Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (44 page)

As at Luebeck and Rostock, the Luftwaffe’s air defense had proven inadequate at Cologne. Of the 1,046 bombers involved, only 40 were shot down: 3.8 percent of the total. Bomber Command did not consider this loss excessive,
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so the raids continued.

General Bodenschatz, the Reichsmarschall’s liaison officer to Fuehrer Headquarters, later testified at Nuremberg that the Cologne raid caused Goering’s first serious loss of prestige with Hitler. “From that moment on,” he said, “there were differences of opinion between Hitler and Goering which became more serious as time went on. The outward symptoms of this waning influence were as follows: first, the Fuehrer criticized Goering most severely; second, the endless conversations between Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering became shorter, less frequent, and finally ceased altogether.”
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Hitler did not react to the bombings by significantly strengthening the defenses of the Reich, but rather by ordering reprisal raids. He brought the He-111 “Pathfinder” bomber wing (KG 100) back from the eastern front and two bomber groups from Sicily (lessening the effort against Malta) and attached them to IX Air Corps, which was ordered to conduct reprisal raids in addition to its regular mine-laying duties. Some thirty-nine reprisal raids were conducted against Britain in the seven months after Rostock, but with little result.
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Sperrle’s 3d Air Fleet was also instructed to engage in reprisal raids, but the disillusioned and increasingly pleasure-loving field marshal did so only in a most perfunctory manner. Except for a few night bomber raids, he sent over Me-109 “Jabos” (fighter-bombers) armed with single 550-pound bombs. Only one wing of Me-109s was assigned to this mission, and it only had two groups (about thirty aircraft each). They dropped their bombs with few losses and even less effect on the British war effort.
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Of all the leaders of the Luftwaffe, only Erhard Milch saw the situation clearly. As early as March, 1942, he became alarmed over American production statistics, which Goering and Hitler refused to believe. He fashioned an ambitious plan for the air defense of the Reich, “an umbrella over Germany,” he called it.
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In late March he presented it to the Reichsmarschall and Jeschonnek.

“Herr Reichsmarschall,” he said, “your total demand is for 360 new fighter aircraft per month. I fail to understand. If you were to say 3,600 fighters, then I would be bound to state that against America and Britain combined, even 3,600 are too few! You must produce more . . .”

“I do not know what I should do with more than 360 fighters!” Jeschonnek shouted violently.
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David Irving, the British author, blamed Hermann Goering for the Luftwaffe’s failure to defend its Fatherland. “By 1942 at the latest,” he wrote, “the provision of adequate air defenses for the Reich should have found first priority. The truth was that the Reichsmarschall lacked the courage to represent this to Hitler.”
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The air defense of the Reich from March 21, 1942, to December 23, 1943, was the responsibility of Luftwaffe Colonel General Hubert Weise, an antiaircraft artillery expert who had commanded a flak corps on the western front in 1940. His Luftwaffe Command Center (later redesignated Air Fleet Reich) included the fighter units stationed in Germany and the flak units in the Luftgaue, except for those in the Weisbaden sector of southwest Germany (which came under 3rd Air Fleet) and East Prussia (which was the responsibility of Keller’s 1st Air Fleet).
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The flak gun (
Fl
ieger
a
bwehr
k
anone, or anti-aircraft cannon) was not a particularly effective weapon against aircraft. To hit its target, a flak battery had to know (or correctly guess) the exact altitude, speed, and direction of its target. Since one cubic mile of airspace contains 5,500,000 cubic yards, and the killing zone of a 88mm shell burst covered only a few thousand yards for 1/50th of a second, it took a well-trained and experienced gun crew to bring down an enemy bomber. The vast majority of these crews were heavily engaged on the Russian front. Many of the flak guns in the Reich were manned by fifteen-, sixteen-, and seventeen-year-olds.
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The German people generally ridiculed the accuracy of their antiair-craft artillery, as a joke that swept Germany in 1943 illustrates. A soldier, so the story went, was condemned to death and given his choice of the means of his execution. He chose to be killed by antiaircraft fire. A tower was constructed, the soldier tied to the top, and three flak batteries blazed away at him for three weeks, but never hit the tower. When they finally gave up and went to retrieve the soldier, however, they found that he had died of starvation in the meantime.
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German antiaircraft fire was, in fact, not very accurate. During the war, it took an average of 3,400 heavy antiaircraft shells to bring down a single enemy airplane.
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Enemy bomber formations were decimated only when they ran into the heaviest concentrations. General Weise’s main weapon against the Allied bombers was Joseph Kammhuber’s XII Air Corps: the night fighters.

