A month later, a series of similar attacks was launched on Rostock, which again destroyed about 60 per cent of the city centre by fire. As German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels stated in his diary, community life had come to an abrupt end: ‘The situation in the city is in some sections catastrophic.’ ¹²Later Harris justified the attack by pointing to the Heinkel aircraft factory on the outskirts of the town, but the real victory was psychological. While the British had failed to make any real impact on major targets, like Berlin or the cities of the Ruhr, they had proved their worth against smaller targets. Here, at last, was a demonstration to the world that the power of the RAF was on the rise.

The destruction of Lübeck and Rostock was merely a taste of things to come. On 30 May Harris launched the first thousand bomber raid of the war. The target was originally supposed to be Hamburg, concentrating as many bombers in one attack as the port normally saw in a year, but the city was temporarily reprieved when the weather over the German coast deteriorated, and the target was switched to Cologne. That night 1,046 aircraft took off for the north Rhineland, and within a few hours had dropped 2,000 tons of bombs on the city. An estimated 3,300 houses were destroyed in the attack, along with thirty-six factories, and 469 people were killed, most of them civilians. Twelve thousand separate fires raged through the city, the gas mains exploded, the water mains were severed, and all transport systems were put into such disarray that the disruption was still felt months later. ¹³But, most importantly, the RAF had achieved a major propaganda success. The magic figure of a thousand bombers was far greater than anything the Luftwaffe could achieve, and when Britain was falling behind their enemy in every other arena of the war this was an important morale boost for her people.

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A second morale boost occurred later in the summer of 1942, when the Americans entered the fray. The USA had officially joined the war shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941, but she was by no means ready for it. Like her British allies, she had been slow to arm. While Germany had been rapidly building her air force since 1935, and Japan likewise throughout the 1930s, it was not until 10 July 1940 that Roosevelt convinced Congress to spend an extra $5 billion on war production. Slowly the world’s greatest industrial giant began the long process of building her army’s air force. By the time the Axis powers declared war against America in December 1941, she was producing some 26,000 military aeroplanes per year, compared to Britain’s 20,000 and Germany’s 11,000. Even so, without experienced crews to fly them it would take eighteen months before the Americans could deploy in force over the skies of northern Europe.

The overall commander of the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) was Lieutenant-General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, the son of a Pennsylvanian doctor. Arnold had learned to fly before the First World War when he joined the Aeronautical Division of the US Army Signal Corps, and at one point had even held the world altitude record. Throughout the First World War he ran the army’s aviation schools, and rose steadily through the ranks until, in 1938, he became head of the Army Air Corps.

If Butch Harris was an uncompromising commander, Hap Arnold was positively severe. He drove his staff relentlessly, and is reputed to have given one officer such a dressing-down that he slumped dead over Arnold’s desk from a heart-attack. Impatient, austere, unceasingly demanding, he would rarely tolerate any form of failure or delay, regardless of whether there was a good reason for it or not. However, like Harris, he was widely respected as a man who got things done, and he had many friends within the air force. Also like Harris, he proved shrewd in his choice of subordinates, and surrounded himself with brilliant and energetic people like Carl Spaatz, Ira Eaker and Fred Anderson.

By the time of the Hamburg raids, Arnold’s representative in Britain was Ira Eaker, commander of the US Eighth Air Force. The contrast between Arnold and Eaker was stark. While Arnold was brusque, Eaker was thoughtful and likeable, and spent many years conducting what amounted to public relations for the USAAF. He was a highly educated man, and had attended Georgetown University, Columbia University, and the University of Southern California. Despite their differences in character the two men seem to have got on well, to the extent that they were able to write three books on military aviation together.

Early in 1942, Eaker was dispatched to Britain to set about creating an organization capable of taking the fight to Germany. From the beginning he and his entourage were welcomed by the British, who immediately handed over several airfields for their use. There has been some suggestion that British friendliness in those early days was governed by ulterior motives, and that what they really wanted was to assimilate the fledgling USAAF into a combined air force firmly under British control. However, it seems much more likely that they were simply glad to accept a new ally, and willing to pass on as much help and advice as was necessary to get them operational as soon as possible. And their help was considerable: the RAF immediately shared its radar and communications systems, as well as vital intelligence; British Spitfires were put at the USAAF’s disposal, both for fighter escort and to carry out weather reconnaissance; fuel trucks and other equipment were donated to US air bases; US airmen were given places on RAF training courses; British resources were used to help build new air bases, and the list goes on.

Relationships between the two forces, especially in the upper levels of command, were remarkably harmonious. When Eaker first arrived in Britain he lived with Harris and his family, and often brought gifts and toys from America for Harris’s young daughter. He also regularly attended Harris’s ‘morning prayers’ at Bomber Command Headquarters, when Harris and his staff chose the following night’s targets. To some degree, therefore, the RAF and the USAAF were working as a combined force from the outset. But from an official point of view, the RAF and the USAAF were, and would remain, completely separate forces, each with their own priorities and methods.

Five weeks after Harris’s thousand-bomber raid on Cologne, American airmen were ready to make their first operational flight over mainland Europe. On 4 July six USAAF crews, flying in borrowed planes, accompanied a squadron of British bombers on a daylight raid against German airfields in Holland. It was a baptism of fire: two of the six American planes were shot down by flak, while a third’s starboard engine was blown to pieces and barely managed to limp home. Nevertheless, a point had been made. The Americans had arrived in Europe.

Six weeks later a dozen American bombers made their first independent attack of the war, this time flying their own planes – the formidable B-17 ‘Flying Fortresses’ of 97th Group. Their target was the Rouen-Sotteville railway marshalling yards, to the west of Paris. As the formation crossed the English Channel, one of the lead planes was carrying General Eaker, and it is proof both of the strength of American enthusiasm and their unshakeable faith in their aircraft that such a high-ranking commander was allowed to fly on this earliest of missions. Fortunately he, and all of the American air crews, returned safely late that afternoon – although two Spitfires in the British fighter escort were shot down.

The Americans had a different philosophy from the British. While the RAF had been forced to fly by night to avoid casualties, just as the Luftwaffe had been earlier in the war, the Americans were determined to conduct their bombing in daylight. There were two reasons for this. First, they were morally opposed to the bombing of civilians – at least in Europe – and strongly believed that bombing in daylight, when they could see their proper targets clearly, would result in fewer unnecessary casualties. ¹⁴Second, they were convinced that daylight bombing would be far more effective. Unlike the British, whose bombing precision had barely improved since the First World War, the Americans had developed the highly accurate Norden bombsight, which allowed them consistently to drop bombs within fifty feet of a practice target from a height of four or five miles above the earth. ¹⁵There was a saying in the USAAF that their aviators could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet: when their accuracy was so good, it made perfect sense to pinpoint their efforts on exact targets, rather than waste their bombs over large areas by night.