CHAPTER ELEVEN

Firestorms: War in the Sky

THE BOMBER BARONS

BY THE WINTER of 1944, bomber operations against Germany had attained awesome destructive power. On 14 October, U.S. and British air forces launched a joint operation, Hurricane, to demonstrate to the Germans—and also to the Allied Chiefs of Staff—the scale of force they could unleash in a single twenty-four-hour period. First, in daylight, 1,251 aircraft of the U.S. Eighth Air Force attacked rail centres at Saarbrücken, Kaiserslautern, and Cologne, escorted by 749 fighters. Six bombers and one fighter were lost. Meanwhile, 519 Lancasters, 474 Halifaxes and 20 Mosquitoes of RAF Bomber Command mounted a daylight raid on Duisburg, escorted by British fighters. They dropped 4,918 tons of bombs, for the loss of thirteen Lancasters and one Halifax. With the coming of darkness, a further 498 Lancasters, 468 Halifaxes and 39 Mosquitoes again attacked Duisburg in two waves, two hours apart. A total of 4,540 tons of explosives and incendiaries were dropped, for the loss of five Lancasters and two Halifaxes. German casualties in the city were unmeasured, but heavy. On the same night, 233 Lancasters and seven Mosquitoes struck Brunswick. Only one Lancaster was lost. The old city centre of Brunswick was totally destroyed—an area of 370 hectares—and 561 people died. It was never thought necessary for Bomber Command to visit Brunswick again.

Meanwhile—still during the night of 14 October—the RAF sent twenty Mosquitoes to Hamburg, sixteen to Berlin, eight to Mannheim and two to Düsseldorf on nuisance raids, designed to drive the inhabitants of those cities into their shelters and force the defenders to expend weary hours manning guns and searchlights. One Mosquito was lost over Berlin. Another 141 bombers manned by crews completing operational training launched a diversionary sweep across the North Sea. One hundred and thirty-two RAF aircraft mounted electronic counter-measures operations, to frustrate German radar and communications. By the time the last aircraft turned homewards, a total of 10,050 tons of bombs had been dropped on Germany, the highest total attained in any single twenty-four-hour period of the war.

Yet what did all this mean? What were the fruits of this huge effort, which absorbed a substantial part of the war-making powers of the United States, and consumed a proportion of Britain’s industrial capacity equal to that devoted to the entire British Army? The bombing of Germany destroyed almost two million homes and killed up to 600,000 Germans, many of these in the war’s closing months. From beginning to end, the Western allies encompassed the deaths of two or three German civilians by bombing for every German soldier they killed on the battlefield. Yet did this shorten the conflict, or achieve an impact commensurate with its human and industrial cost both to the victors and to the vanquished?

Between 1918 and 1939, the apostles of air power had preached the gospel of strategic bombing, which they argued could render redundant the bloody struggles between armies on the ground by destroying the industries essential to a nation’s war effort. Airmen in Britain and America also saw in bombing the key to their own struggle for independence from the older fighting services, proof that an air force was much more than a mere appendage of armies and fleets. Before the war, many European politicians, not to mention the public, were much alarmed by visions of cataclysm inflicted from the skies, and by such early manifestations of the totalitarian states’ contribution to history as the destruction of Guernica and Nanking, Warsaw and Rotterdam.

From 1940 onwards, however, the combatants surprised themselves by learning to live with the consequences of aerial assault. They found that bombing inflicted great misery, hacked brutally at the culture of centuries, and imposed pain on industry. It would be ludicrous to imply that the German people found the experience of being bombed acceptable, or to deny that Hitler’s war production suffered not only from damage to plant, but also from absenteeism and chronic dislocation to the lives of the labour force. After the Luftwaffe had tried and failed to break the British in the blitz of 1940–41, however, a more rational and less absolutist view of bombing supplanted pre-war expectations of doom, among all save the Allied air chiefs.

The airmen remained messianically committed to strategic bombing. In America, the USAAF argued that the Luftwaffe had failed against Britain because it had not systematically addressed precision targets vital to the nation’s infrastructure—oil, transport links, the power grid. The RAF believed that the German attack upon Britain had merely lacked the sustained weight to strike a mortal blow. In 1941, the Chief of Air Staff Sir Charles Portal demanded from Churchill a commitment to create a force of 4,000 heavy bombers, a fantasy which remained unfulfilled even in 1945 by the combined might of the RAF and USAAF’s squadrons in Europe. Churchill was always sceptical about the airmen’s visions. “All things are always on the move simultaneously,” he wrote to Portal in October 1941, “the Air Staff would make a mistake to put their claims too high.”

Throughout 1940 and 1941, however, the RAF’s bomber offensive was the only means by which Britain could carry the war to Germany. The prime minister threw his weight behind the creation of a great bomber force. Unless the British could convince themselves that air attack might eventually defeat Hitler, what course was open to them save a negotiated peace? Even Churchill at his most optimistic never supposed that Britain’s armies could alone beat the Axis. It was ironic that the RAF thus set about attempting to do to the Germans exactly what the Luftwaffe had signally failed to achieve against Britain. The bomber offensive was to be lavishly endowed with ironies.

In 1942, even as the skies over Britain brightened immeasurably with the accession of the United States and Russia as allies, the Combined Chiefs of Staff agreed that bombing remained vital, because it would be years before the Anglo-American armies could undertake a decisive land campaign. In the secrecy of Whitehall, the British were obliged to acknowledge the failure of their precision air attacks upon German industrial targets, for which the RAF’s night bombing force was too weak and ill-equipped. They embarked instead upon the policy of “area bombing”—a systematic assault upon the cities of Germany with a mixture of high-explosive and incendiary bombs, designed to break the morale of the enemy’s industrial workforce, as well as to destroy his means of production. For the rest of the war, this offensive gathered momentum, as the RAF’s Bomber Command grew in strength, despite heavy losses of British aircrew—56,000 highly trained personnel were killed by the war’s end, almost double the fatal casualties suffered by the American bomber men in Europe.

The USAAF’s Eighth Air Force was slow to build up forces in Britain with which to launch its own precision campaign. In 1942, it confined itself largely to attacking short-range targets in France. In 1943, when formations of B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators began to attack Germany, their losses against German fighters were alarming, sometimes horrendous. In the worst single month, October 1943, the Americans lost 186 heavy bombers—a 6.6 per cent casualty rate. In January 1944, during the RAF’s so-called Battle of Berlin, Bomber Command lost 314 aircraft, or an average 5 per cent of its strength on every raid. Since a British bomber crew was obliged to carry out thirty operations to complete a tour of operations, and an American crew twenty-five, it needed no wizard of odds to compute that an airman was more likely to die than to survive his personal experience of bombing Germany.

Yet in 1944 the offensive was transformed. The Americans achieved a decisive breakthrough. Their pre-war doctrine of the self-defending bomber formation had proved unsustainable. Their bombers became, instead, dependent upon fighter escort for protection. It had always been assumed that it was technically impossible to build a fighter with the range to fly deep into Germany, together with the performance to match that of the enemy’s single-seat interceptors, Messerschmitt 109s and Focke-Wulf 190s, once it got there. By fitting the British Rolls-Royce engine to the American P-51 Mustang aircraft, however, a miracle was accomplished. Equipped with fuel drop tanks, the Mustang could fly with the bombers to Berlin, then outfight the Luftwaffe. After months of failure in its efforts to destroy Germany’s aircraft production by bombing factories, by the summer of 1944 Eighth Air Force’s fighters were wrecking the Luftwaffe in the sky, killing irreplaceable German pilots as well as shooting down their planes. Between January 1941 and June 1944, the Luftwaffe had lost 31,000 aircrew. Between June and October 1944, it lost 13,000. In 1944, the USAAF destroyed 3,706 enemy aircraft merely in daylight operations over Germany. This was an extraordinary achievement, which conferred dominance of Europe’s skies upon the Allies.

The RAF’s night attacks, which were already exploiting improved technology, now also profited from the decline of the German fighter force. During the spring and early summer of 1944, the Allied air forces were largely diverted from attacking Germany to strike targets in France and the Low Countries, in support of D-Day. When the bombers returned to Germany once the Allies were established ashore, the enemy had lost most of his coastal air defences. From July onwards, American and British bomber losses fell steeply. There were still some painful days and nights. But average Allied casualties seldom exceeded 1.5 per cent, and were often less.

Yet by the late summer of 1944 enthusiasm for bombing had waned within the Allied leadership. The politicians, generals, admirals, were weary of the airmen’s extravagant forecasts. Sir Arthur Harris, C-in-C of Bomber Command, would forever be haunted by his promise to Churchill in the winter of 1943 that, if his Lancasters achieved another 15,000 sorties against Berlin, the Germans would inevitably be forced to surrender by 1 April 1944. Harris achieved his quota of Lancaster sorties, amid dreadful casualties, but by April Fool’s Day there was not the smallest sign of Germany’s collapse. Only two months before D-Day, General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, America’s air commander in Europe, suggested that the impending triumph of bombing made a descent on Normandy redundant, and urged a less hazardous assault on Norway. The British Army and Royal Navy, in particular, were embittered by the losses they had suffered in their ground campaigns and in the Battle of the Atlantic because the RAF’s obsession with strategic bombing crippled its ability to provide support for land and sea operations.

All the available evidence showed that Germany continued to achieve miracles of industrial production despite the Allies’ huge commitment to bombing. Politically, Churchill had exploited the strategic air offensive in his long struggle to reconcile Stalin to delays in launching the Second Front. But that was now over. The minds of the mightiest war leaders on both sides of the Atlantic were fixed upon the land campaign in north-west Europe. The importance of tactical air support for the armies was undisputed. But no one much cared any longer what Bomber Command and Eighth Air Force, supported by Fifteenth Air Force from Italy, were or were not doing to Hitler’s empire. The extravagant advocates of air power, both American and British, were discredited in the eyes of their peers. The “new warfare” had plainly failed to destroy Hitler’s empire. The footsoldiers were being obliged to fight their way through Germany in the “old warfare” way.

Now, however, there was a new irony. After almost discrediting themselves by the extravagance of their claims, in the spring of 1944 the American airmen had indeed identified Germany’s vital weakness: oil. To continue the war, Hitler was overwhelmingly dependent upon the production of synthetic fuel. The Germans found it incomprehensible that, until May 1944, no systematic attempt had been made by the Allied air force to strike their oil plants. When Eighth Air Force began to do so, alongside Fifteenth Air Force flying from Italy, the results were remarkable. Petroleum available to Germany fell from 927,000 tons in March 1944 to 715,000 tons in May, and 472,000 tons in June. Luftwaffe supplies of aviation spirit declined from 180,000 tons in April to 50,000 tons in June, 10,000 tons in August. Germany needed 300,000 tons of fuel a month to fight the war, yet by September reserves had fallen to half that amount. Speer’s spectacular achievements in sustaining aircraft production became meaningless without fuel. These statistics were, of course, unknown to the Allied leaders, but Ultra provided important clues. Even though the first USAAF raids in May had limited effect, intercepted signals traffic showed how much the attacks had alarmed the enemy. So low had the credibility of the Allied “bomber barons” sunk, however, that no one important in either Washington or London was persuaded that here, at last, the airmen had found Hitler’s vital weakness, a short cut to ending the war. During the armies’ advance into Germany, the RAF and USAAF begged SHAEF to emphasize to media correspondents that the devastation they met was the proud fruit of the air forces’ efforts, rather than of mere artillery. Yet Bradley’s aide Chester Hansen wrote on 7 December: “The gross claims of our airmen on the winning of the war by airmen are discounted by our ground force people.” In October 1944, so disenchanted had Marshall and the U.S. Chiefs of Staff become with the airmen’s unfulfilled promises that they seriously contemplated ordering the USAAF to abandon all strategic operations which did not promise directly to diminish German fighting power.

Air attacks on oil plants achieved dramatic successes in late May and June. They were somewhat interrupted during the summer invasion support campaign, but the American airmen were now convinced of their decisive importance, and threw immense effort into the oil campaign through late summer. As autumn gave way to winter, the weather provided the enemy with just sufficient breathing spaces from American precision bombing to enable the Germans to keep their armies moving. Almost every synthetic plant proved capable of repair within two or three weeks of a given attack. Repeat visits to targets were therefore essential. When these did not take place, because of thick overcast or unavailability of forces, a thin stream of oil flowed once more to Germany’s forces.

