Dresden (23 page)

But there were problems between Harris and his superiors during the period October 1944 to January 1945. They began with a memorandum that Air Chief Marshal Tedder, Eisenhower's British deputy at SHAEF, sent to Portal on October 25, 1944. This criticized the patchwork pattern of Harris's resumed strategic offensive and strongly advised a higher priority for attacks on the German transportation system, including the synthetic oil plants. (The Soviet conquest of the Romanian oil fields had just cost Germany its remaining access to conventional fuel supplies.) A copy was sent to Harris. So was another directive giving oil top priority. Harris's reaction was fierce. He argued about the decisive effects on target selection of weather and tactical factors (including the need to keep the enemy guessing). He repeated his principle that “bombing anything in Germany was better than bombing nothing.” While he resented the continuing pressure from the “panacea merchants,” he was attacking the Ruhr and the oil plants whenever possible, but remained worried lest the fifteen major German cities that remained unbombed (one of them Dresden) were to be left intact.

To and fro the correspondence went, with Harris's position stiffening somewhat as December arrived. The contemptuous word “panacea” cropped up once again in relation to attacks on oil targets (though at the same time he insisted that he was “missing no worthwhile opportunity” to attack them).

On January 8 Portal replied wearily that what he really wanted was “
your
determination” in regard to the oil targets. This implied pretty strongly that Harris was merely going through the motions when it came to these operations. Portal's letter evinced a reply from Harris in which the AOC Bomber Command used his ultimate weapon:

Harris's offer of resignation was refused. Portal backed down. And so Harris was able, for all but the final few weeks of the war, to exercise his judgment about targets. This meant all too often (from the point of view of his critics then and now) that he chose area bombing of cities and towns in preference to aiming for specific industrial and oil installations.

Harris's stubbornness on this issue was not necessarily the whim that it might appear. He had been subjected to constant pressure from his superiors, government advisers, and “ideas” ministries such as the Ministry of Economic Warfare (an organization he clearly loathed), to bomb this or that target, concentrate on this or that perceived enemy weakness, throughout the war. He had not liked the idea of the “dam buster” raids on West German dams, and had gone along with it reluctantly. He had not thought the concentrated attacks on ball-bearings factories or air-frame plants or other similar “crucial” enemy facilities would end or necessarily shorten the war, and he may well have been right.

In the case of oil, as it turned out, Harris was wrong. Germany in
the winter of 1944–45 was afflicted by a real and grave crisis when it came to fuel supplies. German tanks during the Battle of the Bulge had been forced to capture their own fuel from the enemy to keep advancing. The Reich's young fighter pilots, now being trained by the Luftwaffe to replace the catastrophic losses among the German Air Defense's veterans, were forced to learn mostly through simulators; there was scarcely enough fuel for them to fly aircraft. The result, as far as performance was concerned, was predictable. Even the Luftwaffe's operational aircraft had to be towed into takeoff position by horses or requisitioned oxen in a desperate attempt to save fuel. For all the ingenuity of the Wehrmacht's transport experts, the German war effort—especially in the air, where there was no substitute for gasoline—constantly faced shortages that would literally bring it to a halt. Insiders at British intelligence knew this as a certain fact.

One crucial problem might have been Harris's ultimate ignorance of the source of the information about synthetic oil plants. Harris received some ULTRA information. Surprisingly, he had not been initiated into the ENIGMA secret that lay behind it. Harris was therefore not aware of how directly this information, gleaned from German radio communications by means of code-breaking, came to the Allied General Staff from inside the sinews of the German war machine, how reliable it was, and why. Stubborn as Harris was, had he been fully privy to ENIGMA, he might have taken Portal's pleas more seriously, and the dispute between the two commanders could have led to a different policy outcome.

“The matter is critical,” as even one of Harris's fiercest detractors admitted regarding the ENIGMA question, “for an assessment of the grave differences of opinion between them about the advisability or otherwise of a concerted attack on Germany's oil industry during the second half of 1944.”

