Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (23 page)

L
OSSES OF
L
UFTWAFFE
F
IGHTER
P
ILOT
A
CES
, M
ARCH
–M
AY
1944
Luftwaffe pilots who had gained an enormous number of kills on the Eastern Front were no match for the aerial offensive in Western Europe in early 1944. Without these aces, German aircraft production was valueless.

This relentless elimination of Luftwaffe pilots, plus the disruption of Germany’s aircraft industry, supply lines, and, increasingly, aircraft fuel refining, created a favorable feedback loop that affected Bomber Command’s own campaign. By this stage it too had started sending night fighter escorts to accompany the bombers, but they were generally rather slow (Beaufighters), and even when more sophisticated night fighters were introduced they did not achieve a high rate of kills. Still, Germany’s own night fighter strength was already ebbing when, in late spring 1944, Eisenhower, supported by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, demanded that Bomber Command redirect its enormous bomb-carrying capacity to join the USAAF in paralyzing all German rail and road communications that reached westward to the Channel. Attacking
French rail yards was much less dangerous than round-trip assaults on Berlin, but the pressure was coming off Bomber Command in any case. As one of the British official historians (himself a former distinguished flier) put it in his later reflections on the whole bombing campaign, the greater the success of the American long-range fighters by day, the greater the chances of Bomber Command by night. Devastated by their enemies’ low- and high-altitude search-and-destroy policies, and by the destruction of railways and bridges needed to ensure delivery of supplies, the Luftwaffe had fewer and fewer planes to put up at night.
⁵⁶
Too, in the weeks before D-Day, Bomber Command began to make daytime raids for the first time since 1939–40, discovered the loss rate considerably reduced, and found the accuracy of the Lancasters (despite Harris’s gloomy forecasts) devastating. By September 1944, the RAF/USAAF round-the-clock pattern had resumed against a weakened Third Reich, which now lacked the advantage of its advance radar stations in France and the Low Countries. By this time also, Blakeslee’s P-51s with drop tanks could accompany the B-17 Flying Fortresses all the way to western Russia, a distance of a thousand or so miles. The same Mustangs would then escort the bombers back from Russia to Italian bases and hop over the Alps home to East Anglia. In that triangular flight pattern alone, one sees the Third Reich cornered.

Throughout this entire period of February to September 1944, the Allied chiefs quarreled among themselves and across national lines. Harris opposed any selective strategy that targeted enemy oil, transportation, and electricity grids (as opposed to his own weird panacea of blasting cities), though he was overruled. Spaatz struggled against being under army direction and argued for continued attacks upon the German oil industry. Air C in C Sir Arthur Tedder and his guru Solly Zuckerman joined the recently appointed RAF air marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory in pushing for the transportation plan, that is, the interdiction of all rail lines and roads going to western France, though Churchill feared that this would kill many French civilians (he was right). In the end, Eisenhower insisted that both the RAF and USAAF focus upon preventing German army divisions from reinforcing their forward divisions in Normandy by taking out all the marshaling yards, Seine bridges, railway lines, and whatever else moved trains (though he
was willing to release the bombers elsewhere once it became clear that the enemy’s rail and road links were cut).

Eisenhower’s decision to cut off the Wehrmacht’s reinforcement routes was one of the single most important policy calls in the entire war. To avoid giving any indication of a Normandy landing, the two air forces bombed the length and breadth of the French transportation system. By June 6, 1944, French rail traffic was a mere 30 percent of what it had been in January; by early July, it was only 10 percent. The Wehrmacht could neither get reinforcements into western France nor get its forward divisions out.
⁵⁷

It is striking that in these furious debates—with Eisenhower on occasion even threatening to the Combined Chiefs to
resign
if the air marshals would not obey his directives—few of the protagonists, apart from the levelheaded Tedder, seemed to pull back and recognize that they were now discussing targeting choices. They were not worrying about whether they were winning the air war: they were on top. The point at issue now was the swiftest way, in the aerial dimension, to bring down the Third Reich. It was no longer a matter of how one got the bombers through, but of what targets they would bomb. Perhaps it is not surprising that group and air force commanders who had lost dozens of crews each month needed some time to recognize this fundamental strategic change, but the Combined Chiefs should have done so. The battle for air superiority over Germany and Europe was basically won, even if the Reich fought back with astounding tenacity in the final year of the war.

