A Patriot's History of the Modern World (67 page)

A radical difference in soldiers' mentality and attitude could also be detected among the Americans, especially as contrasted with Russians and British. The G.I., as one analyst noted, “regarded himself as only a temporary soldier,” retaining a level of autonomous identity unique among the armies.
³⁹
During the American Revolution, Baron von Steuben, training George Washington's soldiers, had already come to the conclusion that American fighters had to understand their orders, not just obey them: “You say to your [French or Austrian] soldier, ‘Do this' and he doeth it; but I am obliged to say, ‘This is the reason why you ought to do that,' and he does it.”
⁴⁰
Having evolved from a militia tradition where units elected their own officers and thought independently, Americans represented the epitome of the Western Way of War for better or worse on the battlefield.

Whether the upper echelons of the Army learned, or whether it was small unit improvisation that led to American victories, is hard to tell. Critics maintain that American military planning was poor, there was little understanding of the combined arms doctrine, and no one made allowances for high casualties.
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But in this war, no army did, least of all the Russians, who hurled an astonishing 600 divisions (with a total of 34 million men serving) at the Germans. This was more than five times what the Nazis had (117 divisions) when they invaded Russia in June 1941, not counting satellite forces. During the five years the Soviets were at war, they put over 20 percent of their population in uniform, compared with 24 percent for Germany and only 11 percent for the United States. The Soviets lost more than 8.7 million men from 1941 to 1943 alone, and losses topped 13 million over the course of the war. This constituted a jaw-dropping 37 percent military death rate, exceeding Germany's 35 percent rate, and dwarfing the U.S. military death rate of 2.5 percent. Simply put, the American approach was
to employ firepower whenever possible to minimize casualties, and the Soviets appeared not to care.

What U.S. experience showed was that the high levels of individuality and exceptional battlefield autonomy possessed by G.I.s made improvisation not only possible, but routine. Consider the hedgerows in Normandy, which tanks could not climb over without exposing their vulnerable underbellies, and enemy troops could lurk on the hidden back side to threaten infantry. A sergeant, Curtis Culin of the 102nd Cavalry Recon Squadron, welded steel teeth to his unit's tank. The teeth dug into the embankment and created a gap in the hedgerow without exposing either the tank or the men, an innovation soon widely used and known as the “Rhinoceros” attachment.
⁴²
It was not a naval board or even an admiral, but a machinist on the USS
Yorktown
, Oscar W. Myers, who determined that the USS
Lexington
was sunk at the Battle of Coral Sea in large part due to gasoline fires on deck caused by poor fuel control. On the spot, Myers invented a system of draining the carrier's fuel pipes after use and filling them with inert CO
₂
gas. After Captain Elliott Buckmaster approved of the project, the
Yorktown
was outfitted with the new system, which likely saved the ship from a calamitous fire after a direct bomb hit during the Battle of Midway.
⁴³

Death from the Skies

America's insistence that her troops be more than just cannon fodder and that every precaution be taken to reduce casualties played out in the bombing campaign that unfolded over Europe. Where the British pursued the phantom goal of breaking German morale, thereby reducing industrial output, the Americans homed in on destroying the Luftwaffe and German industry and transportation facilities supplying its frontline troops. If that required destroying industries and cities in the process,
c'est la vie
. This long-term strategy was elaborated on at an April 1942 meeting, where General Ira Eaker informed Allied leadership, “The prime purpose of our operations over here…is to make the Luftwaffe come up and fight. If you will support the bomber offensive, I guarantee the Luftwaffe will not prevent the cross-channel invasion.”
⁴⁴
The thousand-plane raids of early summer 1943 were just a warm-up. In August, General Curtis LeMay led a massive series of attacks on the Schweinfurt ball-bearing plants, meeting unprecedented resistance in which the Luftwaffe unleashed relentless, head-on attacks. One bomb group leader noted that B-17s were falling from the sky so fast it “became useless to report them.”
⁴⁵
By the time they reached
the first ball-bearing factories, 8th Air Force had lost 32 of the 330 bombers that began the mission, and lost still more on the way home. The final casualty rate was 20 percent, but the blow delivered to the Nazis was even more crushing, reducing ball-bearings production by almost 40 percent. The Americans begged the British to follow up, but the British Air Staff found excuse after excuse not to attack, and once again, Speer observed, “we barely escaped a further catastrophe.”
⁴⁶
For all the widespread damage caused by British night bombing, the Germans had come up with an effective defense created by General Josef Kammhuber's
Nachtjagd-Division
, or night-hunting force. Kammhuber had coordinated flak, searchlights, and well-spaced fighter forces. Using searchlights to “time” the airspeed of a bomber, nearby fighters had three minutes to find it in the light and kill it or search for another target. The bombers entered a chain of searchlights some eighteen miles deep, divided into quadrants of sixty-inch searchlights, then ran a gauntlet of night fighters. The Hamburg raid had been particularly effective due to a new radar-thwarting tactic of dropping tin foil strips known as “Window,” which filled German radar screens with snow. But the Germans countered Window fairly quickly, and it proved less useful from that time forward.

