CHAPTER 23
FRIGHTENING your enemy is the fundamental and presumably the oldest weapon of war. Starving him – hitting him where it hurts most – cannot be much less old. Mass bombing is the most modern way of trying to destroy both his morale and his economy at one and the same time. Where earlier warriors rushed upon their foes with painted bodies and hideous screams, or poisoned wells and beleaguered towns, their more sophisticated though hardly more civilized successors rain high explosives on factories and homes and set fire to whole cities. Only the techniques and the scale are new.
Perhaps the hallowed antiquity of the aim explains the fact that these new and fearful means were generally accepted in the Second World War. Air raids involving the indiscriminate killing of enormous numbers of civilians were the current step in the natural evolution of the art of war. The very concept of the civilian hardly remained valid. The traditional distinction between men setting forth to risk their lives and those who stayed behind out of range of death disappeared in the first half of the twentieth century. All were now combatants in their several ways. A civilian was a combatant who did not happen to be enrolled in the traditionally recognized fighting services; he was constantly proclaimed to be in the front line, a description implying that he was risking his life as much as anybody and would not think to complain about staking it. Even the deaths of children were accepted as, if not legitimate, yet logical consequences of war, occasioning special grief no doubt but relatively little indignation: that was the way things were.
At the beginning of the war Great Britain and France had promised, in response to a plea by Roosevelt, to confine bombing to strictly military targets provided the Germans did so too, but what was a military target was unclear and changeable. Yet there seemed to be one rule which still survived. There was still a sense of proportion and a feeling of uneasiness if it were disregarded, an acceptance of the ancient Greek tag that means must bear some relation to ends. To destroy factories or the people who worked in them, or the homes of people who worked in them, was perhaps legitimate; but to do these things – as for instance in the bombing of Dresden – without being able to point to a commensurate strategic advantage was not just a sad necessity but also uncomfortably hard to justify – either in general moral terms or in the strict application of the medieval doctrine of Just War.
But if a majority acquiesced in what seemed to be the inevitability of the deplorable, a minority clung to an older teaching. This minority, trying to bend modern capabilities to the Christian faith instead of adapting the latter to the former, said that since all killing was wrong in the absence of special justifying circumstances, indiscriminate mass killing needed to be very meticulously justified indeed – and was not. Champions of this tradition such as Dr George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, accepted that the nature and context of war had so changed that many deaths, hitherto regarded as unjustifiable, must be accepted, but they alleged that there was still a line to be drawn somewhere and that the destruction of closely packed residential areas, because they were closely packed residential areas, was a sin and – even in the absence of any international convention on air warfare – a crime. Even if it was permissible to kill men and women at work in factories, it was not permissible to kill men, women and children in their homes. For keeping these Christian ideas before men’s minds in spite of the clatter of arms the Bishop of Chichester was not elevated to the highest Christian office in England when the see of Canterbury, for which many inside the church and out considered him pre-eminently qualified, fell vacant at the end of 1944. He was even denied the lesser see of York many years after the war was over and after it had virtually been promised to him.
The advent of air power had brought with it a school of theorists who alleged that this new weapon could contribute to war-making by doing something that had never been done before, and could do this independently and without the help of the older sea and land forces. The Second World War put this theory to the test and (with air power as it was before the introduction of nuclear weapons) found it wanting. The prime aim of assailing industry, communications and morale was to compel the surrender of the enemy even though his armed forces had suffered no irreversible defeat in the field. Defeat in workshop and homestead was to take the place of defeat in the field as the first aim of strategy. This had been the aim of naval blockade, but no navy had ever succeeded in making a blockade more than an ancillary element in war-making. It had neither broken morale nor brought the machinery of war to a halt. If air power could succeed in these tasks, then the bomber aircraft would prove a truly revolutionary weapon, more revolutionary than either the submarine which upset a number of military concepts in the First World War or the tank which did the same in the Second.
Although aircraft had appeared in time to take part in the First World War, their role had been too limited and tentative for any settled conclusions to be drawn about the nature of air power. Consequently the question was much debated, a priori and often acrimoniously, between the wars. The importance of air power was conceded, but the best way to use an air force was hotly contested between those who thought of aircraft as a sort of extended artillery operating in conjunction with and under the control of army commanders and, on the other hand, those who held that air power had superseded land power. There were no even approximately accepted estimates of the amount of damage which a bomber force could inflict and most estimates were wildly excessive, largely owing to the unjustified assumption that if a bomber could reach its target, it would have relatively little difficulty in hitting it.
In 1917 Churchill, then Minister of Munitions, said:
It is improbable that any terrorization of the civil population which could be achieved by air attack would compel… surrender… we have seen the combative spirit of the people roused, and not quelled, by the German air raids. Nothing that we have learned of the capacity of the German population to endure suffering justifies us in assuming that they could be cowed into submission by such methods, or… not be rendered more desperately resolved by them.
But in 1940 he thought that ‘only the Air Force’ could win the war. It is not clear what changed his mind, but it is probable that the champions of bombing had succeeded between the wars in implanting in many minds the belief that precision bombing could win a war. This involved considerable loss of life in the factories hit, but it did not envisage the mass bombing of civilians in their homes as well as their factories. But when it came to the test, precision bombing failed to be precise and area bombing was substituted for it as a means whereby an air force could live up to its claim to win a war.
