The Second World War (69 page)

Had Bomber Command been Germany’s only airborne enemy it would have been close to admitting defeat in the spring of 1944. However, the Eighth Air Force was still committed to a campaign of daylight precision bombing, had now assembled a force of 1000 B-17s and B-24 Liberators in Britain and was ready to show the Germans what ‘Americans meant by a
real
battle of material’. So far, apart from its costly forays to Schweinfurt and Regensburg, it had ventured few mass attacks deep into Germany. Beginning in February 1944 (the ‘Big Week’ of 20-26 February) under new commanders, Spaatz and James Doolittle, the latter the hero of the Tokyo raid of April 1942, it started to penetrate to targets which the Luftwaffe was bound to defend: aircraft factories and then the twelve synthetic-oil production plants. Speer, Hitler’s able Armaments Minister, had robbed the enemy air forces of much of their target system in 1943 by separating manufacturing processes and dispersing the fragments to new small sites, particularly in southern Germany. However, aircraft factories and particularly oil plants defied dispersion, and they provided the ‘Mighty Eighth’ with prime targets.

The Eighth Air Force had, moreover, been provided with the means to reach them. Daylight bombing required fighter escorts; consequently Bomber Command had abandoned it in 1941, since the Spitfire lacked the range to reach Germany. During 1943 the range of American fighters had also largely confined the Eighth Air Force to attacks in France and the Low Countries. After August, however, at the prompting of Robert A. Lovett, US Assistant Secretary for War, the P-47 Thunderbolt and P-38 Lightning fighters were equipped with drop tanks, external auxiliary fuel tanks which could be jettisoned in an emergency; these gave them the endurance to reach beyond the Ruhr. In March 1944 there appeared in numbers a new fighter equipped with drop tanks, the P51 Mustang, which could fly to and even beyond Berlin, 600 miles from its British bases. The P-51 was a new phenomenon: a heavy long-range fighter with the performance of a short-range interceptor. It had been delayed in production because it was an Anglo-American hybrid without a strong sponsor. Into an underpowered American airframe the British had inserted the famous Merlin engine; once its improved performance was recognised by Spaatz and Doolittle, they demanded its production in volume and 14,000 were to be built altogether. By March it was present in the German skies in great numbers and already beginning to break the strength of the Luftwaffe.

As soon as the demands imposed by preparation for Overlord ceased, and despite a temporary diversion of effort against the German secret-weapons sites in northern France, Pointblank resumed with redoubled force. The Eighth Air Force had continued its attack on German synthetic oil plants even during the Normandy battle and by September its results were even greater than anticipated. Between March and September oil production declined from 316,000 to 17,000 tons; aviation fuel output declined to 5000 tons. The Luftwaffe thereafter lived on its reserves, which by early 1945 were all but exhausted. Meanwhile the two bomber forces co-ordinated a round-the-clock campaign against German cities, with particular concentration on transport centres. By the end of October the number of rail wagons available weekly had fallen from the normal total of 900,000 to 700,000, and by December the figure was 214,000.

Under day and night attack by the USAAF and RAF, each deploying over 1000 aircraft during the autumn, winter and spring of 1944-5, German economic life was paralysed by strategic bombing. With enemy armies on its eastern and western frontiers, the Reich was no longer protected by a
cordon sanitaire
of occupied territory. The Luftwaffe was overwhelmed as well as outclassed by the daylight bombers’ escorts and eventually could not get its few surviving fighters off the ground. Although the anti-aircraft system drained two million men and women out of other services – perhaps the bombing campaign’s chief justification – flak dwindled into ineffectiveness as the night-bomber streams became too dense and fast-moving to engage for more than a few minutes. As bomber numbers grew over Germany in 1945, the attrition rate conversely declined to as little as one per cent per mission.

