Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

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  In the winter of 1943–4 the two bomber forces were compelled to rethink the campaign. Schweinfurt for the Americans, Berlin and Nuremberg for the British, showed the limitations of bombing, even though the defence had been stretched to the limit. It gradually dawned on the western forces that one thing, and one thing only, would secure the skies over Germany: the defeat of the German air force. They had ignored Clausewitz at their peril. Concentration of force against the armed forces of the enemy was not mere dogma; it was proved again and again in the harsh crucible of combat.

  To be fair, American service chiefs saw this sooner than the British. When bombing plans were first drawn up in August 1941, American planners pointed to the Luftwaffe as an intermediate priority, whose destruction would permit uninterrupted assault on the economy. But British airmen had always dismissed attacks against an enemy air force as a waste of time. The targets were regarded as too dispersed and too small, and, as they had ably demonstrated in the Battle of Britain, recuperation from attack was relatively easy. When the 8th air force began operations in the summer of 1943, the Combined Bomber Offensive directive (codenamed ‘Pointblank’) placed the undermining of German air power as a top priority. American attacks that year did have some success in limiting the expansion of German fighter production; the attack on Schweinfurt on 14 October reduced ball-bearing output by 67 per cent.52 But the defeats suffered in these attacks were a reflection of the complete failure to confront the direct sources of German air power, the fighters, pilots and airfields of the Luftwaffe.

  The defeat of the German air force became a matter of urgency. Without that defeat the projected invasion of Europe in the late spring of 1944, Operation ‘Overlord’, would be placed in jeopardy. Without the bombing offensive, which was supposed to weaken German resistance to invasion and re-conquest, the western Allies faced a long and bloody contest. There was no alternative but to defeat the Luftwaffe if western strategy was not to be thrown into disarray. On New Year’s Day 1944 the Commander-in-Chief of the American air forces, General ‘Hap’ Arnold, sent the following to his commanders in Europe: ‘My personal message to you – this is a MUST – is to, “Destroy the Enemy Air Force wherever you find them in the air, on the ground and in the factories.”’53

  Here, crudely expressed, was the central issue of this zone of conflict. It was resolved not by some revolution in air warfare, but through a tactic of remarkable simplicity: the introduction of additional, disposable, fuel tanks on Allied fighters. It might well be asked with hindsight why it took the Allies so long to recognise that they needed fighters to fight German aircraft, and that their range could only be increased by giving them more fuel. The straight answer is that no one thought it was possible without sacrificing speed and manoeuvrability. It was a technical possibility quite early in the war, but neither the Allies nor the Germans saw any real gains in pursuing it. For too long it was assumed that heavily armed bombers could defend themselves. In fact the bombers were like unescorted merchant ships: to deliver their bomb cargoes they needed to be convoyed.

  By good fortune more than by sound planning the convoy vessels were to hand. The standard American fighter aircraft, the p-38 Lightning and the P-47 Thunderbolt, had been fitted with extra fuel tanks under the wings when they were ferried long distances. By repeating this simple expedient the escort range of both fighters was increased from 500 miles to 2,000 miles. But the attention of the bombing commanders became focused on a hitherto neglected fighter, the P-51 Mustang. Built originally for the RAF in American factories, the marriage of an American airframe and the British Rolls-Royce ‘Merlin’ engine produced a fighter of exceptional endurance and capability, even when loaded with heavy supplies of extra petrol. The first group of adapted Mustangs joined the 8th air force in November 1943, and flew a mission to Kiel and back in December, the farthest any fighter had yet flown and fought in Europe. A crash production programme in American factories turned out enormous quantities in a matter of months. By March 1944 the P-51, with a maximum armed range of 1,800 miles, flew with the bombers all the way to Berlin and back.54

