by Bill Yenne
The Luftwaffe had eradicated the will of the Netherlands to resist German armies by leveling downtown Rotterdam in June, but failed to do the same to the British a few months later. Nevertheless, the London Blitz stunned and nearly demoralized Britain.
In their use of integrated tactical air operations in support of the blitzkrieg, the Luftwaffe had revolutionized tactical air warfare. They had developed the right aircraft and had mastered the right tactics to achieve frighteningly successful results.
The Germans had shown the world that this war would be an air war.
THREE
AMERICA PREPARES FOR THE AIR WAR
Billy Mitchell had resigned in February 1926, and died a decade later, in February 1936, having spent the last ten years of his life predicting that the next world war would be an air war, and insisting that the United States should get ready for it. While there were young officers throughout the US Army and US Navy who had heard Mitchell, the upper levels of command were scarcely more willing to believe the premise of his argument than they had been in 1921.
Though his own countrymen had remained deaf to Mitchell’s message, the idea had obviously taken root in Europe, especially in Germany. While the air forces of Europe were expanding during the 1930s, there was no corresponding urgency among the upper echelon leadership of the United States armed forces to do the same. For nearly two centuries, vast oceans had been both physical and psychological barriers which insulated America from foreign wars. Even eighteen years after Billy Mitchell had proven that bombers could sink battleships, the US Navy defense planners still insisted that oceans and battleships were the only line of defense that the United States needed to avoid war. The US Army, meanwhile, still believed that its subsidiary Air Corps existed only to support troops in the field, not to undertake offensive actions behind enemy lines independent of the ground troops.
However, within the Air Corps, Billy Mitchell’s vision for an independent air force capable of decisive action had resonated with many junior officers since the 1920s. By the 1930s, these men were no longer junior officers. One of the leading voices of airpower advocacy within the Air Corps was the officer who became its chief in 1938—General Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold, West Point class of 1907.
Until the early 1930s, the types of aircraft that were being acquired by the Air Corps were principally single-engine trainers and combat aircraft. By the late 1930s, more and more longer range “multi-engine” warplanes were being added to the mix by forward-thinking officers who were rising in the ranks, graduating from bars to oak leaves.
The development of the technology for such aircraft began in 1933, with two secret Air Corps programs that were called Project A and Project D. With this, the seeds of the strategic airpower doctrine, sewn by Billy Mitchell, were germinated. The two secret projects were the first whisper of a breeze in the winds of change blowing into airpower doctrine. The idea in both projects was to examine the feasibility of very large, very long-range bombers.
These projects were significant in that they were conceived as harbingers of aircraft that would be part of a strategic doctrine. Though the United States was being outproduced elsewhere in the world, especially in Germany and the United Kingdom, when it came to combat aircraft, at least the Air Corps was looking ahead in conceptualizing strategic airpower.
Project A and Project D spawned a series of very large aircraft designs, of which the Boeing XB-15 and Douglas XB-19 became one-of-a-kind prototypes. However, the real value of the projects came in the manufacturers, especially Boeing, having developed the technology base for large bombers. This led to the Boeing Model 299.
Designed by a team of brilliant young engineers, notably Edward Curtis Wells, and built at company expense, the Boeing Model 299 first flew on July 28, 1935. At the rollout, Seattle Times reporter Richard Williams described the huge, four-engine bomber as a “flying fortress.” The name was adopted as the official name. In January 1936, after several months of testing, the Air Corps ordered the first Flying Fortresses under the designation Y1B-17, and by 1938, they were ordering small numbers of operational B-17Bs.
During 1939, as Europe went to war, the Luftwaffe took delivery of 8,295 new aircraft, and Britain’s Royal Air Force acquired 7,940. The US Army Air Corps bought 2,141, mainly trainers. In August, they had ordered 38 B-17C Flying Fortresses for delivery in 1940.
In July 1940, with the German armies in control of most of Western Europe, and England seeming to be ripe for the picking, the United States government and military services were faced with the problem of expanding the army and the Navy, and the air services of both. Nevertheless, the acquisition of four-engine bombers still moved at a timid pace. In 1940, the Air Corps would order just 80 B-17C and B-17D aircraft. Among these, 20 were acquired for Britain’s Royal Air Force in the autumn of 1940 under the designation Fortress Mk.I.
The latter is illustrative of how the world viewed four-engine bomber development, and how planners in England had failed to embrace the doctrine of strategic airpower. Even one year into World War II, the Flying Fortress was the only operational four-engine bomber of which significant numbers were in the pipeline.
By this time, the RAF had awakened and the British Air Ministry had ordered the development of aircraft such as the Short Stirling and the Handley Page Halifax, but their operational careers would not be under way until 1941. The Avro Lancaster, considered Britain’s best strategic bomber of the war, would not be in service until 1942.
Meanwhile, a second American four-engine bomber type was coming on line in 1941. Developed by Consolidated Aircraft of San Diego as its Model 32, the aircraft was designated as the B-24 by the Air Corps, and named Liberator. As with the Flying Fortress, some early Liberators were delivered to the RAF in 1941. The first mass-production variant, the B-24D, would make its squadron service debut in the United States the following year.
