Bomber Command (60 page)

The Americans had come for the marshalling yards, but when they bombed they were also able to destroy a pocket of housing on the north side of the city that had somehow survived the attack thirty-six hours before. Fritz Kramer noted the ironic case of a man who returned to Darmstadt on compassionate leave from the front to see his mother after the night raid. He was killed when the American bombs hit the railway station.

Psychologists who studied the effects of bombing on morale after the war concluded that it was a terrible experience to be bombed, but that once one had been bombed once, successive treatments made less and less effective impact on morale. So it seemed to be in Darmstadt. A passivity, an apathy gripped the city, as if its people were no longer capable of feeling. Overnight they had become hardened, even brutalized. Jacob Schutz met a man who had lost a son, but simply said: ‘I thank God I have two more of them.’ Another man was bemoaning the loss of his wife and child to an officer, who interrupted him with a shrug: ‘In that cellar over there you’ll find a family of ten who all caught it
together.’ When it rained, the hastily piled earth slipped away from some of the mass graves, exposing the bodies once more. Fungus grew upon them. It was days before anyone could be troubled to bury them again.

Bomber Command’s report of the attack on Darmstadt was no more dramatic than that on scores of other targets, past and future: ‘Photographic Reconnaissance Unit cover shows industrial part not covered, but remaining part shows large areas of complete devastation. Damage Assessment shows Rohm & Haas severely damaged; E. Merck – slight damage; diesel engine works has had nine buildings gutted.’ On the night of 11/12 September, Bomber Command lost sixteen aircraft, including the twelve from the Darmstadt force. A
Serrate
Mosquito claimed to have shot down an Me110 north of Darmstadt. An Intruder Mosquito claimed a Ju88 damaged. A surprisingly large number of Bomber Command aircraft – forty-three in all – claimed to have seen German fighters at some point before, during or after the attack on Darmstadt. 218 of the 236 aircraft dispatched claimed to have bombed the target.

It was not until the end of the war that a scientific attempt could be made to assess the achievement of 5 Group’s attack on Darmstadt, by the USSBS. Even this cannot be examined without emphasizing the degree of guesswork and statistical projection that went into the Survey’s work, coupled with an enthusiasm to prove that USAAF ‘precision’ bombing had been more effective than British ‘area’ attacks. But the USSBS ‘Detailed Study of the effects of the Bomber Command raid on Darmstadt’ is the only collated evidence that exists, and thus it should be quoted:

The area raid of 11/12 September came when industrial employment had already started on a general decline [stated the report]. The raid accelerated this decline. Its principal disruptive impact on the city’s labour was felt in small commercial enterprises, who lost some 50 per cent of their workers. The most disruptive factor in the labour situation was not the air raids, but the withdrawal of German men into the army . . . Industrial labour remained adequate, although a shortage of skilled labour was generally acknowledged . . .

Disruption of essential services such as gas, water, electricity and local transportation was not sufficient to interfere with production. The effects on industrial production of the 11/12 September raid were sufficient to have caused an overall production loss to the city of one month. The loss in the chemical industry was 1.4 months, and 1.1 months for the iron and metal production and fabrication industries. However, in a period of general economic decline this loss seems to be overstated in that it does not give proper weight to the downward trend which would have continued even without the raid. Therefore, by means of another computation . . . it was estimated that the overall loss can more fairly be stated as 0.4 months, ie 0.5 months for the chemical industry and 0.4 months for iron, metal production and fabrication.

Without accepting the detailed statistical conclusions of the report, it is possible to state that the raid of 11/12 September devastated the city of Darmstadt without fatally damaging the industries which theoretically prompted the bomber attack. Darmstadt’s production fell from 8.3 million Reichsmarks in August 1944 to 3.7 in September, but then rose to 5.2 in October. In November it was still 4.5 million, despite the general national industrial decline, and in December 4.3. Thereafter, it collapsed completely in the wake of a further massive raid. But in the words of the USSBS: ‘The production loss for the area raid of 11/12 September 1944 was remarkably small for a city experiencing a 49 per cent housing destruction.’ During 5 Group’s attack, the left-hand axis of attack achieved insufficient weight and concentration. While the old town was fatally hit, the industrial northwest escaped remarkably lightly, even after the low-level Mosquito attacks. It was a characteristic shortcoming of Bomber Command area raids: city centres burned readily, but the overwhelming weight of industry was in the suburbs, which were far harder to hit and destroy.

