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

by Bill Yenne

  “The fate of Germany was sealed,” Galland wrote in his postwar memoir The First and the Last. “On April 25 the American and the Soviet soldiers shook hands at Torgau on the Elbe. The last defensive ring of Berlin was soon penetrated. The Red flag was flying over the Ballhausplatz in Vienna. The German front in Italy collapsed. On Pilsen fell the last bomb of the 2,755,000 tons which the Western Allies had dropped on Europe during five years of war. At that moment I called my pilots together and said to them, ‘Militarily speaking the war is lost. Even our action here cannot change anything…. I shall continue to fight, because operating with the Me 262 has got hold of me, because I am proud to belong to the last fighter pilots of the German Luftwaffe…. Only those who feel the same are to go on flying with me.’”

  Galland flew his last mission the next day—against American medium bombers.

  Four days later, in his bunker deep below a Berlin that had been bombed almost beyond recognition, Adolf Hitler killed his dog and entered into a suicide pact with Eva Braun, his wife of less than forty hours.

  By now, the strategic air war had come to an end, and the Luftwaffe was a defeated relic. The Luftwaffe was ridiculously outnumbered at every turn and could essentially do nothing. As John Fagg writes, “Lavish fighter escort flew with the [Allied] bombers even when operations were a matter of roaming over the prostrate Reich looking for targets. This escort was available to a high degree now that Doolittle had taken his fighters off strafing tasks lest friendly troops or prisoners be killed. Most of Germany was not enemy territory any longer.”

  On April 7, RAF chief Peter Portal had suspended large scale bombing operations, expressing concern that “further destruction of German cities would magnify the problems of the occupying forces.”

  About a week later, on April 16, from his headquarters in Reims, Spaatz sent a personal memo to Jimmy Doolittle at the Eighth Air Force and Nathan Twining at the Fifteenth, which read: “The advances of our ground forces have brought to a close the strategic air war waged by the United States Strategic Air Forces and the Royal Air Force Bomber Command.

  “It has been won with a decisiveness becoming increasingly evident as our armies overrun Germany. From now onward our Strategic Air Forces must operate with our Tactical Air Forces in close cooperation with our armies.

  “All units of the US Strategic Air Forces are commended for their part in winning the Strategic Air War and are enjoined to continue with undiminished effort and precision the final tactical phase of air action to secure the ultimate objective—complete defeat of Germany.”

  In its conclusion, the Strategic Bombing Survey summarized the climax of the Allied strategic air campaign by stating that “as in most other cases in the history of wars—the collapse occurred before the time when the lack of means would have rendered further resistance physically impossible.”

  By the time that collapse came, Germany’s once invincible war machine had little in the way of means, and virtually nothing in the way of a will, to continue fighting.

  “The German economy,” Albert Speer had written in his March 15 report, “is heading for an inevitable collapse within four to eight weeks.”

  Seven weeks later, it was all over.

  The end came on VE-Day, which was actually a period of about forty-eight hours, beginning on May 7, when Field Marshal William Keitel, the chief of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the German high command, traveled to Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims to sign the unconditional surrender. The following day, a similar formal surrender ceremony took place in Berlin, now in Soviet hands.

  Billy Mitchell had written two decades earlier, “Air power holds out the hope to the nations that, in the future, air battles taking place miles away from the frontiers will be so decisive and of such far-reaching effect that the nation losing them will be willing to capitulate without resorting to a further contest on land or water on account of the degree of destruction which would be sustained by the country subjected to unrestricted air attack.”

  The strategic air campaign that defeated the Third Reich had begun with little more than the idea promulgated by Mitchell that a major industrial power could be defeated in war from the air.

  The campaign began in 1942 with a handful of aircraft, a handful of crews, and only a general idea of how to proceed. Over the course of its first year, the shape and form of the strategic air campaign gradually gained clarity. At Berkeley Square, a strategy took shape. In East Anglia, a bomber force moved toward critical mass. The dogged determination of the men in USAAF to stick with the doctrine of precision daylight attacks was questioned, ridiculed, and finally proven correct.

