Monday, Jan. 15, 1945

Back in Stride

(See Cover)

On the third day of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt's surprise offensive, fog lay like a folded shroud over the wooded hills and rocky fields of southeastern Belgium. Near Stavelot a large German armored task force of tanks, tank destroyers, self-propelled guns and trucks snaked northward. Its aims: to seize U.S. gasoline and supply dumps just beyond Stavelot, to cut in behind the communications and supply lines of the U.S. First and Ninth Armies. At little Stavelot (pop. 5,000) the Germans would be only 22 miles from Liege, vital U.S. supply point at the end of the line from Antwerp. If Liege with its rich booty fell to the Germans, the U.S. First Army would have to retreat from the whole Aachen-Duren area.

Yet there seemed no way to meet the German force. In front of the advancing enemy were only pathetic detachments of U.S. service troops, supply stevedores, civil-affairs officers, medics, clerks. Combat infantry to delay the attack was coming up to the Stavelot area, but U.S. tanks needed at least 40 hours to get there.

Volunteers. On the day before this crisis, slim, restless Major General Hoyt Sanford Vandenberg, commander of the U.S. Ninth Air Force, had popped into the headquarters of 40-year-old Major General Elwood Ricardo Quesada, head of one of the Ninth's chief components--the IX Tactical Air Command, whose fighter bombers were stationed back of the First Army. "Van" Vandenberg and "Pete" Quesada went over reports, decided that this was the real thing. The immediate task was to muster every fighter bomber into attacks, to impede Rundstedt's armored spearheads. Generals Van and Pete faced hard facts: 1) at many places air power alone stood between the German columns and their objectives; 2) there was little hope that the week-long drizzle and fog would let up long enough to get a plane off the ground.

When, next day, Pete Quesada heard of the columns approaching Stavelot, he called for two volunteers to take a long chance: to fly their speedy Mustangs into the soup, trying to locate the enemy's forces. The names of the volunteers told something about the country they were fighting for: Captain Richard Cassady and 2nd Lieut. Abraham Jaffe.

Cassady and Jaffe found they had to fly less than 100 feet above the floors of narrow valleys to get a glimpse of the roads. But eventually they spotted what they were looking for: a column headed by 60 German tanks and armored vehicles, with their attendant scores of trucks and guns. Guns blazing, the Mustangs swept down the length of the column. The Germans were so surprised that they did not fire until the Mustangs had made three passes.

Cassady and Jaffe got back with the information. Vandenberg's men were ready with antitank guns that travel 400 m.p.h. -- P47 Thunderbolt fighter bombers. For the next four hours the Thunderbolts struck in groups of four, boring in through the mist with flak-scarred wings nearly scraping the towering hills, to drop their bombs and to rake the column with rockets. One contingent found another column of comparable size on a winding road, gave it the lethal works.

Then darkness closed in. The pilots of General Quesada's "Hell Hawks" and "Panzer Duster" groups had counted 126 enemy tanks, armored vehicles and trucks destroyed, 34 more damaged. The U.S. loss had been one plane. The pilots itched for more such good hunting. But next day the fog was so bad they could not even take off.

Only after U.S. tank forces arrived in the Stavelot area the second day after the Ninth's attack did Quesada's men learn how effectively they had stopped that Nazi thrust. The German columns were in approximately the same positions they had been when the pilots found them, and they were still disorganized. No German tank ever got far beyond Stavelot.

Measure of Success. No airman had ever contended that air power alone could stop an offensive, even in perfect weather. But the destruction of those fog-shrouded Nazi tanks could stand as a textbook example of tactical air power soundly applied under correct air-force doctrine.

What Vandenberg's Ninth had done impressively indicated what the Germans would be up against as long as capable Allied hands retained control of the skies. The Ninth had good hunting; by this week it had counted a tremendous bag since the offensive started:

P: 4,727 enemy motor transports destroyed, 13,094 damaged.

P: 760 tanks and armored vehicles destroyed, 490 damaged.

P: 161 locomotives destroyed, 29 damaged.

P: 1,943 freight cars destroyed, 1,574 damaged.

