All Hell Let Loose (79 page)

The specially formed 617 Squadron trained throughout April and early May to carry out the attack. Contrary to popular myth, not every man was a volunteer, nor were all crews highly experienced. Some had flown fewer than ten previous operations against Germany, and several flight engineers had never been in action at all. This makes all the more remarkable the achievement of twenty-four-year-old Wing Commander Guy Gibson, a fierce disciplinarian and obsessively dedicated airman, in preparing his unit to launch the attack on the night of Sunday, 16 May. Nineteen crews took off. The Möhne and Eder dams were identified as priority targets; it was recognised that the third objective, the earth-banked Sorpe, though industrially vital, was less vulnerable to Wallis’s depth-charges.

The Möhne was breached by the fourth weapon dropped, the Eder by the third and last available to the attacking Lancasters. Most of the aircraft directed to the Sorpe were shot down en route; two crews returned home without attacking; the two charges dropped failed to breach the dam, as did another aimed at the Bever, mistakenly identified as the Ennepe. Eight crews were lost, a punitive casualty rate: six of them fell victims to anti-aircraft fire during the deck-level flights to and from the Ruhr in bright moonlight, indispensable to bombing accuracy.

The destruction of the Möhne and Eder created a sensation. The moral impact of the attack was enormous, not least on Germany’s leaders, and much enhanced the prestige of Bomber Command. Gibson received a VC. Some of the popular enthusiasm for ‘the Dambusters’ derived from the fact that destroying industrial targets seemed much less morally uncomfortable than burning cities and civilians. But the flooding of the Möhne valley killed 545 Germans and 749 foreigners, the latter Ukrainian women slave labourers and French and Belgian PoWs. The loss of water imposed only temporary inconvenience upon Ruhr steel production, partly because Harris failed to launch follow-up attacks with conventional bombs to prevent the dams from being repaired. But thereafter the Germans felt obliged to divert substantial resources to reservoir defence. If the economic impact of ‘the Dambusters’ raid’ was limited, the propaganda achievement was great. All those involved richly merited their laurels.

In 1943, the German economy staggered in the face of the combined pressures of shortages of coal, steel and manpower, compounded by massive destruction in the Ruhr achieved by Bomber Command and the USAAF. This was the first year in which the air offensive inflicted significant damage on the Nazi war machine. The July firestorm in Hamburg, created by the heaviest air raids in history, killed 40,000 people and destroyed 250,000 dwellings. ‘We were told the British [bombers] would avoid Hamburg because they would need the town and its harbour later on,’ one of its traumatised citizens, Mathilde Wolff-Monckeburg, wrote amid the rubble. ‘We lived in a fool’s paradise.’ By extraordinary exertions and the skills of Gen. Erhard Milch, the Luftwaffe managed to double its 1942 aircraft output, producing 2,200 combat aircraft a month by the summer of 1943. But its new models, the He177 and Me210, proved failures which wasted vital resources. The later marques of Bf109, which with the Focke-Wulf 190 remained the mainstays of Germany’s daylight air defence until the war’s end, were outclassed by Allied fighters. The August 1943 suicide of Luftwaffe chief of staff Hans Jeschonnek represented an admission of his service’s defeat.

Adam Tooze has made an important and persuasive case against Albert Speer’s claims to have created a German armaments production ‘miracle’ between 1942 and 1945. Many of Speer’s crisis expedients failed: for instance, the revolutionary Mk XXI U-boat was rushed into 1944 production so hastily that technical shortcomings rendered it incapable of useful service. A coal and steel famine persisted until the war’s end – the civilian allocation of fuel was cut to a level 15 per cent below that of the meagre British domestic ration. 1943 was the last year in which Germany still had access to Ukrainian metal ores. Merely fulfilling ammunition requirements absorbed more than half the army’s steel allocation, together with the services of 450,000 workers; a further 160,000 were building tanks, and 210,000 manufacturing other weapons.

Germany’s 1943 production of 18,300 armoured vehicles was far outstripped by the Allies’ 54,100 – 29,000 of these Russian – though Reich factories doubled deliveries between autumn 1942 and spring 1943. German ammunition output peaked in September 1944. From 1943 onwards, the Allies outgunned the Axis in every category of weapon, save tank armament, by ever-growing margins.

