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  After the US entered the war in December 1941, Eaker was promoted to brigadier-general and sent back to Britain along with Spaatz. Their task was to prepare for and then establish the Eighth Air Force, with Spaatz as commanding officer and Eaker as CO of VIII Bomber Command. When Spaatz was sent to North Africa to become USAAF theatre commander, Eaker was the obvious choice to take over the Mighty Eighth. Operationally, the challenge had been to build up a big enough force quickly enough to make an impact. Even more airfields had to be constructed by British and American engineers; aircraft had to be sent from the States – no small matter when coming all the way from factories in the Midwest and beyond; ever more crews had to be trained and shipped over; and vast numbers of staff and ground crew needed to be sent, along with equipment and, of course, bombs. Roughly fifty men were needed on the ground to keep ten aircrew in the air. On top of that, many of the Eighth’s original bomb groups had then been transferred to North Africa.

  There had been strategic challenges too. American troops had first arrived on British soil in January 1942, part of Operation BOLERO, the build-up of US forces in Britain for the planned cross-Channel invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. Yet American – and British – strategy had never been just about getting troops back on to French soil, but also about gradually tightening the noose around Germany’s ability to wage war. This was to happen largely through air power and specifically strategic bombing, part of the policy to use ‘steel not flesh’ wherever possible. The idea was a simple one: in order to avoid the wholesale slaughter of a generation of young men, as had been experienced by Britain in the last war, they would use technology, modern science and machinery to do much of the work. The number of men thrust on to the coalface of war would thus be kept to a minimum. Air power was central to this strategy, so much so that even in the autumn of 1943, it was not the British Navy or Army or RAF that had priority in manpower, but rather the British Ministry of Aircraft Production.

  In the years leading up to the outbreak of war, much thought had been given to air power, not just in Britain but all around the world. One of the most influential prophets had been the Italian Giulio Douhet, a former artillery officer, who in 1921 wrote Command of the Air. Douhet’s book, which was revised and reissued six years later, was widely read and argued that in future warfare would be dominated by air power. Large numbers of bombers were key, he claimed; they would operate independently, striking at the heart of an enemy power’s industrial base, centres of communication and even cities. Winning control of the skies was obviously central to this vision and, although Douhet predicted some air defence, he argued that the side with the biggest, most powerful air force would prevail. In Douhet’s vision, the bomber, not the fighter plane, would be king.

  The idea that the bomber would dominate also held sway in Britain, where Marshal of the Air Force Sir Hugh ‘Boom’ Trenchard, the first commander of the RAF, was an ardent and messianic bomber man who continued to wield enormous influence even though he had formally retired. That Britain had established a fully coordinated air defence system – the world’s first – and its own independent Fighter Command was, in many ways, thanks to the dogged stubbornness and enlightened thinking of a handful of individuals, including the former Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Air Chief Marshal Sir Wilfrid Freeman, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, Fighter Command’s first commander-in-chief and a man who had repeatedly clashed with Trenchard and his lackeys. There were others, but these men, especially, had fought to buck the prevailing thought that it was bombers that would dominate the skies in any future conflict.

  In the United States, the supremacy of the bomber had also taken root. Arguably the most influential of the pre-war theorists was William ‘Billy’ Mitchell, who had finished the First World War as commander of US Army air operations in France and then, post-war, had become assistant chief of the Air Service. So outspoken was he about the need to build up a strong air force and the importance of the bomber, he was even court-martialled in 1925 for accusing the War and Navy Departments of treason for their neglect. Resigning from the air service, and now unshackled from military rules and decorum, he spent the next decade writing and continuing to push his theories. The key, he argued, was to build up an air force that was superior to that of any potential enemy and then unleash it aggressively and swiftly, so ensuring an end to any further hostilities before land or naval forces even came into the fight. This way, future wars would be over quickly without the wholesale slaughter of America’s young men.

