Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (12 page)

They met against the backdrop of numerous strategic concerns. Despite the great potential represented by the United States, the British were impatient with their allies. Not only had the Americans not yet shown substantial results against the Germans in the air, they had yet to confront them in a major land battle.

Churchill and Roosevelt also met against the backdrop of numerous strategic disagreements. The strategic air campaign was only one bone of contention. With Torch having been successful, and the British now having the momentum against Rommel’s Afrika Korps, Roosevelt and US Army Chief General George Marshall favored a return to building up forces for the cross-channel invasion of northern France as soon as possible.

Churchill, on the other hand, favored action against what he called the “soft underbelly of Europe.” In other words, he wanted to see the next major Allied move in the Mediterranean be an invasion of southern, rather than northern Europe. At the ten-day Casablanca Conference, code-named “Symbol,” Churchill was able to convince Roosevelt that the Allies should invade Sicily and Italy in 1943, which effectively delayed the cross-channel invasion until 1944.

The strategic air campaign also emerged as a pivotal agenda item. Anticipating that Churchill would make a move to push the Eighth Air Force into the night, Hap Arnold had ordered Ira Eaker to travel to Casablanca and head off such a decision.

On January 18, Eaker sat down with Churchill himself for a historic half-hour meeting.

“Why,” Churchill asked, “has the USAAF flown so few missions, and had so many abortive missions?”

To this, Eaker explained that the crews were inexperienced, coming in at the base of the learning curve. He reminded Churchill of the diversion of Eighth Air Force assets—including service units—to Operation Torch and to the campaign against the U-boats. Finally, he explained that the weather had not favored precision attacks.

Finally, Churchill asked the big question: “Why have the American bombers not yet bombed Germany itself?”

Eaker had known that this was coming and so had his boss. Arnold had told him that the only way to placate the British was to begin operations against Germany as soon as possible.

Cutting to the chase, Eaker told Churchill that the Eighth Air Force would be prepared to routinely send one hundred heavy bombers escorted by one hundred fighters into Germany by the end of the month. Noting that Torch had been successful, he took this opportunity to add that he hoped to have the diverted Eighth Air Force assets returned to Britain.

“Eaker began his defense of the American tactics by maintaining that only one convincing argument had ever been advanced for night bombing over day bombing and that was that it was safer,” Arthur Ferguson writes. “But in point of fact the Eighth Air Force rate of loss in day raids had been lower than that of the RAF on its night operations, a fact that was explained in part by the great improvement in German night fighter tactics and in part by the heavy firepower of the American bombers.”

Ferguson goes on to say that Eaker estimated that the accuracy of the daylight strikes was about five times greater than “that of the best night bombing, thanks to the excellent [Norden] bombsight they carried. Hence day bombing tended to be more economical than night bombing, for a force only one-fifth as large would be required to destroy a given installation.
Eaker of course admitted that the objective of night bombardment was not primarily the destruction of individual targets but the devastation of vital areas, and as such it could not properly be compared to precision bombing on the ground of accuracy.”

Acknowledging the persuasiveness of Eaker’s arguments, Churchill withdrew his objection to a continuation of the existing doctrine of “around the clock” strategic bombing, assuming that Eaker could make good on his promise to begin operations against Germany within a month.

Three days later, on January 21, the Combined Chiefs of Staff approved what came to be known as the Casablanca Directive. It assumed a continuation of the day-and-night doctrine and delineated a series of priorities for the strategic air campaign, which would later be formally referred to as the Combined Bomber Offensive. Essentially, the Casablanca Directive recognized what had previously existed in practice, while calling for an organizational structure that would coordinate the efforts of the Eighth Air Force and RAF Bomber Command.

In the words of the directive, the primary objective of the Combined Bomber Offensive was “the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.”

The latter phrase echoed the theory repeated by Arthur Harris at every opportunity, that the will of the German people was as valid a target as any factory complex.

In the meantime, Dick Hughes and his EOU team had already been at work behind the scenes, scientifically analyzing the German economy and quietly providing Eaker with the specific
precision
targets.

“Near the end of 1942, after producing some 285 aiming-point reports, Hughes unleashed EOU on the principles and practice of target selection,” Walt Rostow recalls. “In the doctrine we evolved, we sought target systems where the destruction of the minimum number of targets would have the greatest, most prompt, and most long-lasting direct military effect on the battlefield. Each of the modifiers carried weight. One had to ask, in assessing the results of an attack, how large its effect would be within its own sector of the economy or military system; how quickly would the effect
be felt in front line strength; how long the effect would last; and what its direct military, as opposed to economic, consequences would be.

“The application of these criteria was serious, rigorous intellectual business. In part, it required taking fully into account the extent to which the military effect of an attack could be cushioned by the Germans by diverting civilian output or services to military purposes or buying time for repair by drawing down stocks of finished products in the pipeline. In all this, our knowledge as economists of the structure of production, buttressed by what we had learned from the aiming-point reports, converged with the classic military principles Hughes and his best senior colleagues brought to the task. The EOU view was, then, a doctrine of warfare, not of economics or politics.”

Though the formal Combined Bomber Offensive plan would not be worked out until June, orders issued to operational units on February 4 contained a hierarchy of general targets, “subject to the exigencies of weather and tactical feasibility.”

In order of priority, these were to be German submarine construction yards, the German aircraft industry, the German transportation system, and German petroleum facilities, with “other targets in enemy war industry,” added to round out the list.

In addition to the list of general targets, the Combined Bomber Offensive would continue to be tasked with attacking U-boat bases on the west coast of France, as well as the city of Berlin. The latter was included “for the attainment of the especially valuable results unfavorable to the morale of the enemy or favorable to that of the Russians.”

