Blood tears and folly, p.41
Blood, Tears and Folly, page 41
German flyers had returned to Germany with the exciting news that bombers could escape fighters and Flak by virtue of speed, something that both the He 111 and the SB-2 had done in Spain, although eventually the SB-2 had suffered heavy casualties. More far-reaching was their conviction that air power was at its most effective when used in close support of ground forces. In Spain there was no opportunity for anything in the nature of strategic bombing. The Spaniards were reluctant to batter to destruction the towns for which they fought. Wolfram von Richthofen, chief of staff to the Condor Legion and cousin to the First World War ace, had had little alternative but to do what the army wanted. Working on his own initiative, and sometimes against strong opposition, he subordinated his air force to the requirements of army commanders. At first there had not been even rudimentary communications between ground and air units, but by war’s end Luftwaffe officers serving with the front-line infantry were directing air strikes closely coordinated with the army’s movements. All these techniques were studied closely in Berlin and written into training programmes.
In Britain the army minister, Leslie Hore-Belisha, suggested that the Spanish Civil War had shown the value of close air support. Britain’s chief of air staff would have none of that. He immediately condemned it as a gross misuse of air power, and even after Germany’s lightning campaign against Poland in 1939, Britain’s air staff kept their heads pressed deeply into the sand. They issued a memorandum archly reiterating ‘the Air Staff view – which is based on a close study of the subject over many years’: aircraft must not be used to support armies on the battlefield. It was, said these high-ranking airmen, ‘not only very costly in casualties but is normally uneconomical and ineffective’. The truth was that these entirely negative views, like their equally negative views about using aircraft for defence of the sea lanes, were simply the RAF brasshats showing fear that their authority might be eroded by cooperation with the army or the Royal Navy.
The most notable failure the German air force suffered in Spain was discovering that even its most experienced bomber crews could not find their targets in bad weather or at night. An urgent request for some sort of radio navigation aid led to an immediate adaptation of the Lorenz airfield landing system to the task of target finding. It would be a long long time before the RAF admitted to any failing of that kind.
18
Preparations
I’ve seen the Reichsmarschall [Göring] nod off in
mid-conference – for instance, if the conferences went
on too long and the morphine wore off.
That was the commander in chief of our air force!
Luftwaffe General Helmut Forster
Building a fleet of warships was an easy task compared to creating an air force. An air force had to start with the design and construction of training aircraft. Teachers and instructors had to be found and schooled. A construction industry had to be developed, and be complete with advanced research and design facilities. Airfields, with attendant technology, had to be built. Only then could an air force have ever-improving front-line machines, and a regular supply of skilled men to fly them.
Hitler and his Nazis came to power in 1933. He could not have taken Germany to war six years later without the resolute preparations put into effect by the Weimar Republic (as the democratic parliamentary governments of the period 1919–33 are conveniently known). It was during this pre-Hitler period that Germany signed the treaty of Rapallo, whereby the Soviet Red Army collaborated with the Germans to flout the terms of the Versailles peace treaty. Secret establishments in the Soviet Union were used for testing new weapons, and for secret training of German military flyers and tank crews. Here in the years from 1924 until Hitler withdrew from the arrangement in 1933, competent flyers added such military skills as gunnery and bombing to their repertoire. Hitler’s Luftwaffe was born in Russia and its father was the Weimar Republic.
Göring’s air commanders
When Hitler came to power the secrecy surrounding military preparations was abandoned. Göring was assigned to control all aviation, and in order to build a large Nazi air force quickly, he was permitted to head-hunt army officers. For his chief of staff he took Colonel Walther Wever, Colonel Albert Kesselring was appointed as administration chief, and Colonel Hans-Jürgen Stumpff was given the vital job of personnel chief. None of these men had any experience of flying.
However the real creator of the new Nazi Luftwaffe was Erhard Milch. In the First World War he had been an observer with the Army Air Service. (Right up until the war in 1939 the Germans often appointed the observer, rather than the pilot, to command a two-seater aircraft.) Milch rose to become the deputy commander of his squadron and after a break, commanding an infantry company, he ended the First World War commanding Fighter Squadron No. 6, without ever having learned to fly a plane. Although photographs suggest he was a pudgy little fellow, those who met him tell me he was handsome, attractive to women and imposing in real life.
In May 1922 Milch went to work for Junkers Airways, a subsidiary of the aircraft manufacturer, and soon showed himself to be a ruthless and unprincipled conniver. At the age of 36 he became the chief of Lufthansa, the German state airline created when the Weimar government forced small carriers into a nationalized conglomerate. Its routes stretched across Europe to China and to South America. As the Nazis became stronger Milch became involved in corrupt deals with them. It was Milch who arranged for Hitler to be flown from town to town during his political campaigns without being asked to pay fares. Hitler’s arrivals by three-engined Junkers airliners were given great prominence by the Nazi propaganda experts, who exploited the ambiguous slogan ‘Hitler Over Germany’.
When the Nazis gained power, Milch received his reward. He became second only to Göring in an empire that embraced all aspects of civil and military aviation, and which eventually included the anti-aircraft defences of the Reich, parachute troops and some infantry units too.
