The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

  On 6 March 1944 the Americans began daylight raids on Berlin, which was now being pounded almost round the clock. Its strong air defences meant that the cost of attacking the capital was always high, however, and on the night of 24 March 1944 losses of almost 10 per cent of Bomber Command’s planes were suffered, and much damage was caused to those that managed to limp home. Although it cannot be conclusively proven either way, there are those who believe that the decision to concentrate on softening-up targets for D-Day was as much an admission of defeat by Bomber Command over its attempts to destroy Berlin as a necessity in aiding D-Day. Whatever the true reason, and of course both might have been true, from mid-1944 there was a significant diversion of the bombing effort away from hitting German cities towards supporting the Normandy landings, and in particular trying to cut off German retaliation by road and rail. This was given the hardly impenetrable codename of Transportation Plan. After the war, Air Chief Marshal Tedder published a book entitled Air Superiority in War which featured a graph (see Figure 3) emphasizing how exponentially the weight of bombs dropped on Germany increased as the war progressed.

  At a meeting at St Paul’s School in Hammersmith, London, on 15 May 1944, when the entire Allied top brass met to go over the plans for the invasion of France, Operation Overlord, the First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, who sat between Churchill and Admiral Stark, recalled that ‘Bomber Harris complained what a nuisance this Overlord operation was and how it interfered with the right way to defeat Germany, i.e. by bombing.’50 Harris was also characteristically blunt about Churchill’s scientific adviser Solly Zuckerman, who on another occasion had proposed a plan to suspend the area-bombing campaign altogether for three months, describing him as ‘a civilian professor whose peacetime forte is the study of the sexual aberrations of the higher apes’.51

  The massive bombing of targets in north-west France, many of them far from Normandy, as a feint to convince the Germans that the attack was going to come further north, is estimated to have cost between 80,000 and 160,000 (mainly French civilian) casualties. After a War Cabinet on 3 April 1944 Cunningham wrote of how there had been ‘Considerable sob stuff about children with legs blown off and blinded old ladies but nothing about the saving of risk to our young soldiers landing on a hostile shore. It is of course intended to issue warnings beforehand.’52 Ten days later the Defence Committee returned to the theme, prompting Cunningham to report again to his diary: ‘The expected casualties were grossly exaggerated but apparently it is all right to kill 1,100 French people per week. Still I agree with the RAF policy for want of having a better and more useful one propounded.’53

  By 30 May, less than a week away from the proposed landings, Anthony Eden told the War Cabinet that there was a worrying reaction from the French and Belgians about the heavy pre-Overlord bombing campaign. Portal reported to the War Cabinet that ‘95% of RAF

  The Allied and Axis bombing campaigns, 1940–1945

  show finished; US got 50% to do.’ Lord Cherwell, the government’s scientific adviser, pointed out that Swiss newspapers which had hitherto been consistently friendly towards Britain were now full of denunciations. ‘I don’t think it was the right policy,’ said Churchill, in one of the few times that he was recorded saying such a thing in the verbatim reports.54 This seems to have represented the start of a process by which Churchill subtly distanced himself from what were later to be considered by many the ‘excesses’ of Bomber Command. Since he normally would not have cared a hoot for the views of the Swiss press, the subject must have been weighing on him. On 30 November 1944 – incidentally his seventieth birthday – Churchill interrupted Portal’s report to criticize the bombing of Holland: ‘800-900 German [casualties] against 20,000 Dutch – awful thing to do that.’55 Back on 27 June 1943, watching a film of Germany being bombed with Richard Casey, the Australian representative in the War Cabinet, Churchill had ‘sat bolt upright and said to [Casey] “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?” ’ It was probably meant rhetorically at that stage of the war, but he soon got the answer when Casey replied that ‘We hadn’t started it, and that it was us or them.’56

