The first B-17 raid on Rouen

On 17 August 1942 American heavy bombers attacked a target in occupied Europe on their own for the first time. Twelve Boeing B-17E Flying Fortresses of the 97th Bombardment Group of the Eighth Air Force bombed the marshalling yards and railway workshops at Sotteville-lès-Rouen, on the outskirts of Rouen in Normandy, in daylight. They were escorted by British Spitfires. All the aircraft returned to England. The damage was limited, but the mission mattered far beyond the wrecked track: it was the first test over Europe of the American doctrine of daylight precision bombing.

Long preparations

The American bomber command in Britain had been taking shape since February 1942, when Brigadier General Ira Eaker flew to England with a handful of officers. In June Major General Carl Spaatz opened the headquarters of the Eighth Air Force. All through the spring and summer airfields, depots and communications were built, but aircraft were in short supply. On 4 July the Americans flew over occupied Europe for the first time, in borrowed British light bombers, and lost two crews out of six.

The 97th Bombardment Group was the first heavy bomber unit to reach the British Isles. Its aircraft flew over in June and July by way of Labrador, Greenland and Iceland, and the group settled at two airfields in Northamptonshire: Polebrook and Grafton Underwood. The crews, however, were undertrained, and some of the air gunners had never fired at an airborne target. Eaker decided that the group was not fit for combat under its current leadership, and on 31 July he put at its head Colonel Frank A. Armstrong, one of his closest associates. For two weeks Armstrong ran an intensive training programme.

The haste also had political causes. The Chief of the Army Air Forces, General Henry H. Arnold, needed proof that heavy bombers in England would be effective, because the navy and the Pacific commanders were demanding aircraft for themselves. From the beginning of August part of the Eighth Air Force was already being earmarked for the landing in North Africa, then being planned in London, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill was explaining in Moscow to Joseph Stalin why there would be no second front in 1942. The raid was meant to show that the Americans were fighting over Europe after all.

The raid on Sotteville

The target was carefully chosen. Sotteville was one of the largest railway junctions in northern France, through which supplies passed to the German forces on the Channel coast. It lay within range of British fighters, and railway targets on the outskirts of a city offered hope that the bombs would not fall on dense housing.

According to the American official history, the bombers took off from Grafton Underwood at 3.39 p.m. They were led by Armstrong, piloting the aircraft Butcher Shop, with Major Paul Tibbets as co-pilot. Eaker himself flew in Yankee Doodle, leading the second flight, to see with his own eyes whether his doctrine would work. Spaatz, who had not been allowed to fly, waited at the airfield. At the same time six other B-17s flew a diversionary sweep along the French coast to draw off the German defences. Four squadrons of Spitfire IXs covered the bombers over the target, and five squadrons of Spitfire Vs waited to take them over on the way home.

From about 23,000 feet (about 7,000 metres) the twelve aircraft dropped a total of 36,900 pounds – just under 17 tonnes – of bombs on the target. Three aircraft carried 1,100-pound bombs intended for the locomotive workshops, the rest smaller 600-pound bombs for the repair sheds. The flak was weak and inaccurate, and according to American reports only three Messerschmitt Bf 109s went for the bombers. The gunners claimed one of them as damaged. At about 7 p.m. all the B-17s landed in England. No one had been killed.

According to American assessments cited by the official history of the Army Air Forces, roughly half the bombs fell in the target area. Two large transhipment sheds were hit and about ten of the twenty-four sidings damaged. Some of the bombs, however, fell outside the yards, and the junction was soon working again. Militarily the raid was modest, and even its enthusiasts admitted that it was above all a test.

The reception in England

The mission was greeted with delight in Britain, though it did not change the minds of the sceptics. The head of RAF Bomber Command, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, for months Eaker’s friend and adviser, sent the Americans his congratulations on a “most successful” raid and, according to American accounts, added jokingly that Yankee Doodle could stick yet another well-deserved feather in its cap. The press on both sides of the Atlantic wrote of the birth of the American air offensive.

The British, however, had their own experience of the Flying Fortress. In 1941 the RAF had used about a dozen earlier B-17Cs, named Fortress I, for high-altitude daylight raids. The result was failure: the aircraft froze up, the bombs rarely hit, and German fighters shot them down despite their armament. That was why RAF Bomber Command had switched to night area bombing of cities and was urging the Americans to join in. The Americans replied that the new B-17E had stronger defensive armament, and that a better bombsight and tight formations of many aircraft would allow them to hit individual factories. A single raid under fighter cover, against a target just across the Channel and without losses, proved nothing yet in this dispute. The real test would come only over Germany, beyond the range of the Spitfires.

Place in the war

In the days that followed the 97th Group flew against the airfield at Abbeville, in support of the Dieppe Raid on 19 August, and then against the railway junction at Amiens and the shipyards at Rotterdam. According to American accounts, on 21 August German fighters attacked the B-17s with determination for the first time and the first crew member was killed; the Eighth Air Force lost its first Flying Fortress on 6 September. New groups arrived in the autumn, but many units, the 97th Group among them, were handed over in October and November to the air forces for Operation Torch in North Africa. The first American raid on a target in Germany, against Wilhelmshaven, was led by Armstrong on 27 January 1943. His story later became the basis of the novel and film Twelve O’Clock High, and on 6 August 1945 Tibbets flew the Enola Gay over Hiroshima.

At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 Eaker persuaded Churchill to let the Americans continue their daylight raids, which complemented the RAF’s night operations. Thus was born the Combined Bomber Offensive against the Reich. The doctrine of daylight bombing without fighter escort collapsed in the summer and autumn of 1943 over Regensburg and Schweinfurt, when groups lost well over ten per cent of their aircraft in a single day. Only the long-range escort fighters of 1944 turned the situation round and allowed the Eighth Air Force to destroy the German oil industry and the Luftwaffe. “Precision”, moreover, often remained a relative term: in Rouen, too, later American and British raids, especially in the spring of 1944, killed hundreds of French civilians.