Armageddon (62 page)

Yet in 1944 the offensive was transformed. The Americans achieved a decisive breakthrough. Their pre-war doctrine of the self-defending bomber formation had proved unsustainable. Their bombers became, instead, dependent upon fighter escort for protection. It had always been assumed that it was technically impossible to build a fighter with the range to fly deep into Germany, together with the performance to match that of the enemy’s single-seat interceptors, Messerschmitt 109s and Focke-Wulf 190s, once it got there. By fitting the British Rolls-Royce engine to the American P-51 Mustang aircraft, however, a miracle was accomplished. Equipped with fuel drop tanks, the Mustang could fly with the bombers to Berlin, then outfight the Luftwaffe. After months of failure in its efforts to destroy Germany’s aircraft production by bombing factories, by the summer of 1944 Eighth Air Force’s fighters were wrecking the Luftwaffe in the sky, killing irreplaceable German pilots as well as shooting down their planes. Between January 1941 and June 1944, the Luftwaffe had lost 31,000 aircrew. Between June and October 1944, it lost 13,000. In 1944, the USAAF destroyed 3,706 enemy aircraft merely in daylight operations over Germany. This was an extraordinary achievement, which conferred dominance of Europe’s skies upon the Allies.

The RAF’s night attacks, which were already exploiting improved technology, now also profited from the decline of the German fighter force. During the spring and early summer of 1944, the Allied air forces were largely diverted from attacking Germany to strike targets in France and the Low Countries, in support of D-Day. When the bombers returned to Germany once the Allies were established ashore, the enemy had lost most of his coastal air defences. From July onwards, American and British bomber losses fell steeply. There were still some painful days and nights. But average Allied casualties seldom exceeded 1.5 per cent, and were often less.

Yet by the late summer of 1944 enthusiasm for bombing had waned within the Allied leadership. The politicians, generals, admirals, were weary of the airmen’s extravagant forecasts. Sir Arthur Harris, C-in-C of Bomber Command, would forever be haunted by his promise to Churchill in the winter of 1943 that, if his Lancasters achieved another 15,000 sorties against Berlin, the Germans would inevitably be forced to surrender by 1 April 1944. Harris achieved his quota of Lancaster sorties, amid dreadful casualties, but by April Fool’s Day there was not the smallest sign of Germany’s collapse. Only two months before D-Day, General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, America’s air commander in Europe, suggested that the impending triumph of bombing made a descent on Normandy redundant, and urged a less hazardous assault on Norway. The British Army and Royal Navy, in particular, were embittered by the losses they had suffered in their ground campaigns and in the Battle of the Atlantic because the RAF’s obsession with strategic bombing crippled its ability to provide support for land and sea operations.

All the available evidence showed that Germany continued to achieve miracles of industrial production despite the Allies’ huge commitment to bombing. Politically, Churchill had exploited the strategic air offensive in his long struggle to reconcile Stalin to delays in launching the Second Front. But that was now over. The minds of the mightiest war leaders on both sides of the Atlantic were fixed upon the land campaign in north-west Europe. The importance of tactical air support for the armies was undisputed. But no one much cared any longer what Bomber Command and Eighth Air Force, supported by Fifteenth Air Force from Italy, were or were not doing to Hitler’s empire. The extravagant advocates of air power, both American and British, were discredited in the eyes of their peers. The “new warfare” had plainly failed to destroy Hitler’s empire. The footsoldiers were being obliged to fight their way through Germany in the “old warfare” way.

Now, however, there was a new irony. After almost discrediting themselves by the extravagance of their claims, in the spring of 1944 the American airmen had indeed identified Germany’s vital weakness: oil. To continue the war, Hitler was overwhelmingly dependent upon the production of synthetic fuel. The Germans found it incomprehensible that, until May 1944, no systematic attempt had been made by the Allied air force to strike their oil plants. When Eighth Air Force began to do so, alongside Fifteenth Air Force flying from Italy, the results were remarkable. Petroleum available to Germany fell from 927,000 tons in March 1944 to 715,000 tons in May, and 472,000 tons in June. Luftwaffe supplies of aviation spirit declined from 180,000 tons in April to 50,000 tons in June, 10,000 tons in August. Germany needed 300,000 tons of fuel a month to fight the war, yet by September reserves had fallen to half that amount. Speer’s spectacular achievements in sustaining aircraft production became meaningless without fuel. These statistics were, of course, unknown to the Allied leaders, but Ultra provided important clues. Even though the first USAAF raids in May had limited effect, intercepted signals traffic showed how much the attacks had alarmed the enemy. So low had the credibility of the Allied “bomber barons” sunk, however, that no one important in either Washington or London was persuaded that here, at last, the airmen had found Hitler’s vital weakness, a short cut to ending the war. During the armies’ advance into Germany, the RAF and USAAF begged SHAEF to emphasize to media correspondents that the devastation they met was the proud fruit of the air forces’ efforts, rather than of mere artillery. Yet Bradley’s aide Chester Hansen wrote on 7 December: “The gross claims of our airmen on the winning of the war by airmen are discounted by our ground force people.” In October 1944, so disenchanted had Marshall and the U.S. Chiefs of Staff become with the airmen’s unfulfilled promises that they seriously contemplated ordering the USAAF to abandon all strategic operations which did not promise directly to diminish German fighting power.