  After D-Day further efforts were made by the Americans – with large numbers of B-24 bombers now joining the B-17s – to shift concentration towards attacking German synthetic-oil supplies. Harris opposed this too, yet by then the Luftwaffe was somehow surviving on 10,000 tons of high-octane fuel a month, when 160,000 had once been required.57 Harris won, and between October 1944 and the end of the war more than 40 per cent of the 344,000 tons of bombs dropped by the RAF on Germany hit cities rather than purely military targets, even though the Allies had complete aerial superiority and the RAF could bomb their targets in daylight once again. This led to a row between Portal and Harris, with Harris spiritedly protecting his policy. Portal now wanted Bomber Command to concentrate on oil and transportation targets, which Harris still considered mere ‘panacea targets’. Yet the debate was only ever about the efficacy of the bombing offensive, not its morality, over which neither man had any doubts. Nor did Portal feel strong enough simply to order Harris to alter his targets, in the face of his immensely popular lieutenant’s opposition. In the last years of the war, Bomber Command continued to be hugely enlarged. Despite losses, the thirty-three squadrons with which it had begun the war had expanded to ninety-five by its end. As usual Canada made a disproportionate contribution to the war effort: RCAF squadrons made up the entirety of No. 6 Bomber Group, for example, which comprised fourteen squadrons and in 1944 flew 25,353 operational sorties, dropping 86,503 tons of bombs and mines with the lowest loss percentages of four-engined aircraft in the whole of Bomber Command. In all, one in four members of Bomber Command came from the overseas dominions, of whom no fewer than 15,661 did not live to see their native Australia, Canada, New Zealand or South Africa again.

  From February 1945, German west-to-east troop movements were being disrupted at the Russians’ urgent request by the Western Allies bombing the nodal points of Germany’s transportation system, including Berlin, Chemnitz, Leipzig and Dresden. But it was to be the raid on Dresden ten nights later that was to cause the most furious controversy of the entire CBO, which lasts to this day. During the Yalta Conference of 4 to 11 February 1945, the Chiefs of Staff meetings were held at Stalin’s headquarters, the Yusupov Villa at Koreiz, 6 miles from the Livadia Palace at Yalta where FDR stayed and where the plenary sessions took place. The British delegation stayed in ‘the slightly odd Moorish–Scottish baronial style’ Vorontsov Villa Palace overlooking the Black Sea at Alupka, 12 miles from the Livadia Palace.58 Alan Brooke was chairing the Chiefs of Staff meeting at the Yusupov Villa the day after the opening session when the Russian Deputy Chief of Staff Alexei Antonov and the Soviet air marshal Sergei Khudyakov ‘pressed the subject of [bombing German] lines of communication and entrainment, specifically via Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden’. In the view of one of those present at Yalta, Hugh Lunghi, who translated for the British Chiefs of Staff during these meetings with the Russians, it was this urgent request ‘to stop Hitler transferring divisions from the west to reinforce his troops in Silesia, blocking the Russian advance on Berlin’ that led to the bombing of Dresden only two days after the conference ended.59 (Of course this did not prevent the Soviets denouncing the bombing as an inhumane Anglo-American war crime forty years later during the Cold War, until it was pointed out to them that it had been they who had requested it.) At the time, however, the bombing of Dresden was not a major issue.

  The massive attack on Dresden just after 10 o’clock on the night of Tuesday, 13 February 1945 by 259 Lancaster bombers from RAF Swinderby in Lincolnshire as well as other nearby airfields – flying most of the way in 10/10ths (that is, total) cloud – and then by 529 more Lancasters a few hours later, and then by 529 Liberators and Flying Fortresses of the USAAF the next morning, has proved particularly controversial, but possibly for the wrong reasons. It has long been assumed that a disproportionately larg
e number of people died in a vengeance attack that had little or no strategic or military purpose. Yet though the attack on the beautiful, largely wooden, medieval city centre – ‘the Florence of the Elbe’ – was undeniably devastating, there were many war industries centred in this architectural jewel of southern Germany.60

