Two historians talk about world war ii in a program titled supremacy of the skies. Donald miller discusses the Strategic Bombing of germany, followed by conrad crane who focuses on air power during the dday invasion of normandy. This is part of the world war ii annual conference. Our final panel, for what has been a great day and is only going to get better, is supremacy in the skies, allied air domination in europe. Panel, i have to say i feel a certain sigh of relief i am no longer the only world war i guy here, but a gentleman for whom i have tremendous respect, personally and for his scholarship, dr. John mauro. Has really become a pillar in the faculty at the university of georgia, and in the field of military history more widely although of course he and i share a great interest in the First World War and have both done work in that era. Not limited to world war i as you can see today but world war ii and to other conflicts in American Military history. Month, ther this Pritzker Military museum and library awarded john the 2019 Pritzker Military museum and Library Literature award a Lifetime Achievement in military writing. And i cant think of anybody who deserves it more. [applause] thank you, john. Much, ed. Ks very are you ready to take to the air . Are you tired of being on the ground . Have you had enough no . You are about to get more but from above. Look above you. T51, but it is in the insignia of the b 51, not the eighth air force. 17th up there. That if i gotel high enough on what they discussed, i would fly the damn thing. Be ready for a tremendous performance. It could get very physical, not just scholarly. But i am pleased and proud to introduce two fine friends and colleagues. We have been on what they call the president ial council of the it seems ii museum for as long as i can remember. He mustve been original members. I occasionally think they were born here. Nick moeller raised them. ,hey have been here for so long i remember when i came in thought, don miller. I knew con crane, but i didnt know don. Let me introduce than without further ado and turned the floor over to them. Let me first say as an aviation historian of the First World War, what we do have to remember is background, is that everyone in the First World War wanted to out of everybody else. This doesnt come up after the war. Everyone is trying to develop a strategic bomber. And the only country that gets around to doing it is germany planes, r planes and g twin engine, even up to six engines. Planes have the wingspan up to the 29, if you can imagine that in a five lane, but they cant create enough to do any serious damage, although they do to someroperly factories. But by the end of the war, if you read sir william greer, who is the secretary of air in world , he is sayingain to general boone, the commander of the raf, i would like to set a german city on fire. In will beyminded susceptible to that kind of terror bombing. It is worth it to remember that sir william was once again secretary of state in the mid 1930s, when england was its bombers to do exactly what he had wanted in world war i. Is the john Henry Mccracken professor of history emeritus, which means that he is a lot older than he looks, so he is retired. Himi am so happy to see here. He just came in from mississippi. We thought he was coming by mule, but he took a car. It is good for him but i was actually stopped by one of the audience who said where is john miller . We dont know. We are looking at him. No sightings on him. He looked at me and said if he doesnt get here, i am leaving. Around. Ick maybe you white might want to. Ear con but we saw him and he said i am staying. Highlys works, he is a respected authority in u. S. History, in general and in the ,istory of world war ii specifically in his scholarship and his teaching have won numerous awards so he is an all around faculty member as well as films, doing documentaries. He is one of these all around folks who can do everything. To us from to speak his magisterial work on the eighth air force, masters of the year, which we are all looking it is noteing going to be hbo. It is netflix now or apple. Whenever it comes out, we are going to be there. We are waiting for that. Next to me is conrad crane. Con is a colonel retired of the u. S. Army but now chief of Historical Services of the u. S. Educationage and center, u. S. Army war college at carlisle barracks, pennsylvania. Are you going to own up to that . Go ahead. Historyt for military Samuel Eliot Morrison prize for lifetime contributions to the field of military history. He has authored numerous works on air power and various other aspects of military strategy. But the other Development Today is american air power strategy cities, war ii, bombs, civilians and oil. But he is going to diverge from that some because you can see don is going to take the high road, knocking out lived off of knocking out luftwaffe and con will prepare for dday. I will have to discipline everybody at the end. Welcome to the con, don, and j ohn show. [laughter] [applause] donald it is great to be back here. New venue. Just checked into the new hotel about 10 minutes ago. Looks great. Con and i are doing something that is supposed to it hand in fite that is supposed to hand in glove anticongruence. I will tell you how much we planned. We havent talked in six months. But we did do a dog and pony show like this in canada. Have a pretty good idea what hes going to do and i know where to stop. Point stopf point. I wanted to also mention that one of the things i think i should say before we are going to keep our marks real short and have a lot of time for q and a. I want to say a few words about how i write history of the eighth air force and the history or whatever. Rant what you are going to get today. I believe in something called the fallacy of hindsight. Hindsight is supposed to give you perspective. That is what they tell you in the history on murphy hysteria on murphy classes you take. But it can distort in this way. Lets take this panel. Conclusion, the allies land on dday. It is because they achieved your supremacy over the beaches. No air supremacy, no landing. That is how important the bombing is and the transportation bombing to the effort. And