CHAPTER 24
The summary report of the September 1945 US Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) was to a degree influenced by the revulsion felt by some of its members to its subject matter. It differed, too, in some respects from the compendious final report of the USSBS. The World at War episodeWhirlwind: Bombing Germany 1939–1944 reflected the summary report, whose Director, George Ball, and Chief Economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, were among those interviewed. The survey started from the premise brought into the war by the USAAF about the greater accuracy of daytime over night bombing – no longer true in 1945 when the RAF could bomb as accurately by night as by day – and in the transcript we can see how US Lieutenant General Taker became exasperated by his interviewer's attempt to get him to revive the false dichotomy. As noted by Air Chief Marshal Harris in an earlier chapter and by General (then Colonel) Le May in this one, critics of night bombing are inclined to overlook the matter of cloud cover, which blinded the USAAF's highly accurate Norden bombsight. The Eighth USAAF also came to the European theatre wedded to the concept of the self-defending bomber formation, with the B-17 Flying Fortress carrying so many gunners that its payload was half that of RAF bombers. The theory was harshly disproved in 1943 and the USAAF could only return to Germany once the bombers could be escorted all the way by the long-range P-51 Mustang fighters of the Ninth USAAF, after which Luftwaffe fighters were obliged to rise to the challenge of the Eighth and were massacred by the Ninth. Thanks to meddling by Hitler, the jet-powered Messerschmitt 262 fighter, which none of the Allied fighters could intercept, entered service a year or two later than it might have and made no great impact on an already lost situation. Perhaps the least cited passage from the USSBS summary report reads, 'These attacks left the German people with a solid lesson in the disadvantages of war. It was a terrible lesson; conceivably that lesson, both in Germany and abroad, could be the most lasting single effect of the air war.'
LIEUTENANT GENERAL IRA C EAKER
Commander Eighth Air Force, USAAF
I am aware of the effort on the part of some historians and some leaders of other branches of the services to denigrate the bomber effort, but I would think now they've been pretty well answered by the Germans. Mr Speer and without exception all the senior German commanders accredited the air effort with their destruction. From Rommel and the African campaign all the way through to the end, all of the principal German commanders since the war have accredited our air effort with their defeat.
ALBERT SPEER
Hitler's Armaments Minister
The bombing offensive of the Royal Air Force and of the American Air Force was doing tremendous harm and we could see that one day we should collapse if it was continuing, so it was a question of death or life to get again air superiority in Germany. In the opinion of General Galland, who was an expert, it was absolutely possible in time, because even if in shooting down one bomber in daytime he was losing three or four fighters, the pilots mostly were saved but the whole bomber crew was in our hands and what was needed in the production on the other side for one bomber was much more than our losses. We could utilise the material too, so it was almost sure that if we would have enough fighters in Germany – and Galland was building up a thousand fighters just for the home defence – mat one day there would be a battle in the middle of Germany with about eight hundred or so American bombers and quite a lot would be shot down. But it never came to that because Hitler didn't understand this thing, he didn't want to understand, and he ordered when we were just finished, he ordered the whole thousand fighters to go to France to fight the invasion. They weren't even trained for this task so after a few days, a few weeks, nothing was left of them. They could have won the battle over Germany, which would have been as important as the success of the invasion. The same was also with night-fighters against your Royal Air Force bombers. It's quite well known that those who were there already did much harm to the British bombers and if they could have been multiplied, if we would have three or four times as much of the night-fighters, possibly you would have been compelled to stop the whole attack on German towns.
LIEUTENANT GENERAL EAKER
RAF daylight bombing failed because they did not have bombers that were equipped as our Flying Fortresses were and they didn't have sufficient quantity. They only had a hundred heavy bombers when I arrived over here and we were not successful until we had several hundred heavy bombers equipped for daylight work. No one will ever get me to fundamentally disagree with the work of Sir Arthur Harris and Bomber Command. I thought it was well led and superbly executed.
GENERAL ADOLF GALLAND
Commander of the Luftwaffe fighter force
German fighters were fighting all around the world and we could never concentrate our complete fighter strength in Germany or central Europe. Also from the beginning of 1943 the German lack of fuel has resulted in the reduction of training time, which had reduced the capability of our crews and our fighters considerably. The air superiority and the quantity were increased both by the American Air Force and by the Royal Air Force and finally the range of their fighters had been extended so far that even Berlin and East Prussia were in the range of the American fighters. The American fighters on some raids did fly all over central Europe and landed in Russia and they did fly over Germany and landed in Italy. In addition the performance of our fighters, both Messerschmitt and Fokker, were not increased by the extent of the performance of the English and Americans, especially in altitudes over twenty-five thousand feet.
