BIG WEEK
It was to be the battle to end the air war, once and for all…
In the early days of 1944, as the build-up to D-Day intensified, another audacious plan was taking shape in the form of Operation Argument – a brutal and systematic strategy to finally sledgehammer the Luftwaffe into submission. At one stroke they would smash not only their air force but also the aircraft and munitions industry which supported it.
And on Sunday 20thFebruary, an airborne assault, the like of which had never before been seen, eclipsing even the Blitz at its height, was unleashed. Between the US Eighth Air Force who flew in the daytime and the RAF who took the night, over 6,000 sorties were flown over the course of a single week, and a staggering 10,000 tonnes of bombs dropped on targets across Germany. Wave after wave of bombers were escorted by the biggest array of fighter-power ever assembled. The Luftwaffe was to suffer terrible casualties and never really recovered from the shock and awe of the Allied attack.
Big Weekis, quite simply, one of the biggest air battles ever witnessed, before or since – a do or die attempt to prepare the way for the coming ground war. It is the elemental story of bomber against flak gun, and of fighter against fighter, in which tens of thousands of young men were pitted against each other in a punitive, bludgeoning clash of arms, from which there could be only one victor…
