The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945

by Richard Overy

  The German Air Force did not remain passive in the face of the growing American threat. The driving force behind the reorganization of air defence and the expansion of fighter output was Göring’s deputy, Erhard Milch, who understood more clearly than his master that ‘the homeland is more important than the front’.240 The allocation of priority to the defence of the Reich and to fighter production brought about not only a regular process of tactical and technical readjustment, but a major change in command and organization as well. In August 1943 the chief of staff, Hans Jeschonnek, who effectively carried the weight of high command in Göring’s increasing absence, found the constant criticism and abuse from his commander-in-chief over the bombing offensive impossible to withstand. On 19 August he shot himself, leaving behind two letters for Hitler’s air adjutant condemning Göring’s incompetent leadership. Jeschonnek was not entirely blameless since he had continually emphasized the importance of air power at the fighting front rather than defence of the home territory.241 He was replaced by Col. General Günther Korten, whose relationship with Göring was better, but unlike Jeschonnek he was committed to the idea of strengthening home air defences and had Hitler’s support for doing so. In November, Kammhuber was removed from his post, one of the remaining obstacles to reorganizing the defensive system. In northern Germany, Fighter Corps I (Jagdkorps I), responsible for the fighter defence of most of western and central Germany, was expanded and placed under the command of Lt. General Josef ‘Beppo’ Schmid, best known for supplying over-optimistic intelligence during the Battle of Britain. From a single fighter wing in January 1943, Schmid’s new command had 11 wings and 20 fighter Groups by the end of the year. In December 1943, Hubert Weise, Luftwaffenbefehlshaber Mitte, was replaced by Col. General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff, the former commander of Air Fleet 5; on 27 January the command was renamed the Reich Air Fleet (Luftflotte Reich), now responsible for the coordinated control of the entire defensive air war against the Allied bombers.242 The process of creating a single centralized air defence of Germany was completed in February 1944 with the transfer of anti-aircraft artillery and the German air-warning system to direct control by the Reich Air Fleet and the local fighter divisions. The system now more closely resembled the centralized control structure set up by Fighter Command in Britain in 1940. From Stumpff’s headquarters in Berlin it was possible, using the radar information from Fighter Korps I, to communicate a running account of the air battle to the fighter units to ensure a concentrated response; for his part, Schmid had no fewer than 148 direct telephone lines to fighter stations and control centres.243

  The German Air Force knew a remarkable amount about the British and American air forces. Most of the information came from downed Allied aircraft and interrogated prisoners. The bombers’ predictable tactics and long flying time over German territory in the last months of 1943 had contributed to the escalating loss rates imposed on each bombing mission.244 The electronic war, which had swung briefly in the Allies’ favour with the use of ‘Window’ over Hamburg, was more evenly balanced by the end of the year. German researchers quickly discovered ways to neutralize the effects of ‘Window’ with two devices, Würzlaus and Nürnberg, which allowed the more skilful radar operators to distinguish between ‘Window’ echoes and an aeroplane; by the end of the year 1,500 Würzburg radar had been modified. The German Telefunken researchers came up with a new air radar device, codenamed SN-2, which could operate impervious to ‘Window’ interference, and a crash production programme was begun. The new Allied H2S radar navigation could also be tracked by the end of 1943 using a new homing device, Naxos-Z, which enabled German night-fighters to track the RAF Pathfinder force; it also proved possible to get a bearing on the Allied bombers that were not carrying H2S by using their Identification Friend-or-Foe mechanism. Both breakthroughs contributed to Bomber Command’s escalating losses. The Eighth Air Force began to use ‘Window’ (codenamed ‘Chaff’ in the United States) on 20 December 1943 at the same time as introducing a Würzburg jammer known as ‘Carpet’ to reduce losses by radar-guided anti-aircraft fire. Here again German radio engineers later found a partial solution by introducing a modification known as Wismar, which allowed the radar to switch frequencies and avoid the effects of ‘Carpet’, though by this time the tactical battle between the two air forces had rendered electronic protection less important.245

