History of the Second World War (103 page)

Attacks on Berlin during this period had still less effect — owing to bad weather, inability to use Oboe at such a range, and the size of the city affecting H2S. Moreover, German night-fighters had lengthy opportunity to strike during the long flight — a round trip of 1,150 miles — and were directed by radar stations which had now mastered Window to the extent of identifying the main stream of the attack, though not the individual bombers. Of the 123 bombers lost in three raids on Berlin, about eighty fell to the night-fighters. That was a foretaste of the coming ‘Battle of Berlin’.

This battle, lasting from November 1943 to March 1944, was encouraged by Churchill — as Berlin raids pleased Stalin. It involved sixteen major attacks on the German capital, while the twelve other major targets included Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and Leipzig. In all, more than 20,000 sorties were flown.

The results of this massive offensive turned out different from those predicted by ‘Bomber’ Harris. Germany was not brought to her knees, nor Berlin, whereas the British losses became so heavy that the campaign had to be abandoned. The loss rate rose to 5.2 per cent, while the bombing damage did not compare with that inflicted on Hamburg or Essen. The morale of Bomber Command was shaken* which was hardly surprising since 1,047 bombers were lost and a further 1,682 damaged. The presence, or absence, of German night-fighters was usually crucial — for example when they were misdirected in meeting the Munich attack of October 7, Bomber Command lost only 1.2 per cent of the force employed. Usually, the night-fighters were promptly on the scene, and very active — gradually forcing Bomber Command to shift to targets farther south, and to use a greater part of its strength in diversionary raids. The culmination came with the catastrophic Nuremberg raid of March 30, 1944, when ninety-four bombers were lost, and seventy-one damaged, out of 795 employed.

* Official History, vol. II, pp. 195-6.

Already opposition to Harris’s strategy had been growing, and the Air Staff were coming to recognise that the policy of selective bombing, that is to say attack upon selected industries such as oil, aircraft, and the like, was better suited to the Casablanca concept that a land invasion of northern Europe was necessary and that it could not be launched unless command of the air was definitely gained.

As the German air defences and production grew the more questioned Harris’s views became. He was mainly concerned to get the Americans to join him in attacking Berlin — which was impossible for them by night, as they were untrained for such action, and by late 1943 this would have been suicidal by day. By the beginning of 1944, the Air Staff rejected his notion that he could bring Germany to her knees with Lancasters alone by April, and insisted on selective attacks against German industry, such as the Schweinfurt ball-bearings plant.

The attack of February 25 on these plants, reluctantly agreed by Harris, was probably the first true example of the Combined Bombing Offensive. The threat to the bombing offensive and to the prospects of ‘Overlord’ produced by the ever-growing Luftwaffe was responsible for the defeat of Harris’s views, and the failure of the ‘Battle of Berlin’ confirmed this trend. Harris himself clearly recognised the defeat when, in April, he called for the ‘provision of night-fighter support’ for his bombers — as the Americans had done already in seeking long-range fighters to support their daylight operations.

The whole future of Bomber Command’s massed attack upon the German cities was in doubt, and the force was fortunate that in April it was switched, as previously planned, to operations against the French railway network in aid of the coming cross-Channel invasion. That both lightened its task and helped to cover up its heavy defeat in the direct offensive against Germany. It was still luckier to find, after the ‘Overlord’ invasion, that the situation had decisively changed in favour of the Allies.

After 1942 the British strategic air offensive became part of a joint effort; it was no longer independent and unconnected as before. The scheme propounded at the Washington Conference by General H. H. Arnold, the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces, for setting up a large bombing force in Britain was naturally pleasing to Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff, and curbed their criticism of the American policy of daylight bombing. The Americans felt sure that if bombers were well-armed and armoured, flew high enough and close together, they could make daylight raids without suffering heavy casualties. It proved a fallacy, like the R.A.F’s belief in evading interference by operating at night.