ALBERT SPEER
Hitler was once, when Galland and me were there, he was very angry when he got news that the fighter pilots didn't fight courageously enough in France. Of course he didn't want to realise, which was well known, that the British and American fighters had better speed and were superior as pilots. So he told Galland in a rage, the whole fighter force are good for nothing and we are producing only now anti-aircraft guns and the whole production of fighters will be stopped.
DR JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH
Member of post-war Strategic Bombing Survey
In 1944 the German war production went up and went up quite rapidly until September 1944 – thereafter it tapered off and began to decline. It had its effect when we were right on the frontier of Germany and when not only the bombers but the tactical aircraft could patrol the roads and railroads, and greatly reduce the mobility of the German forces. When it became possible to bomb and bomb again the oil plants, this in turn created a shortage of oil which undoubtedly had a further effect on the mobility of the forces. At that time we exaggerated the effect of the air attacks. Roosevelt set up the Strategic Bombing Survey, of which I was a member, because he had become suspicious of the Air Force claims. The suspicion showed that Roosevelt had mastered the first principle of warfare – naturally suspect what air generals tell you. The effect was to minimise the impact of the bombing; the clearest case was on the fighter, the German aircraft industry, which was attacked in February of 1944 and had a forty or fifty per cent increase in production in March of 1944.
ALBERT SPEER
I had the same experience with our Air Forces. They claimed to have bombed a synthetic rubber plant in Russia and it would be out of action for a year or longer and then our experts had a look into the matter and said it would be repaired in a few weeks' time.
LIEUTENANT GENERAL EAKER
We were very hopeful that we could demonstrate the effect of strategic bombing and we were all conscious of the tremendous part that Lord Trenchard had played in its development.*61 We had watched his experiences from World War One and he was the patron saint of air power in this country, as he was in yours. We always felt that the independent status that the Royal Air Force had made it much easier for them to make decisions on equipment and on strategy and tactics, whereas we had to present our case to the Army General Staff.
AIR CHIEF MARSHAL SIR ARTHUR HARRIS
Commander-in-Chief, RAF Bomber Command,
I said to General Arnold before they came in the war, that if they were going in for daylight bombing they would have to have much better armament than they had in the Flying Fortresses at that time.**5 That was when I went over to the States, before the war, and was allowed to go and look at one of their Fortresses. They had hand-held guns in blisters and I told them, 'For goodness sake you must have steadier guns than that if you're going to fly in daylight,' and we offered to give them our target designs.
MAJOR WERNER SCHROER
Day fighter ace with 114 kills
The Americans normally flew in groups of three and then in various levels, and coming from behind we tried to get one of them by a long-distance attack, to get it separated and to hit it in the wings or somewhere in order to reduce the velocity of the plane and have it separate from the other two, and then it was much easier to get them. This was effective in the beginning and later on we tried to attack them from the front, but you could only use experienced fighters for that because of the difficulty in escaping afterwards through the formation, because you had very little time to shoot, hit him and then escape.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL JAMES M 'JIMMY' STEWART
Commander 703rd Bombardment Squadron, Eighth USAAF The fighter, he was the bogeyman in this tremendous, vicious defence that they mounted. The flak, although it got much more serious in the latter part of the war, for some reason I always felt that the odds were better in your favour with flak. The fighter, though, had eyes and in a great many instances the fighter had a pretty competent pilot at the controls, and when he latched on to you, you were in trouble.
LIEUTENANT GENERAL EAKER
When I first went to Harris's headquarters in February 1942 and explained to him our plan and our hope for the build-up of cooperative attacks against the German defence industry, he said very frankly, 'I don't believe you can bomb by day, I think your losses will be too heavy. The German anti-aircraft and fighter defences on the West Wall are too strong. We've tried it and we couldn't do it.' What he referred to, of course, was that General Arnold had given him a small number of Liberators and he'd sent them out on day attack as single planes and they'd been badly shot up. But, he said, as time went on, 'If you could do it, it would be very fortuitous, it would help my night effort, it would keep all the defences on twenty-four-hour alert, it would prevent them going on to factories to make weapons. It would be very good if you could do it and nobody will hope stronger than I do that you succeed and I'm going to do everything possible to support your effort.'
