Bomber Command (50 page)

The Americans now began to take a keen interest in this
extraordinary hybrid. The Packard company started building Merlin engines under licence, and a massive programme was undertaken to provide the USAAF with Mustangs. Progress towards a satisfactory drop-tank was hesitant, and it was not until the spring of 1944 that the Mustang element of 8th Air Force became formidable. But when it did so, the means at last existed to fight the Luftwaffe on highly favourable terms. As the tide of American aircraft production became a flood, with astonishing speed, huge Mustang escorts drove the German air force from its own skies. Whatever Speer was doing to increase German fighter-production in the factories, he could do nothing to halt the attrition of trained aircrew in the air battles. The Luftwaffe continued to offer resistance to the end, and on occasions inflicted heavy loss on the Fortresses. But within four months of Schweinfurt, the Americans had overturned the balance of war in the air.

The escort fighter was introduced to assist bomber operations. But through the spring of 1944, understanding grew among the American airmen that whatever they were or were not accomplishing against the German aircraft industry on the ground through bombing, by compelling the Luftwaffe to scramble to its defence they were winning a critical victory in the air. It was the ultimate vision of the
Circus
operations that the RAF had begun over northern France in 1941, intended to provoke the Luftwaffe to battle, but unsuccessful because the bombers’ targets were not important enough to make the Germans rise to the bait. Now the Americans could compel the defenders to meet the challenge. In ‘Big Week’, the immense effort by 8th and 15th Air Forces against the German aircraft factories that began on 20 February 1944, 3,800 Liberators and Fortresses dropped 10,000 tons of bombs for the loss of 226 heavy aircraft – 6 per cent of sorties dispatched – and twenty-eight escorting fighters. Bomber Command’s five parallel night raids against aircraft-industry targets added a further 9,198 tons of bombs for the loss of 157 aircraft, 6.6 per cent of sorties dispatched. Between them, the Allies inflicted severe blows, but production continued to rise dramatically. In the last half of
1943 Germany produced an average of 851 single-engined fighters a month. The real impact of ‘Big Week’ and the Americans’ other daylight operations became visible in the Luftwaffe’s air-loss figures: these rose from 1,311 aircraft destroyed from all causes in January 1944 to 2,121 in February, and 2,115 in March.

By March the Americans had consciously embarked on a policy of seeking targets which they knew that the Luftwaffe must defend. The skies over Germany were strewn day after day with the plunging wrecks of broken fighters and bombers, the black smears of flak, rocket trails, and amidst them all the glinting silver wings of the Fortress formations, cruising steadily onwards. Encounters continued for hours, with successive waves of Luftwaffe fighters landing to refuel and rearm, then engaging once more. On 6 March, 8th Air Force lost 69 of 660 bombers which attacked, and 11 fighters. The flak was intensifying and becoming more deadly – a quarter of all American bombers dispatched came home with shrapnel damage. But the enemy was tiring:

Viewed in retrospect [wrote the American official historians] the preceding sixteen months of bombing by American forces became a long period of preparation . . . The German air force could still offer serious resistance. Yet it was just such an air fight that the American commanders hoped to provoke, confident as they were in the ability of their airmen to impose a ruinous wastage upon the enemy . . . It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the air battles did more to defeat the Luftwaffe than did the destruction of the aircraft factories.
¹⁰

But even as the USAAF was achieving the victory over the Luftwaffe that would enable Bomber Command eventually to dominate the night skies over Germany, the controversy over Allied bombing policy entered a new phase.
Overlord
, the plan for the Normandy landings, was now the chief preoccupation of the military and political leaders of the Grand Alliance. They were determined that the invasion would receive all the air support at their command to ensure its success. From the summer of 1943 until
the spring of 1944, there was constant and acrimonious debate about how this could best be achieved.