Early American raids in 1942 were on too small a scale to provide any clear evidence, but when bigger ones at longer range were launched in 1943, losses soon rose high. In the Bremen raid of April 17, sixteen bombers were lost, and forty-four damaged, out of 115 employed. In the Kiel raid of June 13, the loss was twenty-two out of the sixty-six B.17 Flying Fortresses; in a raid on Hanover in July, twenty-four out of ninety-two; against Berlin on July 28, twenty-two out of 120. The Americans tried using as escorts Thunderbolt fighters, fitted with extra fuel tanks, but their range was not good enough, and the need for more adequate escort was made still clearer in the autumn, when the series of attacks on the ball-bearings factory at Schweinfurt, to the east of Frankfurt, were made.

In the catastrophic raid of October 14, a force of 291 Flying Fortresses set out with a strong escort of Thunderbolts, but these could not continue beyond the Aachen area, and when they withdrew the B.17s were assailed by wave after wave of German fighters all the way to their target and then back as far as the Channel coast. By the time the American force got back, sixty of its bombers had been shot down, and a further 138 damaged. It was the climax of a terrible week in which the 8th Air Force had lost 148 bombers, with their crews, in four attempts to break through the German defences beyond the existing range of fighter escort. Such an extremely high rate of loss could not be sustained, and the American air chiefs were forced to realise the need for a really long-range fighter escort — a need hitherto discounted, or considered technically impossible.

Fortunately, the right instrument was at hand in the North American Company’s Mustang fighter. The British had placed an order for this in 1940, while the Americans rejected it, and its performance was greatly improved by the installation of British Rolls-Royce Merlin engines. With a Packard-Merlin engine tried in the autumn of 1942 the P.51B Mustang was faster at all heights than all the German fighters of the period, and had also superior manoeuvrability. Fitted with long-range fuel tanks, it had a range of nearly 1,500 miles, and thus could give bombers escort for more than 600 miles from base — in fact, to the eastern frontier of Germany. A crash programme of Mustang production was begun after the Schweinfurt disasters, and the first lot went into action with the 8th U.S.A.A.F. in December 1943. By the end of the war in May, 1945, a total of 14,000 Mustangs was produced.

The winter of 1943-4 was a relatively quiet period for the 8th U.S.A.A.F., as the bombers were temporarily restricted to short-range targets. In December losses were only 3.4 per cent compared with 9.1 per cent in October. The creation of the 15th U.S.A.A.F. to operate from Italy was a further step in the American plan to cripple the German war economy. General Carl Spaatz was appointed to command the two forces.

The early months of 1944 were marked by the ever-increasing flow of Mustangs, and an extension of their range. Moreover they were unleashed to attack the Luftwaffe wherever it could be found, rather than being tied to the bombers — with the aim of attaining an overall command of the air, not merely command of it in the immediate vicinity of the bombers. In this way they forced a fight on the German fighters, with consequent infliction of ever-increasing losses on them. By March, the German fighters showed more and more reluctance to come up and engage the Mustangs. That aggressive action not only enabled the American bombers to pursue their daylight attacks with diminishing interference, and loss, but smoothed the way for ‘Overlord’.

Ironically, it also aided the pursuance of Bomber Command’s night-time offensive against Germany. Just as the Luftwaffe became masters of the air by night, it lost command of the air by day — to the Americans. When the British bomber force renewed its strategic offensive against Germany, after being diverted to aid the Normandy invasion, the German night-fighter force had become very short of fuel, and also suffered from the loss of its early warning radar system in France — whereas Bomber Command had correspondingly benefited by establishing transmitter stations on the Continent.

The change is reflected in the figures of loss, which were high for Bomber Command’s few raids over Germany in May 1944 — and in June rose to 11 per cent in its raids on oil targets. In consequence, about half of the British raids on Germany during August and September were made in daylight, and suffered much reduced losses. By that time, however, even night raids were becoming much cheaper — 3.7 per cent and 2.2 per cent respectively. In September Bomber Command despatched more than three times as many aircraft on night raids as it had in June 1944, but lost only about two-thirds as many.

