US AAC/AAF Doctrine: Target Germany - Illustration of strategic Air War Concepts.

The following text is a reproduction of:  Target Germany. The US Army Air Force´s official story of the VIII Bomber Command´s first year over Europe, British Edition 1944, (extract)

This book published in early 44 is quite interesting. Besides providing the background to a great movie (Twelve o`clock High, staring Gregory Peck, 1949 ) it is obviously intended to explain the issues and problems of a daylight bombing campaign to a broader public. Not the least because of the small immediate returns compaired to the heavy losses in the process and the ensuing criticism. Anyway, the narrative still prooves an interesting read - if not a convincing one - since most of the statements are still conveyed by modern historians.

However, two parts of this book are presented outside the "narrative" as a kind of tribute to the men engaged in the "experiment" of daylight precicion bombing as a means to "strategic" aerial warfare over "Festung Europa":

"THIS BOOK, the official story of the VIII Bomber Command's first year of combat operations in Europe, is a testament to American men and machines and an American idea. In the past twelve months, the men and machines have proved themselves against the fiercest aerial opposition in the world. Thanks to their record, the American idea-high altitude daylight precision bombing-has come through a period of doubt and experimentation to triumphant vindication.

This book has been made possible by the skill and heroism of our combat crews in the air and the patience and devotion of the men of our Air Force on the ground. Some of the men whose exploits are recorded in the following pages have given their lives, some their liberty, to preserve the American way of life.

The rest fight on toward victory."

 H. H. ARNOLD Commanding General Army Air Forces

"Lille was an air battle, the first head-on collision between the American spearhead and the massed strength of the Luftwaffe. Judged by ground force or even naval standards, the actual numbers engaged in combat were small--a thousand American airmen, perhaps, plus a few score British fighter pilots against an undetermined number of Germans in the air and on the ground. But the combat personnel on both sides represented the apex of a vast pyramid of national strength. Behind the planes and the fighting airmen were ranged the opposing ground organizations, behind that the industrial capacity of the warring nations and even the peoples' will to win. In a very literal sense, the fighting strength of Germany and the United States first clashed in the cold thin air four miles above Lille. And the sparks flew. As one navigator succinctly put it, "Lille was our first real brawl."

Chapter II: From 5 miles up.

Target: Germany is the story of an experiment. That the experiment is concerned with destroying the economic fabric of another nation is to be regretted. That it may be a large factor in saving our own way of life should not be forgotten. For aerial bombing is now beginning to return dividends which surpass the expectations of its stanchest adherents. Bombs alone do not win battles - but bombs behind the fighting fronts may rob armies of their vital supplies and make war so terrible that civilian populations will refuse to support the armed forces in the field.

During the past eight months scientific bombing has changed the face of war. For the physical attrition of warfare is no longer limited to the fighting forces. Heretofore the home front has remained relatively secure; armies fought, civil populations worked and waited. This conflict's early air attacks were the first portents of a changing order. In its slashes at Warsaw, Rotterdam, Plymouth, Coventry, and London, largescale bombing showed its claws. The Germans had conceived a terrifying weapon. Fortunately, they had neither the imagination nor the physical resources to capitalize on their revolutionary conception.

On the night of March 5-6, 1943, bombing came of age. On that date the RAF began the systematic, patterned devastation of the twelve cities of the German Ruhr. The ruins of the Ruhr, Cologne, and Hamburg, and the American inflicted damage at the Huells rubber plant, at the Heroya aluminum unit in Norway, and the Blohm & Voss shipyard at Kiel, have now clothed a German vision with reality. To borrow from Macbeth, it is the Nazis' own "Bloody instructions which, being taught, return to plague the inventor." The Ruhr, heart of Germany's heavy industry, has been crippled. In the first climactic four day-and-night Hamburg Blitz (the Germans even had a word for it), well over 2000 British and American aircraft dropped more than 7000 tons of high explosive and incendiaries on a city the size of Detroit. To quote an official report: "There is nothing in the world to which this concentrated devastation of Hamburg can be compared, for an inferno of this scale in a town of this size has never been experienced, hardly even imagined, before."

