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

by Bill Yenne

  Several of the units flying with the 3rd Division on Friday had been bloodied in the first Eighth Air Force mission against Regensburg back on August 17 and were going back for a return visit. These included the 96th and “Bloody Hundredth” 100th Bombardment Groups.

  “As we began our bomb run on Regensburg at about 26,000 feet, the German fighters pulled back and the flak became very heavy,” recalled Sergeant Bill Cook, the tail gunner aboard the 100th Bombardment Group Flying Fortress Mismalovin. “Just after we had dropped our bombs we received a hit in the left inboard engine and lost oil pressure immediately. The propeller began to run away and vibration became very severe; to the point that we thought we might have the engine fall off. We finally were able to feather the prop and stabilize the plane. As you would expect, we lost altitude rapidly; the rest of the Group formation had left us, and we were faced with returning to base alone. As you know, Regensburg is deep into Germany, and the crew debated on whether or not to fly to Switzerland or try to make it back to England alone. Obviously we made the decision to try for England.”

  Unable to gain altitude, Mismalovin flew very low and came under frequent fighter attack as the pilot, Lieutenant Stewart McClain, pushed the B-17 toward the home of the Bloody Hundredth at Thorpe Abbotts. Though the Luftwaffe failed to bring the plane down, several men were shot and killed during these sporadic attacks.

  “I was wounded on four separate occasions,” Bill Cook recalls. “In spite of the licking we were taking, we still managed to give a pretty good account of ourselves. The engineer shot down two fighters, the bombardier had one possible, and I shot down two of which I am sure. As we approached the English Channel, we flew over Calais, France, and as we passed the coast we again picked up heavy fighter attack. At one point we were close enough to England that we could see the cliffs of Dover, and still were being attacked by fighters.”

  When the bomber began a gradual left turn, and Cook could no longer raise the pilot on the intercom, he headed toward the flight deck, hoping to take control of the aircraft, much as Archie Mathies had done on Sunday with Ten Horsepower.

  “I knew we were going to crash if something was not done to prevent it,” Cook recalls in Richard LeStrange’s anthology. “Since I had flown the plane on many occasions, I left the tail gunner’s position and headed for the cockpit. As I reached the main entrance to the plane, I saw Staff Sergeant George Knudsen, a waist gunner, jump from the aircraft. At this point we were only about 100–150 feet from the English Channel and I knew we did not have sufficient altitude for a chute to open. Our ball turret gunner, Staff Sergeant Lawrence Bennett, was standing in the door ready to jump. I reached for him, pulled him back into the plane, and told him to take off his chute because we were about to crash. He was having some difficulty removing his chute, and I was assisting him when the plane crashed into the Channel.

  “I was knocked unconscious in the crash and woke up floating in the water. When I regained consciousness, I saw one other person (a spare gunner flying with us that day—he replaced Staff Sergeant John Walters, and I don’t remember his name) who had survived. We were picked up by some German Marines, taken to hospital in Calais, France, where we stayed for about three or four days, and I was then moved to an interrogation center in Frankfurt. I spent about twenty days in Frankfurt (in solitary) and was then sent to a prisoner of war camp.”

  Of the crew of Mismalovin, only Cook and the “spare gunner,” whose name was Claude Zukowski, survived to see Saturday’s dawn.

  Meanwhile, an hour from the target, one of the 96th Bombardment Group Flying Fortresses, The Saint, piloted by Lieutenant Bob Arstingstall, had been attacked by a German fighter head-on, killing copilot Curt Mosier.

  “Out of that late winter sun, came a silver arrow with guns blazing,” recalls navigator Stan Peterson in his account in Snetterton Falcons by Robert E. Doherty and Geoffrey Ward. “There was a thickening thud. Then silence followed by the scent of cordite…. Bob Arstingstall, our pilot, asked me to come up to the cockpit where I saw that copilot Curt Mosier was dead, the main oxygen line was severed and the 30mm shell which had done the damage was still smoking on the flight deck floor behind Arstingstall’s seat…. I remember hustling all over the bomber in an effort to find spare oxygen bottles to keep my pilot supplied for another four hours.”

