The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945

by Richard Overy

Success only gradually became evident in May and June when Allied bomber losses suddenly fell sharply from the peak in April. By the summer the percentage of attacking bombers actually hit by enemy fighters fell from 3.7 percent in March and April to only 0.4 percent in July and August.60 The reason can be found in the corresponding German statistics. Between January and June, German aircraft losses on all fronts equaled 137 percent of established strength, 6,259 lost in combat, 3,608 due to accidents, predominantly due to poor weather or pilot error. Despite fighting much of the time over German territory, the German Air Force also lost 2,262 pilots. Most of the losses occurred in Germany or on the Western Front in France and the Low Countries. In June 1944 losses totaled 3,534, only slightly less than the 3,626 aircraft of all types produced that month.61 This was an insupportable attrition cycle of both German matériel and manpower: even with the increases in fighter output that peaked later in the year, new production was sucked into a whirlpool of rapid destruction.

The point at which Allied air supremacy was established in German airspace is difficult to establish because of the continual, fluid, and incoherent nature of air combat. Some historians date it from the first attrition battles in March 1944, others from the early attacks on oil installations. The head of the Historical Section of the German Air Force, Major General Hans-Detlef von Rohden, argued in a postwar assessment that Allied air supremacy over Germany had been achieved by the time of the Normandy invasion: “Germany had lost the struggle for Air Control.”62 A Joint Intelligence Committee evaluation in August 1944 concluded that the German Air Force “can no longer affect the military situation on any front,” which was not entirely true, but did reflect the exceptional degree of operational flexibility now available to American and, increasingly, British aircraft over Germany.63 No date is entirely satisfactory, but by June, when German reserves were sucked into the aerial maelstrom in France, the attrition cycle was, for the moment, complete.

Germany’s strategic position in 1944 was very different from Britain’s in 1940, fighting as it was on two major fronts in the Soviet Union and Italy and facing growing resistance in other areas of German-occupied Europe. The German priority was not simply to frustrate the Allied search for air superiority but to try to defend a fortress area in central Europe against overwhelming material superiority on all fronts.

German fighter output reached its wartime peak between the last months of 1943 and the autumn of 1944, though this was achieved in an environment of heavy and continual bombing. As a result, the gap between German fighter production and Anglo-American fighter output (produced in an almost entirely bomb-free environment) was not as significant as the gap in economic resources might suggest. British and American fighter output between January and June 1944 was 11,817; German production over the same six months was 9,489.66 In both cases this production was spread among a number of fighting fronts. Yet the Eighth Fighter Command had more than twice the number of fighters available when compared with the Reich Air Fleet, as well as additional support from RAF Fighter Command and the Ninth Air Force. In May 1944 the Reich Air Fleet had 437 serviceable fighters, the Eighth Air Force 1,174. The explanation lies partly in the difference between the two training regimes already noted, which put novice German pilots at a permanent disadvantage. There was also a major contrast in serviceability rates, which were higher for Allied aircraft once the American logistical system was working effectively. Under constant air attack and a manpower shortage, the production and distribution of spares and the supply of adequate ground engineering staff all declined in Germany. More than 9,000 German aircraft in 1944 were lost in transit to Allied air attack before they reached the combat squadrons.

During the Battle of Britain the peak loss rate for Fighter Command reached 25 percent in September 1940. German Air Force monthly fighter losses were already 30 percent of the force in January 1944 and more than 50 percent by May (see table 3.1). Numerical inferiority was then compounded with the demand that German fighters seek out the Allied bombers rather than fighters, which made them more vulnerable at the moment of attack, and by the decision to assemble large numbers of fighters together (like Douglas Bader’s “Big Wings” in the Battle of Britain); this meant time lost in flight to assembly points and, for pilots who had flown on the Eastern Front in pairs or loose groups of four, a difficult adjustment to flying in larger formations.67 The RAF in 1940 avoided both of these operational handicaps by using Spitfires against enemy fighters, Hurricanes against the bombers, while Dowding judiciously resisted the switch to “Big Wings.” The difference between the two sides was not simply a product of economic resources, as is usually argued, but stemmed from operational and tactical choices that rested in the end with those in command.

From 1942 onward, and particularly after the failure of the air force to supply the encircled forces at Stalingrad, few major decisions in the air war could be taken without Hitler’s approval or intervention. Yet Hitler did many things right in relation to the air war: he did not in the end obstruct the shift to fighter priority, favored a heavy antiaircraft defense, authorized the dispersal of industry underground, and bullied the air force into prioritizing improvements in electronic warfare.

One factor did link the Battle of Britain and the Battle of Germany: the German Air Force did not admit that they had lost either one.

Over the eight months until German surrender the Eighth and Fifteenth air forces together with Bomber Command dropped three-quarters of the wartime bomb total against a deteriorating German defense; approximately half of all German deaths from bombing occurred over the same period.