The weightiest of the early champions of the independent role of the bomber were to be found in Italy and the United States – in particular General Giulio Douhet and General William Mitchell – but its most effective protagonist between the wars was the Royal Air Force under Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard. The US Air Force was the most powerful of all bomber forces before the war ended, but the RAF was the first to acquire and operate a heavily armoured four-engined bomber; the Luftwaffe never had one in any number which counted. In spite of the urgent need to equip Fighter Command with modern fighters, the Air Council decided simultaneously to provide Bomber Command with four-engined bombers, ordered prototypes of the Stirling, Halifax and Manchester (later redesigned as the Lancaster) in 1937 and placed an order for 3,500 heavy bombers in October 1938 for delivery in the spring of 1942. Although these aircraft were not available as early as the Hurricane and Spitfire (with the result that Bomber Command’s best crews had to fly antiquated Blenheims and die in them) they were brought into service in 1940–41. This decision by the Air Council, like the decision to build the eight-gun fighter, was undoubtedly justified, although it was partly the outcome of a conflict of views which was resolved by adopting both – by allowing Dowding to have his eight-gun fighter while at the same time going part of the way with the opposition to Dowding which decried the fighter arm and wanted to concentrate on a smashing bomber force, the symbol and justification of an independent air force.
In Germany a similar conflict was resolved in a different way. The accidental death of the protagonist of the heavy bomber, General Walther Wever, led to the cancellation of plans for such an aircraft, to a decision to rely on speed rather than armour, and to a disproportionate concentration on fighters, dive bombers and the role of army cooperation. The bomber became the Cinderella of the Luftwaffe. The Battle of Britain showed how ill judged this policy was. The Luftwaffe’s relatively fast but lightly armed and lightly armoured medium bombers were defeated – as the RAF’s obsolescent Blenheims had been over France a year earlier. For a time both sides were restricted to operations under the cover of darkness which were clearly not a war-winning effort. But although both sides were thus reduced to similar tactics, their circumstances were very different. The RAF’s Bomber Command was conserving its strength, making few sorties in mass, keeping its losses down to about 3 per cent and awaiting the early delivery of the four-engined aircraft which were to take over from the two-engined Wellington, Whitley and Hampden; between the outbreak of war and the end of 1941 it increased its strength from 200 to 500 and the latter figure included the first few dozen Stirlings and Halifaxes. The Luftwaffe had nothing of the kind in view.
On the British side a further consequence was the evolution of a singularly independent Bomber Command under a Commander-in-Chief less amenable than his fellows to the overall strategic control of the Chief of the Air Staff and dedicated to proving the proposition that his force could win the war independently and was doing so and ought not to be impeded by diverting new bombers to Coastal Command’s war against the U-boats. This position was further enhanced when the heavy bombers reached the Command in strength in 1943, their radar aids became increasingly precise and the invasion of France was postponed to 1944. Moreover by this time Bomber Command’s pertinacious activity had won for it a position of independence from the Americans which the British army, preparing for the role of minor partner in Overlord, could never claim. British independence, which had been saved by Fighter Command in 1940, was symbolized thereafter by Bomber Command.
The first test of air power as an independent war winner as distinct from the army support provided by the Luftwaffe in Hitler’s land campaigns in the west in 1940 came with the Battle of Britain. From the Luftwaffe’s point of view this battle had two entirely different phases. The aim of the first was to destroy the Royal Air Force as a prelude to invasion. This attempt failed. It was succeeded by the attempt to destroy from the air British installations, homes and people, and in this phase the Luftwaffe operated wholly independently of the other two services and its bomber arm came into its own.
London and the industrial midlands were the principal targets in night-time attacks of which the most celebrated was the raid on Coventry on 14 November. Decades later a sinister myth about this raid arose, when it was put about that Churchill and others were forewarned about it by Ultra but failed to take steps to prevent or mitigate the deaths and destruction on the grounds that the safeguarding of the Ultra source was paramount. None of this is true. Ultra did not mention Coventry and the question of securing the Ultra secret did not arise.
Three days before the raid a decoded procedural Enigma message gave a list of frequencies and other directions for a German operation called Moonlight Sonata. It was evident from the message that the operation involved an exceptional effort. No date was given. No target was specified but broad target areas were referred to by code names. From other available evidence these were believed to be areas in and near London. In a separate part of the message appeared the word Korn. In retrospect it has been suggested that Korn stood for Coventry – on the grounds that the initial letters were the same, a common German practice with cover names. A day or two later another routine message set out bearings from a series of beam emplacements in northern France used by the Luftwaffe to direct its bomber raids. The bearings intersected at Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton. These targetings indicated that, at some unspecified future date, these cities were likely to be bombed (which was probable in any case). At almost the same time a prisoner stated that Birmingham and Coventry were shortly to be bombed. His was the only specific reference to Coventry by name. These pieces of information were taken to portend a major raid at the full moon (15 November) with London as the main target and the west midlands the most likely alternative. Certainty would have to await the activation of the beams which could be relied upon to point to the night’s target a few hours before sunset. Between 3 and 4 p.m. on 14 November monitoring of the beams’ frequencies showed that Coventry would be the main target that night. The usual counter-measures were put in hand, including special precautions prescribed some weeks earlier, although one of these – the jamming of the beams – was rendered largely ineffective by a mathematical error. In addition ‘intruder’ operations were flown that night against German targets all the way from Berlin to the west coast of Brittany. Churchill, so far from pondering whether to save Coventry or safeguard Ultra, was under the impression that the raid was going to be on London and ordered the car that was taking him to the country to turn back to the capital.
