Third reich victorious, p.26
Third Reich Victorious, page 26
The Luftwaffe realised that it could not sustain a force with a large number of inferior fighters. This led to a decision to increase Fw 190 production in place of that of the Bf 109, which was to be replaced by the interim Me 209 and Me 309 piston-engined designs until Messerschmitt production capability transitioned purely to the Me 262 in 1945. In the words of Johannes Steinhoff, one of the Luftwaffes young fighter leaders on whom the burden of combat operations was placed, ‘The war in the air is a technological war which cannot be won by a technologically inferior fighting force, however high its morale or dauntless its resolution.’4
The most significant decision was in the development of jet fighters. The Germans early on recognised the potential of the jet fighter as a bomber destroyer—by day and night—and closed down a range of other research and development projects to achieve an early production capability. They decided to push the production Me 262 as an interim fighter type despite the limitations of its Junkers Jumo engines in both design and materials. The Germans also realised that the Me 262 would have to be developed not just as a fighter but as part of an integrated weapons system with a revolutionary new weapon, the 55mm R4M air-to-air rocket.
Other decisions were required to ensure that these weapons and systems would be used effectively in combat. Improved leadership and staff work were central to the transformation of the Luftwaffe. It became an integrated air defence system with a consequent build-up of fighters, radar, flak and a well designed and well thought out battle management system linked with secure landline communications. This required bringing forward a new generation of leaders—the generals who gained success during the Blitzkrieg did not transition easily to a defensive war—who had been thrust forward by success in the cockpit. Supplementing these leaders were staff officers trained in the best German practice, a combination of pre-war General Staff officers who had been sent to the Luftwaffe and the more promising Luftwaffe veterans who had been sent through staff training.
Galland was to become commander-in-chief of the air defence of the Reich. He was empowered to make hard decisions and give orders that would be obeyed not only by the different military services, but by the myriad of state, party, and local institutions that were trying to counter the effects of the bombers. Such a strong degree of unity of command—in effect, combining operational, administrative, and research and development responsibilities—and confidence in the commander by the national command authorities was hitherto unknown in the Third Reich, but events were to show that nothing less was required for survival, let alone victory.
The Allied reaction
It was not enough that the Germans made the ‘right’ decisions. The Allies had to make the ‘wrong’ ones. Where the Germans replaced their leaders, the Allies retained theirs. The leaders of the 1943 bomber offensive, Air Marshal Arthur Harris and Lieutenant General Ira Eaker kept their positions. These leaders had made decisions for the bomber offensive that had been, in retrospect, the result of tunnel vision on the goal of victory through strategic bombing. Thus, the key decision the Allies made was to carry on much as they had before their defeat by the Germans, but to do it harder and with more aircraft.
The Allied strategic air forces were certainly not the first military forces to be led into defeat by how their pre-existing doctrine failed in the face of the harsh audit of the battlefield. Any institution finds it difficult to learn. It has been argued that organisations in general and military organisations in possession of a strong sense of doctrine in particular, are insensitive to change in their environment.5
While the Germans made broad and fundamental changes in aircraft, organisation and technology from that which they had used in 1943, despite their success against the bomber offensive, the Allies decided not to make similar changes. They had seen success—at Hamburg and Huls—and believed that what was required to reach it again was to repeat the process longer and with more resources.
The RAF and USAAF alike remained committed to strategic bombing theory as they had tried to implement it in 1943.6 The British remained committed to striking not at any one specific industry, but at Germany’s will and capability to resist through striking at the urban population, and its administrative and transportation centres. The USAAF was reluctant to modify its pre-war reliance on a doctrine based on mass formations of unescorted heavy bombers destroying critical targets through precision daylight bombing.7
Even though the bomber had failed to get through in 1943, its proponents thought that repeating the procedure would succeed. The USAAF believed that, as its B-17 and B-24 bombers were better suited to daylight than night operations, that they would avoid the problems that Bomber Command had encountered with navigation and poor accuracy in the opening years of the war. The American Way of War tends to look to victory through superior doctrine and resources, and the leaders of the Army Air Force were determined to run their own air arm and its operations independently. However, the failures of 1943 had put the military and political masters of the air arms on notice. They would not write further blank cheques for resources without results.
The decision to go on as before despite indicators that it is not working is certainly not an unknown response in air warfare. Harris viewed the US targeting of German industries with scarce-disguised contempt and refused to be swayed from his offensive against German cities even to interfere with the dispersal of the ball-bearing industry from Schweinfurt. The US Eighth Air Force had continued with its bombing of German U-boat pens in French ports long after it was considered to be ineffective largely because of the training it provided for the bomb groups.8
Military organisations often fail to adjust their strategies or standard operating procedures to meet specific circumstances, especially when these are in flux. Rather, they tend to look for numerical indicators that support the belief that the circumstances actually represent the preferred case, the one they had prepared to deal with. As a result, rather than responding to the actual situation, many military organisations make decisions and implement policies that reflect the preferred approaches and worldview of those making the decisions regardless of the harsh realities faced by those at the sharp end of the equation.9
The ‘cult of the offensive’ has been identified as the view that military organisations have fixed preferences in strategy and will always prefer offensive ones.10 This theory holds that evaluation of the effectiveness of operations in aid of this strategy is not carried out if the results are even potentially contradictory to the organisation’s preference for offensive action.11 Where the Germans had stopped looking at the wrong numbers to determine whether they were ‘winning’ or ‘losing’, the Allies had embraced them. Those evaluating the bomber offensives became concerned with how much effort was put into them—sorties flown and tonnage dropped—but appeared uninterested in the overall results.12 They could determine bombing accuracy quite well, but RAF Bomber Command, for example, placed a great deal of value on the number of acres of German cities it burnt out rather than the more difficult question of how this affected the German war effort.