  For getting The Saint back to the 96th Bombardment Group base at Snetterton, Lieutenant Arstingstall was awarded a Silver Star.

  The Eighth Air Force 1st Division lost thirteen bombers on the Augsburg-Stuttgart mission, while the 2nd Division lost a half dozen Liberators shot down and two later written off. More than three hundred Eighth Air Force airmen bailed out, most of them disappearing into the hellish world of the Stalag Luft system, the prisoner of war camps that were specifically established for captured Allied airmen.

  As Arthur Ferguson writes of the Fifteenth Air Force effort at Regensburg that day, the Fifteenth “lacked escort of sufficiently long range to provide protection during the most distant phase of the penetration. It suffered also from the handicap of a relatively small force. Only bombers equipped for long-range flying could be sent as far as Regensburg, and, although the Fifteenth dispatched that day almost 400 bombers, only 176 were airborne on the main mission. The remainder hit yards and port installations at Fiume, the harbor at Zara, warehouses and sheds at Pola [on the eastern side of the Adriatic Sea], rail lines [in Austria] at Zell-am-See, and the airfield at Graz-Thalerhof [also in Austria].”

  As the 3rd Division and the Fifteenth Air Force rendezvoused over Regensburg that day, they, in turn, were met by Jagdgeschwader 3, whose III Gruppe leader, Walter Dahl, had claimed four bombers the day before. On Friday, two more Flying Fortresses would fall to his guns in the space of twenty-one minutes.

  Attacking the Fifteenth Air Force contingent as they were between the Alps and their targets was Jagdgeschwader 27, based at Wiesbaden, which had taken a heavy toll of forty-five Eighth Air Force bombers during the deep penetration mission to Stuttgart on September 6, 1943.

  Werner Schroer, who led the geschwader’s II Gruppe, and who had personally downed four American aircraft during the September debacle, now claimed two more toward his eventual total of twenty-six four-engine bombers. One of these was near Altötting in southeastern Bavaria, and the second was over the Chiemsee, the lake that lies on the Austro-German border between Rosenheim and Salzburg.

  The 3rd Division lost a dozen Flying Fortresses getting in and out of the target area at Regensburg, a loss of just 5 percent. However, before it was over, the unescorted Fifteenth Air Force contingent took the worst punishment of the day, losing thirty-nine bombers, or nearly a quarter of the force that it sent to Regensburg. In Arthur Ferguson’s words, “It was another proof of the fact, long since conceded by American strategic bombing experts, that a daylight bomber force without full fighter cover could not hope to get through an aggressive enemy without excessive losses, especially when, as in this instance, the enemy chose to concentrate on the weaker and more poorly protected force.”

  The men flying the missions did not need “another proof.”

  Unlike previous days during Big Week, every bombardment group from the Eighth Air Force was able to bomb its primary target, and the clarity of the weather meant a higher degree of accuracy than had been the case on other missions.

  As Ferguson writes, “The main Messerschmitt plant at Augsburg underwent drastic treatment. Blast and fire from over 500 tons of bombs destroyed approximately thirty buildings. Production capacity was reduced by about 35 percent. Almost one-third of all machine tools were damaged, and 70 percent of stored material destroyed.”

  “Our bombs made a hell of a hole in the place and black smoke shot up thousands of feet,” recalled Staff Sergeant James Fisher of the attack on Augsburg. He was a waist gunner aboard the 384th Bombardment Group Flying Fortress known as Loose Goose. “Visibility was excellent. I saw a B-24 [of the force that attacked Fürth, sixty miles to the north] knock down two
of three enemy fighters attacking it and then one of our fighters came in and shot down [the third]. On the ground we could see the Focke-Wulfs taking off to come up at us. We passed by Stuttgart before our other planes got there and fires were still burning from the RAF raid of a couple of nights ago.”

  At Regensburg, which had now been bombed twice by the Fifteenth Air Force and once by the Eighth Air Force during Big Week, every building in the target areas had been damaged and many were destroyed. By Messerschmitt’s own reckoning, monthly output fell from 435 aircraft delivered to the Luftwaffe in January to just 135 in March.

