The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945

by Richard Overy

  On this occasion the decision was made to allow the officer a spell of non-combat duty, rather than assume cowardice. But there were other cases where fear was imputed by the psychiatrists, often unjustifiably, with the result that an airman could be stripped of his commission and the right to fly. In the RAF 8,402 aircrew were examined for neurosis from 1942 to 1945, of whom 1,029 were declared LMF, 34 per cent of them pilots. The best post-war estimate has suggested that Bomber Command crews provided one-third of those figures, which works out at perhaps 20 per month, a remarkably small proportion of all those regularly exposed to the stress of combat flying.211 Most medical reports on the air forces indicated high morale despite the high casualty rate. Eaker claimed that morale was not affected so much by losses as by the knowledge that a raid had been ineffective.212 Psychiatrists nevertheless found that one of the most important motivations was the desire to make it through to the end of the tour still alive. Since only 1 in 4 survived one tour, and 1 in 10 a second one, survival remained a primary drive despite the stresses. Research in the Eighth Air Force found that a large proportion of men returning to the United States after a completed tour of duty displayed ‘subjective anxiety’ symptoms: ‘weight loss, insomnia, severe operational fatigue, and loss of efficiency’.213

  These were the men sent by night and by day against German targets in the context of steadily increasing losses on the major raids. During 1943 Bomber Command lost 15,678 killed or prisoners of war, while the Eighth Air Force lost 9,497, almost all of them in missions against German targets.214 The escalating costs of the offensive presented the bomber commanders once again with questions about the strategic value of what they were doing. The reality of tactical stalemate coincided by chance with a revival of the hope, largely abandoned since 1941, that bombing might induce a social or political crisis so severe that it would critically undermine the German war effort. Though Harris saw area bombing chiefly as a form of economic attrition, he never entirely excluded the possibility that his bombing might provoke a political bonus, even to the point of German surrender, and he was happy to fuel such speculation if it strengthened his hand. Air Intelligence, for example, were impressed by his claim that the destruction of half the German urban area would provoke collapse, even if the Gestapo and the SS were determined to ‘prevent insurrection’.215 For some months political intelligence in Britain, encouraged by German difficulties on the Soviet front and in the Mediterranean, had been suggesting that there might be a positive answer to the question ‘Will Germany crack?’, and that bombing could supply it. In September 1943 the Joint Intelligence Committee prepared a long paper on the ‘Probabilities of a German Collapse’ in which Germany’s situation in autumn 1943 was compared with the historical reality of the collapse of the German home front in the autumn of 1918. The JIC thought the conditions of life in the bombed cities much worse than in 1918 and the signs of revolutionary discontent increasingly evident despite the brutal nature of the dictatorship.216 In November 1943 an even more optimistic evaluation was produced by the British Political Warfare Executive on the creation in bombed cities of a ‘new proletariat’ with a communist mentality, which might yet create a revolutionary crisis in Germany before the winter was over. In January further intelligence was sent to Churchill on social unrest in Germany which suggested that ‘the more we bomb, the more satisfactory the effect’. Churchill underlined the sentence with his trademark red pencil.217

