The Fifteenth Air Force had continued to hit Ploesti in a specialized campaign that will be treated on its own later in this chapter. The Normandy invasion had forced the Eighth Air Force to leave the oil industry alone for the first half of June, and Spaatz was anxious to return to it. On June 8 he made oil the primary strategic aim of U. S. strategic air operations. The target system was divided up among the various Allied air forces. The Fifteenth drew Ploesti and the natural oil refineries in Austria and Hungary, as well as the synthetic plants in Silesia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The Eighth would take on everything in the rest of what had been Germany before 1938, while Bomber Command was allotted the ten Ruhr plants, although the Eighth would sometimes also attack them. Given the difficulties Bomber Command still faced in penetrating Germany, and the desirability of forcing Harris to contribute more to the oil effort, it might have been desirable to split responsibility for the northwestern refineries too.
On June 14 Spaatz restarted the Eighth’s campaign against oil in a small way. While nearly 1,300 bombers hammered other targets, 61 B-24s bombed a refinery at Emmerich, near the Dutch-German border, in the Eighth’s first attack on natural crude-oil production. On June 15 most of the Eighth was again engaged in France, but 172 B-17s struck refineries at Hannover. On June 18 the Eighth was really unleashed, against eleven different refineries at Hamburg, Bremen, and Hannover. The weather forced the use of H2X, but the attack on Hamburg seemed successful. This was the first of fifteen missions the Eighth would fly against the oil targets in the Hamburg-Harburg area; Bomber Command
Would fly four. One June 20 the Eighth mounted its largest force yet (1,361 bombers) against Germany, striking the synthetic plants at Magdeburg and Poelitz and refineries at Hamburg, Harburg, Hannover, and Ostermoor. These attacks, especially the 2nd Division’s on Poelitz, met strong resistance; 49 bombers and 5 fighters went down over Germany while 3 more bombers never flew again. Despite these exceptionally bad losses, the bombing was effective.
This was the last big mission in June that was concentrated on oil alone. On June 21, while the main force struck aircraft plants, rail centers, and other targets in Berlin, 145 B-17s of the 3rd Division hit the largest of the Fischer-Tropsch plants, at Ruhland. This force then flew to the Ukraine, carrying out the Eighth’s first shuttle mission to Soviet bases.
Even with complete air superiority—which, it bears repeating, did not always ptevent terrible losses to an individual bomber group—attacks on oil objectives sometimes failed. On June 24 an attack by 340 B-17s on a refinery at Bremen misfired when clouds and smoke screens hid the target. On June 29 the Eighth ended the month with a major mission against aircraft and V-1 plants, and a Bergius plant at Bohlen. But only 81 B-17s of the 179 assigned to Bohlen reached the target; most of the force went after the plane and missile plants. The directors of the air offensive did not yet see that attacks on airctaft plants, or at least those building piston-engine planes, were superfluous if German fuel production was crippled.®
World History
