The Second World War (86 page)

During the crisis in the Battle of the Atlantic from late 1942, both Bomber Command and the Eighth Air Force concentrated on the U-boat pens on France’s Atlantic coast. But the massive concrete constructions proved impenetrable to their bombs even when they scored direct hits, which was fairly rare in the terrible weather of that winter. The port towns around them, Saint-Nazaire and Lorient, on the other hand, were smashed to pieces. In retrospect, the only consolation for the Allies was that this vast diversion of concrete greatly slowed the building of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, a series of coastal defences to guard against the invasion of northern Europe.

During the Eighth’s raid on the pens at Saint-Nazaire on 23 November, the Luftwaffe tried new tactics against the Fortresses. Up until then German pilots had always attacked from behind, but on this occasion, using thirty of the new Focke-Wulf 190s, they attacked head on, wing tip to wing tip. It took great nerve and skill on the part of the fighter pilot, but the Fortress’s Plexiglass nose containing the bomb-aimer remained the most vulnerable spot. For the crew in the forward part of the bomber, it was terrifying.

Just like RAF aircrew, the Americans found it hard to take the
waiting, and then the cancellation or aborting of missions as a result of bad weather. On only two or three days out of ten was visibility good enough to see the target. American bomber boys also had their own superstitions and rituals, whether wearing a sweater backwards, carrying good-luck coins or flying in the same plane. They hated it when they were transferred to a replacement aircraft.

The freezing winds, especially for the waist-gunners at open doors, were numbing. Some of the crew had electrically heated boots, gloves and overalls, but they seldom worked consistently. In the first year of operations, more men suffered from frostbite injuries than from combat wounds. Turret gunners, unable to leave their cramped position for several hours over enemy territory had to urinate in their trousers. The damp patches soon froze. If a gun jammed, men would tear off their gloves to clear the obstruction, and skin from their fingers would stick hard to the frozen metal. And any man badly wounded by flak splinters or cannon fire was likely to die of hypothermia before the stricken aircraft reached base. If enemy fire knocked out the oxygen supply, men would collapse until the pilot managed to bring the aircraft back to below 20,000 feet. Although deaths resulting from anoxia came to fewer than a hundred, a majority of aircrew had suffered from it at some time or another.

In thick cloud, there were numerous mid-air collisions, and many aircraft crashed on returning to base in bad weather. But the greatest shock was to see another aircraft, just ahead or to the side, disintegrate in a giant ball of fire. Not surprisingly many of the pilots turned to whisky in the evenings to calm their nerves, hoping not to suffer the recurrent nightmares which affected more and more men. They dreamed of comrades badly mutilated, of engines on fire or of fuselages riddled by cannon fire.

As with the RAF, combat fatigue became a common experience, or, in their own words, men became ‘flak-happy’ or suffered the ‘Focke-Wulf jitters’. Many had the ‘shakes’, and some suffered from fainting spells, temporary blindness or even catatonia. These were predictable reactions to the stress caused by helplessness in extreme danger. In some cases, reactions were delayed. Men would seem to have overcome terrible experiences, then go to pieces several weeks later. Few statistics on psychological breakdown are available or reliable, because commanders wanted to conceal the problem.

Major Curtis LeMay, who had just arrived with the 305th Bombing Group, was appalled to find that American pilots over the target would jink and weave to avoid flak and thus throw their bombing aim out entirely. In the view of the combative LeMay, who was later the model for General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s
Dr Strangelove
, this made the whole exercise worthless. So he ordered his pilots to fly straight and
true in their bombing run. Air reconnaissance showed that on the Saint-Nazaire raid of 23 November, the 305th had doubled the usual number of direct hits. Yet even with LeMay’s improvement, fewer than 3 per cent of bombs were falling within a thousand feet of the target. The USAAF’s initial claims of ‘pickle-barrel’ bombing looked over-ambitious to say the least. LeMay then adopted a different system. He put his best navigators and bombardiers in the lead planes, took the Norden bombsight out of all the rest and told their captains to drop their load only when the leaders released theirs. But, even then, the spread of the aircraft formation meant that many bombs would fall wide of the target, however accurate the leaders might be.

