The impact on the economy was much more modest. Official estimates suggested a loss of just 5 per cent of current production. Studies of the effects of bombing on urban activity rates, measured by electric power consumption, confirmed that except for the single exception of Coventry, which took six weeks to recover from the attack in November 1940, most cities suffered only a temporary loss of 10, 15 or 25 per cent of activity, and they made good that loss at an average of 3 percentage points a day, or between three and eight days.200 Railways, it was observed, ‘continued to maintain nearly normal service’ throughout the Blitz. In most cases temporary repairs and re-routing resulted in no more than a day’s delay. The longest reported interruption to the water supply in 1941 was 24 hours. The grid system for electricity and gas supply meant that industry was little affected by sporadic attacks on sources of energy. Only 0.5 per cent of oil stocks were lost as a result of air raids.201 The blockade was similarly unimpressive. The Ministry of Home Security calculated that the bombing destroyed only 5 per cent of British flour-milling capacity, 4 per cent of the production of margarine, 1.6 per cent of oilseed output and 1.5 per cent of the capacity of cold-storage facilities. At no time was the London docks outer basin unserviceable and bombing had ‘no appreciable effect’ on food supply to the capital.202 The measurement of morale was a more challenging task. In a comprehensive survey of the Blitz, produced in August 1941 by British Air Intelligence, it was concluded that ‘no town in England has suffered a breakdown in morale’, though it was admitted that it was not known at what scale of attack, if any, morale actually would collapse.203 The overall conclusion from the many assessments of German bombing was that it achieved high levels of civilian death and damage to housing, but on the critical issues of war economic performance, air force fighting power, food supply and civilian morale its effects were limited and temporary.
None of these British assessments took sufficient account of the costs to Britain’s war effort of maintaining large active air defences and an army of civil defence and emergency personnel, as later assessments of the cost of bombing in Germany have always done. The most significant strategic effect of bombing was the diversion of very substantial military and civilian resources to anti-aircraft defences and civil air-raid precautions. The personnel cost was high, and had to be sustained throughout the war. British Anti-Aircraft Command had 330,000 men by the summer of 1941 and went on to recruit 74,000 women from the Auxiliary Territorial Service.204 The civil defence services in June 1941 employed 216,000 full-time and 1,233,800 part-time personnel (ARP, casualty services, auxiliary police force).205 The fire services at the end of 1940 employed 85,821 full-time and 139,300 part-time, but were supported by the wartime Auxiliary Fire Service, which supplied an additional 67,024 full-time and 125,973 part-time.206 This totalled almost 700,000 full-time and 1.5 million part-time men and women, who would otherwise have been engaged in different wartime activities. The cost of sustaining this ‘civil defence economy’ – uniforms, equipment, provisions, welfare aid, coffins, shelters and so on – was a major item of national and local government expenditure.
The diversion of military resources was also very large. Fighter Command expanded its units in mainland Britain from 58 daytime squadrons in July 1940 to 75 day and night squadrons in January 1941 and 99 by September. As a result it proved impossible to send significant reinforcements of the most advanced fighters overseas. The Middle East and Far East were reinforced with growing numbers of technically inferior or obsolete British and American aircraft.207 Anti-aircraft guns, shells and equipment, and the growing radar network, all diverted production away from any offensive military effort. Defence of Britain was the priority. These many demands on Britain’s war effort as a result of the German bombing campaign represented a large net diversion of resources, regardless of whether the physical damage from German attacks was effective or not. In this sense German Air Force claims were right: Britain’s offensive war effort was curtailed in 1940 and 1941 by the bombing campaign and the expectation of its renewal.