For all their meticulous planning in terms of aircraft and tactics—not to mention their superior numbers of first-rate aircraft—the Luftwaffe had yet to seriously consider four-engine strategic bombers. Those four-engine aircraft the Germans had developed, such as the Fw 200, were long on range but short on combat durability and payload.
The Luftwaffe had proven itself as an undisputed master of tactical air warfare, but they had failed to develop either the long-range aircraft, or a long-rang plan, for strategic air warfare. Meanwhile, the US Army Air Corps had taken a significant step toward developing the aircraft. Soon it would take a step toward developing a plan.
In June 1941, big changes came to the US Army’s conception of airpower. In a move that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier, Chief of Staff General George Marshall ordered the creation of an autonomous US Army Air Forces as the operational successor to the Air Corps.
General Arnold, as the commander of the new USAAF, formed an Air Staff and named General Carl Spaatz as its chief. He charged Spaatz, who had already spent time working with the British Air Staff in London, with creating an Air War Plans Division (AWPD). This organization would coordinate with the US Army’s existing War Plans Division (WPD) but would remain independent from it. Headed by Lieutenant Colonel Harold L. “Hal” George, the AWPD came into being in July 1941 and began developing the plan that would be implemented if, or when, the United States became involved in World War II. This plan, known as AWPD-1, would be integrated into the larger joint US Army–US Navy contingency plan known as Rainbow 5.
The cast of young officers who came together around AWPD-1, as part of Hal George’s staff, not only helped draft the plan, but many would go on to play key roles in its implementation. They included Lieutenant Colonel Orvil Anderson, Major Hoyt Vandenberg, and a World War I flight instructor turned businessman, Lieutenant Colonel Malcolm Moss, as well as a pair of West Pointers, Major Laurence Kuter and Major Haywood Hansell. Hansell would go on to command the first B-17 combat wing in Europe, while Vandenberg would command the wartime Ninth Air Force, and go on to serve as chief of st
aff of the postwar US Air Force.
Ground had yet to be broken for the Pentagon, so these men, among the best and the brightest in the USAAF, rolled up their sleeves and went to work in the Munitions Building on the Washington Mall.
Officially entitled Munitions Requirements of the Army Air Forces to Defeat Our Potential Enemies, AWPD-1 went beyond determining aircraft production goals and developed the comprehensive outlines for a strategy of deploying them to win the war. As Robert Futrell writes in his book, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine, President Roosevelt himself heartily agreed that the mission of the AWPD was to draft the “requirements required to defeat our potential enemies.”
Completed early in August, AWPD-1 included a strategy for fighting a war not just in Europe, but around the world, from the Western Hemisphere to the Western Pacific. Subsequent AWPD planning, such as AWPD-2 in September 1941, which considered aircraft production, would be based on the general outlines of AWPD-1.
Though Hal George and his team were looking ahead, nobody realized how soon the anticipated American entry into World War II would come.
By the end of November 1941, as an Imperial Japanese Navy carrier group was closing in on the Hawaiian Islands, the USAAF had 3,305 combat aircraft in its inventory. Of these, 145 were Flying Fortresses, and only 11 were Liberators.
FOUR
GOING TO WAR
On a sober morning after, the United States went to war.
Before a joint session of Congress on December 8, 1941, as Franklin Roosevelt described the previous day as “a date which will live in infamy” and asked a joint session of Congress for a declaration of war, they were picking up the pieces at Pearl Harbor. Among those pieces were the fragments of a B-24 and eight B-17Ds that had once belonged to the 5th Bombardment Group at Hickam Field. On that same day, most of the nineteen Flying Fortresses based at Clark Field near Manila in the Philippines were also destroyed.
On December 21, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and high-ranking British military officers arrived in Washington, DC, for the Anglo-American summit conference designated as Arcadia. The purpose was to sit down with President Franklin Roosevelt and his top brass—including Hap Arnold and Carl Spaatz—to plan a strategy to defeat Germany and Japan, both of which, at that moment, appeared unbeatable.
The Arcadia Conference was not without precedent. Though the United States did not formally declare war on Germany until December 11, there had been overt as well as covert cooperation with Britain since the beginning of the year. The most overt example of an Anglo-American alliance had been the Lend-Lease Act of March 11, 1941.
When the war began in 1939, British arms buyers came to the United States to buy everything from Flying Fortresses to tommy guns. By the start of 1941, though, His Majesty’s government was running out of money. President Roosevelt feared Hitler as much as the British did, and he knew that the United States was not, despite his buildup for national defense, ready to fight the German war machine. He wanted to keep the British fighting, and he desired very much to keep the fighting British between Hitler and the United States.
Perhaps the second to last thing that Roosevelt wanted to see was Britain running out of money to pay for all the materiel they had ordered during 1940—so he came up with a plan. The plan was called Lend-Lease. The idea was that the United States would “sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of” weapons and materiel to any government whose defense the president deemed vital to the defense of the United States. The way it worked was the United States government purchased the weapons from the manufacturers and then delivered them to the Allies.