  Big Week, as its planners had hoped, did constitute the beginning of the end. After that week, nothing was ever again the same. Albert Speer knew it and so did Hitler.

  Big Week, as its planners had hoped, constituted a vindication of the strategic air campaign. Though there would be bumps in the road on the downhill slide that began that week, it was clear that Germany’s war economy had begun unraveling from that point.

  Just as the Allies had found the skies over Normandy devoid of the Luftwaffe on the Longest Day, the Allies who pondered a defeated Germany saw a nation without an infrastructure.

  Thanks in no small part to the men of the EOU, the complex interrelationship of the components of Germany’s war economy, such as ball bearings to aircraft manufacturing, and petrochemicals to the entire economy, had been examined, understood, and articulated as targets.

  Thanks to the tenacity of the bomber crews—and the fighter pilots and all the ground crews—these targets were systematically struck, then struck again, and then again, until the very foundation of the German war economy had been destroyed. The promise of which Mitchell had spoken was fulfilled.

  Thanks to the heroism and the vision of all of these people, the Third Reich and the dark curtain that it had drawn across Europe and the world, like the dark curtain in an Eighth Air Force briefing room, had been torn down forever.

  As had happened on the final, climactic day of Big Week, the sun had come out across Europe.

  EPILOGUE

  At the 4th Fighter Group field at Debden, David Mathies had known that February 20, 1944, was going to be a big day. There were sixty Thunderbolts on the flight line, with the mechanics running up the engines for a maximum effort. Overhead came the thunder of dozens of bombers, wave after wave of 91st Bombardment Group Flying Fortresses, taking off from nearby Bassingbourn.

  “I understand you have a brother who’s a gunner with the B-17 outfit over there,” an armorer, who was one of David’s friends, casually remarked as they went to work that morning. He nodded to the northwest, in the general direction of Polebrook and a half dozen other Eighth Air Force bomber fields.

  “Yes, that’s right,” David replied. “And I don’t mind telling you that I’m very apprehensive about it too. You can tell from all the activity that’s going on around here that this is going to be a big mission.”

  In the middle of 1943, David had gotten a letter from their mother reporting that brother Archie had volunteered as an aerial gunner and was training down at Tyndall Field in Florida.

  “As soon as I received that letter, I knew that Archie was on a collision course with his destiny,” David later recalled. “One of the words that he was continually kicking around was ‘predestiny.’ It means that from the moment you’re conceived, your date and time of death is written down somewhere. I didn’t believe too much in that, and I always figured there is no sense in rushing things either… but Archie believed in it with all his heart.”

  A couple of days later, near the crescendo of the Big Week activity, David Mathies went over to the Red Cross tent for his usual cup of tea and casually picked up a copy of the News Chronicle, then one of London’s numerous daily newspapers. On page one, there was a small picture of Archie and a recounting of his remarkable heroism on February 20.

  “I was just absolutely shattered,” David recalled grimly. He’d had no
idea that this had happened. “I don’t think I slept a wink that night, but the next day, I got an emergency Red Cross leave and I went up to Polebrook.”

  When David was ushered in to meet Colonel Eugene Romig, the commander of Archie’s 351st Bombardment Group, the first thing the colonel said was that he was recommending Archie for the Medal of Honor.

  David next visited the base dispensary, where he was introduced to three of the men who had broken their legs bailing out of Ten Horsepower over Polebrook.

  “When it was my time to go,” Tom Sowell told him, “I looked forward. Archie was in the seat flying, and for some reason or another, he turned around to me and he gave me Winston Churchill’s famous ‘V for Victory’ sign. He thought he could make it, but I’m afraid the odds were stacked against him.”

  David was then taken down to the barracks where they kept the personal effects of the men who would never come back. Archie’s billfold was there, as was his gold US Army Air Forces ring with the single-bladed propeller across the top.

