The above thinking was based on the bombers that had been used up to that time -- slow, under-armed instruments of questionable accuracy. But the Americans had two new contributions to make -- a bombsight so accurate that good daylight results were obtainable from an altitude above the level at which flak was effective, and a bomber sufficiently well armed to protect itself against the type of fighters then dominating the skies over Europe. Our B-17s and B-24s, conceived originally as defensive weapons that would enable us to meet an invading fleet far at sea and sink it by precision bombing from above effective flak level, seemed to have the qualifications for successful daylight offensive bombing. And American industry had the capacity for providing the B-17s and B-24s in the necessary quantities.

The British Were Skeptical of Daylight Bombing

The British were frankly skeptical of daylight bombing. They had given the matter much thought, and had finally put their faith and national effort into night bombers. They had flown early models of the B-17 over Europe and had lost several. As early as April 1942, they had tested a B-17E and written a report from which they drew several gloomy conclusions. The defensive firepower, they said, was too weak to afford reasonable protection, the tail gun position being cramped and the ball turret very awkward.

They also pointed out that the bomb bay could not carry the huge block-buster bombs (known as "cookies") and that the bomb load was small compared with that of a British Lancaster bomber.

The American reply to this was that improved bombsight accuracy would more than balance the lesser bomb load. As for the armament, certain modifications were being made. Switching from day to night bombing was a vastly more complicated procedure than simply taking off after sunset instead of after sunrise. Furthermore, night technique, at that stage of its development offered little hope of the precision required to take out German factories. And unless this was done, continued production of new planes might make invasion an impossibility.

The First Britain-based Test of Offensive Daylight Bombing

The first Britain-based test of offensive daylight bombing came on August 17, 1942, when 12 B-17s flew during daylight, with Spitfire fighter escort, to Rouen, France, bombed the marshalling yards, and returned without loss. This mission, and the longer unescorted bombing runs of the weeks that followed, were mere military pin-pricks in the thick hide of the Germans, but for anyone who could read the signs, they were among the most important events of the whole war. The question was not whether we were doing serious damage to the submarine pens at St. Nazaire and Brest and Lorient.

The fact is, we were not. The question was whether or not the Luftwaffe could destroy or turn away our unescorted daylight formations from our objectives, as the Spitfires and Hurricanes had either shot down or turned away the Dorniers and the Heinkels from their British targets two years before during the Battle of Britain.

This was the 64-dollar question, because in all the arsenal of democracy, the only weapon that could possibly neutralize the Luftwaffe was American daylight heavy bombing. The Germans did not fully realize this in the autumn of 1942, but the success of the unescorted American heavies did shake their faith -- secure until then -- in a defense based mainly on radar, flak and fighter interception.

Germans Increase Fighter Production To Defend Against Heavy Bombers

From the start the Germans developed a healthy respect for the firepower of a formation of B-17 Fortresses. After one laggard, crippled Fort took on a flight of ME-109s over Holland, shooting down two and damaging others, the word went out over the grapevine (we have a German prisoner of war’s word for this) to “lay off those damned Forts.”

But it wasn't long before heavier armament had been installed in the Germans' two basic fighters, the FW-190 and the ME-109, and intensive study of shot-down Fortresses had resulted in improved tactics in attacking bombers.

Production Numbers for U.S. Fighter Aircraft in World War 2: (fm. WW2 AIRCRAFT.NET)
P-38s- 10,037 P-39s- 9,584 P-40s-13,738 P-47s-15,686 P-51s-15,875 P-63s-3,303

Compared to the sky battles that came later, those early air engagements were small, but they lacked nothing in ferocity, and the caliber of the German pilots was probably higher, on the average, than it ever was again. They were fighting over territory controlled by their own armies; in most cases, the Americans were flying unescorted. If there was ever a time when everything favored the Germans, it was then.

Buildup of Bombers in Britain Slowed by North African Invasion

The buildup of our bombers in Britain began slowly. At first we were not prepared to fight every day -- or even as often as weather permitted. If we had tried to, at that time, our loss rate possibly would have exceeded replacement rate so drastically that the whole daylight offensive would have been jeopardized. Knowing this, the commanders carefully conserved their strength.

There are those who claimed that we should have waited until we had sufficient planes to mount a really large offensive, overwhelming German defenses before they could recover from the initial shock of surprise. There are several reasons why this would not have been a good idea. One reason is that we could not have mounted a successful major offensive, even if we had the planes, without the experience gained from trial and error in the early, smaller missions. One of these early battles was fought over Lille, France on October 9, 1942. There was, as might have been expected, an element of confusion. Some squadrons missed rendezvous, some brought their bombs back with them, and there were conflicting claims of the number of enemy fighters destroyed. Such confusion was a necessary preliminary to the cold, almost uncanny efficiency of the operations of 1944 and 1945. We learned that our planes had to be modified in some respects and our training of crews intensified before we were ready for large-scale action. The Germans learned much from our early strikes and improved their defenses accordingly. But we learned far more.

Also, there was no point in waiting for a build-up of bombers in Britain, because the course of the war had dictated a change in overall strategy, which meant that no such build-up could be achieved for several months. That change resulted from the decision to invade Africa.

Operation Torch

Operation Torch, as the African invasion was called, was dictated by the activities of a man then known as the "Desert Fox" -- Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. As his panzers (tanks) clanked forward on the dusty coastal road that led to Alexandria, Egypt, the situation in the Mediterranean grew more critical. To those on the Allied side responsible for the conduct of the war, it became increasingly evident that he must be stopped. The worst thorn in Rommel's side was Malta. If Malta fell and Rommel's supply lines grew stronger, then there was every probability that Egypt would fall too. With Egypt would go the Suez Canal and the whole Middle East.

The Germans would flank the Russians, win the Caucasian oil fields, which they so desperately needed, and possibly link up with the Japanese in the Indian Ocean. By July 1942, the consequence of not stopping Rommel (left) were so obvious and so grave that earlier plans had to be shelved. Our Britain-based air offensive would have to struggle along as best it could, without the services of some of its most experienced squadrons and-even more disheartening-without the P-38 Lightning fighter cover originally scheduled to escort the heavy Bombers to targets in Germany.

At the time of 'Torch', American airpower was already represented in Egypt by the 9th Air Force. At the start of the battle of El Alamein, October 23, 1942, it had 164 aircraft consisting of a squadron of B-17 Fortresses, a squadron of B-24 Liberators, two P-40 fighter groups and one B-25 medium bomber group.

These, plus British air strength of some 1,100 planes, were opposed by about 2,000 Axis planes of all types. The Luftwaffe had its hands full dealing with these guardians of Egypt. It could not handle a heavy assault on its rear. The responsibility for that assault was given to the 12th Air Force, which landed with the invasion forces on November 8th.

'Torch' differed sharply from subsequent invasions in that it was directed against territory held by a power that was semi-friendly, or at worst only half hostile (the French Vichy forces).

The Vichy were a French puppet government established by the Germans, usually loyal to them, and in control of French colonies in Africa. Adequate air cover, it was thought, could be provided from carriers and nearby Gibraltar. There were two operational plans for the invaders, a war plan in case the Vichy forces resisted, and a peace plan in case they did not. The uncertainty as to which plan would be followed persisted until a few hours before H-hour.

For the invasion, an American paratroop force was flown from Britain in 39 C-47 transport planes in the first American airborne operation of the war. Their story is worth recalling because it indicates the growing pains incident to any new project, in peace or war and because it was the small seed from which grew the great vertical envelopments later in Normandy, in Southern France, in Holland and across the Rhine.

Living conditions faced by these airmen were rugged, to put it mildly. Ground crews performed miracles of ingenuity in keeping aircraft operational in a climate that seemed to consist of a diabolical combination of dust storms and bottomless mud. Missions were flown on short notice, with organization improvised on the spot.

Fighter pilots attended bomber briefings to get a picture of the type of mission they were being called on to escort. Troop Carrier dropped the paratroops that captured Bone airdrome, flew countless air supply missions, and learned how to operate on a shoestring.

But even in those early days, the pattern of tactical support was emerging precisely as predicated by the logicians in the pre-war classrooms. First: gain air superiority. Second: isolate the battlefield Third: provide direct cooperation with the ground forces in the liquidation of the enemy. The success of the second phase depended, obviously, on the first. Without air control there could be no interdiction of the battlefield. And until the battlefield was isolated, close cooperation could have no more than local effect. All this the air planners knew already. The African campaign was to teach them how to apply that knowledge successfully.

German Air Force Stretched Beyond Its Limits

Air superiority was not gained in a week, or a month. At the time of the African landings, the embryonic 12th Air Force consisted of 551 aircraft. There were 1,700 miles between it and the other jaw of the Anglo-American pincer. And the Luftwaffe fought hard. But the truth was that the GAF, at this moment of its greatest territorial expansion, was simply stretched beyond the limits of its capacity to adequately supply itself. Committed to major efforts in both Russia and Africa, with the growing weight of the RAF's night assaults oppressing its cities and the AAF's Britain-based day offensive already casting an ominous shadow, its doom in Africa was sealed from the moment our landings succeeded. The Germans must have wondered, in bitter afterthought, whether their African squadrons, if pulled out in time, might not have tipped the scale at Stalingrad.

At the time, their faith in Rommel was so high, and the stakes for which he fought so glittering, that any such admission of defeat was out of the question. So they fought on, until the harbors of Tunisia were choked with ships sunk by the AAF, and the desert battlefields were littered with the skeletons of more than 1,000 of their first-line aircraft.

Debating the Effectiveness of Daylight Bombing

While the North African campaign was slogging through the mud that marked the end of 1942, our daylight bomber effort from Britain had reached a virtual standstill. In December, exactly four missions were flown. This was not altogether due to weather, although the weather was bad. It was primarily because we did not have the aircraft available. There were four groups operational in those bleak days -- three B-17 groups and one B-24 group -- and for the moment they were orphans of the war. The requirements of the African campaign were such that expanding our force in Britain was out of the question; its replacement rate barely equaled combat losses, which were mounting as the Germans improved their fighter tactics and as the American heavy bombers moved out of the effective but very short-ranged Spitfire fighter protection.

As for the damage the heavy bombers were doing to their targets – primarily the submarine pens – it did not come up to expectations, to say the least. The concrete pens at Lorient, Brest, and St. Nazaire, with their 12-foot-thick roofs, were protected against any bombs being used at that time.

Furthermore, bombing accuracy under combat was in its early stages. Our bombardiers, who could hit a 100-foot circle from 20,000 feet in the quiet sky over Lake Muroc in California, were only learning how to do the same thing over German-held Europe, with the skies full of flak and hostile fighters.

However, from the point of view of the planners of the daylight offensive, optimism at that stage of the game was not entirely missing. Too much stress had been placed on the limitations of daylight bombing and there had been a lot of publicity focused on its growing pains. Optimism was actually necessary to maintain opposition to critics who, in all honesty, favored the switch of the American air effort to night bombing. Their attitude was based not so much on the belief in the superiority of night bombing as doubt whether day forces could survive fighter opposition. This was the crucial question, and at the time of the Casablanca conference in January 1943, there was no proven answer.

The men who commanded our British-based Fortresses and Liberators, however, were convinced that a switch to night operations would be disastrous. Despite the limited scope of their operations, they had accumulated evidence to document their theories. Some of the evidence was invisible. The diversion of German field armies in Russia and Africa to meet the new air threat from the west, the decline of the GAF bomber forces to meet the demand for fighters -- there were no photographs of these trends, but they existed.

