President Franklin Roosevelt often reviewed briefing papers as he ate his breakfast. They would arrive overnight and be brought to him by his closest advisor and troubleshooter, Harry Hopkins. On the morning of September 6, 1942, about a week before Walt Rostow and Chandler Morse joined Dick Hughes at 40 Berkeley Square, the document was entitled Requirements for Air Ascendancy, 1942, but it would be known simply as AWPD-42. The preparation of this report, essentially the sequel to AWPD-1 and AWPD-2 of 1941, had begun only eleven days earlier under the personal direction of the president. Through the spring and summer of 1942—with the exception of the unlikely but welcome American victory at Midway—the course of the war still favored Germany and Japan. Roosevelt asked Arnold what his airmen would have to do in order to have complete air ascendancy over the enemy.
The president reviewed the report while he sipped his coffee, then picked up the phone and called Secretary of War Henry Stimson to say that he approved it. Stimson was caught off guard. He hadn’t seen the report. Nor had Chief of Staff General George Marshall, when Stimson phoned him. Nor had Marshall’s fellow members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—Admiral Ernest King (the chief of naval operations) and Admiral William Leahy (the chief of staff to Roosevelt and, since July 1942, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff)—although they all had their copies within hours.
Roosevelt had already approved it, so this was a moot point.
The fourth member of the Joint Chiefs, General Hap Arnold, had his copy before anyone. His was the name on the return address of the envelopes.
When the president had ordered him to assemble the report, Arnold had recalled Possum Hansell and Malcolm Moss from England and put them in a room with Hal George, Larry Kuter, and other veterans of the earlier air war plans.
AWPD-42 reiterated the agreements made earlier in the year, calling for the USAAF to undertake the “systematic destruction of selected vital elements of the German military and industrial machine through precision bombing in daylight.” At the same time, in accordance with their own stated doctrine, the RAF would be making “mass air attacks of industrial areas at night, to break down morale [which was expected to have] a pronounced effect upon production.”
A dramatic thousand-plane RAF raid on the night of May 30–31, 1942, was pointed to as an example. This single mission had destroyed an estimated 12 percent of the principal industrial and residential districts in the city of Cologne.
More importantly, AWPD-42 set out specific numbers, specific allocations of resources, to make it all happen. It called for the USAAF to have an operational bomber force of nearly three thousand four-engine bombers deployed in the European theater within sixteen months. The US Navy did not like the emphasis on allocation of resources to the USAAF at a time when they wanted an allocation of four-engine bombers to use as long-range patrol planes, but the president had spoken. In fact, he later insisted on American aircraft production being ramped up so that everyone would get the planes they wanted.
Like its predecessors, AWPD-42 was still just a road map, an educated guess, albeit a better educated guess than AWPD-1 and AWPD-2, even though the Eighth Air Force heavy bomber offensive had barely just begun.
Fewer than one hundred four-engine bombers were operational with the Eighth Air Force when AWPD-42 reached the president’s bedside, but the report confidently promised that if the recommended force was in place by the first of January 1944, then the invasion of Festung Europa could be undertaken by the summer of that year. AWPD-42 may have been just a road map, but it was the road map that would lead the USAAF to Big Week, and ultimately to victory.
On August 17, 1942, six weeks after the Eighth Air Force made its Fourth of July raid with borrowed light bombers, the heavy bombers were finally ready to strike. A dozen Flying Fortresses of the 97th Bombardment Group took off from Polebrook in East Anglia on the first Eighth Air Force heavy bomber mission. Of the heavy bombardment groups allocated to the Eighth Air Force, only the 97th had become operational.
Led personally by General Eaker, commander of the VIII Bomber Command, they attacked a target selected by Hughes personally—the railroad marshaling yards at Rouen-Sotteville, near the city of Rouen in Normandy. Attacking a marshaling yard would theoretically impact the transportation network by damaging the interchange of freight trains on a number of intersecting lines.
It was a great boost to Eighth Air Force morale to know that the B-17s had finally bombed their first target, and that they had done so without losses and with greater accuracy than had been expected from fresh, inexperienced crews.
