It was a surreal situation. The day before, General Fred Anderson and Richard D’Oyly Hughes had been calmly discussing operations against a foe that had been presumed to be on the ropes. Now they found themselves personally stranded in the very path of a major German offensive that had taken the Allies completely by surprise—and one which, at least on the morning of December 16, appeared unstoppable.
The German Ardennes Offensive, code-named Wacht am Rhein (Operation Watch on the Rhine, named for a German patriotic song of the same name) had been intended to divide the 12th and 21st Army Groups from each other, while capturing the great Belgian port city of Antwerp, now a key supply hub for the Allies, and encircling as many as four Allied armies. The idea was to force a negotiated armistice before the Allies crossed into Germany, which would then allow the Germans to concentrate all of their forces against the Soviet armies on the eastern front.
The information coming in concerning the German breakthrough was not good. In fact, it was downright demoralizing. Four German armies, comprising more than a dozen divisions and around two hundred thousand troops, had crashed their way across American lines in a lightly defended part of the front in the Ardennes highlands of southern Belgium. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans were reported to have been killed or captured.
The Sixth Panzer Army was headed for Antwerp, and the Fifth Panzer Army was racing to recapture recently liberated Brussels, while the German Seventh Army, backed by the Fifteenth, was pushing south into Luxembourg. Hughes and Anderson learned that a German armored column was headed their way, with nothing in between but a military police company.
“The only sensible thing would have been to get out in a hurry,” Hughes observed. “But General Hodges refused to evacuate his headquarters, so Pete Quesada could not move, and we were just plain ashamed to leave them all in the lurch.”
Since the weather had turned bad, with heavy snow falling, Hughes and Anderson could not fly out, so Quesada invited them to spend the night at the house he had requisitioned in the town of Spa.
“Early next morning we woke up fully expecting to see German tanks patrolling the streets, but all was quiet and we soon learned that the German armored column had taken a fork in the road some four miles short of Spa and passed by to the south of us.”
When Anderson and Hughes got in touch with Spaatz to request orders, Spaatz told Anderson to drive back to rejoin him in Paris, while Hughes was ordered to remain at the headquarters in Liege with Vandenberg.
On December 19, with the Germans still on the move, Vandenberg decided to return to his own headquarters in Luxembourg. Because of the weather, he could not fly there, and because of the Germans having created such a “bulge” in the line, the only way to get to Luxembourg from Liege was to drive there by way of Paris.
Dick Hughes was anxious to get out as well. He writes that “as I no longer seemed to be serving a useful purpose in Liege I telephoned General Spaatz and asked for permission to drive back in General Vandenberg’s car.”
He adds that another man who asked to hitch a ride with them was William Randolph Hearst Jr., who was in Europe serving as a correspondent for his father’s chain of newspapers.
“The three of us, together with a welcome bottle of brandy, took off for Paris together through the fog, driving at an average speed of fifteen miles per hour, [and] arrived at General Spaatz’s house many hours later.”
Vandenberg’s first remark to Spaatz was that his assistant chief of staff for intelligence had just been sent back to the States for medical reasons, and he wondered whether Spaatz knew where he could get someone to take his place.
“What about Dick?” Spaatz replied, looking at Hughes.
“All right, sir,” Hughes replied.
After all of his years planning strategic operations for heavy bombers, Hughes abruptly transferred to tactical operations with the Ninth Air Force.
“I was not sorry to go,” Hughes recalls. “Except for minor day to day details, our strategic plans for ending the war had all been made and as an ex–infantry man I had an intense desire to see something of the ground war at first hand.”
Vandenberg was also pleased. As Hughes soon learned, Vandenberg was anxious to have someone on his staff who was in the confidence of General Spaatz, who was the senior USAAF officer in the European Theater.
Meanwhile, as Hughes was changing jobs, the Battle of the Bulge was unfolding as the largest single land battle fought by the Americans in World War II, costing eighty-nine thousand American casualties. The German advance was not halted until December 26, and the German armies were not pushed back to the pre-offensive lines until the third week of January 1945.
To add insult to the injured Allies—not to mention additional injury—on New Year’s Day, in the midst of the ground battle, the Luftwaffe launched its own surprise offensive, called Operation Bodenplatte (Base Plate). At a time when most Allied planners assumed that the Luftwaffe was finished, the Germans managed to muster more than a thousand aircraft, mostly Fw 190s and Bf 109s, for a massive coordinated attack. These were sent against Allied airfields across France and Belgium, in the biggest German air offensive since well before Operation Overlord.