The strain imposed on Germany by a round-the-clock bombing, the opportunity to whittle down the Luftwaffe in daylight combat, the economy of effort inherent in precision bombing -- all these points and others were presented by General Eaker, Commanding General of the 8th Air Force, and hammered home in a long statement to the Combined Chiefs of Staff at Casablanca.

Hindsight shows that the General might have summed up his argument simply by, “Gentlemen, at this stage in the development of night bombing, the destruction of the German Air Force cannot be accomplished by such means. Night bombing will not give us the accuracy necessary to destroy aircraft factories on the ground, nor the opportunity to decimate the Luftwaffe in the air. The only weapon in our arsenal capable of such a task is the American daylight bomber. Unless we use it, and use it soon, the Luftwaffe will be so powerful that a land invasion of the Continent will become an utter impossibility, and even our air invasion will fail.”

The Chiefs of Staff decreed that daylight bombing should continue. They ordered a Combined Bomber Offensive whose mission was "the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system and the undermining of the morale of the German people, to the point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened." That gave the green light to the architects of destruction from high altitude. Ahead of them lay the critical year of 1943. It was clear, even at Casablanca, that the year was to see the most ferocious air fighting in history. The airmen, with other Allied commanders, hoped for a clear cut decision by the end of 1943. The hope for it was well founded but they did not get it.

The Germans Greatly Increase Fighter Production

The reason that more progress was not achieved by the Allies in 1943 was that the GAF still stood between them and their dream of unrestricted bombing of German industry. The Luftwaffe had lost much of its offensive strength, but its fighter production curve was rising steadily and Germany still had faith in the power of an effective fighter force. The world had seen, in the Battle of Britain, what a determined fighter force could do in defending the homeland, even when badly outnumbered.

A year before, soon after America's entry into the war, Goering had demanded -- and received -- top priority for the production of fighters. Plans called for production, by December 1944, of 3,000 aircraft per month as compared with the average of some 1,200 per month in 1942. Single-engine fighter production alone was to be quadrupled. The reorganization was planned along mass production lines, with the use of slave labor to overcome manpower shortages as part of the program.

The Germans took the precaution of locating most of their new factories at a respectful distance from the airfields of Britain. They did not think it necessary, at that time, to go in heavily for dispersal or to place their key production centers underground. Nor, apparently, did they reckon with the possibility of air attack from the south on such centers as Regensburg or Wiener Neustadt.

The result of these miscalculations was a set of industrial complexes ingeniously contrived so that interchangeable units could facilitate repair of any damage to the whole system. It was, at the same time, a concentrated and vulnerable target for any air force that refused to be deterred by distance or aerial opposition. The Germans knew this perfectly well. They had in their possession enough crippled Fortresses and Liberators to know that the same aircraft which could strike their submarine pens on the fringes of Europe had sufficient range to reach the farthest corner of the Reich. But they never dreamed that one day Allied fighters would go all the way with the bombers, and they counted on their own fighter screen to protect the sources of their air strength. Perhaps they even hoped that we would make the effort, and fail, and abandon in despair all plans for the subsequent invasion of Europe.

In any case, in early 1943 the 8th Air Force, with no more than six groups and able to put no more than 100 aircraft over a target, must not have seemed too formidable an antagonist. The Stalingrad disaster and the African situation, where mounting Allied air strength was slowly strangling Rommel, must have caused the German high command more sleepless nights than a certain group of experts working patiently in Britain. But these Operations Analysts were determining, with a cold scientific logic from which the human element was weirdly excluded, which targets represented the Achilles heel of military Germany.

By April they were ready with their answer. The Nazi war effort was based on six major industries: submarines, aircraft, ball bearings, oil, rubber, and military transport. Each industry was vulnerable, to some degree, to high altitude precision attack. Poring over bomb plots and damage assessments from previous 8th Air Force attacks, the experts calculated how many heavy bombers were required to do the job. They weighed the factors of weather, of enemy opposition; they took into account the problems of target recognition, of German ingenuity at camouflage, of such protective devices as smokescreens. Like laboratory technicians, they arrived at a formula calling for certain numbers of planes flying certain numbers of missions. They submitted the plan to the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Give us these tools, they said, and we think we can do the job.

The plan was approved; indeed, the first phase had already begun with an attack, on April 17, 1943, on the Focke Wulf aircraft factory in Bremen. But the loss of 16 heavy bombers in this attack -- the heaviest losses to date -- was a warning that the Germans were not going to let our plan succeed without a bitter and protracted struggle.

Such losses had been expected; the replacement rate had been fixed by the master plan to take care of them. But during 1943, anticipated replacements sometimes did not arrive as originally scheduled, and throughout the best weather months of that year, the 8th Air Force was several hundred planes behind the figure estimated as necessary to do the job. Since the number of German fighters opposing them was steadily mounting, the ferocity of the air battles increased, without decisive effect.

The Allies Make Good Progress in the Mediterranean

Before tracing the course of the air fighting over Germany in those critical summer months of 1943, it might be well to glance at what was happening in the Mediterranean. There the war was going well. Airpower was slashing at Rommel's over-extended supply line, blocking roads, strafing motor columns, sinking ships, and shooting down air transports. Much of the doctrine of tactical airpower was being reasserted in action: that to operate effectively in conjunction with the ground forces, you first must have control of the air; that when you do have such control, the primary role of tactical airpower consists in attacking supply lines in the rear rather than close support in the immediate battle area.

New lessons were learned every day about the value of softening up the enemy air force by bombing airdromes before launching a ground attack, about the importance of hand-in-glove coordination between air and ground commanders, about the necessity for integrated air forces that could act as a whole rather than scattered squadrons operationally tied to a particular army or navy unit.

This principle of unity of command was accepted at Casablanca in January 1943. In the following month, the converging 12th and Desert Air Forces were merged into the Northwest African Air Forces under AAF General Spaatz, with a second air command in the Eastern Mediterranean, under RAF Air Marshall Tedder.

It was not until the end of the year that the solution of the joint command problem found clearest expression in the creation of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces, in which the function of air units, not their nationality, determined where they were placed and how employed.

As the days lengthened and spring arrived, General Spaatz's forces proceeded with the arduous and necessary task of whittling down the Luftwaffe. A constant problem in those early days was how to find enough fighters to protect the bombers against the still threatening Axis airpower. The original heavy bomber group, the 97th, found revenge for the pounding it had taken from the GAF on its first night in Algiers by plastering Axis shipping and harbor facilities. In December, it had been joined by three squadrons of B-24 Liberators from the 92nd Group in England who lived in the desert on spam and dehydrated cabbage, harassed Rommel's rear guards, and struck across the Mediterranean at Naples and the Sicilian airdromes.

Several medium bomber groups, living under conditions just as rugged, gave the Nazis a foretaste of what B-25 and B-26 medium bombers could do. There were some bad moments in the Tunisian campaign -- as, for example, when Rommel flung his panzers through Kasserine Pass. On that occasion, everything with wings was thrown against him -- even heavy bombers flying below medium altitude. But there were also red-letter days, like the famous Palm Sunday engagement, when P-40 fighters of the 57th Group caught a swarm of JU-52s and ME-323s flying men and supplies to Rommel's hard-pressed forces and shot 79 into the sea in a slaughter reminiscent of the Battle of Britain.

In the Mediterranean there was more variety of air combat -- if not more heroism – than was ever dreamed of in northern Europe at that time. High, medium and low-level bombing, bridge-busting, strafing of armored columns and airdromes, skip bombing of Axis shipping -- all these tactics and many others appeared in the 191 days between the Allied landings in North Africa and the collapse of Axis forces there.

Aerial Photo-Reconnaissance Became Important

It was in this period, too, that an aerial weapon, whose potentialities had never been fully exploited, began to be recognized as an indispensable aid to modern warfare. In 1939, one of Germany's best generals, Werner Von Fritsch, had predicted that the side with the best aerial photo-reconnaissance would win the war. In Britain, the RAF had skilled photo-interpreters assessing bomb damage and making target selections based on high altitude photos brought back by unarmed Spitfires or Mosquitoes. A squadron of American P-38 Lightnings, profiting from RAF experience, was almost operational. But it was in Africa that tactical reconnaissance proved itself invaluable to the ground forces. At one point during the final stages of the drive on Tunis, when weather grounded reconnaissance during the final stages of the drive on operations, the ground commander flatly refused to move until his air photo coverage was obtained.

Flying P-38s (F-versions), members of the 90th Photo Recon Wing experimented with night photography, and brought low-level photo-recon missions -- 'dicing' missions, as they were called -- to a state of development which was invaluable later on in Italy and still later they were called -- to a state of development which was invaluable later on in Italy and still later in the battles of France and Germany. They got little recognition for their work -- photo recon was strictly hush-hush in those days -- but they came to be acknowledged as the real eyes of the Army. To the long-range planners, with an eventual D-day in mind, their work proved beyond question that complete photo coverage of the invasion area and its defenses would be indispensable to successful landings.

Examples of Reconnaissance Photos from WW II

The following images have be added as examples of “Reconnaissance Imagery” and were not a part Maj. Gordon’s article in 1945. Information has been added about the images and credit given if tagged to the photograph. Images were an important asset (if available) in planning for missions going forward during the war. I have added notes here for the readers in 2020.

The following image has been added to Major Gordon’s work that is again a “Reconnaissance” photograph, but was taken over the City of London and specifically the area surrounding St. Paul’s Anglican Cathedral (below). The German bombing raids on London were quite devastating both in the spread of structural damage to the city, and large fire storms that again resulted in wide spread loss of life in the city.

Axis African Forces Collapse and Attention is Turned Toward Sicily

With the final collapse of the Axis African forces, on May 18, 1943, Allied airpower was free to turn its attention across the Mediterranean to Italy, which Winston Churchill had once called the "soft underbelly" of the Axis. The Northwest African Air Forces was, by this time, battle- hardened aggregation of nearly 4,000 aircraft, with 2,630 American airplanes, 1,076 British planes and 94 French planes. The first Axis target to feel the weight of its blows was the island of Pantelleria.

Between May 30 and June 11, this heavily fortified Italian island in the Strait of Sicily, 62 miles (100 km) southwest of Sicily, rocked under more than 6,000 tons of bombs and finally capitulated without a ground assault -- the first territorial conquest to be achieved solely through airpower. It was a great victory, and a relatively cheap one -- we lost 63 aircraft and claimed 236 of the enemy's while gaining fighter fields indispensable for the invasion of Sicily. But airmen knew that such a complete collapse of a garrison was the exception rather than the rule.

With Pantelleria having fallen, plans moved forward rapidly for the invasion of Sicily. The primary mission of the Northwest African Air Forces was the destruction of the enemy airpower based there. Between July 1 and the invasion, on July 10, nearly 3,000 sorties were directed against airfields on Sicily and on the Italian mainland. The Luftwaffe took such a beating on the ground that it was able to offer only token resistance when the invasion of Sicily finally took place.

YouTube Video – speakers on!

The Bombing of Pantelleria (20:43) 11 June 1943. B/W

Some Problems Occurred During the Invasion of Sicily

All was not sweetness and light in the air, however, during the invasion of Sicily. The airborne operations, in which American gliders made their first combat appearance, showed with clarity the need for complete coordination of land, sea and air forces.

Training for the airborne operation had been complicated by the weather. Blistering 120-degree F (49-degree C) heat warped some of the CG4A gliders and, just 10 days before the Sicilian invasion, a howling sirocco (wind storm) caused additional damage to the fragile craft. Nevertheless, preparations went forward.

