FAR above the killing fields, the struggle for command of the skies had long tilted in the Allies’ favor, allowing some four thousand Anglo-American heavy bombers flying from England and Italy to get on with what an airman called “the murder business”: the gutting of the German homeland with well over one million tons of high explosives, incendiaries, and fragmentation bombs.
Allied hopes for strategic bombing early in the war had proved too optimistic, especially the belief that precision strikes would quickly eviscerate the enemy war economy, and so spare ground forces the blood-letting that had characterized World War I. Imprecise targeting, bad weather, and savage German defenses had forced Allied strategists to use the bomber fleet as a blunt instrument, a bludgeon rather than a scalpel. Terrible aircraft losses in the first three months of 1944, including almost 800 U.S. heavies shot down, had been stanched in the spring by the belated arrival of the P-51 Mustang, a fighter with sufficient range to escort bombers to any target on the Continent. An unexpected surge in German aircraft production, with 10,000 single-engine fighters built from May through September, had again challenged Allied hegemony; during the summer, another 900 bombers went down from Eighth Air Force alone. But the Luftwaffe now was in a death spiral, having lost 31,000 planes before D-Day and another 13,000 from June through October. By July, novice German fighter pilots typically received less than thirty flying hours in training before being hurled into combat, less than one-tenth the Anglo-American average; the life expectancy of a Luftwaffe pilot could be measured in weeks if not hours. “Each time I close the canopy before take-off,” wrote one airman, “I feel that I am closing the lid of my own coffin.”
Of necessity, antiaircraft flak had become the primary German defense. Flak was credited with destroying 6,400 Anglo-American planes in 1944 and damaging 27,000 others. A standard 88mm flak gun fired a 17-pound shrapnel grenade that climbed thirteen thousand feet in six seconds before bursting into fifteen hundred shards that could perforate any plane within two hundred yards. Fortunately for Allied crews, sixteen thousand 88mm shells were required on average to bring down a single heavy bomber. Flak nevertheless “held an evil, hypnotic fascination,” an American pilot acknowledged. Heavier German guns were deployed to reach high-flying B-17s, and by war’s end 1.2 million Germans would man the Reich’s ground-based air defenses.
British bombers, flying mostly at night, tried to avoid what a BBC reporter over Berlin described as “a wall of light.” A blue-tinted searchlight beam, guided by radar, would fix on an approaching plane, drawing other searchlights into a brilliant cone so that “the bomber appeared to ride at its moving vertex” while gunfire converged on the target. “The only hope,” an RAF crewman said, “was to get clear before the searchlights could form a cone.” American bombers, flying by day, sought to counter German search and fire-control radars with an expanding array of electronic jammers; one study estimated that effective jamming meant that 25 percent fewer planes were destroyed and 50 percent fewer were spared serious flak damage compared to those flying without countermeasures. Still, as the poet-airman Randall Jarrell wrote:
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Air supremacy provided an invaluable advantage to Allied ground forces and spared the lives of many Anglo-American fliers, even if that meant little to those washed out with a hose. The Allied strategic air effort in Europe cost some eighty thousand lives and ten thousand aircraft, and the vast tactical air war in direct support of ground forces added more losses. In the first half of 1944, battle casualty rates for every 1,000 bomber crewmen serving six months in combat included 712 killed or missing and 175 wounded: 89 percent. By one calculation, barely one in four U.S. airmen completed twenty-five missions over Germany, a minimum quota that was soon raised to thirty and then thirty-five on the assumption that the liberation of France and Belgium and the attenuation of German airpower made flying less lethal.
Perhaps less lethal, but hardly less stressful: the seven British crewmen aboard a Lancaster bomber sometimes spoke of being joined by “the eighth passenger”—fear. Of 7,374 Lancasters built, 3,349 would be lost in action. A British airman had just a one-in-five chance of surviving the loss of his plane, in part because the Lancaster had only a single emergency exit. For an American crewman, the chance was three in five. (The B-17 Flying Fortress had four exits.) In British Bomber Command, two of every five fliers did not live to complete a tour of duty, a mortality rate far exceeding that of British infantrymen on the Western Front in World War I.
