The World at War (61 page)

MAJOR GENERAL WARLIMONT

I couldn't say that the July Plot had any effect on Hitler's ideas; he just kept to this illusionary idea that it would be possible to resume the offensive in the West as soon as possible. But his relations to the General Staff had never been particularly good because they were in his National Socialist Party eyes a flock of intellectuals or defeatists. And from July on this opinion deepened to a suspicion to almost every General Staff Officer as an adversary of his regime and even his person.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL RICHARD SCHULZE-KOSSENS

Waffen-SS

Hitler and all the people who were at the headquarters were shocked by the attempt and later on Hitler has spoken about the July Plot and he never understood that Stauffenberg or another officer, or a general, didn't want to risk his own life to kill him, but rather preferred to risk the lives of some of their own comrades who were present at the military conference when the bomb exploded, and some of them were killed or injured at this time. There were hundreds of officers who came into the headquarters and they could have the possibility to kill him when they wanted – if they risked their own life.

ALBERT SPEER

I was in the room when Goebbels was counteracting the July 1944 plot and I was discussing with him some facts, that Himmler was not to be found. They tried everything to find out where he stays because he was Minister of Interior and he was chief of the whole SS, and it was up to him to fight this plot. But obviously he was hiding somewhere and the same happened with the SS troops, a small number which were in Berlin, they were just as if they couldn't be there. And then late in the night Himmler showed up when everything was finished. Goebbels asked him, 'Where have you been?' and he had some phrase, 'Well, it's better you stay away somewhere far, in a lonely place so you can't get involved in it because you can't erect the countermeasures much better if you are not in the middle of it'. But Goebbels obviously didn't believe him, he mistrusted definitely Himmler this day. I had the same feeling.

DR JOHN

Later on in the night of 20th July 1944 about midnight the announcer said soon the Führer will speak to the German people. I laughed, 'Oh, nonsense, he can't speak, he's dead.' Then I thought that they, the Nazis, had at their disposal a voice being able to imitate Hitler, as we had one at the ready if need be. Then I thought that the imitator would talk but actually at three or four minutes to one o'clock he started talking and I at once recognised his voice and I was flabbergasted that he should be alive.

CHAPTER 24
STRATEGIC BOMBING: US ARMY AIR FORCE

The summary report of the September 1945 US Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) was to a degree influenced by the revulsion felt by some of its members to its subject matter. It differed, too, in some respects from the compendious final report of the USSBS.
The World at War
episode
Whirlwind: Bombing Germany 1939–1944
reflected the summary report, whose Director, George Ball, and Chief Economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, were among those interviewed. The survey started from the premise brought into the war by the USAAF about the greater accuracy of daytime over night bombing – no longer true in 1945 when the RAF could bomb as accurately by night as by day – and in the transcript we can see how US Lieutenant General Taker became exasperated by his interviewer's attempt to get him to revive the false dichotomy. As noted by Air Chief Marshal Harris in an earlier chapter and by General (then Colonel) Le May in this one, critics of night bombing are inclined to overlook the matter of cloud cover, which blinded the USAAF's highly accurate Norden bombsight. The Eighth USAAF also came to the European theatre wedded to the concept of the self-defending bomber formation, with the B-17 Flying Fortress carrying so many gunners that its payload was half that of RAF bombers. The theory was harshly disproved in 1943 and the USAAF could only return to Germany once the bombers could be escorted all the way by the long-range P-51 Mustang fighters of the Ninth USAAF, after which Luftwaffe fighters were obliged to rise to the challenge of the Eighth and were massacred by the Ninth. Thanks to meddling by Hitler, the jet-powered Messerschmitt 262 fighter, which none of
the Allied fighters could intercept, entered service a year or two later than it might have and made no great impact on an already lost situation. Perhaps the least cited passage from the USSBS summary report reads, 'These attacks left the German people with a solid lesson in the disadvantages of war. It was a terrible lesson; conceivably that lesson, both in Germany and abroad, could be the most lasting single effect of the air war.'

