Winston Churchill has said: "Opinion is divided whether ... air power could by itself bring about collapse in Germany. . . . There is certainly no harm in finding out." In November the British-based Allied Air Forces applied themselves to that research in deadly earnest.
The statistics were impressive. From November's beginning to end, there were eight days and five nights when Europe's sirens were silent. Ideally interwoven, the U.S. Eighth Air Force and the R.A.F. saturated or outsmarted German defenses, kept their losses down to acceptable minimums (U.S. losses were 3% below October),...