Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (14 page)

I
n the early morning of October 14, 1943, an armada of 291 American B-17 bombers (Flying Fortresses) took off from airfields in the eastern flatlands of England and began their long journey to drop bombs on the cities of Schweinfurt and Regensburg, home respectively to the manufacturers of such critical German wartime items as ball bearings and Messerschmitt fighters. Viewers who watched their takeoff and rise into the skies were witness to what was probably the twentieth century’s greatest demonstration of military power to date (not even the A-bombs would compare in terms of the number of lives destroyed). They were also witness to what would be a mission of failure and much unnecessary loss. This was not the first time those squadrons had attacked Schweinfurt (an earlier raid had taken place on August 17), but it was going to be the last for quite a while.

Among the almost three thousand fliers that day was Elmer Bendiger, a former journalist turned navigator. Thirty-seven years later, and after visiting a poppy field in England that once had bordered his USAAF base, he published his account of that day.
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Bendiger, a professional writer, had a gift for words (“The cloud
cover stopped close to the English shore, and the Channel sparkled. White froth curled over the blue waves”), so the reader has to make sure he keeps close to the hard narrative amid the magical language. The P-47 Thunderbolt escort fighters were “like shining angels,” but after Aachen they waggled their wings and flew home, because of their limited range. Only then—of course—did Adolf Galland, the head of the German fighter arm and like Doenitz an utter professional, order in the waves and waves of attacking aircraft; once each squadron of Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts had finished its run, it flew to the nearest airfield, refueled and rearmed, and came up again. Even if some B-17s (amazingly) got through to bomb the intended targets, the real issue of the Schweinfurt-Regensburg raids became less what happened to German ball-bearing production than the question of how many Flying Fortresses could be shot down.

As it turned out, twenty-nine Fortresses were lost that day before they reached the targets, and another thirty-one on the way home: sixty aircraft and 600 fighting men, a loss of well over 20 percent in one mission. Coincidentally, the August raid on Schweinfurt also had led to the destruction of exactly sixty B-17s. The raids on the following days simply deepened the losses. “In six days of warfare,” notes Bendiger, “we had lost 1,480 crewmen over Europe.” Only three or four of his squadron of eighteen planes got back to Kimbolton that night; others limped in during the next day, and “six of our planes were burned-out hulks somewhere in Europe.” A little later he adds, “We airmen of ’43 had demonstrated in our own flesh and blood the fallacy that a formation of heavily armed bombers, alone and unescorted, could triumph over any swarm of fighters.… It may now be asked whether in fact we had vindicated Billy Mitchell”—a tart comment on the well-known American theorist of airpower.
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In the autumn of 1943, the Luftwaffe was clearly winning against the attacking armadas of American aircraft; exactly the same setbacks were occurring in the parallel and even longer-lasting strategic bombing campaign carried out by RAF Bomber Command across western Europe every night.
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Even as late as March 30, 1944 (fewer than ten weeks before D-Day and fourteen
months
after Casablanca), 795 RAF bombers were sent to attack Nuremberg. While the British squadrons
steadily lost direction and coherence—some of them, ironically, bombed Schweinfurt, 55 miles away from the planned target—the German night fighter counteroffensive was superbly orchestrated, slashing away at the Lancasters and Halifaxes. The veteran Pathfinder leader Wing Commander Pat Daniels (on his seventy-seventh mission) later recorded: “So many aircraft were seen to blow up around us that I instructed my crew to stop recording aircraft going down for my navigator to log them because I wanted them to spend their time looking out for fighters.”
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The result was that a colossal total of ninety-five RAF bombers failed to return, another dozen were scrapped when they got back to England, and fifty-nine were badly damaged. But the loss of the machines paled in importance beside the slaughter of the trained crews, whose attrition rate was higher than that among British junior officers during the 1916 Battle of the Somme. Similarly, “a young American … had a better chance of surviving by joining the marines and fighting in the Pacific than by flying with the Eighth Air Force in 1943.”
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As the later American and British official histories admit, by early 1944 things were actually going backward. Most of the nonofficial histories are much more scathing. Quite the grandest of the Anglo-American stratagems for winning the war had collapsed.
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Well before the Wright brothers had stunned the world with their flying achievements of 1903, mankind had speculated about the coming of extraordinary machines that would not only transport humans and commerce through the air but also be capable of inflicting terrible damage and panic upon an enemy. Tennyson was not the first to foresee air warfare—Leonardo da Vinci dabbled with some heavier-than-air machines in his military sketches—and the massive technological advances of the nineteenth century only fueled these futuristic speculations.
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Alfred Gollin records that within only a few years of the historic flights at Kitty Hawk, the war ministries of Europe and the United States were planning for aerial forces and knocking at the Wright brothers’ door. And during a public debate in April 1904 about Britain’s global strategic
fate, the prescient imperialist Leo Amery had argued that in the not-too-distant future airpower would join (if not overtake) power on land and sea as an instrument of national policy.
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It is important to realize that even in its early years airpower wore many faces and could be thought of in many different ways.
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The period 1880–1914 witnessed a staggering number of new inventions or vast improvements in earlier, eccentric prototypes—the wireless, the torpedo, the submarine, destroyers, the machine gun, high explosives, calculating machines, the automobile, and the aircraft itself. It is therefore understandable that some commentators thought of the airplane as just another addition to the armory of weapons for combating the enemy’s soldiers and sailors (much as, perhaps apocryphally, President Truman thought that the atomic device was simply another big bomb). Aircraft, in this conception, were a sort of aerial cavalry, useful chiefly for reconnaissance or gun spotting—pre-1914 navies, grappling with the problems of modern fire control, were particularly interested in this aspect. Pilots could perhaps machine-gun the enemy’s troops or toss a few grenades onto their heads, but the skimpy aircraft could not carry any heavy weaponry. Those views would change as planes became stronger and their engines much more powerful, and as airships revealed their vulnerabilities, but the basic point remained: these newfangled instruments were chiefly to be used for observation of, or direct attack upon, the enemy’s forces.