  The trouble was, the United States in the 1920s and 1930s was not only isolationist, but its leaders believed that maintaining large armed forces inevitably led to them being used in conflict, while a small army and navy would ensure America kept out of future wars. In any case, the United States was distancing itself from Europe – and the Atlantic was in the way. Mitchell drove himself to an early death, in 1936, in his efforts to change people’s minds, frustrated that the powers that be refused to listen to his warnings and his ardent belief in the primacy of air power.

  However, Mitchell’s preachings had not fallen on entirely deaf ears. It was true that in September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, the US Army Air Corps had just seventy-odd fighter planes and even fewer bombers; none the less, not only did the Army Air Corps exist, but air doctrine had also been developing alongside some very important technological advances. The Air Service Tactical School, founded at Langley Field in Virginia in 1920, was the spiritual centre of the Air Corps. Renamed the Air Corps Tactical School six years later, as well as effectively being the US air college, its staff were also given the task of developing air doctrine. And at the heart of this doctrine was bombing, although not, it must be said, without considerable debate.

  In the first half of the 1930s, a doctrinal air battle had raged at the Tactical School. Captain Claire Chennault was an ardent believer in the power of the fighter plane, or pursuit aircraft as they were known at that time in the Air Corps. Pursuit aircraft, he argued, were more flexible and could both stop bombers and give support to ground forces. While at the Tactical School, he argued two key tenets: first, that pursuit aircraft would always be able to intercept bombers if given enough warning of an attack, and second, that bombers, flying deep into enemy territory, needed a friendly fighter escort to prevent heavy losses if not complete failure.

  Others, however, such as Harold George and Kenneth Walker, argued that the long-range bomber was the pre-eminent weapon of air power, and that pursuit aircraft could not achieve any strategic influence on any future war in the way that a bomber could. In truth, both were needed, but Chennault left the Tactical School in 1937 and headed to China, where he became a mercenary and led a group of American fighter pilots flying for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists against the Japanese.

  With Chennault gone, it was the influence of the bomber men that was felt most keenly, and what they promoted was high-level, precision and, crucially, daylight bombing. Central to this focus was technological advancement: dreaming of long-range heavy bombing was useless without the kind of aircraft that could deliver such a vision. However, in the United States new, modern civilian commercial aircraft were being developed with far stronger cantilevered wings made of metal spars and covered with stressed lightweight aluminium sheeting. This meant that suddenly the age of fabric-covered biplanes was drawing to a close and, in its place, modern, all-metal and much larger aircraft were emerging.

  Among the early civilian airliners was the Boeing 247, which first flew in 1933, the year Hitler came to power and Roosevelt was sworn in as president of the United States for his initial term. The Boeing had a retractable undercarriage, something quite different, and could fly at around 200 m.p.h. It looked shiny and modern and new – and it was. That it could take a maximum of only ten passengers was, frankly, neither here nor there. Anyone looking at the Boeing 247 was looking at the future and seeing enormous possibilities. The same was true of the Douglas DC-3, whi
ch appeared three years later and, similarly, was all stressed metal and had cantilevered wings. This mighty machine could carry up to thirty-two passengers. In the United States, private commercial business in an economy slowly but surely emerging from catastrophic economic depression was leading the way to rearmament and future military strength.

  In terms of a vision of future air power, it was the Boeing company that set the bar. A year after the Boeing 247 had dazzled the aviation world with its modernity and shininess, the War Department, at the urging of the men of the Tactical School, issued a procurement brief for a new multi-engine heavy bomber, which was to be able to fly at upwards of 200 m.p.h. for ten hours and carry a bigger payload than any American plane up to that point. Three firms, Douglas, Martin and Boeing competed for the prize – and all at their own expense, as America’s strict amortization laws would not be repealed until the autumn of 1940.

