by Unknown
With the USAAF offensive suspended, it was the turn of the RAF’s night offensive against the cities of Germany to carry the burden of the Allied Casablanca strategy. RAF Bomber Command was confident of success, with improved navigational aids and radar, more Lancaster bombers, and new tactics, including the use of the Pathfinder Force to mark targets. Bomber Command set out to land its decisive blow. It failed. In the “Battle of Berlin,” the RAF was unable to inflict decisive damage on Berlin or any of the key cities it targeted, and it suffered unsustainable losses. The climax came with the Nuremberg raid in March 1944, when ninety-six bombers went down. As a result, the RAF also had to curtail its operations against Germany.
The 1944 Bomber Offensive
However thankful the Germans may have been for these successes, no one—from the leadership in Berlin down to the fighter pilots—was under any illusion that this was more than a respite. Spring weather in 1944 would surely bring about decisive battles that would determine the success or failure of the bomber offensive.
As with many decisive battles, the decisions made after the German victories were prefigured or constrained by other ones. In fact, many of the critical decisions that shape the outcome of a conflict are inevitably taken years before, some in long-ago days of peace. The victor is found, in the bright light of hindsight, to have paved the way to success—and the loser to defeat—by a series of decisions that may not have seemed important when they were made.
For the Luftwaffe to be able in 1944 to convert the Allied setbacks of previous months into a lasting and significant defeat required the Germans to have made the right decisions in preceding years. These were fundamental decisions on the doctrine of a modern defensive air wars: what means should be employed, and how? For these decisions to be more than theoretical, they had to be enabled by another set of decisions, on the mobilization of the German war economy, its priorities, and the direction of the war. Some doctrinal decisions required fundamental changes to the nature of the National Socialist regime.
To make the Luftwaffe victories of 1943-44 decisive also required that the Allies made the wrong decisions. Again, key decisions were made years before anyone would know that they would become decisive. Doctrinal questions were key. These had been made, in many cases, before the war, when both the RAF and USAAF were advocating and evolving strategic bombing capabilities and their political leaders were looking for a way to win a major war without repeating the battles of 1916.
Compounding the problem of evolving a doctrinal view to meet a changing threat was the nature of the bomber offensive—there were neither guides in previous experience nor immediate readings of victory and defeat. The RAF and USAAF had thought about strategic bombing campaigns before the war, but never come close to carrying them out. In an air campaign, there were no vital terrain features to win or lose, no towns or hills to give their name to battles and signal victory or defeat. Rather, victory and defeat were determined not by whose flag was planted on the battlefield, but, in the manner of modern war, by statistics: the number of aircraft lost, the rate of loss (often the key indicator) and their trends and apparent repeatability, the number of available replacements, and the tons of bombs dropped. What was harder to determine was the effect of all these indicators. Air forces, trained to think in terms of readiness rates and flight hours, and receptive to modern technology, can delude themselves faster than any other service if they put their minds to it.
For a modern military force, the supply and quality of information is as important as ammunition. Yet, even if the information is available, deciding which elements are important and which will be used to guide operations may twist its impact. In the final analysis it was hard to change a losing strategy if it was not apparent to its practitioners that they were indeed losing.
The Key German Decisions
There was nothing any decisions in 1943-44 could do to redress Germany’s fundamental strategic dilemma of having to wage a two-front war with weak or distant allies against enemies that, if lacking in proficiency, had greater resources and access to technology. But such decisions could sustain the German strengths at the operational level of war that had brought them close to victory in 1939-41, and conceivably could negate the strategic advantages of its enemies.
The key German decisions that made the changes to the Luftwaffe more than mere speculation—on how to mobilize their economy fully—were made before the bomber offensive began to have militarily significant effects.1 Early on, the Germans were faced with the question of what the nature of the Second World War would be. Would it be a short, victorious war waged with as little internal political cost as possible, or a massive struggle of countries, ideologies, and, in Nazi eyes, races? From these fundamental decisions—or the refusal to make them—came the basic framework that determined how many weapons, and what type, would be available to defend Germany.
The key decisions of 1940-41—to fully mobilize the economy of not just Germany, but of all occupied and Axis Europe as an integrated economic superpower waging a long, technologically demanding war—were difficult ones. They were not easily reconciled with the demands of National Socialist ideology—though advocated by some leading ideologues such as Reinhard “Hangman” Heydrich—nor with German popular opinion. The motivation for this change was that the Germans knew the U.S. was planning to gear up the world’s largest economy for war as early as mid-1941. Indeed, the information had been both in reports from the German embassy in Washington and in U.S. newspapers.2 The change was that Hitler and the leadership decided to take the threat of this buildup seriously.
