Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II

by Bill Yenne

  The function of the COA, like that of the EOU but more general in nature, was to identify “industrial targets in Germany the destruction of which would weaken the enemy most decisively in the shortest possible time.”

  The form of the COA was modeled after the EOU paradigm insofar as civilian analysts, in this case mainly bankers and industrialists, were brought in to study the goals of a strategic air campaign against Germany. The most prominent were Edward Earle, of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan & Company, and investment banker Elihu Root Jr., of the New York firm of Root, Clark, Buckner, and Ballantine and the son of the former US senator and secretary of state to Theodore Roosevelt. Also included were Fowler Hamilton from the Board of Economic Warfare, Edward Mason of the OSS, and Boston attorney Guido Perera. Malcolm Moss represented the EOU.

  The COA also tapped the expertise of OSS, the Bureau of Economic Warfare, and the State and Treasury departments—as well as the War Production Board, roughly America’s equivalent to Albert Speer’s Armaments Ministry. At the end of January 1943, members of the COA even flew to England to meet with the British Ministry of Economic Warfare and to visit 40 Berkeley Square.

  The COA had submitted its report to General Arnold on March 8, 1943, six weeks after Casablanca. “It is better to cause a high degree of destruction in a few really essential industries or services than to cause a small degree of destruction in many industries,” the COA concluded, echoing what Hughes had previously determined. “Results are cumulative and the plan once adopted should be adhered to with relentless determination.”

  As Edward Earle told Arthur Ferguson in November 1945, the committee “refrained from stating a formal order of priority for the target systems considered… for reasons of security…. But it is clear from the arguments presented that the systems were listed in descending order of preference.”

  With this understanding, the first “system” on the COA list was the German aircraft and aircraft engine industry, which had been third on the priority list in AWPD-1 and second in the list contained in the Casablanca Directive, and which had been Charlie Kindleberger’s assignment at the EOU since March. The petroleum industry also made the top four on all the lists.

  The reason that aircraft production—especially single-engine fighter aircraft production—moved up the list was certainly the fact that Eighth Air Force operations were now being seriously impacted by Luftwaffe opposition. It was now clear to all that in order to work through the other items on the list, something would have to be done to lessen Luftwaffe effectiveness.

  The notion that the Combined Bomber Offensive should concentrate against the Luftwaffe over all other targets, was underscored by the planners on the Combined Operational Planning Committee (COPC). In an April 9 memo, the British planners summarized this by declaring that “the most formidable weapon being used by the enemy today against our bomber offensive is his fighter force—his single engined fighters by day and his twin engined fighters by night—and the elimination or serious depletion of this force would be the greatest contribution to the furtherance of the joint heavy bomber offensive of the RAF and AAF.”

  With this having been agreed, Eaker delegated the operational details to General Anderson at the VIII Bomber Command and General Hansell, who would work with RAF Air Commodore Sidney O. Bufton to come up with a target list. At the EOU, Walt Rostow was assigned as a liaison to the British Air Ministry, with an eye toward making sure that the Americans and the British each knew what the other was doing with regard to the aircraft industry mission.

  Second to the aircraft industry in the COA target hierarchy, and to a certain extent related to it, were ball bearings. A simple component, ball bearings, and other anti-friction bearings, were essential not only to fighter aircraft and aircraft engine production, but to a broad spectrum of industrial production, from military vehicles to factory machine tools. Indeed, anti-friction bearings, including roller bearings and ball bearings, were seen as a “bottleneck” industry, one which, if removed from the supply chain, would negatively affect a myriad of industries.

  In third place came the petroleum industry, which had topped the AWPD-1 list and had come in at fourth in the Casablanca Directive. Also considered by many to be a bottleneck industry, petroleum was downplayed by other analysts who felt that Germany had adequate standby refining capacity. Nevertheless, Ploesşti in Romania, from which the Reich derived—by some estimates—about 60 percent of its refined petroleum, would be an important future objective for Allied bombers flying from bases in the MTO.

