Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (24 page)

This criticism conflates two separate points. To the extent that any bombings of nonmilitary targets were intended to terrorize the populace below—to deliberately “undermine enemy morale” rather than to keep people from returning to their shipyards or their ball-bearing factories—that form of warfare was indeed morally wrong. Whether saturation bombing took place in China, over Japan, or against Warsaw, London, or Dresden, it stood in contradiction to the generally accepted codes of proportionality and discrimination; it offended the doctrine of “just war.” By the same doctrine, though, if a bomb intended for a Tyneside or Bremen shipbuilding works missed its target and hit the row houses next door, it did not have that moral stain. The real problem, as we have seen above, is that
most of the time
strategic bombing by both British and American squadrons missed the targets due to awful weather, altitude, wind speed, and poor navigational tools. Such obstacles, together with the rise of enemy counterattacks (flak, fighters), caused Allied planners to move to more general bombing, and
caused Allied aircraft to jettison their bombs when under pressure. Yet the latter responses do not deserve to be described as indiscriminate bombing. Moving to bomb “a whole German town,” as the RAF did following the Butt Report (and its analogue by the USAAF against Japan in 1945), crossed a moral watershed.

Drawing a military and strategic balance sheet of the effects of the Allied bombing campaigns brings its own important conclusions, well treated in the better studies.
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The Allied bombing campaign was extraordinarily effective both in its infliction of direct damage upon the Third Reich (and Italy and Japan) and in its many indirect effects—forcing the Germans to cede aerial control over the Eastern Front, diverting vast numbers of guns and crews into antiaircraft duties, consuming millions of workers in the task of rebuilding wrecked communications and relocating damaged factories, and slowing down U-boat development and training. To his credit, Harris did keep up a campaign of aerial mining in Baltic waters. Bomber Command, seduced by the doctrine that theirs was an “independent” service, exaggerated before the fighting what they could achieve by themselves and exaggerated afterward what they had achieved. Yet where their squadrons really worked best was in
conjunction
with the land and naval campaigns—in helping to get aerial command over the D-Day beaches, in pulling the Luftwaffe back from the Eastern Front, in paralyzing any German counterattacks into Normandy, in slowing down assembly of the newest U-boats, and in depleting the Reich of its fuel supplies. That is a considerable tally.

It is difficult to see where intelligence played much of a role here, except to observe that German knowledge of Allied aerial defenses—or offenses—was miserable. Secret agents were of no value to Harris as he pursued his carpet bombing of German cities. Reading codes helped if they could tell the Air Ministry that this or that Luftflotte was being moved from Calabria to the Russian front. But the most valuable data source of all was aerial reconnaissance, because it was consistent, technical, and objective. Bletchley Park sources, by their episodic nature, had no way of capturing how shocked the German leadership was by the bombing of Hamburg—or, for that matter, of spotting the secret development of the Luftwaffe’s jet fighters.

The Allies were helped by mistakes on the German side, especially
those made by Goering and the Fuehrer himself. Hitler paid no attention to the lessons of the Battle of Britain about the importance of careful, calibrated defense. Germany gave inadequate priority to aircraft production as a whole between 1940 and 1943 and very little heed to fighter-plane production. Hitler hated the argument that a greater number of defensive weapons platforms was needed, and he was still screaming for the renewed bombing of England as late as 1943–44. During the final few months he was insisting that the Me 262 be flown as a jet
bomber,
with a 250- or 500-pound load that would totally unbalance it and leave it vulnerable to the Spitfires and Mustangs. The increases in fighters that Erhard Milch and Speer achieved were done despite him. The V-2 rocket was truly impressive, but such a wonder weapon consumed staggering amounts of scarce resources—one estimate believes it was the equivalent to the United States’ Manhattan Project (America could afford its superweapon, but Germany couldn’t), another that it diverted the manpower and materials that could have built around twenty-four thousand regular fighter aircraft.
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In any case, it was too late, like the jet fighter; bringing it into battle in such limited numbers when the Allied armies were advancing with increasing pace toward the Rhine and the Vistula was of little use. Such weapons had been needed during the critical year of 1943, or at the very latest during the early months of 1944, for that was when Germany lost the fight.

The first half of June 1944 was also an important turning point in the strategic bombing campaigns in the Pacific, as will be detailed more fully in
chapter 5
. On June 15, the first wave of U.S. Marines landed on Saipan, in the Mariana Islands, and America burst right through Japan’s vital perimeter. The seizure of the Marianas was critical because it was from swiftly built air bases on those islands that the USAAF could directly attack the Japanese homeland. By late November 1944, a full two years after the invasion of North Africa and the subsequent Casablanca resolutions, American airpower in the form of the massive new high-altitude B-29 Superfortresses was at last able to hit Japan in the way in which its heavy squadrons in Europe, along with RAF
Bomber Command, had been pounding the Third Reich over the preceding months.