  For Churchill the promise of a German collapse revived the confident assumptions about the political impact of bombing which he had harboured ever since the offensive began in 1940. The evidence in the autumn and winter of 1943 was nevertheless slender, based to some extent on imagining what bombing on such a scale might have meant if it had been British rather than German cities under the hail of bombs. American political intelligence was in general dismissive of the idea that bombing alone could generate a German collapse. Spaatz rejected entirely the value of popular war-willingness as a target: ‘Morale in a totalitarian society is irrelevant so long as the control patterns function effectively.’218 American assessments of the revolutionary potential of the German working class focused on the ‘negative character of its assumption of power’ in 1918, following the Kaiser’s abdication, and the failure of the German left to stop Hitler. Arnold asked a ‘Committee of Historians’ for their analysis of the prospects for German collapse. The nine historians included distinguished names – Bernadotte Schmitt, Edward Earle, Louis Gottschalk –with experience of writing the history of war and revolution. They concluded that although German morale had deteriorated during 1943, the existence of Nazi control ‘gives no encouragement to the supposition that any political upheaval can be anticipated in Germany in the near future’. They acknowledged that there was a superficial resemblance to the final days of 1918, but their report concluded that insistence on unconditional surrender, the lack of any effective avenue for popular discontent and the contrast in the military situation ‘make the seeming analogy invalid’.219 The key problem identified by all the critics of the idea that Germany would imminently crack was the exceptional capacity of a totalitarian state to exact obedience. If the German people were ‘discouraged, disillusioned and bewildered’, as intelligence reports suggested, they still appeared to have a fear of state terror more powerful than the fear of further bombing.220 ‘Even when public morale is desperately low,’ remarked Portal’s deputy, Norman Bottomley, in a speech in the spring of 1944, ‘general collapse can for a long while be staved off by a ruthless and desperate party system and a corps of brutal Gestapo hangmen and gangsters.’221

  These projections were, as it turned out, broadly correct. The bombing made the German population more rather than less dependent on the state and the party. Like the Blitz, Allied bombing created largely passive responses to the problem of survival. In its monthly news digest in March 1944, American air intelligence published a translated article on the air offensive from the German Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, which seemed to sum up the frustrating reality of an attrition war in the air:

  A war with its focal point centred in the air is not the shortest, as was once believed, but on the contrary the longest and most meaningless in its accumulation of destruction … particularly as even the greatest terror gradually wears off or corresponding counter-measures are found. Thus the time when it was thought that air offensives alone could force Europe to capitulate and that the Anglo-Americans could then march in with music had disappeared into the dim distance.222

  The Committee of Historians concluded from their assessment of Allied strategy and German staying-power that the defeat of Germany was only possible with continued Soviet pressure from the east, continuous bombing from Britain and Italy, and one or more large-scale invasions of German-occupied Western Europe. ‘It seems clear,’ continued the report, ‘that bombing alone cannot bring about that defeat in the spring of 1944.’223 The stalemate in the bombing war could only be reversed by military means. ‘Our first objective,’ wrote General Doolittle to his commanders on assuming control of the Eighth Air Force in January 1944, ‘is to neutralize the German fighter opposition at the earliest possible moment.’224

  THE ‘BATTLE OF GERMANY’: 1944

  In June 1943 Robert Lovett, Assistant Secretary for War responsible for the air force, wrote a long memorandum for Arnold in which he analysed the problems facing the American air offensive and suggested solutions. The most important issue he identified and emphasized was ‘supply long range fighter protection to help the B-17s’. He suggested designing built-in additional fuel tanks for American fighter aircraft but in the interim adding two wing tanks to the new P-51 ‘Mustang’ fighter. He concluded, ‘This is a “must”.’225 The P-51 did not see long-range service over Germany until the spring of 1944, by which time other fighter aircraft converted to longer range were already in service to protect the American bombers part of the way to their targets. The need for long-range fighters matched the needs the German Air Force had faced in
the Battle of Britain. Success in defeating the German Air Force in their own airspace – the ‘Battle of Germany’ – depended on establishing air supremacy and this in turn relied on the extent to which the Eighth Air Force could use large fighter forces to destroy enemy air power. Fighter-to-fighter combat and counter-force bombing was the solution not only to the expansion of the bomber offensive but also to the eventual success of Allied invasion in the west. What the Eighth (supported by the Fifteenth Air Force flying from Italy) was now engaged in was less a strategic air offensive, more the conduct of a ‘grand tactical’ air battle.

