On 24 February the Fifteenth attacked the same target with
114 effective sorties. The Fifteenth suffered heavily, losing 17 heavy
bombers-a 15 percent loss rate. Bomber Command's No. 205 Group followed this
raid with an attack that night on the same target. It lost six out of 40
bombers or 15 percent. Neither organization could afford such casualties
indefinitely. No. 205 Group, because of worn-out or second-line aircraft and
lack of priority for new equipment, almost always absorbed a severe beating
when it attacked Germany without escort.
The Eighth also suffered heavy losses, but it sent out more
than 800 bombers and 767 fighters. The 3 BD, assigned to destroy air plants
near Rostock and flying without fighter escort, found the targets clouded over
and bombed the city area instead. They lost but five aircraft out of 236
because the Luftwaffe concentrated its efforts elsewhere. The B-24s of the 2 BD
attacked the Bf-110 assembly plants in Gotha. The obsolescent, twin-engine
Bf-110 made up a significant portion of the German night fighter force and the
daylight heavy fighter and rocket-firing day fighter force. Some of the
division aircraft bombed the city area of Eisenach as a target of opportunity.
The 2 BD absorbed heavy losses, 33 bombers out of 213 effective sorties, or
15.5 percent.
The attack of the 1 BD, however, demonstrated how the tide
had turned against the German defenders. The Eighth dispatched a force of 266
aircraft to finish the ball bearing plants at Schweinfurt-a somewhat smaller
but comparable force to those aimed against it in the two previous attacks on
that target. This force represented only one-third of the Eighth's overall
strength-not a maximum effort against one target. The force faced no highly
contested fight from the moment it entered German airspace. Rather 238 of its
aircraft reached the ball bearing plants. They incurred a loss of 11 aircraft
instead of 60-a loss of 4.6 percent instead of 20 percent. For the entire day
the Eighth lost 49 bombers out of 746 effective sorties, a 6.6 percent loss
rate. The Luftwaffe snapped at the bait. The American fighters escorting the
bombers claimed 38 sure kills against a loss of 10 of their own. On the night
of 24 February, Bomber Command followed up the Eighth's daylight raid by
finally attacking Schweinfurt. Harris had refused to attack the city since its
inclusion on the strategic target list in June 1943 because he believed that
his bombers lacked the accuracy to strike the city of 60,000 effectively.
Bomber Command dropped 2,534 tons of bombs, including 1,160 tons of
incendiaries, in the assault. It lost 33 bombers out of 662 effective sorties,
a 5 percent loss rate. In all of the attacks on the town that had once produced
45 percent of Germany's ball bearings, the Allies dropped more than 3,000 tons
of bombs and lost 44 heavy bombers. They did not know at the time that Germany
had already dispersed 34 percent of the ball bearing industry. Still, the
cumulative effect of the raids on Schweinfurt and other plants reduced German
ball bearing manufacturing by 50 percent.
The weather held for one last day, enabling the Allied
strategic air forces to hit targets in southern Germany. The Fifteenth and
Eighth launched a combined mission against the Messerschmidt assembly plants in
the Regensburg area. Allied intelligence credited the plants with the assembly
of one-third of Germany's Me-109s. The Fifteenth came into the target area first
and suffered cruelly. Of 116 effective sorties, it lost 32 bombers, a loss rate
of almost 28 percent, the highest for any US mission of more than 100 bombers
for the war. The 5 BW lost 22 of its B-17s, while the 301 BG lost 13. Lack of
escorts allowed the German fighters, a combined force of single- and
twin-engine fighters, to intercept the 301 BG at its landfall over Yugoslavia
and to follow it, through flak, all the way to the target and for part of the
return flight. The crews of the 5 and 47 BWs amply demonstrated that the larger
and older strategic air forces had no monopoly on gallantry and the will to
press on to the target.
The Eighth's 3 BD came over the target area approximately
one hour later. The fighters that had hurled themselves at the Fifteenth were
either refueling or still in pursuit. The Eighth lost only 12 bombers out of
267 effective sorties-a loss rate of 4.5 percent. Bomb photos indicated that
the 889 tons of bombs dropped by both air forces damaged their target. The 1 BD
went after the huge Messerschmidt development and experimental complex at
Augsburg and the VKF ball bearing plant at Stuttgart. Of 246 effective sorties,
it lost 13 aircraft-5.3 percent. The 2 BD put 161 B-24s over the Bf-110
assembly center at Fürth- losing six bombers, a 3.7 percent loss rate. For the
last day of the Big Week a new P-51 group, the 363 FG, joined the action as the
Eighth and Ninth put up 899 fighters. This armada claimed only 26 sure kills
while losing three of its aircraft. The presence of so many of the bomber's
"little friends" inhibited the German reaction. Although there would
be bad days in the future, the Luftwaffe would not tamely roll over and play
dead. The Americans had proved that they could fly into the worst the Luftwaffe
could muster, as long as they had fighter escort, and they could do so with an
overall loss rate of less then 5 percent. Soon the Fifteenth would get its
share of P-51s, including the all-black 332 FG. Bomber Command not only dropped
the first bombs of Big Week but it dropped the last. On the night of 25
February, it brought down the curtain by following up the Eighth's attack on
Augsburg with one of its own. It dropped 2,048 tons, including 890 tons of
incendiaries, on the city area-losing 21 of 528 effective sorties, a 4 percent
loss rate.
The Fifteenth Air Force, which lacked P-51s, lost 89
bombers, compared with 158 lost by the Eighth, but the Fifteenth suffered a
higher percentage loss. In all USSTAF lost at least 266 heavy bombers; 2,600
aircrew members (killed, wounded, or captured and in German hands); and 28
fighters. 24 Almost half those losses occurred on the last two missions when
the Germans took advantage of mistakes that left the bombers unescorted or
underescorted. In February the Eighth wrote off 299 bombers, one-fifth of its
force, whereas the Luftwaffe wrote off more than one-third of its single-engine
fighters and lost almost 18 percent of its fighter pilots.
