The air attacks on Warsaw were designed to speed up the capitulation of the armed forces defending the city, but no more than that. When Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, designated ‘Air Leader for Special Tasks’ (Fliegerführer zur besonderen Verfügung) and a veteran of the Guernica bombing, requested annihilating attacks on the whole urban area, the German Air Force chief of staff, Colonel-General Hans Jeschonnek, refused.13 Nevertheless, the impression made on the Polish population and those foreigners unlucky enough to be caught in the path of the bombing was of deliberately random attack. A Polish doctor, Zygmunt Klukowski, drove through Lublin on 4 September, where he saw his first evidence of the bombing: ‘three completely destroyed apartment buildings. Many buildings had broken windows and collapsed roofs.’ Five days later he survived eight raids on Lublin in one day: ‘Practically everyone prayed,’ ran his diary. ‘Some civilians were shaking with fright.’ Klukowski observed that he had experienced nothing quite like this in the First World War.14 Chaim Kaplan described in his diary the hell in Warsaw, worse than ‘Dante’s description of the Inferno’; everyone ran to shelter in ‘dark holes’, full of hysterical women.15 An unlucky strike hit the American ambassador’s residence outside Warsaw on 2 September.16 The gap between the air force orders, which specified economic, military and administrative targets, and the reality on the ground, reflected the overwhelming air power German forces were able to bring to bear, but above all the problems faced in achieving a high degree of accuracy even when dive-bombing from low altitude, a problem that characterized almost all bombing operations throughout the war. German post-operational research showed that two aircraft factories at Mielec and Lublin, reported by the pilots who bombed them as destroyed, were untouched. Trains were seen steaming along tracks described by pilots as ‘wrecked’ shortly before.17 A post-operational assessment made by General Hans Speidel in November highlighted the particular importance that had been attached to destroying sources of power (electricity, gas), but since many of these installations were located close to residential zones, the raids inevitably involved civilian casualties.18 A final figure for the dead in Warsaw from bombing has never been calculated with any certainty. Many were the victims of artillery fire rather than bombing; Chaim Kaplan thought shelling to be the greater menace to the civilian population.19 The claims that between 20,000 and 40,000 died is certainly an exaggeration, for fatalities on this scale would have required a firestorm on the scale of Hamburg in 1943 or Dresden in 1945, and of that there is no evidence, nor was the German Air Force at that stage capable of creating one. Current estimates suggest around 7,000 dead, on the assumption that casualty rates per ton of bombs might have equalled the Dresden raid, but a casualty rate equivalent to the Blitz on London would mean around 2,500 deaths on the basis of the limited tonnage dropped.20
The German Air Force itself made the most of its contribution to victory in Poland and in doing so helped to nurture the myth of Warsaw’s destruction from the air. The propaganda arm produced the film Baptism of Fire (Feuertaufe), a documentary deliberately designed to present to the German public and to foreign audiences the image of awesome aerial power exerted against the unfortunate Poles. In November 1939 the new Reich Commissar of the Polish ‘General-Government’, Hans Frank, hosted neutral diplomats and military attachés formerly accredited to Warsaw at a reception in the former capital. In his address he asked them to examine closely the extensive bomb damage in Warsaw (it was claimed that out of 17,000 buildings only 300 had escaped unscathed); as a result of their observations he suggested they should ‘recommend to their respective Governments to intercede for peace’.21 By February 1940 Mussolini was openly talking of the 40,000 Poles who he claimed had died in the ruins of Warsaw, though only 12 per cent of the city had been destroyed or seriously damaged, and not all of that was due to bombing.22 The Hitler regime was happy to make political capital out of the bombing, just as the German Air Force clearly exploited the Polish campaign to enhance its own political weight and strategic status alongside the German Army. Yet the fact remains that the air campaign in Poland was a model of the operational air warfare elaborated before 1939, with air forces closely supporting the land campaign by destroying (with a wide margin of error) military, industrial and infrastructure targets designed to weaken Polish military resistance – and not an example of ruthless Douhetism.
