The Third Reich at War
Page 57
Over the next few months, Bomber Command attacked the capital a further eighteen times. In all, the raids killed more than 9,000 and made 812,000 people homeless. But the cost to the Allies was high. More than 3,300 British pilots and crew were killed, and nearly 1,000 had to bale out into captivity. In the raid of 24 March 1944, 10 per cent of the bombers were destroyed and many others hit. This was the last of these British raids. Earlier in the month, the Americans had begun to mount daylight attacks, which continued through April and May 1944.70 By this time, the Americans had learned to reduce their losses by getting fighter planes to accompany the raids in order to deal with German defences in the air. But the fighters’ limited range forced them to turn back at the German border. On 14 October 1943 a fleet of nearly 300 B-17s flew into the German Reich via Aachen. As soon as the escorting American fighters had turned back, a swarm of German fighter planes appeared, aiming cannon and rocket fire at the bombers, breaking up their formations then finishing them off singly. 220 American bombers reached Schweinfurt and caused further devastation to the ball-bearing factories, but altogether 60 were shot down and another 138 damaged. Similarly, in a raid on Nuremberg on 30 March 1944, 795 bombers, flying on a clear moonlit night, were identified by their vapour trails before they even got to Germany, and attacked by squadrons of night-fighters as they flew the long route towards their target. 95 were destroyed, or 11 per cent of those who had set out. Harris warned that such losses could not be sustained.71
Bombers clearly needed to have fighter escorts to deal with the German night-fighters. American P-38 Lightning and P-47 Thunderbolt fighter planes had already been fitted with extra fuel tanks under the wings, but the real difference was made by the P-51 Mustang, a plane built with an American frame and a British Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. Equipped with extra fuel tanks, it could fly up to 1,800 miles, allowing it to escort bombers all the way to Berlin and get back with fuel to spare. Soon thousands of these aircraft were rolling off the production lines. The first flew into Germany on a raid on Kiel in December 1943, and soon all bombing raids were escorted by squadrons of fighters that were fast and manoeuvrable enough to deal with their German counterparts despite the extra load of fuel they were carrying. Already in November 1943, German fighter-plane losses were beginning to climb as the new tactic began to be employed. In December nearly a quarter of the strength of the German fighter fleet was lost. Production could not keep pace with these losses, which were running at something like 50 per cent a month by the spring of 1944; aircraft factories too were affected by bombing raids, with production falling from 873 in July 1943 to 663 in December 1943. Moving fighter planes to the west to deal with the bombers denuded the Eastern Front, where by April 1944 the German air force had only 500 combat aircraft left, confronting more than 13,000 Soviet planes. The German Air Ministry thought that 5,000 planes a month would have to be produced to stand a chance of winning these confrontations. Instead, Allied bombers destroyed not only airplane factories but also oil refineries and fuel production facilities, leaving the German air force dependent on stockpiled fuel by June 1944. By this time, indeed, the German air force had effectively been defeated and the skies were open to a further escalation of the strategic bombing offensive.72
Of course, even with the reduction of German fighter defences to no more than a marginal threat, bomber squadrons still had to contend with anti-aircraft batteries in large numbers, and flying over German towns and cities continued to be a dangerous and often deadly business. But losses were reduced to numbers that Allied air force chiefs found acceptable, and were more than made good by a huge expansion of aircraft production in Britain and America. By March 1945 there were over 7,000 American bombers and fighter planes in operation, while the British were deploying more than 1,500 heavy bombers in virtually continual sorties across the whole of Germany. Of the 1.42 million tons of bombs dropped on Germany during the war, no fewer than 1.18 million tons fell between the end of April 1944 and the beginning of May 1945, the war’s final year. But it was not merely a matter of quantity. The decline of German defences allowed smaller fighter-bombers to come in and attack their targets with more precision than the Lancasters or Flying Fortresses ever could, and in the second half of 1944 they directed their attention at the transport system, attacking railways and communications hubs. By the end of the year, they had halved the number of goods journeys on the German railway system. Arms factories suffered even more severely than before. By the end of January 1945 Speer’s Ministry calculated that the economy had produced 25 per cent