For the previous three years Bomber Command and the Eighth Army Air Force had been the main offensive tool available to the western Allies against Germany. The vast expense involved in maintaining and expanding these forces, producing new aircraft, and training their crews had been acceptable because there was really no alternative. Harris wrote that “the education of a bomber crew was the most expensive in the world; it cost some £10,000 for each man, enough to send ten men to Oxford or Cambridge for three years.”

By 1944 the combined Anglo-American air forces were massive. In December of that year Bomber Command had at its disposal 1,513 bombers (it would reach 1,609 by April 1945). The Eighth U. S. Army Air Force now had 1,826 bombers, with hundreds of new aircraft being produced
every month
. There were also now ground forces operating successfully on the continent—partly due to the overwhelming tactical use of Allied air power. During the course of 1944 the balance of power in the air had changed even more dramatically than that on the ground. The sheer quantity of new aircraft and trained aircrew—particularly American—would alone have guaranteed such a shift.

However, just as vital was the development of a long-distance fighter escort aircraft, the North American P-51 Mustang. With its British Merlin engine and disposable, wing-mounted drop tanks, this swift fighter could accompany Allied bombers deep into Germany, to Berlin and beyond, and outperform the German fighters that had hitherto inflicted such a terrible toll on the Allied bomber formations. In the first months of 1944, just after Harris had given up his costly assault on Berlin, the Mustang appeared in substantial numbers. In a short time the P-51s all but wiped the German defensive fighters from the sky. German flak defenses remained, but as the ground forces closed in on the Reich from east and west these guns were to find themselves terribly stretched, and many were to be withdrawn from the air war altogether.

For the first time the Allied bomber fleets found themselves, in terms of both numbers and invincibility, truly comparable to the unopposed instruments of destructive power that Douhet, Trenchard, and the other theorists of unstoppable mass annihilation had envisaged back in the 1920s.

So what was now the main use of the mighty, heavy bomber forces that the Allies had brought into being? How were they to be used to maximum effect in this new and, despite the recent setbacks, evidently final stage of the war?

In this respect, so it happened, the mandarins of British intelligence had an idea.

THE JOINT INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE
was established just before the outbreak of war, to coordinate the various streams of information that came in from different branches of British intelligence and to advise the chiefs of staff accordingly. The JIC existed, technically, as a sub-committee of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, of which the prime minister was the chairman. To the JIC's meetings came high-level representatives from MI6, MI5, Naval Intelligence, the Air Ministry, and the Ministry of Economic Warfare.

The chairman of the JIC from 1939 onward was a Foreign Office man called Victor William (“Bill”) Cavendish-Bentinck, nephew of the seventh duke of Portland. In the course of the war, after starting out as a rather marginal body, the JIC, and therefore its chairman, became much more powerful and influential. The JIC's weekly reports summarized a view of the current situation and prospects for the war, and became a major source of information and advice for the chiefs of staff, as did the expert papers it produced on specific subjects.

By New Year 1945 the Germans' Ardennes offensive had ground to a bloody halt. On January 12 the big Soviet offensive in the east had begun, thus reducing the pressure on the hard-pressed western Allies. In order that this relief should continue, it was advantageous to the Anglo-American interest to ensure that the Soviets, despite their long lines of communications, should make good progress against the German eastern defenses (judging from the stubborn German resistance in the West, the Soviets might need help in this matter).

On January 16 a proposal was made to the JIC, through the medium of the deputy chief of Air Staff (intelligence), that “a report
should be prepared by the Sub-Committee, assessing the effect on the Germans of heavy air attacks on Berlin in conjunction with the Russian offensive and taking into account the timing of such attacks.”

In the early summer of 1944, in support of the Normandy invasion, Bomber Command and the U. S. Eighth Army Air Force had been used as airborne “long-range artillery” to pummel the enemy's communications and troop movements. Now, in order to help Russia (whose own heavy bomber force was relatively meager), the air forces were to be called upon to play a similar role, though at even longer range, on the eastern front. It was a novel suggestion.