The simplest missions could be fatal: an American B-24 returning to base from a training flight clipped a tree in Lancashire during a violent thunderstorm, then cartwheeled through the village of Freckleton. A wall of flame one hundred feet high burned for two hours, engulfing the infants’ wing of Holy Trinity School and the Sad Sack Snack Bar, which catered to airmen. Of the sixty-one dead, more than half were children, including some who had been evacuated from London to escape the V-weapon barrage. Bing Crosby, in England on a goodwill tour, found himself too stricken to sing at the sight of the burned children in a local hospital ward. Instead he stood outside in a corridor, crooning “Don’t Fence Me In” and “White Christmas” as elegies to innocence and youth.
High though the war’s cost in men and machines, the U.S. industrial and military base by the fall of 1944 was producing far more planes, pilots, gunners, bombardiers, and navigators than needed to replace combat losses; during the winter, the training of new pilots, which had climbed to more than 100,000 annually, would be cut by over 70 percent. Yet General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, fretted over reports of “incipient weaknesses” among bomber crews in Europe, which he described as “lack of respect (amounting to near hatred) for certain very senior general officers;… lack of desire to kill Germans; lack of understanding of political necessity for fighting the war; general personal lassitude.” Low morale did plague at least part of the force; a rest-and-recuperation program in Atlantic City, Miami, and Santa Monica was abandoned because the interlude at home seemed to make airmen more resentful of civilians, bellicose toward their officers, and reluctant to return to combat. An officer in the 319th Bombardment Group described a fellow pilot as “so shot that he spills food at the table, jerks all night in his sleep, and is highly irritable.… He’ll kill a whole crew someday and it will be called ‘pilot error.’ Oh well, such is war.” Lieutenant Joseph T. Hallock, a twenty-two-year-old flying in B-17s, told the reporter Brendan Gill, “Sometimes I feel as if I’d never had a chance to live at all, but most of the time I feel as if I’d lived forever.” At precarious moments over Germany, he confessed, he would whisper: “God, you gotta. You gotta get me back. God, listen, you gotta.”
In the airman’s world, those afflicted with “the clanks”—a paralyzing inability to shake a sense of dread—were known as “dead men flying.” Bailing out of a stricken “kite” was called “giving birth,” and “chop girls” were English women shunned by superstitious crews because they had befriended airmen who then went missing in action. Temperatures of minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit left brown frostbite patches on foreheads and buttocks, at least until deployment of the F-3 heated suit, with 250 watts flowing through wired jackets, trousers, and felt slippers to give eight Clos of insulation. Plastic surgeons learned to rebuild burned-away faces; after sculpting new lips from skin grafted off an arm, they tattooed them red and then added tiny black dots to simulate mustache whiskers.
In the airman’s world, a B-17 pilot sat in the five-foot cube of his cockpit with “an oxygen mask full of drool” amid the roar of four engines. He fiddled with 130 switches, dials, gauges, levers, and pedals long enough to dump his payload of bombs—“big ugly dead things,” in one officer’s phrase—and then fled for home. In this world, Germany was known as “the Land of Doom.” In this world, the pilot John Muirhead took pains not to grow close to his Flying Fortress crewmates, because “if I didn’t know them, I would not grieve.”
* * *
How best to destroy the Land of Doom had perplexed air strategists for years. The Combined Chiefs at the Casablanca conference in January 1943 called for “the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and economic system” in order to undermine the enemy “capacity for armed resistance.” But where was a big modern state most vulnerable? Some analysts studied the U.S. industrial system in search of “instructive hints to what might be German weak points,” such as the single plant in Chicago that processed 90 percent of all tantalum, a corrosion-resistant metal critical to radar and radio production. Others scrutinized Germany directly, reviewing thousands of intelligence reports. One conclusion: sustained bombing of enemy steel plants was pointless, because the Reich was using only 20 percent of its steel-making capacity.