  The outcome was a planned ‘fly-off’ at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, between the three manufacturers’ prototypes. The Boeing 299 first flew on 28 July 1936 from their Seattle base. Sleek, powerful, and unlike anything that had come before, it had an internal bomb bay, a largely retractable undercarriage and even air brakes, and – a first in aviation – an automatic pilot that could keep the aircraft flying straight and level during a bomb run. It also had five machine guns, protruding with obvious venom, which prompted one Seattle reporter to say, ‘Why, it’s a flying fortress!’ Boeing were delighted with the line and swiftly trademarked the name. They were even more delighted when it effortlessly flew from Seattle to Dayton in just under ten hours at an average speed of 252 m.p.h. – far in excess of the requirement. In truth, the prize was a foregone conclusion: the Boeing had four engines, while Martin’s and Douglas’s bombers each had just two. It was also faster and could carry more. The plane was redesignated the B-17 ‘Flying Fortress’ and Boeing was given an order for sixty-five.

  The quantity was hardly huge and certainly did not reflect the kind of overwhelming air supremacy the harbingers of air power were predicting, but it was the weapon that the bomber advocates within the Air Corps had been dreaming of: fast, powerful, with range, fire-power and a bomb load of more than 2 tons. Even better, around the same time, the US Army took possession of the Norden bombsight, originally designed for the navy in the late 1920s by the Dutch émigré Carl Norden, and a marvel of modern technology and science. This ingenious piece of equipment enabled a bomb-aimer to look at the target through the eyepiece and accurately compute the aircraft’s ground speed and direction, then, after taking into account the weight and size of the bombs, calculate when to release them to best achieve accuracy. Gyroscopic stability, which was also added into this remarkable instrument of scientific wizardry, ensured the telescopic sight was kept on the target despite the roll or sudden jolt of the aircraft from flak bursts. It was a truly extraordinary invention and unrivalled anywhere else in the world. It also meant that the Air Corps not only had a long-range, heavily armed four-engine bomber, they now had the technology to land drops on the enemy from height more accurately than any other air force in the world.

  By the time war broke out in Europe in September 1939, the US Army Air Corps was still tiny at just 17,000 personnel, but it was led by men firmly rooted in the bomber philosophy, not least Major-General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, its commander-in-chief. The vision of Arnold, and of men like both Spaatz and Eaker, was not only to use massed bombing to spearhead any future military operations, but to carry out such bombing by daylight when visual siting was possible and the precision of the Norden bombsight could come to the fore. If the bombs struck their target accurately, then less ordnance would be required to do the job and, as a result, fewer aircraft. And the more efficiently and accurately the Air Corps could carry out their tasks, the smaller the number of Americans who would be needed to risk their necks in any future war. That, in essence, was the theory.

  There was, however, always likely to be a gap between theory and practice. Imagining rafts of American bombers pulverizing key industrial and military targets while watching B-17s flying across the clear, azure-blue skies of the southern United States was easy, but on the other side of the Atlantic the weather was altogether more fickle, even in summer, and the Norden bombsight was less effective in cloudy conditions when the bombardier could not actually see the target.

  Such considerations had little effect on those now leading America’s burgeoning air capability, however, even though several senior air commanders – Spaatz and Eaker among them – had visited Britain well before the US entry into the war.

  A highly regarded and hugely competent air commander, Spaatz – pronounced ‘Spots’ – had been at the very heart of the development of US air forces and strategy. Aged fifty-two by October 1943, he was stocky, square-jawed and handsome, with a trim moustache, and he carried an instantly identifiable air of authority, sagacity and charisma, which he backed up with an intuitive intelligence. These were fine attributes for a senior commander. Spaatz also had plenty of experience. He had flown as a fighter pilot in the First World War, shooting down several enemy aircraft and winning a Distinguished Service Cross.

