Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  The effect of bombing on the Axis states was uniformly negative. About Japan there is little argument. Bombing of Japanese cities clinched victory and almost certainly shortened the war in the Far East. Of course the early naval victories were essential to turn the tide on Japan’s embattled perimeter. But as the island-hopping became costlier for the American forces and Chinese resistance in Asia weakened in 1944, bombing recovered the initiative for the Allies and struck the awesome coup de grâce. In Italy, where heavy bombing began in the summer of 1943, there was almost no effective resistance, or adequate civil defence. Production in the northern industrial regions was cut by an estimated 60 per cent, largely due to the urban workforce sensibly decamping to the countryside. There is little dispute that Mussolini’s fall from grace in July 1943, and the eventual surrender of Italy in October that year, owed a good deal to the effects of bomb attack.69 Neither of Germany’s junior partners had the means to obstruct bombing, and both paid the price. With Germany the case was different, and it was here that bombing mattered most.

  The bombing offensive was for most of its course a fighting contest between the two western bomber forces and the German defences. From the middle of 1943 the defeat of the German air force became a central objective. Until that date German air power, deployed in the main as a tactical offensive arm, was a critical factor in German success on land and sea. The bombing offensive caused German military leaders to drain much needed air strength away from the main fighting fronts to protect the Reich, weakening German resistance in the Soviet Union and the Mediterranean. Though Stalin remained sceptical of Churchill’s claim that bombing somehow constituted a Second Front, the facts show that German air power declined steadily on the eastern front during 1943 and 1944, when over two-thirds of German fighters were sucked into the contest with the bombers. By the end of 1943 there were 55,000 anti-aircraft guns to combat the air offensive – including 75 per cent of the famous 88-millimetre gun, which had doubled with such success as an anti-tank weapon on the eastern front. As the bombing war developed, the whole structure of the Luftwaffe was distorted. On the eastern front it was the bombers that had caused the damage to Soviet forces in 1941 and 1942. The shift to producing fighters reduced the German bombing threat over the battlefield. In 1942 over half the German combat aircraft produced were bombers; in 1944 the proportion was only 18 per cent. The German air threat at the battle of Kursk and in the long retreat that followed visibly melted. By compelling Germany to divide its air forces there were reductions in effectiveness on all fronts, which could not be reversed even by the most strenuous production effort.70

  Once the Allies had the long-range fighter pouring out in numbers from America’s industrial cornucopia, German air power could be blunted once and for all. The result was not a single, spectacular victory, but a slow and lethal erosion of fighting capability. For the Allies this was an essential outcome, if their re-entry to the Continent was not to face hazardous risk. For all Stalin’s impatience, the western Allies knew the stunning effect on their war effort that a German victory on the invasion beaches would generate. Without the defeat or neutralisation of the German air force the Allies might well have hesitated to take the risk. Without the successful diversion of the heavy-bomber force to the job of pulverising roads, railways and bridges, in order to stifle German efforts to reinforce the anti-invasion front, D-Day might have failed at the first attempt. All of these factors, the defeat of the German air force, the diversion of effort from the eastern front at a critical point in that struggle, the successful preliminaries to D-Day, belie the view that bombing was a strategy of squandered effort. It is difficult to think of anything else the Allies might have done with their manpower and resources that could have achieved this much at such comparatively low cost, which is why they accepted the unscrupulous arguments for pursuing a strategy at odds with their pre-war views on restricting air action.

  Beyond these military gains lay the German economy and German morale. No one would argue with the view that for much of the war the bombing forces exaggerated the degree of direct physical destruction they were inflicting on German industry. Neither can it be denied that between 1941 and 1944, in step with the escalating bombardment, German military output trebled. The effect of bombing on the German economy was not to prevent a sustained increase in output, but to place a strict ceiling on that expansion. By the middle of the war, with the whole of continental Europe at her disposal, Germany was fast becoming an economic super-power. The harvest of destruction and disruption reaped by bomb attack, random and poorly planned as it often was, was sufficient to blunt German economic ambitions.

  The effects of bombing on the economy were both direct and indirect. The direct physically reduced the quantity of weapons and equipment flowing from German factories; the indirect forced the diversion of resources to cope with bombing, resources which German industry could have turned into tanks, planes and guns. Direct effects were felt from both area bombing and precision bombing, as the city attacks hit water, gas and electricity supplies, cut railway lines, blocked roads, or destroyed smaller factories producing components. Much of this, it is true, could be made good within weeks, sometimes within days. But for the German manager in the last two years of war there were two battles to fight: a battle to increase production, and a battle against the endless inconveniences produced by bombing, the interruptions to work, the loss of supplies and raw materials, the fears of the workforce. Where the businessman in America or Britain could work away at the task of maximising output, German managers were forced to enter an uncomfortable battlefield in which they and their workers were unwitting targets. The stifling of industrial potential caused by bombing is inherently difficult to quantify, but it was well beyond the 10 per cent suggested by the postwar bombing survey, particularly in the cluster of war industries specifically under attack. At the end of January 1945 Albert Speer and his ministerial colleagues met in Berlin to sum up what bombing had done to production schedules for 1944. They found that Germany had produced 35 per cent fewer tanks than planned, 31 per cent fewer aircraft and 42 per cent fewer lorries as a result of bombing. The denial of these huge resources to German forces in 1944 fatally weakened their response to bombing and invasion, and eased the path of Allied armies.71