Air attacks on oil plants achieved dramatic successes in late May and June. They were somewhat interrupted during the summer invasion support campaign, but the American airmen were now convinced of their decisive importance, and threw immense effort into the oil campaign through late summer. As autumn gave way to winter, the weather provided the enemy with just sufficient breathing spaces from American precision bombing to enable the Germans to keep their armies moving. Almost every synthetic plant proved capable of repair within two or three weeks of a given attack. Repeat visits to targets were therefore essential. When these did not take place, because of thick overcast or unavailability of forces, a thin stream of oil flowed once more to Germany’s forces.

The Americans also focused sharply on transportation targets, as urged by SHAEF’s deputy Supreme Commander, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, and his scientific advisers. In the final months of the war, at last the American airmen could claim that they were playing a vital role in strangling the Wehrmacht. It was extraordinary that German production continued at all. It should never be forgotten that, despite all the efforts of the air forces, until May 1945 ammunition continued to reach Hitler’s forces in sufficient quantities to sustain the struggle. But, from the end of 1944 onwards, the loss of vital factories and raw materials to the Russians, damage to rail links, together with the acute shortage of oil, combined to create immense difficulties for the Germans in producing armaments and in using them effectively on the battlefield. The Luftwaffe, already crippled by disastrous failures of aircraft design and management, was now rendered almost impotent by lack of fuel either to train new pilots or to fly operational aircraft.

Amid the ruins of Germany and impending Allied victory, the USAAF and its leaders received less credit than they deserved for this success. All military achievements can be judged only in the wider context of grand strategy. For instance, if the RAF’s Bomber Command had succeeded in its efforts to sink the pocket battleship
Tirpitz
in 1941, 1942 or even 1943, this would have made a notable contribution to the war. Yet, by the time the airmen destroyed the great vessel in November 1944, its sinking had become strategically irrelevant, a mere clever circus trick. Likewise, and far more important, had the Allied air forces been able to strike effectively against Germany’s oil supply earlier in the war, they might have received the laurels for dramatically foreshortening the outcome. As it was, by the time the Americans identified the vital arteries of Hitler’s war machine, the armies saw themselves on the brink of victory, without much need to acknowledge the contribution of the bombers.

The success of the USAAF could have been both swifter and more complete if the British had also committed themselves with real resolve to the oil campaign. In the autumn of 1944 some important British airmen, including the Chief of Air Staff and the Director of Bomber Operations, became convinced that the RAF should shift its forces from destroying cities to hitting oil plants. Sir Charles Portal was also persuaded of the merits of Tedder’s “Transportation Plan”—battering the rail, road and water links of Germany. Yet both these policies foundered upon the same rock: the obsessive determination of Bomber Command’s C-in-C, Sir Arthur Harris, to complete the programme of destroying Germany’s cities which he had begun in March 1942. By the autumn of 1944, the British aircraft-construction programme undertaken back in 1941 at last reached fruition. Heavy bombers were pouring off the production lines, giving Harris a striking force of unprecedented power. His squadrons could call upon ever-more sophisticated radar navigation, marking and aiming devices. German defences were crumbling. Harris’s power to inflict fire and death upon the cities of the enemy reached its zenith at the very moment when sensible strategists had become persuaded that there were much more useful ways of deploying Allied air power. That shrewd scientific civil servant Sir Henry Tizard acknowledged as far back as 1942 that Bomber Command might eventually inflict
catastrophic
injury upon Germany. He expressed doubt, however, about whether such injury would prove
decisive
. By late 1944, scepticism about the decisive value of destroying German real estate had become widespread in the Allied corridors of power.

