Big Week

On the morning of 26 February 1944 the fires in Augsburg were dying down after the last raid of a series that American airmen later called “Big Week”. For six days, from 20 to 25 February, heavy bombers of the US Eighth Air Force from England and the Fifteenth Air Force from Italy attacked by day the plants producing German fighters, while RAF Bomber Command bombed by night the cities in which those plants stood. The planners gave the operation the code name Argument. Its real target, however, was not the factory buildings themselves but the German fighter arm: the Americans wanted to force it to fight and bleed it white before the invasion of France planned for the spring.

Many war chronologies record under 19 February that Leipzig was bombed “on two successive nights” and that this was how Big Week began, and under 26 February that the campaign ended in success and that the P-51 Mustang fighter proved invaluable. The first statement needs qualifying: Leipzig was attacked by the RAF on the night of 19/20 February and by the Americans in daylight on 20 February – a night and the day that followed it, not two nights. The last bombs of Big Week fell on the night of 25/26 February, hence the date of the summing-up. The word “success” also needs explaining: German aircraft production quickly recovered, and victory was decided by losses in men, not machines.

The bottleneck: the Luftwaffe’s fighters

At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 the Allies agreed on a combined bomber offensive against the Reich, and in June that year the Pointblank directive gave first priority to the German fighter arm and the industry that supplied it. Without air superiority there could be no question either of effective bombing of Germany or of a landing on the French coast. The summer and autumn of 1943 showed, however, that the Luftwaffe was defending itself ever more effectively. The Schweinfurt–Regensburg raid of 17 August cost 60 bombers, and Black Thursday on 14 October another 60. After these losses the Eighth Air Force for several months ventured no deeper into Germany than its escort fighters could reach.

Meanwhile the German aircraft industry, contrary to Allied expectations, was increasing its output. The Messerschmitt works at Regensburg and Augsburg, the Erla plants in Leipzig, the Gothaer Waggonfabrik at Gotha and the factories around Brunswick were assembling ever more Bf 109s and Bf 110s, and the Luftwaffe was pulling fighters back from other fronts for the defence of the Reich. American planners had prepared a plan for a massive strike on this industry as early as the autumn of 1943, but its execution depended on weather that hardly ever occurred over Europe in winter: several successive days of tolerable weather over the airfields in England, allowing the bombers to take off and form up, and clear skies over the targets in central and southern Germany.

New commanders and a new fighter

At the turn of 1943 and 1944 the Americans reorganised their air command in Europe. From 1 January 1944 General Carl Spaatz headed the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe (USSTAF), to which both the Eighth Air Force in England and the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy – formed in November 1943 and commanded from January by General Nathan Twining – were subordinated. The former commander of the Eighth, General Ira Eaker, went to the Mediterranean, and his place in England was taken by Major General James Doolittle – the same man who in April 1942 had led the raid on Tokyo. The plans for Operation Argument were drawn up by Spaatz’s deputy for operations, Major General Frederick L. Anderson.

Doolittle changed the fighters’ task. Until then they had been required to stay close to the bombers and drive off attackers; now – by his own later account – the sign on the wall of the fighter headquarters declaring that their first duty was to bring the bombers back was taken down and replaced with an instruction to destroy German fighters. From then on part of the escort could break away from the formation, chase the enemy and attack him before he got near the bombers. In practice the bombers became bait: attacks on aircraft factories were meant to force the Luftwaffe into a battle in which it would suffer losses it could not make good.

The instrument of this change was the long-range fighter. The Republic P-47 Thunderbolt with drop tanks could already reach western Germany, and the Lockheed P-38 Lightning further still, although its engines often failed in the freezing air over Europe. The breakthrough was the B model of the North American P-51 Mustang, with a British Rolls-Royce Merlin engine built under licence in the United States. With drop tanks it could accompany the bombers all the way to Berlin and back, and at high altitude it matched or outperformed the German fighters. In February 1944, however, there were still few Mustangs: only a handful of P-51 groups took part in the fighting of Big Week, and most of the escort was still made up of Thunderbolts and Lightnings, with British Spitfires at the beginning and end of the route.

Leipzig by night and by day

The forecast of 19 February at last promised several days of clearer weather over Germany. The meteorologists were not sure whether the weather over England would allow a safe take-off, and the Eighth Air Force command feared losses while forming up in cloud. Spaatz decided to take the risk.

