The changed command structure made a common plan for the strategic air war less likely. The Bombing Directorate in the Air Ministry in August 1944 argued for a major operation against German morale, codenamed ‘Thunderclap’, for ‘laying on a “Rotterdam” ’ on the centre of Berlin. The aim was to shatter any German hope of sustaining the war effort by ‘the obliteration of the visible signs of an organized Government’, using 2,000 tons of bombs dropped in accurate concentration on a 2.5-square-mile area of central Berlin. The likely shock effect on German morale was compared with the shock effect on the Dutch government in 1940, which surrendered the day after the Rotterdam raid.319 The proposal came, for the moment, to nothing. The Combined Chiefs of Staff preferred to wait until German morale was evidently at its most fragile. The two bomber forces continued for the moment to attack what they had targeted before Normandy, Harris against city areas, Spaatz against oil and air force targets. During September Spaatz searched for a combination of targets that would put maximum pressure on the German military war effort. Since it was now evident that the Allies, sitting on the German frontier, would not find it as easy to invade as had been hoped, Spaatz preferred a strategy that would maximize the help the air forces could give to Eisenhower. His staff worked on a programme to attack major military industries and communications in the Ruhr-Rhineland, Saarland and south-west Germany to create the maximum dislocation and demoralization of the military and administrative structures. The plan was divided in two parts: ‘Hurricane I’ was to be directed in general at areas which contained valuable targets in western Germany during periods when visual bombing was difficult; ‘Hurricane II’ was for precise attacks in good weather on oil installations, motor transport depots and communications. The directive was issued on 13 October to both Harris and Spaatz, but persistent poor weather rendered ‘Hurricane II’ unworkable while ‘Hurricane I’ was too amorphous in ambition and was largely ignored.320
The search for an agreed plan did not stop the Allied bomber forces from heavy and regular attacks on German targets, almost all of them non-visual on account of the deteriorating weather. On 18 October the two forces agreed to set up a Combined Strategic Targets Committee, chaired jointly by Bufton and Colonel Maxwell from Spaatz’s staff, to work out a better set of priorities. Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, Eisenhower’s deputy, was invited by Portal to contribute to the evaluation process. Tedder deplored what he described as a ‘patchwork quilt’ of targets with no comprehensive pattern and recommended concentration on oil and communications as the two targets most likely to undermine German capacity to wage war. Tedder had been a firm supporter of the transport plan in Italy in 1943–4, then of the invasion of France. He was strongly supported by Solly Zuckerman, who had been responsible for working out the Italian plan, and was now advising SHAEF.321 Tedder’s intervention proved decisive. Ultra intelligence in late October confirmed that attacks on transportation had already had a substantial effect on coal movements. A meeting at SHAEF headquarters on 28 October agreed on priority being given to oil targets and communications, and a new instruction, Strategic Directive No. 2, was issued on 1 November to Spaatz and Harris. The new directive, however, was a compromise, as most directives had been since the Casablanca Conference. Alongside oil and transport, the directive allowed attacks on ‘important industrial areas’ when visual bombing was impaired, as well as policing attacks on the German Air Force organization and, when required, direct support of land operations.322 Bombing preferences in fact remained divided: Spaatz, Doolittle and Bufton preferred the oil campaign; Tedder and Zuckerman sponsored communications; Harris, who had a strong personal antipathy to Zuckerman (‘the “expert” Mr Solly Zuckerman’) and to Bufton (‘one of my ex-Station commanders’), remained wedded to the idea that oil and transport were expensive, dangerous and futile objectives when the destruction of cities could be more easily accomplished.323 In a famous exchange of letters with Portal (his were drafted by Bufton) in December 1944, Harris rejected the oil plan on the grounds that it would need a quarter of a million tons of bombs and months of effort to achieve it.324
The effect of differences of opinion can be exaggerated. Allied air power was now so overwhelming and technically sophisticated that attacks anywhere contributed to the cumulative collapse of the German war effort, and could be carried out with small losses. Harris diverted some of his area raids to the Ruhr-Rhineland synthetic oil installations in November and December, and ordered a heavy attack on Leuna-Merseburg on 6–7 December which, though deep in German territory, cost only 5 bombers from a force of 475. From 6 per cent of its bombing total on oil in October, Bomber Command increased the total to 24 per cent the following month. That same month the Eighth Air Force devoted 39 per cent of its total on oil targets, the Fifteenth Air Force 32 per cent. Despite justified fears that German efforts would be focused entirely on reconstituting oil production, the long-term trend of the oil attacks since the beginning of the year was to create a critical level of loss, whose effects on German military mobility and air power were indeed fundamentally debilitating (see Table 6.5). Most of Harris’s attacks were nevertheless devoted to night raids on urban targets, particularly on smaller cities that had not so far been the object of attack. Between October and April, when area attacks were ordered to cease, Bomber Command launched heavy attacks against cities across Germany. Some contained important rail junctions or marshalling yards, some chemical and oil plant, but most of the time the heavy bombloads destroyed wide urban areas or continued to fall on open ground. Although a number of daylight raids were made, Harris refused to convert his force to day-bombing, perhaps to ensure that the contribution of his Command remained distinctive to the last.