AIR GUNNER JOHN COCHRANE
Eighth Air Force, USAAF
I think it was generally understood that the combat tour was twenty-five missions because it was anticipated that you'd be dead by that time, so there wasn't any point in asking you to stay around any longer. I don't say that the fear was an acute one, that you went around trembling, but it was pretty well felt that our chances of surviving were not particularly good. But after all, it was what we felt we had to do and I felt that if you were going to die that was about the best way to die. I'd much rather die in an aeroplane than in the mud on some battlefield. But my observation was that morale was very good. I think that was partially because you had a definite limited tour, and you knew that if you lucked it out and survived the tour, you went home. I think it's very important to give a human being some goal or some target to aim for, and to know that he'll get relief after that.
LIEUTENANT GENERAL EAKER
We never had a morale problem with our crews. Of course after severe losses any group had a temporary period of reaction from it – human beings always react like that. And I must tell you that one of the reasons I think our morale was sustained is that shortly after I joined Air Marshal Harris, understudying the British effort, he told me, 'We have found that you must give any soldier or sailor or airman a chance for survival. I strongly recommend that you fix a period, a number of missions and then let your crews rest, or go home to join your training effort.' I worked out twenty-five missions at an early date, and the reason I arrived at that was that we began to show a pattern of two per cent of total loss with all our missions. Well, that gave a crew two per cent over twenty-five missions, which gave a crew a fifty per cent chance of survival, so I held to that twenty-five mission level for as long as I was at Eighth Air Force.*62
AIR GUNNER COCHRANE
I think that combat flying is so impersonal that you don't get that intimate sense of loss if you see an aeroplane shot down that you'd have if your buddy on the battlefield had his head blown off right within arm's length. But I know of two fliers who developed a fear of flying to the point that they simply declined to fly any more and they were transferred out. I have no idea what happened to them, whether they were court-martialled or simply reassigned because of some medical justification.
MAJOR SCHROER
I told new pilots not to attack from behind in a direct attack but to move the plane up and down to confuse the rear gunner. I even told them to close their eyes in order not to see the tracer ammunition, which could frighten. I don't know whether I did the same, but I always tried to get as close as possible in order to have a better chance to hit it. The gunners started shooting their tracer ammunition I think at about one thousand metres distance, to get rid of their own fear.
MAJOR STEWART
I think the most complicated part of it was the assembly, that is getting together different Groups from numerous airfields that were situated all over East Anglia, lots of times in marginal weather, getting them into formation, getting them at one point at a certain time. At each one of them, each Group had its own time to arrive at that position and the formation of the bomber stream, in other words getting yourself ready for attack. This always seemed to me the most difficult and the most complicated part of the mission.
GENERAL GALLAND
Hamburg was the first example of the very successful combined operation of the American and British air forces. The Americans during the day and the English during the night-time – this has been called round-the-clock bombing. Also Bomber Command adopted a new tactic with countermeasures against our system, our radar was blind, and also they adopted the bomber-stream tactic, compared to the isolated bombing going on close to the targets. Both methods put our night-fighters in a completely new situation and the effect was that the night defence was absolutely minimal. The attack led to a compact mass attack on Hamburg, which was extremely effective, and this mass attack caused very big fire storms. Losses were very high and this time it was absolutely clear to everybody that by now we had to change to air defence as first priority. Goring was completely convinced to do so and tried to convince Hitler. Hitler, who was always in favour of attacks and against defence, decided completely against everybody's intention and he decided to build more bombers and attack England. This has been a terrible mistake but Hitler decided by his own and nobody was able to convince him to the contrary.
COLONEL CURTIS LEMAY
4th Bombardment Wing, USAAF
One of the frailties of the human mind is always trying to find a sort of miracle or short way of doing something to get the job done without much effort. This was, of course, the goal of our intelligence people, always looking for a target that if you just destroy this one target it'll be the key thing that will cause the enemy to collapse and the war will be over. They discovered the ball-bearing industry, the main part of which was at Schweinfurt – a large part of the ball bearings of Germany were made there. They forgot that they were getting a lot of them from Sweden and other places, so an attack on the ball-bearing industry wouldn't knock out a very vital cog in the German war-making machine.
