The Second World War

by John Keegan

  The Hamburg raids

  While the American campaign hung fire, the British had been spreading destruction even more widely across the cities of western Germany. The ‘Battle of the Ruhr’, which lasted from March to July, involved nearly 800 aircraft in 18,000 sorties (individual missions) which dropped 58,000 tons of bombs on Germany’s industrial heartland. In May and August Harris was also obliged to mount two ‘panacea’ missions, both of which were brilliant successes. In the first a specially trained squadron, 617, destroyed the Möhne and Eder dams, which supplied the Ruhr with much of its hydroelectricity; in August a major raid laid waste the laboratories and engineering workshops at Peenemünde, on the Baltic coast, where intelligence sources had revealed that Germany’s arsenal of secret pilotless missiles was being built.

  More to Harris’s taste, however, was the four-night raid on Hamburg in July, which provoked a ‘firestorm’ and burned to cinders the heart of the great North German port covering 62,000 acres. A firestorm is not an effect that a bombing force can achieve at will; it requires a particular combination of prevailing weather conditions and the overwhelming of civil defences. When such circumstances are present, however, the consequences are catastrophic. A central conflagration feeds on oxygen drawn from the periphery by winds which reach cyclone speed, suffocating shelterers in cellars and bunkers, sucking debris into the vortex and raising temperatures to a level where everything inflammable burns as if by spontaneous combustion. Such conditions prevailed in Hamburg between 24 and 30 July 1943. There had been a long period of hot, dry weather, the initial bombardment broke the water mains in 847 places, and soon the core temperature of the fire reached 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. When it eventually burned itself out, only 20 per cent of Hamburg’s buildings remained intact; 40 million tons of rubble clogged the city’s centre, and 30,000 of its inhabitants were dead. In some areas of the city the total of fatal casualties among the inhabitants exceeded 30 per cent; 20 per cent of the dead were children, and female deaths were higher than male by 40 per cent.

  When the toll of Hamburg’s bombing victims throughout the war was calculated it was found to be only 13 per cent lower than the proportion of battle deaths among soldiers recruited from the city between 1939 and 1945; and the majority had died in the great raids of July 1943. Hamburg was not the RAF’s only firestorm. It was to achieve the same effect, if with lower casualties, in October at Kassel, where fires burned for seven days. Later Würzburg (4000 dead), Darmstadt (6000 dead), Heilbronn (7000 dead), Wuppertal (7000 dead), Weser (9000 dead) and Magdeburg (12,000 dead) would also burn in the same way.

  Hamburg, however, encouraged Harris to set his sights beyond Germany’s western periphery of industrial cities and Hanseatic ports. Berlin had been one of Bomber Command’s first targets when it assumed a retaliatory role during the Luftwaffe’s ‘blitz’ on London. In November 1943 Harris decided to make it his crews’ main target during the coming season of long nights, which were their best protection against German fighter attack. It had last been attacked in January 1942 but was thereafter left off the targeting list because of its long distance from Bomber Command’s bases and its strong defences, which combined to make the ‘attrition rate’ on Berlin raids exceptionally high. Probing attacks mounted in August and September suggested, however, that the German capital had become a softer target than hitherto to Harris’s greatly strengthened bombing force, and on the night of 18-19 November 1943 it committed itself to the ‘Battle of Berlin’.

  Between that night and 2 March 1944 it mounted sixteen major raids on the city. No more than 200 acres of its built-up area had been damaged in all the raids mounted by the RAF since August 1940, and it continued to function normally as the capital not only of the Reich but of Hitler’s Europe. It remained a major industrial, administrative and cultural centre: its great hotels, restaurants and theatres flourished; so too, did life in its elegant residential districts, like Dahlem, home of haut-bourgeois opposition to Hitler. ‘Missie’ Vassiltchikov, an Anglophile White Russian refugee in Berlin, and a close friend of Adam von Trott, one of the principal conspirators in the July Plot, found pre-war life scarcely interrupted at all by ‘enemy action’ (the phrase used in Britain to denote the cause of bombing deaths) until late 1943. She continued to dine, dance and absent herself from work in Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry on such pretexts as attending the last great German aristocratic wedding of the war years at Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen right up until the moment when the Battle of Berlin began.

