The Luftwaffe realized that it could not sustain a force with a large number of inferior fighters. This led to increased Fw 190 production in place of the Bf 109, which was to be replaced by the interim Me 209 and Me 309 piston-engined designs until Messerschmitt production capability transitioned purely to the Me 262 in 1945. In the words of Johannes Steinhoff, one of the Luftwaffe’s young fighter leaders on whom the burden of combat operations was placed, “The war in the air is a technological war which cannot be won by a technologically inferior fighting force, however high its morale or dauntless its resolution.”
4
The most significant decision was the development of jet fighters. The Germans early on recognized the potential of the jet fighter as a bomber destroyer—by day and night—and closed down a range of other research and development projects to achieve an early production capability. They decided to push the production of the Me 262 as an interim fighter type despite the design and material limitations of its Junkers Jumo engines. The Germans also realized that the Me 262 would have to be developed not just as a fighter, but as part of an integrated weapons system with a revolutionary new weapon, the 55mm R4M air-to-air rocket.
Other decisions were required to ensure that these weapons and systems would be used effectively in combat. Improved leadership and staff work were central to the transformation of the Luftwaffe. It became an integrated air defense system with a consequent buildup of fighters, radar, flak, and a well-designed and well-thought-out battle management system linked with secure landline communications. This required bringing forward a new generation of leaders—the generals who gained success during the Blitzkrieg would not adapt easily to a defensive war—who had been thrust forward by success in the cockpit. Supplementing these leaders were staff officers trained in the best German practice, a combination of prewar General Staff officers who had been sent to the Luftwaffe and the more promising Luftwaffe veterans who had been sent through staff training.
Galland was to become commander-in-chief of the air defense of the Reich. He was empowered to make hard decisions and give orders that would be obeyed not only by the different military services, but by myriad state, party, and local institutions trying to counter the effects of the bombers. This strong degree of unity of command—in effect combining operational, administrative, and research and development responsibilities—and confidence in the commander by the national command authorities was hitherto unknown in the Third Reich. But events were to show that nothing less was required for survival, let alone victory.
It was not enough that the Germans made the right decisions. The Allies had to make the wrong ones. Where the Germans replaced their leaders, the Allies retained theirs. The leaders of the 1943 bomber offensive, Air Marshal Arthur Harris and Lt. Gen. Ira Eaker, kept their positions. These leaders had made decisions for the bomber offensive that in retrospect had been the result of tunnel vision, given the goal of victory through strategic bombing. Thus, the key decision the Allies made was to carry on much as they had before their defeat by the Germans, but to do it harder and with more aircraft.
The Allied strategic air forces were certainly not the first military forces to be led into defeat by the failure of preexisting doctrine in the face of the harsh audit of the battlefield. Any institution finds it difficult to learn. It has been argued that organizations in general, and military organizations in possession of a strong sense of doctrine in particular, are insensitive to change in their environment.
5
While the Germans made broad and fundamental changes in aircraft, organization, and technology from what had been used in 1943, despite their success against the bomber offensive, the Allies decided not to make similar changes. They had seen success—at Hamburg and Huls—and believed that what was required to reach it again was to repeat the process longer and with more resources.
The RAF and USAAF alike remained committed to strategic bombing theory as they had tried to implement it in 1943.
6
The British remained committed to striking not at any one specific industry, but at Germany’s will and capability to resist by bombing the urban population and its administrative and transportation centers. The USAAF was reluctant to modify its prewar reliance on mass formations of unescorted heavy bombers destroying critical targets through precision daylight bombing.
7
Even though the bombers had failed to get through in 1943, its proponents thought that repeating the procedure would succeed. The USAAF believed its B-17 and B-24 bombers were better suited to daylight than night operations, and so they would avoid the problems Bomber Command had encountered with navigation and poor accuracy in the opening years of the war. The American Way of War tends to look to victory through superior doctrine and resources, and the leaders of the Army Air Force were determined to run their own air arm and its operations independently. However, the failures of 1943 had put military and political masters on notice. They would not write further blank checks for resources without results.
The decision to go on as before despite indicators that it is not working is certainly not an unknown response in air warfare. Harris viewed the U.S. targeting of German industries with scarce-disguised contempt and refused to be swayed from his offensive against German cities, even to interfere with the dispersal of the ball-bearing industry from Schweinfurt. The U.S. 8th Air Force had continued bombing German U-boat pens in French ports long after it was considered ineffective, largely because of the training it provided for the bomb groups.
8
Military organizations often fail to adjust their strategies or standard operating procedures to meet specific circumstances, especially when these are in flux. Rather, they tend to look for numerical indicators that support the belief that the circumstances actually represent the preferred case, the one they had prepared to deal with. As a result, instead of responding to the actual situation, many military organizations make decisions and implement policies that reflect the preferred approaches and worldview of those making the decisions, regardless of the harsh realities faced by those at the sharp end of the equation.
9
The “cult of the offensive” has been identified as the view that military organizations have fixed preferences in strategy and will always prefer offensive ones.
10
This theory holds that evaluation of the effectiveness of these operations is not carried out if the results are even potentially contradictory to the organization’s preference for offensive action.
11
Where the Germans had stopped looking at the wrong numbers to determine whether they were winning or losing, the Allies had embraced them. Those evaluating the bomber offensives became concerned with how much effort was put into them—sorties flown and tonnage dropped—but appeared uninterested in the overall results.
12
They could determine bombing accuracy quite well, but RAF Bomber Command, for example, placed a great deal of value on the number of acres of German cities it burnt out rather than the more difficult question of how this affected the German war effort.
