Since January 1943, as William Wyler had been gathering footage for his film, the Eighth Air Force was building up its strength and testing the waters of operations inside Germany. They had been doing so under the general outlines of the preliminary Combined Bomber Offensive targeting plan that was contained in the Casablanca Directive. Meanwhile, the Combined Chiefs of Staff had been developing a more formal plan that would succeed the Casablanca Directive and be implemented on June 10, marking the “official” beginning of the Combined Bomber Offensive.
The origins of this official plan dated back to December 9, 1942, when Hap Arnold decided to have someone in his office come up with a document that went beyond AWPD-42 in addressing the issue of strategic targets, and which addressed targeting scientifically and systematically.
Arnold had ordered Colonel Byron Gates to empanel a “group of operational analysts under your jurisdiction to prepare and submit to me a report analyzing the rate of progressive deterioration that should be anticipated in the German war effort as a result of the increasing air operations we are prepared to employ against its sustaining sources. This study should result in as accurate an estimate as can be arrived at as to the date when this deterioration will have progressed to a point to permit a successful invasion of Western Europe.”
Originally called the Advisory Committee on Bombardment, it was later known more vaguely as the Committee of Operations Analysts (COA). Its form and function were similar—arguably duplicative—to those of Hughes, Kindleberger, Rostow, and the EOU team, but while the EOU was in a secret location in London, the COA was located within reach of Arnold’s own headquarters. While the EOU existed for ongoing operational requirements, the COA theoretically existed to provide Arnold with a onetime single USAAF plan that could ultimately be integrated into the joint directive succeeding the temporary Casablanca Directive.
The function of the COA, like that of the EOU but more general in nature, was to identify “industrial targets in Germany the destruction of which would weaken the enemy most decisively in the shortest possible time.”
The form of the COA was modeled after the EOU paradigm insofar as civilian analysts, in this case mainly bankers and industrialists, were brought in to study the goals of a strategic air campaign against Germany. The most prominent were Edward Earle, of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan & Company, and investment banker Elihu Root Jr., of the New York firm of Root, Clark, Buckner, and Ballantine and the son of the former US senator and secretary of state to Theodore Roosevelt. Also included were Fowler Hamilton from the Board of Economic Warfare, Edward Mason of the OSS, and Boston attorney Guido Perera. Malcolm Moss represented the EOU.
The COA also tapped the expertise of OSS, the Bureau of Economic Warfare, and the State and Treasury departments—as well as the War Production Board, roughly America’s equivalent to Albert Speer’s Armaments Ministry. At the end of January 1943, members of the COA even flew to England to meet with the British Ministry of Economic Warfare and to visit 40 Berkeley Square.
The COA had submitted its report to General Arnold on March 8, 1943, six weeks after Casablanca. “It is better to cause a high degree of destruction in a few really essential industries or services than to cause a small degree of destruction in many industries,” the COA concluded, echoing what Hughes had previously determined. “Results are cumulative and the plan once adopted should be adhered to with relentless determination.”
As Edward Earle told Arthur Ferguson in November 1945, the committee “refrained from stating a formal order of priority for the target systems considered… for reasons of security…. But it is clear from the arguments presented that the systems were listed in descending order of preference.”
With this understanding, the first “system” on the COA list was the German aircraft and aircraft engine industry, which had been third on the priority list in AWPD-1 and second in the list contained in the Casablanca Directive, and which had been Charlie Kindleberger’s assignment at the EOU since March. The petroleum industry also made the top four on all the lists.
The reason that aircraft production—especially single-engine fighter aircraft production—moved up the list was certainly the fact that Eighth Air Force operations were now being seriously impacted by Luftwaffe opposition. It was now clear to all that in order to work through the other items on the list, something would have to be done to lessen Luftwaffe effectiveness.
The notion that the Combined Bomber Offensive should concentrate against the Luftwaffe over all other targets, was underscored by the planners on the Combined Operational Planning Committee (COPC). In an April 9 memo, the British planners summarized this by declaring that “the most formidable weapon being used by the enemy today against our bomber offensive is his fighter force—his single engined fighters by day and his twin engined fighters by night—and the elimination or serious depletion of this force would be the greatest contribution to the furtherance of the joint heavy bomber offensive of the RAF and AAF.”
With this having been agreed, Eaker delegated the operational details to General Anderson at the VIII Bomber Command and General Hansell, who would work with RAF Air Commodore Sidney O. Bufton to come up with a target list. At the EOU, Walt Rostow was assigned as a liaison to the British Air Ministry, with an eye toward making sure that the Americans and the British each knew what the other was doing with regard to the aircraft industry mission.