Throughout the winter the Luftwaffe’s bombers wrought a vast amount of destruction but with no strategic gains. If day bombing was too costly, night bombing was too inaccurate. In the first year of the war the British discovered that even fair-sized towns were missed by two thirds of the then inexperienced crews; during the winter of 1940–41 photographic reconnaissance and other intelligence revealed that results were not much better at night even though the enemy’s night fighters (not yet equipped for night fighting) were virtually impotent. Bomber Command’s claims, advanced with partisan fervour and, some thought, with a degree of partisan recklessness, were shown to be very wide of the mark. One solution was to choose larger targets. Attacks on oil refineries were abandoned but attacks on rail centres continued, because these could be significantly damaged even if the bombs fell as much as 1,000 yards wide of the aiming point. But even rail targets could not be usefully attacked without the help of the moon and rather than do nothing on moonless nights Bomber Command began raiding areas of population and hoping for the best. Intelligence continued to report a significant number of misses by miles. This combination of operational imprecision and reliable intelligence drove the Command, under the forceful leadership of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, increasingly to area bombing. It was powerfully supported by Churchill’s fiercely singleminded Principal Scientific Adviser, Professor Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell), who believed that it was both possible and legitimate to destroy half the working-class houses in all the larger German cities, but was strongly contested by other eminent scientists, notably Professors Henry Tizard and P. M. S. Blackett, who alleged (correctly, as it turned out) that expectations were greatly exaggerated and argued for more selective operations such as the war against the U-boats. The policy in action cost the lives of over 55,000 aircrew in Bomber Command – and twice as many in the American air forces in Europe.
When Harris assumed command in February 1942 his force was ready to make massive attacks within a restricted radius and in March Bomber Command’s main campaign of the war opened with a raid on the ancient and inflammable city of Lübeck which was chosen because it was lightly defended and easily accessible from the sea. This was the first operational appearance of the Lancaster. Four raids on Rostock, east of Lübeck and also on the Baltic, followed in April. These raids were experiments and demonstrations. They provoked a German counter-attack on cities in England which were also lightly defended and historically and artistically noteworthy – the so-called Baedeker raids on places like Bristol and Exeter. In May Bomber Command hit back with the 1,000-bomber raid on Cologne, for which training machines and crews were pressed into temporary service. The material damage was not great, but the boost to morale in the force and among civilians, the shock to the Germans and the impression made on allies, Resistance movements and neutrals may be thought to have justified the effort and the cost. German retaliation was ineffective.
In the latter part of this same year Bomber Command’s effectiveness was increased by the formation of a corps of specially equipped and trained Pathfinders, which preceded the main body of aircraft to locate and mark their targets. Other technical aids to navigation and aiming followed. The ground operated Gee was supplemented by Oboe, which helped pilots to keep to the right course but had limited range and was subject to jamming, and from 1943 by the airborne radar H2S which enabled the bomb aimer to ‘see’ his target in spite of poor weather and the heights to which he might be forced by anti-aircraft guns and searchlights. Nevertheless precision bombing remained impossible except at ruinous cost. When in May 1943 the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe Dams were breached in an attempt to immobilize industry in the Ruhr (by dispersing the waters stored to provide energy for industries), the attack was made from the perilous height of sixty feet by a select band of nineteen Lancasters carrying a specially designed mine and crews who had been trained for months over replicas of the target area. On the night of the raid bad weather added to the perils: one aircraft and its crew made ten runs over the target before releasing its mine. Eight of the nineteen aircraft were lost, fifty-four of 133 men killed. This extremely heroic operation had been conceived before the war but rejected, and its outcome justified that rejection inasmuch as it proved to be horribly costly and only moderately successful. Six dams were attacked, two were breached; a number of German workers were drowned but the German grid was able to prevent serious industrial disruption. The air weapon was still at the stage of the bludgeon; precision bombing was suicidal. No comparable raid was ever carried out. The bombing of cities remained Bomber Command’s main way of proving the claim of air power to be a war-winner, the civilian population being the principal target with factories as, in the words of a Bomber Command directive, a bonus.
In this context the Ruhr was marked out as the Command’s main target. But it was very heavily defended. Essen and Düsseldorf were both attacked in the summer of 1942. In retrospect these raids underline how far Bomber Command was and remained an élite force. Essen was attacked by 1,000 aircraft but this was the last time that Bomber Command put 1,000 aircraft into the air for a single raid before 1944. During 1943 it gradually intensified its campaign against the Ruhr and extended it to more distant targets such as Hamburg and Berlin. Its strength in aircraft was not much greater at the beginning of 1943 than it had been a year earlier, but half of these were four-engined aircraft. In addition the Mosquito, one of the outstanding aircraft of the war, designed in the mid-thirties but comparatively unnoticed until now, had the range and speed to enable it to brave the German defences all the way to Berlin with a 4,000 lb. bomb. On the other hand the Luftwaffe’s early warning system, ground controls and night fighter tactics were being greatly improved. When the war began Germany had radar which was more accurate than British radar but of shorter range and not linked with a ground control system of the same complexity and sophistication. As a result the bombing operations of 1942 defeated the German night defences, but in 1943 the tables were turned and the German night fighters began to strike almost as freely as though they were operating by day. Bomber losses rose to over 5 per cent of the attacking force. For several months it was not clear who was winning. Nerves were taut on both sides and in August 1943 the Chief of Staff of the Luftwaffe, General Hans Jeschonnek, committed suicide.