LIEUTENANT GENERAL IRA C EAKER

Commander Eighth Air Force, USAAF

I am aware of the effort on the part of some historians and some leaders of other branches of the services to denigrate the bomber effort, but I would think now they've been pretty well answered by the Germans. Mr Speer and without exception all the senior German commanders accredited the air effort with their destruction. From Rommel and the African campaign all the way through to the end, all of the principal German commanders since the war have accredited our air effort with their defeat.

ALBERT SPEER

Hitler's Armaments Minister

The
bombing offensive of the Royal Air Force and of the American Air Force was doing tremendous harm and we could see that one day we should collapse if it was continuing, so it was a question of death or life to get again air superiority in Germany. In the opinion of General Galland, who was an expert, it was absolutely possible in time, because even if in shooting down one bomber in daytime he was losing three or four fighters, the pilots mostly were saved but the whole bomber crew was in our hands and what was needed in the production on the other side for one bomber was much more than our losses. We could utilise the material too, so it was almost sure that if we would have enough fighters in Germany – and Galland was building up a thousand fighters just for the home defence – mat one day there would be a battle in the middle of Germany with about eight hundred or so American bombers and quite a lot would be shot down. But it never came to that because Hitler didn't understand this thing, he didn't want to understand, and he ordered when we were just finished, he ordered the whole thousand fighters to go to France to fight the invasion. They weren't even trained for this task so after a few days, a few weeks, nothing was left of them. They could have won the battle over Germany, which would have been as important as the success of the invasion. The same was also with night-fighters against your Royal Air Force bombers. It's quite well known that those who were there already did much harm to the British bombers and if they could have been multiplied, if we would have three or four times as much of the night-fighters, possibly you would have been compelled to stop the whole attack on German towns.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL EAKER

RAF daylight bombing failed because they did not have bombers that were equipped as our Flying Fortresses were and they didn't have sufficient quantity. They only had a hundred heavy bombers when I arrived over here and we were not successful until we had several hundred heavy bombers equipped for daylight work. No one will ever get me to fundamentally disagree with the work of Sir Arthur Harris and Bomber Command. I thought it was well led and superbly executed.

GENERAL ADOLF GALLAND

Commander of the Luftwaffe fighter force

German fighters were fighting all around the world and we could never concentrate our complete fighter strength in Germany or central Europe. Also from the beginning of 1943 the German lack of fuel has resulted in the reduction of training time, which had reduced the capability of our crews and our fighters considerably. The air superiority and the quantity were increased both by the American Air Force and by the Royal Air Force and finally the range of their fighters had been extended so far that even Berlin and East Prussia were in the range of the American fighters. The American fighters on some raids did fly all over central Europe and landed in Russia and they did fly over Germany and landed in Italy. In addition the performance of our fighters, both Messerschmitt and Fokker, were not increased by the extent of the performance of the English and Americans, especially in altitudes over twenty-five thousand feet.

ALBERT SPEER

Hitler was once, when Galland and me were there, he was very angry when he got news that the fighter pilots didn't fight courageously enough in France. Of course he didn't want to realise, which was well known, that the British and American fighters had better speed and were superior as pilots. So he told Galland in a rage, the whole fighter force are good for nothing and we are producing only now anti-aircraft guns and the whole production of fighters will be stopped.

DR JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH

Member of post-war Strategic Bombing Survey

In 1944 the German war production went up and went up quite rapidly until September 1944 – thereafter it tapered off and began to decline. It had its effect when we were right on the frontier of Germany and when not only the bombers but the tactical aircraft could patrol the roads and railroads, and greatly reduce the mobility of the German forces. When it became possible to bomb and bomb again the oil plants, this in turn created a shortage of oil which undoubtedly had a further effect on the mobility of the forces. At that time we exaggerated the effect of the air attacks. Roosevelt set up the Strategic Bombing Survey, of which I was a member, because he had become suspicious of the Air Force claims. The suspicion showed that Roosevelt had mastered the first principle of warfare – naturally suspect what air generals tell you. The effect was to minimise the impact of the bombing; the clearest case was on the fighter, the German aircraft industry, which was attacked in February of 1944 and had a forty or fifty per cent increase in production in March of 1944.