A single witness makes this point better than any statistic. Early on the morning of June 6, 1944, Flight Lieutenant Owen of 97 Squadron recorded in his diary a late-night raid on a small enemy gun battery on the Normandy coast. His squadron was, unusually, ordered not to fly below 6,500 feet, not to use the identifying friend/foe transmitters, and not to off-load any bombs in the Channel. What did all that mean? His Lancaster duly dropped its bombs on the target at 0500 hours and turned for home; then, amazed, he and his crew looked down and witnessed the entire D-Day landings beneath them, with “a grandstand view of the Americans running in on the beach.”
⁵⁸
As the British aircrews flew back to their Lincolnshire base, they were staggered by the sheer number of American B-17s and B-24s flying overhead toward the
continent. The Allies were finally invading France, and their troops were protected above by a gigantic aerial armada, safe from Luftwaffe attack. Eisenhower had told his troops, “If you see planes overhead, they will be ours”—what a difference from Dunkirk, even from Dieppe. And they were protected at sea from any U-boat assault. The whole thing—sea, air, and land—had come together.

On that day, the American, British, Canadian, and other Allied air forces put an astonishing 11,590 planes into the air. There had been nothing like it in world history, nor has there been since. A total of 3,700 fighters, including those Polish-flown Spitfires, covered the invasion beaches and patrolled all the way northward to the middle North Sea and westward to the western approaches. There was no chance for the completely diminished Luftwaffe to do anything except lose more and more of its planes and pilots whenever they rose into the air. The German air force would soon receive many additional aircraft, but they would have little overall impact, for they were steadily losing their bases, their fuel, and their crews. (The new pilots were so unprepared that their experience was grimly referred to as
Kindermord,
“infanticide”; 13,000 German pilots and crewmen were lost between June and October 1944 alone.) Their flight commanders had been shot out of the sky, chiefly by the Mustangs, at the critical point in the aerial war, and from that blow they could not recover. For the Allies to gain command of the skies over western Europe only two or three months before D-Day had been, as the Duke of Wellington said of the Battle of Waterloo, “a damned close-run thing.” But great battles often are. The defeat of the Luftwaffe between February and May 1944 was a close run, but also one of the most decisive campaigns in history.

A detailed analysis of Allied strategy is beyond the scope of this book. A few aspects are nevertheless worth noting. In the first place, Harris’s resumption of “strategic” attacks upon German cities after June 1944 did not do much to reduce the Reich’s aircraft production—output actually rose to its height (39,800 planes) in that year. Germany’s massive industrial capacity, spread into its many captured lands, was far too big to be brought down by a general, nonspecific bombing campaign
even if there was much less opposition from Luftwaffe fighters; as late as January 1945 Arnold was expressing his amazement at how resilient the German war economy had turned out to be. By the spring of 1945, it is true, Hitler’s empire was being smashed each day and night by thousands of Lancasters, Liberators, and Flying Fortresses. Four-fifths of the total Anglo-American bomb tonnage (out of a colossal 1.4 million tons) was dropped in the final year of the war. But the RAF and AAF were able to inflict that damage only because other, more important things had happened first.

Second, the strategic aerial offensive did not break the German people’s morale, at least not to the extent of stopping the fight or turning its battered inhabitants against their regime. There is ample evidence of the citizens of Darmstadt, Hamburg, Dresden, and other cities being unable to believe the intensity of the destruction around them and yearning for relief and an end to it all. But there is absolutely no evidence that such desperation ended the war in the way that the meeting of American and Soviet soldiers on the Elbe did. Rather, the continuation of the West’s area bombing (or “carpet” or “blanket” or “indiscriminate” or “general” bombing) stained its reputation and produced a moral equivalent to what the Luftwaffe had done to Warsaw, Rotterdam, and Coventry.