  The keys to German air defence were assumed to be production and manpower. To meet the threat of daylight bombing the anti-aircraft artillery was substantially increased in early 1944, with 1,508 heavy batteries (5,325 guns), 623 light batteries (9,359 guns) and 375 searchlight batteries (5,000 lights of 200 or 150 cm diameter). Output of anti-aircraft guns reached a peak in 1944 of 8,402 heavy and 50,917 light guns, but the wastage rate of barrels doubled over 1943 because of the increased bomber activity.246 An additional 250,000 personnel had to be found in 1944, mainly recruited from Soviet prisoners of war, Italian volunteers from Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic, air force wounded and young German volunteers. This represented a damaging dilution of the quality of anti-aircraft personnel. By spring 1944 some 111,000 women also served in the German anti-aircraft defence system. To navigate the regime’s confused stance on employing women, posters reminded the female volunteers: ‘The woman in a soldier’s post but still a woman!’247 The anti-aircraft batteries by 1944 were organized increasingly in large groups of heavy guns – Grossbatterien made up of three regular batteries – to produce more concentrated fire, but this made heavy demands on a less skilled and less robust workforce. Yet over the course of the year anti-aircraft artillery came to replace the fighters as the main means for destroying or damaging enemy aircraft; the major industrial targets were protected by defensive strongpoints of no fewer than three Grossbatterien.248 Throughout the campaigns of 1943 and 1944 anti-aircraft damage to Allied aircraft was extensive. An American raid on Berlin on 6 March 1944 resulted in damage to 48 per cent of the 672 bombers who reached the target. Only faltering supplies of ammunition prevented anti-aircraft fire from being more effective.249

  The accelerated production of fighter aircraft also faced problems in late 1943, partly because aircraft production was still controlled by the Air Ministry while the rest of the armaments economy had been centralized under Albert Speer’s Ministry of Armaments and War Production, and partly because of Göring’s renewed efforts to revive German offensive air power by switching resources to bombers again in the winter of 1943. The current plans for producing more than 30,000 fighters in 1944 and 48,000 in 1945, drawn up by Milch’s planning staff in the German Air Ministry, also lacked realism, not least because of the problem of fuel supply. Yet the figures matched what the crisis in the skies over Germany seemed to require.250 Milch collaborated closely with Speer and the head of his technical office, Karl-Otto Saur, to reduce the different models of each aircraft type – eventually reducing the models from 42 to 5 – and to speed up dispersal programmes. But the problems posed by Göring’s revival of bomber plans pushed Milch, for political as well as practical reasons, to offer control over aircraft production to Speer to achieve a long-overdue rationalization of the whole production structure.251 In February the two men reached an agreement to run together an emergency ‘Fighter Staff’ (Jägerstab) with Saur as its director, and it was established with Hitler’s agreement on 1 March 1944. As a result in 1944 three times as many fighters were produced than in 1943, in the hope that this would be sufficient to hold back the Allied bombers long enough to allow the whole German aircraft programme to revive and expand.252

  It was nevertheless evident by the end of 1943 that sheer numbers of German fighter aircraft were not the entire solution. The production of aircraft had to be balanced against losses and despite the success rate of German day-fighters and night-fighters against the major raids of the autumn and winter, the cumulative attrition of the fighter force made it difficult to expand overall force strength despite the very substantial increases in output. Although 3,700 day-fighters and nig
ht-fighters were produced between September and December 1943, the force at Stumpff’s disposal when he assumed command in December numbered just 774 day-fighters and 381 night-fighters, with serviceability levels of 60–70 per cent because of shortages of spares and skilled ground personnel.253 This paradox can be explained in a number of ways. Fighter aircraft were compelled to fight in poor weather conditions against bombers now using blind-flying techniques. Commanders sent aircraft out in dangerous conditions (though not usually in fog or heavy cloud) with the result that the accident rate rose sharply again. Icing and misting of the fighter cockpit windows was a particular hazard. Between September and December 1943 the German fighter force lost 967 aircraft in combat, principally with the American P-47 Thunderbolt, but a further 1,052 to accidents.254 The second factor was pilot strength and quality. The high loss rates could not easily be made good by the flying schools which were under intense pressure to supply crew to every combat theatre. The result was a sharp reduction in the length of time devoted to training, which was exacerbated by the careful use of fuel. The hours devoted to training for a new German fighter pilot fell from 210 in 1942 to 112 by 1944; operational training was reduced from 50 hours to 20, and crews could be sent to squadrons with only a few hours’ training on the front-line aircraft they were to fly in combat. Pilots who returned from combat on the Eastern Front found it difficult to adjust to dogfighting with skilled opponents, while pilots drafted in from other branches of the air force, or from air-ferrying, were not the equal of enemy crew who enjoyed dedicated fighter training in an entirely bomb-free environment.255 The result was that by early 1944 the German fighter force was obtaining an average net gain every month of only 26 new pilots. The stalemate inflicted on the bomber forces in the autumn created the illusion of German success. In reality the German Air Force was a brittle shield.