Yet there could be no doubt of the effective impact of the 5 Group attack on Darmstadt as a society. Where the abortive 25 August attack destroyed only 327 buildings, that of 11 September totally gutted 4,064 out of 8,401 dwellings. A further 462 had been rendered uninhabitable. 570 of the town’s 888 shops ceased to exist. The old town was simply erased from the face of the earth. The prison and the post office were the only notable buildings to survive. From Lord Cherwell’s point of view, the operation was a major success: 70,000 people were ‘de-housed’. 49,200 fled the city as refugees. In 1939 Darmstadt and its outlying villages mustered a population of 115,211 people. By December 1943 conscription had reduced the total to 98,440. By 1 March 1945, there were only 51,750 people on the city’s official ration strength. The remainder joined the vast army of refugees, ‘displaced persons’ and corpses. What was done to Darmstadt – virtually unnoticed by the Allied leadership, far less the public of Britain and America – vastly exceeded the devastation in Cologne created by the trumpeted ‘1,000 Raid’ of 1942.

It will never be certain exactly how many people died on the night of 11 September, because so many bodies were never identified and so many records were destroyed. Contemporary Nazi statistics showed that of every 100 deaths, 15 were caused by blast, 15 by incineration, 70 by suffocation. 181 women and children died for every 100 men. One in five of the dead was a child under the age of sixteen.

The best estimate is that 12,300 Darmstadters were killed in air raids up to the end of the war, the overwhelming majority of these on the night of 11 September. In the immediate wake of the attack, the authorities counted 6,049 confirmed dead, 4,502 missing and 3,749 wounded. When the figure of those confirmed dead reached 8,433, the casualty list broke down as follows:

It would be absurd to imagine Darmstadt as a town somehow possessed of a unique innocence, its people free of the taint of Nazism, its factories producing cuckoo clocks or cigarette boxes. Darmstadt was an industrial town no more and no less devoted to supporting Hitler’s war effort than scores of others. It was unusual only in that it was so little prepared to save and defend itself, and that its contribution to the war was slight in proportion to the Allied resources deployed to destroy it. What happened to Darmstadt was merely a supremely efficient example of the destruction meted out to so many towns for so long by the armed forces of Germany. The horrific tales of Darmstadters’ experiences in September 1944 were only a late reflection of those of millions of Poles, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Englishmen and Russians since 1939. For Bomber Command, it had now become possible to administer such blows almost nightly to the cities of Germany. It did so until the last month of the war.

The American 8th Air Force visited Darmstadt once more, on 19 September, just a week after Bomber Command. The Flying Fortresses delivered a precision attack on the Merck works, with considerable effect on production and further devastation of the pockets of buildings still standing around them. It might have seemed impossible that there now remained anything left to destroy in the city, but on 12 December the B-17s came once more – 446 of them, delivering 1,421 tons of explosives to the industrial area on the northwest of the town. The Allied armies then inherited the ruins.

A friend of Jacob Schutz, a very old man, wrote to him after the destruction of Darmstadt:

At the turn of the century, I travelled through Germany’s towns, and each one had its own soul and its own face. Shortly before the war I ventured again through the same towns, and it seemed that their souls and faces were gone, as if they were dead within themselves.

Now, as I walk through the ruins of these same towns, I am overcome by the terrible awareness that they have fulfilled the promise that was made before the war. Instead of living corpses they have become truly dead ones.

14 » SATURATION

You would think the fury of aerial bombardment Would rouse God to relent; the infinite spaces Are still silent. He looks on shock-pried faces History, even, does not know what is meant.