Second to the aircraft industry in the COA target hierarchy, and to a certain extent related to it, were ball bearings. A simple component, ball bearings, and other anti-friction bearings, were essential not only to fighter aircraft and aircraft engine production, but to a broad spectrum of industrial production, from military vehicles to factory machine tools. Indeed, anti-friction bearings, including roller bearings and ball bearings, were seen as a “bottleneck” industry, one which, if removed from the supply chain, would negatively affect a myriad of industries.
In third place came the petroleum industry, which had topped the AWPD-1 list and had come in at fourth in the Casablanca Directive. Also considered by many to be a bottleneck industry, petroleum was downplayed by other analysts who felt that Germany had adequate standby refining capacity. Nevertheless, Ploesşti in Romania, from which the Reich derived—by some estimates—about 60 percent of its refined petroleum, would be an important future objective for Allied bombers flying from bases in the MTO.
As the postwar Strategic Bombing Survey would later demonstrate, the COA report missed the boat in downplaying the importance of Germany’s synthetic petroleum and rubber industries—but in the spring of 1943, these seemed less important than they actually were. Writing with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, Ferguson observed that the COA was “handicapped by a faulty understanding of the German chemical industry. Synthetic rubber, synthetic oil, nitrogen, methanol, and other important chemicals formed interdependent parts of a single industrial complex. The production of nitrogen and methanol, both of extreme significance in the manufacture of explosives, was heavily concentrated in synthetic oil plants. The attack on synthetic oil, when it finally came, in fact succeeded in producing, as a fortuitous by-product, a marked drop in the production of nitrogen, which in turn contributed to the shortage of explosives experienced by the Wehrmacht in the closing campaigns of the war.”
The COA report was favorably received by British authorities when it was sent across on March 23. Representatives of the Air Ministry, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and the RAF concurred with the major recommendations, agreeing that the principal targets should be related to the aircraft, anti-friction bearing, and petroleum industries.
The principal point of contention was the U-boat campaign. The Americans had greatly downgraded its importance, but the British, so fully dependent on the safety of the sea lanes connecting the United Kingdom to the outside world, still insisted that attacks on shipyards building U-boats remain on the list for Combined Bomber Offensive operations.
Though the U-boat campaign would remain as part of the Combined Bomber Offensive Plan, the problem was being overtaken by events, as naval antisubmarine warfare weapons and tactics began to prove themselves to be a more effective solution to the problem. After victories in the North Atlantic in May 1943, it was clear that detecting and sinking U-boats at sea was far more effective than bombing submarine pens. However, as a compromise, shipyards building U-boats, which were more vulnerable than the heavily reinforced concrete pens, retained a priority on the target lists.
Although the Combined Bomber Offensive was addressed at the May 12–27, 1943, Trident Conference in Washington, the third wartime meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill, it was not a controversial issue, as it had been at Casablanca. It was now a foregone conclusion in which the basic premise had been proven. What did emerge from Trident was the understanding by Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff that the Combined Bomber Offensive was an integral and significant part of the overall strategic plan for the cross-channel invasion of Festung Europa. This massive operation, to be code-named Overlord, was now tentatively scheduled for May 1944.
On May 18, after considerable discussion, the Combined Chiefs of Staff approved the Plan for the Combined Bomber Offensive from the United Kingdom—as presented. This document, in turn, formed the basis for the detailed Pointblank Directive, which was issued on June 10.
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.
Though the arrival of the Mustang would completely alter the balance of power in air-to-air combat over Europe, the Germans also feared the P-47. They feared it for what it represented. Scarcely had the Americans started operating their four-engine bombers over the heart of the Reich, then they audaciously sent their fighters over Germany. The P-47s could not penetrate much farther than Aachen or Emden, but they were in German skies.
General Adolf Galland, the Luftwaffe’s general der Jagdflieger, or inspector general of fighter units, was deeply troubled by this and understood that this was only the beginning. A fighter pilot himself, Galland had commanded Jagdgeschwader 26 in 1940–1941, and had scored nearly one hundred victories flying against the Royal Air Force before being put in charge of the entire fighter force in November 1941. As soon as he became aware of there being American fighters over Germany, he informed his boss, Hermann Göring, as well as Hitler himself.
Göring reacted not merely with disbelief, but with a refusal to believe! Albert Speer, who was present at a meeting between Göring and Galland when the topic came up, paints a picture of a conversation that borders on the surreal.