The 51st Troop Carrier Wing, with 133 planes and gliders, was to carry British troops into action, the gliders to be released over the sea but close enough to the coast to make their landing zones. The 52nd Troop Carrier Wing, with 227 aircraft, was to drop American parachutists. Heavy preliminary bombing of the invasion area and strong fighter patrols were ordered.

In spite of such preparations, some things went wrong. Smoke from the bombing, rising to 5,000 feet, blinded both C-47 transport aircraft pilots and glider pilots of the 51st Wing. Defensive flak was heavy.

A strong head wind, plus other factors, resulted in 50 gliders landing in the ocean. The 52nd Wing didn't have much better luck. Some of their craft were shelled by our forces. Fires on the ground, reflecting on windshields, made visibility already obscured by smoke and dust even worse. Eight aircraft went down under fire from both friend and foe. Some chutists landed miles from their intended drop zones. Afterwards, the mission was given an 80 percent efficiency rating, but this charitable reckoning must have taken into consideration the fact that the enemy was thoroughly confused by our own confusion and greatly overestimated the numbers of Allied aircraft involved.

The going continued to be rough for Troop Carrier throughout the remainder of the Sicilian campaign. Not so much from the Luftwaffe -- our strikes against enemy airdromes kept air opposition light. But enemy flak was deadly. On July 11, we lost 23 aircraft out of 144.

Two days later, a misguided Allied convoy sent up a barrage that knocked down seven more C-47s. Harassed pilots began to shy at the sight of anything bigger than a rowboat.

It was a painful process of education, but the lessons were plain and not to be forgotten. They were: absolute necessity for complete coordination between all members of the triphibious team; need for distinctive markings to facilitate aircraft recognition; better radio navigational aids; planes less vulnerable to ground fire than C-47s; bigger drop zones for parachutists. Ruled out of the book were glider releases over water, and the so-called "crash landings" of CG4A gliders, which were too lightly built to stand the shock without injury to the occupants.

These lessons were applied to great advantage a year later at Normandy.

The Attack on the Ploesti Oil Refineries in Romania

As the Axis grip on Sicily was slowly being broken, five groups of Liberators, three from the 8th Air Force and two from the 9th, staged what was probably the most spectacular single mission of the war -- the August 1, 1943 strike against the Ploesti oil refineries in Romania. The decision to fly the 2,000-mile round trip from Africa and go in at treetop level, gambling heavily on the element of surprise, was a bold one. It was based on the theory that the pinpoint accuracy obtained would justify high losses and that dodging radar detection would minimize losses by catching fighter and flak defenses unprepared.

Unfortunately, some faulty navigation nullified the element of complete surprise. The damage inflicted was considerable, Out of 177 B-24 Liberators, 42 were shot down or crashed, and 31 others failed to return to base. Ploesti was destined to be destroyed eventually by bombing, but to accomplish that destruction, the heavies reverted to their fundamental tactic of high-level precision bombing.

Preparations For Invasion of Italian Mainland

After Sicily, inevitably, came Italy. Pre-invasion softening up of German airdromes, particularly a spectacular strafing of 200 JU-88s at Foggia, kept the Luftwaffe's head down. But the Wehrmacht was tough. At Salerno, the only suitable invasion point within range of our fighter cover, the Germans drove a counter attack to within a few hundred yards of the beach. Once again, as at Kasserine Pass, the heavies joined the mediums and the fighter bombers in an all-out effort to break up the attack and save the beach-head. On two successive days, more than 1,000 sorties were flown, a commonplace event later in the war, but a distinct achievement over a distant beach-head in September 1943. The morale lift given our ground troops was enormous.

Movement of the 15th Air Force to Italy in the autumn of 1943 was a triumph of logistics. The main objective was to lose as little operational time as possible. Existing airfields in the Foggia area had been badly battered. These were repaired by the Allies and new airfields were carved out of the soggy Italian plain. The engineering problems involved were enormous.

Steel mats (Marston Mats) were essential to keep bombers from bogging down in the spongy turf. Roads had to be built. Distribution of supplies inside Italy was a major headache. Most shipments were landed at Naples, where shattered port facilities were restored with brilliant efficiency by Army engineers. This equipment then had to be transported over the spiny backbone peninsula to eastern air bases. Sometimes the task of moving several hundred tons of steel mat from one side of a marshalling yard to another was more of a problem than getting the same shipment across mountains.

Fortunately, warfare in Africa had taught everyone, including the AAF, much about the difficult art of keeping mobile. Combat crews never once lacked material with which to fight.

Bomb stackage was kept ahead of requirements. Gasoline was piped in and stored in adequate field facilities. By the end of December, supply problems were largely licked. With its strength building up rapidly, the 15th stood ready for the critical responsibilities of the new year.

The Air War Over Germany – 1943

The year 1943 began with the first tentative strikes by the US AAF against the north German coast. Costly experiments with medium-level daylight bombing had proved conclusively that Nazi flak was too deadly for any but high-level operations. Fortunately, our bombing accuracy had gradually improved to better allow for high-level bombing. Successful high-level attacks on Kiel and Vegesack silenced most of the critics of daylight operations.

In the spring of 1943, however, the cardinal principle of concentration of our air effort was not fully realized. We made some successful strikes against rubber factories at Huls and Hanover, but we were not able to follow up with further such attacks on the factories due to a lack of reserve aircraft, and the Germans were very successful at repairing the factories. Our failure to destroy the rubber industry was an example of biting off more than we could chew.

Besides, we were barely holding our own against the Luftwaffe. By June, the Germans had more than doubled the fighters that opposed our earliest attacks, and had introduced a mortar-type rocket. This rocket out-ranged our .50 caliber machine gun and its burst had a lethal radius of over 100 yards. If the Germans had ever devised an adequate aiming sight for it, they might well have driven us out of the sky before our long-range fighters appeared on the scene. Fortunately for us, P-47 Thunderbolt fighters carrying 100-gallon belly fuel tanks made their appearance in July. They were badly outnumbered, at first, and their range was still limited to the fringes of the Reich. But they slaughtered the twin-engine Nazi rocket-throwing fighters until the Germans were forced into the weird situation of providing fighter cover for their own fighter intercepters.

The range of our fighters, especially when the P-51 Mustangs finally got into action later in the war, was the biggest surprise of the war to most of the Luftwaffe commanders. One prisoner, captured shortly after the Battle of the Bulge, told with evident satisfaction of how General Galland, the Nazi fighter commander, refused to believe the reports of his own men about the long range of our fighter aircraft until four Mustangs pounced on him one day while he was observing an air battle in an ME-410, and chased him all the way to Berlin.

After that he was convinced. So was the German high command. They knew then, as they admitted afterwards, that they had to develop their jet fighters -- and soon. Nothing else would stop the daylight invaders.

Experimenting With Various Weapons Systems

All through 1943, weapon clashed with counter-weapon. The Germans tried various forms of air-to-air bombing. None was successful. We trotted out the YB-40, a heavily armed B-17 Fortress designed to be a platform for firepower and nothing else. It was not a success, because the added firepower did not compensate for loss of speed. With better luck, we introduced flak suits that reduced casualties appreciably. The Germans experimented with intruder Fortresses that they had captured, with faked radio signals. We sent a squadron of B-17s to fly some night missions at very high altitude, while the RAF bombed the same target several thousand feet below. The reports were discouraging. Meanwhile, the RAF's superb air-sea rescue service reached the point where it could, and did, drop whole motor launches to ditched airmen, complete with everything except blondes.

RAF's Bomber Command, meantime, was locked in a night duel with the Luftwaffe as deadly as the day conflict between the Luftwaffe and the AAF. Beginning in March, 1943, with a 12-city blitz on the Ruhr, the RAF poured a steadily increasing bomb tonnage on Germany. How much it hurt the Nazis could be judged by the skill and determination with which their night fighter force fought back. It was tough going, and the night bombers could not count -- as the day bombers now could -- on squadrons of friendly long-range fighters to come charging to the rescue. They had to rely on deception and raw courage. They had an abundance of the latter, but the losses were cruel, and German civilian morale showed no sign of cracking under the rain of fire from the night skies.

It is still too early to attempt finally to evaluate the relative merits of night and day bombing at their respective stages of development in 1943. When asked a question along such lines after the war, Goering shrugged his massive shoulders and said, "Well, we could always evacuate the cities!" But it must be remembered that the RAF's pathfinder technique, in which special advance squadrons located and marked targets with flares at which the main bomber force would then aim, had not reached the degree of perfection it attained later. And the use of radar promises to make some forms of night bombing virtually as accurate as day, before the scientists are through with it.

The shattering daylight battles of the last week of July, when the US 8th. Air Force made its first determined assault on the Nazi aircraft industry, left both sides close to exhaustion. It was at this point that the lack of reserve aircraft was felt most sharply by the AAF. By now it was evident that the growth of the Luftwaffe fighter force had to be stopped. With our heavy bomber squadrons weary and below strength, and without long-range fighters for the last stages of deep penetration missions, the planners of the daylight offensive had to choose a target that would cause Germany the greatest possible dislocation. They chose ball-bearings.

Ball-Bearing Plants Attacked

Concentrated in a few well-defended areas such as Schweinfurt, the ball-bearing industry looked like the most promising Nazi industrial bottleneck in the late summer of 1943. Its destruction would affect not only aircraft production, but transportation, guns, tanks, ships and many other war products, all of which required ball-bearings for their manufacture and use.

The two deadly air attacks on the ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt, on August 17 and October 14, represented the climax of the major air fighting in 1943. The second attack, which resulted in 59 heavy bombers being shot down over Europe, one in the English Channel, and six that crashed trying to land, gave us proof that until we had adequate Mustang fighter cover over remote targets, the cost was simply too high.

The attacks on the ball-bearing plants produced some of the fiercest air battles of the war. By September 1944, the Germans had lost the equivalent of five months pre-attack war production.

We have the testimony of the general manager of Junkers in Italy that "the attacks on the ball-bearing industry were an unqualified success and disorganized Germany's entire war production." Luftwaffe prisoners, too, complained of engine failures caused by inferior bearings. It is true, however, that Germany was cushioned against the blows to some extent by fairly large reserves of bearings and by the fact that demand for bearings dropped sharply as Allied airpower smashed factories and curtailed production of items requiring bearings. The campaign against the ball-bearing industry hurt the Germans, but it was not decisive in the sense that the later campaign against oil was decisive.

Inadequate German Defensive Efforts

Yet if we were gloomy, the Germans were near despair. Goering issued an order in which he stated flatly that the Luftwaffe's defensive efforts were inadequate. This was significant because the Germans had made frantic efforts to improve it. Steadily increasing attacks by our Britain-based B-26 Marauders on German fighter fields were driving the Luftwaffe farther and farther back toward the territorial borders of the Reich. During August, the Nazis had pulled the crack 3rd Fighter Wing out of Russia -- at a time, too, when the German lines were sagging under the Soviet offensive between Kursk and Orel. They had converted night fighters into rocket-throwing fighter-bombers. They had set up elaborate refueling and rearming points from which their fighters could fly double sorties against the daylight invaders. They had issued orders on pain of court-martial, that German fighter pilots were to go for the bombers and ignore the escort fighters altogether. In a final desperate measure, they had created the Sturmstaffel, a suicidal group of pilots who took an oath to ram the American heavies if all else failed. This Teutonic form of the Japanese Kamikaze never came to much. But the fact that it had official sanction shows the German dread of our remorseless application of precision bombing.

