Bomber Command (41 page)

At the end of 1943, 76 Squadron’s CO was ‘screened’ and awarded the usual DSO handed out to squadron commanders at the end of their stint, regardless of operations flown. In his place came Wing-Commander ‘Hank’ Iveson, a pilot of much experience who had flown Whitleys and Halifaxes in 1941. Iveson began by sacking the most persistent ‘Early Runners’, whose crews were broken up and returned to OTU for reassignment. When the new Mark III Halifax arrived at Holme with a fearsome reputation for accidents, Iveson and his three flight commanders flew its first operation themselves. Despite the restriction on squadron COs flying too many trips, Iveson did fifteen in the next six months. He lectured the crews intensively on every aspect of operations, emphasizing three-engine flying, which had caused so many accidents. Within a month this big, bluff, jovial man, who confessed that he found bomber operations ‘fascinating’, had drastically reduced the Early Return rate, and done much to rebuild morale. But even Iveson could do nothing about the losses.

9 » THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HILL

GERMANY 1940–44

‘Reports . . . from towns recently attacked make one’s hair grow grey.’

Josef Goebbels, March 1945
¹

1. The Destruction

Albert Speer became Minister of Armaments in Hitler’s government just two weeks before Sir Arthur Harris took command at High Wycombe, in February 1942. Only thirty-six, he proved the outstanding executive appointment of the Nazi regime. It was Harris’s misfortune that throughout his campaign, he was confronted by an adversary who had a superb grasp of the German economy and a brilliant talent for improvising. Harris began his offensive just as German industry was awakening from the comfortable routines that had continued into the third year of the war. Thenceforth, the rising tenor of bombing was matched step for step by Speer’s mobilization of Germany’s resources. Only in the last six months of the war did precision attacks on the synthetic oil plants achieve the Allies’ aim of severing the jugular vein of the Reich. By then, the victim was already moribund from injuries inflicted on the battlefield.

The Allies’ major misunderstanding from start to finish was that they saw Hitler’s Germany as an armed camp, solely dedicated since at least 1939 to the business of making war. They thus assumed that any damage done by bombing represented a net loss
to the German war effort. In reality, Hitler in the 1930s created a formidable military machine, but he had never rearmed in depth. Because he regarded war as an instrument of policy to be used and discarded as a matter of short-term expediency, he sought to employ the
minimum
possible economic resources to enable the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe to achieve a given objective, whether this was the destruction of Poland or the invasion of Russia. Unlike the British, Hitler in 1940 and 1941 did not see the war as a life-or-death struggle, because the possibility of Germany’s utter defeat did not enter his mind. The worst that he then envisaged was the frustration of his immediate goals.

While the Allies saw Germany as a military monolith, Hitler was always intensely nervous about maintaining his domestic political support, much more so than proved necessary. He was determined to preserve standards of living. Until the end of 1941, he tried to provide both guns and butter for the German people, and to a remarkable extent he succeeded. Short-term munitions contracts were placed with German industry in preparation for his great strategic thrusts, then cancelled the moment victory appeared to be in sight. Faced with the Luftwaffe’s shortage of bombs in Poland in September 1939, Hitler only reluctantly authorized further bomb production on 12 October.
²
In the late summer of 1941, while Bomber Command was struggling to reduce German munitions production, Hitler was pursuing the same end: he ordered substantial reductions in the scale of arms output, because he believed that victory in Russia was already within sight. The consequences for the Germany army that winter were privations to match the tragedy of the British army in the Crimea.

Yet at the beginning of 1942, the year of the Thousand Bomber raid on Cologne, when Britain had been geared to total war and the most stringent rationing for more than two years, German consumer spending was at much the same level as in 1937. Britain had recognized from the beginning that she was fighting for survival, and strained every sinew to tool and arm accordingly. Already by September 1939 she was producing more tanks than
Germany. In 1940, the year when the overwhelming strength of the Luftwaffe was pitted against Fighter Command, Britain was building aircraft faster than the Reich. In 1941, German aircraft production was a pitiful 10 per cent higher than in 1940.
³
Vast numbers of British women had been brought into industry, but Hitler resisted pressure to follow suit, because he feared the effects upon the German way of life. Goering’s ‘Four Year Plan’, begun in 1936 allegedly to put the German economy on a war footing, was in reality only a limited programme to reduce the nation’s dependence on imported raw materials.

