Volume Three EUROPE: ARGUMENT TO V-E DAY JANUARY 1944 TO MAY 1945 THE ARMY AIR FORCES I n World War I1 PREPARED UNDER THE EDITORSHIP OF WESLEY F R A N K CRAVEN Princeton University JAMES LEA GATE University of Chicago New Imprint by the Office of Air Force History Washington, D.C., 1983 For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Uovernment Printing Oface Washington, D.C. 20402 THEU NIVERSITYOF CHICAGOP RESS,C HICAGO37 Cambridge University Press, London, N.W. 1, England W. J. Gage & Co., Limited, Toronto 2B, Canada Copyright 1951 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Copyright 1951 under the Interna- tional Copyright Union. Published 1951. Composed and printed by THEU NIVERSITOYF CHICAGPOR ESS, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. Copyright registration renewed 1979 This work, first published by the University of Chicago Press, is reprinted in its entirety by the Office of Air Force History. With the exception of editing, the work is the product of the United States government. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: The Army Air Forces in World War 11. Vol. 1 originally prepared by the Office of Air Force History; v. 2, by the Air Historical Group; and v. 3-7, by the USAF Historical Division. Reprint. Originally published : Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1948-1958. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Contents: v. 1. Plans and early operations, January 1939 to August 1942-v. 2. Europe, torch to point- blank, August 1942 to December 1943-[etc.]-v. 7. Services around the world. 1. World War, 1939-1 945-Aerial operations, American. 2. United States. Army Air Forces- History-World War, 1939-1945. I. Craven, Wesley Frank, 1905- . 11. Cate, James Lea, 1899- . 111. United States. Air Force. Office of Air Force History. IV. United States. Air Force. Air Historical Group. V. United States. USAF Historical Division. D790.A89 1983 940.54’4973 83-17288 ISBN 0-912799-03-X (v. 1) 11 FOREWORD to the New 1m prin t I N March 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote to the Director of the Bureau of the Budget ordering each war agency to prepare “an accurate and objective account” of thar t agency’s war experience. Soon after, the Army Air Forces began hiring professional historians so that its history could, in the words of Brigadier General Laurence Kuter, “be recorded while it is hot and that personnel be selected and an agency set up for a clear historian’s job without axe to grind or defense to prepare.” An Historical Division was established in Headquarters Army Air Forces under Air Intelligence, in September 1942, and the modern Air Force historical program began. With the end of the war, Headquarters approved a plan for writing and publishing a seven-volume history. In December 1945, Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, Deputy Commander of Army Air Forces, asked the Chancellor of the University of Chicago to “assume the responsibility for the publication” of the history, stressing that it must “meet the highest academic standards.” Lieutenant Colonel Wesley Frank Craven of New York University and Major James Lea Cate of the University of Chicago, both of whom had been assigned to the historical program, were selected to be editors of the volumes. Between 1948 and 1958 seven were published. With publication of the last, the editors wrote that the Air Force had “fulfilled in letter and spirit” the promise of access to documents and complete freedom of historical interpre- tation. Like all history, The Army Air Forces in World War II reflects the era when it was conceived, researched, and written. The strategic bombing campaigns received the primary emphasis, not only because of a widely-shared belief in bombardment’s con- tribution to victory, but also because of its importance in establish- ing the United States Air Force as a military service independent of the Army. The huge investment of men and machines and the effectiveness of the combined Anglo-American bomber offensive against Germany had not been subjected to the critical scrutiny they have since received. Nor, given the personalities involved and the immediacy of the events, did the authors question some of the command arrangements. In the tactical area, to give another example, the authors did not doubt the effect of aerial interdiction on both the German withdrawal from Sicily and the allied land- ings at Anzio. Editors Craven and Cate insisted that the volumes present the war through the eyes of the major commanders, and be based on information available to them as important decisions were made. At the time, secrecy still shrouded the Allied code-breaking effort. While the link between decoded message traffic and combat action occasionally emerges from these pages, the authors lacked the knowledge to portray adequately the intelligence aspects of many operations, such as the interdiction in 1943 of Axis supply lines to Tunisia and the systematic bombardment, beginning in 1944, of the German oil industry. All historical works a generation old suffer such limitations. New information and altered perspective inevitably change the emphasis of an