Glenn Flickinger with Todd DePastino

World War II in Europe was the first and, most likely, the last great air war in history.

Airplanes, of course, appeared in combat before 1939 and would again after 1945.

But in terms of strategic impact and the sheer number of personnel and aircraft involved, air power reached its zenith in the fight to liberate Europe from the grip of Nazism.

On any given day in World War II, tens of thousands of airplanes soared above the continent, from Belfast to Ploesti. That’s many times the number flying today in 2024.

Hundreds of thousands of fighters, bombers, and cargo planes took part in the fighting on the Western Front. And the vast majority of these came from the United States.

Converting the European Theatre into an air war was an immense logistical operation involving the manufacture, transportation, and maintenance of complex machines and the recruitment, training, and support of millions of men and women. And it all happened quickly, in the span of a few years.

Like the Loaves and the Fishes, this wartime miracle sprang from a modest pool of resources. In 1939, the US Army Air Corps numbered 26,000 enlisted and officers operating only 1,200 mostly antiquated bombers and fighters, many with open cockpits. By 1944, Army Air Forces ballooned a hundred fold, making it far and away the mightiest air force in the world.

The seeds of the modern American Air Force lay at the Air Corps Tactical School at Langley Field in Virginia (later, Maxwell Field in Alabama), where Brigadier General Billy Mitchell preached the Gospel of Air Power. Bomber planes, Mitchell argued, will one day win wars, defeating the largest battleships at sea and battalions on the ground.

Mitchell’s concept of strategic bombing went far beyond support of sea and ground operations. Long-range bombers, in his view, could nip protracted wars of attrition in the bud by striking at the enemy’s industrial base, transportation network, and even will-to-fight. With its means of production ground to a halt and its population demoralized, the enemy would be forced to quit the fight.

Mitchell’s students, such as Major General Haywood Hansell, and supporters, such as Air Corps officers Henry “Hap” Arnold and Carl Spaatz, carried the Gospel into World War II, arguing that a massive bomber fleet could achieve victory over Germany and Japan.

Infantry critics called these men the “Bomber Mafia” and resented their sway over the War Department.

Air Power advocates got approval for the mass production of the first four-engine, long-distance heavy bomber, the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress.

Bristling with .50-caliber machine guns, the B-17 was expected to speed past and push aside any air defenses in its path. Combined with the top-secret Norden Bombsight, which, its manufacturer claimed, could place a bomb in a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet, the B-17 became the centerpiece of the Bomber Mafia’s new “Daylight Precision Bombing” doctrine.

The new doctrine was a twist on the strategic bombing idea. Advocates believed that bombers now had the capacity to deliver their massive payloads to enemy targets unescorted. To maximize efficiency, the bombers would even fly in broad daylight, visible to the enemy. B-17s, and later, B-24s, would hit factories and railyards with pinpoint accuracy and return back to their English air bases without fighter planes to protect them.

That was the theory.

In practice, after the US Eighth Air Force Bomber Command launched its daylight raids on Germany on January 17, 1943, it found that German countermeasures against the heavy bombers were devastatingly effective.

Germany, it turns out, had its own doctrine and technological advances that blunted the Allied strategic bombing campaign.

German Focke-Wulf FW-190 and Messerschmitt ME-109 fighters, for example, flew faster and higher than the heavy bombers. The B-17s could not speed past them, nor often shoot them down. Likewise, German anti-aircraft defenses—the infamous 88mm Flak batteries—used radar to home in on large formations of bombers.

American losses climbed week-by-week as winter turned to spring, and spring, summer.  The enemy grew only more adept at shooting down Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators.

On April 17, 106 US bombers attacked Bremerhaven. Sixteen of those never made it back.

Two months later, 102 bombers returned to the port city. This time, 26 crews were lost. Each crew comprised 10 men.

Mother Nature also conspired against Bomber Command. Dismal cloud cover and swirling air currents in northern Europe rendered the Norden Bombsight ineffectual.

Nevertheless, Hap Arnold, commander of Army Air Forces, ordered the Eighth to continue sending its bombers on deep penetration raids without fighter escorts.

The results were disastrous.

August 17 saw the most ambitious raid to date: a dual-strike attack on the German cities of Schweinfurt and Regensburg in Bavaria. Both cities were centers of aircraft production—Schweinfurt famously focused on ball bearings—and keys to the Germany war effort. The Schweinfurt-Regensburg Raid was strategic bombing at its purest.

Delayed by bad weather and hampered by the lack of fighter escorts that had fuel tanks large enough to make it beyond Belgium, the 376 heavy bombers that took off on August 17 faced hornet’s nests of enemy opposition.

By sunset, the Eighth Air Force had lost 60 B-17s—600 men.

The follow-up raid on Schweinfurt was even worse.

On October 14, 1943—a date that would come to be known as “Black Thursday”—291 Flying Fortresses flew to Bavaria to finish the job begun two months earlier. The Germans were prepared, and, once again, 60 Eighth Air Force bombers were shot down, and over twice that number damaged. Almost one-quarter of the bomber crews died on the mission.

Black Thursday effectively ended the American experiment in unescorted Daylight Precision Bombing raids. The Allies had lost air superiority. Strategic bombing had failed. Without command of the skies, the success of any ground invasion of occupied Europe was unlikely.

