Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (79 page)

The notion that ‘socialized’ industry won the war is baseless. The socialized sector of German industry (e.g. the Herman Goering Steel Works) was a complete failure. The Soviet economy performed reasonably well in producing mass quantities of certain basic military items: in August 1942, at the furthest point of the Nazi advance, Soviet factories were already making 1,200 tanks a month.
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But the troop-carrying vehicles and jeeps which gave the Red Army its growing and decisive mobility in 1943–4 came from American industry, and the Western powers jointly supplied the high technology which slowly gave Russia command of the air in the East: even in 1946 Britain was still sending Russia aero-engines, which became the basis for the highly successful post-war Mig-15. In Britain, the adoption of Ludendorff-style ‘war socialism’ and Keynesian macro-economics enabled the British capitalist economy to perform much more effectively than Germany’s: in 1942 her war production was 50 per cent higher. But the real engine of Allied victory was the American economy. Within a single year the number of tanks built had been raised to 24,000 and planes to 48,000. By the end of the first year of the war America had raised its army production to the total of all three Axis powers together, and by 1944 had doubled it again – while at the same time creating an army which passed the 7 million mark in 1943.
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This astonishing acceleration was made possible by the essential dynamism and flexibility of the American system, wedded to a national purpose which served the same galvanizing role as the optimism of the Twenties. The war acted as a boom market, encouraging American entrepreneurial skills to fling her seemingly
limitless resources of materials and manpower into a bottomless pool of consumption. One reason the Americans won Midway was by reducing a three-month repair-job on the carrier
Yorktown
to forty-eight hours, using 1,200 technicians round the clock.
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The construction programme for the defence co-ordinating centre, the Pentagon, with its sixteen miles of corridors and 600,000 square feet of office space, was cut from seven years to fourteen months.
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The war put back on his pedestal the American capitalist folk-hero. Henry Kaiser, Henry Morrison and John McCone, the San Francisco engineers who created the Boulder Dam (and who had been systematically harassed during the New Deal by Roosevelt’s Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes, for breaches of federal regulations), led the field in the wartime hustle. They built the world’s biggest cement plant and the first integrated steel mill. Told to build ships at any cost, they cut the construction time of a ‘Liberty’ ship from 196 to twenty-seven days and by 1943 were turning one out every 10.3 hours.
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General Electric in 1942 alone was able to raise its production of marine turbines from $1 million to $300 million.
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America won the war essentially by harnessing capitalist methods to the unlimited production of firepower and mechanical manpower. After the loss of the decisive battle of Guadalcanal, the Tenno Hirohito asked the navy’s chief of staff, ‘Why was it that it took the Americans only a few days to build an airbase and the Japanese more than a month?’ All Nagano could say was, ‘I am very sorry indeed.’ The truth was, the Americans had a vast array of bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment, the Japanese only muscle-power.
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The devastating combination of high technology and unrivalled productive capacity took its most palpable and significant form in offensive air-power. There were two reasons for this. First, the British
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persuaded the Americans it was the best way to make the maximum use of their vast economic resources, while suffering the minimum manpower losses. Second, the bombing offensive appealed strongly to the moralistic impulse of both nations: what the British atomic scientist P.S.M.Blacken called ‘the Jupiter complex’ – the notion of the Allies as righteous gods, raining retributive thunderbolts on their wicked enemies.

We see here the corruptive process of moral relativism at work. Churchill was well aware of the moral decay war brings; was appalled by it. He had initiated the mass-bombing strategy on 2 July 1940 because he was overwhelmed by the prospect of Nazi occupation – the ultimate moral catastrophe – and saw bombing as the only offensive weapon then available to the British. This was the old utilitarian theory of morals, as opposed to natural law
theory which ruled that the direct destruction of war-waging capacity was the only legitimate manner of conducting combat.
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But all forms of moral relativism have an innate tendency to generate moral collapse since they eliminate any fixed anchorage and launch the ship of state on an ocean where there are no bearings at all. By the end of 1941, with both Russia and America in the war, the defeat of Hitler, as Churchill himself realized, was inevitable in the long run. The utilitarian rationale for attacks on cities had disappeared; the moral case had always been inadmissible. But by this time the bomber force was in being, and the economy geared to producing large numbers of long-range Lancasters. It was on 14 February 1942 that the directive was issued to Bomber Command that a primary objective was the destruction of the morale of German civilians.
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The first major raid carried out in accordance with the new order was on Lubeck on 28 March 1942; the city ‘burned like kindling’, said the official report. The first 1,000-bomber raid followed on 30 May and in the summer the American Air Force joined the campaign.