The British were dismayed by the now inescapable transatlantic domination of the war, by Washington’s unconcealed determination to conduct the liberation of Europe with its commanders and by its strategy. The Americans were no longer much concerned with soothing British sensibilities. Their build-up in Britain and the Mediterranean was flooding bases, ports, airfields. Already the US bomber force outnumbered Bomber Command in aircraft, although not in bomb-load. American policy was to concentrate forces within highly centralized command structures, inevitably controlled by their own generals. The British squirmed furiously to prevent their own air forces from being engulfed in these monoliths. At the
Sextant
conference in Cairo in November 1943, the British were alarmed by the American announcement that they planned to place the 8th and 15th Air Forces under a single commander, and ultimately under the control of the American Supreme Commander of the invasion forces. Sir Douglas Evill, Vice-Chief of Air Staff, signalled London’s reaction to Portal in Cairo in a Most Secret cipher telegram of 26 November:

After consultation with the Secretary of State, Permanent Under-Secretary and Deputy Chief of Air Staff, we are all of us agreed that everything possible should be done to resist any proposal that would end in 8th and 15th Air Forces being placed under the command of the Supreme Allied Commander for North-West Europe. Such centralization would logically suggest inclusion of the RAF strategic night-bomber force, and there are insuperable operational and political objections to this.

There was considerable pathos in the efforts of the British to preserve their dwindling independence. One remarkable proposal to avoid placing Bomber Command under Eisenhower’s control involved appointing an American Deputy Chief of Air Staff at the Air Ministry, to second Portal’s direction of
Pointblank
on behalf of
the Combined Chiefs of Staff. The British finally lost their fight to prevent the union of 8th and 15th Air Forces under the command of Spaatz, but they staved off a decision about Bomber Command’s future place in the Allied command structure.

We were . . . able to secure some improvements in the organization originally proposed [Portal signalled to London on 7 December 1943]. This arrangement gives us essential general control and the new Commanding General will doubtless discover soon enough the difficulties of exercising detailed control of XVth Air Force from the United Kingdom. No commitments have been entered into about the date on which command passes to the Supreme Allied Commander.

But the principal officers and ministers of the Grand Alliance were not in the mood to concern themselves with the airmen’s sensitivities when
Overlord
was at stake. Eisenhower insisted that, as Supreme Commander, he must have operational control of the strategic-bomber forces. Among his colleagues even his Deputy, Sir Arthur Tedder, himself an airman, was unwilling to trust the vital invasion air-support decisions to the discretion of Harris and Spaatz.

During the winter of 1943–44, acres of Air Ministry and Bomber Command paper were dedicated to demonstrating the scale of the British contribution to
Pointblank
against that of the Americans. Much has been made of Portal’s fears that the programme for crippling the German air force before the invasion was falling behind schedule – three months was the stated lag.

[The achievements of the USAAF and Bomber Command] had to be considered always in close relationship to the strategic timetable [write Craven and Cate]. The important thing was to determine how near the operation was to achieving its assigned objectives within the time allotted; for although it was in a sense true that the success of
Pointblank
would determine the date of
Overlord
, there was a limit to how long the invasion could be postponed while awaiting the anticipated fatal weakening of the German air force.
¹¹

This seems grossly to exaggerate the concern of the Allied leadership about
Pointblank
, and about the threat which the Luftwaffe presented to
Overlord
by the winter of 1943. The Russian armies had contributed immeasurably more than
Pointblank
could hope to achieve in bringing about the ‘fatal weakening’ of Germany in advance of the Western Allied invasion. As has been suggested earlier, the superiority of the Allied tactical air forces was already so overwhelming that neither Washington nor London would conceivably have considered postponing the invasion in the light of what
Pointblank
had or had not achieved. Naturally Eisenhower, Marshall, Brooke and others were anxious to drive the German air force from the sky, and for that matter to inflict maximum damage on Germany. But they had long since lost any hope of finding the German ability to resist
Overlord
‘fatally weakened’ by bombing. It was almost embarrassing to recall the plan codenamed
Rankin
, drawn up in the full flush of the airmen’s enthusiasm months earlier, for a sudden occupation of Europe if German resistance collapsed under the weight of bombing or Russian offensives.

