Book Review: 'Big Week: The Biggest Air Battle of World War II'

The cover for the British edition of Big Week. © 2018 Penguin Books (UK) and Atlantic Monthly Press (a Penguin subsidiary) 

On November 6, 2018, the Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Britain's Penguin publishing empire, released the U.S. edition of Big Week: The Biggest Air Battle of World War II.  Its British counterpart, Big Week: The Biggest Air Battle of World War Two, had been published almost three months earlier (on August 6) and was a best-seller in Great Britain. Written by historian and BBC TV presenter James Holland, the 400-page book tells the story of the Anglo-American air forces' struggle to achieve air supremacy over Western Europe as a necessary pre-requisite for Operation Overlord, the planned Allied cross-Channel invasion of German-occupied France, which was scheduled to take place in May of 1944.

As the book's title implies, Big Week focuses on Operation Argument, a series of air strikes by American and British bombers against Nazi Germany's aircraft manufacturing industry and other sensitive targets that Adolf Hitler's vaunted Luftwaffe had to defend. On the surface, the goal was to impair Germany's ability to build the fighters and bombers she needed to retain control of the air over Europe and hinder the Allied invasion of France. But the real purpose of Argument was to lure Luftwaffe fighters and the dwindling pool of veteran pilots into battle and whittle their numbers down in a battle of attrition.

During the third week of February 1944, the combined Allied air forces based in Britain and Italy launched their first round-the-clock bomber offensive against Germany. Their goal: to smash the main factories and production centers of the Luftwaffe while also drawing German planes into an aerial battle of attrition to neutralize the Luftwaffe as a fighting force prior to the cross-channel invasion, planned for a few months later. Officially called Operation ARGUMENT, this aerial offensive quickly became known as “Big Week,” and it was one of the turning-point engagements of World War II.

In Big Week, acclaimed World War II historian James Holland chronicles the massive air battle through the experiences of those who lived and died during it. Prior to Big Week, the air forces on both sides were in crisis. Allied raids into Germany were being decimated, but German resources―fuel and pilots―were strained to the breaking point. Ultimately new Allied aircraft―especially the American long-range P-51 Mustang―and superior tactics won out during Big Week. Through interviews, oral histories, diaries, and official records, Holland follows the fortunes of pilots, crew, and civilians on both sides, taking readers from command headquarters to fighter cockpits to anti-aircraft positions and civilian chaos on the ground, vividly recreating the campaign as it was conceived and unfolded. In the end, the six days of intense air battles largely cleared the skies of enemy aircraft when the invasion took place on June 6, 1944―D-Day.


Big Week is both an original contribution to WWII literature and a brilliant piece of narrative history, recapturing a largely forgotten campaign that was one of the most critically important periods of the entire war. - Dust jacket blurb, Big Week: The Biggest Air Battle of World War II. 

Big Week begins, as most books about specific battles or campaigns are wont to do, with several chapters that set up the drama of Operation Argument's aerial apocalypse. Holland first takes readers back to the beginnings of the Allies' Combined Bombing Offensive, which was touted at the time as a coordinated effort by the U.S. Army Air Forces and Britain's Royal Air Force to take the war to Hitler's Third Reich via "round-the-clock bombing." In reality, the CBO was nothing more than an attempt by both air forces to prove which method of strategic bombing worked best: the Americans' use of B-17 and B-24 bombers equipped with Norden bombsights striking at specific targets with "precision" bombing, or the RAF's approach of attacking German cities at night using "area bombing" techniques.

In Big Week, Holland explains the genesis of these two different (and competing) strategies and how they were reflected in American and British bomber designs. He also gives readers a fascinating glimpse at the personalities of the men who created these military concepts, including the prickly Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, the commander of the RAF's Bomber Command who was determined to prove that Hitler's Reich could be defeated by night bombing alone. Harris's theories and cold, calculating manner are compared to the "can do" enterprising spirit of American generals such as Ira Eaker, James "Jimmy" Doolittle, Curtis LeMay, and Carl "Tooey" Spaatz, men who believed that strategic bombing of industrial and military targets by daylight bombers was the key to victory in the air.

The book also explains how both air forces suffered high losses to Germany's Defense of the Reich strategy, especially during the American Eighth Air Force's attempts to send its Flying Forts and Liberators deep into Germany without fighter escort. Holland shows, in heartbreaking detail, how foolish this was. In one mission (the Second Schweinfurt Raid of October 13, 1943), the Eighth Air Force sent 291 B-17s to bomb ball bearing factories in Schweinfurt, a target that had already been bombed two months earlier but was back online. The German fighters waited till the bombers' P-47 escorts reached their range limit and returned to base, then pounced on the B-17s. The Eighth Air Force lost 60 B-17s outright; 17 others were so badly damaged that they were written off as total losses when they returned to England. Worse, nearly 600 men lost their lives, 43 were wounded, and 65 bailed out and were captured by the Germans.

Big Week tells the story of how the Americans rebuilt their bomber fleet after the deadly air battles of 1943 and added a new weapon to their aerial arsenal: the P-51 Mustang. Introduced in 1943 with an underpowered Allison engine, the Mustang lacked the range and speed to escort the bombers all the way to their targets and back to base. But when it was redesigned to take the British Rolls Royce Merlin engine (the same one that powered the RAF's Spitfire) and equipped with drop tanks which carried extra fuel, the Mustang became the Allies' best fighter of World War II - and a game changer in the battle for air supremacy over Germany.

My Take

I first read about Operation Argument back in the late 1970s when I came across a copy of Martin Caidin's Flying Forts: The B-17 in World War II. I acquired that book when I was in junior high at a used bookstore, and because I'm a military aviation buff, Caidin's writing simply blew me away. His descriptions of Black Thursday (the ill-fated Second Schweinfurt Raid) and the U.S. bomber force's efforts to rebuild and continue its daylight bombing campaign in the run-up to D-Day made an indelible impression on me that has never faded.

James Holland's Big Week: The Biggest Air Battle of World War II is a more detailed look at Operation Argument and explores the six-day long series of bombing missions in a more personal, you-are-there fashion.

Holland is one of Britain's foremost contemporary historians and novelists, as well as a renowned television presenter for the BBC. He is known in Britain and the English-speaking world as the author of the ongoing War in the West trilogy, which focuses on the campaigns fought between Nazi Germany and her Italian Axis partner and the Western Allies (Great Britain, Canada, France, and the United States) in Western Europe, North Africa, and the Mediterranean. He has also written The Battle of Britain, Dam Busters, and Italy's Sorrow: A Year of War, 1944-1945 and other non-fiction works about the war, as well as several novels set during World War II.

Big Week is a well-written book that examines many aspects of a battle that broke the back of the German air force. In its pages readers will meet participants from both sides of the war, including Luftwaffe fighter pilot Heinz Knoke and his commander, General Adolf Galland; U.S. fighter aces Don Gentile and Francis "Gabby" Gabreski; the irascible Bomber Harris, who refused to send any of his Bomber Command squadrons until his superiors ordered him to, and Major James "Jimmy" Stewart, a B-24 squadron commander who was best known as a Hollywood actor but was also a respected and decorated Army Air Forces pilot.

There have been many books written about aerial warfare in World War II, but Big Week is an entertaining and informative addition to the canon. Holland uses his talents as a storyteller as well as his skills as a writer and interviewer to make the events of February 1944 come alive on the page. With Big Week: The Biggest Air Battle of World War II, Holland scores another direct hit.