The second major city attack occurred in the early stages of the German aggression against the Low Countries and France, which began on 10 May 1940. Part of the plan was to move the right wing of the German Army Group B through the Netherlands using a combination of surprise paratroop attack, air strikes on military targets and a ground assault. The German priority was to seize Dutch airfields and key communication points, which was largely achieved, though at high cost. By 13 May German forces had reached and occupied southern Rotterdam, but were facing stiff resistance around the bridges over the River Maas, running through the centre of the city. The German Eighteenth Army issued orders to General Schmidt’s XXXIX Corps to break Dutch resistance in the city using all means available, since speed was essential for the rest of the campaign plan. Orders were given to carry out air attacks on 14 May against military targets in the area facing the German Army. That morning, following a German threat to destroy the city, the Dutch authorities began negotiating its surrender. A little after noon, Schmidt ordered the air force units to abandon plans for the raid: ‘bombing attack Rotterdam postponed owing to surrender negotiations’.23
While talks continued, a large number of Heinkel He111s appeared in the sky, flying in two separate formations towards the centre of the city. Schmidt hastily ordered red flares to be fired; ‘for God’s sake,’ he was heard to say, ‘there’ll be a catastrophe’. Half the 100 aircraft saw the flares and turned back, but 57 dropped their load as directed on Dutch army targets in an urban triangle to the north of the river, in the process burning down 2.8 square miles of the defended area and killing, according to the most recent estimate, 850 people.24 Much of the damage was done by fire caused by leaking oil installations after the bombing. At 3.30 that afternoon the city formally surrendered and to avoid further damage and loss of civilian life, the Dutch Army capitulated a day later. In his memoirs the commander of Air Fleet 2, Albert Kesselring, claimed that radio contact with German forces in Rotterdam broke down at midday so that the cancellation order never got through, but the commander of the bombing squadrons involved later gave testimony that the surrender negotiations were known about and that red flares, fired by German forces from an island on the River Maas, were the signal to abandon the raid if negotiations were still being conducted. One group did see the flares; for the other group, heavy smoke from the battle below obscured them.25 There has never been much doubt that the operation against Rotterdam was occasioned by the difficult situation faced by German soldiers in the south of the city as they tried to force the bridges. Like the bombing of Warsaw, the operations against Rotterdam imposed heavy civilian casualties because the Dutch Army chose to defend the area rather than declare it an ‘open city’ or surrender. In both cases substantial damage and death were also caused by artillery fire. Whether or not Göring was attracted to the idea of displaying German air power once again as irresistible and ruthless, which has sometimes been suggested but never proved, the bombing of Rotterdam excited the same kind of extravagant attention as Warsaw. An RAF air-training manual issued in March 1944 described the attack as an unexampled atrocity with 30,000 dead in 30 minutes.26
Paris might have suffered something of the same fate as Rotterdam if the French Army and government had insisted on defending the French capital to the last. A number of military targets were bombed around Paris on 3 June, in the later stages of the campaign in the West, but on 11 June it was declared an ‘open city’ by the French commander-in-chief, Maxime Weygand, and evacuated by the government and military high command.27 The bombing that took place in France between 10 May and French surrender on 17 June was almost all of it tactical bom
bing, in support of the German offensive, or to prevent the evacuation of Allied (mainly British) troops in late May and the first half of June, or to destroy the French Air Force and its sources of supply. In the process, substantial damage was done to the towns and their civilian populations in the path of the oncoming German forces. Other places were declared ‘open cities’ to avoid the devastation of the First World War, including the cathedral town of Rheims. Once the Dunkirk pocket was eliminated, the German armies turned south towards Paris to complete the destruction of French military power. At this point German aircraft were free to roam over French territory; they were directed to attack rail communications, the aircraft and aero-engine industry and oil depots. Between 1 and 3 June long-range attacks destroyed the major rail links between Paris and most of the rest of France. During the first four days of June attacks were also mounted against the port areas at Marseilles (where there were oil storage tanks), Le Havre and the docks at the mouth of the River Rhône. On 3 June German bombers also hit nine French airfields and aircraft factories around Paris at Villacoublay, Les Mureaux and the Citroën works, killing 254 people, 195 of them civilians.28 The bombing began a panic, accelerating the growing movement to abandon the capital; on 8 and 9 June ministry personnel were evacuated. But the bombing was not resumed and Paris’s status as an ‘open city’ was respected for reasons that are still not entirely clear.29 German forces concentrated on the direct support of their own operations against what remained of the French Army and its Air Force. The German Air Force ended the era of rapid conquests as it had begun in Poland, clearing the way for the army to roll forward and secure final victory.