It was because the ground commanders doubted the airmen’s judgement of what constituted the critical pressure-points of German military and industrial strength that they insisted upon control of the strategic bombers being transferred to the Supreme Commander. There was a final pathetic wrangle provoked by the British, about the precise wording of Eisenhower’s powers over Bomber Command: they refused to let him have ‘command’, but finally settled for giving him ‘direction’. Then the issue was closed. From 14 April 1944 until further notice the Allied air forces would conduct strategic operations only with Eisenhower’s specific consent. Their prime function would be the tactical support of the invasion. This was a total defeat for the wishes of the bomber commanders of Britain and America.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory had been appointed to nominal command of the Allied air forces at the invasion, and although he would never have the opportunity effectively to exercise this, in the winter of 1943 he drew up a plan for the bombing of key rail communications links in northern France and Belgium as a preliminary to D-Day. Professor Solly Zuckerman, co-author of the Hull and Birmingham Report which Cherwell misquoted to such effect in 1942, had subsequently been posted to the Mediterranean. There he achieved considerable influence as a scientific adviser to Tedder, Eisenhower’s air chief, particularly after he planned the bombing of the island of Pantellaria, which surrendered without further ado following the air attack. When Tedder was nominated Deputy Supreme Commander for D-Day in January 1944, Zuckerman came home to serve on his staff, and in particular to devise bombing plans. Zuckerman read the Leigh-Mallory plan, concluded that it was quite inadequate, and set out to devise a comprehensive strategy for the destruction of every key rail link in northern France. The fruits of his efforts became known as the Transport Plan, and unleashed a new bombing controversy that locked the leaders of the Allied war effort in fierce conflict until the last weeks before the invasion.

The Allied planners believed that the greatest threat to the invasion would come in the build-up period after landing. Unless the Wehrmacht could be drastically impeded, the Germans would be able to concentrate divisions around the Allied bridgehead more quickly than the Allies could reinforce it. Eisenhower and Tedder were rapidly persuaded that Zuckerman’s plan represented the most promising means of wrecking the German army’s communications with Normandy, and the most effective use of the strategic bomber force in the weeks before the invasion. Almost all the military leaders agreed, and Portal was willing to be convinced.

But deployed against the Transport Plan were the massed ranks of the other airmen; Lord Cherwell, who was still single-mindedly dedicated to the area offensive, which he cherished as his own brainchild; and the vital figure of the Prime Minister. Churchill
was appalled by initial estimates from Cherwell and RE8 that bombing the key French railway centres could kill 40,000 French civilians.
¹⁵
This seemed to him – the Americans were less concerned – an utterly unacceptable manner in which to begin the liberation of Europe. Harris, who was resolutely opposed to the Transport Plan for a host of his own reasons, refused to give the Prime Minister any reassurance at all about possible civilian casualties: ‘I was not about to start keeping a gamebook of dead Frenchmen.’
¹²
Throughout February the Prime Minister remained obdurate in his refusal to sanction the railway bombing, to the increasing alarm of Eisenhower.

But it was Harris and Spaatz who unleashed the most formidable revolt against the Transport Plan, or indeed against any tactical employment of the heavy-bomber force at all. Even at this late stage, neither officer had renounced his private conviction that
Overlord
was a vast, gratuitous, strategic misjudgement, when Germany was already tottering on the edge of collapse from bombing.

Overlord
[Harris wrote to Portal on 13 January 1944] must now presumably be regarded as an inescapable commitment . . . It is clear that the best and indeed the only efficient support which Bomber Command can give to
Overlord
is the intensification of attacks on suitable industrial centres in Germany. If we attempt to substitute for this process attacks on gun emplacements, beach defences, communications or dumps in occupied territories, we shall commit the irremediable error of diverting our best weapon from the military function for which it has been equipped and trained to tasks which it cannot effectively carry out. Though this might give a specious appearance of ‘supporting’ the Army, in reality it would be the greatest disservice we could do them. It would lead directly to disaster.