Case Studies in the Achievement of Air Superiority - Air Force ...

OPERATION OVERLORD
consideration to the many problems involved and impart the necessary
drive.”’O
General Eaker’s tenure at Eighth Air Force was soon to end. He suffered
the common fate of those commanders sent into battle too soon with
too little. In January 1944, Eaker moved to the Mediterranean where he
assumed the direction of the Allied air forces in that theater. With Eaker’s
transfer, the primary responsibility for POINTBLANK now shifted to Lt.
Gen. Carl Spaatz who commanded a new headquarters-United States
Strategic Air Forces in Europe (USSTAF)-which directed the operations
of both the Eighth Air Force and the new Fifteenth Air Force operating
from bases in southern Italy. Maj. Gen. James Doolittle assumed command
of Eighth Air (See Figure 6-2)
General Spaatz and his deputy, Maj. Gen. Frederick L. Anderson, were
determined to carry out POINTBLANK as originally designed. They wanted
to strike decisive blows at the German aircraft industry and then to shift
the strategic bombing effort to a target system that would bring the
Germans to their knees. Spaatz had long believed in the ability of the
strategic air forces to bring about German defeat without an invasion.
When he first came to London, he feared that there would be “no opportunity
to carry out any air operations of sufficient intensity to justify the
theory that Germany can be knocked out by air power He
thought that it would be “an emasculation of heavy bomber capabilities”
to restrict the role of the strategic air forces to the achievement of air
superiority for the invasion.53 He apparently thought Operation OVER-
LORD to be dangerous and unnecessary, a view which he expressed in a
conversation with Maj. Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, the American Deputy
Commander in Chief of the Allied Expeditionary Air Forces (AEAF), held
in April of 1944:
General Spaatz stated that he feared that the allied forces might be batting their
heads against a stone wall in the OVERLORD operation. If the purpose of OVERL~RD
is to seize and hold advanced air bases: this purpose is no longer necessary since
the Strategic Air Forces can reach all vital targets in Germany with fighter cover.. . .
It is better to win the war surely than to undertake an operation which has really
great risks.”
Arnold reinforced the sense of urgency at USSTAF headquarters. He
wrote Spaatz in January to tell him to stop “pecking away at the German
aircraft ind~stry.”~~ He went so far as to send his Chief of Staff, Maj. Gen.
Barney Giles, to London to convey his feelings and to urge a ruthless persistence
in attacking the Luftwaffe. Among other things, Giles was to tell
Spaatz that he should be prepared to risk losing no less than 600 heavy
bombers per month in order to beat down the L~ftwaffe.~~
Thus encouraged, Spaatz and Anderson aimed at carrying out a plan,
first developed at Eighth Air Force headquarters in the early autumn of
1943, to strike a highly concentrated series of blows which, they believed,
would more or less finish the job at one go. Also, partly in response to the
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