Engineers of Victory

by Paul Kennedy

  In this campaign, as in several others described in this book, it was the numbers of trained crews that were relevant. Were there enough good pilots left to fly the Hurricanes and Spitfires of Fighter Command in 1940? Yes, just. Were there enough well-trained U-boat captains and chief engineers to execute Doenitz’s resumed offensive after the autumn of 1943? No. Were there enough experienced midlevel British Empire officers in the Eighth Army to handle Rommel’s explosive form of ground warfare in 1941–42? No. Were there enough competent Japanese fighter pilots left after the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot” of June 1944? No. Were there enough rock-hard major generals left in Stalin’s army after both the purges of the late 1930s and the first year of Operation Barbarossa? Scarcely, but yes.

  There were certainly not enough competent German airmen left to handle the increasing waves of Spitfires, Thunderbolts, and Mustangs over western Europe from late 1943 and early 1944 onward, despite the more than 80 percent of the German fighter force that was being deployed against Allied bombers by this time. One of those aces, Heinz Knocke, reported in his early 1944 diary the “awe-inspiring spectacle” of going against a thousand heavily armed bombers surrounded on all sides by American escorting fighters. After flying two sorties in one day, he watched his own Bf 109 machine-gunned and destroyed while refueling at a makeshift base; a few months later he himself, leading a group of only five planes patrolling the Reich’s western borders, was pounced on by forty Mustangs and Thunderbolts and shot to the ground.55 Hitler and the Wehrmacht leadership now railed at the “cowardice” of the Luftwaffe pilots for letting the enemy’s bombers get through. Nothing could have been further from the truth, but truth was in short supply in Berlin. The German fliers were as brave as the Tom Blakeslees and Elmer Bendigers and Pat Danielses and Guy Gibsons who faced them month after month, but the plain fact was that, as in the Atlantic convoys campaign, the Allies had come up with a better way of getting things done.

  ATTRITION OF GERMAN FIGHTER ACES IN WEST AND REICH

  ACE VICTORIES DATE LOST (1944)

  Egon Mayer 102 March 2

  Anton Hackyl 192 March

  Hugo Frey 32 March 6

  Gerhard Loos 92 March 6

  Rudolf Ehrenberger 49 March 8

  Egmont Prinz zur Lippe-Weissenfeld 51 March 12

  Emil Bitsch 108 March 15

  Heinrich Wohlers 29 March 15

  Johann-Hermann Meier 77 March 15

  Stefan Litjens 28 March 23

  Wold-Dietrich Wilcke 162 March 23

  Detler Rohwer 38 March 29

  Hans Remmer 26 April 2

  Karl Willius 50 April 8

  Josef Zwernemann 126 April 8

  Otto Wessling 83 April 19

  Franz Schwaiger 67 April 24

  Emil Omert 70 April 24

  Kurt Ubben 110 April 27

  Leopold Moenster 95 May 8

  Walter Oesau 123 May 11

  Gerhard Sommer 20 May 12

  Ernst Boerngen 45 May 19

  Hans-Heinrich Koenig 24 May 24

  Reinhold Hoffman 66 May 24

  Horst Carganico 60 May 27

  Friedrich-Karl Mueller 140 May 29

  Karl-Wolfgang Redlich 43 May 29

  Source: From To Command the Sky by McFarland and Newton, from Obermaier.

  LOSSES OF LUFTWAFFE FIGHTER PILOT ACES, MARCH–MAY 1944

  Luftwaffe pilots who had gained an enormous number of kills on the Eastern Front were no match for the aerial offensive in Western Europe in early 1944. Without these aces, German aircraft production was valueless.