  As the postwar Strategic Bombing Survey would later demonstrate, the COA report missed the boat in downplaying the importance of Germany’s synthetic petroleum and rubber industries—but in the spring of 1943, these seemed less important than they actually were. Writing with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, Ferguson observed that the COA was “handicapped by a faulty understanding of the German chemical industry. Synthetic rubber, synthetic oil, nitrogen, methanol, and other important chemicals formed interdependent parts of a single industrial complex. The production of nitrogen and methanol, both of extreme significance in the manufacture of explosives, was heavily concentrated in synthetic oil plants. The attack on synthetic oil, when it finally came, in fact succeeded in producing, as a fortuitous by-product, a marked drop in the production of nitrogen, which in turn contributed to the shortage of explosives experienced by the Wehrmacht in the closing campaigns of the war.”

  The COA report was favorably received by British authorities when it was sent across on March 23. Representatives of the Air Ministry, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and the RAF concurred with the major recommendations, agreeing that the principal targets should be related to the aircraft, anti-friction bearing, and petroleum industries.

  The principal point of contention was the U-boat campaign. The Americans had greatly downgraded its importance, but the British, so fully dependent on the safety of the sea lanes connecting the United Kingdom to the outside world, still insisted that attacks on shipyards building U-boats remain on the list for Combined Bomber Offensive operations.

  Though the U-boat campaign would remain as part of the Combined Bomber Offensive Plan, the problem was being overtaken by events, as naval antisubmarine warfare weapons and tactics began to prove themselves to be a more effective solution to the problem. After victories in the North Atlantic in May 1943, it was clear that detecting and sinking U-boats at sea was far more effective than bombing submarine pens. However, as a compromise, shipyards building U-boats, which were more vulnerable than the heavily reinforced concrete pens, retained a priority on the target lists.

  Although the Combined Bomber Offensive was addressed at the May 12–27, 1943, Trident Conference in Washington, the third wartime meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill, it was not a controversial issue, as it had been at Casablanca. It was now a foregone conclusion in which the basic premise had been proven. What did emerge from Trident was the understanding by Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff that the Combined Bomber Offensive was an integral and significant part of the overall strategic plan for the cross-channel invasion of Festung Europa. This massive operation, to be code-named Overlord, was now tentatively scheduled for May 1944.

  On May 18, after considerable discussion, the Combined Chiefs of Staff approved the Plan for the Combined Bomber Offensive from the United Kingdom—as presented. This document, in turn, formed the basis for the detailed Pointblank Directive, which was issued on June 10.

  The target list contained within the plan retained U-boat building and included the petroleum industry (which Dick Hughes had placed on his first list of priorities back in the summer of 1941), notably synthetic fuels and synthetic rubber. Mention was made of aluminum, which was one of the top three target categories—along with the aircraft industry. There was also attention given to the anti-friction bearing industry, which was appealing to target planners because of its being a bottleneck industry th
at served so many other industries.

  As Walt Rostow wrote for the War Diary of the OSS Research and Analysis Branch, “The ball bearing industry appeared to offer the most economical and most operationally feasible method of impinging by air attack on the whole structure of German war production.”

  However, the line that was arguably the most significant in the Combined Bomber Offensive Plan was the one that described the Luftwaffe fighter threat as “second to none in immediate importance” and stated that “if the growth of the German fighter strength is not arrested quickly, it may become literally impossible to carry out the destruction planned and thus to create the conditions necessary for ultimate decisive action by our combined forces on the Continent [Operation Overlord].”

  Bearing this in mind, the COPC had formulated the Pointblank Directive, as a corollary to the Combined Bomber Offensive Plan. This directive initiated the operation of the same name, the campaign against the Luftwaffe and against the German aircraft industry, which would culminate eight months later in Big Week.

