The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (64 page)

In the airman’s world, those afflicted with “the clanks”—a paralyzing inability to shake a sense of dread—were known as “dead men flying.” Bailing out of a stricken “kite” was called “giving birth,” and “chop girls” were English women shunned by superstitious crews because they had befriended airmen who then went missing in action. Temperatures of minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit left brown frostbite patches on foreheads and buttocks, at least until deployment of the F-3 heated suit, with 250 watts flowing through wired jackets, trousers, and felt slippers to give eight Clos of insulation. Plastic surgeons learned to rebuild burned-away faces; after sculpting new lips from skin grafted off an arm, they tattooed them red and then added tiny black dots to simulate mustache whiskers.

In the airman’s world, a B-17 pilot sat in the five-foot cube of his cockpit with “an oxygen mask full of drool” amid the roar of four engines. He fiddled with 130 switches, dials, gauges, levers, and pedals long enough to dump his payload of bombs—“big ugly dead things,” in one officer’s phrase—and then fled for home. In this world, Germany was known as “the Land of Doom.” In this world, the pilot John Muirhead took pains not to grow close to his Flying Fortress crewmates, because “if I didn’t know them, I would not grieve.”

*   *   *

How best to destroy the Land of Doom had perplexed air strategists for years. The Combined Chiefs at the Casablanca conference in January 1943 called for “the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and economic system” in order to undermine the enemy “capacity for armed resistance.” But where was a big modern state most vulnerable? Some analysts studied the U.S. industrial system in search of “instructive hints to what might be German weak points,” such as the single plant in Chicago that processed 90 percent of all tantalum, a corrosion-resistant metal critical to radar and radio production. Others scrutinized Germany directly, reviewing thousands of intelligence reports. One conclusion: sustained bombing of enemy steel plants was pointless, because the Reich was using only 20 percent of its steel-making capacity.

But Germany did have an Achilles heel: oil. The Allied powers controlled more than 90 percent of the world’s natural oil, compared to just 3 percent for the Axis. German schemes to exploit Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus had been thwarted by battlefield reverses in Africa and Russia. By the spring of 1944, this vulnerability became increasingly evident to Allied intelligence analysts. Shortages impeded the training of some combat divisions, fuel cuts were imposed on the German navy, and fleets of vehicles were converted to wood-burning engines. Nearly all Luftwaffe aviation fuel came from synthetic-oil plants, and German chemists sought energy substitutes in such unlikely European flora as acorns and grapes. An OSS analysis asserted that further reduction of the Reich’s oil production would have “rapid and drastic effects upon her military capacity.” Ultra intercepts revealed Berlin’s alarm at Allied raids on the vast Romanian petroleum facilities around Ploesti and against oil targets in Germany. British intelligence by late May had concluded that sustained air attacks on German oil production would cause disastrous industrial shortages within three to six months. “Oil,” warned a decrypted message from Japanese officials in Berlin to Tokyo, “is Germany’s problem.”

No one believed that more than Lieutenant General Carl A. Spaatz, commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe. Taciturn and unpretentious, with passions for fishing and cribbage, “Tooey” Spaatz was an aviation pioneer who had shot down three German planes in World War I and helped set a world record for staying aloft in 1929 through innovative midair refueling.
Time
claimed that he now kept “the finest poker table in London.… He bets with a heavy hand [and] bluffs outrageously.” Uncanny in his ability to draw an inside straight, Spaatz sometimes played with a kitten tucked into his uniform blouse for luck. The need to destroy the Luftwaffe, and Eisenhower’s decision to focus on German transportation targets before Normandy, had delayed a full-force blow at the enemy’s oil industry. Yet even before D-Day, the supreme commander had heeded Spaatz’s pleas by authorizing several oil raids, among them a mid-May attack by nine hundred bombers that also resulted in the destruction of sixty Luftwaffe fighters desperately struggling to defend the target.