The Allies lost around three hundred aircraft destroyed, mostly on the ground, and around two hundred damaged, while the Germans lost slightly fewer than three hundred aircraft shot down.
Wacht am Rhein and Bodenplatte were large, well-planned, and generally well-executed attacks. However, they represented an enormous and desperate gamble that cost much and returned little other than to give the Soviet armies a monthlong lead in the final and inevitable battle inside Germany. The Battle of the Bulge was the last offensive hurrah of the German armies on the western front.
Beginning in January 1945, the enemy in the ground war, as viewed at firsthand by Dick Hughes, was a defender of his homeland. As such, he was a determined foe, gradually becoming more exhausted and more desperate.
Although their Ardennes offensive had failed, and they had lost a great deal of valuable personnel and materiel, the Germans had succeeded in striking, if not fear, at least a case of the jitters into the Anglo-American Allies. The mood among Allied leaders and planners in January 1945 was suddenly one of cautiousness bordering on the pessimistic. In retrospect, this was born out of a nervousness that the optimism of the autumn had been groundless to the point of absurdity.
“We have a superiority of at least five to one now against Germany and yet, in spite of all our hopes, anticipations, dreams and plans, we have as yet not been able to capitalize to the extent which we should,” Hap Arnold himself wrote nervously to Spaatz on January 14. “We may not be able to force capitulation of the Germans by air attacks, but on the other hand, with this tremendous striking power, it would seem to me that we should get much better and much more decisive results than we are getting now. I am not criticizing, because frankly I don’t know the answer and what I am now doing is letting my thoughts run wild with the hope that out of this you may get a glimmer, a light, a new thought, or something which will help us to bring this war to a close sooner.”
Those who had seen, just a few weeks earlier, a glass half-full with the tap turned on, now saw a glass half-empty and being drained by the fear that previous assumptions had been totally wrong.
Where they had once been seduced by a phantom that spoke of the war being over by Christmas 1944, Allied leaders now heard the phantom who whispered of a resilient Reich supplied by impregnable underground factories, untouchable by Allied strategic airpower, and who predicted that the skies over Germany would soon be filled with Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighters in numbers that matched those of the Bf 109s and Fw 190s of a year earlier.
It was in January that the jet fighter became the very emblem of a Luftwaffe perceived to have been “reborn.” It was as though planners—on both sides—suddenly woke up to the promise of reinvigorating, and indeed reinventing, the Luftwaffe with a fabulous new technological wonder weapon.
As the Allies saw the great potential danger, Adolf Hitler now saw “his” jet fighter as the ticket to the Reich’s salvation. The Messerschmitt Me 262 twin-jet fighter possessed such a potential. It was the fastest fighter in the world, and superior even to the great P-51 Mustang. It could have been the pivotal secret weapon that stopped the Allied Combined Bomber Offensive in its tracks.
Hitler was right about his jets, but he was at least a year too late.
However, the frightening thing about this “might have been” is that there had been no technical reason why the Me 262 could not have been available in large numbers one year earlier than January 1945. Admittedly, the Me 262 had been slow to evolve—but the project dated to 1939, so there had been plenty of time. Its development program, and that of its Jumo 004 turbojet engine, had been long and complicated, as engineers faced the challenges always encountered when the boundaries of technology are pushed to their limits.
However, the biggest stumbling block in the development of the aircraft that would have answered Hitler’s fondest desire for an eleventh-hour, war-winning secret weapon was resolute sabotage from within the heart of the Third Reich. The saboteur was Adolf Hitler himself.
Had it not been for Hitler’s conscious efforts to hinder the jet fighter’s development back in 1942 and 1943, added to Göring’s own initial ambivalence, the Luftwaffe would have been able to deploy significant numbers of Me 262s during Big Week.
As Albert Speer and others have written, Hitler had deliberately halted large-scale production of the aircraft in 1943, and as late as the summer of 1944, against the protests of Adolf Galland and the since-converted Göring, the Führer had ordered the jet fighter deployed only as an attack bomber against ground forces, a task for which it was ill-suited. It was only at the end of 1944 that Hitler woke up to an appreciation of the weapon that he had denied himself. As Speer writes in retrospect, “With such last-ditch efforts, hopes arose, which could [only] be construed as signs of increasing confusion.”
The jet fighter now existed only as a symbol. For Hitler, it was symbolic of an unreasonable optimism that he could still win the war.
