Still, by the summer of 19 r 8, he realized that America’s major contribution to the Allied advance would be made by aef ground echelons, and that air support would enhance their impact.

McAndrew and Pershing agreed with Mitchell’s emphasis on supporting the ground battle. Besides limiting air operations with the British, in mid-June Pershing’s chief of staff had admonished Patrick that his officers who stressed an “independent” air cam­paign must realize that their views were contrary to the needs of the service. “It is therefore directed that these officers be warned against any idea of independence and that they be taught from the beginning that their efforts must be closely coordinated with those of the remainder of the Air Service and those of the ground army,” McAndrew stated.69 Recent savage fighting by the Amer­ican Second and Third Divisions at Chateau-Thierry had helped stop the German drive on Paris, and further bloodshed was im­minent as Pershing readied his troops to support Foch’s coun­teroffensive. When the assault began, the American commander wanted his soldiers to have maximum backing from their Air Ser­vice. The June name-change of the Strategical Aviation branch to the General Headquarters (ghq) Air Service Reserve reflected this continuing concern.

By the summer of 1918 Gorrell’s scheme for a massive Amer­ican air offensive had atrophied. Colonel Monell had, in Gor- rell’s words, worked on developing a strategic air force for only “a month or so,”70 and Major Fowler left Air Service headquar­ters to command the American air units operating with the Brit­ish. Discouraged by production deficiencies and convinced that an American strategic bombing campaign would never material­ize, Wing Commander Grey returned to a British assignment. Mo­nell succeeded during his tenure as Chief of the Strategical Sec – tion/GHQ Reserve only in selecting prospective airfields for his phantom force.71

After the war, Gorrell wrote that a major reason American stra­tegic bombing never materialized was that his plans “were not syn­chronized properly, especially from a mental point of view” with the Army’s General Headquarters.72 General Foulois concurred, declaring in October 1919: “The General Staff of the Army, either through lack of vision, lack of practical knowledge, or deliber­ate intention to subordinate the Air Service needs to the needs of other combat arms, has utterly failed to appreciate the full military value of this new military weapon, and, in my opinion, has failed to accord it its just place in our military family.”73 Even Mitchell, who had worked tirelessly to support the ground forces with air power, agreed that Army officers—with the sole exception of Ma­jor General Hunter Liggett, who had commanded the First Army— did not know what “air power” meant.74 In July 1918, Mitchell had insisted that the Chief of the Air Service, rather than the Ar­my’s General Staff, should direct the Air Service’s ghq Reserve. He based his argument on the need for unity of command, which would allow the Air Service chief to concentrate all available air power in a critical area for maximum impact.75 His plea went un­heeded, even though the ghq Reserve existed in name only—an American squadron of night bombers did not arrive at the front until 9 November Г918.

In his memoirs, Pershing articulated his views regarding the subordination of air power to ground combat. He remarked in his discussion of the Argonne offensive: “The tendency of our air force at first was to attach too much significance to flights be­yond the enemy’s lines in an endeavor to interrupt his communi­cations. However, this was of secondary importance during the battle, as aviators were then expected to protect and assist our ground troops.”76 To him, the main functions of an air force were to drive off hostile aircraft and provide the infantry and artillery with information on enemy troop movements. Many Army offi­cers agreed. One week before the Armistice, a General Staff anal­ysis noted that the meager number of American bombers at the front (the Air Service had six squadrons of day bombers at the end of the war) and the small number of bombs they carried made their destructive potential “practically the same as long-range ar­tillery.” Ignoring the issue of range, the study’s authors concluded that it took “two squadrons of bombing planes to equal the work of one 15 5mm. gun.”77

In the final analysis, the key reason that the United States never mounted a bomber offensive was indeed the failure to build bomb­ers for it. “Aircraft production [was] the greatest American air headache of World War I,” recalled Hap Arnold, who tracked the building of warplanes as a thirty-year-old colonel and assistant to the director of the Signal Corps’ Aeronautical Division.78 Ar­nold bemoaned the inefficient organization that divided respon­sibility for developing aircraft between the civilian Bureau of Air­craft Production and the Signal Corps’ Production Division. The Bureau, led by the former chief of Hudson Automobiles, How­ard Coffin, supervised engineering, supply, and testing, while the Production Division oversaw procurement. Neither organization had an aviator assigned to it on a full-time basis. Arnold remem­bered that after Coffin boasted forty thousand aircraft would be [3]

built by June 1918, he asked the industrialist how many spare parts he had ordered. “What do you need spare parts for?” was Coffin’s reply.7* Competing guidance from Americans in Europe matched the overlapping authority of production agencies in the United States. After the Bolling mission recommended building the Caproni bomber, General Pershing claimed final authority to determine aircraft types, and in November 1917 he recommended production of the British two-engine Handley-Page.80 Incredibly, despite the difficulties that would stem from building two types of bombers, the Joint Army-Navy Technical Board suggested pro­ducing both—and the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy approved the recommendation!81

European designs compounded American production problems. Most of the materials provided by the French, British, and Italian builders to serve as guidelines for Coffin’s manufacturers were in­complete or delayed. American production centered on the machine tools and detailed blueprints of the assembly line, whereas Euro­pean production stressed skilled craftsmen and individual work­manship.82 Not until 16 January 1918—almost six months after the Bolling mission’s initial selection—did Caproni’s representa­tives arrive in the United States. British designers for the Hand­ley-Page had arrived only two weeks earlier.83 The combination of differing production philosophies, delayed arrivals, and over­lapping authority produced construction programs with wildly fluctuating numbers of projected aircraft. The planned number of Caproni bombers went from 500 on 9 August 1917 to 9,000 a week later, to 2,000 on 24 August, to 50 on 19 February 1918, and to 250 on 3 May.84 In actuality, the United States built only one Caproni before the Armistice. As for the Handley-Page, plans to assemble 300 bombers in Britain resulted in only the shipment of parts for 101 before the war’s end, and none were assembled in time to fight.85 General Patrick’s July 1918 proposal of an Air

Service of 202 total squadrons, of which 41 would be bombers, compared to his proposal six weeks earlier for 261 squadrons, of which 101 would be bombers, reflected no loss of faith in the bomber’s ability to change the war. Rather, it displayed a realistic appraisal of America’s dismal production capability.86

That the war ended before American bombers had the chance to bomb German soil proved significant. Production deficiencies had prevented Gorrell’s dream of defeating Germany through strategic bombing from becoming a reality, yet the dream endured. Gorrell, Mitchell, and other Air Service officers could speculate about the probable effect that an American bomber offensive might have had on the outcome of the war, and blame the lack of aircraft as a reason why the offensive never materialized. Such difficulties could be overcome. Now air officers were aware of Gorrell’s post­war admonition that “money and men could not make an air pro­gram over night,”87 and they would make amends.

Had the war continued into 1919, Mitchell, certain that the Ger­man Army could not stop the American ground advance, planned an aerial assault against Germany’s interior. “I was sure that if the war lasted, air power would decide it,” he wrote after the Ar­mistice.88 According to his diary, he intended to combine incen­diary attacks with poison gas to destroy crops, forests, and live­stock. This air offensive, he mused, “would have caused untold sufferings and forced a German surrender.”89 Yet the likelihood of Mitchell’s vision becoming reality was remote. President Wil­son told Congress in his war message: “We shall, I feel confident, conduct our operations as belligerents without passion and our­selves observe with proud punctilio the principles of right and fair play we profess to be fighting for.”90 Secretary of War Baker re­flected those sentiments, telling Army Chief of Staff General Pey­ton March to notify the Air Service that the United States would not conduct any bombing that “has as its objective, promiscu­ous bombing upon industry, commerce, or population, in enemy countries disassociated from obvious military needs to be served by such action.”91 Moreover, in early January 1919, Mitchell re­vealed that his notion of strategic bombing had come to resem­ble GorrelPs. In a treatise entitled “Tactical Application of Mili­tary Aeronautics,” he argued that the main value of bombardment would come from “hitting an enemy’s great nerve centers at the very beginning of the war so as to paralyze them to the greatest extent possible.”92

Gorrell’s plan, which initially had won Pershing’s approval, borrowed heavily from Caproni and Tiverton in stressing attacks against key industrial centers rather than the German populace and its livelihood. By destroying those elements of Germany’s in­dustrial complex that were essential components of the army’s means to fight, Gorrell aimed to render enemy forces impotent. For him, the key to applying air power successfully was identi­fying those industries that made the German army tick and then wrecking them through accurate bombing. Such bombing would also terrify the German work force and keep it away from the tar­get factories. “Precision” bombing had proved far from precise, though.93 Night raids were notoriously inaccurate, despite Gorrell’s belief that accuracy increased because of immunity from enemy defenses. American day raids, which relied on formation bomb­ing aided by a primitive bombsight in the lead aircraft,94 also of­fered less than pinpoint accuracy. Still, the problem of bombing precisely appeared to be a mechanical one that could be solved through improved equipment, much like production problems could be eliminated through efficient organization.

For both Mitchell and Gorrell, scientifically applied air power of­fered the prospect of ending a war without the horrendous slaugh­ter of trench warfare. If bombing achieved that objective, the Ar­my’s air units might merit status as an independent service—and armies would perhaps become obsolete.

In the aftermath of the Great War, the clamor for air indepen­dence would become a roar, with Mitchell howling loudest of all. The Air Service had achieved an enduring measure of autonomy at the end of May 1918, when the Overman Act removed it from Signal Corps’ control and created a “Director of Military Aero­nautics” directly under the Army’s Chief of Staff. Three months later Congress named Jack D. Ryan, who had succeeded Howard Coffin as chief of Aircraft Production, as Second Assistant Secre­tary of War and Director of Air Service. Yet for Mitchell these steps were not enough. As his cry became increasingly shrill, it welded the bond between air power’s independent application and ser­vice autonomy until the link was impossible to break.

