16
D-Day Diversion
The approach of Overlord gave Bomber Command a new purpose. Its efforts up until the spring of 1944 had been titanic but they had failed to achieve the promised results. The attack on Berlin had been the ultimate test of Harris’s theories. But the Big City, though bleeding, was still functioning and the spirit of its citizens was bruised but not crushed.
Bombing France was less dangerous than bombing Germany and the switch to preparing the ground for D-Day was welcomed by the crews. Their primary task was to disrupt the transportation links that would play a vital part in shifting enemy troops around the battlefield once the invasion began. This meant a radical change in their modus operandi. They were now engaged in widespread attacks on a number of objectives rather than a concentration of force against one. This change of tactics created problems for the German defences, and particularly the night-fighters. Bombers flying in a stream up to 150 miles long, six miles wide and two miles deep made a big, vulnerable target. Once the radar had located them, the interceptors could harry them almost at their leisure, knowing they had little to fear from their guns. The Luftwaffe now had to juggle its resources to deal with several diverse threats. They had less time to get into an attacking position, for the bomber bases were much closer to the targets they wanted to bomb.
The new conditions meant a significant reduction in losses. Between April and June, Bomber Command flew operations on fifty-seven nights and lost 525 aircraft. This was a considerable improvement on the 1,128 machines, almost all four-engined bombers, destroyed during the Battle of Berlin period when only 18 per cent more sorties were flown. Even when Bomber Command resumed its onslaught on Germany it would never again face such dreadful odds as it had endured during the winter of 1943/44.
Harris thought of the new work as a diversion, but one that he accepted was both inevitable and desirable. The Casablanca and Pointblank directives of a year before had given the combined American and British bomber forces the job of creating conditions for the main Allied invasion of Europe to begin. Harris had largely ignored the spirit of Pointblank. He had chosen to misinterpret the instruction to concentrate on a system of precise war industry targets, in particular both the equipment and infrastructure of the German air force. Instead, he persisted with bombing towns.
As Overlord approached, this contrariness could no longer be tolerated. To obtain the tightest possible co-ordination between the key elements in the operation, Bomber Command was placed under the direction of the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower. For once Harris was subordinated to an authority that was impervious to his bluster and he came to heel with surprising grace. He may also have felt the need to behave following the manifest failure of the Berlin campaign, which had threatened to destroy his command.
The principal objective was the dislocation of the railways of northern Europe and in particular northern France. Harris doubted whether his men had the ability to deliver the concentration and accuracy needed for the attacks to be effective but he went ahead and ordered their execution. They began in March with raids on marshalling yards at important junctions like Le Mans, Amiens, Trappes and Courtrai. Between the beginning of April and the end of June, a hundred major operations were flown. There were constant attacks against any target that could interfere with the success of the landing. They included the flying bomb launching sites which threatened the forming-up areas across the Channel, coastal batteries, the synapses of the enemy signalling system, ammunition dumps and military camps. For a while German place names were heard only occasionally at briefings. Between April and D-Day there were only twelve major attacks and eight minor ones on German targets. Instead, to the satisfaction of the crews, they were now directed to specific targets which had an obvious bearing on the progress of the war.
The activities of Bomber Command were, for the time being at least, in tune with American perceptions as to how the air war should be fought. Having entered the war first, the RAF naturally assumed that its methods were the best but the pre-war theories about bombing practice had rapidly been chewed up in the jaws of experience. Commanders had begun the campaign in the belief that bombers, flying in disciplined formations, could defend themselves with their onboard armament. According to this thinking fighter escorts, although desirable, were not essential. There were none available in any case. At the start of the war, designers had yet to come up with a machine with the range and speed to accompany and defend bomber fleets on long-distance raids.
The myth of self-protection had been shattered in the winter of 1939 and spring of 1940 when German fighters, flak and radar made it impossible for Bomber Command to operate in daylight. Instead it sought the cover of darkness. Its survival depended on invisibility, and developing equipment and techniques to outwit the German defences. The Germans in turn devised counter-measures and refined their aeroplanes to deal with each new threat, culminating in the high point of their success, the introduction of the radar-equipped night-fighter.
The RAF tried to pass on its hard-won tactical wisdom to the USAAF. The Americans were reluctant to listen. In the first place they had little faith in the value of of night bombing. They had some evidence of its lack of success through the reports of professional observers, the American diplomats and journalists who stayed in Germany until the United States entered the war in December 1941. By the time the first units of the Eighth Air Force arrived in Britain in 1942 they already had in place the foundations of a bomber fleet which they believed fitted their strategic vision of how an air war should be conducted.
The Americans’ preference was, as they constantly reiterated, for precision bombing carried out in daylight. The emphasis they placed on this formula seemed at times a reproach to Bomber Command. The implication was that American methods were superior to the indiscriminate nocturnal blunderings of the British. The American approach was meant to be cleaner, both militarily and morally. In daylight, the theory ran, they could see what they were doing. In addition their bombers were equipped with the Norden bombsight, which was believed to be marvellously accurate. With all these advantages they stood a far better chance of hitting their targets and missing innocent civilians than their amiable, but to American minds, misguided allies. This belief turned out to be something of an illusion, though it sustained American thinking for some time.