But Germany did have an Achilles heel: oil. The Allied powers controlled more than 90 percent of the world’s natural oil, compared to just 3 percent for the Axis. German schemes to exploit Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus had been thwarted by battlefield reverses in Africa and Russia. By the spring of 1944, this vulnerability became increasingly evident to Allied intelligence analysts. Shortages impeded the training of some combat divisions, fuel cuts were imposed on the German navy, and fleets of vehicles were converted to wood-burning engines. Nearly all Luftwaffe aviation fuel came from synthetic-oil plants, and German chemists sought energy substitutes in such unlikely European flora as acorns and grapes. An OSS analysis asserted that further reduction of the Reich’s oil production would have “rapid and drastic effects upon her military capacity.” Ultra intercepts revealed Berlin’s alarm at Allied raids on the vast Romanian petroleum facilities around Ploesti and against oil targets in Germany. British intelligence by late May had concluded that sustained air attacks on German oil production would cause disastrous industrial shortages within three to six months. “Oil,” warned a decrypted message from Japanese officials in Berlin to Tokyo, “is Germany’s problem.”
No one believed that more than Lieutenant General Carl A. Spaatz, commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe. Taciturn and unpretentious, with passions for fishing and cribbage, “Tooey” Spaatz was an aviation pioneer who had shot down three German planes in World War I and helped set a world record for staying aloft in 1929 through innovative midair refueling. Time claimed that he now kept “the finest poker table in London.… He bets with a heavy hand [and] bluffs outrageously.” Uncanny in his ability to draw an inside straight, Spaatz sometimes played with a kitten tucked into his uniform blouse for luck. The need to destroy the Luftwaffe, and Eisenhower’s decision to focus on German transportation targets before Normandy, had delayed a full-force blow at the enemy’s oil industry. Yet even before D-Day, the supreme commander had heeded Spaatz’s pleas by authorizing several oil raids, among them a mid-May attack by nine hundred bombers that also resulted in the destruction of sixty Luftwaffe fighters desperately struggling to defend the target.
No sooner had OVERLORD forces come ashore than Spaatz declared, on June 8, that the “primary strategic aim of United States Strategic Air Forces is now to deny oil to enemy armed forces,” a decree that remained in force until the war ended. An estimated 30 percent of German production came from the Ploesti refineries, with another 36 percent from two dozen synthetic plants that converted brown coal to gasoline and aviation fuel. Sixty crude-oil refineries in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia provided the rest. Fifteenth Air Force in Italy would target refineries in Romania, Vienna, and Budapest, along with synthetic-oil plants in Silesia, Poland, and the Sudetenland. Eighth Air Force in England would focus on seven large synthetic plants in central Germany, as well as some twenty refineries mostly in northern Germany. British intelligence in late July posited that oil shortages could cause a German military collapse by the end of 1944.
That estimate was too rosy, but German production did plummet through the summer. Ploesti had been wrecked by bombers even before the Red Army overran the region in August, and of ninety-one oil facilities remaining in Hitler’s hands only three were at full production by early fall.
Not everyone subscribed to the oil strategy. A directive from the Combined Chiefs on September 25 gave first priority to enemy petroleum targets, followed by the German transportation system and tank production facilities. But Bomber Command resisted the edict. Its leadership was determined to finish the job of sowing terror and chaos by destroying German cities, a project that had begun with incendiary attacks on the medieval town centers of Lübeck and Rostock in the spring of 1942. The British Air Ministry had long studied the science of “fire-raising,” examining the combustible qualities of German pantries, attics, and furnishings, and collecting insurance maps to study firewall patterns in German buildings. Allied bombers would ultimately drop eighty million incendiary sticks, twenty-two-inch hexagonal rods with a magnesium-zinc case that burned for eight minutes at two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The firestorm that incinerated Hamburg in the summer of 1943, killing 41,000 and “de-housing” nearly a million, “simulated the atmosphere of another planet,” a German writer recorded, “one incompatible with life.”
Air Chief Marshal Arthur T. Harris, the Bomber Command leader, in late 1943 had sent Churchill a list of forty-seven German cities, of which nineteen were deemed “virtually destroyed” and another nineteen “seriously damaged.” Harris argued that Germany would surrender after the destruction of “between 40 percent and 50 percent of the principal German towns,” which he believed could happen by April 1, 1944. “We shall take out one German city after another,” Harris said, “like pulling teeth.” Rumors circulated through Germany that lime pits already had been dug for future bomb victims in Berlin.