  Then the clouds of war drew in fast. Goebbels, as Gauleiter of Berlin, persuaded one million of its four and a half million inhabitants to leave before Bomber Command’s main attacks began. Those who remained then began to undergo the most sustained experience of air attack undergone by any city population throughout the Second World War. Berlin did not suffer firestorm; having been built largely in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with wide streets and many open spaces, it resisted conflagration. Nevertheless its relentless drenching with high explosive and incendiaries, six times in January alone, resulted in devastation. Although only 6000 Berliners were killed in the Battle proper, thanks to the solid construction of shelters in eleven enormous concrete ‘flak towers’, 1.5 million were made homeless and 2000 acres of the city were ruined by the end of March 1944.

  When the battle was then called off, however, it was not only because Harris’s aircraft were needed to help in the preparation for D-Day. Even he had been brought to accept that, in the ‘exchange ratio’ between the attrition of Berlin’s fabric and defences and that of his bomber crews, Berlin had suffered less. Though by March 1944 he disposed of a daily average of 1000 serviceable bombers, losses on raids had risen above the ‘acceptable’ maximum of 5 per cent and had sometimes touched 10 per cent (on the most costly of all raids, ironically not against Berlin but against Nuremberg on 30 March 1944, it exceeded 11 per cent). Since bomber crews were obliged to fly thirty missions before qualifying for rest, each faced the probability, in statistical terms, of being shot down before a tour was completed. In practice, crews who had flown more than five missions achieved a much higher survival rate than novices, who figured disproportionately among the ‘acceptable’ 5 per cent lost. When the attrition rate rose towards 10 per cent, however, even experienced crews were killed. The survivors sensed doom, and there was a corresponding decline in morale, indicated by bombing ‘short’ and premature return to base.

  The rise in the attrition rate testified to the short-term success of German defensive measures. As the bombers penetrated more deeply into Germany, their exposure to German flak and fighter attack increased. In the early days of night bombing the Luftwaffe had found as much difficulty in intercepting the RAF as the RAF had had in combating the German night ‘blitz’ of 1940-1. During 1942, however, its success rose sharply as a result of improvements in the control of fighters, as well as in their armament and equipment. Flak, though it badly frightened the bomber crews, was a lesser means of destruction. Anti-aircraft gunfire could not touch the Mosquitoes of the Pathfinder Force flying at 30,000 feet; but fighters attacked at a range of 400 feet, once they had been guided to the target. From October 1940 onwards in Holland, Bomber Command’s natural approach route to the Reich, the Germans began to deploy, on the so-called Kammhuber Line, a force of radar-equipped night-fighters which were guided to the intruders by ground radar ‘Würzburg’ stations. The RAF retaliated by equipping their aircraft with radar detection devices, by increasing the density of their bomber streams to present fighters with a smaller target, and eventually (July 1943) by dropping metallic chaff, ‘Window’ – first used in the Hamburg raids – to cause radar interference. Eventually all these expedients were overcome: the Germans became adept at using Bomber Command’s electronic emissions as target indicators, at refining their radar sets to overcome Window, and at increasing the density of their own fighter formations to match that of the bomber streams. At the end of 1943, ‘Tame Boar’ squadrons of radar-equipped night-figh
ters were being supplemented by strong forces of ‘Wild Boar’ day-fighters flying as night-fighters; lacking radar, they were guided towards the bombers by radio and light beacons and then attacked in the illumination provided by flak and searchlights.

  The battle of material

  Had Bomber Command been Germany’s only airborne enemy it would have been close to admitting defeat in the spring of 1944. However, the Eighth Air Force was still committed to a campaign of daylight precision bombing, had now assembled a force of 1000 B-17s and B-24 Liberators in Britain and was ready to show the Germans what ‘Americans meant by a real battle of material’. So far, apart from its costly forays to Schweinfurt and Regensburg, it had ventured few mass attacks deep into Germany. Beginning in February 1944 (the ‘Big Week’ of 20-26 February) under new commanders, Spaatz and James Doolittle, the latter the hero of the Tokyo raid of April 1942, it started to penetrate to targets which the Luftwaffe was bound to defend: aircraft factories and then the twelve synthetic-oil production plants. Speer, Hitler’s able Armaments Minister, had robbed the enemy air forces of much of their target system in 1943 by separating manufacturing processes and dispersing the fragments to new small sites, particularly in southern Germany. However, aircraft factories and particularly oil plants defied dispersion, and they provided the ‘Mighty Eighth’ with prime targets.