Measure of Failure. In destruction aground these were totals to stagger even an air enthusiast's imagination of air power on the make. But they were also a measure of the power Rundstedt had thrown into the offensive, of the reserves he had massed to keep his drive going. The German power, assembled under the handicap of air inferiority, was also a measure of the failure by the Allied command and by Vandenberg's Ninth (the biggest air force on the Continent) to use air tactics to prevent such an offensive.

The air tactician believes that his battle should be fought in three basic phases: 1) beat down the enemy's air force, make it impotent to interfere with air and ground action; 2) isolate the battlefields by clipping the enemy's communication lines, bashing his roads and bridges, strangling his supplies; 3) give the ground forces direct support by attacking enemy troops, tanks, strong points.

These were the fundamentals which the British and U.S. air arms had followed to their successes in Africa and Europe. There were historic examples in every Allied airman's mind. In Africa, breezy Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham had combined the three tenets to slug the Germans out of the sky, and then pace Montgomery's march across the desert with advance air strikes. The Americans used the technique to break the stalemates below Rome. D-day was the prime result of applying Principles 1 and 2 (the whittled Luftwaffe had been pushed back from the Channel, the Seine-Loire triangle had been effectively isolated days before the invasion). The Allies' sweep across France was speeded by air power's application of Principle 3 in team with swift, smart ground tactics.

But after the Allies had got themselves enmeshed in the Westwall offensive, something seemed to happen. Weather was admittedly bad for ambitious air operations. Ground commanders pressed hard for more air support of infantry to supplement their artillery. For one reason or another, tactical air power turned largely to bombing of pillboxes, strafing of enemy gun positions.

There was good reason why the first task of pinning down German air strength could be let slide for a time: the Nazi air force had pulled back into Germany. Enemy airfields near the front were empty of planes most of the time; the hoarded Luftwaffe was largely hidden.

But there were other tasks that might have been tackled back of the 50-mile sector through which Rundstedt struck. There bridges were intact, roads were unharmed. A rail line operated from the Rhine nearly to the Allied line opposite Trier.

Quick Change. The Rundstedt assault changed the picture in a hurry. Air power got back in tactical stride. The slighted jobs took a lot of doing in a hurry. But by this week General Vandenberg could report on Principle 1: his Ninth had destroyed 457 German aircraft, probably knocked out 59 more, damaged 169. The Ninth's loss was 202 aircraft.

Vandenberg was willing to let the German airmen come to him ("We've been trying for months to make them come up; now we've got 'em where we want 'em"). The Luftwaffe came in surprising strength. Despite its losses earlier in the offensive, it was able last week, in an early-morning attack on Vandenberg's and Coningham's airfields, to mount its biggest day in the air since Dday. Over most of the Ninth's fields the enemy took a beating. But over some of the British dromes in Belgium and The Netherlands the German strafers had a big day against parked, unprotected planes. The result, at best, was a slim victory for the Allies. The enemy, short of experienced pilots, lost 363 aircraft and about that many pilots. The Allies, rich in aircraft replacements, were only temporarily embarrassed by their sizable (but unannounced) losses.

On Principle 2 Vandenberg could report: all rail bridges on lines leading to the bulge were down and were being kept down by repeated attacks. Only one main bridge still stood in the Belgian salient. Back of it the bombers had created a bridgeless arc extending from Cologne to the Moselle River. The.German railheads were pushed steadily back by continued attack. But the bridges over the Rhine were left standing. "Ike" Eisenhower apparently still believed that the Germans would commit all they had to a battle west of the Rhine (TIME, Dec. 4).

Now that it was on the loose, the Ninth might turn in a classic of tactical air war. But the man who had speeded it into action was no longer commander of all of it. The German bulge had split Hoyt Vandenberg's rule over it. Two of his three fighter-bomber components--Quesada's and Brigadier General Richard E. Nugent's--had been shifted at least temporarily from Vandenberg's to "Mary" Coningham's command. The switch was a part of the realignment by which Field Marshal Montgomery had taken over command of the U.S. First and Ninth Armies, with which Quesada's and Nugent's air groups had been bracketed. Actually the shift was mainly administrative: Vandenberg could still call on Coningham to borrow planes, as Coningham had called on him before.

