Table 6.2: The Build-Up of the Eighth Air Force, 1943–5
* figure for December 1943.
Sources: AFHRA, 520.056–188, Statistical Summary Eighth Air Force Operations 1942–1945; CD A5835, Eighth Air Force, Growth, Development and Operations, December 1942–December 1943, Personnel Status, Exhibit 1.
The Eighth Air Force also suffered from the absence of a large corps of trained officers and men from the pre-war air force. Some senior airmen had combat experience from the First World War, but most younger officers had not had to fire a gun or drop a bomb in anger. Arnold acknowledged that with only 1,500 regular officers in 1941, spread worldwide a year later, ‘the experience level is very thin’.61 Tactical thinking about the conduct of long-range bomber operations was in its infancy and relied on learning from both the British and German experience. The large number of volunteers in the United States for service in the air force had not, like those in the RAF, witnessed the battles over northern France and southern England or seen what bombing might achieve. Eaker called them ‘sturdy amateurs’, not lacking in enthusiasm or courage, but not the equivalent of a highly trained peacetime force.62 Brig. General Haywood Hansell, temporarily in command of the Eighth Bomber Command before Longfellow’s appointment (hitherto commander of the First Bombardment Wing), produced a report for Eaker in February 1943 suggesting that the force was simply not ready yet for a major offensive against Germany. Hansell added that for the following months crews should be asked to undertake shallow attacks against German targets to keep losses to a minimum and to practise with the new target-finding apparatus, Oboe and H2S, taken over from the RAF.63 Nevertheless, the pressure on the Command to show that it could produce results made it difficult for Eaker to limit what was done, even when the early raids sustained high losses and resulted in extensive combat fatigue. Between January and April the monthly loss rate averaged almost 7 per cent, too high a figure for such a small force.64 The slow expansion of the bomber units meant that crews arriving together from the United States might be broken up to fill the losses in existing Groups. This process, Eaker told Arnold, created ‘an understandable and definite loss of morale’.65
The problems faced by the Eighth Air Force in adjusting to new conditions of combat, thousands of miles from the United States with thousands of freshmen aircrew, were exacerbated by the often poor relations between American airmen and the British communities that had to accommodate and service them. The relationship with the air force suffered from the instinctive sense of competition between the Eighth and Bomber Command, since they were the only servicemen actively in battle against the German homeland. The numbers involved were also very large – by December 1943 there were 283,000 servicemen and civilians in the Eighth Air Force – while the irregular nature of air combat gave aircrew long periods when they lived among predominantly civilian communities. One woman, keeping a diary for Mass Observation, condemned Americans as ‘loud, bombastic, bragging, self-righteous’. Opinion polls showed that the British public most disliked American ‘boastfulness’, ‘immaturity’ and ‘materialism’.66 Though established prejudices might explain some of this reaction, the behaviour of mostly very young men a long way from home, learning ‘British English’, contributed to the confrontation. Eighth Air Force commanders were warned in December 1942 that ‘unbridled speech’ was causing embarrassment to Anglo-American relations and that all supplies of alcohol to the Command would be suspended if it continued.67 General Marshall wrote to all senior commanders that American officers had encouraged a ‘marked hostility and contempt for the British’, and great efforts were made to introduce activities that would educate the American servicemen into treating their British hosts with greater respect and dignity. The Provost Marshal of the Eighth Air Force, in a lengthy report on the conduct of airmen towards the British, complained of the persistent ‘Limey complex’ which made them largely indifferent to their hosts unless there was the prospect of sex. A Special Service Study found that only 2 per cent of the air force had actually visited a British home.68 The Eighth Air Force set up a speakers’ pool with officers assigned to give talks to British audiences about American customs and manners; between April and September 1943 the speakers averaged 15 lectures a month, a grand total of 241. Eaker joked that out of the three possible crimes his men might indulge in – murder, rape and ‘interference with Anglo-American relations’ – the first two might under certain circumstances be pardoned, ‘but the third one, never’.69
