This conclusion was even more evident in the efforts of the two bomber forces to destroy the sites from which V-weapons were to be fired rather than raid the factories where they were being made. The first raids against the construction sites and depots in France were made in November 1943 after the Central Interpretation Unit at Medmenham had identified the first V-1 bunkers. The campaign against the V-weapons was codenamed ‘Crossbow’, but the bombing operations were known as ‘Noball’. The quantities of bomb tonnage over the course of the campaign, from early December 1943 to mid-September 1944, exceeded by a wide margin the total devoted to the transportation plan, a final tally of 118,000 tons of bombs, 86,000 of which were dropped between 12 June and 12 September 1944 on targets considerably smaller than the marshalling yards and viaducts targeted for D-Day. The first bombings in the winter of 1943–4 were thought to have set back the onset of the V-weapons campaign by six months, but after the first attacks the Germans abandoned the system of ‘ski-jump’ launch sites (so called after their shape) because of their visibility and vulnerability, but let the impression remain that work was still being done on them in order to attract the bombers.136 Eventually most of the original sites were identified and destroyed, but the newly modified launch sites were hard to find or hit. The German campaign was held up chiefly because of technical problems in producing sufficient operational V-1s to be able to start the offensive any sooner.137 After the first V-1s fell on London from the middle of June 1944 onwards, a renewed order went out to both bomber forces to try to stamp out the threat. From December 1943 to May 1944, ‘Crossbow’ targets had taken 12 per cent of the bombing effort, but between June and August 1944 the proportion was 33 per cent.138 This represented a very large diversion of resources from any assistance that could be given to the Allied armies in France against targets that were almost immune to bomb attack. In April 1944 RE8 had explained to the Air Ministry that small sites protected by 20 feet of concrete had a low level of vulnerability.139 In July Sinclair instructed Portal to give the ‘Crossbow’ sites a lower priority because ‘they are hard to destroy and easy to repair’. When Eighth Air Force B-17s attacked 10 sites in July, they missed eight and dropped only four bombs on the remaining two.140 Although Churchill had been keen for Bomber Command to try to blunt the V-weapon assault, the Air Ministry recognized by July that any effects were likely to be ephemeral. An Air Intelligence report in July on the V-1 sites captured by the American army in Cherbourg showed that although they had been heavily bombed, the design of the sites made them almost impervious to bomb damage and easily repaired if a chance hit achieved anything.141 The bombing continued until September, when most of the sites were captured by the advancing army, but both air forces recognized the limitation of using heavy bombers for what were in effect tactical targets.
The same limitations operated with the decision to use heavy bombers in support of Eisenhower’s ground campaign in France. For almost three months, northern France was a battlefield. Like the German attack on France in 1940, or the Soviet Union in 1941, it proved just as difficult for the advancing Allied armies and air forces to avoid heavy damage to the towns, cities and civilians in their path. In northern Normandy, where the battle lasted longest and was at its most intense, 14,000 French civilians died, 57 per cent as a result of bombing. Heavy air raids began from the first morning, 6 June, after warning leaflets had been dropped at dawn encouraging the Normandy population to ‘Leave for the Fields! You Haven’t a Minute to Lose!’ In Caen on 6 June around 600 were killed by an American air raid, another 200 the following day amidst the ruins of much of the city; on 7 June a raid by more than 1,000 Bomber Command aircraft against six small towns, including Vire, St Lô, Lisieux and Coutances, eradicated the urban areas almost entirely. In the first two days of the campaign, 3,000 French civilians were killed.142 The village of Aunay-sur-Odon, bombed to stop the movement of German tanks a few days later, was literally erased from the map. Pictures taken after the raid showed a single church spire in an otherwise entirely level landscape. The French authorities counted 2,307 bombardments in June, 1,016 of them on the north coast provinces, most against railway targets. In July there were fewer raids, 1,195 in total, in August 1,121.143 The great majority of the raids were tactical, carried out by the Allied Expeditionary Air Force, but on occasion the heavy bombers were asked to bring overwhelming firepower to bear. Two attacks on Caen, one on 7 July and a second on 18 July, were among the heaviest of the Overlord campaign. The raid on 7 July involved 467 bombers, dropping 2,276 tons on the northern outskirts of the town. There were few German defenders and the main effect of the raid, which left a moonscape on the approaches to Caen, was to force the British and Canadian troops to clear the roads before any further advance could be made.144 The raid on 18 July by 942 bombers dropped an extraordinary 6,800 tons on the city and its eastern environs; the result did little to the German defenders, who had largely withdrawn to a defensive line south of Caen, nor to the population, 12,000 of whom eked out a precarious existence in caves outside the town at Fleury, but the raid once again left a ruined landscape which slowed down the advance of ground forces. By the end of the invasion a combination of bombing and shelling had left habitable housing for only 8,000 out of the 60,000 people who had lived there.145
