by Bill Yenne
BIG WEEK
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BIG WEEK
SIX DAYS THAT CHANGED THE COURSE OF WORLD WAR II
BILL YENNE
BERKLEY CALIBER, NEW YORK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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BIG WEEK
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ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON
The week of 20–26 February, 1944, may well be classed by future historians as marking a decisive battle of history, one as decisive and of greater importance than Gettysburg.
—General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold,
Commanding General of the USAAF,
in his report to the Secretary of War, February 27, 1945
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
PROLOGUE
ONE: The Birth of an Idea
TWO: The War Will Be an Air War
THREE: America Prepares for the Air War
FOUR: Going to War
FIVE: The House of Mystery on Berkeley Square
SIX: A Steep Learning Curve
SEVEN: Creating Substance from Promise
EIGHT: Defining the Mission
NINE: Pointblank
TEN: Going Deep at Great Cost
ELEVEN: Black Week
TWELVE: Grasping for a Turning Point
THIRTEEN: Operation Argument
FOURTEEN: Before Sunday’s Dawn
FIFTEEN: Sunday, February 20
SIXTEEN: A Wing and a Prayer
SEVENTEEN: Monday, February 21
EIGHTEEN: Tuesday, February 22
NINETEEN: Wednesday, February 23
TWENTY: Thursday, February 24
TWENTY-ONE: Friday, February 25
TWENTY-TWO: All Roads Led to Overlord
TWENTY-THREE: Against the Wall
TWENTY-FOUR: Total Collapse
EPILOGUE
SELECTED ACRONYMS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank Colonel J. A. (Bill) Saavedra, USAF (Ret.) of the Office of Air Force History in Washington, DC, and Thomas P. Lauria of the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell AFB, both of whom provided an immense volume of research material. It is through them that I had access to information about the life of Archie Mathies, an inspiration to us all, and access to the memoirs of Richard D’Oyly Hughes, the most influential unsung hero in the story of Big Week and the events that led to it. Finally, the author wishes to thank Tom Colgan of Berkley Caliber, who made this book possible.
INTRODUCTION
On a blustery June day in 1944, Larry Kuter took an airplane ride. Far beneath him, one of the greatest military enterprises in world history, certainly one of the biggest in World War II, was unfolding. Down below, across a fifty-mile swath of the shores of France’s ancient province of Normandy, 156,000 Allied soldiers were going ashore to begin the great campaign to drive the German armies out of the nations of Western Europe they had occupied for the previous four years.
The Allied soldiers, including 57,500 Americans, came ashore in places with code names alien to those who actually lived in Normandy—especially Normandy’s newest residents, the Germans manning the artillery and the reinforced concrete fortresses. They came ashore on beaches named Sword, Gold, Juno, and Utah. At a fifth beach called Omaha, the Americans took it especially hard, chopped to pieces by heavy machine gun fire and shelling.
Allied planners aboard some of the five thousand ships that stood offshore in the English Channel, or in the various headquarters in Britain, were fixated on this great battle unfolding in surf and sand and rocky cliff.
However, Larry Kuter’s eyes were on the sky. As the Flying Fortress in which he was a passenger flew almost listlessly through the freezing air, his binoculars were trained not on the vast drama unfolding two thousand feet below, but on the eastern fringes of the great blue dome of sky.
He saw a cluster of airplanes at his own altitude, marked with the same white star as the B-17 in which he flew. He saw another cluster of airplanes beneath him, and their wings were marked with the roundels of Britain’s Royal Air Force.
The bomber diverted from overflying the channel and drifted inland over France, then back over the channel, crisscrossing the invasion beaches—Sword, Gold, Juno, Utah, and Omaha. Down there, Allied soldiers were being hammered relentlessly by a well-armed enemy, but up where Kuter scanned the skies, things were downright peaceful.
The sky was full of airplanes that day, but they were all friendly. It was not supposed to have been that way. Once, a very short time before, Germany’s Luftwaffe had been the most powerful and effective air force in the world. Indeed, only a few months ago, Flying Fortress crews who ventured into the skies over Europe did so at considerable peril, knowing that the Luftwaffe maintained total air superiority in the skies across the continent.
Six months earlier, any Allied aircraft that ventured into continental airspace was liable to be pounced upon by a gaggle of angry Messerschmitts hurling 20mm explosive shells at the rate of seven hundred rounds per minute. Indeed, many Flying Fortresses like the one in which Kuter now rode had been turned into crumpled, falling piles of
wreckage by those shells—and in these skies. Dozens of times, the floors of these Flying Fortresses, like the floor beneath Kuter’s feet, had been covered with pools of American blood because of the Luftwaffe.
