Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [152]
The Germans responded fiercely, but Hitler insisted that the Luftwaffe was an offensive weapon and was extremely reluctant to designate defense of Germany as its primary task. Eventually, he was forced to do so, but he did it with an ill grace and with mental reservations that made it very difficult for the Germans to operate at full effectiveness. An outstanding example of his meddling came in the famous case of the Messerschmitt ME262, the world’s first operational jet fighter.
For years experts had experimented with the possibilities of jet propulsion as a more powerful replacement for the propeller-driven aircraft. The British eventually produced a jet aircraft that entered combat three weeks before the end of the war in Europe. But the Germans beat them to the punch with a jet that became operational in 1944. Faster than contemporary Allied fighters, it might well have regained a degree of air superiority for Germany; Hitler, however, infuriated by the Allied “terror bombing,” ordered that all existing jet fighters be modified as fast bombers to fly retaliatory missions to Britain. This set the fighter program back at least four months and ended whatever chance may have existed for the Germans to become once more masters of their own skies.
As the scientific and developmental battle went on, so did the search for strategic answers. The British by 1943 were resigned to a campaign of pure straightforward pounding. The Germans were tough, but if hit long enough and hard enough, sooner or later they would break. The Americans, committed to precision bombing, became preoccupied with a search for the magic target. Surely, they told themselves, there must be one vital, vulnerable spot in the enemy war machine. Knock out that one specific component, and the Germans would come tumbling down.
They thought they found the answer in the German city of Schweinfurt. Here was concentrated the majority of the German ball-bearing industry. Destroy the factory, the theory went, and the magic one-shot answer would have been found. On August 17, 1943, the 8th Air Force struck at Schweinfurt and at aircraft factories in Regensburg and Wiener Neustadt. Of 376 aircraft on the joint mission, sixty were shot down by the fierce German reaction. Sixteen-percent losses were prohibitive; a week of that would have wiped out 8th Air Force. Nonetheless, Schweinfurt appeared a winning target. In a second raid, in October, the Americans lost another sixty planes, this time out of fewer than three hundred. In the week of that raid their total losses were 148 planes and 1,500 airmen. It was too much, and 8th Air Force could not stand the pace; all they were really proving, at immense cost, was that the British were right—unescorted daylight bombing was impossible.
Having reached the same impasse the British had reached two or three years earlier, the Americans then went on to a different answer. U. S. planes flying deep penetration missions into Germany were escorted across France and the Low Countries by British Spitfires or American-built Mustangs and Thunderbolts. The fighters took on the German fighters of the coastal defenses and got the bombers through. Then, when they reached the limit of their range, the fighters turned back and the bombers were left to go it alone. As soon as the escorts fell away, the German home defense squadrons came up to hit the bombers. The simplest answer to the problem, therefore, was to increase the range of the fighters; provide them with extra fuel and they could cover the bombers all the way to the target and back.
This was the same problem that had beset the Germans in the Battle of Britain; their fighters had not been able to provide cover for the bombers all the way to the target. Ironically, the answer had existed long before the problem. The American Curtiss F11C-2, a short-lived fighter with