by Bill Yenne
Of course, in early 1942, any kind of sustained air offensive was merely theoretical, because of the small number of heavy bombers available. British production of four-engine bombers was moving at so slow a pace that the Brits were still anxious to continue receiving Flying Fortresses and Liberators from America. Meanwhile, the USAAF now had fewer Flying Fortresses than they’d had on December 6.
The USAAF was also spread very thin. Even though the Allies had adopted the “Germany first, contain Japan” approach at the Arcadia Conference, the USAAF still had commitments in the Pacific. The British, though impatient to strike a major blow against Hitler from the air, understood. The rapid movement of Japanese forces threatened their interests as well—especially Australia and their great bastion at Singapore. When the latter was, in fact, captured by the Japanese in February, it underscored the fact that, while the Pacific Theater might be secondary to the European Theater, it could not be ignored.
Indeed, it was against Japan, not Germany, that the USAAF would strike first.
Early in 1942, as the Arcadia Conference was adjourned, two schools of thought were holding court within the American military establishment. One called for a methodical and comprehensive plan of action for substantial, if plodding, steps to defeat the Axis. The other, driven by the requirements of morale-building, called for something to be done quickly.
The former was embodied in the work being done by the Air War Plans Division. The latter manifested itself in two important actions that were undertaken in the spring and summer of 1942, well before the USAAF was anywhere near being ready to undertake truly decisive strategic air operations.
The first of the two was the heroic and iconic April 18 attack on Japanese cities led by prewar aviation pioneer and daredevil air racer Lieutenant Colonel James Harold “Jimmy” Doolittle. The sixteen carrier-launched B-25 medium bombers on Doolittle’s mission did slight damage to Japan but immensely buoyed American morale by demonstrating that the United States was capable of bombing the country.
The second action was the June 12 attack on the oil refineries at Ploesşti (now Ploiesşti), Romania, the Achilles’ heel of the Third Reich’s oil production and the largest refinery complex in continental Europe. Having allied itself with the Axis in November 1940, Romania had contributed troops for the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union and was providing the petrochemicals that oiled and fueled the German war machine.
The Ploesşti mission was flown by a contingent of B-24D Liberators, commanded by Colonel Harry “Hurry-Up” Halverson, which had reached Egypt en route to India, where they were intended to operate against the Japanese from bases in China. Given that the previously considered airfields were now under threat from Japanese forces, and that the Burma Road supply route had been cut, the Halverson Project (HALPRO) was diverted. They would, instead, attack Ploesşti from Egypt.
Like Doolittle’s raid, this attack on the oil refineries at Ploesşti was much longer on symbolism and propaganda value than on concrete results. As Hap Arnold wrote of the Ploesşti mission in his memoirs, “The target was not much damaged. The improbability of this two-thousand-mile round trip was its best protection, and enemy opposition was not heavy.”
It would be more than a year before Allied bombers returned to attack, Ploesşti and more than two for Tokyo, but Halverson and Doolittle had shown that “improbable” was not the same as “impossible.”
Mainly, Doolittle and Halverson proved to the American public—and to the enemy—that the USAAF was doing something. Of course, the people in USAAF uniform understood that it would take time before anything substantial could be done.
For all the prior planning, the fact that the war came sooner than the Americans had anticipated required the Air Staff to play catch-up. James Lea Cate points out, in Army Air Forces in World War II, that “it had been presumed that at outbreak of war, or even before, a substantial air contingent should be sent to the British Isles. Now that war had come, there were more pressing needs. The British naturally were interested in the projected bomber force, but were anxious that it be provided without jeopardy to current allocation of heavy bombers [via Lend-Lease] to the RAF.”
Harris and Portal were wondering how soon that “substantial air contingent” could get into action against Germany.
As recorded in the notes of the Arcadia Conference, Arnold and Spaatz told Portal on January 1 that it might be possible to send two heavy bombardment groups to England “before too long,” but as Cate reminds us, an estimate of “about March or April [was only] a shot in the dark.”
