Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (9 page)

Traveling in a B-24 by way of Presque Isle, Maine, and Prestwick, Scotland, through heavy turbulence over the Atlantic, Hughes returned to the land of his birth and reported for duty at the Eighth Air Force temporary headquarters on Davis Street in London on June 22. Here, he found himself in the turbulent world of wartime British bureaucracy.

He was, as he describes it, surrounded not only by the bureaucrats of the British Air Ministry, but by those of the Ministry of Economic Warfare, which had been the model for Roosevelt’s Board of Economic Warfare. Even though Spaatz had pressed through the paperwork promoting Hughes to lieutenant colonel, he was still greatly outranked by the
RAF air commodores and air vice marshals with whom he dealt. Fortunately, his fourteen years as a British army officer—not to mention his accent—gave him a good working sense of the system.

“One of my most pressing, immediate needs was for competent, capable, people to examine, and evaluate for me, the mass of economic intelligence information being produced by the Ministry of Economic Warfare,” Hughes writes. “Such individuals just did not exist in the Eighth Air Force, so I turned to the only other source of American personnel in England, the American Embassy in London…. They had a small civilian economic section and these people at once volunteered to do everything they could to help me.”

The American ambassador, John Gilbert Winant, who had succeeded Joseph P. Kennedy in 1941, had been a US Army pilot in World War I and was sympathetic to Hughes’s needs. Hughes was able to convince him that appropriately trained civilian economists should be sent to London to work under him.

When Winant cabled the State Department asking for such people to be sent over, it ignited a firestorm of turf warfare. The War Department was furious that the State Department was going behind their backs, interfering in the exercise of selecting potential targets for the Eighth Air Force. General Marshall contacted General Eisenhower, newly arrived in London himself, who contacted General Spaatz for an explanation. This, in turn, led to Hughes being called on the carpet in Eisenhower’s office. The pragmatic Eisenhower listened as Spaatz and Hughes explained the situation, and he agreed that Hughes was on the right track. Naturally, Eisenhower had much larger issues on his plate at the time, not the least of these being Operation Torch, the impending Allied invasion of northwestern Africa, then occupied by Vichy French forces sympathetic to the Germans.

Given the blessing of both Eisenhower and Spaatz, Hughes worked with Henry Berliner, now also in London, to set up the organization that was to be called the Enemy Objectives Unit (EOU) of the Economic Warfare Division of the United States Embassy. Because it would be partially staffed by civilian analysts, the EOU was placed under the nominal administrative umbrella of the embassy, rather than under that of the Eighth Air Force headquarters.

When Spaatz moved his headquarters out to Bushy Park, Hughes and Berliner opted to remain in London, establishing the EOU headquarters in the nondescript building at 40 Berkeley Square in London’s fashionable Mayfair area, not far from Hyde Park and a short walk from the embassy itself. Though the facility was
officially
associated with the embassy, it remained separate, and indeed secret, from the embassy. Winant was one of the few civilians, other than those who worked there, who knew that the unit existed, and he, along with a handful of Eighth Air Force people, were the only outsiders who had access to the place.

The EOU was as strange as it was mysterious. The arrangement defied precedent and thumbed its nose at correct and established procedure. Who could have guessed that behind the great bomber offensive there was to be a gaggle of mid-level USAAF and OSS officers and academics working together in an anonymous building maintained by the Department of State in an upper crust neighborhood in London?

“Except for the quality of the people on each side, such a military-civilian, bastard set-up could never have worked,” Hughes admits. “Because of this quality, however, it worked better than any formally, logically constituted body.”

Two of the “quality people” ranked most highly by Hughes among the EOU team were the whiz-kid economists Charles Poor “Charlie” Kindleberger and Walt Rostow. Both had already been recruited by Bill Donovan for the OSS when they were transferred to the EOU. Kindleberger had earned his PhD from Columbia University in 1937, and Rostow had earned his in 1940 from Yale—the school from which he had earlier graduated at age nineteen. Like Rostow, Kindleberger was a high achiever, having been named to the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in his twenties and to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System at age thirty.

