Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II Read Online Free

Royal Navy. As Dick was with the British Army, fighting Turks in Iraq, Guy was fighting the Turks beneath the waves of the Mediterranean, as first officer aboard the submarine HMS
E11
. Mainly during the Dardanelles Campaign, the sub was credited with sinking more than eighty vessels of various sizes. In 1915, Guy earned a Distinguished Service Order by swimming ashore to blow up a portion of the Constantinople-to-Baghdad railroad.
    World War II would find Guy above the waves as captain of the aircraft carrier HMS
Glorious
. On June 8, 1940, the carrier and two escorting destroyers were intercepted near Norway by the infamous German battlecruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
. In one of the war’s major surface actions involving the German Kreigsmarine and the Royal Navy, all three British vessels were sunk. Guy was killed by a shell from the
Scharnhorst
before
Glorious
slipped beneath the icy waves.
    By the late 1930s, Dick Hughes managed St. Albans Farms, a former dairy operation that was evolving into a comfortable suburban residential community. Overlooking the Missouri River in northeastern Franklin County, about thirty-five miles west of St. Louis, St. Albans Farms once provided around 2 percent of the milk that was sold in that city. Over time, it would supply a similar proportion of commuters to St. Louis.
    When the war began in Europe, and especially after his own brother was killed by the Germans, Dick Hughes yearned to get into the war somehow. It was partly an eagerness for revenge, or so he stated in his unpublished memoir, and partly a yearning to be a part of the twentieth century’s biggest adventure.

ONE
THE BIRTH OF AN IDEA
    “I can see it falling through the sky for a couple of seconds and then it disappears,” a thirty-year-old Italian pilot named Giulio Gavotti recalled breathlessly of his first bomb run over a target in Libya. “After a little while, I can see a small dark cloud in the middle of the encampment. I have hit the target!”
    In 2011, the world watched as NATO airpower provided the critical edge in the defeat of Muammar Gaddafi’s forty-two-year rule in Libya. In the history of airpower, compared to the great battles of World War II, the Libyan campaign of 2011 was a footnote.
    In the history of airpower, 2011 was neither a turning point nor a tipping point. It was the
centennial
.
    Exactly one hundred years earlier, in 1911, in the skies over exactly the same place, Lieutenant Gavotti’s first bomb run had been the first bomb run in the history of aerial warfare.
    With the advent of heavier-than-air flight early in the twentieth century, the armies of the world had been buying airplanes, but as with the balloons used by the armies of the nineteenth century, they were only intended as passive observation platforms.
    Among the wars being fought by European countries in the earlytwentieth century was a land grab by Italy that involved the seizure of Ottoman Turkish colonial possessions in North Africa, specifically in the area that later became Libya. November found a squadron of Italian aircraft involved. One of the pilots was Giulio Gavotti.
    “Today two boxes full of bombs arrived,” Gavotti wrote in a letter to his father in Naples. “We are expected to throw them from our planes. It is very strange that none of us have been told about this, and that we haven’t received any instruction from our superiors. So we are taking the bombs on board with the greatest precaution. It will be very interesting to try them on the Turks.”
    The rest is history.
    Three years later, the armies of Europe’s great powers, each of them now equipped with small aviation sections, were in the opening throes of World War I.
    Meanwhile, the mainstream technical establishment had been slow to grasp the tactical importance of such operations. In October 1910,
Scientific American
dismissed the idea of airplanes as war machines, noting that “outside of scouting duties, we are inclined to think that the