Closing the Ring (72 page)

This turned the scale. The British Chiefs of Staff telegraphed to Washington that it was clear that “Anvil” could not be carried out on the prescribed date, since it was impossible to withdraw either troops from the battle in Italy or landing-craft from the Anzio bridgehead. The American Chiefs of Staff assented, and agreed that General Wilson should prepare to land in the South of France in July, and also to contain and destroy as many German troops in Italy as possible if it were decided to fight it out there. It was thought that early June would be time enough to decide which plan should be carried out.

That I myself was strongly in favour of maintaining the thrust in Italy can be seen from this telegram:

Prime Minister to General Marshall (Washington)
    16 Apr. 44

It is of course very painful to us to forgo the invaluable addition to our landing-craft in the Mediterranean which you so kindly offered under certain conditions and had no doubt great trouble to obtain. What I cannot bear is to agree beforehand to starve a battle or have to break it off just at the moment when success, after long efforts and heavy losses, may be in view. Our forces in Italy are not much larger than those of the enemy. They comprise seven or eight different races, while the enemy is all German. The wet weather has hitherto restricted the full use of our superiority in artillery, in armour, and in the air. Alexander tells me that he strikes out
northeast
, not southeast, from Anzio beachhead shortly after his main thrust across the Rapido. Thus there will not necessarily be a moment when we shall pause and say, “Halt here. Go over to the defensive. All aboard for ‘Anvil.’ ” Nor will there necessarily be an exact moment when the cutting of supplies for the Italian battle for the sake of “Anvil” can be fixed beforehand in imagination. A half-hearted undercurrent sets in with an army which has a divided objective, part to the front and part to the rear. This infects all the rearward services, who cannot help knowing. Remember the terrible bleeding the armies in Italy got when their seven best divisions were taken for “Overlord.”

2. Of course, if the battle goes wrong early and we are hung up before other enemy lines of defence and forced to go over to a general defensive, no doubt strong forces could then be spared, but the drain of feeding the bridgehead would continue to press on our landing-craft, and without your Pacific landing-craft there will be no two-division lift for any amphibious operations, “Anvil” or other.

3. Therefore, it seems to me we must throw our hearts into this battle, for the sake of which so many American and British lives have already been sacrificed, and make it, like “Overlord,” an all-out conquer or die. It may well be that by May 31 we shall see many things which are now veiled from us. I regret having to forgo such an hour of choice.

4. Dill tells me that you had expected me to support “Anvil” more vigorously in view of my enthusiasm for it when it was first proposed by you at Teheran. Please do me the justice to remember that the situation is vastly changed. In November, we hoped to take Rome in January, and there were many signs that the enemy was ready to [retire] northward up the Italian peninsula. Instead of this, in spite of our great amphibious expedition, we are stuck where we are, and the enemy has brought down to the battle south of Rome the eight mobile divisions we should have hoped a full-scale “Anvil” would have contained. Thus there has been cause for rejoicing as well as bitter disappointment.

5. The whole of this difficult question only arises out of the absurd shortage of the L.S.T.s. How it is that the plans of two great empires like Britain and the United States should be so much hamstrung and limited by a hundred or two of these particular vessels will never be understood by history. I am deeply concerned at the strong disinclination of the American Government even to keep the manufacture of L.S.T.s at its full height so as to have a sufficient number to give to us to help you in the war against Japan. The absence of these special vessels may limit our whole war effort on your left flank, and I fear we shall be accused unjustly of not doing our best, as we are resolved to do.

  The instructions Wilson received reflected my views, and in a telegram to the President on April 24, I said:

Prime Minister to President Roosevelt
    24 Nov 44

I am very glad at what has happened in Italy. It seems to me that we have both succeeded in gaining what we sought. The only thing now lacking is a victory. I had long talks with Alexander when he was here for a few days’ consultation. He defended his actions, or inactions, with much force, pointing out the small plurality of his army, its mixed character, there being no fewer
than seven separate nationalities against the homogeneous Germans, the vileness of the weather, and the extremely awkward nature of the ground. At latest by May 14, he will attack and push everything in as hard as possible. If this battle were successful, or even raging at full blast, it would fit in very well with other plans.