The weight of attack that could now be employed by the bomber commands was out of all proportion to the nature of the ground threat and on balance did little to speed up the course of the campaign. The establishment of air superiority over the battlefield was assured by the thousands of fighters and fighter-bombers available to Leigh-Mallory to establish a protective air umbrella over the Allied armies. Occasionally the bluntness of the bombing weapon spilled over to impose friendly fire on Allied troops. On 24 July, on the eve of the American breakout into Brittany, codenamed Operation ‘Cobra’, hundreds of Eighth Air Force bombers were ordered to shatter the German defences in front of General Omar Bradley’s armies. ‘Ground grunted and heaved as the first cascade of bombs came down,’ wrote Captain Chester Hanson in Bradley’s war diary, ‘horrible noise and the shuddering thunder that makes the sound of the bomb so different from the artillery.’ It was followed by the sight of ambulances streaming to the front line to pick up the dead and injured from among the American troops hit by the bombardment, a total of 25 killed and 131 wounded. Among the victims was Lt. General Lesley McNair whose mangled body was thrown 60 feet by a bomb and could only be identified by the three stars on his collar.146 More bombs dropped on American troops the following day, bringing the total dead to 101. Eisenhower decided not to use heavy bombers again to support the ground battle but to use them against targets he properly regarded as strategic, but Bradley once again called in heavy bombers to help unblock German opposition in Aachen in November 1944.147 This time elaborate precautions were taken to ensure that the 2,400 American and British bombers used did not impose friendly fire on American forces. Large panels visible from the air were used as checkpoints in Allied lines to indicate clearly where the army was; a line of vertical radar beams was then set up by mobile units which could be distinguished by onboard radar in the approaching bombers; barrage balloons with special cerise markings flew at 1,500 feet in front of the American line, and anti-aircraft guns were set up to fire coloured flares at 2,000 feet below the bombers. Despite the most elaborate of precautions, two bomb batches still fell on American troops, but with only one casualty.148 Aachen was turned into a wasteland.
The gulf separating means and ends in the application of heavy bombers to the campaign in France was no more evident than in the fate of two coastal towns which were obliterated by the Allied bomber commands. Both towns held stubborn German garrisons which refused to surrender even when all France had been liberated. The Channel port of Le Havre, subject to 153 small attacks since 1940, was no stranger to bombardment. It was strategically important as a potential port for Allied supply as Eisenhower’s armies moved rapidly eastwards towards Germany, but it was defended by a garrison o
f over 11,000 German troops commanded by Colonel Eberhard Wildermuth. Since Le Havre was heavily fortified and he was under orders to prevent the port falling to the enemy for as long as possible, he rejected a request to surrender on 3 September. Bomber Command was then ordered to bombard the city for a week before a ground assault could finally seize the port. A remarkable 9,631 tons of bombs were dropped and 82 per cent of the town was destroyed at a cost of at least 1,536 French civilians. The German commander refused to give up and a brief ground assault soon captured the port and the entire garrison. The post-raid analysis carried out by SHAEF concluded that the bombing had not done much to assist the eventual ground assault, a view that Harris shared.149 Wildermuth cited artillery as the real source of the Allies’ rapid success on the ground; bombing killed only a tiny handful of German soldiers.
The second port was Royan at the mouth of the River Gironde, where the garrison had also refused to surrender when the whole surrounding area had been liberated. The presence of German forces made it difficult for the Allies to use the neighbouring port of Bordeaux and in December 1944 SHAEF was requested by the local American army commander to lay on a heavy bombing to push the garrison to abandon the fight. On the night of 4–5 January 1945, 347 Lancasters dropped 1,576 tons, including 285 4,000-lb ‘blockbusters’; around 85 per cent of the town was destroyed and 490 French civilians (and 47 German soldiers) were killed. Poor communication had failed to alert Harris to the fact that targets outside the town had in fact been requested, not the town itself, while the French authorities had insisted that the civilian population had already been evacuated, which was not true.150 The raid achieved nothing. The German commander refused to surrender until two further attacks by the Eighth Air Force on 14 and 15 April, which dropped another 5,555 tons, destroying everything still standing. The two raids, one of 1,133 bombers, the second with 1,278, were the largest operations mounted against any target in France. The Germans surrendered three days later. A French journalist ‘defied anyone to find even a single blade of grass’.151
The overall cost from bombing in French lives and property during the war was exceptionally high and it resulted in the main from using the overwhelming power of the bomber forces against modest targets that might more easily have been attacked by tactical air forces with greater accuracy. It was this lack of proportionality that attracted most criticism from French sources sympathetic to the Allies and anxious that German targets should be bombed. ‘That which revolts the vast majority,’ ran an intelligence report from December 1943, ‘of whom a great number are members of the Resistance is the inaccuracy of aim.’152 The result of using large heavy-bomber forces in level flying from high altitude was to exact forms of damage not very different from the impact on German targets. The following table (Table 9.2) shows the overall cost of the bombing on France. The official figures presented here are lower than the figure of 67,000 for overall deaths regularly cited in the post-war literature, and the Passive Defence authorities regarded the initial statistics as a minimum. But although there are minor discrepancies in the figures published by different agencies in 1945, and a more general problem in classifying deaths caused by bombing, tactical air raids or artillery fire in a battle zone, a figure between 53,000 and 54,000 dead is unlikely to be superseded by anything more precise.153 The figure for 1940 includes deaths and destruction from the air inflicted by all air forces during the German invasion in May and June.