The sudden reversal of advantage between defence and attack undoubtedly derived directly from the appearance of the Mustang as an escort to the Eighth Air Force’s Fortresses and Liberators and later as a unit of aggressive fighter patrols, seeking out the enemy. In late 1943 the American campaign had been defeated by the Luftwaffe’s day-fighters, in early 1944 the British campaign by its night-fighters. The Mustang restored the Eighth Air Force’s ability to penetrate German airspace. In so doing it starved the Luftwaffe of its fuel supply and thereby drastically undercut its ability to sustain the high attrition rate it had inflicted on Bomber Command in 1943-4. Thus it opened the way for the British to match the Americans’ level of destructiveness in the round-the-clock campaign of late 1944 and so ensured that German industrial production, whether as a result of physical damage or by the strangulation of supply, should come to a halt in early 1945.

Because the peak of the bombers’ success coincided with the defeat of the Wehrmacht in the field and the progressive occupation of Reich territory by the Allied armies, the claims of the strategic-bombing advocates that they possessed the secret of victory have not and can never be proved. Such claims are better supported by the results of the USAAF’s bombing campaign against Japan mounted by General Curtis LeMay’s XXI Bomber Command: between May and August 1945 the dropping of 158,000 tons of bombs, two-thirds incendiaries, on to the fifty-eight largest Japanese cities, all largely wooden in construction, destroyed 60 per cent of their ground area and brought their populations to destitution and despair. Even before the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the unleashing of the Red Army’s
Blitzkrieg
into Manchuria, to which Japan’s decision to surrender is variously ascribed, the home islanders’ will to resist had unquestionably been brought to breaking-point by the American bombers.

German civilian morale, by contrast, was never broken by bomber attack. The populations of individual cities were severely distressed by heavy raids. Dresden, overwhelmed on the night of 14 February 1945, did not begin to function again until after the war was over; but in Berlin public transport and services were maintained throughout and were still functioning during the ground battle for the city in April 1945. In Hamburg the 50,000 deaths from bombing, largely concentrated into the period in July 1943, almost equalled those suffered in Britain throughout the war (60,000), yet industrial production returned to 80 per cent of normal within five months. Nothing better vindicated the German people’s reputation for discipline and hardihood than the resilience of their urban men and women under Allied air attack in 1943-5 – perhaps the women most of all, since so many were forced by the war to act as heads of families.

The cost of strategic bombing on Germany’s civilian population was tragically high: 87,000 people were killed in the towns of the Ruhr, at least 50,000 in Hamburg, 50,000 in Berlin, 20,000 in Cologne, 15,000 in the comparatively small city of Magdeburg, 4,000 in that tiny baroque gem, Würzburg. Altogether some 600,000 German civilians died under bombing attack and 800,000 were seriously injured. Children represented some 20 per cent of the dead and female deaths exceeded male by as much as 40 per cent at Hamburg and 80 per cent at Darmstadt, both cities where firestorms occurred. In the aftermath, privation added to the suffering caused by bereavement and homelessness: reductions in output of up to 30 per cent of steel, 25 per cent of motor engineering, 15 per cent of electrical power, 15 per cent of chemicals and effectively 100 per cent of oil, combined with the effect of a nearly total transport standstill in May 1945, deprived the surviving population of the means to begin reconstruction; the breakdown of transport also imposed fuel shortages which reduced consumption to barest subsistence level.

Because the whole of Germany was occupied by the time of the capitulation, however, no part of the population starved, as happened during the Allies’ sustainment of the wartime blockade after November 1918. The armies, even the Red Army, collected food and made themselves responsible for its distribution. The air forces which had devoted themselves to Germany’s economic devastation in 1943-5 found themselves engaged, almost as soon as the war was over, in transporting essential supplies to the cities they had recently been overflying with high explosive and incendiaries in their bomb-bays.

In the course of their campaign the Allied bombing forces had suffered grievously themselves: in 1944 alone the Eighth Air Force lost 2400 bombers; throughout the war Bomber Command suffered 55,000 dead, more than the number of British army officers killed in the First World War. The dead aircrew were not, however, accorded the memorialisation given to the ‘lost generation’. Their campaign, though it gave a dour satisfaction to the majority of the British people in the depths of their war against Hitler, never commanded the support of the whole nation. Its morality was publicly questioned in the House of Commons by the Labour MP Richard Stokes, more insistently in the Lords by Bishop Bell of Chichester and in private correspondence by the Marquess of Salisbury, head of the leading Conservative family in Britain. All made the point, to quote Lord Salisbury, ‘that of course the Germans began it, but we do not take the devil as our example.’ This accorded with a nagging self-reproach to the national conscience which, when the war was over, denied ‘Bomber’ Harris the peerage given to all other major British commanders and refused his aircrew a distinctive campaign medal of their own. With their backs to the wall the British people had chosen not to acknowledge that they had descended to the enemy’s level. In victory they remembered that they believed in fair play. Strategic bombing, which may not even have been sound strategy, was certainly not fair play. Over its course and outcome its most consistent practitioners drew a veil.

