Sicily '43. James Holland

back to the next landing ground. The aircraft would then join them on their return from operations over the front. This enabled Coningham’s fighters and bombers to harry the enemy almost constantly, and after the fall of Tobruk on 21 June 1942 and with Eighth Army in full and desperate retreat, it was the Desert Air Force that very probably saved it from annihilation, hammering the pursuing Axis forces without let-up.

      The pause that followed between Rommel’s defeat at Alam Halfa at the very beginning of September that year and the Battle of Alamein in the third week of October had allowed Coningham and Elmhirst to develop their forces yet further. Piecemeal units were kicked into touch and replaced by groups of fighters, divided into three wings, each with its own administrative staff. This centralization of administration allowed wing and squadron commanders to get on with the job of leading their men and fighting the enemy rather than worrying about paperwork and logistics. It also meant the pilots could train harder and better. Gunnery techniques were improved and the hours in logbooks increased. Coningham didn’t want his pilots thinking about flying; that was to be automatic. He wanted them thinking about how best to shoot down the enemy or destroy targets on the ground.

      Like Tedder, Coningham also firmly believed the aim of a tactical air force should be to win air superiority over the battle area. Once that was achieved, more direct support could be provided for the troops on the ground. In other words, while the Desert Air Force could offer close air support to Eighth Army, it could do much more than that; but although it was obviously vital to form close working relations with the army command, it was also essential that the air commander be left to command his force how he, as an airman, thought fit. Sometimes, for example, he could best help troops down below not by responding to a specific target request, but by neutralizing a threat further back behind the enemy.

      Coningham had also learned from the enemy, and while he had been impressed with how effective dive-bombing could be, he had also realized how vulnerable the Junkers 87 Stuka was as it emerged from its dive to any Allied fighter waiting to pounce, and that generally it was simply too slow in all forms of flight. Instead, he increasingly used fighters, especially the rugged US-built P-40 Kittyhawks, as fighter-bombers, not least because they could out-dive the latest Messerschmitt 109s and Macchi 202s. The ‘Kittybombers’ soon became an incredibly effective weapon, and increasingly so as the pilots gained in experience. Able to hurtle towards a target at speed, which made them harder to shoot down, they could drop their load and speed on out of the fray. The results were quickly felt. Not only did the RAF save Eighth Army’s bacon, it contributed to the victory at Alamein every bit as much as the troops on the ground – as Montgomery, to be fair to him, freely acknowledged. And Monty also accepted and understood the importance of working hand-in-hand with the air forces, gladly agreeing to joint tactical HQs as Coningham had proposed.

      Coningham’s developments, backed up by Tedder and combined with the authority to act independently from the army commanders conferred by Churchill, transformed close air support in North Africa and laid down the basis of future doctrine not just for the RAF but for the USAAF as well – which was significant, because with the TORCH landings had arrived burgeoning US air forces, including a bevy of bright, dynamic and hugely competent airmen only too happy to learn, improve and develop the very exciting and ever-growing potential of air power.

      Prominent among them was Lieutenant-General Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz, who had first reached North Africa soon after the TORCH landings as USAAF Theater Commander. Spaatz was fifty-one, with a resolute jaw, trim silver moustache, intelligent eyes and a natural air of charisma and authority. An experienced airman with combat experience from the First World War, he had risen up the ranks of the Air Corps during the 1930s to become Chief of Plans. A close friend and colleague of General Henry Harley ‘Hap’ Arnold, C-in-C of the USAAF, Spaatz had been at the forefront of modernizing America’s air forces. Energetic, open-minded and forward-thinking, he oozed competence and good sense from every pore. Sent to Britain in 1940 as an observer, he had swiftly – and correctly – concluded the Luftwaffe had little chance of winning the Battle of Britain. A bomber man first and foremost, he recognized that weight of numbers, both of aircraft and of bombs, counted, and that the Luftwaffe simply didn’t have enough of either. But he’d also been impressed by RAF organization, and had returned to Britain earlier in 1942 to take command of the fledgling US Eighth Air Force.

      US involvement in North Africa meant that no sooner had he begun to lay foundations for the Eighth than he was needed in the Mediterranean instead. He had arrived in Algiers in November with a number of misgivings, not least the depletion of Eighth Air Force, which lost some fourteen units of fighters, bombers and transports to the Mediterranean.

      There had been a further concern, however, and that was doctrinal. The Eighth was a strategic air force designed to operate on its own, and they had worked out and agreed their doctrine for daylight operations in coordination with, but separate from, RAF Bomber Command. The duties of Twelfth Air Force in North Africa, however, were very different: part strategic, part coastal and part tactical in support of ground operations. For this he had good numbers of aircraft, but inexperienced crews, an untested logistical organization and no doctrine at all for close air support. What’s more, unlike the RAF, which was an independent armed service, the US air forces were part of the army. Eighth Air Force could operate without interference from the army ground forces, and were already doing so; but North Africa was already proving a different kettle of fish.

      As if to complicate matters further, there had been no unified command. The Americans were doing their thing in Twelfth Air Force, and the RAF were doing theirs – and were also split up between Eastern Air Command in Algeria and Tunisia, and the Desert Air Force and other units of RAF Middle East. The set-up had been designed in this way to support the landings and on the assumption that Tunisia would be swiftly captured; but by the end of 1942 it was clear that this had been wishful thinking. Spaatz, quite rightly, had felt that the dispersal of command and total lack of any coordinated close air support doctrine had been threatening to undermine the material strength being thrown into the theatre.

      But everything the Allies had been doing in Tunisia in terms of air power had been new. Even in Libya, where Mary Coningham had been developing his Desert Air Force into a finely tuned tactical force offering close air support, he and his men had still been feeling their way and working out methods on the hoof. What’s more, they only had Eighth Army to support, whereas in north-west Africa there were the American, French and British ground forces to support, all new to fighting and each with different structures and attitudes to air power. Joined-up thinking on air power was decidedly lacking. Yet if they were feeling their way, it was hardly surprising. After all, just three years earlier the United States had only had an air corps amounting to a handful of fighter planes; it had already come an incredibly long way in really no time at all.

      Clearly, unifying the Allied air forces in the Mediterranean had been essential; and it had been done, as part of the shake-up in February 1943 in which Eisenhower had been made Supreme Allied Commander and Alexander put in charge of 18th Army Group. Tedder had become C-in-C Mediterranean Air Command and so the overall Allied air commander. Under him fell RAF Malta, RAF Middle East and also the new North African Air Force, which was by far the largest single command now in the Mediterranean. This was given to Spaatz, and directly under him was now the Northwest Africa Strategic Air Command headed by another American hot-shot, Major-General Jimmy Doolittle, a celebrated aviation pioneer and a household name back in the States. In the same reorganization, all Allied tactical air forces were handed over to Coningham, first as Air Support Tunisia but then renamed North African Tactical Air Force, which also fell within Spaatz’s command. Coningham’s new deputy was Brigadier-General Larry Kuter, who had helped write the USAAF’s strategic air doctrine; he too was supremely competent and forward-thinking, and was eager to hone this exciting and rapidly developing weapon every bit as much as Tedder, Spaatz, Coningham et al. Nor was that all. Also under Spaatz’s umbrella were coastal air operations against Axis shipping and the all-important training command.

      It was notable how well these commanders, different people all, and suddenly thrown together, seemed to get on. A pioneering spirit welded them together. For sure, ruffles occurred along the way – including a fairly major spat between Coningham and Patton in March during the latter’s command of US II Corps. Patton, with no understanding at all of the