historical account. Some accounts in these volumes have been superseded by subsequent research and other portions will be superseded in the future. However, these books met the highest of contemporary professional standards of quality and comprehensiveness. They contain information and experience that are of great value to the Air Force today and to the public. Together they are the only comprehensive discussion of Army Air Forces activity in the largest air war this nation has ever waged. Until we summon the resources to take a fresh, comprehensive look at the Army Air Forces’ experience in World War 11, these seven volumes will continue to serve us as well for the next quarter century as they have for the last. RICHARD H. KOHN Chief, Ofice of Air Force History iv F 0 REW 0-RD * * * * * * * * * * * I N PLANNING a seven-volume history of The Army Air Forces in World War ZZ the editors hoped to achieve a reasonable degree of unity in a complex narrative which seemed to divide itself into three related but sometimes disparate themes: air operations against the European Axis; air operations against the Japanese; and those services in the United States and in the several theaters which made combat operations possible. To those hardy souls who get through the seven stout volumes-and the editors hope they are legion-this unity may be discernible; but for readers whose endurance is less rugged or whose interests are less catholic the volumes have been so arranged that the three themes may be found treated with some degree of com- pleteness in, respectively, Volumes I, 11, and 111; Volumes I, IV, and V; and Volumes I, VI, and VII. This information has been purveyed in an earlier volume, not without an eye to its possible effect on sales; it is repeated here to fix the present volume into the context of the whole series. For with Volume I11 the story of the AAF’s war against Hitler’s Germany and his satellite nations-and hence one subsection of the series-is completed. Volume I dealt mainly with plans and preparations; Volume I1 de- scribed the AAF’s war against Hider which began in mid-1942 in the skies over Libya and France. In the Mediterranean, where U.S. air forces were part of an effective Anglo-American team, the war went well and in a number of combined operations the Allies conquered North Africa, Sicily, and southern Italy and by the end of 1943 were confronting the enemy, strongly intrenched, along the Sangro and Garigliano rivers and were planning an amphibious operation de- signed to open the road to Rome. In northwestern Europe, however, the AAF had scored no such obvious victories. Its only sustained oper- ations, strategic bombardment by the Eighth Air Force as a part of the Anglo-American Combined Bomber Offensive, had not as yet proved V THE ARMY AIR FORCES I N WORLD WAR I1 decisive nor had the Allies achieved that superiority over the Luft- waffe which was prerequisite to both the strategic and the tactical air mission. As 1943 wore out, the AAF was anxiously awaiting the spell of clear weather which would allow a concentrated series of strikes against the sources of German air power and thus, in respect to both the ETO and MTO, Volume I1 ended on a note of expectancy. The present volume begins with the winter bombardment campaign of I 943-44 and ends with the German surrender in May I 945 : it tells of air‘s contribution to the slow drive up the Italian peninsula; it de- scribes the activities of the strategic bombers as they beat down the Lufnvaffe and, turning to other targets, ruined the German war economy; it tells how tactical forces prepared for and supported the landings in Normandy and then spearheaded the Allied sweep across France and, after a check and a serious counterattack, across Germany. ‘The volume contains then the climax of air operations, and the de- nouement too-for before the armistice the strategic bombers had run out of targets and the Eighth Air Force had begun its redeployment to the Pacific, while tactical forces had little to do beyond policing duties. The measure of the air victory and of the vast power which made it possible may be seen in a typical American gesture at war’s end-a great sight-seeing excursion in which the Eighth flew 30,000 of its ground personnel over Europe to view the damage wrought by the planes they had serviced. The chapter headings and subtitles provide a working outline of the present volume. Roughly, these may be grouped around four main topics: (I) the air war in Italy; the strategic bombing campaign; (2) (3) tactical operations in support of the land armies from the Cotentin to the Elbe; and (4) supporting operations of various sorts. The war in Italy brought more than its share of disappointments to the Allies. For a year after the TORCH landings the Mediterranean had been the active theater for the Allied forces as they pushed, with only temporary checks, from Oran and Casablanca and from Egypt to a line well above Naples. But as this volume opens they had bogged down, thwarted in their effort to break through to Rome by rugged terrain, rugged weather, and a rugged German defense. With the OVERLORD invasion of France imminent, the Mediterranean no