In Washington, the USAAF Air Staff seized upon this moment to insist that the previously theoretical doctrine of daylight precision bombing had been vindicated by this first mission. In a memo to General Marshall prepared for Arnold’s signature, it was asserted that the result of the mission “again verifies the soundness of our policy of the precision bombing of strategic objectives rather than mass (blitz) bombing of large, city size areas [as the RAF was doing]. The Army Air Forces early recognized that the effective use of air power on a world wide basis equired the ability to hit small targets from high altitudes.”
However, many USAAF officers, including Ira Eaker, later commented that the comparison to the British effort was unfair and “most unfortunate,” given that those in the field wished to maintain a harmonious working relationship with the RAF.
Two days after Rouen, twenty-two B-17s attacked airfields near Abbeville, home of Jagdgeschwader 26, one of the Luftwaffe’s most highly regarded fighter wings. The objective of this bombing was to divert German fighters at the same time the Allies made their commando raid on the French coastal city of Dieppe. According to Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, the air commander for the Dieppe operation, “The raid on Abbeville undoubtedly struck a heavy blow at the German fighter organization at a very critical moment during the operations [and thus] had a very material effect on the course of the operations.”
Referring, no doubt, to Leigh-Mallory’s comments, Ira Eaker effused contentedly in an August 27 memo to Hap Arnold that the British “acknowledge willingly and cheerfully the great accuracy of our bombing, the surprising hardihood of our bombardment aircraft and the skill and tenacity of our crews.”
Five additional raids were flown by the Eighth Air Force through the end of August, striking targets ranging from shipyards to airfields across an arc from northern France to Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
As Dick Hughes observed, “It really did not matter, at this early stage, what we bombed.” The idea was that the crews needed to gain experience before flying into highly defended German airspace.
In an August 1 memo, General Ira Eaker wrote that his VIII Bomber Command had as its role the “destruction of carefully chosen strategic targets, with an initial subsidiary purpose [of determining its] capacity to destroy pinpoint targets by daylight accuracy bombing and our ability to beat off fighter opposition and to evade antiaircraft opposition.”
In other words, the secondary mission was to prove that the primary mission was possible!
The airpower historian Arthur B. Ferguson of Duke University writes in “Origins of the Combined Bomber Offensive” in Volume II of Army Air Forces in World War II, “These early missions were less important for what they contributed directly to the Allied war effort than for what they contributed indirectly by testing and proving the doctrine of strategic daylight bombing. In either instance it was as difficult and dangerous to strive for quick results as it was natural for observers, especially those at some distance from the scene of operations, to look impatiently for them.”
These missions, beginning with the one on the fourth of July, marked a timid beginning for a strategic offensive, but even this was about to be interrupted by Operation Torch.
The only major American ground offensive operation against the Germans that was on the drawing boards for the foreseeable future, Torch was the centerpiece of Allied offensive actions against Germany in the second half of 1942. General Erwin Rommel’s German Afrika Korps had proven itself to be as successful as the blitzkrieging German armies in Europe in 1940. He controlled Tunisia and Libya, and—in victory after victory—he had pushed the British deep into Egypt. Meanwhile, in his rear, Morocco and Algeria were safe and secure, controlled by the Vichy French, Germany’s nominal allies. Planned for early November, Torch was designed to land Allied troops in Morocco and Algeria, and to relieve Rommel of his secure rear.
General Eisenhower, who was in overall command of Torch, and the highest ranking American officer in Europe, was keen to concentrate maximum American firepower in support of this operation. This included the bombers of the Eighth Air Force. He let it be known that he was seriously considering the idea of suspending the Eighth Air Force campaign when it had barely started, in order to concentrate all of the Eighth’s bombers under Twelfth Air Force command in the Mediterranean Theater.
While understanding and recognizing the strategic goals of Operation Torch, Spaatz naturally argued in favor of continuing his strategic campaign. Every distraction of Eighth Air Force assets meant a postponement of the validation of the strategic concept that Spaatz and his air commanders sought most feverishly. As Arthur Ferguson recalls, “The delay was the more vexing because from an early stage in war planning the bomber campaign against Germany had been conceived as the first offensive to be conducted by United States forces.”