British criticism was not confined to popular areas of social friction. Over the first half of 1943 there was evidence of mounting frustration from the Air Ministry and Bomber Command over the long apprenticeship and unredeemed promises from the American Air Force. Harris and Portal both pressed Eaker to collaborate more fully in the renewed offensive in the spring of 1943, though both well knew that Bomber Command had taken three years to reach its current size and capability. There were British complaints about the quality of the B-17 ‘Flying Fortress’ as a daylight bomber and arguments over the effectiveness of the new American oil-based incendiary bomb, the 6-lb M69. British tests suggested that the new bomb lacked penetration, had an unreliable fuse and relatively low incendiary efficiency, and despite American objections to the test results, the RAF continued to use the standard 4-lb incendiary.70 There were strong objections to the British view of the B-17, but the American judgement on the bombers currently employed also accepted that the two main bombers, the ‘Flying Fortress’ and the B-24 ‘Liberator’ were rapidly reaching the end of their useful life.71 Indeed the harshest criticism of Eighth Air Force performance came from the American side, not from the RAF. Arnold, whose health deteriorated badly during 1943, finally lost patience with Eaker’s force in June 1943. Citing the number of aircraft already sent to Britain, Arnold telegraphed Eaker that the number of bombers sent out on each mission ‘is not rpt not satisfactory’, and told him bluntly to change his commanders and staff to find officers who could organize attacks in ‘a highly efficient manner’.72
In the short correspondence that followed, Eaker was defensive about his force and resentful of Arnold’s intervention. Arnold ought certainly to have known better, since the ratio between aircraft supplied and aircraft on missions always had to take account of those awaiting repair, modification, or used for training purposes. ‘Neither of us,’ Eaker replied, ‘has been able to accomplish ideal for reasons both should appreciate. We get nowhere with recrimination.’73 Nevertheless Eaker agreed to make major changes in his command structure, anxious perhaps about the security of his own position. Longfellow, who Arnold regarded as insufficiently aggressive, was redeployed to Washington; Hansell was passed over (too ‘nervous and highly strung’, according to Eaker); responsibility for the Eighth Bomber Command was given on 1 July 1943 to Brig. General Frederick Anderson, commander of the Third Bombardment Wing, while Hansell was replaced as commander of the First Bombardment Wing in June. The Third Wing was taken over by a young commander admired by both Arnold and Eaker, Colonel Curtis LeMay, future chief of the Strategic Air Command after the war. Anderson had arrived in England in February, flew his first mission to Rouen on 15 March (‘enjoyed it thoroughly’), and in his diary looked forward to the day when a stream of B-17s would be taking off every day ‘as they carry out their joy, dropping bombs on Germany’. He flew regularly with his crews and took the same risks.74 Though Anderson had only been a few months in active service, Eaker judged that he had the right character for high command, though he regretted losing Longfellow, who was a close friend. ‘This Bomber Command job of ours is a killer,’ he told Arnold. ‘It will break anybody down in six months unless he is a very unusual fellow.’75 What had most concerned Arnold during the Command crisis was not the virtue of the bomber offensive itself and its achievements, but the extent to which it represented the claims to a distinct air force identity and a distinct strategy. For Arnold this meant a clear demonstration to the American public that the offensive was producing results whic
h would inspire their ‘faith in our way of making war’.76
The different force profiles and levels of preparation were no more sharply evident than in the contrast between the operational performance of the two bomber forces over the course of 1943, when Harris launched what have come to be seen as the three major battles of the bomber offensive, against the Ruhr-Rhineland in late spring and early summer 1943, against Hamburg in July, and against Berlin in the autumn. The campaign against the Ruhr-Rhineland was not in any sense a new one, since it had been a first priority for bombing ever since the onset of the campaign in May 1940. The difference in the spring of 1943 was the advent of substantial numbers of heavy bombers, particularly the Lancaster. During the months from March to June when the Ruhr ‘battle’ took place, the operational strength of Bomber Command averaged 794 heavy bombers, of which 578 (or 73 per cent) were serviceable. Each bomber dropped an average of just over 7,000 lbs of bombs, against an average load of 4,970 for the Eighth Air Force throughout 1943.77 The Pathfinder Force was now fully equipped with the Mosquito Mk IX, which utilized the new electronic aids, Oboe Mark IA and H2S, which were both now available in sufficient quantity, though H2S proved a disappointment over heavily urbanized areas. Raids on the Ruhr had always been subject to the hazards of cloud and industrial smog, and the effective use of decoy sites. Navigation equipment no longer dependent on visual sighting was expected to allow a much greater degree of concentration at or near the principal aiming point. Over the target, new systems of marking had been developed using bright white markers when the ground was visible, or red, green and yellow sky-markers when it was not. The colourful flares were known by the codename ‘Wanganui’; the German public called them Christmas trees. Once at the target the new Mk XIV bombsight could be used even when the aircraft took evasive action.78 Radio countermeasures were available to block the German Freya radar, codenamed ‘Mandrel’, and to interfere with German ground-control transmissions, known as ‘Tinsel’, while new airborne devices to warn of German night-fighters and radar (‘Monica’ and ‘Boozer’) were finally being used, though again with only mixed effect.79 All of these many technical and tactical innovations made Bomber Command a much more formidable threat. In a speech later in the war Harris admitted to an army audience that the bomber offensive only started seriously in March 1943.80
