Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II by Bill Yenne

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.

SIX
A STEEP LEARNING CURVE
    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 AdmiralWilliam 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,