The 4 Days That Ended Germany's Air Force (Big Week)

WW2, from the records. https://warshelf.com/ February 19, 1944. The weathermen finally see what they've waited months for: clear skies over central Germany by dawn. Over England there's cloud to eight thousand feet and icing inside it. Doolittle advises against flying, Anderson's staff braces for two hundred bombers lost on the first day, and headquarters sends them anyway. The targets are bait. Pointblank has made the German fighter force the first priority before the invasion, and the factories are chosen because the Luftwaffe has to defend them. Doolittle has already torn down the sign telling his fighters to bring the bombers home and cut them loose to hunt. Over six days the Eighth and Fifteenth fly more than three thousand eight hundred sorties and drop nearly ten thousand tons on the plants building Germany's fighters. Three Medals of Honor are won on the first day. Gotha's eastern half is destroyed, and Regensburg falls from 435 aircraft in January to 135 in March. But German fighter production goes up, moved into sheds, caves and forests. What the week really destroys is the pilots: more than a thousand day-fighter pilots lost by April, and replacements arriving with thirty hours in their aircraft. Over Normandy on D-Day, the Allies fly 14,674 sorties and the Luftwaffe in the west manages 319.