  Of this, Rostow adds, “In the course of the war, no aspect of intelligence received wider, more continuous, and more devoted attention than the [Luftwaffe], and within it, German aircraft production. It was recognized early that aircraft production bore a more immediate and direct relationship to fighting at the front than other forms of armament manufacture.”

  Rostow credits Dick Hughes with being notable in bearing “the brunt of the salesmanship at higher levels that led to [the] acceptance” of the recommendations that formed the Pointblank Directive.

  The importance of Operation Pointblank to continued strategic bomber operations was illustrated almost immediately—ironically in missions directed at shipyards.

  On June 11, the day after the Pointblank Directive was formally adopted, almost on cue, the bad weather that had prevailed over the continent for several weeks finally lifted. On that “opening day,” the Eighth Air Force launched 252 heavy bombers against Bremen. Upon encountering cloud cover over the primary target, 168 bombers diverted to attack Wilhelmshaven, while another 30 bombed Cuxhaven.

  Because these targets lay beyond the range of Eighth Air Force P-47s or RAF Spitfires, the bombers flew the mission without fighter escort. As was expected, based on past experience, the Luftwaffe interceptors struck as the formations began their bombing run. The tactic, as usual, was a head-on attack against the aircraft and the front of the formations. This greatly interfered with the lead bombardiers’ ability to accurately sight their targets, and most of the bombs dropped by the force missed their targets.

  Two days later, 102 Eighth Air Force heavy bombers struck Bremen, the missed primary target from two days before, while 60 went to the shipyards at Keil. The Luftwaffe attacked the bombers bound for Keil over the North Sea coast, and hammered them all the way to their final run on the target. In this action, the Luftwaffe doctrine of utilizing overwhelming force came into play. The Eighth would report them as the heaviest attacks encountered to date. In addition to the usual Bf 109s and Fw 190s, the crews saw German night fighters, painted black all over.

  Black indeed was the unlucky thirteenth of June. While only 8 aircraft had been lost by the Eighth Air Force two days before, there were 26 heavy bombers shot down on that day, including 22 from the force that had attacked Keil.

  Trying to put lipstick on a particularly unsightly pig, the Eighth Air Force press people focused on the probable claims that the American gunners had shot down nearly 40 German fighters. To this, Arthur Ferguson writes that “although hailed by both British and American air commands [in Tactical Mission Report 62] as a great victory, the ‘Battle of Kiel’ can be so considered only in terms of the bravery and determination with which the shattered force of bombers did in fact reach the target and drop its bombs. In terms of the cold statistics which ultimately measure air victories, it was a sobering defeat.”

  The Battle of Keil provided a painful demonstration of why the Luftwaffe threat was “second to none,” and why Operation Pointblank was of vital importance if the Combined Bomber Offensive was ever to succeed.

  A week after the “sobering defeat” at Keil there came the story of a successful mission wrapped in an interesting paradox. On June 22, 183 bombers flew deep into the Ruhr industrial area, the deepest penetration yet by the Eighth Air Force, to strike Chemische Werke Hüls, a synthetic rubber works at the city of Hüls. Operated by I.G. Farben, and sprawling across 541 acres, the plant was one of the largest, most modern, and most efficient in the world, providing 30 percent of Germany’s styrene and synthetic rubber needs.

  The success story was that the bombers took the Germans by surprise and succeeded in doing enough damage to shut the facility down for a month—and to reduce Germany’s total reserves to just a six-week supply. Indeed, full production would not be back on line until the end of the year. To this achievement, one might add that the bomber formation lost just a single aircraft in this unanticipated strike, compared to a third of the force shot down at Kiel, a location where the Luftwaffe was used to seeing Allied bombers.

