The German Air Force was planning neither an aerial banquet nor a programme of gas warfare. Instead, the operations staff took stock of what had been achieved by the end of 1940 and produced a plan of attack for the spring which was designed to be the ‘culmination point’ of the campaign before the transfer to the war against the Soviet Union.175 In mid-January 1941 a list of priority targets was drawn up, uniting the blockade strategy with the campaign against British aircraft production (see Table 2.2). These formed the main objectives in the final six months of the campaign between January and June 1941 and were confirmed by a directive from Hitler’s headquarters on 6 February, which once again emphasized the military importance of attacking war-essential targets rather than residential areas.176 In January the air fleets were sent new maps of ports, docks, principal naval installations and aircraft industry targets. Attacks on the aircraft industry were divided between operations against areas of concentrated armaments production (Coventry, Birmingham, Sheffield) and individual targets suitable for attack by a small number of aircraft on clear nights.177 Particular attention was to be paid to shipping and port facilities, which were now thought to have suffered much less damage from the bombing in 1940 than at first believed. Air intelligence estimates for the port of London had at first assumed a decline of up to 80 per cent in the handling capacity of the main docks. By January the available intelligence suggested that London was still operating at almost three-quarters of its capacity despite months of heavy raiding, a figure that did indeed reflect the reality.178 To ensure that the food blockade worked more effectively, bomber units were instructed to attack grain silos, sugar refineries and oilseed plants
Table 2.2: Principal Targets for German Bomb Attack, Spring 1941
Ports I Rank Porst II Rank/Naval Depots Aircraft Industry Aircraft Industry
I Rank II Rank
Merseyside Southampton Manchester Preston
London Barrow-in-Furness Birmingham Gloucester
Clydeside Port Talbot Coventry Cheltenham
Humber ports Great Yarmouth Glasgow Oxford
Belfast Portsmouth Belfast Chelmsford
Bristol Plymouth Bristol Slough
Tyne ports Chatham Sheffield Reading
Tees ports Rosyth Derby Yeovil
Swansea Luton
Cardiff Liverpool*
Leith
* Liverpool to be subjected to area attack as the principal port for American aircraft supplies.
Source: TsAMO, Fond 500/725168/110, Operations Staff, report on British targets and air strength, 14 Jan 1941.
German bombing followed the plan closely in 1941. Between January and May there were 61 major raids on ports and 9 major raids on armaments centres, as well as numerous smaller Störangriffe against industrial or naval targets. These included heavy raids on Glasgow-Clydeside on 13 and 14 March, 7 April and 5 May, and on the Merseyside area on 12 and 13 March and the first four nights in May, and on Hull on the 18 March and 7–8 May. Belfast, the Northern Ireland capital, was bombed heavily on 15 April (leaving 700 dead), and Dublin, the capital of neutral Ireland, was bombed by accident on 2–3 January and again on 31 May (causing 34 deaths).179 Coventry was visited again on the night of 8 April with almost as large an attack as the one in November. The largest raids, however, were reserved for London. On 16 April, 681 bombers delivered 886 tonnes of bombs and three nights later 712 aircraft dropped 1,026 tonnes and 4,252 incendiary canisters, the largest raid of the whole campaign. These were again described as ‘vengeance attacks’ for the RAF bombing of central Berlin on 10 April, which destroyed the State Opera House, and damaged Humboldt University and the State Library. The opera house was to have hosted a leading Italian opera company the following week, which may well explain why Hitler chose to subject Göring to an angry tirade following the attack.180 A final heavy ‘vengeance’ raid was inflicted on London on 10 May by 505 aircraft dropping 718 tonnes of high explosive and damaging the Houses of Parliament, but after that night-time bombing tailed away.
