Bomber Command certainly did hit precision targets, such as the rocket factories at Peenemünde in August 1943 and the Tirpitz on several occasions from September to November 1944, and on the night of Sunday, 16 May 1943 Wing Commander Guy Gibson’s 617 Squadron breached the Möhne and Eder dams of the Ruhr, dropping specially designed bouncing and spinning Upkeep bombs with incredible precision from only 60 feet above the water. As the actor and writer Stephen Fry has said of that raid:
It was about practice, practice, practice (for they knew not what). Then, on the day, it was about the constant monitoring of data – glide paths, magnetic compass deviations, dead reckoning pinpoints, calculations of fuel according to atmosphere and so on. These men were not just beefy brave chaps; they had real brains. Lancasters cannot take off at night in formation and fly low for hundreds of miles, drop an enormous bomb that is spinning at 500 revolutions per minute from exactly the right height and then move on to another target before returning home – all the time under fire from enemy anti-aircraft batteries – without a particular kind of steady, unblinking courage, tenacity and will that is out of the ordinary.29
The loss of no fewer than eight bombers out of nineteen and fifty-three air crew on the ‘Dambusters’ raid was a high price to pay, but Churchill was right when he told Harris that ‘The conduct of the operations demonstrated the fiery gallant spirit which animated your aircrews, and the high sense of duty of all ranks under your command.’
The bombing of the Ruhr and Hamburg suddenly brought the monthly growth in German armaments production – which had been averaging 5.5 per cent since February 1942 – crashing down to 0 per cent from May 1943 to February 1944.30 As the leading expert on the Nazi economy records: ‘For six months in 1943 the disruption caused by British and American bombing halted Speer’s armaments miracle in its tracks. The German home front was rocked by a serious crisis of morale.’31 Although the Nazi war economy was still producing as much in 1944 as it had in May 1943, indeed production was slightly higher, the miracle that had more than doubled armaments production between February 1942 and May 1943 was over and the all-important rates of increase were never to recover.
Between March 1943 and April 1944 the Krupp factory in the Ruhr lost 20 per cent of production, which was ‘far below’ what British propaganda was making out at the time, but very significant nonetheless.32 Yet that was only one site, and overall the results were mixed: in Essen, although 88 per cent of its housing had been destroyed or badly damaged, and 7,000 inhabitants killed, the intensive post-war investigations discovered that production had somehow continued, through German bravery and ingenuity, until March 1945, when it was overrun. At the end of January 1945 Albert Speer found that in 1944 Allied bombing had meant that Germany produced 35 per cent fewer tanks than he had wanted to build and Germany required, as well as 31 per cent fewer aircraft and 42 per cent fewer lorries.33 In a sense those figures alone justify the Allies’ CBO, as we have already seen what the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were capable of achieving in counter-attack when they had enough tanks and aircraft.
The debate about strategic bombing has all too often centred on its failure significantly to lessen actual German armaments production, but that is based on a false premise. What the campaign needed to do was to curtail the rate of increase in armaments production by which the Germans could have prolonged, or even won, the war, and this it achieved triumphantly, as is shown in Figure 1. The tragic reality was that area as well as precision bombing was necessary to halt Speer’s miracle, although by 1944 the RAF ought to have switched to concentrating more on Luftwaffe factories, which could be targeted with a far higher degree of accuracy than in 1940. The estimation that the entire Combined Bomber Offensive of 1944 reduced German gross industrial production by only 10 per cent seems damning, in view of the sacrifice in Allied servicemen’s lives, the cost in resources in building the 21,000 bombers that were destroyed and of course the deaths by bombing of around 720,000 German, Italian and French civilians throughout the war.34 Yet the entire campaign took up only about 7 per cent of Britain’s war effort, and so was militarily justified.