THE ‘ENGLAND-PROBLEM’
The exercise of German air power between September 1939 and June 1940 reflected a particular conception of ‘strategic’ air warfare in which victory was a combined achievement of the air forces and the army. The use of bombing was essentially tactical, even when targets distant from the actual front line were the object of attack. Although some German Air Force commanders thought that this form of force projection signified a new age of independent air warfare, and revelled in its novelty and power, there was a great difference between a campaign launched to support a major ground offensive and a campaign in which aircraft were working entirely on their own. The possibility in June 1940 that the German Air Force might be used to strike at Britain opened up for the first time the prospect of a genuinely independent bombing campaign, but it was by no means a certainty. In the summer of 1940 there were no plans for an air campaign against Britain that would last almost a year, though that is eventually what happened.
The priority for the German bombing force in June 1940 was to recuperate and reorganize after the effort made during the Western campaign. The bomber arm at the start of the invasion of France and the Low Countries had a strength of 1,711 aircraft with 1,084 available for service; by early July the regrouped bomber force had a strength of 1,437 with 993 serviceable aircraft. Between 10 May, when the campaign started, and 29 June, the air force had lost 1,241 combat aircraft, 51 per cent of them bombers. One-third of the bomber crew strength was lost during the same period, 446 out of 1,325 available.30 During June and July new aircraft and replacement crew joined the two air fleets assigned to northern France and the Low Countries: Air Fleet 2 under the newly promoted Field Marshal Albert Kesselring occupied an area from northern Germany to Le Havre on the French Channel coast; Air Fleet 3 under Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle (another beneficiary of the crop of promotions announced by Hitler after the defeat of France) was spread out from south-west Germany across occupied France to the Atlantic coast and the Normandy peninsula. Most of their aircraft were stationed on bases close to the coastline facing Britain. Fliegerkorps IV (Air Corps IV), which specialized in anti-shipping operations, was moved from Kesselring’s command to Sperrle’s, so that it could attack shipping approaching the English coast from the Atlantic. A smaller Air Fleet 5, under General Hans Stumpff, was stationed in Norway for attacks against North Sea shipping and targets in Scotland and the north-east of England, though difficult flying conditions were to limit its contribution during the long aerial siege that unfolded from the autumn of 1940.