  This relentless elimination of Luftwaffe pilots, plus the disruption of Germany’s aircraft industry, supply lines, and, increasingly, aircraft fuel refining, created a favorable feedback loop that affected Bomber Command’s own campaign. By this stage it too had started sending night fighter escorts to accompany the bombers, but they were generally rather slow (Beaufighters), and even when more sophisticated night fighters were introduced they did not achieve a high rate of kills. Still, Germany’s own night fighter strength was already ebbing when, in late spring 1944, Eisenhower, supported by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, demanded that Bomber Command redirect its enormous bomb-carrying capacity to join the USAAF in paralyzing all German rail and road communications that reached westward to the Channel. Attacking French rail yards was much less dangerous than round-trip assaults on Berlin, but the pressure was coming off Bomber Command in any case. As one of the British official historians (himself a former distinguished flier) put it in his later reflections on the whole bombing campaign, the greater the success of the American long-range fighters by day, the greater the chances of Bomber Command by night. Devastated by their enemies’ low- and high-altitude search-and-destroy policies, and by the destruction of railways and bridges needed to ensure delivery of supplies, the Luftwaffe had fewer and fewer planes to put up at night.56 Too, in the weeks before D-Day, Bomber Command began to make daytime raids for the first time since 1939–40, discovered the loss rate considerably reduced, and found the accuracy of the Lancasters (despite Harris’s gloomy forecasts) devastating. By September 1944, the RAF/USAAF round-the-clock pattern had resumed against a weakened Third Reich, which now lacked the advantage of its advance radar stations in France and the Low Countries. By this time also, Blakeslee’s P-51s with drop tanks could accompany the B-17 Flying Fortresses all the way to western Russia, a distance of a thousand or so miles. The same Mustangs would then escort the bombers back from Russia to Italian bases and hop over the Alps home to East Anglia. In that triangular flight pattern alone, one sees the Third Reich cornered.

  Throughout this entire period of February to September 1944, the Allied chiefs quarreled among themselves and across national lines. Harris opposed any selective strategy that targeted enemy oil, transportation, and electricity grids (as opposed to his own weird panacea of blasting cities), though he was overruled. Spaatz struggled against being under army direction and argued for continued attacks upon the German oil industry. Air C in C Sir Arthur Tedder and his guru Solly Zuckerman joined the recently appointed RAF air marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory in pushing for the transportation plan, that is, the interdiction of all rail lines and roads going to western France, though Churchill feared that this would kill many French civilians (he was right). In the end, Eisenhower insisted that both the RAF and USAAF focus upon preventing German army divisions from reinforcing their forward divisions in Normandy by taking out all the marshaling yards, Seine bridges, railway lines, and whatever else moved trains (though he was willing to release the bombers elsewhere once it became clear that the enemy’s rail and road links were cut).

  Eisenhower’s decision to cut off the Wehrmacht’s reinforcement routes was one of the single most important policy calls in the entire war. To avoid giving any indication of a Normandy landing, the two air forces bombed the length and breadth of the French transportation system. By June 6, 1944, French rail traffic was a mere 30 percent of what it had been in January; by early July, it was only 10 percent. The Wehrmacht could neither get reinforcements into western France nor get its forward divisions out.57

  It is striking that in these furious debates—with Eisenhower on occasion even threatening to the Combined Chiefs to resign if the air marshals would not obey his directives—few of the protagonists, apart from the levelheaded Tedder, seemed to pull back and recognize that they were now discussing targeting choices. They were not worrying about whether they were winning the air war: they were on top. The point at issue now was the swiftest way, in the aerial dimension, to bring down the Third Reich. It was no longer a matter of how one got the bombers through, but of what targets they would bomb. Perhaps it is not surprising that group and air force commanders who had lost dozens of crews each month needed some time to recognize this fundamental strategic change, but the Combined Chiefs should have done so. The battle for air superiority over Germany and Europe was basically won, even if the Reich fought back with astounding tenacity in the final year of the w
ar.