As for the risks of operating in daylight, the USAAF planners discounted the British experiences of the early war. Their two main aircraft, the B17 Flying Fortress and the Liberator, were well equipped with heavy .50 machine guns firing from five turrets. In theory at least, a tidily-held formation should enable the gunners to provide a field of fire of such breadth, height and depth to deter all but the most foolhardy German fighter pilot. To add to their defences, they had the support of fighter escorts which began arriving in numbers in Britain in the autumn of 1943. Their reach though, was limited. The Lightnings and Thunderbolts could not range more than 300–400 miles from base if they were forced to weave or to dogfight.
The Americans were intent on hitting specific targets which had a direct and unarguable bearing on the Germans’ ability to prosecute the war. That meant factories, oil installations, ports, submarine pens and the like. Operations began in the late summer of 1942. Initially they concentrated on objectives in France but in January 1943 moved into Germany itself. In keeping with Pointblank, their particular intention was to fatally weaken German air power by destroying aircraft while they were still in production. This ambition was undiminished by the fact that the aircraft industry was widely dispersed and its factories hard to find. By the late summer they were suffering severe losses but remained convinced that they were nonetheless inflicting serious damage on the enemy. On 17 August 1943, the anniversary of the beginning of operations from England, two large groups of Fortresses set off to bomb the Messerschmitt factory at Regensburg and the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt, a particular favourite with those who believed in surgical operations
to cut out vital components of the machinery of war. The 147 aircraft from Fourth Bomb Wing heading for Regensburg were to carry on after their attack to land in bases in North Africa. Those from First Wing bound for Schweinfurt were to return to England. The two groups were supposed to leave together in order to divert the attentions of the waiting fighters. First Wing were held up by thick ground mist. The delay meant that the chance that the enemy would be confused by the two-pronged assault was lost. The first group crossed the Dutch coast at 10 a.m. in formations of twenty-one. There was barely a cloud in the sky. Two clusters of Thunderbolt fighters met up with them over Holland to provide a patchy escort for as long as their petrol supply allowed.
The ordeal started when Focke-Wulf fighters began attacking the unprotected tail of the stream, south-east of Brussels. At the German frontier, the fuel indicator needles of the Thunderbolts were dipping ominously and they were obliged to turn back. As the Fortresses headed into Germany the attack began in earnest. Relay after relay of Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitt 109s drove into the formations, often in head-on attacks and one by one the bombers began to burn and fall. An observer riding with the 100th group reported later that ‘the sight was fantastic; it surpassed fiction.’ A historian of the Eighth Air Force described the battle moving over Germany, ‘its course marked by flashes, flames, smoke, the debris of disintegrating aircraft, parachutes and men; the noise indescribable …’1 This running combat went on for ninety minutes. By the time the Americans reached Regensburg seventeen Fortresses had been destroyed. Nonetheless the force, led by the famously aggressive Colonel Curtis Le May, still managed to attack with exemplary determination and precision. On arrival in Africa, Le May cabled London: ‘Objective believed totally destroyed.’ The belief was justified. The result turned out to be even better than he imagined. Unbeknown to him, the bombs had obliterated a workshop housing the fuselage jigs for a secret jet fighter.
First Wing had met equally ferocious opposition. From Antwerp to Schweinfurt and back it was under continuous attack from a swarm of fighters vectored in from virtually every Luftwaffe fighter base in the West. The bombers beat on with extraordinary bravery and achieved respectable results. The cost of the operation, though, was shockingly high. At the end thirty-six B-17s and 370 crew were missing. Many other aircraft limped home with dead and wounded aboard.
Altogether sixty aircraft were lost. This was more than double the previous high of twenty-six recorded in a raid the previous 13 June. Was it worth it? The claims made by the air gunners suggested it might be. They reported downing an astonishing 288 enemy aircraft. This figure almost matched the entire Luftwaffe force involved in the interception. The figure was later reduced to 148, still an impressive score and one which some senior officers appeared to find credible. The true figure, it emerged later, was twenty-seven.2
The Schweinfurt factories continued to exert a fatal attraction for the Eighth Air Force planners. Destroying ball-bearing production would not only do fundamental damage to the German military machine. It would also vindicate the air chiefs’ claims. On 14 October 1943 the bombers went back in an operation that was to settle the question of whether air operations could continue as conceived.
A force of about 300 set off from bases in central and eastern England. The German fighters waited for their escorts to drop away before attacking in earnest. Then the assaults were relentless all the way to and from the target. The attack was a success. Three of the five main plants were hit heavily. But so too were the bombers, especially as they ran for home. At the final count, sixty aircraft were lost and five others crashed in England as a result of damage sustained in the fight.