This makes it all the more remarkable that, in the face of so many handicaps and misjudgements, German forces were able to maintain a ferocious resistance until May 1945. In assessing the Third Reich’s industrial experience and the work of Speer and Milch – Jeschonnek’s successor as Luftwaffe chief of staff – historical revisionism can be overdone. By 1943, and indeed earlier, the Reich was set upon a course that could lead only to economic collapse. But Allied soldiers fighting the Germans would have derived little comfort from this knowledge as they faced devastating artillery and mortar barrages, and strove to challenge Tigers and Panthers with their own inferior tanks.

The weakness of the Allied bomber offensive was poor intelligence, which caused it to become, in Churchill’s rueful words, a bludgeon rather than a rapier. Ultra offered little help in divining what was happening inside Germany, because most industrial data was transmitted on paper or by landline rather than radio. Even as the destructive power of the RAF and USAAF grew, the ‘bomber barons’ remained ill-informed about the choke points of Nazi industry, which Sir Arthur Harris was anyway little interested in identifying. Having embarked on a campaign to wreck Germany’s cities, he sustained this with obsessive dedication until 1945. The USAAF, doctrinally committed to precision bombing, devoted much more energy to pinpointing key target systems: in August and October 1943, for instance, Eighth Air Force suffered shocking casualties attacking ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt, with indifferent success. On the first raid 147 of 376 aircraft were lost, and on the second sixty out of 291, with a further 142 damaged.

These disasters increased Harris’s contempt for precision bombing of what he called ‘panacea targets’. It has been justly observed that, although the British leadership at the Casablanca conference in January 1943 mandated a combined bomber offensive, what actually took place was a competition between the RAF and USAAF, each independently pursuing its own doctrine. Adam Tooze believes that Harris’s ‘Battle of the Ruhr’, which began with an attack on Essen on 5 March 1943, came close to achieving a decisive victory, by wrecking German coal and steel production. Goering expressed astonishment that the Allies did not continue their attacks on the Ruhr, ‘because there we are in some places having to deal with production bottlenecks that present enormous dangers’, as Goebbels recorded. But Bomber Command underrated the importance of maintaining pressure on industrial cities already attacked, which Harris too readily erased from his target list on the evidence of aerial photographs showing roofless buildings.

In July 1943 Harris, supposing the Ruhr sufficiently devastated, shifted Bomber Command’s focus of attack first to Hamburg, then to Berlin. Over Hitler’s capital his squadrons, operating at extreme range in winter weather against a huge and widely dispersed target area, suffered severely – losses on every mission rose to an unacceptable average of more than 5 per cent. At the end of 1943, Bomber Command headquarters dispatched a report to all its groups and stations, proclaiming in the most fanciful terms the results of its attacks: ‘These raids on the German capital do indeed mark the beginning of the end … The Nazis’ military and industrial organization, and above all their morale, have by these attacks suffered a deadly wound from which they cannot recover.’

On 7 December, Harris wrote to the prime minister, asserting that if he could deliver a further 15,000 Lancaster sorties against Germany’s major cities, the Nazi regime would collapse by 1 April 1944. Bomber Command almost fulfilled his appointed mission quota, but Germany’s resistance remained unbroken. The C-in-C’s extravagant predictions damaged his credibility with the prime minister and the service chiefs, including Sir Charles Portal. By the early spring of 1944, when Bomber Command was diverted to join the USAAF in attacking pre-invasion targets in France, its casualties in the ‘Battle of Berlin’ had become prohibitive. But Harris’s iron will enabled him later that summer to renew his assault on Germany’s cities, which continued until April 1945.