  The indirect effects were more important still, for the bombing offensive forced the German economy to switch very large resources away from equipment for the fighting fronts, using them instead to combat the bombing threat. By 1944 one-third of all German artillery production consisted of anti-aircraft guns; the anti-aircraft effort absorbed 20 per cent of all ammunition produced, one-third of the output of the optical industry, and between half and two-thirds of the production of radar and signals equipment. As a result of this diversion, the German army and navy were desperately short of essential radar and communications equipment for other tasks. The bombing also ate into Germany’s scarce manpower: by 1944 an estimated two million Germans were engaged in anti-aircraft defence, in repairing shattered factories and in generally cleaning up the destruction.72 From the spring of that year frantic efforts were made to burrow underground, away from the bombing. Fantastic schemes were promoted which absorbed almost half of all industrial construction and close to half a million workers.73 Of course, if German efforts to combat the bombing had succeeded the effort would not have been wasted. As it was the defences and repair teams did enough to keep production going until the autumn of 1944, but not enough to prevent the rapid erosion of German economic power thereafter, and not enough to prevent the massive redirection of economic effort from 1943. Bombing forced Germany to divide the economy between too many competing claims, none of which could, in the end, be satisfied. In the air over Germany, or on the fronts in Russia and France, German forces lacked the weapons to finish the job. The combined effects of direct destruction and the diversion of resources denied German forces approximately half their battlefront weapons and equipment in 1944. It is difficult not to regard this margi
n as decisive.

  The impact of bombing on morale is a different question altogether. The naive expectation that bombing would somehow produce a tidal wave of panic and disillusionment which would wash away popular support for war, and topple governments built on sand, was exposed as wishful thinking. Neither in Germany nor Japan did bombing provoke any serious backlash against the regime from those who suffered. But there can surely be little doubt that bombing was a uniquely demoralising experience. No one enjoyed being bombed. The recollections of its victims are unanimous in expressing feelings of panic, of fear, of dumb resignation. The chief ambition of ordinary Germans in the last years of war was survival, das Überleben, the desperate struggle to secure food and shelter, to cope with regular and prolonged cuts in gas and light, to keep awake by day after nights of huddling in cramped shelters.74 The last thing on the minds of those living under the hail of bombs was political resistance. Not even the prospect of vengeance against the bombers could sustain morale.75 Bombed populations developed an outlook both apathetic and self-centred; each night they hoped that if there had to be bombing, it would be on someone else.

  If the real thing was not bad enough, the survivors were subjected to a second bombardment when the war was over, this time of surveys and questionnaires. Ordinary Germans and Japanese were selected for close interrogation by an army of American officials, anxious to learn at first hand what being bombed felt like. The Irish-American writer James Stern was among their number. He found the fatuous questions and the endless stream of tired, unhappy, defeated Germans almost more than he could bear. ‘What do you do and say with all that Galluping nonsense on the table to be answered?’ he wrote two years after the war, ‘and across the table the forlorn life with nothing to live for …’ Nevertheless Stern, and a host of others, went on to extract the answers.76 They were in the main predictable. Many Japanese respondents placed bombing at the top of the list of factors that had made them doubt the possibility of victory (34 per cent of those polled). In a second poll on ‘Reasons for Certainty that Japan Could Not Win’ 47 per cent put bombing.77 In Germany, 36 per cent of interviewees explained the decline of morale by the impact of bombing, and one out of three claimed that their personal morale was affected by bombing more than by any other single factor. When they were asked the more specific question ‘What was the hardest thing for civilians during the war?’, 91 per cent said bombing.78

  The impact of bombing was profound. People became tired, highly strung and disinclined to take risks. Industrial efficiency was undermined by bombing workers and their housing. In Japan absenteeism from work rose to 50 per cent in the summer of 1945; in the Ford plant in Cologne, in the Ruhr, absenteeism rose to 25 per cent of the workforce for the whole of 1944. At the more distant BMW works in Munich the rate rose to one-fifth of the workforce by the summer of 1944. A loss of work-hours on this scale played havoc with production schedules. Even those who turned up for work were listless and anxious. ‘One can’t get used to the raids,’ complained one respondent. ‘I wished for an end. We all got nerves. We did not get enough sleep and were very tense. People fainted when they heard the first bomb drop.’79 For the bombed cities the end of the war spelt relief from a routine of debilitating terror and arbitrary loss. No one could doubt who walked through the ghost towns of Germany and Japan, past the piles of rubble and twisted concrete, the rusting machines and torn up rails, miles and miles of burned-out houses, their few frightened inhabitants eking out a half-life in the cellars and ruined corners, no one could doubt but that bombing shattered civilian lives.

