Caesar had his Ides of March. Goering, that latter-day would-be Caesar of the air, had many days of reckoning during March of 1944. For in that month, the U.S. Eighth Air Force outstripped not only every previous measure of accomplishment, but surpassed even the fondest hopes of those who were responsible for its growth. Never in the past had we exceeded the number of ten missions flown in a single month. Yet in this month of fulfillment, our forces dispatched over twenty heavy bombardment missions and our Combat Wing took part in sixteen of these.

 

Explanation is not to be found in the quality of the missions. Only one of the sixteen would have been considered anything, but a long, hard penetration just a few months earlier. Never before had we attacked Berlin, long spoken of reverently and timorously as “The Big E”. Yet in this month, we attacked Berlin on three successive days and then returned again later in the month for good measure. We attacked Frankfurt on the 2nd 24th, Wilhelmshaven on the 3rd, Dusseldorf on the 4th, Augsburg on the 16th, Oberpfaffenhofen near Munich on the 18th, Mannheim on the 20th, Ahlen near Hamm on the 23rd, Brunswick on the 29th,and Berlin on the 6th, 8th, 9th, and 22nd. In occupied France, we attacked the airdrome at St. Jean d’Angely, just north of Bordeaux, on the 27th, Rheims/Champagne airdrome on the 28th and the cryptic “military installations in the Pas de Calais area” on the 26th.

 

The explanation of all this activity is multiple. Part of it was, of course, that the weather was better than average. But the weather alone was not the cause: even with perfect weather we could not have flown so many missions a month or so earlier.

 

No, the real reason was that our force was getting bigger, better, more seasoned, while at the same time Jerry was finding it harder and harder to make both ends meet. We thought that we could see the pattern of the ultimate in the month’s tale. We would never obliterate the Luftwaffe, because Jerry would never expose his last airplane to loss. Jerry would keep an air force in being whether he could afford to fight with it or not. But we were getting to the point where Jerry had already made up his mind that he could not afford to oppose us every time we came over. He couldn’t afford a chocolate sundae every day in the week, but he could still buy himself a banana split on Saturday. But we had him on short rations, no doubt about that. We could afford to take advantage of his shortcomings. And in March we did.

 

Relative size of forces means everything in war, and the air war is no exception. Way back at the beginning, when Jerry was big and we were small, it didn’t matter where we went; we had opposition. We had it on our short and perilous trips over occupied lands, Northern France, Belgium, and Holland. Then when we started hitting Germany, we found opposition everywhere. Then as we grew, and the power of our attacks became greater and the increasing size of our task forces started to dilute the fighter opposition, Jerry was forced to husband his resources, leaving some areas undefended save for flak and marshalling his fighters force in defense of his homeland. Then he was forced to leave the nearer portions of Germany without a roof.

 

Finally, the volume of our blows in March reduced him to a point where his geographical economy was at the irreducible minimum. No opposition whatever over occupied lands. The entire force, practically speaking, was grouped in north central Germany in an effort to deny us the direct route to Berlin and the industrial hinterland. Yet even that economy did not suffice. It became evident that Jerry would not come up, as a rule, except on days when our attack could be made visually. There would be no opposition, as a rule, on days when Jerry knew that cloud covered the important and most sensitive areas of the Reich. Not that he didn’t fear our Pathfinder attacks, which could lay waste large areas of his biggest cities even when they were cloud-covered. But he couldn’t afford to oppose all attacks anymore and preferred to let his sprawling population centers quiver helplessly under our attacks in order to save his fighters for days when he knew we would be able to make our deadly visual attacks on his most important factories. Area attacks meant blows against his morale and disorganization of his civil economy. But precision attacks threatened his ability to continue defending himself. It was Hobson’s choice, but he had to make it.

 

There were things we couldn’t say publicly, but that we knew many were thinking. One of these was the upsetting of the dope on day versus night bombing. Time was not long since we had thought of ourselves as the left jab, and the RAF heavyweights as the Sunday punch. In those days, our boys could deliver a couple of hundred tons on a factory, when visible, but we goggled at the ability of the RAF heavies to clonk down two thousand tons on an industrial center in a matter of forty minutes. We remembered that when we first came over the old hands of the RAF had doubted our ability to fly over Europe in daylight at all.