A high proportion of incendiaries were carried in the raids in 1941 and large-scale fires started. Photo-reconnaissance confirmed that incendiary bombs did more damage to port areas and storehouses than high explosives, with the result that the ratio between incendiary and high-explosive loads reached 1:1.181 In the last weeks of the campaign German bombers undertook a wide variety of operations. In April the three air fleets flew 5,448 sorties; 3,681 on major raids, 1,292 on Störangriffe, 263 against shipping targets at sea and 212 for sea-mining. The constant activity produced continually high losses. Between January and June 1941, 572 bombers were destroyed and 496 damaged; the figures for fighters were 299 lost and 300 damaged.182 By 17 May the bomber arm had 769 serviceable aircraft out of an established strength of 1,413, divided between the northern European and the Mediterranean theatres. This was 30 per cent smaller than the number of bombers available for the start of the campaign in France and it was to have serious repercussions on the impending operation against the Soviet Union. For the rest of the war the bomber arm never again achieved the size it had enjoyed on 10 May 1940.
For German aircrew the last months of the campaign were difficult to sustain. Thousands of casualties were taken for a campaign where there was no clear conclusion and results that could only be speculated over. Moreover, from March 1941 the air units in the west knew that the bulk of forces would be diverted to the war in the east; some forces were already detailed for combat in the Mediterranean and, from April, in the Balkan campaigns against Greece and Yugoslavia. Those that remained for the campaign against Britain were told to bomb with ever greater concentration and accuracy to compensate for the reduced numbers. On 16 March a directive was issued to the three air fleets explaining that part of Air Fleet 3 would stay behind in France during the Barbarossa campaign while the rest of the air force moved east. The remaining bomber force, including the small number posted in Norway (Air Fleet 5), was instructed to keep up the pressure on British supply by attacking ships in port and at sea and to raid aero-industry targets opportunistically. Attacks on London as ‘vengeance’ were to be carried out only when instructed by the air force High Command.183 On 22 May the first stage in transferring Air Fleet 2 to the east began when command and organization units were sent to Posen in Poland. On 8 June air groups began a two-week transfer eastwards, leaving just 8 bomber groups out of 44. On 25 June Air Fleet 3 completed its reorganization across the whole of northern France. The reduced activity was immediately evident. In June only 6 major raids were mounted and 221 Störangriffe, in contrast to 31 major raids and 852 minor raids in April and May.184 In France and the Low Countries the constant drone of German aircraft and the noisy presence of thousands of crewmen suddenly ceased. Londoners had their first month of almost uninterrupted sleep.
What did the eleven-month bombing campaign achieve? Although Hitler did not halt the bombing until the switch to the campaign against the Soviet Union, his few remarks show a sustained scepticism about the possibility of achieving anything decisive by air action alone. In December 1940 he dismissed the effects of bombing on British industry as minimal.185 Göring later claimed that he had told Hitler repeatedly that raiding London would ‘never force them to their knees’.186 The prospect that bombing would bring about a political collapse faded the longer the campaign continued. When the navy commander-in-chief discussed the bombing campaign with Hitler in February 1941, he found the Führer in complete agreement with his view that morale in Britain had remained ‘unshaken’ by the bombs.187 Hitler was generally more optimistic about the sea blockade and the submarine war, to which bombing contributed indirectly. In his directive of 6 February he emphasized the importance of attacks on shipping and ports, but concluded that the effects on the British willingness to fight had been the least successful aspect of the bombing.188 In spring 1941 he assumed that Britain could be dealt with by bombing and invasion after the defeat of the Soviet Union, in the summer of 1942. ‘We’ll deal with them later,’ he told a sceptic
al Göring, ‘if the stubborn Churchill fails to see sense.’189
There were nevertheless strategic gains to be made from the bombing campaign, which Hitler also recognized. The bombing kept up consistent pressure on the British war effort and always carried the possibility that Britain’s war willingness would decline to the point of abandoning the struggle. It is also possible to read the bombing as a warning to the United States not to support Britain or to intervene in the conflict. President Roosevelt received regular reports on the course of the air war and it was some months before either he or the United States military leadership were confident enough of Britain’s survival to send aid without the risk that it would fall into German hands.190 The bombing also supported German strategy in other parts of Europe. During the latter part of 1940 Hitler became increasingly concerned with the Mediterranean and Balkan theatres, not only because of Italian difficulties in the war with British Commonwealth forces in North Africa and the Italian invasion of Greece, launched on 28 October 1940, but because he feared that Britain might intervene militarily in the Balkans, opening up the possibility of a third front, as had happened in the First World War.191 Bombing was one way to ensure that large resources would have to be kept in mainland Britain rather than be diverted to other theatres, weakening the British position in the Mediterranean, Middle East and South-East Asia, where small numbers of obsolete aircraft would prove no match for the German and, later, the Japanese air forces. In spring 1941 the British were expelled from Greece and Crete, unable to contest German air superiority, and the way was open for Hitler’s invasion to the east.