  The long-range escort fighter transformed the air war overnight. When Thunderbolt fighters were shot down over Aachen in September 1943 Göring refused to believe they could have flown that far, insisting instead that strong westerly winds had somehow blown the damaged aircraft to the east. But high and rising fighter losses in the last months of 1943 showed that the new threat was real enough. In November the Luftwaffe lost 21 per cent of the fighter force, in December 23 per cent. Production of fighters declined too, from a peak of 873 in July to 663 in December. German forces were faced with a vicious cycle of attrition from which there was no escape. American production escalated beyond anything the Germans had expected. Eighth air force fighter strength quadrupled in eight months. The Lightnings, Mustangs and Thunderbolts roamed at will over northern and central Germany, forcing the German fighters to unequal combat. By the spring the German fighter force was decimated. Half the fighters and a quarter of the pilots were lost each month.55 Despite frantic efforts to reorganise fighter production the initiative lay firmly with the Allies. With a heavy heart the General of Fighters, Adolf Galland, reported to his superiors the irreversible crisis of German air power: ‘The ratio in which we fight today is about 1 to 7. The standard of the Americans is extraordinarily high. The day fighters have lost more than 1000 aircraft during the last four months, among them our best officers. These gaps cannot be filled. Things have gone so far that the danger of a collapse of our arm exists.’56

  The German air force never regained the initiative. The defeat of German air power in the skies over the Reich starved other theatres of desperately needed aircraft. The invasion in the west could be met with only three hundred aircraft against over twelve thousand Allied planes.57 By April there were only five hundred single engine fighters left on the eastern front facing over thirteen thousand Soviet aircraft. If this were not enough, the bombing offensive was now renewed with fresh vigour. The target for the daylight bombers was the German aircraft industry. In a concentrated attack, later nicknamed ‘Big Week’, escorted bombers launched a devastating attack on the leading aircraft and aero-engine plants. The attacks did not halt aircraft production altogether, but they forced a desperate and improvised dispersal of the plants which put to an end any thought of producing five thousand fighters a month, as the German Air Ministry wanted. Most new aircraft were shot out of the skies in a matter of days, and nine thousand were destroyed on the ground by marauding US fighters. A temporary respite, while the bombers were withdrawn for the destruction of transport targets to support the invasion of Europe, ended when the bombers returned in May to hammer the German oil industry. In June the production of aviation fuel was reduced to a trickle, and the Luftwaffe from then on relied on accumulated stocks. The defeat of the German air force was now an accomplished fact.

  During the last year of the war the bombing campaign came of age. With the thin veil of German air defence in tatters, the economy and population was at last exposed to the full fury of the bombers. Most of the bomb tonnage dropped by the two bomber forces was disbursed in the last year of the war – 1.18 million tons out of a total for the whole war of 1.42 million. These attacks did not go entirely unresisted. There were over fifty thousand heavy and light anti-aircraft guns at the peak, organised into heavy batteries, concentrated around the most important industrial targets. There remained an exiguous fighter force by day and night (including a few of the new jet fighters), whose pilots continued with almost reckless bravery to pit their tiny strength against the air armadas. The force now available to the Allies was one of overwhelming power. ‘It is a truly awe-inspiring spectacle which confronts us,’ wrote one German fighter pilot in his diary early in 1944. ‘There are approximately 1,000 of the heavy bombers flying eastwards along a wide frontage with a strong fighter escort … Against them we are forty aircraft.’58 A few months later he led his depleted squadron of five
aircraft in a final do-or-die battle with sixty Mustangs and Thunderbolts and was shot down in minutes.

