The results of the Ploeşti raid fell short of the ambition to knock the complex out for months, but enough serious damage was done to reduce output substantially at three major refineries and to destroy two completely. Spare capacity and rapid repair nevertheless reduced the effects on German supplies of crude oil. The effect on the local population was to produce a sudden exodus into the surrounding countryside, but casualties were relatively low save for 84 women killed when one aircraft crashed onto their prison.191 The oilfield was allowed an eight-month respite during which time the pre-raid levels of output were once again restored. Losses of 40 per cent of the force could not be sustained and the Allied air forces had other urgent priorities in Italy and southern Germany. At a conference on bombing strategy in Gibraltar in November 1943 between Spaatz, Eaker, Tedder and Doolittle, the main concern was coordinating attacks on German targets from England and Italy. It was agreed that Balkan capitals might make a good morale target, and Sofia was bombed shortly afterwards, but oil in south-eastern Europe had for the moment disappeared as a priority.192 Not until 17 March 1944 was Spaatz informed by Arnold that the Combined Chiefs of Staff favoured a renewed attack on Ploeşti when good weather permitted, but the changing strategic situation, with Soviet forces driving on south-eastern Europe, gave priority to bombing communications around Bucharest rather than oil and the target was again postponed.193 The change back to oil came later after Spaatz lost his argument with Portal over the best strategy for the pre-Normandy bombing and had to accept the Transportation Plan. In order to get at oil surreptitiously he allowed Eaker to send aircraft not only against the communications targets around Bucharest, but to attack once again the Romanian oilfield.
The result was a devastating series of 24 raids against Ploeşti between 5 April and 19 August 1944 under the command of Maj. General Nathan Twining. Twenty of the raids were undertaken by the Fifteenth Air Force, four at night by RAF 205 Group. Between them they dropped 13,863 tons of bombs, all but 577 from American aircraft. German and Romanian defences had been strengthened since the first raid. Alongside 34 heavy and 16 light anti-aircraft batteries and 7 searchlight batteries, there were between 200 and 250 aircraft.194 By the close of the offensive there were 278 heavy and 280 light guns, including the new heavy-calibre 10.5 and 12.8 cm, supported by 1,900 smoke generators. The oilfield was designated a German ‘stronghold’ and Gerstenberg was appointed by the German High Command as ‘German Commandant of the Romanian Oil Region’.195 But this time the American bombers flew at high altitude, protected by large numbers of long-range P-38 and P-51 fighters. As a result the contest proved more one-sided than the raid in August 1943. Axis air forces managed to mount 182 sorties against the first raid, on 5 April, when 13 out of 200 bombers were lost. But by July the sortie rate had fallen to an average of 53 against the five raids that month. On the final raid, on 19 August, there was no fighter opposition.196 Total losses were 230 American bombers, many to anti-aircraft fire. Destruction of the refineries was as complete as it could be, with half a million tons of oil destroyed, and more sunk through the successful mining operations on the Danube carried out mainly at night by RAF 205 Group. Some 1,400 mines were dropped and traffic on the Danube was reduced by two-thirds, though 15 per cent of the RAF force was lost in raids carried out dangerously at between 100 and 200 feet above the river.197
In a final gesture, on the eve of the Soviet entry into Romania, Gerstenberg gathered together any German troops he could find together with the oilfield anti-aircraft division in a bid to seize Bucharest (where the young King Michael had overthrown the Antonescu government) and bring the capital under German control. To support the coup, the German Air Force mounted a heavy raid on the centre of Bucharest on 24 August, destroying some of the administrative centre around the royal palace. The population, according to the German ambassador, was taken completely by surprise, perplexed by the sudden change from German ally to German enemy. But the German coup was stifled by the Romanian Army and the German presence replaced by a Soviet one.198 In September 1944 Eaker was given permission by the authorities in Moscow to visit Romania, which had been occupied by Soviet forces on 30 August. He found the devastation at Ploeşti worse than any photo-reconnaissance image he had seen. The information Eaker was given showed that refining capacity had been reduced by 90 per cent. By the last attack on 19 August, remaining German personnel were only able to transport an estimated 2–4 per cent of Romanian capacity. He found his reception cordial and the Red Army commanders astonished at what high-level bombing could achieve. The Romanian people, Eaker reported to Washington, ‘look upon us as liberators’.199
