Armageddon (63 page)

The USAAF focused its attacks through the closing period of the war upon oil and transportation targets. “We should never allow the history of this war to convict us of throwing the strategic bomber at the man in the street,” declared General Ira Eaker, Eighth Air Force’s commander, in January 1945. Yet such fervently moral observations would not have impressed the Germans beneath Eighth Air Force’s assaults. It was true that American targeting specified rail junctions, bridges and suchlike, rather than city centres. But, given the mean error of aiming accuracy, a great many American bombs landed on civilian residential areas rather than on infrastructure targets. When conditions were overcast and it was necessary to bomb by radar, as was often the case, the destruction wrought by the USAAF was broadcast almost as widely as that generated by the RAF’s area attacks. The British found it convenient publicly to deny the existence of any moral issue about striking at German centres of population. The Americans did acknowledge a moral issue, but killed many civilians anyway. There is no evidence that the German people, then or later, recognized much practical distinction between the brands of misery imposed upon them by the respective Allied air forces. To an extraordinary degree, and especially in the last months of the war, the air chiefs were left to make policy as they saw fit. On the American side, writes the historian Michael Sherry, “after September 1944, no one outside the air force carefully examined its methods of bombing. Whether it chose to blast factories, mine sea-lanes or level cities was largely for [General “Hap”] Arnold and his subordinates to decide . . . The leaders and technicians of the American air force were driven by technological fanaticism.”

It is important to establish the background against which the last phase of the bomber offensive took place, because this proved overwhelmingly the most destructive. Between September 1944 and April 1945, the Western allies dropped more than 800,000 tons of bombs on Germany, 60 per cent of the total tonnage delivered between 1939 and 1945. German industrial production peaked in September 1944, and thereafter declined relentlessly as plant and raw materials in occupied territories were lost. In January 1945, with considerable courage Speer informed Hitler that the German economy was within weeks of collapse. From an Allied viewpoint, there was an overwhelming case for maintaining air attacks on oil installations and transport links. It would have been unthinkable to stand down Bomber Command and the U.S. Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces while the Germans continued fiercely to resist Allied assaults on the battlefield. It is hard to imagine, however, that any strategic purpose was served, or might rationally have been expected to be served, by continuing the destruction of cities. Yet this is what happened, on a vastly greater scale than ever before. In August 1943, its most active month of that year, Bomber Command dropped 20,149 tons of bombs on Germany, and Eighth Air Force 3,999. In October 1944, Bomber Command dropped 61,204 tons, Eighth Air Force 38,961 tons. In February 1945, British and American tonnages were 45,889 and 46,088 respectively; in March, 67,637 and 65,962. In all, in the first four months of 1945 the British dropped 181,740 tons of bombs on Germany, and Eighth Air Force 188,573. In the whole of 1943, the British had dropped only 157,367 tons. Such statistics emphasize how much destruction was done to Germany’s cities at a phase of the war when “de-housing” civilians had become meaningless to everyone except the wretched Germans beneath.

Bishop Bell of Chichester, one of the most prominent British civilian critics of area bombing, had delivered a stinging rebuke in February 1944:

I desire to challenge the Government on the policy which directs the bombing of enemy towns on the present scale, especially with reference to civilians who are non-combatants . . . It is of supreme importance that we, who are the liberators of Europe, should so use power that it is always under the control of Law. It is because our bombing of enemy towns—this “area bombing”—raises this issue of bombing unlimited that such immense importance is bound to attach to the policy and action of His Majesty’s Government.

It is a tribute to the maintenance of democracy in Britain that such a statement could be made, and publicly debated, in the midst of a world war, even if after years of suffering at the hands of the Luftwaffe few among the bishop’s British audience were in a mood to heed him.

