The first USAAF missions in Europe

On 4 July 1942, American Independence Day, airmen of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) took part for the first time in an organised raid on German-occupied Western Europe. Six American crews of the 15th Bombardment Squadron (Light), flying alongside six British crews of No. 226 Squadron RAF, attacked four German airfields in Holland from very low level. The Americans did not yet have any bombers of their own in England ready for combat, so they flew borrowed British aircraft with British markings on their wings. Three Bostons failed to return; according to most accounts two of them had American crews. Militarily it was a minor episode. Politically it carried symbolic weight: the United States, which had been at war for half a year, showed that its airmen were already fighting over Europe.

Airmen without aircraft

The build-up of American air power in Britain had been under way since February 1942, when Brigadier General Ira Eaker arrived in England to organise a bomber command. In June the headquarters of General Carl Spaatz’s Eighth Air Force opened at Bushy Park near London, and on 24 June General Dwight Eisenhower flew into London as the new commander of US forces in Europe. For its first months, however, the Eighth Air Force was more a staff and a plan than a fighting force. The first heavy B-17 bomber to fly the Atlantic did not land in Scotland until 1 July, and the bomb groups were only just arriving and training.

One of the first combat units in the British Isles was the 15th Bombardment Squadron (Light), which arrived by sea in May without aircraft. Its men were sent to RAF Swanton Morley in Norfolk, home of No. 226 Squadron of No. 2 Group, Bomber Command. There they trained on British Boston III bombers, a version of the American Douglas DB-7, known in the United States as the A-20 Havoc. These were fast twin-engined aircraft with a crew of four, capable of a little over 300 miles (about 500 kilometres) an hour, which No. 2 Group used for daylight raids on targets in the coastal belt of France, Belgium and Holland. On 29 June one American crew from the squadron flew with the British for the first time, against the railway junction at Hazebrouck in France, and returned without loss.

Washington wanted a quick and visible share in the fighting. According to American histories, the head of the USAAF, General Henry H. Arnold, assured Winston Churchill during a visit to London in the spring that American and British airmen would be fighting side by side by 4 July. The date was an obvious choice: the national holiday would give the first operation a resonance that would be useful at home. So although the American crews were still training and had not yet received their own A-20s, they were assigned to a raid planned by the RAF.

The raid on the Dutch airfields

The targets were four Luftwaffe airfields on the Dutch coast: De Kooy near Den Helder, Bergen near Alkmaar, Haamstede on the island of Schouwen-Duiveland in Zeeland, and Valkenburg near Leiden. The twelve Bostons were divided into four flights of three, one for each airfield. According to some accounts Eisenhower himself watched the take-off at Swanton Morley. The first aircraft left the ground a few minutes after seven in the morning. The bombers crossed the North Sea just above the waves to avoid detection by German radar, and attacked the airfields from heights of a few dozen metres or less.

Low-level tactics protected the aircraft from fighters but exposed them to light anti-aircraft fire, which that day proved strong and alert right from the coastline. Over Bergen the Boston of Second Lieutenant William G. Lynn was hit and crashed on the airfield; the whole crew was killed. Over De Kooy the aircraft of Second Lieutenant Frederick A. Loehrl was shot down: two airmen were killed, the fate of the fourth remained unknown, and the surviving bombardier, Second Lieutenant Marshall Draper, was taken prisoner, the Eighth Air Force’s first prisoner of war. The third Boston, flown by Pilot Officer Charles M. Henning, came down in the sea a dozen or so miles off the Dutch coast. The Bomber Command operations record states that all three aircraft lost had American crews. According to most American accounts and to No. 226 Squadron’s loss records, however, Henning’s crew belonged to the RAF, and the Americans lost two aircraft out of six, which matches the picture accepted in the history of the Eighth Air Force.

Kegelman over De Kooy

The best-known episode of the day was the flight of Captain Charles C. Kegelman, the senior American on the operation. Over De Kooy an anti-aircraft shell hit the right engine of his Boston, which caught fire, and the aircraft began to sink. It scraped the ground of the airfield, but Kegelman managed to pull it up; according to American accounts he also strafed an anti-aircraft position with his forward machine guns, and then nursed the aircraft on one engine across the sea back to England. On landing, the ground crew found scrape marks on the underside of the fuselage.

On 11 July General Spaatz decorated the men who had taken part in the raid. Kegelman became the first member of the Eighth Air Force to receive the Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest American award for gallantry; the officers of his crew received the same cross, and the enlisted men the Distinguished Flying Cross. The American press covered the raid at length, and Kegelman briefly became a newspaper hero.

The military effects of the raid could not be accurately assessed, and nothing suggests that any of the four airfields was put out of action for long. Of the twelve aircraft three failed to return and one came back damaged, so losses amounted to a quarter of the force. For light bombers attacking well-defended targets at low level this was a high price, and that is how both the British and the Americans judged it.

Place in the war

The operation of 4 July 1942 did not yet open the American bombing offensive. It became its symbolic prologue. The Americans had no intention of waging war in borrowed light bombers. Their doctrine envisaged daylight precision bombing of industrial targets in Germany by heavily armed four-engined B-17s and B-24s, which, flying in close formation, were to defend themselves against fighters. The British, after their experience of 1939–1941, considered this an illusion and urged their allies to join the night raids of RAF Bomber Command. The dispute was to last until early 1943.

The first independent American heavy-bomber raid in Europe took place on 17 August 1942, when twelve B-17s bombed the railway yards at Sotteville-lès-Rouen in daylight; Eaker flew in one of them. For the rest of 1942 the Eighth Air Force attacked only targets in France, Belgium and Holland, within range of British escort fighters, and in the autumn many of its units were taken away to North Africa. The first American raid on a target in Germany, Wilhelmshaven, was not carried out until 27 January 1943.

The Eighth Air Force then grew into the most powerful air formation of the war, numbering dozens of bomb and fighter groups by 1944, and its daylight raids, complementing the RAF’s night operations, became a pillar of the Combined Bomber Offensive against the Reich. It paid an enormous price for this: according to American figures, more than 26,000 of its men were killed. The first names on that list were written on 4 July 1942 over the Dutch airfields.