In truth the bombing of Romania did not liberate the population but contributed to the collapse of German resistance and the onset of half a century of Soviet domination. Whatever the political ambitions to intimidate the Balkan satellites into surrender or to boost the morale of Czechs and Yugoslavs, the pattern of bombing across eastern Europe was to a great extent governed by the military interest of the Allies in weakening German military resistance to the advancing Red Army. The priority given to communications and oil during the course of the summer of 1944 matched the priorities agreed for the bombing of Germany from English bases, and brought a great many more locations in Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Balkans onto the list of key targets assigned to the MAAF. The strategic commitment to attacking German communications in the region was made in April 1944 when it was realized how successful the Soviet advance had been during the winter months.200 The MAAF drew up a survey at the end of April 1944 to see what could be done in ‘giving direct aid to the Russian army’, first by cutting German supplies then by interrupting any German withdrawal in the event of a Russian breakthrough.201 In May, Portal instructed Spaatz to give top priority to bombing communications in Romania and Hungary and to treat the whole European transport system ‘as one’ when undermining German mobility.202 Eighteen marshalling yards were singled out for attack, with high priority given to the yards at Bucharest where the Romanian authorities told Eaker later that a Fifteenth Air Force raid had killed 12,000 people, 6,000 of them refugees sitting in trains on the track in the belief that the air-raid siren was only a test. The raid was indeed a heavy one, hitting part of the residential area of the city, but official figures showed only 231 killed but 1,567 buildings destroyed or damaged.203 From June 1944 oil was finally given a top priority and oil sites in Czechoslovakia and Poland were added to the list of potential targets throughout the region.204 Right to the end politics played a part in bombing calculations. Strategic attacks against targets in Germany, Austria and Hungary could be undertaken either by visual or by blind-bombing technique against any military target defined in the broadest sense, including ‘targets of opportunity’. Over Czech and Polish territory crews were only permitted to bomb the designated military target visually or in exceptional cases by blind-bombing, but no opportunity targets were permitted, to minimize the risk of casualties amongst allied populations.205
The most urgent need was to devise a way of ensuring that American and British aircraft did not accidentally bomb or strafe the advancing Soviet lines. In April 1944 a bomb line was agreed with the Soviet side in south-eastern Europe from Constanza, on the Romanian coast, through Bucharest, Ploeşti and Budapest. Only the last three could be the object of bomb attack, and American airmen were warned to learn the silhouettes and markings of Soviet aircraft.206 The Soviet forces continued to inform their allies of the changing front line through the Allied missions in Moscow, though the MAAF had also posted representatives informally at the headquarters of the Soviet army group in the Balkans to try to minimize any hazard. A zone of 40 miles in front of the advancing Red Army was agreed as the limit for British and American bomber operations, but information about where the line was had to come through a cumbersome process of consultation in the Soviet capital. As the Allied air forces converged from east and west, the danger of inadvertent bombing increased. On 7 November 1944 a force of 27 P-38 ‘Lightnings�
� strafed and bombed a Soviet column in Yugoslavia 50 miles behind the Soviet front line, killing the commander and five others. Three of the nine Soviet fighters sent to protect the column were shot down.207 Stalin’s military headquarters made a strong protest and suggested a bomb line running from Stettin on the Baltic Coast down through Vienna to Zagreb and Sarajevo in Yugoslavia, leaving many designated oil and transport targets out of bounds to Western air forces. The Combined Chiefs of Staff refused to accept a bomb line further north than the Danube, but offered to set up a proper liaison organization with advancing Soviet armies to avoid further mishaps. When Moscow rejected the idea of any collaboration on the ground, Spaatz and Eaker worked out their own bomb line and communicated it to Moscow, sealing Dresden’s fate a few weeks later.208 The Soviet desire to reduce the bombing in eastern Europe was not disinterested, since by that stage of the war Moscow was more concerned to capture resources, equipment and plant intact rather than watch the strategic air forces obliterate them shortly before they fell into the Soviet sphere. After the war, the formal Communist line was to argue that bombing in the teeth of the Red Army advance had been carried out by the agents of capitalist imperialism to weaken the future socialist economy.