Over the next four months, the US Army Air Force was compelled to reform and retool in order to win the air war.

The Bomber Mafia conceded on the need for fighter escorts. B-17s and B-24s, no matter how well-armed, required “little friends” in the sky to fight off German FW-190s and ME-109s.

The problem was that the current fighters—P-38 Lightnings, P-47 Thunderbolts, and British Spitfires—lacked the range to make it to Germany as well as the overall performance qualities to match German fighters.

Salvation came in the form of the North American Aviation P-51 Mustang, which had been there all the time, right under the Eighth Air Force’s nose.

The P-51 featured a Rolls-Royce Merlin supercharged engine that dramatically improved range, altitude, and performance. For the first time, the Allies had a fighter that could go toe-to-toe with the best the Luftwaffe had to offer.

Development and adoption of the P-51 had been slowed, as David and Margaret White so expertly show in their book, Wings of War: The World War II Fighter Plane that Saved the Allies and the Believers Who Made It Fly, by the Bomber Mafia, which had been intent on proving its theory of Daylight Precision Bombing and eventually winning the Air Force’s independence as a US service branch.

American government bureaucracy, business corruption, and suspicion of foreign manufacturing also impaired the adoption of the plane, which featured a British Rolls Royce engine.

It took the Schweinfurt raid disasters to force a reconsideration of the P-51, which Eighth Air Force Command finally put into action in early 1944.

The turnabout was swift and just in time.

The P-51’s arrival coincided with the final buildup of Allied forces for the invasion of Western Europe. Such a massive beach landing required control of the air space, not only over the landing zones’ beaches but the routes inland towards Germany. The bigger the impact of the bombing campaign against German industry, infrastructure, and military capacity, the greater the chances of success on D-Day and beyond.

On February 20, 1944, the Eighth Air Force, along with the Royal Air Force and the newly established Fifteenth Air Force based in Foggia, Italy, re-activated its strategic bombing campaign in dramatic fashion.

The Air Force would call it “Big Week” because the raids of over 1,000 bombers and 600 fighters took off daily through February 25 and attacked dozens of targets in Germany’s industrial heartland. Codenamed Operation Argument, Big Week represented the single largest air battle of World War II hammering factories, railroads, and urban centers day and night.

In some ways, the results were the same as before: unspeakable losses in airplanes and crews. By the end of Big Week, both the Eighth and the Fifteenth had lost 20% of its fighting forces.

The difference in Big Week was the damage suffered by the German Luftwaffe. The new commander of the Eighth Air Force, Lieutenant General Jimmy Doolittle, ordered his long-range fighters to stray from the bomber formations after reaching their targets in order to chase down enemy aircraft.

This change wreaked havoc on the Luftwaffe, which lost one-third of its fighter airplanes during Big Week. With the wrecked fighters went all those expert Luftwaffe veteran pilots who had dispensed with so many Allied air crews the previous year.

Big Week reclaimed the skies for the Allies, a prize they would never relinquish. By late spring 1944, the air over the beaches, rivers, and roads of Normandy were largely free of enemy fighter planes. The Luftwaffe would have little impact on the D-Day invasion of June 6 or on the subsequent campaign to liberate France.

Of course, no one component of the Allied victory over Germany can be treated in isolation. The fighting in other theaters and in other realms made the air war’s triumph possible.

Take the Soviet ground campaign in the East, for example. Without the Red Army pushing the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, Germany would have been able to concentrate the full force of its military might against Britain and the US in the West.

And without the surrender of Italy in 1943, Germany also would have been able to fight back better during Big Week and afterwards.

The home front, too, won the air war. Air Power was only possible because of the awesome productive capacity of factories and assembly plants in the United States and Great Britain. The US alone produced over 30,000 heavy bombers. Great Britain, under the extreme duress of enemy bombings, managed somehow to manufacture over 7,000 Avro Lancasters, which carried heavier bomb loads and boasted longer ranges than American airplanes.

Without doubt, the most important factor in the Allies winning the air war was the willingness of so many men to take to the skies, day after day, week after week, despite the dismal odds of survival.

The Allied air war casualty list is almost too unbearable to believe. The British lost 57,000 men Killed in Action (KIA), almost half of the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command. The Eighth Air Force alone saw 26,000 killed.

The suffering wasn’t limited to those Killed in Action. Air combat broke people mentally and psychologically in ways we recognize today as Traumatic Stress Reaction. A few had to stop flying. Many more took rests in so-called “Flak Houses”—asylums for recuperation. And almost everyone who flew combat in World War II and survived were haunted the rest of their lives by excruciating memories of terror and death.

Physical suffering in unpressurized compartments at 30,000 feet was inevitable. Air temperatures of -40 or -50 degrees Fahrenheit were the norm, cold enough to freeze off toes and fingers, hands and feet—and that’s even before the shooting started.

In total, 77% of those who flew with the Eighth Air Force during the hard months of 1942-1943, when the Bomber Mafia was trying to prove its bombers could get through unescorted, were either killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. Put another way, less than a quarter of all airmen in this period escaped their missions physically unscathed. Few, if any, warriors in history have faced such odds.

May we never forget them.