The emphasis that has usually been put on the economic impact of bombing, in part a result of the very full economic data supplied by the bombing surveys, has had the effect of avoiding the more important question about the effect of bombing on the German military effort. Here the impact is more evident, though it would be prudent not to take at face value the USSBS claim that bombing was decisive. The air war over Germany was, in Albert Speer’s phrase, ‘the greatest lost battle’.394 But it was a battle that was won alongside the Allied armies and navies; no particular service was decisive on its own. At the end of the war, Bufton observed that the whole purpose of the bombing offensive in 1944 ‘has been designed to weaken the German war machine as a whole so that it could not resist successfully when the Allied Armies made their final attack’.395 One of the principal criticisms of the BBSU report made by Portal (now Lord Portal of Hungerford) was the failure of its authors to grasp that ‘from 1941 onwards, if not before, the object of the bomber offensive from the U.K. was to weaken Germany to such an extent that an invasion of the Continent would succeed’.396 The problem with such claims is to be able to find a way to calculate the extent to which bombing really did inhibit German fighting power. As in the British case, the critical factor was the distorting effect that bombing had on German strategy once it became necessary to divert large resources to the military combat against the air offensive. Bombing, as Speer recognized, really did come to constitute a ‘Second Front’ by 1943, preventing German military leaders from using air power effectively at the fighting front as they had done in all the campaigns from 1939 to 1941. Failure in Russia, in the Mediterranean theatre and against the Allied invasion of France owed a great deal to the fact that German fighter aircraft, guns, ammunition and radar equipment were tied up in the Reich. This had not necessarily been the Allied intention, which focused on unhinging the domestic war effort, but it undoubtedly contributed to the military outcome at the fighting fronts throughout the last three years of war and compensated for whatever weaknesses might have existed in Allied combat experience or skills.
There are two ways in which the effects of bombing on Germany’s military effort can be directly measured. The Combined Offensive distorted German military strategy by imposing a heavy cost in active and passive anti-aircraft defence. One of the keys to Germany’s early battlefield successes was the employment of fighters, fighter-bombers and medium bombers in support of ground forces. The Allied bombing forced the German leadership to switch aircraft back to the defence of the Reich and to reduce sharply the proportion of output devoted to front-line bombers and fighter-bombers, as the following table demonstrates (see Table 6.6). This had the immediate effect of limiting severely the offensive air power available on the battlefield.
In early 1943, 59 per cent of German fighters were in the western theatre facing the bombing; in January 1944, 68 per cent; by October 1944, 81 per cent. At the beginning of 1944 German aircraft available on the Soviet front were little more than a year before, in the Mediterranean theatre they were 40 per cent fewer, but in defence of Germany the number increased by 82 per cent. The same was true for the distribution of anti-aircraft guns: in summer 1944 there were 2,172 batteries of light and heavy anti-aircraft artillery on the home front, but only 443 batteries in the Mediterranean theatre, and 301 on the whole of the Eastern Front.397 This situation left German armies denuded of air protection at a critical juncture of the ground war on the eastern and Mediterranean fronts, while the diversion to the defence of Germany created just the conditions the American air forces needed to be able to overcome the German Air Force in the ‘Battle of Germany’, perhaps the single most significant military achievement of the offensive.
Table 6.6: German Fighter and Bomber Strength and Production, 1943–4
Date Fighter Output Bomber Output Fighter Strength Bomber Strength
Mar 1943 962 757 2,028 1,522
June 1943 1,134 710 2,403 1,663
Sept 1943 1,072 678 2,220 1,080
Dec 1943 1,555* 522* 2,172 1,604
Mar 1944 1,638 605 2,261 1,331
June 1944 2,449 703 2,301 1,089
Sept 1944 3,375 428 3,002 929
Dec 1944 2,630 262 3,516 528
* Figures for January 1944.
Source: Calculated from Webster, Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, vol 4, 494–5, 501–2.
