Page:A Concise History of the U.S. Air Force.djvu/37

 Despite heroic efforts to restore production, Germany found its tanks and aircraft immobilized because of growing fuel shortages. The entrance of the Me 262 jet fighter into combat inflicted occasional heavy losses on USSTAF, including thirty-three of the 445th Bombardment Group's thirty-seven bombers on September 27, 1944, but it could not change the war's outcome.

Adding Germany's railroad network to its priority target list in the autumn of 1944, USSTAF brought Germany's economy to the point of collapse by February 1945. Responding to temporary German successes during the Battle of the Bulge, Soviet requests, and a desire to hasten the enemy's surrender, USSTAF joined with the RAF in area-bombing Berlin, Dresden, and other German cities in February. Assigned targets remained industrial and transportation chokepoints in keeping with precision strategic bombing doctrine, but clouds and other factors made these missions, in effect, terror bombings. Spaatz declared an end to the strategic bombing campaign on April 16, 1945.

American airmen had decided that they could defeat the enemy most efficiently by destroying its industrial web through precision strategic bombing. In so doing they hoped to prevent a repeat of World War I's trench warfare. Ironically, the contest they found in the skies over Europe from 1942 to 1945 was in many ways just as bloody as the earlier war's contest on the ground. Medal of Honor recipient Lieutenant William Lawley of the 305th Bombardment Group flew a B-17 back from Heiterblick, over 550 miles, with a face full of broken glass and shrapnel, a dead copilot draped over the controls, wounded crewmen, and only one engine running. The numbers associated with the USAAF's tactical and strategic campaigns against Germany reveal the ferocity of the air war: 1.6 million tons of bombs dropped on Europe, 765,000 bomber sorties, 929,000 fighter sorties, 31,914 airmen dead (by combat and accident), and 27,694 aircraft lost (by combat and accident).

In the waning days of the war against Germany, Arnold ordered an independent team to evaluate air power's accomplishments and failures. Their product, called the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) and supported by 216 volumes of analysis and documentation on the European war (another 109 covered the war against Japan), concluded "that even a first-class military power―rugged and resilient as Germany was―cannot live long under full-scale and free exploitation of air weapons over the heart of its territory." The USSBS admitted that a slow buildup of aerial forces and inaccurate bombing had kept air power from reaching its potential, but judged as "decisive" the diversion of Germany's capabilities from the supporting of armies to the defending of 32