The introduction of long-range night-fighters for Bomber Command helped in the trend, but was never a major factor, as the aircraft used were too slow and the task proved too difficult for them. Only thirty-one German night-fighters were destroyed in the period December 1943 to April 1944, and even when more squadrons of better aircraft became available the total claimed from December 1943 to April 1945, the last seventeen months of the war, was only 257 — an average of barely fifteen a month. So neither this nor new radar and radio jamming techniques counted as much as the German loss of oil, territory, and daylight control.

In 1943, a total of 200,000 tons of bombs was dropped on Germany — nearly five times as much as in 1942. Yet German productivity rose to new heights, thanks largely to the reorganisation carried out by Albert Speer, the minister put in charge of war production, while ‘air raid precaution’ measures and the German ability of quick recovery prevented any crisis in either morale or production. The increased output of aircraft, guns, tanks, and submarines contributed to the overall 50 per cent rise of armaments production in 1943.

The Germans were certainly worried by the mass attacks of Bomber Command, for the first time since the war began, and after the great attack on Hamburg in July 1943, Speer is reported to have said gloomily that six more city raids on that scale would bring Germany to her knees. But no such devastation and moral effect was achieved by area-bombing in the raids that followed during the second half of the year, while Speer’s brilliant activities in the dispersal of industry annulled his earlier anxieties.

The American selective precision-bombing had more effect for a time, and by August reduced fighter production by some 25 per cent, but after the costly defeat inflicted on the 8th U.S.A.A.F. in October it rose again, and to new high levels early in 1944. While assessments of the damage indicted had become fairly accurate, the Allies underrated the capability of German productive power, and mistakenly assumed that the evident rise in the Luftwaffe’s strength was due to the transfer of aircraft from the Eastern Front.

For Bomber Command, the most significant feature of the period was a development in precision-bombing at night, confined at first to the use of 617 Squadron as a specialist ‘marking force’ following their dams raid, but becoming more general with improvements in the Pathfinder marking system, the new bomb-sights, and the advent of the 12,000 lb. Tallboy ‘earthquake’ bomb — followed by that of the 22,000 lb. Grand Slam.

The most important general effect of the Anglo-American bombing campaign was that it did eventually draw off an increasingly large proportion of Germany’s fighter and anti-aircraft force from the Eastern Front to the Western, thus aiding the Russian advance, while also dominating the air by day to an extent that enabled ‘Overlord’ to go ahead with little interference from the Luftwaffe.

In the final year of the war, from April 1944 to May 1945, the Allies definitely achieved command of the air, thanks mainly to the American onslaught in February-April 1944. But the requirements of ‘Overlord’ were a major diversion that for several months tended to turn the Combined Bombing Offensive away from German targets to ones which would give direct help to the Allied armies, both before and after the Normandy landing.

This diversion was naturally disagreeable to Sir Arthur Harris and other single-minded bombing enthusiasts, but Sir Charles Portal and the Air Staff showed a more balanced outlook, and recognised that the bomber must play a more auxiliary role in Allied strategy. As the strategic bomber forces were needed to assist the tactical forces, the direction of all of them was placed in mid-April under Sir Arthur Tedder, who had by then been appointed Deputy Supreme Commander to General Eisenhower. Tedder had previously commanded the air forces in the Middle East, and made a great impression there. He saw that the chief immediate effect that the bombing forces could give to ‘Overlord’ was in paralysing the German transport network. This plan was actually agreed on March 25, 1944, despite Churchill’s worries about French civilian losses and Spaatz’s preference for oil targets — a preference shared by Portal.

Spaatz’s determination to concentrate on oil targets resulted in the 8th U.S.A.A.F. continuing the attack on Germany in the spring of 1944, while the British Bomber Command spent the months April-June mainly in attacking railway targets in France. (In June, only 8 per cent of its bombs were directed against German targets.) By June, over 65,000 tons of bombs had been cast on the enemy’s transport system, together with strikes at coastal batteries, rocket-sites, and similar targets. In retrospect, it can be seen that Tedder’s paralysis of the transport, or communications, system was the greatest factor in paving the way for the success of the Normandy invasion. Harris’s objections, that Bomber Command was not capable of the precision needed, was disproved as early as March by the effectiveness of the attacks on the French marshalling yards.