  There has been since the war much discussion of why it took so long for the United States air forces to develop fighter aircraft with long-range capability. Spaatz had been a witness to the German raids on England in 1940 when the need for fighter cover to protect German daylight bombing had been self-evident. The planners in 1941 who drew up AWPD-1 emphasized that the development of escort fighters that could fly as far as the bombers was ‘mandatory’.226 Arnold as early as February 1942 had asked for all new fighters to be developed with auxiliary tanks. In June 1943 he ordered a crash programme to ensure that full bomber escort could be provided by early 1944.227 There was no shortage of high-quality fighter aircraft designed with longer range than the British Spitfire (which had supplied limited fighter escort in 1943). The P-38 Lockheed ‘Lightning’, a radical twin-engine, twin-boom fighter was a pre-war development which had long-range extra fuel tanks built into the design. Its development was delayed and it entered service in summer 1942, used in North Africa as a low-altitude battlefield aircraft, in a role that suited it poorly. Late in 1943 two Groups were allocated to Eighth Air Force and at once extended potential escort range as far as Leipzig, though in numbers too small to transform the offensive, and with persistent technical problems with the engine. The mainstay of the Eighth Fighter Command in 1943 was the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, a high-performance fighter/fighter-bomber designed in 1940 around the Pratt and Whitney R-2800 radial engine. It could carry two external fuel tanks to boost range as far as the German frontier when drop tanks were first installed in July 1943, but little effort went into modifying the P-47 so that it could reach far into Germany. Eaker gave auxiliary tanks a low priority among his many other problems. Yet with larger tanks the P-47 could by the spring of 1944 fly as far as Hamburg, where before it had been confined to an arc that reached little further than the Low Countries.228

  The one aircraft that did promise to transform the air war over Germany was the North American P-51 ‘Mustang’ recommended by Lovett. Originally designed to meet a British requirement in 1940, it began service with the RAF (under the name ‘Apache’) in November 1941. British engineers fitted it with a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine and revolutionized its performance, increasing speed, rate of climb and manoeuvrability. News reached Washington via the American Embassy in London and Arnold immediately saw the aircraft’s potential. By November 1942 he had placed initial orders for 2,200, fitted with Merlin engines made under licence in the United States.229 Since the P-51 was supposed to fulfil British orders, Arnold had once again to renege on the agreement. After a stormy exchange with Portal in the late autumn of 1943, Arnold got his way.230 The P-51 entered service in early December 1943 with drop tanks that could take it 475 miles into Germany; when it finally came on stream in significant numbers in spring 1944 its range, with new tanks, could take it further than Berlin and even as far as Vienna. Most accounts of the battle for air supremacy credit the P-51 with the destruction of German fighter defences, but rather like accounts of the Battle of Britain, in which the Spitfire has always been privileged over the Hurricane, the sturdy and less glamorous P-47 Thunderbolt bore the brunt of the first months of the Battle of Germany. On the day the P-51 was introduced to combat against targets in France, 5 December 1943, there were 266 P-47s but only 36 P-51s. Three months later, on the first deep daylight raid into Germany against Leipzig, there were 688 P-47s and just 73 P-51s. By the end of March 1944, the point that some historians have seen as the moment when air superiority passed to the Eighth Air Force, there were still more than twice as many Thunderbolts as Mustangs.231

  The explanation for the slow evolution of a long-range fighter capability lies not with the technology but with the Eighth Air Force commanders. Eaker had always believed in the self-defending capability of the large daylight bomber formation. The prevailing tactical assumption in operations was ‘the security of the force’; the larger the bomber stream, the more secure it would be.232 The Eighth Fighter Command under Brig. General Frank Hunter shared Eaker’s view that unescorted bomber operations were possible, and for much of the summer and autumn, when Eighth Bomber Command losses were rising, he ordered fighter-sweeps across northern France and the Low Countries which on some occasions encountered no German aircraft at all. When it was insisted that the P-47s escort the bombers more effectively, the range was still too short to provide more than limited assistance, and made shorter still by the order to fly a weaving route next to the bomber formation to match its speed. In August 1943, after the first Schweinfurt raid, Arnold insisted on sacking Hunter and replacing him with Maj. General William Kepner, a dedicated fighter general, popular with his crews, who saw the role of his command to fly deep into Germany in order to destroy the German fighter force. Eaker opposed the change of commander and remained lukewarm about the effort to use fighters, rather than his bombers, to achieve the air superiority required from the Pointblank offensive. Destroying enemy fighters he saw as ‘the secondary job’; the primary task was dropping bombloads as accurately as possible on strategic air force targets.233

