Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (39 page)

Hughes took down the acetate overlays and, observing that “confusion, bordering on panic, arose in First Army headquarters,” suggested to Anderson that they move along and let Hodges “fight his own war for himself.”

It was a surreal situation. The day before, General Fred Anderson and Richard D’Oyly Hughes had been calmly discussing operations against a foe that had been presumed to be on the ropes. Now they found themselves
personally
stranded in the very path of a major German offensive that had taken the Allies completely by surprise—and one which, at least on the morning of December 16, appeared unstoppable.

The German Ardennes Offensive, code-named Wacht am Rhein (Operation Watch on the Rhine, named for a German patriotic song of the same name) had been intended to divide the 12th and 21st Army Groups from each other, while capturing the great Belgian port city of Antwerp, now a key supply hub for the Allies, and encircling as many as four Allied armies. The idea was to force a negotiated armistice before the Allies crossed into Germany, which would then allow the Germans to concentrate all of their forces against the Soviet armies on the eastern front.

The information coming in concerning the German breakthrough was not good. In fact, it was downright demoralizing. Four German armies, comprising more than a dozen divisions and around two hundred thousand troops, had crashed their way across American lines in a lightly defended part of the front in the Ardennes highlands of southern Belgium. Hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of Americans were reported to have been killed or captured.

The Sixth Panzer Army was headed for Antwerp, and the Fifth Panzer Army was racing to recapture recently liberated Brussels, while the German Seventh Army, backed by the Fifteenth, was pushing south into Luxembourg. Hughes and Anderson learned that a German armored column was headed their way, with nothing in between but a military police company.

“The only sensible thing would have been to get out in a hurry,” Hughes observed. “But General Hodges refused to evacuate his headquarters, so Pete Quesada could not move, and we were just plain ashamed to leave them all in the lurch.”

Since the weather had turned bad, with heavy snow falling, Hughes and Anderson could not fly out, so Quesada invited them to spend the night at the house he had requisitioned in the town of Spa.

“Early next morning we woke up fully expecting to see German tanks patrolling the streets, but all was quiet and we soon learned that the German armored column had taken a fork in the road some four miles short of Spa and passed by to the south of us.”

When Anderson and Hughes got in touch with Spaatz to request orders, Spaatz told Anderson to drive back to rejoin him in Paris, while Hughes was ordered to remain at the headquarters in Liege with Vandenberg.

On December 19, with the Germans still on the move, Vandenberg decided to return to his own headquarters in Luxembourg. Because of the weather, he could not fly there, and because of the Germans having created such a “bulge” in the line, the only way to get to Luxembourg from Liege was to drive there by way of Paris.

Dick Hughes was anxious to get out as well. He writes that “as I no longer seemed to be serving a useful purpose in Liege I telephoned General Spaatz and asked for permission to drive back in General Vandenberg’s car.”

He adds that another man who asked to hitch a ride with them was William Randolph Hearst Jr., who was in Europe serving as a correspondent for his father’s chain of newspapers.

“The three of us, together with a welcome bottle of brandy, took off for Paris together through the fog, driving at an average speed of fifteen miles per hour, [and] arrived at General Spaatz’s house many hours later.”

Vandenberg’s first remark to Spaatz was that his assistant chief of staff for intelligence had just been sent back to the States for medical reasons, and he wondered whether Spaatz knew where he could get someone to take his place.

“What about Dick?” Spaatz replied, looking at Hughes.

“All right, sir,” Hughes replied.

After all of his years planning strategic operations for heavy bombers, Hughes abruptly transferred to tactical operations with the Ninth Air Force.

“I was not sorry to go,” Hughes recalls. “Except for minor day to day details, our strategic plans for ending the war had all been made and as an ex–infantry man I had an intense desire to see something of the ground war at first hand.”

Vandenberg was also pleased. As Hughes soon learned, Vandenberg was anxious to have someone on his staff who was in the confidence of General Spaatz, who was the senior USAAF officer in the European Theater.