The combination of German flak batteries, now firing in ‘boxes’, and more aggressive enemy fighter attacks reduced bombing accuracy still further. A tight formation for defence against fighters also meant a more concentrated target for flak from the ground. As a historian of the American bombing campaign put it: ‘The Eighth Air Force would never find a way to bomb with maximum precision and maximum protection. This threw it into a conundrum that led irrevocably to carpet bombing, with some bombs hitting the target and the rest spilling all over the place. It was combat realities, not prewar theory, that led the Eighth inexorably in the direction of Bomber Harris’s indiscriminate area attacks.’

At the Casablanca conference in January 1943, General Eaker was told by General Arnold that Roosevelt had agreed to switch the Eighth Air Force to night bombing with the RAF. Eaker tried to convince Churchill that daylight bombing was more effective. He claimed that his bombers were knocking down at least two or three German fighters for every aircraft lost, a claim that the British knew to be totally untrue. But Churchill said nothing, because Portal had persuaded him in advance not to fight the Americans on the subject of daylight bombing. The combination of the USAAF attacking by day and the RAF by night was turned into a virtuous compromise of ‘round-the-clock’ bombing.

The Allies agreed on a bombing directive which stated that the ‘
primary objective will be
the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened’. Harris, of course, saw this as the seal of approval of his own strategy. And although Portal was to direct the ‘Combined Bomber Offensive’, the key decisions would be taken by Eaker and Harris, who could pick and choose their targets.

Even with agreement on this bombing directive, which was known as Pointblank, the Combined Bomber Offensive was anything but combined, even though Harris and Eaker got on well together and Harris had done
all he could to help the Eighth Air Force get up and running. Directed partly by General Marshall to prepare for the invasion of Europe, Eaker was to focus on the destruction of the Luftwaffe, both aircraft factories on the ground and fighters in the air. Harris, on the other hand, simply intended to carry on as usual, smashing cities while just paying lip-service to the priority of attacking military targets. He delighted in showing off his large leather-bound ‘blue books’ to important visitors at his headquarters at High Wycombe. They were filled with charts and graphs depicting the importance of his target cities and the area destroyed. Harris’s anger and resentment continued to increase with his conviction that Bomber Command was not receiving the attention and the respect that it deserved.

On 16 January 1943, just as the Battle for Stalingrad was approaching its grim and frozen end, Bomber Command carried out the first of a series of raids on Berlin. It was also the first raid to use Pathfinder aircraft dropping markers. Eleven days later, the Eighth Air Force attacked targets in Germany for the first time as they went for U-boat construction yards on the northern coasts. A month after that they returned to Wilhelmshaven, with eight journalists on board, including Walter Cronkite. Soon the film director William Wyler and the actor Clark Gable were flying with the Eighth Air Force, adding a glamour that RAF Bomber Command could never hope to match. Harris’s longing for newspaper coverage was dwarfed by the public relations efforts of Spaatz and Eaker.

On 5 March, Bomber Command returned to attacking the industrial heartland of Germany, especially Essen. The raid on 12 March destroyed the panzer construction shop, which delayed production of both Tiger and Panther tanks, thus contributing to the postponement of the great Kursk Offensive. The Eighth Air Force soon followed to join what was called the Battle of the Ruhr, and the total of casualties rose to 21,000 Germans killed.

Göring, humiliated by the Luftwaffe’s weakness against the Allied onslaught, withdrew more fighter groups from the eastern front for home defence. Although this was not one of the stated objectives of the Allies, the effect on the outcome of the war was perhaps far greater than the damage they were inflicting at the time. Not only did Red Army aviation begin to achieve air superiority if not supremacy in places. It also meant that Luftwaffe reconnaissance flights had to be drastically reduced. This in turn allowed the Red Army, especially in the following year, to achieve major successes in
maskirovka
, or deception operations.