In October 1918, the twenty-seven-year-old Gorrell became the youngest American colonel since the Civil War. He served as As­sistant Chief of the Air Service until the Armistice, and then began writing the Air Service’s combat history. In March 1920 he left the military to try his hand as a corporate executive, ultimately becoming director and president of the Stutz Motor Car Com­pany and president of the American Air Transport Association. In the meantime, his plan for bombing Germany, and his 1918 analysis of it, inspired lectures for a future generation of air strat­egists at Maxwell Field’s Air Corps Tactical School. Three days after he died in March 1945, a single Army Air Forces airplane scattered Gorrell’s ashes across the plain at West Point, where he had sprinted almost thirty-five years before to catch a glimpse of Glenn Curtiss’s flying machine. The tribute befitted the man who laid the cornerstone for vast air campaigns then underway in Eu­rope and the Pacific.

Germany, 1944-45

It has been an unhappy fact for the rest of the world that these gullible and warlike peo­ple [the Germans] should have developed a powerful industrial and technical organiza­tion to support a huge military machine. This machine depends on some 90-odd industri­al centers of which perhaps 50 are of major importance. If these centers can be destroyed or seriously damaged it must be obvious that her means to make war will be reduced. And in the process of destroying them the people can be given theirfirst searing lesson, in the heart of their hitherto untouched homeland that crime doesn’t pay. This should re­duce their will to fight. If, therefore, we can reduce the means to fight and the will to fight, the tasking of overpowering her is made easier or the time shortened. That, very simply, is the contention of the Air Forces.

• ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF WAR FOR AIR, ROBERT A. LOVETT, 9 DECEMBER 1943

Hit oil if visual assured; otherwise, Berlin—center of city.

• GEN. CARL A. SPAAT2 TO LT. GEN. JAMES DOOLITTLE, 1 FEBRUARY 1945 14 February 1945

As the crews of 311 B-17S approached their target, a smoky black haze arose from the city surrounding it and mingled with dense clouds. Dresden, the medieval capital of Saxony, was in ruins. More than 750 raf Lancasters had dropped 1,471 tons of high explo­sive bombs and 1,175 tons °f incendiaries on the refugee-filled city the night before, and now the Eighth Air Force would add to that total.1 The thick blanket of clouds across northern Europe had caused the target to change as the B-17S crossed the English Channel. Originally, it had been the vast marshalling yard on the southern bank of the Elbe. By the time crews could see the smoke rising from the city, the target had become a rail intersection in Dresden’s center, west of the main residential area.

Clouds obscured the rail junction, though, and when the lead bombardier signaled “Bombs away!” he was actually over Dres­den’s most densely populated district—the same area that the raf had pummeled just hours before. Using radar bombing techniques, the B-17S dropped more than seven hundred tons of bombs, al­most half of which were incendiaries. The next day, 211 B-17S at­tacked Dresden’s marshalling yard, and cloud cover once again prevented accurate bombing. Almost five hundred tons of high explosive bombs fell on the city’s center.2 The series of raids cre­ated a firestorm similar in intensity to the one almost two years earlier at Hamburg; between twenty-five thousand and thirty-five thousand German civilians died, and an estimated five hundred thousand lost their homes.3

On the afternoon of 15 February, raf Air Commodore С. M. Grierson conducted a press conference in Paris in which he high­lighted the Dresden raids. Grierson stated that bombing popula­tion centers caused the Germans difficulty because it forced them to send in trains carrying relief supplies and send out trains carrying homeless civilians, thereby disrupting transportation and contrib­uting “greatly to the break up of the German economic system.” Concerning Dresden, Grierson noted that the city was a commu­nications center that the Germans used to relay men and equip­ment to the Russian front, and that refugees fleeing the Russians clogged the city. He maintained that the principal reason for the raids was to stop communications rather than to kill refugees.4

Grierson’s comments had an immediate effect on the journal­ists in attendance. One of them, the ap’s Howard Cowan, wrote on page i in the 18 February edition of the Washington Star: “The Allied Air Commanders have made the long awaited decision to adopt the deliberate terror bombing of great German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom.” Cowan added that “more raids such as the British and American heavy bombers carried out recently on the residential sections of Ber­lin, Dresden, Chemnitz, and Cottbus are in store for the Reich, and their avowed purpose will be creating more confusion in the German traffic triangle and sapping German morale.”5 The arti­cle created an uproar at Army Air Forces headquarters in Wash­ington dc, and at Coral Gables, Florida, where recently promoted five-star General Hap Arnold was recovering from his fourth heart attack of the war. Arnold demanded an explanation. He cabled General Carl Spaatz, the Commander of the U. S. Strategic Air Forces (usstaf), and told him to “transmit as a matter of urgency the specific text of your present directive to usstaf, together with any further comments in order to clarify in my mind completely the entire present situation as to directives and priorities for stra­tegic bombing.”6

Spaatz was away from his headquarters near London visiting units in the Mediterranean, and his deputy commander, Major General Frederick Anderson, received the Cowan article as well as Arnold’s request from a Colonel Rex Smith, who lamented, “This is certain to have nationwide serious effect on the Air Forces as we have steadfastly preached the gospel of precision bombing against military and industrial targets.”7 Anderson replied to Ar­nold on 19 February, contending that Cowan’s article was an ex­aggeration that had slipped past the censors. “We have not, or do not,” he asserted, “intend to change the basic policy which has governed the direction of effort of the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe from the time they first started operations in this Theater. Our attacks have been in all cases against Military objec­tives.”8 Colonel Alfred R. Maxwell, usstaf’s Director of Opera­tions, followed with another message written on Spaatz’s behalf: “It has always been my [Spaatz’s] policy that civilian populations are not suitable military objectives.”9 An Army Air Forces spokes­man in Washington DC mirrored those replies in a zi February press conference, remarking that Americans stressed precision bombing over “wasteful and ineffective” indiscriminate attacks and adding, “We have never done deliberate terror bombing. . . we are not doing it now… we will not do it.”10

Such statements were half-truths at best. Since May 1943 when Ira Eaker, then the Commander of Eighth Air Force, acknowl­edged that cloud cover prevented precision bombing, the Amer­ican bomber force had often resembled raf Bomber Command on days that weather obscured the target area. The distinction between the two bomber forces became especially thin once the Eighth Air Force received radar bombing equipment in autumn 1943 an<-I Eaker informed Arnold of his intention to break the morale of the German public. Spaatz had refused to state such an objective since taking charge of usstaf in January 1944. Yet he consistently bombed Germany using radar whenever the weather was disagreeable, and he possessed many more bombers than had Eaker.

Moreover, the longer the war progressed, the louder the clamor grew to end it, and the closer Spaatz’s targets crept to residential districts in German cities. Both Dresden’s marshalling yard and the rail junction selected for the 14 February attack were less than a mile from the heart of the city’s residential area. Even with the Norden bombsight in excellent weather, bomber crews were cer­tain to hit more than just their aiming point; using radar against a “precision” target in the midst of a city guaranteed many civil­ian deaths. Indeed, the “last resort” target for the 14 February Dresden mission was: “Any military objective definitely identi­fied as being in Germany and east of the current bomb line.”11 By February 1945 the impetus to end the war quickly provided few limits to the definition of “military objective.”

Spaatz and the Battle for Air Superiority

When Arnold tapped Spaatz in late 1943 to lead usstaf, the new command comprising the heavy bombers of Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces, both men understood that the paramount need for rapid results might forestall the conduct of an efficient air campaign. Spaatz had to gain daylight air superiority, and do so quickly— Overlord could not occur without it. He possessed a wealth of experience for the task at hand. A fighter pilot in World War I, Spaatz arrived at the front three weeks before the armistice and shot down three German aircraft, earning him the Distinguished Service Cross. During the interwar years, he commanded both a bomb group and a bomb wing, plus he helped set a flight endurance record of 150 hours (along with Ira Eaker and three other crew­men) aboard the Question Mark in 1929. He had been Arnold’s choice to command Eighth Air Force when it began the daylight assault on Hitler’s Europe, and competently led the Northwest African Air Force as it supported the American ground advance from North Africa to Italy.

Moreover, Tooey Spaatz was a man Arnold could trust, and trust implicitly, to get him the desired results. The two had es­tablished an enduring friendship through many assignments to­gether, and a 1920 incident in San Francisco typified the depth of that connection—after Colonel Arnold, who served as air officer for the Army’s Ninth Corps Area, reverted to his prewar rank of captain, Major Spaatz, who had been Arnold’s executive officer, requested a transfer rather than take command of a unit that he thought rightfully belonged to Arnold.12 Modest in appearance with a graying mustache, loyal and selfless, Spaatz commanded respect from all who knew him. Dwight Eisenhower rated him, along with Omar Bradley, as the two American generals who con­tributed the most in the war against Germany, and Bradley ranked Spaatz second, after Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Bedell Smith.15

Eaker, asked to rank Army Air Forces officers in November 1944 in terms of their merit for postwar leadership, listed Spaatz sec­ond behind Arnold.14

Arnold presented Spaatz with usstaf in January 1944 to achieve daylight air superiority over Europe and facilitate the Normandy invasion—and, if all went well, to score a knockout blow against German industry. Arnold had long believed that a single air com­mander was essential for the maximum efficiency of a heavy bomber force and to prevent ground commanders from taking air elements piecemeal to pursue their own objectives.15 With Spaatz he had the desired unity of command and the prospect that air power could make the decisive contribution to ending the European war.

Much like Eaker before him, Spaatz heard the steady ticking of a clock as he set out to snatch control of the European sky from the Luftwaffe. He would have preferred to have set his own time­table for destroying Germany’s capability and will to fight, and viewed the invasion “as a necessary temporary diversion of the strategic air forces, not a primary objective of strategic air war.”16 Indeed, when he heard that the Combined Chiefs of Staff had se­lected a date for Overlord, he reportedly said, “This means the death of the strategic air war.”17 Spaatz would support the inva­sion with all the force that he possessed, but to him, the primary reason for achieving air superiority was to enhance the bomber offensive’s prospects for independent success.