ALBERT SPEER

I had the same experience with our Air Forces. They claimed to have bombed a synthetic rubber plant in Russia and it would be out of action for a year or longer and then our experts had a look into the matter and said it would be repaired in a few weeks' time.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL EAKER

We were very hopeful that we could demonstrate the effect of strategic bombing and we were all conscious of the tremendous part that Lord Trenchard had played in its development.
^*61
We had watched his experiences from World War One and he was the patron saint of air power in this country, as he was in yours. We always felt that the independent status that the Royal Air Force had made it much easier for them to make decisions on equipment and on strategy and tactics, whereas we had to present our case to the Army General Staff.

AIR CHIEF MARSHAL SIR ARTHUR HARRIS

Commander-in-Chief, RAF Bomber Command,

I said to General Arnold before they came in the war, that if they were going in for daylight bombing they would have to have much better armament than they had in the Flying Fortresses at that time.
^**5
That was when I went over to the States, before the war, and was allowed to go and look at one of their Fortresses. They had hand-held guns in blisters and I told them, 'For goodness sake you must have steadier guns than that if you're going to fly in daylight,' and we offered to give them our target designs.

MAJOR WERNER SCHROER

Day fighter ace with 114 kills

The Americans normally flew in groups of three and then in various levels, and coming from behind we tried to get one of them by a long-distance attack, to get it separated and to hit it in the wings or somewhere in order to reduce the velocity of the plane and have it separate from the other two, and then it was much easier to get them. This was effective in the beginning and later on we tried to attack them from the front, but you could only use experienced fighters for that because of the difficulty in escaping afterwards through the formation, because you had very little time to shoot, hit him and then escape.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL JAMES M 'JIMMY' STEWART

Commander 703rd Bombardment Squadron, Eighth USAAF
The fighter, he was the bogeyman in this tremendous, vicious defence that they mounted. The flak, although it got much more serious in the latter part of the war, for some reason I always felt that the odds were better in your favour with flak. The fighter, though, had eyes and in a great many instances the fighter had a pretty competent pilot at the controls, and when he latched on to you, you were in trouble.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL EAKER

When I first went to Harris's headquarters in February 1942 and explained to him our plan and our hope for the build-up of cooperative attacks against the German defence industry, he said very frankly, 'I don't believe you can bomb by day, I think your losses will be too heavy. The German anti-aircraft and fighter defences on the West Wall are too strong. We've tried it and we couldn't do it.' What he referred to, of course, was that General Arnold had given him a small number of Liberators and he'd sent them out on day attack as single planes and they'd been badly shot up. But, he said, as time went on, 'If you could do it, it would be very fortuitous, it would help my night effort, it would keep all the defences on twenty-four-hour alert, it would prevent them going on to factories to make weapons. It would be very good if you could do it and nobody will hope stronger than I do that you succeed and I'm going to do everything possible to support your effort.'

AIR GUNNER JOHN COCHRANE

Eighth Air Force, USAAF

I think it was generally understood that the
combat tour was twenty-five missions because it was anticipated that you'd be dead by that time, so there wasn't any point in asking you to stay around any longer. I don't say that the fear was an acute one, that you went around trembling, but it was pretty well felt that our chances of surviving were not particularly good. But after all, it was what we felt we had to do and I felt that if you were going to die that was about the best way to die. I'd much rather die in an aeroplane than in the mud on some battlefield. But my observation was that morale was very good. I think that was partially because you had a definite limited tour, and you knew that if you lucked it out and survived the tour, you went home. I think it's very important to give a human being some goal or some target to aim for, and to know that he'll get relief after that.