Eighth Air Force

• 1. Introduction

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  The Eighth Air Force flew its first heavy bomber mission on the 17th of August 1942. Twelve B-17 Flying Fortresses left RAF Grafton Underwood, bound for the Rouen-Sotteville rail yards in France. In the co-pilot's seat of the lead aircraft, Butcher Shop, sat a young pilot named Paul Tibbets. Three years later, on the 6th of August 1945, Tibbets flew the Boeing B-29 Enola Gay. He dropped the first atomic bomb, Little Boy, on Hiroshima. That single thread connects a bomber command formed in 1942 to the nuclear-capable force that exists today. How did a unit assembled in 1942 become the organization that now holds America's stealth bombers, supersonic bombers, and heavy bombers under one headquarters? What did it cost to fly daylight raids over occupied Europe? How did a command built to fight Germany end up fighting in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq?

• 2. First Blood Over Europe

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  VIII Bomber Command was established on the 19th of January 1942 and activated at Langley Field, Virginia, on the 1st of February. Within two weeks it moved to Savannah Army Air Base, Georgia. By the 23rd of February, an advance detachment had set up at RAF Daws Hill, near RAF Bomber Command's headquarters at High Wycombe. The ground echelon of the 97th Bombardment Group reached RAF Polebrook and RAF Grafton Underwood on the 9th of June 1942. It was the first American combat group to arrive in Britain.

  Six RAF-flown Douglas Bostons of the 15th Bombardment Squadron struck four airfields in the Netherlands on the 4th of July 1942. Six more experienced Bostons from No. 226 Squadron RAF joined them. Captain Charles C. Kegelman led the American crews. Flak shot away the right propeller of his aircraft over De Kooy Airfield and set the engine on fire. Kegelman brought the crippled bomber home anyway. On the 11th of July, General Carl Spaatz awarded him the Distinguished Service Cross, the first earned by anyone in the Eighth Air Force. The other American-flown Boston went down over De Kooy.

  By June 1943 the command had become the daylight half of the Combined Bomber Offensive against Germany, striking factories and cities alongside RAF night raids. That same month, two of its groups began training for Operation Tidal Wave, a low-level raid on the Ploiesti oil refineries in Romania. A third group, the 389th, joined them. The groups moved to Libya in July. There they hit targets with the Ninth Air Force, supporting the invasion of Sicily. Weeks after the raid, they returned to England.

  On the 4th of January 1944, B-24 Liberators and B-17s stationed in England flew their last mission under the VIII Bomber Command name.

• 3. New Commander, New Tactics

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  On the 22nd of February 1944, American airpower in Europe was reorganized. VIII Bomber Command was redesignated as the Eighth Air Force. The original Eighth Air Force became the new United States Strategic Air Forces, or USSTAF, under General Carl Spaatz. Weeks earlier, on the 6th of January 1944, Major General Jimmy Doolittle took command of the Eighth Air Force. He replaced Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker at RAF Daws Hill. Doolittle was already famous among American airmen as the 'Tokyo Raider' and a former air racer. His directive to the command was blunt: 'Win the air war and isolate the battlefield.'

  Doolittle made one change that reshaped the air war within weeks of taking command. He lifted the rule requiring escort fighters to stay tied to the bomber formations at all times. American fighter pilots were freed to fly ahead of the bombers in an air supremacy sweep. They cleared German fighters from the sky before the bombers ever reached them. The tactic crippled the twin-engined Zerstörergeschwader wings and the heavily armed Fw 190A Sturmgruppen that had been built to break up bomber formations.

  The North American P-51 Mustang made the new tactic possible. Fitted with a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine and a four-bladed propeller in place of the original three-bladed design, the P-51B improved dramatically. It could finally match the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 and the newest Messerschmitt Bf 109s. The first Eighth Air Force escort mission using the type flew on the 5th of December 1943. By 1945, all but one of the Eighth's fighter groups flew the improved P-51D. That shift set the stage for the most intense week of aerial combat the command would fly, in late February 1944.

