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THE BOMBING STRATEGY SAVED BY THE USAF
It was only the US 8th Air Force’s destruction of the Luftwaffe’s fighter arm in Spring 1944 that saved the British Bomber campaign.
Although the USAF began acting in tandem with the RAF from 1943 in attacking German cities the American philosophy was different to the British and targeted the German production system rather than civilians:
“The U.S. Eighth Air Force preferred to shut down the system with precision strikes on a key location. As of mid-1943, the German sky had been divided up between the British and the Americans. The British flew the night raids and the Americans flew during the day. U.S. aircraft flew at higher altitudes, their aerial gunners fired higher calibre’s, their squadron formation was large and awe-inspiring, and their convictions humane, so they rejected carpet bombing… The bomber force had other talents besides just razing residential districts.” (Jorg Friedrich, The Fire, p.88)
The USAF identified the ball-bearing works as the target whose destruction would block all important war production. So they targeted it. Raids proved costly due to heavy German defence. So the USAF changed tack and went after the German defence system which made their aircraft vulnerable. The German fighters, their production facilities, fuel sources, aerodromes and hangers were targeted. By late 1944 the German air defences had been substantially degraded and the skies were free to the USAF and RAF.
This is important in two ways. Firstly it shows the U.S. to have been of a different mind-set from the British, aiming to solve military problems and pursue purely military objectives. The British were aiming to exterminate civilians under the pretence of military aims in a long war of attrition against the German populace – as they did historically in their warfare to damage the enemy society as much as possible. They were the only nation in the war who wished to prolong it beyond necessity. But the U.S. (and all other combatants) were concerned with winning the war as quickly as possible.
Secondly, the success of the USAF had the unfortunate consequence of freeing the skies for the RAF to go on an extermination rampage against smaller German cities and towns of no military significance, from the start of 1945. The RAF dropped half its total tonnage of 60 months of war in the final 9 months, bombing full-time with hardly any losses. High-explosive bombs had to replace incendiaries because there was nothing left to burn in German cities.
Around half of all Britain’s war expenditure in its Second World War went on its bombing strategy. David Edgerton has recently argued that the prime British war strategy of bombing citizens was actually detrimental to any winning of its War. In Britain’s War Machine he states:
“This book suggests that Britain was strong, particularly so in the early years of the war… If Britain was as industrially, technically and militarily strong in 1940-41 as I suggest, why did it not defeat Germany on its own and indeed quickly?… There is which is perhaps harder to accept – that the British placed emphasis on modern weapons which simply did not work very well. Britain had a fleet of great bombers, which in 1940-1941 could do little or no damage to Germany… In other words, the problem was not a lack of modern weapons but over-investment in them. They came to work only late in the war, and were even then less effective than hoped.” (p.xvi)
There is an interesting parallel between the two attritional instruments of British warfare used in its two World Wars on Germany – the Blockade and the Bomber. They both took the US to enter the Wars to work effectively. Because Britain banked on them both and they failed to win the Wars for them before the US was required to bail out Britain, the US walked away from both Wars stronger at the expense of Britain.
But there was one crucial difference between the First and Second World War that only became apparent to me after reading the diaries of Lord Esher. There was a thought within British ruling circles in 1918 that it might not be in Britain’s interest to allow the U.S. armies to win the Great War by capturing Berlin. This would take American power to the heart of Europe and give the U.S. the predominant position in the Peace Treaties. Such an eventuality would mean the hijacking of the Great War Britain had declared and its settlement according to U.S rather than British interests. And so an Armistice was favoured in Whitehall with the Royal Navy squeezing Germany until the pips squeaked. That put England in the driving seat at Versailles and side-lined President Wilson to such an extent Congress rejected the Treaty.
But in Britain’s Second World War the Americans were not content with supplying the tools so that Britain “could finish the job” as Churchill wished. The U.S. was determined to finish the job itself and have the predominant say in the Peace. And once the U.S. had gotten its armies onto the continent, overcoming the British reluctance and desire to finish things with its Bombers, the game of British Imperial world-dominantion was up. This striking passage from R.W. Thompson explains why D-Day was a monument in the decline of Britain and the ascent of its Anglo-Saxon cousin:
“This day, the 6th June, was Britain’s Swan song. It had been implicit after the Arcadia Conference, when the United States turned her back on George Washington and put ‘Germany first’. And steadily the ‘Bill had grown, as it was bound to do, as Britain would have known it would. The ‘destroyer’ deal hammered home the facts… Britain was not ‘side by side’ or ‘hand-in-hand’ with her great ally, but under her wing, finally her thumb. George Marshall was not a semi-tone behind Stalin in clamouring for the ‘Second Front’, in 1942, in 1943. Perfidious Albion!
“In the Mediterranean, Britain fought a rearguard action for a time, but time was not on her side. With the agreement on ‘Anvil’ her Balkan and Mediterranean strategy was in ruins; at Teheran the coup de grace, Uncle Joe and the President keeping an eye on the wily old British with their ‘Imperial’ designs, their shocking ‘Colonialism’, their ridiculous delusions that their grandeur might survive.
