Shuttle Bombings in World War II

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Victory, President John F. Kennedy once declared, has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan.

The aphorism is appropriate because who it was that first came up with the plan for shuttle bombing by U. S. Air Forces based in Italy or England with landings and servicing in Soviet Russia is uncertain. The idea was grandiose in scope but failed to accomplish its purposes.

What is known is that twenty-one months after America officially declared war, General Barney Giles from the U. S. Air Staff for Plan and Combat Operations wrote the following memo to General Laurence Kuter:

Request that you prepare plans for discussions, findings, and recommendations on the employment of our heavy bomber force from Russian airports. Your plans should initially include only shuttle service, that is, take-off from England in possibly very bad weather, bomb military objectives in Germany and land under favorable weather conditions on airports in Russia; re-service and bomb German targets en route back to England or possibly en route to Italy…