Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (22 page)

There was also strong pressure from air force officers stationed in England, including the irrepressible Major Donald Blakeslee, an American who had fought through the Battle of Britain with a Royal Canadian Air Force squadron, then, to avoid being appointed a training officer, switched into the volunteer American Eagles squadron. Blakeslee flew Spitfires and adored them, but he knew their limitations of range. When he flew the first RAF Mustangs, he agitated incessantly to have the fighter groups attached to the Eighth Army Air Force (based in
eastern England) equipped with the same planes. When the pugnacious Lieutenant General Jimmy Doolittle was pulled back from the Mediterranean and put in charge of the Eighth, he immediately pressed for Mustang squadrons, and Arnold and Spaatz, now persuaded of their virtues, found them. Portal in turn ordered four RAF Mustang squadrons to fly with the Americans. All such squadrons from the Ninth were transferred northward and placed under Blakeslee’s boss, Major General William Kepner, the forceful head of the fighter groups. In fact, all USAAF pilots with
any
Mustang training were ordered to the Eighth. The logjam had broken, and not a moment too soon.

The air war in Europe was not, of course, transformed by a single “wonder weapon.” Rather, the crucial developments came about as a result of tactical, technical, and operational complementarities that, coming together after many setbacks, allowed a small group of British and American individuals to solve a problem that had plagued strategic bombing for many years: how to realize the early visions of weakening an enemy’s capacity to fight through the steady application of modern airpower.

What was critical were the interactions and feedback loops: the impact of one operational failure or victory upon another, for example, or the changes a new weapon could bring about at the tactical level that in turn affected the larger outcome of battles.
⁴⁹
One such complementarity was mentioned earlier, namely, the fact that the RAF and USAAF bombed around the clock and thus gave the enemy little respite. Much more could have been done in this respect, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff repeatedly urged a greater integration of targeting, but the mere fact that British bombers flew over Germany each night and U.S. bombers did so each day placed enormous stress on the Reich’s defenses. Neither air force could claim that they did it alone.

The other great complementarity was the use—perhaps a better word is
placement
—of the Mustang as a long-range daylight escort. It did
not
make redundant the Spitfires, Thunderbolts, and Lightnings, but augmented their efforts, especially at the greater flight distances. The tests by Rolls-Royce had shown that while the P-51 was considerably
heavier than the Spitfire, it needed far fewer revs per minute to attain the same altitude and speed (this was the aerodynamic puzzle); it got to where it needed to go with much less effort. But there was another aspect to this aircraft that had intrigued Freeman, namely, its astounding fuel capacity, which when combined with its aerodynamic economy of consumption produced a miracle. “In terms of US gallons, its normal internal fuel tanks held 183 gallons (269 with a full rear tank) compared with 99 for the Spitfire, and it consumed an average of 64 gallons an hour compared with 144 for the P-38 and 140 for the P-47. With full internal tanks, including an 86 gallon rear fuselage tank, and two 108 gallon drop-tanks, its combat radius was 750 miles.”
⁵⁰
That must have been more than twice a Spitfire’s range.

The drop tanks—the second enhancement pressed by Lovett after his visit, and being toyed with by most air forces by the middle of the war—were thus also a critical part of this tale, for while they were the factor that most enhanced the P-51’s range, they automatically gave
every
British and American fighter a much wider range. Once the full potential of drop tanks to increase an aircraft’s range was appreciated, everyone wanted them, not just the fighter squadrons. The British were so desperate for them that they manufactured a 108-gallon fuel tank out of stiffened paper; it was actually lighter and more capacious than the later U.S. metal versions, and was preferred by many American fliers, who scrounged batches of them. It also denied the enemy the reuse of the discarded aluminum casings.
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With attached drop tanks, all the Allied fighters—Spitfires, Lightnings, Thunderbolts, Mustangs—could fly farther and stay longer in the air.

The newly equipped Allied strategic bombing campaign (called Operation Pointblank) resumed with a vengeance in early 1944, at last putting into practice its declared goal of the “progressive destruction and dislocation” of the enemy’s capacity to resist. The breakthrough was a consequence of the resumption of the USAAF’s daylight raids upon the great industries of the Third Reich, this time increasingly escorted by long-range fighters. It didn’t happen all at once, of course. The first Mustang squadron (Blakeslee’s) had joined the Eighth at the end of 1943, but there were never enough planes in the early raids, nor were the new Mustangs themselves free of imperfections. But the American war machine was now in full swing, and hundreds of Thunderbolts
and Mustangs were arriving in the United Kingdom each week—transported on the decks of the escort carriers no longer needed for that role because of the U-boats’ setback—to join the hundreds of new Flying Fortress and Liberator bombers that were being flown overhead by the male and female shuttle crews of Allied Transport Command.