For the Allied strategic planners, it was symbolic of unrealistic pessimism, and the unfounded fear that all of the work that had been done would not win the war any time soon.
In the Allied camp, January’s phantom of doom was even wider off the mark than had been November’s phantom of sanguinity. The German economy and the German military machine were teetering on the edge of utter collapse. Even as Anderson, Spaatz, and Arnold furrowed their brows, Albert Speer spoke of the “catastrophic situation in armaments production” in Germany. Indeed, he went on to say in his memoirs that this industry, which fell under the supervision of his ministry, “began to disintegrate by late autumn” 1944.
Contrary to what the Allies feared, the strategic air campaign against the German petrochemical industry and infrastructure had paid off. The economy and war machine were running on empty. Far from being on the verge of rebirth, the Luftwaffe was dangling by a thread. Not only were fuel supplies running short, most of its best pilots were dead or exhausted by overwork and stress.
The first Combined Bomber Offensive plan drawn up after the departure of Dick Hughes from the EOU and the Eighth Air Force appeared in January 1944. Known as the “Interim Plan,” it was drafted by the Combined Strategic Targets Committee and it targeted railways west of the Rhine that could contribute to supporting German armies facing the Anglo-American Allies.
Meanwhile, USAAF commanders remained adamant that strikes on the German rail network be concentrated on large, industrial-scale marshaling yards and not on targets such as small-town railway stations. In an “eyes only” memo to Spaatz on the first of January, Ira Eaker had pointed out that this would only serve to convince the German people that the Americans were indeed the “barbarians” that Hitler described. As Eaker insisted, “You and [assistant secretary of war for air] Bob Lovett are right and we should never allow the history of this war to convict us of throwing the strategic bomber at the man in the street.”
As John Fagg writes, “Eighth Air Force mission reports for most of January show enormous numbers of heavy bombers, sometimes as many as 1,500, going out day after day to bomb targets whose neutralization would benefit Allied ground forces but would not directly accelerate the dislocation of Germany’s industries. The preponderant weight of such air effort went on what was officially a secondary objective, enemy communications. Some 147 rail and road targets, rail centers, marshalling yards, repair shops, junctions, bridges, and traffic bottlenecks received USSTAF raids during the month.”
Nevertheless, as Fagg points out, citing the postwar Strategic Bombing Survey, “German economic traffic in the west had already been choked off from the rest of the Reich to a dangerous degree.”
February 1945, the one year anniversary of Big Week, was marked by an increase in the strategic efforts against Germany that finally precipitated the total collapse of the economy of the Third Reich. Indeed, on February 22, the anniversary of Day Three, the weather across all of Germany cleared as though offering up a reminder of the weather that week, and the Eighth Air Force launched a maximum effort involving 1,359 heavy bombers. While this mission involved double the average number of bombers that the Eighth put out during Big Week, it was a sign of the times that by now, it was becoming common for the Eighth to launch missions with 1,200 bombers.
The Fifteenth Air Force, meanwhile, restricted to sending fewer than 200 bombers over the Reich a year earlier, was now capable of launching 600.
The 1,359 bombers launched by the Eighth on February 22 were supported by a fighter force that flew 822 effective sorties. In was also a sign of the times that the Luftwaffe countered this vast effort with only around 70 interceptors, and they flew mainly ineffective sorties. Only seven bombers were lost to flak or fighters that day, and the jets were still rarely seen. Indeed, by February, Luftwaffe interceptors of any kind were becoming a rarity. Some missions were even going unchallenged by fighters, although the flak was as ferocious as ever.
As Fagg writes, it was during February that “the strategic air forces destroyed any serious possibility that Germany might unduly protract the war. The heavy bombers expended their greatest efforts since June 1944. Although flying conditions in the first half of the month were the worst ever experienced and 80 percent of the missions were blind attacks, the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces each carried out large-scale operations on twenty days during the month. The results were impressive in every respect. The oil campaign, into which USSTAF and Bomber Command poured 24,800 tons during the month, remained well under control with complete victory coming into view. The Germans failed utterly to make anything out of the program for underground plants, largely because of the breakdown in transportation.”
RAF Bomber Command, meanwhile, was routinely launching in excess of a thousand four-engine bombers on each mission. On March 17 and March 18, Bomber Command put out two consecutive missions against industrial and petrochemical targets in the Ruhr that averaged 1,094 heavy bombers dropping an average of more than 4,800 tons of bombs, record numbers for the RAF. Because of the general absence of Luftwaffe opposition, the RAF was now frequently flying daytime raids.