In Berlin, which suffered sixteen major night raids spread over four months in the winter of 1942–3 as well as additional American daylight raids in the latter part of this period, the damage was severe enough to cause a considerable exodus and close all schools, but even in the immediate aftermath of the raids less than half of the city’s industries stopped work and many of the stoppages were brief. Hamburg on the other hand, which was attacked by night and day seven times in nine days in July and August 1942, was savagely and to some degree permanently wrecked with the assistance of two new techniques: the dropping of strips of tinfoil called Window which so confused the defence’s radar scanners that bomber losses on the first night were only twelve out of 800; and the raising of fire storms by incendiary bombs which created fierce currents of flame rushing at temperatures of 1,000° centigrade to the centre of the storm at speeds of 100–150 m.p.h. and incinerating people above and below ground. At least 50,000 were killed in this way and a million more fled from the city: half the houses were destroyed and more than half the remainder damaged.
Yet morale broke in neither city. Bomber Command failed to bring German industry to a halt and the German defences pushed bomber losses up beyond 5 per cent and, early in 1944, even to 10 per cent. A new German airborne radar called Lichtenstein gave the night fighters longer range and a wider angle of vision and also enabled them to overcome Window. In an attack on Nuremberg in March the Command lost ninety-four aircraft out of 791 (12.5 per cent). In four and a half months 1,000 aircraft were totally lost and 1,682 more seriously damaged. Such losses were not tolerable. The Command’s onslaught had been parried. No other arm suffered such casualties during the Second World War. The cost and the results were horribly reminiscent of Passchendaele. The only consolation was that German counter-attacks on London and elsewhere in the early months of 1944 had been thwarted by the defences, and the Luftwaffe could no longer even carry out reconnaissance flights over Great Britain.
The American strategic bombing offensive was showing the same pattern of destruction at great cost and without commensurate results. At the Casablanca conference of January 1943 Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that strategic bombing was for the time being their principal weapon against Hitler and their principal way of helping Stalin. At that time, however, the US air forces were comparatively small and stretched over many theatres (the Pacific and Atlantic, North Africa and the Middle East), and it was not until the second half of that year that the US Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces were able to add significantly to the British effort: the first American raid on Germany was made on 17 August 1942 by eighteen aircraft of which twelve found their target.
The Americans entered the battle with the conviction that area bombing was useless and precision bombing possible. The main instrument of American bombing was the four-engined B17 or Flying Fortress, an aircraft bristling with guns and designed to fight off any enemy’s daylight fighter attacks. But the B17s were badly mauled by the German fighters and the American commanders drew the conclusion that effective precision bombing of the German economy as a whole must be preceded by the destruction of German fighter production – by precision bombing. The duel which followed was weighted against the Americans because the fighter factories were not only specially well defended but numerous, dispersed and far away. An attack in August 1943 on the Messerschmitt factory at Regensburg coupled with an attack on ball-bearing factories in Schweinfurt came to grief with excessive losses. A further attack on Schweinfurt two months later caused the loss of more than a quarter of the attacking force. The conclusion drawn this time was that successful precision bombing at tolerable cost was impossible without a fighter escort capable of going all the way with the bombers. The right aircraft happened to be at hand. The American P51 (Mustang), already in service with the RAF in a modest way, was chosen for the job and equipped with long-range tanks which enabled it to cover the required distances without losing too much speed or its capacity to outmanoeuvre the German fighters. This aircraft played a role as remarkable in its way as the Spitfire or the Mosquito, for after it had been put into production with the intensity for which American manufacturers were famous, it enabled the B17s, withdrawn from the battle in the autumn of 1943, to resume their offensive, and this combination overcame the German defences. The German fighters were eliminated from the battle by their fighter foes and the American and British bombers were together able to undertake round-the-clock bombing of Germany and, from the summer of 1944, to pound an economy which had abruptly begun to disintegrate irretrievably fast.
