Hit the Target by Bill Yenne

Author:Bill Yenne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-07-06T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 27

REGENSBURG AND SCHWEINFURT

During the last week of July 1943, under the mandate of the Pointblank Directive, the Eighth Air Force launched a series of maximum-effort missions against German aircraft factories. In planning these attacks, Ira Eaker and Fred Anderson concentrated on targets in northern Germany that were within the range of operations routinely flown by the Eighth.

These included Heinkel Flugzeugwerke at Warnemünde and Apparatebau GmbH Oschersleben (AGO) Flugzeugwerke in Oschersleben, as well as various Fieseler Flugzeugbau plants in the Kassel metropolitan area. While Fieseler is best remembered for light observation aircraft and AGO is a mere footnote in German aviation history, it should be recalled that both companies manufactured Messerschmitt Bf 109 and Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighters under license.

Meanwhile, as Eaker, Anderson, and LeMay looked at the big map of German industry that was mounted on the Widewing wall, their eyes invariably fell on the largest concentration of fighter aircraft production in Germany. The city of Regensburg was home to the massive Messerschmitt GmbH facility that topped the Eighth’s Pointblank Directive wish list.

Also on the minds of the Eighth Air Force leadership and those of the economists turned strategic planners at the Enemy Objectives Unit were other targets whose factories contributed to the effectiveness of the Luftwaffe. In the lexicon of strategic war plans they spoke of “bottleneck industries.” On the flowchart of the German industrial economy, these were places where the lines intersected. They were the junctions that, if removed, affected myriad other industries downstream in many directions.

The glittering bottleneck that caught the eye of the Eighth Air Force and its planners in the summer of 1943 was a product so simple that it had but a single part—antifriction bearings, especially ball bearings. They were elementary but essential, not only to fighter aircraft and aircraft engine production, but to a broad spectrum of industrial products from military vehicles to factory machine tools. As the planners began to research the German bearing industry, they discovered that the majority of Germany’s ball-bearing factories, or Kugellager, were located in or near the city of Schweinfurt. It was almost too good to be true.

Regensburg and Schweinfurt had the makings of ideal Pointblank targets.

However, they both lay in Bavaria, Germany’s southernmost state and deeper inside the Reich than the Eighth Air Force had yet flown. They were at the limit of the range of the bombers and far beyond the range of the Eighth’s escorting fighters. The airmen who had been advocating for strategic airpower since Billy Mitchell’s time had a challenge laid before them.

—

In the history of USAAF strategic air operations, August 1943 is remembered for two very long, extremely ambitious, maximum-effort, and ultimately very costly missions. These adverbs and adjectives made them milestones. One was to the vast oil refinery complex at Ploesti, Romania. The other was to both Regensburg and Schweinfurt. The former was a Ninth Air Force operation to which the Eighth contributed aircraft and crews. The latter was completely an Eighth Air Force show.

Ploesti was important for being the largest petroleum refinery complex in continental Europe.

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