Yet April passed without a surrender, and British bomber losses were dreadful. Allied intelligence found “no grounds for supposing that the effects of area bombing on civilian morale would contribute to Germany’s collapse.” The Japanese ambassador in Berlin shared that view: he advised Tokyo that “internal collapse will certainly not be brought about by means of air raids.”
Harris believed otherwise. Known to subordinates as both “Bomber” and “Butcher,” imbued with what Churchill called “a certain coarseness,” he was described by one admiring journalist as “a tiger with no mercy in his heart.” With a bowling-pin shape that no uniform could flatter, Harris was given to wearing a mulberry-colored velvet smoking jacket and chain-smoking Camels or partaking of ceremonial snuff. Though sometimes saturnine—he bathed his stomach ulcers with Dr. J. Collis Browne’s Mixture, which contained peppermint oil and anhydrous morphine—he never tired of showing dinner guests his private “Blue Book,” bulging with aerial photos of skeletonized German cities. Often he drove his black Bentley at lunatic speeds, remanding the ostensible chauffeur to the backseat, and he was not above taking a pony trap from his headquarters at High Wycombe to Chequers, the prime minister’s nearby country house west of London. When Churchill grumbled, “I’m sick of these raids on Cologne,” Harris replied, “So are the people of Cologne.”
In the British official history’s portrait:
He had a tendency to confuse advice with interference, criticism with sabotage, and evidence with propaganda. He resisted innovations and was seldom open to persuasion.… Seeing all issues in terms of black or white, he was impatient of any other possibility.
Harris believed that bombers should be clubs to bash the German Volk. To a colleague he wrote, “If the Germans were asked today, ‘Oil plants or cities?’ they would reply, ‘Bomb anything you fancy except the cities.’” Accordingly, more than half of Bomber Command’s payloads during the war would fall on urban centers. Each morning, in a command center known as the Hole, Harris would decide which German city would suffer that night, each with an ichthyic code name: CATFISH, for Munich; WHITEBAIT, for Berlin. His animating principle, as the official history explained, was “that in order to destroy anything it is necessary to destroy everything.” By the late fall of 1944, Harris claimed that forty-five of sixty listed German cities had been “virtually destroyed,” at a rate of more than two each month, with a dwindling number awaiting evisceration. These were mostly in the east: Halle, Magdeburg, Leipzig, Dresden. Air Chief Marshal Charles F. A. Portal argued in early November that “the air offensive against oil gives us by far the best hope of complete victory in the next few months.” Harris disagreed, and instead urged completion of what he called “the city programme.” Portal replied on November 12, “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.”
Harris’s resolve to crack the enemy’s will and effect a surrender with terror raids would be found wanting both militarily and morally. “The idea that the main object of bombing German industrial cities was to break the enemy’s morale proved to be totally unsound,” he acknowledged in 1947. Yet the postwar U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that “bombing seriously depressed the morale of German citizens. Its psychological effects were defeatism, fear, hopelessness, fatalism, and apathy.” At any given time two thousand Allied aircraft might be above Germany, and as Randall Jarrell wrote:
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school—
Till our lives wore out.
While British Bomber Command believed in leveling entire cities, the Americans considered themselves “precision bombers,” a term that implied attacks exclusively against military targets out of revulsion at indiscriminately killing civilians. But because the skies of central Europe were chronically overcast, half of Eighth Air Force’s bomb tonnage was dropped using “blind bombing” radar techniques; often, as few as one out of ten bombs fell within half a mile of an obscured target. Even when conditions were ideal for bombardiers—this was the case in roughly one sortie of seven—less than a third of all bombs detonated within a thousand feet of the aiming point. The term “precision bombing,” Spaatz conceded, was intended “in a relative, not a literal sense.” Bad weather also caused frequent diversions to secondary targets such as rail yards, a practice that amounted to emptying bomb bays over city centers. Such attacks on transportation targets gradually restricted the movement of German war commodities, notably coal, while razing urban precincts. “The way to stop the killing of civilians,” Hap Arnold asserted in a memo that could have been dictated by Bomber Harris, “is to cause so much damage and destruction and death that the civilians will demand that their government cease fighting.” Eighth Air Force would devote more than 20 percent of its payloads to city bombing, the historian Richard G. Davis subsequently calculated, while making efforts to conceal the extent of such attacks. And press censors blocked any hint that precision bombing was often terribly imprecise.