Hitler had not prepared his economy for a long war and Germany was not ready for one when it came. In 1939–41 Germany was able to fight and win a series of campaigns on a half-stretched economy, but it could not overrun the whole continent on this basis, and after 1941 it had to convert to a war economy in the face of the crippling campaigns in the east and the increasingly severe bombardment from the west. Germany was not short of equipment or factory space; it started the war with twice as many machine tools, and multipurpose ones, than Great Britain and probably still had more than the United States half-way through the war. Its vital industries were as efficient as any in Great Britain or France and its output of coal and steel was greater than the combined British and French output; but it was economically inferior to the United States and the USSR, it was short of practically all minerals, and its steel and aluminium industries were dependent on imported iron ore and bauxite until sources had been overrun by the German armies. Stocks of some raw materials were low when the war began but they were replenished for a time by the bonuses of conquest. Germany’s greatest economic weakness was the inefficiency of its administrative machine. Hitler’s government was ill adapted to make the huge adjustments required in order to fight and beat the Russians and the Americans at one and the same time. Nazi Germany had no single central administrative authority; it was run by discordant authorities dominated by potentates more attuned to mutual in-fighting than to working together against outside enemies; its industries as well as its administration were a tangle. Hitler himself was in no sense a planner or an organizer. He seems to have regarded talk as a substitute for planning and, from the records that have been left behind of his sessions with his favourite associates, it would appear that the talk, which was of a miserably low intellectual order, was intended less for use than for ostentation. Nevertheless Germany was astonishingly successful for two years in sustaining an enormous war effort and expanding its war production.
The conquests of 1939–41 were regarded, from the economic point of view, as bonuses which enabled the government to fight wars and increase the German standard of living at the same time. Domestic consumption in Germany rose to the end of 1941. More significant, however, in the longer run were the failures of 1939–41; the failure to finish off Great Britain and, more serious still, the failure to defeat the Russians before the first winter of the war in the east. These failures forced Hitler to expand his arms base, his labour force and also his armed forces. The latter, which stood at 5.6 million in May 1940, expanded voraciously and, at the same date in the next three years, reached 7.2, 8.6 and 9.5 million; the rise of nearly a million in 1942–3 was achieved despite losses of the same extent in the same period, and with further losses of 1.6 million in 1943–4 the total armed manpower began to fall. In October 1944 all available males between sixteen and sixty were mobilized in the Volkssturm, to fight and not to labour.
During these same years the German labour force had dwindled steadily, until by the end of the war it had been reduced by a quarter. This decline was not made good by the conscription of women (as was done in the much more tightly regimented British war economy), and although the proportion of German women at work in wartime Germany rose, their numbers did not, partly because of the Nazi doctrine that woman’s place was in the home and partly owing to the afflux of foreign labour which obscured the need for a more extensive conscription of German labour. During the war the numbers of Germans at work increased by no more than the natural increase of the population, whereas in Great Britain and the United States the number of workers rose by 15 per cent over and above natural increase. (If, on the other hand, the significant manpower figures should embrace the armed services as well as industry, then Germany was using in these joint occupations a smaller proportion of its population than Great Britain.) As we have seen in an earlier part of this book, the German labour shortage was met by putting prisoners of war onto war production and raiding conquered countries for slavelike labour, but although the labour so acquired ran into millions of men (three million by May 1941, over four million a year later and over six million from May 1943), foreign labour was no substitute for German labour, especially in skilled jobs.
The re-orientation of German industry was begun by Fritz Todt, a brilliant technician who created at short notice an organization which stood up to unparalleled enemy bombardment for nearly three years after his death in an aircraft accident in February 1942. He was succeeded by Albert Speer, an indifferent architect with an aesthetic taste akin to Hitler’s but also a gifted and versatile amateur with a flair for organization and an excellent sense for capturing and retaining Hitler’s trust and friendship. Like Schacht, Speer has been judged, not without equivocation, to have been a non-Nazi technocrat who served the Nazi government in spite of his better nature and his better intelligence. Again like Schacht, he escaped the death penalty at the Nuremberg trial, where he was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment for crimes against humanity (Schacht was acquitted on all counts), and he has since been treated by historians with some leniency, partly owing to his courage in refusing at the end to obey the (now decrepit) Führer’s orders to lay Germany waste and partly because he survived the Nazi era to talk and write about it with some intelligence and show himself decent after the event. Speer’s wartime achievement was considerable but not perhaps as remarkable as has been made out. He kept the German aircraft industry going in spite of crippling shortages and furious bombing, but what he and it produced was quantity rather than quality and the last aircraft of the Third Reich were inferior replicas of finer models. He believed in centralized capitalist control with the emphasis on the large leading industrial concerns as opposed to the Nazi partiality for the little man and the regionalism embodied in the local boss-rule of the Gauleiters. He kept the conveyor belts moving. Hitler backed him for three years, made him Minister for Armaments and Munitions (later Minister for Armaments and War Production) and defended him against satraps like Goering (as head of the Four Year Plan) and Funk (at the Ministry of Economics) and also against the army’s own Office of War Production in his efforts to rationalize the German economy in terms of the overriding need for weapons. But Speer never won a completely dominant position. Goering and Milch managed to exclude aircraft production from his empire (except partially in 1944–5), and the odious and jealous Sauckel retained the control and procurement of labour to the end. Nevertheless Speer succeeded in more than doubling Germany’s war production by the middle of 1943 and more than trebling it by the middle of 1944. Under his direction Germany produced arms in great quantities; in the latter part of the period it produced more weapons than the available divisions could use.
The areas of principal concern in the defence of Germany’s war machine against air attack were the aircraft industry, the synthetic fuel plants, the Ruhr’s coal and steel production and the rail, road and water services which linked these activities and distributed their output. In the end the interdependence of the different parts of the German economy proved to be its Achilles’ heel. This was shown most clearly by the experiences of the aircraft and fuel industries.
