The Combined Bomber Offensive 1943 - 1944: The Air Attack on Nazi Germany. L. Douglas Keeney
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The Combined Bomber Offensive 1943 - 1944: The Air Attack on Nazi Germany
L. Douglas Keeney
Copyright © 2013 L. Douglas Keeney
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2013-03-14
Acknowledgments
Original manuscript found at the Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama
All Photographs: Courtesy The National Archives
FOREWORD
During a dinner party on the evening of November 28, 1943, Russian Marshal Joseph Stalin raised his glass to toast President Franklin D. Roosevelt during their first Big Three conference in Tehran, although one might have wondered what on Earth there was to celebrate. The war against Hitler was at a stalemate. The Germans had just defeated the British on Leros and the Allies were now stalled in Italy below Rome. British manpower was taxed to the limit and Prime Minister Winston Churchill now feared the end of it all if he launched D-Day and it failed. He had in fact become so despondent about its prospects that he had a change of heart and was now insisting that D-Day be completely canceled. If it was, said U.S. Army General George Marshall, he would resign.
But one thing was going very, very well, and Stalin saw it and he brought it to everyone’s attention as he rose to toast the President. “Machines,” said Stalin. “I want to tell you, from the Russian point of view, what the President and the United States have done to win the war. The most important thing in this war are machines. The United States has proven that it can turn out from 8,000 to 10,000 airplanes per month. Russia can only turn out at most 3,000 airplanes a month. England turns out 3,000 to 3,500 airplanes a month which are principally heavy bombers. The United States therefore is a country of machines. Without the use of Lend-Lease, we would lose this war.”[i]
It was just what the leaders needed to hear and it turned around the war. Yes, combat had stalled in Italy and Churchill had his fears but there was America and behind the scenes were more than a million fresh American soldiers coming into combat — and tens of thousands of American bombers and fighters. Churchill had no reason to fear D-Day. What would have sent chills up and down his spine was how poorly these machines were being employed. Until now, the United States’ Eighth Air Force had failed to use their machines against Nazi Germany with any degree of effectiveness whatsoever. Through November of 1943, American B-17s and B-24s were being destroyed at rates that made the completion of 25 missions statistically impossible. The October raids into Germany had been so thoroughly savaged by the Luftwaffe that we had decided to halt deep mission altogether. Barring something new, the prospect of getting soldiers ashore on the Normandy Beaches seemed dim indeed, Churchill’s cold feet notwithstanding.
But then came January 1, 1944 and with it a complete overhaul of the air war and the creation of the United States Strategic Air Forces. General Carl A. “Tooey” Spaatz came in from North Africa to take over, General Jimmy Doolittle was give command of the Eighth Air Force, and a firebrand named Pete Quesada arrived and honed his Ninth Air Force into a killing machine. Strategic bombing was validated. Air-to-ground interdiction was pioneered. Bridge busting was pioneered. Air photo reconnaissance was pioneered. The air war turned around and in just five months the Luftwaffe was so beaten down that they could scarcely mount a single mission against the landings. It would go down as the most effective air campaign in the history of military aviation. And D-Day was saved.
But none of this happened the way we remember it today.
On D-Day the Germans completed every single attack on the D-Day beaches with just a few dozen combat losses. One German squadron shot up the soldiers on the beaches then spent that afternoon beside a pool working on their tans. That morning, the bombers of the Eighth Air Force missed 100% of their critical targets and left the soldiers on Omaha beach exposed to German coastal batteries and pillboxes that had been untouched by bombs.
But that was a mere blemish on what had already been accomplished through the Combined Bomber Offensive. The greatest air campaign had already so badly defeated the German Luftwaffe and its supply of aircraft that on the day of its greatest failure, the German Air Force was in such tattered remains that it scarcely mattered.
Stalin toasted the machines but it was The Pointblank Directive that saved D-Day and made June 6, 1944 the crowning achievement of air warfare, a victory on a scale of air combat never before seen, and never seen since. For five solitary months the airmen of the Eighth, Ninth and Fifteenth Air Forces combined their more than 20,000 bombers and fighters to create an arc of destruction 130 miles wide around the D-Day beaches. The flew treetop-level reconnaissance missions, bombed radar sites, aircraft factories, more than 100 German airfields while freeing their fighters to engage in air-to-air combat that cost the Germans 90% of their frontline European airplanes.
And it culminated on D-Day. Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower summed up what the Combined Bomber Offensive meant as he and his son John walked on Omaha Beach one week after D-Day. Armored trucks and tanks crawled bumper-to-bumper in a traffic jam as thick as rush hour traffic in Manhattan. Said the young Eisenhower to his father, “You’d never get away with this if you didn’t have air supremacy.”
His father didn’t miss a beat. “If I didn’t have air superiority, I wouldn’t be here.”[ii]
In restoring this set it was impossible to decipher every word but it was possible to maintain the original integrity of the documents so that historians and buffs can read what was written about the war as it was written fresh from the victory over Nazi Germany. Mistakes will be obvious to the well trained eye and many spellings have changed over the years and some small villages have simply been swallowed up by the larger metro areas. History even refutes some of the numbers and conclusions contained on these pages – aerial kills are but one glaring example – but there’s more to this than that. In today’s world of quick answers and Wikipedia reporting, it’s rare to find an original manuscript with the original voice and the old feelings – but through that old voice events take on a substance the bare facts – and time—have erased. It is impossible to write without some emotion, some bias, some inflexion points and the restoration of old documents allows us to immerse ourselves in those old emotions today as we examine events so far back in our history.
There is also a sense of a war evolving. As of the writing of this document, there was no formal name given to the “ski” sites bombed by the Eighth but we now know they were rocket launch sites. Additionally, the now well known V-1 and V-2 rockets were then called “pilotless aircraft.”
We sense the evolution of war in other ways, too. Blind bombing sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t work and often worked best on coastal targets because the radar could easily paint the land-sea divide. But coastal targets were relatively unimportant and often the radar simply failed to work. The experiments continued and we sense the evolutionary nature of it all although the author refrains from casting judgment. We now know, however, that it went on to become a significant technology for Curtis Lemay in the Pacific.
It is clear that deep penetration bombing missions into Germany were failing to do significant damage and, worse, that they were sustaining horrific losses. Through November of 1943, these missions were simply death traps for our bomber crews. The author sees this but continues a conceit that ultimately doomed Ira Eaker. The answer to the horrific losses of bombers wasn’t a larger bombing force or multiple bombing missions on one day. The answer also wasn’t drop tanks alone. The true answer was a complete change in one’s mindset about