On October 14, 1943, the air war over Europe reached a critical turning point. On that Thursday, the United States Eighth Air Force mounted Mission No. 115 against the city of Schweinfurt, the center of the German ball bearing industry.

Sixteen bomber groups from the 1st and 3rd Air divisions would participate in the strike. In all, 291 Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses took off from bases in England and headed east toward the German border. As the bombers formed up over the Channel, short-range British Supermarine Spitfire fighters climbed to escort the heavies to the Continent. There, Republic P-47 Thunderbolts took over, escorting the flying armada to the German border. But insufficient range prevented the Thunderbolts from keeping the bombers company all the way to the target. Turning back somewhere around Aachen, just inside the German border, the P-47s left the unescorted bombers to a catastrophic fate.

Out of 291 bombers dispatched, 257 actually entered German airspace. Sixty were shot down, just over 20 percent of the total number. Two hundred twenty-nine B-17s reached Schweinfurt and dropped their bombs. Only 197 returned to England. Of those, five planes were abandoned or crashed on landing, while 17 others landed so damaged that they had to be written off. Altogether, 82 of the 291 original bombers that left England were lost, more than 28 percent of the entire force assigned to the raid.

Moreover, the Schweinfurt raid was the climax of a week of strikes against German industrial targets. Between October 8 and 14, 1943, the Eighth Air Force flew 1,342 heavy bomber sorties, losing a total of 152 bombers (11.3 percent), with another 6 percent receiving heavy damage. During the entire month of October, the Eighth lost a total of 214 heavy bombers, almost 10 percent of the total number dispatched. Lost and damaged planes constituted more than half the sorties flown during the month. At that rate of attrition, an entirely new bomber force would be required every three months in order to maintain the Allied bomber offensive.

After the prohibitive losses sustained in October 1943, the Eighth Air Force suspended deep bomber strikes into German territory. Two premises of daylight strategic bombing–that bombers would be able to get through enemy defenses and back without escorts, and that destroying the enemy’s industrial base would cripple its war effort–appeared to be greatly mistaken. American air leaders, recognizing the inability of unescorted heavy bombers to get through and bomb German industry without excessive losses, questioned the very foundation of American air strategy. But why did American air leaders initially believe their heavy bombers would always get through, and what were the consequences of the American strategic doctrine when applied in the skies over the Third Reich? How has American air doctrine changed as a result?

The airplane, initially used during World War I in a reconnaissance role to locate enemy troop and artillery movements and concentrations, evolved throughout the conflict to perform all of the roles identified with modern air power–including strategic bombing. Although it was an immature weapons system during the Great War, the airplane’s enormous potential fueled the imaginations of interwar air theorists, foremost among them Italy’s Giulio Douhet.

Assuming that population and industrial centers would be vulnerable to fleets of heavy bombers, Douhet advocated attacking an enemy nation’s urban areas and factories with explosives, incendiaries and poisonous gas–with no distinction being made between combatant and noncombatant. Douhet believed that the impact of strategic bombing would simultaneously demoralize an enemy’s civilian population and destroy its capacity to wage war.

During the 1920s, Douhet’s theories and those of air power advocate Brig. Gen. William ‘Billy’ Mitchell gained champions within the U.S. Army Air Corps, and strategic bombing doctrine began to be reflected in its field manuals. Chief among this new generation of bomber advocates in the late 1930s was the leader of the Army Air Corps, General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold. As the commander in chief of the American air service, General Arnold surrounded himself with ‘bomber men,’ disciples of daylight strategic precision bombing. According to Arnold and his top commanders, the primary purpose of air power in Europe during the coming conflicts would be strategic bombing. Strategic bombing was the only major contribution the airmen could make to the war effort that was largely independent of the Army and Navy. If air power was to show its capabilities as an equal partner to ground and naval forces, it would be done through the successes of strategic bombing.

Because of the prohibitive cost of creating a bomber fleet on a ‘Douhetian’ scale in the interwar fiscal environment, the U.S. Army Air Corps Tactical School advocated only the precision bombing of an enemy nation’s vital centers–its factories, power sources, transportation and raw materials. Advocates believed this goal could be achieved through the use of the new, fast, long-range ‘precision bombers’ coming into service late in the 1930s, the B-17 Flying Fortress and the Consolidated B-24 Liberator.

Powered by four turbocharged engines, the B-17s and B-24s were, at the time of their test flights in the mid-1930s, faster than most of the world’s operational interceptors. ‘If the superior speed of the bomber was such to make interception improbable, or at worst, infrequent, then no provision need be made for escort fighters to accompany the bombers on their long range missions,’ said one modern analyst of the 1930s air doctrine. Moreover, the new heavy bombers flew above 20,000 feet, too high to be reached by most ground-based anti-aircraft.

The Air Corps bomber men believed the American heavy bombers would fly high and fast into enemy territory, eluding interceptors and anti-aircraft defenses. Once above the target area, these’self-defending’ American bombers would utilize the world’s most sophisticated bombsight–the Norden–which allowed for such factors as speed, course, wind direction and distance to target. Under favorable conditions, trained aircrews were able to place their payloads within a few hundred feet of their target from over 15,000 feet, prompting an Army Air Forces spokesman to boast that the aircrews could ‘drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 25,000 feet.’ But for the Norden bombsight to work well, American pilots had to deliver their payloads during daylight hours, in good weather and in level flight.

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