  Arnold’s persistent dissatisfaction with the performance of the Eighth Air Force speeded up the decision to activate the Fifteenth Air Force in the Mediterranean to attack Pointblank targets from the south, where the weather was better. Without notifying Eaker, Arnold asked the Combined Chiefs at their meeting on 18 November to approve the reorganization of American air forces by appointing an American strategic air commander for both European theatres, responsible for the Eighth, Fifteenth and Ninth Air Forces and, if possible, Bomber Command. The Combined Chiefs agreed to the rearrangement on 4 December (with the exception of Bomber Command, which Portal refused to hand over) and Arnold got support from Roosevelt and Churchill.234 Arnold asked Spaatz to return to Britain to take up the post of Commanding General, Strategic Air Forces, on 1 January 1944. He brought with him Maj. General James Doolittle, commander of the Northwest African Strategic Air Force, and a firm advocate of bomber escorts. Spaatz took over Eaker’s headquarters, while Doolittle commanded the Eighth from ‘Widewing’, up until then headquarters for Anderson’s Bomber Command. Anderson became chief of operations to Spaatz. Arnold had been insensitive enough to notify Eaker of the change in command by telegraph back on 19 December, rather than in person, consistent with his testy treatment of Eaker earlier in the summer. Eaker objected vehemently to the change but his objections were overruled; on 6 January Doolittle took over the Eighth and Eaker left to command strategic forces in the Mediterranean at just the point when large numbers of bombers and escort fighters were at last coming through the pipeline to transform the capability of the air force Eaker was compelled to abandon.235

  In any assessment of the success in establishing air superiority over Germany, the change in American leadership is clearly central. Spaatz, Doolittle and Kepner shared a common strategic outlook on the importance of combining the indirect assault on air force production and supplies through bombing with the calculated attrition of the German fighter force through air-to-air combat and fighter sweeps over German soil. Spaatz spent some weeks reviewing the offensive in January 1944 and then told Doolittle that destroying German fighter strength and increasing the tempo of attacks on German aircraft production was ‘a critical deciding factor in Germany’s defeat’.236 Doolittle was from the start anxious to use his large force, now with more than 1,000 bombers and 1,200 fighters, to destroy the German air arm. Comment
ing to Spaatz on the plans for completing the Combined Bomber Offensive, he was critical of the idea of pursuing ‘economic’ bombing, and argued for making attacks on the enemy fighter force in the air and on the ground the ‘primary consideration’, as it had been when he was a commander in the Mediterranean.237

  Kepner had already begun to transform the tactics of fighter support before Doolittle’s appointment. The key was to allow the fighter escorts to engage the enemy fighter force and not simply protect the bombers; this had been the dilemma facing German fighters in the Battle of Britain, when they were eventually compelled to fly as close support for the bomber stream, and lost their combat flexibility. From January 1944 onwards American fighter units were ordered to ‘pursue the Hun until he was destroyed’.238 The new tactic of ‘Free Lance’ allocated some fighter planes to abandon the bombers entirely and seek the German force wherever it was to be found. The escort aircraft, flying in loose groups of four, ranged up to seven or eight miles away from the bomber stream in search of combat. On the return flight they were encouraged to fly at low level to strafe German airfields or attack German fighters taking off or returning to base. To maximize combat time a system of escort relays was set up in which each stage of a bomber’s flight would be protected by fighter units assigned to a particular stretch, so that they could fly direct to the rendezvous point rather than lose precious fuel flying slowly with the bombers. P-47s guarded the first and last legs of the route, P-38s the intermediate stretch, and the very long-range P-51s the area close to the target zone. The success of the change in tactics depended first on a much-enlarged supply of fighter aircraft and pilots, with improved levels of maintenance, and on the exploitation of the RAF ‘Y’ radio-intercept service, which made it possible for American fighters to be directed to the point where German aircraft were themselves assembling in formation.239 The object was to leave the German enemy no respite from the threat of combat and to impose an insupportable level of attrition.