Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (16 page)

Though the arrival of the Mustang would completely alter the balance of power in air-to-air combat over Europe, the Germans also feared the P-47. They feared it for what it represented. Scarcely had the Americans started operating their four-engine bombers over the heart of the Reich, then they audaciously sent their
fighters
over Germany. The P-47s could not penetrate much farther than Aachen or Emden, but they
were
in German skies.

General Adolf Galland, the Luftwaffe’s
general der Jagdflieger
, or inspector general of fighter units, was deeply troubled by this and understood that this was only the beginning. A fighter pilot himself, Galland had commanded Jagdgeschwader 26 in 1940–1941, and had scored nearly one hundred victories flying against the Royal Air Force before being put in charge of the entire fighter force in November 1941. As soon as he became aware of there being American fighters over Germany, he informed his boss, Hermann Göring, as well as Hitler himself.

Göring reacted not merely with disbelief, but with a
refusal to believe!
Albert Speer, who was present at a meeting between Göring and Galland when the topic came up, paints a picture of a conversation that borders on the surreal.

“What’s the idea of telling the Führer that American fighters have penetrated into the territory of the Reich?” Göring snarled accusatorially at Galland.

“Herr
Reichsmarschall
,” Galland replied calmly, “they will soon be flying even deeper.”

“That’s nonsense, Galland, what gives you such fantasies?” Göring said emphatically. “That’s pure bluff!”

“Those are the facts, Herr
Reichsmarschall
!” Galland explained. “American fighters have been shot down over Aachen. There is no doubt about it!”

“That is simply not true, Galland,” Göring insisted. “It’s impossible.”

“You might go and check it yourself, sir; the downed planes are there at Aachen.”

“Come now, Galland, let me tell you something. I’m an experienced fighter pilot myself,” Göring said, although that had been a quarter of a century earlier, during World War I. “I know what is possible. But I know what isn’t, too. Admit you made a mistake. What must have happened is
that they were shot down much farther to the west. I mean, if they were very high when they were shot down they could have glided quite a distance farther before they crashed.”

“Glided to the east, sir?” Galland asked impassively. “If my plane were shot up…”

Göring seethed. “Now then, Herr Galland. I officially assert that the American fighter planes did not reach Aachen.”

“But, sir, they were there!”

“I herewith give you an official order that they weren’t there!” Göring said with finality. “Do you understand? The American fighters were not there! Get that! I intend to report that to the Führer. You have my official order!”

“Orders are orders, sir!” Galland smiled wryly.

The delusional Göring still had half a year before he would be compelled to issue an order to the effect that the Mustangs did not exist. For those six months, bombers reaching past Emden or Aachen would do so without their “little friends.” It was something they would rather not have had to do, but there were Pointblank targets outside the range of the USAAF fighter escorts that just could not wait. Topping that list, of course, were those of the Pointblank Directive and the campaign against the German aircraft industry.

To date, these attacks had focused on the Focke-Wulf facilities, which were located in northern Germany, closer to the Allied bases, and in places where fighter escort was available for most of the mission.

Not yet struck by precision attacks, however, were the large Messerschmitt facilities building the Bf 109. Two Messerschmitt complexes, located at Regensburg in Bavaria and Wiener Neustadt, near Vienna, were then producing 48 percent of the Luftwaffe’s single-engine fighters. However, Regensburg was deeper inside Germany than the Eighth Air Force had yet flown, while Wiener Neustadt was an equally grueling hike for bombers based in the Mediterranean. Messerschmitt’s headquarters factory at Augsburg in Bavaria was even farther from either England or the Mediterranean, and would not be on a list for USAAF missions until the end of the year.

The ink on the Combined Bomber Offensive Plan had been dry for
about a month when the Eighth Air Force prepared to mount its first attack on the German anti-friction bearing industry. To the men on the COA staff who had studied this industry in the abstract, it was a very straightforward target, because the vast majority of Germany’s ball bearing factories, or
kugellager
, were located in or near a single city, Schweinfurt. The two largest of the anti-friction bearing factory complexes in the area were those belonging to the firms of Kugelfischer and Vereinigte Kugellagerfabriken (VKF), a subsidiary of the Swedish Svenska Kullagerfabriken (SKF) company.

