by Bill Yenne
With the success of the Normandy invasion and the establishment of a solid Allied beachhead in northern France, the USSTAF could once again return to the strategic mission for which it had been created. On June 8, two days after the invasion, Spaatz issued an order to Jimmy Doolittle at the Eighth Air Force and Nathan Twining at the Fifteenth to give their top priority to the “Oil Campaign” that had been drafted by Hughes, Rostow, and the Oily Boys of the EOU.
The Eighth Air Force and the RAF would focus on synthetic fuel plants in the Ruhr, as well as crude oil refineries around Hamburg, Bremen, and Hannover. Meanwhile, the Fifteenth, now based in Italy several hundred miles closer to Ploiesşti than it had been at the time of Tidal Wave a year earlier, would make itself a frequent visitor to that sprawling complex that still accounted for a significant proportion of the Reich’s petroleum needs. This renewed campaign began with an average of around four hundred heavy bombers hitting the Romanian oil country on two consecutive days in late June.
On August 25, exactly one month after the breakout from Normandy—which had been facilitated by massive Eighth Air Force attacks on German ground forces—the Allies had liberated Paris. General George Patton’s fast moving Third Army had almost single-handedly swept the Germans from the northwest corner of France, moving faster and capturing more territory than any American army in history. By September, both Eisenhower’s and Spaatz’s headquarters had been relocated there from England.
Ironically, all of the rail bridges, marshaling yards, and infrastructure across northern France that had been destroyed a few months earlier by the Tedder-Zuckerman Rail Plan were now in Allied hands and being repaired to serve the armies of those who had destroyed them.
A month later, the Anglo-American Allies were pressing close to the borders of Germany itself. So much optimism was flowing that some overly optimistic commentators dared suggest that the war might be over by Christmas.
However, the German war machine that had seemed to crumple before Allied might in August and September was not yet through. Though the Allies would not know the full extent until after the war, the German aircraft industry had actually resumed its expansion two months after Big Week while the USSTAF was isolating the Normandy battlefield.
“Illogically, it seems, German aircraft production had continued to rise during the months immediately following the great Pointblank successes of early 1944,” writes John Fagg in the official history of the USAAF in World War II.
As had been the case since the earliest days of the Combined Bomber Offensive, Allied strategic airpower was not arrayed against a static German economy, but one that was more resilient than the Allies had imagined. Indeed, it was presided over by a clever and innovative administrator. Thanks to the management genius of Albert Speer, who had risen from his sickbed to consolidate aircraft production under the control of his Armaments Ministry in the aftermath of Big Week, the German aircraft industry was actually expanding, even at the moment that the Allies were ready to count it out.
“Most baffling of all at first glance is the fact that the German aircraft industry continued to expand throughout 1943 and most of 1944 despite the severe and accurate pounding given it by daylight bombing forces,” observes Arthur Ferguson in his chapter on Big Week in the official USAAF history. “To be sure, it suffered two serious setbacks. The raids of the summer and fall of 1943 are estimated to have caused as much as three months’ loss of production; those of February 1944, a total of two months.
“To the Allied strategists, accurately informed about damage to plant buildings if not to the inner workings of the factories, it seemed at the time that the Luftwaffe must certainly be on the decline from sheer inability to replace its losses. After the February 1944 attacks, their ability to oppose daylight bombing missions tended rapidly to deteriorate, and this fitted Allied expectations, but there was to be a surprise after the termination of hostilities. Investigation of German production records revealed the astonishing fact that, despite the staggering blows delivered by the Allies in February, aircraft acceptance figures for single engine aircraft rose rapidly until September 1944.”
In their detailed postwar analysis, economist John Kenneth Galbraith and his Strategic Bombing Survey team discovered that monthly production of fighter aircraft actually increased from 1,104 in February to 2,449 in June, which was on par with production in the United States. By comparison the average of monthly factory acceptances of fighter aircraft by the USAAF in 1944 was 2,015, and of heavy bombers, the average was 1,241.
However, the USAAF inventory of heavy bombers stood at 9,278 at the time of Big Week, and 12,526 in September. As the numbers pouring out of American factories were increasing every month, the German aircraft industry was about to nose over like a damaged Messerschmitt and spiral downward.
Back in 1940, when the Air Corps possessed fewer than 3,000 combat aircraft, President Roosevelt had proposed that they should have 36,500, which seemed at the time to be an unapproachable number. By the autumn of 1944, the USAAF inventory exceeded 69,000.
The Strategic Bombing Survey goes on to say that the German aircraft industry’s increase in output during the middle of 1944 is explained only “by the adoption of energetic rationalization measures, by drawing on the pipeline of components, and by the fact that a large scale expansion of the industry had been planned previously. To what extent bombing prevented the realization of these plans is difficult to decide. It is possible that production would have been 15–20 percent higher in the absence of bombing.”
Ferguson adds that the survival defied the odds. He writes that “when Speer brought aircraft production under the control of his ministry [after Big Week], he began to disperse the entire industry and to accelerate the repair of bombed plants. Dispersal may have proved ultimately to have been wasteful, but until late 1944 it was highly successful. The factories were so small, concealed, and scattered that Allied intelligence found it exceedingly difficult to locate them and bombers often failed to hit their vital parts. Allied air leaders failed to assess the German effort with complete accuracy.”