  The paradox in the story was that despite the vulnerability of the fragile factory, which was illustrated by the success, the Eighth Air Force never returned. Neither the COA nor the EOU fully appreciated the importance of synthetic rubber to the German war machine. As Arthur Ferguson writes, the postwar Strategic Bombing Survey later determined that “three to five strong attacks would have effectively eliminated Hüls as a producing plant. To the amazement of German officials it received no major attack after 22 June 1943, and in March 1944 it reached peak production.”

  In another instance, on July 24, the Eighth Air Force again broke out of the usual targeting parameters to run an extremely long-distance attack on German aluminum facilities at Herøya in Norway. The Nordische Aluminium Aktiengesellschaft aluminum and magnesium plant in Herøya, which had been built by the Germans after they occupied Norway in 1940, was operated jointly by the Norwegian aluminum and hydroelectric company, Norsk Hydro, in partnership with the Luftwaffe, making it a prime Operation Pointblank target.

  In contrast with the attack on Hüls, where the plant recovered, the plant complex at Herøya was so badly damaged that the Germans boarded it up and walked away, costing the German aircraft industry a major new state-of-the-art supplier. However, Allied photoreconnaissance interpreters mistook the boarding up for repairs and did not realize that the plant had been abandoned. Nevertheless, like Hüls, it was not the subject of a follow-up attack. Postwar surveys showed that the bombers had scored 151 direct hits, three times the number observed in the reconnaissance imagery.

  Even as the precision bombing sought by the Eighth Air Force was finally beginning to materialize, RAF Bomber Command’s Air Marshal Arthur Harris was mounting larger and larger nocturnal area raids. As these attacks, which were by their nature imprecise, grew in scale and ferocity, it was inevitable that substantial areas of civilian residences would be hit. These operations became one of the most controversial legacies of the Combined Bomber Offensive. This was especially the case as increasing numbers of bombers became available.

  Most often cited today as examples of such attacks are those against Dresden in February 1945, but the 1943 attacks on Hamburg involved a more sustained campaign and resulted in even greater loss of life. In five nighttime attacks between July 24 and August 3, most of them involving more than seven hundred four-engine bombers, the RAF decimated Germany’s largest port and second largest city. In the 1961 United Kingdom government publication The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939–1945, Noble Frankland and Charles Webster note that 42,600 civilians were killed that week in Hamburg, as opposed to 25,000 in Dresden in 1945.

  “Rash as this operation was, it had catastrophic consequences for us,” Albert Speer later observed. “The first attacks put the water supply pipes out of action, so that in the subsequent bombings the fire department had no way of fighting the fires. Huge conflagrations created cyclone-like fire
storms; the asphalt of the streets began to blaze; people were suffocated in their cellars or burned to death in the streets. The devastation of this series of air raids could be compared only with the effects of a major earthquake. Gauleiter Kaufmann teletyped Hitler repeatedly, begging him to visit the stricken city. When these pleas proved fruitless, he asked Hitler at least to receive a delegation of some of the more heroic rescue crews. But Hitler refused even that.”

  Speer went on to comment cynically that “Hamburg had suffered the fate Göring and Hitler had conceived for London.”

  Having leveled a square mile of central Rotterdam in May 1940 in order to bully the people of the Netherlands into surrender, Hitler had indeed intended to do the same to the British capital, and to a certain extent, he did so during the Blitz of 1940.

  “Have you ever looked at a map of London?” Hitler crowed at a dinner party in his chancellery in 1940. “It is so closely built up that one source of fire alone would suffice to destroy the whole city, as happened once before, two hundred years ago [actually in 1666]. Göring wants to use innumerable incendiary bombs of an altogether new type to create sources of fire in all parts of London. Fires everywhere. Thousands of them. Then they’ll unite in one gigantic area conflagration. Göring has the right idea. Explosive bombs don’t work, but it can be done with incendiary bombs—total destruction of London. What use will their fire department be once that really starts!”

  As Harris had pointed out, Hitler had been operating “under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them.” In Harris’s biblical analogy, his RAF Bomber Command had just caused Hamburg to “reap the whirlwind.”