  Despite the frightful losses suffered by the Fifteenth Air Force, Friday’s Regensburg mission was regarded as having been their most successful mission across the Alps to date.

  On Saturday, General Ira Eaker, commanding the Mediterranean Allied Air Force, cabled General Twining his congratulations on the success enjoyed by the Fifteenth. He noted that the photoreconnaissance images “for the second successive day have given us an example of precision bombing at its very best. Being engaged in one of the greatest air battles in history yesterday your force fought through the heaviest opposition it has encountered. The Air Force’s record of reaching the objective and accomplishing the assigned task was maintained with distinction. Aircraft factory destroyed by you in this attack is estimated to produce at the rate of 250 per month. When considering the losses sustained, this fact should be borne in mind.”

  General Spaatz, now back at Bushy Park in England, sent his own telegram, writing that “Strike photographs of the Regensburg attack [have been] examined and I consider that superior results were obtained. The Fifteenth Air Force accomplished a superior job of bombing and vital destruction to enemy installations in the face of heavy air attack, without fighter support and with heavy losses. Even without consideration of the 93 enemy fighters shot down by our bombers, the results far outweigh the losses.”

  The same might have been said about the entirety of the results of the six days that came to be known as Big Week.

  Walt Rostow wrote half a century later, “Looking back, I can see again the faces of Hughes, Anderson, and Spaatz, as well as the key figures in British intelligence, on whom the American effort was based—as able, imaginative, and dedicated a group of men and women as was ever assembled…. The German single-engined fighter force never recovered from its unlikely defeat by the American long-range bombers. [Big Week] was the week that, in effect, a mature US Air Force emerged.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  ALL ROADS LED TO OVERLORD

  “On February 23, 1944, [Erhard] Milch visited me in my sickroom,” wrote Albert Speer, Hitler’s all-powerful armaments minister. Milch, meanwhile, held the post of state secretary in the Reich Aviation Ministry. “He informed me that the American Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces were concentrating their bombing on the German aircraft industry, with the result that our aircraft production would be reduced to a third of what it had been, at least for the month to come.”

  When Milch came to him as the bearer of bad news—from Schweinfurt, from Regensburg, from Gotha, from Fürth, and from all those other places—Speer had been hospitalized for more than a month for exhaustion. As he wrote in his memoirs, “The nearly two years of continuous tension had been taking their toll. Physically, I was nearly worn out at the age of 38. The pain in my knee hardly ever left me. I had no reserves of strength. Or were all these symptoms merely an escape?”

  Big Week brought plenty of bad news that Speer would yearn to escape, but from which he could not.

  Saturday, February 26, marked the “morning after” of Big Week. A low pressure area had moved into Europe on the seventh day, and the curtain fell. It was the metaphorical curtain, brought down on an epochal operation made possible only by the “strangest freak” of a window in the weather and by the men who were in a position to exploit it.

  It was also a literal curtain, brought down by a bleak weather system that would cloak the continent in clouds for the better part of a month. The maximum effort officially designated as Operation Argument had come to an end.

  In the American media of February 1944, Big Week was overshadowed by great land battles—the Battle of Anzio and the marine landing on the Pacific atoll of Eniwetok were ongoing simultaneously, and Overlord was on everyone’s mind. In the coming months, though, Big Week would come to be recognized as a significant crossroads on the highway to victory in World War II. Albert Speer and Erhard Milch were already seeing the handwriting on the wall of Speer’s sickroom.

  Big Week did not destroy the Luftwaffe, nor the German aircraft industry, but it did destroy the complacency that had come to Speer and Milch from possessing air superiority and assuming that certain targets in certain regions were essentially untouchable by Allied strategic airpower.

  Big Week, like Gettysburg eight decades earlier, did not herald a conclusion to a bloody war so much as it marked, in retrospect, a high water mark. Never again after Gettysburg would Robert E. Lee threaten to take the Civil War onto northern soil. Never again after Big Week could the Luftwaffe truly claim to possess and exercise air superiority over German soil.