Table 6.5: German Oil Production and Imports, 1944–5 (000 tonnes)
Month Synthetic Production Oil Refined in Germany Imports Total
Jan 1944 498 175 179 852
Feb 1944 478 160 200 838
Mar 1944 542 191 186 919
Apr 1944 501 157 104 762
May 1944 436 170 81 687
June 1944 298 129 40 467
July 1944 229 115 56 400
Aug 1944 184 134 11 329
Sept 1944 152 113 11 276
Oct 1944 155 124 34 313
Nov 1944 185 105 37 327
Dec 1944 164 108 22 294
Source: Calculated from Webster, Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, vol 4, 516.
By contrast, American bombing, though intended to be directed at oil and transport targets, was often little distinguishable from area raiding. Much of the air policing of the German Air Force and attacks on targets of opportunity on the German transport network were carried out by fighters and fighter-bombers, which swarmed over Germany. The heavy bombers focused on major industrial and rail targets, but poor visibility for much of the winter meant that most bombs again fell widely scattered. From every 100 bombs dropped on an oil plant, 87 missed the target entirely and only 2 hit the buildings and equipment.325 A conference on bombing accuracy called in March 1945 confirmed that most bombing since September 1944 had been blind-bombing, much through 10/10 cloud cover. From September to December 1944 only 14 per cent of bombing was done with good to fair visibility, a further 10 per cent visually aimed with poor visibility; 76 per cent was carried out non-visually, using a variety of electronic aids. In good visibility, at least four-fifths of bombs were found to fall within one mile of the aiming point, but through 10/10 cloud cover only 5.6 per cent.326 The instructions given to the Eighth Air Force in October 1944 on bombing procedure encouraged attacks in poor weather on any towns visible with the aid of H2X, for the reason that they were certain to contain some vital military targets. The effect, like the directives to Bomber Command three years before, was to encourage escalating damage to the civilian milieu and higher civilian casualties.327
Whatever the operational drawbacks to flying in poor weather against heavily defended targets, enough bombs struck the oil plants and transport network to cause sufficient disruption. T
he transport plan was put into effect by the Eighth Air Force in early September, but serious assaults on the main rail junctions and marshalling yards began in October against Cologne, Hamm and Duisburg. The Rhine was blocked at Cologne by a lucky strike on the Cologne-Mulheimer Bridge, which collapsed into the water, blocking one of Germany’s main traffic waterways. By November the German Railway was down to 11 days’ supply of coal, by 12 December down to five days. Southern and eastern parts of Germany were starved of coal; locomotives and wagons were routinely strafed by fighters and fighter-bombers. Out of 250,000 goods wagons available, almost half were inoperable by late November. Total rail freight traffic fell by 46 per cent from September 1944 to January 1945. In the Ruhr, rolling stock available for daily use was by late October half the level of September. Rolling stock was withdrawn further away from the attacks in western Germany, but the result was to block supplies of coal and coke from the Ruhr, and force a reduction of one-third in electricity generation.328 Serious damage to the Mittelland Canal, the main link between the Ruhr and central Germany, left it unusable for much of October and November. Coal traffic on inland waterways was 2.2 million tons in September, but 422,000 in December.329 Hitler ordered the transfer of 1,000 heavy and 2,000 light anti-aircraft guns to defend key transport junctions, but as a result denuded the defence available to other vital war industries. Ultra intelligence decrypts kept the Allies regularly aware of the impact the transport plan was having and encouraged its expansion.330