The Americans also focused sharply on transportation targets, as urged by SHAEF’s deputy Supreme Commander, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, and his scientific advisers. In the final months of the war, at last the American airmen could claim that they were playing a vital role in strangling the Wehrmacht. It was extraordinary that German production continued at all. It should never be forgotten that, despite all the efforts of the air forces, until May 1945 ammunition continued to reach Hitler’s forces in sufficient quantities to sustain the struggle. But, from the end of 1944 onwards, the loss of vital factories and raw materials to the Russians, damage to rail links, together with the acute shortage of oil, combined to create immense difficulties for the Germans in producing armaments and in using them effectively on the battlefield. The Luftwaffe, already crippled by disastrous failures of aircraft design and management, was now rendered almost impotent by lack of fuel either to train new pilots or to fly operational aircraft.

Amid the ruins of Germany and impending Allied victory, the USAAF and its leaders received less credit than they deserved for this success. All military achievements can be judged only in the wider context of grand strategy. For instance, if the RAF’s Bomber Command had succeeded in its efforts to sink the pocket battleship Tirpitz in 1941, 1942 or even 1943, this would have made a notable contribution to the war. Yet, by the time the airmen destroyed the great vessel in November 1944, its sinking had become strategically irrelevant, a mere clever circus trick. Likewise, and far more important, had the Allied air forces been able to strike effectively against Germany’s oil supply earlier in the war, they might have received the laurels for dramatically foreshortening the outcome. As it was, by the time the Americans identified the vital arteries of Hitler’s war machine, the armies saw themselves on the brink of victory, without much need to acknowledge the contribution of the bombers.

The success of the USAAF could have been both swifter and more complete if the British had also committed themselves with real resolve to the oil campaign. In the autumn of 1944 some important British airmen, including the Chief of Air Staff and the Director of Bomber Operations, became convinced that the RAF should shift its forces from destroying cities to hitting oil plants. Sir Charles Portal was also persuaded of the merits of Tedder’s “Transportation Plan”—battering the rail, road and water links of Germany. Yet both these policies foundered upon the same rock: the obsessive determination of Bomber Command’s C-in-C, Sir Arthur Harris, to complete the programme of destroying Germany’s cities which he had begun in March 1942. By the autumn of 1944, the British aircraft-construction programme undertaken back in 1941 at last reached fruition. Heavy bombers were pouring off the production lines, giving Harris a striking force of unprecedented power. His squadrons could call upon ever-more sophisticated radar navigation, marking and aiming devices. German defences were crumbling. Harris’s power to inflict fire and death upon the cities of the enemy reached its zenith at the very moment when sensible strategists had become persuaded that there were much more useful ways of deploying Allied air power. That shrewd scientific civil servant Sir Henry Tizard acknowledged as far back as 1942 that Bomber Command might eventually inflict catastrophic injury upon Germany. He expressed doubt, however, about whether such injury would prove decisive. By late 1944, scepticism about the decisive value of destroying German real estate had become widespread in the Allied corridors of power.

Between its assaults upon cities, Bomber Command did attack transportation and oil targets. In the heated conflict of opinion which developed between the Air Ministry and Harris in the winter of 1944, Bomber Command’s C-in-C kept his critics at bay by paying some lip-service to their demands. But he never disguised his determination to employ the chief weight of his forces where he wanted them. Between July and September 1944, some 11 per cent of British sorties were directed at oil targets and 20 per cent against cities. Between October and December, 14 per cent of RAF bomber attacks fell upon oil, 58 per cent upon cities. Repeated Air Ministry missives to Bomber Command, urging greater concentration on oil, vanished swiftly into Harris’s waste-paper basket. In a letter to Portal on 1 November 1944, he deplored the range of demands on his resources and urged the importance of persisting with the assault on cities:

In the past 18 months, Bomber Command has virtually destroyed 45 out of the leading 60 German cities. In spite of invasion diversions, we have so far managed to keep up and even to exceed our average of 2 cities devastated a month . . . There are not many industrial centres of population now left intact. Are we going to abandon this vast task, which the Germans themselves have long admitted to be their worst headache, just as it nears completion?

All that was required to complete his grand design, said Harris, was the destruction of Magdeburg, Halle, Leipzig, Dresden, Chemnitz, Nuremberg, Munich, Coblenz, Karlsruhe and some undamaged areas of Berlin and Hanover. Harris never wavered in his opposition to attacking oil and transportation—indeed, everything save Germany’s cities. He derided those who advocated such wishy-washy policies. He wrote contemptuously to Portal on 25 October 1944: “During the past few weeks, every panacea-monger and ‘me too expert,’ to many of whom we had already (we hoped) given the quietus in the past, has raised his head again.”

Portal responded on 5 November: “At the risk of your dubbing me ‘another panacea merchant,’ I believe the air offensive against oil gives us by far the best hope of complete victory in the next few months . . .” On 12 November, the Chief of Air Staff returned to the charge, rejecting Harris’s argument for completing the destruction of Germany’s cities: “I know that you have long felt such a plan to be the most effective way of bringing about the collapse of Germany . . . If I knew you to be as wholehearted in the attack on oil as in the past you have been in the matter of attacking cities, I would have little to worry about.”

In November, 24.6 per cent of Bomber Command’s sorties were devoted to attacking oil plants, delivering a larger tonnage of bombs than the USAAF’s Eighth Air Force. Portal wrote again to Harris on 8 January 1945, urging even greater efforts. He pointed out bluntly that, but for the success of the Americans in creating a “favourable air situation,” Bomber Command’s attack on cities might well have ceased to be sustainable. This was indeed a remarkable admission from the head of the RAF: only the success of American air policy had saved that of Britain from humiliating failure. None of these arguments moved Harris, however. He was a man of elemental passions. Churchill observed after the war that Bomber Command’s C-in-C was “a considerable commander,” but he added: “there was a certain coarseness about him.” Harris told Portal defiantly that he would resign if the Air Staff had lost confidence in his direction of the bomber offensive.

In the face of such obduracy, Britain’s Chief of Air Staff retreated. On 20 January 1945, he wrote to Harris: “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 . . .” This was an extraordinarily feeble letter for the head of the Royal Air Force to write to a subordinate commander. But propaganda had made “Bomber” Harris one of the most celebrated war leaders Britain possessed. At a time when it was plain that the war would end within months, Portal lacked the stomach for the huge row that must accompany Harris’s dismissal. While Churchill no longer revealed much interest in the bomber offensive, he had always displayed respect for Harris’s leadership. It was most unlikely that the prime minister would welcome, even if he was willing to acquiesce in, the dismissal of Bomber Command’s C-in-C when victory was at hand. Harris should have been sacked in the winter of 1944 for his defiance of the policy approved by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, and for his insubordination towards Portal. Contrary to widespread belief, Harris did not invent area bombing. This was established before he assumed command of his forces. But he executed the policy with a Cromwellian zeal which ensured that his name is forever identified with the destruction of Germany’s cities in the Second World War.

The USAAF focused its attacks through the closing period of the war upon oil and transportation targets. “We should never allow the history of this war to convict us of throwing the strategic bomber at the man in the street,” declared General Ira Eaker, Eighth Air Force’s commander, in January 1945. Yet such fervently moral observations would not have impressed the Germans beneath Eighth Air Force’s assaults. It was true that American targeting specified rail junctions, bridges and suchlike, rather than city centres. But, given the mean error of aiming accuracy, a great many American bombs landed on civilian residential areas rather than on infrastructure targets. When conditions were overcast and it was necessary to bomb by radar, as was often the case, the destruction wrought by the USAAF was broadcast almost as widely as that generated by the RAF’s area attacks. The British found it convenient publicly to deny the existence of any moral issue about striking at German centres of population. The Americans did acknowledge a moral issue, but killed many civilians anyway. There is no evidence that the German people, then or later, recognized much practical distinction between the brands of misery imposed upon them by the respective Allied air forces. To an extraordinary degree, and especially in the last months of the war, the air chiefs were left to make policy as they saw fit. On the American side, writes the historian Michael Sherry, “after September 1944, no one outside the air force carefully examined its methods of bombing. Whether it chose to blast factories, mine sea-lanes or level cities was largely for [General “Hap”] Arnold and his subordinates to decide . . . The leaders and technicians of the American air force were driven by technological fanaticism.”

It is important to establish the background against which the last phase of the bomber offensive took place, because this proved overwhelmingly the most destructive. Between September 1944 and April 1945, the Western allies dropped more than 800,000 tons of bombs on Germany, 60 per cent of the total tonnage delivered between 1939 and 1945. German industrial production peaked in September 1944, and thereafter declined relentlessly as plant and raw materials in occupied territories were lost. In January 1945, with considerable courage Speer informed Hitler that the German economy was within weeks of collapse. From an Allied viewpoint, there was an overwhelming case for maintaining air attacks on oil installations and transport links. It would have been unthinkable to stand down Bomber Command and the U.S. Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces while the Germans continued fiercely to resist Allied assaults on the battlefield. It is hard to imagine, however, that any strategic purpose was served, or might rationally have been expected to be served, by continuing the destruction of cities. Yet this is what happened, on a vastly greater scale than ever before. In August 1943, its most active month of that year, Bomber Command dropped 20,149 tons of bombs on Germany, and Eighth Air Force 3,999. In October 1944, Bomber Command dropped 61,204 tons, Eighth Air Force 38,961 tons. In February 1945, British and American tonnages were 45,889 and 46,088 respectively; in March, 67,637 and 65,962. In all, in the first four months of 1945 the British dropped 181,740 tons of bombs on Germany, and Eighth Air Force 188,573. In the whole of 1943, the British had dropped only 157,367 tons. Such statistics emphasize how much destruction was done to Germany’s cities at a phase of the war when “de-housing” civilians had become meaningless to everyone except the wretched Germans beneath.

Bishop Bell of Chichester, one of the most prominent British civilian critics of area bombing, had delivered a stinging rebuke in February 1944:

I desire to challenge the Government on the policy which directs the bombing of enemy towns on the present scale, especially with reference to civilians who are non-combatants . . . It is of supreme importance that we, who are the liberators of Europe, should so use power that it is always under the control of Law. It is because our bombing of enemy towns—this “area bombing”—raises this issue of bombing unlimited that such immense importance is bound to attach to the policy and action of His Majesty’s Government.

It is a tribute to the maintenance of democracy in Britain that such a statement could be made, and publicly debated, in the midst of a world war, even if after years of suffering at the hands of the Luftwaffe few among the bishop’s British audience were in a mood to heed him.

Most people believed that the German people deserved their fate. Yet it seems debatable whether Allied aircraft were appropriately employed in belatedly administering punishment to the German people, as distinct from inflicting strategic damage upon their capacity to continue the war. The bomber offensive may be perceived in four phases. From 1940 through 1942, it inflicted negligible damage upon the Germans, but represented a heroic earnest of British defiance. In 1943, the impact of intensified bombing was assuaged by increased industrial output, but air attack obliged the Nazis seriously to address the defence of the Reich. From the spring of 1944 onwards, the bomber offensive achieved a terrible maturity. It made mounting inroads on Germany’s industrial capacity, and brought the Luftwaffe to its knees. Richard Overy, among others, has justly highlighted the importance of bombing in forcing Hitler to devote huge resources—above all some 10,000 of his excellent 88mm guns—to the home defence of the Reich when these deadly weapons would otherwise have been deployed on the fighting fronts, to the detriment of the Allied armies. This drain on battlefield armaments would have been even greater had not Hitler professed an unconcern, even satisfaction, about the destruction inflicted by bombing: “[it] actually works in our favour, because it is creating a body of people with nothing to lose—people who will therefore fight on with utter fanaticism.”

Up to 1945, there seems little difficulty in justifying the bomber offensive militarily and morally, as a matter of both desirability and necessity. In all wars, combatants must pay a moral price for military actions, and painful choices must be accepted. Churchill agonized before D-Day about the inevitable deaths of thousands of French civilians if France’s rail links were bombed. He reluctantly concluded that the greater good—the success of the invasion—must be held paramount, and he was surely right. Few British or American people worried much about the fate of the people of Germany during the war years. Why indeed should they have done so? The Germans had brought unspeakable misery upon the world.