they are operating against the clock. They have five months to do this beginning in january. Because they are losing up until then. That, it ist like the result can you go, ok, this is the fallacy of hindsight. You study all of the things that led to the achievement of air all the lossest and contingencies, the bad luck, the missions that failed, the men in the planes, not just the results, you miss the whole story because nobody in any plane and in the commander behind any desk knew what was going to happen. Everything we do, no one knows what will happen to them in the two minutes they are outside of this hall. Neither did the fighters in world war ii and the general. Warcially with the air which is really if organizations. No one has flown this five or or fought this time before flown this high before or fought this before. You get the mystery of history and you get closer and get behind the eyes of the commanders. They make the decisions. At the point they make the decisions, you dont know how they will turn out. That is interesting. I want to make brief points about the key incidents that occurred in the months between january and dday. Only got the time to do dday. Some of this you already know. The first thing is a big decision, to replace ira aker as commander. It was a stupid decision in a lot of ways because he was aggressive and he was facing daunting odds and those pioneering days of the bombing. Then bombers are getting creamed because they dont have fighter escorts. But arnolds, on the chief of staff and head of the air force throughout the world, was pressuring him and doesnt feel he is aggressive enough. In many ways his fighters thought he was overaggressive. There is a myth that the air force stops bombing because they got hammered so badly in the fall of 1943 and the weather went bad. But he continued to plan missions. It was only the weather that stopped him. He had this whole plan for the operation called argument with a big week. On his desk in early november. So much for that. But jimmy becomes a good commander. The first is insisting he makes is to change tact. This led to a change in strategy. Instead of the fighter planes escorting the bombers all the way to the target and protecting them that is your first duty you are told he wants to release the fighters to go kill the luftwaffe wherever they are. Them. Ground, hit all returns from missions, you strike german airfields. That is how the great aces of world war ii. Those garage guns. Ns. Barrage gu this can only be executed with the right plane. We get the right lane. A plane a lot of people thought was a technological impossibility. The germans thought that. They never developed a fighter that had late that could go 1100 miles to poland ahead of the bombers. Same time was nimble. You can have all of the gas on that plane, it cant handle combat. In an effective way. People will have a field day with it. The air force thought that was a technological impossibility. They get to work late on it. He gets a miracle there. It is one of the most egregious mistakes. During the plane in in the nick of time. I want to lay out points we can talk about in discussion rather than going into the reasons for the delay. In the mustangs. They are going to use the mustang first effectively in mass force, in three days. They start to go after part of this campaign, killing fighters on the ground and in the sky but destroying aircraft plans and part. What they are doing here is sunowing the philosophy of thewho argued that opportunity to defeat the enemy is usually presented by the enemy himself. In this case the germans build a massively efficient aircraft infrastructure. Now they got to protect it. Trying to protect it, they lost. During big week is moderately effective. The air force were exaggerated the results and historians since then have underplayed the results. Importante some outcomes. One thing it did was forced the germans to disperse production, to decentralize it. It is not all bad for us, the allied side. In one sense it looks bad because the forest plans located often underground, they were discovered by photographers and people after the war, we never were able to hit them effectively. They were too well disguised. All of the plans are not underground. Camouflage,rks as but it is ineffective as a production mechanism, because of the larger rationalize plans are thesere productive than dispersed factories. If you have a disperse factory and increase the number of 100 in someto areas in germany, you got to get parts from one place to the others that used to be all concentrated. They ship those parts by rail. And the real some of trains become fat targets. Becomes thatil targets. It will become effective policy much later after dday, september, november and december 1943 or 1944. They finally went after berlin. The economic colossus of europe. It is the way they went after berlin that was so interesting. Spots he is not a butcher, but he says there is no diversions. Usually they will send out three toferent groups of squadrons three different targets. One might be a lowlevel target and one might not be a target at all. You turn around and go back. So the German Air Force we said we will go on predetermined targets. He will tell the germans we are coming. He wants to bring on a fight. He wants to. This is like fighters in the ring. German fighter planes taken off the robes like fighters would. They go at each other. He doesnt expect the air fights to take place between bombers and fighters but between german and american because now we have a more effective fighter. The thunderbolt continues to be a good fighter plane especially under the 66 fighter group. So we are going into germany looking for and the bombing is not affected in berlin. It is not effective. But we are not there to bomb and the guys figure this out. We are therefore a firefight. There for a firefight. And its one of the gigantic battles, one of the decisive battles. It really turned around the air war and we begin to achieve air superiority. Because here we are using a the american strategy, mass against mass. It is attritional warfare and the germans cannot win that, they dont have the productive machines. We can produce more fighters. A lot of people will tell you the bombing was less effective than it shouldve been because germany continue to produce fires produce fighters. Rate at the end of the war. But they did not have the pilots to fly them. I suggest to you that this is a pilot killing campaign. We are killing the best german fighters because they are the ones that will defend the right the reich. Luftwaffe is around berlin. Berlin,first rate on 60,000 men and women were involved in the raid. 12,000 american airmen, bomber pilots. 