The Luftwaffe also had to undergo a change, away both from Göring’s National Socialist romantic vision of air combat—which did not even represent what was taking place in 1918—and, more important, its role in overall German operations, which had proven successful in 1939-42. This meant that the response to the growing Allied air offensive had to be envisioned as improving the defenses of the Reich. This was a vital change and against the deep-seated views of Hitler, whose belief in offensive operations led him to stress attacks against Britain, first by aircraft and later by the “vengeance weapons,” guided missiles.
Hitler’s instinct was to defend Germany by attacking Britain.3 Not doing so was another of the key decisions that made German victory possible against the Allied bombers. This meant that Hitler and the national leadership had to make decisions through a rational and relatively objective process. This was difficult, for Nazi ideology stressed “thinking with the blood,” and what was seen as the iron law of races and struggle trumped other considerations, yet was eventually accomplished. This involved easing Göring aside and replacing him with Gen. Adolf Galland, the fighter ace and general of the Fighter Force, as head of the Luftwaffe. The Luftwaffe would have to be transformed. It had to be made capable of winning a defensive air campaign.
Making this all possible was a cold-eyed triage of capabilities and forces. The bomber force was deemphasized and bomber production cut back. A proposal to use emerging jet combat aircraft designs primarily as “blitz bombers” was disregarded. Operational bomber units, many still weak from their defeat in Operation Steinbock, the retaliatory “Baby Blitz” ordered against Britain, were combed for skilled air crew, especially for night fighter units. The V-weapons program was also cut back. A defeat of the Allied bomber offensive would remove much of the German demand for retaliation that motivated the program.
Many results of these decisions would not be seen until 1943-44, but they made possible the mass production of the implements of war that could turn the temporary defeat of the bombers into something more long-lasting and costly: Messerschmitt 262 jet-propelled day and night fighters, Focke-Wulf 190D piston-engined fighters (the most effective of Germany’s prejet fighters), high-powered engines and the aviation fuels to run them, advanced radars, and much more.
The hardest decision was that the Luftwaffe prevailed over Albert Speer in arguing for quality in place of quantity in aircraft
production. Speer’s original goal was to boost the number of military aircraft produced by Germany wherever he could. He thought it less important that they were older designs than that numbers be kept up. This approach, which could have led to Germany ending the war with large numbers of obsolescent, fuel-less fighters waiting at dispersal sites, was changed by a key decisions to move to a technologically sophisticated, integrated war-fighting approach.
The Luftwaffe realized that it could not sustain a force with a large number of inferior fighters. This led to increased Fw 190 production in place of the Bf 109, which was to be replaced by the interim Me 209 and Me 309 piston-engined designs until Messerschmitt production capability transitioned purely to the Me 262 in 1945. In the words of Johannes Steinhoff, one of the Luftwaffe’s young fighter leaders on whom the burden of combat operations was placed, “The war in the air is a technological war which cannot be won by a technologically inferior fighting force, however high its morale or dauntless its resolution.”4
The most significant decision was the development of jet fighters. The Germans early on recognized the potential of the jet fighter as a bomber destroyer—by day and night—and closed down a range of other research and development projects to achieve an early production capability. They decided to push the production of the Me 262 as an interim fighter type despite the design and material limitations of its Junkers Jumo engines. The Germans also realized that the Me 262 would have to be developed not just as a fighter, but as part of an integrated weapons system with a revolutionary new weapon, the 55mm R4M air-to-air rocket.
Other decisions were required to ensure that these weapons and systems would be used effectively in combat. Improved leadership and staff work were central to the transformation of the Luftwaffe. It became an integrated air defense system with a consequent buildup of fighters, radar, flak, and a well-designed and well-thought-out battle management system linked with secure landline communications. This required bringing forward a new generation of leaders—the generals who gained success during the Blitzkrieg would not adapt easily to a defensive war—who had been thrust forward by success in the cockpit. Supplementing these leaders were staff officers trained in the best German practice, a combination of prewar General Staff officers who had been sent to the Luftwaffe and the more promising Luftwaffe veterans who had been sent through staff training.
Galland was to become commander-in-chief of the air defense of the Reich. He was empowered to make hard decisions and give orders that would be obeyed not only by the different military services, but by myriad state, party, and local institutions trying to counter the effects of the bombers. This strong degree of unity of command—in effect combining operational, administrative, and research and development responsibilities—and confidence in the commander by the national command authorities was hitherto unknown in the Third Reich. But events were to show that nothing less was required for survival, let alone victory.