Compared to Eaker, Spaatz had a vast array of force at his command; American production had finally begun to catch up to wartime requirements. New crews began to arrive in theater as well. By the end of December 1943 Eighth Air Force possessed twenty-six heavy bomber groups compared to eleven the previ­ous May—so many aircraft and crews that Lieutenant General James “Jimmy” Doolittle, the new Eighth Air Force Commander, could regularly send out missions with a mix of seven hundred

B-17S and B-24S. Many of Doolittle’s B-17S were new “G” models, which had a combat radius of seven hundred miles—nearly three hundred miles more than most of Eaker’s B-17S—plus they could carry two thousand more pounds of bombs. The “G” model also possessed a chin turret under its Plexiglas nose to ward off head- on fighter attacks, a favorite tactic of the Luftwaffe pilots. The в-24 had received a nose-turret as well, though it was manned in­stead of remotely operated as in the в-17 and made the bomber a bit wobbly in flight, yet the “Liberator” could still carry the same seven-thousand-pound bomb load as the “G” model “Fly­ing Fortress.”18 B-24S comprised two-thirds of the heavy bomb­ers in Fifteenth Air Force, headquartered in Foggia, Italy, and ca­pable of attacking targets in southern Germany, Austria, and the Balkans. By February 1944, the Fifteenth possessed twelve groups of “heavies.”19

An increase in fighter strength for Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces matched the sizable gains in heavy bombers—and Army Air Forces engineers finally began to perfect 75- and 108-gallon drop tanks that allowed fighter escort for a distance of six hun­dred miles, enough to reach Berlin. The p-47 “Thunderbolt” and p-51 “Mustang” were the key escort fighters; both could fly in ex­cess of 430 mph above 25,000 feet, and the P-47 could approach 550 in a dive. At the beginning of 1944 Eighth Air Force possessed eleven fighter groups containing between seventy-five and ninety – six aircraft each, and by February Fifteenth Air Force would have four fighter groups of its own. In addition, Spaatz and Doolittle de­cided that Eighth Air Force fighter pilots, who had thus far flown escort by staying close to the bombers that they defended, could now roam freely to seek out Luftwaffe fighters. Eighth Air Force fighter pilots also received the same amount of credit for destroy­ing enemy aircraft on the ground as they did in aerial combat to encourage the strafing of airfields. Bomber crews were initially dismayed by these policies, but the new directives soon paid div­idends over Germany.20

Spaatz realized that “cutting loose” his fighters would produce increased combat—and hence increased losses—for his fighter force. Given the situation that he faced, he felt that he had little choice. He had three months to wrestle control of the air from the Luft­waffe; in April, General Eisenhower would take charge of usstaf (and kaf Bomber Command) for invasion support. Yet Spaatz also knew that he had an abundance of numbers and a steady stream of replacements, while Ultra intelligence intercepts told him that the German fighter force had suffered severely during Eaker’s fall offensive—so much that Luftwaffe commanders had reduced re­cuperation times for wounded pilots, and even ordered test and transport pilots to fly against American bombers.21

In late January, Spaatz wrote Arnold that he could not sim­ply wait for decent weather to bomb German aircraft factories— destroying them would not suffice to gain daylight air superiority in the time allotted. Thus, Spaatz would also bomb German air­fields, and he would further attack “objectives which force Ger­man fighters into combat action within range of our fighters.” In short, he would wage attrition warfare, and use his bombers as bait. “Losses will be heavy,” he stated, “but we must be prepared to accept them.”22 He was confident not just that he could sustain the losses, but also that the magnitude of destruction inflicted on the Luftwaffe would produce air superiority in the shortest amount of time. Spaatz even acknowledged a willingness to risk bombers without fighter escort if such attacks yielded corresponding dam­age to the Luftwaffe. “Under peculiar weather conditions when all of Germany is fog-bound,” he told Arnold, “raids might be made well beyond fighter cover on area targets, such as Berlin, to force the German fighters into the air under conditions which will re­sult in heavy operational losses to their fighters.”23

Until the weather cleared, Spaatz would continue radar bomb­ing, much like Eaker in late 1943. American engineers at mit had perfected their own version of the British H2S device, and the Amer­ican model, dubbed H2X, employed a shorter microwave length that resulted in a sharper radar picture of the ground. But H2X did not appreciably increase bombing accuracy, and the Army Air Forces official historians glumly noted that with radar “the aim­ing point became a highly theoretical term.”24

Arnold knew that radar bombing was far from precise, but he did not want his air commanders to convey that impression pub­licly. He directed Spaatz to avoid the phrase “blind bombing” when referring to raids with H2X, and Spaatz agreed to label such attacks “overcast bombing technique,” “bombing through the overcast,” or “bombing with navigational devices over clouds ex­tending up to 20,000 feet.”25 Regardless of the terminology used, Eighth Air Force bombers mounted six weeks of radar raids, in­cluding a mission by more than eight hundred B-17S and B-24S against Frankfurt on 29 January, which mirrored raf Bomber Command’s area attacks in terms of methods used and damage inflicted. Remarked the aaf historians: “It seemed better to bomb low-priority targets frequently, even with less than precision ac­curacy, than not to bomb at all.”26

While Spaatz likely agreed with that assessment, he could not wait indefinitely to achieve significant results. On 8 February he di­rected that “Operation Argument,” the anticipated assault against the German aircraft industry by the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces, would conclude by 1 March 1944. Primary targets would consist of airframe and final assembly plants for single – and dual-engine fighters as well as ball bearing production facilities, which mem­bers of the Committee of Operations Analysts (coa) and usstaf planners alike deemed essential to aircraft construction.27 Those targets all demanded “precision” bombing, and to attack them successfully Spaatz needed a week-long stretch of decent weather. Thick clouds had canceled Argument on numerous occasions, but Spaatz could no longer wait for ideal conditions and accepted that poor weather might lead to losses exceeding two hundred bomb­ers for a single mission.28

On 19 February usstaf’s weather officers predicted a period of clear skies across Europe, in contrast to the forecast made by weather officers at Eighth Air Force. Major General Frederick Anderson, Spaatz’s deputy commander who had led VIII Bomber Command for Eaker, urged Spaatz to begin Argument. Spaatz gave the order and risked that clouds and icing might ground many of his escort fighters. His fears proved illusory. The next day, six­teen combat wings of heavy bombers—more than 1,000 aircraft— supported by seventeen groups of escort fighters took off for tar­gets in southern Germany, usstaf’s forecasters proved correct, and 941 heavy bombers attacked fighter assembly plants in the vicinity of Leipzig and Brunswick. German defenses claimed 21 bombers, but the bombing results were good.29

The 20 February mission marked the beginning of a six-day se­ries of attacks dubbed “Big Week.” Not only did Eighth and Fif­teenth Air Forces jointly participate in many of the attacks, but the raf contributed as well by pounding many of the target cit­ies the night before American bombers attacked specific installa­tions in them. The Luftwaffe fought back fiercely and losses were heavy. On 22 February the Eighth lost forty-one bombers and the Fifteenth lost nineteen; on 24 February the Eighth lost forty-nine bombers and the Fifteenth lost seventeen; and on 25 February, when both Air Forces jointly attacked the Messerschmitt plants at Regensburg, the Eighth lost thirty-one bombers and the Fif­teenth lost thirty-two, which was 19 percent of the Fifteenth’s at­tacking force. All told, Big Week cost the Eighth Air Force alone three hundred aircraft, most of which were bombers, and 2,500 airmen killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.30 Yet on Spaatz’s bal­ance sheet, the advantage was decisively his—in February the Ger­mans lost 33 percent of their single-engine fighters and 18 percent of their fighter pilots, many of whom had shot down more than one hundred aircraft.31 Improved P-47S with water-injection en­gines were responsible for most of the damage done to the Luft­waffe; only two groups of Mustangs participated in the air bat­tles.32 The Thunderbolts tipped the balance for control of the skies in favor of the Americans.

Besides inflicting substantial damage in the air, Big Week also hurt the German aircraft industry. Radar bombing occurred on few missions; crews conducted most attacks with the Norden bomb – sight.33 B-17S and B-24S dropped more than ten thousand tons of bombs during the six-day span—more tonnage than the Eighth Air Force had dropped on all targets for all of 1943.34 The attacks completely wrecked the Regensburg complex and damaged other facilities as well, but analysts’ claims that the attacks had reduced production to 650 aircraft a month were wishful thinking. In ac­tuality, the large amount of slack in the German aircraft indus­try enabled the monthly production rate to increase despite the raids; many factories with only one shift of workers changed to twenty-four-hour operations.35 Still, Big Week stymied German production plans. Nazi economic leaders had calculated that they could produce 80,000 aircraft a year by 1945, Уег they reached only 36,000 in 1944.36 Big Week was a key reason that they could not produce more.

Buoyed by Big Week’s success, Spaatz turned his attention to the target that American airmen had most wanted to bomb since their first raid over Hitler’s Europe—Berlin. The first raid against the German capital was a feeble one, when 29 B-17S failed to get a weather recall message on 4 March and pressed on to their tar­get; they survived because three groups of p-5 is stayed with them.

Two days later, Spaatz unleashed 730 heavy bombers and 800 es­corting fighters in an aerial stream sixty miles long. The Luftwaffe defended tenaciously, and 75 bombers were shot down, crashed, or written off. Yet the statistic that mattered most to Spaatz was enemy losses, and his fighter pilots claimed 82 German aircraft downed for a cost of 14 American fighters.37

On 8 March the onslaught continued. Spaatz sent 600 bomb­ers and 900 fighters against Berlin, losing 13 bombers and 17 fighters. Three hundred bombers returned the next day, bombing through the clouds with H2X. Nine heavies fell to flak—but none were lost to Luftwaffe fighters, which did not oppose the attack. On 22 March 650 bombers returned to Berlin, and flak claimed all 12 that fell.38 For the month, Luftwaffe fighter units wrote off 56 percent of their single-engine fighters, while crew losses reached almost 22 percent of the pilots present for duty at the beginning of March.39 American bomber crews suffered as well; Spaatz lost 345 heavy bombers in March alone.40 Yet, in blunt terms, he felt he could afford the losses; he knew the Germans could not. At the end of the month, with the Luftwaffe reeling, Arnold raised the tour length for bomber crews from 25 to 30 missions. Spaatz had given him daylight air superiority.

