Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (19 page)

This, surely, was the apotheosis of the Trenchardian doctrine (the old man was still around, closely informed and grunting approval). Around 260 factories in the Hamburg area were obliterated; so, too, were 40,000 houses and 275,000 apartments, 2,600 shops, 277 schools, 24 hospitals, and 58 churches; some 46,000 civilians were killed. The devastation of Hamburg totally shocked the German leadership. Speer warned the Fuehrer that six more such attacks would finish off the Third Reich, a conclusion Hitler rejected. Goebbels, however, privately called the Hamburg bombings “a catastrophe.”
²⁸

But Harris’s terrible success in the flattening of Hamburg soon turned out to be Bomber Command’s downfall, or close to it. These nighttime attacks were so obviously destructive and produced such huge panic in the German civilian population that the Reich’s leadership could no longer dismiss them as a marginal activity. The damage inflicted upon Hamburg, following as it did upon Stalingrad, Kursk, El Alamein, North Africa, and Sicily, constituted a trio of warnings to the Third Reich that the relatively easy early years were over. From now on, it could not coast along, offering the German people guns and butter. Speer for his part, and the Luftwaffe leadership for its—by this stage,
Goering was just an ineffective blusterer—had the talent and drive to do just that.

As soon as the Hamburg campaign was over, Harris immediately raised the stakes by moving to the Battle of Berlin, which involved sixteen major attacks between November 1943 and March 1944 (along with side attacks on Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Leipzig—20,000 sorties in all). During the same time, however, and with great alacrity, the German air defense system had been strongly revamped and reinforced. A gigantic army of heavy antiaircraft battalions now covered Germany. Special rocket-firing night fighter squadrons had been formed. German detection systems had made huge advances. The Luftwaffe had also figured out a way to circumvent the blurring effects of “window.” Finally, of course, there remained two obstacles to any strategic bombing campaign: the weather, which during these winter months was unrelentingly bad, and distance, because attacking Berlin took far longer than raids on Hamburg or Cologne. German night fighters based, say, near Hanover could attack the bombers once, refuel, then attack again on the enemy’s return flight.

For all these reasons, the damage inflicted upon Berlin—a massive, sprawling city, like London—was far less than that achieved against smaller German cities such as Essen. By contrast, Bomber Command’s losses of aircraft and crews spiraled sharply upward as 1943 led into 1944. The loss rate for each raid was averaging 5.2 percent, and the morale among these extraordinarily brave crews was plummeting. In all, Bomber Command lost 1,047 heavy aircraft and had a further 1,682 damaged in the Berlin campaign. Shortly afterward, the catastrophic losses the Pathfinder pilot Pat Daniels had observed during the Nuremberg raid of March 30, 1944, brought the RAF’s strategic bombing campaign against Germany to a grinding halt. To lose 95 bombers out of 795 dispatched was a totally unsustainable casualty rate of 11 percent. At this stage, even the Air Staff in Whitehall (Air Chief Marshal Portal and planners) had abandoned Harris, and they probably were glad that Eisenhower had now directed both the USAAF and RAF to concentrate solely upon targets connected with the impending D-Day landings—that is, tactical targets such as French railway bridges rather than strategic operations. In April 1944 Harris himself admitted to the Air Ministry that “casualty rates … could not in the long run be
sustained.” With recent innovations such as “window” and the Pathfinders no longer so effective, remedial action was needed, including perhaps RAF night fighter escorts for his bombers. As the official British historians who examined these reports two decades later concluded, the Battle of Berlin was more than a failure—“it was a defeat.”
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The third new element between late 1940 and 1943—that is, the coming of the United States Army Air Forces to join the RAF in the aerial campaign against Germany’s capacity to fight—was the most important of all. This story also can be reduced to its few fundamental parts. To begin with, it was strategically significant because the arrival of a new strategic air force in Europe meant more pressure upon the Third Reich and more pressure from the west, which logically implied less capacity (fewer aircraft, fewer industrial resources, fewer trained personnel) for Luftwaffe allocations to the grinding battle in the east or the expanded fighting in the Mediterranean and North Africa, which nonetheless required a greater number of German squadrons to meet the steadily growing British Empire and American air forces. It is about this time (1942–43) that one can detect Luftwaffe air groups being shuffled to and from the Eastern Front, North Africa and Italy, France, and the defense of the Reich. Hap Arnold, though always complaining about the lack of aircraft and crews for the USAAF, actually was able to dispatch fresh streams of squadrons to Britain, North Africa, and the Pacific. Goering no longer possessed that option. By late 1943, new airfields were opening up every six days across the topographically convenient flatlands of East Anglia to receive the flow of brand-new American bombers and fighters.

