Bomber Command (42 page)

The Americans, meanwhile, fared no better. The detailed story of the 8th Air Force’s attempts to ‘sever Germany’s jugular’ by destroying the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt does not belong here. It is enough to say that their first attack on 17 August 1943 cost them a paralysing loss of 60 of the 376 aircraft dispatched. Production fell by a disturbing, yet not fatal 38 per cent. But the attack also awakened the Germans to the extreme vulnerability of their ball-bearing supplies, and by the time of ‘Second
Schweinfurt’ on 14 October 1943, much had been done towards marshalling reserve stocks from all over Germany, and preparing to disperse production. Schweinfurt’s output fell by 67 per cent after the 8th Air Force’s extraordinarily gallant second attempt, but the Americans lost another 60 Flying Fortresses out of 291 dispatched. They now suffered a major trauma about the future of their daylight operations, and, to Speer’s overwhelming relief, Schweinfurt was not attacked again until 1944, by which stage its relative importance to German industry had been reduced. Harris refused to allow his bombers to have anything to do with the Schweinfurt operations in 1943, which he dismissed as a further example of ‘panacea-mongering’. The American failure greatly strengthened his hand in resisting further demands from the Ministry of Economic Warfare for precision attacks on allegedly exposed sectors of the German economy. Bomber Command only went to Schweinfurt in February 1944, when the pressure on Harris had become irresistible. By then it was too late.

The Americans also spearheaded the assault on German aircraft production, notably by their attacks on airframe plants. Here, too, in the autumn of 1943, they suffered overwhelming defeat. German aircraft production advanced by huge strides until the first serious check imposed by the 8th Air Force’s ‘Big Week’ in February 1944. Even after this it reached new peaks. As Dr Frankland has said of the American assault on German aircraft production in 1943: ‘The bombers were committed to a race between the destruction of the German air force in production by the bombers, and the destruction of the bombers by the German fighters in being. The result was a decisive victory for the German fighters in being.’
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After the war, Speer professed himself astonished by the inconsistency of the Allied air attack. ‘The vast but pointless area bombing,’ he said,
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had achieved no important effect on the German war effort by early 1944. But at intervals the bombers stumbled on a blind spot, a genuine Achilles’ heel, only to turn aside and divert their attack elsewhere when they had done so. He marvelled at the American failure to repeat the two Schweinfurt
attacks, at whatever cost. He was amazed that the British, having achieved remarkable success at Hamburg, neither returned to that city in sufficient force to prevent its recovery nor attempted to inflict the same treatment on any other city save Berlin, where the odds were impossible. He cited the example of the Dams Raid in May 1943. The Ministry of Economic Warfare in London correctly judged that the Mohne and the Sorpe dams were the key to the Ruhr water supplies. But after destroying the Mohne, 617 Squadron used its remaining mines to wreck the Eder dam, which was quite irrelevant. Bomber Command merely judged it more easily breachable with Barnes Wallis’s special mines than the Sorpe. It was the same profoundly flawed reasoning process which sent the bombers to Lübeck: a target was attacked because it was destructible, not because it was vital.

Throughout the war Speer’s efforts were crippled by the lack of coherent economic thinking by the Nazi leadership. But he recognized that the Allies were as incapable as Hitler of assessing the fatal weakness of the German war machine. The RAF had discussed bombing electricity generating plants in the 1930s, yet no serious attempt was made against Germany’s power supplies by Bomber Command. The British assumed that they were too sophisticated and too widely dispersed to succumb. Speer was astonished that the Allies only began their major attack on the synthetic oil plants in the spring of 1944, and even then Harris took no part. For a few weeks, it seemed that the German economy faced imminent collapse. But Speer exhorted his managers. On past experience, the Americans would persist for a few weeks and then change policy: ‘We have a powerful ally in this matter,’ he said. ‘That is to say, the enemy has an air force general staff as well.’ His optimism was justified. It was another six months before the air attack on oil was pressed home.

Two further aspects of the British bomber offensive must be considered here. The first is the significant myth, fostered by the
British official historians, that it contributed to the Luftwaffe’s lack of bomber aircraft in 1944, and thus to its inability to intervene against the Allied armies on and after D-Day. It is perfectly true that Milch and Speer made great efforts to stop bomber production and concentrate exclusively on fighters from the summer of 1943. ‘Gentlemen,’ Milch told his staff after Hamburg, ‘we are no longer on the offensive. For the last one and a half or two years we have been on the defensive. This fact is now recognized even at the highest levels of the Luftwaffe command.’
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Galland, General of Fighters, fought determinedly for increases in the defences of Germany. Speer was in despair about the effort he considered wasted on bombers, each of which cost nine times the labour and resources of a fighter to build.