Of all the factors that encouraged the final months of heavy bombing, the fear that the German military situation might be reversed by new weapons, secret or otherwise, kept bombers at their task. Though some of these fears might appear with hindsight as mere fantasy, the launch of the German V-weapons in the summer of 1944, and the first employment of the Me262 jet fighter/fighter-bomber, confirmed the Allied view that Germany’s military situation might abruptly improve. The so-called vengeance weapons hit British targets indiscriminately, first the V-1 flying bomb, which was first launched in mid-June, and then the V-2 rocket, which first fell on London in September. The Me262 was a crude fighter, easily adapted to mass production, but with its high speed it appeared capable of posing a serious challenge to the bomber fleets had it been available in sufficient numbers. The few units equipped with the Me262 by the end of the war claimed to have shot down 300 heavy bombers. The new aircraft was certainly welcomed by German air leaders as a possible war winner. Evaluations of the war situation produced in September 1944 and January 1945 by German Air Force intelligence presented the possibility of a “final victory” given the apparent decline in Anglo-American military capability and enthusiasm since the summer and the clutch of dangerous new technical developments available to Germany; these included the Wasserfall ground-to-air missile (V-4), proximity fuses, jet fighters ...

The U.S. Chemical Warfare Committee in January 1945 warned that although German leaders had not yet authorized the use of gas, the strategic situation they faced had changed for the worse: “The Germans are now fighting with their backs to the wall, on their homeland, and may out of zealousness, in defense of their own soil, or the fanatical desperation of the Nazi leadership, resort to the gas weapon.”

by the beginning of 1944 the German armed forces had thousands of tons of chemical weapons on hand, including the deadly agents sarin and tabun.

In January 1944, Portal told Churchill that he was toying with the idea of using gas to attack preliminary V-weapon installations that had been identified in France and the Low Countries, but hesitated to do so because the repercussions of starting gas warfare “would be far-reaching.” The RAF was nevertheless alert for the first whiff of German gas in order to activate its extensive plans for airborne gas attacks. The War Cabinet was notified by the air staff the same month that if Germany should ever use it, the air force would immediately unleash six area attacks with mustard gas and two with phosgene every month. The attacks were to be divided between lighter, harassing raids and heavy concentrated raids using a mix of gas bombs, incendiaries, and high explosive, which would have to be repeated regularly “on the most densely populated centres.”85 The air staff understood that even if the German forces used gas against the invading troops in June 1944, Churchill favored gas attacks not only on enemy troops but also on “the cities of Germany.” A list of suitable cities was drawn up in case such attacks were needed, fifteen for Bomber Command, thirty for the Eighth Air Force, and fifteen for American bombers from Italy. For the Normandy landings Bomber Command planned 11,000 sorties using gas and other bombs against a variety of military and civilian targets.86 The stalemate in Normandy and the onset of the V-weapons campaign brought further pressure from Churchill to use ...

Less well known are the plans for biological warfare against Germany developed in 1944–45. These too were the result of growing fears that a desperate enemy might utilize bacteriological warfare, possibly projected by some form of rocket propulsion. In 1942, Roosevelt authorized a War Research Board directed by George Merck, with an advisory board of prominent scientists, disguised simply as the “ABC Committee,” whose first task was to work out ways to protect the American population from a possible German or Japanese bacteriological attack. In late 1942 the work was taken over by the Chemical Warfare Service, which set up a research facility at Camp Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. As with gas warfare, intelligence began to appear in 1943 that suggested Germany was planning the use of biological warfare agents, and in particular “bacillus botulinus” (now known as Clostridium botulinum, the cause of botulism), which was impossible to detect in an airborne attack, caused symptoms in four to five hours, and death by embolism in most cases. The assumption was that Germany would only hesitate to use biological weapons because of the threat of “instant reprisal,” and as a result a program to produce lethal pathogens was accelerated. A further report in January 1944 warned that rocket or air attacks using bacteria might be imminent, and their effects “devastating.” This included the probability of using anthrax spores directed at human populations.90 Three plants were set up for ...

The most significant factor is that fear of chemical and biological weapons prompted the Allies to think in terms of retaliation against civilian populations on a large scale, turning interwar fantasies about gas and germs into potential reality.