With autumn came bad weather. Our formations had to fall back on instrument bombing, which at that point was far from a state of perfection. The Luftwaffe, licking its own wounds, rarely bothered to come up to oppose our planes.

The climb through the icy overcast wasn't worth the risk involved. Slowly, both sides built up strength for the final test which lay ahead. When USSTAF (United States Strategic and Tactical Air Forces) was created at the turn of the year, with the 8th Air Force almost at full strength and the 15th Air Force building up rapidly in its newly acquired Italian bases, everyone knew the test was at hand. The decisive battles had not been fought in 1943. Perhaps 1944 would be a different story.

The Air War -- 1944

The year 1944 began with a furious assault on the German fighter factories. By now there was absolute clarity of purpose as to the first priority of daylight strategic bombing. It was the neutralization of the Luftwaffe. Without achieving that, the great machinery of the D-day invasion, for which the dynamic code word 'Overlord' had been coined, could not begin to turn.

By this time the Germans' monthly production of single-engine fighters had reached 650, with great expansion imminent. Breaking the back of this production would not only safeguard the invasion armada, it would leave our heavy bombers free to attack the real Achilles heel of the Nazi war effort -- oil.

It might, moreover, liberate the RAF from the night bombing that had been its chosen element for so long. Failure to neutralize the Luftwaffe simply meant that the war might be prolonged indefinitely.

The first round was fought on January 11, 1944, when some 800 heavies, with escorting fighters, attacked aircraft factories at Oschersleben, Brunswick, Halberstadt and elsewhere. The Luftwaffe offered furious resistance. Fifty-three bombers and five escorting fighters were lost. Our returning airmen claimed 292 Nazi fighters destroyed.

The decisive attacks came in February, with an almost miraculous week of good weather and a great two-pronged blitz, from Britain and the Mediterranean, on the Nazi fighter complexes. When the smoke cleared away, German single-engine fighter production was reduced by 60 percent, and twin-engine production was cut by 80 percent.

With their amazing antlike persistence, the Nazis immediately started to repair their factories. Constant policing of their production remained necessary, and grew more and more difficult as the industry disappeared underground. But the air losses they suffered during the February attacks, both in planes and in pilots, made it impossible for them to come back to the strength required to defend against the looming certainty of D-day. In succeeding months, the Luftwaffe fought only to protect such vital targets as oil refineries, or the sacred heart of the Reich -- Berlin. D-day found Germany tired and dispirited. The lifeblood had been drained out of it in February 1944.

The Blitz On London

Also in February, the German Bomber Command showed a flickering spark of life.

This took the form of a baby blitz on London, an effort in which an attacking force, rarely exceeding 100 planes, took heavy punishment to drop a few more bombs on London, the city that had survived the big blitz of 1940-41, known as the Battle of Britain.

Just why the Germans chose this way to decimate their remaining night bomber squadrons, which might much better have been used against the juicy targets offered by the D-day invasion, still remains a mystery. Perhaps it is not too far fetched to wonder if the German high command, bearing in mind the progress of certain of its secret construction along the French coast, came to the conclusion that their bombers were obsolete in view of what was coming and decided to give German home morale a boost at the cost of their remaining planes. What was coming, of course, was the V-weapon assault on England.

The V-weapons

Since the summer of 1943, Allied intelligence had watched, with growing concern, Germany's experiments with a long-range rocket (the V-2) and a flying bomb (the V-1). The RAF's surprise attack on the experimental rocket facility at Pennemunde, on the Baltic coast, was reported to have delayed the work on these weapons by several months. But by the end of 1943, queer launching ramps were mushrooming along the coast, all ominously sighted toward London.

To the B-26 Marauder medium bombers of the 9th Bomber Command went the major responsibility for neutralizing this new threat. The targets became more and more difficult as the Germans modified and camouflaged their launching sites. Moreover, they were so heavily guarded by flak that exasperated AAF crews wondered audibly if the whole thing were not just an elaborate Jerry flak trap. As the concern of high British officials became more acute, heavy bombers were also assigned to the targets. Their use was uneconomical -- fighter bombing in the end was to prove the best antidote to the flying bomb sites -- but the threat was too grave to ignore. The delay imposed on the Germans by the attacks on the rocket sites undoubtedly saved London from an ordeal far worse than eventually materialized.

It is interesting to speculate as to what effect the V-weapon program had on the Luftwaffe. The diversion of materiel – and even more important, of the best scientific brains in the Reich – undoubtedly weakened the Luftwaffe to some degree. The Nazis could hardly be blamed, for they knew they could never hope to match us in mass production of orthodox types of weapons. But if they had concentrated on their jet plane program instead of the V-1, V-2 and other unconventional weapons, they might have realized their dream of an aerial stalemate. In any case, the V-weapon threat never interfered with Allied preparations for the D-day invasion.

Experimenting With High Altitude Fighter-Bombing

One interesting innovation that appeared in those days was the brief experiment with high altitude fighter-bombing. A P-38 Lightning fighter group, led by a modified P-38 “Droop Snoot” carrying a Norden bombsight and a bombardier, proved capable of dropping a respectable bomb load with considerable accuracy and a minimum of risk. The implications of this type of bombing – with the bomb pattern easily controlled by formation flying, with relatively less danger from flak, with no escort required since the Lightnings could jettison their loads and defend themselves if attacked by enemy aircraft, with a risk element of only one man per ton of bombs instead of two men per ton as in a medium or heavy bomber – the implications were interesting, to put it mildly. Granted that the Lightning was not as stable a bombing platform as a Marauder or a Fortress; granted, too, that the success or failure of the mission depended entirely on the skill of one bombardier in the lead P-38 – nevertheless this method of getting a bomb on a target seemed to have much to recommend it in terms of speed, safety and economy of men and machine.

Setbacks and Victories in Italy

In Italy, meanwhile, the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces had ably supported the Anzio landings, neutralizing German airfields in the vicinity, and cutting supply routes to the battlefield. But the Germans were able to contain the beachhead and prevent the capture of Rome.

Accordingly, on March 15, an attempt was made to blast a hole in the main front across Italy at Cassino. This was the first mass use of US AAF heavy bombers in close cooperation with ground troops. Four hundred and eighty-three planes dropped 1,205 tons of bombs on the town in a spectacular bombardment that caused worldwide comment. Cassino was pulverized but no break-through was achieved. The ground forces were unable to follow up at once with a heavy infantry attack due to a few hours of waiting for bulldozers to clear a path for tanks through the cratered rubble. In the interval, the stunned Germans were able to regroup and re-establish strong defenses. This lesson was not ignored when similar concentrated bombing was used at St. Lo in France, and at the Rhine and before Cologne in Germany.

In the 12th Air Force's 'Operation Strangle', supply problems of the German armies in Central Italy were made so acute that when the Allies finally jumped off in the push for Rome, German Commander Kesselring was unable to hold them. By cutting all railroads, the medium bombers and fighter-bombers of the 12th forced the Germans to use motor transport. Then the bombers pounced on these motor convoys and destroyed them. When the Nazis, in desperation, tried to send supplies down by sea, Coastal Air Force sank their ships. It was a brilliantly conceived and executed operation.

D-day -- The Invasion of France *

As the days lengthened, preparations for Operation Overlord (the D-day invasion of France) quickened. Over Europe, Britain-based AAF medium bombers stepped up their attacks on airfields in France and Holland.

The RAF withdrew from its grim battering of Berlin and turned its attention to French marshalling yards and enemy supply concentrations. Our photo-reconnaissance flyers mapped coastal defenses ceaselessly. Weather planes flew halfway across the Atlantic in rehearsal for the all-important day. The heavy bombers, their mortal duel with the Luftwaffe almost ended, began girding themselves for the tactical commitments of D-day and a new strategic campaign -- the campaign against oil.

The part played by airpower in the preparations for D-day and in the operation itself cannot, obviously, be fully discussed here. A whole chapter, indeed a whole book, could be written about any one of a dozen major contributions: the RAF's last-minute neutralization of German radar which left the enemy groping blindly for the direction of our main thrust; the patience and skill that lay behind the work of the lone weather plane, whose code message, flashed from far at sea, started the wheels of the whole gigantic machine; the superb effort of Troop Carrier in depositing two paratroop divisions behind the enemy lines and flying supplies to them despite fierce anti-aircraft opposition; the work of the fighters who struck at ground targets and guarded the seaborne armada; the instrument bombing by 1,077 AAF heavies who laid down a carpet of explosives 10 minutes before the landings, while the assault troops waited in their landing craft less than 1,000 yards from the beaches; the aviation engineers who built the landing strips while under fire... the catalogue is endless.

The story of how tactical airpower cut the remaining bridges over the Seine before sundown on D-day plus 1, thus leaving the German defenders virtually cut off from reinforcements, has already been told in the pages of this magazine and elsewhere. It was another Strangle operation, applied to an even more critical situation. There is no lack of evidence as to its effectiveness. General Guderian, Germany's great tank expert, growled afterwards: "Lack of German air superiority in Normandy led to a complete breakdown of the German net of communications. The Luftwaffe was unable to cope with Allied air superiority in the West.

Nevertheless, by the middle of July the Germans had managed to bring up enough reserves to contain our ground forces in an uncomfortably small space. The hedgerows war was falling farther and farther behind schedule when once again the heavy bombers were called upon for a maximum effort. The British struck first at Caen, on July 18, and the British ground forces made a five-mile advance. But the real breakthrough followed the American effort at St. Lo on July 25. Here, 1,500 aircraft dropped 3,400 tons of bombs on the fixed positions of the enemy.

The follow-up was instantaneous and decisive. The 1st Army, paced by the 9th Tactical Air Command, widened the breach and swung east. A week later General Patton's 3rd Army poured through the gap. The German counterattack at Avranches was smashed by a joint RAF-AAF effort. Tactical airpower was off on an offensive sweep that was to last until the end of the war.

With the breakthrough at St. Lo, the air war entered the exploitation stage. Limitations of space prevent here a full or even an adequate discussion of the colorful and varied achievements of the three Tactical Air Commands and the 1st Tactical Air Force in the pell-mell race across Europe. Some of their exploits were completely without precedent, as when the 19th TAC undertook to protect Patton's unguarded flank in his dash toward Germany, and did it so well that the German troops south of the Loire finally abandoned any thought of counterattack and surrendered in despair.

The farther the Germans retreated toward their homeland, the more they were harassed by swarms of fighter-bombers leapfrogging into airfields the Germans had just abandoned. The degree of coordination between these tactical aircraft and the ground forces was far beyond anything the Nazis had achieved in their best days of conquest. Tank commanders could whistle up fighter bombers in a matter of seconds. Roving aircraft controlled artillery fire, directing it on enemy emplacements and concentrations. Tactical reconnaissance planes kept an eye on enemy movements, spotting traffic jams that strafing P-47 Thunderbolts turned into traffic shambles. The losses of the Germans in vehicles of every kind had to be witnessed to be believed.

Meanwhile, the Italian-based heavies, having shared the credit for the February victory over the Luftwaffe, were busy aiding the Russians by strikes against Balkan communications. This campaign to deny the Germans access to the Balkan Battlefields continued right up to the fall of Vienna. At the same time the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces were dropping supplies to partisans in Yugoslavia, flying shuttle missions to Russia, hammering Axis ports in Vichy France and occupied Greece, pounding the Brenner Pass today above (in color) through which material was flowing to the stubborn German armies in Italy, participating in the oil blitz, and preparing for the August 15 landing in Southern France, an operation in which our air mastery was so complete that only one German plane was on hand to oppose some 2,700 Allied sorties.

