The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (89 page)

For all its indiscriminate character, there is no denying that area bombing inflicted significant damage on the German war effort. It diverted air cover away from the strategically vital Eastern Front. In the spring of 1943, 70 per cent of German fighters were in the western European theatre, leaving German ground forces in the East increasingly vulnerable to Soviet air attacks. Lack of air support was one of the reasons the German tanks were beaten at Kursk. By April 1944 there were only 500 single-engine fighters left on Eastern Front, facing
around 13,000 Soviet aircraft. Moreover, as Speer later noted, ‘the nearly 20,000 anti-aircraft guns stationed in the homeland could almost have doubled the anti-tank defences on the Eastern Front.’ (The German 88 mm AA guns were equally fearsome anti-tank weapons when dug in and firing low.) The situation on the Eastern Front was, indeed, the principal rationale for the bombing of Dresden. ‘In the midst of winter,’ the RAF crews who flew the mission were told in their briefing notes, ‘with refugees pouring westwards and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium’:

Dresden has developed into an industrial city of first-class importance… its multiplicity of telephones and rail facilities is of major value for controlling the defence of that part of the front now threatened by [the Soviet] offensive. The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front… and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.

That illustrates how difficult it was to distinguish military from civilian targets by this stage in the war. Although the aim was partly to render German civilians homeless(and dead, though that was not made explicit) as well as to impress the Soviets, bombing Dresden was also designed to weaken German command and control capabilities. The relentless pressure exerted by the bombing raids also helped the British and American armies by eroding German fighter strength on the Western Front; at the time of D-Day, the Germans had barely 300 serviceable planes available to repel the invaders, as against 12,000 on the British and American side.

Furthermore, strategic bombing greatly hampered Speer’s considerable efforts to mobilize Germany’s economy for total war. In May 1944, for example, the Germans were still producing 156,000 tons of aviation fuel, but bombing of their oil installations, which began in that month, cut production to 17,000 tons in August and just 11,000 tons in January 1945. Not all the available statistics are, it is true, so impressive. As we have seen, the Allies dropped around 1.6 million tons of explosives and incendiaries on Germany and North-West Europe, more than twenty times the amount the Germans dropped on Britain throughout the entire war, including the V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets. The impact on German armaments production was,
at first sight, minimal. As Figure 16.2 shows, the major raids of July 1943 merely slowed the growth of arms production, which had resumed its upward trend by March 1944. It was not until after July 1944, as the Allied raids reached their devastating climax, that output from Speer’s factories declined. Even then, production in January 1945 was merely reduced to the level of December 1943; it was still more than double what it had been in 1941. A breakdown of the main components of German arms output suggests that bombing hampered only some sectors of the economy (see
Table 16.1
). The production of vehicles, ships, gunpowder and explosives were all substantially reduced between June 1943 and January 1945. Yet the production of rifles and pistols rose by a fifth and that of tanks by nearly two-thirds. Production of aircraft and ammunition was virtually unchanged.

Nevertheless, the best measure of the impact of strategic bombing is not actual output, but the difference between actual and potential output. In January 1945 Speer and his colleagues sought to calculate the damage done by Allied bombing in the previous year. The figures are impressive: 35 per cent fewer tanks than planned, 31 per cent fewer aircraft and 42 per cent fewer trucks. No fewer than two million men were tied down in air defence; valuable manpower that might have been productively employed. We cannot know exactly what wonders Speer might have worked with the German economy in the absence of sustained bombardment, but what we do know is that Speer himself called the air war ‘the greatest lost battle on the German side’.

Moreover, there is at least some evidence that by 1943, especially following the Hamburg firestorm, German civilian morale was showing signs of strain. To be sure, bombing did not encourage Germans to overthrow Hitler, as had been hoped in the wake of the Battle of Kursk. But the devastating scale of Allied attacks did much to undermine ordinary Germans’ belief in their government’s propaganda. One joke doing the rounds in December 1943 was sufficiently close to the bone that SD agents made a note of it:

Table 16.1: The impact of allied bombing (percentage change between June 1943 and January 1945)

Figure 16.2
The impact of bombing, January 1942–January 1945 (January 1943 = 100)

Dr Goebbels has been bombed out in Berlin. He rescues two suitcases and brings them onto the street and goes back into the house to hunt for other things. When he comes out again, both suitcases have been stolen. Dr Goebbels is very upset, weeps and rails: when asked what was so valuable in the suitcases, he replies: ‘In the one was Retaliation (
Vergeltung
) and in the other Final Victory (
Endsieg
).’

Demoralization wasnot a political phenomenon; rather it led to apathy and cynicism, one symptom of which was rising absenteeism in the workplace. No one who reads Gerd Ledig’s harrowing post-war novel
Payback
(
Vergeltung
), based on his own experiences as an
anti-aircraft officer in the later stages of the war, can doubt that Churchill did achieve his object of demoralizing the German population. In the inferno Ledig depicts, ordinary Germans are reduced to bestiality, murdering and raping one another in a struggle that has ceased to be about anything as rational as survival.