Hamburg Blitz High over the smoke of fires started by the RAF the night before, Fortresses strike at key targets from five miles up. Black flak bursts hang in the air. At lower right, Nazi fighters rise to challenge the American invaders.

Here, then, we have terror and devastation carried to the core of a warring nation. The implications of such destruction of public morale and economy are not yet clear. They soon will be - perhaps before this book is published. It may be that, in forging so terrible a weapon, the United Nations have found the way to break any nation's will to fight. That would mean not only victory in this conflict but also the answer to any threats of war in the foreseeable future.

There are two kinds of bombing-strategic and tactical. Strategic bombing strikes at the economy of the enemy; it attempts to cripple its war potential by blows at industrial production, civilian morale, and communications. Tactical bombardment is immediate air support of movements of air, land, or sea forces. This record concerns itself only with strategic bombing.

There are, in turn, two kinds of strategic bombardment. Area bombing is directed at the industrial district or the city as a whole. This is the method perfected by the British Bomber Command in its night attacks. Precision bombing is directed at the specific industrial unit-the plant, the factory, or the railroad yards. This is day bombing on the American Plan. Neither force allows itself to be restricted by definition. The British Bomber Command occasionally employs precision bombing, though mostly at low altitudes; the daylight raids of its fast Lancasters on the M.A.N. Diesel-engine plant at Augsburg in central Germany, on the Ruhr dams, and on the Le Creusot steel plant in central France were classics of planning and daring execution. The American VIII Bomber Command edges into its neighbor's field of area bombing when unforeseen weather conditions close in on specific primary targets and general industrial areas are attacked as targets of opportunity.

These two types of bombing have so often been contrasted, usually to the disadvantage of one or the other, that it is not generally understood, outside of military circles, how the two complement each other. Day-precision and nightarea bombing carried on simultaneously from the same bases, in this case the British Isles, results in a number of tactical advantages:

1. Our combined air attack against Germany can be spread over twenty-four hours a day. This means that their defenses must be alerted continuously and that their industrial work schedules are constantly being upset.

2. Both day and night fighter defenses must be maintained by the enemy. As these are independent commands using different types of planes, this results in a heavy drain on the German fighter strength on the active fronts.

3. Using part of our tremendous combined British-American bomber force by day and part by night simplifies the traffic problem over bases and the checking system in the coastal areas over which the planes pass on their way to and from enemy territory.

4. Area- and precision-bombing forces give the joint planning staff two specialized weapons. With the British force a city may be devastated but a specific plant may be missed. The American force, not yet -carrying the weight of explosive necessary to wipe out the city, can go in and get the plant.

Day-precision and night-area bombing thus work ideally together. The two concepts, however, demand different equipment, different operational technique, and crew training systems that vary in many particulars. Area bombing at night is a highly complex art, demanding as much co-ordination, skill, and planning as precision bombing by day. As practised by the British Bomber Command, it requires a large force to saturate the enemy radio-location stations and night fighter defenses, and spread the damage over the largest area in the shortest possible time.

British bombers carry a large proportion of incendiaries; the value of starting hundreds of simultaneous fires in a city is obvious. A concentration of planes over the target also makes the job more difficult for the defending searchlights and antiaircraft batteries. The aircraft used - the Lancasters, Halifaxes, and Stirlings are designed with load and range as primary considerations. The crews are trained for night operations, with special emphasis on accurate navigation by radio devices. The whole plan of operation is based on single-plane flights, each bomber navigating its own way to the target and arriving there at a given height, on a certain course, and at a scheduled time. "Pathfinders," especially trained in target identification, precede the main force and find and mark the target with flares.

High-level precision bombing demands, first, bomb-aiming equipment that insures accurate placing of the loads from high altitudes. It requires, also, planes with enough ceiling to avoid the most accurate heavy flak levels. German heavy flak (antiaircraft artillery fire) can reach above 40,000 feet, but its accuracy drops off fifty per cent every 5,000 feet above 15,000 feet, so the value of high-altitude operations is readily apparent. High-level precision bombing also calls for planes with the fire power to ward off enemy fighters and for crews which work perfectly as a team in meeting and repulsing these attacks. Pilots and copilots, must be extraordinarily skillful in flying heavily loaded planes in close formations at high altitudes, and the handling of the bomb sight must be of the highest order.