  The Eighth Air Force had, moreover, been provided with the means to reach them. Daylight bombing required fighter escorts; consequently Bomber Command had abandoned it in 1941, since the Spitfire lacked the range to reach Germany. During 1943 the range of American fighters had also largely confined the Eighth Air Force to attacks in France and the Low Countries. After August, however, at the prompting of Robert A. Lovett, US Assistant Secretary for War, the P-47 Thunderbolt and P-38 Lightning fighters were equipped with drop tanks, external auxiliary fuel tanks which could be jettisoned in an emergency; these gave them the endurance to reach beyond the Ruhr. In March 1944 there appeared in numbers a new fighter equipped with drop tanks, the P51 Mustang, which could fly to and even beyond Berlin, 600 miles from its British bases. The P-51 was a new phenomenon: a heavy long-range fighter with the performance of a short-range interceptor. It had been delayed in production because it was an Anglo-American hybrid without a strong sponsor. Into an underpowered American airframe the British had inserted the famous Merlin engine; once its improved performance was recognised by Spaatz and Doolittle, they demanded its production in volume and 14,000 were to be built altogether. By March it was present in the German skies in great numbers and already beginning to break the strength of the Luftwaffe.

  As soon as the demands imposed by preparation for Overlord ceased, and despite a temporary diversion of effort against the German secret-weapons sites in northern France, Pointblank resumed with redoubled force. The Eighth Air Force had continued its attack on German synthetic oil plants even during the Normandy battle and by September its results were even greater than anticipated. Between March and September oil production declined from 316,000 to 17,000 tons; aviation fuel output declined to 5000 tons. The Luftwaffe thereafter lived on its reserves, which by early 1945 were all but exhausted. Meanwhile the two bomber forces co-ordinated a round-the-clock campaign against German cities, with particular concentration on transport centres. By the end of October the number of rail wagons available weekly had fallen from the normal total of 900,000 to 700,000, and by December the figure was 214,000.

  Under day and night attack by the USAAF and RAF, each deploying over 1000 aircraft during the autumn, winter and spring of 1944-5, German economic life was paralysed by strategic bombing. With enemy armies on its eastern and western frontiers, the Reich was no longer protected by a cordon sanitaire of occupied territory. The Luftwaffe was overwhelmed as well as outclassed by the daylight bombers’ escorts and eventually could not get its few surviving fighters off the ground. Although the anti-aircraft system drained two million men and women out of other services – perhaps the bombing campaign’s chief justification – flak dwindled into ineffectiveness as the night-bomber streams became too dense and fast-moving to engage for more than a few minutes. As bomber numbers grew over Germany in 1945, the attrition rate conversely declined to as little as one per cent per mission.

  The sudden reversal of advantage between defence and attack undoubtedly derived directly from the appearance of the Mustang as an escort to the Eighth Air Force’s Fortresses and Liberators and later as a unit of aggressive fighter patrols, seeking out the enemy. In late 1943 the American campaign had been defeated by the Luftwaffe’s day-fighters, in early 1944 the British campaign by its night-fighters. The Mustang restored the Eighth Air Force’s ability to penetrate German airspace. In so doing it starved the Luftwaffe of its fuel supply and thereby drastically undercut its ability to sustain the high attrition rate it had inflicted on Bomber Command in 1943-4. Thus it opened the way for the British to match the Americans’ level of destructiveness in the round-the-clock campaign of late 1944 and so ensured that German industrial production, whether as a result of physical damage or by the strangulation of supply, should come to a halt in early 1945.