Yet in the early months of 1945 Bishop Bell’s remarks a year earlier attained a new relevance. By this last phase, the moral cost of killing German civilians in unprecedented numbers outweighed any possible strategic advantage. The wholesale destruction of some great cities, Dresden foremost among them, could have been averted, even if attacks on urban rail centres had continued. Ironically, and although the leaders of the USAAF never admitted this, Spaatz’s aircraft joined in many area attacks in the last weeks, because they ran out of identifiable precision targets. The performance of the strategic air forces at this period was a murderous, largely futile muddle. “I felt that again our efforts were rather disconnnected,” wrote Tedder, as Eisenhower’s deputy. “We were attacking more or less simultanously oil, cities, depots, marshalling yards, canals and factories. In this I could discern no comprehensive or economical use of our overwhelming air forces.” Churchill or Portal should have stopped Harris’s manic assault on Germany’s surviving cities. Neither did so, Churchill because he was preoccupied elsewhere, Portal because he lacked the steel indispensable to great military commanders.

The USAAF’s strategic offensive achieved formidable success, in winning air supremacy over Europe and in crippling German oil production and transport links. By contrast, the final stage of the area offensive against Germany’s cities contributed little to the defeat of the Nazis, and cast a moral shadow over Allied victory which has never been lifted. It is impossible to fight any war wholly humanely. In most respects, the Western allies displayed commendable charity in their conduct of total war against an enemy bereft of civilized sentiment. Aerial assault, however, provided the exception. It was a policy quite at odds with the spirit in which the Americans and British otherwise conducted their war effort. The remoteness of bombing rendered tolerable in the eyes of Western political leaders and military commanders, not to mention their aircrew, actions which would have seemed repugnant and probably unbearable had the Allies confronted the consequences at close quarters. Eisenhower’s soldiers frequently found themselves killing local inhabitants in the course of battles for Germany’s towns and village. They would have surely revolted at the notion of systematically slaughtering civilians by artillery bombardment or machine-gun fire. This is what the Allied air forces did, nonetheless, protected by the curious moral absolution granted by a separation of some thousands of feet of airspace, together with the pragmatic excuse that it was impossible to hit targets of military relevance with air-dropped missiles without inflicting what is now called “collateral damage.”

We should recognize, however, that it is far easier to pass such judgements amid the relative tranquillity of the twenty-first century than it seemed in 1945, when Hitler’s nation was still doing its utmost to kill American and British people, together with millions of Nazi captives, by every means within its power. Some Germans today brand the bombing of their cities a war crime. This seems an incautious choice of words. It is possible to deplore Harris’s excesses without accepting that they should be judged in such emotive language. For all its follies and bloody misjudgements, the strategic air offensive was a military operation designed to hasten the collapse of Germany’s ability to make war. It stopped as soon as Hitler’s people ceased to fight. Most of Germany’s massacres, by contrast, were carried out against defenceless people who possessed not the slightest power to injure Hitler’s empire. They were murdered for ideological reasons, devoid of military purpose.

LIBS, LANCS AND FORTS

THOSE WHO CARRIED out the Allied bomber offensive never saw themselves as persecutors of innocent women and children. They were young, and far too preoccupied with their own vulnerability to death to have much sentiment to spare for the sorrows of the enemy. The bomber crews of the United States and Britain suffered wartime casualty rates almost as dreadful as those of Hitler’s U-boat crews. For an Allied flier, the skies over Europe represented a terrifying environment. Flak guns, fighters, the hazards of weather, collision and mechanical failure rendered the experience of bombing Germany among the most alarming assignments of the war. Those who flew bombers never witnessed the human consequences of their actions. They knew only that they were striving, at great personal risk, to cripple the industrial and military might of Hitler’s empire.

Among airmen, opinion was divided about whether formation flying with the USAAF Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces was preferable to the loneliness experienced by the crews who carried out the RAF Bomber Command’s night attacks. Some men found fighting in daylight, watching comrades die in stark proximity, frighteningly cold-blooded. The Americans stationed in England felt very far from home. In the huts on their bleak airstrips in Norfolk and Suffolk, they were wakened for briefing around 0400, about the time their RAF counterparts were going to bed. Out on the desolate stands where the bombers were dispersed, pilots watched for the green flare arching into the sky, the signal to start engines. In a long procession Four of a Kind, Little Audrey,Piccadilly Commando, Miss Carriage, Liberty Belle and the rest of their exotically named silver sisterhood swung around the perimeter track on to the runway. One by one, the “Forts” and “Libs” lumbered into the air to take up their places in the rigid formations demanded by U.S. tactical doctrine. The least popular slot was that of “tail-end charlie,” “Purple Heart corner,” first target of German fighters. The crews switched on oxygen at 8,000 feet, and usually approached the enemy coast around 1000 hours. The waist gunners pulled away their hatches, exposing the fuselage to a blast of icy air which chilled every flier, even in a heated suit. Staff-Sergeant John Romine wrote of the special loneliness of the tail gunner: “The few feet that separated us from even the waist gunners seemed like a thousand miles.” Crews tested their thirteen guns before entering German airspace, then settled down for the long run to the target.

For six to ten hours, any flier doing his job properly was required to make a fierce effort of concentration. “In bright sunlight, even with dark glasses our eyes grew tired from squinting,” wrote Carl Fyler, a Kansan who flew B-17s from Molesworth in Cambridgeshire. On overcast days when they were sometimes obliged to rely upon instruments, every crew was haunted by the fear of collision. In these last stages of the war, interference from the Luftwaffe diminished dramatically, even when Göring’s handful of Me-262 jet aircraft joined the battle. The German fighters often found themselves outnumbered forty to one. “Each time I close the canopy before take-off,” wrote a young Luftwaffe pilot gloomily, “I feel that I am closing the lid of my own coffin.” But on bad days the Fortresses and Liberators fought running battles against Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts across hundreds of miles of German sky. Flak remained a mortal danger until the last days. There was no counter to anti-aircraft fire save luck. American aircraft were more strongly built than their British counterparts, which relied upon darkness for protection. The heavy armour fitted to USAAF planes required them to carry smaller bombloads than the RAF’s Lancasters and Halifaxes, but they could also survive more punishment. Again and again, American aircraft were desperately damaged, but some of their crewmen survived. A gunner in Carl Fyler’s squadron was hit by shrapnel which tore off his left arm and inflicted mortal internal wounds. The doomed man crawled forward to the wounded waist gunners, whose arms were broken. He buckled on their parachutes and helped them to bail out before he himself went down with the stricken plane. He was recommended for a posthumous Medal of Honor, for a display of courage and sacrifice of the kind which was often asked of bomber aircrew.

Formation-flying was an intensely demanding discipline, requiring relentless commitment by every pilot, and above all from the lead aircraft. Returning from bombing oil refineries in Rumania on 13 September 1944, Arthur Miller’s squadron were appalled to find themselves flying headlong towards a mountainside. They pulled up steeply, prompting a storm of abuse over the radio, directed against their leader. “You fucking bastard,” shouted a pilot, “trying to kill us all for shoe shines.” After a shocked pause, the colonel commanding the formation said: “This is Red Leader—plane making comment, identify yourself now.” There was another silence, then laughter, snickers, and an outpouring of fearful anger from other aircraft: “Red Leader, why don’t you go and sit in a corner and play with yourself and shine your balls, if you have any”; “You turd-eating son-of-a-bitch, you almost had your day of reckoning”; “If you had marched today and your uniform was on straight, you wouldn’t be flying into mountains, you cocksucking motherfucker.” At last, they landed in Italy to refuel. Miller was surprised to see only five planes fire flares to indicate casualties aboard—fewer than he had expected, after meeting heavy and accurate flak over the target. As they taxied in, they were amazed to hear the voice of their deputy leader: “I apologize to you all. I almost killed the whole squadron. I should never let up until we touch down. I am sorry.”

Staff-Sergeant Delbert Lambson, a gunner, was a nineteen-year-old small farmer from New Mexico. A deeply religious young man, Lambson was married to a seventeen-year-old girl, and had a baby son. He once hit a man who said in the mess that there wasn’t a woman in the world who could be trusted. He pitied those who found the job unbearably hard, including their own ball-turret gunner: “Soldiering and especially combat never did agree with him. Before each mission, even on cold winter mornings, the sweat would be running down his face. I liked him because he was uncomplicated, honest, and made few demands. He seemed grateful to be with me, and that made me feel at ease.” On one trip, Lambson found himself assuming the job of a gunner who was found mentally unfit to fly.

Over Regensburg with the 390th Bomb Group, his plane was badly hit, and a 20mm cannon shell struck Lambson in his turret: “Streaks of fire shot through my brain. My hands shot up to my face. Blood trickled through my fingers and down my chest. My left leg was numb and my left shoulder felt as if a hot branding iron had been thrust into it. The left leg and arm of my padded flying suit was ripped to shreds, and was soaking up the blood that poured from my wounds.” On escaping from his turret, he made the alarming discovery that the rest of the crew had already jumped without him. He bailed out, and pulled the ripcord of his parachute at 5,000 feet, terrified of bleeding to death before he reached the ground. He lost consciousness, and awoke to find a group of unsmiling German soldiers peering down at him. He had lost an eye, and remained comatose for a week. In the air, Lambson had never thought much about the nature of the task he and his comrades were performing. Yet in hospital he was tended with wonderful solicitousness by Marie, a German nurse. She went on leave to visit her mother in Berlin. Lambson was shocked to hear that she had been killed on the train by strafing Allied fighters.

While the heavy bombers attacked Germany from fields in England, their medium counterparts flew missions from strips in France, where they enjoyed nothing like the comforts of fighter and bomber crews stationed at English bases. The French grass fields, overlaid with pierced plank runways, offered accommodation not much less cold and dirty than those of rear-area ground troops. Yet Lieutenant Robert Burger, a B-26 navigator based near Cambrai, found his job in the last months of the war almost routine: “I can go out on a mission now wondering what we are going to have for dinner.” Major Jack Ilfrey said: “Whenever I heard any griping about food and living conditions, I always reminded the men they were better off than most of the other boys scattered around the world. They had places to go and things to do. It wasn’t like home, of course, but it wasn’t Africa or sleeping in tents in Italy, or fighting in the South Pacific. We all had a hell of a lot to be grateful for.” Yet life in tents alongside the French strips was always dreary and cold. Robert Burger experienced a stab of envy when he landed at a fighter base near Brussels one day and found the pilots sitting down to eat “on cushioned chairs, covered tables and pitchers of lemonade, Belgian girls waiting on table. The pilots ordered a cocktail from the nearby bar as a string quartet played soft music. It was unbelievable—shangri-la to us!”

Most of the medium bombers’ short-range operations were carried out at the request of army commanders. Each day, the crews stood by, waiting upon the pleasure of the generals. “Nice day, but nothing for us. Played horseshoes all afternoon. Big bull session round the fire at night,” Captain Marvin Schulze of the 397th Bombardment Group wrote in his diary one typical autumn day of 1944. As the weather worsened, there were many days when flying was impossible: “Stood down early. Big drunken brawl that lasted till early morning. Major Hamilton got two broken ribs out of the deal . . . Pretty foggy all day long. Sawed wood for about three hours. Peeled potatoes and made French fries. No mail in over a week now . . . A beautiful raid this morning. Target a railway road bridge at Prayen, Germany. No flak, no fighters. Flew number four.” But then there were the days when the enemy intervened, sometimes ferociously. On 23 November, “two ships blew up before we got to the target . . . two more were lost to fighters. The whole of Capt. Stephenson’s flight went down, with the exception of Lt. Neu, who landed the most shot-up plane I ever saw . . . It’s a pretty sad outfit tonight.” Schulze’s B-26 Group lost fifty-one men in two days. The big picture, of overwhelming Allied dominance, masked the intimate reality, of some bad days which maintained the tempo of fear.

