The World at War (62 page)

LIEUTENANT GENERAL EAKER

We never had a morale problem with our crews. Of course after severe losses any group had a temporary period of reaction from it – human beings always react like that. And I must tell you that one of the reasons I think our morale was sustained is that shortly after I joined Air Marshal Harris, understudying the British effort, he told me, 'We have found that you must give any soldier or sailor or airman a chance for survival. I strongly recommend that you fix a period, a number of missions and then let your crews rest, or go home to join your training effort.' I worked out twenty-five missions at an early date, and the reason I arrived at that was that we began to show a pattern of two per cent of total loss with all our missions. Well, that gave a crew two per cent over twenty-five missions, which gave a crew a fifty per cent chance of survival, so I held to that twenty-five mission level for as long as I was at Eighth Air Force.
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AIR GUNNER COCHRANE

I think that combat flying is so impersonal that you don't get that intimate sense of loss if you see an aeroplane shot down that you'd have if your buddy on the battlefield had his head blown off right within arm's length. But I know of two fliers who developed a fear of flying to the point that they simply declined to fly any more and they were transferred out. I have no idea what happened to them, whether they were court-martialled or simply reassigned because of some medical justification.

MAJOR SCHROER

I told new pilots not to attack from behind in a direct attack but to move the plane up and down to confuse the rear gunner. I even told them to close their eyes in order not to see the tracer ammunition, which could frighten. I don't know whether I did the same, but I always tried to get as close as possible in order to have a better chance to hit it. The gunners started shooting their tracer ammunition I think at about one thousand metres distance, to get rid of their own fear.

MAJOR STEWART

I think the most complicated part of it was the assembly, that is getting together different Groups from numerous airfields that were situated all over East Anglia, lots of times in marginal weather, getting them into formation, getting them at one point at a certain time. At each one of them, each Group had its own time to arrive at that position and the formation of the
bomber stream, in other words getting yourself ready for attack. This always seemed to me the most difficult and the most complicated part of the mission.

GENERAL GALLAND

Hamburg was the first example of the very successful combined operation of the American and British air forces. The Americans during the day and the English during the night-time – this has been called
round-the-clock bombing. Also Bomber Command adopted a new tactic with countermeasures against our system, our radar was blind, and also they adopted the bomber-stream tactic, compared to the isolated bombing going on close to the targets. Both methods put our night-fighters in a completely new situation and the effect was that the night defence was absolutely minimal. The attack led to a compact mass attack on Hamburg, which was extremely effective, and this mass attack caused very big fire storms. Losses were very high and this time it was absolutely clear to everybody that by now we had to change to air defence as first priority. Goring was completely convinced to do so and tried to convince Hitler. Hitler, who was always in favour of attacks and against defence, decided completely against everybody's intention and he decided to build more bombers and attack England. This has been a terrible mistake but Hitler decided by his own and nobody was able to convince him to the contrary.

COLONEL CURTIS
LEMAY

4th Bombardment Wing, USAAF

One of the frailties of the human mind is always trying to find a sort of miracle or short way of doing something to get the job done without much effort. This was, of course, the goal of our intelligence people, always looking for a target that if you just destroy this one target it'll be the key thing that will cause the enemy to collapse and the war will be over. They discovered the ball-bearing industry, the main part of which was at
Schweinfurt – a large part of the ball bearings of Germany were made there. They forgot that they were getting a lot of them from Sweden and other places, so an attack on the ball-bearing industry wouldn't knock out a very vital cog in the German war-making machine.

ALBERT SPEER

When you hit Schweinfurt first it was to me like a nightmare getting true, because I was often thinking that bombing one of our bottlenecks of the armament industry would be much more effective than the bombing of cities. And one of the aims I always considered was bombing the ball-bearing industry, and really two attacks on Schweinfurt industry you did much more damage than you ever did before with all the ground bombing. We thought first that we are now at the end of our efforts for armaments industry. But I had a very good representative, Tessler, and he did this all means not only the repair but also the replacement of ball bearings with other devices, which could do the job not as good as the ball bearing but it could be done, and then we found that there were stocks in the Army and so stocks could be used too, so we could bridge over the lack of ball bearings for several months until we had repaired the damages. Of course we were frightened that there will be other raids on Schweinfurt and really there were other raids but too late. If you would have repeated those raids shortly afterwards and wouldn't have given us time to rebuild then it would have been a disastrous result.

MAJOR SCHROER

We didn't expect an attack coming that far into the country without fighter escort; we were very astonished at it. If you had a Group of twenty-seven planes and you don't know how many planes are joining you for a combined attack, twenty-seven planes is not much to attack hundreds of bombers. Besides it was very difficult to find out whether the fighter planes we were seeing were our own fighter planes or were Allied planes and there was very much concern and the attack could not be executed in the way it should be because of the fear of [P-47] Thunderbolts in the back. But later on we found out and we were informed by our ground station that no enemy fighters were there, so it was easier. But the trouble by that time was the long distance we had to fly to get to the bomber formations. Our detour to Frankfurt took almost all our petrol reserve and we have twenty minutes left and we all had to land in Frankfurt to get the fuel and later we didn't succeed in finding them again. My squadrons didn't – others did.

