There has been much academic argument over the question of whether an operation against the Birkenau extermination facility or the railway lines was feasible or not.162 There is no doubt that had it been a priority target for the Allies, it certainly could have been bombed. At just the time that the Allies were considering the requests from the Jewish Agency to undertake the bombing, the United States Fifteenth Air Force began a series of raids on the I. G. Farben complex at Monowitz where the prisoners in the Auschwitz labour camp were marched to work every day. Auschwitz had been on the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces target list since at least December 1943 when plans were drawn up for attacks on German oil and chemical plants in eastern Europe.163 The first raid on 20 August 1944 hit Monowitz accurately, a second on 13 September was hampered by enhanced German anti-air defences, the third and fourth attacks on 18 and 26 December did more damage to the plant, and it was finally abandoned in January 1945 as the Red Army drew near. The damage was not extensive and output of methanol (from one of the completed parts of the site) was reduced by only 12 per cent. The raids showed, however, that operations over Auschwitz were indeed feasible; only six aircraft were lost despite the strengthening of German defensive measures.164
The raids against Monowitz took place against the background of a second request for ‘political’ bombing. On 1 August 1944 the Polish Home Army began an armed rising against the German garrison in Warsaw. The Polish army in London requested help from the RAF in the form of military supplies dropped from low altitude over the city. Churchill was once again keen that something should be done.165 The Operation ‘Frantic’ shuttle-bombing to bases in the Ukraine had been temporarily suspended at Soviet insistence, which ruled out supply missions by the Eighth Air Force. Although Portal and Slessor, Eaker’s second-in-command in the Mediterranean, regarded the operations as ‘not practicable’ because of the distance and the prospect of high losses, it was decided that the pressure from the Poles and the expectation that the Red Army would soon capture Warsaw were sufficient grounds for undertaking limited operations.166 The RAF 205 Group, based at Brindisi in southern Italy (considerably closer to Warsaw than bases in England), was ordered to begin night-time operations. An unofficial mission had already been flown on the night of 4–5 August to drop weapons to Polish partisans, but only six aircraft arrived at the target and four were shot down. On 8 August Moscow was informed that an airlift to the Poles was about to begin, which almost certainly confirmed the Soviet side in the decision not to allow further shuttle-bombing until mid-September, when Polish resistance was almost over.167 On the night of 8–9 August three Polish aircrews successfully reached Warsaw without loss; a total of 19 missions were flown, the largest on 14–15 August when 12 out of the 27 aircraft despatched found Warsaw, for the loss of eight aircraft. Total losses were 35 bombers (19 per cent) out of 195 sorties, but substantial quantities of ammunition and weapons reached the Home Army in the areas of the city where they still held out.168 In this case the operational conditions were similar to a putative attack on Auschwitz-Birkenau. The difference in the Allied response in the late summer of 1944 can perhaps best be explained in military terms, for the Poles were fighting against the common German enemy. Appeals to help with civilian victims, whether refugees or those slated for genocide, were regarded as outside the remit of Allied military forces, whatever the moral force of the argument. The PWE rejected a Jewish appeal in December 1943 to take action against the Romanians over the killing of Romanian Jews (‘considering the constant spate of requests for warning or appeal from Jewish organisations’), but were happy to suggest bombs on Bucharest in March 1944 to speed up the surrender of Romania’s armed forces and to help the approaching Russians.169 In the end, whether bombing Auschwitz-Birkenau would have had any impact on the conduct of a genocide that had almost run its macabre course by August 1944 remains open to speculation.
The arguments about what was possible in the bombing of eastern Europe, and under what operational conditions, highlight the very different circumstances faced by Allied air forces when confronted with the challenges of distance and geography. For at least the first half of the war, targets in eastern and south-eastern Europe were difficult to reach from any bases the RAF might have in the Middle East or North Africa. Navigation problems were magnified for flights from desert airfields across inhospitable terrain with poor mapping and reconnaissance, while maintaining heavy bombers in the heat and dust of the Middle East, thousands of miles from the sophisticated maintenance and logistical system in Britain, was a Sisyphean task. From bases in England, however, most aircraft could not reach distant targets; with the advent of the Lancaster and the Mosquito it took time before serious raids could be mounted even against Berlin, and most of the flight was across the heavily defended areas of the Low Countries and Germany. A large-scale offensive against the Balkan states, Austria, Hungary and Poland became possible only once bases were available in Italy, from the autumn of 1943.