Meanwhile, as Hughes was changing jobs, the Battle of the Bulge was unfolding as the largest single land battle fought by the Americans in World War II, costing eighty-nine thousand American casualties. The German advance was not halted until December 26, and the German armies were not pushed back to the pre-offensive lines until the third week of January 1945.

To add insult to the injured Allies—not to mention additional injury—on New Year’s Day, in the midst of the ground battle, the Luftwaffe launched its own surprise offensive, called Operation Bodenplatte (Base Plate). At a time when most Allied planners assumed that the Luftwaffe was finished, the Germans managed to muster more than a thousand aircraft, mostly Fw 190s and Bf 109s, for a massive coordinated attack. These were sent against Allied airfields across France and Belgium, in the biggest German air offensive since well before Operation Overlord.

The Allies lost around three hundred aircraft destroyed, mostly on
the ground, and around two hundred damaged, while the Germans lost slightly fewer than three hundred aircraft shot down.

Wacht am Rhein and Bodenplatte were large, well-planned, and generally well-executed attacks. However, they represented an enormous and desperate gamble that cost much and returned little other than to give the Soviet armies a monthlong lead in the final and inevitable battle inside Germany. The Battle of the Bulge was the last offensive hurrah of the German armies on the western front.

Beginning in January 1945, the enemy in the ground war, as viewed at firsthand by Dick Hughes, was a defender of his homeland. As such, he was a determined foe, gradually becoming more exhausted and more desperate.

Although their Ardennes offensive had failed, and they had lost a great deal of valuable personnel and materiel, the Germans had succeeded in striking, if not fear, at least a case of the jitters into the Anglo-American Allies. The mood among Allied leaders and planners in January 1945 was suddenly one of cautiousness bordering on the pessimistic. In retrospect, this was born out of a nervousness that the optimism of the autumn had been groundless to the point of absurdity.

“We have a superiority of at least five to one now against Germany and yet, in spite of all our hopes, anticipations, dreams and plans, we have as yet not been able to capitalize to the extent which we should,” Hap Arnold himself wrote nervously to Spaatz on January 14. “We may not be able to force capitulation of the Germans by air attacks, but on the other hand, with this tremendous striking power, it would seem to me that we should get much better and much more decisive results than we are getting now. I am not criticizing, because frankly I don’t know the answer and what I am now doing is letting my thoughts run wild with the hope that out of this you may get a glimmer, a light, a new thought, or something which will help us to bring this war to a close sooner.”

Those who had seen, just a few weeks earlier, a glass half-full with the tap turned on, now saw a glass half-empty and being drained by the fear that previous assumptions had been
totally
wrong.

Where they had once been seduced by a phantom that spoke of the war being over by Christmas 1944, Allied leaders now heard the phantom
who whispered of a resilient Reich supplied by impregnable underground factories, untouchable by Allied strategic airpower, and who predicted that the skies over Germany would soon be filled with Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighters in numbers that matched those of the Bf 109s and Fw 190s of a year earlier.

It was in January that the jet fighter became the very emblem of a Luftwaffe perceived to have been “reborn.” It was as though planners—on both sides—suddenly woke up to the promise of reinvigorating, and indeed
reinventing
, the Luftwaffe with a fabulous new technological wonder weapon.

As the Allies saw the great potential danger, Adolf Hitler now saw “his” jet fighter as the ticket to the Reich’s salvation. The Messerschmitt Me 262 twin-jet fighter possessed such a potential. It was the fastest fighter in the world, and superior even to the great P-51 Mustang. It could have been the pivotal secret weapon that stopped the Allied Combined Bomber Offensive in its tracks.

Hitler was right about his jets, but he was at least a year too late.

However, the frightening thing about this “might have been” is that there had been no technical reason why the Me 262
could not
have been available in large numbers one year earlier than January 1945. Admittedly, the Me 262 had been slow to evolve—but the project dated to 1939, so there had been plenty of time. Its development program, and that of its Jumo 004 turbojet engine, had been long and complicated, as engineers faced the challenges always encountered when the boundaries of technology are pushed to their limits.