The Allied Reaction
It was not enough that the Germans made the right decisions. The Allies had to make the wrong ones. Where the Germans replaced their leaders, the Allies retained theirs. The leaders of the 1943 bomber offensive, Air Marshal Arthur Harris and Lt. Gen. Ira Eaker, kept their positions. These leaders had made decisions for the bomber offensive that in retrospect had been the result of tunnel vision, given the goal of victory through strategic bombing. Thus, the key decision the Allies made was to carry on much as they had before their defeat by the Germans, but to do it harder and with more aircraft.
The Allied strategic air forces were certainly not the first military forces to be led into defeat by the failure of preexisting doctrine in the face of the harsh audit of the battlefield. Any institution finds it difficult to learn. It has been argued that organizations in general, and military organizations in possession of a strong sense of doctrine in particular, are insensitive to change in their environment.5
While the Germans made broad and fundamental changes in aircraft, organization, and technology from what had been used in 1943, despite their success against the bomber offensive, the Allies decided not to make similar changes. They had seen success—at Hamburg and Huls—and believed that what was required to reach it again was to repeat the process longer and with more resources.
The RAF and USAAF alike remained committed to strategic bombing theory as they had tried to implement it in 1943.6 The British remained committed to striking not at any one specific industry, but at Germany’s will and capability to resist by bombing the urban population and its administrative and transportation centers. The USAAF was reluctant to modify its prewar reliance on mass formations of unescorted heavy bombers destroying critical targets through precision daylight bombing.7
Even though the bombers had failed to get through in 1943, its proponents thought that repeating the procedure would succeed. The USAAF believed its B-17 and B-24 bombers were better suited to daylight than night operations, and so they would avoid the problems Bomber Command had encountered with navigation and poor accuracy in the opening years of the war. The American Way of War tends to look to victory through superior doctrine and resources, and the leaders of the Army Air Force were determined to run their own air arm and its operations independently. However, the failures of 1943 had put military and political masters on notice. They would not write further blank checks for resources without results.
The decision to go on as before despite indicators that it is not working is certainly not an unknown response in air warfare. Harris viewed the U.S. targeting of German industries with scarce-disguised contempt and refused to be swayed from his offensive against German cities, even to interfere with the dispersal of the ball-bearing industry from Schweinfurt. The U.S. 8th Air Force had continued bombing German U-boat pens in French ports long after it was considered ineffective, largely because of the training it provided for the bomb groups.8
Military organizations often fail to adjust their strategies or standard operating procedures to meet specific circumstances, especially when these are in flux. Rather, they tend to look for numerical indicators that support the belief that the circumstances actually represent the preferred case, the one they had prepared to deal with. As a result, instead of responding to the actual situation, many military organizations make decisions and implement policies that reflect the preferred approaches and worldview of those making the decisions, regardless of the harsh realities faced by those at the sharp end of the equation.9
The “cult of the offensive” has been identified as the view that military organizations have fixed preferences in strategy and will always prefer offensive ones.10 This theory holds that evaluation of the effectiveness of these operations is not carried out if the results are even potentially contradictory to the organization’s preference for offensive action.11 Where the Germans had stopped looking at the wrong numbers to determine whether they were winning or losing, the Allies had embraced them. Those evaluating the bomber offensives became concerned with how much effort was put into them—sorties flown and tonnage dropped—but appeared uninterested in the overall results.12 They could determine bombing accuracy quite well, but RAF Bomber Command, for example, placed a great deal of value on the number of acres of German cities it burnt out rather than the more difficult question of how this affected the German war effort.
One of the key questions was how much credence to give to the claims of unescorted bomber formation gunners. The decision makers were well aware that every German fighter that went down would be claimed by every gunner firing at it, but were they to believe actual losses were one-tenth of those claimed? Two-thirds? Some other number? Here, the tendency was to believe the figures that meant good news, that in a battle of attrition between bomber gunners and the fighters, the fighters were losing. But whether this meant they were winning or losing overall was a judgment that eluded the decision makers.
The most significant decision that led to the defeats of 1944 was the increased hostility toward the use of long-range
fighter escorts as part of the bomber offensive. The idea of reengining the North American P-51 Mustang with the Packard-built Merlin engine was put aside, as it was deemed there was no requirement for such a fighter. The USAAF’s doctrine, worked out before the war, did not include a “strategic fighter” such as a long-range P-51. The USAAF had looked at large two-engine designs such as the Bell YFM-1A Airacuda, the Lockheed XP-58, and the Northrop XP-61, which had been envisioned in its original air war plan, AWPD-1. This led to a decision not to increase the number of escort fighters above that in 1943. Doctrine rather than adaptation carried the day.