  Because the peak of the bombers’ success coincided with the defeat of the Wehrmacht in the field and the progressive occupation of Reich territory by the Allied armies, the claims of the strategic-bombing advocates that they possessed the secret of victory have not and can never be proved. Such claims are better supported by the results of the USAAF’s bombing campaign against Japan mounted by General Curtis LeMay’s XXI Bomber Command: between May and August 1945 the dropping of 158,000 tons of bombs, two-thirds incendiaries, on to the fifty-eight largest Japanese cities, all largely wooden in construction, destroyed 60 per cent of their ground area and brought their populations to destitution and despair. Even before the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the unleashing of the Red Army’s Blitzkrieg into Manchuria, to which Japan’s decision to surrender is variously ascribed, the home islanders’ will to resist had unquestionably been brought to breaking-point by the American bombers.

  German civilian morale, by contrast, was never broken by bomber attack. The populations of individual cities were severely distressed by heavy raids. Dresden, overwhelmed on the night of 14 February 1945, did not begin to function again until after the war was over; but in Berlin public transport and services were maintained throughout and were still functioning during the ground battle for the city in April 1945. In Hamburg the 50,000 deaths from bombing, largely concentrated into the period in July 1943, almost equalled those suffered in Britain throughout the war (60,000), yet industrial production returned to 80 per cent of normal within five months. Nothing better vindicated the German people’s reputation for discipline and hardihood than the resilience of their urban men and women under Allied air attack in 1943-5 – perhaps the women most of all, since so many were forced by the war to act as heads of families.

  The cost of strategic bombing on Germany’s civilian population was tragically high: 87,000 people were killed in the towns of the Ruhr, at least 50,000 in Hamburg, 50,000 in Berlin, 20,000 in Cologne, 15,000 in the comparatively small city of Magdeburg, 4,000 in that tiny baroque gem, Würzburg. Altogether some 600,000 German civilians died under bombing attack and 800,000 were seriously injured. Children represented some 20 per cent of the dead and female deaths exceeded male by as much as 40 per cent at Hamburg and 80 per cent at Darmstadt, both cities where firestorms occurred. In the aftermath, privation added to the suffering caused by bereavement and homelessness: reductions in output of up to 30 per cent of steel, 25 per cent of motor engineering, 15 per cent of electrical power, 15 per cent of chemicals and effectively 100 per cent of oil, combined with the effect of a nearly total transport standstill in May 1945, deprived the surviving population of the means to begin reconstruction; the breakdown of transport also imposed fuel shortages which reduced consumption to barest subsistence level.

  Because the whole of Germany was occupied by the time of the
capitulation, however, no part of the population starved, as happened during the Allies’ sustainment of the wartime blockade after November 1918. The armies, even the Red Army, collected food and made themselves responsible for its distribution. The air forces which had devoted themselves to Germany’s economic devastation in 1943-5 found themselves engaged, almost as soon as the war was over, in transporting essential supplies to the cities they had recently been overflying with high explosive and incendiaries in their bomb-bays.

  In the course of their campaign the Allied bombing forces had suffered grievously themselves: in 1944 alone the Eighth Air Force lost 2400 bombers; throughout the war Bomber Command suffered 55,000 dead, more than the number of British army officers killed in the First World War. The dead aircrew were not, however, accorded the memorialisation given to the ‘lost generation’. Their campaign, though it gave a dour satisfaction to the majority of the British people in the depths of their war against Hitler, never commanded the support of the whole nation. Its morality was publicly questioned in the House of Commons by the Labour MP Richard Stokes, more insistently in the Lords by Bishop Bell of Chichester and in private correspondence by the Marquess of Salisbury, head of the leading Conservative family in Britain. All made the point, to quote Lord Salisbury, ‘that of course the Germans began it, but we do not take the devil as our example.’ This accorded with a nagging self-reproach to the national conscience which, when the war was over, denied ‘Bomber’ Harris the peerage given to all other major British commanders and refused his aircrew a distinctive campaign medal of their own. With their backs to the wall the British people had chosen not to acknowledge that they had descended to the enemy’s level. In victory they remembered that they believed in fair play. Strategic bombing, which may not even have been sound strategy, was certainly not fair play. Over its course and outcome its most consistent practitioners drew a veil.