The disagreement between Spaatz and Eisenhower over the use of airpower was more practical than theoretical. Eisenhower may have come from the ground forces, but he understood the potential of airpower. This is why he wanted as much of it as possible to be part of Torch. Spaatz, the airman, wanted no interruption to his aspiration to continue demonstrating airpower’s strategic potential. The argument came about because in the autumn of 1942, there were not yet enough USAAF aircraft in Europe to please both men.
It was only because of the fact that Eisenhower was quite fond of Spaatz personally that the strategic air campaign was not suspended indefinitely in September 1942. “From the time of his arrival at London in July [1942] he was never long absent from my side until the last victorious shot had been fired in Europe,” Eisenhower recalls in his wartime memoir, Crusade in Europe. “On every succeeding day of almost three years of active war I had new reasons for thanking the gods of war and the War Department for giving me ‘Tooey’ Spaatz. He shunned the limelight and was so modest and retiring that the public probably never became fully cognizant of his value.”
Indeed, Spaatz was able to argue the case of the strategic operations convincingly, and on September 5, Eisenhower agreed—but only to allow Spaatz to continue Eighth Air Force heavy bomber operations. Eisenhower diverted personnel, as well as the Eighth Air Force fighters, smaller tactical bombers, and two heavy bomber groups, to the Torch operations. Even the VIII Air Force Service Command was being asked to support aircraft assigned to Operation Torch.
Spaatz’s narrow victory was almost pyrrhic. He had won the right to continue his campaign, but he had too few bombers to make it more than a token effort. The loss of half the fighters previously assigned to the VIII Fighter Command also put the VIII Bomber Command in a position of having to become more dependent on RAF Fighter Command for fighter escorts.
This came at the same time that RAF Bomber Command was steadily increasing its ability to conduct strategic missions against Germany, something that the Eighth Air Force had yet to do. While RAF Bomber Command could now muster strike forces of a hundred or more bombers for their nighttime missions against Germany, the Eighth Air Force lagged far behind. As Arthur Ferguson reminds us, “The basic concept of a combined bomber offensive presumed complementary operations of RAF night bombers and AAF day bombers.”
However, the two forces were still far from complementary. Most of the Eighth Air Force August missions involved a dozen or fewer Flying Fortresses. As late as mid-September, Spaatz noted in a memo to General George Stratemeyer, Hap Arnold’s chief of staff, that the British were in a position to speak with authority on bombing operations and that at the time, the RAF was the only Allied entity persistently engaged in “pounding hell out of Germany.”
During September, as the 91st and 301st Bombardment Groups became operational and began flying their first missions, Spaatz and Eaker were able to muster at least 30 aircraft for several missions, but there just weren’t as many as they needed. Though 328 Flying Fortresses and 105 Liberators had been deployed overseas by the end of August, preparations for Operation Torch, as well as requirements in the Pacific, had syphoned off much of the flow of equipment that Spaatz might have like to see go to the Eighth Air Force.
On October 9, the Eighth Air Force was at last able to launch more than 100 bombers on a single day. Including two dozen Liberators from the newly operational 93rd Bombardment Group, the Eighth sent out 108 heavy bombers, of which 69 hit their primary target—the industrial complex around the French city of Lille.
Calling the Lille mission a “minor climax,” Arthur Ferguson writes enthusiastically that it was “the first mission to be conducted on a really adequate scale and it marked, as it were, the formal entry of the American bombers into the big league of strategic bombardment. Then, for the first time, the German high command saw fit to mention publicly the activities of the Flying Fortresses, although they had already made thirteen appearances over enemy territory. Lille’s heavy industries contributed vitally to German armament and transport.”
However, Ferguson gives low marks to the bombing precision achieved, noting that it “did not demonstrate the degree of accuracy noticeable in some of the earlier and lesser efforts,” although he goes on to say that “despite a scattered bomb pattern and numerous duds, several bombs fell in the target area—enough, in any event, to cause severe damage.” He reports Spaatz saying that the “bombing had been accurate in relation to European [RAF] standards rather than according to any absolute standard.”