The people who fight wars are customarily referred to as “men.” Yet in truth, irrespective of their ages, most of those engaged in combat behaved, thought and talked as boys—exuberant and emotional, careless and naive. “Dear Mom,” a pilot of the 95th Bomb Group, Harry Conley, wrote home.

No air battle manufactured in Hollywood can approach the thrills and sights of the real thing. They rarely last over half an hour, but the thrills of a lifetime are contained in that short space of time. It’s a funny reaction. I sit there flying my airplane and I can hear and feel all my boys’ guns going off. The only enemy planes I can see are those coming from the front or side, and I can see whatever flak appears in those regions. You sit there quite calmly and watch the flak explode around you in little puffs of black smoke . . . as if it were a movie. Then a couple of hours after you are back on the ground, it begins to dawn on you, and it is then that you get properly scared. The German boys are marvellous pilots and really have guts.

On 4 November 1944, the crews of 408 Squadron Royal Canadian Air Force prepared to fly from Linton-on-Ouse in Yorkshire, on one of Bomber Command’s great night raids against Germany’s cities. A force of 384 Halifaxes, 336 Lancasters and 29 Mosquitoes was to attack Bochum. The 408 Squadron was scheduled to take off at 1600, but to the bitter frustration of the crews bad weather caused repeated postponements. David Sokoloff’s crew were specially tense, because it was the thirteenth trip of their tour. “We had to hang around the Halifax, F-Freddie, checking and re-checking for something to do, smoking cig after cig in the clammy half-dark of the English winter evening,” wrote the nineteen-year-old bomb-aimer, Alan Stables from British Columbia. Dave Hardy, the rear gunner from Saskatoon, felt nervous and gloomy. Jon Sargent, the navigator, an accountant from British Columbia, said: “Why the hell don’t the bastards scrub it in this weather?” Their spirits were further depleted by a friendly visit from the base’s Catholic chaplain.

The planes finally took off at 1930, carrying fourteen tons of fuel and bombs, slipping into the familiar routine: “Lock throttles—adjust pitch on the starboard outer—wheels up and locked—synchronise engines—adjust trim tabs—throttle back to climbing boost.” “Sok,” the pilot, always worried about putting his chocolate too close to the heating outlet, where it would melt. He was a twenty-four-year-old Londoner who had been studying architecture at Yale in 1939. He went north to Montreal to join up, which is how he now found himself captaining a Canadian crew. He was dismayed to find the aircraft struggling to reach operational height, a familiar problem with Halifaxes, whose ceiling was 2,000 feet below that of the Lancs. Sok told Stables to ditch part of their bombload, a practice which infuriated Bomber Command’s senior officers, but was commonplace in some squadrons.

F-Freddie gained 1,000 feet, but the plane was still 5,000 feet below the bomber stream’s designated altitude and ninety minutes short of target when Hardy in the rear turret yelled, “Fighter port—go!,” and they pitched into violent corkscrew evasive action. When they resumed their course, the gunner said he had seen a Ju-88, but it was gone. A nervous, jocular voice on the intercom said: “How many engines did it have?” Sok said briefly: “Cut the chatter.” They saw other aircraft around them catching fire and falling through the sky. Then oncoming tracer streaked up to meet F-Freddie and lashed into the wing. Stables, in the nose, closed his eyes and prayed. The engineer yelled: “Port engine on fire, skip, let’s get the hell out.” Sok said coolly: “Feathering port inner, hit the graviner switches, Dick, prepare to abandon aircraft everyone. Bomb doors open. Drop your bombs, bomb aimer.” The graviner switches released CO₂ on to the engines, but this failed to extinguish the fire. The crew left their stations and went to the hatches. Sok threw the aircraft into a steep dive, to put out the fire. This was a terrifyingly risky manoeuvre. Sometimes it succeeded. Often, however, it created a blowtorch effect which melted the wing off the aircraft. The seven men in F-Freddie were lucky. Levelling off at 4,000 feet, they found that the fire was out.

The crew returned to their positions—except Hardy, the rear gunner. His turret was traversed sideways, and empty. He had bailed out—a wise move, for it was notoriously difficult for rear gunners to escape from a stricken aircraft. They set a course for home, hampered by the loss of all their maps and logs, which had been sucked out into the slipstream by the great blast of air that swept through the fuselage when the hatches were ditched. The main fuse panel had been destroyed by German fire. The fuel gauges and radar were gone. They suffered another moment of terror when the mid-upper gunner reported seeing two fighters, provoking Sokoloff to corkscrew again.

By late 1944, bomber crews possessed one huge asset for survival: if they were badly hit, they no longer had to struggle home across the North Sea, where so many met their ends earlier in the war. F-Freddie crash-landed on the flarepath at Brussels without flaps or brakes, bouncing so violently that the undercarriage collapsed. The aircraft skidded rasping on its belly past the end of the runway and over a ditch, earth exploding upwards into the fuselage through the shattered nose. It lurched to a stop seventy yards short of a cluster of houses. There was a mad scramble to get out before the aircraft caught fire, though mercifully there was no blaze. They counted a hundred holes in the aircraft. Later, Sok’s mother asked anxiously if the pilot would have to pay for the damage.

The exhausted and traumatized crew were taken by truck to the Imperial Hotel in Brussels. In addition to their own aircraft, twenty-nine others were lost by Bomber Command that night. A thousand people died in Bochum, where the steelworks was badly hit. After three weeks’ survivors’ leave, David Sokoloff’s crew returned to operations from Linton and flew a further twenty-three trips. Among every hundred RAF Bomber Command aircrew in the course of the war, fifty-one died on operations, nine were lost in crashes in En-gland, three seriously injured, twelve were taken prisoner, one was shot down and escaped capture, and just twenty-four completed a tour of operations. One night just before Sok’s crew were due to take off again, they found their new rear gunner drinking beer. If he ever did such a thing again, they said, they would kill him. Survival depended on luck, but also upon relentless vigilance through each minute of every hour that men braved the airspace over Germany.

From the autumn of 1944 onwards, Bomber Command conducted a growing number of daylight operations, alongside its night attacks. As the Luftwaffe’s powers declined, and with France and Belgium now in Allied hands, daylight “ops” offered a chance of more accurate bombing and reduced casualties. Daylight raids were initially conducted against easy targets. Most groups committed their less experienced crews to them. Yet this bred resentment among those who were still flying long, dangerous night sorties to eastern Germany. Eddie Lovejoy, a navigator with the RAF’s 75 Squadron, was one of a crew serving their second tour. They were exasperated to see others racking up several trips towards their quota of thirty operations on short daylight “milk-runs,” while Lovejoy’s men were flying through the darkness for nine or ten hours to targets such as Stettin. In September, their pilot formally protested to the commanding officer, who duly rostered them for some daylight ops against German V-weapon sites in Holland. “It was thus that I saw the enemy coast approaching in full daylight for the first time in the war,” wrote Lovejoy wonderingly. After flying so often over Europe in darkness, he found it strange now to do so in sunlight, and was even more amazed when he saw a German Me-262 jet fighter streak past them. At the end of October, his crew took part in a tactical raid on German gun positions near Flushing. The neighbouring Lancaster was a wingspan away when Lovejoy, in the astrodome, saw a 105mm shell strike its bomb bay. The ensuing explosion caused the entire formation to lift in the air. Lovejoy was hurled against the side of the astrodome by the force of the blast, “and to my utter horror was gazing at a few dark pieces of debris drifting down to earth . . . By flying at night, we had missed the spectacle of horrors like these, but seeing it happen close to was an experience to shake one clear down to the soles of one’s shoes . . . It was a rather silent and melancholy journey home.”

All heavy bomber crews found it a strange experience, creating a special kind of strain, to drink one night in a pub in rural Lincolnshire or Norfolk, then to be thrown next day into a battle that might end in a PoW camp or in death. Most men’s loyalties became fiercely focused upon their own crews. “Other people in the squadron were just acquaintances,” said Sergeant Bill Winter, a Lancaster wireless-operator. “The crew was everything—you slept together, drank together, ate together, went on leave together—and fought together. My biggest fear was of being sent on a trip as a ‘spare bod’ with a strange crew.” On the ground, little was asked of bomber aircrew save that they should rest, attend briefings, check and test equipment. At Winter’s 106 Squadron, there was intense resentment when, during a period of poor weather which permitted little flying, aircrew were ordered to muster for a morning jog around the airfield perimeter track. There was even greater fury when they were issued with shovels and told to help clear snow off the runways. They believed, not unreasonably, that enough was asked of them over Germany to merit forbearance on the ground.

If there was a common strand among young men of the wartime generation, whether American, British, German, Russian, it was their passion for flying. They were seized by the romance of escaping from the earth. The air corps was first choice of assignment for millions of disappointed conscripts who finished up in armour, infantry, artillery. Richard Burt, a Liberator gunner from Utah, found that flying above cloud “made you feel as if they had cleaned up the earth . . . it has a peaceful, mind-washing effect on me.” Until he met the enemy, he simply gloried in the aesthetic beauty of the sky.

“I thought a lot about our guys down there on the ground with the army,” said another B-24 gunner, Ira Wells. “We had all the glory. I realised how fortunate we were to be in the air.” Wells was a dentist’s son from Staten Island who volunteered for the air corps in 1943, but realized during training on Piper Cubs that he would never make the grade as a pilot. His crew formed in Lincoln, Nebraska, a wonderful amalgam of Americans at war. There were two Jews, two Catholics and five Protestants. The pilot was from Michigan, the bombardier from Iowa, the top turret gunner from Illinois, waist gunners from Oklahoma and Massachusetts, tail from Ohio; the other three were New Yorkers. “We were the Lindbergh generation,” said Harold Dorfman, their navigator. “I wanted to fly like I could taste it.” The only one among them who seemed less than enamoured with their Liberator was the pilot. Before being drafted, he had been an inspector on a B-24 production line. “I know all the things that are wrong with these aircraft,” he announced gloomily. “I’m more frightened of them than any of you.”

They joined the 448th Bomb Group at Seething, a remote Norfolk airfield, in September 1944. They slept two crews to a Nissen hut, and found themselves moving into the beds of men who had gone down the previous day. Their surviving roommates had done fifteen trips. The newcomers quizzed them about what it was like, and were told: “pretty scary.” Wartime bomber crews were mere passing visitors on their bases for the few months of their tour, amid a huge permanent population of ground staff and maintenance personnel. The only exception at Seething was George, a cook who had been there since the base was built, and suddenly volunteered to reclassify as an air gunner. George had made himself so cosy that he spent most of his off-duty time in the cottage of villagers who lived at the end of the runway, whose daughter Daphne was “just a little bit pregnant” by him.

Wells’s and Dorfman’s crew made their first trip on 13 September, a milk-run to a marshalling yard. Their second trip was more hazardous. They flew at 200 feet over Arnhem, pushing out supplies to the beleaguered British paratroops, glimpsing the Dutch waving and the German tracer slashing up at them. “We dropped our supplies in the right place,” said Harold Dorfman, “right on the Germans, of course.” Dorfman was a passionate amateur photographer and snatched some remarkable images from the cockpit during their tour, not least those of Liberators disintegrating in mid-air. “I stood at the window and cried as I photographed our wingman breaking up,” said Dorfman. His own crew was lucky. They trusted each other—“Sometimes I think we were too young to be as scared as we should have been,” said Corporal Wells. He himself felt no great animosity towards the Germans they were bombing. “We knew Germany was the ally of Japan. That was enough. In those days, people were just patriotic. It never occurred to us to ask ourselves whether what we were doing was right.” But Harold Dorfman said: “I’m a Jew. I knew what was going on. I had no sympathy whatsoever for the Germans.” Likewise the RAF’s Bill Winter, who said: “We never thought about what was underneath—if you saw a lot of fires you just thought: ‘We’ve really given them a pasting tonight.’ ”

Sergeant Jack Brennan, a B-17 radio-operator/gunner in 200th Group, belonged to an unhappy crew. They neither liked nor trusted their pilot, “a phoney . . . There was a real personality problem. We got hit just about every trip. Mostly, we survived thanks to the skill of our navigator. None of us was in the mould of heroes.” Brennan was a twenty-two-year-old baker’s son from Staten Island, and his family were furious when he volunteered in 1942. They had been confident of getting him a deferral. As his pilot blundered through the skies over Germany, hardly a day passed when Brennan did not regret his eagerness to join the Air Corps. His only consolation was that he felt very conscious of how much better they lived on their base at Royston in Hertfordshire than did GIs on the ground in Germany.