The story of the strategic bombing offensive against Japan is beyond our narrative.
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It had, to be sure, a common Trenchardian aspect, that of devastating aerial attacks upon the enemy’s industries, cities, communications, and people. But, simply because of the imbalance of power, it lacked the dramatic ebb and flow of the prolonged, desperate fight against the Luftwaffe. Germany really was a tougher opponent in all respects, but especially in the duel for air superiority. By the time that the B-29s began their attacks, both the Japanese naval and army air forces—especially, once again, their pilots—had been greatly reduced in numbers. The long-range Mustang escorts, when brought into service in the Far East, had very little dogfighting to do. In any case, the B-29s could fly so high that it was difficult for Japanese planes to reach them. By the spring of 1945, their pugnacious commander, Curtis LeMay, had many of the bombers stripped of their gun turrets and ordered them to bomb their targets at night (to further confuse Japanese defenses) and from a mere 8,000 feet, unloading vast numbers of smaller incendiaries upon the timber-framed buildings below. The results of the Tokyo and other fire raids were terrifying, with losses unimaginable to the Anglo-American peoples’ experience of war, or at least war upon civilians as distinct from war in the trenches. The entire Blitz on Britain took approximately 43,000 lives, with another million wounded.
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The obliteration of 150,000 inhabitants in the firestorms of Tokyo was not the end of the story. Once the B-29s had replenished their incendiaries—they ran out of supplies in late March—it was the turn of many other Japanese cities, towns, and harbors to be totally crippled. Then came the two atomic bombs, which killed at least 200,000 people. The theory and practice of strategic air warfare had reached its apotheosis. And a new, threatening age of bombing civilians had begun.

The years after the war brought mixed blessings to the characters described above. The glamorous, casual, and very influential Tommy Hitchcock, rejoicing that the Mustangs were coming to England, died in 1944, just before D-Day, when a plane he was trying out plunged
mysteriously to the ground. Jimmy Doolittle “retired” to a busy life that mixed a business career with government service, for which he deservedly received much recognition; in 1985 President Ronald Reagan pinned a fourth star on his epaulets, making him a full general at last. Lovett had an even more distinguished postwar career, being undersecretary of state to George Marshall from 1946 to 1949 and then secretary of defense himself during much of the Korean War (from 1951 to 1953). Don Blakeslee stayed in the air force and served in both Korea and Vietnam until a gentle retirement to Florida. Elmer Bendiger, like so many of the “average” fliers, returned to civilian life; thirty-five years later he began writing his account of the Schweinfurt raids.

Sir Wilfrid Freeman retired as air chief marshal and took a senior management position at the British company Courtaulds; he died in 1953, by one account of “overwork,” which sounds plausible. He could be deeply satisfied that all the aircraft he had authorized, protected, and then put into service from the late 1930s had done so well. Arthur “Bomber” Harris was a less satisfied man. Already by the closing months of the war the British government was uneasy at the rising criticism of Bomber Command’s “shock and awe” area-bombing policies. Harris was the sole British commander in chief not made a peer at the end of the war. In 1948 he left, disappointed, for a business job in South Africa, although he eventually returned to a quiet life in the Thames Valley until his death in 1984. Eight years later his statue was unveiled by the Queen Mother beside the RAF’s church, St. Clement Dane’s, but even that provoked protests, and the statue had to be guarded for some time. Regrettably, this moral and political unease hurt the reputation of Bomber Command itself, the only service not to be given a campaign medal—a lasting shame, because it confused the arbiters of a bad targeting policy with the gallant crews who carried it out, tens of thousands losing their lives.

Long after the war, Ronnie Harker retired to New Zealand, where he indulged in his two favorite hobbies, fly-fishing and taking a Mustang up, higher and higher, into the skies he loved. A large number of P-51s had been acquired by the Australian and New Zealand air forces and performed wonderfully during the Korean War before enjoying a long retirement in the antipodean climate. There were still many around as the second half of the twentieth century wound to a close,
and one of them was always available to Harker. In 1997 he took a Mustang into the air for the last time, his final solo flight. One doubts if he pushed it around as much as he had done to the Alison-powered P-51 on that raw morning of April 30, 1942. But no matter: he was back in a machine that he had helped to transform from an ugly duckling into the most formidable long-range fighter of the Second World War. He, and the others mentioned here, had created not so much a war-winning weapon as a war-winning system. One wonders whether Harker, a mere eighty-eight years old, reflected on all this as he handed over his oxygen mask for the last time. Two years later, he himself went to the central blue.
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The historian of great-power politics and of the force of economic change in humankind’s rise cannot but be pulled up by the role of chance and serendipity in this story of the Mustang’s rescue from the scrap heap. What if Ronnie Harker had not been invited to fly the P-51 by the Duxford Testing Station in April 1942? What if another test pilot had not been so perspicacious or had not known about the new Merlin 61 engine? What if the Rolls-Royce manager had not had such a close relationship with Sir Wilfrid Freeman? What if Lovett had not made his important 1943 visit to the air bases in Britain?

So many conjunctures and hypotheticals. Perhaps other solutions might have arisen to unblock the late 1943 impasse in Allied strategic bombing. Still, without the breakthroughs described above, it remains difficult to see how Overlord could have taken place in June 1944 and the Third Reich could have collapsed less than a year later. Serendipity counts.