With Germany resisting into 1946—the additional resources made possible by the defeat of the bombers kept the Russians on the Vistula and Romania and its oil in the war—the Allies were forced to reinvent the strategic bombing campaign yet again. The U.S. strategic bombing forces in Europe were largely rebuilt with modified Boeing B-29s, diverted away from the Pacific War. Meanwhile, the first of the massive six-engine piston B-36s and four-engine jet B-45s were coming into service.
Some of the new U.S. bombers also went to veteran RAF Bomber Command units. This was significant because the British war economy could no longer keep up after years of near total mobilization, so the Bomber Command became less of a factor in the 1946 campaign, despite the introduction of Avro Lincoln and Vickers Windsor heavy bombers. Britain had invested so much of its resources in the previous bomber offensives there was little more to give, and the RAF was increasingly reliant on what the United States could transfer.
It would now be a high-altitude war, with bombers operating at 30,000 feet or more, above the reach of the flak. To deal with the German jets, there were large numbers of piston-engined fighters that, if individually noncompetitive with the Germans, were still effective in operating against their bases.
21
But U.S. industry was also able to produce large numbers of P-80 and P-84 jet fighters, which joined RAF Meteors and Vampires. Though these lacked range, their use of forward bases was supplemented by increased work on British-developed midair refueling techniques.
To meet this challenge, the German war economy—still fully functioning—was able to field the first of the “secret weapons” made possible by the rational reordering of research and development priorities. Me 263 rocket fighters provided high-altitude point interception capability, and the first Wasserfall surface-to-air missiles supplemented increasing numbers of 105mm and 128mm flak guns for high-altitude defense.
Though the Germans were still able to challenge the bomber offensive as the Allied armies pressed at the borders of Germany in the spring and summer of 1946, there was one element of the Allied investment in technology they were unable to counter. The first atomic bomb was dropped on Berlin, followed a few days later by one on Dresden. It took a further ten bombs—all the United States had—over the spring and summer of 1946 to finally bring about victory through airpower. The Soviet Army was able to push over the Vistula. Romania switched sides. The Western Allies were able to push bridgeheads over the Rhine.
This finally brought about the collapse of the German war economy, though it required an additional five months of often bitter broken-back conflict before German unconditional surrender was forthcoming.
The Luftwaffe’s triumph against the combined bomber offensive proved to be Germany’s disaster. All Germany won from the heroic struggles of its defenders was primacy on the atomic targeting list above Japan. There was nothing the Luftwaffe could do to stop the inexorable development of atomic weapons. What their victory over the bombers provided was an extension of the war that enabled the revolutionary impact of these weapons to have the final, decisive impact on the war in Europe.
The German military of the Second World War was good at securing operational success—winning a major battle or campaign—but could not convert this to a lasting solution to Germany’s fundamentally insoluble strategic problem of fighting a multifront war against enemies with much greater resources. Only where the opponents lacked the time or space to deal with German operational success, or the flaws in their war-fighting capability prevented their resources from being effectively used—as in 1940—were the Germans able to gain a strategic success. But even this—like the Luftwaffe’s success in 1944—proved transitory.
The “might have been” shows the significance of the Allied bomber offensive against Germany. Its counterfactual absence suggests that its impact cannot be easily “disaggregated.” The effects of the most effective phase of the bomber offensive—72 percent of the total tonnage was dropped after D-Day—were integral with other effects on the German capability and will to resist. Postwar conventional wisdom, that the bomber offensive could not reduce German industrial production nor crack civilian morale, and that its impact was limited to keeping German fighters and flak at home rather than in Normandy, is largely contradicted by more recent writing.
I have been guided by Max Weber’s 1905 suggestion that counterfactuals should change as little as possible. The second-order impacts of changing the values, goals, and contexts in which decisions were made are impossible to predict. It is often difficult—or irrelevant—to treat them properly, especially in the type of causation that evolves along the “for want of a nail” path of impact escalation.
22
Friedrich Engels’s posited that history was a “parallelogram of forces” and that to move one corner would affect parts of the figure far away and in unintended ways.
23
The Allies proved on a number occasions in both world wars to be as committed to doctrinal solutions as those that led to the defeat of the bomber offensive in this scenario. The cult of the offensive and the self-delusion by numbers were all too real. However, the U.S. strategic bombing offensive in Europe actually proved to be very good at learning.
The German changes to their fighter force and industrial program that could lead to victory in 1944 are generally those identified, with the benefit of hindsight, by Adolf Galland in postwar interrogations, as among those omissions that cost Germany the war. The “Big Blow” was a Galland project in 1944 that was never implemented.
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(Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1994).
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, vol. 15, no. 3, September 1992.
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, vol. 14 no. 1, February 1992.
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The Air War 1939-45
(Europa, London, and Stein & Day, New York, 1980).
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———,
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1
. On the time frame, see Speer,
Inside the Third Reich
, 239.
2
. Murray,
Strategy for Defeat
, 103, 134.
3
. Price,
Luftwaffe
, 94.
4
. Quoted in Galland,
The Luftwaffe Fighter Force
, 215.
5
. See generally: Avant,
Political Institutions and Military Change;
Rosen,
Winning the Next War;
and Zisk,
Engaging the Enemy.
6
. On strategic airpower theory in general, see: Overy,
The Air War 1939-45
, 5-25; and MacIsaac, David, “Voices From the Central Blue,” in Paret,
Makers of Modern Strategy.
7
. See generally: McFarland,
America’s Pursuit of Precision Bombing
, especially 182-86.
8
. Konvitz, “Bombs, Cities and Submarines: Allied Bombing of the French Ports 1942-43,” 40-43.
9
. The USAAF was less likely—or able—to fall into this type of problem than its successor, the USAF, which has been the subject of several case studies on this type of bureaucratic behavior. See generally: Clodfelter,
The Limits of Airpower.
10
. Posen,
The Sources of Military Doctrine
, 50.
11
. See generally: Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War,” in Miller,
Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War;
also Van Evera, “Why States Believe Foolish Ideas.”
12
. On the tendency to look at tonnage rather than results, see the Spaatz quotation in Werrell,
Who Fears?
, 83.
13
. Davis,
Carl A. Spaatz and the Air War in Europe
, 61.
14
. Overy, 15. Murray, “The Influence of Pre-War Anglo-American Doctrine on the Air Campaigns of the Second World War,” in Boog,
The Conduct of the Air War in the Second World War
, 238-40.
15
. On the “Big Blow,” see Galland,
op. cit.
, 176-80.
16
. On the competition between German industrial hardening and the Atlantic Wall, see Overy, “World War II: the Bombing of Germany,” in Stephens,
The War in the Air, 1914-1994
, pp. 123-25.
17
. Gooderson, “Heavy and Medium Bombers: How Successful Were They in the Tactical Close Support Role During World War II?”
18
. Gooderson, 367.
19
. On the impact of bombing on German morale, see Overy, 208, and Murray,
Strategy for Defeat
, 300. While some sources hold that the bombing stimulated German morale, the weight of the evidence is that it took a considerable toll.