By late June it was not yet evident what direction German strategy would take now that German hegemony had been established over Continental Europe. Hitler and much of the German leadership and public hoped that the war in the West was over and that Britain would now try to seek a way to extricate itself from an unwinnable contest. In late June Hitler withdrew to his headquarters near Kniebis in the Black Forest where, according to his air force adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, ‘he sat in deep contemplation of his enemy’.31 Hitler had already speculated about the prospect of offering Britain a way to end the war, but he was not confident that a Britain led by Churchill would be likely to embrace negotiation.32 Another alternative was an invasion of southern England, the capture of London, and a dictated settlement. This possibility had already been suggested by the German Navy commander-in-chief, Grand-Admiral Erich Raeder, in meetings with Hitler on 21 May and 20 June, partly to ensure that the next campaign, if there were one, would give a higher profile to the navy. Raeder nevertheless repeatedly warned of the high risks involved with a cross-Channel assault; his personal preference was for another approach altogether, a concerted strategy of blockade directed at British trade using aircraft, submarines and surface raiders to reduce British imports and stocks to an insupportably low level.33 This was a strategic choice with strong echoes from the First World War when the German Navy had promised that unrestricted submarine warfare, launched in 1917, would sink enough tonnage every month to force Britain out of the war. Blockade was also a strategy strongly supported by the air force. In November 1939 the air staff drew up detailed target plans for attacks on British shipping, ports and food stocks. The head of German Air Intelligence, Colonel Joseph ‘Beppo’ Schmid, in a paper entitled ‘Proposal for the Conduct of Air Warfare against Britain’, argued a powerful case that in this war it was Britain which was more vulnerable to blockade. ‘Key is to paralyse British trade,’ he wrote, to counter-blockade the blockader.34
In the end Hitler opted for all three possibilities, and achieved none of them. The air-sea blockade of Britain was already in being, based on a still-active directive first issued from Hitler’s headquarters on 29 November 1939 in which he had ordered extensive aerial mining of British coastal waters and estuaries.35 In early July Hitler finally decided to make an offer to Britain at the next session of the German Parliament, scheduled for 19 July, and asked his Foreign Secretary, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to draft a suitable speech. But at the same time, on 2 July, the armed forces were asked to begin exploratory planning for the possibility of invasion, and five days later were given a formal directive to prepare operational plans for the ‘War against England’. The same day, 7 July, Hitler informed the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, who was visiting Berlin, that he was inclined to unleash ‘a storm of wrath and of steel’ on the recalcitrant British, but had not finally made up his mind. Ciano found Hitler ‘calm and reserved, very reserved for a German who has won’.36 On 16 July Hitler finally ordered the invasion as a priority. Given the codename ‘Operation Sea Lion’ (Seelöwe), the directive explained that a landing on the south-east coast of England between Ramsgate in Kent and the Isle of Wight would be possible only if the English Air Force could be so morally and physically disabled ‘that it no longer showed any worthwhile capacity to attack the German crossing’.37 No definite date was announced until it was certain that Britain would not agree to talks.
In the early evening of 19 July Hitler duly made his offer to Britain in a packed and uncharacteristically sombre session of the German Parliament, now invaded by the reality of war. Laurel wreaths had been laid in the seats of six deputies killed in action during the land campaign; the front rows of the chamber balconies were populated by senior military commanders, smothered in braid, their medals gleaming. Most of the speech was a tr
iumphant review of German conquests. The war itself Hitler blamed on international Jewry; the ‘offer’ amounted to little more than an appeal to Britain to see sense.38 It was brusquely rejected in London as Hitler had suspected it would be. Invasion became by default the next option. Discussions with senior commanders in the days following the offer to Britain showed Hitler just how difficult the operation was going to be. The navy commander-in-chief emphasized the essential role of the air force in providing a protective umbrella over the landing grounds and keeping the Royal Navy at bay, but his lack of confidence was shared by Hitler. A strong case was made by Hitler’s chief of operations, Colonel Alfred Jodl, that Italy should play a full part in the defeat of Britain to make success more likely, by diverting Italian submarines to the Atlantic and Italian aircraft to northern France to take part in the bombing campaign. Although Hitler approved Jodl’s idea in August, the German military chiefs were characteristically unenthusiastic. (Eventually, between October 1940 and January 1941, a handful of Italian fighter and bomber squadrons flew a number of desultory raids from Belgian bases, dropping 54 tonnes of bombs on East Anglian ports.)39 The uncertainty about invasion is one of the explanations for Hitler’s growing concern with the Soviet Union in the summer of 1940. At first Hitler hoped that Britain would abandon the war to free his hands for the more important clash with the Communist enemy and avoid a war on two fronts.40 When it became clear that Britain would not consider a cessation of hostilities, he turned the argument round. At a conference with the service commanders-in-chief on 31 July 1940 he suggested that the Soviet Union was Britain’s last hope in Europe and ordered that exploratory preparations begin for a massive blow to be struck against Soviet military power in the summer of 1941. On the same day in a conference with Raeder, Hitler nevertheless insisted on a final timetable for Sea Lion. The operation was to be ready by 15 September, to be launched at some point in the following ten days, but only if air superiority and adequate shipping could be guaranteed.41
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