From the first small group of Eaker’s B-17s arriving under Bolero at bases like RAF Bassingbourn and RAF Kimbolton, the narrative tracks how the Eighth, Ninth, and later Fifteenth Air Forces built an Anglo-American air armada that battered Germany from the initial Rouen-Sotteville raid in 1942 to the Remagen bridgehead in 1945. Key commanders—Carl Spaatz orchestrating USSTAF from Bushy Park, Jimmy Doolittle reshaping tactics after taking the Eighth, Lewis Brereton assembling IX Bomber, Fighter, and Troop Carrier Commands, and Arthur Tedder and Trafford Leigh-Mallory pushing the “transportation plan”—steered campaigns such as Big Week against Regensburg and Schweinfurt, the P-51-escorted Berlin strikes, and the shuttle missions that leapt from Italian strips at Foggia to Soviet fields at Mirgorod, Piryatin, and Poltava. Tactical air teams led by Elwood Quesada’s IX TAC and Otto Weyland’s XIX TAC used forward strips carved near Saint-Lô and Le Mans to guide armor in Operation Cobra, choke Seine bridges at Vernon and Oissel, and smother V-weapon pads in the Pas-de-Calais under Operation Crossbow. Airlift by IX Troop Carrier Command dropped the 82d and 101st Airborne during Market-Garden and ferried Patton’s fuel across France, while massed heavies from Kimbolton, Bassingbourn, and Amendola pounded Ploesti, Hamburg, and synthetic oil plants at Leuna and Böhlen. Despite early bloodletting over Schweinfurt and Münster, long-range P-51s and P-38s decimated the Luftwaffe, enabling flawless cover for Eisenhower’s D-Day convoys, the Wesel airborne crossings of the Rhine, and relentless strikes that crippled rail hubs from Cologne-Kalk to Leipzig. By VE-Day the air offensive had wrecked German oil, transport, and morale, sealing victory even as the ground forces closed the Ruhr pocket and advanced from Antwerp to Berlin.