  A single witness makes this point better than any statistic. Early on the morning of June 6, 1944, Flight Lieutenant Owen of 97 Squadron recorded in his diary a late-night raid on a small enemy gun battery on the Normandy coast. His squadron was, unusually, ordered not to fly below 6,500 feet, not to use the identifying friend/foe transmitters, and not to off-load any bombs in the Channel. What did all that mean? His Lancaster duly dropped its bombs on the target at 0500 hours and turned for home; then, amazed, he and his crew looked down and witnessed the entire D-Day landings beneath them, with “a grandstand view of the Americans running in on the beach.”58 As the British aircrews flew back to their Lincolnshire base, they were staggered by the sheer number of American B-17s and B-24s flying overhead toward the continent. The Allies were finally invading France, and their troops were protected above by a gigantic aerial armada, safe from Luftwaffe attack. Eisenhower had told his troops, “If you see planes overhead, they will be ours”—what a difference from Dunkirk, even from Dieppe. And they were protected at sea from any U-boat assault. The whole thing—sea, air, and land—had come together.

  On that day, the American, British, Canadian, and other Allied air forces put an astonishing 11,590 planes into the air. There had been nothing like it in world history, nor has there been since. A total of 3,700 fighters, including those Polish-flown Spitfires, covered the invasion beaches and patrolled all the way northward to the middle North Sea and westward to the western approaches. There was no chance for the completely diminished Luftwaffe to do anything except lose more and more of its planes and pilots whenever they rose into the air. The German air force would soon receive many additional aircraft, but they would have little overall impact, for they were steadily losing their bases, their fuel, and their crews. (The new pilots were so unprepared that their experience was grimly referred to as Kindermord, “infanticide”; 13,000 German pilots and crewmen were lost between June and October 1944 alone.) Their flight commanders had been shot out of the sky, chiefly by the Mustangs, at the critical point in the aerial war, and from that blow they could not recover. For the Allies to gain command of the skies over western Europe only two or three months before D-Day had been, as the Duke of Wellington said of the Battle of Waterloo, “a damned close-run thing.” But great battles often are. The defeat of the Luftwaffe between February and May 1944 was a close run, but also one of the most decisive campaigns in history.

  After Normandy

  A detailed analysis of Allied strategy is beyond the scope of this book. A few aspects are nevertheless worth noting. In the first place, Harris’s resumption of “strategic” attacks upon German cities after June 1944 did not do much to reduce the Reich’s aircraft production—output actually rose to its height (39,800 planes) in that year. Germany’s massive industrial capacity, spread into its many captured lands, was far too big to be brought down by a general, nonspecific bombing campaign even if there was much less opposition from Luftwaffe fighters; as late as January 1945 Arnold was expressing his amazement at how resilient the German war economy had turned out to be. By the spring of 1945, it is true, Hitler’s empire was being smashed each day and night by thousands of Lancasters, Liberators, and Flying Fortresses. Four-fifths of the total Anglo-American bomb tonnage (out of a colossal 1.4 million tons) was dropped in the final year of the war. But the RAF and AAF were able to inflict that damage only because other, more important things had happened first.

  Second, the strategic aerial offensive did not break the German people’s morale, at least not to the extent of stopping the fight or turning its battered inhabitants against their regime. There is ample evidence of the citizens of Darmstadt, Hamburg, Dresden, and other cities being unable to believe the intensity of the destruction around them and yearning for relief and an end to it all. But there is absolutely no evidence that such desperation ended the war in the way that the meeting of American and Soviet soldiers on the Elbe did. Rather, the continuation of the West’s area bombing (or “carpet” or “blanket” or “indiscriminate” or “general” bombing) stained its reputation and produced a moral equivalent to what the Luftwaffe had done to Warsaw, Rotterdam, and Coventry.

