The Appointed Time

Our enemy at the appointed time will feel the might of a thoroughly coordinated British-American air force.

When these words were spoken last week by Major General Carl ("Tooey") Spaatz, the U.S. Army Air Forces' commander in Britain, U.S. fighter pilots were flying over the Channel and into Occupied France. They were operating for the first time in complete squadrons commanded by U.S. officers. Behind their historic flight were weeks of training with R.A.F. squadrons, with whom the U.S. pilots had flown individually.

The circled star on their wings was the Army Air Forces' emblem, but the planes were battle-proven British Spitfires.* Other Spitfires with U.S. pilots in the cockpits roamed the Channel and the British coasts, seeking out stray Nazi raiders.

"A sort of beginners' proposition," an Army spokesman in London called these initial flights. Many, many more U.S. beginners were training with the R.A.F. It was from them that the blow at Germany would come; and they were evidently almost ready to strike.

Vindicating Blow. This week they struck--and in a way to answer recent criticism of the Army's heavy bombers. Gist of this criticism had been that, while they were good flying machines, they were no good for attack on heavily defended Europe. None other than blunt, blue-jawed Brigadier General Ira Eaker, chief of the U.S. bomber command, led a force of twelve U.S. Flying Fortresses on the kind of mission for which they were designed: a daylight, high-altitude raid requiring the utmost precision in bombing.

Upon ancient Rouen, where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, the Fortresses plumped bomb after bomb. Great geysers of smoke and sand rose from Rouen's railway yards, now an important link in the Nazis' transportation system. A Fortress gunner shot down one of the Nazis' famed FW190 fighters; escorting allied fighters got two more planes, lost two. Not one Fortress was lost. Drawn for Hitler was the face of the immediate future: intensified R.A.F. and U.S. raids at night, U.S. day raids on a scale which Germany (and the R.A.F.) had not believed possible. Happy General Eaker had lived up to his own aggressive dictum: "Air leaders do not send men; they lead them."

Said Ira Eaker's superior, Major General Carl Spaatz, when the bombers returned: "This marks the real start."

The scale of the coming raids of course will not be announced in advance. But the known flow of U.S. crews and bombers to Britain is huge. At a conservative guess, U.S. participation should at least double the average bomb tonnage the R.A.F has dropped in recent months. Before winter's end, 30 German cities might be Cologned. In that case, the United Nations will not lose the war in 1943.

* "A flat lie," Lieut. General Henry H. Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces, last week called a report that the Spitfires were being used in preference to U.S. fighters. The alternative assumption was that they were being used because they were plentiful in Britain.

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