Aircraft production, which reached a first wartime peak in the middle of 1943 and then fell back, rose again in 1944 and surpassed all previous records in the autumn of that year. But the squadrons had by then no fuel for their aircraft, because for a time there had been too few aircraft to defend the fuel plants. The pre-war target for the German aircraft industry was 2,000 a month, increased to 2,300 shortly after the war began. Actual production was 700–800 a month from 1935 to 1940. During the first part of this period the types which played the biggest part in the war were being evolved. During the first two years of war Hitler, still planning on a short war, was not worried about production or interested in the development of further new types since he believed that the war would be over before they could be brought into service. In 1941 there was a modest increase in production and in 1942 a well-organized expansion in Germany and occupied Europe which raised production from 1,000 to 1,600 a month. In the summer of 1943 the damage inflicted by allied bombing – although it was repaired before the end of the year – forced the German Air Ministry, which still had more than thirty different types in production, to streamline the industry. Production, which had risen by June 1943 to 2,316 and had been set a new target of 3,000, was cut back by the raids to below 1,900.
In 1944 the industry was put under new management. Speer and Milch severely cut back the production of bombers, introduced a seventy-two hour week with high wages and improved working conditions, created new factories underground and provided the older ones with better defences, improved the repair services and raised the target first to 6,400 a month and then to 7,400. As a result production, which had again fallen at the beginning of the year to 1,369, rose in September to 3,538 new aircraft, while damaged aircraft returning to squadrons provided another 776, almost twice as many as in January; the production of single-engined fighters was more than doubled between February and June. Of a total of 113,514 aircraft produced during the war 40,593 were produced in 1944. The annual production of fighter aircraft in 1939–44 inclusive was 605: 2,746 : 3,744: 5,515: 10,898: 25,285. Even in 1945 production of fighters almost reached a total of 5,000 for the four months before the war stopped. But this astonishing riposte to the bombing of the aircraft industry was in vain.
Until the end of 1943 Speer had been able to answer the allied bombing offensive. Reconstruction kept pace with destruction, stocks of vital materials (mostly large at the beginning of the war) were not dangerously run down and essential imports were maintained in spite of damage to railways and rolling stock. In 1944 the allied air forces were required to combine their attack on Germany with preliminary operations in aid of Overlord, but their own resources in the production of aircraft and the training of pilots enabled them, ominously for Germany, to fulfil both roles; the weight of the American attack was enormously increased, so much so that in one month in 1944 more American bombs were dropped than during the whole of 1942. Bomber Command similarly dropped in the last quarter of 1944 a bomb load four times as heavy as in the same part of 1943 and twenty times as heavy as in the same part of 1942. The synthetic oil industry, which was singled out for special attention in 1943–4, began to falter. Although the damage inflicted by a first series of raids was repaired, Speer’s miraculous reconstruction services did not manage to cope so fully with a second series, stocks began to be drawn down alarmingly and production fell below demand. During nine consecutive days in September 1944 no aviation fuel whatever was produced except on one day, and production for the month was the hopelessly inadequate total of 9,400 tons. A pause in the bombing owing to bad weather gave some respite, but Germany’s air defences were, if not totally eliminated, at least rendered negligible for the last six months of the war. When Dresden was bombed in February 1945, there was no defence of the city. Yet the aircraft industry was still producing 1,000–2,000 aircraft a month when the war ended.
This critical interdependence of aircraft and fuel production was made the more acute by the concentration of German heavy industry in the Ruhr and the dependence of industry outside the Ruhr on coal from the Ruhr. Germany was never short of coal but the damage done to communications in and around the Ruhr prevented Ruhr coal (80 per cent of Germany’s output) from being moved to where it was needed. At the end of 1944 coal was being transported out of the Ruhr at one quarter of the normal rate and a few months later, after the winter’s respite, this traffic was again halved. This dislocation of the Ruhr, combined with the conquest of Silesia and Lorraine by the Russians and Americans, strangled the steel industry which produced in the last quarter of 1944 less than 4 million tons in place of a projected 37.2 million. Other sectors of the economy collapsed with equal or greater suddenness in a chain reaction. At the end all fronts, except one, collapsed together – the fronts where the armies were still fighting and the economic front which finally succumbed under air attack.
The one front which held out with incredible tenacity was morale at home. This was the achievement of Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda and one of the few masters of his craft among the Nazi chieftains. What Speer did for Germany’s war industry Goebbels did for its morale. Ultimately Hitler’s greatest debt was to Goebbels whom he had once described – in an interview with a right-wing editor as early as 1931 – as his Field Marshal on the spiritual front, the man whom he would make Minister of Propaganda when he came to power and who would occupy a post as important as that of Foreign Minister or Chief of the General Staff.
Propaganda – the attempt to make an impact on large numbers of people in order to affect their mood and their actions, to get them to change their minds or not to change their minds, to get them to act in a certain way or not to – is an ancient instrument. It was modernized and immensely extended in the twentieth century by the invention of radio, and Goebbels was one of its master practitioners. He was not universally successful. In addressing himself to foreigners he was less adept than some British propagandists who had a better understanding of the society – and the language – of their enemy than Goebbels ever had. Also, like all propagandists, he found there was a limit to the extent to which he could affect people who basically did not want to believe what he had to say. But with German audiences he was very successful not only before the war but even in the face of the horrors of the Russian campaigns and mass bombing. He was appointed to his post a few weeks after Hitler became Chancellor and he held it until he and his entire family died with Hitler in Berlin.