These are the basic differences, then, in the two strategic bombing techniques practised in the European Theater of Operations. The British turned to night-area bombing, after considerable early-war experience with both types of operations, because they felt the area technique better suited to their strategic capabilities. The Americans worked for years on the technique and the equipment for daylight precision bombing and then took the idea to war to try it out in actual combat. The difference in the way the two Bomber Commands were forced to approach the same problem should not be overlooked, as it accounts for many of the developments in the experiment described in the chapters to follow.

This American faith in the practicability of high-level, precision bombing in daylight began with a tactical problem, an airplane, and a bomb sight. The problem - was that of defending American shores against attacking fleets. What was needed was a battleship of the air, and in 1935 the Boeing Aircraft Company designed and built one. This first Fortress cracked up and burned on a take-off during its trials, but the Army Air Corps had seen enough and thirteen were ordered. It took Boeing two years to produce these thirteen planes-at our present rate of production the thirteen could probably be turned out in a few hours at our heavy-bomber factories.

These original experimental models, known as YB- 17s, had 4,000 horsepower, a speed of 250 miles per hour, and carried five .30-caliber machine guns. The first production model, known as the B-17, came in 1937, and in 1938 the B-17A appeared. This plane, equipped with exhaust-driven turbosuperchargers, set a record of 259 miles per hour for 620 miles with a bomb load of 11,000 pounds. Several planes of this model were flown to South America and back.

The Army Air Force bombardment experts, meanwhile, had combined this new plane with a bomb sight developed during the early thirties. This sight (a piece of precision optical equipment with a computing device but without any of the magic qualities with which the Sunday-supplement writers invested it) was already in use in the Army's smaller bombers. Experiments were carried out at successively higher altitude levels. Each thousand-foot step, from 10,000 to 20,000 and then to 25,000 feet, introduced new problems.

Oxygen lack affected some men below 18,000 feet, all men above that. At 25,000 feet and above, this oxygen starvation can be fatal within a very few minutes. So oxygen masks were devised and a system gradually was developed for feeding the oxygen automatically. High altitudes and the consequent decrease in atmospheric pressure also accentuated many physical ailments and deficiencies unnoticed at lower altitudes-sinus trouble became unbearable, weak eardrums burst, and stomach disorders were aggravated. The intense cold at high altitudes resulted in many cases of frostbite, so electrically heated suits and gloves and boots were developed. The problem of what diet would best meet the discomfort of gas distension in the digestive tract was studied, as were the psychological effects of high-altitude fatigue. A whole new school of aviation medicine grew up to meet the demands of this new type of flying.

Meanwhile, the experimentation went on. The results were startling. From 20,000 feet above the dry bed of California's Muroc Lake, bombardiers found they could hit a 100-foot circle time and again. The Army's experts weren't deceived by these early successes; they analized that the trials were being carried on with the scales heavily weighted in the bombardier's favor - that bombing readily identifiable targets in perfect weather conditions with no enemy fighter or flak opposition was the ultimate simplification of the problem involved. Bombing enemy installations under combat conditions would be a different proposition.

Unfortunately, some air power enthusiasts lacked the professionals' caution. The result was a general public misapprehension concerning the accuracy of high-altitude bombing. This came to be known as "pickle-barrel accuracy" and spread the completely false impression that American bombers could drop their loads in a barrel from 20,000 feet. Nothing could be more unrealistic. Under combat conditions in the western European Theater - admittedly the most heavily defended area on the war map - our bombers have a good day when, operating from 25,000 feet, they manage to concentrate their destructive load in a factory area the size of a city block. And when they do, it's a bad day for the enemy.

By midsummer of 1939 delivery had begun on the B series of the Forts. In December of this same year a second type of four-engined bomber was made available when the Consolidated Aircraft Company produced the first of a long series of B-24's-later to be known as Liberators. The B-24's had greater medium-altitude speed, greater range, and greater load-carrying capacity than the B-17s but sacrificed some of the Forts' defensive fire power and high-altitude speed. When war broke out in Europe in September, British orders for improved versions of both ships were placed and the tempo of production and modification was immeasurably increased.