The Oil Campaign

The oil campaign, which ranks, along with the neutralization of the Luftwaffe and the immobilization of the Wehrmacht, as the greatest contributions of airpower to victory in Europe, actually began a few weeks before the invasion of Normandy. To the British went the assignment of destroying synthetic oil plants in the Ruhr which were within easy range, even during the short summer nights. Oil targets in central, northern and eastern Germany, western Czechoslovakia and western Poland were given to the 8th Air Force; those in south and southeastern Germany, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy, Albania, southern Poland, southern France, and most important -- Ploesti, in Romania -- went to the 15th Air Force.

This combined offensive continued in mounting strength through June and July. By the end of that month, all but a handful of the important refineries and synthetic plants had been attacked. Every intelligence source indicated at the time, and the Germans have since agreed unanimously, that the results substantially hastened the end of the war. Conservative estimates showed that the loss of output at the 66 separate plants attacked between May and July was in excess of 400,000,000 gallons. By August, gasoline production had been reduced to 20 percent of Germany's minimum requirements. By V-E day the oil industry production was down to seven percent of pre-attack level.

This unqualified success, which left the remnants of the Luftwaffe with no gasoline for training pilots, left tanks stranded for lack of fuel, and dislocated the submarine campaign more than bombing had ever done, was not achieved without cost. The Germans ringed their refineries with the thickest concentration of flak guns ever assembled. With plenty of guns and skilled crews, they took a high toll of our men and machines. The strikes against Ploesti alone cost the 15th Air Force well over 200 heavy bombers.

The Nazis tried, too, to disperse their oil industry, but it was a slow process and they began it too late. Our timing of the oil blitz was good. If we had started it sooner, German dispersal would have begun sooner and might have gone far enough to provide the fuel for their jet program, which was rapidly nearing completion when our ground forces moved in. If the underground jet fighter factory at Kahla, with a monthly capacity of 1,000 ME-262 jet planes, had been left unmolested for five or six more months, the consequences are not pleasant to contemplate.

Picture Credits: (Wikipedia)

Disappointments in Latter Half of 1944

Accompanying the brilliance of the strategic performance against oil and the magnificent work of the Tactical Air Commands, there were a few disappointments in the latter half of 1944. None was important in relation to the whole air effort, but in any attempt to present a balanced picture, they are worth mentioning.

One was the partial failure of the Allied Airborne Army's first major effort to breach the northern end of the Siegfried Line. The retreat of the British from Arnhem emphasized the necessity for dropping airborne troops fairly close to the advancing ground forces, and highlighted some of the limitations of airborne supply.

Another source of some disappointment were certain missions which were flown against the Germans who were clinging grimly to the Atlantic ports. They merely proved again that a motionless enemy, well dug into a fixed position, is hard to dislodge by air attack.

Then there were the much publicized shuttle flights to Russia. They did prove that the individual Soviet and American airmen had a lot in common and could get on well together. But any official exchange of information was somewhat limited. On the other hand, Allied airpower performed superbly in the gravest threat against our march to the Rhine. This was in the Battle of the Bulge.

Battle of the Bulge

The Battle of the Bulge (December 16, 1944 - January 25, 1945) was a surprise major German offensive campaign launched through the densely forested Ardennes region of Wallonia in Belgium, France, and Luxembourg. Its purpose was to buy a little more time for the Germans at any cost. For the first four days of the offensive, the weather was unflyable. On December 21, Tactical Air Command (TAC) Reconnaissance flew some suicidal sorties. On December 23, the weather mercifully cleared, and the TACs hurled themselves at the Nazi armored columns, while in the next week the medium and heavy bombers dropped more than 100,000 tons of bombs in a gigantic interdiction effort. The Germans, obstructed in their narrow corridor by the heroic stand of ground forces at Bastogne and St. Vith, were unable to supply themselves under the ceaseless rain of bombs. By December 27 they began to pull out. Within a month, the bulge was hammered flat.

New Year's Day, however, saw the last offensive effort of the dying German Air Force. Goaded to desperation by Allied attacks on their airfields, the Luftwaffe commanders squandered their last reserves of fuel by flying some 800 sorties, most of them at low level, against Allied airdromes. They hit us a sharp crack -- 127 aircraft destroyed on the ground, 133 damaged. But the Nazis lost about 200 aircraft to flak and fighters, and they could not stand such losses. Some of their battered squadrons were returned to the Russian front in a vain effort to halt the final drive on Berlin. In the West, the Luftwaffe was through. In March 1945, when the great airborne assault across the Rhine took place -- an effort involving some 14,000 troops carried in transports and gliders -- not one of the carriers was lost to enemy air action.

There is no need to elaborate here on the final weeks that saw the airfields of the shrinking Reich jammed with aircraft which had neither fuel to fly nor places to go. In the first three weeks of April, our air forces destroyed more than 3,000 planes, most of them on the ground. This slaughter coincided with the United States Strategic and Tactical Air Forces announcement that it had run out of strategic targets. Strange by-products of our bombing appeared, such as the bitter assertion of one prisoner that the Volksturm, the German civilian army, was nothing but an unemployment scheme made necessary by the destruction of German industry from the air.

By April 1945, it was clear that Germany was conclusively beaten. The final capitulation in May was something of an anti-climax.

Those who witnessed first hand the evidence of the terrible beating Germany received from the air were not surprised by the total collapse of her war effort. The amazing thing was that any nation could have endured so much for so long.

Final Analysis

The first postwar surveys seem to indicate that the German war machine was not fatally damaged by bombing before July 1944, regardless of how the German people suffered. The reason for this was simply that, up to that point, German industry was keeping pace with the rising tempo of the bombing. German production in mid-summer 1944 was considerably higher than it was in mid-summer 1942, because in 1942 the Germans still hoped to win by a blitzkrieg type of warfare that did not require the harnessing of their full industrial strength. In July 1944, however, with the Luftwaffe knocked out of the fight, and selective bombing being applied relentlessly by the Allies, production curves of the Nazis went into a decline that Allies,

production curves of the Nazis went into a decline that led finally to oblivion. One of the main reasons was that our fighter-bombers began to paralyze rail traffic within the Reich itself. Coal trains leaving the Ruhr dropped to something like eight percent of normal. General Pelz, the Luftwaffe's fair-haired boy, was not exaggerating when he said, in the autumn of 1944, that unless the Allied fighter-bombers were driven away, there would be no coal for Germany's industries. Dispersal of industry to escape our strategic bombing made this transportation problem even more acute.

But it is worth noting that, until bombing of transportation facilities became heavy and sustained, the German railways were able to absorb terrific punishment. In the last analysis, the mission of Allied airpower was to hasten the collapse of the enemy. It achieved this mission partly by crippling his war production and partly by denying him mobility. Coal production plant in the 40’s at Ruhr, Germany.

But it is worth noting that, until bombing of transportation facilities became heavy and sustained, the German railways were able to absorb terrific punishment.

In the last analysis, the mission of Allied airpower was to hasten the collapse of the enemy. It achieved this mission partly by crippling his war production and partly by denying him mobility.

Exactly what percentage of German industry was destroyed by bombing is yet to be determined. The Nazis tried to hide the true facts, even from one another. But the overall figure is not so important; it was selective damage that counted. The 93 percent destruction of German oil production was far more important in bringing Germany to her knees than the percentage of damage to her industries as a whole, whatever that figure may have been.

As for mobility, unless you can move freely, you cannot fight a successful war. When the Luftwaffe was slapped down and kept down, the Germans lost their mobility in the air. On D-day and thereafter, the Nazi armies lost a fatal degree of their ground mobility to Allied air superiority, which severed communications arteries and made daylight road movements virtually impossible.

Throughout the long years of war, as marshalling yards were torn up, railroad rolling stock destroyed, bridges knocked down and oil refineries smashed, German industry gradually lost the mobility that supplied it with raw materials and carried finished products to wherever they were needed. Lack of ability, for example, to transport V-weapons to their launching sites was one of the main reasons why this menace never became more effective.

Such German local successes, as there were toward the end of the war, came only when the Nazis were solidly dug in and didn't have to move, as in some of the Channel ports, or when bad weather grounded the Anglo-American air arm, as it did temporarily in the Battle of the Bulge.

In postwar interrogations, prisoner after prisoner complained bitterly of being pinned down, of arriving too late, of not getting supplies on time. They could not fight offensively because they could not move. And they could not move because, in a thousand ways, Allied airpower had robbed them of their mobility. There, if you like enormous nutshells, is one to put the European war in.

The temptation to try to look into the future is irresistible, and such crystal ball-gazing is no idle occupation, because on it depends the supremacy of this nation in the air.

It is obvious that an air force such as we possessed on V-J day will be a tremendous factor in supporting and enforcing the principles and ideals of the United Nations Charter. Aerial photography directed by ourselves or our Allies can be useful in observing the activities of nations that are potential troublemakers, and the tremendous range of our very heavy bombers will enable them to remain a threat to any aggressor, if global bases are maintained.

We must never discount, however, the possibility that in the future, despite our vigilance or perhaps through lack of it, new and revolutionary air weapons may be used against us. The flying bomb is still in the kindergarten stage of development. So is the radio-controlled rocket.

The appearance of the jet fighter put the whole daylight bomber offensive in serious jeopardy. It is known that right up to the end of the war, the Germans were working feverishly on improved flak defenses. If the range and accuracy of their antiaircraft fire had been much more deadly, our bombers would not have been able to stand the losses. And they had other unpleasant tricks up their sleeves.

In retrospect, it seems that we were indeed fortunate in applying the overwhelming power of long-range bombardment just when we did. A few years earlier, the bombers could not have carried decisive loads. A few years or even months later, improved defenses might have stopped them.

In the Pacific, we are now witnessing long-range strategic bombing brought to a magnificent climax. But the air defenses of Japan, even today, are not comparable to those of Germany in 1943 or 1944. We should not let such successes make us complacent or blind us to the ultimate vulnerability of the big planes to defenses not now envisioned.

In any future war -- and it is more realistic than pessimistic to face the possibility -- the only certainty is that the weapons of the last war will be outmoded, and nothing becomes obsolete faster than an air weapon. Large air fleets do not guarantee air superiority. Pre-eminence in research is just as important.

To repeat a phrase from the beginning of this article, 'thinking -- not materiel -- is what wins wars'. Boldness in discarding old weapons, ingenuity in devising new ones, and intelligent plans for using them are indispensable to national defense.

No one knows exactly what the laboratories of the future will bring forth in the way of new explosives, rocket projectiles, radar-guided flak, and so forth. At any time, revolutionary weapons may revise all previous military concepts. The trend may be away from the super-airplane. Swarms of smaller, faster, more versatile planes capable of great range, considerable bomb-load, and a high degree of self protection, guided by radar, operating regardless of weather, by day or night, and augmented by various advanced types of V-weapons -- this may be the shape of airpower in the future.

Whatever the future may hold, we would be foolhardy to rely on the protection of our surrounding oceans. To airpower already discernible, oceans will be no barrier. Nor can we be sure of finding, again, a natural air base like Great Britain, anchored to the flank of our deadliest adversary. We must maintain a force capable of instantaneous offensive action against any opponent, anywhere, at any time. The only power that can traverse land and sea overnight, and put the enemy on the defensive, is airpower.

Much has been learned, in three years over Europe, about the stunning impact of bombing, especially when concentrated against two or three vital targets.

But much has also been learned about countermeasures. Any aggressor nation, given the opportunity that Germany had before this war, will certainly disperse and conceal its key industries in such a manner that the power of strategic bombing to inflict fatal damage will be greatly lessened. The moral is too obvious to stress: the time to stop aggression is before the aggressor is ready to strike.