‘HIGH SCHOOL FOR BOMBERS’: GERMAN BOMBING 1941–5
On 14 February 1944 a German Air Force Academy lecturer explored the many phases of the German bombing of Britain since 1941. For eighteen months, he told his audience, there had been no major inland attacks on England. Thanks to a solid and effective defence the only prospect for German bombers and fighter-bombers stationed in France was to undertake small hit-and-run raids on England’s south coast. Even these operations had fallen from an average of 15 a month in 1942 to 5 or 6 a month by late 1943. The risks for the pilots, he continued, were considerable. The raids on England were a kind of ‘high school for bombers’: pilots either learned their trade or they died. The average crew survived no more than 16 to 18 missions. ‘It’s plain to see,’ he concluded, ‘that in this way England’s war economy and morale cannot be hit in any war-decisive way.’208
In the summer of 1941 that is not how the future looked to either side. As noted, the German intention was to return to finish Britain off once the Soviet Union had been defeated in a six-month campaign. So confident was Hitler that the war would work out this way that in July 1941 he ordered the large-scale expansion of aircraft output and naval equipment to meet the expected renewal of the contest with Britain in 1942. Göring was able to extract a special priority order from Hitler (the so-called ‘Göring Programme’) to produce a fourfold increase in output, including a complement of around 400 heavier four-engine bombers (principally the Heinkel He177) in 1942 and around 1,000 in 1943.209 The development of very long-range bombers – nicknamed the ‘Amerikabomber’ – was moving out of the realm of fantasy. The Messerschmitt company had begun work on the Me264, which with a maximum range of over 9,000 miles would be capable of reaching American cities and returning to Europe. The idea circulated at Hitler’s headquarters from autumn 1940 of occupying the Azores as a potential base for long-range air attacks on the United States if, or when, they entered the war.210 The object for Sperrle’s Air Fleet 3 was to hold the line in 1941–2 until the full weight of German air strength could once again be brought to bear against the Western powers. It was this bleak scenario that British leaders also anticipated. Churchill harried the Air Ministry to expand night defences for the renewed ‘night-bombing season’ expected that autumn. Sholto Douglas, Dowding’s replacement at Fighter Command, wanted to expand night-fighter squadrons to at least 30 (from the 16 he had) by the end of the year to deal with ‘the heavy and prolonged attacks by night’ against British cities once the German Air Force had deployed its bombers westward during the winter lull in the ground fighting in Russia.211 It took some time before it was evident that German difficulties in the Soviet campaign would make it impossible ever again to mount a sustained bombing offensive against Britain.
In the second six months of 1941, Air Fleet 3 tried to find ways in which it could get at Britain with some strategic purpose despite its limited numbers. At first German bombers continued to carry out night raids on distant urban targets. Birmingham was hit three times in July 1941, Hull twice. In August the weather was so poor that there could be no raiding on 25 days of the month. In September the force switched to mining operations. In December small raids were made on Newcastle, Plymouth and Hull. German spirits were kept up by vastly exaggerating the losses inflicted on the enemy; for the cost of 236 German aircraft between July and December, the force claimed 1,223 RAF planes destroyed.212 As the urgent demands of other theatres drew aircraft away, Sperrle was left by the winter of 1941–2 with just two bomber groups. The most obvious route for his shrunken force to take was to help the navy in the war against British shipping. On 7 April 1942 Air Fleet 3 also took over command of the air-sea forces of Fliegerführer Atlantik and played a more effective part in the blockade war against ships at sea and southern English ports.213 Occasional raids were made by German night-fighters, flying low to attack RAF bomber stations, but these too petered out during 1942.