In a Combined Chiefs of Staff memorandum of February 22, entitled Policy for Disposition of US and British Air Forces, it was determined that for the present the RAF would assume responsibility for the air offensive against Germany, with the USAAF joining in “at the earliest dates practicable.”
As an operational organization to join with RAF Bomber Command to execute the strategic air offensive, the USAAF created the VIII Bomber Command, which was, along with other units, an element of the larger Eighth Air Force, which was formed to control and manage USAAF assets in Britain.
The numbered air forces were the largest operational components of the USAAF during World War II. As the plural in “US Army Air Forces” implies, the USAAF was composed of multiple numbered air forces. The original four had been created in the four quadrants of the continental United States. The Fifth was the former Philippine Department Air Force in the Western Pacific, the Sixth Air Force originated as the Panama Canal Air Force, and the Seventh Air Force was born out of the Hawaiian Air Force. All had been prewar components of the Air Corps.
An additional eight air forces would be added during the war. The Ninth would operate first in North Africa and later from Britain as the tactical airpower parallel to the strategic Eighth. The Tenth and Fourteenth would operate in the China-India-Burma Theater, and the Thirteenth in the South Pacific. In the Mediterranean Theater, the Twelfth and Fifteenth would evolve into the tactical and strategic counterparts to the Ninth and the Eighth in the European Theater. Indeed, the Eighth and Fifteenth would ultimately coordinate their efforts in the strategic campaign against Germany. The Sixteenth through Nineteenth were not activated during World War II, and the Twentieth would become operational in 1944 as a strategic force that operated the Boeing B-29 Superfortress against Japan.
As the decisions of the Arcadia Conference were implemented early in 1942, the VIII Bomber Command was placed under the command of General Ira Eaker. Preceding the arrival of the heavy bombers that would put teeth into his command, Eaker went overseas to observe the activities and tactics of RAF Bomber Command. His conclusions were fairly simple—and predictably obvious: The strategic airpower doctrine was sound, but the RAF, like the USAAF, did not have a sufficient number of four-engine bombers to fully exploit the doctrine.
“After two months spent in understudying British Bomber Command it is still believed that the original all-out air plan for the destruction of the German war effort by air action alone was feasible and sound, and more economical than any other method available,” Eaker observed on April 26. “General Arnold points out, however, that the required means is not now available, and time does not allow for the completion of this total air effort, hence it now seems wise to combine a limited air effort with ground forces to open up a Western European front.”
In fact, there would be no such front opened for more than two years, and in the meantime, strategic airpower would have to fulfill its promise.
Having been named by Arnold to command the Eighth Air Force, Spaatz arrived in England on June 18 against the backdrop of the official announcement that “the object in view is the earliest maximum concentration of Allied war power upon the enemy.”
As James Cate writes, all the American “air units initially based there [in the United Kingdom] were to be integrated into the Eighth Air Force. General Spaatz as commander was to have his own headquarters.”
This headquarters, code-nam
ed Widewing, would be located at Bushy Park, a suburb southwest of London.
Within a week, General Dwight Eisenhower arrived in London to assume his role as the commander for the recently delineated European Theater of Operations, US Army (ETOUSA). As the highest ranking American officer in Europe, he assumed command of the growing buildup of American forces, of which the Eighth Air Force would be an important element.
In addition to the VIII Bomber Command, the Eighth Air Force expanded to also contain organizations such as the VIII Air Force Service Command, which provided the logistical and maintenance support to keep the aircraft flying, and the VIII Fighter Command, which was intended to supply the fighters that escorted the bombers through the curtain of interceptors the Luftwaffe threw across their paths. An VIII Ground Air Support Command (later Air Support Command), which was formed to operate medium bombers in a tactical role, was later inactivated and its assets transferred to the Ninth Air Force, which was located in England specifically for tactical operations.