• 4. Big Week and Berlin

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  Cold, clear weather was predicted for the last week of February 1944, opening the way for Operation Argument, popularly known as Big Week. On the night of the 19th and the 20th of February, RAF bombers hit Leipzig with 823 aircraft. The Eighth Air Force answered with over 1,000 B-17s and B-24s and more than 800 fighters. In all, twelve German aircraft factories came under attack. Targets included Junkers and Messerschmitt plants at Leipzig, an AGO factory making Focke-Wulf Fw 190A fighters at Oschersleben, and Heinkel's headquarters at Rostock.

  On the 22nd of February, twelve aircraft of the 446th Bombardment Group and two of the 453rd bombed Nijmegen by mistake. The crews did not realize they were over Dutch territory. Among the 850 civilian casualties were children on their way to school. Two days later, on the 24th of February, over 800 Eighth Air Force bombers struck Schweinfurt and the Baltic coast, losing 11 B-17s. Separately, 230 B-24s hit a Messerschmitt Bf 110 plant at Gotha and lost 24 aircraft.

  Less than a week after Big Week ended, the Eighth Air Force made its first attack on Berlin. On the 6th of March 1944, more than 700 heavy bombers and 800 escort fighters dropped the first American bombs on the German capital. A second raid on the 8th of March destroyed a ball-bearing plant at Erkner, and radar-equipped B-17s struck again through cloud cover on the 9th. Altogether, the Eighth dropped over 4,800 tons of explosives on Berlin in that first week of March. Two weeks later, on the 22nd of March, over 800 bombers returned to Berlin through thick cloud cover. Pathfinder crews of the RAF Alconbury-based 482d Bomb Group guided them to their targets. The next target for Eighth Air Force bombs would be fuel, not cities.

• 5. Fuel and the Final Battles

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  On the 13th of May 1944, the Eighth Air Force struck German oil targets for the first time. It sent 749 bombers, escorted by nearly 740 fighters, against sites in the Leipzig area and at Brüx in Czechoslovakia. A smaller force also hit a Focke-Wulf 190 repair depot at Zwickau. Over 300 German fighters rose to meet the bombers and lost nearly half their number. American pilots claimed as many as 47 kills, though the Luftwaffe still shot down 46 bombers that day.

  After the invasion of Normandy, destroying German oil production became the campaign's top priority. Eighth Air Force bombers, escorted by P-51Ds and long-range P-38Ls, hit refineries across Germany and Czechoslovakia through late 1944 and into 1945. The bombing reached as far as Hungary. Meanwhile, the Fifteenth Air Force struck oil targets in Yugoslavia, Romania, and northeastern Italy. The refineries at Merseburg, in Leuna, where most of Germany's synthetic jet fuel was made, were bombed on at least eighteen occasions. By the end of 1944, only three of the Reich's 91 refineries still ran normally; 29 worked partially, and the rest were destroyed.

  On the 1st of January 1945, the Luftwaffe launched Operation Bodenplatte. It sent its entire western fighter force, drawn from eleven day fighter wings, against 27 Allied airfields in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Germany lost over 300 aircraft, mostly to anti-aircraft fire, and the Allies replaced their own losses within weeks. German Messerschmitt Me 262 jets did not seriously threaten Eighth Air Force bomber formations until March 1945. That month, Jagdgeschwader 7 attacked over Dresden and Essen. Even the largest jet formation the Allies ever saw brought down only three bombers. On the 7th of April 1945, the Luftwaffe flew its most desperate mission of the war. Pilots of Sonderkommando Elbe rammed worn-out Bf 109s, each armed with a single machine gun, into American bombers. Of fifteen bombers attacked, eight were destroyed.

  Eighth Air Force flew its last full mission of the European war on the 25th of April 1945. B-17s hit the Skoda armaments factory at Plzeň, while B-24s bombed rail lines around Hitler's mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. One cost of the war was personal. On the 27th of June 1944, the command's chief of intelligence, Brigadier General Arthur W. Vanaman, was captured in northern France. He became the highest-ranked American prisoner of war in Europe.

