The Bomber Mafia was ready for war.
Footnotes
i This quotation comes from a 1920 letter Pershing sent to the director of the Air Service, in which he argued that the Air Service should “remain a part of the Army.” He believed that air forces existed to aid the Army and should remain under its command: “If success is to be expected, the military air force must be controlled in the same way, understand the same discipline, and act in accordance with the Army command under precisely the same conditions as other combat arms.”
Chapter Three
“He was lacking in the bond of human sympathy.”
A British motorcycle messenger drove up to my residence at Castle Combe, outside London. And the message that he delivered to me was from General [Hap] Arnold, which, when decoded, said, “Meet me tomorrow morning at Casablanca.”
—Commanding General Ira Eaker
1.
Casablanca, in what was then French Morocco, was the site of a secret conference in January of 1943 between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. The war was just starting to turn in the Allies’ favor, and the two leaders were meeting to plan what they hoped would be the final, victorious chapter. Both men brought their senior military brass. For Roosevelt that included General Hap Arnold, who commanded all American airpower. And now, midway through the conference, Arnold was sounding the alarm by sending an urgent wire to his most important deputy.
Ira Eaker was a distinguished graduate of the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field. Eaker was a charter member of the Bomber Mafia, a true believer in daylight high-altitude precision bombing. And he was the head of the Eighth Air Force—the fleet of bombers stationed in England that was charged with hitting all the targets outlined in the crucial war-planning document AWPD-1.
Come to Casablanca, the message to Eaker said. Now.
As Eaker recalled it:
They had kept the Casablanca Conference under such secrecy and wraps that I didn’t even know what that meant. But I knew that I’d better comply. So I called General [Frederick Louis] Anderson, who was the bomber commander, and I said, “Have one of your crews pick me up in a B-17 at Bovington at midnight tonight to fly me to Casablanca, to arrive there shortly after daylight tomorrow morning.”
Eaker arrived and went straight to General Arnold’s villa.
And General Arnold said, “I have bad news for you, son. Our president has just agreed, upon the urging of the prime minister, that we discontinue our daylight bombing and you join the RAF in night bombing.”
The RAF was the Royal Air Force. The ideas that had so enthralled Eaker and his classmates at Maxwell Field did not have quite the same effect on the other side of the Atlantic. The British were skeptical about precision bombing. They had never fallen in love with the Norden bombsight. They never got tantalized by the possibility of dropping a bomb into a pickle barrel from thirty thousand feet. The Bomber Mafia said that you break the will of your enemy by crippling it economically—by carefully and skillfully taking out the aqueducts and the propeller-spring factories—so that the enemy is incapable of going on. They believed that modern bombing technology allowed you to narrow the scope of war. The British disagreed. They thought the advantage of having fleets of bombers was that you could broaden the scope of war. They called it “area bombing,” which was a euphemism for a bombing strategy in which you didn’t really aim at anything in particular. You just hit everything you could before flying home.
Area bombing is not done in daylight, because if you aren’t bombing at anything specific, why do you need to see anything? And it was explicitly aimed at civilians. It said: You should hit residential neighborhoods, and keep coming night after night, in wave after wave, until your enemy’s cities are reduced to rubble. Then the will of the enemy is going to sink so low that it will just give up. When the British wanted a better euphemism for what they were doing, they called it “morale bombing”—bombing with the intent to destroy the homes and cities of your enemy and reduce your enemy’s population to a state of despair.
The British thought the American Bomber Mafia was crazy. Why were they taking all the risks of flying during the day against targets too hard to hit? The British were trying to win a war, and it seemed to them that the Americans were holding an undergraduate philosophy seminar.
So at Casablanca, Churchill said to FDR, Enough. You’re doing it our way now. And in a panic, General Arnold summoned his commander in Europe, Ira Eaker, to tell him the bad news: area bombing had won the day.