COLONEL
LEMAY

The first raid on Schweinfurt was to be a combination attack with Schweinfurt one target and the Messerschmitt plant at
Regensburg another. The plan was that my Division and the 1st Division would go in with fighter escort as far as they could. I would attack the Messerschmitt plant and then go out through the Brenner Pass and land in North Africa. That would mean that I took on the German Air Force on the way in. But the 1st Division coming behind me by ten, fifteen minutes or so, would come in relatively free because the main fighter force had been expended on me and would be on the ground rearming and refuelling, but they would have to fight going out. That was the plan. At the time the attack was launched the weather was good over the target but miserable in England. I managed to get my Division in the air because we'd been practising instrument take-offs for some time but the fighters did not get in the air and the 1st Division did not get in the air until an hour and fifteen minutes later. This placed the Bomber Commander [General Eaker] in a position of having to make a decision of aborting the whole operation or going under very adverse conditions. We'd been waiting so long for the weather for this important target that he decided to go. So we went in.
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GENERAL GALLAND

Schweinfurt had been the result of very good conditions in favour of the German fighter command. The American escort fighters were not able to follow the bomber over the target, they had to turn back about the area of the Rhine and we were able to intercept the bomber stream with most of our fighter units.

ALBERT SPEER

When in 1943 ball-bearing industry in Schweinfurt was attacked heavily with the American Air Force I thought that we couldn't continue our war production because for every armament it is necessary to have ball bearings. But to our good luck, the Americans and the British didn't continue for strategic reasons too, they had too high losses, as I see nowadays. Then the second time it happened on a much larger scale when on 12th May 1944, the Eighth American Air Force bombed oil plants in the middle of Germany. These plants were, we thought until then, are protected because they were too far away and the fighters couldn't accompany the bombers, but they did. This day 1 just was on the airfield to fly to see the damage done; I told my closest man in the planning office, the leading man of the planning office, with this the war is definitely lost, and I wrote a memorandum to Hitler in which I stated that after September 1944, after a few months, we shall run short of fuel because our stocks will be used, and the supply of new production of fuel is absolutely insufficient to the tanks and also to the planes. But Hitler just said I trust you are getting along; you did get along so many times, in increasing production when we thought production had been decreased, and possibly you will do it this time again.

DR GALBRAITH

The question of whether a more complete concentration on the oil targets would have shortened the war is really unanswerable. The RAF would have had to attack them in the daytime because the attacks were very imprecise at night – the losses would have been heavy. And this would have enabled the Germans to concentrate even more energy on the regeneration of the oil plant. They had half a million working on it; it might have been a million men because they wouldn't be repairing transport and other things. Most of us felt that concentration on major targets and hitting them day after day and week after week was the sound tactic. But I would be hesitant to reach a final conclusion because the overriding fact is that air-power bombing was a much less effective thing than was imagined at that time, and we've been learning in Korea and Vietnam ever since how ineffective and limited its effect is.

ALBERT SPEER

But again here it happens that you didn't repeat it as fast as we were frightened of and so the repairs could take place and we had at least the small part of the whole capacity once again for production. In October– November 1944 new raids were on the
oil industry and those raids were so successful that production was almost nil. The stock of gasoline for the Army was running very short: we had no more for instance to train fighter pilots for the fighters; the tanks were almost no more able to move but just short distances. For instance the Ardennes offensive was supposed on gaining large stocks of gasoline off the Americans, otherwise we couldn't succeed to get deep into the country, even if they had succeeded in breaking through.

DR GALBRAITH

Had the power plants been attacked this could have been disastrous but we might well have found out that the speed with which those were put back would be similar to the speed with which the aeroplane fighters were put back, or the speed with which the oil plants were put back. One just doesn't know how great the regenerative process would have been until it was experienced. It was almost my hunch that had the central power stations been taken out this would have done more damage but we might only have discovered that the Germans were very good at putting those back.

MAJOR GENERAL WALTHER WARLIMONT

Deputy Chief of Wehrmacht Operations

In headquarters one didn't notice very much, but I had some connections with the people when I came to Berlin in September 1944. All the lives in Germany were dominated by the Allied attacks, nobody was safe from air attacks here.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL EAKER

I think the greatest thing we did was destroy the Luftwaffe, making it possible for the subsequent sea and ground operations to be successful. You may recall that when the British were doing sweeps over the German airfields in France they didn't respond – they said why go up and get shot down, because the Spitfires outmanoeuvre us. The same way when we began to go over with our long-range fighters against their aerodromes: they'd move their planes off the aerodromes under the trees or into the autobahns, and bring them back when our fighters had left. The only reason, the only way in which we could bring the German Luftwaffe to engage with us was to do something that was causing them great damage, and Hitler and Goring forced them to respond to our bomber effort because we were cutting up their industry. And that's why we sent our fighters with our bombers, because it gave our fighters a chance to engage the enemy fighters when they came up after our bombers.

COLONEL JOHN MEYER

Commander 487th Fighter Squadron, Ninth USAAF

Just as I was starting down the runway I saw a lot of flak off the edge of the field. I called our control and asked him if there were any other aircraft in the area and he said no there weren't. At about that time I saw a Messerschmitt 109 that was headed directly at me, but I was still on the ground without flying speed and anybody who flies knows that an aeroplane is a pretty clumsy instrument when it's still on the ground. So that's memorable in the sense that I saw there was nothing I could do and my view was that I'd had it. Fortunately for me this German pilot saw a C-47 just at the end of the runway so instead of continuing his attack on me he pulled up with a wing-over and started shooting at this C-47, which put his tail right in front of me just about the time I got airborne. I pulled the gear up immediately and had my sights on him and shot him down before the wheels had fully retracted in the well.
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