He staffed the executive side of his Ministry with bright young men, half of them with a university education, and he taught them how to appeal to the emotions and the reason of the masses at one and the same time, so that an audience which had had its feelings roused would be captured not merely for the moment but also enduringly because a message had lodged in their minds. There were no limits to Goebbels’s emotive appeals. He set out to intoxicate audiences and throw them into hysteria. The most rabble-rousing speeches of western politicians were by his standards sedate. In the years before and after the Nazi capture of power in 1933 Germany was in a state of crisis and Goebbels’s techniques were designed to benefit from this feeling of crisis and to perpetuate it. People were screwed up, perils and evils were emphasized, the situation was presented as one which called above all for action – and for a man who could lead into action and must therefore be followed. From 1933 to 1939 German opinion was never allowed to let up, still less when war came. Goebbels could not make the Germans want war – there was a wild outburst of joyful relief in Berlin in October 1939 upon a false report that the British government had fallen and the war was over – but he created a mentality of endeavour and was able during the war to foster, against the odds, a solid mood of endurance. A crucial element in his technique was simplicity. Even in the most febrile and far-ranging tirades Nazi orators pinpointed and repeated one or two essential facts or arguments, eschewing generalization, representing issues as conflicts between good and evil, making them concrete and personal. While hammering away at favourite themes like the wickedness of Jews, the ill treatment of the Sudeten Germans, the need for Lebensraum, the western democracies’ sinister but feeble attempts to encircle Germany, atrocity stories from the republican side in the civil war in Spain or, after the war began, successes in the field, Goebbels and his disciples held their audiences by the actuality of specific illustrations, true or false, which went home.
Goebbels made great use of shows: sporting events, funerals, festivals of every kind. Using entertainment to capture the public was not new – Thomas Cromwell had subsidized plays which were performed in town squares and on village greens throughout England in order to rub in Henry VIII’s case against the papacy – but Goebbels made the most of its vastly increased scope. The Olympic Games of 1936 were turned into a propaganda event of the first magnitude. Goebbels also realized the importance of films, commissioning documentaries and newsreels and bringing pressure to bear on the film industry (which was not brought wholly under government control until it was nationalized in 1943) to make the sort of films he wanted. War films were used to impress neutrals as well as to fortify morale at home, where newsreels were compulsorily shown in all cinemas. These films, like Nazi oratory, were simple and repetitive. The press was not only regimented and bullied, but overwhelmed by official hand-outs, press conferences and special briefings. The number of newspapers in Germany sank during the Nazi period from 4,700 to fewer than 1,000. Uniformity, imposed by decree and by fear, produced dullness but once again it simplified the issues. The reader did not get the impression that one paper was saying one thing and another another, so that it was impossible to know what to think.
In the first years of war Goebbels’s task was made comparatively easy by the turn of events. He extolled Hitler as the infallible leader who told his people what he was going to do and did it. A cheap radio set (with a limited range) had been marketed just before the war and about 70 per cent of German households had a radio. Goebbels made play with the taunt that the British were fighting to the last Frenchman and ascribed the collapse of France to racial miscegenation, but by July he was restraining overconfidence about the collapse of Great Britain and was soon advising editors not to tell their readers that London was a heap of ruins: British resistance was futile but it might go on for a time.
The invasion of the USSR gave him a new line. He represented the German attack as pre-emptive, alleging that Hitler had certain intelligence of a Russian attack, and he plugged the theme of the brutal and subhuman Slav. He did not minimize the rigours of the new war. After a calculated pause of a week came twelve special announcements (Sondermeldungen), all issued on the same day – a Sunday – and taking up practically the whole of the day. This battery of victory communiqués created an overwhelming effect commensurate with the scale of operations in the east and gave anxious Germans, who had been struggling to make sense of unfamiliar names scattered about their maps, the assurance that details did not matter. But Goebbels was careful not to commit himself to the statement that the war was won and he was therefore all the more horrified when Hitler and his press chief, Otto Dietrich, declared in October with premature exuberance that it was. Goebbels had already foreseen that his theme was as likely to be the preaching of total war as the proclaiming of total victory, and as winter came on he reverted to his sober warnings, started a campaign to collect clothes for the men freezing at the front and made regular reports on the response to this appeal. On the more optimistic side he could at least claim that Hitler had done better than Napoleon in spite of General Winter and the brutish tenacity of the Russian soldier, and that the gains in oil, grain, iron ore and other materials were considerable. Rommel’s victories also provided good cheer.
From 1942 Goebbels, as the chief upholder of the home front, had to counter the general decline in Germany’s fortunes and two major catastrophes in the defeats of the German armies in Russia and the heavy bombing of German cities. At first the army’s communiqués about Stalingrad had been optimistic, the strategic importance of the city was underlined and its capture was to be the climax of the war in the east. The capitulation of the Sixth Army was a tremendous blow and Goebbels, not without courage, took the unique step of issuing a Sondermeldung about a defeat instead of a victory. It was accompanied by muffled drums, the national anthem and a three-minute silence, and all places of entertainment were closed for three days. Two weeks later a vast – and picked – audience was assembled in the Sportpalast in Berlin. Ten questions were put and answered to counter enemy propaganda that Germany had had enough and to pledge total war. In the shadow of Stalingrad this demonstration probably stiffened morale but it also made people think that total catastrophe might be on the way.