The time has passed -- or should have passed -- when people argue heatedly about whether or not airpower, unaided, can win wars. To date, it never has. This does not mean that it never will. But the question is almost academic in the face of two certainties that have emerged from the European war with the respective fates of Britain and Germany as final proof:

If you hold the air, you cannot be beat.
If you lose the air, you cannot win.

We would do well, if we wish to dwell secure in this nation of ours, to remember those two lessons for the rest of our lives.

*Three Years over Europe

The above article appeared in the September 1945 issue of Air Force magazine, the official service journal of the U.S. Army Air Forces, and discusses in great detail the role played by American airpower in the WW2 European theater. Although the article emphasizes the American contributions to the war effort, it also discusses the actions of all parties, both Allied and Axis, and presents an excellent summary of the role airpower played in the ultimate outcome of the war.

He served in the 8th Army Air Force from the fall of 1942 as an Intelligence Officer, as chief of the Magazine Section. 8th AAF PRO, and as the European staff correspondent of the Air Force. He participated in a number of combat missions both from England and Italy and was awarded the Air Medal by Gen. Carl A. Spaatz. He returned to the United States in July of 1944 to become Editorial Director of the Air Force Magazine. He later traveled back to Europe in April of 1945 to report on the war's ending.

Wing Tip to Wing Tip? (picture HERE too)

This photograph is somewhat skeptical here on this side of the “Pond” in California. Perhaps a flying RAF Officer can help. First of all, it is a daylight image over a land mass with RAF single engine fighter going wingtip to wingtip with a flying bomb when a single burst of 50 caliber would resolve the issue that is presented. No location is given, but I understood that much of the “Terror Bombing” happen at nigh to enhance the “terror bombing effect”. Most of the images on the “Web” reflect night time raids and the resulting fires of burning buildings in London. I have enlarged the image to max but could find no enhancements via “Photoshop” or other manipulations. I served on a WW2 Destroyer for four years in the Pacific and fed a duel 3” A. A. Gun and we couldn’t hit a towed target being dragged by another aircraft in the early 60s. It doesn’t make sense to upset a “gyro” when just knocking it out is faster and easier. Respond if you wish via e-mail email at (march4_1945project@earthlink.net).

About the author:

GEORGE ARTHUR GORDON was born thirty-seven years ago in Savannah, Georgia. His family background, medical on one side, mercantile-military on the other, is completely Southern. His maternal grandfather was Stonewall Jackson’s surgeon; his paternal great-grandfather was the first Georgian to graduate from West Point.

Educated at Yale and Oxford (Rhodes Scholar from Georgia), he came to New York in 1936 to start a magazine-writing-and-editing career. At the time of Pearl Harbor, he was managing editor of Good Housekeeping.

He went overseas in 1942 as a lieutenant assigned to the Eighth Air Force; came out a major in the 1945. With Major Richard Thruelsen, he wrote Target: Germany, the official story of the VIII Bomber Command, which sold close to a million copies here and in England.

After the war he became editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, a post he held until mid-1948. Then he went back to Georgia to write Reprisal.

He now lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife and small daughter. He has written many magazine stories and articles, and a book.

His Military Service: He served in the 8th Army Air Force from the fall of 1942 as an Intelligence Officer, obtained a top rank of Captain, and served as chief of the Magazine Section - 8th Army Air Force PRO, and as the European staff correspondent of the Air Force. He participated in a number of combat missions both from England and Italy and was awarded the Air Medal by Gen. Carl A. Spaatz. He returned to the United States in July of 1944 to become Editorial Director of the Air Force Magazine. He later traveled back to Europe in April of 1945 to report on the wars ending. His WW2 work: Three Years Over Europe. ( I wish to thank Mrs. Vivian Rogers-Price, Ph.D. Historian and also Research Center Director for the 8th Army Air Corps, for her kind help and encouragement in providing background information about the author in January of 2019.)

About the Pathfinder Technique:

A product of the struggle within the Royal Air Forces (RAF)Bomber Command between advocates of area and precision bombing, the pathfinder technique employed a force of experienced bomber crews to mark aiming points of experienced bomber crews to mark aiming points for night bombing with sky and ground target indicators. The strongest advocate was Group Captain Sidney Bufton. The technique was worked out by Number 8 Group’s Vice-Marshal Donald Bennett (q.v.), who formed the Pathfinder Force (PFF) beginning on 15 August 1942 over the objections of Bomber Command commander in chief Air Marshall Arthur Harris (q.v.)

When visual bombing conditions existed, PFF used flares to illuminate the target area for aiming their ground markers, which served as aiming points for the main force. PFF also employed blind-bombing radio and radar techniques, including Gee, Oboe, and H2S airborne radar (see Night Operations Air). At its best, Air Vice Marshal Ralph Cochrane's Number 5 Group indicators away fro the dust and smoke obscuring the target, could achieve accuracies within 300 yards. At its worst, the PFF misidentified Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, on 16-17 April 1943 , and the main force bombed an asylum seven miles from the target. The pathfinder technique provided for greater bomb concentrations, but only if the PFF found and identified the correct aiming point.

In American use, the pathfinder technique allowed daylight bombers to bomb through undercast. Equipments include H2S, H2X and Micro-H (a modified Gee system), accounting for more than half of the bomb Tonnage dropped in the last two years of the war. Where the Eight Air Force achieved 30 percent of its bombs within 1,000 feet of the assigned aiming points in later 1944 using visual aiming, PFF techniques using Micro-H achieved 5 percent and H2X only 0.2 percent

During World War II, Braunschweig (known as Brunswick in English) was attacked by Allied aircraft in 42 bombing raids.

The attack on the night of 14/15 October 1944 by No. 5 Group Royal Air Force (RAF) marked the high point of the destruction of Henry the Lion's city in the Second World War (WWII). The air raid, part of Operation Hurricane to demonstrate the Allied bombing campaign's capabilities, caused a large fire or conflagration, that may have developed into a firestorm, which resulted in Braunschweig burning continuously for two and a half days from 15 October to the 17th. Moreover, the attack destroyed Braunschweig mediaeval city centre (more than 90% of it), thereby changing the city's appearance right down to the present day.

Raids

The RAF first bombed Braunschweig on 17 August 1940, killing seven people, and the 94th BG earned a Distinguished Service Cross for an 11 January 1944 mission against the MIAG bomber components factory. As part of the Combined Bomber Offensive, Braunschweig was a regular target for RAF (nighttime raids) and American bombers (daylight), including two "Big Week" attacks on 20 and 21 February 1944.

The first major British raid against Braunschweig was on 14/15 January 1944, when nearly 500 Lancasters attacked, but faced a strong defence by German fighters. As a relatively small target, most of the bombing missed the city.

In an experimental raid on to see if bombing by radar alone (without target marking) was effective, nearly 400 heavy bombers were sent on 12/13 August 1944. No effective concentration of the bombs occurred, and nearby towns were bombed by mistake.

Between these dates, fast Mosquito bombers occasionally were sent on nuisance raids and diversions against Braunschweig.

On October 14, 1944, No. 106 Squadron RAF bombed Brunswick, and one of the last attacks was an attack on chemical plant in March 1945 as part of the campaign against synthetic oil production.

Braunschweig in 1944

Braunschweig was subjected to 42 WWII air raids, and the city was ringed by antiaircraft guns. In January 1944, Bomber Commands raids against "Stettin, Brunswick and Magdeburg" were taking 7.2% losses - more than in raids against Berlin that month. The targets included machine and munitions works, the harbour, research institutions, canneries, railway stations and the railway maintenance works, and the German Research Centre for Aviation. Nearby targets included the Reichswerke Hermann Göring in Salzgitter and the KdF-Stadt Volkswagen factory near Fallersleben. The nearby Oflag 79 prisoner-of-war camp was attacked on 24 August 1944.

Preparation for the 15 October 1944 air raid

Raid's purpose

On 13 October, the RAF received orders to carry out Operation Hurricane. The purpose of this action was to demonstrate the Allied bomber forces' destructive might, and to make clear Allied air superiority. The orders included the following:

"In order to demonstrate to the enemy in Germany generally the overwhelming superiority of the Allied Air Forces in this theatre … the intention is to apply within the shortest practical period the maximum effort of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command and the 8th United States Bomber Command against objectives in the densely populated Ruhr."

Operation Hurricane foresaw Duisburg as its main goal for the RAF's thousand or so bombers, and Cologne for the USAAF's 1,200 or so bombers. A further 233 RAF bombers were detailed for Braunschweig, which in October 1944 had about 150,000 inhabitants.

The planning for the attack on Braunschweig was finalized as of 15 August 1944. Darmstadt had been attacked on the night of 11 September 1944 using a new targeting technique, fan-shaped flying formation, staggering of explosive and incendiary bombs. A largely unprepared town, the resulting fires caused about 11,500 deaths. The Allies now turned their attention to Braunschweig.

Braunschweig was to be largely destroyed, not only as an important centre of the armament industry, but also, and above all, as a living place, thereby making it uninhabitable and useless. The goal, namely the greatest possible destruction, was to be reached through detailed attack plans and careful execution thereof, and also using the attributes of the materiel that was to be deployed. The means whereby the goal was to be reached would be the aforesaid firestorm, whose production was no accident; it was scientifically based and developed through painstakingly detailed work.

On 13 October, the chief meteorologist at RAF High Wycombe advised RAF Bomber Command headquarters of the weather forecast for the weekend of 14–15 October: Slight cloudiness, good visibility throughout the night, moderate winds. The next day, Air Marshal Arthur "Bomber" Harris issued the orders to carry out the attack on Braunschweig and other cities. Brunswick was codenamed Skate by RAF Bomber Command, all German cities being given names of fish, the person responsible for the naming being a keen angler. Actual city names were never used in operational orders for security reasons.

RAF Bomber Command had sought four times in vain during 1944 to inflict lasting destruction upon Braunschweig, failing each time as a result of, among other things, bad weather and strong defences.

On Saturday 14 October 1944 at No. 5 Group's headquarters at Morton Hall, the preparations for the attack were finalized.

October 1944 raid

The raid coincided with a British thousand-bomber raid on Duisburg, the second on that city within 24 hours, a previous British attack having been made by daylight.

According to plan, the aircraft of No. 5 Group took off around 2300 hours local time on 14 October. The main force of the group was 233 four-engined heavy bombers – Avro Lancasters Mark I and III – each with a bomb load of about 6 tons. The Lancaster were accompanied by seven de Havilland Mosquito fast light bombers. The bombers bound for Braunschweig took a course that ran to the south to avoid the Ruhr area, which was heavily defended by antiaircraft batteries and aircraft. Near Paderborn, it turned towards the north, overflew Hanover, and went on to Braunschweig.

As was usual, the British activities for the night included a number of sorties to deceive the German defences about the true targets for the night. One hundred and forty-one training craft flew simulated attacks on Heligoland, 20 Mosquitos went to Hamburg, eight to Mannheim, 16 to Berlin and two to Düsseldorf. They were supported by 140 special operations aircraft of 100 Group RAF deployed in electronic warfare measures against German nightfighter defences. Strips of tinfoil (codenamed "Window") were scattered into the air in great amounts to jam the German air defence system's radar stations, thereby rendering them very nearly useless on this night. The feint against Mannheim, which German forces expected to be the main target, left the Brunschweig attack unopposed.

The siren signal alerting the city to an air raid was sounded at about 0150 on 15 October.