However, the biggest stumbling block in the development of the aircraft that would have answered Hitler’s fondest desire for an eleventh-hour, war-winning secret weapon was resolute sabotage from within the heart of the Third Reich. The saboteur was Adolf Hitler himself.

Had it not been for Hitler’s conscious efforts to hinder the jet fighter’s development back in 1942 and 1943, added to Göring’s own initial ambivalence, the Luftwaffe would have been able to deploy significant numbers of Me 262s during Big Week.

As Albert Speer and others have written, Hitler had deliberately halted large-scale production of the aircraft in 1943, and as late as the summer
of 1944, against the protests of Adolf Galland and the since-converted Göring, the Führer had ordered the jet fighter deployed only as an attack bomber against ground forces, a task for which it was ill-suited. It was only at the end of 1944 that Hitler woke up to an appreciation of the weapon that he had denied himself. As Speer writes in retrospect, “With such last-ditch efforts, hopes arose, which could [only] be construed as signs of increasing confusion.”

The jet fighter now existed only as a symbol. For Hitler, it was symbolic of an unreasonable optimism that he could still win the war.

For the Allied strategic planners, it was symbolic of unrealistic pessimism, and the unfounded fear that all of the work that had been done would
not
win the war any time soon.

In the Allied camp, January’s phantom of doom was even wider off the mark than had been November’s phantom of sanguinity. The German economy and the German military machine were teetering on the edge of utter collapse. Even as Anderson, Spaatz, and Arnold furrowed their brows, Albert Speer spoke of the “catastrophic situation in armaments production” in Germany. Indeed, he went on to say in his memoirs that this industry, which fell under the supervision of his ministry, “began to disintegrate by late autumn” 1944.

Contrary to what the Allies feared, the strategic air campaign against the German petrochemical industry and infrastructure
had
paid off. The economy and war machine were running on empty. Far from being on the verge of rebirth, the Luftwaffe was dangling by a thread. Not only were fuel supplies running short, most of its best pilots were dead or exhausted by overwork and stress.

The first Combined Bomber Offensive plan drawn up after the departure of Dick Hughes from the EOU and the Eighth Air Force appeared in January 1944. Known as the “Interim Plan,” it was drafted by the Combined Strategic Targets Committee and it targeted railways west of the Rhine that could contribute to supporting German armies facing the Anglo-American Allies.

Meanwhile, USAAF commanders remained adamant that strikes on the German rail network be concentrated on large, industrial-scale marshaling yards and not on targets such as small-town railway stations. In an
“eyes only” memo to Spaatz on the first of January, Ira Eaker had pointed out that this would only serve to convince the German people that the Americans were indeed the “barbarians” that Hitler described. As Eaker insisted, “You and [assistant secretary of war for air] Bob Lovett are right and we should never allow the history of this war to convict us of throwing the strategic bomber at the man in the street.”

As John Fagg writes, “Eighth Air Force mission reports for most of January show enormous numbers of heavy bombers, sometimes as many as 1,500, going out day after day to bomb targets whose neutralization would benefit Allied ground forces but would not directly accelerate the dislocation of Germany’s industries. The preponderant weight of such air effort went on what was officially a secondary objective, enemy communications. Some 147 rail and road targets, rail centers, marshalling yards, repair shops, junctions, bridges, and traffic bottlenecks received USSTAF raids during the month.”

Nevertheless, as Fagg points out, citing the postwar Strategic Bombing Survey, “German economic traffic in the west had already been choked off from the rest of the Reich to a dangerous degree.”

February 1945, the one year anniversary of Big Week, was marked by an increase in the strategic efforts against Germany that finally precipitated the total collapse of the economy of the Third Reich. Indeed, on February 22, the anniversary of Day Three, the weather across all of Germany cleared as though offering up a reminder of the weather that week, and the Eighth Air Force launched a maximum effort involving 1,359 heavy bombers. While this mission involved double the average number of bombers that the Eighth put out during Big Week, it was a sign of the times that by now, it was becoming common for the Eighth to launch missions with 1,200 bombers.