While the evolution of our weapons was progressing, the Air Force was painstakingly developing the method by which the weapons could be used. This involved an entirely new concept of crew training. It was found that the ten-man crew of a heavy bomber had to work as a completely integrated unit during all the crucial phases of an operation. With a maximum allowable straight-and-level bombing run of forty seconds over the target in combat conditions, split-second teamwork was necessary. Bombardiers, navigators, and gunners assumed roles of equal importance with the pilots, for unless each did his job faultlessly-the mission was liable to end in failure or disaster.

At the same time, the problem of the actual piloting had to be considered in the light of large-scale operations. Flying the heavily loaded planes at extreme altitudes had presented problems even to the veteran fliers who were then permitted to handle the controls. Now the Air Force had to anticipate the employment of thousands of young and comparatively inexperienced pilots who would be flying these same airplanes under combat conditions. The answers to these perplexities were the main concern of our bombardment experts during the several years preceding our entry into the war.

Ohe rough blueprint of American heavy bombardment was at hand and the implementation of the plan was in progress. The next question was where and how would it be used?

The weapon was the first to receive its trial.. The first of the B- I 7C's, faster and more heavily armed than their predecessors but without tail guns, armor, or leakproof tanks, arrived in England early in 1941. British unofficial opinion was skeptical. The Forts' first mission under the aegis of the RAF was an attack on the German cruiser Gneisenau at Brest. Hits were claimed and the planes returned undamaged. On July 26 a Fortress attacked Emden and on August 2 Kiel was bombed. Both raids were without loss. On an August 16 raid a Fortress was attacked by seven German fighters and beat them off.

And then, during a strike against Oslo on September 8, two of the-four Forts dispatched fell victim to enemy fighters. Shortly after, daylight raids with this early. version of the B-17 were discontinued. British opinion remained unconvinced. The designers of the American Plan, watching these experiments from across the Atlantic, were content to wait for a trial of the improved bombers then being constructed and the operational technique they had conceived.

The new planes continued to accumulate defensive armor and armament, speed and bomb capacity. The B-17E, with which the VIII Bomber Command operations were started in England, carried thirteen machine guns, two power-driven turrets and a tail-gun position. These planes also incorporated the second great development of the bomb-aiming process. This was the Automatic Flight Control Equipmentan American invention which permitted the bombardier, through his manipulation of the bomb sight, automatically to control the flight of the plane during the bomb run.

With its airplanes, its bomb sight, its AFCE, its tactical theories, and a nucleus of trained combat crews, the VIII Bomber Command traveled to England in the middle of 1942 and set about a job which had never been done before. High-altitude precision bombing of key enemy targets by day might or might not be possible. The VIII Bomber Command, standardbearers of a brave new idea, meant to prove it could be done. The following chapters tell the story of the first year of this effort.

Chapter XIII: The Summing up.

ON AUGUST 17, 1942, twelve Flying Fortresses stepped accurately but not heavily on the little finger of the Nazi war machine. They penetrated fifty miles into France, dropped eighteen tons of bombs on the marshaling yards at Rouen, and returned intact.

On August 17, 1943, three American aerial task forces, totaling more than 350 Fortresses, struck two hard blows at the industrial heart of Germany. Two of the forces, dropping 424 tons of bombs on Schweinfurt, fought their way back to Britain. The third force, hitting Regensburg with 298 tons, roared on across the Mediterranean. As the brakes squealed on African runways and the tired men climbed -down, a cycle became complete. The VIII Bomber Command's first year over Europe was ended.

What the year proved, what it added up to, cannot be summarized in a phrase. The official figures: 16,977 tons of bombs dropped, 2050 enemy fighters destroyed, 472 bombers and 4481 men missing, do not give the complete picture any more than Goebbels' mid-August understatement that the war in the air was Germany's most serious problem. No one hero story can convey all the heroism, no one example of bomb damage can indicate the tremendous cumulative strain on Nazi industrial resources. The scale is too large for easy simplification.

Fortunately, there is no need for such capsule conclusions. It is unnecessary, at this stage of the war, to convince anyone of the military importance of air power. The purpose of this book has been factually to record the testing of a new concept of vertical warfare. The final evaluation is yet to be made, but already a general trend of the results is apparent.