ALBERT SPEER
When you hit Schweinfurt first it was to me like a nightmare getting true, because I was often thinking that bombing one of our bottlenecks of the armament industry would be much more effective than the bombing of cities. And one of the aims I always considered was bombing the ball-bearing industry, and really two attacks on Schweinfurt industry you did much more damage than you ever did before with all the ground bombing. We thought first that we are now at the end of our efforts for armaments industry. But I had a very good representative, Tessler, and he did this all means not only the repair but also the replacement of ball bearings with other devices, which could do the job not as good as the ball bearing but it could be done, and then we found that there were stocks in the Army and so stocks could be used too, so we could bridge over the lack of ball bearings for several months until we had repaired the damages. Of course we were frightened that there will be other raids on Schweinfurt and really there were other raids but too late. If you would have repeated those raids shortly afterwards and wouldn't have given us time to rebuild then it would have been a disastrous result.
MAJOR SCHROER
We didn't expect an attack coming that far into the country without fighter escort; we were very astonished at it. If you had a Group of twenty-seven planes and you don't know how many planes are joining you for a combined attack, twenty-seven planes is not much to attack hundreds of bombers. Besides it was very difficult to find out whether the fighter planes we were seeing were our own fighter planes or were Allied planes and there was very much concern and the attack could not be executed in the way it should be because of the fear of [P-47] Thunderbolts in the back. But later on we found out and we were informed by our ground station that no enemy fighters were there, so it was easier. But the trouble by that time was the long distance we had to fly to get to the bomber formations. Our detour to Frankfurt took almost all our petrol reserve and we have twenty minutes left and we all had to land in Frankfurt to get the fuel and later we didn't succeed in finding them again. My squadrons didn't – others did.
COLONEL LEMAY
The first raid on Schweinfurt was to be a combination attack with Schweinfurt one target and the Messerschmitt plant at Regensburg another. The plan was that my Division and the 1st Division would go in with fighter escort as far as they could. I would attack the Messerschmitt plant and then go out through the Brenner Pass and land in North Africa. That would mean that I took on the German Air Force on the way in. But the 1st Division coming behind me by ten, fifteen minutes or so, would come in relatively free because the main fighter force had been expended on me and would be on the ground rearming and refuelling, but they would have to fight going out. That was the plan. At the time the attack was launched the weather was good over the target but miserable in England. I managed to get my Division in the air because we'd been practising instrument take-offs for some time but the fighters did not get in the air and the 1st Division did not get in the air until an hour and fifteen minutes later. This placed the Bomber Commander [General Eaker] in a position of having to make a decision of aborting the whole operation or going under very adverse conditions. We'd been waiting so long for the weather for this important target that he decided to go. So we went in.*63
GENERAL GALLAND
Schweinfurt had been the result of very good conditions in favour of the German fighter command. The American escort fighters were not able to follow the bomber over the target, they had to turn back about the area of the Rhine and we were able to intercept the bomber stream with most of our fighter units.
ALBERT SPEER
When in 1943 ball-bearing industry in Schweinfurt was attacked heavily with the American Air Force I thought that we couldn't continue our war production because for every armament it is necessary to have ball bearings. But to our good luck, the Americans and the British didn't continue for strategic reasons too, they had too high losses, as I see nowadays. Then the second time it happened on a much larger scale when on 12th May 1944, the Eighth American Air Force bombed oil plants in the middle of Germany. These plants were, we thought until then, are protected because they were too far away and the fighters couldn't accompany the bombers, but they did. This day 1 just was on the airfield to fly to see the damage done; I told my closest man in the planning office, the leading man of the planning office, with this the war is definitely lost, and I wrote a memorandum to Hitler in which I stated that after September 1944, after a few months, we shall run short of fuel because our stocks will be used, and the supply of new production of fuel is absolutely insufficient to the tanks and also to the planes. But Hitler just said I trust you are getting along; you did get along so many times, in increasing production when we thought production had been decreased, and possibly you will do it this time again.
DR GALBRAITH
The question of whether a more complete concentration on the oil targets would have shortened the war is really unanswerable. The RAF would have had to attack them in the daytime because the attacks were very imprecise at night – the losses would have been heavy. And this would have enabled the Germans to concentrate even more energy on the regeneration of the oil plant. They had half a million working on it; it might have been a million men because they wouldn't be repairing transport and other things. Most of us felt that concentration on major targets and hitting them day after day and week after week was the sound tactic. But I would be hesitant to reach a final conclusion because the overriding fact is that air-power bombing was a much less effective thing than was imagined at that time, and we've been learning in Korea and Vietnam ever since how ineffective and limited its effect is.
