Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II by Bill Yenne Read Free Book Online Page B

ignored.
    Indeed, it was against Japan, not Germany, that the USAAF would strike first.
    Early in 1942, as the Arcadia Conference was adjourned, two schools of thought were holding court within the American military establishment. One called for a methodical and comprehensive plan of action for substantial, if plodding, steps to defeat the Axis. The other, driven by the requirements of morale-building, called for something to be done quickly.
    The former was embodied in the work being done by the Air WarPlans Division. The latter manifested itself in two important actions that were undertaken in the spring and summer of 1942, well before the USAAF was anywhere near being ready to undertake truly decisive strategic air operations.
    The first of the two was the heroic and iconic April 18 attack on Japanese cities led by prewar aviation pioneer and daredevil air racer Lieutenant Colonel James Harold “Jimmy” Doolittle. The sixteen carrier-launched B-25 medium bombers on Doolittle’s mission did slight damage to Japan but immensely buoyed American morale by demonstrating that the United States was
capable
of bombing the country.
    The second action was the June 12 attack on the oil refineries at Ploesşti (now Ploiesşti), Romania, the Achilles’ heel of the Third Reich’s oil production and the largest refinery complex in continental Europe. Having allied itself with the Axis in November 1940, Romania had contributed troops for the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union and was providing the petrochemicals that oiled and fueled the German war machine.
    The Ploesşti mission was flown by a contingent of B-24D Liberators, commanded by Colonel Harry “Hurry-Up” Halverson, which had reached Egypt en route to India, where they were intended to operate against the Japanese from bases in China. Given that the previously considered airfields were now under threat from Japanese forces, and that the Burma Road supply route had been cut, the Halverson Project (HALPRO) was diverted. They would, instead, attack Ploesşti from Egypt.
    Like Doolittle’s raid, this attack on the oil refineries at Ploesşti was much longer on symbolism and propaganda value than on concrete results. As Hap Arnold wrote of the Ploesşti mission in his memoirs, “The target was not much damaged. The improbability of this two-thousand-mile round trip was its best protection, and enemy opposition was not heavy.”
    It would be more than a year before Allied bombers returned to attack, Ploesşti and more than two for Tokyo, but Halverson and Doolittle had shown that “improbable” was not the same as “impossible.”
    Mainly, Doolittle and Halverson proved to the American public—and to the enemy—that the USAAF was doing
something
. Of course, the peoplein USAAF uniform understood that it would take time before anything substantial could be done.
    For all the prior planning, the fact that the war came sooner than the Americans had anticipated required the Air Staff to play catch-up. James Lea Cate points out, in
Army Air Forces in World War II
, that “it had been presumed that at outbreak of war, or even before, a substantial air contingent should be sent to the British Isles. Now that war had come, there were more pressing needs. The British naturally were interested in the projected bomber force, but were anxious that it be provided without jeopardy to current allocation of heavy bombers [via Lend-Lease] to the RAF.”
    Harris and Portal were wondering how soon that “substantial air contingent” could get into action against Germany.
    As recorded in the notes of the Arcadia Conference, Arnold and Spaatz told Portal on January 1 that it might be possible to send two heavy bombardment groups to England “before too long,” but as Cate reminds us, an estimate of “about March or April [was only] a shot in the dark.”
    In a Combined Chiefs of Staff memorandum of February 22, entitled
Policy for Disposition of US and British Air Forces
, it