The AAF official history states that the damage inflicted by
the week's missions caused a two-month delay in German fighter aircraft
production. At the end of February,
Field Marshal Erhard Milch (the Luftwaffe officer in charge of aircraft
production) informed Albert Speer (the German minister for armaments
production) that he expected the March production figures to equal only 30 to
40 percent of the February total. As a result of this meeting, the two set up a
fighter staff to push through a large increase in fighter production. The head
of the fighter staff, Karl-Otto Saur, estimated that, at the time of its
establishment on 1 March 1944, 70 percent of the original buildings of the
German aircraft industry had been destroyed. Damage to machine tools was at
much lower levels.
The delay in German fighter production was even more
significant than the actual number of fighters never produced. By the time the
aircraft industry recovered in late spring and early summer, the situation had
changed totally. The Eighth Air Force's attacks on German synthetic oil-begun
in May 1944-produced severe shortages in aviation gasoline, which resulted in
catastrophic curtailment of training programs and operations. By July 1944,
hundreds of newly assembled fighters were grounded by a lack of fuel. If those
new fighters had gone into operation in April or May when the Germans still had
sufficient fuel available, they might have made Pointblank or even the
cross-channel invasion more risky undertakings.
Big Week also affected replacement production by persuading
the German leadership and aircraft industry to undertake an immediate,
large-scale dispersal program. They divided the 29 major aircraft producers
into 85 airframe factories and scattered aeroengine production to 249 sites. This
program eventually rendered the aircraft industry relatively invulnerable to
bombing. However, it caused more production delays, increased indirect labor
costs by 20 percent, robbed the German air industry of the advantages of
economic scales of production, and heightened the demand on the German railway
system by forcing elevated levels of shipment and transshipment of materials,
assemblies, subassemblies, and components. This situation further strained the
economy and left aircraft production dependent on uninterrupted rail
transportation. By October 1944 the German air industry employed 450,000
workers, 103,000 of them women, with 48 percent of the workforce native
Germans, 36 percent foreigners, and the remaining 16 percent Jews, prisoners of
war, and political prisoners. The fighter staff also instituted, at last,
double factory shifts and a seven-day, 72-hour workweek.
Although postwar research has shown that the missions
between 20 and 25 February accomplished less than originally estimated by the
Allies, what made Big Week "big" was not only the physical damage
inflicted on the German fighter industry and frontline fighter strength, which
was significant, but also the psychological effect it had on the AAF. In one
week Doolittle dropped almost as much bomb tonnage as the Eighth had dropped in
its entire first year. At the same time, the RAF Bomber Command conducted five
heavy raids on Combined Bomber Offensive targets losing 157 heavy bombers-a
loss rate of 6.6 bombers per 100 bomber sorties, which slightly exceeded the
American rate of six bombers per 100 sorties. In trial by combat the AAF had
shown that precision bombing in daylight not only performed as claimed, but
also at no greater cost than the supposedly safer and less accurate night area
bombing.
What is more, USSTAF, thanks to its fighter escorts, claimed
to have destroyed more than 600 enemy aircraft; Bomber Command could claim only
13. Of course, the US claim of 600 German fighters destroyed was a vast
exaggeration. Such a claim could be approached only by counting not just the
sure and probable kills by US fighters but also the numbers claimed by the
American bomber crews. As noted earlier, American bomber gunners, aided by
faulty intelligence debriefing evaluation techniques, killed, at best, only
one-tenth of the enemy fighter aircraft that they claimed and were credited
with. Fragmentary Luftwaffe sources do not allow a specific breakout for the
Big Week, but they support a conclusion that the Germans lost between 225 and
275 aircraft, 37 a close approximation to the 241 sure and probable kills claimed
by the American fighters.
In their own minds General Spaatz and other high-ranking
American air officers had validated their belief in their chosen mode of
combat. Spaatz fairly glowed in a letter he sent to Arnold summarizing the
month: "The resultant destruction and damage caused to industrial plants
of vital importance to the German war effort, and to the very existence of the
German Air Force, can be considered a conspicuous success in the course of the
European war." Spaatz went on to compare the relative contributions of the
month by the AAF and RAF. The Eighth flew 5,400 more sorties than Bomber
Command and dropped some 5,000 tons more bombs, all with a lower loss rate. The
AAF had come of age; the long buildup in Britain had produced results at last.
"During the past two years as our forces slowly built up and the RAF
carried the great part and weight of attack, some circles of both the
Government and the general public have been inclined to think that our part in
the battle was but a small one. I trust that this brief comparison of effort
will enable you to erase any doubts that may exist in some minds as to the
great importance of the part now being played by the United States Army Air
Forces in Europe in the task which has been sent us-the destruction of Germany's
ability to wage war."
Although the Luftwaffe fighter force actually increased its
bomber kills in March and April, the Big Week-in the minds of Spaatz and others
in the AAF-was the beginning of the end for the German daylight fighter. Most
of the senior American Airmen in Europe probably agreed with USSTAF's assistant
director of intelligence, Col R. D. Hughes, who said three weeks later, "I
consider the result of the week's attack to be the funeral of the German
Fighter Force." Hughes added that USSTAF now realized that it could bomb
any target in Germany at will-a realization that led USSTAF and Spaatz to begin
the hunt for the one crucial target system to bomb now that the first
objective, the suppression of the Luftwaffe, seemed to have been accomplished. In
short order they agreed on the German synthetic oil industry as that critical
target system.
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