America at War by Terence T. Finn

Author:Terence T. Finn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2014-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

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As the Royal Navy and its American counterpart fought the U-boats, their comrades in the Allied air forces were engaging the Luftwaffe, the German air force. In 1939 the Luftwaffe was the foremost aerial combat organization in the world. By 1943 it was waging war on three fronts—Italy, Western Europe, and Russia—and the strain was beginning to tell. Yet it remained a formidable foe, as both England’s Royal Air Force and the American Eighth Air Force were finding out.

Proponents of airpower in both the United States and Great Britain believed aircraft alone could destroy Nazi Germany, thus making the inevitably costly cross-channel invasion unnecessary. Their plan was to strike Germany from the air with well-armed long-range bombers. They expected to destroy the Nazis’ capacity to make war and to break the morale of the German people. In the event, they accomplished neither. But the damage their bombers inflicted was immense and their contribution to victory significant.

The British bombed at night. Their principal targets were German cities. By April 1945, most major cities in Germany were in ruins, thanks to the RAF’s Bomber Command. Because thousands and thousands of German civilians were killed, postwar moralists would declare the raids to be inhumane, condemning Bomber Command and its leader, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris. Harris, however, simply wanted to win the war. He and his pilots thought what they were doing was eminently reasonable given what the German air force had done to Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry, London, and numerous Russian cities.

The Americans bombed in daylight. Their goal in the strategic bombing campaign was to destroy Germany’s industrial base. Over a period of 966 days the four-engine B-17s and B-24s of the Eighth Air Force would depart England and fly to the Continent. There, they would bomb shipyards, railroad yards, munitions factories, naval bases, aircraft plants, and the like. By mid-1944, the Luftwaffe no longer could stop them.

The Eighth Air Force was one of fifteen numbered air forces the United States established during the Second World War. Eleven of them were deployed overseas. The Tenth Air Force, for example, operated in Burma and India. The Fifth flew in the southwestern Pacific. The Eighth was based in East Anglia. It operated from sixty-two airfields that crowded this most eastern bulge of the United Kingdom.

The Eighth began its endeavors on February 29, 1942, when seven U.S. Army Air Force officers arrived in Britain. Their job was simple: create an aerial armada that would pulverize the enemy. That is exactly what they did. But the cost was high. Some twenty-six thousand Americans of the Eighth Air Force did not return home alive.

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