No sooner had
OVERLORD
forces come ashore than Spaatz declared, on June 8, that the “primary strategic aim of United States Strategic Air Forces is now to deny oil to enemy armed forces,” a decree that remained in force until the war ended. An estimated 30 percent of German production came from the Ploesti refineries, with another 36 percent from two dozen synthetic plants that converted brown coal to gasoline and aviation fuel. Sixty crude-oil refineries in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia provided the rest. Fifteenth Air Force in Italy would target refineries in Romania, Vienna, and Budapest, along with synthetic-oil plants in Silesia, Poland, and the Sudetenland. Eighth Air Force in England would focus on seven large synthetic plants in central Germany, as well as some twenty refineries mostly in northern Germany. British intelligence in late July posited that oil shortages could cause a German military collapse by the end of 1944.

That estimate was too rosy, but German production did plummet through the summer. Ploesti had been wrecked by bombers even before the Red Army overran the region in August, and of ninety-one oil facilities remaining in Hitler’s hands only three were at full production by early fall.

Not everyone subscribed to the oil strategy. A directive from the Combined Chiefs on September 25 gave first priority to enemy petroleum targets, followed by the German transportation system and tank production facilities. But Bomber Command resisted the edict. Its leadership was determined to finish the job of sowing terror and chaos by destroying German cities, a project that had begun with incendiary attacks on the medieval town centers of Lübeck and Rostock in the spring of 1942. The British Air Ministry had long studied the science of “fire-raising,” examining the combustible qualities of German pantries, attics, and furnishings, and collecting insurance maps to study firewall patterns in German buildings. Allied bombers would ultimately drop eighty million incendiary sticks, twenty-two-inch hexagonal rods with a magnesium-zinc case that burned for eight minutes at two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The firestorm that incinerated Hamburg in the summer of 1943, killing 41,000 and “de-housing” nearly a million, “simulated the atmosphere of another planet,” a German writer recorded, “one incompatible with life.”

Air Chief Marshal Arthur T. Harris, the Bomber Command leader, in late 1943 had sent Churchill a list of forty-seven German cities, of which nineteen were deemed “virtually destroyed” and another nineteen “seriously damaged.” Harris argued that Germany would surrender after the destruction of “between 40 percent and 50 percent of the principal German towns,” which he believed could happen by April 1, 1944. “We shall take out one German city after another,” Harris said, “like pulling teeth.” Rumors circulated through Germany that lime pits already had been dug for future bomb victims in Berlin.

Yet April passed without a surrender, and British bomber losses were dreadful. Allied intelligence found “no grounds for supposing that the effects of area bombing on civilian morale would contribute to Germany’s collapse.” The Japanese ambassador in Berlin shared that view: he advised Tokyo that “internal collapse will certainly not be brought about by means of air raids.”

Harris believed otherwise. Known to subordinates as both “Bomber” and “Butcher,” imbued with what Churchill called “a certain coarseness,” he was described by one admiring journalist as “a tiger with no mercy in his heart.” With a bowling-pin shape that no uniform could flatter, Harris was given to wearing a mulberry-colored velvet smoking jacket and chain-smoking Camels or partaking of ceremonial snuff. Though sometimes saturnine—he bathed his stomach ulcers with Dr. J. Collis Browne’s Mixture, which contained peppermint oil and anhydrous morphine—he never tired of showing dinner guests his private “Blue Book,” bulging with aerial photos of skeletonized German cities. Often he drove his black Bentley at lunatic speeds, remanding the ostensible chauffeur to the backseat, and he was not above taking a pony trap from his headquarters at High Wycombe to Chequers, the prime minister’s nearby country house west of London. When Churchill grumbled, “I’m sick of these raids on Cologne,” Harris replied, “So are the people of Cologne.”

In the British official history’s portrait:

He had a tendency to confuse advice with interference, criticism with sabotage, and evidence with propaganda. He resisted innovations and was seldom open to persuasion.… Seeing all issues in terms of black or white, he was impatient of any other possibility.

