Bomber Command (62 page)

Speer testifies that when Bomber Command did attack oil plants, its larger bombs caused greater damage than those of 8th Air Force. But beyond Harris’s underlying contempt for the oil plan, High Wycombe also suffered grievously in the winter of 1944 from the perennial difficulty of damage assessment. Again and again oil plants were judged destroyed when Speer’s extraordinarily effective repair squads had been able to restore some level of
production. 18.9 per cent of RAF bombs dropped on oil plants failed to explode. The winter weather hampered effective photographic reconnaissance, just as during the Battle of Berlin a year before. When pictures did become available, Harris personally studied them, and often drew unwarrantably sanguine conclusions.

In the last quarter of 1944, 14 per cent of Harris’s effort fell on oil targets against 53 per cent on cities, 15 per cent on transport targets, 13 per cent on army-support operations, 5 per cent on naval targets such as U-boat and E-boat pens. Between January and May 1945, 26 per cent of Harris’s effort was directed towards oil, 37 per cent against cities. The cost of his stubbornness to the Allied war effort at this last stage was almost certainly grievous. The Oil Plan will be remembered by history as one of the Allies’ great missed opportunities. Harris himself said thirty years later:
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The only serious row I ever had with Portal was about the Oil Plan. I was against putting everything into oil. It was using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. I remember Portal ringing me up, the only time in the war that he lost his temper with me. I simply told him that if he didn’t want me, I was quite prepared to go.

Long after the war, Portal sought to argue that his dispute with Harris was grossly exaggerated by mischievous witnesses.

Harris’s offer of his resignation (by no means the only one I had from him) was not, I knew, intended seriously, but was made in a moment of exasperation [he wrote in 1959
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]. His good qualities as a commander far outweighed his defects, and it would have been monstrously unjust to him and to his command to have tried to have him replaced on the ground that while assuring me of his intention to carry out his orders, he persisted in trying to convince me that different orders would have produced better results.

It is impossible to accept this view. Portal in his own wartime correspondence made it abundantly clear that he was not satisfied
that Harris was wholeheartedly seeking to carry out his orders. The issue at stake was one of profound significance for the conduct of the war. The evidence is clear that Harris never conformed single-mindedly to his instructions, and the margin by which he failed to do so may have been decisive.

But the simple fact was that at the end of 1944, Harris enjoyed wider fame and greater prestige than Portal, and knew it. He believed, rightly or wrongly, that he could count on the support of the Prime Minister. He was certain of his own cause. He inspired considerable open and tacit admiration for pursuing a defiantly British policy at a moment when American dominance of the Alliance was everywhere being made painfully apparent: ‘By 1945 he was one of the very few senior British officers who seemed able to ignore, let alone to deny the American predominance in the conduct of grand strategy.’
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In those last months of the European war, it seemed to Portal that the uproar that would have surrounded Harris’s removal was not justified by the strategic benefits that would result. He flinched from sacking his C-in-C, and having shown his own weakness, had no further sanctions against him. His letter of formal surrender to Harris on 20 January 1945, which effectively acknowledged his subordinate’s right to continue bombing cities as he saw fit, bears a note of almost pathetic resignation:

I willingly accept your assurance that you will continue to do your utmost to ensure the successful execution of the policy laid down. I am very sorry that you do not believe in it, but it is no use my craving for what is evidently unattainable. We must wait until after the end of the war before we can know for certain who was right, and I sincerely hope that until then you will continue in command of the force which has done so much towards defeating the enemy, and has brought such credit and renown to yourself and to the Royal Air Force.

Portal’s retreat, which greatly diminishes his stature as a director of war, was the negation of all that he sought to achieve at Quebec by the transfer of authority from SHAEF. He had proved
too weak to impose his will on the command structure he himself created. It is hard to believe that had Bomber Command continued under SHAEF’s orders, Tedder would have tolerated the same degree of defiance from Harris. Whether or not Tedder would have insisted that Bomber Command dedicate itself single-mindedly to the Transport Plan, it is at least likely that a coherent policy would have been consistently pursued.