The moral cost of strategic bombing was nevertheless high. As was pointed out in 1943 by the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, ‘To bomb cities as cities, deliberately to attack civilians, quite irrespective of whether or not they are actively contributing to the war effort, isa wrong deed, whether done by the Nazis or by ourselves.’ Few airmen experienced – or lived to relate – the bizarre role reversal that befell Sergeant John Charnock, a 23-year-old Australian gunner who was blown out of his Lancaster at the start of an RAF raid on Frankfurt in March 1944. Charnock parachuted to the ground just in time to witness the full brunt of the bombardment. Having landed, by a grotesque irony, in a freshly dug grave, he survived the raid, but was very nearly beaten to death by an angry crowd of Germans who set upon him in Bruchfeldstrasse. Yelling ‘
Luftgangster
! Terror bomber! Murderer!
Schwein
!’, they spat on him and beat him with bricks, iron bars and even an unexploded incendiary bomb. Other airmen shot down over Germany were hanged from lampposts. In Ledig’s
Payback
, the American airman who stumbles half-naked through the mayhem he himself has helped to create is manifestly just as demoralized as his German victims.

For those who completed their missions, none of this was apparent. ‘Flying is such a clinical business,’ one RAF officer explained after the war. ‘You took off and, unless you were hit or anything happened to you, you just came back to a relatively civilized world. You were obviously in some danger when you were flying, but you were not as emotionally involved in what goes on to the extent that you would be in a tank.’ Even the deaths of comrades could be subsumed into the less painful ‘death’ of their plane. Typical was the way the bomber’s target looked to one pilot, who flew numerous missions over Germany:

It was an awesome sight. Below, a carpet of red where thousands of incendiaries had fallen, with big yellow bubbles of light as bombs hit the deck,
especially the 4,000lb Cookies. It was like looking at a pile of red hot ashes, with violent eruptions of sudden light from the explosions. Drifting down in the sky would be the Pathfinders’ red and green flares, dripping clusters of light, whilst all around was the crack, red flashes and puffs of black smoke from the flak. Searchlights in their hundreds sometimes illuminated the target, fingers of light waving backwards and forwards, occasionally trapping an aircraft in their beam. It looked like some sort of hellish inferno. On one trip, to Nuremburg, I recall the light from the fires below illuminating the sky so much it was like daylight and I was able to read my log at 18,000ft.

Reading the log by the light of an inferno 18,000 feet below; it is a vivid summation of the bomber’s disconnection from the indiscriminate death and destruction he is causing. This was precisely the attitude that allowed ‘civilized’ men to engage in the mass slaughter of civilians. The higher the Allied planes could fly, and the more their routes were fixed by technologies like ‘Pathfinder’, the more the bomber crews’ sense of detachment grew. Herein lay the practical difference between incinerating women and children from thousands of feet in the air and herding them into gas chambers. It was possible to pulverize a city without looking into the eyes of those civilians being invisibly consigned to hell below. Allied bombing was as indiscriminate as Nazi racial policy was meticulously discriminating. The moral difference – which has lately been forgotten by some German writers – is that the crews of Bomber Command were flying their missions in order to defeat Nazi Germany and end the war. Whether or not this was the best means of achieving that end was not for them to decide; their intent was not dishonourable. For the Nazis, let it be reiterated, the murder of Jews and other ‘alien’ civilians was always an end in itself. Hatred filled the minds of the SS men at Bełżec; it was absent from the thoughts of Allied airmen.

It may remain debatable how far bombing served to end the war against Germany. There can be little doubt that it hastened the end
against Japan. At no point prior to the attack on Hiroshima did Japan’s leaders evince read inessto end hostilities other than on terms designed to preserve the untrammelled power not merely of the Emperor but also of the military. Some members of the government, including the Prime Minister Admiral Suzuki Kantarō, as well as senior courtiers and even the Emperor himself, were willing to contemplate a negotiated peace through either Switzerland or, preferably, the Soviet Union, but the War Minister, Anami Korechika, and the Chiefs of Staff, General Umeza Yoshijirō and Admiral Toyoda Soemu, insisted on ‘prosecuting the war to the bitter end in order to uphold our national essence
(kokutai),
protect the imperial land and achieve our goals of conquest’. Suzuki himself publicly spoke of ‘fighting to the end, the entire population uniting asone body’. Given the fanatical mood of resistance that the Americans had already encountered on Okinawa and other outlying islands, there was every reason to expect an amphibious invasion of Japan itself to be exceedingly bloody. As in Europe, it was the last year of the war that was the most lethal. In the year after July 1944, US forces had suffered more than 185,000 casualties and more than 53,000 deaths – more than half of all the fatalities in the entire Pacific war. The Japanese had lost many more men, perhaps as many as half a million, in the same period but were still very far from having exhausted their reserves of manpower and will. Indeed, the Supreme Command had already prepared ‘Operation Decision’
(Ketsu-gō),
which envisaged the deployment of 2.35 million troops along the Japanese coast to repel any Allied landings; these would be reinforced by four million civilian employees of the armed services and a civilian militia numbering twenty-eight million. It is easy to forget that the Japanese armed forces had suffered significantly fewer fatalities than the German – the total death toll for the entire period between 1937 and 1945 has been put at 1.74 million. A conventional invasion of Japan would have been no D-Day; it might have been more like Stalingrad by the sea.