  The 2,680 tons of bombs dropped laid waste to over 13 square miles of the city, and many of those killed were women, children, the old and some of the several hundred thousand refugees fleeing from the Red Army, which was only 60 miles to the east. ‘They were… suffocated, burnt, baked or boiled,’ writes the military historian Allan Mallinson.61 Nor was ‘boiled’ an exaggeration: piles of corpses had to be pulled out of a giant fire-service water tank where people had jumped to escape the flames but instead were boiled alive. The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut was a POW in Dresden the night it was bombed, and had to dig corpses out of the ruined city the morning afterwards. In his novel Slaughterhouse Five, which can be described only as semi-autobiographical because he is abducted by aliens and travels through time, the hero Billy Pilgrim nonetheless recalls how before the raid he had been ‘enchanted by the architecture of the city. Merry amoretti wove garlands above windows. Roguish fauns and naked nymphs peeked down at Billy from festooned cornices. Stone monkeys frisked among scrolls and seashells and bamboo.’62 Yet when Pilgrim and his German guards emerged at noon the day after the bombing, ‘the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.’ Pilgrim notices what seemed like ‘little logs lying around’, which had been people who had been caught in the firestorm. Houses were just ‘ashes and dollops of melted glass’. Digging corpses out of the rubble, ‘They didn’t smell bad at first, were wax museums. But then the bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was like roses and mustard gas.’ After a while, bodies were no longer excavated, ‘They were cremated by soldiers with flame-throwers right where they were. The soldiers stood outside the shelters, and simply sent the fire in.’63

  Vonnegut claimed that ‘around 130,000’ people died in the bombing of Dresden, but he took his figures from the former historian David Irving’s 1964 book The Destruction of Dresden, which have long been disproven. The true figure was probably around 20,000, as a special commission of thirteen prominent German historians, headed by the respected Rolf-Dieter Müller, has concluded.64 Claims by the Nazis at the time, and by post-war neo-Nazis since, that human bodies completely disappeared in the high temperatures have been shown by the commission to be false.

  By February 1945 the Allies had discovered the means to create firestorms, even in cold weather very different from that of Hamburg in July and August 1943. Huge ‘air mines’ known as ‘blockbusters’ were dropped, designed to blow out doors and windows so that the oxygen would flow through easily to feed the flames caused by the incendiary bombs. High-explosive bombs both destroyed buildings and just as importantly kept the fire-fighters down in their shelters. ‘People died not necessarily because they were burnt to death,’ records one writer, ‘but also because the firestorm sucked all the oxygen out of the atmosphere.’65 In Dresden, because the sirens were not in proper working order, many of the fire-fighters who had come out after the first wave of bombers were caught out in the open by the second.

  Yet this in itself does not make the raid the war crime that Labour’s Richard Stokes MP and Bishop George Bell described it as at the time and many have since assumed it to have been. For as the foremost historian of the operation, Frederick Taylor, has pointed out, Dresden ‘was by the standards of the time a legitimate military target’. As a nodal point for communications, with its railway marshalling yards and conglomeration of war industries – its pre-war industry based on porcelain, typewriters and cameras had been converted into an extensive network of armaments workshops, particularly in the vital optics, electronics and communications fields – the city was always going to be in danger once long-range penetration by bombers with good fighter escort was possible. ‘Why is it legitimate to kill someone using a weapon’, one historian has asked, ‘and a crime to kill those who make the weapons?’66

  Nor was it the Allies’ fault that the Nazi authorities in Dresden, and in particular its Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann, had failed to provide proper air-raid protection. There were inadequate shelters, sirens failed to work and next to no anti-aircraft guns were stationed there. When Mutschmann fell into Allied hands at the end of the war he quickly confessed that ‘A shelter-building programme for the entire city was not carried out’, because ‘I kept hoping that nothing would happen to Dresden.’ He nonetheless had two deep reinforced-concrete shelters built for himself, his family and senior officials, just in case he had been mistaken.67 Even though the previous October 270 people had been killed there by thirty USAAF bombers, the Germans thought Dresden too far east to be reached, since the Russians left the bombing of Germany almost entirely to the British and Americans. Quite why Mutschmann thought that, almost alone of large cities, Dresden should have been immune to Allied bombing is a mystery, for the Germans had themselves designated it ‘a military defensive area’.