fewer tanks than planned, 31 per cent fewer aircraft and 42 per cent fewer lorries, all because of the destruction wrought by bombing. Even had those production targets been met, they would in no way have matched the staggering military-industrial output of the United States, let alone the additional production of the war economy in Britain and the Soviet Union. Moreover, the need to combat the bombing absorbed more and more German resources, with a third of all artillery production going on anti-aircraft guns by 1944, and 2 million people engaged on anti-aircraft defence or repairing and clearing up after raids. German air superiority was lost on the Eastern Front, where fighters and bombers were no longer present in numbers sufficient to offer the ground forces the support they needed to defeat the Red Army, support that had played such a key role in the early stages of the war. Allied bombers were able to pulverize the roads, bridges and railways behind the Normandy beaches in 1944, making it impossible for the German army to bring up adequate reinforcements. Had the German air force retained the command of the skies, the invasion could not have taken place.73
It has been argued, therefore, that bombing helped save lives by shortening the war, and in particular that it saved Allied lives by weakening German resistance. Nevertheless, it also caused between 400,000 and half a million deaths in Germany’s towns and cities, the overwhelming majority of them civilian. Of these people, some 11,000 were killed up to the end of 1942, perhaps 100,000 in 1943, 200,000 in 1944 and between 50,000 and 100,000 in the last months of the war, in 1945. Around 10 per cent were foreign workers and prisoners of war. All these figures are extremely approximate, but about their concentration in the last two years of the war there can be no doubt. On the Allied side, some 80,000 airmen were killed in the bombing raids, along with 60,000 British civilians in German raids, and quite possibly as many again in German aerial attacks on Warsaw, Rotterdam, Belgrade, Leningrad, Stalingrad and other European cities. About 40 per cent of housing stock in German towns and cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants was destroyed; in some cities, like Hamburg and Cologne, the figure was as much as 70 per cent, and in some smaller towns like Paderborn or Giessen virtually every single dwelling was rendered uninhabitable. The devastation was enormous, and took many years to make good.74
The German dead were not mere ‘collateral damage’, to adopt the phrase made familiar by wars in later years and other places. Undermining civilian morale, even wreaking revenge on Germany and the Germans, unquestionably belonged among the aims of the strategic bombing offensive, although attacks on civilians have customarily been regarded as a war crime. Even if one does not accept that the entire bombing campaign was unnecessary, then it is at least arguable that it was continued longer than was strictly necessary, and conducted, especially in the final year of the war, in a manner that was too indiscriminate to be justifiable.75 Arguments will no doubt continue to rage over this difficult question. What is undeniable, however, is that the bombing had a huge effect on civilian morale. The hope of some in Britain that it would inspire ordinary Germans to rise up against the Nazis and bring the war to an early end by an act of revolution was unrealistic. Most Germans affected by the bombing were too busy trying to survive amidst the ruins, to reconstruct their shattered homes and disrupted lives, and to find ways of avoiding getting killed to bother about things like revolution. Asked after the war what the hardest thing had been for civilians in Germany to put up with, 91 per cent said the bombing; and more than a third s
aid that it had lowered people’s morale, including their own.76 It did even more than the defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa to spread popular disillusion about the Nazi Party. One not untypical example in this respect can be seen in the correspondence of the paratrooper Martin P̈ppel, by now serving in a unit fighting the invading Allied forces after D-Day. In 1944 he was receiving increasingly despairing letters from his wife at home in Germany. She could no longer understand or support the Nazis. ‘What have they made of our beautiful, magnificent Germany? ’ she asked. ‘It’s enough to make you weep.’ Allied bombs were destroying everything. It was surely time to call a halt to the war. ‘Why do people let our soldiers go to their death uselessly, why do they let the rest of Germany be ruined, why all the misery, why?’77
16. Allied Bombing Raids on German Cities, 1941-5
Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry poured out bile against the Allied bombing crews and their political masters. The Americans were gangsters, their air crews uncultivated mobsters taken out of the prisons. By contrast, the German media claimed, the British fliers were drawn mainly from the effete ranks of the aristocracy. Both, however, in the view propagated by the Nazi media, were in the service of Jewish conspirators, who were also manipulating Roosevelt and Churchill in their quest for the total destruction of Germany.78 The propaganda did have an effect.79 There were widespread reports from 1943 at the latest of people demanding reprisal attacks on London; but this was not so much in anger, rather in the belief that only this could prevent further raids on Germany and even defeat in the war in general.80 ‘Again and again,’ reported the Security Service of the SS, ‘one could hear: “If we don’t do something soon, nothing will help us any more,” or “We can’t watch much longer as everything we have is smashed to bits.” ’81
In 1944 there was some popular anger against the pilots and crew of Allied bombers, under the psychological pressure of constant alarms, raids, death and destruction, and encouraged by Goebbels’s mass media. It began to express itself in violence against Allied airmen who were forced to bale out after their plane had been hit. On 26 August 1944 seven American airmen who had baled out over R̈sselsheim were beaten to death by an angry crowd, while on 24 March 1945 a British airman who landed by parachute in a field near Bochum was attacked by a soldier with his rifle-butt. He fell over and was surrounded by a crowd who kicked him, hurting him badly. Someone tried to shoot the airman but the gun jammed, so he was dragged away until a member of the crowd produced a hammer and beat him to death. Three other British airmen who had also landed in the area were arrested by the Gestapo, tortured and then shot. One local works fireman who protested to his workmates against these murders was denounced, arrested and shot by the Gestapo. Not only did the police fail to intervene to stop such incidents, but anyone who did was likely to be arrested and tried for ‘forbidden contact with prisoners of war’. The Party Regional Leader for Southern Westphalia ordered on 25 February 1945 that pilots ‘who have been shot down are not to be protected from the people’s anger’. Altogether at least 350 Allied airmen were lynched in the last two years of the war and a further sixty or so injured without being killed. In a particularly notorious incident, when fifty-eight British airmen had escaped on 24 March 1944 from a prisoner-of-war camp near Sagan in Lower Saxony, all those who were recaptured were shot by the Gestapo on the explicit orders of Heinrich Himmler. Yet these incidents have to be kept in perspective. The total number of Allied airmen who were lynched or shot by the Gestapo made up no more than 1 per cent of the total captured.82 The hatred that animated such actions was a product above all of the last phase of the bombing, and was, as the Security Service of the SS noted, not really present before 1944. The Security Service’s observers noted calls among the population, especially those who had been bombed out of their homes, for the British to be gassed or ‘annihilated’, but added that ‘hate-filled-sounding words against England are often more an expression of desperation and the belief that the annihilation of England is the only rescue . . . One cannot speak of hatred for the English people as a whole.’ And they quoted one woman who had lost her home in a raid as saying: ‘It hurts me that all my things have gone for good. But that’s war. Against the English, no, I don’t have anything against them.’83
THE LONG RETREAT
I
The sharp decline of morale amongst the German population in 1943 was not just the result of the intensification of Allied bombing raids on German cities, it also reflected a series of dramatic reverses in other areas of the war as well. Amongst these, one of the most disheartening was in North Africa. In the summer of 1942 Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had succeeded in capturing the key North African seaport of Tobruk and driving the British back into Egypt. But difficulties in supplying his troops by either land or sea weakened Rommel’s position, and the British stood their ground at El Alamein, where they prepared deep defensive positions and massed their forces ready for a counter-attack. On 23 October 1942, under yet another new general, the meticulous Bernard Montgomery, the British attacked the German forces with over twice the number of infantry and tanks that Rommel could assemble. Over twelve days they inflicted a decisive defeat on them. Rommel lost 30,000 men captured in his headlong retreat across the desert. Little over two weeks later the Allies, their command of the Mediterranean virtually unchallenged, landed 63,000 men, equipped with 430 tanks, in Morocco and Algeria. The German bid to gain control of North Africa and penetrate from there to the oilfields of the Middle East had failed. Rommel returned to Germany on sick leave in March 1943.84 Defeat in North Africa turned into humiliation in mid-May, when 250,000 Axis troops, half of them German, surrendered to the Allies.85 Its complete failure to disturb British control over Egypt and the Middle East denied the Third Reich