Between its assaults upon cities, Bomber Command did attack transportation and oil targets. In the heated conflict of opinion which developed between the Air Ministry and Harris in the winter of 1944, Bomber Command’s C-in-C kept his critics at bay by paying some lip-service to their demands. But he never disguised his determination to employ the chief weight of his forces where he wanted them. Between July and September 1944, some 11 per cent of British sorties were directed at oil targets and 20 per cent against cities. Between October and December, 14 per cent of RAF bomber attacks fell upon oil, 58 per cent upon cities. Repeated Air Ministry missives to Bomber Command, urging greater concentration on oil, vanished swiftly into Harris’s waste-paper basket. In a letter to Portal on 1 November 1944, he deplored the range of demands on his resources and urged the importance of persisting with the assault on cities:

In the past 18 months, Bomber Command has virtually destroyed 45 out of the leading 60 German cities. In spite of invasion diversions, we have so far managed to keep up and even to exceed our average of 2 cities devastated a month . . . There are not many industrial centres of population now left intact. Are we going to abandon this vast task, which the Germans themselves have long admitted to be their worst headache, just as it nears completion?

All that was required to complete his grand design, said Harris, was the destruction of Magdeburg, Halle, Leipzig, Dresden, Chemnitz, Nuremberg, Munich, Coblenz, Karlsruhe and some undamaged areas of Berlin and Hanover. Harris never wavered in his opposition to attacking oil and transportation—indeed, everything save Germany’s cities. He derided those who advocated such wishy-washy policies. He wrote contemptuously to Portal on 25 October 1944: “During the past few weeks, every panacea-monger and ‘me too expert,’ to many of whom we had already (we hoped) given the quietus in the past, has raised his head again.”

Portal responded on 5 November: “At the risk of your dubbing me ‘another panacea merchant,’ I believe the air offensive against oil gives us by far the best hope of complete victory in the next few months . . .” On 12 November, the Chief of Air Staff returned to the charge, rejecting Harris’s argument for completing the destruction of Germany’s cities: “I know that you have long felt such a plan to be the most effective way of bringing about the collapse of Germany . . . If I knew you to be as wholehearted in the attack on oil as in the past you have been in the matter of attacking cities, I would have little to worry about.”

In November, 24.6 per cent of Bomber Command’s sorties were devoted to attacking oil plants, delivering a larger tonnage of bombs than the USAAF’s Eighth Air Force. Portal wrote again to Harris on 8 January 1945, urging even greater efforts. He pointed out bluntly that, but for the success of the Americans in creating a “favourable air situation,” Bomber Command’s attack on cities might well have ceased to be sustainable. This was indeed a remarkable admission from the head of the RAF: only the success of American air policy had saved that of Britain from humiliating failure. None of these arguments moved Harris, however. He was a man of elemental passions. Churchill observed after the war that Bomber Command’s C-in-C was “a considerable commander,” but he added: “there was a certain coarseness about him.” Harris told Portal defiantly that he would resign if the Air Staff had lost confidence in his direction of the bomber offensive.

In the face of such obduracy, Britain’s Chief of Air Staff retreated. On 20 January 1945, he wrote to Harris: “I willingly accept your assurance that you will continue to do your utmost to ensure the successful execution of the policy laid down. I am very sorry that you do not believe in it, but it is no use my craving for what is evidently unattainable. We must wait until after the end of the war before we can know for certain who was right . . .” This was an extraordinarily feeble letter for the head of the Royal Air Force to write to a subordinate commander. But propaganda had made “Bomber” Harris one of the most celebrated war leaders Britain possessed. At a time when it was plain that the war would end within months, Portal lacked the stomach for the huge row that must accompany Harris’s dismissal. While Churchill no longer revealed much interest in the bomber offensive, he had always displayed respect for Harris’s leadership. It was most unlikely that the prime minister would welcome, even if he was willing to acquiesce in, the dismissal of Bomber Command’s C-in-C when victory was at hand. Harris should have been sacked in the winter of 1944 for his defiance of the policy approved by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, and for his insubordination towards Portal. Contrary to widespread belief, Harris did not invent area bombing. This was established before he assumed command of his forces. But he executed the policy with a Cromwellian zeal which ensured that his name is forever identified with the destruction of Germany’s cities in the Second World War.