Nevertheless, referring to the VIII Bomber Command study entitled The First 1,100 Bombers Dispatched, Ferguson writes that “by early October, the first fourteen missions had been on the whole very encouraging. Targets had been attacked with reasonable frequency, especially during the first three weeks, and hit with a fair degree of accuracy. During the first nine missions, the Germans had evidently refused to take the day bombing seriously. The American forces had been small and the fighter escort heavy, and so the Germans had sent up few fighters, preferring to take the consequences of light bombing raids rather than to risk the loss of valuable aircraft. And when the German fighters did take to the air, they exhibited a marked disinclination to close with the bomber formation.”
Citing memos from Eaker to Spaatz, and from Eaker to Hap Arnold, Ferguson goes on to say that “the bombing had been more accurate than most observers had expected. Indeed, it was a tribute of sorts to the accuracy of the Americans that after the ninth mission enemy fighter opposition suddenly increased. And it was a source of satisfaction to the AAF commanders that the B-17s and the B-24s appeared more than able to hold their own against fighter attacks.”
RAF Bomber Command planners, who had always been skeptical of the USAAF precision daylight bombing doctrine, were now willing to give the Yanks some measure of credit. As Arthur Ferguson puts it, “British observers in September and October were at least ready to admit that the AAF day bombers and the policy of day bombardment showed surprising promise.”
Peter Masefield, the popular aviation journalist and air correspondent for the Sunday Times, had written adamantly in August that “there is no doubt that day bombing at long range is not possible as a regular operation unless fighter opposition is previously overwhelmed or until we have something too fast for the fighters to intercept.”
On October 18, after the Lille mission, he qualified his stance somewhat, asking in the Sunday Times, “Can we carry day air war into Germany?”—which had hitherto been answered in the unqualified negative but was now subject to a new assessment…. “The Americans have taught us much; we still have much to learn—and much we can teach.”
Originally, Spaatz and Eisenhower had agreed that the loaning of Eighth Air Force assets to Operation Torch would leave the VIII Bomber Command mission substantially intact, but by October, this command had been asked to part with two heavy bomber groups, 1,098 officers, including pilots and navigators, and 7,101 enlisted men.
According to minutes of an Eighth Air Force commanders meeting on November 1, Spaatz had been heard to quip wryly, “What is left of the Eighth Air Force after the impact of Torch?”
In response to this, one might ask, “What might have happened to Torch without the impact of the Eighth Air Force?”
Whatever the answers to these hypotheticals, the fact is that Torch succeeded. Indeed, November 1942 provided a welcome turn of events for the Allies in North Africa. On November 4, the British finally broke Rommel’s momentum with a victory at El Alamein, just sixty miles from Alexandria, Egypt, and on November 8, Operation Torch put a one-hundred-thousand-man, mainly American, ground force ashore in Algeria and Morocco against quickly fading resistance. The landings were a big boost to American morale both at home and among the troops overseas.
For the Eighth Air Force, however, November brought only bad weather and a reorienting of its priorities. In late October, Eisenhower ordered another change of direction. The Eighth had not had to relinquish all of its heavy bombers to support Operation Torch directly, but they were now directed to use their range and payload capacity to support Operation Torch indirectly.
Eisenhower understood strategic airpower well enough to know that a key principle is cutting off a threat at its source, rather than in the field where it becomes a threat. He had a threat that was in need of being clipped at its source.
One of the most aggravating vexations for Allied planners throughout the war thus far had been the German U-boat campaign. While Britain’s Royal Navy had successfully won its campaign against the surface fleet of the German Kreigsmarine, multiple “wolf packs” of submarines lurked beneath the surface of the Atlantic. Since the beginning of the war, they had proven to be the one German naval weapon that most worried the British. They had long been one, preying upon the convoys supplying the United Kingdom from its overseas dominions, and now they were a serious threat to the convoys bringing American men and materiel to the island nation.
