Bomber Command (43 page)

In the burning and devastated cities we daily experienced the direct impact of war [wrote Speer]. It spurred us to do our utmost. Neither did the bombings and the hardships that resulted from them weaken the morale of the populace. On the contrary, from my visits to armament plants and my contacts with the man in the street, I carried away the impression of growing toughness. It may well be that the estimated loss of 9 per cent of our production capacity was amply balanced out by increased effort.
¹⁷

The British official historians looked back at 1943 and declared: ‘For the first time in the war, Germany herself . . . began to pay the price of the fearful deeds which she had perpetrated and was yet to perpetrate, against others.’
¹⁸

Beyond dispute, the area offensive punished Germany terribly. It destroyed centuries of construction and of culture, the homes and property of Germans who for the first time glimpsed the cost of Nazism. At the end of 1942 Goering had said: ‘We will have reason to be glad if Germany can keep the boundaries of 1933 after the war.’ By the end of 1943 production in every critical area of war industry – tanks, U-boats, guns, aircraft – was still expanding at a gigantic rate. But it had become apparent to the German people that they were beyond the hope of mercy. After three years of terrible sacrifice, this was the principal achievement of Bomber Command.

2. The Defences

For the first year of the British bomber offensive that began in May 1940, the Luftwaffe which was responsible for every aspect of the air defence of the Reich relied principally upon flak and searchlights. In 1939 the German air force possessed only one experimental night-fighter squadron equipped with Me109s – this was the first unit to engage 3 Group’s Wellingtons on 18 December 1939. In June 1940, Goering himself admitted that the lack of night-fighters was ‘the Luftwaffe’s Achilles’ heel’. That summer, the unsuitable 109s were withdrawn from night operations and progressively replaced by twin-engined Me110s. But their crews roamed the moonlit skies of Europe conducting visual searches for British bombers with almost the same sense of helplessness as afflicted many of the men in the Hampdens and Whitleys, of which they destroyed a bare handful.

But with the appointment of General Josef Kammhuber as General of Night Fighters in October 1940, Germany began to create the great defensive system against the bomber which came within an ace of victory in 1944. Through the winter of 1940–41, as his resources allowed, Kammhuber progressively extended a belt of searchlights and sound-locators across northern Germany and the Low Countries, between fifty and a hundred miles inland from the coast. Fighters patrolled sectors of this line, seeking to attack bombers which been detected and illuminated. Kammhuber himself recognized that these were inadequate stop-gap measures until more sophisticated equipment came into service. By the time Hitler ordered the transfer of all searchlights from Kammhuber’s belt to the direct defence of Germany in the spring of 1942, the new and much more deadly
Himmelbett
system, based on a chain of radar-guided fighter ‘boxes’, had been established the length of the
European coast from north Germany to Belgium, and around the most important cities of Germany.

Dr R. V. Jones has described
¹⁹
how British Scientific Intelligence, through 1941 and 1942, progressively unravelled the mysteries of what they came to call ‘The Kammhuber Line’. Each overlapping night-fighter ‘box’ was equipped with a
Freya
radar set, which provided early warning of Allied bombers and their course, although not of their height. But as the fighters scrambled and gained altitude to meet them, a bomber was picked up by a short-range
Würzburg
radar – the early model was effective up to something over twenty miles, which determined the radius of each ‘box’. A second
Würzburg
meanwhile tracked the German fighter. On the ground, in the T-shaped control huts that now stood at intervals from Ostend to Denmark, the ground controllers plotted the position of fighter and bomber by green and red dots projected on to the
Seeburg
evaluation screen. At first, they sought to trap the bomber in the cone created by their supporting searchlight battery, for the fighter to attack. Later, in 1942, when
Lichtenstein
airborne radar had been fitted to the night-fighters, they sought to guide the fighter to the point within the two miles of the bomber at which the
Lichtenstein
could take over for the final approach.