Meanwhile, the Eighth Air Force began to break ground on dozens of new airfields, nominally RAF airfields, from which it would operate. Eventually, the Eighth Air Force would fly from more than a hundred air bases, which were concentrated mainly in East Anglia, northeast of London.
As Eisenhower told Spaatz in a July 21 memo, the broad objective of the Eighth Air Force, in coordination with the RAF Fighter Command and Bomber Command was to gain “air supremacy over Western Continental Europe in preparation for and in support of a combined land, sea, and air movement across the Channel into Continental Europe.”
Strategic air operations would evolve as a key element of this very tall order.
By now, the total number of Flying Fortresses in the USAAF inventory had grown to 535, and the number of Liberators to 309. Though a majority were to be allocated to the Eighth Air Force, demands of the Pacific Theater would also have to be met. Among these totals were an increasing number of B-17Es.
While the Flying Fortress had earned its nickname for a handful of machine guns protruding from its fuselage, the small number of B-17C and B-17D aircraft on hand when the war began were hardly equipped to defend against Luftwaffe interceptors. Having been designed with no provision for a turret in the extremely vulnerable tail, and built with no powered turrets, they were no more “fortresses” than the Luftwaffe’s Fw 200. As British experience using the early model Flying Fortresses on strategic missions in 1941 had illustrated, the defensive armament was inadequate to an extreme.
The B-17E was an entirely different package. There was a powered turret on top behind the flight deck, a ball turret aft of the bomb bay, and the tail was redesigned for another gunner’s position. Each was equipped with a pair of .50-caliber machine guns. Additional, side-firing guns were located in the nose and waist. The B-17E was the first Flying Fortress to be produced in large numbers—512 would be built, all at Boeing’s Plant 2 in Seattle. The B-17E was also the first Flying Fortress to see combat on a regular basis.
The further improved B-17F was introduced in April 1942 with the same armament as the B-17E, but with more powerful engines and increased fuel capacity, which translated to increased range. The faceted Plexiglas nose of the earlier model had inhibited visibility, so the one-piece nose of the B-17E was a welcome improvement. Over the course of the fifteen months the B-17F was in production, 605 would be built by the Douglas factories and another 500 by Lockheed-Vega—all in Southern California. Meanwhile, Boeing’s Plant 2 would roll out 2,300.
The first mass-produced Liberator, the B-24D, was introduced in January. Like the B-17E and B-17F, it had powered turrets top and bottom, as well as a tail turret. Over the coming months, Consolidated built 2,415 in San Diego and 303 at their new factory in Fort Worth, while Douglas began building them at their plant in Tulsa. Meanwhile, the USAAF brought the Ford Motor Company on line as a Liberator manufacturer, under the theory—subsequently proved correct—that the company could bring automobile assembly line efficiencies to aircraft production. Ford built a new state-of-the-art factory at Willow Run, Michigan, and beginning in September 1942, the company rolled out 490 B-24Es, which were similar to the B-24D. Through the end of the war, Ford would build a total of 6,792 Liberators, of several variants, at Willow Run.
As the aircraft flowed from American factories to the skies over Festung Europa, they flowed through the filter of operational doctrine.
Both the Eighth Air Force and RAF Bomber Command had committed themselves to the Combined Chiefs of Staff directive that they would coordinate their efforts in that upcoming strategic air campaign. However, their operational doctrines and principles turned out to be, in the understated words of Hap Arnold, “entirely different.”
The RAF would choose to fly its missions at night, allowing the attackers to clothe themselves in darkness for protection. This meant that targets were harder to see, and therefore more difficult to hit without expending a great deal of ordnance. The USAAF doctrine called for precision raids in the daytime, when the targets were clearly visible.