The tenth anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power was marked by the first assertion that capitulation was out of the question: it was also the first mention of capitulation. The eastern battles in 1943 and 1944 increased the foreboding. There were only three Sondermeldungen in 1943; there had been sixty-five in 1941. The fall of Mussolini did not help. Hitler himself became remote, seldom appearing or speaking. Allied propaganda suggested that he had been driven to silence by his own mistakes; he had no words to explain what had gone wrong. Goebbels countered with a new image of Hitler as the supreme sufferer, stoically enduring like Frederick the Great in adversity, shunning the limelight unlike his flashy and temporarily successful opponents. At the same time, as disaster threatened, Goebbels worked to inculcate the feeling that the only way to avert it was to stick by Hitler.
Mass bombing was Goebbels’s biggest problem. When bombing first began, Goebbels had repeated with sarcastic comment the exaggerated claims made by the British Air Ministry on the basis of aircrews’ instant reports, but these tactics no longer sufficed when the destruction became heavy. Goebbels did not seek to deny it. He used it to stir up hatred against the enemy. He also showed himself all over Berlin, inspecting raid damage, showing that a Minister cared and was in control, and so forestalling panic and a break in morale. He initiated an anti-defeatist campaign (strengthened by a few death sentences) and although he could not prevent the German mood from drooping he succeeded in preventing it from turning into action against the government. His plea that this was the time for government and people to hang together was sufficiently widely accepted. Appointed Plenipotentiary for Total War in 1944 he extended normal working hours, conscripted women up to the age of fifty, cut entertainment, schooling and university courses and by these and other means ensured that Germans should go on fighting not just because they were afraid of the Gestapo but also because they were persuaded that this was the right thing to do. With a part of their minds they knew that they were defeated and that fighting on meant postponing the end without altering the outcome. But because Goebbels spoke to them straight, they took what he said as straight. By telling them, as one adult to another, that things were bad, he dissuaded them from facing the fact that they were hopeless. They behaved like a man who knows that he is condemned to death with cancer but prefers to believe the doctor who tells him that he has appendicitis. At the same time Goebbels piled on the horror of Slavic hordes about to sweep over Germany devastating the land and debauching its maidens. The nearer it came, the worse did Goebbels make fate sound, so that there seemed to be no purpose in doing anything except go through the motions of warding off the inescapable.
In the final assessment the bombers’ contribution to the defeat of Germany must be judged a weighty one in the final stages of the war. In the light of the pretensions of the Douhet-Mitchell school of air strategists two questions arise: Did the bombers win the war? If they did not, could they have done? The answer to the first question is no. The German armies were fatally defeated by the Russians in July 1943 and at that point the bomber onslaught had barely begun and had caused no decisive damage; it did not do so for another year. The second question is hypothetical. Air power equipped with nuclear weapons may be a war-winning weapon in the sense that it can compel the surrender of an enemy whose armed forces in the field are undefeated. There was, however, no such air power in the European theatre in the Second World War. On the other hand it can be plausibly argued that the surrender of Japan after two nuclear bombs was a consequence of the overwhelming superiority of American air power over Japan’s total defences. It is all a question of degree and there is nothing to prove that the fatal imbalance between attack and defence could be achieved by nuclear weapons alone. If the allied air forces had been even stronger than they were, and if allied air policy had not wavered between general attacks on population and morale and selective attacks on economic nerve centres and bottlenecks, then Germany might have been brought to surrender without the necessity for a major invasion and the hard-fought campaigns from Normandy to the heart of Europe. Such a possibility cannot be disproved, but the experiences of the American and British air commands show that this strategy would have been exceptionally costly in lives. It is moreover all but certain that, in a war in which Germany was being attacked by the USSR as well as by themselves, the western allies would never willingly have confined themselves to strategic bombing or have delayed their invasion in such a way as to allow the Russians to occupy the whole of Germany.
Leaving aside the inadmissible claim that bombing did win, or could have won, the war on its own, there emerges a different question: how far bombing, judged as a contributory instead of an independent factor, shortened the war. No precise answer to such a question is possible, but in general it is pertinent to recall that allied bombing diverted German air power from the offensive fronts to the defence of the Reich and diverted German labour – 1–1.5 million men, many of them skilled – to repair and reconstruction works. Perhaps these contributions should be adjudged significant subsidiary sources of Germany’s defeat. They cannot be held to be decisive but they must have made the allied victory somewhat easier and somewhat quicker. Both area bombing and precision bombing made this kind of contribution, for even if a government at war is more intent on protecting its factories than its industrial proletariat, there is nevertheless a point beyond which it cannot leave its people undefended and unhoused. Speer’s evidence after the war was that precision bombing could do crucial damage; but until the last phase the allies were not able to carry out effective precision bombing operations. Area bombing, to which they resorted instead, paid only a small dividend and one which those who bring ethics into the equation may well regard as too small.