For the German war effort the costs of all forms of air defence by 1943–4 were substantial in terms of both manpower and equipment. The anti-aircraft service absorbed 255,000 personnel in 1940, but 889,000 at its peak in 1944; the 14,400 heavy and 42,000 light guns by 1944 required production of 4,000 new guns a month; anti-aircraft units consumed one-fifth of all ammunition, half the production of the electronics industry and one-third of all optical equipment.398 The passive civil defence personnel numbered around 900,000 (supported by 15 million members of the Air Protection League); the numbers involved in post-raid clearance fluctuated over time, but they totalled by 1944 in the hundreds of thousands. Civil defence and medical equipment had to be maintained in the face of wide losses, hospitals had to be built and repaired, and fire services expanded. Few of those involved would have been potential soldiers, but many would have been potential war-workers, if they were not already combining civil defence activities with paid work. This does not mean that civilians were ipso facto legitimate targets, but as in the British case, it shows that bombing compelled German resources to be allocated in ways that directly affected German military potential at the fighting front and the pattern of strategic choices. Without bombing, the German war effort would have been as free to optimize the use of resources and conduct the military war effort as was the United States. The military consequences of the bombing campaign were clearly more important than the economic, psychological or political ones.
This still begs the question of what it meant for the Allies. J. K. Galbraith, one of the USSBS team, later wrote in his memoirs that the man-hours, aircraft and bombs ‘had cost the American economy far more in output than they had cost Germany’.399 Both air forces were sensitive to this charge and calculated themselves what proportion of the national effort could be attributed to the bombing. In the British case the proportion was calculated to be 7 per cent of all man-hour equivalents, in the American case an estimated 12 per cent of wartime expenditure, both figures that did not distort exceptionally the structure of either war effort, unless account is taken of just how wasteful much of the bombing was.400 Moreover, these were positive choices made about the allocation of resources, where in the German case the choice was involuntary, an addition to the other choices made about the distribution of strategic resources. Nevertheless the cost in manpower and aircraft lost in combat was substantial. In RAF Bomber Command, 47,268 were killed in action (or died as prisoners of war) and 8,195 in accidents. According to Harris, an estimated 135,000 flew in combat with Bomber Command, a loss rate of 41 per cent. Total RAF dead during the war from all causes totalled 101,223, so that Bomber Command deaths amounted to 54.7 per cent of all RAF losses.401 Of these, the largest non-British contingent was composed of Canadians, 9,919 of whom died in Bomber Command.402 Total wastage of Bomber Command aircraft from all causes was 16,454.403 American heavy-bomber losses against Germany totalled 10,152 between 1942 and 1945, and the total killed in all theatres against Germany was 30,099.404
Balancing the Allied losses against the German figures for aircraft and personnel says little about the final outcome. The costs were modest compared with the 9 million Soviet military dead and 5 million German dead, reflecting the priority of both Western Allies to avoid repeating the losses of the Great War for publics likely to be less tolerant of the escalating human cost to themselves than were populations under dictatorship. For Britain and the United States, the political advantages of preferring bombing to other forms of combat were to be found in the desire to limit the cost to the home population while maximizing the use of advanced technology and large manufacturing capacity to impose insupport
able costs on the population, economy and military structure of the enemy. Bombing could be used to maintain domestic morale and to exert leverage on the enemy in ways which were rendered easily visible in the democratic media. That the campaign could have been conducted differently, at lower cost (to both sides) and with greater efficacy, is not in doubt, but it is evident from the historical record why these opportunities, strategic and technical, were missed or ignored or misunderstood, or incompetently attempted. War is always easier to fight looking backwards.