  With his honed political instinct, Churchill could see that the Combined Bomber Offensive would provide a future line of attack against his prosecution of the war, and on 28 March 1945 he wrote to the Chiefs of Staff to put it on record that:

  It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land. We shall not, for instance, be able to get housing materials out of Germany for our own needs because some temporary provisions would have to be made for the Germans themselves. The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing… I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives… rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.68

  This minute has been described as sending ‘a thunderbolt down the corridors of Whitehall’. Harris, who had had considerable misgivings about the operation because of the long distances involved, was nonetheless characteristically blunt in defending the destruction of a city that once produced Meissen porcelain: ‘The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden could be easily explained by a psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munition works, an intact government centre and a key transportation centre. It is now none of those things.’69 One argument made since the war, that the raid was unnecessary because peace was only ten weeks off, is especially ahistorical. With talk of secret weaponry, a Bavarian Redoubt, fanatical Hitler Youth ‘werewolf’ squads and German propaganda about fighting for every inch of the Fatherland, there was no possible way of knowing how fanatical German resistance might be, and thus when the war would end.

  Although the Blitz on London and other British cities in 1940–41 did not break civilian morale as it was in part intended to do – indeed it stiffened it – the bombing was far lighter and shorter-lived than the retribution against Germany from 1940 to 1945, which certainly did leave very many Germans in despair. Defeatism was ever present, especially after D-Day, but unsurprisingly kept private in a totalitarian state where spreading it was a capital offence. A total of 955,044 tons of bombs were dropped by Bomber Command during the war, and this was bound to have a demoralizing effect, but overall it was the dawning knowledge that Germany not only was not going to win the war after all, but was instead going to be defeated, that wrecked morale in the Reich.70

  The second major reason why the Combined Bomber Offensive was justified, as well as ending the rate of increase in German armaments production, was because of the vast number of fighter aircraft that it forced Hitler to keep stationed on the defensive in Germany, when they would have proved invaluable in other places, primarily the all-important Eastern F
ront. The night before Albert Speer died in 1981, in a hotel room in London, he told the historian Norman Stone that the Allied bombing campaign ‘had caused so many German fighters simply to patrol the skies that there was not enough air power left for the Eastern Front’.71 This was true: by the spring of 1943, just as the Germans needed every weapon they could use for the Kursk offensive, no fewer than 70 per cent of all German fighter aircraft were stationed in the west.72 The Allied bombing campaign also forced the Germans to divert from offensive use as much as one-third of their artillery in anti-aircraft guns, two million men for anti-aircraft defence plus repairing, rebuilding and restoration, building air-raid bunkers and flak towers, and 20 per cent of all ammunition, just in order to protect the Reich from aerial assault.73 ‘German air power declined steadily on the Eastern Front during 1943 and 1944, when over two-thirds of German fighters were sucked into the contest with the [Allied] bombers,’ records Richard Overy. ‘By the end of 1943 there were 55,000 anti-aircraft guns to combat the air offensive – including 75 per cent of the famous 88mm gun, which had doubled with such success as an anti-tank weapon on the Eastern Front.’74 This meant that the Luftwaffe was forced to produce fewer bombers – 18 per cent of the total aircraft produced in 1944, against over 50 per cent in 1942 – even though bombers had hugely aided Hitler in his eastern victories of 1941–2, with their devastation of Russian aerodromes, industry and military installations.

  In his 1969 autobiography, Inside the Third Reich, Speer denied that Allied bombing had weakened the German public’s morale, and that the 9 per cent loss of production capacity in 1943 might even have been ‘amply balanced out by increased effort’, but he accepted that the ‘ten thousand anti-aircraft guns [whose barrels] were pointed towards the sky’ in Germany and the west instead ‘could have well been employed in Russia against tanks and other ground targets’.75 More rounds of 88mm or higher-calibre ammunition were produced in 1941–3 for non-tank than for anti-tank purposes, and one-third of Germany’s optical industry and half her electronics industry was engaged in producing gun-sights, radar and communications networks for defence against bombing, leaving front-line troops without infantry walkie-talkies and artillery sound-ranging apparatus, such as the Western Allies were developing.76