In late July and early August 1943, four bombing raids on Hamburg over ten days codenamed Gomorrah led to the deaths of between 30,000 and 50,000 people.35 On 27 July a navigational error sent 787 RAF planes 2 miles to the east of the intended target, Hamburg’s city centre, and over the closely packed tenement buildings of its working population instead. The release of thousands of strips of aluminium
German armament production, 1942–1944 (Jan 1942 = 100)
foil, codenamed Window, blinded the radar on which the German night-fighters and anti-aircraft artillery depended, allowing the raiders more time to do their work. Hamburg had been experiencing a freak heatwave and the hot, dry weather, when combined with the flames from high-explosive and incendiary bombs, created a firestorm inferno that reached 1,600 Celsius and reduced to ashes all in its path. It was said that the orange luminosity from fires that raged, largely unfought, for forty-eight hours could be seen 120 miles away.
The surviving population of 1.8 million fled the city, spreading panic throughout the region. ‘Hamburg had put the fear of God in me,’ admitted Speer, who predicted to Hitler that ‘a series of attacks of this sort, extended to six more major cities, would bring Germany’s armaments production to a total halt.’ The Führer merely replied: ‘You’ll straighten all that out again.’36 Goebbels was as worried as Speer, writing in his diary of the:
most serious consequences both for the civilian population and for armaments production. This attack definitely shatters the illusions that many have had about the continuation of air operations by the enemy. Unfortunately we shot down very few planes – twelve, all told… It is a real catastrophe… It is believed that new quarters must be found for about 150,000 to 200,000. I don’t know at this time of writing how we are going to solve that problem.37
Yet six more such attacks proved beyond the capacity of the already overstretched Allies. On 17 August 1943 an Eighth Air Force raid of 376 planes against the ball-bearing factories of Schweinfurt attracted the attentions of 300 German fighters around Frankfurt. Twenty-one Flying Fortresses were shot down before the air armada even reached Schweinfurt, and overall the raid led to the loss of sixty B-17s, 16 per cent of the total, and the damaging of a further 120 (most beyond repair), a further 32 per cent, some of them through air-to-air rocket fire for the first time.38 On 14 October the Americans bravely, if foolhardily, decided to return to Schweinfurt with nearly 300 bombers, only to suffer yet heavier carnage from rockets, air bombing from above, heavy anti-aircraft fire and then fighter action, with another sixty bombers (20 per cent) destroyed and 138 (46 per cent) damaged. In the aftermath of this defeat, the USAAF was forced to suspend daylight raids until it developed a long-range fighter that could escort its bombers and protect them from German fighters. German ball-bearing production was badly hit – dropping 38 per cent by Speer’s estimates after the first raid and 67 per cent after the second – but was made up after a few weeks by using different bearing types, slide rather than ball, and buying in more from the ever helpful (and well-paid) Swedes and Swiss.
By late 1943 the Americans had got their fighter, and began to mass-produce – total production topped 15,500 – the single-seater, 437mph, P-51B Mustang to escort their bombers as far as Berlin and back, and take on anything the Luftwaffe had at the time. Auxiliary fuel tanks that could be jettisoned were the key to flying the long distances, and the fastest version, the P-51H, could reach 487mph. Although Mustangs had been used operationally by the RAF since before America entered the war, by 1944 the constant updating of the prototype (the D model with its bubble canopy was the most recognizable) had produced a plane that could tip the balance of the air war over Germany. Once the Mustangs established dominance over the German skies, shooting down large numbers of Messerschmitts flown by experienced Luftwaffe pilots, thereby allowing Allied bombers to destroy Luftwaffe factories, the next sta
ge was to destroy the synthetic-oil factories without which new German pilots could not even complete their air training.