Above all the bombing was intimately linked with the decision to invade Russia in 1941. The two strands of Hitler’s strategy are usually described as if they were separate, but they were complementary: first because bombing would persuade Moscow that the war in the west was Hitler’s priority; second because it would limit any help that Britain might be able to give the Soviet Union once Barbarossa was under way. The German air campaign certainly convinced Stalin that Hitler intended to finish Britain off first and contributed to his conviction that Germany would not attack the Soviet Union in 1941. The Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky, confirmed in his memoirs the Soviet view at the time that Hitler did not just want to use bombing as pressure on Britain to negotiate, but as a prelude to the physical conquest of the British Isles.192 It is not by chance that the German Air Force indulged in a final heavy flourish against Britain in the weeks just before the launch of Barbarossa. Moreover, the war against the Soviet Union would have presented a greater element of risk if Britain had been allowed the luxury to arm and prepare for military intervention or increased bombing of Germany once German forces were occupied in the east, as a German wartime analysis of the bombing later suggested:
In general the 10 months of uninterrupted attacks on the British Isles were of considerable importance in the subsequent unfolding of events. Even if this purely strategic air offensive did not force any decisions, the damage to enemy supplies and economy was nevertheless great … It was two years before the RAF was able to deal any effective counter blows. Thus the time when the Reich would have come under heavy attack had been delayed. Our flyers had assured that the Russian offensive would not be undermined from the rear.193
When the invasion of the Soviet Union began in late June 1941, Goebbels observed in his diary that the RAF had ‘by and large not exploited the situation’ beyond a handful of unsuccessful raids. German bombing had pushed Britain onto the defensive at a critical juncture for German strategy.194
The difficult task was to be able to gauge with any degree of certainty exactly what effect bombing had had on Britain’s supply of essential food and materials or on British aircraft production. Unlike the British and Americans at the end of the war, the German Air Force was never able to carry out its own bombing survey. In general, its view was over-optimistic about the degree of damage. The aggregate picture of the campaign, the first of its kind, suggested to the Germans the possibility of really debilitating effects. (Details of the location and weight of bombs dropped on major night raids are in Table 2.3.) Nevertheless, the only material the air force had to go on to assess damage were pilots’ reports, photo-reconnaissance and occasional foreign news reports or accounts by neutral observers. Such intelligence could be frustratingly ambiguous, as British and American assessors were to discover later in the war. The photo-reconnaissance of Coventry and Birmingham after the major raids in November 1940 was inhibited by smoke and cloud over the chief target areas, and conclusions had to be extrapolated from the condition of the visible area.195 The observations of neutrals could be read a number of ways. The American report cited earlier on the long-term damage to London’s infrastructure also contained the author’s opinion that the one important thing evident in the capital among all classes was ‘a mood of remarkable courage, phlegm, an element of “aprés nous le deluge” ’. As a result, he continued, ‘the majority of Londoners are firmly convinced that despite everything, England will win’.196
Table 2.3: Major Night Raids on the British Isles and Weight of Bombs (Tonnes), 12 August 1946–26 June 1941
City HE Bombs Incendiaries Number of Attacks
London 14,754 1,135 79
Liverpool 2,796 304 14
Birmingham 2,057 225 11
Bristol 1,237 248 10
Plymouth 1,125 207 8
Portsmouth 1,091 180 5
Southampton 971 88 7
Coventry 797 69 2
Glasgow 748 176 4
Manchester 703 106 4
Sheffield 587 70 3
Hull 474 57 3
Swansea 363 103 4
Cardiff 273 63 3
Belfast 180 25 2
Others 550 60 –
Total 28, 706 3, 116 159
Source: BA-MA, RL2 IV/27, Bechtle lecture, appendix, ‘Grossangriffe bei Nacht gegen Lebenszentren Englands in der Zeit 12.8.1940–26.6.1941’.