  With postwar access to German data, the Strategic Bombing Survey later concluded that Big Week had “damaged or destroyed 75 percent of the buildings in plants that at the time accounted for 90 percent of the total German production of aircraft.” Production recovered, and faster than Allied analysts realized at the time, but it did so under the hardship of the time and expense of dispersal, and under the cloud of knowing that wherever it was dispersed, it was now potentially vulnerable.

  As Arthur Ferguson writes in the official history of the USAAF in World War II, “The German authorities, whose plans had hitherto rested on unduly optimistic foundations, now apparently for the first time showed signs of desperation…. The February bombings did deny many hundreds of aircraft to the enemy at a time when they were badly needed and could probably have been brought into effective use against the Allied invasion of Europe. The fact that the Germans suffered only a temporary setback in their overall program of aircraft production is less important than that they lost a significant number of planes at a critical point in the air war and that, at the same critical juncture, they were forced to reorganize and disperse the entire industry.

  “According to the US Strategic Bombing Survey, the February campaign would have paid off even if its only effect had been to force the enemy into an intensive program of dispersal. For that program not only accounted indirectly for much wasted effort and production loss; it also left the industry vulnerable to any serious disruption in transportation. The dispersal policy did, in fact, defeat itself when Allied bombers subsequently turned to an intensive strategic attack on transportation.”

  After the tipping point, the tide had not simply turned, it was running out.

  It has often been asked how big the week had really been. It was, indeed, the largest sustained maximum effort by the Combined Bomber Offensive to date. The Eighth Air Force flew more than 3,300 sorties, and the Fifteenth Air Force flew more than 500, while RAF Bomber Command contributed more than 2,350. The ten thousand tons of bombs dropped by the Americans were roughly the equivalent of what the Eighth Air Force had dropped in its entire first year of operations.

  Big Week had been as successful as it was big. Based on the experiences of the earlier Schweinfurt and Regensburg missions, the USSTAF planners and leadership had braced themselves for the probability of losing 200 bombers each day. In fact, the Eighth Air Force lost just 137 for the week, the Fifteenth lost 89, and the week cost the RAF 157 heavy bombers.

  The force of USAAF escort fighters lost around 30 of their own, but total claims of Luftwaffe interceptors, both by the fighters and by the bomber gunners, was more than 500. The Oberkommando Luftwaffe (Luftwaffe High Command) itself recorded a loss of 456 fighters in February, including 65 night fighters. Assuming the majority of the daytime losses for the month occurred during Big Week, the ratio was in the vicin
ity of ten to one in favor of the Americans.

  Not all the damage done to the Luftwaffe during Big Week was done by the bombs. As Glen Williamson mused, “The wall [of Luftwaffe fighters] which had been so difficult and dangerous, shrank each day [following Big Week]. It was wonderful how fast we got along after we broke down that wall.”

  Or, as Ferguson puts it, “There is reason to believe that the large and fiercely fought air battles of those six February days had more effect in establishing the air superiority on which Allied plans so largely depended than did the bombing of industrial plants.”

  Big Week had also marked the turning point in terms of one critical component of Luftwaffe doctrine—pilots. The supply of this vital element of earlier Luftwaffe successes was now seen to be precariously finite. As John Fagg of New York University writes in the official USAAF history, the problem of a continuous flow of top quality replacement pilots “calls attention to the importance of the air fighting during the spring of 1944. It was as a result of the air battles, especially those of the Big Week, that the Luftwaffe was for the first time forced to admit defeat…. By March the ability of the Luftwaffe to defend the Reich and engage in combat on anything like equal terms with Allied bombers and fighter forces had passed its marginal point and was steadily deteriorating whereas the capabilities of the Allies were improving.”

  Adolf Galland, the Luftwaffe’s own inspector general of fighters, was driven to comment that Big Week had cost “our best Squadron, Gruppe and Geschwader commanders. Each incursion of the enemy is costing us some fifty aircrewmen. The time has come when our weapon (the Luftwaffe) is in sight of collapse.”