On their twenty-fourth mission, they were hit amidships by flak over Berlin. To the disgust of some of the crew, the pilot set course for neutral Sweden, a destination favoured by Allied airmen who had seen enough of the war. “We’d always known that if something happened, the pilot wouldn’t be there—and he wasn’t.” Seven members of the crew jumped over Sweden. Only Brennan, the navigator and bombardier survived. A U.S. legation representative, who came from Stockholm to visit Brennan in the Swedish hospital where he was recovering from arm and leg injuries, said anxiously: “Don’t say anything detrimental about your pilot.” The gunner observed wearily: “They had to think everybody was a hero.”

In the air, attacking in their vast formations, American bombardiers scarcely used their Norden bombsights; they simply flicked the switches to release their loads in unison with the mission leader. A combat historian asked each of Wells’s crew after their first trip what they had thought about as they approached their target. The pilot answered: his wife; the co-pilot: his baby; Dorfman, the navigator, said he was too busy to think at all, trying to see they didn’t get lost. By the end of 1944, the huge accompanying forces of escort fighters overwhelmed the dwindling Luftwaffe on most sorties. Wells never fired his guns in anger. He occasionally glimpsed German jets in the distance, but they were too far away and too fast to offer a shot. Wells retained a profound fear of having to bail out because, like his navigator, he was Jewish. But he claimed to have experienced more fear visiting his girlfriend in London during the German V2 rocket attacks than he did over Germany.

By 1945, every heavy bomber carried an extraordinary weight of high technology and skilled manpower to operate it. A B-24 Liberator contained 1,550,000 separate parts. British Lancasters required crews of seven, American Fortresses and Liberators nine or ten. The functions of pilots, flight-engineers and navigators were self-evident. It sometimes seemed debatable, however, whether a dedicated wireless-operator was necessary. The bombardier—bomb-aimer, in British parlance—was a passenger until the five or ten minutes of a bomb-run, though he sometimes operated a radar set. In American formations, where following aircraft merely released their bombs when their leader did, many men wondered whether a bombardier was required in every crew. British “heavies” carried three gun-turrets and two dedicated gunners. They learned early in the war that with their small-calibre .303 machine-guns they were most unlikely to shoot down a well-armoured German night-fighter. Some critics urged dispensing with the heavy hydraulically powered front and mid-upper turrets to improve aircraft ceilings. However, the presence of the guns was thought essential to crew confidence. The chief function of gunners was as look-outs, watching for fighters and triggering evasive action from the pilot. “Our gunners never fired in anger,” said Bill Winter. “The only time we were really plastered, we never even saw the fighter.”

Flying as a gunner imposed stresses almost equal to those facing the pilots or specialists, because a man had much less to do and more time to think. When an American daylight formation was under attack, the gunners’ purpose was to contribute to the geometrically calculated barrage, interlocking between the aircraft of a formation, through which a Luftwaffe attacker must pass. It was essential to fire repeated short bursts rather than to press the trigger continuously. The barrel of a .50-calibre machine-gun overheated and bent if it remained in action for more than eight seconds. For all their extravagant claims, only a tiny number of gunners ever hit a German aircraft. In the last months of the war, escort fighters provided the defensive capability that mattered. The two waist gunners, at least, might have been dispensed with. But the barrage generated by the Fortress and Liberator .50 calibres was thought to be morale-building. The bombers’ large crews were maintained to the end. It did not go unnoticed, however, that the most successful British aircraft of the war was the twin-engined Mosquito, which carried no guns in its bomber role, and relied solely upon speed and agility for survival. “Mossie” losses to enemy action, especially towards the end, were negligible. The Mosquito, with a crew of only two, could carry a formidable bomb-load.

Now that overwhelming forces of escort fighters dominated the skies over Germany, crews feared flak much more than the Luftwaffe. Each exploding shell left an image of smoke in the sky like an inverted Y ten feet high, tilting in different directions. Formations weaved to confuse the gunners until they reached their “IP”—the “initial point” ahead of the target. From there on, they were required to fly straight and level for the ten minutes of their bomb run, ignoring the hailstorm rattle of shrapnel on the fuselage, praying for the bomb release to be over. “There would be seconds when you felt your lungs would burst because you forgot to exhale,” wrote a crewman. “Instants would occur when you believed your eyes were seeing more than they could behold. There was an unreal sensation of having your body feel moist all over, and then . . . your mouth felt like it was stuffed with dry cotton . . . for no reason at all your lower jaw would quiver and you couldn’t speak.”

There were very bad days when even the Luftwaffe in its decline committed substantial forces of fighters. On 11 September 1944, a mission to the Ruhland synthetic oil-plant on the Czech border met some fifty Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitt Bf-109s. On the 1,300-mile round trip, Eighth Air Force lost forty-five bombers and twenty-one escorting Mustangs. Of thirty-six aircraft of the 100th Bomb Group, fourteen failed to return. It was often the case that once a formation had been broken open and some aircraft lost, the enemy was able progressively to cut down its survivors. Over the Ore Mountains on the Ruhland raid, ten American aircraft crashed within a six-mile radius.

On 31 December 1944, thirty-seven aircraft of the 100th Bomb Group attacked Hamburg, a coastal target which was usually considered far less hazardous than objectives inland. After making a landfall south of the Danish border, the formation turned south-west down the Elbe at 25,000 feet. “The flak was brutal. We flew through flak clouds and aircraft parts for what seemed like an hour,” said Lieutenant William Leek, from Washington State, making the twenty-second trip of his tour. Luftwaffe fighters attacked the formation as it left the target, battling into a strong headwind. Ten U.S. aircraft went down in the space of a few minutes. Leek’s first pilot, Lieutenant Glenn Rohjohn from Greenock, Pennsylvania, was manoeuvring to fill a gap in their formation left by a neighbour’s demise when there was a tremendous impact. They had suffered a disaster of a unique kind. Another B-17, piloted by Lieutenant James Macnab, was flying immediately below that of Rohjohn. Suddenly, it lurched upwards, and locked on to the Fortress above. The top turret pierced the lower fuselage of Rohjohn’s B-17. “We were like creeping dragonflies,” said Leek. The ball-turret gunner in Macnab’s aircraft cranked his turret manually until he could escape into the fuselage. The plane began to burn. Rohjohn attempted in vain to break his own aircraft free by gunning the engines. Three of the lower aircraft’s four motors were still turning. Rohjohn now feathered his own propellers and rang the “bail out” bell. His ball-turret gunner was saying Hail Marys over the intercom. The man knew he could not escape, that he was doomed. “I couldn’t help him,” said Leek, “and I somehow felt that I was invading his right to be alone.”

Ammunition began to explode as fire spread through the lower aircraft. Rohjohn told Leek to go, but the co-pilot refused, knowing that alone the pilot could not control the B-17. Shortly before 1300, they crashed into a field at Tettens, near Wilhelmshaven. On impact, Rohjohn’s plane at last slid free of Macnab’s. It ended a mad career across the grass when the left wing sliced into a wooden military headquarters building. By a miracle, both Rohjohn and Leek survived the crash. They crawled out on to the wing, into the hands of a German soldier. “All that was left of the Flying Fortress was the nose, the cockpit and the seats we were sitting on,” said Leek. Four men survived from Macnab’s plane. In all, 100th Group lost twelve aircraft that day.

Bombing Germany was never a safe activity. To the very end of the war, some crews and some missions suffered horrible experiences. But the overall rate of attrition had declined steeply since the bloody days of 1943, when a bomber crew was more likely to die than to survive. Throughout the war, both the RAF and USAAF periodically varied the number of operations a crew had to complete before being relieved. In the worst days, American fliers had to fly twenty-five missions. By the winter of 1944, with the progressive collapse of the German defences, this had risen to thirty-five. Yet throughout the war fliers based in England were cosseted by their commanders, as befitted men called upon to perform extraordinary tasks and live with exceptional strains. After seven trips, Wells’s crew was sent for a week’s “R & R” in delicious comfort at “the flak house,” a country mansion near Salisbury maintained specially for U.S. bomber aircrew. They felt they needed it.

Earlier in the war, many squadrons had suffered serious problems with airmen who “Section-A’ed”—succumbed to combat fatigue. But nobody at Seething did so in the final months, though a pilot once panicked and bailed out over Germany, leaving the rest of his crew to bring the plane home. Wells and Dorfman flew their last mission to Berlin in March 1945, awed by the vast armada of which they formed a part. Their designated targets were usually bridges or marshalling yards, but that day they were told explicitly that they were hitting the centre of Hitler’s capital. On their return, they exultantly buzzed the control tower at Seething to celebrate their own survival. The pilot, alone among them, volunteered for a further tour of operations. Everybody else went gratefully home.

There sometimes seemed a peculiar bloodlessness about the routine of massed bomber operations in the final months of the war. The fliers tripped their switches 21,000 feet above Germany, and those who had not suffered misfortune or disaster went home to see that night’s movie or to head for the huge dance hall in London’s Covent Garden that was their favourite rendezvous. Meanwhile, far beneath, flame and death engulfed a chosen tract of Hitler’s shrinking empire. “We just wanted to get it over with,” shrugged Ira Wells. “If we could bring the end closer by dropping bombs on Germany, that was fine by us. We were kids.” It was ironic that the surviving bomber crews went home to their loved ones without ever having seen at close quarters the land upon which they had wreaked such havoc.

FIGHTERS

THERE WERE SIGNIFICANT gradations of pleasure and pain about flying combat operations in different types of aircraft. Both USAAF and RAF fighter pilots pitied their counterparts in the heavy bombers, as a man in a sports car might condescend to a trucker beside him. More than a few fighter pilots actively enjoyed the experience of war, in a fashion denied to most bomber aircrew. Yet, in fighters as in bombers, much hinged upon the luck of a man’s assignment. Ground attack was infinitely more hazardous than flying escort missions. In both roles, men continued to die until the very end. In Squadron-Leader Tony Mann’s RAF Typhoon wing, two squadron commanders were shot down and killed over Holland in the last week of the war. Not every pilot found fighter operations tolerable. A man who joined the same group as Marvin Bledisloe quit after three missions, because he preferred the humiliation of being stripped of his wings to going on. A few pilots seized upon any mechanical excuse to abort a mission.

Bledisloe had spent almost two years as an instructor in California before being drafted to a P-47 Thunderbolt squadron in England late in 1944. This made him an exceptionally experienced flier, and thus more likely to survive. But as a married thirty-year-old, he came to combat flying with no heroic ideal, merely a determination to fly the 300 operational hours necessary to complete a fighter tour, and get home to his family. He was taught at the outset that the job of an escort fighter was not to pursue Luftwaffe fighters to destruction, but to stick close to the bombers. On Bledisloe’s first mission, he was shocked to see one of his group’s most experienced pilots blown out of the sky by flak. Luck, as well as skill, played a critical role in survival. The Thunderbolt was a much heavier and stronger aircraft than the Mustang, but also a poorer performer.

The gravest crime for a “fighter jock” over Germany was to hog the radio, sacred for the passage of split-second word about the enemy. One day, a new pilot suddenly burst into a monologue across the airwaves: “Hey, this is Jerry! My coolant is haywire. The indicator is in the red. What’ll I do? This thing is liable to quit on me any minute. Where are we? What’ll I do if my engine quits?” “Jerry” faced the rage of the entire group when he got home. In air combat, at collision speeds with enemy aircraft of 700 or 800 m.p.h., seconds were vital. The strain of flying long single-seat missions over Germany told on most men. By autumn, as Bledisloe neared the end of his tour, “my nerves were on edge, I was fidgety, eating little and not getting enough sleep. My butt was killing me from sitting on the hard raft. I was hollow-eyed and weak from the diarrhoea that hit me after every briefing. My weight was down from my normal 160 pounds to 130.” Halfway to Germany on his last trip, he was ordered to abort and escort home an aircraft with mechanical failure. He embraced the break. He was simply happy to finish alive. He returned to California after flying seventy missions in 103 days.