Some sense of how difficult raiding was to be against targets quite remote from the aerial battlefield in western Europe had already become evident when in 1940, and again in 1941, the RAF undertook preparations to bomb the Soviet oilfields in the Caucasus region in order to deny Germany and Italy vital supplies of fuel. The plans in 1940 were prompted first by the French High Command, which wanted to strike at Soviet oil not only to undermine the trade with the Axis states but also to create a possible political crisis for the Soviet Union among the Moslem peoples of southern Russia. French military leaders were much happier about bombing the Soviet Union than bombing Germany.170 The British side agreed with the plan and drew up a detailed study in April 1940 for deploying 48 Blenheim light bombers from bases in Syria and Iraq, supported by 65 Glenn Martin bombers bought by the French from American production. RAF planners thought little of Soviet air and anti-aircraft defences, and like the French, hoped that a three-month attack on Batum, Baku and Grozny might lead sooner or later ‘to the complete collapse of the war potential of the USSR’, as well as disastrous repercussions for Germany.171 Chamberlain’s Cabinet thought the campaign too risky, and following the German attack on France on 10 May, the French abandoned the idea. But the RAF remained in a state of readiness to eliminate the entire Soviet oil industry in three months, assuming an average margin of error of 75 yards, a conclusion entirely at odds with all the bombing trials conducted in 1939 and 1940.172 The plan was revived again in June 1941 in the knowledge that Germany was about to attack the Soviet Union. There were strong recommendations from the British Embassy in Cairo and the chiefs of staff to use two squadrons of Wellington bombers and two of Blenheims for a month of intensive attacks, not only to deny the oil to the Germans but ‘to remind the Soviet of consequences of acceding to German demands’.173 Planning was completed by August 1941, but once again operational and strategic reality prevented a campaign in which the means were manifestly inadequate for the military and political ends desired. When an impromptu attack was finally made on German oil supplies in Romania on 11 June 1942 by 13 B-24 Liberator bombers from the airbase at Fayid in Egypt, the result was described by the Middle East RAF headquarters as a fiasco. The aircraft flew singly and independently; not one reached the oilfield at Ploeşti but instead dropped their bombs wherever they could; three returning aircraft landed at Ankara airport, two at Aleppo in Syria, one at Mosul, two more at other desert airfields, and only four reached the planned return base at Habbaniya in Iraq. The unlucky thirteenth aircraft was reported missing.174
By the summer of 1943 these conditions had altered a great deal. Victory in North Africa in May 1943 opened the way for the invasion and occupation first of Sicily, then of the southern provinces of mainland Italy. Based in Algiers, the Mediterranean High Command, first under Eisenhower, then under the British general, Henry Maitland Wilson, began to consider at last a full air offensive, combining both political propaganda and bombs, against the Balkan region and more distant targets in central Europe. The North African Air Forces w
ere transformed into the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces; the American Ninth Air Force (replaced in November by the Fifteenth) was based in southern Italy at Foggia, and the smaller RAF 205 Group at Brindisi. The political offensive mirrored the activity of the PWE and the RAF in western Europe and Germany. It was based on calculations about how populations in the occupied or satellite areas of eastern Europe might react to leaflet propaganda as well as occasional bombing to enhance political pressure. In the Mediterranean, the American Psychological Warfare Branch (PWB) oversaw the production and distribution of most of the Allied political effort in cooperation with officials from the PWE; how that worked in the Italian campaign has already been described. Out of the more than 1.5 billion leaflets produced at the PWB centre at Bari and dropped by air or fired in propaganda ‘shells’ whose paper contents burst over enemy lines, hundreds of millions were targeted at Albania, Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and the Yugoslav territories, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia.175