Bombing did not make the decisive impact upon civilian morale that the British aspired to achieve: factories continued to produce and orders to be obeyed, just as in Britain in 1940–41. It was always an irony, rooted in brashly chauvinistic assumptions, that the RAF set out to do to Germany just what the Luftwaffe had failed to do to Churchill’s people. But the misery of urban Germans became very great; the Nazi regime was driven to increasingly desperate expedients to explain to its own people their vulnerability to air assault. Newspaper headlines after the May 1943 dams raid asserted that it was ‘the work of Jews’. The public was unconvinced: security police reported that many citizens merely asked why the Luftwaffe was incapable of such achievements. In June a municipal foreman in Hagen watched a British night raid on nearby Wuppertal:

In June 1943, a citizen of Mülheim wrote: ‘Our Führer ought now to give the order to destroy the big cities in England, too.’ Hitler would certainly have done this if he could, but the Luftwaffe was incapable of returning to finish what it had left off in May 1941. A few thoughtful Germans feared that the growing havoc visited on their land represented a judgement on the Nazis’ crimes: on 20 December 1943, the Protestant Bishop of Württemberg roused Berlin’s ire by writing to the head of the Reich Chancellery to suggest that his flock were ‘often feeling that the suffering they were having to endure from the enemy bombing raids was in retribution for what was being done to the Jews’. He was sternly enjoined to show ‘greater reticence in such matters’.

As bombing intensified and civilian morale slumped, oppression and compulsion were employed ever more ruthlessly to sustain Nazi hegemony. In 1943, the courts passed a hundred death sentences a week on citizens deemed guilty of defeatism or sabotage: two branch managers of Deutsche Bank and a senior executive of an electricity combine were among those executed for expressing gloom about the war’s outcome. To maintain output, the aircraft industry adopted a seventy-two-hour working week. As slave labour became increasingly important, Milch urged ever more draconian measures to increase its productivity. He wrote of foreign and PoW workers: ‘These elements cannot be made more efficient by
small means
.
They are just not handled strictly enough
. If a decent foreman would sock one of those unruly guys because the fellow won’t work, then the situation would soon change.
International law cannot be observed here
. I have asserted myself very strongly … I have very strongly represented the point of view that prisoners, with the exception of the English and the Americans,
should be taken away from the military authorities
. Soldiers are not in a position … to cope with these fellows … If [a prisoner of war] has committed sabotage or refused to work, I will have him hanged, right in his own factory.’ Hitler’s ‘wonder weapons’, the V1 flying bomb and V2 rocket, were produced by slaves in conditions of appalling hardship and brutality. Industrial output was sustained only by ruthless exploitation of captive manpower. The commitment to high-technology ‘revenge weapons’, estimated to have cost the Reich around one-third of the resources expended by the Allies on the Manhattan atomic project, represented a massive and futile burden on a shrinking war economy.

Though the RAF inflicted huge damage on Germany, it was left to the USAAF to achieve the most important victory of the air war, in the early months of 1944, by means which surprised its own commanders. The Mustang long-range fighter, capable of escorting Flying Fortresses and Liberators all the way to Germany and outfighting any opponent when it got there, became available in large numbers. The USAAF embarked on a major campaign against aircraft factories, pounding them for six consecutive days of ‘Big Week’ in February, and forcing the Luftwaffe to commit every available fighter to their defence. It quickly became plain that the ground destruction achieved by the bombers was less significant than the startling success of American pilots in air combat. In a single month, the Luftwaffe lost one-third of its fighters and one-fifth of its aircrew. In March, half the Germans’ remaining air strength was destroyed; in April 43 per cent of residual capability; in May and June 50 per cent.

German production remained remarkably high: as late as September 3,538 aircraft of all types were built, of which 2,900 were fighters. But the Luftwaffe’s total 1944 output of 34,100 combat aircraft was dwarfed by the Allies’ 127,300, of which 71,400 were American, and the Germans’ loss of pilots was calamitous. The USAAF thereafter began to address synthetic oil plants, the Reich’s principal source of fuel once the Russians overran the Romanian oilfields in April 1944, with an immediate impact on fuel supplies: the Luftwaffe found many of its planes grounded, aircrew training crippled. When D-Day came in June, Goering’s shrunken squadrons were unable to offer significant support to the Wehrmacht. Thereafter the air bombardment of Germany attained massive proportions, while RAF and USAAF losses fell. Whereas in a typical March 1943 attack, around a thousand aircraft delivered 4,000 tons of bombs, by February 1944, average force size had tripled; by July, the Allies deployed 5,250 planes of all types against Germany, with a bomb capacity of 20,000 tons. In the course of that year and the first months of 1945, they reduced the Reich’s conurbations to rubble. By November 1944, attacks on the rail network had made it almost impossible to ship steel produced in the Ruhr to manufacturing plants elsewhere.