Spaatz had achieved what Eaker could not because Spaatz pos­sessed an abundance of resources that allowed him to conduct an air campaign based on attrition.41 Eaker had counted on the Luft­waffe’s aerial losses to spur his quest for air superiority as well, but anxiety about the survival of his bomber force prevented per­sistent attacks deep into Germany. Neither Eaker nor Spaatz com­pletely abandoned their progressive belief that the destruction of key targets like aircraft factories and ball bearing plants would produce rapid results; their concern was whether the results would occur rapidly enough. As the countdown toward Overlord contin­ued, a negative answer appeared likely. Spaatz chose to forego the progressive goal of “cheapness” to obtain the higher priority ob­jective of speed, and, in the end, was successful. Yet the cost was enormous. Eaker’s painstaking commitment of a weak bomber force that lacked escort fighters, and Spaatz’s ruthless use of the strength that he possessed, combined to make a staggering 77 per­cent of all American airmen who flew against the Third Reich be­fore D-Day casualties.42

Eaker and Spaatz had accurately surmised the importance of the German aircraft industry to Hitler’s war machine. The Luft­waffe was not going to risk losing its production centers without a fight—which was exactly what Spaatz hoped in early 1944. Be­tween January and the end of April, the Germans had 1,684 pi­lots killed, and Ultra intercepts made Spaatz aware of the loss.45 Eaker, who now “owned” Fifteenth Air Force as a part of his Med­iterranean Allied Air Forces (Spaatz, as usstaf Commander, di­rected the heavy bombers of the Fifteenth and coordinated with Eaker on all missions for that force), gained bittersweet satisfac­tion in knowing that the plan he had set in motion finally bore fruit. Without the damage that Eaker’s Eighth Air Force had in­flicted on the Luftwaffe, Spaatz could never have gained air su­periority in the time allotted.

In one sense, the achievement of air superiority that enabled Overlord fulfilled the progressive goal of inexpensive results by guaranteeing that fewer Allied soldiers would die in the invasion than if the Germans had retained control of the air. Whether the Allies would have attempted a cross-Channel assault lacking con­trol of the air remains doubtful, though, especially in light of the disastrous Dieppe raid in August 1942.44 American air leaders hoped that the bomber offensive might eliminate the need for an invasion by wrecking German capability and will to fight once the air campaign gained control of the sky. Army Air Forces plan­ners designed both awpd-i and AWPD-42 with that goal in mind, and that objective still resonated at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, when the Combined Chiefs of Staff defined the purpose of the Combined Bomber Offensive as destroying Ger­man military, industrial, and economic capability, and the morale of the German people “to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.”45

By the time of the Trident Conference four months later, the Combined Chiefs defined “fatally weakened” as “so weakened as to permit initiation of the final combined operations on the Con­tinent.”46 Arnold, Eaker, and Spaatz would have defined it differ­ently if given the choice. Instead, they had to temper their expec­tations for independent success and hope that air power could still play a decisive role in Overlord’s aftermath. Arnold in particular would view the failure of the bomber offensive to forestall the in­vasion of France as impetus to make sure that a similar air cam­paign in the Pacific did not lead to similar results.

It is a fundamental principle of democracy that personnel casualties are distasteful. We will continue to fight mechanical rather than manpower wars.

• GEN. HENRY H. ARNOLD, 1944

Only air power can frequently circumvent enemy forces and attack strategic centers of gravity directly. Other components, on the other hand, need to fight their way in— normally with large casualties. Air operations—especially with modern weapons and accuracy as used in the Gulf war—are very much likely to result in fewer casualties to either side. Air power then becomes quintessential^ an American form of war; it uses our advantages of mobility and high technology to overwhelm the enemy without spill­ing too much blood, especially American blood.

• COL JOHN A. WARDEN 111,1992

2 September 1945

Tooey Spaatz stood on the deck of the uss Missouri and watched a seemingly endless stream of B-29S pass low overhead. The spec­tacle, which also included vast formations of Army Air Forces and Navy fighters, was an awesome display of American air power fol­lowing the formal Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay. Spaatz was the only American representative present at each of the war’s ma­jor surrender ceremonies—at Rheims and Berlin in May 1945, as well as at Tokyo—and he could take grim satisfaction in know­ing that much of the devastation that he observed in the two en­emy capitals resulted from men and aircraft that he had led. As he watched on the Missouri with the other Allied representatives, he was the acknowledged commander of the world’s mightiest aer­ial strike force.

Postwar Perceptions

The American public and its political leaders also acknowledged the Army Air Forces’ contribution to concluding the Pacific War, and they viewed that contribution from a progressive perspective. Yet their definition of “progressive air power”—had they used such a term—would have now mirrored the definition that air com­manders would have given it since at least the summer of r943 in Europe and March 1945 *п the Pacific: air power designed to end the war as rapidly as possible with the fewest American lives lost in the process. Most Americans believed that the atomic at­tacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had accomplished exactly that. That conviction—along with the belief that the nation would rely on strategic bombers and atomic bombs to decide a future con­flict—enabled airmen to embrace the grail of service autonomy in September 1947. As Billy Mitchell had predicted, the new U. S. Air Force became the nation’s first line of defense, and the key to defending the country now rested on the ability to attack and de­stroy any potential aggressor with air power.

For American airmen, World War II did not perfectly fit the progressive ideals that many of them had held on the eve of the conflict. They had entered the war believing that they possessed the necessary technology and a blueprint for using it that would enable them to wage war in pristine fashion. Relying on high altitude, daylight precision bombing, they would sever the key strands of an enemy’s industrial web, bring its war-making ca­pability to a halt, and compel surrender—while at the same time they would validate the need for a separate air force. The entire process would be quick, inexpensive, and efficient—the precise destruction of a small number of vital targets would risk few air­men and would kill a small number of civilians, thus averting the carnage from a clash of armies like that generated by World War I’s Western Front.

Although the character of World War II matched that envi­sioned by Mitchell and Air Corps Tactical School instructors—a global struggle against enemies viewed as direct threats to Amer­ica’s security—the conflict soon developed its own momentum that proved difficult to restrain. “Unconditional surrender” was an outgrowth of the war’s evolution, and unconditional surren­der and rapid victory were not complementary objectives against fanatical foes like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The former goal demanded the destruction not only of war-making capability, but also of hostile governments and the way of life that they fos­tered, and those objectives could not be obtained quickly. In addi­tion, the aim of unconditional surrender may have inadvertently lengthened the war by causing German and Japanese leaders to fight harder than they might otherwise have done since early ca­pitulation provided them with no benefit.1 When combined with the goal of rapid victory, unconditional surrender produced such brutal applications of force as the area bombing seen in both the­aters. In the meantime, unexpected “frictional” developments fur­ther shaped the air campaigns and undercut the progressive pre­dictions of prewar planners.2 Diversions and production problems delayed the buildup of heavy bomber forces; key industrial tar­gets proved difficult to identify and destroy under wartime condi­tions; weather, wind, and climate produced constant challenges to effective bombing; and bombers, especially in the European the­ater, were much more vulnerable than anticipated.

Given the aim of rapidly destroying the fascist regimes, the aer­ial technology available, and the impact of friction on the technol­ogy’s employment, air power was not the antiseptic instrument of finite destruction that Mitchell and Tactical School instructors had forecasted, nor was it necessarily “cheap” in terms of men or money. American bomber crews in Europe paid a heavy price for their attempts to gain daylight air superiority over the conti­nent in time to permit an invasion of France in spring 1944. The в-29 was the war’s costliest weapon, which contributed to Hap Arnold’s zeal to gain a return on the investment in it. The desire to achieve quick success, and hence limit American losses, con­sistently trumped the desire to limit enemy civilian casualties— and also produced losses among civilian populations in occupied countries.

Still, many airmen during the war continued to think in prewar progressive terms. They sincerely believed that their bombing ben­efited all concerned because they were certain that it guaranteed a quicker end of the war than a reliance on surface forces alone— and the sooner the killing stopped, the better for the world as a whole. Their assertion presumed a strategic equation: a quicker end of the war = fewer deaths. But that logic was uncertain, even regarding the likelihood of saving American lives, because other outcomes were possible. For instance, reducing the incendiary ef­fort against Japan, eliminating the atomic bombs, and increasing aerial mining might, in concert with a vigorous Soviet advance in Asia, have produced Japanese surrender later than mid-August but before the i November date scheduled for Operation “Olym­pic.” Such an outcome would have likely saved more American lives by exposing в-29 crews to less danger than they endured from overflying Japanese cities, and probably would have pro­duced fewer civilian casualties. Similarly, a less intense bombing of German urban areas, and greater emphasis on close air support, might have yielded victory in more time but with fewer losses— for all concerned—than actually occurred. The faith of air leaders in the perceived progressive merits of strategic bombing—which they viewed as the surest path to service autonomy—led them to dismiss alternatives for using heavy bombers in an auxiliary role to surface forces.

For most air commanders, the great dilemma was bow stra­tegic bombing would hasten the war’s end. Assuming that they correctly identified the targets that would fatally damage the en­emy’s war effort and destroyed them, what assurances did they have that the destruction would induce rapid surrender? Curtis LeMay told Arnold in June 1945 that the war would end by 1 October because by then B-29S would have destroyed all Japa­nese industry.3 Likewise, the Committee of Operations Analysts often estimated how the loss of certain industries in the United States would impact America’s war-making capability, and then applied those projections to Germany and Japan. Such mirror­imaging presumed “rational” behavior and downplayed the ene­my’s will to keep fighting (it downplayed American will as well). Most air commanders understood that will was an essential part of the enemy’s war effort and that breaking it would produce col­lapse. Indeed, awpd-i noted that an attack against German morale late in the war might prove decisive, and both Eaker and Spaatz launched area attacks designed to break Germany’s will to fight. LeMay’s initial incendiary raids—as well as the atomic bombs— targeted Japan’s will. Yet airmen could only guess at the impact such bombing might have on speeding the end of the war, espe­cially against the fanatical opposition that they faced.

The time element had a significant impact on the conduct of the air campaigns in both Europe and the Pacific, and Arnold was al­ways conscious of a ticking clock as he pressed his commanders to achieve results independent of land and sea forces—the pur­suit of service autonomy added to the impetus for rapid results. At great cost, the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces achieved air supe­riority over the European continent, but they could not forestall the Normandy invasion, nor could they score a knockout blow against Germany before ground forces overran much of the coun­try. Eaker and Spaatz relied on widespread radar bombing—preci­sion methods were useless for much of the weather encountered— against Germany’s war-making capability as well as its will, and radar bombing devastated the residential areas of German cities. The goal of rapid victory subsumed all other prewar progressive rationales; it sanctioned heavy losses of aircrews and civilians, and air commanders relentlessly pursued that goal convinced that it assured fewer losses than would the war’s continuation.