Harris believed that bombers should be clubs to bash the German
Volk
. To a colleague he wrote, “If the Germans were asked today, ‘Oil plants or cities?’ they would reply, ‘Bomb anything you fancy except the cities.’” Accordingly, more than half of Bomber Command’s payloads during the war would fall on urban centers. Each morning, in a command center known as the Hole, Harris would decide which German city would suffer that night, each with an ichthyic code name:
CATFISH
, for Munich;
WHITEBAIT
, for Berlin. His animating principle, as the official history explained, was “that in order to destroy anything it is necessary to destroy everything.” By the late fall of 1944, Harris claimed that forty-five of sixty listed German cities had been “virtually destroyed,” at a rate of more than two each month, with a dwindling number awaiting evisceration. These were mostly in the east: Halle, Magdeburg, Leipzig, Dresden. Air Chief Marshal Charles F. A. Portal argued in early November that “the air offensive against oil gives us by far the best hope of complete victory in the next few months.” Harris disagreed, and instead urged completion of what he called “the city programme.” Portal replied on November 12, “If I knew you to be as wholehearted in the attack on oil as in the past you have been in the matter of attacking cities, I would have little to worry about.”

Harris’s resolve to crack the enemy’s will and effect a surrender with terror raids would be found wanting both militarily and morally. “The idea that the main object of bombing German industrial cities was to break the enemy’s morale proved to be totally unsound,” he acknowledged in 1947. Yet the postwar U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that “bombing seriously depressed the morale of German citizens. Its psychological effects were defeatism, fear, hopelessness, fatalism, and apathy.” At any given time two thousand Allied aircraft might be above Germany, and as Randall Jarrell wrote:

In bombers named for girls, we burned

The cities we had learned about in school—

Till our lives wore out.

While British Bomber Command believed in leveling entire cities, the Americans considered themselves “precision bombers,” a term that implied attacks exclusively against military targets out of revulsion at indiscriminately killing civilians. But because the skies of central Europe were chronically overcast, half of Eighth Air Force’s bomb tonnage was dropped using “blind bombing” radar techniques; often, as few as one out of ten bombs fell within half a mile of an obscured target. Even when conditions were ideal for bombardiers—this was the case in roughly one sortie of seven—less than a third of all bombs detonated within a thousand feet of the aiming point. The term “precision bombing,” Spaatz conceded, was intended “in a relative, not a literal sense.” Bad weather also caused frequent diversions to secondary targets such as rail yards, a practice that amounted to emptying bomb bays over city centers. Such attacks on transportation targets gradually restricted the movement of German war commodities, notably coal, while razing urban precincts. “The way to stop the killing of civilians,” Hap Arnold asserted in a memo that could have been dictated by Bomber Harris, “is to cause so much damage and destruction and death that the civilians will demand that their government cease fighting.” Eighth Air Force would devote more than 20 percent of its payloads to city bombing, the historian Richard G. Davis subsequently calculated, while making efforts to conceal the extent of such attacks. And press censors blocked any hint that precision bombing was often terribly imprecise.

The Americans were no less intent than the British on refining the techniques of havoc. In the Utah desert, Hollywood set designers and engineers from Standard Oil built two facsimile working-class neighborhoods, one German and the other Japanese, with replicas of furniture, bed coverings, and other household inflammables; repeated fire-bomb experiments led to the development of incendiaries that could punch through stout German roofs. The M-76 Block Burner, another American innovation first used in March 1944, spattered incendiary gel in big, burning gobs. “Aerial incendiaries,” a U.S. Army study concluded, “probably caused as much death and destruction as any other weapon used in World War II.”

Air Chief Marshal Harris never believed in the oil plan, which he described to Portal as “a faith to which I am not only not a convert, but against which I have waged … unrelenting opposition.” Harris would be condemned both during and after the war for a mulish recalcitrance that impeded a unified assault on the Reich’s weakest link, but in his grudging, tardy fashion he did comply with the directives of the Allied high command. Bomber Command’s first daylight strategic assaults of the war fell on oil targets in August and September 1944; by November, British and American bombers were flying a comparable number of sorties against oil. Thereafter Bomber Command flew more than twice as many missions as Eighth Air Force, and in the final year of the strategic air war in Europe, Harris’s planes would drop nearly 100,000 tons, compared with 73,000 tons for Eighth Air Force. Arguably the British attacked to greater effect since their bombers carried larger payloads and bigger bombs, and frequently dropped those bombs with greater accuracy. Analysts concluded that the Americans attacked petroleum targets with too many small bombs incapable of cracking blast walls, too few incendiaries, and too many bombs—about 14 percent—that proved defective, often because of faulty fuzes.