The Americans were no less intent than the British on refining the techniques of havoc. In the Utah desert, Hollywood set designers and engineers from Standard Oil built two facsimile working-class neighborhoods, one German and the other Japanese, with replicas of furniture, bed coverings, and other household inflammables; repeated fire-bomb experiments led to the development of incendiaries that could punch through stout German roofs. The M-76 Block Burner, another American innovation first used in March 1944, spattered incendiary gel in big, burning gobs. “Aerial incendiaries,” a U.S. Army study concluded, “probably caused as much death and destruction as any other weapon used in World War II.”
Air Chief Marshal Harris never believed in the oil plan, which he described to Portal as “a faith to which I am not only not a convert, but against which I have waged … unrelenting opposition.” Harris would be condemned both during and after the war for a mulish recalcitrance that impeded a unified assault on the Reich’s weakest link, but in his grudging, tardy fashion he did comply with the directives of the Allied high command. Bomber Command’s first daylight strategic assaults of the war fell on oil targets in August and September 1944; by November, British and American bombers were flying a comparable number of sorties against oil. Thereafter Bomber Command flew more than twice as many missions as Eighth Air Force, and in the final year of the strategic air war in Europe, Harris’s planes would drop nearly 100,000 tons, compared with 73,000 tons for Eighth Air Force. Arguably the British attacked to greater effect since their bombers carried larger payloads and bigger bombs, and frequently dropped those bombs with greater accuracy. Analysts concluded that the Americans attacked petroleum targets with too many small bombs incapable of cracking blast walls, too few incendiaries, and too many bombs—about 14 percent—that proved defective, often because of faulty fuzes.
The inclement fall weather gave Germany a bit of breathing room, as did crash programs dedicated to smoke generation, camouflage, the dispersal of targets, and repair. By late autumn, 350,000 workers—mostly foreign slaves—toiled to repair and hide oil facilities. Defenses became more ferocious: the vast Leuna synthetic-oil plant west of Leipzig, which was attacked twenty-one times at a cost of eighty-two Allied bombers, became the single most heavily defended industrial plant in Germany, bristling with more than five hundred heavy flak guns.
But the die had been cast. For a time in late fall, Rundstedt limited divisions in the west to 1,200 gallons of gasoline a day rather than the standard 7,200. Aviation-fuel production by the end of November had dropped to a quarter of the May level; the Luftwaffe was even forced to minimize aircraft taxiing, and some planes were pulled to the runway by oxen. Attacks on oil-hydrogenation plants also led to dwindling nitrogen stocks, which in turn severely constricted German ammunition production. Likewise, the destruction of synthetic-oil facilities brought the added benefit of impairing production of synthetic rubber, as well as of other chemicals used in explosives.
No industrial disparity during the war had greater importance than the gap between German and American fuel production. From 1942 through 1944, Berlin’s refineries and plants generated 23 million tons of fuel; during the same period, the United States produced more than 600 million tons. By the spring of 1945, after more than 500 Allied attacks against some 130 oil targets, German petroleum output would decline to 12 percent of what it had been a year earlier. For want of the commodity most vital in a modern society, the Reich was dying.
* * *
The German people were dying, too. From the Air Ministry rooftop in King Charles Street, while watching London burn after a Luftwaffe raid in 1940, Harris had mused, “They are sowing the wind.” Now came the whirlwind: some 131 German cities and towns would be attacked from the air during the war, leaving 400,000 dead and seven million homeless.
For those on the ground, the ordeal always began with the shriek of warning sirens, signaling that it was time to turn off the gas, turn on the radio, fill the bathtub, get out the flashlight. In cinemas the words “Flieger Alarme” appeared on the screen. Hurrying to the shelters during daylight raids, citizens craned their necks to look for the bright beads of approaching bombers dragging their white contrails. “People alongside us started counting the tiny silver dots,” one German recalled. “They had already got to four hundred, but there was still no end to be seen.” At night, civilians wore fluorescent badges to avoid colliding in the dark as they made their way by following the phosphorescent paint slathered on street curbs.