Unlike the situation in the western zones of Germany and Austria, it proved impossible for American or British intelligence teams to survey systematically the damage bombing had done to the industrial and infrastructure targets in eastern Europe, or to establish how effective the political offensive against the satellite and occupied populations had been. An American Military Mission arrived in Sofia in November 1944, but the Red Army command proved uncooperative. Eaker’s visit to Ploeşti in September 1944 was the closest that Allied air commanders got to assessment of the damage, and his judgement that the offensive was ‘a perfect example of what bombing can do to industry’ is supported by the German figures on oil supply.209 By the end of the war relations between the Allies were already cooling and Stalin was unwilling to allow Western intelligence officers access to the bomb sites in the Soviet-controlled regions of Europe. In July 1945 some of the USSBS team arrived in Berlin where amidst the chaos they tracked down Speer’s chief economist, Rolf Wagenführ, who was already working for the Russian occupiers. An American team broke into his house in Soviet East Berlin, dragged him out of bed and bundled him onto an aeroplane to the American zone where he gave advice on German statistics for two weeks before being sent back. A key was also found to the German Air Ministry document safe where additional information was discovered; a discreet foray into the Soviet zone secured more German papers.210 But all this was little substitute for ground-level reconnaissance of the targets bombed in Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Balkan states. Assessment of whether bombing had delivered the political dividend in encouraging Axis populations to abandon the link with Germany was open to speculation. In Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia the political scene was dominated by the imminent arrival of the Red Army. The resentment and anxiety provoked by sporadic bombing of civilian areas, evident from intelligence sources, paled into insignificance at the prospect of a Soviet Empire.211 This was not the political outcome the West had wished for when the air forces were at last in the position to rain down bombs and leaflets on the distant East.
ROTTERDAM ONCE AGAIN
The situation for the smaller states in the German New Order on the northern fringes of Europe – Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark and Norway – differed from the fate of France and of eastern Europe. In both these latter cases invasion displaced the German occupier well before the final end of the war in Europe. Belgium was finally fully liberated by November 1944, but not before heavy bombing by the Allies and V-weapon attack by the German side had inflicted wide destruction and casualties. The Netherlands, Denmark and Norway remained under German occupation until the end of the war. A raid by British bombers which hit residential districts of The Hague on 3 March 1945, killing more than 500 people, occurred just weeks before liberation.212 Over the course of the war the enthusiasm relayed to the Allies by Dutch, Belgian or Norwegian resisters about bombing German targets became tempered by growing resentment at the cost in lives and livelihoods imposed on those caught in the crossfire of war.