Although German morale did not break as the Allies had hoped, Goebbels and other leaders were deeply concerned. Nazi propaganda was met by sarcasm in the population. A well-known poem of the time ran:

Lieber Tommy fliege weiter,

Wir sind alle Ruhrarbeiter,

Fliege weiter nach Berlin,

Die haben alle ‘ja’ geschrien.

(‘Dear Tommy fly on,

We are all Ruhr workers,

Fly on to Berlin,

They all screamed “yes”.’)

This was a reference to Goebbels’s speech after Stalingrad in the Sportpalast in Berlin in February 1943 when he whipped up the audience by shouting: ‘Do you want Total War?’ and they all yelled back in the affirmative.

In that spring of 1943, Allied air losses rose to terrifying levels. Less than one RAF aircrew in five survived a thirty-mission tour. On 17 April the Eighth Air Force over Bremen lost fifteen bombers to German fighters. Eaker, furious at not having received the reinforcements he had been promised, warned General Arnold back in Washington that he was down to a maximum of 123 bombers for a single raid. The Eighth Air Force was simply not in a position to achieve the air supremacy required to ensure the success of a cross-Channel invasion.

Arnold was in a difficult position. Every theatre of war was demanding more bombers. But in May he sent reinforcements to Britain and a huge programme of airfield construction began in East Anglia. Fresh faces were badly needed since the Eighth Air Force had lost 188 bombers and 1,900 crewmen in its first year of operations. Eaker had finally come round to the urgent need for long-range fighter escorts. The tubby P-47 Thunderbolt had a range no further than the German border.

On 29 May, the RAF created its first firestorm in a raid on Wuppertal. After the Pathfinders had dropped their marker flares, the leading wave of bombers dropped incendiaries to get fires going before the high-explosive bombs from the next wave blasted open the buildings. The blazing buildings soon created an inferno which sucked in air from all around. Many citizens were asphyxiated by the smoke or lack of oxygen, and in a way they were the lucky ones. Tarmac melted on the streets so people’s shoes stuck fast. Some ran to the river and threw themselves in to protect their bodies from the heat. After the fires had died down, charred bodies were so reduced, with all fat burned, that the burial parties could collect three blackened corpses in a washtub and seven or eight in a zinc bathtub. Some 3,400 people were killed that night. Like the Luftwaffe in 1940, the RAF had discovered that incendiaries were the vital ingredient in mass destruction. They were also lighter than conventional bombs and could be scattered en masse.

Harris still resented any interruptions to his remorseless campaign against urban targets, especially when he had to divert his bombers to attack U-boat bases. He intensified the bombing of cities, especially those which had already been hit. On 10 June 1943, the Combined Bomber Offensive–Pointblank–began officially. Two weeks later, just over a year after his first thousand-bomber raid, he sent Bomber Command back against Cologne. The incendiaries and bombs began to drop in the early hours of 29 June, the feast of St Peter and St Paul.

‘
All the inhabitants
of the house were in the cellar,’ wrote Albert Beckers. ‘Over us, for some considerable time, aircraft engines made the air vibrate. We were like rabbits in a warren. I was worried about the water pipes–what would happen if they burst, would we all be drowned? The air shook with detonations. We hadn’t felt the hail of incendiaries in the cellar but above us everything was ablaze. Now came the second wave, the explosives. You cannot imagine what it is like to cower in a hole when the air quakes, the eardrums burst from the blast, the light goes out, oxygen runs out and dust and mortar crumble from the ceiling. We had to make our way through the breach into the neighbouring cellar.’

The journalist Heinz Pettenberg described the panic in the cellars of the house of a friend where 300 people had sought shelter while fires began above. ‘
With two other men
, Fischer fought like mad to save the house. During the work they often had to go down to prevent a panic among the crazed group in the cellar. Fischer’s wife would blow a whistle and Fischer ran down with the pistol to control the mayhem. All inhibitions had fallen.’