– Richard Eberhart

In the last phase of the war, between October 1944 and May 1945, the Allied strategic-bomber forces played a dominant part in bringing the German economy to the point of collapse. Against only ineffectual resistance from the Luftwaffe, they attacked Germany by day and night on an unprecedented scale. Bomber Command alone dropped more bombs in the last quarter of 1944 than in the whole of 1943. The air forces’ destruction of Germany’s oil resources was chiefly responsible for the breakdown of the Ardennes offensive at the end of 1944, and must have hastened the end of the war at least by several weeks. The bomber attack on German rail and water communications was choking industry to death by the last weeks of 1944. However, it is more difficult to argue that the Transport Plan had a decisive effect, since although munitions production was doomed to extinction, the German armies continued to possess adequate supplies of arms and ammunition almost until their capitulation. The airmen’s misfortune was that their triumphs came too late, in the context of the advance of the Allied armies across Germany, to be accepted as a decisive contribution to victory. By September 1944, with a degree of assistance from Bomber Command, the USAAF had brought
German oil production almost to the point of collapse. Aviation spirit production, for instance, fell from 156,000 tons in May to 54,000 in June, 34,700 in July, 17,000 in August and 10,000 in September, measured against Luftwaffe consumption of 165,000 tons in April. Pilot training all but ceased; the Luftwaffe could not operate the aircraft Speer was still producing with such huge exertions. Total supplies of all fuel products had fallen to less than a third of their January levels. The German armies were largely driven back on horse-drawn transport; diesel trucks towed petrol vehicles; whole tank formations were immobilized; tactical battlefield mobility was seriously affected, and strategic fuel reserves were rapidly becoming exhausted.

But with the onset of winter weather that often made precision bombing impossible, and the herculean efforts of Speer’s repair squads at the oil plants, the Allied bombing offensive lost momentum. Aviation spirit production rose to 21,000 tons in October, 39,500 in November, and 24,500 in December. Germany was able to husband the slender reserves with which it became possible to mount the Ardennes offensive. Thereafter, the bombing pressure became finally intolerable, and by the end of January 1945 the Allied victory over Germany’s oil resources was all but complete. But the airmen had missed their moment. They were never to receive undisputed credit for an achievement that came so late. There has been a continuing controversy about responsibility for the failure to press home their assault in the summer and autumn of 1944, when a marginal increase in bombing effort might have tipped the balance to make the oil campaign decisive and to end the Second World War in Europe months earlier.

In previous chapters, it has been suggested that in the spring of 1944 the airmen’s credibility was too low for Spaatz’s enthusiasm for the Oil Plan to be wholeheartedly accepted by the Allied High Command. By autumn, however, there was widespread understanding of the success and potential of the attack on fuel. How was it, then, that against the USAAF’s overall wartime effort of 131,000 tons of bombs dropped on oil targets, Bomber Com
mand with its greater lifting capacity contributed only 94,000 tons, most of this in the last stages of the campaign?

The answer lies in the decisive breakdown of the RAF’s internal command structure which took place in the winter of 1944, when the Chief of Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, finally showed himself unable to exercise authority over Sir Arthur Harris. At the Quebec
Octagon
conference in September 1944, Portal proposed to the Combined Chiefs of Staff that the strategic air forces should be removed from control of SHAEF now that the Allied armies were fully established in Europe. The Americans demurred – they thought that Eisenhower and Tedder had directed the bombing effort admirably since June. They also believed, according to their official historians, that behind the smokescreen of British arguments about effective command, ‘perhaps the crucial issue was one not mentioned in the official British proposals: a desire of the Air Ministry to re-establish its control of Harris’s Bomber Command’.
¹
That September, the Chiefs of Staff still envisaged the European war coasting to a reasonably smooth conclusion by Christmas. The British Air Staff were acutely conscious that Bomber Command had thus far failed to make the ‘decisive’ contribution to victory that they sought. They sensed time running out on them. Portal had become completely committed to the attack on German oil. He clearly believed that by re-establishing his control of Bomber Command, it might yet be possible for the RAF to play a leading part in the conclusive attack of the war on German oil supplies. Air Ministry papers of 1944 refer repeatedly to the danger that unless Bomber Command addressed itself urgently to the oil attack, 8th Air Force would complete the task single-handed. The British would be left to rest on the withered laurels of their area campaign against the cities.