Yet Major Jack Ilfrey of the 79th Squadron believed that morale was always higher among the fighter pilots than among their bomber counterparts. Losses were lower, “and we did not have death brought so close. When a fighter was lost, he just failed to come home. But many times crippled bombers returned to base with one or more dead on board, and the men got a first-hand view of death.” Ilfrey, a twenty-four-year-old Texan, had an extraordinary and by any standards heroic war. He started out flying P-38 Lightnings in North Africa, then moved to England, committed to four- or five-hour bomber escort missions. In the summer of 1944, he took over command of a squadron deployed on ground support. On 11 June, he bailed out over the German lines after being hit, but successfully evaded capture and rejoined his squadron in nine days. He was temporarily demoted a rank for the riotous celebration which followed.

On 20 November, Ilfrey’s wingman Duane Kelso was hit while they were attacking German positions near Maastricht. Kelso set down on a German runway, amid heavy flak. Ilfrey made a split-second decision: “I thought of several instances that my comrades had saved my life.” He landed his own Mustang alongside Kelso’s crippled aircraft, stopped, jumped down on the wing, threw out his dinghy and parachute, then pushed Kelso into the seat. He climbed in on top of his wingman and gunned the engine for take-off before the astounded Germans could react. With four legs in the cockpit, Ilfrey could not operate the rudder, so crossed his own and let Kelso work the pedals. The other pilot was understandably shaken. “For Christ’s sake, Kelso, don’t get a hard-on and send me through the canopy!” exclaimed Ilfrey from his lap. They landed safely back in England. A month later, Ilfrey was posted back to the U.S., after flying 142 combat missions.

Most pilots who gazed down from their cockpits upon the battlefields of Germany reckoned that their lot was enviable alongside that of the fighting soldiers far beneath them. “The landscape looked just like Passchendaele,” wrote an RAF Typhoon pilot of 197 Squadron, Richard Hough, staring down on the Reichswald early in 1945, “amid the splintered trees and countless shell-holes, the zig-zag of never-ending trenches, the long columns of lorries snaking up towards the front line, the sparkle of guns from the east.”

The RAF’s Typhoon pilots expected to fly two missions a day of an hour apiece, though in emergency this might extend to four. Most pilots flew a hundred such operations before being relieved, though a flier who was showing the strain could be grounded sooner. Their aircraft normally carried two 500-pound or even 1,000-pound bombs, in addition to their cannon, on a variety of ground-attack missions exotically codenamed Ramrods, Lagoons, Jim Crows, Roadsteads, Rhubarbs. In the last months of the war, “anything that moved on the road was fair game, as only the military had petrol. But sometimes military traffic mixed in with the refugees in their horse-drawn vehicles. I saw open trucks crammed with infantry, with innocent ox-drawn carts in front and behind. Of course we killed civilians—we couldn’t help it.” Hough, like most pilots, acknowledged that it was much easier to overcome scruples if the consequences of one’s own actions were invisible. “You sometimes saw too much with ground strafing. At the same time, with the hunter’s instinct, the heart lifted with excitement at the sight of a target below, and the hunter’s blood ran faster as you pushed down the stick, opened the throttle wide, made a quick intercept calculation, switched on the sight and slipped the shield from the gun button.” Every ground strafer hated flak gunners as personal enemies, and would take extraordinary risks to get in a shot at them after bombing a target.

An age ago, in the innocent days of 1940, a British fighter pilot in France was appalled to see the Luftwaffe’s “knights of the air” machine-gun refugees on the roads. “They are shits after all,” Paul Richey observed in shocked dismay in his officers’ mess. Yet by 1945 few of the leaders of the American and British air forces found anything to trouble them in their orders for Operation Clarion, an assault on German communications links which was unleashed on 22 February. Clarion was allegedly designed to inflict a massive blow on the remaining German transport net, by striking with 9,000 American and British bombers and fighters across the widest possible area. The bombers, as usual, were deployed against railroads and bridges, but their attacks also covered many small towns. All those concerned with Clarion’s planning recognized that, whatever the targeting pretext, its real purpose was explicitly terroristic—to demonstrate the power of the Allies to strike at will into every corner of the Reich. General Ira Eaker of Eighth Air Force expressed concern that Clarion would demonstrate to the Germans “that we are the barbarians they say we are, for it would be perfectly obvious to them that this is primarily a large-scale attack on civilians, as, in fact, it of course will be.” General Charles Cabell, an adviser to General Arnold, scribbled bitterly on a copy of the Clarion proposal: “This is the same old baby-killing plan of the get-rich-quick psychological boys, dressed up in a new kimono.” Clarion went ahead anyway. Allied fighters were committed to attacking road movements of every kind. “CLARION hit people who had never been bombed before,” notes a German historian. “The psychological effect was very great.” The civilian casualties inflicted by the operation were never documented, but certainly ran into thousands. For the rest of the war, Allied pilots attacked German civilians with growing promiscuity. Who could blame them, after the lead Clarion had given them from the top?

The Allied fighter-bomber pilots, like those of the Luftwaffe in 1940, were very young men. Few denied the adrenaline rush that often transcended the terrors of operational flying: “I could see the cannon strikes dancing along the road like a hysterically fast fuse racing to its point of detonation,” wrote Richard Hough. “The car was packed with passengers—there must have been five or six inside, and not one with the sense to keep a look-out through the window. My glimpse of them, alive, intact, perhaps talking together and smoking, was one frame from a film, flickering like the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein’s Potemkin. The next frame, as the full weight of my shells tore in, was all blood and fire.” In the spring of 1945, even in rural Saxony German civilians became reluctant to go shopping because of the danger of being strafed by passing fighter-bombers. They learned to throw themselves flat on the ground whenever aircraft approached. It was so easy for a bored young man to touch his gun-button, to relieve the monotony of a patrol. “We sometimes thought the Allied pilots were playing a game with us,” said fifteen-year-old Helmut Lott, who grew weary of ditching his bike and running for the nearest cover as soon as a Jabo peeled off into a dive.

During a firing pass at 600 m.p.h. in the dive, wrote Lieutenant Jack Pitts of the 371st Fighter Group, “you feel as if you are flying the guns, not the plane. You see where the bullets are hitting, and make minor adjustments with the controls to ‘walk the stream of bullets’ onto the target.” Pitts’s Thunderbolt squadron sometimes flew three missions a day from their French bases, spending perhaps thirty minutes each time over enemy lines. On 19 December, he and his squadron were looking for “targets of opportunity” across the Rhine. He fired some 2,400 rounds of ammunition and wrote in his diary: “I really did enjoy this mission. I probably killed a lot of German civilians. Tough luck. C’est la guerre.” Afterwards he recalled:

I was barely 22, probably still quite immature, and didn’t take much of anything seriously except when I was flying . . . It was fun. Most small boys like to tear things up; the most fun with toys was not in building a windmill, but in knocking it down. Well, we had graduated from being small boys into being big boys, but we still liked destroying things, especially since that was what we were expected to do. It was great fun watching a locomotive blow up, or seeing a truckload of ammunition explode, with parts of the truck flying through the air.

Pitts’s squadron suffered few casualties. He experienced little fear, even when engaged by the Germans’ shrinking force of Focke-Wulfs. He felt: “This is what I was trained for; I’m better than they are, my plane is better than theirs; let’s get it on!” Sometimes, he sang to himself in the cockpit:

It may be in the valley, where countless dangers hide,

It may be in the sunshine, that I in peace abide

. . . If Jesus is with me, I’ll go anywhere!

The RAF’s Squadron-Leader Tony Mann, a Typhoon reconnaissance pilot, even found it in his heart to pity the plight of the Luftwaffe in those last months: “I felt sorry for the German air force because they were let down by their commanders and their industry. When the dreaded Hun just stopped turning up, you began to wonder if they were frightened or something. It was only afterwards that we realized they simply couldn’t do it.”

The recklessness of some aircrew persisted on the ground. Jack Pitts and his fellow pilots used aviation fuel for almost every purpose, including cleaning clothes. Once, the gasoline stove in the house in which they were billeted exploded, killing one pilot and severely burning several others. The house burned down. Towards the end, however, even frankly callous young fliers began to feel spasms of pity for the beaten enemy, just as Tony Mann did. “There were four men unloading some stuff from the back of a caisson,” Jack Pitts wrote in his diary on 18 March 1945. “They evidently heard me just before I fired, because they all turned round, and I could practically see a look of surprise. I squeezed the trigger and these four just seemed to melt away. The caisson burned and the horses dropped . . . All in all, I got one truck, 14 horses and six Germans. It’s almost sickening because these poor devils don’t have a chance. Oh well, they started it.”

Bradley’s aide Chester Hansen recorded a conversation among America’s top soldiers in which his chief suggested:

that it would be good to fight the Germans all the way to Berlin, to teach them the lesson of death or destruction they have carried to the world. Everyone is in hearty assent. I suggested to Bull [G-3 at SHAEF] that we bomb each town in our path, but “Pinky” protested that this was not our way of waging war. Patton promptly declared that if it was necessary to have military objectives to bomb, he would declare every switchboard in every town a military objective. The need for harsh treatment of Germany is now more apparent than ever.

TARGETS

MOST OF THE citizens of the Third Reich, great and small, cherished a sense of outrage about the Allied air assault. Guderian used the opportunity of a radio broadcast to deliver what he called “an appeal to the chivalry of our adversaries. I referred to the Anglo-American air terror. I regret to say that this desperate plea of mine was without success. Humanity and chivalry had both disappeared during those months.” Even those Germans who possessed no love for Hitler, and yearned for an end of the war, felt deep bitterness towards the Allied air forces. Lieutenant Helmut Schmidt, a post-war chancellor of Germany, witnessed the destruction of Hamburg. “The sky became black, the sun disappeared. The worst thing was the stench—like being in the kitchen of McDonalds . . . a smell of beef . . . but the beef was people.” Schmidt lost his parents, grandparents, parents-in-law and home to Allied bombing. “It was wholly unjustified, indeed it was inexcusable,” he said passionately, long afterwards.

Few Germans ever acknowledged the legitimacy of the role in which the Allies cast them, shareholders in a monstrous evil which placed them beyond the pale of civilization and the right to mercy. Instead, most of those on the ground perceived themselves as victims of a great injustice. They were oblivious of concentration camps and murdered millions. They saw only their own law-abiding, hard-working, civilized communities reduced to rubble by Germany’s boundlessly vengeful foes. In 1944–45 air attack and its consequences became the dominant realities of most Germans’ lives. “It was a war of despair and mounting torments,” wrote Paul von Stemann, the Danish correspondent in Berlin. “There were no signs that the bombings would lead to a collapse. It was incomprehensible how people struggled on . . . but there did not seem to be a breaking point. It was the great fallacy of the war, that civilians could be brought to succumb by conventional bombing.”

“I’ll describe to you today how our home town looks,” a Heuchelheim woman wrote in misery to her husband at the front.

The middle of Ludwigshaven is flat, and Ludwigstrasse a heap of ruins, only the Bürgerhaus is standing. Bismarck street is almost burnt out. Schiller, See Krak and Neidermann completely gone. Ludwig arrived on leave in the morning, and had the most terrifying experience that night: incendiaries on the house. He put them out, but all around is a ruin . . . he got terrible burns on his left hand. One horror follows another. Last week, Frankenthal and Opal Oppau got it. Mannheim and Ludwigshaven are dying cities. Helene Kruck can’t take it any more, she simply can’t . . . she hasn’t got even a bed, so I’m taking her in here so she can at least rest at night. Each successive attack is more terrible than the last. Horror and fear run through every street.

Frau Rothmeier of Idstein wrote to her husband: “We spend most of our lives in the shelters. Our little girl sleeps for 15 minutes, and then I have to get her up again . . . At noon today it was especially bad. Squadron after squadron of bombers were followed by fighters which fired on people and houses. They fly so low you can almost touch them.”

On 1 December 1944, Private Heinz Trammler went home on leave. “At 4 o’clock, I arrived in Hamburg,” he wrote in his diary.