  In the years that followed, he took on various commands, first in a pursuit role and then in bombers. In January 1929 he captained a tri-motor Fokker aircraft called the Question Mark, which set a world endurance record for remaining airborne for more than 150 hours, thanks to repeated air-to-air refuelling. Ira Eaker had also been part of his Question Mark team. In the 1930s, Spaatz had been among those helping Boeing develop the B-17 and later the Consolidated B-24 four-engine bomber. Like Eaker, he had spent a year at the Command and General Staff School. From there he held staff posts at what was then called GHQ Air Force and in January 1939 took command of the Plans Section in the office of the Chief of the Air Corps, with a secret brief to draw up an expansion plan that would raise the Air Corps to ten thousand aircraft within two years. This had placed him at the core of the Air Corps’ preparations for war, a position that was further augmented by a trip to England in the summer of 1940 in the role of special military observer as the RAF tussled with the Luftwaffe over southern England. Spaatz had regarded himself as a ‘high-class spy’.6

  Under-resourced during the 1920s and 1930s the US Army Air Corps may have been, but from the summer of 1940 onwards, as President Roosevelt began mobilizing the American war industry, air power lay at the heart of that expansion. Like the British, the US was determined to use technology and industrial output to limit the number of their young men who had to put their necks on the line. Back in 1940, Roosevelt had promised 50,000 aircraft a year. That had seemed fantastical at the time, but had been proved a reality since. The Army Air Corps had also become the US Army Air Forces in June 1941 and, although strictly speaking it was still part of the US Army, it had been given its own staff and its commander, the newly promoted Lieutenant-General Hap Arnold, had a seat on the Combined Chiefs of Staff alongside General George Marshall and Admiral Ernest King.

  Once America had entered the war, Spaatz, with Eaker as his right-hand man, arrived in Britain on 18 June 1942 to take command of the newly formed US Eighth Air Force. The plan had been to build up a force of sixteen heavy bombardment groups, each with thirty-two heavy bombers, three pursuit – or fighter – groups of 75–80 fighters each, as well as medium and light bomber groups. The first units started arriving that summer.

  Spaatz had reached England already a committed supporter not only of strategic air power – that is, air forces operating independently of ground forces – but specifically of daylight precision bombing. Nothing he had witnessed in England in the summer of 1940 had dissuaded him from that firmly entrenched stance, but he did learn a great deal in the few weeks he was there. He had correctly predicted that Germany had nothing like enough aircraft for the task and would lose the Battle of Britain, but he had also accepted the crucial role of fighter aircraft and having a fully coordinated air defence system. A modern, well-dispersed air force protect
ed by an effective early-warning system, he recognized, could not be destroyed on the ground. So it had proved.

  Spaatz had left Britain in September 1940, but not before the Luftwaffe had turned on Britain’s cities and begun night bombing. ‘The Germans can’t bomb at night,’ he told an American reporter over dinner in London.7 ‘Hell, I don’t think they’re very good in daylight – but they haven’t been trained for night bombing. Nope, the British have got them now. They’ve forced them to bomb at night. The Krauts must be losing more than we know.’

  Night bombing meant sacrificing accuracy. And without accuracy, there seemed little point in bombing, because it wouldn’t achieve its aims; what he had seen of the Blitz convinced him that civilian morale would not collapse in the wake of area bombing – and in this he was quite right, as the Luftwaffe’s failed Blitz went on to prove and as Bomber Command had learned after long and costly years of bombing Germany up to March 1943.

  So it was that in the summer of 1942, when Spaatz had returned to England as commander of the fledgling Eighth Air Force, he had done so as committed to daylight bombing as ever he had been. And in this he had the absolute backing of the C-in-C of the USAAF, General Hap Arnold. Heavy bombers, Spaatz and Arnold had hoped – and particularly the B-17 Flying Fortress, which by 1942 had improved armour and armament – would be able to operate deep inside enemy territory without fighter escort. They would fly in mass formation, so that, rather like the merchant shipping convoy system, there would be safety in numbers. At the time, there had been some grounds for this confidence. Unlike the British Lancasters and Halifaxes, for example, which had a seven-man crew and were equipped with .303 Brownings that had already proved to be little more than pea-shooters, the Flying Fortress had a crew of ten and was equipped with a whopping thirteen .50-calibre machine gun in eight different positions. The .50-calibre was everything that an air-to-air machine gun needed to be and that a .303 was not: it had a good velocity and rate of fire and could pack a hefty punch. The B-17 was, quite simply, designed for daylight, not night operations.