The first major raid on the Ruhr was made on the night of 5–6 March against Essen. A force of 442 aircraft attacked with 1,014 tons of bombs, two-thirds of them incendiaries. The Pathfinders worked well and an estimated 75 per cent bombed within three miles of the city centre, which was the principal aiming point. The apparent success of the raid gave Harris his verb ‘to essenize’ the target, but the next raid on Essen was less successful and a major raid on Duisburg on 26–27 March was scattered, largely because five out of nine of the Pathfinder Mosquito aircraft had to turn back with technical problems. A major raid on Berlin, conducted at Churchill’s suggestion, lost direction and hit the capital with only 10 high-explosive bombs; the next raid missed the city altogether. Although the Ruhr plan was the first time Bomber Command had concentrated on a single coherent target, major raids were also made on more distant cities, reducing the impact on the Ruhr-Rhineland to no great effect. Attacks on Munich and Stuttgart recorded between one-fifth and one-third of bombs within three miles of the aiming point, levels of accuracy not significantly better than the year before.81 Between March and June, when the battle against the Ruhr came to an end, Bomber Command had launched 28 raids against cities in the Ruhr-Rhineland area, but another 18 raids against targets in central Germany, Italy and France. Though the pattern of destruction varied widely between the different operations, the attacks on the Ruhr-Rhineland were the first raids to inflict serious levels of destruction on the urban area.82
The reaction from the German side was to search for new ways to cope with the sudden escalation of RAF capability. Hitler was preoccupied with stabilizing the war in Russia and North Africa but angered by what he saw as the continued failures in air defence. His air adjutant von Below recalled long evening conversations with Hitler about the inadequacy of anti-aircraft fire, the incompetence of Göring and the shortage of modern aircraft designs, but Hitler remained, according to von Below, ‘at a loss’ on questions of air power.83 To stifle widespread popular anxiety Goebbels ordered the press and propaganda agencies to stop using the word ‘mood’ to describe public attitudes, which could evidently be widely variable, and to write only about ‘high morale’.84 Security Service intelligence reports showed the population in the bombed regions dismayed and restless at the apparent absence of effective defence, while exaggerated rumours of the extent of the destruction and casualties in the Ruhr were in circulation throughout the unbombed areas and could not be stopped. ‘Even sensible people,’ ran one report, ‘have given these rumours credence.’85
The German defences against night-bombing were nevertheless stronger than they had been a year before. General Josef Kammhuber had around 400 night-fighters, double the level of the previous year, organized in five wings. There were around 500 day-fighters in the Western theatre protecting the Reich against daylight incursions. Each box in the Himmelbett system now had enough radars to control three fighters at a time, and had developed the means to pass on information to neighbouring boxes, but the rigid nature of the fixed line of air defence made less sense against large concentrations of heavy bombers that could routinely swamp the line as they crossed into Germany. Kammhuber proposed a single central authority to control the whole night-defence system and a fivefold increase in the night-fighter force, but the proposal was rejected by Hitler in favour of strengthening anti-aircraft and searchlight defences around the vulnerable inland areas.86 As a result the night-fighter force stagnated, taking losses of 282 aircraft during the period of the Ruhr battle, against an overall loss of 600 RAF bombers from all causes. Pressure to change to a more flexible system of defence was rejected. The idea of using ground-control stations to direct night-fighters into the bomber stream so that they could fly with it, shooting down any bomber that came within range, a tactic known as Zahme Sau (‘Tame Boar’), was turned down because it would drain resources away from the Kammhuber Line; a second proposal from Major Hans-Joachim Hermann to use single-engine day-fighters at night against bombers illuminated by searchlights, flares and target markers, known as Wilde Sau (‘Wild Boar’), arrived too late for the spring attacks and was again difficult to integrate with the existing system.87 Kammhuber’s insistence that his aerial fortification was the only way to combat the bombers brought him into conflict with Göring and his deputy, Erhard Milch, and in November he was finally relieved of his command and sent to run the rump Air Fleet 5 in Norway.