One of the key questions was how much credence to give to the claims of unescorted bomber formation gunners. The decision-makers were well aware that every German fighter that went down would be claimed by every gunner firing at it, but were they to believe actual losses were one-tenth of those claimed? Two-thirds? Some other number? Here, the tendency was to believe the figures that meant good news, that in a battle of attrition between bomber gunners and the fighters, the fighters were losing. But whether this meant they were winning or losing overall was a judgement that eluded the decision-makers.
The most significant decision that led to the defeats of 1944 was the increased hostility towards the use of long-range fighter escorts as part of the bomber offensive. The idea of re-engining the North American P-51 Mustang with the Packard-built Merlin engine was put aside as it was deemed there was no requirement for such a fighter. The USAAF’s doctrine, worked out before the war, did not include a ‘strategic fighter’ such as a long-range P-51. The USAAF had looked at large two-engine designs such as the Bell YFM-1A Airacuda, Lockheed XP-58 and the Northrop XP-61 that had been envisioned in its original air war plan AWPD-1. This led to a decision not to increase the number of escort fighters above that in 1943. Doctrine rather than adaptation carried the day.
Because doctrines, rather than research and development issues were driving decision-making, there was no increased emphasis on the P-38 or modifications to the P-47 to allow it to carry twin drop tanks to extend the range of fighter escort. Drop tanks had been considered pre-war and were seen as redundant.13 The heavy losses of 1943 were not seen as calling for fighter escorts beyond those already provided. Some indicted even those escorts then available—P-47s and Spitfires—as reducing the effectiveness of the bombers’ defensive armament. The bomber was going to get through to its target in daylight.
The RAF had long distrusted the concept of fighter escorts.14 It was also reluctant to commit its most advanced Mosquito night fighters to escort duties over Germany for fear of compromising their advanced radar systems once shot down and because operating without their ground controlled intercept capability would leave them vulnerable to German night fighters. Even though the German bomber operations against Britain had been largely defeated by early 1944, the bulk of the night fighter force remained defending against its resumption.
Compounding the problem was the long lead-time inherent in fabricating modern weapons, organising and training the fighting forces that used them, and in the research and development required both to keep existing weapons viable and to provide their eventual replacements and counters to enemy innovations. The decision to invest in the strategic bomber offensive long pre-dated the Casablanca Conference. It was reflected in a wide range of US and British decisions made throughout 1940-42. This meant that even if the bomber offensive were to be defeated decisively in 1944, the Allies would be unable to make a clean break from their investment in strategic bombing and reinvest it elsewhere. Ford’s massive Willow Run plant would still be turning out bombers, not landing craft, even though landing craft were, by 1944, proving to be the great Achilles heel of being able to translate economic capability into military force. Had the decision to curtail the bomber offensive been made earlier, some of the resources could have been made available to address the Allies’ great strategic need, that for landing craft, especially LSTs (landing ships, tank) and a more responsive and flexible strategy might have been possible. The allies had made the investment in strategic bombing long before the defeats of late 1943. For them to have invested the resources that went into the bomber offensive into more LSTs and better rifle platoon leaders would have required decisions to be made long before then.
‘Big Week’ leads to the Big Blow
The first opportunity the Germans had to demonstrate the improved capabilities for their integrated air defence system was in mid-February. Then, taking advantage of the week of good weather common in midwinter in northern Europe, the USAAF decided to announce its return to the offensive mission with a series of attacks on the German aircraft industry. The goal was both to push back the rising tide of German aircraft production and to force the Luftwaffe fighter force to impale itself on the defensive fire of the bomber formations.
Over the course of two weeks of maximum-effort air battles that pushed both sides to the brink of exhaustion, considerable damage was done to several German factories but, without deep penetration fighter escort, the bomber rate of loss was even higher than that experienced in 1943. While German losses to the short-range escorts and the bomber guns were not inconsequential, without long-range strategic fighters that could take the war to the enemy fighter force, then the bomber-destroying system that worked so well in 1943 would not only remain intact, it would improve.
After the costly attacks of ‘Big Week’, the USAAF shifted its objective again, to join with the RAF in the closing stages of the ‘Battle of Berlin’, as Harris had urged them to do since October. The planning for a series of long-range daylight attacks on Berlin was underway even as ‘Big Week’ ended. The Germans, aware that the RAF’s continued offensive against Berlin would likely lead to pressure on the USAAF to join in, were planning to meet it at the same time.