The aim of any bombing program is destruction of enemy objectives. Here is an inventory of the VIII Bomber Command's achievements for its first year of operation:

Targets                                                                              Attacks
U-Boat Operating Bases                                                      22
U-Boat Building Yards                                                        19
Ship-Repair Yards                                                                 4
Airfields                                                                               18
German Air Force Installations                                            11
Synthetic-Rubber Plant                                                          1
Magnesium, Aluminium and Nitrate Works                           1
Transport and Shipping Facilities                                          26
Industrial Plants (tire, automotive, steel, etc.)                         6
Aircraft Factories                                                                    8
Industrial Targets of Opportunity                                            8
Total                                                                                   124

The results of these 124 attacks, of course, varied. A few were relative failures, others moderate successes, and some prodigious triumphs. Fortunately, the improvement in the bombing which came about as the first year's campaign progressed placed most of the notable successes in the second six months of operations -when target's of more importance were attacked. Thus, the Huells rubber plant was knocked out for an undetermined period, the Heroya aluminum plant blasted to pieces, the Renault plant crippled,- and the Messerschmitt fighter factory almost totally destroyed-all these high priority objectives were attacked after the American forces had perfected their bombing in the early raids.

One factor hampering the appraisal of the returns from strategic bombing is the interval between destruction and effect. A naval squadron sinks an enemy cruiser and there is one less enemy to face, an infantry division captures a town and the front lines move forward, an air support squadron wrecks a transport column and the tactical advantage is instantly obvious --but this immediacy is lacking in strategic bombing.

A heavy bomber force destroys a synthetic rubber plant and plugs the source of one third of the enemy's supply, but the military effects of the blow may not become apparent for six months. A marshaling yard is blown to bits, forcing upon the enemy an expenditure of labor, rails, locomotives, and cars that he can ill afford; an aircraft factory is wrecked and its production of fighters ceases. Again, the results may not be immediately obvious. But sooner or later the inevitable cost of these losses makes itself felt-a thousand armored cars are withheld from combat for lack of tires; for lack of railroad roiling stock a reserve division reaches its position a day too late; half a hundred enemy fighters never reach the front to blast our troops in transport lines. In an accumulation of such economic shortages and the consequent military dislocations are the seeds of final disaster.

The first five months of the operational life of the VIII Bomber Command were kindergarten months. The exponents of high-altitude precision bombing had to walk before they could run. In the process of learning to walk they sometimes stumbled. But the case these pioneers proved was more important than the damage they inflicted. Their assaults on the submarine bases, their strikes on Nazi industrial targets in France, the attrition and division of strength they forced upon the Nazi fighter command-these achievements represented valuable contributions to the Allied war effort. Just as valuable was the evidence that such contributions were possible, in daylight and from five miles up.

The kernel of the proof was the inability of the Germans to prevent American daylight bombers from attacking their objectives. Time and again in the Battle of Britain, Spitfires and Hurricanes intercepted Nazi raiders and drove them away from their targets. The American bombers were never stopped. Weather sometimes made recall necessary, but unless that recall came through the Forts and Liberators went on to their target. The Germans are trying every defense they can think of, but neither flak nor fighters, nor aerial bombs nor rocket cannons, have ever deflected an American formartion from its objective.

It was this fact, plus the parallel success at the RAF's night operations, that resulted in the  Casablanca mandate to the British and U. S., bomber forces in the United Kingdom. At Casablanca the Combined Chiefs of Staff ordered a joint British-U. S. air offensive to accomplish "the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and economic system and the undermining of the morale of the German people to the point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened." The term "fatally weakened" was interpreted as meaning so weakened as to permit initiation of final combined operations on the Continent. That order was given in January. The two bomber commands lost no time in setting about the job.

To the RAF fell the task of destroying Germany's great cities, of silencing the iron heartbeat of the Ruhr, of dispossessing the working population, of breaking the morale of the people.

 The mission of the VIII Bomber Command was the destruction of the key industries by which the German military machine is sustained.