The United States demonstrated the same confident enthusiasm for political warfare as the British. ‘History may well show,’ wrote the Eighth Air Force assistant chief of staff, ‘that no single factor has contributed more to the raising and sustaining of morale in the occupied countries.’ The combined effect of the British and American leaflet campaigns, he continued, ‘will shorten the war as a certainty’.176 A pamphlet produced under Spaatz’s signature to explain the value of airborne propaganda to American crews (who like RAF flyers preferred dropping bombs to paper) claimed that the millions of RAF leaflets had brought ‘truth, hope and comfort’ to the oppressed and sustained the will for sabotage and resistance. ‘In occupied territory the spirit of rebellion is being fanned,’ Spaatz continued. ‘The output of the factories suffers as surely as if they had been struck by bombs.’177 A sophisticated technology was developed to ensure that the leaflets fluttered down over a wide area. A single bomber could carry up to 2 million leaflets at a time. Two large canisters were installed in the bomb bay, each holding 60 bundles of approximately 16,000 leaflets bound by a cord fixed to a barometric device. On release from the aircraft each bundle tumbled down until the change in air pressure acted on the release mechanism, scattering the individual leaflets over a wide area. The system was not foolproof: sometimes the bundles opened prematurely, scattering the loads in the wrong place; sometimes they failed to open and whole bundles, each weighing around 55 lbs, fell dangerously on the target population.178
Both the American PWB and the British PWE understood that for eastern Europe the propaganda had to be carefully calibrated to match the circumstances of individual countries, some of which were satellite states of Germany, others the victims of invasion and occupation. For the satellites the propaganda had to suggest the option of abandoning the German alliance and helping the Allies. The leaflet ‘Take a Decision’ dropped in May 1944 on Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Finland had this object in mind. Occupied Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, had to be appealed to differently. Intelligence sources suggested that the Czechs felt abandoned by the Allies as they had been at Munich in September 1938, and the figures show that Czechoslovakia indeed received only a fraction of the leaflet drops made on other areas.179 Above all, the political initiative had to be related to the possibility or probability of bombing, either as a threat or a promise. The Czech sources confirmed that workers were waiting for the bombing to start and would add sabotage to anything the bombs failed to destroy. For the satellite states, bombing was seen, like the case of Bulgaria, as a means to bring the war home to these distant and formerly immune peoples. In the summer of 1944 the Western Allies also had to take account of the onrush of the Red Army, which was by now poised to invade central and south-eastern Europe. The PWE assessment of bombing Bucharest, for example, pointed out that bombs might increase Romanian ‘depression’, but were unlikely to induce defection from the war as the Romanian Army struggled desperately to keep the Soviet invaders at bay. Bombs dropped on Hungary were regarded as more useful since they would remind the Hungarian government and population that they had to do more to sever their connection with Germany.180 Even against satellite states, the political warfare officers recommended attacks only on evidently military targets so as to avoid alienating the populations that were to be liberated from German domination. Czech informers made it clear that as allies, the Czech people should not be subjected to area bombing, which would provoke ‘serious resentment’.181 The Yugoslav partisan armies welcomed precise raids on German targets, but not raids on the major cities. The propaganda made much of Allied claims for bombing accuracy against military targets but was occasionally let down by the translation. A leaflet destined for Axis Bulgaria in late 1943 had the English ‘blockbuster bomb’ (designed to destroy factories or military facilities) translated into Bulgarian as ‘homewrecker’.182
These political imperatives were integrated as far as possible with the military planning directed at eastern Europe, although the promise of accuracy was as difficult to fulfil in this case as it had been in the west. For the Western Allies there was only one principal target in eastern Europe once the area came within effective bombing range. The oil-producing region around Ploeşti in Romania supplied around 3 million tons of oil annually to Germany and Italy out of a total production of 5–6 million tons. For Germany, Romanian exports in 1943 amounted to one-third of all German oil products.183 Since oil was a major target for the Combined Bomber Offensive, the interruption of Romanian supplies assumed a high priority. The RAF had begun to explore the possibility of raiding Ploeşti in the spring of 1942 to aid the Soviet Union but the operation, at the limit of aircraft range, was regarded as impossible with current strengths. The Combined Chiefs of Staff at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 