  Third, the Allied air forces did carry out some clever bombing campaigns after Normandy, especially in their attacks upon oil-refining installations, transportation bottlenecks, and electrical grids. Here again, one is talking about choices. It doesn’t make sense to get into a messy technical debate as to whether those massive bomber fleets should by then have concentrated more or less of their explosives upon marshaling yards or oil refineries, or more generally upon Germany’s cities. The fact was that collectively they were bringing their enemy to his knees and were doing so with directional aids, Pathfinder forces, and a bombing accuracy that they had not possessed in previous years. If the German mines were still producing masses of coal but the rail lines were destroyed, that increase in coal output meant nothing. If fantastic new U-boats were being assembled at Kiel and Bremen but the diesel engines could not be transported from the Ruhr, they were of no use. The Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944 saw German panzers run out of fuel. If Speer and his able managers were cranking up fighter production in factories hidden in mountainsides but those aircraft had no fuel, that also meant nothing—or, rather, it meant that the Allied bombers were opposed by fewer and fewer German planes in the air. If extraordinary German ingenuity produced the world’s first combat jet fighter in the Messerschmitt Me 262—by late 1944 Mustang pilots were reporting some extraordinary non-propeller-driven plane sweeping past them at unmatchable speed—then it was a further example of a Nazi “wonder weapon” (like the schnorkel and type XXI “elektroboot” U-boats and the V-2 rocket) that could not affect the outcome of the war because the Germans had run out of time.59 The greatest of all the wonder weapons, the A-bomb, was of course unknown to all the European commanders, who had to fight with the tools at hand. But such tools were enough to deliver an Allied victory.

  This epic struggle had to be, and was, won between 1943 and 1944; it was virtually impossible for Germany to turn back its course in the twelve months following June 1944. The shrinking German aviation fuel production figures after they lost air supremacy say it all: in March 1944 the totals were at their highest output (185,000 tons), but after the late May assaults the totals tumbled fast, to 56,000 tons in June, 17,000 tons in September, and a mere 1,000 tons by February 1945.60 When British paratroopers landed at Arnhem (its own sad story), some Luftwaffe squadrons could not rise to join the fight at all. Germany had run out of gas, as Ultra decrypts of the desperate messages of its high command readily confirmed. Spaatz and his planners had, at last, got it right. In any case, by the beginning of 1945 the Allied generals no longer cared all that much for strategic bombing. Their ground armies were to close in on the Third Reich, its factories, rail yards, missile launching pads, and U-boat pens. The sort of airpower the generals wanted in order to help them reach the Fuehrer’s bunker in Berlin was now tactical, not strategic. Turning German cities into heaps of rubble and destroying all the bridges actually slowed down the advance of Allied armor.

  The two great breakthroughs in the strategic air offensive against Germany, or so Hastings argues, were American: the introduction of the long-range Mustang fighter to weaken the Luftwaffe and then, near the end, the campaign against enemy fuel production and distribution.61 This is true, but it is only a partial explanation, rather like arguing for the decisiveness of MIT’s Rad Lab in the radar war without mentioning Birmingham’s invention of the cavity magnetron in the first place. As the narrative above has tried to show, the greatest and most successful of those long-range fighters would not have been produced without Rolls-Royce, the Merlin engine, the P-51 airframe, the drop tank, and a small, dedicated group of first British and then American individuals who helped further advance this project. Counterfactuals such as “Without the long-range Mustang, how long would the war have gone on?” are always of limited usefulness, but it is surely incontesta
ble that only the destruction of Germany’s fighter defenses in early 1944 made possible the fulfillment of that Casablanca directive to place an invasion army into western Europe shortly afterward.

  The meaning of the Allied strategic air campaign was fought out long after the Second World War ended. Predictably, Harris and his Bomber Command supporters rushed in early to claim that the aerial offensive was key to the defeat of the Third Reich.62 In retrospect, we can see it was not. At the other extreme, there has been a tendency to describe it as an unwise and excessive use of scarce resources (especially Britain’s), a point reinforced by the recent slew of books and films about the horrors of indiscriminate bombing. Strategic bombing, from this standpoint, was thus both evil and an unnecessary waste.