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

raid on Abbeville undoubtedly struck a heavy blow at the German fighter organization at a very critical moment during the operations [and thus] had a very material effect on the course of the operations.”
    Referring, no doubt, to Leigh-Mallory’s comments, Ira Eaker effused contentedly in an August 27 memo to Hap Arnold that the British “acknowledge willingly and cheerfully the great accuracy of our bombing, the surprising hardihood of our bombardment aircraft and the skill and tenacity of our crews.”
    Five additional raids were flown by the Eighth Air Force through the end of August, striking targets ranging from shipyards to airfields across an arc from northern France to Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
    As Dick Hughes observed, “It really did not matter, at this early stage, what we bombed.” The idea was that the crews needed to gain experience before flying into highly defended German airspace.
    In an August 1 memo, General Ira Eaker wrote that his VIII Bomber Command had as its role the “destruction of carefully chosen strategic targets, with an initial subsidiary purpose [of determining its] capacity to destroy pinpoint targets by daylight accuracy bombing and our ability to beat off fighter opposition and to evade antiaircraft opposition.”
    In other words, the secondary mission was to prove that the primary mission was
possible
!
    The airpower historian Arthur B. Ferguson of Duke University writes in “Origins of the Combined Bomber Offensive” in Volume II of
Army Air Forces in World War II
, “These early missions were less important for what they contributed directly to the Allied war effort than for what they contributed indirectly by testing and proving the doctrine of strategic daylight bombing. In either instance it was as difficult and dangerous to strive for quick results as it was natural for observers, especially those at some distance from the scene of operations, to look impatiently for them.”
    These missions, beginning with the one on the fourth of July, markeda timid beginning for a strategic offensive, but even this was about to be interrupted by Operation Torch.
    The only major American ground offensive operation against the Germans that was on the drawing boards for the foreseeable future, Torch was the centerpiece of Allied offensive actions against Germany in the second half of 1942. General Erwin Rommel’s German Afrika Korps had proven itself to be as successful as the blitzkrieging German armies in Europe in 1940. He controlled Tunisia and Libya, and—in victory after victory—he had pushed the British deep into Egypt. Meanwhile, in his rear, Morocco and Algeria were safe and secure, controlled by the Vichy French, Germany’s nominal allies. Planned for early November, Torch was designed to land Allied troops in Morocco and Algeria, and to relieve Rommel of his secure rear.
    General Eisenhower, who was in overall command of Torch, and the highest ranking American officer in Europe, was keen to concentrate maximum American firepower in support of this operation. This included the bombers of the Eighth Air Force. He let it be known that he was seriously considering the idea of suspending the Eighth Air Force campaign when it had barely started, in order to concentrate all of the Eighth’s bombers under Twelfth Air Force command in the Mediterranean Theater.
    While understanding and recognizing the strategic goals of Operation Torch, Spaatz naturally argued in favor of continuing his strategic campaign. Every distraction of Eighth Air Force assets meant a postponement of the validation of the strategic concept that Spaatz and his air commanders sought most feverishly. As Arthur Ferguson recalls, “The delay was the more vexing because from an early stage in war planning the bomber campaign against Germany had been conceived as the first offensive to be conducted by United States forces.”
    The disagreement between Spaatz and Eisenhower over the use of airpower was more