Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (15 page)

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 that 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 firestorms; 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.”

As Speer had observed, Hitler’s plan and Harris’s whirlwind had now been inflicted on the Reich’s largest port. Luckily, Hitler now demanded that Hermann Göring, the commander in chief of his Luftwaffe, take the steps necessary to build a fleet of four-engine bombers for the Luftwaffe.

The Eighth Air Force passed through the smoke from Hamburg’s smoldering ruins twice during this period, on July 25 and again the next day, as part of a series of precision daytime strikes on shipyards building U-boats, which also included another round of strikes against Keil. Much of the American attention during these early days of Pointblank was focused on aircraft factories in Germany. Included were those of Heinkel and Focke-Wulf in Warnemünde, and of Feisler and Focke-Wulf near Kassel.

Through June and July, as the weather improved, the Eighth Air Force had been spending a great deal of time alternating between aircraft-related targets in Germany and aircraft-related targets in France. The latter, less enthusiastically defended by the Luftwaffe than those in the Reich, provided a welcome break for the crews and a case study in the importance of fighter escorts.

As Operation Pointblank oriented the Eighth Air Force toward the German aircraft industry, it is worth a reminder that
French
aircraft factories had been on the Eighth Air Force target list off and on since October 1942, when thirty Flying Fortresses first hit the Avions Potez plant at Méaulte in the Picardy region of northern France.

One of the most overlooked aspects of German aircraft acquisition during World War II is the important part played by the
French
aircraft industry. Under the terms of a July 1941 agreement, plane makers in France were allowed to continue operating, so long as two-thirds of their production was for Germany.

As Julian Jackson writes in
France: The Dark Years
, “The total contribution of the French aircraft industry to Germany was not insignificant: 27 percent of Germany’s transport planes in 1942, 42 percent in 1943, and 49 percent in 1944 had come from France. Planes produced in France supplied Rommel’s African army in 1942 and German troops at Stalingrad in 1943. If Vichy had not collaborated in this matter, the Germans would probably have dismantled French aviation factories and reassembled them in Germany. But there were more positive motives for cooperation. German orders kept the French aircraft industry going, allowed France to envisage building up an air force again, and provided employment to the aircraft workers who had been laid off after the Armistice. Their number had dropped from 250,000 in May 1940, to 40,000 in June; by 1942 it was back to 80,000; by 1944, 100,000. The aircraft industry embodied a paradox which applied to French industry as a whole: the Germans posed a threat to the French economy, but they also provided the only prospect of its [postwar] recovery.”

Allied attacks on French factories would continue through 1943 and into 1944, although the bulk of the attention given to aircraft manufacturing would naturally target combat aircraft—made mainly in Germany—rather than factories building transports.

During the last week of July, when the Eighth Air Force was concentrating mainly on targets inside Germany, Luftwaffe action cost the Americans a loss rate of roughly 8.5 percent of the bombers dispatched. American fighters could escort the bombers to any target in northern France, but it was not until late July that the P-47s received the jettisonable auxiliary fuel tanks that would give them the range to accompany the bombers to
some
of the targets in Germany.

The remarkable North American P-51 Mustang long-range fighter, then in development back in the United States, would be a game-changer of the highest order when it arrived in substantial numbers, but this would not happen until late in the year.