However straightforward the ball bearing industry as a bottleneck industry may have appeared on paper, it was far from an easy target. Like Regensburg, Schweinfurt was located in Bavaria, more than four hundred miles from Eighth Air Force bases in Britain. This put both cities at the limits of the effective range of bomb-laden American aircraft, and substantially beyond the range of fighter escorts. It was like a tempting piece of fruit hanging on a limb beyond a precipice, just out of reach, easily seen, but untouchable without considerable peril. Regensburg and Schweinfurt presented a level of danger beyond what had yet been experienced by the Eighth.

Yet, with every passing day, more and more ball bearings flowed forth from Schweinfurt to Regensburg and to factories across the Reich, just as Regensburg was churning out increasing numbers of the single-engine fighters to challenge the bombers. As with the rivers of bearings, the fighter threat could not be allowed to grow and grow.

By the beginning of August 1943, the men of the COA had rolled down their sleeves and gone home, but at 40 Berkeley Square, the hard decision making for the EOU was in full swing.

“Almost in despair,” Dick Hughes recalls painfully, “General Anderson and I decided to ‘go for broke,’ and attempt to destroy the ball bearing factories at Schweinfurt—without regard for casualties. It was one of those horrible decisions. On the information available to us at the time, it appeared that we were damned if we did, and that we were doubly damned if we did not.”

Four clusters of pins appeared on the target map. August 1943 was shaping up to be a big month for USAAF strategic operations. In terms of coordinated planning, it was an important precursor to Big Week. The pins were backed by a plan to organize missions to all four of these target clusters as part of a rapid series of maximum effort attacks under the mantle of Operation Pointblank.

What distinguished these clusters of pins from earlier clusters was that they were situated mainly in parts of the map that were closer to the heart of Hitler’s Reich, in places where such pins had not previously been placed.

Richard Hughes and the EOU had been busy. As it was conceived, the plan for August was to correlate strikes against the Reich’s economy made by the Eighth Air Force from bases in England with missions flown by Ninth Air Force bombers flying from the Mediterranean. While the Eighth would fly south to the clusters of pins ringing Schweinfurt and Regensburg, the Ninth would fly north to Wiener Neustadt, as well as to Ploesşti. It had been fourteen months since the great Romanian refinery complex had been touched by the USAAF.

Of the four missions delineated by the four clusters of pins, one would
attack bearings, one would attack petroleum, and two missions would be mounted against Messerschmitt factories.

This stratagem had evolved as Dick Hughes was contemplating maps that stretched across the floor of his office, from East Anglia in the north to Benghazi, Libya, in the south.

“As I casually studied [the maps] I was suddenly struck with a flash of inspiration,” he recalls. “Why should not our newly formed 3rd Bombardment Division, now being equipped with long range fuel tanks, attack Regensburg from England, and then, instead of flying back under heavy fighter attack all the way across Germany to England, fly straight from their target over the Alps, cross the Northwest corner of Italy and the Mediterranean Sea and land at airfields in Africa?”

Hughes further theorized a simultaneous attack on Schweinfurt by the other Eighth Air Force air divisions, which would compel the Luftwaffe to split its interceptor resources between the two targets. Having hastily sketched the plan on a map, he took it immediately to General Eaker’s office.

“General Eaker was completely disinterested,” Hughes recalls. “I sorrowfully returned to my office and filed the map away in my safe.”

Four days later, the Eighth Air Force received a message that Secretary of War Henry Stimson would be arriving in London the following day. Unknown to anyone at Berkeley Square, or anyone at the Eighth Air Force headquarters, was that Stimson and Dr. Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, were visiting London in July 1943 to draft an agreement with Winston Churchill defining the terms for future collaboration on the atomic bomb program. The visit to Eighth Air Force headquarters was secondary to Stimson’s unannounced primary mission.