7
The Logic of Total War: German Society under the Bombs
After the war in Europe ended in May 1945, many of those who had helped direct the bombing of Germany were curious to see the destruction for themselves. General Spaatz flew to Augsburg in Bavaria on 10 May to meet Hermann Göring, who had just been captured by American troops. The American official historian, Bruce Hopper, was with Spaatz and recorded the two-hour interrogation in a small office in the Augsburg Riding School in which Göring reflected on why his air force had failed to halt the bombing. It was, Hopper wrote, a historic meeting of the ‘Homeric Chiefs of the Air War’. All around was evidence of the destruction of the national economic and civil life of a great nation, doomed, so he thought, to be set back by a century as a result. ‘That,’ he added, ‘has never happened before in history.’1
Other senior American airmen followed suit. General Anderson flew around the captured areas of western Germany, landing where he could and unloading a jeep to get a better look at the ruins. The diary record of his trip – ‘Jeeping the Targets in a Country that Was’ – recorded a shocking catalogue of destruction: ‘Mainz, a shimmering shell … Darmstadt, a shambles … Frankfurt. Largely roofless. Looks like Pompeii magnified … Ludwigshafen. Frightful, fantastic spectacle.’ Anderson flew across the Ruhr-Rhineland industrial basin where the language he used to describe the spectacle was stretched to extremes: ‘Dusseldorf, not even a ghost … all ruins begin to look alike … Cologne, indescribable. One gets a feeling of horror: nothing, nothing is left.’ His plane took him back to France five days later. His diarist breathed a sigh of relief, ‘escape from Götterdamerung [sic] back to civilization’.2 Sydney Bufton went to look at Hamburg and was ‘greatly impressed’, but shocked at the sight of people living in wrecked buildings ‘into which I would not care to venture’.3 Around the same time Solly Zuckerman, the British government scientist and champion of the Transportation Plan, visited the same Ruhr cities where he witnessed a similar desolate landscape: ‘so much destruction one longed for open fields and to get away from the trail of our bombs’. Here and there he saw women sweeping the pavement in front of houses that were no more than neat piles of rubble; in the eradicated city of Essen he observed people who looked neat and tidy and in no obvious sense dejected. He was puzzled by this behaviour, so at odds with what he had expected. ‘How the German civilians stuck the bombardments,’ he wrote a few days later, ‘is a mystery.’4
The survival of German society under the bombs has generally attracted less attention than explanations of British survival during the Blitz. Yet the German population of the major cities had to endure more than four years of increasingly heavy bombardment, fighting a war that was evidently lost long before its end. Despite Germany’s growing debilitation, industrial production, food supply and welfare were all maintained until the very last weeks when Allied armies were on German soil and Allied bombers were pounding ruins into ruins. The capacity of the state and the National Socialist Party to absorb this level of punishment and manage its consequences demonstrated some remarkable strengths in the system, as well as its harsher characteristics. The question asked by the Allies before 1945 was typically ‘When will Germany crack?’ For the historian the issue needs to be approached the other way round. As for Zuckerman, the real issue is how German civilian life, trapped between remorseless bombardment and a suicidal dictatorship, adapted to the material and psychological pressures of progressive urban obliteration.