As Timothy Runyan and Jan Copes write in their book The Battle of the Atlantic, the U-boats sunk 607,247 tons of Allied shipping in May 1942, the month that Dick Hughes came back to England. This was part of the reason that he came by air. The following month, the total tonnage lost was 700,235, and in October, the German submarine fleet sent 619,417 tons to the bottom.
Recognizing that Operation Torch depended on safe passage of troop ships from the United States, Eisenhower ordered Spaatz to use the Eighth Air Force against the U-boat pens, which the Kreigsmarine had constructed along the Atlantic coast of France, at places such as Saint-Nazaire and Lorient, as well as at Bordeaux, Brest, and La Pallice. Because nighttime area bombardment would be ineffective against reinforced concrete submarine pens that required precision strikes, the job could not be done by RAF Bomber Command.
Eisenhower had told Spaatz pointedly that he deemed the reversal of the U-boat threat “to be one of the basic requirements to the winning of the war.”
When the Eighth Air Force came to Berkeley Square for a plan, Dick Hughes was pessimistic, telling the generals that “with the size of force and the types of bombs available to us, we could do very little damage to these massive structures, and that I doubted that by such attacks the Eighth Air Force could appreciably affect the outcome of the submarine war. I also pointed out that the anti-aircraft defenses around each of these bases were extremely heavy, and we would probably pay a heavy price for conducting what were virtually training operations over such targets.”
Hughes was right. Ultimately the attacks were ineffective against reinforced concrete, and the losses suffered by Eighth Air Force crews were high.
“The crews themselves quickly got onto the fact that the small amount of damage they were doing… was in no way affecting the outcome of the war,” Hughes writes. “We were proving our point to the British that, with fighter escort, we could operate in daylight over enemy territory with acceptable casualties, but the unfortunate air crews were not, personally, as interested in proving this point, with their own lives, as were the generals, and crew morale began to become a serious problem.”
Hughes appealed to both General Spaatz and General Eaker in an attempt to “get these useless attacks abandoned.” However, so serious was the U-boat threat that the attacks continued past the successful completion of Operation Torch. It was not until June 1943, by which time the threat had been curbed by more effective naval escorts, that the campaign against the submarine pens was finally discontinued as a priority.
After the premature euphoria of September and early October, the winter brought a maze of difficulties for the Eighth Air Force. The weather, which caused some missions to be canceled, also caused about 40 percent of the missions launched over the ensuing three months to be aborted. This was mainly manifested in targets obscured by cloud cover, which the weather reporting teams had failed to predict. The weather also resulted in mechanical failures. Aircraft taking off in mud and rain often found themselves with frozen guns or with flight deck windows encrusted in frost. According to the Eighth Air Force Operational Research Section (ORS) day raid reports, malfunctioning bomb bay doors were such a problem that some crews took to removing them.
The weather, combined with the inexperience of the crews, also made for navigational errors and impacted bombing accuracy. Sometimes, this involved bombs missing their targets with disastrous results if the bombs hit French civilian residential areas instead of submarine pens. Other times, the errors verged on the almost comical. On November 18, for example, one bomber formation bombed the submarine pens at Saint-Nazaire under the erroneous notion that they were attacking the pens at La Pallice, a hundred miles away.
The ORS reports also indicate that the mounting tempo of battle damage was putting heavy demands on a still-meager maintenance depot infrastructure, which kept a growing percentage of the bombers off the mission-ready list. In September, 13 percent of the aircraft flying missions came back with damage, which could be repaired. In October, this increased to 38 percent, and by December it was above 42 percent. However, the fact that the damage could be repaired was only half the story. Hampered by shortages of trained personnel and parts, the depots fell behind to the point where half the fleet was in the shop and any moment.
The issue of damage done to the targets by the bombing eclipsed all other matters, consuming a great deal of the time of the Operational Research Section. The precision that had been promised by the theorists had yet to materialize in 1942. Indeed, when the ORS “crater-counters” studied post-strike photoreconnaissance imagery, they identified the impact points of only about half of the bombs that were known to have been dropped. The other half had either been duds, or bombs that had missed their targets by so wide a margin as to not even appear in the aerial photographs. This raised the obvious concerns about errant bombs striking French civilians.