There was also an important political difference in the case of Norway, The Netherlands and Belgium. Each had a government-in-exile in London, with a miniature apparatus of state. Unlike any other bombed state, the exile governments could represent directly to the British government their views on bombing policy and their objection to or approval of its conduct. This in turn placed considerable pressure on the RAF, and later the United States air forces, to ensure that the guidelines governing the bombing of targets in the region clearly expressed its limits. Damage to civilian targets and civilian deaths had to be explained or apologized for unlike raiding against most other targets in Europe. This was even more the case when bombs intended for a German destination instead fell inadvertently on Dutch or Belgian cities. Both states lay on the flight paths to German targets for the whole war period. The Dutch town of Groningen was bombed by mistake on 26 July 1940 and two people were killed; it was bombed again in error when the German port of Emden was shrouded in fog on the night of 26–27 September 1941 and this time six people died.213 Maastricht was bombed by mistake for Aachen in February 1942, prompting Dutch protests that the RAF used trainee crews for nearer and easier targets, as they did, making mischance more likely. Raids deliberately targeted against Dutch cities provoked even higher casualties. Operations against targets in Rotterdam in October 1941 and January 1942 cost 177 Dutch lives; a raid in October 1942 on Geelen and one two months later on the Philips electrical works at Eindhoven killed a further 221.214 Although the British Foreign Office believed that the Dutch took the robust view that ‘war is war’, Eden remained keen to ensure that proper guidelines were drawn up and crews instructed in their observance.215 Belgian and Dutch targets were governed by the same rules drawn up in October 1942 for bombing occupied France, with the difference that attacks on trains by night could only take place between the hours of 11 o’clock in the evening and 4 o’clock in the morning rather than throughout the hours of darkness. Military targets had to be identified and if the prospect of a ‘large error’ occurred that was likely to lead to civilian casualties, the operation was supposed to be aborted.216
The systematic bombing of military and industrial targets in the Low Countries only began in 1943 when the Eighth Air Force used its heavy and medium bombers for attacks on targets near enough for fighter protection so that novice crews could be initiated into operational practice with fewer immediate risks, the very policy condemned by the Dutch when bombing started in 1941. The result was an immediate disaster. A daylight raid on Rotterdam on 31 March 1943 cost an estimated 400 lives; an attack that was supposed to hit the German ERLA aircraft plant near Antwerp instead devastated the town of Mortsel, killing 926 Belgians, including 209 children in four schools hit by the bombs. The bombing of Mortsel resulted in the worst casualties of the war from a single raid on the Low Countries. No warning leaflets had been dropped and the town was crowded with people. In addition to the dead, a further 1,342 were injured, 587 seriously, while 3,424 houses were damaged or destroyed. In the ERLA works 222 workers were killed.217 Although heavy damage was done to the aircraft plant, the bombs were strewn over a wide residential area. The Eighth Air Force post-raid assessment showed that only 78 out of 383 bombs dropped came within 2,000 feet (600 metres) of the target.218 For the residents of the town the raid was a shocking realization of the horrors of aerial war. ‘I heard the screams of dying schoolchildren,’ recalled one witness. ‘I heard the grief-stricken cries of desperate mothers and fathers, searching in the ruins for their beloved children … I saw fires, heaps of ruins and people wringing their hands.’219 A Foreign Office official wrote to the PWE a few days later describing the raid as ‘catastrophic’; the ‘bad shooting’ of the Eighth Air Force, he complained, had done serious damage to the reputation of Allied air f
orces in a country which had hitherto welcomed the idea of bombs on German targets.220
The poor record of American bombing soon provoked a wider crisis. Eaker was first asked by the Air Ministry to take special care in bombing centres where civilians were likely to be hurt, then told to suspend bombing in occupied areas altogether pending a decision about which specific targets should be allowed. Despite protests from Washington, a list was agreed between the two air forces and Eaker and Harris were asked to avoid using freshmen crews against targets in major cities. The 20 agreed targets included only one in The Netherlands and five in Belgium. Bomber Command agreed to use only reliable and experienced crews, but Eaker insisted on the continued right of the American bomber force to use novices.221 No sooner was the list agreed when the new Pointblank directive, drawn up for the Combined Bomber Offensive, apparently reversed the decision by listing targets in densely populated areas of occupied Europe as part of the overall plan. Eaker at once asked whether he was now free to bomb what he liked, but the issue could only be resolved at the highest level. Eden worried that civilian casualties in Belgium and The Netherlands would deeply affect ‘the morale and spirit’ of the local population and asked that radio broadcasts and leaflets should notify the people of impending bombing, but only after agreement had been reached with the Dutch and Belgian governments in London.222 Leaflets were drafted warning the population that it would be dangerous to work in any factories assembling aircraft, locomotives, submarines and vehicles, or any one of their component parts. On 25 June 1943 the Belgian government-in-exile agreed to allow the new targets to be bombed once warning had been given; the Dutch government followed suit on 15 July but only after making it clear that they would only tolerate operations conducted in such a way ‘as to minimize the danger to the civilian population’.223
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