On the evening of 19 February Arthur Harris sent 823 bombers to Leipzig. The Chief of the Air Staff, Charles Portal, had first had to force Harris – who preferred to continue the air Battle of Berlin – to have Bomber Command attack the same centres of the aircraft industry as the Americans. The raid on Leipzig turned out to be a disaster. German night fighters intercepted the bomber stream as early as the Dutch coast, and a strong wind meant that some aircraft arrived over the target before the pathfinders and circled over the city under fire. According to British figures, 78 bombers failed to return, about 9.5 per cent of those dispatched – the most in a single Bomber Command raid up to that time. After that night Harris withdrew the older marks of the Halifax bomber from operations over Germany.

On Sunday 20 February the Eighth Air Force for the first time dispatched more than a thousand heavy bombers in a single day – according to the American chronology, 1,003 B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators – escorted by several hundred American and British fighters. The targets were aircraft plants in Leipzig, including the Erla works assembling Bf 109s and the Mockau airfield, as well as factories in the Brunswick, Bernburg and Oschersleben area; some of the bombers flew out over the Baltic to Tutow and Rostock. The German defences were tired after the night’s fighting with the RAF, and the Luftwaffe split its forces between several threatened directions. According to the most frequently cited figures, the Americans lost 21 bombers – far fewer than expected. Three airmen were awarded the Medal of Honor for that day, two of them posthumously: a navigator and a gunner who tried to bring a bomber with a wounded pilot back to England were killed attempting to land. The Fifteenth Air Force could not fly over Germany that day – its bombers were supporting the troops holding the beachhead in the battle of Anzio, where the German counter-offensive was just then collapsing.

From Brunswick to Regensburg

Over the following days the weather decided the plans each morning. On 21 February more than 760 American bombers struck at Brunswick and airfields in north-western Germany, but thick cloud forced many of them to drop their bombs on secondary targets. On 22 February the Eighth Air Force was to cooperate with the Fifteenth against the Messerschmitt works at Regensburg. Over England, however, cloud broke up the formations, whole bomb divisions were recalled, and only about a hundred bombers reached the factories at Bernburg, Halberstadt and Aschersleben. Some of the returning aircraft looked for targets of opportunity over the Netherlands. Bombs fell on Nijmegen, Arnhem and Enschede; in Nijmegen, which some crews very probably took for a German town, about 800 civilians were killed according to Dutch findings (some studies give nearly 900). That day the Americans lost 41 bombers over Germany and the Netherlands, and the Fifteenth Air Force, which reached Regensburg from the south, another 13.

On 23 February the weather over England was bad and the Eighth Air Force did not take off; instead the Fifteenth’s Liberators flew from Italy and bombed the works at Steyr in Austria, which made bearings and aircraft parts. On 24 February the Eighth returned over Germany in three columns. The B-17s bombed the bearing factories at Schweinfurt, losing 11 aircraft. The Liberators that went for the Gothaer Waggonfabrik works at Gotha, which produced the Bf 110, lost 33 bombers, one group losing 13 out of 25. The third column was to attack aircraft plants and airfields at Krzesiny near Poznań and at Tutow, but cloud forced it to bomb Rostock instead. That same day the Fifteenth attacked Steyr again, and that night 734 RAF bombers flew to Schweinfurt; aerial photographs showed that most of the bombs fell far from the target.

The last day of the operation, 25 February, was also the best coordinated. About 680 Eighth Air Force bombers took off from England and attacked the Messerschmitt works at Regensburg and Augsburg, a factory at Fürth and bearing plants at Stuttgart; from Italy the Fifteenth’s Fortresses flew to Regensburg. This second expedition, which had to fight its way across the Alps without cover for the whole of the route, met the fiercest resistance: more than 30 aircraft failed to return to Italy, and 31 to England. The Regensburg factories were, however, badly damaged and for several months produced only a fraction of their former number of Bf 109s. On the night of 25/26 February nearly 600 RAF bombers attacked Augsburg. This time the pathfinders marked the target accurately, and the raid destroyed a large part of the medieval city centre; according to municipal figures about 730 inhabitants were killed and tens of thousands were left homeless. Then the clouds closed over Europe again, and Big Week was over.