Third, the Allied air forces did carry out some clever bombing campaigns after Normandy, especially in their attacks upon oil-refining installations, transportation bottlenecks, and electrical grids. Here again, one is talking about
choices
. It doesn’t make sense to get into a messy technical debate as to whether those massive bomber fleets should by then have concentrated more or less of their explosives upon marshaling yards or oil refineries, or more generally upon Germany’s cities. The fact was that collectively they were bringing their enemy to his knees and were doing so with directional aids, Pathfinder forces, and a bombing accuracy that they had not possessed in previous years. If the German mines were still producing masses of coal but the rail lines were destroyed, that increase in coal output meant nothing. If fantastic new U-boats were being assembled at Kiel and Bremen but the diesel engines could not be transported from the Ruhr, they were of no use. The Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944 saw German panzers run out of fuel. If Speer and his able managers were cranking up fighter production
in factories hidden in mountainsides but those aircraft had no fuel, that also meant nothing—or, rather, it meant that the Allied bombers were opposed by fewer and fewer German planes in the air. If extraordinary German ingenuity produced the world’s first combat jet fighter in the Messerschmitt Me 262—by late 1944 Mustang pilots were reporting some extraordinary non-propeller-driven plane sweeping past them at unmatchable speed—then it was a further example of a Nazi “wonder weapon” (like the schnorkel and type XXI “elektroboot” U-boats and the V-2 rocket) that could not affect the outcome of the war because the Germans had run out of time.
⁵⁹
The greatest of all the wonder weapons, the A-bomb, was of course unknown to all the European commanders, who had to fight with the tools at hand. But such tools were enough to deliver an Allied victory.

This epic struggle had to be, and was, won between 1943 and 1944; it was virtually impossible for Germany to turn back its course in the twelve months following June 1944. The shrinking German aviation fuel production figures after they lost air supremacy say it all: in March 1944 the totals were at their highest output (185,000 tons), but after the late May assaults the totals tumbled fast, to 56,000 tons in June, 17,000 tons in September, and a mere 1,000 tons by February 1945.
⁶⁰
When British paratroopers landed at Arnhem (its own sad story), some Luftwaffe squadrons could not rise to join the fight at all. Germany had run out of gas, as Ultra decrypts of the desperate messages of its high command readily confirmed. Spaatz and his planners had, at last, got it right. In any case, by the beginning of 1945 the Allied generals no longer cared all that much for strategic bombing. Their ground armies were to close in on the Third Reich, its factories, rail yards, missile launching pads, and U-boat pens. The sort of airpower the generals wanted in order to help them reach the Fuehrer’s bunker in Berlin was now tactical, not strategic. Turning German cities into heaps of rubble and destroying all the bridges actually slowed down the advance of Allied armor.

The two great breakthroughs in the strategic air offensive against Germany, or so Hastings argues, were American: the introduction of the long-range Mustang fighter to weaken the Luftwaffe and then, near the end, the campaign against enemy fuel production and distribution.
⁶¹
This is true, but it is only a partial explanation, rather like arguing
for the decisiveness of MIT’s Rad Lab in the radar war without mentioning Birmingham’s invention of the cavity magnetron in the first place. As the narrative above has tried to show, the greatest and most successful of those long-range fighters would not have been produced without Rolls-Royce, the Merlin engine, the P-51 airframe, the drop tank, and a small, dedicated group of first British and then American individuals who helped further advance this project. Counterfactuals such as “Without the long-range Mustang, how long would the war have gone on?” are always of limited usefulness, but it is surely incontestable that only the destruction of Germany’s fighter defenses in early 1944 made possible the fulfillment of that Casablanca directive to place an invasion army into western Europe shortly afterward.

The meaning of the Allied strategic air campaign was fought out long after the Second World War ended. Predictably, Harris and his Bomber Command supporters rushed in early to claim that the aerial offensive was key to the defeat of the Third Reich.
⁶²
In retrospect, we can see it was not. At the other extreme, there has been a tendency to describe it as an unwise and excessive use of scarce resources (especially Britain’s), a point reinforced by the recent slew of books and films about the horrors of indiscriminate bombing. Strategic bombing, from this standpoint, was thus both evil
and
an unnecessary waste.