Third Reich Victorious (36 page)

5
. Roberto Farinacci had once been the secretary of Italy’s Fascist Party when, in 1924, he led a purge of the government. He clashed openly with Mussolini, who considered him too violent and extreme. Mussolini had him removed from office and, although still a party member, Farinacci had not held any other high position. See Deakin,
The Brutal Friendship.

6
. “Werther” was thought to be Maj. Gen. Hans Oster, the second in command of the German military intelligence and counterintelligence organization, the Abwehr, under Adm. Wilhelm Canaris. The other spy reporting the cancellation was “Lucy,” Rudolf Rössler, an anti-Nazi German working out of Switzerland with senior Wermacht sources. See Glantz,
Soviet Military Intelligence in War.

7
. This was, of course, because Hitler had not officially cancelled the offensive.

*
8
. Churchill discusses his thoughts in some detail in his memoirs,
The Broken Crusade
(HMSO, London, 1948).

David C. Isby

“There is a might-have-been which is more true than truth.”

—William Faulkner,
Absalom, Absalom

Over a five-month period, from October 1943 to March 1944, the Luftwaffe succeeded in defeating both the U.S. and British bomber offensives against Germany. Both of these offensives, at different times, had effectively stopped the deep penetration attacks whose strategic impact was considered vital. The Allies’ heavy losses, and whose lack of evidence that the bombers were having any impact on the German war machine, forced Allied airmen to reconsider their bomber operations.

For their part, the Germans were faced with decisions that had to be made to ensure that their successes were not fleeting. The German check to the Allied bomber offensives had obviously not been decisive. The way in which both sides reacted to these German victories in late 1943 and early 1944 amounted to a turning point in the war in Europe, even though the impact of the decisions made by each side would be seen as decisive for many months.

The British bomber offensive of 1940-41 was largely ineffective, killing more British air crew than the German citizens it had targeted. But by late 1942 the bomber offensive was being waged in deadly earnest. By the end of that year the U.S. Army Air Force’s 8th Air Force was entering combat over occupied Europe, and the RAF had made its first massed thousand-bomber raids and started to inflict significant damage on German cities.

The Luftwaffe reacted strongly, pulling back fighters from other fronts and massing flak guns. The German war economy, now belatedly mobilized, geared up to meet the bomber offensives. Production priorities were set to build ammunition for flak guns, cutting into the quantity available for the army for ground combat.

In January 1943, at the Casablanca Conference, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their staffs established the bomber offensive as a major element of Anglo-American strategy against Germany, putting a seal on decisions made before the war and included in the Anglo-American ABC-1 report of 1941. In July 1943 the destruction of Hamburg demonstrated the potential power of the bomber offensive. Albert Speer, now directing the German war economy, feared that if Hamburg were to be repeated throughout Germany over the summer of 1943, a different city burning each week, Germany would crack. The threat was not only from British night area bombardment. The 8th Air Force precision daylight bombing attack on the synthetic oil plant at Huls showed that, done right, this type of attack could be devastating to high-value targets.

But it did not happen. No other cities burned like Hamburg, nor were any oil plants damaged as in Huls for the rest of 1943. Instead, the Luftwaffe’s efforts—improvised rather than well-planned—delivered Germany from the bomber threat.

In the summer and autumn of 1943, the Luftwaffe fought the U.S. daylight bomber offensive—which relied on unescorted bomber formations striking key industrial targets—to a standstill. The Germans had to improvise an integrated air defense system far more extensive than the one that defeated them in the Battle of Britain. A U.S. maximum effort against the “soft underbelly” of the German war economy—the oil refineries at Ploesti, Romania—cost fifty-four B-24 Liberators, and its low-level attempt at decisive accuracy proved to be unrepeatable. The 8th Air Force lost sixty B-17 Flying Fortresses in the Regensburg—Schweinfurt raid on August 17. Finally, in October, 148 heavy bombers were lost on four missions, sixty of them on the October 14 return to Schweinfurt. With an eighth to a third of its force lost in each major attack, the USAAF was forced to suspend the bomber offensive against Germany after the second Schweinfurt raid.

With the USAAF offensive suspended, it was the turn of the RAF’s night offensive against the cities of Germany to carry the burden of the Allied Casablanca strategy. RAF Bomber Command was confident of success, with improved navigational aids and radar, more Lancaster bombers, and new tactics, including the use of the Pathfinder Force to mark targets. Bomber Command set out to land its decisive blow. It failed. In the “Battle of Berlin,” the RAF was unable to inflict decisive damage on Berlin or any of the key cities it targeted, and it suffered unsustainable losses. The climax came with the Nuremberg raid in March 1944, when ninety-six bombers went down. As a result, the RAF also had to curtail its operations against Germany.

However thankful the Germans may have been for these successes, no one—from the leadership in Berlin down to the fighter pilots—was under any illusion that this was more than a respite. Spring weather in 1944 would surely bring about decisive battles that would determine the success or failure of the bomber offensive.

As with many decisive battles, the decisions made after the German victories were prefigured or constrained by other ones. In fact, many of the critical decisions that shape the outcome of a conflict are inevitably taken years before, some in long-ago days of peace. The victor is found, in the bright light of hindsight, to have paved the way to success—and the loser to defeat—by a series of decisions that may not have seemed important when they were made.

For the Luftwaffe to be able in 1944 to convert the Allied setbacks of previous months into a lasting and significant defeat required the Germans to have made the right decisions in preceding years. These were fundamental decisions on the doctrine of a modern defensive air wars: what means should be employed, and how? For these decisions to be more than theoretical, they had to be enabled by another set of decisions, on the mobilization of the German war economy, its priorities, and the direction of the war. Some doctrinal decisions required fundamental changes to the nature of the National Socialist regime.