  “I kept that ring for 27 years until my son Archie came of age,” David recalled a half century later, with a lump in his throat. “I gave him that ring. There’s never a day goes by in that fellow’s life that he hasn’t got that ring on his finger.”

  Back at his own barracks in Debden, David wrote home to their mother, explaining what had happened. He figured that the letter would reach her sometime after the official War Department telegram—that telegram, the one like the ones that were received by four hundred thousand other American mothers during World War II—but his letter arrived first. As he put it, “Maybe it was apropos that my mother learned of her oldest son’s death from her youngest son.”

  On July 23, four months after Archie’s death, his posthumous Medal of Honor was presented to Mary Mathies. Wally Truemper’s mother received his Medal of Honor on the Fourth of July.

  Rather than traveling to Washington, DC, Mary Mathies elected to receive Archie’s medal at the Presbyterian church in Finleyville, the same church that Archie had attended, often under protest—because Sunday morning followed too closely on the coattails of Saturday night—and always at his mother’s insistence.

  Fredericka Truemper received Wally’s medal while seated in a rocking chair on her font lawn in Aurora, Illinois. Wally’s father, his sister, and his two brothers were also present that evening.

  In 1976, at the age of eighty-four, having outlived her oldest son by more than three decades, Mary Mathies was on hand for the dedication of one of the Pittsburgh Coal Company mines, renamed in Archie’s honor. In 1987, the noncommissioned officers school at RAF Upwood, an installation operated by the US Air Force in Cambridgeshire, near Molesworth, not far from the field in which Archie Mathies died, was formally rededicated as the Archibald Mathies NCO Academy.

  Bill Lawley, the only man to earn the Medal of Honor during Big Week and survive, received his medal from General Spaatz personally on August 8, two weeks after Mary was given Archie’s. He had gone on to fly fourteen additional combat missions after Big Week, with his last coming in June, as Operation Overlord was in full swing. He remained in the US Air Force after World War II, served in a number of locations, including the Pentagon, the US Air Attaché’s office in Brazil, and at the Air University at Maxwell AFB in his home state of Alabama. He retired as a colonel in 1972.

  Ralph Braswell was one of the gunners aboard Cabin in the Sky, the heavily mauled Flying Fortress that Bill Lawley had brought home against all odds on the first day of Big Week. He went to see his pilot shortly before Lawley’s death in 1999. Lawley apologized to Braswell as they greeted each other, because his battle-scarred hands were crippled with arthritis.

  “After I shook his hands,” the former gunner recalls, “I said ‘They’re beautiful. They saved my life.’”

  Joe Rex, the radio operator who repaired the intercom wiring aboard Ten Horsepower so that Archie could communicate with Wally as Wally communicated with the Polebrook tower, remained in the radio business. He went on to a long career—made possible by his life having been saved by Wally and Archie—during which he enriched the lives of generations as a popular newscaster on radio station WMBD in Peoria, Illinois.

  Jesse Richard Pitts, the man who had graduated magna cum laude from Harvard before flying as copilot aboard the 376th Bombardment Group Flying Fortress called Penny Ante, returned to academia, having formed an export business in Morocco to finance his further education. He married the daughter of French Resistance hero Claude Bonnier, received his PhD from Harvard, and became a prominent sociologist. He published numerous sociology textbooks and founded the Tocqueville Review, a bilingual journal studying social change.

  Penny Ante herself, the “lucky” Flying Fortress protected by the ritual of the crew chief loaning the pilot a penny before each mission, which was repaid at the mission’s successful completion, “protected” Pitts, Streit, and the original crew, who all made it through their tours safely. As Pitts writes in his memoir, the ritual was abandoned by later crews. Penny Ante was shot down on May 24, 1944, over Berlin.

  Of the household name officers who oversaw the USSTAF and the Eighth Air Force before and during Big Week, Tooey Spaatz continued to command the USSTAF as it burgeoned into a force with more than three thousand heavy, four-engine bombers later in 1944. Spaatz received his fourth star in March 1945, and when the Third Reich was defeated, he was reassigned in July to do to Japan what he had done to Germany, as commander of the US Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific. He never had the chance. The war against Japan ended within a few weeks of his arrival.