Somehow or other, amidst the accumulating chaos of smashed rail lines, burnt-out cities and crumpled factories, the German Air Force continued to sustain a threat to the ubiquitous enemy. Despite the long battle of attrition, there were 2,500 serviceable fighters and night-fighters still available by December. Moreover, Allied losses on a number of daylight raids began to mount again: 40 bombers were lost in raids on oil targets on 7 October, 40 again on 2 November. But most of the raids recorded in the Eighth Air Force war diary show negligible losses and in many cases no losses to combat at all. Overall loss rates fluctuated between 1 and 2 per cent throughout the period from September 1944 to the end of the war, an increasing number due to anti-aircraft fire. Allied fighter losses were never high (the peak in September 1944 was only 1.9 per cent of sorties); losses amounted to just 1.37 per cent of all sorties in the last eight months of the war.331 Meanwhile the German Air Force remained trapped in the attrition cycle set in motion earlier in the year. Combat in large formations proved dangerous even to experienced pilots. The Allied raid on 2 November that lost 40 bombers cost the German fighter force 120 planes. The collapse of aviation fuel supply played an important part; training was cut back even further and strict instructions were given on flight times and procedures to reduce fuel consumption. Both day-fighter and night-fighter squadrons found they had a surplus of pilots with available aircraft, but they could not fly because of the restrictions. The enthusiastic expectations of the Me262 jet fighter were disappointed by the slow pace of development and continued technical problems with the jet turbines. Although 564 jets were produced in 1944, the first fighter squadron armed with the new model began operations only in November.332
The situation for the night-fighters was also seriously affected by fuel shortages. Bomber Command losses fell dramatically from the high point of the summer when attacks were still suffering average losses of 6–7 per cent. Over the last months of the war loss rates dropped to an average of 1.5 per cent. In 1943 a Lancaster bomber had lasted on average for 22 combat sorties, whereas by 1945 the figure was 60.333 The more experience the crews got, the better their chances of survival. The German night-fighter force, on the other hand, was hit by the collapse in fuel supply in a number of ways. It was essential to be able to run full training programmes for crews in the use of the complex scanning equipment, the SN3 and FuG218, now available to locate the bomber aircraft. The dynamos needed to charge the radar equipment could not be operated because of fuel shortages; electricity supply to the radar stations was intermittent by the winter months of 1944, which also reduced training time on the new detection instruments.334 Most night-fighters were now the high-quality Junkers Ju88G, fitted with SN2 and Naxos equipment, and the Flensburg detector used to home onto an Allied bomber’s ‘Monica’ signals. By chance this equipment fell undamaged into British hands when a disorientated German night-fighter pilot landed in error on a Bomber Command station at Woodbridge in Suffolk in July 1944. Extensive testing soon showed that the simple expedient of turning off both the ‘Monica’ tail radar and the H2S set would blind the enemy night-fighters. New devices – ‘Perfectos’, ‘Piperack’ and ‘Serrate IV’ – were developed to give warning of enemy fighters and to confuse German radar.335 Although a new round of research began in Germany, there was too little time or opportunity to profit from it as the infrastructure collapsed. The see-saw electronic war ended in the Allies’ favour. By 1945 the night-fighter force was a wasted asset.