called for the immediate bombing of the oilfield, but when Churchill asked Portal to consider the operation he was told that it was still too risky, not only because it would require flying over Turkish airspace to be feasible, but because it would have to be a single, heavy and demobilizing strike which current air strengths in the North African theatre could not promise.184 Although Churchill was willing, as he told Eden, ‘to put the screw very hard on Turkey’ to modify its neutrality for the RAF, the attack on Ploeşti when it came was made by American air forces acting under pressure from the American Joint Chiefs to act quickly to block Axis oil supplies.185 The British contribution to the opening raid was to supply good maps of the region and large-scale models of the refineries. Portal was keen to allocate three skilled Lancaster crews because he was not confident that American pilots would be able to navigate the 1,850-mile trip successfully, but in the end the raid launched on 1 August 1943 was made only by the B-24 aircraft of the recently constituted Ninth Air Force.186
The American operation was first codenamed ‘Statesman’ then changed in May to ‘Soapsuds’. Churchill disliked the new choice – ‘unworthy of those who would face the hazards’ – and it was eventually christened, with Roosevelt’s approval, ‘Operation Tidalwave’.187 The operation required a great deal of preparation. It was originally scheduled for 23 June 1943, but postponed not only because priority was given to air support for the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, but because the period of intelligence research and crew training took much longer than anticipated. For the American airmen involved the raid was a daunting prospect. When a British adviser appeared at the airbase at Benghazi from which the raid was to be mounted, he found the morale of the crew ‘about as bad as it could possibly be’: they told him that they lacked experience of the low-level bombing chosen to maximize the impact of the attack; that they had no previous experience of operations over such long distances; that the countries over which they had to fly were completely exotic, ‘populated by cannibals’ for all they knew. Rigorous training and better information on the value of the raid contributed to overcoming the worst fears, but there could be no disguising the fact that Ploeşti was one of the most heavily defended targets in Europe.188 American intelligence on G
erman defences was in general poor, because the target was remote from the main operational theatres. Instead of the 100 anti-aircraft guns identified, there proved to be well over 200; instead of a token force of fighter aircraft, there were more than 200 Me109, Me110 and Ju88 aircraft, as well as the Romanian and Bulgarian air forces along the line of attack. The defence of Ploeşti was under the command of Lt. General Alfred Gerstenberg, who was also the unofficial German ‘protector’ of Romania. He long expected an Allied attack and introduced regular exercises for the defences as well as establishing a line of radar stations and a corps of visual observers in the Balkan region. Chemical-smoke battalions were ready to obscure the target, while two dummy sites were constructed north-west and east of the complex to distract any attacker.189 This was as formidable a defence as any available in Germany itself. For the American crews it meant an operation that was likely to be more suicidal than any they would encounter in western Europe.
The raid on 1 August 1943 began early in the morning. Under the command of Brig. General Uzal Ent, 175 aircraft flew off on a course designed to take them to the north-west of Ploeşti, in order to avoid the guns and the barrage of 100 balloons. Over Romania the lead commander turned east at the wrong point, bringing most of the force close to Bucharest where the German defenders were put on full alert. The force turned north into the teeth of the anti-aircraft and fighter defences. Some small groups flew low into the oil complex and bombed designated targets from 500 feet, but most, on Ent’s orders, bombed what they could and escaped. The planned return route was abandoned as aircraft damaged by anti-aircraft fire and harried by German fighters flew south in disarray. Only 88 returned to Benghazi; 11 landed in Cyprus, eight in Sicily, four on Malta, eight were interned at Turkish bases and two crashed into the sea. A total of 54 aircraft were lost, many in acts of extraordinary courage in low-level attacks against massed defences. Almost all those that returned had suffered damage. Two weeks later the survivors were sent on a further long-range mission against the Wiener-Neustadt aircraft plant in Austria, but on this occasion suffered only two losses against the lightest of resistance.190
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