The American air force in Britain

In February 1942 American military aviation arrived in Britain, where in the following years, together with the RAF, it was to drop bombs on the Reich. For the time being there was very little of it. On 20 February Brigadier General Ira Eaker landed in England with six staff officers, and on 22 February the commander of American forces in the British Isles, Major General James E. Chaney, issued an order setting up an American Bomber Command under Eaker’s command. It was the first American air headquarters in Europe. It did not yet have a single aircraft.

Some calendars state that by 21 February the American Air Corps was firmly established in bases in Britain. This calls for two corrections. First, since June 1941 the army’s aviation had been called the United States Army Air Forces, and the Air Corps was now only a part of it. Second, in February 1942 there were no American air bases or combat units in England, only seven officers who were to prepare for them. The first squadrons arrived in the summer, and the first independent heavy bomber raid took place in August 1942.

Bombers for Europe

The decision had been taken at the Arcadia Conference, where the Americans and the British confirmed that Germany was the principal enemy. The Chief of the Army Air Forces, General Henry Arnold, announced there that American bombers would be sent to England to join the air offensive against the Reich. Ground forces were to come with the airmen. The first of them, soldiers of the 34th Infantry Division, came ashore at Belfast on 26 January 1942. Two days later a formation was created in the United States that was to become the backbone of the American air war in Europe. On 28 January the headquarters of the Eighth Air Force was activated at Savannah, Georgia. It had originally been earmarked for the planned invasion of French North Africa, but when that plan was postponed it was sent to Britain instead.

From 9 February the question of how many aircraft would go to Europe and how many to the Pacific was decided by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, on which Arnold sat as an equal of the heads of the army and the navy. The dispute was sharp, because in February 1942 the Japanese were conquering Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, and commanders in the Pacific and in Australia were demanding every bomber they could get. Arnold and Marshall, however, upheld the principle that the decisive air blow had to be aimed at Germany, and from bases in Britain, from which bombers could reach the Reich’s industrial heartland.

On 31 January Arnold instructed Eaker to prepare in England for the reception, accommodation, training and operations of an American bomber command. The choice was not an obvious one: Eaker was a fighter pilot, not a bomber man, and had never commanded a bomber unit. But he was a close associate of Arnold’s, with whom he had written several books on aviation, an efficient organiser and a skilful diplomat, which was exactly what working alongside the British required. Among the officers who flew with him were Lieutenant Beirne Lay, later co-author of the novel and screenplay Twelve O’Clock High about American bombers in England, and Captain Frederick Castle, who as a general was killed on Christmas Eve 1944 leading the largest bombing mission of the Eighth Air Force.

Alongside Bomber Command

Eaker was at first based at the headquarters of RAF Bomber Command near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. He arrived at a turning point. On 14 February the Air Ministry had issued Bomber Command with a new directive: the main aim of the night raids was now to break the morale of the German civilian population, especially industrial workers, by bombing whole areas of cities. On 22 February, the same day the American headquarters was set up, Air Marshal Arthur Harris took over RAF Bomber Command. British bomber aviation was then going through a crisis. In the autumn of 1941 it had emerged that most of its bombs were falling far from their targets, and heavy losses, such as those of the night of 7–8 November, had forced the command to scale back its raids. On 12 February the bombers had failed to stop the German warships that passed through the English Channel in Operation Cerberus.

Harris and Eaker quickly became friends. According to accounts from those months, the American lived for a time in Harris’s house, and the British helped him with everything, from training in communications and air defence to finding airfields. Doctrine, however, divided them. The British, taught by their own losses in 1939–1941, bombed by night and believed that daylight raids over Germany would end in the slaughter of the crews. The Americans believed in precision bombing by day: heavily armed B-17 bombers flying in tight formations were to defend themselves against fighters and hit specific factories thanks to the Norden bombsight. The British, led by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal, long tried to persuade the Americans to join the night offensive. Eaker, Arnold and their superior in Europe, General Carl Spaatz, did not give way.

From seven officers to an air force

On 15 April Eaker moved his headquarters to a hastily vacated girls’ school in High Wycombe, right next to Harris’s headquarters. It was given the code name “Pinetree”. In April the Bolero plan also got under way: the build-up in Britain of American forces for the future invasion of the Continent. On 11 May some 1,800 officers and men, the advance echelon of the Eighth Air Force, arrived at Liverpool aboard the transport Andes. On 18 June Spaatz opened its headquarters at Bushy Park on the outskirts of London, under the code name “Widewing”, and Eaker’s command became the force’s VIII Bomber Command. On 1 July the first B-17 to fly the Atlantic landed at Prestwick in Scotland.

The first American crews flew over occupied Europe on 4 July 1942, Independence Day. Six crews of the 15th Bombardment Squadron, in British Boston light bombers and together with British crews, attacked German airfields in the Netherlands. Two American aircraft did not return. The first independent heavy bomber raid took place on 17 August 1942: twelve B-17s of the 97th Bombardment Group bombed the railway yards at Sotteville-lès-Rouen near Rouen in daylight. Eaker flew in one of the aircraft. All the planes returned.

Significance

February 1942 was the start of a road that for many American airmen ended in death over Germany. Within two years the Eighth Air Force grew into one of the largest air formations in history. At its peak, in 1944, it numbered some 200,000 men and could send more than two thousand heavy bombers over the Reich in a single mission. The doctrine of daylight raids was put to a severe test: in 1943, during the missions to Schweinfurt and Regensburg, the Eighth lost several dozen bombers in a single day, and its formations were only properly protected once long-range escort fighters arrived in the spring of 1944. According to American figures, more than 26,000 of its men were killed in the war.

The dispute with the British was settled at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943. There Eaker persuaded Churchill that the RAF’s night raids and the American daylight raids could complement each other, and so the principle of bombing “around the clock” was born. The Combined Bomber Offensive of the two air forces, conducted from June 1943, weakened German industry, forced the Luftwaffe to concentrate its fighters over the Reich and helped the Allies win air supremacy before the Normandy landings. It also cost tens of thousands of civilian lives in Germany, and its moral assessment remains a matter of dispute among historians.