Conversely, in his own analysis of the results of the aircraft industry dispersal, John Fagg writes that Big Week’s “February bombings deprived the Luftwaffe of a substantial number of fighter planes at a time when they were badly needed and that in forcing the German aircraft industry to expedite dispersal of its factories they caused considerable indirect loss of production and, what is even more important, left the industry extremely vulnerable to any dislocation of transport facilities. When that dislocation finally came about as a result of the concentrated attack on transportation, it contributed more than anything else to the complete breakdown of the aircraft industry.”
Indeed, it was an industry that was pressed to its limits. It was an industry that was now compelled to cut corners, to get by with less, and to respond to the inefficiencies of dispersal by pressing workers to the limit and ultimately by the use of slave labor.
Meanwhile, the industries that supplied the all-important aircraft industry were struggling, and this would have an effect on the decline of aircraft production after September. The Strategic Bombing Survey notes that “the production of ball bearings in the second quarter of 1944 fell to 66 percent of the preraid average. An energetic dispersal policy, however, made it possible for production to reach almost the preraid average in the third quarter of the year. In the meantime, careful use of stocks, substitution of plain bearings for anti-friction bearings, and redesign of equipment to eliminate the previously luxurious use of bearings, enabled the Germans to prevent the fall in bearing production from affecting the output of finished munitions.”
The Oil Campaign also played an important role in preventing the increase in aircraft production from turning into a resurgence of Luftwaffe aggressiveness. The Strategic Bombing Survey points out that synthetic fuel production fell from an average of 359,000 tons prior to the beginning of the campaign to 134,000 tons in June and 24,000 tons in September, add
ing that “the aviation gasoline output of these plants fell from 175,000 tons in April to 5,000 tons in September.
“In the same period stocks of motor and aviation gasoline fell by two thirds, and only drastic curtailments in consumption kept them from falling still further,” states the Survey. “As in the case of ball bearings and aircraft, the Germans took the most energetic steps to repair and reconstruct oil plants. As many as 350,000 men were engaged in reconstruction projects and the building of underground plants, but these measures proved of little value. Reconstructed plants were soon reattacked, while underground plants even at the end of the war produced but a fraction of Germany’s then minute oil supply.”
The shortfall in available fuel not only impacted Luftwaffe mission availability rates, but forced strict limits on training at a time when the loss of experienced pilots demanded that replacements be trained and pressed into service. Training, rather than availability of aircraft, turned out to be an Achilles’ heel for the Luftwaffe’s intrepid attempts to pick up the pieces after Big Week.
As noted in the postwar USSTAF report The Contribution of Air Power to the Defeat of Germany, by mid-1944, “training in tank warfare became for the Germans a luxury beyond reach, and even the Luftwaffe reduced its training period to a few insufficient weeks because aviation gasoline could not be spared.”
John Fagg goes on to say that by the second half of 1944, “no matter how many aircraft were produced they were of no possible use unless men were available to fly them. This appears to have been the weakest point in the entire German air situation. The bottleneck within this bottleneck was the training program.
“They could, therefore, follow two alternative courses: either fall short of the required replacements or cut hours of training so that fuel allocations would be sufficient to produce the required number of pilots. They chose the latter policy, with the result that pilots entered combat increasingly ill-trained. Faced with thoroughly trained American and British pilots, these replacements fought at a disadvantage, which helps explain the increasing rate of attrition imposed on the Luftwaffe. The consequent rise in the demand for replacements simply completed the vicious cycle.”
Within the context of petrochemical production, the Strategic Bombing Survey reports that “by the end of the year synthetic nitrogen output was reduced from a preraid level of over 75,000 tons to 20,000 tons monthly. The Germans were forced to curtail the use of nitrogen in agriculture, and then to cut supplies used for the production of explosives. Methanol production also necessary for explosives manufacture was similarly cut. These shortages were largely responsible for the 20 percent loss of ammunition production in the last half of 1944.”
Also noted by the Strategic Bombing Survey is that in the last quarter of 1944, steel production fell by 80 percent, and “attacks on panzer production set back an ambitious expansion program and caused a 20 percent loss of output in the latter half of 1944.”
After September, as the Eighth Air Force was routinely launching strategic missions comprised of nearly a thousand bombers, other industries were starting to implode. By now, Doolittle had 2,100 heavy bombers at his disposal, and Twining had nearly 1,200, while Arthur Harris’s RAF Bomber Command had more than 1,100. Beginning in October, the three entities coordinated their efforts through a Combined Strategic Targets Committee.
Meanwhile, as the numbers of bombers steadily increased, bombing accuracy was also improving. The Fifteenth Air Force reported that the percentage of bombs falling within one thousand feet of the target grew from 18 in April to 32 in June and 50 in August, compared to a progression of 29 to 40 and 45 for the Eighth Air Force.