COMMUNITY SELF-PROTECTION
In 1935 the German Reichsluftschutzbund (Reich Air Protection League) published a poster featuring a stern-faced Hermann Göring above the slogan ‘Air defence fighters have as much responsibility and as much honour as every soldier at the front!’ The civil defence structure built up in Germany in the 1930s was from the outset more military in character than its British counterpart. The purpose of preparations for a possible bombing war was not simply to provide adequate protection from gas and bombs but to use air-raid precautions as a form of collective social mobilization. Civil defence was a community obligation which matched the wider claims of the German dictatorship to have created a rearmed and psychologically reinvigorated people after years in the democratic wilderness. By 1939, 15 million Germans had joined the Luftschutzbund; by 1942 there were 22 million, almost one-quarter of the population.5
The formal civil defence structure in Germany was intentionally military in nature because it was set up and commanded by the German Air Force when the armed forces were reconstituted in March 1935 in defiance of the Versailles Treaty. From 1933 to 1935 air-raid defence was an office in the German Air Ministry, first set up in September 1933 with Göring as minister. In March 1935 it became part of the new air force structure and on 4 July the Air Protection Law was published, defining the responsibilities of the new organization. The Air Protection Department was run by Dr Kurt Knipfer, an air-protection expert previously with the Prussian Ministry of Commerce, who held the office down to 1945, despite numerous changes in the organization of the ministry and the nature of civil defence activity. In 1939 the department was placed under Air Force Inspectorate 13 (Air Protection), but Knipfer was able to avoid too much interference from the military side of the air force, which regarded civil defence as a passive subsidiary to the combat role enjoyed by the rest of the service. With the creation of 12 Regional Air Commands (Luftgaukommandos) in 1938, a territorial structure was established for running air-raid protection at local level. The regional commands were responsible for all active and passive air defence in their area, including the air-raid warning service (Luftschutzwarndienst), emergency repairs, medical aid, decontamination squads, blackout, camouflage policy and fire protection.6
The question of organization was in practice far from straightforward. The Reich Interior Ministry, which had hitherto been responsible for air-raid protection, objected to the changed ownership of civil defence, and retained some responsibilities in areas of public health, civil administration and post-raid organization which survived until well into the war, though without very clear definition.7 More significant was the claim made by the leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, when he was appointed Chief of German Police in June 1936. At local level the responsible leader of air-raid protection was usually the city police president, together with a committee composed of the local heads of the various emergency services. In smaller towns or the countryside the control post could be assumed by the local mayor, or rural officials, but in the threatened urban areas, the regular Order Police assumed responsibility. Himmler claimed that the police, rather than the air force, should run the fire service, provide medical help (in collaboration with the German Red Cross), organize gas decontamination and coordinate the emergency rescue services (Sicherheits- und Hilfsdienst). Confusion was temporarily set aside by an agreement between Göring’s deputy, Erhard Milch, and Himmler in 1938, which confirmed that the Regional Air Commands had overall responsibility for active and passive air defence, but the Order Police would operate the rescue and welfare services once an air raid had taken place. The arguments over responsibility continued into the war as Himmler sought to exploit civil defence as an instrument for internal security as much as civil protection.8 The emergency services were in July 1942 turned into the Air Protection Police (Luftschutzpolizei) to make clear that they served the police authorities, not the air force. Such dualism was characteristic of the institutional competition provoked in the Third Reich by the efforts of
the Party and the SS to penetrate or subvert or substitute conventional forms of authority.9
The creation of a national fire service was a typical example. The fire service was decentralized before 1933, the responsibility of local cities or provinces, with no technical compatibility between the different forces in equipment, hydrants or hose couplings, and dependent on a large number of volunteer auxiliaries. In 1933 the Air Ministry began a programme to encourage manufacturers to standardize fire-service equipment. In Prussia, the largest German province, fire and police services were tied more closely together and instructions on standardized practices and technical standards introduced; these were confirmed in the 1935 Air Protection Law. In 1936 the Interior Ministry planned to extend the Air Ministry guidelines to other provinces in order to promote national standards. Himmler, however, wanted the fire service under his control as Chief of Police and prepared legislation to create a National Fire Service, run on standard lines defined by the police authorities and including both professional firemen and volunteers. A National Fire Service Law came into force on 23 December 1938, dissolving all existing fire services and placing the new national organization under the control of the Order Police. Firemen were now to be known as Fire Defence Police (Feuerschutzpolizei), the volunteers as police auxiliaries.10 By 1940 standard and interchangeable equipment was available, including a single model light-alloy hose coupling which could be used for all types of hose, and three standard pump appliances.11 In the end, the contest for jurisdictional control did not inhibit the development of a more effective service to meet the needs of a future air war. German practice was the example used when a national fire service was created in England in 1941.
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 56