Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (42 page)

Dick Hughes had been on the continent since December 1944, when his years with strategic air operations had ended so abruptly and dramatically. As he moved across the continent with the headquarters of the Ninth Air Force—from Luxembourg into Germany—it continued to be collocated, for tactical coordination purposes, with that of the 12th Army Group. As such, Hughes found himself reunited with his old colleague from the Enemy Objectives Unit at 40 Berkeley Square, Charlie Kindleberger, who had made the transfer to the intelligence staff of the 12th in May 1944.

Around the first of May in 1944, as the German surrender seemed imminent, Hughes and Kindleberger decided to take a drive to see the once-secret underground factories in the Harz Mountains near Nordhausen, where the Germans had used slaves to manufacture their V-1 cruise missiles and V-2 ballistic missiles.

While they had been aware of Germany’s having used slave labor in manufacturing as a desperate measure to keep their factories going in the
final months of the war, they were unprepared for the horror of seeing the walking skeletons who were still living in the vicinity of their former camps, now under the care of the United States First Army.

The two former EOU hands, well versed in the nuances of econometric models, stared in incredulity at evidence of a practice that had never been discussed in any textbook in association with the economy of a modern industrialized nation.

The next day, while investigating a German plant that had generated hydrogen peroxide for rocket fuel, they were approached by a trio of well-dressed German gentlemen who explained that they had been managers at the facility.

As Hughes later described, they were “full of smiles and hospitable friendship, and attempted to shake our hands. This, after the sights of the concentration camp, to the great and obvious surprise of the Germans, we were not prepared to do, and Charlie Kindleberger, who was of German extraction himself, and spoke German fluently, quickly set them to rights about the position they were in.”

Within a matter of days, World War II in Europe was over.

Dick Hughes never got to meet Albert Speer, the man who built and defended what the EOU and the USSTAF methodically tore down, but his friend, General Fred Anderson, did.

When the war ended, Speer retreated to Flensburg, near the Danish border to join Admiral Karl Doenitz, Hitler’s designated successor. Doenitz was then still operating under the delusion that he could create a postwar German government that the victorious Allies would recognize. In a genteel setting that defied credulity against the backdrop of the global devastation of World War II, Speer was living in Schloss Glücksburg, a sixteenth-century castle that had been placed at his disposal by the duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.

When Fred Anderson caught up to him there on May 16, he was in his comfortable sitting room, graciously entertaining guests—the members of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey.

These men had explained that American headquarters was accumulating data on the effects of the Allied bombings, and asked whether Speer would be willing to provide information.

“We discussed the mistakes and peculiarities of the bombings on both sides,” the former armaments minister recalls. “The next morning my adjutant reported that many American officers, including a high-ranking general, had arrived at the entrance to the castle. Our guard of soldiers from a German armored force presented arms, and so—under the protection of German arms, as it were—General F. L. Anderson, commander of the bombers of the American Eighth Air Force, entered my apartment. He thanked me in the most courteous fashion for taking part in these discussions.”

Within three days, others arrived, including Franklin Woolman D’Olier, handpicked by Harry Truman to head the Strategic Bombing Survey, and Henry C. Alexander of Morgan Guaranty Trust, his vice chairman. They were accompanied by Paul Nitze, George Ball, and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith—all of whom became influential, household-name policy makers and advisors to presidents in the decades following the war.

“During the next several days an almost comradely tone prevailed in our ‘university of bombing,’” Speer relates in his memoirs. “We went systematically through the various aspects of the war in the air. From my own work I could appreciate the great importance of this division for the American military operations…. General Anderson paid me the most curious and flattering compliment of my career: ‘Had I known what this man was achieving, I would have sent out the entire American Eighth Air Force merely to put him underground.’ That air force had at its disposal more than two thousand heavy daylight bombers. I was lucky General Anderson found out too late.”

On May 23, Speer’s “university” was compelled to close its doors. Another, less congenial group of Allied officers arrived to place Speer under arrest. Tried at Nürnberg, he was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity—primarily because of the use of slave labor in German industry during the final years of the war. He was sentenced in October 1946 to twenty years and traded the comfortable castle for a cramped cell in Berlin’s Spandau Prison.

Shortly after Fred Anderson had paid his call at Schloss Glücksburg, Dick Hughes received a phone call from Tooey Spaatz, who reminded
Hughes that he had long ago promised to release Hughes to return to civilian life as soon as Germany had been defeated.

The following day, Hughes was back at an Eighth Air Force base in England, where he was to catch a ride on a Flying Fortress that was headed back to the United States. To his surprise, he discovered that the aircraft was being piloted by General Frederick Lewis Anderson.

Anderson had been reassigned to the Pentagon, where he was to serve under Hap Arnold as the director in charge of relocating USAAF personnel, especially those of the Eighth Air Force, from the European Theater to the Pacific.

“I think that the most personally gratifying thing to me,” Hughes writes in the conclusion to his wartime memoir, “was that Fred Anderson and I, who had sweated through together, and executed, the truly terrible decisions of 1943 and early 1944, should leave the European Theater in company.”

Less than a week later, Dick Hughes was home in Clayton, Missouri, and two weeks after that he went to work at the Cupples Company in St. Louis as an executive assistant to the president. The Cupples Company, which would celebrate its centennial in 1951, was illustrative of the types of firms that were so much a part of the fabric of the United States economy in the two decades after World War II. A manufacturer of everyday home products, from American brand rubber fruit jar rings, to Kent double-edged razor blades, to the Good Housekeepers brand products, Cupples was typical of thousands of small businesses that flourished in those years but which have long since faded away as the consumer products industry has consolidated into larger and larger corporations.