Still, there was the further possibility that, because planes could fly over the enemy’s lines, they might also be used to launch attacks in the rear, against supply lines, wagon trains, rail lines, bridges, or even army headquarters. In an era when armies in battle used up an unprecedentedly large amount of munitions and other supplies every day, wrecking a road or destroying a depot 20 miles behind the front lines might really influence the fighting, and very quickly. One might not be very accurate in such attacks, but one certainly could be very disruptive, forcing troops and wagons off the roads, possibly compelling them to march only at night. One might, of course, also provoke the other side to deploy aircraft to shoot down one’s own aircraft. Both of these options were soon to be described as
tactical
air warfare, and they called for their own, appropriate weapons systems. To be sure, any fighter plane could swoop down to strafe a column of enemy soldiers on the
march, but its true function was to shoot opposing fighters out of the skies; if one wanted to have a serious tool for ground attacks, far better to construct more heavily armed and heavily armored aircraft, equipped with rockets and bombs, to roam low across and behind the battlefield in a campaign of disruption.

All this was pure theory in 1918, and scarcely in sight throughout the 1920s; by the advent of the Second World War, it was beginning to become true, and would be manifested in the Luftwaffe’s Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers, the RAF’s Typhoons, and the USAAF’s Thunderbolts. Yet since an aircraft’s range theoretically knew no limits (depending upon sufficient fuel capacity), early airpower enthusiasts also envisaged deploying them much farther afield and in a very different capacity, against the sources of the enemy’s fighting capacities: the industrial plants and shipyards, hundreds of miles behind the front lines, that were pouring out guns, ammunition, trucks, ball bearings, sheet steel, warships, and so on. These would be aerial attacks upon the enemy’s homeland, perhaps a great distance from the fields of battle or the naval struggles, and called for other, different types of aircraft, ones that would be larger, heavier, multiengined, and capable of carrying bombs over long distances. Since such bombers would be slower than the nimble fighters, they would also carry, in addition to a navigator and a bombardier, several gunners to beat off aerial attacks—thus vastly increasing the demand for aircrews.

The military implications here were revolutionary. To airpower theorists, the newer long-range bombers should no longer play a supporting role over some future putative Western Front or in support of fleets in the North Sea. They were an independent third force, and had to be organized as such. Their mission was no longer tactical and short-term; it was
strategic,
because it independently struck at the enemy’s capacity to fight, and could bring war to the home front. This was the revolutionary part, the revolutionary appeal: longer-range bombing would cut the enemy’s arteries, starve his armies of supplies, and shorten the war. It was, its advocates insisted, a far better investment than the slow slaughter of trench warfare and grinding maritime blockades; it could, they said, avoid the losses of hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ lives in land campaigning. This was not just a new offensive instrument, then, but a fighting arm that one day would relegate armies and
navies to a secondary role—hence the resistance of traditional generals and admirals to independent air forces from the early 1920s on, and their profound mistrust of their advocates.

There was one further leap, which would be the most controversial of all: why not use airpower to crack the morale of the enemy’s entire population, that is to say, deliberately to destroy their will to support the fight by ensuring that, like their fighting troops, they too were going to be directly hurt by their support of the war? It was a natural further step. Having taken a step away from immediate fighting in the field, why not go after the munitions workers who produced the enemy’s weapons—and then those who supported those workers? Bombing a bakery was in this sense as logical as bombing a power station, just as destroying the power station was as logical as bombing a railway line pointing toward the front. But this idea of area bombing was not something that simply emerged from the furnace of war around 1940 or 1942. The vision of monstrous aerial raids that would cause widespread civilian panic and loss of life was common to all the futuristic war literature over the previous century—the most famous being H. G. Wells’s 1908 bestseller
The War in the Air,
with its lurid description of New York City being consumed in flames. And had not Napoleon himself declared that the factor of morale in warfare was many times the physical element?

As we shall see, both of these strategic aims—bombing to destroy the enemy’s military output and bombing to destroy his morale—tended to merge as the Second World War unfolded, for a number of very different reasons. In the first place, since the enemy’s shipyards, steelworks, arms plants, and railway junctions were almost always located in big cities, the workers and their families traditionally lived right next door.
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Thus there was bound to be what, in later euphemistic military jargon, was termed “collateral damage” to nonmilitary targets. Second, there was the awkward fact that the pinpoint bombing of a defined military target such as a tank factory was not, and would never
be, “pinpoint,” unless it was a very rare event such as the low-altitude attacks of, say, Mosquito special squadrons on a particular object. The accuracy of higher-altitude and larger-scale bombing over the Brest shipyards or the Duisburg steelyards was badly affected by almost constant cloud cover and high winds for most of the year, making the bombsights inadequate. Somewhere down there was the enemy factory, but the flak was getting heavy and the enemy fighters were approaching, so the aircrews dropped the bombs and got back to base. Many of the remarkably candid memoirs of American and British fliers during the strategic bombing campaign admit that they just wanted to get rid of their dead weight of 4,000 pounds of bombs and escape home.