Air Force Museum
Fifteenth Air Force—Strategic Bombing from Italy
In September 1943, the USAAF formed the Fifteenth Air Force, uniting its Mediterranean heavy bomber forces together at bases in southern Italy. The USAAF could now mount major strategic raids in southern and eastern Europe, creating even more pressure on the Luftwaffe defense.
In depth
History & service
Image String of bombs on the way to hit the Messerschmitt fighter plant in Wiener Neustadt, Austria.
Image Fifteenth Air Force heavy bombers obliterate the Bresso aircraft factory in Milan, Italy.
Image Medical personnel remove the body of a navigator killed on a raid against the ball-bearing plant at Steyr, Austria.
Fifteenth Air Force and 727^{th} Bomb Squadron patches worn by B-24 bombardier 1^{st} Lt Robert Henbest.
Bombardier Harold Cooke made these items while imprisoned after he was shot down over Regensburg in February 1944.
Fifteenth Air Force emblem and map carved from a chair seat with a table knife.
Aircrew badge display made by wrapping tin foil around actual badges. The frame was made from bed slats, the padding from an RAF uniform, and glass from a window.
Ike jacket worn by Fifteenth Air Force “togglier” SSgt James Walsh. On some heavy bombers, an enlisted person called a togglier dropped the bombs on cue from the lead aircraft. The togglier also manned the nose guns.
Aircraft change the battlefield
In the First World War, aircraft became valuable because they could see beyond the front line. Reconnaissance and artillery observation affected decisions on the ground. Once that information mattered, opposing forces had reason to attack the aircraft gathering it. Fighters, defensive armament, and increasingly specialized missions developed around this contest over observation and freedom of movement.
The aircraft were fragile by later standards, but their crews worked inside a rapidly expanding military system. Training, maintenance, replacement aircraft, photography, communications, and weather reporting supported each sortie. Improvements in engines and armament changed tactics, while the pressures of combat exposed weaknesses that might have taken much longer to discover in peacetime.
Personal stories should be read alongside those systems. A uniform or a named aircraft connects the war to an individual, but the individual depended on many others and operated under constraints that skill could not eliminate. Aircraft from opposing sides show how designers answered similar problems in different ways. The later military collections in Dayton and at Udvar-Hazy reveal what endured: the need to gather information, protect friendly forces, move people and supplies, and coordinate action across distance. The scale changed enormously; the relationship between an aircraft's design and the job it had to perform remained fundamental.
