BATTLE OF EUROPE: The Man Who Paved the Way

(See Cover) Four days before the Great Invasion the aerial encirclement of Fortress Europe was completed.

U.S. Flying Fortresses took off from Italy, bombed rail targets in Rumania, flew straight on to new U.S. bases in the heart of the Soviet Ukraine.

From then on, every main base of attack on Germany was manned, at least in part, by Western Allied air power. Harassed German defense commanders had to rearrange their thinning squadrons to meet new bombing attacks from every direction. Allied air power had bombed around the compass.

The closing of that circle gave grim satisfaction to the man who commands U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, brisk, wiry, peppery Lieut. General Carl Spaatz.

Now his bombers could shuttle back & forth, pounding from all sides at Germany's heart, destroying the enemy whom "Tooey" Spaatz hates. That hate and satisfaction he shared with Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris of the R.A.F., his collaborator in bringing more physical damage to Germany than the Germans had felt since the Thirty Years' War.

The Enemy Standard. German propagandists, hating and fearing Harris and Spaatz, called them the "aerial bandits." But the Germans themselves had established the first bombing standards for World War II. In the celebrated blitz of 1940-41, German planes attacked Britain with an average of 200 tons of bombs a night for about 100 nights. The "measuring stick" raid on Coventry saw about 275 tons fall in seven hours.

But now Berlin has received as many as 2,800 tons in half an hour. Last month the Allies dropped 147,000 tons on German targets; this meant more than three tons a minute. The month's total was 60 times greater than the bomb tonnage dropped by the Luftwaffe on Britain in all of 1943.

General Henry H. Arnold, commander in chief of U.S. Army Air Forces, considering such figures, thinking of the 33 German cities that have been hit worse than Coventry, admitted frankly that it made him wonder: how could the Germans stand it? Now that air power has probably lost its chance to prove itself the all-powerful weapon, the invasion will show what it has done. Most airmen are sure it has bled Germany white.

The Country Club. Tooey Spaatz is one of a little group of officers who kept the tiny Army Air Corps a going concern in the U.S. after World War I. The rest of the Army might snicker about "the Flying Country Club" and its publicity tricks, but the airmen kept right on.

"Hap" Arnold led a bomber flight to Alaska. Jimmy Doolittle was the first man to fly across the U.S. in less than 24 hours. Major General William Kepner (the Eighth Air Force fighter commander) flew around in a stratosphere balloon. Spaatz himself commanded the famous endurance flight of the Fokker monoplane Question Mark. In his crew were Lieut. General Ira Eaker, now Allied air commander in the Mediterranean, and Brigadier General Elwood ("Pete") Quesada, Ninth Air Force fighter commander in Britain.

The Unteachable Gambler. Then as now, Spaatz was a shy and silent yet strangely gregarious man, who loved to have people around him, and could open up and talk fluently—especially on air power. At games he is an insatiable (and unteachable) gambler, and a hard competitor. He plays to win.