Tall (6 ft.), gregarious Hoyt Vandenberg still had a big outfit and able sub-commanders. The XIX Tactical Air Command, headed by quiet, efficient Brigadier General Otto P. ("Opie") Weyland (rhymes with island) was Vandenberg's link to the battlefields of Lieut. General George S. Patton's Third Army. Vandenberg's bomber outfit was a whopper, headed by Brigadier General Samuel E. Anderson, whose Marauders and Havocs had played a big part in pushing the German airfields back from the Atlantic in advance of Dday.

Mature Youthfulness. At 46 (on Jan. 24), Hoyt Vandenberg is typical of many top-rank U.S. airmen. He combines the energy of an athlete with mature judgment. He is dead serious and fluent about anything having to do with aviation, reasonably interested in such lesser matters as golf (low 80s), tennis, gin rummy, Scotch highballs and good panatelas. Like most airmen of top rank, he has spent all his Army career learning and unlearning about air operations.

He rates as one of the U.S. Air Forces' thinkers as well as doers, with a talent for staff work and planning, and an added gift of good looks and attractive, easy manner. He gets along with people--and he has got along famously with Air Forces Chief Henry H. Arnold, General Eisenhower, Carl ("Tooey") Spaatz, Jimmy Doolittle, many others.

He hit it off well with Doolittle when he was Doolittle's chief of staff in Africa, but incurred his frowns for sneaking out on combat missions without letting Doolittle know. (Doolittle had wanted to go himself.) Once, on a flight to Gibraltar, Vandenberg manned a waist gun, helped drive off a German attacker while Doolittle took the place of the wounded copilot.

Vandenberg (a nephew of Michigan's U.S. Senator) gets along with his crewmen and enlistees by talking air-slanguage with the slangiest of them,* playing volleyball and ping-pong with them, and usually beating them. A dashing figure in impeccable uniform, cap set at a rakish angle, he seems to be always in action. He usually flies his own Thunderbolt in hops to staff headquarters. Back at his own post, he wants a lot of his own staff around in the evening, insists on singing with a quartet although he cannot carry a tune.

The good breaks seem to come to him, but he works hard at his jobs. At West Point he boned for the air service, graduated 240th in his 1923 class of 261, made the air grade by reason of his superb physical condition (he is a lithe 165-pounder), became one of the Army's crack attack pilots and instructors. He met his wife at a West Point hop. They have a son, 16, who wants to go to the Academy, and a daughter, 19.

In World War II's five years he has come up from major to major general, has won a string of decorations. He has got around--as a sort of Air Forces diplomat. He got along with the Russians, helped persuade them to give the Allies bomber bases. He got along with the British as Eisenhower's deputy air commander in London (the British refer to his tactical planning as "outstanding"). He was at the Quebec, Cairo and Teheran conferences.

Vandenberg took over the Ninth last August, when Lieut. General Lewis H. Brereton was assigned command of the First Allied Airborne Army. Since then Vandenberg has wielded the weapon of his big air force with skill and devotion. If other top airmen had any criticism of the Ninth, it might be that its bosses had got to working too closely with ground-force commanders. The problem is a delicate one. Coordination of air and ground operations is highly important in battle, and nothing helps it more than good relations between the air and ground commanders. But it is the unalterable nature of the infantry general to get all the close air support he can lay his hands on, then yell for more. Somewhere in the process of wholehearted cooperation, the air commander may find himself being seduced into giving extra ground support at the expense of sound tactical air doctrine. Then an enemy bridge stands unmolested, while the plane that ought to be bombing it is miles away, working out on a tank or a pillbox that might better be dealt with by a self-propelled gun.

But where is the invisible point at which, for the airman, cooperation becomes seduction? It is the kind of argument that could go on forever. Last week Vandenberg and his men were too busy blasting Germans to join in.

* Samples: "clobber"--to destroy an enemy plane; "beaver"--to shoot holes in an enemy plane; "wetfeet"--to fly over the Channel; "happy valley"--where flak is heavy.

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