  * * *

  There has always seemed something fundamentally implausible about the contention of bombing’s critics that dropping almost 2.5 million tons of bombs on tautly-stretched industrial systems and war-weary urban populations would not seriously weaken them. Germany and Japan had no special immunity. Japan’s military economy was devoured in the flames; her population desperately longed for escape from bombing. German forces lost half of the weapons needed at the front, millions of workers absented themselves from work, and the economy gradually creaked almost to a halt. Bombing turned the whole of Germany, in Speer’s words, into a ‘gigantic front’. It was a front the Allies were determined to win; it absorbed huge resources on both sides. It was a battlefield in which only the infantry were missing. The final victory of the bombers in 1944 was, Speer concluded, ‘the greatest lost battle on the German side …’80 Though there should be necessary arguments over the morality or operational effectiveness of the bombing campaigns, the air offensive appears in fact as one of the decisive elements in explaining Allied victory.

  5

  ALONG A GOOD ROAD …

  The Invasion of France

  ‘We are going along a good road … The history

  of war never witnessed such a grandiose operation.

  Napoleon himself never attempted it. Hitler envisaged

  it but was a fool for never having attempted it.’

  Stalin to Averell Harriman, 10 June 1944

  * * *

  LATE IN MARCH 1942 a small convoy of ships steamed south from the Clyde estuary in Scotland destined for the invasion of French territory. Convoy ws17 carried two thousand Royal Marines and a wide assortment of naval and military supplies. The ships were a motley collection, small armed escort vessels swaying side by side with smart passenger liners crudely converted to the dull costume of war. Mercifully unattended by submarines, the convoy ploughed on, past the continent of Europe, past the Azores and on into the South Atlantic. On 19 April the convoy arrived in Cape Town where it met up with the rest of the invasion fleet, the aircraft carriers Indomitable and Illustrious, an ageing battleship and two cruisers. The 34 ships left for Durban, on the east coast of South Africa. In the last week of April they sailed in two separate groups to take part in Operation ‘Ironclad’, the invasion of Madagascar.

  Their destination was the northernmost tip of the island, Cap d’Ambre, which was almost separated from the rest by a deep inlet that formed the natural harbour of Diego Suarez. This large sheltered anchorage was used by the French as a naval base. It was overlooked by the small port of Antsirane, where the French garrison and a handful of aircraft were stationed. This colonial backwater might well have remained untouched by the war save for the threat from Japan. Following the rapid Japanese conquest of south-east Asia and the East Indies it was feared that Japanese forces would fan out into the Indian Ocean, seizing Ceylon or Madagascar in order to cut the vital shipping lines that sustained Britain’s fragile war effort in the Middle East and India. Madagascar suddenly became the key to British survival, and Churchill signalled his strong approval of its occupation.

  Ironclad was a tricky operation. The island was protected in the north by natural fortifications of shoal and reef. The harbour itself was dominated by large naval guns set in coastal fortresses, and its long winding entrance was easy to defend. Armed with the element of surprise, the task force was detailed to land on the undefended western coast and attack the port from the rear. D-Day was fixed for 5 May – every operation had a D-Day and H-Hour to signal its beginning – and the flotilla arrived punctually off the coast at two in the morning. Minesweepers marked a channel through the treacherous waters and the small transport vessels gingerly steered past the buoys to reach the undefended beaches of Courrier and Ambararata bays. Three mines exploded in the approach but no one on the shore noticed. The landings were carried out unopposed, for the French regarded the western shore as unnavigable. Not until the marines had advanced 3 miles towards the port did they suddenly meet stiff resistance. Any hope that the defenders would come over to the Allied cause evaporated. For most of the following day British Commonwealth forces were pinned down with heavy casualties. The operation was rescued from disaster only by an act of desperation. The destroyer Anthony was sent with fifty marines aboard to run the gauntlet of the harbour guns and seize the port under the noses of the French forces. In darkness and in swirling seas Anthony rose
to the occasion; the marines were disembarked on the jetty and seized the naval depot and the commanding general’s house. Attacked from the rear the startled garrison began to crumble. By 3 a.m. on 7 May resistance was almost over. The port was surrendered. A brief naval bombardment the following morning silenced the harbour guns.1

  The seizure of Diego Suarez effectively forestalled the Japanese. It was the first successful amphibious assault of the war for the western Allies, and the first genuinely combined operation, using aircraft, ships and soldiers working together. It came at a dark time in the war for the Allied cause and was, Churchill later recalled, the only bright spot in Britain’s war effort ‘for long months’.2 But it was small comfort. The whole operation had come close to disaster. The ships supporting it had almost run out of fuel and water by 7 May; casualties were surprisingly heavy, 107 killed and 280 wounded, some 20 per cent of the attacking force; and contrary to expectations the French governor of the island not only refused to surrender but continued hostilities. The doughty Monsieur Masset retreated south with his forces leaving behind a trail of blown bridges and booby-trapped roads. He survived the fall of his capital in September. South African forces, depleted by illness and plagued by clouds of dry red dust, finally cornered the remnants of the French army in the very south of the island. Here the governor solemnly surrendered on 5 November, exactly six months and one minute after the onset of hostilities in May. Under French law the island’s defenders were now entitled to higher pay and awards for enduring more than half a year of combat.3