Big Week Begins: Allies Cripple German Air Power

Over a thousand American heavy bombers crossed the English Channel on the morning of February 20, 1944, and for the next six days the Allied air forces systematically destroyed the German aircraft industry in the most concentrated bombing campaign of the European war. Operation Argument, known as "Big Week," sent wave after wave of B-17s and B-24s against fighter factories, ball-bearing plants, and assembly facilities across Germany. The operation cost the Allies 226 bombers and over 2,000 airmen, but it broke the Luftwaffe’s ability to defend German airspace and made the D-Day invasion possible. By early 1944, the Allied strategic bombing campaign was in crisis. American daylight bombing raids deep into Germany were suffering unsustainable losses. The October 1943 raid on Schweinfurt’s ball-bearing factories had cost 60 bombers out of 291 — a 20 percent loss rate that would destroy the Eighth Air Force in five missions. Something had to change before the planned invasion of France in June. Two developments made Big Week possible. The P-51 Mustang, fitted with a Merlin engine and drop tanks, could escort bombers all the way to Berlin and back. And General Jimmy Doolittle, who took command of the Eighth Air Force in January 1944, changed fighter doctrine: instead of staying close to the bombers, escort fighters were unleashed to hunt German interceptors aggressively. The hunters became the hunted. Big Week targeted aircraft factories at Leipzig, Regensburg, Augsburg, Stuttgart, and Brunswick. The Eighth Air Force flew from England while the Fifteenth Air Force struck from Italy. Over six days, the combined forces dropped nearly 10,000 tons of bombs. German fighter production facilities were heavily damaged, though Albert Speer’s dispersal program would rebuild much of the capacity within months. The irreplaceable loss was pilots: the Luftwaffe lost hundreds of experienced fighter pilots who could not be replaced at the rate they were being killed. Big Week did not destroy German aircraft production, but it destroyed the Luftwaffe’s ability to contest Allied air superiority — and air superiority over Normandy was the prerequisite for everything that followed on June 6.