Specific to the Eighth Air Force and the second item in the list of priorities, the Casablanca Directive stated that the American bombers should “take every opportunity to attack Germany by day, to destroy objectives that are unsuitable for night attack, to sustain continuous pressure on German morale, to impose heavy losses on the German day fighter force and to contain German fighter strength away from the Russian and Mediterranean theaters of war.”

As Allied air planners debated the merits of various hierarchies of target priorities within the German economy, the latter was not static. If Egon Mayer personified the nemesis of Allied aircrews, the man who
played that role for the planners at Berkeley Square and Bushy Park was Albert Speer, a thirty-seven-year-old architect and gifted technocrat. A member of Adolf Hitler’s inner circle, he had been named by the Führer as the Third Reich’s minister of armaments in February 1942, upon the death in a plane crash of his predecessor, Fritz Todt. The post gave Speer immense powers in organizing the German economy, especially industrial production. As such, it was his job to build and expand upon the same entity that Dick Hughes and others were committed to tearing down.

“We formed ‘directive committees’ for the various types of weapons and ‘directive pools’ for the allocation of supplies,” Speer explains in his memoirs. “Thirteen such committees were finally established, one for each category of my armaments program. Linking these were an equal number of pools. Alongside these committees and pools I set up development commissions in which army officers met with the best designers in industry. These commissions were to supervise new products, suggest improvements in manufacturing techniques even during the design stage, and call a halt to any unnecessary projects. The heads of the committees and the pools were to make sure—this was vital to our whole approach—that a given plant concentrated on producing only one item, but did so in maximum quantity.”

As Speer bragged, “Within half a year after my taking office we had significantly increased production in all the areas within our scope. Production in August 1942, according to the
Index Figures for German Armaments End-Products
, as compared with the February production, had increased by 27 percent for guns, by 25 percent for tanks, while ammunition production almost doubled, rising 97 percent. The total productivity of armaments increased by 59.6 percent. Obviously we had mobilized reserves that had hitherto lain fallow.”

As summarized in the report of the postwar US Strategic Bombing Survey, directed by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, “Speer set about replacing the existing machinery of control with a new organization (the ‘Rings’ and ‘Committees’), manned by people selected from among the production managers and technicians of industry. They were charged with the task of increasing production by rationalizing German war industry; that is, by simplifying designs, standardizing components, concentrating
production in the most suitable plants, reducing the number of different armaments orders given to a single firm, exchanging patents and secret processes, and generally adopting, throughout industry, the most efficient processes of production. The result of this policy was a more than threefold increase in Germany’s munition production.”

Such was the challenge faced by the EOU, as well as by the Combined Bomber Offensive. They were not attacking an economy that remained static, but one that was rapidly expanding and one which had a great deal of expansion potential.

In the meantime, as the economists were analyzing the substance of target systems, the operational units were still coordinating the form of their operations.

While the Combined Chiefs of Staff saw the day and night missions carried out under the Combined Bomber Offensive as complementary, they were never really coordinated in a strict sense of the word.

As Arthur Ferguson explains, “It was assumed that the ‘area’ bombing of the RAF would be complementary to the daylight campaign, but, owing mainly to differences in tactics and operating potentialities, the two forces in fact seldom achieved more than a general coordination of effort. The Combined Bomber Offensive was thus a combined offensive but not a closely integrated one.”

Back at 40 Berkeley Square, Dick Hughes welcomed the news from Casablanca and noted that Eaker’s lack of interest in operational details gave the EOU a unique opportunity.

In his memoir, Hughes writes that the Casablanca Directive “had furnished us with a list of target priorities, but the directive was purposely so loosely phrased that, in practice, we had virtually complete freedom to conduct operations as we saw fit. Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal, also, with complete wisdom, kept his hands completely off attempting to direct, or control, Eighth Air Force operations, and all decisions were ultimately made by myself, with the cooperation and backing of General [Fred] Anderson at VIII Bomber Command.”

Echoing Hughes’s assessment, Arthur Ferguson writes that “the Casablanca Conference did much to clear the strategic atmosphere, especially in regard to the use of air power. It was thereafter possible for Allied
strategists to plan with new assurance and to think with new clarity. But the work of the conference was done on the level of general policy; although it laid down guiding principles, it did not entertain specific plans.”

Anderson and Hughes, the airman and the analyst, developed a unique and effective working relationship of the sort that is so desirable within an organization, but often not achieved. As Hughes has written, “Fred Anderson completely understood the problems with which I was confronted,” and Hughes understood the issues that Anderson faced.

While Hughes had gone to Sandhurst, Anderson was a 1928 graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point. He had earned his wings a year later and had worked his way through the Air Corps to a position on General Arnold’s staff as deputy director of bombardment before going overseas as Arnold’s personal representative for bombardment matters in both North Africa and England.

Anderson’s right-hand man at the VIII Bomber Command, meanwhile, was a fellow West Pointer, class of 1929, named Charles Glendon Williamson. In the
Howitzer
, the West Point yearbook, it had been said of Cadet Williamson that “his ambitions in life are to make an airplane, do things never before imagined and to make better drawings. May he be successful in both, and any other activities he may undertake in his career as an Army officer.”

If he had not
made
an airplane, he and Anderson now commanded lots of them, and they were doing things that had never—at least not before Billy Mitchell—been imagined.

As in his relationship with Hughes, Anderson worked well with Glen Williamson, though the two were recalled as an odd couple by many who interacted with them. For example, Charles J. V. Murphy, a well-connected Harvard dropout turned freelance journalist—who later authored biographies of Winston Churchill as well as of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—colorfully described the contrast in a 1944 article for
Life
magazine.