by Bill Yenne
The erosion of German air superiority was due to a number of factors, including the burgeoning size of the Eighth Air Force and the substantial damage done to the Luftwaffe and the German aircraft industry during Big Week.
If any specific American weapon were to be singled out as critical to the success of Operation Argument, it would be the P-51 Mustang escort fighter, which had made its debut in significant numbers in January and had proven itself indispensable during Big Week. With 108-gallon external fuel tanks, the P-47 Thunderbolt, which had long been the mainstay for Eighth Air Force bomber escort duty, had the combat radius to accompany bombers about 475 miles from British airspace. The Mustang could do this without external tanks.
Equip a Mustang with two 75-gallon wing tanks, and its radius was extended to 650 miles. With 108-gallon tanks, the P-51 could function as a “little friend” to bombers flying 850 miles from their bases. This meant that the Mustangs could fly to distant targets such as Schweinfurt and Regensburg—or Berlin—and be prepared to do battle. The number of Luftwaffe fighters shot down, for the much smaller number of Mustangs lost, is indicative of how well the new American fighter was able to function in those battles—and in the air battles over Germany from Big Week to the war’s final week.
By the end of March 1944, the Eighth Air Force had its 4th, 355th, and 357th Fighter Groups fully operational with the Mustang, and in addition the Ninth Air Force’s 354th Fighter Group. The veteran 4th Fighter Group, commanded by Colonel Don Blakeslee, had entered Big Week with around 150 total aerial victories, and by the middle of March, the number had topped 400.
With its range, plus its speed and high altitude maneuverability, the P-51 had not only quickly dominated the aerial battlefield, it gave the Eighth Air Force leadership the confidence to plan missions to even the most heavily defended targets in Germany.
On March 4, 1944, the Eighth Air Force for the first time bombed Berlin. Weather forced the diversion of all but 31 of the Flying Fortresses, but two days later, 658 heavy bombers reached the German capital, followed by 460 on March 8 and around 300 on March 9.
The targets included the Vereinigte Kugellagerfabriken ball bearing works at Erkner, which had long been eyed by Dick Hughes and the other American planners and considered as a target on Day Three of Big Week. Also on the target list were the facilities of Robert Bosch AG in the suburb of Klein Machnow. Now known as Robert Bosch GmbH, the company is today a world leader in engineering and electronics, but during World War II it was a prominent supplier of electrical components for aircraft and military vehicles, and therefore worthy of a place on the Pointblank target list.
Aside from the damage done to the targets—the VKF plant at Erkner suffered mightily from seventy-five direct hits on March 8—the effect that the Berlin missions had on morale was significant. With the American public, a first USAAF attack on an Axis capital was cause for celebration. For the British, an American attack on the capital of the country whose bombers had devastated London in 1940 was seen as a gesture of solidarity. The London Evening Standard’s editorial page called the attacks “a sign of the unshakable comradeship” and ran a headline that read allies over berlin, rather than just americans over berlin.
For Berliners, who had been bombed before—but by the RAF at night—the sight of rows of gleaming Flying Fortresses over their city in tight formation, and with fighter escorts, spoke volumes about the loss of air superiority in the Reich.
For the German propaganda machine, it was a challenge to spin this new reality. Indeed, the best reaction seemed to be to just say that things were not as they seemed. The Voelkischer Beobachter, the official Nazi Party daily, explained to its readers on March 13 that “if occasionally they fly in a clear sky without at the moment being pursued by the dreaded German fighters, only the layman is fooled, and then only for a few minutes…. In their case the closed drill formation is not a sign of strength.”
With Big Week behind them, Allied planners were able to turn to the future of the strategic air offensive against the Reich. As Dick Hughes writes, “Now, for the first time, I was able seriously to think of the destruction of the entire Axis oil industry—the decisive target system which I had mentally selected, as far back as the summer of 1941, as being the one the destruction of which would most nearly accomplish our purpose…. By the early spring of 1944, both the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces had large numbers of heavy bomber groups at their disposal, together with the necessary long-range escort fighters. The German fighter defenses, while still containing many a sting, were no longer deadly…. At last the time was ripe to destroy the German oil industry.”