Most people believed that the German people deserved their fate. Yet it seems debatable whether Allied aircraft were appropriately employed in belatedly administering punishment to the German people, as distinct from inflicting strategic damage upon their capacity to continue the war. The bomber offensive may be perceived in four phases. From 1940 through 1942, it inflicted negligible damage upon the Germans, but represented a heroic earnest of British defiance. In 1943, the impact of intensified bombing was assuaged by increased industrial output, but air attack obliged the Nazis seriously to address the defence of the Reich. From the spring of 1944 onwards, the bomber offensive achieved a terrible maturity. It made mounting inroads on Germany’s industrial capacity, and brought the Luftwaffe to its knees. Richard Overy, among others, has justly highlighted the importance of bombing in forcing Hitler to devote huge resources—above all some 10,000 of his excellent 88mm guns—to the home defence of the Reich when these deadly weapons would otherwise have been deployed on the fighting fronts, to the detriment of the Allied armies. This drain on battlefield armaments would have been even greater had not Hitler professed an unconcern, even satisfaction, about the destruction inflicted by bombing: “[it] actually works in our favour, because it is creating a body of people with nothing to lose—people who will therefore fight on with utter fanaticism.”

Up to 1945, there seems little difficulty in justifying the bomber offensive militarily and morally, as a matter of both desirability and necessity. In all wars, combatants must pay a moral price for military actions, and painful choices must be accepted. Churchill agonized before D-Day about the inevitable deaths of thousands of French civilians if France’s rail links were bombed. He reluctantly concluded that the greater good—the success of the invasion—must be held paramount, and he was surely right. Few British or American people worried much about the fate of the people of Germany during the war years. Why indeed should they have done so? The Germans had brought unspeakable misery upon the world.

Yet in the early months of 1945 Bishop Bell’s remarks a year earlier attained a new relevance. By this last phase, the moral cost of killing German civilians in unprecedented numbers outweighed any possible strategic advantage. The wholesale destruction of some great cities, Dresden foremost among them, could have been averted, even if attacks on urban rail centres had continued. Ironically, and although the leaders of the USAAF never admitted this, Spaatz’s aircraft joined in many area attacks in the last weeks, because they ran out of identifiable precision targets. The performance of the strategic air forces at this period was a murderous, largely futile muddle. “I felt that again our efforts were rather disconnnected,” wrote Tedder, as Eisenhower’s deputy. “We were attacking more or less simultanously oil, cities, depots, marshalling yards, canals and factories. In this I could discern no comprehensive or economical use of our overwhelming air forces.” Churchill or Portal should have stopped Harris’s manic assault on Germany’s surviving cities. Neither did so, Churchill because he was preoccupied elsewhere, Portal because he lacked the steel indispensable to great military commanders.

The USAAF’s strategic offensive achieved formidable success, in winning air supremacy over Europe and in crippling German oil production and transport links. By contrast, the final stage of the area offensive against Germany’s cities contributed little to the defeat of the Nazis, and cast a moral shadow over Allied victory which has never been lifted. It is impossible to fight any war wholly humanely. In most respects, the Western allies displayed commendable charity in their conduct of total war against an enemy bereft of civilized sentiment. Aerial assault, however, provided the exception. It was a policy quite at odds with the spirit in which the Americans and British otherwise conducted their war effort. The remoteness of bombing rendered tolerable in the eyes of Western political leaders and military commanders, not to mention their aircrew, actions which would have seemed repugnant and probably unbearable had the Allies confronted the consequences at close quarters. Eisenhower’s soldiers frequently found themselves killing local inhabitants in the course of battles for Germany’s towns and village. They would have surely revolted at the notion of systematically slaughtering civilians by artillery bombardment or machine-gun fire. This is what the Allied air forces did, nonetheless, protected by the curious moral absolution granted by a separation of some thousands of feet of airspace, together with the pragmatic excuse that it was impossible to hit targets of military relevance with air-dropped missiles without inflicting what is now called “collateral damage.”

We should recognize, however, that it is far easier to pass such judgements amid the relative tranquillity of the twenty-first century than it seemed in 1945, when Hitler’s nation was still doing its utmost to kill American and British people, together with millions of Nazi captives, by every means within its power. Some Germans today brand the bombing of their cities a war crime. This seems an incautious choice of words. It is possible to deplore Harris’s excesses without accepting that they should be judged in such emotive language. For all its follies and bloody misjudgements, the strategic air offensive was a military operation designed to hasten the collapse of Germany’s ability to make war. It stopped as soon as Hitler’s people ceased to fight. Most of Germany’s massacres, by contrast, were carried out against defenceless people who possessed not the slightest power to injure Hitler’s empire. They were murdered for ideological reasons, devoid of military purpose.