• 6. The Toll and the Medals

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  Half of all U.S. Army Air Forces casualties in the Second World War were suffered by the Eighth Air Force. The total ran to more than 47,000 casualties, including over 26,000 dead. By mid-1944 the command had grown to more than 200,000 people. An estimated 350,000 Americans served in its ranks over the course of the war. At its peak, it fielded forty heavy bomber groups, fifteen fighter groups, and four specialized support groups. It could send more than 2,000 four-engine bombers and over 1,000 fighters against multiple targets in a single mission.

  Seventeen Medals of Honor were awarded to Eighth Air Force personnel during the war. By war's end the command had also earned 220 Distinguished Service Crosses and 442,000 Air Medals. Many more decorations were granted to veterans afterward and were never fully counted. Two hundred sixty-one men became fighter aces flying for the Eighth. Thirty-one of them scored 15 or more confirmed kills. Another 305 enlisted gunners were also recognized as aces. None of those decorated crews would fly against Germany again. Within weeks, plans were already underway to send Eighth Air Force bomber groups to the Pacific, to be re-equipped as Boeing B-29 Superfortress units.

• 7. A War That Never Came

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  Plans called for shifting some of Eighth Air Force's B-17 and B-24 groups to the Pacific, to be rebuilt as Boeing B-29 Superfortress units. On the 16th of July 1945, the command's headquarters moved to Kadena Airfield on Okinawa. It was assigned to the United States Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, without personnel or equipment. Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle, reassigned from England, took command there on the 19th of July. He staffed the new headquarters with personnel drawn from the inactivated XX Bomber Command. The Eighth controlled three airfields on Okinawa: Bolo, Futema, and Kadena, and received its first B-29 on the 8th of August 1945.

  The mission at first was to organize and train new bomber groups for the invasion of Japan. Those B-29 raids from Okinawa were planned alongside the Twentieth Air Force, operating out of the Mariana Islands. The atomic bombings of Japan brought about the Japanese surrender before Eighth Air Force ever saw combat in the Pacific. The command stayed on Okinawa until the 7th of June 1946, its bombers never having fired a shot at Japan. Then, on that same day, the headquarters was reassigned into an entirely new organization, one built around nuclear deterrence: the Strategic Air Command.

• 8. Cold War to Global Strike

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  On the 7th of June 1946, Eighth Air Force headquarters moved from Okinawa to MacDill Field in Florida. It became the new Strategic Air Command's second numbered air force. Personnel from the 58th Bombardment Wing filled its ranks, and by November the headquarters had moved again, to Fort Worth, Texas. Only the 509th Composite Group at Roswell Army Air Field could actually carry the atomic bomb in those first postwar years. The rest of the command was still converting its aircraft. Through the late 1940s and into the 1950s, propeller-driven B-29s and B-50s gave way to Boeing B-47 Stratojets and, by 1955, the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress. Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman missiles joined the arsenal too.

  When North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, Eighth Air Force deployed its 27th Fighter-Escort Wing into combat. On the 21st of January 1951, Lieutenant Colonel William Bertram of the 523rd Fighter-Escort Squadron shot down a MiG-15. It was the wing's first kill, and the first confirmed MiG kill by any F-84 pilot. Two days later the wing hit Sinuiju Airfield in North Korea and downed four more MiG-15s. By the time it rotated home, the 27th had flown more than 23,000 combat hours over some 12,000 sorties.

  Eighth Air Force entered combat again in 1965, this time in Southeast Asia, deploying B-52 and KC-135 units to bases in Guam, Okinawa, and Thailand. Its bombers carried out Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, eleven days of intensive bombing over Hanoi and Haiphong. The campaign helped push North Vietnam toward ending the fighting. In 1991, the 2d Bomb Wing spearheaded the opening of the Gulf War. It launched conventional air-launched cruise missiles from B-52s based at Barksdale against targets inside Iraq.