The Luftwaffe leadership did not perceive the defeat of the bomber offensive as simply the end product of an industrial process. They did not think that allocating greatly increased resources to the defence of the Reich would inevitably and of itself produce a large number of shot-down bombers. They realised that the operational skill that had made possible so many of their victories in the early years of the conflict had often been absent from the campaign against the bomber offensive. The command and technology changes made prior to 1943 enabled the Luftwaffe to implement initiatives in 1944 that they had been unable to use in earlier air battles.
The principles of mass and annihilation had been enshrined in the German way of war since the days of General Alfred von Schlieffen and his study of the Battle of Cannae in the nineteenth century but, in 1943, the Luftwaffe was unable to apply these to defeating the bomber offensive. Though they could impose a general high level of attrition on the overall attacking forces, the Germans were concerned that this was a cost that the Allies, with their superior manpower and industrial bases, could sustain if they had the will. The Germans had been able to inflict heavy losses, to be sure, but the goal of a Cannae-style air battle, leading to a decisive concentration against part of the enemy force and its destruction, was not within their grasp. If part of the enemy force was destroyed, rebuilding it would not simply be a matter of adding new replacements to an existing, if diminished, trained cadre. The German plan aimed at removing bomber groups from the enemy order of battle as thoroughly as ground battles could remove enemy divisions, what a later age would call targeting the enemy’s force reconstitution capabilities.
In February 1944, however, the Germans started planning for what was termed ‘The Big Blow’.15 This would be an attempt to mass all of German interceptor strength against part of a daylight bomber raid. Gall and selected for his target the first US daylight bombing raid on Berlin that he believed was coming. Fighters were brought in from throughout the Reich. Fighter groups were concentrated into larger formations capable of putting massed interceptor formations together. Over 1,000 sorties—perhaps as many as 3,000—could be launched at an incoming US long-range attack.
The first ‘Big Blow’ fell on the first US daylight mission to Berlin on 6 March 1944. The battle turned into the largest of the war so far. The US bombers fought their way through to the target and back but several bomb group formations were either totally destroyed or reduced to a handful of bombers. Total losses far exceeded those which had halted the daylight air offensive in October 1943. Galland had found a way to maximise a key indicator: the number of German fighter sorties in defence of the Reich required for a bomber kill. In the 1943 battles, the number had been about 10. Now, with the qualitative improvements in the fighter force and the massing of formations starting to show, the number started to go down. The improvements in the air defence system meant that fewer sorties were wasted through failing to intercept the bombers.
The USAAF repeated its contribution to the Battle of Berlin twice more within the following week. Losses were high on both sides, but, at the end, without long-range strategic fighters to take the initiative against it, the Luftwaffe remained master of the sky over Berlin much as the RAF had remained over London in 1940. The USAAF, without strategic escort fighters able to prevent the Germans from concentrating fighter forces to make them more effective and forced to allow the enemy’s twin-engine fighters to pick off stragglers at their leisure, had conceded the operational initiative to the Luftwaffe fighter force.
The pre-invasion bombing decision
With the heavy USAAF losses over Berlin and the RAF losses reaching their height over Nuremberg in March 1944, the strategic bombing offensive was largely shifted to targets in support of the upcoming invasion. This required moving the USAAF attacks away from German industrial targets—over the protests of the American airmen—and RAF attacks away from German cities—over the protests of the British airmen—and using them to hit transportation and tactical targets in France. While the German de-emphasis of the V-weapons programme limited the need to devote sorties beyond those absorbed by some decoy ‘No-Ball’ V-l ramp sites, the pre-invasion air offensive now assumed greater strategic importance. It was becoming increasingly obvious that attacks on German industry would not limit the flow of munitions and fuel that would be required by the German Army in the upcoming battle.
These defeats in effect undid the Casablanca decision to emphasise the bombing offensive. What they could not easily undo were the allied decisions, made largely in 1941–42, to invest heavily in the air war and in heavy bombers. Roosevelt, Churchill, the Combined Chiefs of Staff, and Eisenhower and his staff at SHAEF had never been of one mind about the wisdom of making the bomber offensive a cornerstone of strategy. The airmen running the bomber offensives had been, and so had been given the opportunity to proceed in their own way. Now that this had resulted in heavy losses for small gain, with the political costs that entailed, the Allied leadership re-fashioned their strategy. However, with the two bomber offensives’ earlier defeats now compounded, the switch to a pre-invasion bombing campaign provided a respite for the Allies to rebuild. They could also make plans for the resumption of the bomber offensive once the invasion was established ashore.
With the German fighter force now largely pulled back to defend the Reich itself and beyond the reach of the Allied fighter force, it was thought that the pre-invasion bombing offensive would force the Luftwaffe to return to bases within the range of Allied fighter cover. Because the Luftwaffe had continued to become stronger since 1943 but had largely concentrated in Germany, air superiority would have to be secured after the invasion started rather than through the defeat of the Luftwaffe fighter force in the months before the invasion.