Payment for the Lend-Lease goods, or their return to the United States, was to be made after the war. In fact, few of the goods that survived the war were actually returned, and repayment was delayed. Britain finally settled up its bill, at a deeply discounted rate, at the end of 2006.
On the covert side, American officers had already met secretly with British and Canadian military leaders between January and March in the “ABC-1” (First American-British-Canadian) staff conferences to discuss strategy for “if” the United States entered the war against Germany. Indeed, elements of the ABC-1 plan had been incorporated into AWPD-1, specifically the part about the implementation of a joint Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign against Germany.
The seeds of a wartime working relationship had sprouted earlier, in August 1941, when Roosevelt and Churchill themselves met at sea off Newfoundland to announce an optomistic postwar cooperative agreement, which came to be known as the Atlantic Charter. The Arcadia Conference in Washington that winter was both a confirmation of previously understood cooperation, and a nuts-and-bolts planning session for specific collaboration toward what should be and could be done next—now that the two parties had become wartime allies.
In the dark days of December, what could be done next was summarized as not much. What would be done next was up to the British and American officers who knew they faced an uphill climb.
In the Pacific, in the previous two weeks, the Japanese had used airpower to decimate the United States Pacific Fleet and sink two of Britain’s biggest warships. They had landed in the Philippines and were headed for Manila, washing over American and Filipino defenders with ease—and with air superiority. While the Arcadia conferees were in the midst of their talks, the Japanese captured the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, even as the Germans were banging on Moscow’s door.
With 20/20 hindsight, we know that the German failure to capture the Soviet capital in December 1941 was a watershed moment, but at the time, the only hindsight available told the planners that since their invasion of the Soviet Union six months earlier, the Germans had captured more territory faster than any army in history. In addition to dominating virtually all of continental Europe, they occupied an area of the Soviet Union more than twice as large as Germany itself.
At their historic December meeting, the American and British leaders created a “Combined Chiefs of Staff” (CCS) to direct the war effort, and they decided on a strategy. They decided to put their principal military efforts in the war against Germany, while attempting to contain the Japanese offensive.
They knew that one day, they would have to fight a major land battle against the German Army that had defeated France in a couple of weeks and appeared to have defeated the Soviet Union in a few months.
There was not an American in the room who did not get a nervous lump in his throat when he thought of having to fight the blitzkrieg. The British knew that their expeditionary force had fought the blitzkrieg in France in 1940—and they barely escaped with their lives. In the meantime, the Germans were turning the continent into their Festung Europa (“Fortress Europe”), fortifying the coastline opposite Britain into an impregnable citadel.
Though the failure of the Germans to capture Moscow in December was touted by the Soviets as a great victory, the Arcadia conferees interpreted it merely as a minor setback for an army that had thus far proven invincible. They based their planning on the correct assumption that the Germans would try again to crush the Soviets in the spring of 1942, and the very plausible fear that the Soviet Union could be knocked out of the war before the Anglo-American Allies could launch any kind of land assault on Festung Europa.
The Soviets, naturally, shared this fear. As a consequence, they demanded, and continued to demand at every opportunity, that the Americans and the British launch a “second front” against the Germans sooner rather than later. No one knew better than the Arcadia conferees that this would be impossible in 1942. Instead, they agreed to Operation Bolero, the buildup of forces necessary to launch a second front against Festung Europa in 1943. The date for this invasion of Europe by way of northern France, code-named Operation Roundup, was originally set for April 1943.
As the German army seemed all-powerful, in the air the Luftwaffe commanded an equivalent fear and respect. Even though the Royal Air Force had challenged them successfully in 1940 over Britain, they
still controlled the skies over Europe.
That which concerned the men most about Germany—the elephant in the room, so to speak—was the might of German industry that had made all this possible. There was no way that the Anglo-American Allies could challenge Hitler’s mighty war machine on the ground in Europe so long as the mighty German industrial machine continued to churn out the tanks and aircraft that had thus far proven unstoppable.
The men in the room also knew that the only way to do anything to impact the mighty German industrial machine was with strategic airpower.
The Combined Chiefs of Staff found themselves facing the situation that Billy Mitchell had predicted.
The RAF needed no convincing when it came to strategic airpower. Arnold and Spaatz, longtime advocates of Mitchell’s strategic vision, found kindred spirits in the commander of RAF Bomber Command, Air Marshal Arthur Travers “Bomber” Harris, and his boss—and predecessor as head of Bomber Command—RAF commander Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles “Peter” Portal. It was only a matter of coordinating the effort.
The ABC-1 report from early in the year had already concluded that “US Army air bombardment units [would] operate offensively in collaboration with the Royal Air Force, primarily against German Military Power at its source.” The emphasis on “German Military Power” was reiterated in AWPD-1. The foresight of AWPD-1, which had gone beyond its mandate of merely calculating production numbers, had given the USAAF the operational framework that was so badly needed.
As for the basing of the Anglo-American strategic force, Britain was the only viable option. As with the existing and planned British bombers, the range of the Flying Fortress and the Liberator dictated that targets in the German industrial heartland could be attacked only from bases in southeast England.