Bombing used up 7 per cent of Britain’s total military manpower, and perhaps as much as 25 per cent of Britain’s war production.
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The entire strategy may have been, even in military terms, mistaken. Bombing, which killed 600,000 Germans altogether, reduced but could not prevent the expansion in German war-production up to the second half of 1944, achieved by the switch from civilian consumer goods which, against an index of one hundred in 1939, fell to ninety-one in 1943 and eighty-five in 1944 – Britain’s being as low as fifty-four in both years.
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True, from the end of 1944 bombing effectively destroyed the German war-economy. Even before that, the need to defend German cities by night and day had prevented the
Luftwaffe
from keeping its air superiority on the Russian front. But the effectiveness of bombing as a war-winning weapon depended entirely on the ability to maintain indefinitely very heavy raids on the same targets night after night. The Allies came near to a strategic ‘victory’ in the raids on Hamburg, by far the best-protected German city, from 24 July—3 August 1943, using the ‘Window’ foil device which confused German radar. On the night of 27–28 July, the
RAF
created temperatures of 800 to 1,000 centigrade over the city, producing fire-storm winds of colossal force. Transport systems of all types were destroyed, 214,350 homes out of 414,500, 4,301 out of 9,592 factories; eight square miles were burnt out completely, and in one night alone fatal casualties in the four fire-storm districts were 40,000 or up to 37.65 of the total population.
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Albert Speer, who had succeeded Todt as the production supremo, told Hitler that if another six cities were similarly devastated, he could not keep war-production going. But the British simply did not have the
resources to enable Bomber Command to repeat raids on this scale in quick succession.