All this time Briti
sh defences were being expanded and their level of technical performance transformed. By 1943 there was a network of 53 inland radar stations (GCI) spread across the country from the Scilly Isles to the Orkney Islands, and all night-fighters were fitted with AI Mark IV sets for radar interception of incoming German aircraft.214 Luftflotte 3 losses averaged 10 per cent, an unacceptably high rate for a small force, short of reinforcements. By the end of 1941, RAF night-fighters, now chiefly Bristol Beaufighters converted to a night-fighter role, were inflicting loss rates of up to 18 per cent on the small and infrequent German raids.215 By spring 1942 Anti-Aircraft Command had supplies of new searchlights with radar detection and a new system for clustering them in ‘Killer Zones’ to achieve a more effective light trap, in conjunction with radar-directed guns and night-fighters. Improved gun-laying reduced the number of shells fired for each aircraft destroyed to 1,830, the lowest of the war.216 A German bomber group commander told an investigation team sent to evaluate Air Fleet 3 in March 1943 that any attacks overland against British targets under existing air defence conditions would produce ‘a catastrophe’.217
Nevertheless there were two final flurries of German bombing in the late spring of 1942 and the early spring of 1944, both of them inspired by a renewed desire to retaliate against the greatly expanded British bombing of German cities. The first came in April and May 1942 with the so-called Baedeker raids. The term ‘Baedeker’, after the well-known German tourist guides, was invented by the deputy director of the Foreign Office press department, Baron von Stumm, and it stuck despite Goebbels’ hostility to the idea of publicly boasting about ‘the destruction of things of cultural value’.218 The raids have usually been explained as a response to the RAF bombing of the ancient German ports of Rostock and Lübeck, which destroyed their medieval centres, but the main RAF raids on Rostock occurred after the Baedeker raids had started. In fact the origin of the renewed wave of bombing lay in an RAF attack on Paris in early March 1942. Hitler was incensed by the threat to the artistic and architectural heritage of the French capital, which had been spared in 1940 by the German Air Force, and demanded that Air Fleet 3 prepare a revenge attack on London. Göring, who throughout the long period of air force inactivity in the west chafed at the bit to start bombing again, ordered Hans Jeschonnek, the German Air Force chief of staff, to get Air Fleet 3 to start attacking British industry as well.219 Following the destruction of two-thirds of the historic port of Lübeck on 28–29 March, Hitler changed the order to bomb London into reprisal attacks against selected British cities with special historic or cultural value. This time bomber groups were permitted to carry out terror raids against the population as revenge for RAF attacks, but Göring told his crews that there was little to be gained from simply bombing residential districts, and ordered them to find useful military or economic objectives instead.220
The raids were carried out by small forces of between 40 and 70 aircraft, starting with Exeter on 23–24 April, followed by attacks on Bath on 25–26 April, Norwich on 27 and 29 April and, in between, York on 28 April. On 16 May Göring ordered raids against Canterbury too and the city was attacked on 31 May and 2 June. Two raids against the seaside resort of Weston-super-Mare in late June were later recorded by the German Air Force history office in the list of principal Baedeker targets, though its cultural value was at best modest (‘a popular watering-place’, according to the 1927 Baedeker Great Britain).221 Over the summer months some 30 raids were made, dropping a total of only 439 tonnes on target, but by August the thick defence and declining numbers brought the raids to a halt. The brief campaign had almost no strategic effect except to provoke an even higher level of defensive alertness and technical improvement on the part of the enemy. In the first three months of 1943 only 67 tonnes of bombs were dropped on target, mostly along the English south coast. German aircraft were forced to fly low and to shift course constantly to avoid detection by enemy radar. Little reliance was made on radio navigation, and the results on poorly illuminated nights were regarded by the field commanders as ‘worthless’.222
The second brief campaign occurred in the spring of 1944, following repeatedly heavy attacks against the German capital in the ‘Battle of Berlin’ in the autumn of 1943. The roots of what was codenamed Operation Steinbock lay in Hitler’s angry insistence in the spring of 1943 that the German Air Force do something to intensify the air war against Britain in order to counter the remorseless impact of the Anglo-American Combined Bomber Offensive and satisfy growing popular demands for retaliation.223 Secret missile development, which Hitler hoped would prove decisive, was still more than a year from operational readiness. In mid-March Göring’s deputy, Field Marshal Erhard Milch, convened a meeting to discuss ways of rebuilding air striking power against Britain. One way, it was concluded, lay in improvements to the existing technology. Air Fleet 3 was promised increased supplies of the new fast medium bomber, the Messerschmitt Me410, the improved Junkers Ju188S and the Focke-Wulf Fw190 fighter-bomber version with additional drop fuel tanks; a more effective incendiary bomb and improved radar aids (Lichtenstein-R and Neptun-R) were also expected to raise the operational effectiveness of the force.224 It was also promised larger numbers. Throughout 1943, despite growing pressure to give priority to fighters, plans were hatched to expand bomber output. By December 1943 Göring was calling for an increase in bomber output to 900 a month, from the modest 410 achieved in October. It was indicative of the declining political influence of the air force commander-in-chief that these ambitions remained in the realm of fantasy.225