  Over the last year of war the bombing of Germany was relentless. Both Bomber Command and the American air force finally had the aircraft they needed. Eighth air force was supplemented by 15th air force from the Mediterranean theatre, which could attack over the Reich at long range. At the end of the war, in March 1945, the Americans had over seven thousand fighters and bombers on hand for the offensive. The RAF had over 1,500 heavy-bombers, which could carry bombs of up to 20,000 pounds in weight. This massive firepower was thrown against the industrial fabric and urban inhabitants of Germany. Oil supplies for Germany’s war effort were critically reduced. Chemical production was emasculated, reducing the output of explosives by half by the end of the year. From the autumn, attacks were concentrated against transport targets, which could now be hit accurately by fighters and fighter-bombers flying unmolested in German air space. The railway system was fatally debilitated. By December 1944 the number of freight-car journeys was half that of the previous year, and only half the quantity of coal needed by German industry could be moved by rail.59 Bombing gradually dismembered the economic body. By the winter of 1944–5 Germany was carved up into isolated economic regions, living off accumulated stocks, while frantic efforts were made to divert essential military production into caves and saltmines and vast, artificial, concrete caverns built, like the pyramids, by an army of wretched slaves. But by January 1945 the end was near. Albert Speer sent Hitler a memorandum on 30 January, the twelfth anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power, in which he declared that ‘The war is over in the area of heavy industry and armaments … from now on the material preponderance of the enemy can no longer be compensated for by the bravery of our soldiers.’60 By the time the Allies mounted their last bombing attacks late in March 1945, Bomber Command was back to flying by day, for the first time since 1940.

  With so much power to inflict massive physical destruction it was difficult to resist the temptation to turn the bombing weapon against Japan. For long geography had been Japan’s salvation. But by the spring of 1945 the American forces in the Pacific had finally secured island bases from which it was possible to hit Japanese cities. The air forces, now equipped with a new heavy-bomber, the B-29 Super-Fortress, were ordered to do what they had done in Europe, to soften up mainland Japan to ease the American conquest of the home islands. But against a flimsy air defence quite unprepared for the aerial onslaught the bombers were able to destroy almost at will. In the end air power alone was able to bring Japan to the point of surrender.

  In the six months between April and August 1945 21st Bomber Command, under the direction of General Curtis LeMay, devastated most of Japan’s major cities. One by one the urban areas were ticked off as vast quantities of incendiary bombs were poured on to houses of wood, bamboo and paper. So poor were the defences that the B-29s could fly in at just 7,000 feet to release their bombs. Against the firestorms they caused there was little the emergency services could do. Using only a fraction of the bomb tonnage disgorged on Europe the Command destroyed 40 per cent of the built-up area of 66 cities. In desperate efforts to halt the spread of the conflagrations the Japanese authorities knocked down over half a million houses to form fire breaks. The terrified populations fled into the hills and the countryside. Over eight million refugees clogged the villages; in the factories absenteeism rose to 50 per cent. A combination of sea blockade and bombing reduced most Japanese industries to a mere fraction of their wartime peak – by July aluminium production was reduced to 9 per cent, oil refining and steel production to 15 per cent.61 All except the most diehard militarists could see that Japan was defeated.

  In Tokyo the politicians and generals squabbled over the terms of a possible surrender while American bombers remorselessly ate away at the very fabric of Japanese life. The equivocation cost Japan dear. At long last the Americans had not only a ‘super-bomber’ but also a ‘super-bomb’. Science fiction became science fact. On 16 July in the heart of the New Mexico desert the first atomic device was successfully exploded. A second was shipped in a lead casket across the Pacific. Months before, LeMay had been told to reserve some Japanese cities for special treatment, and the fire-bombers left alone Kyoto, Hiroshima and Niigata. On 24 July the 20th air force was ordered to prepare for atomic attacks on two Japanese cities. Hiroshima was selected for the first, Niigata was rejected as too far north. For the second LeMay proposed Nagasaki, farther south down the coast, which he had not yet reached on his city hit-list.62 America’s new President, Harry Truman, gave his approval to destroy what he insisted on calling a ‘military base’, when everyone knew Hiroshima was an ordinary city, like so many of those already torched.63