Far-sighted men in the government understood that Hitler’s economic policy was fraught with danger. General Georg Thomas, head of the
WiRuAmt
, the ‘War Economy and Armaments Branch’ of OKW, pleaded in vain for rearmament in depth. When the huge drain of casualties on the eastern front began, the Luftwaffe above all suffered acute shortages of aircraft and spares. Goering’s squadrons lost 3,000 aircraft missing and a further 2,000 damaged in the first ten months of the Russian campaign, together with thousands of the most experienced aircrew. The ceaseless struggle for personal power among the Nazi leaders precluded the much more co-ordinated economic controls and policies adopted as a matter of course in Britain and America. ‘The whole structure of the German administrative body was one of competing individuals and competing machines,’ writes the economic historian Professor Milward,
⁴
‘which by 1942 represented a powerful collection of vested interests, each unwilling to relinquish its control of its own small part of the war economy.’

The prospect of imminent defeat concentrated British minds wonderfully in 1940. There was no parallel confrontation with reality in Germany until at least 1943, but the Russian counter-offensive of November 1941 caused Hitler to concede that the days of the ‘blitzkrieg economy’ were ended. Fritz Todt’s appointment as Minister of Munitions signalled the beginning of the reorganization and mobilization of German industry that was continued by Speer on Todt’s death in an air crash in February 1942.

As Hitler’s architect and a member of the inner circle of his intimates, for the next two years Speer worked with the overwhelming advantage of Hitler’s personal support. He acted on the authority of the Führer Command directive ‘Armament 1942’, issued to Todt on 10 January 1942. To achieve the massive increase in production that he sought, Speer expanded Todt’s system of industry-wide committees of businessmen, who were made responsible for meeting output targets by settling priorities, enforcing cooperation between companies, assigning raw materials. ‘Directive Committees’ were created to take responsibility for specific weapons, and ‘Directive Pools’, for the allocation of supplies.

Yet while Hitler had in principle accepted that arms production was now the overwhelming economic priority, it was another matter for Speer to make him accept the consequences of this decision. The new Minister fought an uphill struggle to induce the Führer to cut back on domestic consumer production, and to import Germany’s consumer needs from the Occupied Territories. Although in April 1942 90 per cent of German industry was still working only a single shift, Speer was immediately concerned by the shortage of labour which remained his overwhelming problem throughout the war. Conscript workers from the Occupied Territories were inadequate substitutes for native skilled workers drafted into the Wehrmacht. Speer and General Erhard Milch, State Secretary of the Air Ministry and the man responsible for aircraft production, were continuously at loggerheads with Sauckel, the Plenipotentiary for Labour, about manpower. In the first half of 1942 the aircraft industry was allocated 403,000 additional workers, but only 60,000 ever reached the assembly lines. Shortage of men – for the army, the factories, construction and reconstruction work – was the nightmare of the directors of the German war effort until the end.

The British official historians of the strategic air offensive suggest that part of the German achievement must be attributed to ‘the strong controls which could be employed in a totalitarian state’. Yet Speer himself and a succession of economic historians have
marvelled at the inefficiency and lack of central control in the German war economy compared with that of Britain. In a speech to manufacturers on 6 October 1943, Speer commented acidly on the difficulties of preventing German industry from dissipating its energies on irrelevant production. He noted that in the preceding year, the Reich had produced 120,000 typewriters, 200,000 domestic radios, 150,000 electric blankets, 3,600 refrigerators, 300,000 electricity meters, 512,000 pairs of riding boots and 360,000 spur straps. ‘It remains one of the oddities of this war that Hitler demanded far less from his people than Churchill and Roosevelt did from their respective nations,’ Speer was later to write.
⁵
By the end of 1943, Britain had reduced her pre-war army of domestic servants by two-thirds, yet in Germany 1.4 million workers were still employed in household service, and Hitler was so anxious to maintain living standards that he decreed the import of a further half-million Ukrainian girls to reinforce this total. At the end of 1943 there were still six million Germans employed in consumer industries. Speer’s efforts to cut back consumer output were repeatedly frustrated by Hitler’s personal veto. Eva Braun intervened to block an order banning permanent waves and the manufacture of cosmetics.

