Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  The casualty bill for Hamburg is still widely debated. It is probable that up to 46,000 residents of the city, of whom 22,000 were women and 5,000 children, were killed, and around 1 million fled the city.81 The results of the raids seemed and still seem appalling, and it is highly questionable whether the operation shortened the war to any appreciable extent. The Germans unsurprisingly imposed a news blackout and, with their usual organizational ability, got Hamburg’s factories working again remarkably quickly: most of those who had fled returned within a week of the raid, and only about fifty days’ production was lost.

  Both the raid on Hamburg and the later assault on Dresden have given much ammunition to those who maintained at the time and still maintain that to attack innocent civilians was a war crime and that Harris and his crews were therefore war criminals. Quite apart from the fact that the Hague and Geneva Conventions, the relevant international law of armed conflict of the time, do not forbid aerial bombing (although Roosevelt had said in 1939 that he hoped belligerents would avoid it), the facts are that the only way to hit back directly at the German homeland from 1940 to 1944 was by bombing, and a government that refused to use Bomber Command for that purpose would have been censured, not least by those whose own homes had been destroyed by the Luftwaffe, and would have drawn even more opprobrium from Stalin, who was constantly demanding a second front, never mind the bombing of German cities. The exigencies of war could be pleaded for the Hamburg slaughter, but the attack on Dresden is cited as being unnecessary, coming as it did only three months before the end of the war. Dresden was attacked by 796 Lancasters of the RAF on the night of 13/14 February 1945 which dropped 2,700 tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs, and on the days of 14 and 15 February and 2 March by 300 B-17s of the USAAF. The resulting firestorm destroyed the medieval centre of the city and may have killed 40,000 people, many of them refugees from the approaching Russians. Why, some asked then and others ask now, did this have to happen when the war was nearly over? The raid was questioned in the House of Commons, where Churchill, sensing that world opinion might not entirely approve of the policy of saturation area bombing, swiftly distanced himself from what had been his own policy. But, while we now know that the war would end less than three months later, nobody knew that at the time: fighting was still fierce on both European fronts; the Western allies had not yet got over the Rhine, and the Russians had specifically requested that Dresden be bombed. Beautiful medieval city it undoubtedly was but it was also a legitimate military target: it was a centre of road and rail communication through which German troops and supplies for the Eastern Front passed, it manufactured optical instruments, gas masks, aero-engines and artillery shells, and its military industries employed some 10,000 people. The USAAF has managed to avoid the opprobrium piled upon Harris and the RAF because of its policy of only going for military targets, but in practice it too found it almost impossible to hit precision targets, even by day, and dropped bombs on cities just as the RAF did, although it took twice as many aircraft to deliver the same weight of explosive.

  It is sometimes asked why RAF Bomber Command failed to take action against the concentration camps, the theory being that, had the camps been bombed, the inmates could have escaped. Some would, of course, have been killed in the bombing, but then they were going to be killed by the Germans anyway. Against this, most of the camps were in Poland or in eastern Germany, which meant the bombers would have had to fly for a very long way over enemy territory to reach them, and it is unclear what the inmates were supposed to do once they had exited the camps. Dressed in prison clothing and weakened by minimal rations as they were, they could not simply have slipped back into the population at large: Poland was just as anti-Semitic as Germany and the locals would not have given them shelter. In any case, had the inmates been really determined, they could have effected their own escape; they vastly outnumbered their guards and in a mass breakout many would have succeeded, leaving behind no more dead than would have been caused by the RAF’s bombing, and a lot less than would eventually go up the chimneys of the crematoria. The harsh truth is that the release of concentration camp prisoners, even if it could have been effected by Bomber Command, would have contributed nothing to winning the war and that there were other, far more important targets. Furthermore, perhaps the Jewish lobby would have been listened to more readily, in Britain at least, had its terror gangs not been killing British soldiers and officials in Palestine: even Churchill, who had been sympathetic towards the idea of a Jewish state, rather went off the idea when the Fighters for Israel’s Freedom, the re-branded Stern Gang, murdered Lord Moyne, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, in Cairo in November 1944.