To make the Luftwaffe victories of 1943-44 decisive also required that the Allies made the wrong decisions. Again, key decisions were made years before anyone would know that they would become decisive. Doctrinal questions were key. These had been made, in many cases, before the war, when both the RAF and USAAF were advocating and evolving strategic bombing capabilities and their political leaders were looking for a way to win a major war without repeating the battles of 1916.

Compounding the problem of evolving a doctrinal view to meet a changing threat was the nature of the bomber offensive—there were neither guides in previous experience nor immediate readings of victory and defeat. The RAF and USAAF had thought about strategic bombing campaigns before the war, but never come close to carrying them out. In an air campaign, there were no vital terrain features to win or lose, no towns or hills to give their name to battles and signal victory or defeat. Rather, victory and defeat were determined not by whose flag was planted on the battlefield, but, in the manner of modern war, by statistics: the number of aircraft lost, the rate of loss (often the key indicator) and their trends and apparent repeatability, the number of available replacements, and the tons of bombs dropped. What was harder to determine was the effect of all these indicators. Air forces, trained to think in terms of readiness rates and flight hours, and receptive to modern technology, can delude themselves faster than any other service if they put their minds to it.

For a modern military force, the supply and quality of information is as important as ammunition. Yet, even if the information is available, deciding which elements are important and which will be used to guide operations may twist its impact. In the final analysis it was hard to change a losing strategy if it was not apparent to its practitioners that they were indeed losing.

There was nothing any decisions in 1943-44 could do to redress Germany’s fundamental strategic dilemma of having to wage a two-front war with weak or distant allies against enemies that, if lacking in proficiency, had greater resources and access to technology. But such decisions could sustain the German strengths at the operational level of war that had brought them close to victory in 1939-41, and conceivably could negate the strategic advantages of its enemies.

The key German decisions that made the changes to the Luftwaffe more than mere speculation—on how to mobilize their economy fully—were made before the bomber offensive began to have militarily significant effects.
¹
Early on, the Germans were faced with the question of what the nature of the Second World War would be. Would it be a short, victorious war waged with as little internal political cost as possible, or a massive struggle of countries, ideologies, and, in Nazi eyes, races? From these fundamental decisions—or the refusal to make them—came the basic framework that determined how many weapons, and what type, would be available to defend Germany.

The key decisions of 1940-41—to fully mobilize the economy of not just Germany, but of all occupied and Axis Europe as an integrated economic superpower waging a long, technologically demanding war—were difficult ones. They were not easily reconciled with the demands of National Socialist ideology—though advocated by some leading ideologues such as Reinhard “Hangman” Heydrich—nor with German popular opinion. The motivation for this change was that the Germans knew the U.S. was planning to gear up the world’s largest economy for war as early as mid-1941. Indeed, the information had been both in reports from the German embassy in Washington and in U.S. newspapers.
²
The change was that Hitler and the leadership decided to take the threat of this buildup seriously.

The Luftwaffe also had to undergo a change, away both from Göring’s National Socialist romantic vision of air combat—which did not even represent what was taking place in 1918—and, more important, its role in overall German operations, which had proven successful in 1939-42. This meant that the response to the growing Allied air offensive had to be envisioned as improving the defenses of the Reich. This was a vital change and against the deep-seated views of Hitler, whose belief in offensive operations led him to stress attacks against Britain, first by aircraft and later by the “vengeance weapons,” guided missiles.

Hitler’s instinct was to defend Germany by attacking Britain.
³
Not doing so was another of the key decisions that made German victory possible against the Allied bombers. This meant that Hitler and the national leadership had to make decisions through a rational and relatively objective process. This was difficult, for Nazi ideology stressed “thinking with the blood,” and what was seen as the iron law of races and struggle trumped other considerations, yet was eventually accomplished. This involved easing Göring aside and replacing him with Gen. Adolf Galland, the fighter ace and general of the Fighter Force, as head of the Luftwaffe. The Luftwaffe would have to be transformed. It had to be made capable of winning a defensive air campaign.

Making this all possible was a cold-eyed triage of capabilities and forces. The bomber force was deemphasized and bomber production cut back. A proposal to use emerging jet combat aircraft designs primarily as “blitz bombers” was disregarded. Operational bomber units, many still weak from their defeat in Operation Steinbock, the retaliatory “Baby Blitz” ordered against Britain, were combed for skilled air crew, especially for night fighter units. The V-weapons program was also cut back. A defeat of the Allied bomber offensive would remove much of the German demand for retaliation that motivated the program.

Many results of these decisions would not be seen until 1943-44, but they made possible the mass production of the implements of war that could turn the temporary defeat of the bombers into something more long-lasting and costly: Messerschmitt 262 jet-propelled day and night fighters, Focke-Wulf 190D piston-engined fighters (the most effective of Germany’s prejet fighters), high-powered engines and the aviation fuels to run them, advanced radars, and much more.

The hardest decision was that the Luftwaffe prevailed over Albert Speer in arguing for quality in place of quantity in aircraft production. Speer’s original goal was to boost the number of military aircraft produced by Germany wherever he could. He thought it less important that they were older designs than that numbers be kept up. This approach, which could have led to Germany ending the war with large numbers of obsolescent, fuel-less fighters waiting at dispersal sites, was changed by a key decisions to move to a technologically sophisticated, integrated war-fighting approach.