ALBERT SPEER
But again here it happens that you didn't repeat it as fast as we were frightened of and so the repairs could take place and we had at least the small part of the whole capacity once again for production. In October– November 1944 new raids were on the oil industry and those raids were so successful that production was almost nil. The stock of gasoline for the Army was running very short: we had no more for instance to train fighter pilots for the fighters; the tanks were almost no more able to move but just short distances. For instance the Ardennes offensive was supposed on gaining large stocks of gasoline off the Americans, otherwise we couldn't succeed to get deep into the country, even if they had succeeded in breaking through.
DR GALBRAITH
Had the power plants been attacked this could have been disastrous but we might well have found out that the speed with which those were put back would be similar to the speed with which the aeroplane fighters were put back, or the speed with which the oil plants were put back. One just doesn't know how great the regenerative process would have been until it was experienced. It was almost my hunch that had the central power stations been taken out this would have done more damage but we might only have discovered that the Germans were very good at putting those back.
MAJOR GENERAL WALTHER WARLIMONT
Deputy Chief of Wehrmacht Operations
In headquarters one didn't notice very much, but I had some connections with the people when I came to Berlin in September 1944. All the lives in Germany were dominated by the Allied attacks, nobody was safe from air attacks here.
LIEUTENANT GENERAL EAKER
I think the greatest thing we did was destroy the Luftwaffe, making it possible for the subsequent sea and ground operations to be successful. You may recall that when the British were doing sweeps over the German airfields in France they didn't respond – they said why go up and get shot down, because the Spitfires outmanoeuvre us. The same way when we began to go over with our long-range fighters against their aerodromes: they'd move their planes off the aerodromes under the trees or into the autobahns, and bring them back when our fighters had left. The only reason, the only way in which we could bring the German Luftwaffe to engage with us was to do something that was causing them great damage, and Hitler and Goring forced them to respond to our bomber effort because we were cutting up their industry. And that's why we sent our fighters with our bombers, because it gave our fighters a chance to engage the enemy fighters when they came up after our bombers.
COLONEL JOHN MEYER
Commander 487th Fighter Squadron, Ninth USAAF
Just as I was starting down the runway I saw a lot of flak off the edge of the field. I called our control and asked him if there were any other aircraft in the area and he said no there weren't. At about that time I saw a Messerschmitt 109 that was headed directly at me, but I was still on the ground without flying speed and anybody who flies knows that an aeroplane is a pretty clumsy instrument when it's still on the ground. So that's memorable in the sense that I saw there was nothing I could do and my view was that I'd had it. Fortunately for me this German pilot saw a C-47 just at the end of the runway so instead of continuing his attack on me he pulled up with a wing-over and started shooting at this C-47, which put his tail right in front of me just about the time I got airborne. I pulled the gear up immediately and had my sights on him and shot him down before the wheels had fully retracted in the well.*64
AIR GUNNER COCHRANE
I think perhaps my most vivid recollection is the first time [8 March 1944] that my Group went to Berlin. After we had dropped our bombs there's a manoeuvre as you turn away, one Group has to cross above the other, and the Group on top dropped their bombs right smack on to our squadron. We lost one aeroplane and that was a terrifying memory and an incident mat I'll never forget.
MAJOR SCHROER
I had two Fortresses and one Mustang in two-hour fight on a Berlin raid. But this was a very good attack as far as our fighters were concerned. We had at that time, for one of the very few times, managed to assemble a quantity of more than a hundred fighters in one formation and attack the American bombers with that strength, which had never happened before. And I was in front of that formation and I had the best chances.
GENERAL HASSO-ECCARD FREIHERR VON MANTEUFFEL
Commanding Fifth Panzer Army 1944–45
The population of Germany, especially in the big cities and in the industrial areas, the houses and rooms were destroyed, the family were separated, no fuel or coal for heating, the food supply was insufficient, they received no mail by their dependants who were on the front line. The propaganda machine by Goebbels and the promise of Hitler's new weapons, improved aircraft types and submarines and the increase production of German industry – expectations for this were raised to a higher pitch therefore failure was all the greater.
GENERAL GALLAND
We have lost one good opportunity when we discovered that we had a fighter which was superior by at least 100 miles over other enemy fighters. This had been the jet fighter Me-262, which came so late because Hitler at the beginning of the war had not allowed long-term developments to continue. He has ordered that all developments which in one year's time would not be ready to be used in operations should be dropped from the drawing board. And this had led to a very limited effort only to continue the development. When in 1943 it became know that enemy superiority was increasing tremendously in air power, only at this time Messerschmitt got the order to show the proof of this jet fighter. But then Hitler made a second terrible mistake. He ordered that this superior fighter should be used as a Blitz bomber and not as a fighter. We have lost a good opportunity to stop at least the daylight raids in good weather conditions. More than twelve hundred Me-262 had been used but only a very small number had been used as fighters and the effect of the Blitz bomber was about zero.