But they were all defeated by Hitler’s overriding obstinacy. Until June 1944 he absolutely refused all proposals for the halting of bomber production, and by insisting that the jet Me262 meet the requirements of a bomber, delayed its appearance as a revolutionary fighter until too late. Hitler complained insistently about the Luftwaffe’s inability to produce an adequate heavy bomber to carry out retaliatory raids upon England. All that Speer could do in the face of Hitler’s obsession was to increase fighter production enormously, while maintaining that of bombers at a more or less static level. ‘Milch’s and my proposals that the manufacture of bombers be radically reduced in favour of increased fighter plane production was rejected until it was too late,’ says Speer.
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Why was it, therefore, that whereas in September 1940 the Luftwaffe front line included 1,871 bombers and 1,162 fighters, by September 1944 the squadrons in Western Europe were reduced to 209 bombers against 2,473 fighters? The answer is that there was a long and disastrous series of design and development failures, beginning in the 1930s, when Goering, in his determination to create a tactical air force, ordered the destruction of the prototypes of the Do19 and Ju89 bombers. Germany entered the war with some superb aircraft. But after 1939 only the FW190 fighter appeared, to take the Luftwaffe into the next generation. Early in
the war, immense development work was wasted on the Ju288 and the FW191, which was intended to carry five tons of bombs and to replace the Ju88. Most futile of all was the Heinkel He177, an extraordinary aircraft with four engines geared to two propellers which Milch christened ‘the dead racehorse’ in bitter judgement on the millions of hours wasted on flogging it. Several hundred were produced at enormous cost, but proved a total operational failure.

The German aircraft industry was burdened with an impossible number of unproven and competing development projects – at the end of 1941 there were forty different types under active development or in production. The advanced version of the Ju88, the best Luftwaffe light bomber and night-fighter, required 50,000 design changes on the production line, and its problems were resolved only in 1943. Early in the war, in anticipation of the new generation of bombers, the production lines of the old He111 and Do17 had been running down. Yet, in the event, even in 1944 the Heinkel and the Ju88 were the only bombers that the Luftwaffe could get. They were still being produced in quantity, and destroyed in large numbers on the Russian front. There were still more than 1,400 serviceable bombers and dive-bombers on the Luftwaffe strength in June 1944, but few of these were adequate for their task. Speer was always a production rather than a development expert, and he sought to expand the output of what was available rather than risk slowing production to introduce new models. Germany’s best scientists and engineers were working on an impossibly extensive range of advanced weapons: the V-1 and V-2, the acoustic torpedo and half a dozen alternative jet aircraft. But if Germany had been able to build a satisfactory new bomber, Hitler would have insisted that the Luftwaffe should be given it, whether his airmen wanted it or not.

It is important to make one further point in this context: the overwhelming tactical lesson of the war was that no bomber could operate effectively unless air superiority had been gained. By early 1944 the Allies possessed the capability for creating such an
overwhelming air umbrella over the invasion that there was never the remotest possibility that the Luftwaffe could have intervened effectively against the Allied armies. German airmen like to point out that while they put up nineteen aircraft in support of every German division attacking France in 1940 and twenty-six aircraft for every division invading Russia a year later, on D-Day the Allies launched 260 aircraft for every division landing.
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Such was the pathetic plight of the Luftwaffe that its pilots flew only 319 sorties in northern France that day, and lost a thousand aircraft in Normandy alone in the month that followed. But the German air force had been brought to this pass by strategic and technical failures at home, followed by defeat in the air by the Allied air forces, not destruction in the factories. The fact that the Allies attained such absolute dominance of the skies, and yet faced a further eleven months of bitter fighting before final victory, raises other questions about the limitations of air power which fall beyond the scope of this book.

The final issue about the effectiveness of the 1943–44 area-bombing campaign is that of its effect on the morale of the German people. When Bomber Command’s great attacks on the cities began, the German leadership was deeply alarmed. ‘Hitler had repeatedly exclaimed that if the bombings went on, not only would the cities be destroyed, but the morale of the people would crack irreparably,’ wrote Speer.
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‘Hitler was succumbing to the same error as the British strategists on the other side who were ordering mass bombings.’