Even the very existence of these American super-fighters with improved fuel capacity produced a stand-up row between Göring and his Fighter Arm commander General Adolf Galland. After Galland had warned Hitler that the Mustangs would be able to escort American bombers far deeper into German territory than ever before, Göring ‘snapped’ at him, saying: ‘That’s nonsense, Galland, what gives you such fantasies? That’s pure bluff!’ Galland replied: ‘Those are the facts, Herr Reichsmarschall! American fighters have been shot down over Aachen. There is no doubt about it!’ ‘That is simply not true,’ retorted Göring. ‘That’s impossible.’ When Galland suggested that he inspect the wreckages for himself, Göring replied that they might have glided ‘quite a distance further before they crashed’. Galland then pointed out that the planes would hardly have glided further into the Reich, as opposed to away from it, whereupon Göring left the meeting on his special train, saying: ‘I officially assert that the American fighter planes did not reach Aachen.’ Galland’s reply was simply: ‘Orders are orders, sir!’39
The Mustang would have faced a mighty competitor, however, if Hitler had concentrated on producing the twin-engine Messerschmitt Me-262, which has been described as ‘the plane with which the German air force could have reclaimed the skies over Germany’.40 The speed of this jet-powered fighter, along with its relative stability in flight, suggests that it offered the best possibility ‘of Germany driving the Allied bombers out of the sky’. Hitler saw the Me-262 for the first time at Insterburg airfield after the Berlin raids of late November 1943, in the company of Göring, Milch, Speer, the warplane designer and manufacturer Willy Messerschmitt, Galland and others, and his Luftwaffe adjutant Nicolaus von Below. (Below was a devout Nazi until his death in 1983, and his recollections of working beside Hitler between 1937 and 1945 provide an invaluable and reliable source for historians.41 He was a Christian Prussian from an old Junker soldiering family, thus personifying an entire menagerie of Hitler’s bêtes noires, but he and his wife Maria loved the Führer, and Maria was also close to his girlfriend Eva Braun.) At the Insterburg meeting, Below recorded, Hitler ‘called Messerschmitt over and asked him pointedly if the aircraft could be built as a bomber. The designer agreed, and said that it would be capable of carrying two 250kg bombs.’ Hitler replied, ‘That is the fast bomber,’ and insisted on its being developed as such exclusively, rather than as a fighter. He saw it as part of the campaign against London and the southern English invasion ports, rather than as a fighter that could protect Germany from the Allied bombing offensive. Yet the conversion and the development of new bombing mechanisms took up valuable production time, while the acquisition of bomb-loads drastically slowed down the plane’s top speeds. Hitler saw it as a new Stuka, rather than an entirely new kind of warplane, which potentially it was.
As a result of German air production being dispersed into smaller units, and the alterations Hitler had ordered, the Me-262 did not arrive until March 1944, and even then in numbers that were far too small to make a difference. With the Americans’ destruction of oil facilities and Luftwaffe targets, the Reich did not have the fuel to train the pilots, and many brand-new models were destroyed on the ground anyway. A similarly promising warplane project, the Arado 234, which could reach speeds of 500mph, saw only 200 produced before the Red Army captured the factory where its production had been moved to in the east, for fear of bombing from the west.42
After the big raids of late 1943, Albert Speer drove around the factory districts of Berlin. Buildings were still burning and a cloud of smoke 20,000 feet high hung above the city, which ‘made the macabre scene as dark as night’. When he tried to describe this to Hitler, he was interrupted every time, almost as soon as he began, with questions about, for example, the next month’s tank production figures.43 By the end of that year the Allies had dropped 200,000 tons of bombs on Germany.44 Their effect in at least blunting the rate of increase in aircraft production can be seen in Figure 2.
The word Nuremberg meant many things in the relatively short period covered by the Nazi experiment. Originally it denoted the vast rallies held there in the late 1930s, then the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws, then a city that was devastated by Allied bombing, and finally the place where the International Military Tribunal brought the worst of the surviving Nazis to justice.45 On the night of 30 March 1944, some 795 Allied aircraft devastated the city centre, but at very serious loss – mainly of Canadian air crew – with ninety-five aircraft shot down and seventy-one damaged. After this reversal, the policy of heavy night-time raids on Germany was suspended, which was due to happen anyway in order to help prepare for the invasion of Normandy.
