REVIEWS
BIG WEEK
The Biggest Air Battle of World War II
by James Holland, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018, $28.
In Big Week, James Holland contends that Operation Argument (aka “Big Week”), the Allied aerial campaign waged against the Third Reich from February 19 to 25, 1944, was, if “taken as one single battle… the largest of [World War II], yet today it is largely forgotten, as is the importance of [its] epic clashes” over Germany and Western Europe. Holland’s thoroughly researched and engrossing book cogently establishes the operation’s stakes and significance.
For almost two years after the United States entered the war in December 1941, the priority in Europe of the U.S. Army Air Forces and the Royal Air Force was the massive bombing of German industry. But as the beleaguered but still dangerous Luftwaffe mauled Allied bombers and inflicted hideous casualties, the Allies finally concluded that attaining dominance in the sky by targeting enemy fighters was at