That logic guided the bombing of Japan as well as Germany. Against Japan, weather conditions foiled high altitude precision bombing, and the nature of Japanese industry would have made the utility of such bombing problematic even in the absence of jet stream winds. Air commanders on the Marianas could point to a nine-month campaign that was remarkably efficient from the American perspective. For the loss of fewer than 2,500 air­men, the в-29 offensive (punctuated by two atomic bombs) in­cinerated almost all of Japan’s most populous cities and helped to compel a surrender prior to an invasion of the home islands. Untold numbers of Americans—and Japanese—were spared from savage ground fighting that might have persisted for more than a year. Precluding that combat cost the lives of at least 330,000 Japanese civilians.

In the war’s aftermath, many airmen continued to view air pow­er’s contribution to victory in prewar progressive terms. Shortly after he replaced Arnold as Commanding General of the Army Air Forces in 1946, Spaatz wrote an article for Foreign Affairs that lauded strategic bombing’s ability to minimize the war’s to­tal costs:

Our land and sea forces, supported by air, could be expected to con­tain the most advanced echelons of our enemies, and gradually drive their main armies into their heavily fortified citadels. But the essen­tial question remained. How was their military power to be crushed behind their ramparts without undertaking an attritional war which might last years, which would cost wealth that centuries alone could repay and which would take untold millions of lives? . . . The devel­opment of a new technique was necessary. Some new instrument had to be found…. The outcome of the total war hung in the balance un­til that new technique had been found and proved decisive in all-out assault. The new instrument was Strategic Air Power.4

After the war, LeMay contended that his bombers had efficiently destroyed Japan’s war-making capability before Hiroshima, and noted that the atomic bomb “was anticlimactic in that the verdict was already rendered.”5 He also maintained that his bombing, in producing a quicker end to the conflict, had saved Japanese lives as well as American. LeMay further claimed—in his memoirs— that some postwar Japanese understood his motives and had re­acted positively to them.6

Ira Eaker agreed that civilian death and destruction caused by bombing was regrettable but necessary. He observed after the war that Allied leaders “deeply regretted the necessity of endan­gering ‘defenseless women and children’ in the vigorous prosecu­tion of their campaigns, but all realized that such was necessary to prevent a greater loss of human life.” Eaker also stressed that the goal of quickly ending the war dictated many of his decisions as an air commander, and he referenced the 1944 bombing of the medieval monastery at Monte Casino to make his point. “Our purpose in bombing Monte Casino was the hope that it would break the stalemate; save future U. S. and Allied casualties; and affect [sic] an earlier end of the campaign against the Germans in Italy,” he recalled. “Thus, we did not permit our knowledge that on top of Monte Casino was one of the oldest churches in Chris­tendom, prevent us from accomplishing our primary mission— the earliest end of the war.”7

Possum Hansell argued that the European war could have ended sooner if American political and military leaders had adhered to awpd-i, the plan that he had helped craft in August Г941 to guide a bomber offensive against Germany. “If we had followed the plan which was eventually approved the devastation which char­acterized Germany in March of 1945 might have been imposed by mid-summer of 1944,” he maintained. “Invasion, if it were needed under those conditions, might have been an operation of ‘occupation’ against slight resistance.”8 LeMay agreed that an in­vasion of France was not essential to produce Allied victory once the Army Air Forces had achieved daylight air superiority over the continent. “I believed that once we had the complete upper hand in the air we could have waited for an inevitable German capitu­lation,” he contended in 1982.9 Hansell remarked after the war that achieving control of the air sped victory in Europe, making it less costly for the Allies. “The air offensive did achieve the lat­ter part of the objective of awpd-i,” he wrote. “It did make an invasion feasible without excessive losses. It did achieve the de­feat of the German Air Force. Without that achievement, there would have been no invasion.”10

As air power can hit at a distance, after it controls the air and vanquishes the opposing air power, it will be able to fly anywhere over the hostile country. The menace will be so great that either a state will hesitate to go to war, or, having engaged in war, will make the con­test much sharper, more decisive, and more quickly finished. This will result in a dimin­ished loss of life and treasure and will thus be a distinct benefit to civilization.

• BRIG. GEN. WILLIAM MITCHELL, 1925

There is one thing certain: Air power has given to the world a means whereby the heart of a nation can be attacked at once without first having to wage an exhausting war at that nation’s frontiers.

• MAJ. HAROLD LEE GEORGE, 1935 21 July 1921

For Billy Mitchell, the final attack on a relic of the Kaiser’s navy was as important as any he had directed on the Western Front. One by one, the six Martin mb-2 bombers and a single Fland – ley-Page flew past Mitchell’s Osprey, a blue and white DH-4 with a blue command pennant flapping from the rudder. The dual­engine biplanes formed the essence of the First Provisional Air Brigade, which Mitchell had created ad hoc in January 1921. For the next six months, its thousand men had devoted their full attention to preparing for the task that now awaited the seven bomber crews—sinking the rust-covered German battleship Ost – friesland. The Navy had received the dreadnought, along with sev­eral smaller warships, for testing as a result of the Versailles Peace Treaty, and Mitchell had convinced influential congressmen that the Air Service should participate in those tests as well. To him, though, only the Ostfriesland mattered. His goal was to dem­onstrate—unequivocally—that bombers could sink the world’s mightiest warships. By proving that air power had supplanted the Navy as America’s traditional first line of defense, Mitchell be­lieved that he would establish an ironclad rationale for his dream of an independent air force.

The challenge was formidable. The Navy anchored the Ost­friesland sixty-five miles off the Virginia Capes, requiring Mitch­ell’s aircraft, based at Langley Field, Virginia, to fly almost one hundred miles before arriving at their destination. Navy rules also limited the number of hits airmen could score against the imposing target. Launched in 1911, the twenty-seven-thousand – ton dreadnought sported a four-layered hull and numerous wa­tertight compartments. It had survived eighteen direct hits and a mine detonation at the Battle of Jutland. And it had withstood earlier attacks that morning and on the previous day by Navy air­craft and Mitchell’s Martins. The Martin bombers had scored three hits with 1,100-pound bombs, but Navy inspectors deemed that the ship remained seaworthy. Mitchell agreed; he knew that stan­dard bombs would not suffice to wreck the German behemoth. In his eyes, the previous attacks had been for the Navy’s benefit, as they permitted observers to scrutinize the damage inflicted at pe­riodic intervals. After the next bomb run, he aimed to make fur­ther inspections superfluous.

Slung beneath the fuselage of each bomber that flew past the Osprey was a specially built two-thousand-pound bomb. While those bombs would likely cause substantial damage to the Ger­man battleship if they hit it, Mitchell had directed his crews to drop their ordnance in the water near the ship. He planned to take advantage of the Navy’s limit on direct hits by relying on the hammer-like pressure of underwater explosions to crush the un­armored hull. The first of the massive bombs exploded one hun­dred feet off the Ostfriesland’s starboard bow, causing the ship to list 15 degrees before righting itself. The second detonated three hundred feet in front of the vessel. The third glanced off her port bow, exploded in the water, and ripped a gaping hole in the hull. The fourth landed off her port beam, and the fifth struck the wa­ter twenty-five feet off the port side near the waist gun turret. These last two blows raised the bow, causing the ship to roll from side to side while the stern disappeared below the waves. A sixth bomb landing off the starboard side blasted the stern out of the water. Suddenly, the bow began rising until it reached a height of one hundred feet above the surface, and the stern slid downward. Twenty-one minutes after the first two-thousand-pound bomb fell, the Ostfriesland sank.

Mitchell hovered over the battleship during the attack at an al­titude of three thousand feet, five hundred feet above his bomb­ers. From among the flotilla of vessels observing the tests he now picked out the Henderson, the Navy transport filled with admi­rals, generals, congressmen, and foreign dignitaries, and dived to within two hundred feet of the craft. Grinning widely, he doffed his goggles and helmet and waved his arms to the cheers of many of those on deck. All did not respond approvingly, however; sev­eral admirals wept. For Mitchell the moment was one of supreme triumph. “The problem of the destruction of seacraft by Air Forces has been solved, and is finished,” he wrote in his report of the tests. Fie was certain that his bombers had vindicated his faith in the supremacy of air power and justified the need for an indepen­dent air force.1

On i April 1944, with daylight air superiority secured, Opera­tion Pointblank officially ended, and two weeks later Eisenhower assumed operational control of usstaf and raf Bomber Com­mand. He retained the authority for the next five months. Dur­ing that span he used the heavy bombers to disrupt transportation routes in northern France that the Germans could use to thwart the invasion, as well as to spur the drive of Allied armies across France after the landings. Winston Churchill initially balked over the prospect of substantial French casualties from the bombing, but relented when President Franklin Roosevelt stated an unwill­ingness to restrict any military action that “might militate against the success of ‘Overlord’ or cause additional loss of life to our Al­lied forces of invasion.”47 Approximately 4,750 French civilians died from the bombing of transportation lines before D-Day.48 To

Roosevelt and Churchill, those deaths were a small price to pay for a successful invasion that would shorten the war, especially since both leaders placed a higher premium on the lives of their own combatants than they did on the lives of civilians in occu­pied countries. Eisenhower sympathized with those views. On 6 June, he used B-17S to demolish twelve French towns and block roads in them that the Germans could use to move reinforcements to the invasion beachhead.49

American air commanders shared the progressive desire for rapid victory, but continued to maintain that independent bomb­ing operations, rather than those devoted to ground support, of­fered the most inexpensive way to end the war quickly. Before departing England for his Mediterranean command, Eaker re­viewed the Overlord plan and deemed the proposed use of B-17S and B-24S to support ground forces a mistake. “Heavy bombers are inefficient artillery,” he observed. “They have a more impor­tant assignment in the war effort which, incidentally, is more im­portant to winning the battle on the beaches as well.”50 Arnold concurred in his response for “Eaker’s Eyes Only,” which Eaker received in the midst of his effort to prevent widespread use of Fif­teenth Air Force bombers as “flying artillery” in the Italian cam­paign. “I have reason to fear that we will be dragged down to the level and outlook of the Ground Forces,” Arnold fumed. “Our airmen thoroughly know the capabilities of their Arm. They, and they alone, must control the operations of their Air Forces. It is, in my opinion, impossible for Ground Force officers to fully uti­lize vision and imagination in air action, since they are not well acquainted with air capabilities and limitations.”51

Spaatz despaired as well over the extensive use of his bomber force to support Overlord. In June, he scoffed at Eisenhower’s suggestion to have B-17S drop supplies to partisans in southern France, and also complained that British ground commanders “vi­sualize the best use of our tremendous air potential as plowing up several square miles of terrain in front of the ground forces to obtain a few miles of advance!”52 Yet without a massive infusion of air power, Eisenhower’s invasion may well have stagnated in the Normandy hedgerows. For almost two months after D-Day, German troops and tanks prevented Allied armies from moving more than twenty miles inland from the invasion beaches. Oper­ation “Cobra” made the difference. On 25 July, 1,495 American heavy bombers, 380 medium bombers, and 559 fighters blasted German positions near Saint-Lo.53 A follow-up attack by 200 me­dium bombers and five fighter groups the next morning broke the spirit of the German defenders, enabling American troops to pour into the gap and begin their drive to the German frontier.