  Protest about attacking civilians by bombing cities is strangely muted when applied to the Japanese. The USAAF deliberately targeted Japan’s cities using incendiary bombs, which were particularly effective when dropped on conurbations containing so many wooden buildings. The fire-bombing of Tokyo alone may have killed up to 100,000 people and yet there is little criticism of it in the West. Perhaps this is explained partly by old prejudices about the Japanese, and partly by the feeling that, by their blatant disregard of the laws of civilized behaviour in war – laws to which they had signed up – they forfeited all claims to sympathy. It may, of course, be argued that it was the German and Japanese governments and their armed forces that were the enemy, and that their civilian populations could do nothing to influence them. This argument can be dismissed in short order: the Germans had voted the NSDAP into power in as democratic an election as Germany had ever had, and, while the Japanese system was not a democracy in the British sense, it governed with the consent and support of the people, who must therefore take responsibility for what they had spawned.

  Argument still rages as to whether area bombing of cities shortened the war or could have shortened the war. There were those who insisted in 1942 that if other German cities were systematically subjected to the same treatment as Hamburg, and were reduced one by one, then the German government would be forced – by public opinion, if nothing else – to end the war. This line of debate has to be suspect: Hamburg was a special case in that, being a port, it was relatively easy to find; it was also a compact city and the destruction caused was helped by a freak weather pattern which might not be repeated elsewhere. In any case, the Allies did not have the numbers of aircraft needed to repeat the exercise on other German cities, and the suggestion that Berlin, a city of far greater expanse than Hamburg and surrounded by more anti-aircraft defences than anywhere else in the Reich, should be next was simply pie in the sky. The bombing offensive by the RAF and USAAF did not cause German morale to collapse, just as the Blitz had not caused British morale to collapse; nor was its effect on German industrial production as great as its advocates predicted. What it did do was to disrupt communications – roads, railways, bridges – to such an extent that, while Germany continued to manufacture large quantities of tanks and aircraft right up to the end, she could not get them from the factories to the front. It also – and this was crucial – forced the bulk of anti-aircraft defences, including the Luftwaffe fighter arm, back into Germany for the defence of the homeland, leaving very little to oppose the Allied air forces in the run-up to Overlord or later. This enabled the Allies to maintain complete superiority over North-West Europe in 1944–45, which meant that, unless the weather intervened, which of course it sometimes did, Allied units could move far more easily than could German ones.

  Despite the fact they did not win the war from the air, Arthur Harris and the men of Bomber Command were in many ways the heroes of the British war effort. Night after night, in the cold and the dark, they set out over hostile territory facing enemy fighters, flak and weather, knowing full well what the consequences could be. With only 7 percent of all British military manpower, Bomber Command suffered 24 per cent of all British military deaths, and they got precious little thanks for it. Embarrassed by criticism of civilian deaths, the British government pulled the carpet f
rom under Harris and his men. There was a Burma Star and an Africa Star, an Atlantic Star and a Pacific star, but there was no Bomber Offensive Star, and alone amongst the commanders-in-chief Harris was not elevated to the peerage after the war. It was a disgraceful way to treat brave men, who were following the policy dictated to them by the War Cabinet and the prime minister, and it rankles still amongst the few ageing survivors of Bomber Command.

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  In the Far East, air power was critical. China was kept in the war – not that she did very much to help the Allies but at least she kept large numbers of Japanese troops tied down – by American pilots flying supplies over the Hump; the second Chindit expedition could not have been maintained without the delivery of troops and supplies by air; and at sea it was the American ability to build more carriers and produce many more aircraft than the Japanese that tipped the balance. Equally, air power was essential to Slim’s reconquest of Burma and the Asian war was eventually brought to an end by the dropping of atomic bombs on two Japanese cities and the threat of more to come. The Allies would probably not have dropped the atom bomb on the Germans or the Italians, but, as with fire-bombing, the Japanese were seen as fair game. Indeed, it is very likely that without Hiroshima and Nagasaki they would not have surrendered without a full-scale invasion of the Japanese homeland, every inch of which they would have fought for, presenting the Allies with a huge death toll.