In April and May, the Eighth Air Force had resisted its being diverted away from the strategic mission in order to join with the Ninth Air Force in the tactical campaign of attacks against the transportation network in France. Four months later, the transportation network in France was in Allied hands, and the attention was turned to the transportation network inside Germany.
This was not done to isolate the battlefield, but to disconnect the interconnectedness of the German economy. German industry, having been dispersed, was more dependent than ever on being able to move components and subassemblies to the myriad of dispersed assembly locations. Without rail transportation, this all began to fall apart.
The effects of this stage of the air campaign were what the Strategic Bombing Survey later called “the most important single cause of Germany’s ultimate economic collapse.”
As the survey notes, between August and December freight car loadings fell by about half, and “the progressive traffic tie-up was found to have first affected commodities normally shipped in less than full trainload lots—finished and semifinished manufactured goods, components and perishables. The effects of the attack are best seen, however, in the figures of coal transport, which normally constituted 40 percent of rail traffic. Shipments by rail and water fell from 7.4 million tons in August to 2.7 million tons in December.
“The index of total munitions output reached its peak in July 1944 and fell thereafter,” the Strategic Bombing Survey reports. “By December it had declined to 80 percent of the July peak, and even this level was attained only by using up stocks of components and raw materials. Air raids were the main factor in reducing output, which in their absence would probably have risen. A loss of armaments output somewhat above 15 percent can be credited to bombing in the last half of 1944. This compares with a five percent loss for the last half of 1943 and a ten percent loss for the first half of 1944.
“By the third quarter of 1944 bombing had succeeded in tying down a substantial portion of the labor force. This diversion amounted to an estimated 4.5 million workers, or nearly 20 percent of the nonagricultural labor force. This estimate includes 2.2 million workers engaged in debris clearance, reconstruction and dispersal projects and in other types of activity necessitated by bombing, a million workers engaged in replacing civilian goods lost through air raids, and slightly less than a million workers in the production and manning of antiaircraft weapons. Air raid casualties were not numerous…. Late in 1944 the diversion of laborers due to bombing began to lose importance because the disintegration of the economy had reached a point at which the full utilization of the total labor force was no longer possible.”
By December, contagious optimism reigned in Allied headquarters all across the western front. Since the liberation of Paris in August, the only thing that had slowed the surging onrush of Allied land armies had been their outrunning their own supply columns as they chased the Germans toward their border.
The war would not be over by Christmas, but it was seen as just a matter of time. The 21st Army Group, comprised of the British Second Army and the First Canadian Army, had pushed its way to Germany’s border with the Netherlands. The 12th Army Group, incorporating the United States First, Third, and Ninth Armies, was lined up against the German border in Belgium, Luxembourg, and eastern France.
As the winter weather slowed the Allied advance, planners sat down to consider operations that would take their forces into Germany itself. For the final push, there was naturally a great desire for the immense firepower of the Eighth Air Force. During the second week of December, General Courtney Hodges of the First Army and General William Hood Simpson of the Ninth Army were each on the threshold of marching his army into Germany, and each requested that Spaatz support his offensive.
On December 15, Spaatz ordered Dick Hughes and Fred Anderson to fly to First Army headquarters to sort out the details with the two threestar generals. Along with General Hoyt Vandenberg, commanding the Ninth Air Force, and General Pete Quesada, commander of the IX Tactical Air Command of the Ninth Air Force, Hughes and Anderson met Hodges and Simpson at Hodges’s headquarters early on the morning of December 16.
“We persuaded Generals Simpson and Hodges to sit side by side on a sofa, facing operational maps pinned to the wall,” Hughes recalls. “Over these maps, I fastened the acetate overlays portraying our
air support plan. General Anderson commenced to explain it in detail to the two generals. Suddenly, the telephone rang. General Hodges took the call, turned to us in great excitement, and told us that the Germans had launched a surprise attack in force and had broken through his southern flank in the Ardennes. So began the Battle of the Bulge.”
Hughes took down the acetate overlays and, observing that “confusion, bordering on panic, arose in First Army headquarters,” suggested to Anderson that they move along and let Hodges “fight his own war for himself.”
TWENTY-FOUR
TOTAL COLLAPSE
It was a surreal situation. The day before, General Fred Anderson and Richard D’Oyly Hughes had been calmly discussing operations against a foe that had been presumed to be on the ropes. Now they found themselves personally stranded in the very path of a major German offensive that had taken the Allies completely by surprise—and one which, at least on the morning of December 16, appeared unstoppable.
The German Ardennes Offensive, code-named Wacht am Rhein (Operation Watch on the Rhine, named for a German patriotic song of the same name) had been intended to divide the 12th and 21st Army Groups from each other, while capturing the great Belgian port city of Antwerp, now a key supply hub for the Allies, and encircling as many as four Allied armies. The idea was to force a negotiated armistice before the Allies crossed into Germany, which would then allow the Germans to concentrate all of their forces against the Soviet armies on the eastern front.
The information coming in concerning the German breakthrough was not good. In fact, it was downright demoralizing. Four German armies, comprising more than a dozen divisions and around two hundred thousand troops, had crashed their way across American lines in a lightly defended part of the front in the Ardennes highlands of southern Belgium. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans were reported to have been killed or captured.