Of course, in 1942, the art of post-strike analysis was still in its infancy. It was not until after the start of 1943 that a routine for systematic analysis was developed. As with everything pertaining to the as-yet unproven doctrine of strategic airpower, there was a steep learning curve.
Enemy interceptor attacks were second only to bombing accuracy among the operational concerns for the Eighth Air Force planners. Defensive armament aboard the bomber served as a partial deterrent, causing the attackers to adjust their tactics, such as to make quick passes, rather than sustained attacks. A heavy bomber without tail guns, for example, was a doomed airplane. A smaller airplane could have tried to outmaneuver a fighter, but a heavy bomber would be susceptible to having a fighter come up behind and almost leisurely chew it apart.
At the same time, the gunners also claimed their share of downed fighters. Out of the October 9 strike package, gunners aboard the 69 bombers attacking Lille destroyed 21, probably shot down another 21, and damaged 15 German interceptors. The gunners had initially claimed that they shot down 102 German fighters, which would have been more than 15 percent of the estimated Luftwaffe fighter strength in Western Europe. On further scrutiny, it was determined that there were a huge number of multiple claims in which gunners from multiple bombers were shooting at the same fighter.
What this illustrates, other than the obvious need for more careful debriefing of gunners, was the importance of having the gunners from multiple aircraft laying down interlocking fields of fire, thus creating a mutually beneficial defensive zone.
A study conducted by the Eighth Air Force Operations Analysis Section concluded that large numbers of bombers flying in formation would give one another decent protection against fighters. While such a tight formation would then be more susceptible to antiaircraft fire, this would be only in the vicinity of the target, and therefore it would be for shorter duration than the fighter attacks, which took place over a longer duration.
On November 23, the heavy bombers of the Eighth Air Force first met the man who would become their deadly nemesis.
Oberleutnant Egon Mayer was a twenty-five-year-old pilot who was born on the shores of Lake Constance in the penultimate year of World War I. He had joined the Luftwaffe in 1937 and first flew in combat with Jagdgeschwader 2 during the Battle of France in June 1940. Flying against the RAF over southern England, he became an air ace four times over by August 1941, scoring twenty aerial victories, most of them against pilots flying the RAF’s best fighter aircraft, the Spitfire. For this, he was awarded the Iron Cross. Within the next year, the young Luftwaffe ace increased his score to fifty, then added two more—both Spitfires—on August 19, 1942, his twenty-fifth birthday.
In November, he was named Gruppenkommandeur of III Gruppe of Jagdgeschwader 2. In the meantime, Mayer had studied Eighth Air Force defensive tactics and had observed a critical point of weakness in the Flying Fortresses and Liberators.
On November 23, Egon Mayer first approached the heavy bombers of the Eighth Air Force with the fruits of his observations, and the bombers met Egon Mayer head-on. While gun barrels protruded from the top, the bottom, the rear, and the sides of the bombers, their front was their Achilles’ heel. Some of the B-17Es and B-17Fs had a single .30-caliber handheld gun, firing through one of four eyelets just off-center of the nose, while B-24Ds had a single .50-caliber center nose gun that was mounted to fire below horizontal only. Both had .50-caliber side-firing nose guns, but all the bombers had a blind spot in front.
As the bombers approached Saint-Nazaire that day, Mayer led III Gruppe up to meet them. His newly developed tactic of attacking the lead aircraft head-on worked to deadly effect. He personally shot down two of the Flying Fortresses and one of the Liberators that the VIII Bomber Command lost that day.
Because of the rapid rate of closure in a head-on attack, it demanded great skill on the part of the fighter pilot, but in the right hands—such as those of Egon Mayer—such a tactic could be deadly. Soon, Luftwaffe pilots across Europe were following Mayer’s lead, while in the United States, Boeing and Consolidated engineers responded with the inclusion of powered nose turrets with twin .50-caliber machine guns. These would become standard in the B-17G, as well as the B-24G, B-24H, and B-24J, but these aircraft would not reach the Eighth Air Force in significant numbers until the latter part of 1943.