At 5:30, I was standing in the ruins of my house. My heart stood still. It was here that I lived with my wife and children in peace and comfort. Who is to blame for all this? The English? The Americans? Or the Nazis? Had a Hitler not come, there would have been no war. If the Nazis had not talked so big, or put on such a show, or done so much sabre-rattling, we would have peace with those who are our enemies today. Had we retained democracy in Germany, we would still be in accord with England and the United States. It was with those thoughts that I stood before my ruined home.

Few Germans thought as clearly as Private Trammler, but his uncommonly penitent reflections availed him nothing. The diary was found on his corpse by American troops advancing near Hennamont on 13 January 1945.

Dr. Marcus Scaff-Howie was shocked to find villagers near his Bavarian home raking through the debris of a crashed Liberator, searching the pockets of the dead crew for cigarettes and chocolate. “It seemed monstrous that even these decent country folk had lost their reverence for death,” he wrote in his diary. The British Joint Intelligence Committee agreed. Its members suggested in a report composed in the autumn of 1944 that the emotional reactions of the German people had been dulled by the innumerable horrors they were experiencing:

Everyone is convinced that no opposition could prevent the tragedy of the German people taking its fatal course . . . even bombing does not seem to have any influence on people’s morale. It is accepted as an inevitable fate. Nevertheless, there is much more interest in bombing than in events on the fields of battle, not because bombing is expected to hasten the end of the war, but because it directly affects the personal life of the individual. The main question for every German today is: “Shall I be bombed?”

“We discussed why the Germans carried on,” wrote Paul von Stemann.

Our answers were all inadequate. We said it was because they were apathetic, because they were tired, because they had no civic courage or initiative. They were mentally exhausted, and did not have the strength to end the war. When I came home to Denmark I was asked how the feeling was in Berlin. The answer was that there was no public feeling one way or the other. There was no reaction to be observed to the great events of the war. When the army tried to get rid of Hitler and did not succeed, there was no more reaction than if they had been told that the moon was not made of green cheese. It was all now beyond them.

The Berlin diarist “Missie” Vassiltchikov remarked upon the paradox that daylight bomber attacks mesmerized people by their terrible beauty as well as by the horrors they inflicted. When civilians were not in the shelters, they watched the perfect formations of glittering aircraft parade across the sky, inscribing signatures in condensation trails, their bombs often clearly visible as they fell.

The black-out was a dominant reality. “We lived in a dark world,” said Klaus Fischer, who lived in Jena in central Germany. “Even in the daylight hours you couldn’t see where you were going in the street cars with their windows painted black. At night you sometimes saw people in the street trying to read newspapers by moonlight.” The first alarm sounded when enemy aircraft were 120 miles away—perhaps forty minutes’ flying time. As soon as the sirens were heard, people knew that it was time to turn on the radio, fill the bath with water, turn off the gas. Families checked that luggage, thermoses, torches and gas masks were ready in the hall, and dressed children. In cinemas, a big V appeared on the screen. A second alarm sounded when raiders were much closer. The words Flieger Alarme appeared on cinema screens. The big feature stopped until the all-clear sounded. It was time to descend to the shelters, there to sit reading uneasily, listening in silence to the dull thunder above, or chatting in tense, muted tones to relations and neighbours. In Hamburg, Mathilde Wolff-Monckeberg recorded in February 1945 that she and her fellow citizens had suffered five early warnings and three proper alarms in a single day and night “during this period of vast, general distress, of certain extinction.”

Although Germany’s armament production figures continued to rise through much of 1944, these would undoubtedly have been very much higher but for the effects of bombing on both plant and the workforce. In 1944, the Ford plant in Cologne reported 25 per cent absenteeism, and BMW in Munich 20 per cent. Such figures represented severe disruption of shift patterns and orderly working. Anyone who said that he was not frightened of being bombed was a liar or a fool. There was a glass-blower in Jena who always refused to go down to shelters when there a raid: “Either it gets you or it doesn’t,” the man shrugged fatalistically. “It” finally got him, like so many other people, in March 1945. Fires often burned for days, because there were too few engines to address the hundreds of conflagrations started by a big attack.

It would be mistaken to suppose that air-raid shelters represented havens of security. Many thousands of people asphyxiated in their subterranean gloom. Amid the fires created by a heavy attack, intense heat killed. Sometimes burst boilers or water mains drowned or cooked underground fugitives. During every attack, scenes of terror were played out among those seeking sanctuary. Twelve-year-old Vilda Geertz, in Hamburg, like many children treated the first raids as a game. But, as the attacks intensified, she saw the naked panic in the streets when alerts sounded, the tearful adults, people fighting each other to get through the doors into the shelters. Once inside, when the bombs began to fall, the whole world seemed to shake. Almost everyone suffered in some degree from claustrophobia. “I came to live in a fantasy world, in my books, because reality was so terrible.”

Frau Husle of Cologne wrote to her husband, a corporal in Model’s army, “The streetcars don’t run, the Neumarkt looks as if it had been ploughed. We have no water or electricity and very little gas. Candlelight may be romantic at Christmas, or if two people are together, but when I am so lonely it makes me very unhappy. My nerves are completely finished. One day you will see me again, but it is better not to think about it. If my hair has turned white it won’t matter—or will it???” Early in the air war, the authorities urged city-dwellers to send a trunk of clothes and possessions to some friend or relation in a less vulnerable area. That way, if their house was destroyed, they could retain some of the bare necessities of life. When Joyce Kuhns fled westward from Breslau with her three small children in January 1945, after many adventures she arrived at last on the doorstep of a friend in Halle. With the help of the caretaker, she gratefully dragged from the cellar a trunk of clothes she had sent there months before. Next night there was an air raid. When she and her children returned from the shelter, the house and the trunk had disappeared. Only the body of the caretaker remained.

When Allied aircrews saw black puffs of flak pockmarking the sky around them, they felt fear and often animosity towards the gunners beneath. Yet most of the crews of those hated flak guns were teenagers, too young to have been allowed to fly. Hans Moser was the sixteen-year-old son of a government official from Nuremberg, manning a 105mm gun named Bertha at a synthetic-oil plant in Upper Silesia. Between attacks, he and his comrades were expected to continue with homework, and even to attend some school classes in the battery huts. The teenage gunners were supposed to receive an allowance of a pint of milk a day to build their strength, though this never reached them. Moser, who was nicknamed “Moses,” walked to church every Sunday with a friend named Georg, who intended himself for the priesthood after the war. They sat in the pews among a congregation of sturdy local peasants. “We were so young that we didn’t think very deeply about things,” said Moser. “We simply accepted that this was how life was.”

In their chilly barracks after hours, girls played no part in their thoughts. They talked about schoolwork, played chess and read Karl May Western novels. They slept a lot and nursed their hunger, because they were at an age when boys are always hungry. Most of the time, their greatest enemy was boredom. Perhaps every three weeks, there was a raid. As they stood to their guns, there was a long, tense period of expectation. The smoke generators masking the oil plant began to pour forth steep columns of oily fumes, designed to confuse the enemy’s bomb-aimers. The unit doctor told the boys sternly that they should try to empty their bowels before an attack, because it would thus be easier to treat them if their intestines were pierced by shrapnel. When a raid began, as the gunners sweated to load and fire Bertha, they gazed up at the huge silver formations, resenting what they saw as the arrogant security of the crews, so confident of dumping their loads of terror and returning home for supper.

The gun crews cheered uproariously when they saw a plane suddenly bleed black smoke and plunge downwards. Once, an American flier fell beside their battery on his parachute. He had lost a leg, but remained conscious. The boys crowded curiously around him, and were amazed to hear him address them in fluent German. His name was Richard Radlinger. “Why do you come here attacking us?” the gunners demanded. The airman replied easily: “We’ll all have a beer together after the war.” Then he was taken away to a military hospital. After every raid, the oil plant looked a mess of wreckage and tangled steel. The gunners were amazed that within two or three days it always seemed able to resume production.

Throughout the air war, there were many cases of Germans wreaking summary vengeance upon shot-down airmen. When Richard Burt, a Liberator gunner from Utah, was being escorted through Vienna after being shot down, an elderly civilian began to curse him and belabour him with his umbrella. Burt’s guard restrained him. As Carl Fyler was taken to Bremen rail station after parachuting from his B-17, civilians shouted at him: “Terrorflieger! Schweinhund! Chicago gangster!” Sometimes, German bitterness had much deadlier consequences. Lieutenant Henry Docherty, co-pilot of a B-17, was badly beaten up in front of the mayor of Spandau. Docherty reported seeing four RAF fliers hung from telegraph poles. A Nazi SA man drove up to a house where a British airman was being held and asked: “Where is the pig?” The flier was lying on the floor, his face bleeding. The SA man shot him in the stomach, and told one of the guards to finish him off, which the man did.

On 28 February 1945, two Spitfires hit by flak crash-landed almost beside each other north of the village of Bohmte. The pilots, Flight-Lieutenant Taylor and Sergeant Cuthbertson, were uninjured. They were taken under guard to the local inn. Soon afterwards Norbert Mueller and Fritz Buchning, two Nazi SA officials, arrived. They demanded to see the prisoners. Buchning delivered a raving harangue about “murderers of innocent women and children.” The fliers were then marched into a nearby wood and shot. The SA said they were acting in obedience to an order issued on 26 February by the local kreisleiter, that all pilots of strafing aircraft were to be executed. Interrogated later, one of the firing squad said: “I was of the opinion that the Orstgruppenleiter was acting correctly, because I knew of the order.” Many other such incidents are recorded in war-crimes investigations files. Aircrew who found themselves confined in prison camps may have suffered privations, but in the hysterical atmosphere of Germany under bombardment in early 1945 they could think themselves fortunate to survive.

It was ironic, of course, that in the last stage of the war many PoWs themselves died in air attacks. Large numbers of Polish prisoners were killed during an RAF raid on Lübeck. Next morning, those who survived found themselves the objects of intense local bitterness: “An angry crowd of civilians gathered outside the camp shouting abuse at us,” wrote Piotr Tareczynski, a Polish gunner officer in captivity since 5 September 1939. “Rightly or wrongly, they blamed us for their misfortunes. Some of the crowd carried staves. That was the only time we were glad to have barbed wire around us.” Cloud obscured Coblenz during a raid against the city on the night of 22 December 1944. The RAF’s markers drifted towards Stalag XIIA, twenty-five miles eastwards. Several PoW medical personnel were killed by stray bombs, along with civilians in the neighbouring village of Diez. Bud Lindsey, a nineteen-year-old Texan, was disgusted to find himself strafed by a U.S. Thunderbolt as he was led to the rear after being captured in the Vosges Mountains in November 1944. He had stumbled into the German lines while collecting platoon reports days after he joined the 100th Infantry Division, without ever having fired a shot in anger. The American fighter caught his group of prisoners a few hundred yards behind the front, bullet strikes throwing sparks from a nearby house: “I don’t know why the pilot suddenly decided to fire on a small group of men of which five were American PoWs,” wrote Lindsey bitterly. “. . . Perhaps it had been a dull day for him.”

In the aftermath of a big raid, prisoners of war and slave labourers could often be seen in the cities manning rescue equipment, pumping air into ruins where survivors were believed to be trapped in rubble. Every city-dwelling German became accustomed to walking to work through streets on which glass from uncountable shattered windows scrunched underfoot at every step. Ruined buildings bore chalked inscriptions, guiding friends and relations to the new abodes of survivors. Half of Europe, in those days, seemed to be searching for lost loved ones. Some were only temporarily mislaid. Others were gone for ever. And there was worse, far worse, to come.

After a USAAF raid on Berlin on 3 February 1945 local rumour alleged that 15,000 people had died, though the real total was much smaller. Paul von Stemann wrote: “That everything was dissolving in confusion became clear to me as I walked unchallenged through the battered buildings of the Foreign Office. They had been hit by a big stick of bombs, and all the doors were open, so that I could stroll freely through the offices. Documents, papers, books lay about the floor covered with chalk, rubble, broken glass and ink running from shattered bottles. Among the crowd was von Ribbentrop himself, spruce as a cadet in his fine uniform, but with bewilderment in his face.” For some weeks, the winter snows had rendered Berlin’s miles of ruins wonderfully picturesque. Now, instead, amid the February thaw they looked grey and wretched. People tramped through streets thick with mud created by rain falling upon ubiquitous dust and rubble.