Target marking

The Mosquitos of 5 Group marked the target for the main force. No. 5 Group had developed its own techniques separate to the Pathfinder Force and was using "sector bombing". It used the cathedral as a reckoning point for the "master bomber" in the lead plane. Over the Dom-Insel – the site of Braunschweig Cathedral – a green flare was dropped, a so-called "blind marker". Other Mosquitoes dropped their markers of various colors, lighting the target up. Southwest of the downtown core fell the first red flare. These craft in turn gave forth about 60 flares from a height of 1000m, which then slowly floated down to the ground, each burning for about 3 to 7 minutes. These lit markers were called "Christmas tree" by the Germans for their characteristic appearance. Given the clear night, the problem-free overflight, the flawless marking of the target, the conditions for this attack were, from the British point of view, optimal.

The green marker on the Dom-Insel served to guide the bomb aimers in all following aircraft, who flew in over it from various directions in a fan-shaped formation, whereupon they dropped their bombs.

RAF filming

This raid on Braunschweig was filmed by a Lancaster of the RAF Film Production Unit outfitted for the task with three "Eyemo"-type cameras. It flew along with the rest at a height of 4,950m (16,240ft) over Braunschweig at 260km/h (160mph). The time of the attack's onset was noted as 0233 hours. A copy of the film is held by the Städtisches Museum Braunschweig .

The film is provided with the following informational text: "Bomber Command … made a heavy and concentrated attack on the industrial town of Brunswick, which is one of Germany’s biggest center for the aircraft and engineering industries. As the aircraft with the cameras runs up to the target, the fires can be seen spreading rapidly all over the city and by the time the aircraft is over the target, the whole city is ablaze and the streets can be seen clearly outlined.

The Firestorm

Braunschweig city centre burning on the night of 15 October 1944

Before long, about 847 tons of bombs had been dropped on the city, first about 12,000 explosive bombs – the so-called "blockbusters" – in many "carpets" on the old timber-frame town to get the intended firestorm started in the most efficient way – with the old town's wooden houses. The blast waves blew the houses' roofs off, exposing the insides, blew windowpanes out, splintered the inner structure, broke walls down, tore electricity and water supplies up, and drove firefighters and rescue service personnel, as well as damage observers, into cellars and bunkers.

After the wave of explosive bombs came about 200,000 phosphorus and incendiary bombs whose job was to ignite the firestorm. It would still be burning long after the bombers had returned to England.

By about 0310 hours, about 40 minutes after the first explosive bombs had been dropped on Braunschweig, the RAF bombing was over.

The hot masses of air were sucked upwards by the powerful thermal that arose from the conflagration. Cooler air was thereby brought down from great heights, making the local weather much like a windstorm with constantly changing winds that only worsened the fires, thereby further strengthening the winds, which were actually strong enough to sweep small pieces of furniture up and toss people about.

About three and a half hours later, towards 6:30 in the morning, the firestorm reached its peak in the downtown core. About 150ha of historic old Braunschweig were going up in flames. The city's tallest church steeples – those of St. Andrew’s at about 100m tall – could be seen burning far beyond the town, and they also rained embers down over the whole city. Streets, buildings, and the ruins of the downtown core were heavily littered with incendiary bombs, greatly slowing rescue vehicles and fire engines, which had to fight their way through this and many other dangers in the firestorm to reach into the fire.

The city burnt so intensely and brightly that the light from the fire could be seen far and wide. From all directions, helpers and firefighters thronged into the burning town to help. They came from, among other places, Hanover to the west and Helmstedt in the east, from Celle to the north and Quedlinburg to the south.

Within the 24 hours of Operation Hurricane, the RAF dropped about 10,000 tons of bombs in total on Duisburg and Braunschweig, the greatest bomb load dropped on any single day in WWII.

Rescue of 23,000 trapped people

The many fires in the city centre quickly grew together into one widespread conflagration. However, in this area were six large bunkers and two air raid shelters, all quite overfull, in which 23,000 people had sought refuge from the attack. While these thousands waited in seeming safety inside their thick-walled shelters for the all-clear signal, outside the firestorm raged.

The fire brigade very soon realized the threat to these 23,000 trapped people – the fire was growing ever hotter, and the oxygen in the bunkers and shelters thereby ever thinner. The danger was clearly that the victims would either suffocate for lack of oxygen if they stayed in the bunkers, or be burnt alive if they tried to leave and escape through the firestorm outside.

Die Wassergasse ("water alley")

Towards 0500, before the firestorm had reached its full intensity, the idea of building a "water alley" was conceived by Lieutenant of the Fire Brigade Rudolf Prescher. This "water alley" would allow the trapped people to flee their shelters for safe areas of the city.

The water alley consisted of a long hose that had to be kept under a constant water mist to shield it against the fire's tremendous heat as the firefighters led the hose through to the shelters where the people were trapped. The reach of each of the little jets issuing from the holes in the hose overlapped each other, making a continuous, artificial "rain zone".

The bunkers were reached towards 0700 Sunday morning, after the fire storm had reached its greatest intensity. All the trapped people were still alive, but had no idea what lay outside for them. All 23,000 managed to get out of the danger zone and reach safe areas, such as the museum park.

Only at the Schöppenstedter Straße 31 air shelter did the help come too late, where 95 of the 104 people had suffocated by the time the fire brigade reached them. The firestorm had been so intense in this particular part of the city that it had used up nearly all the oxygen, making saving more than nine people impossible.

Effect

A great part of Braunschweig's tightly packed city centre was made up of about 800 timber-frame houses, many of which dated back to the Middle Ages. The city also had stone buildings dating mainly from the 17th and 18th centuries. The old cathedral, which the RAF had used as a reckoning point for the whole operation, and which the Nazis had turned into a "National Shrine" in 1935, was left standing. Many important historic buildings were largely or utterly destroyed.

On the next morning, 16 October, Braunschweig lay under a thick cloud of smoke. A British reconnaissance aircraft sent to take photographs of the bombing's aftermath for analysis had to return to England, as its mission had been rendered impossible by the opaque pall that hung over the town.

By the evening of 17 October, the last of the fire's main hotspots had been put out, but it took another three days to quench lesser fires, until 20 October. Eighty thousand of the townsfolk were left homeless by the attack.

The destruction was so widespread and thorough that ordinary people and the experts alike, even years after the war, were convinced that the attack had come from one of the dread "thousand-bomber attacks", such as the one that had laid Cologne waste. The extent of the damage could seemingly not otherwise be explained. Only after the British opened their military archives did it become plain that it had been "only" 233 bombers.

Casualties

The exact number of victims of the 15 October attack is unknown. The given figures range from 484 to 640 dead, 95 of those by suffocation at the Schöppenstedter Straße 31 shelter alone. Nowadays, historians put the number at more than a thousand.

These "light" losses – compared with those suffered in the great air raids on Dresden, Hamburg, Pforzheim and other German cities – according to expert opinions stem from various factors. For one thing, Braunschweig lay on the direct flight path, that is, the "lane" leading to Magdeburg and Berlin, and right near the armament industry centers of Salzgitter (Hermann-Göring-Werke) and Wolfsburg (Volkswagen Works), meaning that Braunschweigers were used to – even in a sense "trained for" – quickly responding to alarms (there were 2,040 warnings and 620 air raid alarms between 1939 and 1945). This may have prepared them for the attack, even though many of the earlier attacks from which they had sought shelter actually targeted the other cities mentioned. Furthermore, the city also had at its disposal a great number of the latest type of air raid bunkers and blockhouses known as Hochbunkers. Lastly, the fire brigade's "water alley" alone saved 23,000 people's lives.

The RAF lost a single Lancaster bomber to anti-aircraft fire that night.

Braunschweig Armour

Braunschweig had, compared to other German cities, a great number of the most modern air raid bunkers, some of which were Hochbunkers (high-rise bunkers), which nevertheless suffered from regular overcrowding as the war wore on. As modern and robust as they were, the fact is that the so-called Braunschweig Armour was developed at the Institute for Building Materials, Massive Construction and Fire Protection of the Technical University of Braunschweig. It became a kind of safety standard for building air raid bunkers throughout the Reich.

Fire brigades from Braunschweig and other cities deployed against the firestorm

According to estimates, especially during the night of the bombing as well as in the next six days until the last fires were put out, about 4,500 firefighters were deployed. They came from up to 90km (56mi) away, and included not only members of city fire brigades from, among other places, Blankenburg, Celle, Gifhorn, Hanover, Helmstedt, Hildesheim, Peine, Salzgitter, Wernigerode and Wolfenbüttel, but also volunteers and members of plant fire brigades at the various factories in Braunschweig and the surrounding area. Due to their efforts the city was not utterly burnt that night.

Aftermath

The bombing in the Nazi press

Even on the night of the attack, the National Socialists seized the opportunity to make the victims an instrument in their quest for total war, for already by the next day, 16 October, with Braunschweig still burning, the local Nazi propaganda newspaper, the Braunschweiger Tageszeitung, came out with the headline "Die teuflische Fratze des Gegners. Schwerer Terrorangriff auf Braunschweig – Volksgemeinschaft in der Bewährung" ("The foe's devilish antics. Heavy terror attack on Braunschweig – Population put to the test"), and Südhannover-Braunschweig Gauleiter Hartmann Lauterbacher's (1909–1988) pithy words of perseverance to "the Braunschweigers". On 19 October, the number of "fallen" was given as 405, and on 20 October appeared a full-page death notice with 344 names. On 22 October, one week after the disastrous attack, there was a "memorial act" for the victims, both at the State Cathedral ("Staatsdom") – as the Nazis called Braunschweig's cathedral – and at the Schlossplatz, the square in front of Braunschweig Palace.

The same night, Braunschweig had another heavy air raid. This time the bombers were USAAF Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses. The last air raid on Braunschweig came on the morning of 31 March 1945, carried out by the 392d Bombardment Group. Their main target was the East Railway Station.

Statistics of destruction

Population

When the Second World War began, Braunschweig had 202,284 inhabitants. By the war's end, the population had fallen by 26.03% to 149,641. From the effects of war (mainly air raids but also their aftermath, such as having to dispose of or otherwise make safe the duds that the Allies dropped) about 2,905 people died, 1,286 of whom (44.3%) were foreigners. These foreigners were predominantly prisoners of war, forced labourers, and concentration camp inmates who worked in the armament industry, and who were forbidden access to the air raid bunkers.

Destruction of housing and infrastructure

Between 1940 and 1945, Braunschweig was targeted 42 times by RAF and USAAF air raids.

Exact figures are available only for destroyed houses and flats. By the time the war was over, about 20% of Braunschweig's dwellings had been left completely undamaged, but about 24% of them had been utterly destroyed. The remaining 55% were somewhat damaged, with the extent of damage to any particular dwelling varying greatly with others. In 1943, before the area bombing of Braunschweig, there were 15,897 houses in the city, but by mid-1945, only 2,834 (about 18%) were left undamaged. The city also had 59,826 flats, of which 11,153 (about 19%) were still undamaged by the time the war ended. The level of destruction with regard to residential buildings stood at 35%, leading to homelessness for almost 80% of the townsfolk by war's end. Sixty percent of the city's places of cultural interest, including the municipal buildings, were likewise destroyed, along with about 50% of its industrial areas.

Overall destruction rate and amount of rubble

The destruction rate in Braunschweig's downtown core (within the "Oker Ring", the Oker being a river that encircles Braunschweig) stood at about 90%, and the overall figure for Braunschweig as a whole was 42%. The attack on the city produced an estimated 3670500m³ of rubble. These figures put Braunschweig among Germany's most heavily damaged cities in the Second World War.