longer had first priority for resources; it became, and was to remain, a secondary theater. Nevertheless, in early 1944 the Allies in Italy enjoyed a marked Vi FOREWORD superiority over the Germans in air power and this would increase in time. The newly established Mediterranean Allied Air Forces, which Eaker had come down from England to command, was a complex organization in which the Twelfth and Fifteenth Air Forces were the principal U.S. components. The Twelfth was to carry a heavy re- sponsibility for tactical operations and the Fifteenth, though engaging occasionally in like activities, was to find its primary role in assisting the Eighth and RAF's Bomber Command in the Combined Bomber Offensive. Both forces participated in the first large-scale endeavor to break the stalemate, the landing at Anzio. They cut communications lines into the battle area, softened defenses, and provided-in spite of the distance of their fighter bases from Anzio-an effective cover for the landings. The lodgment was made but Operation SHINGLE, suc- cessful as an amphibious assault, failed in its purpose of forcing the Germans to withdraw from their Gustav Line, and the Anzio beach- head became a liability whose defense put a heavy drain on air and ground resources. Winter weather severely handicapped the air war; its only useful function was to ease a difficult command decision in February-whether to send the Fifteenth Air Force on the long- awaited attacks on German aircraft factories or to use it tactically to help protect the endangered beachhead at Anzio. Two spectacular air operations after Anzio have attracted a degree of attention wholly incommensurate with their military importance. On 15 February U.S. bombers destroyed the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino, hallowed throughout Christendom as the wellspring of western monasticism. Eaker was opposed to the strike, though he thought the monastery was being used by German troops, an assump- tion which is still being debated. The reluctance of AAF leaders to bomb cultural or historical monuments is sufficiently documented in this history-witness the extreme care exercised in hitting military targets at Rome; the tragedy in the case of Monte Cassino is made more bitter by its futility as a military act. The same was true at the town of Cassino which was literally razed by U.S. bombers on 15 March in an effort to crack the*GustavL ine. Here Eaker was flatly against a tactic which he thought more likely to impede, by craters and rubble, than to help the advance of armor; when ground forces moved in too slowly to take advantage of the momentary shock the heavy pounding gave German defenders, the vii THE ARMY AIR FORCES IN WORLD WAR I1 operation failed as he had predicted. Criticisms of air power that came afterward were not always fair, since the attack was clearly a misuse of a weapon; unfortunately the lesson was not wholly absorbed and similar errors were to be repeated later. With the coming of spring, air operations increased in intensity as MAAF inaugurated STRANGLE, an appropriately labeled opera- tion designed to choke off the enemy’s communications so that his Gustav Line might be forced when he had consumed reserve supplies at the front. After much debate over rival suggestions-whether to concentrate on bridges or on marshalling yards-the issue was settled by a latitudinarian compromise which listed for simultaneous attack all features of the railroad system: bridges, yards, tunnels, tracks, roll- ing stock, and shops, and coastal shipping as well. Launched officially on 19 March, STRANGLE enjoyed an early success which grew more marked as bombers and fighter-bombers increased the accuracy of their strikes. Severely hampered in their use of railroads, the Ger- mans came to depend more heavily upon M/T but as trucks were di- verted to the long north-south haul the number available for lateral distribution shrank. Thus when a heavy ground offensive (DIADEM, jumped off May) forced the Germans to expend more supplies at 12 the front the carefully hoarded reserves were quickly depleted and the Allies cracked the line, linking up with the Anzio beachhead which at last began to pay dividends. Tactical air forces rendered close support in the assault but it was their sustained interdiction program that turned the trick. By 4 June the Allies had reached Rome and thereafter the German retreat became a rout which seemed to presage an early German collapse in Italy. In the air especially the Allies en- joyed an overwhelming superiority; the Germans came to depend more upon heavily reinforced AA forces than upon fighter defense, until MAAF claims of enemy planes destroyed were often less than Allied losses. An even stronger defense for the enemy was the weather which worsened at the end of June; by August the Germans had dug in again along the Gothic Line. An Allied attempt to sever all com- munications in the Po Valley (MALLORY MAJOR) achieved a con- siderable success but it was impossible to choke off supplies in the broad Lombard plain as it had been in the narrow peninsula and the enemy held tenaciously to his new line. The Allied cause in Italy was weakened by