  The declining skills and rising losses of the German day-fighter force were magnified by the insistence that the object for the force as a whole was to destroy the enemy bomber. This, too, had been a problem for RAF Fighter Command in 1940 when the choice had to be made between stopping the German bombers or fighting their intruding fighter force. German Air Force tactics worked effectively as long as their fighters could seek combat in areas where the bomber force was unescorted. The introduction of longer escort runs in late 1943 transformed the battlefield, though the German Air Force was slow to adapt to the changed reality. Göring famously insisted that the first long-range American fighters to crash near Aachen must have drifted there with the prevailing wind.256 The existing German fighter force was divided between the Me110/Me410 ‘destroyer’ aircraft, armed with rockets and cannon against the Allied bombers, and the more versatile Me109 and Fw190 fighters which were responsible when necessary for air-to-air combat with enemy fighters. Once American escorts appeared, the slower twin-engine German ‘destroyers’ were sitting ducks. The first reaction was to move defence units further into Germany in the hope that Allied escort fighters would still have a limit to their range. But the heavier destroyers now had to be escorted by the single-engine fighters, which meant that they too would be tied to a role in which they would be at a persistent disadvantage. In March the destroyers were finally withdrawn altogether after one wing of 43 aircraft lost 26 in one raid, but the prevailing German view was still that their single-engine fighters had to try to get close to the enemy bombers to inflict damage, leaving those fighters easier prey to the increasingly aggressive Americans.257 The more flexible the tactics of the Eighth Fighter Command became, the more inflexible the tactical demands on the German Air Force.

  These weaknesses were cruelly exposed when Spaatz unleashed his campaign for air superiority over Germany. The eventual success of this campaign could not be taken for granted, not because of the German enemy but because of arguments over strategy among the Allies. There was no question that undermining the German Air Force was now a top priority. But Spaatz had to achieve Pointblank in competition with the demands for the ‘Crossbow’ operation authorized by Allied leaders in late 1943 against the V-weapon silos and installations, and the early onset of bombing tactical targets in support of Operation Overlord, which was expected in February 1944 to absorb at least three months’ bombing effort by the strategic air forces.258 The tension between pursuing Pointblank targets in Germany, and the diversion to targets in occupied Europe more directly related to invasion, was evident to Spaatz and his commanders. It resulted in prolonged arguments over target priorities, which were finally resolved at a meeting between Eisenhower and the senior Allied commanders in Europe on 25 March 1944 in favour of the ‘Transportation Plan’ for interrupting German rail traffic in north-west Europe. Spaatz was able to start his assault on the German Air Force before these arguments had been properly formulated and resolved – and in the event between January and May 1944 the Eighth and Ninth air forces based in Britain dropped 111,546 (75%) tons of bombs on strategic targets against 38,119 (25%) on tactical ones.259 The real problem for Spaatz was the difficulty in persuading Harris to share in the task of defeating the German Air Force.