Three thousand municipal air-raid shelters had been built by the regime, far too few even when supplemented by mine shafts and subway tunnels. “I had the feeling of having ended up in an underworld, in filth and disorder,” a diarist in Krefeld wrote. “It went well with a sign saying in bright letters, ‘The People are grateful to their Führer.’” Shelter dwellers wrapped themselves in wet sheets and covered their eyes with gauze, opening their mouths to protect eardrums against concussion and drawing shallow breaths when the ventilators were closed because of fires raging above. A German medic in Hamm reported, “Children with scarlet fever and diphtheria … keep being found in bunker rooms. Hopefully we will be spared typhus this time.”
“In Cologne life is no longer possible,” a diarist wrote in an entry that no doubt would have pleased Harris. “No water, gas, or electricity, and no food.” Stuttgart’s inner city “ceased to exist” after raids in mid-September: “We had to climb over the dead to get away from the sea of fire,” one woman recalled. “I couldn’t help thinking, ‘We’ve been living through the day of judgment.’” Bombs battered Essen in 39 of the air war’s 60 months; 272 raids left only 5,000 of 65,000 buildings undamaged. From the air, an Allied crewman wrote in his logbook, the burning city resembled “an immense pot, boiling over.”
The iron and steel center of Duisburg was bombed nearly three hundred times; during one twenty-four-hour period in November, Bomber Command dropped as much tonnage on the city as had fallen on London during the entire war. In Hanover, a man who rode through the charred ruins on his bicycle after one raid wrote, “The night had done its work.… All you could say, over and over, was, ‘That too, oh, and that too!’” In Osnabrück, where the ruins were sardonically dubbed “Hermann Göring Square,” a single fourteen-minute raid on September 13 dropped 181,000 incendiaries and 2,171 high-explosive bombs; more followed a month later. Five thousand died in Braunschweig in “one great maelstrom of fire” on October 15. Seven thousand died in Heilbronn—one-tenth of the population—during raids in early December. Delay-fuzed bombs kept rescue crews at bay while flames loped through the half-timbered town; among the dead were hundreds in cellars where ventilation pumps had sucked in carbon monoxide. Goebbels told his diary, “A large industrial town ablaze from end to end is a hideous sight.” He proclaimed “Politeness Week,” urging civic amiability.
Even from the Dutch coast, pilots could see Cologne burning, wrote the novelist and poet W. G. Sebald, like “a fiery speck in the darkness, like the tail of a motionless comet.” Names of former residents were chalked on charred apartment walls, with crosses next to those killed; survivors received 210 Reichmarks toward the cost of burying their dead, according to the historian Jörg Friedrich. Helmut Kohl, a future German chancellor who was fourteen in 1944, described shoveling debris from a destroyed house near Mannheim where residents had suffocated in the basement: “They lay there with blue faces.” Police assigned to work in morgues and cemeteries were fortified with alcohol. “Do you still remember when we were in school we read Schiller’s ‘The Bell’?” a girl in Hanover wrote an SS corporal at the front. “‘Many must go into the hostile world.’ Then we did not think much about it.… Monotonously and cheerlessly we spend our best years, we bury our youth.”
On and on it went, high explosives and incendiaries falling nearly every night and every day by the thousands of tons, week after week, month upon month. Deranged mothers, unwilling to abandon their dead children when evacuating Hamburg, carried away the roasted or asphyxiated corpses in cardboard suitcases. A firefighter in Krefeld reported, “The heat was so great that we could not touch the metal on our helmets.” A one-hour RAF attack on Darmstadt ignited a firestorm that drew 3,000 firefighters with 220 engines from across the region. “Burning people raced past like live torches,” a witness reported, “and I listened to their unforgettable final screams.” Among the dead were knots of human beings so thoroughly fused together by the heat that tools were needed to pry the bodies apart for burial. Nurses soaked the sheets of burn victims in salad oil as a palliative. One survivor wrote, “I saw a man dragging a sack with five or six bulges in it as if he were carrying heads of cabbages. It was the heads of his family, a whole family, that he had found in the cellar.”
Here then, the annihilative whirlwind—this vortex, this gyre of flame, this destroyer of worlds. “The destruction will go on,” wrote one man in Berlin, “until the world has bled to death.”