The Strategic Bombing Survey notes that in February 1945, coal deliveries, partly through the loss of Silesia and the Saar, fell to 25 percent of normal. In March they fell to 16 percent and, by the end of the month, to only 4 percent of normal. Indeed, coal shipments were scarcely adequate even for the needs of the railroads themselves. The survey goes on to remind us that Germany’s raw material industries, her manufacturing industries, and her power supply were all dependent on coal.
German boys a generation younger than Archie Mathies were on the threshold of experiencing rounds of bleak seasons with fewer, if any, trestles and coal trains than there had been a few years earlier.
However, in the coming dark, cold winter, there would no longer be skies filled with bombers, and cities no longer would be gutted with fire. Those boys would grow to manhood with neither war nor Hitler and with a determination that their nation would be never again benighted by his kind.
It was in March, while steam locomotives were running out of coal, that the large scale jet fighter menace finally—and so very belatedly—revealed its full potential. The world’s first all–jet fighter wing, Jagdgeschwader 7, had been formed in January under Oberst Johannes Steinhoff, a veteran Luftwaffe ace with more than 150 aerial victories when he took command. However, lack of fuel and materiel delayed its entry into combat until February, and into large scale operations until March 3, when the wing flew twenty-nine missions and claimed eight bombers.
On March 18, after two weeks of relatively light Luftwaffe opposition, Hitler’s dream—and Spaatz’s nightmare—was in full swing. Had the events of that day been routinely repeatable, or if they had occurred a year earlier, the story of the strategic air campaign against the Third Reich would have been much different.
Jagdgeschwader 7 attacked Eighth Air Force aircraft over Berlin with 37 Me 262s, shooting down a dozen bombers and a fighter, while losing three of their own. It was a four-to-one victory for the Luftwaffe. Had this occurred during Big Week, it really would have been worthy of the kind of serious reappraisal that Fred Anderson had feared was necessary in January.
However, the Eighth had launched 1,251 four-engine bombers that day, so the losses amounted to just 1 percent, and Jagdgeschwader 7 was in no position to put up the numbers of jets that had any hope of slowing, much less turning, the tide.
By March 18, the United States Ninth Army had been across the Rhine for more than a week, other American and British units were following suit, and the Soviet armies were closing in on Berlin from the east.
On April 7 and April 10, the Luftwaffe managed to muster nearly sixty jets, but on the latter date, the nineteen bombers and eight fighters lost by the USAAF cost the Luftwaffe twenty-seven Me 262s and sixty Bf 109s.
It will be remembered that in the wake of the debacle of Black Thursday over Schweinfurt in October 1943, Ira Eaker had wired Hap Arnold with the absurd characterization that the Luftwaffe was done for, when in fact it was at the very apogee of its prowess. In his words, Black Thursday had been the “last final struggle of a monster in his death throes.”
Now, eighteen months later, the men of the USSTAF really were watching the almost theatrically spectacular, and jet-propelled, “last struggle of a monster in his death throes.”
Had Eaker held his colorful characterization, he would have been right on the mark. Of course, by April 1945, even the most pessimistic of Allied leaders could see that the end had come.
In the meantime, the Luftwaffe had been collapsing from the inside. A growing number of experienced pilots, fed up with Göring’s erratic leadership, were speaking out. Among them was Adolf Galland, who was fired from his post as inspector general of fighter aviation for his impertinence. He promptly returned to flying status and organized an all–jet fighter squadron known as Jagdverband 44. To staff his new organization, Galland recruited most of the top scoring aces in the Luftwaffe. It was a dramatic gesture, but it was too little too late by a wide margin. As with Jagdgeschwader 7, Galland’s dream team might have impacted the air war significantly if it had appeared a year—or even half a year—sooner.
“The fate of Germany was sealed,” Galland wrote in his postwar memoir The First and the Last. “On April 25 the American and the Soviet soldiers shook hands at Torgau on the Elbe. The last defensive ring of Berlin was soon penetrated. The Red flag was flying over the Ballhausplatz in Vienna. The German front in Italy collapsed. On Pilsen fell the last bomb of the 2,755,000 tons which the Western Allies had dropped on Europe during five years of war. At that moment I called my pilots together and said to them, ‘Militarily speaking the war is lost. Even our action here cannot change anything…. I shall continue to fight, because operating with the Me 262 has got hold of me, because I am proud to belong to the last fighter pilots of the German Luftwaffe…. Only those who feel the same are to go on flying with me.’”