ALBERT SPEER
You succeeded in November 1944 to besiege the whole Ruhr valley by just striking on the transport. There is a memorandum of Hitler from November in which I am telling him that now the oil industry is as much as no more existing for us, that we have no more coal transports for the other parts of Germany and that without coal the other industry will cease to produce. And this was really true. You can see it on our own production: production was highest peak in July and then it dropped very quickly to only a percentage of what we did in the utmost in the peak of our production.
GEORGE BALL
Director of the US Strategic Bombing Survey
We came up with a rather complicated set of conclusions which I don't think were agreed, at least not with the same degree of enthusiasm, by everyone on the Board. By and large one of the most effective things that the bombing had done was to force the German Air Force into the sky in order to defend the targets in Germany and this enabled the Allies to kill the German Air Force, which gave command of the air to the Allies for the invasion of Normandy. This was fully indispensable. The second thing was that much of the bombing we had done was not as effective as it might have been because of the great over-supply of general-purpose machine tools in the German economy. Sometimes we only succeeded in rationalising production, which was otherwise out of phase. By June of 1944 German war production was three hundred per cent of what it had been in 1939. Beginning in June of 1944 when we began to strike the hydrogenation plants which produce the synthetic gasoline, the whole situation began to change and this has been made clear by Albert Speer, who I interviewed with some of my colleagues in May 1945. Then in September 1944 we started the massive bombing of the Rhineland and the effect of this was to disrupt production enormously, not so much by smashed-up plants and knocking down a lot of bricks and mortar but by interrupting the movement of supplies and goods within the plants, that is from one building to another on the little railroads that they had, and the thing finally ground to a considerable halt and the Germans were in terrible trouble by the end of 1944.
ALBERT SPEER
This was in November 1944 and again there is a memorandum to Hitler which is still in the files, and I told Hitler that the Ruhr valley is blocked, which meant that we haven't had no more supply of coal for other parts of Germany, that the production of parts and of steel parts in the Ruhr valley didn't come to the factories in other Germany, so the production in a short while would be nil. Then we introduced a new system: we said we shall try to complete tanks and guns as much as possible with the parts which are already there, distributed over many factories, and all the factories had to report to central offices what parts they have and then we shifted parts around and could get along. But I had to give Hitler a list of what he has expected, and I told him there are the last weapons you are getting, then it's finished because without the Ruhr valley we can't do it any more. I gave him a second memo in 30 January 1945 and told him, said things have gone worse and said he can only get so and so many weapons, and in this statement was a sentence running like: 'With this the war is lost even if the courage of the German soldiers is superior to the soldiers of the others.' And this was distributed, six copied to the General Staff, to the six departments of the General Staff of the Army, and Hitler first has no reaction at all, he didn't ask me to come. For a few days I didn't know what his opinion is and then he asked me together with my deputy and he told me very bluntly that's not up to you to tell me the war is lost or not lost, that's my decision; you can tell me what your situation on your field is and no more. And if you do it again I won't accept it any more. He was quite angry and turned to my deputy and continued talking with him and 1 was sitting at the side.
URSULA GRAY
Dresden resident, post-war wife of author J Glenn Gray
The third raid was by the Americans and they concentrated on strafing people. There was no defence, we had no defence at all, and they concentrated on getting these people who were trying to save their lives and get out into the suburbs and go into the country. All the people who were gathered on the meadows along the river, they went right down and strafed the people and killed them one by one. It was such a terrible feeling because you were so helpless. Here was this machine above you and it hit you or it hit the next one and there was no defence.
LIEUTENANT GENERAL EAKER
I don't agree there was overkill. There may have been in Dresden, but bear in mind we'd been asked by the Russians to destroy that great railroad complex because most of the German weapons and supplies and reinforcements going to the central section of the Eastern Front were going through there. Well, we lit some fires one afternoon and the British sent a thousand bombers over that night and we followed up next day with a thousand bombers, and of course it created a great fire which killed fifty thousand or so Germans – but it eliminated that great bottleneck that we were asked to destroy. No commanders knew what amount of resources the weather and other things would permit you to get on that target. It was always better to put up more than you needed in order to saturate defences than to send not enough and suffer heavier losses and not accomplish your mission, and have to go back.