the diversion of air and ground forces for the invasion of southern France (DRAGOON). ... Vlll FOREWORD This assault, long a matter of contention among the Americans, the British, and the Russians, was postponed until August but moved thereafter rapidly enough. It offered little that was novel to combined forces who had gone over half-a-dozen beaches in the MTO and in size it was dwarfed by the recent OVERLORD landings. There had been the familiar pattern of preparation: strikes at communications by which enemy reinforcements might move in; attacks on German air installation? (only light blows were required here); and bombing of coastal defenses. Planes based in Italy and Corsica participated in these pre-invasion activities and in providing cover for the landings. Several successful airborne operations gave clear indication of how much had been learned since the tragic attempts in Sicily. XI1 TAC stayed with the Seventh Army, helped chase the Germans up the Rhone Valley and beyond until by early September they pulled up just short of Belfort. In Italy, as in northwestern Europe, Allied hopes of an early victory continued strong well into September as the Fifth Army crossed the Arno and broke through segments of the Gothic Line and the Eighth Army took Rimini. MAAF’s tasks were to sever escape routes, partic- ularly at the Po, and to help ground forces thrust the enemy back on those closed exits. But the armies, weakened by transfers and tired by long battles, could not breach the stubborn German defense and in October it was no longer a question of cutting the enemy’s lines of retreat; the interdiction program continued but priorities now favored more northerly lines in an effort to cut off supplies coming from north of the Alps via the Brenner and other northeast passes while fighter- bombers attempted to destroy supply dumps in the forward area. Allied operations had been handicapped by much wet weather which slowed the ground advance and which held back the bombers often enough to allow the Germans to repair bridges and rail lines. Allied air forces, weakened by diversions in favor of DRAGOON, suffered further losses as additional bomber and fighter-bomber units were sent to France and to the Pacific. Indeed, Throughout autumn and winter there was much sentiment in favor of moving all AAF forces in Italy up into France, and the Fifth Army as well. Though this drastic step was never taken, the very threat, coupled with the piecemeal cannibalization of Twelfth Air Force, brought to the sev- eral MTO headquarters an air of uncertainty which lasted until the eve of victory. Internal changes in the command structure-the estab- ix THE ARMY AIR FORCES IN WORLD WAR I1 lishment of XXII TAC on I 9 October and the wholesale reshuffling of commanders when Eaker went back to the States in March 1945- seem to have had less effect on operations than transfers of combat and service units. At any rate, the Italian campaign became to Allied soldiers “the for- gotten war.” Air preparations for a winter attack on the German lines proved abortive when a counterattack launched by Kesselring on 26 December induced MTO Headquarters to cancel the planned drive. Thereafter the Allies went on the defensive and for three months there was little ground activity. This threw upon air the main burden of the theater directive to maintain constant pressure upon the enemy, and the 280 combat squadrons of MAAF became “by far the most potent Allied weapon in the Mediterranean.” Except for a brief period in November when Fascist Italian air units trained in Germany gave a futile challenge, MAAF was untroubled by enemy air opposition; the general practice of sending out medium bombers without escort was a taunting symbol of the impotence of the GAF. The long-anticipated withdrawal of German divisions toward the Reich began on January and thereafter MATAF (supported occa- 23 sionally by SAF) intensified efforts to interdict the routes toward the Alpine passes. Other communications were cut and when the final Allied offensive jumped off in April, XXII TAC and DAF greatly aided the breakthrough by a tremendous effort against German posi- tions. So thoroughly had communications been disrupted, especially at the Po, that there was no chance of an orderly retreat to a new line and the total surrender came on z May, just a year after the begin- ning of the punch through the Gustav Line. The Fifteenth had meanwhile been engaged in strategic operations (which will be described presently) and, with the Balkan Air Force, in supporting the Russian advance which drove the Axis powers from Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, and part of Hungary. Bomb- ing airdromes, supply centers, and rail targets, MAAF forces encouti- tered the usual difficulties in cooperating with an ally who would not allow any real system of liaison to be established or any rationally de- termined bomb line. The subtitle of the present volume suggests that it begins with January 1944. Actually the narrative reviews briefly the strategic air operations of the last two months of 1943. The Eighth Air Force had begun its attack against the German war machine on 17 August 1942. X