*  *  * *  *

Political events in Southern Italy again came to a head. A constitutional compromise was reached whereby the King would hand over his powers to his son, Crown Prince Umberto, as Lieutenant-Governor of the Realm. The fate of the Monarchy would then await a plebiscite after the ultimate victory. The royal decree was signed on April 12, and was to take effect at the moment when the Allies entered Rome. At the end of the month, Badoglio reconstructed his Government to include leading political figures in the South, of whom Croce and Sforza were the most prominent.

*  *  * *  *

While our armies were preparing to attack, General Wilson used all his air-power to impede and injure the enemy, who like us were using the pause for reorganising and replenishing themselves for further battle. The potent Allied Air joined in attacking enemy land communications in the hope that these could be kept cut and their troops forced to withdraw for lack of supplies. This operation, optimistically called “Strangle,” aimed at blocking the three main railway lines from Northern Italy, the principal targets being bridges, viaducts, and other bottlenecks. They tried to starve the Germans out of Central Italy.

The effort lasted more than six weeks, and did great damage. Railway movement was constantly stopped far north of Rome, but it failed to attain all that we hoped. By working their coastal shipping to full capacity, transferring loads to motor transport, and making full use of the hours of darkness, the enemy contrived to maintain themselves. But they could not build enough reserve stocks for protracted and heavy fighting, and in
the severe land battles at the end of May they were much weakened. The junction of our separated armies and their capture of Rome took place more rapidly than we had forecast. The German Air Force suffered severely in trying to defend its communications. By early May, it could muster only a bare seven hundred against our thousand combat aircraft.

Here then we may leave the Italian theatre, where much was ripening, for the supreme operation across the Channel.

12
The Mounting Air Offensive

Our Progress in Bomber Expansion___Radar Aids to Target-Finding___The Germans Forced to Turn to Fighter Production___The Americans Join in the Bombing of Axis Europe in
1943___
The Casablanca Directive___British Night Bombing of the Ruhr___The Air Battle at Hamburg___The Onslaught on Berlin___Heavy American Losses at Schweinfurt, October
14, 1943,
and Their Sequel___British Losses in the Attack on Nuremberg___American Fortresses at Last Provided with Long-Range Fighters___Increase in the Power of British Bombs___Lord Cherwell’s Inquiry___Aluminised Explosives___Effect of Our Air Offensive on German War Economy___Part to be Played by the Allied Air Force in “Overlord”___British War Cabinet’s Distress at Heavy French Civilian Casualties___We Accept President Roosevelt’s Decision___The Valour and Devotion of British and American Bomber Crews.

B
OMBER
C
OMMAND
played an ever-growing part in all our war plans, and eventually made a decisive contribution to victory. Some review of its activities is required at this point in the story.

It was not till 1943 that we possessed sufficient and suitable aircraft for striking heavy and continuous blows, and in the same year the bombers of the American Eighth Air Force joined in our strategic air offensive. Ever since 1940, I had encouraged the expansion of our bomber strength. The difficulties were numerous. Production lagged behind forecasts; other theatres of war and the campaign against the U-boats made heavy demands; and when the Americans came into the
war their output was of course at first largely diverted to their own needs. Although growth in numbers had been slow, our new four-engined planes carried a far heavier weight of bombs. In the opening months of 1942, the average load per aircraft was 2800 pounds; by the end of that year, it was 4400 pounds; during 1943, it rose to 7500 pounds.