By living to a ripe old age, and talking to countless historians, Milch was able to bend many postwar historical accounts to his own advantage. A competent bureaucrat, with unusual administrative skills, his judgement was entirely inadequate. The Luftwaffe’s subservience to the army, its neglect of production and research, the cancellation of plans for a strategic bombing force, the neglect of long-range fighter escorts, the disastrous failure of the Stalingrad airlift – these were all evidence of his shortcomings.
The same neglect of their duties was displayed by Göring and by his wartime comrade Generaloberst Ernst Udet, who took control of the Luftwaffe’s technical department. Udet was only really happy in a cockpit, while Milch was largely concerned with his own grandiose ambitions, even trying to supplant Göring at one time. As the war progressed Milch’s power declined, but by that time the damage he had done was beyond repair.1 After the war, Milch was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment for war crimes. Released in 1954, he was employed as an aviation consultant by Fiat and by Thyssen Steel.
The birth of the jet aircraft
Milch’s most profound error of judgement dates from 27 August 1939, when Heinkel’s He 178 – powered by Dr Pabst von Ohain’s engine – made the world’s first jet-powered flight. Milch saw it but was not impressed. Even when Heinkel developed his machine so that on 2 April 1941 he could offer the Luftwaffe the Heinkel He 280, the world’s first jet fighter, Milch showed no interest in it.2 Like Udet, who was responsible for research, Milch saw no need for jet aircraft.
FIGURE 24: Heinkel He 280 – the world’s first jet fighter
Britain was the only other country in which any work was being done on jet-propelled flight. Britain’s Air Ministry showed much the same apathy as Milch and Udet had done. Frank Whittle, a young RAF officer, had published his jet-engine patents in 1930. Four years later the British official view was recorded in a letter written by the under-secretary of state for air.
We follow with interest any work that is being done in other countries on jet propulsion, but scientific investigation into the possibilities has given no indication that this method can be a serious competitor to the airscrew-engine combination. We do not consider that we should be justified in spending any time or money on it ourselves.3
Despite the official attitude, Whittle got a practical engine running by 1937. In May 1941, installed in a Gloster E.28/39, this powered the first jet aircraft to take to the air outside Germany. America displayed no interest in jet planes until a Whittle engine was taken to the United States in October 1941 and a number of copies were built. Developments came quickly. In effect, the United States jet industry grew directly from British engines.4
In the period from 1918 to 1939 the techniques and technology of the world’s navies changed only minimally. Many of the warships engaged in the Second World War had been at sea in the First. Such economies could not be effected in the air war. Aircraft designs had developed too radically. Biplane fighters made of wood and fabric were replaced by monoplanes with stressed metal skins.5 Heavier and heavier planes with ever-increasing ranges were carrying bigger and more destructive bombloads. Theorists abounded and much was being written about the strategy of the warplane that could bombard capital cities into submission. No one, they said, would be immune from the ‘war in the air’.
The strategic bomber: Britain
In 1917 Britain’s flyers, hitherto the Royal Flying Corps, a part of the army, became an entirely separate service and were looked upon with envy by high-ranking airmen in foreign armies. When at war’s end Winston Churchill was given both the War Office and the Air Ministry some thought he would dismantle the Royal Air Force and hand its parts back to the soldiers and the sailors. Instead he appointed Hugh ‘Boom’ Trenchard to be its chief of staff. Trenchard was a talented administrator who was still digesting the lessons he had learned while commanding the Independent Air Force, which had bombed Germany in 1918. He realized that advocating strategic bombing was the best, if not the only, way to make his RAF a service as important as the army and the navy.
And the prospect of bombing led to questions about the morale of the working class if bombed. Will their working class collapse before ours does? In the 1920s, with Germany in disarray, France had become the theoretical enemy. National pride always shines through British theories: ‘the French in a bombing duel would probably squeal before we did,’ said Trenchard in July 1923, and for good measure he added that aircrew losses would have a greater effect on French pilots than on British ones.6
By this time the fighter plane, which had proved such a decisive weapon in the 1914–18 war, was being prematurely relegated to history. An Air Staff memorandum of March 1924 said that ‘as a principle the bombing squadrons should be as numerous as possible and the fighters as few as popular opinion and necessity for defending vital objectives will permit’.7
Trenchard made sure that the RAF put all its energies into plans for the bombing force, even though this was a time when the RAF was primarily engaged in colonial policing tasks. Cooperation with the army or the navy was rejected. Parachute infantry must not be formed, said the RAF chiefs of staff in 1938, for that would divert planes from bombing.
And yet, as war drew closer, the RAF had no big bombers and its medium bombers were mostly inadequate designs. Only the Wellington from Vickers, a geodetic airframe designed by Barnes Wallis, was good enough to face German defences and survive. Handley Page’s Hampden and Avro Whitworth’s Whitley were soon to be relegated to minelaying and training.