The coming of the American squadrons was important not just because it was a major addition in the fight against the Axis in Europe and not just because it provided an inordinate boost to British morale, but also because it brought two critically important operational elements into the fray. The first was that the USAAF insisted on carrying out only daylight bombing; this had been their doctrine for years because it played to the strengths of the high-altitude, heavily armed B-17s and B-24s, equipped with the purportedly ultra-accurate bombsights developed by the Norden Company in the 1930s. For some time Harris and other senior RAF staff, even Churchill himself, pressed the Americans to join in the nighttime campaign, a foolish operational idea
that was rightly resisted. The beauty of the American plan was that it brought the possibility of twenty-four-hour-a-day bombing of Germany. Londoners at least had the daylight hours to clear away the Luftwaffe’s nighttime damage and to get some rest. But round-the-clock bombing by the USAAF in daylight hours and the RAF at night promised, in theory at least, unrelenting pressure upon German aerial defenses, air controllers, and damage and relief services, as well as the German workers themselves.

The second development was that the Americans also insisted on the other critical aspect of their prewar aerial doctrine, the “pinpoint” bombing of identifiable military-industrial targets. As we shall see, this was much easier said than done, and more often honored in the breach by confused and frightened crews. But the USAAF’s insistence upon attacking targets such as a Messerschmitt factory or a railway marshaling yard was significant because it complemented the more general area bombing of the RAF’s nighttime raids, and made a response more complicated for the German aerial defense planners—should they cluster their antiaircraft battalions around Cologne or around an important tank factory 30 miles away? After the war Allied assessors compared the performance of these two very different bombing doctrines. In the heated postwar controversies about the mass bombing of enemy civilians, the U.S. Army Air Forces could claim a somewhat higher moral ground—at least in their European campaign. But in practical terms, that is, in destroying German infrastructure, factories, and roadways, there wasn’t that much difference.

All these apparent advantages were welcomed on the Allied side. The only problem was that these operational assumptions about being able to carry out pinpoint bombing on any selected enemy target
really didn’t work
when put into practice between 1942 and early 1944, so in fact the American record was little different from Bomber Command’s. And finding a solution to this particular challenge was, clearly, taking much longer than winning command of the Atlantic sea-lanes.

With all the wisdom of hindsight possessed by armchair strategists and historians, it is not difficult to see where the obstacles lay. The first reason must be that the Eighth Air Force’s bombing assaults against Germany, especially in 1942 and early 1943, were a case of what one might call “too little, too
early
.” Politically and institutionally, the
USAAF’s leaders (Arnold, Spaatz, and Eaker) and their staffs worried that the existence of their service as an independent third arm depended upon proving itself as soon as possible. For obvious geographic reasons, and possibly because of memories from 1917–18, both the U.S. Army and the USAAF had always regarded the European theater as being much more important than the Pacific and Far East. To the army, distances across the Pacific were simply far too wide to allow it to play the lead role—the island groups were much too small to permit the deployment of twenty-five or fifty divisions in the tradition of the “American way of war,” that is, the massive allocation of men and munitions to overwhelm a foe, as happened in the Civil War and again in 1917–18 in France.
³⁰
There was no room in the Pacific for tanks, and little room for artillery; there was nothing that the army could do in those theaters that an expanded U.S. Marine Corps could not do as well, or perhaps better.

This was also the air force’s problem. There was nothing to
bomb
in the Pacific, strategically, until one got close to Japan, probably after years of fighting. Not only was Germany the greater foe industrially and technologically, but its factories and railways lay just across the North Sea from Suffolk—just as the beaches of Normandy lay right across the Channel from Sussex. Without a German focus, Arnold feared, the air force’s precious new bomber squadrons would be divided and scattered, from Newfoundland (anti-U-boat work) to North Africa (supporting Eisenhower and Patton’s ground forces) to New Guinea (assisting MacArthur’s laborious campaigns).