“What’s the idea of telling the Führer that American fighters have penetrated into the territory of the Reich?” Göring snarled accusatorially at Galland.
“Herr Reichsmarschall,” Galland replied calmly, “they will soon be flying even deeper.”
“That’s nonsense, Galland, what gives you such fantasies?” Göring said emphatically. “That’s pure bluff!”
“Those are the facts, Herr Reichsmarschall!” Galland explained. “American fighters have been shot down over Aachen. There is no doubt about it!”
“That is simply not true, Galland,” Göring insisted. “It’s impossible.”
“You might go and check it yourself, sir; the downed planes are there at Aachen.”
“Come now, Galland, let me tell you something. I’m an experienced fighter pilot myself,” Göring said, although that had been a quarter of a century earlier, during World War I. “I know what is possible. But I know what isn’t, too. Admit you made a mistake. What must have happened is that they were shot down much farther to the west. I mean, if they were very high when they were shot down they could have glided quite a distance farther before they crashed.”
“Glided to the east, sir?” Galland asked impassively. “If my plane were shot up…”
Göring seethed. “Now then, Herr Galland. I officially assert that the American fighter planes did not reach Aachen.”
“But, sir, they were there!”
“I herewith give you an official order that they weren’t there!” Göring said with finality. “Do you understand? The American fighters were not there! Get that! I intend to report that to the Führer. You have my official order!”
“Orders are orders, sir!” Galland smiled wryly.
The delusional Göring still had half a year before he would be compelled to issue an order to the effect that the Mustangs did not exist. For those six months, bombers reaching past Emden or Aachen would do so without their “little friends.” It was something they would rather not have had to do, but there were Pointblank targets outside the range of the USAAF fighter escorts that just could not wait. Topping that list, of course, were those of the Pointblank Directive and the campaign against the German aircraft industry.
To date, these attacks had focused on the Focke-Wulf facilities, which were located in northern Germany, closer to the Allied bases, and in places where fighter escort was available for most of the mission.
Not yet struck by precision attacks, however, were the large Messerschmitt facilities building the Bf 109. Two Messerschmitt complexes, located at Regensburg in Bavaria and Wiener Neustadt, near Vienna, were then producing 48 percent of the Luftwaffe’s single-engine fighters. However, Regensburg was deeper inside Germany than the Eighth Air Force had yet flown, while Wiener Neustadt was an equally grueling hike for bombers based in the Mediterranean. Messerschmitt’s headquarters factory at Augsburg in Bavaria was even farther from either England or the Mediterranean, and would not be on a list for USAAF missions until the end of the year.
The ink on the Combined Bomber Offensive Plan had been dry for about a month when the Eighth Air Force prepared to mount its first attack on the German anti-friction bearing industry. To the men on the COA staff who had studied this industry in the abstract, it was a very straightforward target, because the vast majority of Germany’s ball bearing factories, or kugellager, were located in or near a single city, Schweinfurt. The two largest of the anti-friction bearing factory complexes in the area were those belonging to the firms of Kugelfischer and Vereinigte Kugellagerfabriken (VKF), a subsidiary of the Swedish Svenska Kullagerfabriken (SKF) company.
However straightforward the ball bearing industry as a bottleneck industry may have appeared on paper, it was far from an easy target. Like Regensburg, Schweinfurt was located in Bavaria, more than four hundred miles from Eighth Air Force bases in Britain. This put both cities at the limits of the effective range of bomb-laden American aircraft, and substantially beyond the range of fighter escorts. It was like a tempting piece of fruit hanging on a limb beyond a precipice, just out of reach, easily seen, but untouchable without considerable peril. Regensburg and Schweinfurt presented a level of danger beyond what had yet been experienced by the Eighth.
Yet, with every passing day, more and more ball bearings flowed forth from Schweinfurt to Regensburg and to factories across the Reich, just as Regensburg was churning out increasing numbers of the single-engine fighters to challenge the bombers. As with the rivers of bearings, the fighter threat could not be allowed to grow and grow.
By the beginning of August 1943, the men of the COA had rolled down their sleeves and gone home, but at 40 Berkeley Square, the hard decision making for the EOU was in full swing.
“Almost in despair,” Dick Hughes recalls painfully, “General Anderson and I decided to ‘go for broke,’ and attempt to destroy the ball bearing factories at Schweinfurt—without regard for casualties. It was one of those horrible decisions. On the information available to us at the time, it appeared that we were damned if we did, and that we were doubly damned if we did not.”