LIBS, LANCS AND FORTS

T
HOSE WHO CARRIED
out the Allied bomber offensive never saw themselves as persecutors of innocent women and children. They were young, and far too preoccupied with their own vulnerability to death to have much sentiment to spare for the sorrows of the enemy. The bomber crews of the United States and Britain suffered wartime casualty rates almost as dreadful as those of Hitler’s U-boat crews. For an Allied flier, the skies over Europe represented a terrifying environment. Flak guns, fighters, the hazards of weather, collision and mechanical failure rendered the experience of bombing Germany among the most alarming assignments of the war. Those who flew bombers never witnessed the human consequences of their actions. They knew only that they were striving, at great personal risk, to cripple the industrial and military might of Hitler’s empire.

Among airmen, opinion was divided about whether formation flying with the USAAF Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces was preferable to the loneliness experienced by the crews who carried out the RAF Bomber Command’s night attacks. Some men found fighting in daylight, watching comrades die in stark proximity, frighteningly cold-blooded. The Americans stationed in England felt very far from home. In the huts on their bleak airstrips in Norfolk and Suffolk, they were wakened for briefing around 0400, about the time their RAF counterparts were going to bed. Out on the desolate stands where the bombers were dispersed, pilots watched for the green flare arching into the sky, the signal to start engines. In a long procession
Four of a Kind,
Little Audrey,
Piccadilly Commando,
Miss Carriage,
Liberty Belle
and the rest of their exotically named silver sisterhood swung around the perimeter track on to the runway. One by one, the “Forts” and “Libs” lumbered into the air to take up their places in the rigid formations demanded by U.S. tactical doctrine. The least popular slot was that of “tail-end charlie,” “Purple Heart corner,” first target of German fighters. The crews switched on oxygen at 8,000 feet, and usually approached the enemy coast around 1000 hours. The waist gunners pulled away their hatches, exposing the fuselage to a blast of icy air which chilled every flier, even in a heated suit. Staff-Sergeant John Romine wrote of the special loneliness of the tail gunner: “The few feet that separated us from even the waist gunners seemed like a thousand miles.” Crews tested their thirteen guns before entering German airspace, then settled down for the long run to the target.

For six to ten hours, any flier doing his job properly was required to make a fierce effort of concentration. “In bright sunlight, even with dark glasses our eyes grew tired from squinting,” wrote Carl Fyler, a Kansan who flew B-17s from Molesworth in Cambridgeshire. On overcast days when they were sometimes obliged to rely upon instruments, every crew was haunted by the fear of collision. In these last stages of the war, interference from the Luftwaffe diminished dramatically, even when Göring’s handful of Me-262 jet aircraft joined the battle. The German fighters often found themselves outnumbered forty to one. “Each time I close the canopy before take-off,” wrote a young Luftwaffe pilot gloomily, “I feel that I am closing the lid of my own coffin.” But on bad days the Fortresses and Liberators fought running battles against Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts across hundreds of miles of German sky. Flak remained a mortal danger until the last days. There was no counter to anti-aircraft fire save luck. American aircraft were more strongly built than their British counterparts, which relied upon darkness for protection. The heavy armour fitted to USAAF planes required them to carry smaller bombloads than the RAF’s Lancasters and Halifaxes, but they could also survive more punishment. Again and again, American aircraft were desperately damaged, but some of their crewmen survived. A gunner in Carl Fyler’s squadron was hit by shrapnel which tore off his left arm and inflicted mortal internal wounds. The doomed man crawled forward to the wounded waist gunners, whose arms were broken. He buckled on their parachutes and helped them to bail out before he himself went down with the stricken plane. He was recommended for a posthumous Medal of Honor, for a display of courage and sacrifice of the kind which was often asked of bomber aircrew.