On 1 April 1943 Colonel Dietrich Peltz was appointed Angriffsführer England (Attack Leader England) with instructions to find ways of reviving the enervated bombing campaign. He was a successful commander with experience of the 1940–41 bombing and was soon to be promoted general at the remarkably young age of 29. His reputation was his undoing. In May he was appointed Inspector of Bombers and in June a sudden emergency in the Mediterranean saw him transferred away from the revived England campaign before anything had been achieved. During his absence the airmen responsible for the anti-shipping campaign tried to get the promised new resources allocated instead to the blockade strategy on the grounds that land bombing had never proven its worth. In conjunction with the promised new submarines and the use of new long-range aircraft it was argued that the level of tonnage attrition might reach 1.5 million tonnes a month, enough to seriously damage Anglo-American invasion plans.226 Some sense of the frustration felt by those in charge of the air-sea effort was expressed in a facetious letter to Hans Jeschonnek in early September 1943. ‘If for example,’ wrote the Fliegerführer Atlantik, Lt General Ulrich Kessler, ‘bombs are dropped on an English country house where dances are taking place, there is little possibility of killing anyone of importance, since Churchill doesn’t dance …’. But bombs on ships, he continued, ‘is the deciding factor in this war’.227 By the time the letter arrived, Jeschonnek had killed himself, unable to bear the continued pressure of coping with air force failures after the successful Allied raid on the air force research station at Peenemünde in August.
The attempt to shift strategy once again to a naval-air blockade failed to convince either Hitler or Göring. Peltz returned to his role as Angriffsführer and succeeded in scraping together 524 bombers and fighter-bombers for the renewed ‘England-Attack’, of which 462 were serviceable. The aircraft were mainly the older Ju88s and Dornier Do217s, and a handful of He177 heavy bombers. The promised new equipment failed to materialize. The standard of training and preparation for long-range attacks was known to be poor, and serviceability rates were low. Peltz relied on the target-marking Kampfgruppe 66, who had greater experience of city bombing, though they could still be misled by British countermeasures. To increase the damage, the aircraft were to carry 70 per cent incendiaries, as British bombers did.228 On 1 December Hitler approved renewed operations for ‘long-range warfare against England’. Göring saw the campaign as an opportunity to show once again what the air force cou
ld do. ‘If we succeed in carrying out vengeance on the sharpest scale,’ he announced, ‘this will exercise the greatest effect on the war-weariness of the English people, stronger than anything else.’229
On 21 January 1944 the first raid of ‘Operation Steinbock’ was flown against London. One of the German casualties that night was an He177, the first time the Allies had ever seen a German heavy bomber over London. Out of the 500 tonnes destined for the city only 30 tonnes reached the target. Of the 14 raids on London between January and April, only 4 delivered even half the destined tonnage in the right place. A typically abortive operation was undertaken by 13 He177s on 13 February: one burst a tyre on takeoff, eight turned back with engine trouble, one flew to Norwich by mistake and then jettisoned its bombload in the Zuyder Zee, and three reached London, where one was shot down. Attacks on Bristol and Hull failed to find the cities at all. On the nights when the pathfinders succeeded in reaching the target, there was a significant concentration of bombing. In London there were 890 deaths, the highest level of casualty since May 1941.230 In the February raids the German crews used for the first time thousands of small strips of foiled paper known by the codename Düppel (first used by the RAF under the codename ‘Window’ for the devastating attack on Hamburg in July 1943). Though intended to blind British radar, it did not stop night-fighters and anti-aircraft fire from exacting a high toll on the attacking force.231 Losses of between 5 and 8 per cent for a force that could not be replenished led to the collapse of the renewed campaign after a few weeks. The last attack, on Falmouth in Cornwall, took place on 29 May. By that stage Peltz had just 107 aircraft left, far too few to pose any threat to the Allied invasion of France, which took place a week later.
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 17