In the midst of the campaign against the Ruhr, Harris was compelled to organize an operation of which he fundamentally disapproved. The engineer Barnes Wallis had begun work in 1940 on the kind of explosive device needed to breach a major dam wall. In March 1941 an Air Attack on Dams Committee was set up to study the possibility, using the Road Research Laboratory as a base. In April 1942 Wallis developed the idea of a cylindrical bomb, dropped from a low height, to bounce across the water and drop to the foot of the dam wall; codenamed ‘Upkeep’, the bomb tests represented a real technical challenge but were convincing enough by February for the air staff to approve a possible operation against the German Möhne, Sorpe and Eder dams.88 When the report was passed to Harris he scrawled at the bottom: ‘This is tripe of the wildest description … not the smallest chance of it working.’89 Nevertheless, more trials were conducted to determine whether the ‘bouncing bomb’ was a viable operational proposition. A squadron of Lancasters under Wing Commander Guy Gibson, no. 617 squadron, was activated on 21 March 1943 and trained rigorously for an operation against the reservoir dams that supplied water for the Ruhr. Harris remained adamantly unconvinced: ‘As I always thought,’ he minuted in April, ‘the weapon is balmy [sic] … get some of these lunatics controlled or if possible locked u
p.’90 His scepticism was ignored. On the night of 16–17 May, under the codename ‘Operation Chastise’, 19 Lancasters were despatched of which 12 attacked the three dams, breaching the Möhne and the Eder, but doing only superficial damage to the Sorpe dam. Two-thirds of the water escaped from the reservoirs and 1,294 were drowned in the inundation, including 493 foreign workers. The destroyed dams lost an estimated 25,000–30,000 tons of masonry but both were repaired by October, while the long-term damage to the industrial water supply was less than had been hoped.91 Further attacks were ruled out, partly because of the high loss rate. Only 8 Lancasters returned from the raid and 56 out of the 113 aircrew were lost.
The early raids against the Ruhr were regarded by Harris as less than satisfactory. The proportion of aircraft dropping bombs within three miles of the aiming point varied greatly. The experiment with sky-marking showed that out of 11 raids that used it, one resulted in severe damage, one in considerable damage, eight in ‘scattered damage’, and one in no damage at all. The photo-reconnaissance evidence on major raids showed that the percentage of hits within three miles varied from 80 per cent to 25 per cent, with most less than 50 per cent.92 Harris assumed that ‘weaker brethren’, as he called them, were failing to press home attacks, while he singled out the tactic of violent evasive action (an instinctive response to intense searchlight and anti-aircraft activity) as a key culprit. In early May 1943 he circulated a tactical memorandum to groups on ‘Evasive Action by Bombers’ to replace existing instructions, which had given pilots advice on what forms of evasion to take under different circumstances. The new memorandum insisted that most forms of evasion were ‘useless’, since an anti-aircraft barrage was indiscriminate and inaccurate (a claim scarcely justified by the 1,496 bombers damaged by anti-aircraft fire during the campaign). Evasion, the report continued, increased the chance of collision, kept bombers for longer in the danger zone, and placed serious strain on the aircraft structure. Crews were told to fly ‘straight and level’ through the target area to increase the concentration of bomb hits.93 Whether crews really did respond to the instruction, or whether the growing experience of the Pathfinders and the surviving pilots reduced losses and increased concentration, the major raids carried out between May and July against Cologne, Duisburg and Wuppertal-Barmen resulted in the most destructive and lethal attacks so far.
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 44