Bombing, particularly the Americans' daylight raids, consumed the most attention of German defense planners. Despite the crushing defeat at Stalingrad and the growing superiority of the Red Air Force, Hitler kept moving planes west to counter the bombers, and Joseph Goebbels admitted in his diary that the bombing kept him from ever sleeping.
⁴⁷
The RAF estimated that of 2,750 fighters in the Luftwaffe, 1,900 were deployed on the Western Front, almost four times what was sent to Russia! One assessment of the pivotal battle of Kursk, while the Germans still had a chance to slow the Red Army, concluded that a 30 percent increase in German tactical air forces, which comprised the Nazis' entire antibombing effort in the West, would have swung the fight.
⁴⁸

In fact, General Carl Spaatz
wanted
the Luftwaffe in front of him, where he could destroy it. During the “Big Week” in February 1944, 1,000 U.S. bombers and 900 fighter escorts with long-range drop tanks (a seemingly simple idea that proved dauntingly complex, requiring 150 separate valves and pressure pumps) headed for Germany. This time, Spaatz had issued new directives to his fighter jockeys. “Seek and destroy” the German pilots, he told them, freeing the fighters from bomber escort to achieve “nothing less than annihilation of the Luftwaffe. The strategy [was] to bait them….
Send in the bombers—the bait—to destroy the aircraft factories and then massacre the planes and pilots that came up to defend them.”
⁴⁹
The bombers, of course, were far more than merely “bait,” smashing the Ju-88 and Me 109 factories, destroying the Reich's ability to put up new aircraft. The raids exceeded Spaatz's expectations. On the first day, Germany lost 150 fighters, and over the next five days, and from then on, between 40 and 50 fighters per raid. Brunswick's air production, Daimler-Benz's engine and vehicle manufacturing in Stuttgart, and Regensburg's Messerschmitt factories were all flattened, and the British joined in, pounding Leipzig, Berlin, Aachen, Munich, and a half dozen other cities. Augsburg was nearly eradicated. Attempting to defend Berlin, the Luftwaffe lined up its fighters 50 abreast and flew head-on into the bombers as P-51s shot down between 70 and 170 planes—they fell so fast no accurate count could be made.

Speer recorded later that February–March of 1944 marked the virtual end of German air power, as approximately 60 percent of German aircraft in the West were shot down in a two-month period. By May, new attacks on oil-producing facilities meant “the end of German war production,” and by July, the attack on the synthetic oil plant at Merseburg left it entirely unusable.
⁵⁰
Whereas in May, the Reich still had 180,000 tons of aviation fuel available, a month later it had only 10,000 tons, leading Speer to inform Hitler that the loss of aviation petrol neared 90 percent. The economic miracle had come crashing down, and the steady increase in Nazi production since 1942 abruptly sputtered. A collapsing economy dovetailed with an increasing level of pessimism and defeatism among the civilian sector, to which the Reich courts responded by issuing death sentences for negative talk and sabotage to the tune of one hundred per week by 1943. Two Deutsche Bank managers were arrested and executed in the fall of 1943 for “defeatist” comments, as was a board member of the electricity company RWE.

Even though Nazi industry continued to produce, turning out 2,900 fighters alone in the months from February to September 1944, such industrial productivity was irrelevant when the Luftwaffe's entire complement of fighter pilots was either killed or seriously wounded over a five-month span in 1944.
⁵¹
Throwing inexperienced pilots up in more advanced planes amounted to sending children onto the Los Angeles freeways in Ferraris. Ironically, the success of bombing on several levels intersected with the Nazi acceleration of the Holocaust, most notably in forcing the Reich to rely ever more heavily on slave labor.