Walt Rostow writes in his OSS War Diary that Hughes formally presented his “Oil Plan” to General Spaatz on the evening of March 5 at Park House. Rostow added that Fred Anderson “had already read the plan and was an advocate of it.”
Rostow, who was apparently present at the meeting, explains that “discussion began before dinner and ran into the early hours of the morning around the Park House conference table. Despite the effort to emphasize, within the plan, the will to complete the attacks on the Pointblank [target] systems, General Spaatz quickly appreciated that it was to all intents and purposes an oil plan. [Spaatz] explored at length the issues at stake, and especially the capabilities of the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces with respect to the number of targets involved, and ordered the plan completed for prompt presentation to Air Marshal Portal and General Eisenhower.”
Hughes interpreted this as the plan having met with Spaatz’s approval.
However, the Oil Plan was developing even as there was about to be a major reshuffling of the Allied command structure in anticipation of Operation Overlord, which was now imminent.
As of April 1, operational control of Spaatz’s USSTAF was to pass from the Combined Chiefs of Staff to the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), in anticipation of Operation Overlord. The idea was that control would revert back once Allied ground forces had established themselves ashore on the continent, but for the time being, the fate of the USSTAF was not in its own hands. Suddenly, as Hughes puts it, “for the first time in a long while, we were no longer free to operate as we ourselves wished.”
At the head of SHAEF was Eisenhower, the supreme commander, with whom Spaatz had excellent relations. However, directly beneath Eisenhower was his deputy supreme commander, and the overlord of Overlord air operations, RAF Air Marshal Arthur Tedder.
Counterintuitively, Tedder’s point of view on the use of strategic airpower in support of Operation Overlord came not from professional airmen, but from a civilian consultant who had attached himself to Tedder’s headquarters while he was in his earlier post as the commander of the joint Mediterranean Air Command. The man came to Tedder’s staff, not from the staff of an Allied air force, or any military or economic organization whatsoever. Solomon “Solly” Zuckerman came to this post of great influence and responsibility within the RAF from the London Zoo!
Zuckerman was a South African–born zoologist who had graduated from University College Hospital Medical School in London and whose prewar career had been at the London Zoological Society. When the war began, Zuckerman consulted for the British government on several projects and wound up in North Africa working with the RAF. Given an honorary officer’s commission, he eventually became the “scientific director” of the British Bombing Survey Unit (BBSU). In this role, he gradually became indispensable to Tedder.
When Tedder came to London ahead of Overlord, Zuckerman came along and was assigned as the advisor to Air Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, Tedder’s subordinate. Leigh-Mallory commanded the Allied Expeditionary Air Force (AEAF), an amalgam of the British and American tactical air forces that would support Overlord.
It had long been understood that the Eighth Air Force would participate in the preparations for Operation Overlord. They would join the AEAF effort to attack the rail transportation network, specifically railroad marshaling yards, in order to “isolate the
battlefield” across northern France. It had not originally been intended that the Eighth Air Force should be under the AEAF command, but Tedder now insisted that it should be. Zuckerman had convinced both Tedder and Leigh-Mallory that this was the best use of strategic bombers.
Zuckerman’s abrupt arrival on the scene, and his ideas, which were at odds with existing USSTAF doctrine, put him in direct conflict with the Eighth Air Force and the EOU.
Walt Rostow recalled many years later, that “at the intellectual level, EOU was squared off against Tedder’s one-man brain trust, Solly Zuckerman, a scholar of the sexual and social life of apes; under the curious but not untypical imperatives of war, he became an expert on the physical effects of bombing which he applied in the Mediterranean, and then he became a bombing strategist. There are Americans (and some British) who to the end of their days regarded (or will regard) the last year of the struggle in Europe as a war against Solly Zuckerman rather than Adolf Hitler.”