After the war

The bombing in the Nazi press

Even on the night of the attack, the National Socialists seized the opportunity to make the victims an instrument in their quest for total war, for already by the next day, 16 October, with Braunschweig still burning, the local Nazi propaganda newspaper, the Braunschweiger Tageszeitung, came out with the headline "Die teuflische Fratze des Gegners. Schwerer Terrorangriff auf Braunschweig – Volksgemeinschaft in der Bewährung" ("The foe's devilish antics. Heavy terror attack on Braunschweig – Population put to the test"), and Südhannover-Braunschweig Gauleiter Hartmann Lauterbacher's (1909–1988) pithy words of perseverance to "the Braunschweigers". On 19 October, the number of "fallen" was given as 405, and on 20 October appeared a full-page death notice with 344 names. On 22 October, one week after the disastrous attack, there was a "memorial act" for the victims, both at the State Cathedral ("Staatsdom") – as the Nazis called Braunschweig's cathedral – and at the Schlossplatz, the square in front of Braunschweig Palace.

The same night, Braunschweig had another heavy air raid. This time the bombers were USAAF Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses. The last air raid on Braunschweig came on the morning of 31 March 1945, carried out by the 392d Bombardment Group. Their main target was the East Railway Station.

Statistics of destruction

Population

When the Second World War began, Braunschweig had 202,284 inhabitants. By the war's end, the population had fallen by 26.03% to 149,641. From the effects of war (mainly air raids but also their aftermath, such as having to dispose of or otherwise make safe the duds that the Allies dropped) about 2,905 people died, 1,286 of whom (44.3%) were foreigners. These foreigners were predominantly prisoners of war, and concentration camp inmates who worked in the armament industry, and who were forbidden access to the air raid bunkers.

Destruction of housing and infrastructure

Between 1940 and 1945, Braunschweig was targeted 42 times by RAF and USAAF air raids.

Exact figures are available only for destroyed houses and flats. By the time the war was over, about 20% of Braunschweig's dwellings had been left completely undamaged, but about 24% of them had been utterly destroyed. The remaining 55% were somewhat damaged, with the extent of damage to any particular dwelling varying greatly with others. In 1943, before the area bombing of Braunschweig, there were 15,897 houses in the city, but by mid-1945, only 2,834 (about 18%) were left undamaged. The city also had 59,826 flats, of which 11,153 (about 19%) were still undamaged by the time the war ended. The level of destruction with regard to residential buildings stood at 35%, leading to homelessness for almost 80% of the townsfolk by war's end. Sixty percent of the city's places of cultural interest, including the municipal buildings, were likewise destroyed, along with about 50% of its industrial areas.

Overall destruction rate and amount of rubble

The destruction rate in Braunschweig's downtown core (within the "Oker Ring", the Oker being a river that encircles Braunschweig) stood at about 90%, and the overall figure for Braunschweig as a whole was 42%. The attack on the city produced an estimated 3670500m³ of rubble. These figures put Braunschweig among Germany's most heavily damaged cities in the Second World War.

After the war

Reconstruction

Reconstruction and commemoration: sign on a house wall neighbouring the Andreaskirche. " On 15 October 1944 Braunschweig's old town became a victim of the war. Peaceable work from 1953-1955 built new homes, protected by St. Andrew’s Church."

On 17 June 1946, the rubble clearing officially began in Braunschweig. The job took 17 years, with the city only officially declaring the task accomplished in 1963. Actually, however, smaller messes were still being cleared up years after that.

Braunschweig's reconstruction in the 1950s and 1960s proceeded very quickly, as housing was so badly needed, and the city's infrastructure needed to be built all over again. Since the downtown core was a rubble-strewn wasteland, city and spatial planners seized the chance to build a new, modern, and above all car-friendly city, an idea promoted by Hans Bernhard Reichow.

This once again led in many places to further destruction (through new roadways, for instance) and the removal of city scenery that had become historic, since in part the former city layout was ignored. Ruins were hastily torn down instead of being restored, and the car was raised as the new "yardstick" whereby the "new" Braunschweig was to be measured. Thus was wrought, especially in the downtown core, a "second destruction" of Braunschweig.

The later destruction of historic buildings and cultural sites, such as the demolition of many medieval, baroque and classical buildings or the controversial demolition of the damaged Braunschweiger Schloss (palatial residence) in 1960 led much as with the Dresden Frauenkirche, the Berliner Stadtschloss (Berlin City Palace) and other prominent buildings in other cities to a further loss of identity for the local people, and was the cause of much controversy for decades.

Reconstruction of damaged or destroyed buildings continues in part down to the present day, as can be seen in the partial reconstruction of the Braunschweiger Schloss.

Memorials

Meaning and necessity of the destruction

Already in 1943, the Anglican Bishop and Member of the House of Lords George Bell was putting forth the view that such attacks as these threatened the ethical foundations of Western civilization and destroyed any chance of future reconciliation between the former foes.

Since the end of World War II, the question has been raised as to whether the destruction of Braunschweig in October 1944 was still a military necessity given that the war was into its final phase. This is part of the debate on whether the destruction of other German cities and loss of life that occurred once the Allied strategic bomber forces were released from their tactical support of the Normandy landings and resumed the strategic bombing campaign in September 1944 (a campaign that would last without further interruption until days before the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945,) can be morally justified.

15 October as a fixed point in the city's history

In the Main Cemetery in Braunschweig is a memorial, together with the graves of many victims of the 15 October 1944 raid.

Since the attack, memorial events and exhibitions have been held in Braunschweig every 14–15 October. The events of those two days also echo strongly in local historical literature (see under "References"). On 14–15 October 2004 – the sixtieth anniversary of the destruction of Braunschweig's historic old town – there were once again many events. Among other memorials that took place was Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, conducted at the Braunschweig Cathedral in the presence of British Ambassador Sir Peter Torry.

Credit Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing of Braunschweig (October 1944)

Greatest Bomb Assault
Passes 72 Hrs.

American bombers yesterday struck their second major blow in two days at Germany's war industry and carried the Allies' heaviest air offensive of the war into its 72nd hour.

Brunswick, 120 miles west of Berlin, was sledge-hammered by a force of Fortresses and Liberators almost as great as the record fleet of more than 800 heavy U.S. bombers which in daylight Saturday dumped a record 1,800 tons of high explosives and incendiaries onto Frankfurt, in the southwestern Reich.

The two American attacks, bringing the USAAF's total for the month to ten, were coupled with two successive RAF raids on Berlin, stretching the Nazis' overworked defenses toward the breaking point. The great assaults by the heavies were supplemented by endless relays of Allied medium, light and fighter-bomber assaults on other targets in Nazi-occupied Europe.

The report on the Brunswick attack referred for the first time in a communiqué to the new administrative setup of the USAAF in the ETO -- the U.S. Strategic Air Force in Europe -- official name for the heavy bombers whose task probably will continue to be the disruption of Germany's war manufacturing and transport machine behind the invasion walls.

Yesterday's raid, like Saturday's, involved a round trip of about 900 miles. It was the second U.S. blow at Brunswick, which first was hit by the Americans in the widespread attacks of Jan. 11, when 60 bombers were lost in successful attacks on aircraft factories throughout central Germany.

In the attack on Brunswick, Capt. Walker Mahurin, of Fort Wayne, Ind., leading ETO ace, boosted his total to 15 by shooting down a Ju88, and Maj. Walter C. Beckham, of DeFuniak Springs, Fla., second high scorer in the ETO, got an Me109, bringing his total to 14.

NEWSWIRE:

A Lawton, Okla, Thunderbolt pilot, 1/Lt. Robert S. Johnson, shot down two -- an Me210 and an Me109 – to tie Maj. Beckham for ETO second place with 14 destroyed Germans to date.

Brunswick is the site of factories turning out complete bomber and fighter units, as well as components for virtually all the Luftwaffe's machines. The Brunswick-Waggun plant making Me110 assemblies, severely damaged in the Jan. 11 attack, is one of the largest of a group including the Muhlenbau U. Industrie E.G., making fighter-bombers and trainer components, the Brunswick-Neupetriter plant, the Niederfachsische Motor Enwerg at Brunswick Querun, and other assembly factories. The city also was hit by the RAF on Jan. 14, when 2,200 tons spread devastation in a night attack.

The USAAF fighters escorting the bombers were taking up their second major battle in two days. They set a new record for enemy aircraft destroyed in Saturday's assault, shooting down 42 confirmed victims for the loss of 13, while the heavy-bomber gunners were destroying 60 enemy aircraft for the loss of 31 U.S. bombers.

While the heavies were flying against Brunswick, the German High Command issued a communique admitting "heavy damage" in the attacks on Frankfurt.

The attack on Frankfurt was being prepared even as Liberator groups were coming home from Friday's "milk run" attack on military installations in northern France. Bombed-up and briefed early, the heavy bombers were winging out to Frankfurt only a little while after RAF Lancaster’s came back from Berlin.

As the biggest force of American heavy bombers ever to fly a combat mission swung over the German coastline and headed for the industrial metropolis on the Main, 900 miles airline round trip from London, the Luftwaffe threw up major formations of interceptors.

Using tactics which apparently have become standard practice in the last two months, the Nazi fighters and rocket planes concentrated almost their entire attack against single groups and elements of the bombers, which apparently accounted for varying combat reports after the crews came home. Some groups met intense fighter opposition, as well as heavy flak; others had only the flak to bother them as the USAAF fighters kept off stray Luftwaffe interceptors.

As they approached the target some groups had to battle through head-on attacks not only by standard fighters but by rocket-firing craft, which usually stay well out at long range.

In Frankfurt, chief railway junction for western Germany, some 500,000 persons are engaged directly or indirectly in transportation, in manufacturing chemical and machine tools for the Wehrmacht and in the distribution of supplies which funnel into the city's inland port at the juncture of the Main and Rhine rivers. Prime target of the manufacturing communities in and around the city was a suburban plant turning out possibly half of the propellers used by the Luftwaffe.

Thunderbolt and Lightning fighter groups and long-range Mustangs escorted the Fortresses and Liberators in relays to the target and on the way home. More relays of USAAF fighters carried them back to within range of Allied Spitfire escorts.

While the heavies were hitting Frankfurt, Marauder mediums carried on the pounding of the military installations in the Pas de Calais area. The B26s now have flown 1,500 sorties with the loss of only three planes. Saturday's was their eighth attack of the month.

http://www.stelzriede.com/ms/html/threeoe1.htm#intro

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Photographs of the city – Old and New:

City Ctr. with street car and parking – undated. Bombing Photograph of the city – undated.

Author’s Notes: In the lower right hand corner I believe is the City Square that is featured in the photographs on the previous pages above. Note the location of power poles and circular tracking on the pavement from automobile tires.

This author wishes to acknowledge creative authorships to those individuals who have posted their material to the “Web” and when known, credit has been given to those individuals who were cited. To those who are not known at this posting, I have not created any of the historical narratives in this upload, but I have inserted (when they could be found), “Images and minor Text” to further clarify other’s descriptions of events that have been previously posted to the World Wide Web. The history presented in this paper seems to have been generated by others who actually lived the experience or were familiar with the events that they recorded. Major Gordon’s work was published with one graphic and 3-4 images. I have add additional images to further clarify his descriptions. In conclusion, special recognitions go out to all “First Responders” (both fire and police), who, before the war, during the war, and up to this very day, continue to serve the welfare of all citizens everywhere, in a time of need, peril, or wars.

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