“There was always a chance that the Germans might reach a point of near-collapse… but ‘Unconditional Surrender’ made that unlikely, and ruined the hope that the Germans might begin to put their house in order, and deal with their own maniac themselves. But… no enemy is more ruthless than a friend and no friend more ruthless than a benevolent friend, a protector… On D Day Britain ceased to be a major power in the world, no longer to even shape her own ends. The new Europe would not be hers, or of her making. George Washington might have trembled in his grave.” (pp.257-8)
George Washington had established the U.S. to be free of the foreign entanglements that might implicate America in the vicissitudes of her politics. But now Germany would have to fight to the end and the U.S. would re-make Europe in the Peace, not Britain. There would be no repeat of 1919 when the British Balance of Power was played and another World War made inevitable.
David Edgerton suggests that Britain was not stupid, it just miscalculated the balance of forces in its Balance of Power mindset:
“… an early victory by bombing, say in 1943, would have made Britain, as it hoped to continue to be, the greatest of the great powers; if things had turned out as Churchill hoped and believed in late 1941, Britain ‘would not have become so junior a partner in the Anglo-American effort.’ For in 1942-3 the USA was still catching up with Britain in this crucial machine, and the Soviet Union was nowhere. British air power would have dominated the world. But it didn’t, not just because bombing wasn’t as decisive as had been hoped: the nature of the continental war was quite different from the theories of modern war advocated by British analysts.” (pp. 289-90)
Edgerton points out the Churchillian myth of “Britain Alone” in 1940-1. He puts forward the fact that Britain was never “alone” – it had the largest Empire and the greatest military machine in the world, in terms of both quantity and quality. Its failure to fight and defeat Germany in 1940 was entirely a matter of will and strategy. With regard to the war in the air, just as the Battle of Britain was about to begin, Edgerton points out that Britain was diverting its war expenditure toward its bombing strategy to the detriment of its other military needs:
“There was no shortage of new aircraft in Britain in 1940. Modern types had been in production for years, and just as importantly gigantic new factories were ready to increase production. In 1940 Britain out-produced Germany in aircraft, just as the propagandists stated.Even the high level of production before May 1940 was not enough. One of Churchill’s first acts on becoming Prime Minister was to create a new Ministry of Aircraft Production, under Lord Beaverbrook. Beaverbrook wanted a rapid increase in production, and issued appeals to workers and managers. More importantly he decided to give priority to five types already in quantity production… We may note that three of these types were bombers, instruments of offence… One of the main aims of the rearmament programmes was to build up a powerful air force which could bomb Germany. Big twin-engined bombers like the Wellington, Whitley and Hampden were built… Despite enormous efforts and expenditure these programmes were, as of 1940-41, failures…” (p.66)
Edgerton concludes that if Britain had concentrated its efforts on producing tanks and rifles from 1936-40 as it got ready to fight a land war against Hitler, instead of deploying its resources toward its strategy of bombing German civilians there would have been no “phoney war” or military disaster of 1940. Ultimately it led to the end of the British Empire as a world power after it was shafted by its most benevolent friend.
Edgerton’s book also emphasises the points already made:
“For all the propagandist image of the Germans destroying Warsaw and then Rotterdam from the air, the committment to the bombing of cities was a British rather than a Nazi phenomenon. British bombing of Germany was not in retaliation for the Blitz, a case of the German reaping the whirlwind they had sown. It predated not only the blitz, but also the Battle of Britain. Bomber Command launched the first general bombing offensive against cities in the war on 11 May 1940. The Luftwaffe was prohibited from bombing cities not in the front line. It was not till September 1940 that Hitler allowed the Luftwaffe to start British-style bombing of Britain, following the bombing of Britain.” (p.66)
The 30-ton four engine bomber was a British (and then US) phenomenon. No other airforce produced them in any more than dozens:
“Strategic bombing was without question the most important large-scale novelty in the mode of warfare conducted by Britain and the USA… The bombing of civilians and industry was central to British war-like practice from 1940, and to policy long before that. It did not offend British values in warfare; it exemplified them. It has been seen as an extension of the idea of blockade… The British killed somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000 German civilians by bombing – the figures are highly uncertain -… The Germans killed many more British soldiers, sailors and airmen than British civilians… To put the issue another way, the losses of RAF Bomber Command and the merchant navy were each of the same order as those resulting from a single very heavy RAF raid on a German city, say Hamburg (1943) or Dresden (1945).” (pp.284-5)
Len Deighton in his interesting book Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective look at World War II makes this interesting comment on Hitler’s War in the East:
“The Luftwaffe’s true failure became apparent in those early days of the assault on the Soviet Union. Such a vast country might have been fatally crippled by strategic bombing, but Goring, Milch and Udet had made sure that Germany had no long-range bombers, and no men trained in its demanding techniques.” (p.451)