Although he realized that air power had played a useful role in supporting Allied armies, Spaatz wanted to use his bombers inde­pendently, not as an auxiliary force, and in a way that would have a more decisive impact on Germany’s capability to fight—as well as highlight the distinctive contribution of strategic bombing to the Allied war effort.’4 He was of course familiar with awpd-i, AWPD-42, and Eaker’s proposal for the Combined Bomber Offen­sive, and all stressed oil as a vital component of Germany’s war­making capacity. In January 1944, coa members had examined prospects for attacking oil production and refining centers. They rejected such raids because they estimated that the Germans would not feel effects from them for at least six months, too long a time to influence the battle for air superiority that Spaatz had to win by April.5S Once he had gained daylight control of the air, the de­sire to attack those targets resurfaced.

In late March, Spaatz argued that destroying Germany’s oil sup­ply would provide the greatest support to the invasion by restrict­ing enemy troop movements, but Eisenhower thought that attacks on transportation lines in northern France and Belgium would pay more immediate benefits.56 Still, in his initial bombing directive on 17 April, Eisenhower called for continued pressure on the Luft­waffe, and Spaatz reasoned that raids on oil facilities would com­pel the Luftwaffe to fight—and suffer attrition—much like the Big Week attacks on the aircraft industry. Spaatz pressed Eisenhower for limited attacks on oil—and even threatened resignation over the issue.57 Eisenhower relented, and gave him permission to use two good-weather days to attack synthetic oil facilities.

Spaatz knew that the plans for bombing Germany called for six months of concentrated attacks on key industries to produce tell­ing results, yet he thought that he could inflict significant damage to the Nazi oil system with intermittent raids while the focus re­mained on supporting Overlord. He now possessed a vast force of more than three thousand heavy bombers, and Fifteenth Air Force provided the capability to attack key Balkan targets like Ploesti on a regular basis.58 In fact, Spaatz had already begun the assault on Ploesti under the guise of attacking the city’s rail yards to support the Russian advance in Romania—most of the bomb­ing in three April raids caused “incidental” damage to Ploesti’s oil refineries.59 Despite the scattered nature of the oil system, com­prising more than eighty facilities in Nazi-controlled Europe, the coa determined that certain targets were system linchpins—for instance, four Bergius synthetic oil plants produced half of Ger­many’s aviation fuel supply.60

Spaatz began the oil offensive with Eisenhower’s blessing on 12 May against the synthetic oil plants at Merseburg-Leuna, Zwickau, Bohlen, and other cities. More than eight hundred B-17S and B-24S attacked, with heavy fighter escort, and three hundred Ger­man fighters rose to intercept them. Eighth Air Force lost forty – six bombers and seven escorts, while the Luftwaffe lost sixty-five fighters.61 The enemy response following the raid showed that Spaatz’s bombers had indeed hit a vital part of the industrial web.

On 16 May, Spaatz received an Ultra intercept that the Germans had canceled the movement of nine flak batteries to France and sent them instead to synthetic oil plants, along with ten other flak batteries—some of which had defended aircraft factories.62 The Nazi Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer, recalled: “I shall never forget the date May 12. . . . On that day, the technological war was decided…. It meant the end of German armaments produc­tion.” A week after the attack Speer told Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, “The enemy has struck us at one of our weakest points. If they persist at it this time, we will no longer have any fuel pro­duction worth mentioning.”63

The results of the raids pleased Eisenhower, and he not only approved additional attacks on German oil targets for 28 and 29 May, but also permitted Spaatz to make oil usstaf’s top priority target on 8 June. Heavy bombers knocked out nine-tenths of avi­ation fuel production before Spaatz had to return his focus to in­vasion support on 22 June.64 For the next month, attacks on oil facilities fluctuated according to the needs of the ground offen­sive in France.

coa members spent much of June examining Germany’s oil sys­tem and revised their earlier estimate. This time they determined that oil was particularly vulnerable to bombing. Analysts con­cluded that the Germans could not easily hide or disperse their sprawling refineries and synthetic production facilities. In addi­tion, the Germans possessed no excess refining capability. Ploesti was essential to the Nazi war effort, but other refineries in Ger­many, France, Belgium, and Hungary were also important. The coa identified twelve key refineries and five synthetic oil plants that, if destroyed in a single month, two months later would pro­duce “a very serious curtailment in German military operations.” One analyst estimated that after three months, if other refineries remained at current production levels, “you will have immobi­lized the German economy. They will not be able to either fight or manufacture.”65

Such assessments intensified Spaatz’s desire to wreck German oil. As the air power demands in the Italian ground war began to subside, he dispatched Fifteenth Air Force heavies to wreck the oil target at the top of the list once and for all. Fie had begun a di­rect assault on Ploesti’s refineries with attacks on 18 and 31 May, with almost 500 bombers participating in the latter raid. The last week of June he ordered three more strikes, and then five more in July. The July raids cost Fifteenth Air Force nearly 100 bomb­ers—by the end of the month it had lost 30 percent of its bomber strength. Spaatz, though, could count on a steady stream of air­craft and crews to replace the losses, and waged an attrition cam­paign against Ploesti similar to his Big Week battles against the aircraft industry. Four more attacks followed in August, with the raf joining in the assault with night raids. The Luftwaffe did not oppose the final mission against the refineries on 19 July; intelli­gence officers estimated that Ploesti’s oil production was now a mere 10 percent of its peak output. The Soviet army overran the smoldering complex at the end of the month. Fifteenth Air Force dropped almost fourteen thousand tons of bombs in the five – month campaign that eliminated nearly half of Germany’s ability to refine oil. In the process it lost 3 50 bombers, 200 fighters, and more than one thousand men.66

Spaatz wanted to continue hammering oil installations, but other requirements diverted him from that effort. Soon after D – Day, the Germans began launching v-i “buzz” bombs against Eng­land from northern France and Belgium. While the attacks caused little damage compared to the Luftwaffe’s blitz in the Battle of Britain, they killed almost six thousand civilians in two and a half months and produced widespread anxiety.67 Churchill persuaded Eisenhower to make the launch sites the top target for usstaf and raf Bomber Command. Spaatz began attacking them in mid – June, though he thought the effort yielded minimal results against well-camouflaged targets that had a minimal impact on the war. At the end of the month he met with Eisenhower and persuaded the Supreme Allied Commander to allow attacks against targets in Germany when the weather cooperated, the ground forces did not face an emergency, and the V-weapons did not demand the complete attention of the strategic air forces.68

Nonetheless, the demand for air support from Allied armies continued. Fifteenth Air Force heavies devoted substantial as­sistance to the “Anvil” landings in southern France in August. Operation “Market Garden,” the airborne assault in Holland, consumed much of Eighth Air Force’s heavy bomber fleet in Sep­tember. Spaatz reported to Arnold that using heavy bombers to resupply ground and airborne troops for ten days in Market Gar­den cost Eighth Air Force the equivalent of а в-24 wing for six weeks. During the ten-day span, Spaatz bemoaned, his bombers lost the chance to conduct precision raids against German targets on two days, and radar attacks on another six.69 Spaatz’s deputy commander, Fred Anderson, also voiced his displeasure over the need to provide air support to ground forces. “The Armies can­not move forward without help from the Air,” Anderson confided to Major General Curtis LeMay in early October. “They stay un­til we blast the way, and once the way is blasted they move the extent that their supplies allow; then they stop. And when they stop the German digs in, and the way must be blasted again be­fore they move.”’0

Following the war the views of air leaders like Spaatz, LeMay, Eaker, and Hansell solidified into doctrine for the new U. S. Air Force. Much of that doctrine reflected the progressive ideals that airmen had possessed before the war, and many airmen believed the war validated those notions. Their convictions, strengthened by the attainment of service autonomy soon after the conflict, made World War II a template for “victory through air power,” and that template highlighted the belief that bombing had scored a knock­out blow in the Pacific. Major General Fred Anderson typified the perspective of many postwar air leaders in a letter to Spaatz eight days after Nagasaki: “I wish to congratulate you and your staff on your superior handling of the final stages of the strategic war against Japan. I wish to congratulate you upon proving to the world that a nation can be defeated by air power alone.”11