Charlie Kindleberger, meanwhile, remained in government for a time and served as one of the leading architects of the Marshall Plan for the recovery of the European economy after World War II. One of the men who had been responsible for the deconstruction of the German economy was one of those who stepped in to save and restore that economy and the nations that it had occupied during World War II. As such, he helped to define the course of European history through the remainder of the twentieth century.

Kindleberger later settled in on the faculty of MIT and published a
number of books on economics and economic history. His 1978 book
Manias, Panics, and Crashes
, about speculative stock market bubbles, is now considered prophetic because of its prediction of the “Dot-Com Bubble.” It remains as required reading in many master’s of business administration programs to this day.

While working on the Marshall Plan, Kindleberger was reunited with another one of the bright young men of the EOU, Walt Rostow, who also went on to serve on the faculty at MIT. Rostow, however, is best remembered for serving in the administrations of three American presidents. He was a speechwriter for President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former commander at SHAEF, whose pre-Overlord London office was a few steps from 40 Berkeley Square.

Rostow joined John F. Kennedy when he was still a presidential candidate, and coined Kennedy’s famous campaign phrase “New Frontier.” When Kennedy was elected, Rostow became the deputy to McGeorge Bundy, the president’s special assistant for national security affairs. He later served as Lyndon Johnson’s national security affairs assistant.

Fred Anderson had returned to the United States to prepare for a phase of the war that became unnecessary almost before he had a chance to settle in at his Pentagon desk. Instead, he found himself presiding over a downsizing of the world’s largest air force from 2.4 million people at its peak in 1944 to 305,827 in 1947.

Anderson himself became one of those heading for the door, and he, like Ira Eaker and thousands of others, chose 1947 as his retirement year.

Around that time, Anderson crossed paths with William Henry Draper Jr., a longtime investment banker with the New York firm of Dillon, Read & Company. Draper, who had held general’s rank during World War II, had been part of the Economics Division of the Allied Control Council in Berlin immediately after the war. Here, as with Kindleberger and Rostow, who came later with the Marshall Plan, he was tasked with reconstruction of the same German economy that Anderson had worked to destroy.

In 1952, when Draper was named as the US special representative in Europe, and later became the American ambassador to NATO, he picked
Fred Anderson as his deputy. In turn, Draper and Anderson got to know Horace Rowan Gaither Jr., a San Francisco attorney and financier who had been a cofounder, along with Donald Douglas of Douglas Aircraft, of the RAND Corporation think tank. Coincidentally, during the war, Gaither had been assistant director of the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where they built the H2X (AN/APS-15) radar system for the Flying Fortresses that flew as pathfinders for Anderson’s VIII Bomber Command.

In 1959, this trio moved to California’s Santa Clara Valley, south of San Francisco, where the high-tech talent coming out of Stanford University was creating a new era of technological innovation. In 1959, they founded Draper, Gaither & Anderson (DGA), the first venture capital firm in the West, to invest in leading edge technology that could be seen as the H2X-type systems of the future. This was an exciting time in the rolling hills south of San Francisco, coincidentally just two years after two of the brightest young future household names in the area, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, went public with Hewlett-Packard, and at a time when top secret projects from missile guidance to spy satellites were going full bore in the Santa Clara Valley.

In turn, this was two decades before the valley became known as “Silicon Valley” and famous as the home of an archipelago of venture capital firms that were to underwrite another technological boom and another monumental change in the course of world history.

In 1992, David J. Mathies turned sixty-five and went back to the United Kingdom for the fiftieth anniversary of the “Friendly Invasion” of England by the troops of the United States armed forces. When it was learned that David was in the country, he was invited to give a talk at the Archibald Mathies NCO Academy at Upwood in Cambridgeshire.

Though Upwood, a US Air Force installation since 1981, would be abandoned, except for its hospital, by 2005, the words that David spoke there will live as long as the memory of Archie’s heroism.

His words can also be taken to speak for that entire generation of young men, the later-named “Greatest Generation,” who served bravely
and selflessly in the United States armed forces during World War II. And of course, that generation included the analysts who worked at 40 Berkeley Square through the terrible and difficult days of Black Week and Big Week.

As Walt Rostow said in an address given in Washington one year before David Mathies went to Upwood, “I do not believe that the members of EOU, caught up in exciting headquarters business, ever forgot for long those for whom we were ultimately working. After all, they were of our generation…. Above all, there were the aircrews who flew up from the peaceful British countryside, assembled, and, in a matter of minutes, found themselves for much of the air war plunged into an inferno of antiaircraft fire and lethal air combat—some dying or going into captivity; others limping home with dead or wounded aboard; all undergoing traumatic strain carried gracefully or otherwise for the rest of their lives.”

Rostow was aware of Archie Mathies and recognized that they shared the bond of being of that unique generation.

“In the aging of my memory, I always come back to England and the Eighth Air Force,” David Mathies reflected in his talk that night in Upwood. “Always there echo and reecho in my ears, just as they probably echoed in Archie’s ears, three words: ‘duty, honor, country.’ Duty. He felt that it was his job as a practicing Christian to try to save that pilot’s life. It was certainly the honorable thing to do. Country. Oh yes, America, land of the free, and home of the brave. Archie certainly was brave on that fateful, final day of his life.”

In closing, he recalled that when “Archie took off on that deep penetration mission to Leipzig, he had recently been promoted to staff sergeant, but before that day was over, he was a captain, the captain of his fate, the master of his soul.”

AAF
Army Air Forces (short for USAAF)

AEAF
Allied Expeditionary Air Force

AFCE
Automatic Flight-Control Equipment

AFHQ
Allied Forces Headquarters (the operational command of the MTO)

AFSC
Air Force Service Command

AGO
Apparatebau GmbH Oschersleben

AWPD
Air War Plans Division (also the acronym for documents prepared by the division)

BBSU
British Bombing Survey Unit