Table 9.2 French Losses from Bombing, 1940–45
Year Deaths Injured Buildings Destroyed Buildings Damaged
1940 3,543 2,649 25,471 53,465
1941 1,357 1,670 3,265 9,740
1942 2,579 5,822 2,000 9,300
1943 7,446 13,779 12,050 23,300
1944 37,128 49,007 42,230 86,498
1945 1,548 692 300 800
Total 53, 601 73, 619 85, 316 183, 103
Source: BN, Bulletin d’Information de la Défense Passive, May 1945, 4.
Why did the Allies use the bomber force in France, in the face of the political anxieties regularly expressed in London, with such apparent disregard for civilian losses? The bomber commanders were themselves unhappy with what was being asked of them. Spaatz considered the tactical air forces adequate for giving effective ground support. In notes for Eisenhower he argued that strategic bombers would not yield a sufficient strategic return if used for the invasion: ‘The advantages gained by such use would be very small compared to the effort put forth.’154 The Eighth Air Force commander, Jimmy Doolittle, told Eisenhower and Spaatz in August that the use of strategic bombers with insufficient training and planning time in support of ground operations was bound to produce errors in execution and admitted that ‘the fighters have done a better job of supporting the Army than the bombers’.155 The persistent use of the strategic forces has a number of explanations. For the Allied Supreme Command in Europe and the Combined Chiefs of Staff, bombing had evident advantages: it would speed up the invasion after years in which demands for the Second Front had failed to be met; it would help to bring the end of the war closer for democratic populations anxious that hostilities should end sooner rather than later; it would make victory in France more certain and less hazardous; and it would finally allow the Allies to cash in the very large investment already made in strategic bombing which had not yet delivered what had been promised from the Combined Bomber Offensive. The bomber commanders also bear some of the responsibility. By making repeated and often strident claims about the capacity of strategic bombing to make a decisive contribution to shortening the war, they invited the ground forces to exploit those claims in a campaign that was regarded as decisive for the war effort. In the end, the balance between operational and political calculation was bound to fall in favour of the anticipated military outcome. When Eaker asked Portal in 1943, before starting the heavy bombing of French targets, how to overcome political objections to French losses, Portal replied that the government ‘have never shrunk from loss of civilian life where this can be shown to be an inevitable consequence of a considered and agreed plan’.156
EASTERN EUROPE: EVERYWHERE BUT AUSCHWITZ
The first time the RAF was invited to bomb the camp at Auschwitz (Oświęcim) in Poland was in January 1941. At that time it was not the extermination and labour complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where more than 1 million European Jews were murdered between the spring of 1942 and the end of the war, but a camp for 20,000 Polish prisoners of war. The request came, according to General Sikorski’s Polish Army headquarters in Britain, from the prisoners themselves, who would welcome a bombing raid that would allow them to escape en masse. Air Marshal Peirse, commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, replied that it was impossible. On clear nights every bomber had to be deployed against German industry. The German war economy, Peirse explained, was likely to experience a crisis in 1941. ‘Sporadic attacks’ against a target such as Auschwitz were unlikely to be accurate enough to do more than kill many of the prisoners.157
The next time the RAF was asked to bomb Auschwitz was in July 1944 when it was no longer a prisoner-of-war camp, but the centre for the mass murder of European Jews. The complex consisted of three main areas: an extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau; a camp for forced labour selected from those deemed fit enough from among the arrivals; and an industrial complex at nearby Monowitz where the chemical giant I. G. Farben was constructing a plant to produce synthetic rubber and other war-related chemicals. On 7 July, following an interview with Chaim Weizmann, president of the Jewish Agency, Eden wrote to Sinclair asking whether it was possible to bomb the camp or the railtracks leading to it. Churchill was keen to pursue this, but Sinclair, like Peirse, was unsympathetic. He told Eden that interrupting rail traffic in France had proved difficult even with the full weight of Bomber Command behind it; to find and cut a single line far away in Poland was beyond the power of the bomber force. Sinclair doubted that bombing the camp or dropping arms to the prisoners ‘would really help the victims’. He thought the American air f
orces might be in a better position to do it, and promised to discuss the issue with Spaatz, overall commander of American air forces in Europe.158 Spaatz was sympathetic, but claimed that nothing could be done without better photographic intelligence of the camp itself. There was extensive reconnaissance material on the nearby Monowitz plant and other war-economic targets around Auschwitz, but although some photographs showed areas of the camp, the extermination centre had not been the object of a specific reconnaissance operation.159 Unknown to Spaatz, the War Department in Washington had already been lobbied several times in the summer of 1944 to undertake bombing of the rail lines or the gas chambers but had deemed the operation to be ‘impracticable’. On 14 August the Assistant Secretary of War, John McCloy, rejected the request (and did so again when lobbied in November).160 Two weeks later the Foreign Office informed Sinclair that since the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau appeared to have been halted, there was no longer any need to consider an operation to bomb it. On 1 September 1944 Spaatz was instructed to pursue the idea no further.161
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 79