Britain’s civil aircraft designs were equally disappointing. In 1918, the aircraft industry had been at peak production, and the Empire provided potential air routes across the world. But no British aircraft emerged to take advantage of this golden opportunity. In 1926, when other nations were flying excellent three-engined metal monoplane airliners, such as the Ford Tri-Motor, the Fokker F. VII/3m and Junkers G31, the British put into service the Armstrong Whitworth Argosy and De Havilland DH 66 Hercules. Both were cumbersome biplanes, with uncowled engines and a square-sectioned fabric-covered fuselage.
The 1930s are marked by the Air Ministry’s vacillations and its failure to get a transatlantic flying boat.8 Plans for long-range land-planes issued in 1938 went the same way. The British armed services were stretched across the world to a greater extent than those of any other nation, yet the RAF showed little interest in air transport. The new technique of moving infantry, and much other war material, by air was not encouraged. Even Franco’s dramatic airlift of troops to mainland Spain did not prompt the RAF to offer such movements to the army.
When war began the RAF was forced to the humiliating measure of chartering ‘almost every civil airline in Britain’ to ferry equipment to France. In the words of the BBC’s war correspondent Charles Gardner:
Stately, if slightly coughing, Ensign air liners, and even the superannuated old Handley Page 42’s, were filched from Imperial Airways. D.H. Albatrosses, Rapides, Dragons, and 86’s were assembled from the smaller air-line concerns to reinforce the Royal Air Force’s own small collection of troop-carriers … Food, field telephones, blankets, tents, cables, spare engines, maps, men, uniforms, guns, ammunition, aerodrome equipment – all these and a hundred more things, were flown out from England, without a single mishap.9
The absence of any modern long-range British designs made it necessary for the RAF to fly American transport aircraft in the war and after it. There are historians repeating the myth that America’s prime position in the postwar air transport race was gained by an invidious arrangement whereby Britain produced the bombers and the United States produced transport aircraft. No such deal was ever made.10
Britain’s progress with heavy bombers was little better than that of its commercial aircraft. When Britain went to war, the RAF was still flying the bizarre-looking Handley Page Heyfords: biplane bombers with huge spatted wheels that did not retract. One historian remarks: ‘Considering that “strategic” bombing represented the raison d’être for the Royal Air Force, it is surprising that so little was done to prepare for this task.’11 RAF target-finding was poor and bombing accuracy was, according to the assistant chief of air staff in 1938, ‘very poor indeed’.
As war came closer, the RAF proposed the creation of a new fleet of heavy bombers. The Handley Page Halifax and the Avro Manchester were put forward as designs for an RAF strategic bombing force. Prime Minister Chamberlain intervened to postpone both. He said that building a Halifax bomber would provoke Germany into producing a super-Halifax bomber. Sensitive as always to cost, he added that a heavy bomber cost as much as four fighters.12
The most decisive technology was proving to be that of aircraft engines. A wonderful engine could make a second-rate plane into a winner, but a superb airframe powered by a poor engine could never be made a success. Britain had one superlative power-plant, the liquid-cooled Merlin, and it was in short supply. First priority for them must be the Spitfire and Hurricane fighters, but only after four Merlins were fitted into it did the accident-prone Manchester become the successful Lancaster.
FIGURE 25: British Avro Lancaster bomber
The first four-engined bomber to see operational service was the Short Stirling, which had been ordered straight off the drawing-board, without waiting to see the prototype fly. It did not have Merlin engines and was the least successful of the RAF’s heavy bombers. When becoming airborne it had a dangerous tendency to swing to starboard, and its tail and undercarriage provided enough wind resistance to make the tendency fatal in even a light crosswind. The Air Ministry’s specification foolishly limited the machine’s wingspan to 100 feet, which produced a high wing-loading and a poor ceiling. The landing gear then had to be made higher to give the aircraft the angle of attack that would get it airborne in a normal take-off run. The result was an ungainly machine, with weak landing gear, that suffered high casualty rates because it could not climb high enough to avoid the Flak.
Trenchard’s big bomber policy meant convincing everyone that bombing was decisive, so the bomber brasshats had to say that enemy bombing forces were similarly fearsome. It was such extravagant talk that led in December 1938 to official estimates that the first three weeks of war could see 465,000 houses totally destroyed and over 5 million damaged out of Britain’s 14 million homes. The Committee for Imperial Defence in 1937, estimating compensation rates for casualties, began with a figure of 1,800,000 casualties in the initial eight weeks, of which one third would be fatal. Figures accepted by the cabinet in October 1938 estimated that 5 per cent of all property in Britain, valued at £550,000,000, would be destroyed in the first three weeks of war.13 Such predictions as these lent weight to the spurious arguments of the appeasers and allowed Hitler to go so far unopposed.
The strategic bomber: Germany
Göring had contrived that his new Luftwaffe was also a separate service, and yet its role was narrow and firmly defined. The German air force was to be a form of long-range artillery, providing support to the army in short sharp wars that the sensitive German economy could endure.
One meticulous American historian, citing German sources, blames the German economy for the absence of a strategic bomber.14 The worldwide depression that began in the United States in 1929 hit Germany severely. Even when it started to recover in the mid-Thirties there remained a shortage of foreign exchange. All imported raw materials were strictly allocated, and the army always had first priority. Thus there were never adequate resources to build a significant bombing fleet, and never the prospect of enough fuel to sustain one.
