If Butch Harris was an uncompromising commander, Hap Arnold was positively severe. He drove his staff relentlessly, and is reputed to have given one officer such a dressing-down that he slumped dead over Arnold’s desk from a heart-attack. Impatient, austere, unceasingly demanding, he would rarely tolerate any form of failure or delay, regardless of whether there was a good reason for it or not. However, like Harris, he was widely respected as a man who got things done, and he had many friends within the air force. Also like Harris, he proved shrewd in his choice of subordinates, and surrounded himself with brilliant and energetic people like Carl Spaatz, Ira Eaker and Fred Anderson.
By the time of the Hamburg raids, Arnold’s representative in Britain was Ira Eaker, commander of the US Eighth Air Force. The contrast between Arnold and Eaker was stark. While Arnold was brusque, Eaker was thoughtful and likeable, and spent many years conducting what amounted to public relations for the USAAF. He was a highly educated man, and had attended Georgetown University, Columbia University, and the University of Southern California. Despite their differences in character the two men seem to have got on well, to the extent that they were able to write three books on military aviation together.
Early in 1942, Eaker was dispatched to Britain to set about creating an organization capable of taking the fight to Germany. From the beginning he and his entourage were welcomed by the British, who immediately handed over several airfields for their use. There has been some suggestion that British friendliness in those early days was governed by ulterior motives, and that what they really wanted was to assimilate the fledgling USAAF into a combined air force firmly under British control. However, it seems much more likely that they were simply glad to accept a new ally, and willing to pass on as much help and advice as was necessary to get them operational as soon as possible. And their help was considerable: the RAF immediately shared its radar and communications systems, as well as vital intelligence; British Spitfires were put at the USAAF’s disposal, both for fighter escort and to carry out weather reconnaissance; fuel trucks and other equipment were donated to US air bases; US airmen were given places on RAF training courses; British resources were used to help build new air bases, and the list goes on.
Relationships between the two forces, especially in the upper levels of command, were remarkably harmonious. When Eaker first arrived in Britain he lived with Harris and his family, and often brought gifts and toys from America for Harris’s young daughter. He also regularly attended Harris’s ‘morning prayers’ at Bomber Command Headquarters, when Harris and his staff chose the following night’s targets. To some degree, therefore, the RAF and the USAAF were working as a combined force from the outset. But from an official point of view, the RAF and the USAAF were, and would remain, completely separate forces, each with their own priorities and methods.
Five weeks after Harris’s thousand-bomber raid on Cologne, American airmen were ready to make their first operational flight over mainland Europe. On 4 July six USAAF crews, flying in borrowed planes, accompanied a squadron of British bombers on a daylight raid against German airfields in Holland. It was a baptism of fire: two of the six American planes were shot down by flak, while a third’s starboard engine was blown to pieces and barely managed to limp home. Nevertheless, a point had been made. The Americans had arrived in Europe.
Six weeks later a dozen American bombers made their first independent attack of the war, this time flying their own planes – the formidable B-17 ‘Flying Fortresses’ of 97th Group. Their target was the Rouen-Sotteville railway marshalling yards, to the west of Paris. As the formation crossed the English Channel, one of the lead planes was carrying General Eaker, and it is proof both of the strength of American enthusiasm and their unshakeable faith in their aircraft that such a high-ranking commander was allowed to fly on this earliest of missions. Fortunately he, and all of the American air crews, returned safely late that afternoon – although two Spitfires in the British fighter escort were shot down.
The Americans had a different philosophy from the British. While the RAF had been forced to fly by night to avoid casualties, just as the Luftwaffe had been earlier in the war, the Americans were determined to conduct their bombing in daylight. There were two reasons for this. First, they were morally opposed to the bombing of civilians – at least in Europe – and strongly believed that bombing in daylight, when they could see their proper targets clearly, would result in fewer unnecessary casualties. 14Second, they were convinced that daylight bombing would be far more effective. Unlike the British, whose bombing precision had barely improved since the First World War, the Americans had developed the highly accurate Norden bombsight, which allowed them consistently to drop bombs within fifty feet of a practice target from a height of four or five miles above the earth. 15There was a saying in the USAAF that their aviators could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet: when their accuracy was so good, it made perfect sense to pinpoint their efforts on exact targets, rather than waste their bombs over large areas by night.
To start with, Harris, Portal and even Churchill objected to the American insistence on daylight attacks, largely because they thought the whole policy was doomed. It was one thing to hit a practice target in the clear blue skies of California, but a different thing altogether to find a specific building in the centre of a German city, especially when that city might be shrouded in the thick cloud of a European winter, and defended by both Luftwaffe fighters and walls of predictive flak. 16The Americans refused to be swayed, and it took them until the second half of 1943 to come to the painful realization that, in the absence of a long-range fighter escort, their terrible losses in the skies over Germany would be too heavy to bear.
But all that was in the future. For now the policy of daylight bombing seemed to be successful, largely because the Americans confined their fledgling efforts to targets in western France or the Low Countries, where they could still be accompanied by fighters. By the end of 1942 the Americans had flown more than 1,500 sorties in twenty-seven operations (missions), and lost only thirty-four aircraft – a loss rate of just two per cent. American optimism was so high that in August 1942 Ira Eaker confidently predicted that he and Butch Harris together would be able ‘completely to dislocate German industry and commerce and to remove from the enemy the means for waging successful warfare’ as early as the middle of 1943. 17When the two leaders were finally to join forces in the bombing of Hamburg, his prediction would almost come true.
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Right from the beginning the British and American air forces had worked closely together, and their co-operation was formally sealed when British and American military and political leaders met in Casablanca in January 1943 to plan a combined air offensive against Germany. Since the Allies were not yet strong enough to attempt an invasion of mainland Europe it was decided that the only way to carry the fight to the Axis powers was to increase the bombing campaign. Indeed, if the Allies were ever to attempt an invasion, it was essential that they first achieved air supremacy over the Germans.
To this end, the Combined Chiefs of Staff issued a directive to Air Marshal Harris and General Eaker, ordering them to begin demolishing a range of German targets: submarine yards and bases, aircraft production, ball-bearing factories, oil and rubber plants, and military-transport systems. They were also required to undermine German morale, as the preamble to the directive made clear: ‘Your primary aim will be the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened…’ 18The plan was to subject Germany to a round-the-clock bombing campaign on a vast scale. RAF Bomber Command would continue their campaign against the cities by night, while the US Eighth Army Air Force would attack specific military targets by day.