by Paul Kennedy
Thus, although both sides experienced massive attrition rates in frontline aircraft, that was the lesser worry. Both Germany and Britain were moving to “total war” production and receiving fresh aircraft every month, with output from U.K. factories surprisingly some way ahead. The greater mutual concern was the attrition rate of skilled pilots, who were much harder to replace than single-engine aircraft. As Williamson Murray’s detailed analysis reveals, both air forces were suffering enormous losses of fighter pilots as August 1940 unfolded into September. The RAF switched pilots from Bomber Command, borrowed from the Fleet Air Arm, cut the training time for new pilots in half, and—an enormous blessing—opened its arms to any Free French, Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, and Americans who could fly, not to mention the stream of fresh pilots from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Rhodesia.c (The Luftwaffe, by contrast, received only an ill-fated Italian show of support during the Battle of Britain.) The key statistic is also supplied by Murray: at the beginning of May 1940 Goering commanded more than 1,000 “operationally ready” Bf 109 pilots, and their attrition rate that month was a mere 6.8 percent; at the beginning of September he had only 735 such pilots, and 23.1 percent were lost as the month unfolded.22 The great RAF counterattack of Sunday, September 15, when sixty fighters from No. 12 Group in the Midlands swept southward into the German formations late in the day, shocked Luftwaffe commanders by demonstrating the depth of Britain’s aerial defenses.
Overall, the strategic lesson of the Battle of Britain was very clear: against a well-defended and well-organized aerial defensive system, a force of bombers could not always “get through” in the Baldwinian meaning of the term; a few might make it, but most would suffer if flying alone or with only partial protection from escort planes. Getting protection for half of the journey was like getting hardly any protection at all, for the enemy simply moved his chief defensive lines farther back, waited, and then assaulted. A strategic bombing campaign by one industrialized nation against another thus depended for its outcome upon which side’s fighter forces had cleared the skies of their direct opponents. Nothing else would do.
It is for this reason that we have spent much space and detail on a campaign that was waged almost two and a half years before Casablanca. Of course, the many differences between the (essentially) four months of the Battle of Britain and the unremittingly harsh fifty months (if one counts from January 1941 onward) of the British and American strategic bombing campaign against Germany were massive. But the basic operational principles of aerial warfare—that is, a true appreciation of geography, targeting, and men and planes—remained the same.
It is therefore remarkable how swiftly and completely both the American and British commanders dismissed the idea that there was a larger lesson to be learned from Fighter Command’s defeat of a numerically larger Luftwaffe in those epic months of 1940. American observers concluded that the German bombers had inadequate armament, flew too low, and had poor formation discipline; this would not happen to them. Since the Americans planned to deploy “large numbers of aircraft with high speed, good defensive power, and high altitude,” the USAAF would avoid all of Goering and Kesselring’s problems. True, the B-17 Fortresses and B-24 Liberators were vastly superior to, say, a Heinkel 111, yet all this assumed that the Luftwaffe’s fighting capacities would remain static and that flying at 24,000 feet rather than 12,000 feet would minimize losses. But what if newer German fighters flew at 30,000 feet? The conclusions of the RAF chiefs (though probably not Dowding himself) were even more egregious. The remarkably high morale and fighting spirit of the civilian populations of London, Portsmouth, and Coventry when under heavy bombing did not lead to any questioning of air force doctrine about striking at the enemy’s heartland. Instead, the C in C, Sir Charles Portal, and others simply assumed that the German people would not be as tough as the British—an exact mirror of the conclusion that the Luftwaffe’s prewar planners had come to regarding the weaker determination of the Western democracies compared with the iron will and national unity established by the Nazi movement.23 If the operating assumption was that the other side would crack first—which sounds awfully like Douglas Haig, Erich Ludendorff, and trench warfare during the First World War—then it is no surprise that little attention was paid to really important issues such as distance, targeting, and detection.