 

Now the shoe was on the other foot. Our carrying capacity had grown until it equaled that of the RAF. We had our own 2,000-ton missions. But that was the least. We could play RAF Game of area attack when we had to. But when the weather opened we could play a game they couldn’t even attempt. We could hit a dozen targets at once and get most if not all of them. We didn’t need area saturation, obtainable only through putting the entire force on a single target, whereas the RAF, flying only at night, couldn’t get results in any other way. We could effectively destroy isolated targets located outside of urban areas, targets that were entirely immune from night attack because too small in extent, too easily camouflaged, too hard to find in the dark. Most important of all, we didn’t care what time of the month it was. If there was flying weather over Germany, we went to Germany; not so the RAF. Big, slow-flying bombers, not flying formation, incapable of being escorted at night, are dead meat when the night fighters can see them. And they can be seen when there is a moon. The RAF heavies didn’t dare visit Germany in the moonlight. That meant that there were only about ten days out of each month when they could hit Germany. If the weather was unsuitable during the dark of the moon, they were out for the month. March being a bad month for them, though not for us, they did attempt one attack by moonlight. They went to Stuttgart, in an area where Jerry no longer gave our boys any real opposition. They lost 94 bombers, more than either force had ever lost on any single operation. This was because the RAF not only paid for their tactics of evading combat in direct losses, but because their tactics imposed no serious attrition on the German night fighter force. Jerry had no reason to economize on night fighters, which merely grow in experience and effectiveness. Consequently, the RAF loss ratio over Germany showed a slow but steady increase, while ours continued to drop. We had reached the point where we invited combat, as part of the long-range program ultimately to eliminate the German day fighter force as a serious element in the air war. A respectable school of military thought held that the Infantry had yielded its traditional title of “Queen of Battles” to the single-engine fighter airplane, and that every major land battle in the current war had been won by the side enjoying fighter superiority over the battlefield. If this view was right, then we were not only slowly sapping the enemy’s fountain of strength, but we were winning the future battles of Western Europe by denying the Hun the fighters he would need when the big show opened.

 

Our Combat Wing carried things off rather well during this biggest of all months to date. We flew a total of 880 accredited sorties on operational missions. Considering the length and frequency of missions flown, we had an incredibly low abortive rate: only 3.9% of accredited scheduled, compared with 9.0%, 7.5%, and 6.1% for the other Combat Wings of the Division. The 381st Group had the proud distinction of being the first unit cited by the Division for outstanding performance in the matter of abortive aircraft. The citation, awarded by General Williams, read in part as follows: “During the period 6 March 1944, this unit was ordered to fly thirteen (13) combat operations, four (4) of which were to objectives in the Berlin area. In carrying out these attacks, eight (8) missions were flown with no aircraft returning early. This includes twice flying three (3) successive operations with no abortive aircraft. The record achieved by the 381st Bombardment Group (H) for this period indicates that 98.4% of the aircraft dispatched attacked targets in enemy territory. The exemplary conduct of the crewmen teamed with the untiring application to the task at hand by the administrative and maintenance personnel of this Group has made possible the carrying out of these successful missions.”

 

There was no doubt about the United States getting its money’s worth out of the 1st Combat Wing in March. When your abortive rate went down, your percentage of aircraft attacking targets necessarily went up. Ours was 90.1%, comparing not unfavorably with the other Combat Wings of the Division, which had 75.5%, 82.3%, and 76.5% respectively.

 

Our loss ratio was the highest in the Division. That was just the breaks of the game, but still it was lower than we had ever known. Division losses for the month were only 86 aircraft, fewer than British Bomber Command lost on its single raid on Stuttgart. On a total of 4,276 sorties, this was a mere 1.9%. Our Wing lost 24 aircraft, or 2.6% of sorties. That was a vast improvement over some of our earlier months, when we had lost as many as 8 and 10% of our sorties in a single month.

 

There were so many major missions during the month that none is really outstanding in retrospect. The last mission to Frankfurt was perhaps the most successful Pathfinder mission to date. Crews were briefed to attack Schweinfurt if it could be seen, otherwise to make a blind attack on Frankfurt. Schweinfurt was socked in, so three Combat Wings of the Division, let by our boys, went on to Frankfurt. One Group brought back pictures showing the center of the town, and reconnaissance cover obtained a day or two later showed that the entire center of the town had been obliterated.

 

St. Jean d’Angely on the 27th was the best bombing ever. Our lead Group deposited a pattern of bombs that was a bomber’s ideal: a perfect circle completely blanketed with bombs, not a single stray outside the perimeter of the circle, and the center of the circle sank on the assigned aiming point. It couldn’t have been better. Then the other Groups came in and laid their bombs exactly where they were supposed to go. It was a complete job, as was the next day’s attack on Rheims/Champagne airfield.

 

The month also saw the elimination of Augsburg as a city – a result of consecutive attacks by our force and the RAF. The attack on Erkner, in the suburbs of Berlin, on the 8th, polished off Jerry’s last surviving ball-bearing works.

Personnel changes for the month included the acquisition from the 381st of Captain William J. McDaniel, known variously as McEnglish, McCorkle, McIsaac, or anything beginning with a “Mc”. He joined the Operations staff. We were also joined by our first Wing Engineering Officer, Major Arren A. (“Ace”) Akins, who until then was keeping ‘em flying at Polebrook. And the Boss traded in his chauffeur, Cpl. Eddie Barauskas, for Pfc. Garland J. Bullard, famed as the guitar-playing Singing Sam of the 91st Group.