Air force conclusions were necessarily based on an extravagant and generous interpretation of what had been done. Exaggeration was built into air force estimates of achievement in this, as in most other bombing campaigns during the war. The sight of a blazing city below, the gutted ruins spied from the air a day or so later, suggested complete devastation. All bombing forces assumed that a bombed factory was a destroyed factory, when in reality it meant a factory that needed repairing or dispersing. Ships claimed as sunk by pilots, who could only briefly watch the plume of water or the fires on deck after the bombs fell, might just as easily limp to port hours later. Records show that German pilots regularly reported around four times the number of enemy aircraft actually shot down. In most of these cases there was no way of verifying the claims, though knowledge of the gap between published RAF claims and actual damage to German units ought to have raised serious doubts. And indeed air intelligence used the evidence of physical damage to the British aero industry to try to assess RAF capability over the course of the Blitz rather than rely on pilot reports, though this too was largely conjectural. It was calculated that the output of British combat aircraft fell from a peak of 1,100 in July 1940 to a low of 550 by April 1941. A figure of 7,200 was suggested for total output in 1941. In fact, production in April alone was 1,529, and for the whole year, 20,094.197
On the other effects of bombing there was more reticence. No effort seems to have been made to calculate the number of deaths and the area of housing damaged. The eventual death toll of 43,384 from June 1940 to June 1941 was far in excess of the deaths inflicted on the German population by British bombing, which in 1940 numbered only 975. In the absence of any published statistics, it is unlikely that the German side could possibly have guessed how heavy the toll of civilians was. The population was not a specified target, though civilian deaths were to be expected. The high level of casualty was a result not only of the growing inaccuracy of German bombing already noted, but also of the congested nature of the working-class quarters around the major port areas that were
bombed and the poor level of shelter provision generally available in inner-city precincts. What interested the German High Command more was damage to the British war effort, which shaped their view of what bombing was supposed to achieve. Throughout the campaign it was stressed how extensive must be the cost to British military output and the supply of military personnel. In a daily briefing to the air force in May 1941, Göring assured his crews that German attacks had achieved ‘enormous damage to the point of complete destruction’ of British armaments capacity. A later summary of the bombing campaign by the air force historical branch in July 1944 continued to assert that ‘many armament factories and ports in England were destroyed and their reconstruction delayed due to the possibility of further attack’. All this was so much guesswork.
Fortunately for the historian, the British authorities undertook their own statistical surveys of German bombing. From October 1940 careful records were kept of all forms of casualty and damage to housing and industry. Estimates of the impact on production were derived from calculating fluctuations in the aggregate supply of electric power to bombed cities. By December there were calculations of the extensive average damage of one ton of German bombs on London: 6 people killed, 25 wounded, 35 rendered homeless, 80 made temporarily homeless, 10 houses destroyed, 25 temporarily uninhabitable, 80 slightly damaged.198 These proved to be exceptional figures from the early heavy raids. Over the whole course of the German offensive, according to the government scientific adviser Patrick Blackett, German bombs killed 0.8 persons per ton (about four times the rate of RAF killing of Germans in 1941), a total of 44,652 people throughout 1940 and all of 1941. An additional 52,370 were seriously injured. Damaged housing totalled over 2 million, though most were quickly repaired.199
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 16