The strategic air campaign that defeated the Third Reich had begun with little more than the idea promulgated by [Billy] Mitchell that a major industrial power could be defeated in war from the air.

The campaign began in 1942 with a handful of aircraft, a handful of crews, and only a general idea of how to proceed. Over the course of its first year, the shape and form of the strategic air campaign gradually gained clarity. At Berkeley Square, a strategy took shape. In East Anglia, a bomber force moved toward critical mass. The dogged determination of the men in USAAF to stick with the doctrine of precision daylight attacks was questioned, ridiculed, and finally proven correct.

Big Week, as its planners had hoped, did constitute the beginning of the end. After that week, nothing was ever again the same. Albert Speer knew it and so did Hitler.

Big Week, as its planners had hoped, constituted a vindication of the strategic air campaign. Though there would be bumps in the road on the downhill slide that began that week, it was clear that Germany’s war economy had begun unraveling from that point.

Just as the Allies had found the skies over Normandy devoid of the Luftwaffe on the Longest Day, the Allies who pondered a defeated Germany saw a nation without an infrastructure.

Thanks in no small part to the men of the EOU [Enemy Objectives Unit], the complex interrelationship of the components of Germany’s war economy, such as ball bearings to aircraft manufacturing, and petrochemicals to the entire economy, had been examined, understood, and articulated as targets.

Thanks to the tenacity of the bomber crews—and the fighter pilots and all the ground crews—these targets were systematically struck, then struck again, and then again, until the very foundation of the German war economy had been destroyed. The promise of which Mitchell had spoken was fulfilled.

Thanks to the heroism and the vision of all of these people, the Third Reich and the dark curtain that it had drawn across Europe and the world, like the dark curtain in an Eighth Air Force briefing room, had been torn down forever.

As had happened on the final, climactic day of Big Week, the sun had come out across Europe.

In 1992, David J. Mathies turned sixty-five and went back to the United Kingdom for the fiftieth anniversary of the “Friendly Invasion” of England by the troops of the United States armed forces. When it was learned that David was in the country, he was invited to give a talk at the Archibald Mathies NCO Academy at Upwood in Cambridgeshire.

Though Upwood, a US Air Force installation since 1981, would be abandoned, except for its hospital, by 2005, the words that David spoke there will live as long as the memory of Archie’s heroism.

His words can also be taken to speak for that entire generation of young men, the later-named “Greatest Generation,” who served bravely and selflessly in the United States armed forces during World War II. And of course, that generation included the analysts who worked at 40 Berkeley Square through the terrible and difficult days of Black Week and Big Week.

As Walt Rostow said in an address given in Washington one year before David Mathies went to Upwood, “I do not believe that the members of EOU, caught up in exciting headquarters business, ever forgot for long those for whom we were ultimately working. After all, they were of our generation. . . . Above all, there were the aircrews who flew up from the peaceful British countryside, assembled, and, in a matter of minutes, found themselves for much of the air war plunged into an inferno of antiaircraft fire and lethal air combat—some dying or going into captivity, others limping home with dead or wounded aboard; all undergoing traumatic strain carried gracefully or otherwise for the rest of their lives.”

Rostow was aware of Archie Mathies and recognized that they shared the bond of being of that unique generation.

“In the aging of my memory, I always come back to England and the Eighth Air Force,” David Mathies reflected in his talk that night in Upwood. “Always there echo and reecho in my ears, just as they probably echoed in Archie’s ears, three words: ‘duty, honor, country.’ Duty. He felt that it was his job as a practicing Christian to try to save that pilot’s life. It was certainly the honorable thing to do. Country. Oh yes, America, land of the free, and home of the brave. Archie certainly was brave on that fateful, final day of his life.”

In closing, he recalled that when “Archie took off on that deep penetration mission to Leipzig, he had recently been promoted to staff sergeant, but before that day was over, he was a captain, the captain of his fate, the master of his soul.”