Rostow joined Hughes in September, along with two other transferees from Donovan’s OSS, economist Rosaline Honerkamp and Chandler Morse, also from the Federal Reserve. Having previously been assigned to the OSS Military Supplies Section, Kindleberger arrived on the last day of February 1943, replacing Morse.

In a paper entitled
Waging Economic Warfare from London
, presented
at a 1991 OSS historical symposium, Rostow writes that “as a professional product of Wellington and Sandhurst, [Hughes] had long been trained in the principles of concentration of effort at the enemy’s most vulnerable point and of prompt and maximum follow-through when a breakthrough was achieved. The members of EOU were, mainly, trained as economists, reflecting the assumption that the broad objective of the strategic bombing offensive was to weaken the German war economy. Our task was to develop and apply criteria for the selection of one target system versus another, one target within a system versus another, and, if the target was large enough and bombing precise enough, one aiming point versus another….
EOU was the child of Air Corps Colonel Richard D’Oyly Hughes
.” [Author’s italics.]

Rostow went on to describe the early days of the EOU, explaining that “Hughes took a little time to size up the small but overactive young crew he had evoked from Washington at long distance—a bit like a colonel in the field trying to figure out a batch of lieutenants sent from headquarters. He initially put EOU to work on a narrowly focused and painstaking task: aiming-point reports. These were analyses of particular German industrial plants or installations designed to establish the most vulnerable point of attack. The aiming-point reports were an invaluable education, requiring, among other things, visits to the nearest equivalent plants in Britain. They also required exploitation of virtually all the intelligence London could provide about the plant itself, the economic sector of which it was a part, and the role of that sector in the German war effort.”

Inside the undisclosed location in Mayfair, such esoteric conclusions, calculated by scarcely more than a dozen people, would guide the actions of tens of thousands in the biggest air campaign in history.

Virtually no one knew they were there, or knew the source of the material that issued forth from 40 Berkeley Square over the course of thirty-two long months. Though the shroud of secrecy has long since been drawn back, the quiet anonymity of the mystery house on Berkeley Square still endures today.

President Franklin Roosevelt often reviewed briefing papers as he ate his breakfast. They would arrive overnight and be brought to him by his closest advisor and troubleshooter, Harry Hopkins. On the morning of September 6, 1942, about a week before Walt Rostow and Chandler Morse joined Dick Hughes at 40 Berkeley Square, the document was entitled
Requirements for Air Ascendancy, 1942
, but it would be known simply as AWPD-42. The preparation of this report, essentially the sequel to AWPD-1 and AWPD-2 of 1941, had begun only eleven days earlier under the personal direction of the president. Through the spring and summer of 1942—with the exception of the unlikely but welcome American victory at Midway—the course of the war still favored Germany and Japan. Roosevelt asked Arnold what his airmen would have to do in order to have complete air ascendancy over the enemy.

The president reviewed the report while he sipped his coffee, then picked up the phone and called Secretary of War Henry Stimson to say that he approved it. Stimson was caught off guard. He hadn’t
seen
the report. Nor had Chief of Staff General George Marshall, when Stimson phoned
him
. Nor had Marshall’s fellow members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—Admiral Ernest King (the chief of naval operations) and Admiral
William Leahy (the chief of staff to Roosevelt and, since July 1942, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff)—although they all had their copies within hours.

Roosevelt had already approved it, so this was a moot point.

The fourth member of the Joint Chiefs, General Hap Arnold, had his copy before anyone. His was the name on the return address of the envelopes.

When the president had ordered him to assemble the report, Arnold had recalled Possum Hansell and Malcolm Moss from England and put them in a room with Hal George, Larry Kuter, and other veterans of the earlier air war plans.

AWPD-42 reiterated the agreements made earlier in the year, calling for the USAAF to undertake the “systematic destruction of selected vital elements of the German military and industrial machine through precision bombing in daylight.” At the same time, in accordance with their own stated doctrine, the RAF would be making “mass air attacks of industrial areas at night, to break down morale [which was expected to have] a pronounced effect upon production.”