  On the Eastern Front, Germany and Russia fielded very different air forces. In 1941 the USSR could deploy over 8,000 aircraft. Most units were intended to offer direct support for army formations, but there were also a few strategic bombers and some naval aircraft. The latter were, however, almost all land-based and used to protect the flanks of army fronts, with only a small percentage of their sorties being directed against enemy shipping. When the Germans attacked on 22 June 1941, they caught much of the Red Air Force on the ground and destroyed it: Russian aircraft and Russian pilots were no match for the highly skilled Luftwaffe crews, whose talents had been honed by lightning victories in Poland and France, and at least until Stalingrad the Germans had complete air superiority over the Eastern Front. Stalin’s insistence in 1941 on evacuating Soviet factories to the east, out of range of German bombers, paid off, however, and even in the first six months of the war, from June to December 1941, although around 12,000 aircraft were lost, not only to the Luftwaffe but around 25 per cent to accidents and crashes due to pilot error or incompetent maintenance, Russian factories managed to build 7,000 replacements.

  While Lend-Lease, starting in 1941, helped, the Soviets themselves began to replace their obsolete fighters and bombers with indigenous designs, many of which – the robust Yak-9 fighter, for example – were more than able to meet the Germans on their own terms. Between 1939 and 1945 the Russians built 158,000 aircraft of various types, building 18,000 in 1942 and reaching a peak of 31,000 in 1944, and received 14,800 from the Allies as Lend-Lease, including 2,800 Spitfires and 1,300 Hurricanes from Britain. As a comparison, between 1939 and 1945 the United Kingdom produced 103,000 aircraft and Germany 117,000. Even as late as 1944, however, more Soviet aircraft were lost to accidents than to the enemy; the priority was to get aircraft into the air, at the expense of pilot training. The vast majority of aircraft produced were fighters, for air defence, or ground support aircraft, and little attention was paid to strategic bombing. The Ilyushin Il-2 Sturmovik, a two-seater assault bomber or ground support aircraft with a top speed of 280 mph and armed with cannon, machine-guns and rockets, was manufactured in large numbers and particularly effective. From the summer of 1943, when the Germans were being pushed back on the Eastern Front, Soviet aircraft factories were completely safe from air raids and output – largely by a female workforce – increased accordingly. Although Soviet air power was not a critical factor in the German defeat on the Eastern Front, the inability of the Germans to follow up their initial complete mastery of the skies certainly was. Similarly, their neglect of roles other than that of direct tactical ground support, and a political failure to give clear and consistent direction to the air staffs as to exactly what roles they should undertake, combined to ensure that, excellent though the Luftwaffe’s pilots were, there were never enough of them. Furthermore, its transport aircraft never possessed sufficient capacity to counterbalance the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Soviet ground forces.