Four years earlier, when Adolf Hitler’s legions had swept across Europe, defeating nations as powerful as France in a matter of weeks, they had done so beneath an umbrella of airpower that attacked and pounded Germany’s enemies into submission. Nothing moved on the ground but that it was seen from above and strafed by a Messerschmitt or bombed by a Stuka.
This was the fear that had haunted Allied planners when they imagined the great battle now taking place in Normandy. It had kept them awake at night, and it had caused chills to run up their spines and nest in the bases of their skulls like icy rodents.
“If I were the German operations officer and Providence had promised to allow me to select the weather in which to make my defense, these were the conditions I would have chosen,” Kuter thought as he looked beneath him. “A solid bank of overcast covered the Normandy coast and extended to mid-Channel. The top was at twelve thousand feet and the bottom down to thirteen hundred. Here was perfect concealment for German airmen. They could dive out of the dense cloud on the packed Channel below, bomb or strafe any ship and climb back into the protecting clouds in a matter of seconds. They could come and go before a gun was brought to bear or any of our thousands of fighters were able to intercept. I was apprehensive more than I would care to admit.”
With his Clark Gable mustache and his energetic demeanor, Major General Laurence Sherman Kuter was one of a group of young men who had helped form and define the US Army Air Forces. One week from his thirty-ninth birthday, Kuter was the youngest general in the US Army when he was promoted in 1942, and the first man since William Tecumseh Sherman to receive a “jump” promotion to general without having served as a colonel.
In 1929, the young officer from Rockford, Illinois, was two years out of the US Military Academy at West Point and serving as a coast artillery officer in Monterey, California. Soon, however, he had transferred to the Army’s Air Corps and earned his wings in the skies over Texas. By the time that Hitler’s armies were subjugating Europe, he was in Washington, DC, as part of that cadre of brilliant young officers who clustered around their revered chief, Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold, to form this service that would become the largest air force in the world, and to formulate the strategy that would use this weapon to win World War II.
“The cloud bank could be swarming with Germans,” Kuter observed. Left unsaid was the phrase “the cloud bank should be swarming with Germans.”
Everywhere he looked, the skies over the English Channel, and as far away as he could see with his high-powered binoculars, were full of airplanes. Yet everywhere that he looked, the airplanes were marked with stars or roundels. Nowhere did Kuter see the black cross and swastika of the Luftwaffe.
“We kept watching and gradually it became clear to us that if an air battle was taking place, it must be an extremely compressed affair, because few aircraft ever burst through the top of the cloud and those few were friendly,” Kuter later recalled. “Not only that, the radio produced none of the usual German air controller’s battle directions. We knew then that we were right. The air was full of American and British fighters. Columns of Flying Fortresses stretched back to England as far as the eye could follow. We had over 1,800 ‘heavies’ over France that morning. The Hun never showed up. He couldn’t because he had nothing left. His bluff had been called.”
This book is the story of how events were molded to create the week in which that bluff was called.
Big Week was a watershed moment in World War II, and in the military history of the twentieth century. It was the point after which nothing would be as it had been before. After a long and difficult gestation, it marked the birth of strategic airpower as a means of effecting the outcome of military action.
A year and a half earlier, when British armies achieved their first important ground victory against the Germans in three years of war—at El Alamein—Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, delivered one of his most memorable wartime speeches.
“We have a new experience. We have victory—a remarkable and definite victory,” Churchill said. “The Germans have received back again that measure of fire and steel which they have so often meted out to others. Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Big Week was the beginning of the end.
It was not so much a turning point as it was a tipping point.
As defined by the physicists, a tipping point is a threshold, the point at which an entity is displaced from a position of established balance into a new equilibrium significantly unlike what has existed previously. A tipping point is a moment of critical mass.
The threshold was the last week of February 1944. The entity that was about to be displaced from its established balance was the economy and war-making capacity of the Third Reich. The critical mass that was achieved that week was in the number of heavy bombers that comprised the strategic airpower of the USAAF Eighth Air Force.
Between February 20 and 25, 1944, the US Army Air Forces began running massive raids against the economic heart of Hitler’s Germany. It was a battle of epic proportions on a three-dimensional battlefield.