The brilliant British commando raid on Bruneval in March 1942 enabled the British to seize a
Würzburg
for examination, and the scientists were impressed by its quality and precision. German standards of manufacture in electronics remained higher than those of the Allies throughout the war. But they lagged in design and application. British scientists and airmen preferred their own simpler techniques of tracking both fighter and bomber on the same radar screen. The German system also suffered the overwhelming limitation that each ‘box’ could direct only one interception at a time. It was in this knowledge that the British evolved their ‘streaming’ techniques, pushing the bomber force through a single ‘box’ at the utmost speed and density, to saturate the defences. The German control stations
Jaguar
,
Delphin
,
Löwe
,
Eisbar
,
Seidler
and the rest achieved a formidable total of successes, especially after the introduction in 1942 of the improved ‘Giant
Würzburg’,
with its range approaching fifty miles. But with the coming of the massive British attacks of 1942 and 1943, although the night-fighters were inflicting terrible losses on Bomber Command, it was evident that the Kammhuber Line was being hopelessly swamped by the scale of the offensive.

Kammhuber’s greatest misfortune was that, on Hitler’s orders, in October 1941 he was ordered to abandon his experimental ‘intruder’ operations against British bomber airfields. Hitler considered that only aircraft shot down over Germany were of value in convincing the German people that they were being defended. From late 1940 onwards, the general had been dispatching the largest force he could spare – never more than twenty Ju88 fighters, equipped with cannon and small bombs – to attack British bombers at their most vulnerable moments, as they took off and landed at their airfields. In 1940–41 they had been responsible for two-thirds of the Luftwaffe’s night-fighter victories. Kammhuber was convinced that this promised to be the most effective means of causing casualties and chaos to the British bomber offensive. Bomber Command shared his opinion. By 1943 the marshalling and dispatch of Harris’s huge force had become an exercise of the utmost complexity, calling for precision timing at every airfield in eastern England. If Kammhuber’s ‘intruders’ had been allowed to continue their operations, the consequences could have been overwhelming. But High Wycombe’s nightmares went unfulfilled. With the exception of a single isolated incursion in October 1943, the Luftwaffe left British airfields in peace. It was the greatest missed opportunity of the bomber war, and like so many other major tactical errors, this was a personal decision of the Führer.

It was only in the wake of the Battle of Hamburg that Germany’s leaders began to perceive the scale of the threat to the Reich, and for that matter the enormous requirement for aircraft in total war. Ernst Udet, the former First World War flying ace who controlled aircraft production in the first years of the war,
made a series of disastrous errors and omissions before his suicide in November 1941. Milch, who took over his responsibilities, struggled to make good shortages and to gear the aircraft industry for all-out effort. He insisted that work should be delayed on the Me262 jet in order to get the Me109F into urgent production. Yet in 1942 when he told Goering that he proposed to build a thousand fighters a month, the Reichsmarshal laughed heartily: ‘Where would we use them all?’

But by late 1943 the Luftwaffe was losing more than a thousand aircraft a month, most of them on the Russian front. In June that year, the Luftwaffe’s front-line strength on all fronts stood at some 7,000 aircraft. Until late 1944, when fuel shortages made the figures irrelevant, it hovered between 6,000 and 7,000. Yet for the night defence of Germany there were rarely more than 350 fighters, in six
Geschwaders
of four or five squadrons each. On a good night in 1943 or early 1944, the Luftwaffe could hope to mount between 200 and 250 sorties against a bomber attack. When the American Flying Fortresses began their massive daylight operations, the 8th Air Force from England and the 15th Air Force from Italy, the pressure on the Luftwaffe’s home defence units became intolerable. Instead of the 400 or 500 day-fighters that were vital to meet the huge American formations on acceptable terms, there were never more than 300. To reinforce them, night-fighters and their highly trained crews were flung into the struggle, intensifying the pressure on aircraft serviceability, and losing a steady stream of experienced aircrew and their precious
Lichtenstein
sets. Again and again Milch, Speer, Kammhuber and Galland pleaded for increased resources for night defence, but until the summer of 1944 they were resolutely denied.

It was the Luftwaffe’s misfortune to be under the command of Hermann Goering. For all his pleasure in the trappings of power, deep within himself this indolent sybarite regarded the war as a terrible error which had sown the seeds for Germany’s destruction. Even as his own air fleets were launching their great attack on England in 1940, he crushed the bounding optimism of
Jeschonnek, his Chief of Staff, about the prospects for an early British surrender: ‘Do you think that Germany would give in if Berlin was in ruins?’