Germany started the war with only five squadrons of night fighters, equipped with Me-109s. This aircraft was certainly not the best choice, since it could not be flown “blind” (i.e., flown and navigated by instruments only), so it was replaced with the twin-engine Me-110, which had proven so ineffective in the Battle of Britain. The first night fighter division (
Nachtjagddivision
) was formed on July 20, 1940, under the command of Colonel Kammhuber, the former chief of staff of the 2nd Air Fleet, who had been sacked by Goering after the Mechelen incident. Although Ju-88s and Do-17s were added to Kammhuber’s command, the Me-110 formed the “backbone” of the night fighter corps throughout the war.
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Working closely with Lt. Gen. (later Gen. of Air Signal Troops) Wolfgang Martini,
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the Luftwaffe signals expert, Kammhuber developed the idea of establishing ground control interception “boxes” across Germany. Known as the Himmelbett system, each box included two Wuerzburg radars and a shorter-range Freya radar, enabling the night fighters to triangulate the location of British night bombers. Each “box” covered a zone thirty miles deep and controlled its own night fighter and searchlight units. By extending this system from the northern tip of Denmark, through northwestern Germany, Holland, Belgium, and eastern France to the Swiss-Italian border, Martini and Kammhuber assured that the R.A.F. could not enter Reich airspace unopposed.
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There were two major weaknesses in the Himmelbett system. First, it was designed for defense in breadth, not depth. Once the bombers broke through the line of Himmelbett stations, there was little behind it to oppose them. Second, of course, was the shortage of night fighters. Hitler’s strategy was predicated on offensive weapons, and fighters are essentially defensive weapons; therefore, their production was not emphasized, despite the urgings of Milch and Galland. Kammhuber only had 164 aircraft at the end of 1940; nevertheless, 1941 was a successful year for the night fighters. They shot down 442 enemy aircraft and were gradually reinforced. On August 10, 1941, the Nachtjagddivision was upgraded to XII Air Corps, and Kammhuber became general of night fighters. His new command included two searchlight divisions, three signal regiments, a few day fighter units,
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and a new Nachtjagddivision (1st Night Fighter Division) under Maj. Gen. Kurt von Doering, the former C.O. of 2nd Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain and most recently inspector of fighter and ground attack aircraft at RLM.
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The bombs continued to fall on Germany throughout 1942, although only one more thousand-bomber raid was launched that year. Flown on the night of June 25-26, its target was Bremen, in particular the Focke-Wulf factory there. The plant was hit by a 4,000-pound bomb and almost completely wrecked, but because of an abrupt change in wind direction the cloud cover did not clear as British meteorologists expected, the bombs were scattered, and the raid was not very successful.
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Bremen was the last thousand-bomber attack the R.A.F. sent against a single target until 1944.
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After May 30, however, thirty-two more major raids were launched against nineteen different targets, including Bremen (five raids), Duisburg (four raids), and Essen, Hamburg, and Emden (two raids each).
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By the end of the year the Allies (mostly the British) had dropped 78,500 tons of bombs on the Reich and 22,500 tons on occupied Europe since the start of the war, as opposed to the 67,000 tons the Luftwaffe had dropped on Great Britain. Although several fighter groups had been transferred from Russia (where they were badly needed) to the Reich, the R.A.F.’s impact on the German war effort had been minimal. Estimates of the total loss of the Reich’s economic output to the bombings vary from 0.7 percent to 2.5 percent of the total for 1942. Britain, on the other hand, had committed roughly 33 percent of her war economy to the prosecution of the air offensive. Kammhuber’s night fighters continued to expand (by the end of the year he had 477 aircraft in three night fighter divisions) and continued to enjoy success. By the end of 1942, the R.A.F. had lost 2,859 aircraft in night operations and 627 British bombers had been lost in daytime raids over occupied Europe. The Reich’s air defenses were generally taken for granted. As late as December, 1942, 150 flak batteries had been transferred to Italy.
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Jeschonnek went so far as to say: “Every four-engine bomber the Western Allies build makes me happy, for we will bring these . . . down just as we brought down the two-engine ones, and the destruction of a four-engine bomber constitutes a much greater loss to the enemy.”
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Of the top Nazis, only Milch was worried. He realized that the Allies had dropped twice as many bombs on Germany in 1942 as the previous two years combined. He also realized that the advent of the four-engine bomber was greatly improving the range and efficiency of the enemy bomber force. He also understood that the military and industrial resources of the United States were about to come into full play in the air war and that, when combined with those of the British, they would overwhelm Germany’s defenses. He could not get Goering or Hitler to listen to him on this vital issue, however.

Reichsmarschall Goering was especially militant in refusing to believe that the United States was manufacturing a fraction of the aircraft that it was, in fact, producing. In 1942 he forbade his people to even mention the American production figures, which he considered to be a colossal bluff.
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That same year Walter Schellenberg, the head of the SS Foreign Intelligence Service, presented him with a special (and accurate) report on American war production. “Everything you have written is utter nonsense,” Goering told him. “You should have a psychiatrist examine your mental condition.”
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