Before he visited, Stimson had let Eaker know that he wanted to discuss a solution to the problem of high casualty rates on the Eighth Air Force missions into Germany. Eaker decided that he should probably show Stimson something dramatic in relation to Operation Pointblank. Remembering Hughes’s proposal, Eaker ordered him to prepare a large-map briefing for the secretary of war, and this was done.

When Stimson had departed, Eaker ordered Hughes to drive to VIII Bomber Command and outline the plan to General Fred Anderson. When Hughes arrived, Anderson was conferring with Colonel Curtis LeMay,
the commander of the 4th Bombardment Wing (later a component of the 3rd Bombardment Division, which would then be commanded by LeMay).

“I was able to go over [the plan] with both of them simultaneously. Even the usually phlegmatic LeMay caught fire at the idea, and both he and General Anderson immediately grasped its immense possibilities.”

Hughes writes that he and LeMay then flew to North Africa in a Flying Fortress to “sell the idea” to General Tooey Spaatz and Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, who were the air commanders in the Mediterranean under Eisenhower. Historian Arthur Ferguson goes a step further, writing in the official history of the USAAF that their mission was actually “to arrange for necessary maintenance and base facilities” for an already “sold” operation.

Hughes reports that Spaatz and Tedder “agreed to cooperate in every possible way.” They sent for General Lewis Brereton, who headed the USAAF Middle East Air Forces (MEAF) under Spaatz’s command, and “instructed him to make all preparations to attack Wiener Neustadt simultaneously with the Eighth Air Force attack on Regensburg and Schweinfurt.”

Brereton expressed concerns about casualties that would result from such a deep penetration mission.

“In front of General Spaatz and Air Marshal Tedder, he asked me how many planes I thought he might lose,” Hughes recalls. “I told him that our information on the German fighter defenses in Austria indicated that opposition would be slight, and that in my opinion I did not think that his whole force would lose more than two bombers.”

Hughes and LeMay then flew to the fields, notably Telergma Airfield in northeastern Algeria, near the Tunisian border, which Spaatz had promised to put at their disposal to receive the bombers from the Regensburg mission. They informed the base commanders of the mission and asked them to secretly stockpile sufficient fuel to get the strike force back to England.

Flying over the Atlantic on the way back to England, Hughes thought about Brereton’s pointed questions and did some soul searching.

“This plan, a risky one, was particularly my own,” he reflected. “Over the previous months I had been strictly chair-borne while sending, maybe two or three thousand young men to their deaths. Day by day it had preyed on my mind more, until it seemed absolutely necessary personally to make some expiation.”

When he had returned to Britain, Hughes went to see Eaker to request permission to personally accompany the bomber force on the Regensburg attack.

“Eaker turned me down cold, telling me that, informed as I was on all our future operational plans, I was the last person whom he could possibly permit to fly over enemy territory. That ended that.”

Hughes then asked Eaker whether the EOU should draw up a plan for targets that could be bombed on the way back to England from North Africa. Eaker told him that he didn’t want them to do this. The bombers would just fly out over the Atlantic on the way back.

Hughes suggested that Hap Arnold would probably like to see them bomb
something
on the return, “but General Eaker disagreed.”

The Ploesşti mission, designated as Operation Tidal Wave, designed as the first of the package of four deep penetration missions planned for August, was launched on the first day of the month. Generals Eisenhower and Spaatz, as well as Air Chief Marshal Portal, had favored an attack on Wiener Neustadt
before
Tidal Wave, but from Washington, George Marshall and Hap Arnold both insisted that the operation against Ploesşti should come first.

The force included the 98th “Pyramiders” Bombardment Group and the 376th “Liberandos” Group of the Ninth Air Force, as well as three bombardment groups on loan from the Eighth Air Force (the 44th, 93rd, and 389th). A total of 177 Liberators took off from Benghazi, Libya, crossed the Mediterranean, and attacked the source of most of the Third Reich’s refined petroleum.

The cost to the USAAF, on what came to be known as “Black Sunday,” was staggering. There were 53 aircraft shot down, more than 300 crewmen killed, and more than 100 captured. Among those killed in action was the commander of the 93rd, Lieutenant Colonel Addison Baker, who earned a posthumous Medal of Honor for his heroic leadership in the inferno of Ploesşti.