BATTLE OF EUROPE: The Man Who Paved the Way

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The ultimate outcome of the ETO poker game will largely determine the size of the sailboat Spaatz intends to moor in the Potomac after the war. After 18 months he is about even, but all the players agree he is sure to wind up either a big winner or big loser. Aside from the sailboat, Tooey has another special dream of heaven—to come home to Alexandria in the evening and sit down on the floor of the living room. Then Tatty will mix him a pale highball. His second daughter Becky (wife of an air force lieutenant and mother of Tooey's granddaughter "Pinky") will play Beethoven on the piano. The third daughter, twelve-year-old Carla ("Boops") will join Tooey on the floor with the latest of the stray kittens she collects. And that will be that.

Long Road. Before the General attains that dream, he has a lot more warring to do. For Tooey Spaatz, the real march on the long, straight road to victory really began on the night of Feb. 19, 1944, a date for the historians of air power to remember.

Spaatz and his staff had gathered at

X-House as usual, for dinner and then for coffee in the big living room. There they talked shop, but this night there was no poker game. After months of building up U.S. strategic bombing power, after maddening delays and unavoidable diversions of equipment to other theaters of war, General Spaatz at last had the force in hand for fullscale, daylight, precision bombing of the enemy; he was waiting for weather reports.

Spaatz knew already that the time was strictly limited for using his weapon the way he wanted to use it; the day of invasion had been set. Quietly Sally Bagby put through a call to Jimmy Doolittle. Over the phone (equipped with a secrecy scrambling device) Tooey talked in low tones; the bombers were ready. A weather report came in. It was better than it had been for days, but still not too good. Bad icing conditions were forecast at 5,000 feet over the rendezvous area.

But Tooey was anxious to make a start on his greatest assignment: knocking the props from under the German air force. His plan was ready, with six top-priority factories listed for destruction in the first paralyzing blow.

"It's so important that I would risk the loss of 200 planes," he said.

Long Wait. At 11:30 p.m. Spaatz made his decision. Orders flashed out, at bases throughout Britain ground crews tumbled out of their bunks to ready the armada — 1,600 bombers and fighters. The attack was to mark the beginning of modern precision air war. In the paneled room at X-House Spaatz and his officers talked on until 2 a.m., then went to bed.

Tooey's gamble turned out well. By next evening the results were in. The icing condition had not developed. Instead of 200 planes, 41 had been lost. Four of the six targets had been smashed, the other two severely damaged. From that night on, Tooey kept them flying. In the comparatively brief time this super-power bombing had to work, it forced the Luftwaffe to become an in-&-out air force, fighting hard one day but refusing battle the next.

By this desperate tactic of hoarding planes the Nazis have succeeded in holding together a fighter force that will still be formidable. But it is almost certainly a hollow-shell force.