Pacifica Military History Free Sample Chapters.pmd

Free Sample Chapters 441
Air Force (which would be activated in August). In a way, the Eighth
had been relegated to the status of training command for the Twelfth at
the precise moment it was struggling to get into the fight. On top of that,
the nascent air force in Egypt—eventually to become the Ninth—was
being strengthened with combat units from the States that might
otherwise have been shipped to England for service with the Eighth.
If there was any doubt that Churchill would temper his plan, the
Prime Minister dashed it on July 23. A massive German breakthrough
between the Don and Volga rivers in the Soviet Union brought a plea
from Premier Stalin that the western Allies open a second front posthaste.
Operation SLEDGEHAMMER was impossible on its face at this
juncture—there were no troops—and Churchill’s attention was riveted
on North Africa. He snuffed any remaining notion Stalin clung to that
the cross-Channel invasion would take place in 1942, and he more or
less privately thought an invasion of France in 1943 had become fanciful.
The only concession the British and Americans were able to make to
Soviet woes was scheduling TORCH for earlier than December 1, 1942.
*
Eaker and to a lesser degree Spaatz faced an immense dilemma as
planning for Operation TORCH got underway. There were too few
combat units in England at that moment to open a strategic bombing
offensive against Germany, and the B-17 groups that had arrived were
not completely trained. Their presence in England was just that, a
presence—a show of future intent. But Spaatz and Eaker—both of them
career-long fighter pilots with no personal or even professional stake in
the concept of strategic bombing—felt they owed it to their service to at
least mount newsworthy demonstration missions against targets near at
hand while they still had a force in hand.
The Army Air Forces bomber doctrine did allow as air superiority
was a precondition for a successful bombing campaign. There were
German-manned airfields in France that could do with a little clearing.
Moreover, the airmen were raring to get started on the work of war. A
few bombing missions against targets near at hand would certainly serve
as graduation exercises for hard-training groups in England. And
bombing missions against nearby targets would certainly be a means to