access to key sources of oil. These failures once more signalled not only the fact that the British were determined not to give in, but also the massive strength of the far-flung British Empire, backed to an increasing degree by the material resources of the United States.86 Reflecting privately on these failures in 1944, Field Marshal Rommel still believed that, if he had been provided with ‘more motorized formations and a secure supply line’, he could have seized the Suez Canal, thus disrupting British supplies, and gone on to secure the oilfields of the Middle East, Persia and even Baku on the Caspian Sea. But it was not to be. Bitterly, he concluded that ‘the war in North Africa was decided by the weight of Anglo-American material. In fact, since the entry of America into the war, there has been very little prospect of our achieving ultimate victory.’87 It was a view that many ordinary Germans shared. Rommel was a brilliant general, the student Lore Walb confided to her diary. But, she went on: ‘What can he do with limited forces and little ammunition?’ After the recapture of Tobruk by the Allies in November 1942, she was beginning to wonder if this was ‘the beginning of the end’, and a few days later she began to fear that the entire war was being lost: ‘Will Heaven then permit us to be annihilated???’88
The Third Reich was now beginning to lose its allies. In March 1943, King Boris III of Bulgaria decided that the Germans were not going to win the war. Meeting with Hitler in June, he thought it politic to agree to the German dictator’s request for Bulgarian troops to replace German forces in north-east Serbia so that they could be redeployed to the Eastern Front. But he refused to render any further assistance, and behind the scenes he began to put out peace feelers to the Allies, rightly fearing that the Soviets would disregard Bulgaria’s official stance of neutrality in the wider conflict. Hitler continued to put pressure on him, meeting with him again in August 1943. But before anything could come of their talks, events took an unexpected turn. Shortly after arriving back in Sofia, Boris fell ill, dying on 28 August 1942, aged only forty-nine. In the feverish climate of the times, rumours immediately spread that he had been poisoned. An autopsy carried out in the early 1990s revealed, however, that he had died of an infarction of the left ventricle of the heart. He was succeeded by Simeon II, who was only a boy, and
the regency largely continued Boris’s policy of disengaging from the German side, spurred on by increasing numbers of Allied bombing raids on Sofia, starting in November 1943. Popular opposition to the war spread rapidly, and armed partisan bands formed under the leadership of the Soviet-inspired Fatherland Front, causing increasing disruption; British agents arrived to assist them, but the partisan movement failed to make much headway, and some of the British agents were betrayed and shot. Nevertheless, under these pressures, the government began to backtrack, repealing anti-Jewish legislation, and declaring full neutrality the following year.89
Far more alarming to many Germans were the dramatic events that unfolded in Italy after their defeat in North Africa. On 10 July 1943 Anglo-American forces, ferried across by sea and backed by airborne assaults on defensive positions behind the beaches, landed in Sicily, which was occupied by a combination of Italian and German troops. Despite extensive preparations, the attack was far from perfectly executed. The landing forces mistook the planes flying overhead for enemy aircraft and started firing on them, weakening the airborne thrust. The British commander Montgomery split his forces in the east into a coastal and an inland column, as a result of which they only made slow progress against heavy German resistance. Syracuse was captured, but because of the delays in the British advance, the Germans managed to evacuate most of their troops across to the mainland. Still, the island eventually fell to the Allied forces. Ominously for the Italian Fascist dictator Mussolini, too, the citizens of Palermo had waved white flags at the invading Americans, and there were growing indications that ordinary Italians no longer wanted to continue fighting. Hitler visited Mussolini in northern Italy on 18 July 1943 to try to bolster his confidence, but his two-hour monologue depressed the Italian dictator and made him feel he lacked the will to carry on. The dictator’s prestige and popularity had never recovered from the catastrophic defeats of 1941, most notably in Greece. His relationship with Hitler had changed fundamentally after this: even Mussolini himself referred to Fascist Italy as no more than the ‘rear light’ of the Axis, and he soon acquired a new nickname: the Regional Leader of Italy. Hitler, always late to bed, had taken to sending him messages in the middle of the night, obliging him to be woken up to receive them; and the Italian dictator began to complain that he was becoming fed up with being summoned to meetings with him like a waiter by a bell.90