The weekly JIC report on “German Strategy and Capacity to Resist” (January 21, 1945) showed a little more clearly what this concern with troop movements inside the shrinking Nazi empire was about. The outcome of the Russian offensive hinged, it said, on “the result of the race between the arrival of German reserves…and the loss of the Russian advance owing to logistic difficulties and the distraction of forces on the flanks…” Ominously, it predicted that substantial German reinforcements could be involved by the beginning of February, and that by mid-March 1945 such reinforcements might reach a total of forty-two divisions—almost half a million men.

On January 22 the JIC's secretary, King-Salter, made a note for guidance on the work still in progress, asking the joint intelligence staff to draft a report specifically assessing the effect on the Germans of “heavy air attacks on Berlin in conjunction with the Russian offensive.” In particular, he wanted (on the JIC's behalf) information about how much of the German administrative machine remained in Berlin, whether it had been dispersed around the suburbs as an antibombing measure, to what extent German industry would suffer from a “devastating” succession of attacks on Berlin, and, last but not least, “what morale effect in Germany as a whole it is thought that a catastrophic ‘flattening' of Berlin would have.” The use of language indicates that what was being considered at this time was a “knockout”-type attack, of a kind discussed in the past, now revived under the very different circumstances of early 1945. Pointedly attached to the secretary's note is an extract from an Air Staff paper of July 22, 1944, when the idea for a massive attack on Berlin, code-named Thunderclap had been under intensive discussion.

The Thunderclap idea floated in the summer of 1944 had envisaged “220,000 casualties. 50 percent of these (or 110,000) may expect to be killed. It is suggested that such an attack resulting in so many deaths, the great majority of which will be key personnel, cannot help but have a shattering effect on political and civilian morale all over Germany…”

So the chief of Air Staff, Air Marshal Portal, had written at the time. He also put forward a suggestion that would haunt his reputation for years afterward as historians made the inevitable connections:

However, on August 17, 1944, the joint planners reported that they did not think such an operation “likely to achieve any worthwhile degree of success.” Thunderclap was to be retrieved once more for possible use almost five months later, under very different circumstances.

The JIC's general report on bombing and the eastern front was delivered on January 25, 1945, accompanied by the report on the bombing of Berlin that the committee's secretary had asked his staff to prepare. The latter went into considerable detail about how such a Thunderclap-style “knockout blow” against Berlin might be delivered, and where. It did not explore the overall political and war situation, for that had not been its brief:

Significantly, straight after this basic statement of principle, the report made a proviso that, since existing attacks on oil targets were causing such problems for the enemy, “attacks against oil targets should continue to
take precedence over everything else
.”

Though keeping options open, the general tone of the main paper
is markedly different from the “knockout” implications of King-Salter's note of a few days earlier (and of the report which the joint intelligence staff dutifully delivered in response). It was clear to the JIC's mandarins that to inflict such an annihilating blow against Berlin would take both the British and American air forces a number of days of continuous bombing. Something around twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand tons of bombs in three to four consecutive days was the general idea (between twice and three times the total dropped on Hamburg over several days in July 1943 with such catastrophic results for that city). It is difficult to see how a massive, sustained Thunderclap attack (or rather, series of attacks) on anything like such a scale was compatible with idea that raids on oil targets should continue to “
take precedence over everything else,
” as the JIC main paper so emphatically put it, or that attacking tank and aircraft production facilities should remain of the highest priority.

The main JIC paper to the chiefs of staff actually says it is time for major strikes behind the Russian front, the air forces should move from their habitual strategic campaign against industry, infrastructure, and housing toward using their overwhelming strength to create chaos in areas behind the battlefield. In other words, the air forces should assume a quasi-tactical role. This alone represents a substantial change in policy, Thunderclap or no. On the other hand, the JIC says, we cannot commit ourselves to the extent of abandoning the oil program, and we do not expect to destroy German morale by our use of air power (no longed-for “knockout blow”). We just expect powerfully to help the Russians on the eastern front and by this to further discourage German resistance.

This is tough, hard-headed advice, and by no means kindly meant from the point of view of German civilians—ruthless use of the Allied air forces' altogether awesome destructive power has become accepted by now as a key war-winning tool, and enemy refugees are seen as just another element in the equation.