As Dick Hughes explains, Zuckerman “had been taken into the Royal Air Force to conduct a series of experiments on monkeys, in an endeavor to determine the effects of bomb blasts on human beings. From this, being very astute and ambitious, he had gradually worked his way up to [being] an expert on the effects of bombing of all kinds, and from thence it had been fairly easy to insert himself into the realms of target selection and operational planning. He had assisted Air Marshal Tedder in planning the raids against the transportation systems in Italy, and had sold himself to Tedder as an individual who would be of value in planning the air operations in support of the [Operation Overlord] invasion—during which it would be of utmost importance to interrupt and delay the movement of German reinforcements towards our bridgeheads.”
Zuckerman’s reputation had preceded him. Hughes went on to say that the staff of the Eighth Air Force and the EOU had “received word by the grapevine from Italy of his failings, and were more than alarmed when Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory placed complete confidence in him and gave him a free hand to prepare the invasion plan. This led to the bitterest argument over air planning that I was ever to experience.”
Essentially, it was the Oil Plan formulated by Dick Hughes facing off against the Rail Plan of Solly Zuckerman.
The battle lines were drawn, not between the British and Americans, but between the Anglo-American command staff at SHAEF on one side and the upper levels of command at USSTAF on the other. Apparently there was also a division of opinion within RAF Bomber Command. Some within that service were displeased with being assigned to fly essentially tactical missions, but their chief, Arthur Harris, sided with Zuckerman and Tedder, referring to the EOU staff and their allies as “the Oily Boys.”
As Rostow points out, “Spaatz took the view that attacks on marshalling yards would have diffuse, generalized effects but would not interdict military supplies because the minimum essential lines could be repaired overnight and because the Germans would not engage their beleaguered fighter force to defend marshalling yards. Thus, his primary and overriding responsibility of Allied air supremacy on D-Day would be at risk.”
Regarding the specific targets picked by Zuckerman, Hughes writes that the USSTAF was “convinced, from information received from [the Fifteenth Air Force in] Italy, that a rail transportation system could be much more effectively and economically interrupted by the destruction of railroad bridges [which are difficult to repair or replace] rather than by bombing marshaling yards. The latter belief contained a bonus in that if the railway system were economically paralyzed by the destruction of bridges, then there would be enough surplus effort remaining available to destroy the oil industry—with the long term benefit of seriously hampering the operations of the German army and air force, and of German industry, for the whole of the rest of the war.”
Zuckerman countered by insisting that aircraft could not destroy targets as precise as bridges, despite the fact that he had just come from the Mediterranean Theater, where bombers had successfully destroyed most of the key rail bridges in Italy. During the coming weeks preceding Overlord, both Ninth Air Force medium bombers and Eighth Air Force heavy bombers proved, and on numerous occasions, that airplanes could, in fact, accurately hit and destroy railroad bridges.
Eventually, the argument went all the way to the upper levels of command, with both Prime Minister Churchill and General Eisenhower weighing in. Ultimately, at what Rostow calls “an historic meeting” on March 25, Eisenhower “decided in favor of Tedder and marshalling yards on the grounds that the latter would provide some immediate help in the landings and their aftermath, whereas the military effects of the oil attacks might be delayed.”
However, Eisenhower did compromise to a certain degree, allowing that the Eighth Air Force would be released from the rail campaign whenever weather conditions over Germany promised good visibility for precision attacks against the petrochemical industry targets favored by the Oily Boys, in concurrence with Spaatz and Anderson.
“I am convinced,” Hughes writes, “that General Spaatz did not want to argue the point with any force. His prime concern was that in case Overlord should fail, no one should be able to point a finger at him and his air forces and blame them for not cooperating with General Eisenhower’s requests in every way.”
As has been written in numerous accounts of the weeks leading up to Operation Overlord, it was a time of serious anxiety and nail-biting. Spaatz, and indeed Eisenhower himself, knew that the success of the Normandy invasion was not a foregone conclusion and that should it fail, it would be a major catastrophe that would seriously delay the end of the war.
