(See Cover)
In the air over Europe a great battle is nearing its climax. The combined forces of the R.A.F. and the U.S. Eighth Air Force are in head-on collision with the bulk of Germany's fighter-plane strength. The issue may be decided in the next month. On it may depend: 1) success or failure of an Allied invasion; 2) the answer to the question: Can Germany be bombed out of the war?
On the western air front the Germans have concentrated 50 to 60% of their total strength in fighter planes. They have stripped the Russian front to a thin cover of fighters, almost denuded the Mediterranean front. All their new fighter production is being sent to the west, and with it their best pilots. They are using every known tactic of air warfare and many new ones to break up the formations of big Allied bombers raiding Germany by day and by night. They have bombed them from the air, have devised planes to carry rocket guns. They are ' massing their fighters in formation to obtain a concentration of fire and lately have even used captured U.S. Flying Fortresses with American markings to sneak into the U.S. formations and spy out their missions.
The Allies, in their campaign, are using the greatest air force the world has known: a combination of the daylight precision bombing planes of the U.S. Eighth Air Force and the heavy nighttime saturation raiders of the R.A.F. This combined force is fighting a new kind of aerial war. with strategy and tactics made possible by the unique combination of day & night bombers, and by the quantity of subsidiary aircraft for diversionary attacks which the U.S. and Britain could supply. The effects of their joint offensive have already been felt on every battlefield in Europe. If they can overcome the German defenses, their campaign may decide the war before an Allied soldier has set foot on western European soil.
The Combined Force. This new air war is what airmen have envisaged since the first plane dropped the first bomb in the earth-crawling battles of World War I. It is land warfare carried to the air in battles as intricately planned, as painstakingly put into operation as the movement of great armies on the ground. It is a war in which each airplane flies in strict coordination with hundreds of others, in which every bomb dropped contributes its share to a carefully planned pattern of destruction. This pattern, by its cumulative effect, is designed to bring Germany to her knees.
To the world at large this air war is still a jumble of seemingly unconnected attacks on a steadily increasing number of German targets. To the heads of the combined U.S.-British air forces in Britain, and to the German High Command, it is a vast chess game whose players move freely in three dimensions. To win this game, or at least to stalemate it, the Germans are putting virtually all of their air effort into defense.