‘Of course not,’ said Jeschonnek.

‘Then you think the British are different? That is where you are wrong . . .’

Goering’s sense of doom became overwhelming when Hitler launched the invasion of Russia. For the remainder of the war he took refuge in drugs and delusions, exhibiting spasms of energy only when he felt his empire threatened by the expanding operations of Speer or Milch. The Luftwaffe was left without a dominant voice in the struggle around Hitler’s throne. Goering was discredited and despised among his senior colleagues, but Hitler would not dismiss him because of ‘The Fat Man’s’ wide public popularity, and Goering would not voluntarily abandon power. The Reichsmarshal quarantined himself from all unacceptable realities. When the news of the first ‘1,000 Raid’ was brought to him, he declined to believe it. He rejected reports of the American Mustang long-range fighter engaging the Luftwaffe over Germany, because he would not acknowledge that such an aircraft could be built. At a meeting at his Castle Veldenstein in the autumn of 1941, Goering brushed aside the proposals of Kammhuber, Molders and Galland for the defence of Germany: ‘This whole phoney business won’t be necessary any more once I get my squadrons back to the west.’
²⁰
He continued to delude himself that the return of the vast Luftwaffe forces from the eastern front was imminent, just as he promised Hitler in 1942 that he could supply the beleaguered Sixth Army at Stalingrad from the air. The night-fighters, meanwhile, were starved of numbers and aircrew, fuel and equipment.

‘The defence of the Reich follows the latest bomb crater,’ the pilots muttered cynically.
²¹
By 1943, pupils under training were finding themselves scrambled with their instructors to meet bomber attacks. When the former bomber pilot Major Hajo Hermann formed his first ‘Wild Boar’ squadrons in July that year,
he found himself obliged to recruit among failed bomber pilots and disgraced aircrew rejected by other line units. When the
Lichtenstein
AI radar began to be fitted to night-fighters, the scientists had to overcome resistance from senior Luftwaffe officers who believed that its protruding aerials would have an unacceptable effect on speed and performance. From 1941 onwards the fuel allocation for aircrew training was quite inadequate, and the quality – though not the courage – of the Luftwaffe’s pilots began the steady decline that continued until late 1944, when they were reaching line squadrons with only 150 hours’ flying experience. It is generally accepted by former bomber pilots as well as by the Luftwaffe that the enormous scores claimed by a handful of pilots such as Lt.-Col. Helmut Lent – the veteran of Wilhelmshaven who was credited with 102 victories before he was killed in 1944 – were not far from the reality. A small minority of superb airmen such as himself, Major Heinz-Wolfgang Schnaufer (121 victories), Prince Lippe-Weissenfeld (51 victories) and Prince Sayn-Wittgenstein (83 victories) accounted for the overwhelming majority of bombers shot down by night-fighters, while hundreds of ‘green’ pilots landed night after night without a kill, even at the height of the ‘Battles’ in 1943–44.

After Goering, General Hans Jeschonnek, the Luftwaffe’s Chief of Staff, bore much responsibility for the shortcomings of the defence of Germany, which he seemed to recognize by his suicide on hearing the news of the British raid on Peenemünde in August 1943. Jeschonnek was entirely in thrall to Hitler. He directed the Luftwaffe as he believed that the Führer wished, without thought for strategic or tactical reality. In the spring of 1942, in the face of fierce warnings about the long-term consequences for the Luftwaffe, Jeschonnek stripped training units and reserves of every man and aircraft to support the new offensive in Russia. ‘The Luftwaffe must attack and not defend,’ said Goering at the end of 1941, and Jeschonnek supported the fantasies of the Reichsmarshal and his Führer to the end of his life. Since the beginning of the war, the Luftwaffe had regarded flak and searchlights as the
principal defence against strategic air attack, with fighters in a subsidiary role. Now, despite overwhelming evidence that the night-fighter was the decisive weapon in meeting the bomber offensive, there was still no major shift of priorities.