Early in the war, both we and the Germans had found that bombers, even in close formation, could not fight their way in daylight through an efficient fighter defence without overheavy casualties. Like the enemy, we had had to turn to night attacks. We were too confident at first about the accuracy of our bombing, and our attempts in the winter of 1940/41 to destroy German oil plants, paramount but small targets, proved a failure. In the spring of 1941, Bomber Command was called to join in the Battle of the Atlantic, and not till July was the offensive against Germany resumed. The targets now chosen were industrial cities and their railway centres, especially the Ruhr and Hamburg, Bremen, Hanover, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart. However, neither our means nor our methods sufficed. Our losses mounted, and during the winter months we had to reduce our effort. In February 1942, “Gee,” the new position-finder already described,
¹
was brought into use, and with its help the Ruhr became our primary goal. Under the vigorous leadership of Air Marshal Harris, dramatic results were achieved. His operations included fire-raising attacks on Lübeck and Rostock, the thousand-bomber assault on Cologne in May, and the daylight attack on the submarine Diesel-engine works at Augsburg, when Squadron-Leader Nettleton won the Victoria Cross.

In August, the Pathfinder Force was formed, under Air Commodore Bennett. Radar aids were playing a growing part in navigation and target-finding, and it was a wise measure to entrust the scarce and complicated apparatus to specialists whose duty it was to find the way and point the target to others.

Although accurate night bombing, denied so long, thus came gradually into being, the bomber offensive of 1942 did not
lower Germany’s war production or civilian morale. The strength of her economy had been underestimated. Productive capacity and labour were drawn extensively from the occupied countries, and German armament production seems to have actually increased. Under the iron discipline imposed by Goebbels, who was in charge of relief measures, civilian morale stood firm, and local disasters were prevented from having a national effect. But the German leaders had become deeply alarmed and were forced onto the defensive in the air. German aircraft production was increasingly devoted to fighters rather than bombers. This was the beginning of defeat for the Luftwaffe, and a turning-point in our struggle for the air supremacy which we gained in 1944, and without which we could not have won the war. Second only in importance to this moral victory over the minds of Hitler and his air commanders was the dangerous Third Air Front created for Germany in the West, to the advantage of the Russians, and of ourselves in the Mediterranean.

Thus we come to the year 1943, when the Americans joined in the bombing of Axis Europe. They had different ideas about method. Whereas we had adopted and were now bringing to efficiency our night-bombing technique, they were convinced that their heavily armed Fortress bombers in close formation could penetrate deeply into Germany by daylight without fighter escort. I was doubtful whether this was a practicable system, and have recorded in a previous volume how at Casablanca I discussed my misgivings with General Eaker, commanding the United States Air Forces in England, and withdrew my opposition.
²
The Casablanca directive, issued to the British and American Bomber Commands in the United Kingdom on February 4, 1943, gave them their task in the following terms:

  Your primary object will be the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and economic system,
and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.

Within that general concept your primary objectives … will for the present be in the following priority: (
a
) German submarine yards. (
b
) The German aircraft industry. (
c
) Transportation. (
d
) Oil plants. (
e
) Other targets in enemy war industry.

General Eaker, with the American Eighth Air Force, aimed at destroying six groups of targets by daylight precision bombing. He did not receive the reinforcements for which he had asked, but made many gallant and costly attacks. Air-Marshal Harris, bombing only at night, concentrated from March to July 1943 mainly upon the Ruhr, beginning on the night of March 5/6 with the heavily defended town of Essen. Eight Mosquitoes dropped target indicators, using the blind bombing device of “Oboe”; then twenty-two heavy bombers of the Pathfinder Force further illuminated the target for an intense attack by 392 aircraft. Essen was severely damaged for the first time in the war. As the power and activities of Bomber Command developed, Goebbels became more and more despairing of the outcome, and his diaries bitterly reproach the Luftwaffe for its failure to stop the British bombers. Speer, the most capable German Minister of Production, in an address to Gauleiters in June 1943, referred to the serious losses in production of coal and iron and crankshafts and to the decision to double the anti-aircraft defences of the Ruhr and draft a hundred thousand men for repair duties.