The legacy of Egon Mayer’s brainstorm would be with the Eighth Air Force through to the end of World War II. However, Egon Mayer would not. He was shot down and killed by Lieutenant Walter Gresham, flying a USAAF P-47 fighter, while escorting Eighth Air Force bombers, on March 2, 1944. By this time, however, Mayer had claimed 102 Allied aircraft, 26 of them Eighth Air Force four-engine bombers.
November 1942 brought big organizational changes at the upper levels of command of American forces in Europe. In the wake of the dramatic shift in the strategic situation in North Africa, Eisenhower moved south from England to become commander of the North African Theater of Operations, US Army (NATOUSA), and later commander of the joint Anglo-American Allied Forces Headquarters (AFHQ), the operational command staff for the Mediterranean Theater of Operations (MTO).
When Eisenhower moved, he took Spaatz with him. The man who, as Eighth Air Force chief, had resisted transfer of heavy bombers to the Twelfth Air Force became commander of the Twelfth Air Force in December 1942. Four months later, as Eisenhower became the supreme Allied commander in the Mediterranean, Spaatz was named as commander of the joint Allied Northwest African Air Forces (NAAF), which included the Twelfth Air Force, and which was later a component of the Mediterranean Air Command, headed by RAF Air Marshal Arthur Tedder.
“I had left General Spaatz in England and now I called him forward to take on this particular task,” Eisenhower writes in Crusade in Europe. “We merely improvised controlling machinery and gave General Spaatz the title of ‘Acting Deputy Commander in Chief for Air.’ Initially, the commander of the American [Twelfth] Air Force in North Africa was Major General James Doolittle, who had sprung into fame as the leader of the raid on Tokyo. He was a dynamic personality and a bundle of energy. It took him some time to reconcile himself to shouldering his responsibilities as the senior United States air commander to the exclusion of opportunity for going out to fly a fighter plane against the enemy. But he had the priceless quality of learning from experience. He became one of our really fine commanders.”
When the USAAF Fifteenth Air Force was created in 1943 to become the strategic equivalent of the Eighth Air Force in the MTO, Doolittle became its first commander.
The plan had been for Eisenhower and Spaatz to return to England after Torch in anticipation of a cross-channel invasion of Festung Europa from the United Kingdom. However, as further actions in the Mediterranean that were planned for 1943—specifically the invasions of Sicily and Italy—required their attention, the return would be delayed.
Meanwhile back in England, the post-Torch command shuffle brought Ira Eaker up from VIII Bomber Command to head the entire Eighth Air Force, while Major General Frederick Lewis Anderson Jr., previously Deputy Director of Bombardment at USAAF headquarters, who had been Hap Arnold’s representative “on bombardment matters” in the ETO, was named to head the VIII Bomber Command. As Henry Berliner, Dick Hughes’s immediate superior, became incapacitated with spinal meningitis, Hughes was promoted to full colonel and took charge of the Eighth Air Force G-5 (operational planning section) and, as such, became an assistant to Eaker.
It was not a marriage made in heaven.
“General Eaker’s personality and characteristics were very different from those of General Spaatz,” Hughes recalls. “General Spaatz’s interest had always been intimately concerned with the conduct of operations, and he very largely delegated day to day administrative problems to others. General Eaker kept even the most minute administrative details in his own hands, and seemed to have very little time, or inclination, for discussing operational plans. For the ensuing year and a half the decision as to which targets our strategic bombers should attack fell squarely upon my shoulders. With no sympathetic intellectual support, or understanding, from my commanding general it was a difficult and heavy burden.”
On the other hand, Hughes has high praise for the new chief of VIII Bomber Command.
“Fred Anderson completely understood the problems with which I was confronted, and whenever I was near the breaking point I would drive down to Bomber Command, unburden all my cares and worries on this truly great man, and return again to Eighth Air Force Headquarters, and strong enough to continue ordering out [young American airmen] to their deaths.”