After Hamburg, Milch said:

It’s much blacker than Speer paints it. If we get just five or six more attacks like these on Hamburg, the German people will just lay down their tools, however great their willpower. I keep saying, the steps that are being taken now are being taken too late. There can be no more talk of night fighters in the East, or of putting an umbrella over our troops in Sicily or anything like that. The soldier on the battlefield will just have to dig a hole, crawl into it and wait until the attack is over. What the home front is suffering now cannot be suffered much longer.
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Since April 1942, Goebbels had been advocating reprisals, which the Luftwaffe was entirely incapable of carrying out:

I now consider it absolutely essential that we continue with our rigorous reprisal raids. I also agree that not much is to be accomplished with raids on munitions centres. Like the English, we must attack centres of culture, especially those which have only little antiaircraft. Such centres should be attacked two or three times in succession and levelled to the ground; then the English probably will no longer find pleasure in trying to frighten us by their terror attacks.
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By March 1943, Goebbels was recording in his diary:

Reporting from the Rhineland indicates that in some cities people are gradually getting rather weak in the knees. That is understandable. For months the working population has had to go into air raid shelters night after night, and when they come out again they see part of their city going up in flame and smoke. The enervating thing about it is that we are not in a position to reply in kind . . . Our war in the east has lost us air supremacy in essential sections of Europe, and we are completely at the mercy of the English.
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Goebbels and his colleagues were intensely concerned to convey to the German people the notion that the British had unilaterally instituted terror bombing. British monitoring services noted that in one week of June 1943, 15 per cent of all German radio news output was given up to denunciations of the Allied air attack on German culture. In July a book was published under the auspices of the Propaganda Ministry, discussing the origins of strategic bombing, and entitled
England’s Sole Guilt
. A plan was put forward for leafleting England with photographs of the grotesquely
broken bodies of shot-down Bomber Command aircrew. A Party Chancellery directive
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reminded newspaper editors that ‘the concept of “terror raid” is intended to reflect the criminal behaviour of the enemy . . . Therefore a German attack must never be called a “terror raid”. Counter-measures of the German Air Force are to be designated as “retaliation measures”.’

Yet, astonishingly, the Nazi leadership’s fears and caution proved entirely unnecessary. The morale of the German people remained unbroken to the end, despite growing awareness that the war must be lost, and despite the increasing indifference of their Führer to their fate. Hitler refused to visit bombed cities, for all the imprecations of Goebbels and Speer. The Propaganda Ministry reacted nervously to every symptom that might suggest an impending moral collapse: reports from the Schweinfurt area of a decline in the general exchanging of the ‘Heil Hitler!’ salute; a growing resignation to subterranean life – ‘Bunker fever’ – as raids intensified; dismay about the news from the Russian front. But even in the ruined cities people queued to pay their taxes at temporary offices. After ‘Big Week’ in February 1944, Speer and Milch marvelled at the manner in which the aircraft workers laboured on temporary assembly-lines created in the open air in freezing winter weather, the heated factories having been reduced to rubble. Workers everywhere went back to their plants even after the firestorms. They repaired damage, restored production – even made their own shattered homes somehow habitable – with less assistance than the British authorities provided for their own people during the Blitz. The 1940 German attack on Coventry destroyed 100 out of the city’s 1,922 acres. In 1943, Krefeld lost 40 per cent of its housing in one night, yet continued to man its factories. Somewhere in the ruins of Hamburg, the vast majority of the million refugees who fled in the immediate wake of the firestorm returned and took up residence to live again within weeks, even with 6,200 of the city’s 8,382 acres apparently totally destroyed, according to the reconnaissance photographs that were studied with such fascination at High Wycombe. What was done
in Germany in the face of the bombing between 1942 and 1944 was not an economic miracle – Speer was extremely able, but he was not a genius. It was a triumph for the courage and determination of the German people in the face of the utmost suffering, paralleling that of the British in 1940. The chauvinistic assumption upon which the RAF founded its area-bombing campaign, that Germans were liable to moral collapse in a way that the British proved in 1940 they were not, was shown to be totally unfounded. In 1943, Dr Goebbels’s department noted a marked stiffening of national morale in the face of raids, matched by the growth of an unprecedented popular hatred for the enemy.