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The aim of this book is to examine the methods used to pick targets for the USAAF’s heavy bombers as they attempted to inflict serious damage on the German war machine, focusing in particular on the period to the end of 1943 – the period when the Eighth Air Force was commanded by Ira C. Eaker.
We start with a look at the USAAF’s urgent need for its own air intelligence branch – in the pre-war period the Army was reluctant to allow its air wing to develop its own intelligence service, claiming that it would duplicate effort. As a result the USAAF had to set up a series of new organisations, some of which rapidly expanded. A huge number of intelligence officers were needed to work with the expanding bomber forces. However the most significant impact on the choice of targets came from small American civilian organisations, operating in the US and the in the UK, because of the impact they had on Hap Arnold, head of the USAAF.
The biggest problem with this book is that we start from the assumption that picking targets like Schweinfurt was indeed a mistake. The focus is then on how the American system came up with that erroneous conclusion. We see this in the use of post-raid damage analysis. Positive reports are seen as over positive, negative reports are more accurate. What is missing is an examination of the German side of the picture – the massive post war Strategic Bombing Survey and surviving German records should give some idea of that part of the story. Instead our view of how much damage was done and how quickly repairs were completed comes from Allied intelligence and not from German sources. For me this means that the author never really proves that the targeting priorities in 1943 were actually at fault. His own work proves that the Eighth Air Force didn’t actually attack these targets all that often – only twice in 1943.
The author is very good when examining the USAAF side of the story. We look at the problems faced by the newly formed USAAF school for intelligence officers, and the biases built into their programme (in particular the idea that everyone should be obsessed with aviation – not something required of their photographic interpretation officers). We look at the different groups who offered advice, covering the makeup of the groups and how that influenced their suggestions – economists tended to produce different ideas to industrialists or to aviators. We look at the flaws in their work – the main one being a tendency to ignore the operational realities in the air and thus fail to take into account the dangers posed by German opposition, along with the difficulties of achieving accurate bombing. Many of the underlying assumptions that set the character of the USAAF’s bombing campaign are shown to have little supporting evidence – including the idea that the most effective way to bomb was as many as possible of the smallest bomb possible. One significant problem is that during the inter-war period the USAAF and its precursors were fighting for their future, and tended to treat their theories of air power as if they were proven fact. When the bombing campaign didn’t live to their expectations it appears that they didn’t examine their own conclusions, but instead blamed the bomber command. On that side we look at that targets Eaker did hit, and how the Americans viewed the accuracy of the bombing. Efforts to improve that bombing saw the number of bombs getting close to the target increase, although the distance chosen was still too large to guarantee that a recorded hit actually did any damage. This was also the period where the lead bombardier system was introduced, where every aircraft in a formation was in theory controlled from the lead bombardier’s aircraft, and dropped bombs at the same time. The theory was that the best navigators and bombardiers would carry out that role, so everyone would share their better accuracy. The downside was that if the lead missed, so did everyone else.
Although the topic may seem a little dry, this is actually an interesting read, taking us into the heart of the US bombing campaign, the logic behind it and how it was implemented (or not).
Chapters
1 – The AAF at War for a Bomber
2 – Picking up the Slack
3 – Eaker’s Imperfect Pitch
4 – ‘The Appearance of the Bottom of the Barrel’
5 – Quadrant to Sextant
Author: Brian D. Vlaun
Edition: Hardcover
Pages: 320
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Year: 2020