The Allied Bombing Offensive and Its Collapse, Late 1940 to Late 1943
On October 12, 1940, Hitler postponed Operation Sealion until the following spring at the earliest. By January, with his mind now fixed upon the coming attack on the USSR, he ordered a halt to most preparations for an invasion of Britain. Goering in turn instructed Luftflotte No. 3 under Sperrle just to concentrate upon night attacks on industrial targets. There would be no more epic fighter duels over the apple orchards of Kent.
And in fact there would rarely be any German fighters over England again. Sperrle’s force was augmented by the transfer of some bomber squadrons from Luftflotte No. 2 and became the single command for the continuation of the air war against Britain. He thus possessed a considerable fleet of up to 750 bombers (although repair, maintenance, and training made total operational numbers much smaller than that). There was no letup for the inhabitants of London and other British cities during the night attacks of the rest of the year—even after Hitler’s postponement of Operation Sealion, London was attacked for fifty-seven nights in a row before the Luftwaffe switched to a terrifying raid that flattened large parts of Coventry’s historic city center. The aerial Blitz continued until the end of December, when it was suspended due to continued poor weather, but resumed in the spring of 1941. As late as May 10 London was pounded again and again by very heavy nighttime attacks. After that, and although German raids would continue off and on throughout the war (until replaced by the V-bombs), the Luftwaffe’s bombing campaign would never again be as strong. By the middle of May 1941 most of Goering’s bombers and fighters were either heading to the Eastern Front or being diverted to the Balkan and Mediterranean theaters. Later, this had a very significant but unforeseen result: because German planes were no longer flying over England in daylight, there was no photo reconnaissance of the massive buildup of Allied forces in preparation for D-Day. Aerial weakness meant that Germany was blind.
While the Luftwaffe’s nighttime bombing offensive was much less dramatic than the great aerial duel of August and September 1940, there was a lot to be learned from it, had an acute observer bothered to do so. It showed how difficult it was to carry out a sustained night offensive, whichever air force was making the attack, for they all faced the task of finding their way in the dark. Once the German squadrons had passed over the coastal radar stations, finding them and then shooting them down became a game of hide-and-seek, so any losses inflicted were piecemeal rather than decisive. Over the next few years it galvanized the British into establishing a very sophisticated defensive system against aerial attacks at night—a combination of specially trained Spitfire and Mosquito squadrons, a much broader band of HF-DF detection stations, and interceptions of Luftwaffe Enigma messages (although, as with the Atlantic battles, detection and decryption breakthroughs did not automatically bring destruction of the foe).
But the Luftwaffe’s task was much harder. To begin with, there were the usual hurdles of range and endurance, especially for twin-engine medium bombers; if RAF Blenheims and Wellingtons could not reach very far into France and Germany, then equally Dorniers and Heinkels could not reach far into Britain—or stay very long once they got there.d Aside from the gigantic target of London and some special maritime targets such as Harwich and Portsmouth, the greater part of British industry was located farther north and west. The main shipyards were all there, and so were many of the vital coalfields. Apart from lighter vessels in the south, the Royal Navy positioned its heavier warships and its Atlantic escort squadrons in northern Ireland, Liverpool, the Clyde, and the Orkneys. And while the Midlands contained many factories, the late Victorian structure of Br
itish manufacturing meant that they were scattered across a very large area. Even on a rare moonlit night (which also made the German planes most vulnerable to RAF fighters), the rigidly kept blackout meant it was difficult for German pilots to find out where their appointed target was; on cloudy nights, the natural temptation was to dump their bombs somewhere in the area and run for home. Most of those bombs dropped harmlessly into fields, though not a few of them struck a school, a hospital, or a row of workers’ houses.