  Spaatz is recalled as having been the only general who was present at the surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945, as well as at the surrender of Germany to the Anglo-American Allies on May 7, and of Germany to the Soviet armies on May 8 in Berlin. After the war, he succeeded his boss and mentor, Hap Arnold, as the commanding general of the USAAF, and in 1947, he became the first chief of staff of the newly created US Air Force.

  Jimmy Doolittle continued to command the Eighth Air Force through the defeat of Germany and was in the process of relocating the Eighth to the Pacific Theater when Japan surrendered. After the war, Doolittle reverted to inactive reserve status as a three-star general, but undertook a number of special projects for the US Air Force through his retirement in 1955. Though he commanded the USAAF’s largest numbered air force through its greatest triumph, he will forever be best remembered for that April 1942 mission when he led sixteen bombers to Japan for a daring feat of short duration that is summarized in the title of the 1944 Hollywood movie about it, entitled Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.

  Curtis LeMay would go on to greater glory, even as many of his fellow commanders were in the twilight of their careers. In August 1944, he was reassigned to the Far East to command the first strategic bombing missions against the Japanese home islands since Doolittle’s “thirty seconds.” The weapon was the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the largest strategic bomber of the war. Half again larger than a Flying Fortress or a Liberator, it could carry triple the bomb load and fly twice as far.

  When the B-29 entered service in 1944, Hap Arnold decided to use it only against Japan, and to make sure that the aircraft was used only as a strategic weapon, he retained command of the new Twentieth Air Force himself. LeMay was originally assigned to command the Twentieth’s XX Bomber Command, but he later acted as the de facto field commander of the entire Twentieth Air Force offensive against Japan.

  It was after World War II that LeMay became a household word. After planning the Berlin Airlift in 1948, he was named to head the US Air Force’s Strategic Air Command (SAC). Under LeMay’s unprecedented nine years of uncompromising leadership, SAC evolved into a well-oiled war machine, operating a vast, globe-spanning fleet of B-47 and B-52 jet bombers, as well as the first generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles. LeMay eventually served as chief of staff of the US Air Force.

  Haywood “Possum” Hansell, the veteran of the Air War Plans
Division who served as one of the Eighth Air Force’s principal early leaders, went on to a career marked by controversy. He missed Big Week, having been recalled to Washington after the Operation Tidal Wave mission against Ploesşti in August 1943. Here, he was back at Hap Arnold’s side as the USAAF planner on the Combined and Joint Staff as plans were being laid for the strategic air campaign against Japan. He helped to develop and deploy the Superfortresses, and he was Arnold’s original choice to be his field commander for the strategic campaign against Japan.

  In the Pacific, Hansell commanded the Twentieth’s XXI Bomber Command, based in the Mariana Islands in the Pacific, while LeMay commanded the XX Bomber Command in China. When the results achieved by Hansell using daylight precision bombing were not considered effective, he was replaced by Arnold with LeMay, who was seen as a more aggressive commander who could accomplish the job of destroying the Japanese economy.

  Ironically, LeMay would adopt the RAF Bomber Command tactic of nighttime area raids against Japanese cities, rather than staying exclusively with the precision tactics that the Americans had so vociferously advocated in Europe.

  Hansell was reassigned, first to a training wing, and later to a transport wing, both based in the United States, and took early retirement in 1946. As this author knows from firsthand conversations with both, Hansell and LeMay continued to insist, until the end of their lives, that strategic airpower could have ultimately brought about the defeat of Japan without the use of nuclear weapons.

  Ira Eaker, who left his command role at the Eighth Air Force just as the Eighth was coming into its own, served as commander of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces (MAAF) until April 1945, the eve of the defeat of Germany. Recalled to Washington by Arnold, over his objections, Eaker served on the Air Staff of the USAAF until it became the US Air Force. After his retirement in 1947, he served as a vice president at Hughes Aircraft and later at Douglas Aircraft.