Germany was inevitably doomed to lose a battle of production against the western Allies – they ultimately achieved a superiority of 9 to 2 in
matériel
. But almost until the end of the war, Speer’s factories were producing more tanks and arms than there were men left in the Wehrmacht’s combat divisions to use them. In the two and a half years following Speer’s appointment, Germany increased her production of tanks sixfold; of ammunition, weapons and aircraft threefold. It is highly doubtful whether further increases of arms production would significantly have improved her strategic position. Manpower, always manpower, was Germany’s central problem. ‘Until the last six months of the war,’ reported the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, ‘the army was never critically short of weapons and shells.’

But where in all this was the Allied bombing of Germany? In 1943, Harris’s great year of area attack, 200,000 tons of bombs fell
on the Third Reich, five times the weight which had been dropped in 1942. In a minute to the Prime Minister dated 3 November 1943, Harris listed nineteen German cities which he claimed were ‘virtually destroyed’, meaning that they had become ‘a liability to the total German war effort vastly in excess of any assets remaining’. These were: Hamburg, Cologne, Essen, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Hanover, Mannheim, Bochum, Mülheim, Köln Deutz, Barmen, Elberfeld, München Gladbach/Rheydt, Krefeld, Aachen, Rostock, Remscheid, Kassel and Emden. He also listed a further nineteen which were ‘seriously damaged’: Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Duisburg, Bremen, Hagen, Munich, Nuremberg, Stettin, Kiel, Karlsruhe, Mainz, Wilhelmshaven, Lübeck, Saarbrücken, Osnabrück, Münster, Rüsselsheim, Berlin and Oberhausen. In 1943, Bomber Command stated that 36 per cent of production had been lost in twenty-nine towns attacked.

In reality, the German armaments production index rose from 100 in January 1942 to 153 in July, 229 in July 1943, 332 in July 1944. The USSBS estimated after the war that in 1943 9 per cent of German production had been lost as a result of bombing, and a further 17 per cent in 1944, mostly in the latter part of the year. Speer said: ‘The total damage suffered by the armament programme as a result of air attack during the year 1943 was not considerable.’ There was such enormous slack capacity in the economy to be diverted from consumer production that damage on this scale could readily be absorbed by the German war machine.

In 1942 it would have seemed incredible to most people in Britain had they known the relative comfort and normality of life in Germany. In 1943 the bombing of German cities swept away that illusory tranquillity for ever, and brought the German people face to face with the manner of suffering they had inflicted upon so many others. Hitler’s Reich suffered a catastrophe:

Hamburg had put the fear of God into me [said Speer]. At the meeting of Central Planning on 29 July, I pointed out: ‘If the air raids continue on the present scale, within three months we shall be relieved of a number of questions we are at present discussing. We shall simply be coasting downhill, smoothly and relatively swiftly . . .’ Three days later I informed Hitler that armaments production was collapsing and threw in the final warning that a series of attacks of this sort, extended to six more major cities, would bring Germany’s armaments production to a total halt.

‘You’ll straighten all that out again,’ he merely said. In fact Hitler was right.
⁶

Speer himself was astonished by the speed of Hamburg’s recovery. The British official historians, weighing the various estimates made at the end of the war, suggest that 1.8 months’ production was lost. Textile and food output suffered more than armaments. In 1943 thirty U-boats under construction were destroyed by bombing in all parts of Germany; the majority of these were lost in the damage of shipyards in the Battle of Hamburg. The Battle of the Ruhr, according to Webster and Frankland, the official historians, cost the region between one and one-and-a-half months’ loss of output. Recalling the huge attacks on Essen, Krupps lost a total of three months’ production from all air attacks up to and including the spring of 1944. The firm began to believe that it was intended to serve as a decoy for the bombers, since although its production of locomotives, tank bodies and artillery was important, it was nothing like as pivotal to the German war economy as the Allies obviously believed.