Finally, although German air intelligence had assembled a portfolio of British industrial and infrastructural targets before the war, there hardly seems to have been much pattern in the Luftwaffe’s nighttime campaign. The bombing of London eased the pressure not only upon RAF bases but also upon the manufacturing regions, yet the slightly later attacks upon Birmingham, Coventry, Bristol, Exeter, the Tyne, Plymouth, and South Wales, although inflicting damage, were too scattered and sporadic to have a strategic impact. During the spring of 1942 there occurred another case of mutual stupidity by each side’s air commands. In late March the RAF planners inexplicably ordered a raid upon the ancient, wooden-framed Hanseatic city of Lubeck, so enraging Hitler that he ordered retaliatory raids upon British cathedral and university cities (the so-called Baedeker raids) such as York and Norwich, and on May 3, 1942, the medieval heart of Exeter’s town center was bombed to bits. Such raids had no strategic purpose whatsoever. They simply wasted bombs (and crews) and inflamed hatreds. In retrospect, as will be seen in the rest of this chapter, the most important industrial targets by far were the Rolls-Royce engine factories in Derby and the Spitfire and Lancaster assembly lines (often with “shadow factories” built even farther away, in north Wales or northwest England). A flailing, retributionist bombing offensive against cathedral cities simply lacked strategic purpose and took the focus away from the need to cripple Britain’s rising aircraft production. Total aircraft production figures tell it all: 15,000 planes were built in 1940, 20,000 in 1941, and 23,000 in 1942.24
The Blitz upon Britain’s cities did two other things: it steadily inured people to the coming of indiscriminate aerial bombing, and it aroused a yearning to hit back at Germany’s population. Churchill’s most popular speeches in this period were those in which he warned the German people that if they continued to follow the heinous Nazi leadership (what choice had they?), they would in turn suffer from what had been done to Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, and Coventry. In recent years it has become quite fashionable to denounce the Anglo-American strategic air offensive against Germany as a special form of holocaust—and there is indeed severe criticism to be leveled at it, as will be discussed below. It is only proper to remember that “terror bombing” first took place when Japanese, Italian, and especially German bomb bays opened upon civilian populations below.
RAF Bomber Command’s aerial offensive against German targets encountered many of the same problems that the Luftwaffe had faced beforehand. The early months of the war had not been auspicious for a service that for over two decades had advertised the benefits of independent strategic bombing. It carried out some early limited raids over western parts of Germany, was forced by bomber casualties to abandon daytime raids, and then found nighttime bombing over Germany full of difficulties; the usually thick clouds hid Wellington bombers from enemy fighters but also hid enemy targets, and detection aids, if any, were primitive. After May 1940, Italy’s entry into the struggle meant that an increasing number of RAF squadrons, including modern medium bomber squadrons, had to be diverted to the Mediterranean. And everyone—Coastal Command, the Fleet Air Arm, Fighter Command, the tactical commands across the Middle East and India—was screaming for more trained pilots and aircrews.
Still, by the end of 1940, and for another two years, Bomber Command occupied a very special place in British grand strategy. With the fall of France and much of the rest of western Europe, Britain and its Empire stood alone against the Axis, with the United States and the Soviet Union watching on the sidelines. In almost all respects its posture had to be a defensive one: to protect the merchant shipping convoys from the U-boats, to head off the German surface raiders, to blunt the Luftwaffe’s nighttime attacks upon British cities and factories, to hold out against vastly larger Italian forces in Africa and the Mediterranean, and (if possible) to try to send some reinforcements to India and the Far East in response to Japan’s piecemeal aggressions. Repeated and ever larger aerial attacks against Germany, by contrast, were the proof that Britain could hurt the foe and was serious about winning. This was hugely important in Churchill’s relationships with Roosevelt and Stalin, and immensely helpful in sustaining British domestic morale. Not only that, a successful bombing campaign would weaken Germany’s fighting strength, perhaps not to the extent that dedicated airpower advocates believed (i.e., bringing enemy collapse through bombing alone), but certainly sufficient to make the reconquest of Europe—when it came—somewhat easier. Even those British admirals and generals skeptical of Bomber Command’s claims had to agree that wrecking German shipyards, hitting aircraft factories, and disrupting gun production were jolly good things.
