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By Root 976 0

began setting up the apparatus to undertake their own bombing campaign. They came in a trickle in the spring, and it mounted to a near-flood as the year went on. The U. S. 8th Air Force was the command made responsible for the bomber offensive, with General Ira C. Eaker as its chief. Initially, they hoped to be operating in great numbers by late 1942, but the necessary diversion of units to North Africa prevented this. It was August before the first operations began, and for the rest of the year, flying in relatively small numbers, they mounted daylight attacks against targets in France. In January of 1943 they hit north German targets, penetrating the airspace of the Reich itself, and they soon ran into trouble.

The Americans insisted on repeating most of the mistakes the British had already made. It was not, as was thought at the time, because they were either stupid or wildly overconfident, but rather because they came to the battle with different ideas based on different equipment, and had to see for themselves the error of their ways. British experts said that precision bombing was impossible, and that the necessary degree of accuracy to get results was unattainable. The American response was that they had a gadget, the Norden bombsight, which could hit the target every time. In the phrase of the day, they could “put a bomb in a pickle barrel,” and do it from 30,000 feet. The British said that German fighter opposition was too strong for unescorted bombers. The Americans believed they possessed the answer to this too. British heavy bombers—the Stirling, Lancaster, and Halifax—carried lighter defensive armament than American types. The Lancaster had eight machine guns in three turrets, two in a nose turret, two in a top turret, and a four-gun turret in the tail. The last sub-type of the Flying Fortress, the B-17G, carried thirteen machine-guns—all of heavier caliber than the British—in chin, nose, dorsal, center fuselage, ventral, waist, and tail positions. There was of course a penalty for this; the maximum normal bomb load for the B-17G was lighter than that for the Lancaster, and the number of crew members was larger. The Americans had to use more planes and more men to deliver less payload than the British.

They insisted, however, that their heavily armed planes could fly successfully in the daytime and they sent them off in tight formations, stacked up “boxes” ostensibly able to give each other protection against German fighters. That too exacted its toll, for a substantial amount of the damage done to American planes was a result of the defensive fire of other American planes. The first raids over Germany went well, however, and led 8th Air Force to believe its ideas were being vindicated.

The Americans and British had agreed on a mutually supportive scheme of operations. The British would continue their night attacks and area or saturation bombing, aimed basically at the German civilian population and general disruption of the war economy; the Americans would operate by day, aiming at specific crucial targets. The R. A. F. occasionally had trouble convincing its aircrews that their raids had purely military value, and commanders had to insist that every general target contained a definitely military objective. New ways had to be developed to increase accuracy; specially selected crews were drafted into “pathfinder” squadrons whose job it was to locate a target and mark it with flares and specially colored bombs, so that follow-up squadrons could bomb where they were supposed to. Late in 1943 a new type of radar that allowed them to bomb through cloud was fitted to some Fortresses so that bad weather need not cause abortion of missions.

As the Americans got organized, and with the R. A. F. now fully into its stride, the tempo increased markedly in 1943. Units based first in North Africa flew across the Mediterranean to hit Italian factories and to strike at the Balkans. Later, heavy-bombardment groups operating out of southern Italy crossed the Alps to bomb Austria and southern German targets and flew costly