  The aviation industries of the main combatants produced an intimidating number of aircraft types that ranged from the excellent to the very bad and soon forgotten. The Soviet Union, as we have seen, recovered rapidly from the shock of invasion and, despite Stalin’s fondness for imprisoning aircraft designers, went on to produce very capable aircraft such as the Petlyakov Pe-2 bomber and Lavochkin La-7 fighter. These were technically less sophisticated than their Western counterparts, but they were ideally suited to Russian pilots and to operations over the Eastern Front, being for the most part rugged, easy to maintain and repair, and reliable. In contrast, Germany’s aircraft industry, although inventive and productive, suffered from a damaging duplication of design and manufacturing effort as well as an unnecessarily complicated procurement process. The Luftwaffe’s principal fighters, the Bf 109 and Fw 190, proved stalwart and adaptable, but opportunities were frequently squandered. The Heinkel He 219 night-fighter was just what the Luftwaffe needed and could have cut a swathe through the British bomber stream, yet it was cancelled after only 288 had been produced, mainly because Field Marshall Erhard Milch, the Inspector General of the Luftwaffe, disliked the concept of such a specialized aircraft and was suspicious of the untested technology. Meanwhile, the development of many promising aircraft degenerated into a bewildering number of variants, and standardization on the production lines was rare, with the result that the German air force ended up with far too many sub-types of aircraft. German designers regularly conceived potentially war-winning aircraft, among them the world’s first operational jets, but their efforts were frustrated by air ministry bureaucracy and infighting – not to mention, in the case of the Messerschmitt Me 262, by the direct intervention of Hitler himself, who decreed this revolutionary jet aircraft should be used as a fighter-bomber rather than a fighter, thereby delaying its entry into service until it was far too late. At the war’s end, the Allies were to capture blueprints for radical new concepts that would influence the thinking of British, American, Russian and French aircraft designers for years to come, and so it was perhaps fortunate that Germany’s expertise in this field was so often thwarted.

  In contrast, Italy never really had a wartime aircraft industry worthy of the name. Italian aeronautical design had flourished in the 1930s, but by the time Italy declared war many of her aircraft were either obsolete or obsolescent. Her pilots were generally good but, with few exceptions, their mounts left much to be desired. Later in the conflict, a trio of fighters – the Macchi MC 205, the Fiat G 55 and the Reggiane Re 2005 – proved themselves the equal of anything the Allies could put up against them, but they were built in pitifully small numbers and all three were powered by a licence-built version of a German engine. As for the Japanese, their own, comparatively small, industrial base was to cause them similar problems. In December 1941 Japan’s army and navy air forces could call on a useful mix of modern fighters and bombers, but, even though there was no shortage of competent Japanese aircraft designers, replacing these machines with newer types often proved a challenge. The fate of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter was perhaps typical. The Zero carried all before it in the early stages of the Pacific war, but unlike, say, the Spitfire, it had only limited development potential and by 1943 was in danger of being outclassed by its latest Allied opponents. Mitsubishi struggled to provide the navy with a new fighter in the form of the J2M Raiden, a good land-based interceptor that sacrificed manoeuvrability for speed, while another company, Kawanishi, produced an excellent all-round fighter, the N1K Shinden. But neither was produced in significant numbers and the Zero had to fight on until the very end – even in
August 1945 its intended successor, the Mitsubishi A7M Reppu, only existed in the form of a handful of prototypes. The Japanese aircraft industry always struggled to build enough aircraft or to produce engines that were as reliable as they were powerful. The occasional earthquake didn’t help, and, once American B-29 bombers could reach the homeland and hit its factories, that effectively meant the end of any significant Japanese aircraft production.

  In any case, Japan could never realistically hope to compete with the awakened giant that was American industry, which in a very short space of time began to roll vast numbers of aircraft off its production lines, just as it did ships and tanks. The statistics tell their own story: in 1941 America produced 26,277 aircraft and Japan 5,088;in 1944 she produced 96,318 and Japan 28,180.82 The United States’ overwhelming superiority was not just a matter of numbers. In 1941 the country’s front-line fighter aircraft were mostly rather pedestrian machines, but their replacements – the P-51 Mustang and P-47 Thunderbolt on land and the F6F Hellcat and F4U Corsair at sea – were anything but. As for America’s heavy bombers, while later versions of the B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator represented significant improvements over their predecessors, it was the entry into service in 1944 of the B-29 Superfortress that, although not without its problems, signalled a major advance in aircraft design. The B-29 was the first such aircraft to be pressurized for the comfort of its crew, its defensive armament was remotely controlled, it flew higher and faster than any of its contemporaries, and it carried 20,000lb of bombs, a payload only specialized variants of the British Lancaster could match. It was, in every sense, a very American aircraft, combining brains with brawn, high technology with hitting power.