The question was, could a successful bombing campaign be accomplished? The answer was no in 1941, and no again in 1942. Bomber Command sorties went out night after night, sometimes diverted to attacks upon German battle cruisers in Brest or the U-boat pens, but always returning to the assault upon the enemy heartland. But the extraordinary courage of the crews in being willing to undertake those appalling journeys, to lose many friends and colleagues in the night and then to go out again, was no guarantee of operational success if the right tools were not at hand to match the strategic doctrine. If the RAF’s aircraft had limited range (and even when they had more range), usually couldn’t see the targets, and possessed inadequate navigational and target-setting instruments, then there was little chance of damaging the foe’s massive industrial strength even if he had no night fighter and flak defenses with which to hit back. With increasingly enormous antiaircraft barrages driving the bombers to fly at ever higher altitudes, the level of accuracy tumbled further. By the spring of 1941 the Air Staff was assuming a theoretical average error of drop of 1,000 yards, which was dismaying enough. However, in the rigorously compiled internal Butt Report of August 1941, based upon new day-after photographic reconnaissance, it was found that in a series of raids on the Ruhr only one-tenth of the RAF’s bombers found their way even to within 5 miles of their assigned targets. This evidence really shook Churchill’s faith in bombing. While he might continue to boast of the air offensive publicly, he was withering in his reply to the Air Staff’s plea for a war-winning force of four thousand heavy bombers, pointing out that increased accuracy alone would quadruple their capacity to damage Germany. He also, for the first time, privately admitted that “all we have learnt since the war began shows that [bombing’s] effects, both physical and moral, are greatly exaggerated.”25
The RAF’s response was to concede that “the only target on which the night force could inflict effective damage was a whole German town,” which clearly implied a shift toward indiscriminate bombing.26 It is from this time onward that increasing stress was placed upon weakening the enemy’s morale, whatever that meant. Moreover, the means of mass destruction were increasing fast. What damage could hundreds of the newer, powerful Lancasters inflict if let loose over the Third Reich? Also, the British scientific establishment was beginning, with RAF funding, to develop a series of top-secret directional aids to navigation and target identification—code-named Gee, Oboe, and H2S—that were increasingly capable of getting the bombers closer to the target. So, too, were the new RAF Pathfinder squadrons, specifically trained to fly ahead of the main bombing force and identify the target with flares and explosives. The British authorities also decided, a little later, to authorize the dropping of odd strips of aluminum (called variously “window,” “snowflake” or “chaff”) that blurred the enemy’s radar screen. And in the midst of these many improvements, on February 22, 194
2, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris became C in C, Bomber Command, and the service received its most implacable advocate of the sustained and general bombing of Germany.
None of this actually solved the basic operational dilemma: how to get control of the air over Germany so as to be able to eliminate the Nazi industrial machine. The idea that this might not be possible was absent from Bomber Command’s mind. All that was needed now, it was argued, was the systematic application of further force, chiefly by the RAF’s own efforts, although the coming to Britain of the USAAF in 1943, with its own conviction of the centrality of strategic bombing, was hugely welcome. If the American air generals Henry “Hap” Arnold, Carl Spaatz, and Ira Eaker needed the Air Staff’s strong support for their European strategy, the RAF definitely required senior American airmen to keep up the pressure for the strategic bombing campaign. At Casablanca, the Anglo-American air chiefs stood firm together.
Harris was a remarkable character who was both much loved and much hated; he was as strong and egotistical as MacArthur or George Patton and just as aggressive. Like those two, he recognized the need for display, hence the coming in 1942 of Bomber Command’s much-acclaimed “Thousand Bomber Raids.” By scraping together training squadrons and second-line units, he managed to dispatch 1,046 bombers against Cologne on the night of May 30—a chiefly symbolic raid, although the city also possessed light industries and occupied a key spot on the lower Rhine. Six hundred acres of that ancient city were flattened, at a cost of forty bombers (3.8 percent). Other such raids followed against Essen and then Bremen, though repeatedly cloudy conditions and the higher losses among the training squadrons forced Harris to abandon such spectacles for a while. Still, he had made his point: he had an independent tool for killing Germans and hurting the Third Reich. This gave him the elbow room for the RAF’s three great campaigns of 1943–44: the Battle of the Ruhr, the Battle of Hamburg, and the Battle of Berlin.