The balance of losses

In six days the Eighth Air Force flew more than 3,000 bomber sorties and the Fifteenth more than 500. According to figures cited by American historians, the two air forces dropped nearly 10,000 tons of bombs – roughly as much as the Eighth had dropped in its entire first year of operations. Losses were heavy: depending on the method of counting, between about 226 and 247 heavy bombers (the higher figure includes aircraft that returned but were fit only to be written off), several dozen fighters and about 2,600 airmen killed, wounded or taken prisoner. Bomber Command lost 131 bombers in the night raids. Unlike in 1943, however, these losses represented a small percentage of the aircraft dispatched, and the factories and flying schools in the United States more than made them good.

German losses are harder to establish. American gunners and pilots claimed more than 500 fighters shot down – a heavily inflated figure, as is usual in air combat. According to studies based on German documents, the Luftwaffe lost some 260–355 aircraft in those days, including many Bf 110 and Me 410 heavy fighters, which proved defenceless against the escort. Most painful was the death of nearly a hundred experienced fighter pilots. The American historian Williamson Murray calculates that in February 1944 as a whole the German fighter arm lost about a third of its single-engined fighters and almost a fifth of its pilots. The Inspector of Fighters, Adolf Galland, wrote after the war that between January and April 1944 the day-fighter arm lost more than a thousand pilots, among them its best squadron and group commanders.

Factories that came back to life

The raids themselves did not destroy the German aircraft industry. The Messerschmitt, Erla and Gothaer Waggonfabrik works lost many buildings and finished airframes, but the machine tools often survived beneath the rubble. As early as 1 March 1944 the Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, and the Luftwaffe’s Inspector General, Erhard Milch, set up the Fighter Staff (Jägerstab), which dispersed production to hundreds of smaller plants, forests, mines and tunnels, introduced longer shifts and cut the production of other aircraft types. An ever larger part of this work was done by concentration camp prisoners and forced labourers, including people from Poland. According to the post-war findings of the US Strategic Bombing Survey, fighter production in 1944 did not fall but rose, reaching its peak in the autumn, when in some months it exceeded 3,000 aircraft.

The Luftwaffe thus had aircraft, but increasingly lacked men who knew how to fight in them. The training of new pilots was cut short for lack of fuel and instructors, and young airmen reached their units with a few dozen hours on fighters, only to be killed in their first combats against Americans who had been trained for far longer.

What the Mustang meant

The claim that the P-51 proved invaluable in Big Week is true if it is understood as a portent. In February 1944 a few Mustang groups covered the bombers on the most distant stretches of their routes – over Leipzig, Gotha or Regensburg there was no other fighter that could get there and fight on equal terms. The burden of escort, however, was still carried by the Thunderbolts and Lightnings, and the raids from Italy flew largely without cover. The Mustang’s real importance was shown in the following months, when American factories delivered them by the hundred and the Eighth Air Force’s fighter groups re-equipped with the P-51 one after another. From the spring the Mustangs accompanied the bombers all the way and, after seeing the raids home, strafed German airfields.

Place in the war

Big Week did not destroy the German aircraft industry, but it began a battle of attrition that the Luftwaffe could not win. On 6 March 1944 American bombers attacked Berlin in daylight in great strength for the first time. It cost 69 bombers, but subsequent raids on the Reich capital in March suffered ever lighter losses, because German fighters were less and less often able to interfere. The RAF ended its offensive against Berlin in March, and from the spring, as the Overlord plan required, the bombers of both countries switched to French railway junctions, and the Americans – from May – also to German refineries and synthetic fuel plants. This last target proved far more dangerous to the Reich than the aircraft factories: without fuel, even new fighters stayed on the ground.

When the Allies landed in Normandy on 6 June 1944, the Luftwaffe managed only a few hundred sorties over the invasion area, while the Allies flew more than 14,000. Air superiority, for which the bomber and fighter crews had fought in February, was a precondition for the success of the invasion. Historians argue over whether the bombing campaign against Germany was worth its costs – human costs on both sides, and moral ones when cities were bombed. On Big Week, however, there is agreement that it marked the beginning of the Luftwaffe’s loss of control over its own skies, and the February raids on Leipzig, Brunswick, Gotha, Regensburg and Augsburg are regarded in American aviation history as the turning point of the air war in Europe.