James Cate explains that “to attack congested transportation centers surrounded by sprawling factory districts, [RAF Bomber Command] chose area rather than pinpoint bombing, and stray bombs—‘overs’ and ‘shorts’—were absorbed by adjacent residential districts. Because targets thus defined were large, and more importantly because German defense was rugged, attacks were delivered at night from medium or high altitudes. Bomber Command was proving that its Stirlings and Manchesters (as later its Lancasters and Halifaxes) could deliver a heavy load of bombs in the general vicinity of a transportation-industrial complex without prohibitive losses. In view of lower costs of construction, the greater bomb load, and the smaller crew demanded, the night bomber seemed more economical than the day. The clinching argument was the factor of lower operational losses.”
Despite the shortcomings of area bombardment—also called “carpet bombing”—the British genuinely believed that it would be effective in destroying specific industrial targets. A July 1939 contingency plan developed by the British Air Ministry cautioned that area attack strategy “is not intended to imply an indiscriminate scattering of projectiles over the whole or any part [of a specific industrial area]…. On the contrary, there will be definite objectives in the area itself normally consisting of industrial targets [which]… constitute the chief vital spots of the industrial body.”
The report went on to discuss the dispersal of manufacturing facilities, noting that in “alternative manufacturing processes, the manufacture of an essential commodity… can readily be started in many different factories.” Area bombing would theoretically catch dispersed factories.
The British also saw value in the nocturnal area raids as a weapon against the morale of the German people. When area bombardment was discussed, British officers often recalled that in World War I, Germany had ultimately agreed to an armistice after the collapse of the civilian will to continue the war. “Bomber” Harris insisted that the war could be won by attacking German cities and the morale of civilians.
During the London Blitz in 1940, as the Luftwaffe was bombing the British capital, Harris vowed to turn the same weapon back upon the Germans. Paraphrasing Hosea 8:7 from the Old Testament, he said to Portal, “The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”
The British were as firmly convinced of the appropriateness of this approach as they were unconvinced of the practicality of the American doctrine. In July, when Harris wrote to General Eaker that “I, myself, and all the members of my command who have been in official or unofficial relations with you and yours, by now well appreciate that common doctrines prevail,” he was speaking only of the final objectives.
RAF commander Peter Portal, like Harris, remaine
d skeptical of the American approach and never missed an opportunity to politely suggest that Arnold and Spaatz reconsider. In August, however, the RAF and the Eighth Air Force agreed to disagree and to continue to operate by night and day respectively—and they issued a joint directive to that effect. It came down to an agreement as to ends, and dissent as to means.
The Americans went forward under the assumption that strategic targets could best be destroyed by precision bombing from high altitude, which was possible only in daylight. As Cate puts it, “Paralysis of selected key spots would be as effective as, and far cheaper than, total obliteration…. There was in the United States a traditional reverence for marksmanship which went back to the squirrel rifle of frontier days when scarcity of powder and shot put a premium on accuracy. Even if the facts sometimes belied the tradition, it was an element of American folklore which could be taken over by analogy to the new weapon. Emphasis on precision was also an antidote to widespread antipathy toward attacks on ‘civilian’ objectives.”
When recalling the hardware that made American precision bombing practical, even possible, for the strategic bombers, one specific piece of equipment cannot be ignored. The “squirrel rifle” of American strategic airpower in World War II was the Norden bombsight.
The person who created the most sophisticated aiming device in history not to use electronics was a Dutch engineer named Carl Lukas Norden. Before World War I he had worked for the Sperry Gyroscope Company, where he had been recognized as a pioneer in the field of gyroscopically stabilized naval gun platforms. Having formed his own company, Norden began work on an aerial bombsight for the US Navy in 1921, and by 1935, his constantly improving design had evolved to the Norden Mk.IV, capable of hitting within 165 feet of a target from altitudes up to 15,000 feet. By World War II, the Norden M-Series was capable of hitting within a 50-foot radius from an altitude of more than 20,000 feet. This provided a level of precision up to eight times that of the contemporary British Mk.XIV bombsight.