One of the key questions was how much credence to give to the claims of unescorted bomber formation gunners. The decision makers were well aware that every German fighter that went down would be claimed by every gunner firing at it, but were they to believe actual losses were one-tenth of those claimed? Two-thirds? Some other number? Here, the tendency was to believe the figures that meant good news, that in a battle of attrition between bomber gunners and the fighters, the fighters were losing. But whether this meant they were winning or losing overall was a judgment that eluded the decision makers.
The most significant decision that led to the defeats of 1944 was the increased hostility toward the use of long-range fighter escorts as part of the bomber offensive. The idea of reengining the North American P-51 Mustang with the Packard-built Merlin engine was put aside, as it was deemed there was no requirement for such a fighter. The USAAF’s doctrine, worked out before the war, did not include a “strategic fighter” such as a long-range P-51. The USAAF had looked at large two-engine designs such as the Bell YFM-1A Airacuda, the Lockheed XP-58, and the Northrop XP-61, which had been envisioned in its original air war plan, AWPD-1. This led to a decision not to increase the number of escort fighters above that in 1943. Doctrine rather than adaptation carried the day.
Because doctrines, rather than research and development issues, were driving decision-making, there was no increased emphasis on the P-38 or modifications to the P-47 to allow them to carry twin drop tanks to extend the range of fighter escort. Drop tanks had been considered before the war and were seen as redundant.
13
The heavy losses of 1943 were not seen as calling for fighter escorts beyond those already provided. Some indicted even those escorts then available—P-47s and Spitfires—as reducing the effectiveness of the bombers’ defensive armament. The bomber was going to get through to its target in daylight.
The RAF had long distrusted the concept of fighter escorts.
14
It was also reluctant to commit its most advanced Mosquito night fighters to escort duties over Germany for fear of compromising their advanced radar systems once they were shot down, and because operating without their ground controlled intercept capability would have left them vulnerable to German night fighters. Even though the German bomber operations against Britain had been largely defeated by early 1944, the bulk of the night fighter force remained to defend against its resumption.
Compounding the problem was the long lead time inherent in fabricating modern weapons, organizing and training the fighting forces that used them, and in the research and development required both to keep existing weapons viable and to provide their eventual replacements and counters to enemy innovations. The decision to invest in the strategic bomber offensive long predated the Casablanca Conference. It was reflected in a wide range of U.S. and British decisions made throughout 1940-42. This meant that even if the bomber offensive were to be defeated decisively in 1944, the Allies would be unable to make a clean break from their investment in strategic bombing and reinvest it elsewhere. Ford’s massive Willow Run plant would still be turning out bombers, not landing craft, even though by 1944 landing craft were proving to be the great Achilles heel in translating economic capability into military force. Had the decision to curtail the bomber offensive been made earlier, some of the resources could have been available to address the Allies’ great strategic need—for landing craft, especially LSTs (landing ships, tank)—and a more responsive and flexible strategy might have been possible. The Allies had made the investment in strategic bombing long before the defeats of late 1943. To invest the resources that went into the bomber offensive into more LSTs and better rifle platoon leaders would have required that decisions were made long before then.
The first opportunity the Germans had to demonstrate the improved capabilities for their integrated air defense system was in mid-February. Taking advantage of the week of good weather common in midwinter in northern Europe, the USAAF decided to announce its return to the offensive mission with a series of attacks on the German aircraft industry. The goal was both to push back the rising tide of German aircraft production and to force the Luftwaffe fighter force to impale itself on the defensive fire of the bomber formations.
Over the course of two weeks of maximum effort air battles that pushed both sides to the brink of exhaustion, considerable damage was done to several German factories, but without deep penetration fighter escort, the bomber rate of loss was even higher than in 1943. While German losses to the short-range escorts and the bomber guns were not inconsequential, without long-range strategic fighters that could take the war to the enemy fighter force, the bomber-destroying system that worked so well in 1943 would not only remain intact, but improve.
After the costly attacks of the “Big Week,” the USAAF shifted its objective again, to join with the RAF in the closing stages of the “Battle of Berlin,” as Harris had urged them to do since October. The planning for a series of long-range daylight attacks on Berlin was under way even as the Big Week ended. The Germans, aware that the RAF’s continued offensive against Berlin would likely pressure the USAAF to join in, were planning to meet it at the same time.
The Luftwaffe leadership did not perceive the defeat of the bomber offensive as simply the end product of an industrial process. They did not think that allocating greatly increased resources to the defense of the Reich would inevitably and of itself produce a large number of shot-down bombers. They realized that the operational skill that had made possible so many of their victories possible in the early years of the conflict had often been absent from the campaign against the bomber offensive. The command and technology changes made prior to 1943 enabled the Luftwaffe to implement initiatives in 1944 that they had been unable to use in earlier air battles.
The principles of mass and annihilation had been enshrined in the German way of war since the days of Gen. Alfred von Schlieffen and his study of the Battle of Cannae in the nineteenth century, but in 1943 the Luftwaffe was unable to apply these principles to defeating the bomber offensive. Though they could impose a general high level of attrition on the overall attacking forces, the Germans were concerned that this was a cost the Allies, with their superior manpower and industrial bases, could sustain if they had the will. The Germans had been able to inflict heavy losses, to be sure, but the goal of a Cannae-style air battle, leading to a decisive concentration against part of the enemy force and its destruction, was not within their grasp. If part of the enemy force was destroyed, rebuilding it would not simply be a matter of adding new replacements to an existing, if diminished, trained cadre. The German plan aimed at removing bomber groups from the enemy order of battle as thoroughly as ground battles could remove enemy divisions, what a later age would call targeting the enemy’s force reconstitution capabilities.