In November 1944 the crisis in the German Air Force reached a peak. Göring found himself caught between two poles, Hitler’s harsh accusations over the failure of the air force and the stark reality of Allied air supremacy. He took out his own frustration by blaming his aircrew for lack of courage and loyalty. On 11 November Göring convened a tribunal (‘Aeropag’) in Berlin with his senior air force commanders at which he announced that German air power had failed and asked for solutions. It became, recorded one of those present, ‘a dreary forum which harped on about National Socialist influences within the Luftwaffe’ but resolved nothing.336 The anxieties in the West about the revival of German air power now scarcely reflected the reality. The air force relied increasingly on gestures. New Sturmjäger (storm fighter) units were created from skilled pilots who flew their aircraft, armed with heavy new 30-mm cannon, straight at the bomber stream, regardless of the powerful fighter escort. The suicidal tactics were occasionally accompanied by ramming, despite Hitler’s disapproval of the idea of German kamikaze. To cope with the impossibility of day-to-day combat in small formations – usually groups of 10 or 20 aircraft, now directed mainly at fighter-bombers and fighter-intruders rather than the bomber stream – Adolf Galland, the General of Fighters, organized a plan for a ‘Great Blow’ by building up a reserve of fighters and fuel to release a sudden devastating attack on a large bomber stream. By 12 November there were 3,700 fighters of all kinds available, around 2,500 assigned for the blow. The object was to shoot down at least 400 bombers in one raid to try to deter the Allied offensive and buy time for the build-up of modern air equipment, ‘the shock the enemy needed’, one of the pilots later told his American captors, ‘to make them cease their inroads into the heart of Germany’.337
At just the point that Galland and his commanders were waiting for the weather to clear, the units were ordered westward to the Ardennes to take part in Operation Autumn Mist (Herbstnebel), better known as the Battle of the Bulge. The reserves were lost and later decimated in operation Bodenplatte directed against Allied airfields in early January, when almost 300 German fighters were shot down. Galland was sacked by Göring a week later on suspicion of instigating a pilots’ rebellion against his leadership. A mutiny finally surfaced in a grim confrontation at the Air Ministry after Karl Koller, the successor to Korten as chief of staff, sent a delegation to meet Göring to request changes in command, the re-equipment of fighter units with the Me262 jet, and greater respect for what the fighter arm was trying to do. Göring threatened them with court martial, but in the end the ringleaders were simply posted away from Berlin. Hitler, however, finally conceded that the jet ought to be used as a fighter rather than an ineffective fighter-bomber. Galland was sent to lead one of the first converted Me262 squadrons. On his last mission, flown on 26 April, 11 days before the end of the war in Europe, he was attacked by an undetected Mustang and limped back to his base with a smashed instrument panel, and both turbines damaged. As he arrived, the airfield was being bombed and strafed by Thunderbolts. He landed among them and dived into
a bomb crater from his battered aircraft. Two weeks later he was explaining to his American captors the most effective way to put airfields out of commission.338
By January 1945 there was accumulating Ultra evidence that the choice of oil and the transport network as targets had been sensible. The stabilization of the front after the Battle of the Bulge made it evident that German forces were near the end of their fighting power, yet the assault on Germany itself promised a costly finale. The possibility of using Operation Thunderclap as a way to bring about sudden collapse was raised again. The Bombing Directorate wrote to SHAEF suggesting a bombing operation of exceptional density designed to provoke ‘a state of terror by air attack’ in which any individual in the vicinity of the raid would realize that the chances of escaping death or serious injury ‘are extremely remote’.339 This was one of a number of voices raised over the winter in favour of punitive raids designed to spread the bombing over wider sections of the population. The Joint Intelligence Committee at SHAEF suggested in October 1944 that surplus bombing capacity before German surrender might be usefully employed in attacks against parts of Germany which had not yet been affected ‘in order to bring home to the whole population the consequences of military defeat and the realities of air bombing’.340 Post-war interpretations of the last three months of bombing on a collapsing German war effort and a disorientated population have also come to regard the final flourish of bombing against a weakened enemy, with overwhelming force, as merely punitive, neither necessary nor, as a result, morally justified. The American air forces alone between January and April 1945 dropped more than four times the bomb tonnage used by Germany during the 10-month Blitz on Britain. For both Allied air forces the fact that it was now possible to demonstrate the full potential of air power at a critical point of the European war played some part in their willingness to push the offensive to the maximum, in case air power really could deliver the coup de grâce. But the calls for punitive attacks were not reflected in the prevailing directives, which still presented German resistance, particularly after the crisis in the Ardennes, as substantial enough to merit unrelenting attack. Robert Lovett wrote to Arnold early in January 1945 that despite everything, Germany showed no signs of cracking, while the German forces were fighting with such ‘skill and fanaticism’ that it might produce ‘a type of dug-in, trench warfare which will be slow, costly in lives and difficult to synchronize with the increased demands of accelerated Pacific operations’. Only air power, Lovett concluded, could break the stalemate.341
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 53