1000 german pilots. 50,000 support personnel. 25,000 german support personal. And german antiaircraft personnel. 60,000. And again, we take losses in these raids. 67 bombers ll 67 bombers go down and we are killing twice as many fire planes and germany cannot sustain these are unsustainable losses for the germans in these campaigns. I just want to have you think about this air war is often described as something that is impersonal. Pushbutton warfare. It has become more so. , they arefirefights described as unbelievable. Each other,ting german against american, closing speeds at 600 miles per hour, and you get a burst, about a quarter second burst, before you close into the opposition plane. Is fast but you can still see the eyes of the pilots. Not many combat veterans on the ground, not many koreans at manylcanal or army not marines at guadalcanal or the army had that. Plummets, you start to get rumors about muni and guys not flying about mutiny and guys not flying. Bennett was ordered to fly two days after the first berlin raid. He questioned it. He was shouted down. He flew that morning and he wrote in his diary that i dont know if these guys will follow me when i turned to the target. He turned around and was dubious because they had taken such staggering losses in the berlin raid, the 100 bomb group, they lost in 16 seconds. It has a staggering effect. A lot of the kids started taking pills to go to sleep, to stay awake, to be depression. And some, in horrible shape, would take morphine. They would get it out of the firstaid kits. The thing that really works in our favor in this is we are fighting with highly skilled pilots. A typical American Air Force in lets say may, 1944, 300400 hours of training. Germans, 100. If they are lucky. So we are fighting green kids. As one german pilot wrote in a book, every time i close the canopy on the plane, i feel i am closing the lid of my coffin. They are going on suicide missions. Is how, through these new not yet, we achieved complete air supremacy but certainly air superiority. The final thing that has to happen, and then we will turn it over to conrad, is the socalled battle of the buildup. The shock effect and the surprise of the invasion, and we can control the beaches. We will take staggering casualties but control the beaches. The big fight is the battle of the buildup. Germany is all set up for the battle of the buildup, who will build up so they can move effectively inland . The germans control the railroads and highway systems, so how do you do that . Now what the air force has to it is not the luftwaffe. They have to prevent them from win thep in time, to battle in normandy. Most of the german generals who were interviewed by air force personnel and others off to the war argued that they were convinced this is debatable but they argued that if we had gotten our resources up in wee and not the right time, could have blunted the invasion and one it won it. The way we do it is a thing called the transportation plan, the brainchild of a professor. At this point, ike is in control of the air force. He has taken over the eighth air force and the Bomber Command and he said this invasion depends on this. He did not want the bombers burning cities. Targets, go after oil a good idea, even churchill supported that. But we have to wait for that. Iny run three brief raids may, and they are tremendously effective. Albert said this was the end for war, the technological when they found our achilles heel, oil. We got them now. Most of the raid was against the transportation system, done by heavy and light bombers. Heavy bombers were trying to destroy trains as they assembled in the yard. In a marshaling yard city in pennsylvania, and we could hear the trains coupling at night. 1 am i leading to . French and lot of belgian civilians around these targets and they take a lot of losses. Buildup, 12,000 french and belgian civilians are killed. Churchill opposed the policy before that, he said we would leave a legacy of hate that would last for a century, between britain and france especially. But the french generals said that is war, if we are going to win it, we have to take casualties and pay the cost. Fdr said go. Ike turns the switch and they go after the target. They also went after and this proved to be more effective they went after bridges. A lot of streams in northern france. Here with fighterbombers, they go in really low and disrupt roads and bridges. You see a lot of fighter photography from the air of them blowing out trains on the run, operation chattanooga choochoo. It was not as effective as the raids i latter mentioned. At the time, the german raids have the final defenses set up and the allies hit the beaches, the left offer is in their uffwaffe offer l isnt there. 18,506 air casualties. Dday atnt diminish all, the 6000 americans killed, wounded or missing in action on the dday beaches. 18,406. I would just say this in conclusion that i think they , theye, the airmen deserve credit because they had a bad day, as con is going to tell you. But people forget the 500 campaign. For that i think they deserve equal credit in the National Memory, an equal place in the National Memory with the 6000 soldiers and airborne who were killed on the beaches and inland on dday. Thank you. [applause] for those of you who think it takes special air t stick expertise to come up with this sully wrote about the mating habits of it was hinted at, it was a bad day for the eighth. A lot of bombs missed. They took away every buddy close your eyes and about the movie the longest day, and remember the strafing attack on the british beaches. Thats what i was going to show but because of copyright i cannot, i will blame the museum for that. I am sure they could affor