The worst aspect of terror-bombing was the appeal of the ‘Jupiter complex’ to the war-leaders striking their geopolitical bargains. This was the explanation for the greatest Anglo—American moral disaster of the war against Germany, the destruction of Dresden on the night of 13–14 February 1945. The origin of the raid was the desire of Roosevelt and Churchill at the Yalta Conference to prove to Stalin that the Allies were doing their best to assist the Russian effort on the Eastern front. In particular they wanted to deliver a crippling blow to German morale to help on the Russian offensive which began on 12 January. Dresden was not an industrial but a communications centre. Its population of 630,000 had been doubled by German refugees, 80 per cent of them peasants from Silesia. Stalin wanted them destroyed to facilitate his plan to ‘move’ Poland westwards and he also believed the city was being used as a concentration-point for troops. According to Sir Robert Saundby, deputy head of Bomber Command, the Russians specifically asked for Dresden as the target of ‘Operation Thunderclap’. Not long before, the Command’s chaplain, Canon L. John Collins (later to create the nuclear disarmament campaign), had invited the pious Christian socialist, Sir Stafford Cripps, who was Minister of Aircraft Production, to talk to senior officers. He took as his text ‘God is my co-pilot’ and told them it was essential they should be sure they were attacking military targets: ‘Even when you are engaged in acts of wickedness, God is always looking over your shoulder.’ This led to an angry scene, since Bomber Command believed Cripps’s Ministry was deliberately starving them of aircraft for pseudo-moralistic reasons. Thereafter they were anxious to make it clear they were under politicians’ orders. Hence they queried the Dresden order. It was confirmed direct from the Yalta Conference (by either Churchill or Air Chief Marshal Portal).
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The attack was carried out in two waves (with a third, by the
USAF
, to follow) in accordance with Bomber Command’s tactic of the ‘double blow’, the second falling when relief forces had concentrated on the city. Over 650,000 incendiaries were dropped, the firestorm engulfing eight square miles, totally destroying 4,200 acres and killing 135,000 men, women and children. As it was the night of Shrove Tuesday, many of the children were still in carnival costumes. For the first time in the war a target had been hit so hard that not enough able-bodied survivors were left to bury the dead. Troops moved in and collected huge piles of corpses. The centre round the Altmarkt was cordoned off. Steel grills, twenty-five feet across, were set up, fuelled with wood and straw, and batches of five hundred
corpses were piled up on each and burned. The funeral pyres were still flaming a fortnight after the raid. Goebbels claimed, it is the work of lunatics.’ According to Speer, the attack sent a wave of terror over the whole nation. But by this stage there was no means whereby public opinion could bring pressure on an inaccessible, isolated and paranoid Hitler to negotiate surrender. And there were neither the resources nor the will to repeat the raid, which affronted the pilots themselves. One commented, ‘For the first time in many operations I felt sorry for the population below.’ Another said it was ‘the only time I ever felt sorry for the Germans’.
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Germany yielded less to the Jupiter syndrome only because Hitler distrusted Goering’s ability to make effective use of the vast resources a strategic bombing campaign would require. But the idea of dealing mass destruction impersonally, by remote control, appealed strongly to him. The Versailles Treaty forbade Germany to make bombers but it said nothing about ballistic missiles. Hence when Hitler came to power he found a military missile team already in existence: in 1936 its head, Walter Dornberger, was authorized to issue a directive calling for a rocket to carry one hundred times the explosive force of the Big Bertha gun of 1918 over twice the range (2,200 lbs over 156 miles).
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In a sense Hitler was right that the coming strategic weapon would be a high-payload ballistic missile. One of the few to grasp this on the Allied side was the Tory
MP
Duncan Sandys, who warned on 23 November 1944: in future the possession of superiority in long-distance rocket artillery may well count for as much as superiority in naval or air power.’ Allied orthodoxy revolved around the flexibility of the big bomber, essentially a First World War concept. The reply of Churchill’s chief scientist, Lord Cherwell, 5 December 1944, was that the long-range rocket would be highly inaccurate, without a compensatory high payload. This was an unanswerable criticism so long as the explosive remained conventional.

Hitler’s difficulty was that he had to choose between two possibilities. The pilotless guided aircraft (V1) appealed strongly to his highly developed sense of military economy. It was one of the most cost-effective weapons ever produced. For the price of one Lancaster bomber, crew-training, bombs and fuel, Hitler could fire well over three hundred V1s, each with a ton of high-explosive, a range of 200 miles and a better chance of reaching its target. In the period 12 June-1 September 1944, for an expenditure of £12,600,190, the V1 offensive cost the Allies £47,645,190 in loss of production, extra anti-aircraft and fighter defences, and aircraft and crews in the bombing offensive against the sites. The Air Ministry reported (4 November 1944): ‘The results were greatly in the enemy’s favour,
the estimated ratio of our costs to his being nearly four to one.’ Only 185 Germans lost their lives, against 7,810 Allies (including 1,950 trained airmen). The V1s were damaging 20,000 houses a day in July 1944 and the effect on London morale was very serious.

But Hitler did not invest early or extensively enough in this telling weapon. In the chaos of the Nazi procurement programme, it was necessary to appeal to the Führer’s romanticism to get priority. That was what Dornberger’s big rockets did. The V2 programme seemed the only way to gratify Hitler’s intense desire to revenge himself on Roosevelt by destroying New York. The allocation of resources to it made no sense in terms of likely performance. In Germany alone it employed 200,000 workers, including a large proportion of the highest-skilled technicians. The programme deprived the Germans of advanced jets and underground oil refineries and its absorption of scarce electrical equipment interfered with production of aircraft, submarines and radar. The actual rockets used in the V2 campaign, the A4, of which only 3,000 were fired, cost £12,000 each (against £125 for the V1), carried a payload of only 12,000 lb and were hopelessly inaccurate. The projected intercontinental rocket, the A9/A10, weighing 100 tons and with a second stage ascending to 230 miles into the stratosphere, planned to be used against New York and Washington, never got beyond the drawing-board stage.
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Even if built and fired, its conventional payload would have rendered it nugatory.