  Harris was determined in early 1944 not to abandon the city attacks for a more concentrated assault on German Air Force targets. In January his Command was asked directly to abandon indiscriminate area attack (Harris scrawled ‘never has been’ in the margin of the memorandum) in favour of raids on ball-bearings factories and fighter output as a contribution to the Eighth Air Force effort to establish ‘free deployment’ for the day campaign over Germany.260 Figures were produced by Bomber Command intelligence to show that over one-third of German man-hours had been lost in the bombed cities. Harris told the Air Ministry in early March 1944 that if his force stopped city-bombing, German industry would quickly recover and nullify all the efforts his force had made over the previous year.261 When the Air Minister, Sir Archibald Sinclair, asked Portal for the opinion of the air staff on Harris’s strategy, Portal replied candidly enough that the effort to calculate when Germany might collapse under a certain weight of bombs was ‘little more than a waste of time’; the air staff, he continued, preferred a strategy of isolating and attacking the vulnerable points in the German structure whereas Harris just believed in ‘piling the maximum on the whole structure’.262 Portal nevertheless made little effort to get Harris to comply with the American plan to hit air force targets, until pressured to do so by Sydney Bufton, Director of Bombing Operations. Harris was finally ordered to bomb Schweinfurt by a special directive, and Bomber Command obliged on 24–25 February. Target-marking was generally poor and the damage to the city and its ball-bearing industry ‘nominal’; only 22 bombs fell within the city boundaries, the rest in open country. In this sense Harris’s fear that his force could not hit a small urban target effectively was right.263

  Further raids were made to support the American campaign against Leipzig, Augsburg and Stuttgart, where there were aircraft and component firms, but the raid on Leipzig missed the Erla aircraft works entirely at a cost of 11 per cent of the attacking force, while the raid on Augsburg did little industrial damage but burnt out the whole medieval centre of the city. The raids on Stuttgart mainly through cloud were scattered, though a lucky hit was made on the Bosch magneto plant. Throughout the period when Spaatz was attacking the German Air Force, Harris persisted in continuing the Battle of Berlin where losses remained high and the impact limited. An assessment of the attacks on the capital between November 1943 and February 1944 by RE8 showed that only 5 per cent of residential buildings and 5 per cent of industrial plant had been damaged in heavy raiding.264 The attacks made in March on Berlin still brought loss rates of between 5 and 9 per cent on each raid. The last major British raid of the war on Berlin, on 24–25 March, experienced high winds and resulted in scattered bombing across 126 villages and townships. Some 72 aircraft were shot down, 8.9 per cent of the force. In April the final city raid against Nuremberg before the switch to the Overlord campaign showed the persistent limitations of area bombing. A total of 95 aircra
ft were lost out of the 795 despatched, the highest loss rate of the war, 11.9 per cent. At least 120 aircraft bombed Schweinfurt by mistake, but missed the main area of the city; the remainder bombed a wide area of the German countryside north of Nuremberg, killing 69 villagers. Harris at last recognized that the effectiveness of the German night defences, as he told the Air Ministry, might soon create a situation in which loss rates ‘could not in the end be sustained’.265 Between November 1943 and March 1944, Bomber Command lost 1,128 aircraft for little evident strategic gain. Losses among the expanding German night-fighter force were also high, but by the spring they could see that they were gaining as close to a victory as air war would allow.266

  In the end the defeat of the German Air Force was an American achievement. Spaatz divided the campaign into three elements: Operation Argument to undermine German aircraft production; a follow-up campaign against the German oil industry to starve the air force of its most precious resource; and finally continuous counter-force attacks against German fighters and their organization. The attack on the aircraft industry, which came to be known as ‘Big Week’, was postponed regularly through late January and early February 1944 by poor weather. Attacks were carried out against targets in France and a few deeper raids into Germany, but the cloud and snow kept German fighters grounded and increased the risk of accident to American aircrews. On 19 February the weather finally cleared and for the week until 26 February the Eighth Air Force flew 6,200 sorties against 18 aircraft assembly plants and two ball-bearing factories. The raids on the first day, 20 February, divided the bombers between 12 major targets in Rostock, Brunswick, Leipzig and half a dozen other, smaller towns. The losses totalled only 15 bombers from the 880 which attacked – a rate of only 1.7 per cent – and four fighters. Losses climbed as the German Air Force grasped the pattern of attacks, and the cost during the week was eventually 158 for the Eighth Air Force (imposed when, for some reason, escorting lapsed) and 89 for the Fifteenth, which attacked from Italy entirely without escort. Only 28 American fighters were lost from the large numbers despatched on each raid, but the German Air Force lost one-third of its single-engine fighters during February and almost one-fifth of its fighter crew. By contrast, the number of P-51 ‘Mustang’ fighters available was 90 per cent higher at the end of ‘Big Week’ than it had been at the beginning.267