Most airmen thought that America’s vast superiority in strate­gic bombers and atomic bombs assured that future wars would be quick, cheap, and efficient compared to the savagery that had killed tens of millions from 1939-45. Even in the aftermath of the Korean War—a “limited” conflict that did not conform to air­men’s expectations—the progressive notions underpinning Air Force doctrine remained little changed from the ideals espoused at the Air Corps Tactical School. The authors of the 1955 edition of the Air Force’s Basic Doctrine Manual anticipated a conflict with the Soviet Union but were mindful of the recent experience in Korea. Regardless of the type of conflict that next emerged, they believed that air power would decide it quickly and efficiently. They noted: “War has been characterized in the past by a general pattern of events in which military forces were engaged in an ex­tended struggle of attrition in surface battles. With air forces and modern weapons systems available, it no longer is necessary to defeat opposing armed forces as a prerequisite to conducting ma­jor operations directly against an opponent either in his sovereign territory or in any other locality.”12 The manual further stated: “Of the various types of military forces, those which conduct air operations are most capable of decisive results. .. . They provide the dominant military means of exercising the initiative and gain­ing decisions in all forms of international relations, including full peace, cold war, limited wars of all types, and total war.”13 The total war with the Soviets never materialized, but eight years of limited war in Vietnam produced no substantial changes to the Air Force’s progressive mindset. The 1984 edition of the Basic Doctrine Manual stressed that “aerospace forces have the power to penetrate to the heart of an enemy’s strength without first defeating defending forces in detail.”14 The manual identified the enemy’s heart as a “selected series of vital targets,” which, if destroyed, would wreck the enemy’s capability and will to fight.15 Of the ten possible targets listed, six were components of a na­tion’s industrial apparatus. The manual also noted that strategic bombing could occur successfully “at all levels of conflict,”16 an obvious reference to Vietnam and President Richard Nixon’s De­cember 1972 bombing of the North that many airmen believed produced the Paris Accords a month later. LeMay expressed that conviction when an interviewer asked him in 1986 if America could have won in Vietnam. “In any two-week period you want to mention,” he answered.17 LeMay believed—as did many other airmen—that the political controls restraining much of the bomb­ing in the North had prevented air power from producing a rapid, inexpensive victory much earlier in the conflict.18

For air commanders today, the political restrictions inherent in limited war are givens, yet service doctrine continues to stress a progressive viewpoint. The current edition of the Air Force’s Ba­sic Doctrine Manual, written in 2003, lists “strategic attack” first among a list of seventeen “air and space power functions.”19 The manual further emphasizes that strategic attack not only gives the United States a unique capability to defeat an enemy without bloody ground combat, but also provides the means to transform the character of war itself:

Air and space power is inherently a strategic force and an offensive weapon. Unlike other forms of military power, air and space power may simultaneously hold all of an enemy’s instruments of power at risk—military, economic, and diplomatic. Employed properly, it offers the capability of going to the heart of the enemy sources of strength, avoiding prolonged attrition-based surface combat operations as a precursor… . Strategic attack, as envisioned today, is more than just a function—it is also a different approach for thinking about war. It is the manifestation of the Airman’s perspective: thinking about de­feating the enemy as a system.20

The Ostfriesland episode demonstrated much more than simply Mitchell’s commitment to Air Service autonomy. It also revealed that the vestiges of progressivism remaining in postwar America had enveloped many airmen, and none more so than Billy Mitch­ell.2 Far more ambitious than their muckraker predecessors, Mitch­ell and the air progressives aimed to reform the most violent of man’s activities—war. Rifled artillery, the machine gun, and poi­son gas had made war an endless nightmare that killed millions, as typified by the unremitting fury of the Western Front. Technol­ogy was the demon responsible for the slaughter, but, Mitchell and his cohorts believed, technology was also the key to salvation. The bomber would be their instrument of change. Not only would it prevent a naval force from attacking the United States, it would obviate trench warfare, single-handedly achieving a victory that was quicker, cheaper, and hence more humane than one gained by ground combat. The wartime application of air power would, Mitchell contended, “result in a diminished loss of life and trea­sure and will thus be a distinct benefit to civilization.”1

Mitchell’s unabashed faith that air power had altered the charac­ter of war caused him to demand an air force separate from Army or Navy control to guarantee its proper use. Ffe continually voiced progressive notions in his appeals for service independence, and used the term directly in the foreword to his book Winged De­fense: “The time has come when aviation must be developed for aviation’s sake and not as an auxiliary to other exiting branches [of the service]. Unless the progressive elements in our makeup are availed of, we will fall behind in the world’s development.”4 Much like the muckrakers, Mitchell took his case for autonomy straight to the American public. In the aftermath of the “War to End All Wars,” however, he found that his message could not per­suade a populace beset by isolationism, pacifist tendencies, and, ultimately, the Great Depression.5 Still, his progressive ideals en­dured among airmen, and provided the foundations for the bomb­ing doctrine they developed during the interwar years.

Mitchell was an apt choice to serve as the messiah of Amer­ican air power. With a United States senator for a father and a railroad tycoon grandfather, he possessed ties to leaders in both government and industry. World War I provided him with con­siderable experience as a combat air commander, and he had ex­celled at it—most of the pilots who flew in his units adored him. Brimming with confidence in any situation, he could charm most audiences, often by relying on his fluent French or his expert polo. Yet his overwhelming self-assurance did not stem entirely from expertise. Mitchell was a driven man, a man on a mission, a man with little time to waste. He wrote his mother in December 1919 that he “was practically the only one that can bring about a bet­terment of our national defense at this time” and noted with pride in his diary on Christmas Eve five years later: “Supposed to be a half-holiday, but I worked hard all day in the office neverthe­less.”6 Those who interfered with his promotion of air power—or his boundless ego—incurred his wrath. “Mitchell tried to convert his opponents by killing them first,” observed British Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, who served as Mitchell’s air power mentor during World War I.7 During the war, Mitchell’s vanity produced bitter clashes with fellow airmen Benjamin Foulois and “Nap” Gorrell, both of whom, he believed, snubbed him after obtaining high Air Service positions.8

After the Armistice Mitchell turned his temper toward those who opposed his ideas and his methods of espousing them. His quick tongue and steadfast beliefs prevented him from command­ing the Air Service; he had to settle for Assistant Chief, which car­ried with it a brigadier general’s rank. As such, he refused to de­fer to Major General Charles T. Menoher, a non-flying Air Service chief who had led the Forty-second “Rainbow” Division in World War I. Mitchell published his report of the Ostfriesland sinking despite Menoher’s warning not to do so. Instead of confronting Mitchell afterward, Menoher resigned his post. His successor, Ma­jor General Mason Patrick, was an engineer, the West Point class­mate of General John J. Pershing, and the Air Service commander during the last six months of the world war. He learned to fly at age sixty to enhance his image with his subordinates.

Upon replacing Menoher, Patrick stated that he would be chief in deed as well as name in a remark aimed at Mitchell. When Mitch­ell responded with an offer of resignation, Patrick told him that the offer would be accepted, and Mitchell reconsidered.9 Patrick realized his deputy’s brilliance and even came to share his views on an independent air force, but he did not appreciate Mitch­ell’s unorthodox methods of pursuing his goal. Patrick sent him to inspect European air forces to prevent Mitchell from disrupt­ing the 1922 Washington Naval Conference, and also dispatched him to the Pacific in early 1924. In the end, though, the Air Ser­vice chief proved incapable of curbing his deputy’s penchant for seeking public support.

Because his ideas conflicted with traditional Army views on the “proper” role of air power in war, Mitchell believed that the Army leadership would never endorse air force autonomy. He un­derstood full well the Army’s desire to guarantee that it received adequate air support for its ground forces—he had provided that backing in France during the war, and he did not dismiss the need for it afterward. Yet the auxiliary application of air power of­fered meager prospects for overcoming the murderous technol­ogy of modern land warfare—or for justifying an autonomous air force. As long as ground advance remained the primary means to achieve victory (and Army leaders had little incentive to change that emphasis), the bomber’s ability to revamp war remained lim­ited. “Should a War take place on the ground between two indus­trial nations in the future,” Mitchell wrote in 1919, “it can only end in absolute ruin, if the same methods that the ground armies have followed before should be resorted to.”10 In contrast, inde­pendently applied air power presented an opportunity to win a war by avoiding stalemate and slaughter.

Mitchell maintained that air power alone could defeat a na­tion by paralyzing its “vital centers,” which included great cit­ies, factories, raw materials, foodstuffs, supplies, and modes of transportation.11 All were essential to wage modern war, and all were vulnerable to air attack. Moreover, many of the targets were fragile, and wrecking them promised a rapid victory. Mitchell as­serted: “Air forces will attack centers of production of all kinds, means of transportation, agricultural areas, ports and shipping; not so much the people themselves. They will destroy the means of making war, because now we cannot cut a limb out of a tree, pick a stone from a hill and make it our principal weapon. Today to make war we must have great metal and chemical factories that have to stay in one place, take months to build, and, if destroyed, cannot be replaced in the usual length of a modern war.”12 Only an air force possessed the means to attack vital centers without first confronting enemy surface forces, and destroying those cen­ters would eliminate the need to advance through enemy territory on the ground. “The influence of air power on the ability of one nation to impress its will on another in an armed conflict will be decisive,” he insisted.13

Like many Army officers of his time, Mitchell could recite Clause – witz’s dictum on the objective of war, and he did so with a paro­chial twist. Air power would wreck an enemy’s will to fight by de­stroying its capability to resist, and the essence of that capability was not the army or navy, but the nation’s industrial and agricul­tural underpinnings. Eliminating industrial production “would deprive armies, air forces and navies .. . of their means of main­tenance.”14 Air power also offered the chance to attack the will to fight directly. Mitchell equated the will of a nation to the will of its populace, but he vacillated about the propriety of bombing civil­ians. On the one hand, he called for attacks on “the places where people live and carry on their daily lives” to discourage their “de­sire to renew the combat at a later date,” advocated burning Jap­anese metropolitan areas in the event of a war with Japan, and noted that poison gas could be used to contaminate water sup­plies and spur evacuations from cities. On the other hand, in a 1922 bombing manual written for Air Service officers, he argued that attacking a factory was ethical only if its workers received “sufficient warning that the center will be destroyed” and that “in rare instances Bombardment aviation will be required to act as an arm of reprisal.”15

The dominant theme emerging from these discussions was not the desire to attack civilians directly, but rather the desire to sever the populace from the sources of production. “It may be neces­sary to intimidate the civilian population in a certain area to force them to discontinue something which is having a direct bearing on the outcome of the conflict,” Mitchell observed in his bomb­ing manual. Achieving that goal might cause some civilian deaths, but the number would pale compared to the deaths produced by a ground war between industrialized powers. Moreover, once bombed, civilians were unlikely to continue supporting the war effort. “In the future, the mere threat of bombing a town by an air force will cause it to be evacuated and all work in munitions and supply factories to be stopped,” he asserted.16 In Mitchell’s eyes, civilian will was exceedingly fragile, and its collapse would cause a corresponding loss in war-making capability. In addition, civilians did not have to be attacked directly to produce a direct impact on an enemy’s will to fight.