Between the bombing campaign and the millions of new subjects in the conquered lands who consumed resources, Germany was caught in a vise. At first the subjugated lands had provided a windfall of food and ores. Goebbels called German extraction “digesting” the occupied territories. After 1942, in fact, food rations were increased thanks to the doubling of deliveries from conquered territories—not only wheat, but potatoes and meat.
⁵²
Much of the food never got into Germany at all, however: the Wehrmacht consumed over half of the rye and potato imports and two thirds of the oats. Matters were made worse by the RAF's attacks on the Dortmund-Ems canal, the bomber offensive's attack on the Hamm marshaling yards, and the blockage of the Rhine in October when the Cologne-Mülheim bridge was destroyed. Without coal or iron ore, steel production shriveled. Coal shortages plagued the Reich after late 1944; by that time, the arms industry had ground to a halt. Late in 1944 while Americans were churning out a Sherman tank every forty-five minutes, Germany could put a total of only one hundred Tiger I tanks in operation on the entire Eastern Front. All “King Tigers” (Tiger IIs) were being reserved for the Battle of the Bulge.

Solutions, Final and Otherwise

Shortages in the Reich always posed a conundrum for Nazi leadership, for Germany badly needed laborers—every Jew killed was one who could not work. “The hard truth,” Heinrich Himmler said, was that “this people must disappear from the face of the earth.”
⁵³
But a harder truth was that every German man in a factory was one less in the field. The first group to benefit from this problem was the Soviet prisoners captured early in the war; the initial policy was to starve them, but by November 1941, Hitler reversed himself and decided to use them in Germany as workers, even though a malnutrition policy continued. The Reich had been consuming fuel and wasting manpower to move hundreds of thousands of Russians to Germany, but then left them to die, serving no useful purpose. Even as workers, allowing them to die was counterproductive: industrial workers needed training, also an investment of time and expertise—a loss of capital with every death.

Throughout 1942 slaves continued to arrive—an astonishing reverse Lebensraum. Prisoners were concentrated in labor and prison camps throughout virtually every industrial city in Germany, most of them without housing, often utterly disorganized, presenting, according to one hard-bitten Nazi, “a picture of desolation and immiseration.”
⁵⁴
Nor was this new:
forced labor had built the Nazi military machine sent to Russia after the invasion of France. By 1941 alone, Germany had more than a million foreign prisoner-workers (mostly French) and a million more “civilian” workers from Poland and other occupied countries, all of whom made up over 8 percent of the workforce. A million more soon arrived from Poland after Russia was invaded, including large proportions of teenagers, followed by almost two million more throughout 1942. Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel, who headed the labor mobilization agency (GBA), delivered 34,000 new workers per week for seventy-eight consecutive weeks.
⁵⁵
At its peak, the foreign labor force constituted one fifth of Germany's labor: Munich alone had more than 16,000 slave laborers for its BMW plant, and some labor populations actually grew in size as the Wehrmacht was chased out of Russia, evacuating some 400,000 people back to work camps. Until that time, German factories littered conquered lands—prior to the withdrawal, Ju-87 Stukas were 80 percent constructed in Russia.

Even with the Russians and Poles, however, the manpower crisis continued as Hitler's Holocaust exterminated Jewish workers. Millions were gone by 1942 alone, eliminating almost 2.4 million potential workers, and another 1.1 million died in “work” camps, along with 175,000 Soviets. Auschwitz was only one of many concentration camps to farm out its inmates for industrial work with I. G. Farben; Sachsenhausen provided labor for Daimler-Benz; and so on, to the tune of 500,000 workers. Many of them were driven by “performance feeding,” whereby underperforming workers had their rations deducted and the difference given to better workers. Friction resurfaced between the SS and administrators of industrial programs, with the former interested in decreasing the inmate population and the latter seeking to stabilize it. After the winter of 1942, steps were taken to increase food rations and provide basic medical care. The primacy of food for slave labor—Jews especially—produced something of an irony, as Hitler had begun his “Second Book” with an extensive discussion of food, calling “the struggle for daily bread…the top of all vital necessities.”
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