Nevertheless, contrary to Hughes’s interpretation that Spaatz did not want to rock the boat, Rostow writes that at one point Spaatz went so far as to threaten to resign over the diversion of his assets to support the Rail Plan.
In any case, the Oil Plan advocates were vindicated after a large number of petrochemical facilities across central Germany were attacked in one of the “compromise” missions by a force of around eight hundred Eighth Air Force heavy bombers on May 12. Rostow told an OSS symposium half a century later that decryptions done by the codebreakers of the British “ultra” project of German messages transmitted in the wake of the May 12 missions “promptly and unambiguously provided evidence of the Germans’ panic as they elevated the defense of their oil production to top priority, even ranking above factories producing single-engined fighters. The evidence was sufficient to convince Tedder that the oil attacks should be immediately pursued.”
Rostow reports that Tedder’s actual words were “I guess we’ll have to give the customer what he wants.”
By this he meant that Eisenhower was now convinced of the value of the mission for the strategic bombers.
Even with more than half a century of 20/20 hindsight, we know Spaatz was right to acknowledge that in the two months preceding June 6, 1944, there was no more important Allied strategic goal in the European Theater than ensuring the success of Operation Overlord. All roads did, indeed and rightly so, lead to that single purpose.
With the same clarity of retrospection, especially with the knowledge of the Ultra decryptions—which were known to Hughes when he wrote his memoir but which were still secret—we understand that Hughes was also right to see the “big picture” significance of the petrochemical industry as a follow-on to the Operation Pointblank campaign against the German aircraft industry. Without oil, the war machine could not run.
It is also clear that the USSTAF had handed SHAEF the luxury of concentrating on the rail transportation network by virtue of what had been done to the Luftwaffe during Big Week.
Overlord’s D-Day, originally penciled into the Allied offensive calendar during May, was postponed to June 5, and finally to June 6. On that D-Day, which Cornelius Ryan famously dubbed the “Longest Day,” as 156,000 Allied troops crossed the beaches of Normandy against heavy German ground fire, the skies above were clear of the Luftwaffe. Thanks to the hard work and sacrifice of American bomber crews during Big
Week, Eisenhower was able to say to the troops, “If you see fighting aircraft over you, they will be ours.”
Indeed, General Werner Junck, the Luftwaffe’s fighter commander in Normandy, admitted during a postwar debriefing that he had only 160 aircraft available, and just half of these were operational. Within a short time, his complement increased to 600, but counting all the aircraft assigned to it, Leigh-Mallory’s AEAF had around 12,000 aircraft available for Overlord.
In the afternoon of the Longest Day, one of those Allied aircraft was a Flying Fortress piloted by General Fred Anderson—and crewed by five generals and two colonels. Standing at one of the waist gun positions, Richard D’Oyly Hughes stood ready to man the .50-caliber Browning if a Luftwaffe fighter should appear. As had been the case earlier that day as General Laurence Kuter made his own observation flight in this same airspace, the only aircraft Hughes saw, and he saw hundreds, were friendly.
“There was cloud [cover] over England to an altitude of some 10,000 feet, and we spiraled up through this until we finally broke into the clear to find ourselves near a group of Eighth Air Force B-17s on their way to bomb Caen [a city near the invasion beaches]. We quickly joined this formation and halfway across the English Channel the clouds dispersed and the whole invasion coast lay spread out before us…. Our bomb run to Caen was uneventful, with no antiaircraft fire and not a sign of a single German fighter plane in the sky.”
While Big Week had not crushed the Luftwaffe out of existence—that final struggle was yet to come—what Big Week had accomplished was tellingly demonstrated in the skies over Normandy on that Longest Day in June.
TWENTY-THREE
AGAINST THE WALL
A great weight was lifted from the shoulders of those Allied leaders—from Eisenhower down through the chain of command—who had sweated through the planning process for months. Difficult battles lay ahead—indeed, it would not be until July 25 that the Allies finally broke out of their Normandy beachhead—but the great invasion that had been the all-consuming object of the war against Germany since the beginning, had succeeded.
