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

the RAF would be making “mass air attacks of industrial areas at night, to break down morale [which was expected to have] a pronounced effect upon production.”
    A dramatic thousand-plane RAF raid on the night of May 30–31, 1942, was pointed to as an example. This single mission had destroyed an estimated 12 percent of the principal industrial and residential districts in the city of Cologne.
    More importantly, AWPD-42 set out specific numbers, specific allocations of resources, to make it all happen. It called for the USAAF to have an operational bomber force of nearly three thousand four-engine bombers deployed in the European theater within sixteen months. The US Navy did not like the emphasis on allocation of resources to the USAAF at a time when they wanted an allocation of four-engine bombers to use as long-range patrol planes, but the president had spoken. In fact, he later insisted on American aircraft production being ramped up so that everyone would get the planes they wanted.
    Like its predecessors, AWPD-42 was still just a road map, an educated guess, albeit a better educated guess than AWPD-1 and AWPD-2, even though the Eighth Air Force heavy bomber offensive had barely just begun.
    Fewer than one hundred four-engine bombers were operational with the Eighth Air Force when AWPD-42 reached the president’s bedside,but the report confidently promised that if the recommended force was in place by the first of January 1944, then the invasion of
Festung Europa
could be undertaken by the summer of that year. AWPD-42 may have been just a road map, but it was the road map that would lead the USAAF to Big Week, and ultimately to victory.
    On August 17, 1942, six weeks after the Eighth Air Force made its Fourth of July raid with borrowed light bombers, the heavy bombers were finally ready to strike. A dozen Flying Fortresses of the 97th Bombardment Group took off from Polebrook in East Anglia on the first Eighth Air Force heavy bomber mission. Of the heavy bombardment groups allocated to the Eighth Air Force, only the 97th had become operational.
    Led personally by General Eaker, commander of the VIII Bomber Command, they attacked a target selected by Hughes personally—the railroad marshaling yards at Rouen-Sotteville, near the city of Rouen in Normandy. Attacking a marshaling yard would theoretically impact the transportation network by damaging the interchange of freight trains on a number of intersecting lines.
    It was a great boost to Eighth Air Force morale to know that the B-17s had finally bombed their first target, and that they had done so without losses
and
with greater accuracy than had been expected from fresh, inexperienced crews.
    In Washington, the USAAF Air Staff seized upon this moment to insist that the previously theoretical doctrine of daylight precision bombing had been vindicated by this first mission. In a memo to General Marshall prepared for Arnold’s signature, it was asserted that the result of the mission “again verifies the soundness of our policy of the precision bombing of strategic objectives rather than mass (blitz) bombing of large, city size areas [as the RAF was doing]. The Army Air Forces early recognized that the effective use of air power on a world wide basis equired the ability to hit small targets from high altitudes.”
    However, many USAAF officers, including Ira Eaker, later commented that the comparison to the British effort was unfair and “most unfortunate,” given that those in the field wished to maintain a harmonious working relationship with the RAF.
    Two days after Rouen, twenty-two B-17s attacked airfields near Abbeville,home of Jagdgeschwader 26, one of the Luftwaffe’s most highly regarded fighter wings. The objective of this bombing was to divert German fighters at the same time the Allies made their commando raid on the French coastal city of Dieppe. According to Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, the air commander for the Dieppe operation, “The