Although the Germans did manage to jam the Allies’ Gee radio-based navigational device after its introduction in March 1942, improved technologies such as Oboe, by which a control station in Britain could broadcast a radar beam that would lead Pathfinder bombers to the target, were operational from November 1942, and by the end of 1943 airborne H2X radar sets were guiding USAAF daylight bombers to enemy targets in all weathers. Pathfinder target-making squadrons (later No. 8 Group), the corps d’élite of Bomber Command, had been founded in July 1942, their specially selected crews identifying and marking the targets. The Pathfinders consisted of men who had flown a minimum of forty-five operational sorties,
Allied and German aircraft production, 1940–1945
and the bravest of the brave were the crews of the master bombers, who flew the aircraft that led the entire attack. These men determined the accuracy of the target indicators that had been dropped by the primary visual markers, and decided what further illumination was required. They would tell the rest of the force which colour markers to bomb and which to ignore, sometimes flying over the target area for more than an hour.46
The policy on bombing Germany and her allies also affected – some said skewed – grand strategy. A principal argument for landing on mainland Italy, besides capturing Rome, tying down eighteen German divisions and keeping Allied forces occupied with a successful land campaign prior to D-Day, was to capture the Foggia air bases in eastern Italy from where southern European targets could be more easily bombed than from England and Sicily. On 28 September 1943, General George Marshall wrote to President Roosevelt to explain that ‘The fall of Foggia has come exactly at the time when it is needed to complement our Bomber Offensive now hammering Germany from bases in the UK. As winter sets in over northern Europe, our heavy bombers operating from the dozen or more (13) air bases in the Foggia Area will strike again and again at the heart of German production, not only in Germany proper but in Austria, Hungary and Romania. For our bombers operating from England, this aerial “Second Front” will be a great assistance.’47
Differences between the RAF and USAAF emerged occasionally, but not to the extent that they affected operations. On 1 November 1943 Trafford Leigh-Mallory, reporting from Washington, indeed writing on USAAF HQ paper, told Charles Portal about a lunch he had had with the Chief of the US Air Staff, Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold. After registering his shock at the way ‘We were waited on by two Negro servants before whom matters of the highest secrecy were freely discussed,’ Leigh-Mallory reported that Arnold could not understand why with air superiority the RAF had not destroyed the Luftwaffe in France. ‘I managed to keep my temper and explain to General Arnold how air operations are carried out and how the German Air Force fights.’ Arnold claimed that the British figures were ‘hopelessly inaccurate’, and ‘also delivered a tirade against the short range of the Spitfire, and seemed to think we lacked vision in the design of our fighters and were not alive to the developments of the war. I did my best to overcome this prejudiced outlook.’48
The very next day Air Marshal Sir William Welsh also wrote to Portal, this time from the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington: ‘I feel sure that the fundamental misunderstanding between us and the Americans is the consta
nt feeling in their minds that they are always “outsmarted” by us and that we do not recognise what a great country theirs is.’ Roosevelt’s closest confidant Harry Hopkins had dinner with Welsh and spoke about Arnold, explaining that he ‘was not a great staff officer or strategist, that he was lost when dealing with the Chiefs of Staff, but that he was a born leader and a terrific fighter who had the whole of the air force behind him’. He said that Arnold was ‘bitter against the British Air Force, because we had all the important commands – in the United Kingdom, Mediterranean and India’, and added that Arnold ‘was determined to get one of these for an American, and it was only natural that he should, because America was building the greatest Air Force in the world and… her production far outstripped ours… All this was constantly drumming in Arnold’s mind.’ Welsh replied by saying that the RAF bomber force based in the UK was only 45 per cent larger than the Eighth Air Force, yet it had dropped 237 per cent more bombs in September.49 But these were the inevitable turf wars found in any great conflict, and not evidence of a genuine rift between the RAF and USAAF, whose division of labour between daylight and night-time bombing automatically solved a number of possible operational problems.
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War Page 54