  For the inhabitants of Hiroshima their neglect by LeMay’s bombers was welcome but unnerving. Superstitions quickly spread. It was widely believed that rubbing a pickled onion over the scalp, to symbolise a bombing, rendered immunity. The rumour spread through the city that President Truman’s mother was Japanese and lived in seclusion in Hiroshima.64 The reality was nightmarishly, almost absurdly different. On the morning of 6 August a single atomic bomb was loaded on to a B-29, christened the Enola Gay a few days before. As it approached Hiroshima the air-raid alarms began, but on the sight of only one aircraft the all-clear was sounded. A few minutes later a single bomb destroyed in seconds 50 per cent of the city and killed forty thousand people. Here was Super-Armageddon with a vengeance. Everything around the bomb was shrivelled to ash. The thick black clay tiles which covered most Japanese roofs boiled and bubbled over a mile from the explosion. Windows shattered 5 miles away. Demented survivors staggered into the suburbs, ghoulish, doomed. A young student observed them: ‘Their faces were all burned and the meat on their faces was hanging down, the lymph dripping all over their bodies.’ As for Hiroshima, ‘everything – as far as the eye could reach – is a waste of ashes and ruin.’65

  The Japanese authorities could scarcely believe what had happened. Frantic efforts were made to find a surrender formula, but too slowly to avoid a second, equally devastating attack on Nagasaki on 9 August. By the end of 1945 seventy thousand people, half the city’s population, were dead. Even Truman was horrified by the results and called a halt to atomic attacks. Yet five days later, as the Emperor, Hirohito, prepared to broadcast the surrender of Japan, a thousand bombers bearing incendiaries inflicted a final, retributive, flourish. The bombers might have failed to bring Germany to defeat unaided, but the ruthless destruction of Japanese cities from the air made direct invasion here redundant. The war was over.

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  Did bombing help the Allies to win the war? The arguments began even before the war was over, when American and British technical intelligence teams scoured the bomb sites trying to decide what effect bombing had had on the enemy war effort. The air force commanders wanted the civilian investigators to confirm that if bombing had not quite won the war, it had at least made a major contribution to victory. The civilians, drawn in the main from academic or business backgrounds, were at best sceptical of air power claims, at worst hostile to bombing. Their concluding reports damned with faint praise: bombing had certainly contributed to undermining resistance in Germany in the last months of war, but until then it had done nothing to reverse the sharp upward trajectory of German production, and it had clearly not dented morale sufficiently to reduce production or produce revolution.66 It was estimated that Germany lost only 17 per cent of its production in 1944, which could hardly be regarded as critical. The view has persisted ever since that bombing was a strategic liability, a wasteful diversion of resources that might more fruitfully have been used building tanks or laying down ships.

  Bombing has also occasioned a chorus of moral disapproval. The Western allies killed over 800,000 civilians from the air, including 70,000 Frenchmen and 60,000 Italians in lesser-known campaigns.67 Yet to understand what bombing achieved it is necessary, though agonisingly difficult, to lay aside the moral issue. I
ts strategic achievements are distinct from its ethical implications, however closely entwined they have become in the contemporary debate. Even on the strategic questions there is a great deal of confusion. There persists the myth that bombing was supposed to win the war on its own, and was thus a failure in its own terms. This was never the expectation of Allied leaders. Bombers were asked to contribute in a great many ways to what was always a combined endeavour of aircraft, ships and armies. The popular view of bombing has concentrated far too much on the narrow question of how much German production was affected by bomb destruction, at the expense of looking at bombing’s other functions, and the other theatres of combat in which it was used. To give a more balanced answer to the question of how much bombing contributed to victory we must be clear about the nature of its achievement.

  To take Allied strategy first. Bombing met some significant objectives of western engagement in war. Though the costs were far from negligible – over six years the death of 120,000 American and British airmen, and the loss of 21,000 bombers – bombing did reduce the overall level of western casualties in Europe and in the Far East, by weakening German resistance and by knocking Japan out of the war before invasion. Western losses were far lower than those of the other fighting powers. Bombing also permitted Britain and the United States to bring their considerable economic and scientific power to bear on the contest. The campaign was capital intensive, where the great struggle on the eastern front was based on military labour. This suited the preferences of the west, which did not want to place a much higher physical strain on their populations. For all the criticism directed at the waste of resources on bombing, the whole campaign absorbed, according to a postwar British survey, only 7 per cent of Britain’s war effort.68