A dramatic thousand-plane RAF raid on the night of May 30–31, 1942, was pointed to as an example. This single mission had destroyed an estimated 12 percent of the principal industrial and residential districts in the city of Cologne.

More importantly, AWPD-42 set out specific numbers, specific allocations of resources, to make it all happen. It called for the USAAF to have an operational bomber force of nearly three thousand four-engine bombers deployed in the European theater within sixteen months. The US Navy did not like the emphasis on allocation of resources to the USAAF at a time when they wanted an allocation of four-engine bombers to use as long-range patrol planes, but the president had spoken. In fact, he later insisted on American aircraft production being ramped up so that everyone would get the planes they wanted.

Like its predecessors, AWPD-42 was still just a road map, an educated guess, albeit a better educated guess than AWPD-1 and AWPD-2, even though the Eighth Air Force heavy bomber offensive had barely just begun.

Fewer than one hundred four-engine bombers were operational with the Eighth Air Force when AWPD-42 reached the president’s bedside,
but the report confidently promised that if the recommended force was in place by the first of January 1944, then the invasion of
Festung Europa
could be undertaken by the summer of that year. AWPD-42 may have been just a road map, but it was the road map that would lead the USAAF to Big Week, and ultimately to victory.

On August 17, 1942, six weeks after the Eighth Air Force made its Fourth of July raid with borrowed light bombers, the heavy bombers were finally ready to strike. A dozen Flying Fortresses of the 97th Bombardment Group took off from Polebrook in East Anglia on the first Eighth Air Force heavy bomber mission. Of the heavy bombardment groups allocated to the Eighth Air Force, only the 97th had become operational.

Led personally by General Eaker, commander of the VIII Bomber Command, they attacked a target selected by Hughes personally—the railroad marshaling yards at Rouen-Sotteville, near the city of Rouen in Normandy. Attacking a marshaling yard would theoretically impact the transportation network by damaging the interchange of freight trains on a number of intersecting lines.

It was a great boost to Eighth Air Force morale to know that the B-17s had finally bombed their first target, and that they had done so without losses
and
with greater accuracy than had been expected from fresh, inexperienced crews.

In Washington, the USAAF Air Staff seized upon this moment to insist that the previously theoretical doctrine of daylight precision bombing had been vindicated by this first mission. In a memo to General Marshall prepared for Arnold’s signature, it was asserted that the result of the mission “again verifies the soundness of our policy of the precision bombing of strategic objectives rather than mass (blitz) bombing of large, city size areas [as the RAF was doing]. The Army Air Forces early recognized that the effective use of air power on a world wide basis equired the ability to hit small targets from high altitudes.”

However, many USAAF officers, including Ira Eaker, later commented that the comparison to the British effort was unfair and “most unfortunate,” given that those in the field wished to maintain a harmonious working relationship with the RAF.

Two days after Rouen, twenty-two B-17s attacked airfields near Abbeville,
home of Jagdgeschwader 26, one of the Luftwaffe’s most highly regarded fighter wings. The objective of this bombing was to divert German fighters at the same time the Allies made their commando raid on the French coastal city of Dieppe. According to Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, the air commander for the Dieppe operation, “The raid on Abbeville undoubtedly struck a heavy blow at the German fighter organization at a very critical moment during the operations [and thus] had a very material effect on the course of the operations.”

Referring, no doubt, to Leigh-Mallory’s comments, Ira Eaker effused contentedly in an August 27 memo to Hap Arnold that the British “acknowledge willingly and cheerfully the great accuracy of our bombing, the surprising hardihood of our bombardment aircraft and the skill and tenacity of our crews.”

Five additional raids were flown by the Eighth Air Force through the end of August, striking targets ranging from shipyards to airfields across an arc from northern France to Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

As Dick Hughes observed, “It really did not matter, at this early stage, what we bombed.” The idea was that the crews needed to gain experience before flying into highly defended German airspace.