How well the RAF succeeded in the next eight months, sending six, seven, eight hundred heavy bombers over a target, dropping four or five times the weight of explosives that fell on Coventry, may be judged by the desperate outcries of the German press and the incontrovertible photographic evidence brought back by reconnaissance planes.

Meanwhile the American bomber command, with a striking force which in January, 1943, was about one seventh the, size of the RAF, was hitting the key objectives of the Nazi war industry. As the American bomber force grew and the weight and variety of the blows increased, German defenses stiffened. Concentrations of antiaircraft guns mounted and Nazi fighter strength on the Western Front rose sharply. Between January and July the number of enemy first-line single-engine fighters specifically charged with neutralizing the daylight raiders was almost doubled, largely at the expense of other fronts. Necessity to defend the homeland cost the Germans what little hope they had of maintaining air superiority in Russia or air equality in Africa.

For the Germans the only answer to the bomber offensive was the stepping up of fighter plane production. This decision had become apparent months before, when their aircraft industry began to shift from bomber to fighter production-that is, from offensive to defensive weapons.

The Allies, well aware of this strategy, took energetic steps to meet it. More and more the thrusts of precision bombing were aimed at German aircraft factories. In July the VIII Bomber Command attacked plants involving sixty-five per cent of Germany's Focke-Wulf production, seventy-one per cent of her airplane tire capacity. The anniversary raid of August 17 robbed the Nazis of the use of their second largest Messerschmitt plant at Regensburg. A few days earlier Liberators, based on Africa had struck the sister factory at Wiener Neustadt, not far from Vienna. Meanwhile, over Russia, Italy, and Germany the attrition of the Luftwaffe went on.

As these words are written, the battle for air supremacy in Europe is in full swing. If the Luftwaffe can be pushed over the edge of the cliff as it was in Africa, as it was in Sicily, as it will be in Germany if the pressure is maintained, the collapse of Germany within a foreseeable time becomes certain.

This is one answer to the question so often raised, -"Will bombing win the war?"  To the military logician, the question is beside the point. Aerial assault is directed both at the enemy's will to resist and his means to resist. One may collapse before the other; either eventuality is desirable. Bombing will be carried out to the fullest extent in any case. Whether or not German morale cracks, the work of destroying the enemy's fighting capacity must go on. Daylight precision bombing, in co-operation with RAF night area bombing, is the most economical and practicable means now at hand for achieving that destruction.

The word -"economical" is used advisedly. All war is hideously expensive. But compared to damage inflicted, the cost of aerial attack- in dollars and cents as well as human lives is moderate. In large-scale bombing, the balance sheet shows the attacker well in the black, the defender hopelessly in the red. To meet the challenge Germany maintains more than fifty-eight per cent of her fighter strength and 39,000 antiaircraft guns on the Western Front. A million men serve the guns, searchlights, and barrage balloons and ten per cent of the total population give all or part of their time to the air-raid services. In devastating Hamburg, the RAF and the USAAF lost 103 planes out of some 2700 sent over the target. At a cost of some $25,000,000 worth of equipment lost, therefore, and less than a thousand men missing, the two bomber commands paralyzed Germany's greatest port, and destroyed an incalculable amount of industrial property. At Vegesack, in an attack which cost the Germans at least four submarines, some fifty fighters destroyed, and vast damage to the shipyards, the Americans lost two bombers.

The picture is not always so rosy. In the anniversary battles of August 17, the VIII Bomber Command lost more aircraft in a single day than it had lost in the first six months of operations over Europe. The price paid was no higher than expected and was more than justified by the results achieved. But it indicated clearly that the battle for air supremacy is not yet won. German antiaircraft defenses are still on the increase; their new fighters are more heavily armed. The air war in the European Theater of Operations is becoming a slugging match between offense and defense. The side with the most stamina will win by a knockout.

Whether the decision is reached sooner or later, the VIII Bomber Command will-if present plans are followed-emerge from the struggle, as one of the most polished and powerful instruments of aerial destruction ever assembled. When the end comes in Europe, this force of men and planes, this accumulation of skill and experience, will join its strength with the strength of the American bomber commands now fighting on other combat theaters. As one force, this mighty armada will turn its attention elsewhere. . . .

Japan has been listening to the ominous sound of the thunder in the West, one day our lightning will strike in the East.