Although adamant about the fragile nature of civilian will, Mitchell was less than explicit about how breaking it would trans­late into a rapid peace. He thought that air raids would trigger evacuations of hundreds of thousands of people from urban ar­eas. Those refugees would not be able to obtain adequate food or shelter, and their plight would cause a war to end. “There is only one alternative and that is surrender,” he wrote in 1930. “It is a quick way of deciding a war and really much more humane than the present methods of blowing people to bits by cannon projec­tiles or butchering them with bayonets.”17 Yet Mitchell neglected to say whether “surrender” would occur because the government of the battered nation was sympathetic to the plight of its people, feared overthrow by an irate populace, or had in fact been dis­placed by a new regime demanding peace.

In many of his futuristic examples, he depicted the United States as the country undergoing air attack, so the presumption was that surrender would stem from a sympathetic government. Mitchell claimed that America’s “strategical heart” consisted of the man­ufacturing complexes within a triangle formed by Chicago, Bos­ton, and the Chesapeake Bay, and that destroying those centers and their transportation links would not only wreck industrial productivity but also lead to widespread starvation if the nation chose not to capitulate.18 In such projections, war-making capa­bility ceased once bombs destroyed vital industries and agricul­tural areas, or once civilians left the factories and fields. Mitchell dismissed stockpiles of materiel, especially food, and he also re­jected reserves of morale.19 He bestowed on the governments un­der attack a degree of rationality that ignored the enemy’s war aims and the possibility that the population would willingly suf­fer to avoid capitulation. His examples intimated that all indus­trial powers were alike—and that all resembled his view of the United States. He thus overlooked crucial distinctions between nations—and the types of wars they fought—that would directly affect bombing’s ability to achieve an independent victory, much less a rapid one.

For Mitchell, the key prerequisite for achieving victory through air power mirrored the requirement stipulated by the Italian air theorist Giulio Douhet: gaining control of the sky. Mitchell later stated that he had “frequent conversations” with Douhet during his 1922 visit to Italy; whether those conversations actually occurred, he was well acquainted with Douhet’s confidant, Gianni Caproni, and received a synopsis of Douhet’s classic book, The Command of the Air, in late 1922.20 Much of Mitchell’s and Douhet’s writ­ing was remarkably similar.21 Both agreed that “nothing can stop the attack of aircraft except other aircraft,” and that after achiev­ing air supremacy, an enemy’s vital centers—a term used by both men—could be wrecked at will.22 They differed, however, about how best to achieve air control. For Douhet, the best method was to destroy the enemy air force on the ground, either at its bases or before it left factory assembly lines.21 Mitchell countered that air combat was also a suitable means, and that attacking a crit­ical vital center would compel the hostile air force to rise in de­fense, whereupon it could be overcome.24 Both initially thought that escort fighters for bombers were essential to ward off the en­emy’s fighters, although Douhet would later advocate an air force based on a single type of aircraft, a bomber bristling with ma­chine guns that he dubbed the “battleplane” in his 1926 revision to Command of the Air.

Like Mitchell, Douhet argued that an independent air force em­phasizing the bomber was the cheapest and most efficient means to defend his nation. Yet unlike his American counterpart, Douhet had to consider that his country was susceptible to air attack.25 The Italian asserted that a defending air force could not protect all of a nation’s vital centers, because the defender could never be certain what centers the attacker would choose to strike.26 His answer was to attack first, with as much air power as possible, and destroy the enemy’s ability to retaliate in kind. Once enemy bombers took to the air against an unknown target, attempting to stop them was probably futile.27 Mitchell realized that advanc­ing technology would ultimately overcome the limitation on range that protected the United States from air attack by a European or Asiatic power. Under his guidance, Air Service Colonel Townsend F. Dodd prepared an April Г9Г9 study evaluating the need for a separate air force that concluded: “The moment that [an] aircraft reaches that stage of development which will permit one ton of bombs to be carried from the nearest point of a possible enemy’s territory to our commercial and industrial centers, and to return to the starting point, then national safety requires the maintenance of an efficient air force adapted for acting against the possible en­emy’s interior.”28 By the time that trans-oceanic flight had been perfected, Mitchell aimed to make Americans an “air-going peo­ple,” ready to conduct “war at a distance” through a Department of the Aeronautics equal in status to the Army and Navy Depart­ments in a single Department of National Defense.29

Mitchell tried to transform the American populace into air power advocates by emphasizing the progressive notions of order and effi­ciency. Not only could an autonomous air force protect the United States and achieve an independent victory in war, he insisted that it could do so more cheaply—and more effectively—than either the Army or the Navy. Yet the Air Service could not perform an independent mission, Mitchell argued, as long as the Army con­trolled it. Because the Army divided air units among its various corps and divisions to assure that they received adequate air sup­port, air units had a meager chance of being massed together for a long-range independent mission in which Army commanders had little interest. “To leave aviation essentially under the domi­nance and direction of another department is to absolutely stran­gle its development, because it will be looked on by them merely as an auxiliary and not as a principal thing,” he protested in De­cember 1919.30 Mitchell provoked the Navy’s ire with his persis­tent claims that the sea service provided minimum defense for a maximum price tag. In 1922 he contended that an average bat­tleship cost roughly forty-five million dollars to build and equip, while bombers cost twenty thousand dollars each. Thus, the na­tion could either build one battleship or two thousand bombers— each of which could sink a battleship!31 Mitchell’s argument omit­ted a great deal, such as the rapid rate of obsolescence of aircraft compared to capital ships, and the high costs of training aircrews and building air bases, but its simplistic logic touched a receptive chord in many Americans.

In December 1924 Representative Julian Lampert, chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, began hearings in re­sponse to Representative John F. Curry’s bill for a unified avia­tion service. Mitchell testified extensively at the hearings, making some of his most inflammatory accusations. “All the organiza­tion that we have in this country really now is for the protection of vested interests against aviation,” he told the committee. He added that some individuals testifying for the government had showed “a woeful ignorance. . . and in some cases possibly a falsification of evidence, with the evident intent to confuse Con­gress.” When asked by Secretary of War John W. Weeks to elab­orate on his testimony in writing, Mitchell declined to provide specifics and added additional charges. He berated the Navy for the conduct of its bombing tests, remarking that it “actually tried to prevent our sinking the Ostfriesland.”32 Mitchell had recently angered Secretary Weeks by publishing an explosive series of avi­ation articles, unreviewed by the War Department, in the Satur­day Evening Post. The confrontational testimony following on the heels of those articles caused Weeks to deny Mitchell’s reap­pointment as Assistant Chief of the Air Service when it came up for renewal in March 1925.33 At the end of the month Mitchell reverted to his permanent grade of colonel and was transferred to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, as aviation officer for the Army’s Eighth Corps Area.

Mitchell, however, had no intention of remaining dormant in the Texas hinterland. In August 1925 he published Winged De­fense, which expanded many of the arguments that he had made in the Saturday Evening Post. Although stressing the importance of an independent air force built around the bomber, the book continued the attack on Army and Navy leaders opposed to such an organization.54 It also contained cartoons lampooning Sec­retary Weeks, who at the time of publication had become seri­ously ill. Mitchell had been unaware that the cartoons would be published in the book, and on 4 September received a letter from his wife, Elizabeth, who was in Detroit with their infant daugh­ter. Elizabeth was greatly distressed about the appearance of the cartoons and contended that no one would believe that Mitch­ell had not approved them. “I don’t very well see how they can avoid court-martialing you now, my sweet—but I’m sorry it will have to be over something sort of cheap like those cartoons,” she lamented.35 Mitchell’s receipt of his wife’s letter coincided with the crash of the Navy dirigible Shenandoah in an Ohio thunder­storm and perhaps influenced his decision to make the Navy di­saster his personal Rubicon. On 5 September he told San Antonio newspapers that the crash resulted from “the incompetency, crim­inal negligence, and almost treasonable administration of the Na­tional Defense by the Navy and War Departments.”56 Two weeks later he was court-martialed.

For Mitchell, the trial and the “Morrow Board” that preceded it were anticlimaxes. An enraged President Calvin Coolidge, who called Mitchell a “God-damned disturbing liar,” proffered the court-martial charges himself.57 Coolidge summoned friend and J. P. Morgan banker Dwight Morrow to conduct a formal investi-

gation of American aviation that would undercut the publicity of Mitchell’s trial.58 The president directed Morrow to produce a re­port by the end of November, and Morrow’s hearing concluded on r 5 October, thirteen days before the court-martial started. Mitch­ell testified for the Morrow Board but chose to read long passages of Winged Defense rather than to engage in the verbal sparring at which he excelled. Although he returned to form at his trial, the verdict was a given. Found guilty on 17 December—ironically, the twenty-second anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first pow­ered flight at Kitty Hawk—he retired from the service on 1 Feb­ruary 1926 to continue his crusade sans uniform.59

While newspapers gave the court-martial proceedings extensive coverage, no outcry for an independent air force erupted follow­ing the verdict. The Morrow Board, which had received testimony from an array of civilian and military aviation specialists, had in­deed diminished interest in the court-martial. Winged Defense sold only 4,500 copies between August 1925 and January 1926 dur­ing the peak of sensationalism.90 Mitchell received many support­ive letters in that span, but few individuals were willing to back his cause with a demand for legislation.41 Future general Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, then an Air Service major and a close personal friend of Mitchell’s, later speculated on why the American people failed to act on Mitchell’s recommendations: “the public enthusi­asm. . . was not for air power—it was for Billy.”42 Flamboyant, intrepid, and cocksure, Mitchell appealed to New Era America. His message, though, struck an uncertain chord. His argument that bombers could now defend the nation more efficiently than battleships seemed to make sense, as did his assertion that bomb­ers could defeat an enemy without the need for a ground invasion. Yet questions remained—defend against whom? Whom would air power defeat? The Morrow Board’s conclusion, “that air power… has yet demonstrated its value—certainly not in a country situ­ated as ours—for independent operations of such a character as to justify the organization of a separate department,” reflected con­cerns held by the bulk of Americans regarding Mitchell’s ideas.43 In Г925, the public realized that no enemy threatened the United States, and airplanes could not cross the Atlantic or Pacific. The mood endured for more than a decade.