The German army, adept as always at surmounting crisis, lost no time in putting distance between itself and the disaster of Normandy. Hitler had been forced to accept the result of the Falaise battle, yet previously he had refused to allow any construction of defences on the line of the Somme and Marne rivers, tentatively designated by Army Group B as an intermediate position between the Atlantic and West Walls. In consequence, once the
Westheer
crossed the Seine between 19 and 29 August it could and did not pause in its retreat until it reached defensible positions on the great northern European waterways – the Schelde, the Meuse, the tributaries of the Rhine – in the first week of September. The British captured Brussels on 3 September, to ecstatic civic rejoicing, and Antwerp, Europe’s largest port, the next day. By 14 September the whole of Belgium and Luxembourg was in Allied hands, together with a fragment of Holland, and on 11 September patrols of the American First Army actually crossed the German border near Aachen. The vanguard of the Franco-American force which had landed in Provence on 15 August linked up with Patton’s Third Army near Dijon on 11 September. Thereafter, as the 6th Army Group, it went into the line in Alsace. By the end of the second week in September there was a continuous battlefront in northern Europe running from the banks of the Schelde in Belgium to the headwaters of the Rhine at Basle on the Swiss frontier.

However, Patton and Montgomery, Eisenhower’s two most thrusting subordinates, arrived at the approaches of the German frontier both believing that a more clear-cut strategy and a more calculated allocation of supplies would have resulted in the West Wall’s being breached. The roots of this dispute, subsequently known as the ‘Broad versus Narrow Front Strategy’, lay far back in the Overlord campaign, when the air campaign against the French railway system was at its height. The Allied forces had then been so successful in destroying French railway bridges, lines and rolling stock that when the armies at last broke out of the bridgehead in August the means to supply their advance could be provided only by truck and by road. It was hoped that, as the armies advanced, the truck route would be shortened by the progressive capture of ports along the Channel coast (also desirable because Hitler’s flying-bomb launch sites lay in the same area); but Hitler’s insistence on Army Group B’s leaving garrisons to hold Le Havre, Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk and the mouth of the Schelde vitiated that hope. Although Le Havre was captured on 12 September, Boulogne on 22 September and Calais on 30 September, Dunkirk held out until the end of the war, while, more critically for the Allies, the defences of the Schelde estuary were still in German hands at the beginning of November.

In retrospect it can be seen that the failure to clear the Schelde estuary, and thus to open the way for the Allies’ fleet of cross-Channel supply vessels to deliver directly to Antwerp in the immediate rear of the Canadian First, British Second and American First Armies, was the most calamitous flaw in the post-Normandy campaign. It was, moreover, barely excusable, since Ultra was supplying Montgomery’s headquarters from 5 September onwards with intelligence of Hitler’s decision (of 3 September) to deny the Allies the use of the Channel ports and waterways; and as early as 12 September Montgomery’s own intelligence section at 21st Army Group reported that the Germans intended to ‘hold out as long as possible astride the approaches to Antwerp, without which the installations of the port, though little damaged, can be of no service to us.’

Montgomery – despite every warning, and contrary to his own military good sense, which was acute – refused to turn his troops back in their tracks to clear the Schelde estuary. Instead he determined upon using the First Allied Airborne Army (the British 1st and the American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions) to leap across the Meuse and the lower Rhine, establish a foothold on the North German plain and capture the Ruhr, heartland of Germany’s war economy. On 10 September – the day on which formal command of ground forces in north-west Europe passed from himself to Eisenhower, and he became a field marshal in recognition of his achievements – he secured the Supreme Allied Commander’s assent to the plan and on 17 September the operation, codenamed Market Garden, began.