The breakthrough was the decimation of German fighter squadrons, and it worked in the following way. Spaatz stuck to specific strategic targets: Allied intelligence had identified Germany’s shrinking oil production as a key weakness and, slightly later, Eisenhower ordered concentrated bombing of the railway lines and bridges of most of western Europe as preparation for the D-Day landings. North German shipbuilding yards for U-boat construction were also on the short list. As the Americans recognized, such targets
had
to be defended by the Luftwaffe. But the new Allied long-range fighters could now neutralize Galland’s hitherto successful policy of waiting until the Allied bombers were unescorted. If Luftwaffe squadrons sought to disrupt the bombers before they reached the Rhine (which made a lot of sense), they would have to tangle with the advanced Spitfires and the remarkably tough Thunderbolts; if they waited until the aerial armadas were attacking key inland German industries, communications, and refineries, they would find Mustangs high above them, coming down out of the sun. More than that, Doolittle made the bold decision to release the Mustang squadrons from close escort duty to go hunt German fighters all over the skies, if necessary driving them down to ground level, where the Mustangs’ astonishing aerodynamics would prevail.

The Americans lost heavily in the ferocious battles of that critical spring of 1944, and many of their best bomber and fighter pilots were killed, maimed, or captured by a desperate German resistance. But they always had reinforcing squadrons, while the Luftwaffe suffered a catastrophe from which it never recovered. To save the Reich, it pulled vast numbers of aircraft and crews from the Eastern Front, which gave the Soviet air force a major advantage in the advance on Germany. It also pulled most of its remaining squadrons from the Mediterranean. But it availed Goering nothing: seeing Mustangs flying in broad daylight over Berlin in mid-1944, he is reported to have said, “We have lost the war,” perhaps one of his few honest statements. By March of that same year
Mustangs were downing proportionately three to five times more German fighters than the more numerous Thunderbolts, although the latter were certainly inflicting their own heavy damage.
⁵²
And the giant British bombers still came during the night, intensifying the pressure upon Germany’s aerial defense systems.

Around this time, in late spring 1944, the Luftwaffe cracked; its exhausted fighter pilots could take no more. “Monthly losses, which included most of the experienced German fighter pilots, averaged 450 in the first five months of 1944; by the end of May, 2,262 had been killed. By 24 May 1944, only 240 of Germany’s single-engine day fighters remained operational.”
⁵³
Actually, many more aircraft were in the pipeline, but their completion was hampered by disrupted communications, slowdowns in ball-bearing production, and completely inadequate fuel production. Above all, there was the loss of fighter pilots and crews. The newly trained men had far fewer hours of flying experience than their American and British equivalents, and suffered accordingly. Mustang pilots who chased their prey to the ground reported that many German planes were unable to avoid crashing into a pylon, a tree, or a high building. Even the finest German aces, perhaps softened by an easier tussle on the Eastern Front, met their match, great and revered names simply exploding into the sky. In March 1944 the Luftwaffe lost more than a dozen veterans of the air war, including two group commanders, one with 102 kills, the other with 161. They were irreplaceable. As the U.S. official history diplomatically acknowledges, the Luftwaffe was hurt more through these aerial battles than through even the most relentless and expensive daylight and nighttime bombing of aircraft factories.
⁵⁴

In this campaign, as in several others described in this book, it was the numbers of
trained
crews that were relevant. Were there enough good pilots left to fly the Hurricanes and Spitfires of Fighter Command in 1940? Yes, just. Were there enough well-trained U-boat captains and chief engineers to execute Doenitz’s resumed offensive after the autumn of 1943? No. Were there enough experienced midlevel British Empire officers in the Eighth Army to handle Rommel’s explosive form of ground warfare in 1941–42? No. Were there enough competent Japanese fighter pilots left after the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot” of June 1944? No. Were there enough rock-hard major generals left in Stalin’s
army after both the purges of the late 1930s and the first year of Operation Barbarossa? Scarcely, but yes.

There were certainly not enough competent German airmen left to handle the increasing waves of Spitfires, Thunderbolts, and Mustangs over western Europe from late 1943 and early 1944 onward, despite the more than 80 percent of the German fighter force that was being deployed against Allied bombers by this time. One of those aces, Heinz Knocke, reported in his early 1944 diary the “awe-inspiring spectacle” of going against a thousand heavily armed bombers surrounded on all sides by American escorting fighters. After flying two sorties in one day, he watched his own Bf 109 machine-gunned and destroyed while refueling at a makeshift base; a few months later he himself, leading a group of only five planes patrolling the Reich’s western borders, was pounced on by forty Mustangs and Thunderbolts and shot to the ground.
⁵⁵
Hitler and the Wehrmacht leadership now railed at the “cowardice” of the Luftwaffe pilots for letting the enemy’s bombers get through. Nothing could have been further from the truth, but truth was in short supply in Berlin. The German fliers were as brave as the Tom Blakeslees and Elmer Bendigers and Pat Danielses and Guy Gibsons who faced them month after month, but the plain fact was that, as in the Atlantic convoys campaign, the Allies had come up with a better way of getting things done.