As he flew in for the Casablanca Conference, Arnold had every right to be fearful. The Japanese attacks upon Pearl Harbor and the Philippines had given Admirals Ernest King and William Leahy terrific ammunition to argue for a “Pacific first” policy, one supported by much popular sentiment, but one that would surely give the lead role to the U.S. Navy. At the same time, the increasing British reluctance to commit to a definite date for an Allied invasion of France weakened the precarious 1941 agreement that the defeat of Nazi Germany had first priority. Then there was the enormous, angry pressure that Stalin was putting upon London and Washington to do more than they were, and the fact that even America’s enormous productive capacities could not meet the gigantic claims from all services for weapons and men. There
were fierce interservice clashes over priorities all throughout 1942, causing the USAAF to fear for its bomber programs as cuts were made to every service’s early demands—and so the need to show that the service was hitting and hurting Germany became overwhelming.
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Like it or not, the American bombers had to take off, however few and poorly prepared, as had their British cousins in 1939.

Arnold and his colleagues came away from the Casablanca conference much relieved by the pronouncement that “the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system” was second only to the winning of the Battle of the Atlantic in order of priority. They had quarreled with the navy right up to the eve of the conference and then encountered enormous disputes with Churchill and the British chiefs (normally their natural allies for the “Germany first” argument) regarding allocations in the Mediterranean. They had spent 1942 employing every conceivable argument to advance their case—for example, touting the October 9 raid upon Lille (with its mixed if not downright dubious results—see below) as an example of a powerfully armed bomber force executing its mission unescorted. And any and all RAF reports that year on the effectiveness of
their
strategic bombing were eagerly consumed and swiftly circulated to higher authorities. By January 1943, then, the USAAF hoped that at last it had demonstrated its significance and preserved its strategic mission. Years after the war, Albert Speer asked Eaker why he had committed his squadrons so early, in such relatively small numbers, and without long-range fighter escorts. The answer was that it was politically necessary. No wonder Elmer Bendiger got so furious when he learned of that reply thirty years after the event.
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There were other reasons the first two years of the American bombing campaign against Germany were disappointing. The USAAF was creating the single largest strategic air force in history (by 1945 the total American bomber force in Europe, including the new and separate Mediterranean air groups, would be twice the size of Bomber Command) and was expecting to do so in an exceptionally short time. Where were the thousands of pilots to come from, and who would train them? Whence the tens of thousands of crew, whence the vital ground staff and repairmen? The adjutants, the intelligence personnel, the staff for group headquarters? The airfields, control towers, hangars, and
messes? The aircraft and the bombs? Arnold also knew that if he did not dispatch a lot of long-range bombers to the Southwest Pacific, the United States might lose the hard-fought Battle of Guadalcanal, which raged from August 1942 until January 1943, and he could not neglect the non-European theaters of war; thus the supplies of men and planes to England were bound to be limited. In the event, it was scarcely a surprise that the initially small Eighth and Ninth Army Air Forces got off to a rough start when they carried out their first flights across the Channel, because they had new commanders, new crews, new planes, new bases—and a new, sophisticated enemy.

There was also, inevitably, the usual array of practical problems: poor weather, aborted missions, disappointment with the bombsights, range limits, Luftwaffe counterattacks, the lack of escorts. All this would have tested a completely trained and prepared bomber force. There was simply nothing to do about the almost continually cloudy weather over northwest Europe for most of the months of the year, as the British had pointed out. Placing “a bomb in a pickle barrel” with a Norden bombsight may have been possible over the clear testing grounds of Texas, but it simply didn’t work when there was ten-tenths cloud cover. At this early stage, there were no sophisticated directional tools to put the B-17s directly over their targets, and squadron leaders had often to order a return to base, mission unfulfilled. Whether one came back with the bomb bays empty or not was an unpursued question, but few pilots liked landing with a belly full of bombs. Even when the skies were clear, there were still strong winds to deflect the bombardiers’ aim; the higher one flew to avoid the flak, the greater the margin of error.