In six days, the Eighth Air Force bombers based in England would fly more than 3,300 missions and the Fifteenth Air Force based in Italy more than 500. Together they dropped roughly 10,000 tons of bombs on targets that accounted for 90 percent of German aircraft production. The British Royal Air Force Bomber Command flew more than 2,350 nighttime missions against the same targets during Big Week.
Big Week had been a long time in the making.
Indeed, it had its origins in World War I, when forward-thinking strategists looked at airpower and saw its big picture. From this evolved the theory that in wartime, airpower could be used, not just as a tactical weapon near the battlefront, but as a strategic weapon that could profoundly and decisively affect the outcome of the war.
Strategic airpower had many fathers, but none more outspoken and influential in United States military circles than William Lendrum “Billy” Mitchell, the man who had commanded the aviation component of the American Expeditionary Force during the First World War.
“The world stands on the threshold of the ‘aeronautical era,’” Mitchell wrote in his 1925 book, Winged Victory. “During this epoch the destinies of all people will be controlled through the air. Airpower has come to stay. But what, it may be asked, is airpower? Airpower is the ability to do something in or through the air, and, as the air covers the whole world, aircraft are able to go anywhere on the planet. They are not dependent on the water as a means of sustentation, nor on the land, to keep them up. Mountains, deserts, oceans, rivers, and forests, offer no obstacles. In a trice, aircraft have set aside all ideas of frontiers. The whole country now becomes the frontier and, in case of war, one place is just as exposed to attack as another place.”
Mitchell died exactly eight years, to the day, before the eve of Big Week, but his words and his ideas had a profound and consequential effect on the men who planned it.
Mitchell died three years before the start of World War II, the first war in which airpower would be decisive, but he had a profound effect on the American air officers who were the founding fathers of the concept that the USAAF could make airpower decisive. These men were led by General Hap Arnold, the commanding general of the USAAF throughout World War II, who gathered around him the men who won the war in the air.
Most significantly, these men included General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, a veteran pilot and staff officer who headed Arnold’s Air Staff when the war began, and went on to be the field officer at the top of the USAAF chain of command in Europe when Big Week came. Among the coterie of young officers—not yet generals when the war began—were those who drafted the master plan that would turn Billy Mitchell�
��s vision into a war-winning reality. They included Larry Kuter, as well as Harold L. “Hal” George, Orvil Anderson, Hoyt Vandenberg, and Haywood S. “Possum” Hansell.
Among the officers in the field who would, under the watchful eye of Tooey Spaatz, execute the master plan that culminated with Big Week, were men whose names became, and in some cases still remain, as household words. They included Ira Clarence Eaker, Frederick Lewis Anderson, James Harold “Jimmy” Doolittle, and Curtis Emerson LeMay.
Burning the midnight oil to provide the specific details of the targets that made up the incomprehensibly vast mosaic of strategic aerial victory in World War II were men, and a few women, whose names never became household words. Significant among them was Richard D’Oyly Hughes.
Flying in the airplanes that executed the plans were the thousands of young men—of 2.4 million in USAAF uniform in June 1944—who sweated the missions, dropped the bombs, and shed the blood. These men included young airmen, barely into their twenties, like Archie Mathies, as well as Bill Lawley and Wally Truemper. Their names are not household words, but they are iconic within today’s US Air Force because of their heroism during Big Week.
Everything that came together during Big Week was about one thing—the use of American airpower to defeat German airpower in order to ensure the success of an epic campaign on the ground.
“On that first and crucial day, with our troops clinging to at least one beachhead ‘by an eyelash,’ the soldiers who were bombed and strafed were not Americans but Germans,” Kuter observed. “German airpower, far from being a factor in the final struggle for Europe, was practically nonexistent.”
As Larry Kuter pondered the scene above, around and beneath him on June 6, 1944, it was clear that the beginning of the end had come at last. The war was not over, not by a long shot, but its outcome had been assured.
It was a terrible thing, this enormous battle that spread across fifty miles of Norman coastline. By the time the sun set on June 6, the Allied casualty count had reached ten thousand young, human lives, a quarter of whom would never see the sun rise on June 7. However, the important thing was that they were still in Normandy. Terrible, difficult battles lay ahead, but the Allied soldiers would not step back into the English Channel, and on the first anniversary of Operation Overlord, the loudest thunder on the Normandy beaches would not be gunfire and exploding shells, but the surf—and Adolf Hitler would be gone forever.