Galland flew his last mission the next day—against American medium bombers.
Four days later, in his bunker deep below a Berlin that had been bombed almost beyond recognition, Adolf Hitler killed his dog and entered into a suicide pact with Eva Braun, his wife of less than forty hours.
By now, the strategic air war had come to an end, and the Luftwaffe was a defeated relic. The Luftwaffe was ridiculously outnumbered at every turn and could essentially do nothing. As John Fagg writes, “Lavish fighter escort flew with the [Allied] bombers even when operations were a matter of roaming over the prostrate Reich looking for targets. This escort was available to a high degree now that Doolittle had taken his fighters off strafing tasks lest friendly troops or prisoners be killed. Most of Germany was not enemy territory any longer.”
On April 7, RAF chief Peter Portal had suspended large scale bombing operations, expressing concern that “further destruction of German cities would magnify the problems of the occupying forces.”
About a week later, on April 16, from his headquarters in Reims, Spaatz sent a personal memo to Jimmy Doolittle at the Eighth Air Force and Nathan Twining at the Fifteenth, which read: “The advances of our ground forces have brought to a close the strategic air war waged by the United States Strategic Air Forces and the Royal Air Force Bomber Command.
“It has been won with a decisiveness becoming increasingly evident as our armies overrun Germany. From now onward our Strategic Air Forces must operate with our Tactical Air Forces in close cooperation with our armies.
“All units of the US Strategic Air Forces are commended for their part in winning the Strategic Air War and are enjoined to continue with undiminished effort and precision the final tactical phase of air action to secure the ultimate objective—complete defeat of Germany.”
In its conclusion, the Strategic Bombing Survey summarized the climax of the Allied strategic air campaign by stating that “as in most other cases in the history of wars—the collapse occurred before the time when the lack of means would have rendered further resistance physically impossible.”
By the time that collapse came, Germany’s once invincible war machine had little in the way of means, and virtually nothing in the way of a will, to continue fighting.
“The German economy,” Albert Speer had written in his March 15 report, “is heading for an inevitable collapse within four to eight weeks.”
Seven weeks later, it was all over.
The end came on VE-Day, which was actually a period of about forty-eight hours, beginning on May 7, when Field Marshal William Keitel, the chief of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the German high command, traveled to Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims to sign the unconditional surrender. The following day, a similar formal surrender ceremony took place in Berlin, now in Soviet hands.
Billy Mitchell had written two decades earlier, “Air power holds out the hope to the nations that, in the future, air battles taking place miles away from the frontiers will be so decisive and of such far-reaching effect that the nation losing them will be willing to capitulate without resorting to a further contest on land or water on account of the degree of destruction which would be sustained by the country subjected to unrestricted air attack.”
The strategic air campaign that defeated the Third Reich had begun with little more than the idea promulgated by Mitchell that a major industrial power could be defeated in war from the air.
The campaign began in 1942 with a handful of aircraft, a handful of crews, and only a general idea of how to proceed. Over the course of its first year, the shape and form of the strategic air campaign gradually gained clarity. At Berkeley Square, a strategy took shape. In East Anglia, a bomber force moved toward critical mass. The dogged determination of the men in USAAF to stick with the doctrine of precision daylight attacks was questioned, ridiculed, and finally proven correct.
Big Week, as its planners had hoped, did constitute the beginning of the end. After that week, nothing was ever again the same. Albert Speer knew it and so did Hitler.
Big Week, as its planners had hoped, constituted a vindication of the strategic air campaign. Though there would be bumps in the road on the downhill slide that began that week, it was clear that Germany’s war economy had begun unraveling from that point.
Just as the Allies had found the skies over Normandy devoid of the Luftwaffe on the Longest Day, the Allies who pondered a defeated Germany saw a nation without an infrastructure.
Thanks in no small part to the men of the EOU, the complex interrelationship of the components of Germany’s war economy, such as ball bearings to aircraft manufacturing, and petrochemicals to the entire economy, had been examined, understood, and articulated as targets.
Thanks to the tenacity of the bomber crews—and the fighter pilots and all the ground crews—these targets were systematically struck, then struck again, and then again, until the very foundation of the German war economy had been destroyed. The promise of which Mitchell had spoken was fulfilled.
Thanks to the heroism and the vision of all of these people, the Third Reich and the dark curtain that it had drawn across Europe and the world, like the dark curtain in an Eighth Air Force briefing room, had been torn down forever.
As had happened on the final, climactic day of Big Week, the sun had come out across Europe.