The paper laid out a timetable of movements of German reinforcements suspected to be for the Russian front, the areas from which they might be drawn, and the times within which (subject to operational difficulties) these reinforcements might reach that front. The list of German troop movements that the Allied air attacks would disrupt—based on ENIGMA intercepts of German signals—ran as follows:

 

 

The crunch point fell around mid-February. Time was short.

 

IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF HOURS
later that Bottomley, Portal's deputy, discussed the JIC's analysis and suggestions with Harris. The AOC Bomber Command suggested that Chemnitz, Leipzig, and Dresden be added to the list. Harris had been pushing these targets forward for some time, and it must have seemed a logical occasion on which to bring them up again. Even the JIC had admitted that an attack, however massive, on Berlin alone would not decide the war. The Saxon cities were closer to the front, and in order to really damage the Germans' ability to move large amounts of men and matériel between the fronts, their rail networks (as well as Berlin's) would have to be attacked.

Bottomley's conversation with Harris was not the only immediate consequence of the JIC's paper on bombing the eastern front. On the evening of January 25, before going off for a drink with President Roosevelt's envoy, Harry Hopkins, Winston Churchill, who read such documents as a matter of course, spoke on the telephone with his Liberal secretary for air, Sir Archibald Sinclair. With his habitual colorful turn of phrase, the prime minister demanded to know what plans Bomber Command might have for “basting the Germans in their retreat from Breslau.” This apparently tasteless remark may have been misunderstood. The most common use of “baste” is to “moisten during cooking with hot fat and the juices produced” but its second meaning (less common, but then Churchill relished unusual words) is “to beat thoroughly, thrash.”

The largest city in Silesia, just a hundred or so miles east of Dresden, Breslau was now under direct threat from the Russians—
though it was to be another three weeks before it was cut off. It had been declared a fortress the previous autumn, but until a few days previously its citizens had seemed unaware of imminent danger. Its fanatical Gauleiter, Karl Hanke (a former close associate of Goebbels at the Propaganda Ministry) was reluctant to spread “defeatism.” Whatever the reasons, things changed quickly on January 20, when loudspeakers throughout the city blared out the message: “
Achtung! Achtung!
Citizens of Breslau. The Reich Defense Commissar and Gauleiter announces that Breslau is to be evacuated. There is no reason for alarm…” Universal alarm duly ensued.

Tens of thousands of civilians, mainly women and children, immediately fled Breslau. Outside temperatures were twenty below zero, and the snowbound roads were already choked with refugees from eastern Silesia. Soon bodies—especially those of babies—were being returned to Breslau for burial. Eighteen thousand refugees died of privation on the march to Kanth, twenty miles southwest of Breslau, where they had been told there would be transport.

The
London Times
quoted a radio broadcast by the German journalist “Hans Schwarz van Berg” (actually van Berk, a close associate of Goebbels and longtime political editor of the propaganda minister's weekly newspaper,
Das Reich
) describing women and children crowding the couplings between railway coaches and wagons, despite the bitter cold. Other papers were filled with similar refugee stories. Van Berk, a prominent German propagandist, was hardly likely to describe troop movements, especially retreats, with quite the same care or pathos, but his message was clear. The objects of the “basting” would be mostly refugees.

Whether—since the “fortress” was not yet surrounded and would not be until the middle of the next month—the prime minister could have safely assumed that the entire human tide pouring westward either from or via the Breslau area excluded the military, it is hard to say. The German Seventeenth Army, for instance, was in the process of being pushed out of Lower Silesia (southeast of Breslau), and within forty-eight hours of Churchill's remarks was in headlong retreat to the west. One thing is sure: Churchill, in typical aggressive fashion, was not happy with the air minister's guarded reply to his demand.

Sinclair said that German forces retreating from Breslau might
more appropriately become a target for tactical forces rather than “heavy” bombers operating from altitude. He felt that the best use of the “heavies” could be in continuing attacks on German oil plants, but conceded that if weather conditions prevented these, area bombing of “Berlin and other large cities in eastern Germany such as Leipzig, Dresden and Chemnitz” might be considered. These were after all “not only administrative centres controlling the military and civilian movements but…also main communications centres through which the bulk of the traffic moves.”