Von Stemann sometimes drove the 120 miles from Berlin to Dresden, to experience the blissful tranquillity of that city after the relentless air raids in the capital. Installed at Dresden’s Bellevue Hotel, “all around us was the manmade beauty we were starving for,” he wrote, “August the Strong’s castle, the Zwinger, the baroque Hofkirch, the museums with their huge collections of china, ivory, sculpture and paintings, and further behind the Alt Stadt with its winding streets and many antique shops well stocked and eager to make a sale.”

Gotz Bergander, a young Dresdener, had been twelve when the war began. In the early years, his father returned laden with luxuries from duty with a Luftwaffe flak unit in France. The boy quizzed him eagerly about how many British planes he had shot down. In 1941, Gotz was surprised to see his mother burst into tears when the invasion of Russia was announced on the radio, yet his favourite pastime remained the depiction of lurid battle scenes in his sketchbook. At school, he and his classmates regarded air-raid drill as a game. They lit balls of paper to simulate falling incendiaries, and practised extinguishing them. They gazed at pictures of bombed cities. Until 1945, however, Dresden was a distant and low-priority target for Allied aircraft. “I had a lot of imagination, but not enough to conceive what air attack might mean for us.” When Bergander himself was drafted to join a local flak-gun crew, his romantic illusions about war were swiftly shattered. The work was hard, the routine relentlessly boring. A few mis-aimed bombs occasionally fell on Dresden, but the guns seldom fired. One cold, clear night, they saw the distant glow of Leipzig burning. But local opinion held that Dresden’s great cultural heritage rendered it immune from Allied devastation. As the front came closer, and defeat loomed, another rumour held that their city was designated for preservation, to serve as the Allied occupation capital.

Bergander’s father Emil had been released from his flak unit to run the well-known Bramsch company, manufacturing yeast and schnapps at a distillery close to their home. When the teenager was sketching in his room and heard a radio warning of an air raid, he would hang a towel out of the window, as a signal to his father to halt production in the works. They preferred to do this at the last possible moment, because the yeast spoilt if the plant was shut down. In the late afternoon of 13 February 1945, the boy spent some time with his mother at Dresden station, watching the great throng of soldiers, travellers and refugees. They took the streetcar home at 9 p.m. Soon after they reached their house, which stood in the inner suburbs, there was an alarm. The building was owned by his father’s company, which had its offices on the ground floor. The managing director had ordered the cellar specially strengthened as a shelter with steel shutters, rubber seals and a telephone line. The family descended into its safety, and sat there through the storm of concussions which followed. Only twenty-five minutes after the raid began, the planes departed. The Berganders emerged into the darkness to find that no bombs had fallen near by, but a great pink glow suffused the sky above the city. Gotz climbed on to the factory roof, and used sand to extinguish a few incendiaries which had fallen there. The largest local landmark was a big cigarette factory, domed like a mosque, and surmounted by minarets. Everything upon the horizon as far as its gates was burning. Gotz marvelled at the beauty of the flames, reflected in the yellow glass of the dome. He was awed, and afraid. This first attack had been carried out by 244 Lancasters of the RAF’s 5 Group, which had dropped more than 800 tons of bombs.

Even at a safe distance from the vast conflagration engulfing the city, the teenager felt its heat. He descended again to the street, and saw the first trickle of terrified fugitives approaching. “Everything is burning!” they cried. Their coats were covered with ash, and many were coughing violently from smoke inhalation. Some carried bags laden with a few possessions. A small, stunned crowd gathered in front of the Bergander house, discussing the nightmare. Suddenly somebody shouted: “Alarm again!” They looked at each other in disbelief. “Impossible!” said a man. The teenager shouted fiercely at the sky: “Criminals!” It seemed so utterly unjust. They retired to their cellar again, listening in terror to explosions which seemed much heavier and closer than during the earlier wave of bombing. So they were. Five hundred and twenty-nine RAF Lancasters delivered more than 1,800 tons of bombs with deadly accuracy. Just six were lost. The impact upon Dresden was catastrophic.

After forty minutes, the attack stopped. The Berganders emerged from the shelter to find that their own house and factory were almost the only buildings in the area which survived undamaged. When the boy went back on to the roof, he descended to tell his parents that he could see only a white wall of flame. Sporadic explosions persisted, from delayed-action bombs. The lower part of their own street was burning. The crowd of fugitives was swelling constantly. At last, Gotz Bergander tired of the awful spectacle, and sank exhausted into sleep.

Next morning, the residents of Dresden stumbled out into the streets, to behold the utter devastation of their city. Victor Klemperer, a sixty-three-year-old Jewish academic, yearned as much as any man in Europe for the defeat of the Nazis, yet he was appalled by what he now saw before him:

We walked slowly, for I was now carrying both bags, and my limbs hurt . . . Above us, building after building was a burnt-out ruin. Down here by the river, where many people were moving along or resting on the ground, masses of the empty, rectangular cases of the stick incendiary bombs stuck out of the churned-up earth. Fires were still burning in many of the buildings . . . At times, small and no more than a bundle of clothes, the dead were scattered across our path. The skull of one had been torn away, the top of the head was a dark red bowl. Once an arm lay there with a pale, quite fine hand, like a model made of wax such as one sees in barber’s shop windows. Some people . . . pushed handcarts with bedding and the like, or sat on boxes and bundles. Crowds streamed unceasingly between these islands, past the corpses and smashed vehicles, up and down the Elbe, a silent, agitated procession.

Another Jewish family in Dresden made a special pilgrimage that terrible day: to satisfy themselves that the Gestapo headquarters had gone. “It was terrible, the bodies, the city burning,” said Henni Brenner; “. . . but from a distance we saw that it [too] was burning. Well, then, we felt some satisfaction.” Klemperer’s own home was destroyed. He and his wife cut the yellow stars from their clothes, because they knew that only as Aryans did they have any chance of securing food, shelter, mercy. When they heard the distant sound of aircraft once more, and threw themselves to the ground amid renewed explosions and rubble dust trickling over their heads, Klemperer thought fervently: “Just don’t get killed now!”

As Gotz Bergander ventured down to the street, he met a throng of people from the city begging for water—the factory had its own supply. Bizarrely, a worker arrived on his bicycle. “Why have you come?” asked the boy. “I wanted to see if the old place was still standing,” said the man, one of their most conscientious workers, in his strong Saxon accent. They were all emotionally exhausted: “We could not grasp what had happened to us. I felt no hatred for the airmen, but a great anger. I felt they were cowards. Why didn’t they face us man to man?”

When the sirens sounded again, they looked blankly at each other. Somebody said: “But there’s nothing left to bomb.” Almost a hundred people, most of them hysterical, crowded into their shelter at the same time as Victor Klemperer lay hugging his fear in the street. Three hundred and eleven USAAF Fortresses had come to complete what the RAF’s Lancasters had begun, delivering a further 771 tons of bombs on Dresden. The Berganders heard the first sticks falling, very close. It felt as if they were standing under a railway bridge as a train thundered overhead. All the lights went out. Torches revealed a thick cloud of white dust choking the air of the cellar. A sudden shock of blast drove the breath from their lungs for a moment. They were too stunned even to cry out. The Bergander family threw themselves on the floor. They were exceptionally fortunate in the strength of their shelter. A stick of 500-pound bombs had landed within yards of the house. Somehow, both the building itself and the neighbouring factory survived almost unscathed, save for the loss of every pane of glass and most of the roof tiles.

They came out to find the strong west wind fanning flames through almost every surrounding building. The Berganders ran among the buildings, dousing with wet blankets burning fragments of debris that had drifted through the air before falling to the ground. They thanked their good fortune, in having saved not only their lives and possessions but also a store of potatoes which alone fed them through the days that followed. They began carrying water to the neighbouring hospital, which had none. They laboured to restore power to the factory, while giving such help as they could to the tide of refugees. Gotz Bergander possessed a camera. He photographed everything that he could see, for posterity. His father was furious: “Why waste your time? Besides, it’s forbidden!” In the weeks that followed, they had little time to talk to each other or even think about what had happened. They were simply engaged in a struggle for survival. His mother suffered a heart attack. She was just forty-four.

In a single night and day, Dresden had suffered devastation more comprehensive than any other great urban centre of Germany save Hamburg and Berlin. At least 35,000 of its people had died. By a characteristic irony, the city’s railway links, pretext for the Allied bombardment, were relatively unscathed. Trains were again running through the city within a few days. “The bombing of Dresden was an extravagance,” observed Bergander almost sixty years later, with the detachment of an historian, most unusual among Germans of his generation.

Even in war, the ends must relate to the means. Here, the means seemed wildly out of proportion to the ends. I will not say that Dresden should not have been bombed—it was a rail centre, and thus an important target. I will not say Dresden was an exceptional case as compared to other German cities. But I do not understand why it had to be done on such a huge scale. The only answer, I suppose, is that the Allied policy of bombing had developed a dynamic of its own.

Enormous scholarly effort has been expended since 1945 upon exploring the Allies’ motives for destroying Dresden. Many researchers, especially Germans, find it hard to comprehend that, in the minds of the Allied planners, the city possessed no special significance. It was merely one among a dozen undamaged urban areas which had been listed for months on Sir Arthur Harris’s target board at High Wycombe—his notorious schedule of unfinished business in Germany. The demolition of itemized cities was essential to the fulfilment of his vision for the triumph of air power. Harris was specifically encouraged to address targets in eastern Germany by Churchill, on the eve of the Yalta conference. The prime minister was eager to demonstrate to the Russians the power of the Allied air forces. Freak meteorological conditions created in Dresden a firestorm—a wall of flame driven by fierce wind—of a kind which Bomber Command aspired to create every night of its offensive, but only three times accomplished: at Hamburg in 1943, Darmstadt in 1944 and Dresden in 1945.

When researching the bomber offensive a quarter of a century ago, the author chanced upon, and revealed for the first time, the RAF’s briefing notes to its squadrons which attacked Dresden. “In the midst of winter,” these read in part,

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 Marshal Konev’s 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.

The banality of this document accurately reflects the almost casual spirit in which the assault on Dresden was mounted. Great horrors in war are not always, or even often, the product of commensurate reflection by those who unleash them. Churchill himself regretted the destruction of Dresden after it had taken place, when the cultural implications were drawn to his attention. But amid the relentless pressures of prosecuting a war, to the prime minister as much as to Harris, Dresden seemed merely a placename on a map until the attack took place. Afterwards, of course, it was scarcely even that.

“This misery has got to stop,” Luftwaffe Unteroffizier Erich Schudak wrote in anguish in his diary after an air raid on 5 March. “What has become of our beautiful Germany?” Yet Schudak could not bring himself to accept that there was only one fashion in which “this misery” would end. On 18 March, he wrote: “Most of the squadron is convinced we have lost the war. To that, I can only say: ‘What weaklings!’ I know things don’t look bright and are getting desperate, but I’m sure we could turn the situation around.” Sir Arthur Harris might have said that, as long as such a spirit persisted among Germany’s defenders, his assault upon Germany’s people had to continue. And so indeed it did.

Henry Kissinger, perhaps surprisingly given his own Jewish background and subsequent political history, is among those who believes today that the area bombing of Germany was wrong: “Yet when a nation had tolerated the murder of so many people, they did not seem to deserve much sympathy.” This point will continue to be argued, with special passion among the people of Germany, through generations yet unborn.

The bombing of the cities and industrial centres of the Reich continued to the very end, destroying some targets useful to the Nazi war effort, and many that were not. On Monday 12 March 1945, a massive USAAF raid on Vienna destroyed its great Opera House. Some 160,000 costumes, together with sets for 120 productions, were consumed in the pyre. Two hundred and seventy people died merely in the cellar of the Jockey Club, which received a direct hit. It took rescuers a fortnight to burrow through the rubble and recover the bodies. “The smell is nauseating and clings to one’s nostrils for days,” wrote “Missie” Vassiltchikov, who had left Berlin to work in a Viennese hospital. The last perfor-mance to be staged at the Opera House was that of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.