The operation was nonetheless hailed as a significant victory. Portal was particularly fulsome. It could well, he claimed, ‘have saved countless lives by depriving the enemy of a great part of his means of resistance.’3 The lives that were demonstrably saved by the operation, as it turned out, were those of American airmen as a result of the change of tactics that the incident had brought about. The overall losses of 14 October were nearly twice the figure of 5 per cent of the force, considered as the maximum that could be sustained for a protracted period before operations became too costly to endure. The Americans could not mount similar operations on a regular basis without a catastrophic loss of both effectiveness and morale. Despite the extravagant claims of the gunners it was clear that their efforts were having no appreciable effect on eroding the means and the will of the Luftwaffe to resist. Inevitably, as any professional and motivated air force could be expected to do, the Germans had devised tactics that blunted the formations’ ability to defend themselves. They had learned to concentrate on one formation at a time, unleashing salvoes of rockets from beyond the range of the American guns so that the pilots were unable to hold station, then swooping in on the dispersed components.
There was clearly an urgent need to think again. In the space of six days 148 American bombers had failed to return home. It was obvious that until they gained control of the air and succeeded in dominating the enemy’s skies, they would never achieve their strategic goals.
The American air force staff, despite its proud modernity, was sometimes afflicted by stiffness of thought and an arrogant outlook. Its members could, on occasion, be as mulish as the most conservative French or British general of the First World War, preferring to reinforce failure than to admit error or the fallibility of the rule book. The obvious thing to consider, when it became clear that the British warnings about daylight operations were well-founded, was whether to follow their example and shift to bombing by night. Indeed the idea was explored tentatively in the late summer of 1943 when 422 Bomb Squadron carried out a handful of night operations alongside the RAF. But the experiment was discontinued. The American crews had been prepared for only one task. A shift from daylight to darkness would mean enormous upheaval and the effective discontinuation of the American effort for an unacceptable period. Portal reckoned the process would take two years. The American crews were highly trained in the formation tactics that sustained day bombing. But that was of little use at night. What was needed primarily was an ability to navigate in the dark, which few American navigators possessed. In the absence of that option, intensive thought was given to the question of how the bombers could be better protected. The need for an effective long-range fighter escort was more obvious than ever.
The Americans’ occasional inflexibility was counterbalanced by a redeeming national virtue. Faced with a crisis, they could react effectively and fast. In this case the hunt for the solution was greatly helped by the application of British technical ingenuity. Underlying the transformation in the Allies’ fortunes was the arrival of a new aeroplane which completely altered the nature of the air war. This was the long-range fighter which could accompany the bomber fleets all the way to distant targets and escort them home again. The value of the long-range escort had long been understood but until the winter of 1943 the technology was not available to provide one.
In the history of aviation no single aircraft tipped the strategic balance as effectively as the P-51 Mustang. Its arrival on the battlefield resuscitated the Eighth Air Force and accelerated the Luftwaffe’s terminal decline. The aircraft began life in the most unpromising circumstances. It was designed by North American Aviation in 1940 in answer to a request from the RAF’s Air Commission who were desperate to obtain aircraft from any quarter. Britain bought a number. The Americans, whose needs were less urgent, were unimpressed however. The Mustang was slowish and its performance fell off sharply at altitude. Its optimal height was only 15,000 feet where it strained to reach 366 mph. By the time it arrived at the RAF in November 1941 the aircraft shortage was over and it was shunted off to army co-operation duties. There the Mustang’s undistinguished operational career might have ended but for the diligence of some Rolls-Royce engineers. The problem, they decided, was a lack of power. As an experiment they installed their own Merlin 61 engines in five aircraft and put them through air tests.
The initial results were unpromising. They decided to persist, modifying the airframe and trying again with a new power plant, a Packard-Merlin hybrid. This technological cross-breeding worked brilliantly. The humdrum genes produced a machine which shattered the existing supposition that long-range and a sparkling peformance could not be combined in the same machine.
The new Mustang went faster as it got higher. At 15,000 feet it could only manage 375 mph. At 35,000 feet it could reach 440 mph. This made it quicker than both the Focke-Wulf 190 and the Messerschmitt 109. Even more importantly, it could turn more tightly than its two main adversaries, thus giving it a crucial edge in the most important manoeuvre in dogfighting. But speed and nimbleness were of limited use without range. By September 1943 Thunderbolts fitted with drop tanks were covering 1,500 miles in test flights, with the extra weight of fuel only marginally reducing performance. This was soon stretched yet further so that by the spring of 1944 they could accompany the Fortresses and Liberators from their bases in the Midlands and East Anglia deep into eastern Germany.
After Schweinfurt, Mustangs began to pour off the production lines. They started operations with the Eighth Air Force in December 1943. Thanks to their arrival, the effectiveness of the short-range fighters was also substantially increased. Until now the Luftwaffe could, if it chose, ignore the presence of Lightnings and Thunderbolts. It was simply a matter of waiting for their fuel to run low and their noses to turn homewards. Then the German fighters had the freedom of their own skies. Now the luxury of waiting for their prey to come to them, unescorted, had vanished. The aerial front line was pushed forward and henceforth they were forced to attack wherever they could, exposing themselves to the attentions of the conventional Allied fighters. The demands the new circumstances imposed also meant that German night-fighter units were now landed with the extra duty of going to the support of their daytime colleagues.
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 88