Harris’s behaviour towards the Air Staff in this last phase almost certainly influenced the fact that he received no peerage and was offered no further employment at the coming of peace, much more than any notion of making him a scapegoat for Dresden. If he had shown sufficient flexibility in the autumn of 1944 to acknowledge that the usefulness of area bombing was ended, that his force was now capable of better and more important things, history might have judged him more kindly. But he did not. With the single-mindedness that even one of his principal supporters at the Air Ministry had termed obsession,
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he continued remorselessly with his personal programme for the levelling of Germany’s cities until the very end. In the first four months of 1945, 181,000 tons of bombs were delivered to Germany, a fifth of the tonnage dropped throughout the entire war.

No period is more resistant to setting in context than this final phase, from the winter of 1944 to May 1945. Bomber Command reached the zenith of its strength: 1,609 aircraft, drawn from a force that included 1,087 Lancasters, 353 Halifaxes, 203 Mosquitoes. Sir John Grigg, the Army Minister, said in the House of Commons in the Army Estimates debate of 1944: ‘We have reached the extraordinary situation in which the labour devoted to the production of heavy bombers alone is believed to be equal to that allotted to the production of the whole equipment of the army.’ Every heavy bomber was equipped with H2S,
Gee
and a mass of other sophisticated electronic equipment. Belatedly, some Lancasters were being fitted with 0.5 calibre rear-turret guns, and a handful even with gun-laying radar. The advanced successor to the Lancaster, the Lincoln, was being prepared for operations in
the Far East with the RAF’s ‘Tiger Force’ when the European war ended. There was a vast surplus of aircrew, many of whom were never called upon to fly operations. Cochrane and Carr were transferred from their Groups early in 1945, merely in order that two other promising officers might gain experience of operational command before the end. Amidst the deep weariness that afflicted Britain by 1945, Bomber Command at last tasted victory.

Until the final days, the Luftwaffe offered resistance, and Bomber Command’s overall loss rate of 1 per cent masked individual nights of operations when casualties of 5 per cent, even 10 per cent were inflicted by the dwindling band of German night-fighters. But stripped of their early-warning systems and swamped by the mass of Allied jamming and radar devices, the defences were in ruins. After losing 31,000 aircrew between January 1941 and June 1944, the Luftwaffe suffered 13,000 casualties between June and October 1944 alone. In 1944, the USAAF destroyed 3,706 enemy aircraft merely in daylight operations over Germany.
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No air force could stand losses on this scale. As Bomber Command’s operations became more and more a routine exercise of technique and professionalism, amidst the monotony of the long trips to and from Germany, for the first time some crews felt sufficiently lightened of their own fear to pity those who lay beneath. Standards of marking, of bombing, of devastation had risen enormously since the previous winter of the Battle of Berlin. Huge forces of aircraft set forth, and the cities beneath were levelled in due measure. In the first four months of 1945, there were thirty-six major Bomber Command operations against German urban areas, twenty-four by night and twelve by day: 528 and 1,107 aircraft went on two nights to Dortmund, 717 and 720 to Chemnitz, 276 to Kassel, 805 to Dresden, 654 to Munich, 521 and 293 to Nuremberg, 597 to Wiesbaden, 349 to Worms, 458 to Mainz, 478 to Mannheim, and 238 to Bonn.

Night after night the huge palls of smoke and fire rose from the cities. ‘The situation grows daily more intolerable and we have no means of defending ourselves against this catastrophe,’ wrote
Goebbels on 2 March.
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‘Reports sound almost monotonous but they tell of so much sorrow and misery that one hardly dares think about them in detail.’
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Had Hitler not maintained his spellbinding influence over the German people to the very end, it is impossible to believe that they would have continued the war through these months, if the opportunity had existed for them to surrender. It is almost beyond belief that the German army continued to resist so effectively even amidst the rubble of the nation. The Wehrmacht’s dogged last stand, and the continued output from the factories until the last weeks, rendered the concept of morale bombing finally absurd.

Beyond the great area attacks, Bomber Command delivered 17,621 tons of bombs – more than half the total dropped by all the Allied strategic and tactical air forces – in the campaign against Germany’s communications. Thousands more sorties were carried out in support of the Allied armies, although some argued that these were self-defeating, because of the mountains of rubble that they created in the path of advancing armour. On 12 November 1944 the
Tirpitz
was finally capsized in Tromsö Fjord by Lancasters of 617 and 9 Squadron – the victims of Wilhelmshaven on 18 December 1939. The
Admiral Scheer
was capsized in Kiel harbour during an attack on 9 April 1945. A vast ten-ton ‘Grand Slam’ bomb, created by Barnes Wallis and delivered by 617 Squadron, finally severed the Bielefeld Viaduct linking Hamm and Hanover on 14 March 1945, and 617 Squadron dropped forty more of these monstrous weapons on hitherto impregnable installations before the end of the war. Altogether in 1945, Bomber Command launched 67,487 sorties for the loss of 608 aircraft. It is a measure of the scale of the strategic air offensive in its final months that such casualties could be regarded as a small price.

There will never be a definitive judgement on the contribution of the strategic bombers to the final collapse of Germany, because there are so many impenetrable uncertainties. Speer and his army of managers and workers struggled through the winter of 1944 against the tides of disaster breaching their industrial sandcastle
on every side, and by the beginning of 1945 it was clear to him that it was being overwhelmed. ‘From July 1944 to May 1945 the German economy was tried with so many stresses applied from different directions that it is impossible to say which was the heaviest stress and which caused the final break,’ writes Professor Milward.
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The advancing Allied armies had cut off Germany from the raw materials on which her industries were dependent. There would be no more chrome from Turkey. The Swedes were belatedly cutting the flow of high-grade steel to the Reich. The Rumanian oil-fields were in the hands of the Russians. Germany had been desperately short of manpower thoughout the war, but in October 1944 Hitler made clear his own priorities by decreeing the creation of the
Volkssturm
and calling up every German male between sixteen and sixty for some degree of part-time military training. Hitler and most of his colleagues perceived clearly that unless they could achieve a decisive success on the battlefield within months, the achievements of industry would become irrelevant. Thus they ignored the desperate protests of Speer about the effects of the call-up on production. After the autumn of 1944, Speer was probably the only leading man in Germany still concerned about the long-term future of the armaments industry, or indeed about any industry at all.

Beyond the final success of the oil offensive, the Allied bombing of German communications and especially of the Ruhr’s rail and canal network was strangling coal output and thus steel production by the end of November 1944. It is impossible to separate the achievements of precision air attacks on rail yards, bridges and canals from those of the Allied area attacks on the Ruhr cities. The end result, in any event, was catastrophic. 80 per cent of Germany’s coal came from the Ruhr, and to maintain supplies to industry it was necessary for 22,000 wagon-loads a day to leave the pits. By the end of November, this flow had been cut to 5,000 a day. In the last quarter of 1944, it was essential for Germany to produce more than 9 million tons of steel. Largely in consequence of the coal
famine, less than 4 million tons were in fact produced, barely enough to sustain ammunition production, far less to create new armaments. Allied bombing of the Ruhr links relaxed sufficiently that winter to allow coal flow to increase to 8,100 wagons a day by February, but after another deluge of explosives early in March the Ruhr was totally isolated from the rest of Germany by the middle of the month, a few days before the arrival of the Allied armies.

From September 1944, Speer’s economic edifice had passed its peak and was doomed to decline as labour, raw materials and plant in fallen territories were taken from him. By 30 January 1945, with remarkable courage he conceded openly to Hitler that the game was played out: ‘It is a matter of estimating with certainty the final collapse of the German economy in four to eight weeks . . . After this collapse the war can no longer be pursued militarily.’ Thereafter Speer devoted most of his labours to frustrating Hitler’s orders to destroy German industry in the face of the advancing armies.