American bombing, though intended to be directed at oil and transport targets, was often little distinguishable from area raiding. Much of the air policing of the German Air Force and attacks on targets of opportunity on the German transport network were carried out by fighters and fighter-bombers, which swarmed over Germany. The heavy bombers focused on major industrial and rail targets, but poor visibility for much of the winter meant that most bombs again fell widely scattered. Of every hundred bombs dropped on an oil plant, eighty-seven missed the target entirely and only two hit the buildings and equipment.104 A conference on bombing accuracy called in March 1945 confirmed that most bombing since September 1944 had been blind bombing, much through complete cloud cover. From September to December 1944 only 14 percent of bombing was done with good to fair visibility, a further 10 percent visually aimed with poor visibility; 76 percent was carried out nonvisually, using a variety of electronic aids. In good visibility, at least four-fifths of bombs were found to fall within one mile of the aiming point, but through 10/10 cloud cover only 5.6 percent.105 The instructions given to the Eighth Air Force in October 1944 on bombing procedure encouraged attacks in poor weather on any towns visible with the aid of H2X, for the reason that they were certain to contain some vital military targets. The effect, like the directives to Bomber Command three years before, was to encoura...

Whatever the operational drawbacks to flying in poor weather against heavily defended targets, enough bombs struck the oil plants and transport network to cause sufficient disruption. The transport plan was put into effect by the Eighth Air Force in early September, but serious assaults on the main rail junctions and marshaling yards began in October against Cologne, Hamm, and Duisburg. The Rhine was blocked at Cologne by a lucky strike on the Cologne-Mülheim Bridge, which collapsed into the water, blocking one of Germany’s main traffic waterways. By November the German Railway was down to eleven days’ supply of coal, by December 12 down to five days. Southern and eastern parts of Germany were starved of coal; locomotives and wagons were routinely strafed by fighters and fighter-bombers. Out of 250,000 goods wagons available, almost half were inoperable by late November. Total rail freight traffic fell by 46 percent from September 1944 to January 1945. In the Ruhr, rolling stock available for daily use was by late October half the level of September. Rolling stock was withdrawn farther away from the attacks in western Germany, but the result was to block supplies of coal and coke from the Ruhr and force a reduction of one-third in electricity generation.107 Serious damage to the Mittelland Canal, the main link between the Ruhr and central Germany, left it unusable for much of October and November. Coal traffic on inland waterways was 2.2 million tons in September, but 422,...

The Allied raid on November 2 that lost 40 bombers cost the German fighter force 120 planes. The collapse of aviation fuel supply played an important part; training was cut back even further and strict instructions were given on flight times and procedures to reduce fuel consumption. Both day-fighter and night-fighter squadrons found they had a surplus of pilots with available aircraft, but they could not fly because of the restrictions.

In 1943 a Lancaster bomber had lasted on average for twenty-two combat sorties, whereas by 1945 the figure was sixty.112 The more experience crews got, the better their chances of survival. The German night-fighter force, on the other hand, was hit by the collapse in fuel supply in a number of ways. It was essential to be able to run full training programs for crews in the use of the complex scanning equipment, the SN-3 and FuG218, now available to locate the bomber aircraft. The dynamos needed to charge the radar equipment could not be operated because of fuel shortages; electricity supply to the radar stations was intermittent by the winter months of 1944, which also reduced training time on the new detection instruments.113 Most night fighters were now the high-quality Junkers Ju88G, fitted with SN2 and Naxos equipment, and the Flensburg detector used to home in to an Allied bomber’s “Monica” signals. By chance this equipment fell undamaged into British hands when a disoriented German night-fighter pilot landed in error on a Bomber Command station at Woodbridge in Suffolk in July 1944. Extensive testing soon showed that the simple expedient of turning off both the Monica tail radar and the H2S set would blind the enemy night fighters. New devices—“Perfectos,” “Piperack,” and “Serrate IV”—were developed to give warning of enemy fighters and to confuse German radar.114 Although a new round of research began in Germany, there was too little time or opportunity to profit fr...

By January 1945 there was accumulating Ultra evidence that the choice of oil and the transport network as targets had been sensible.

The story of the last months of desperate German resistance is now well known, but at the time the intelligence picture for the Allies was less coherent and full of potential menace. Persistent rumors of German plans to build a “redoubt” in southern Germany or the Alps were taken more seriously than they deserved. The capacity of the Red Army to complete its victory on the Eastern Front was regarded as more imponderable than it should have been. These uncertainties help to explain the decision that led on the night of February 13–14 in the Saxon city of Dresden to a third major firestorm, which killed approximately 25,000 people in a few hours. No other raid of the war, not even Operation Gomorrah, has generated so much critical attention. Harris has regularly been blamed for conducting a needlessly destructive and strategically unnecessary raid against Dresden, but the irony is that the purpose on this occasion was dictated by the conditions of the ground war rather than the bombing campaign. It was Dresden’s misfortune to be not only in the path of the oncoming Soviet armies, but also a possible transfer route for the phantom last stand of German armies in the south. Although the city was ranked number 22 on the MEW list of target cities, with a key-point rating of 70, Harris had not yet attacked it in force, partly because of the long distance, but almost certainly because it contained no major industries linked to the current directive.121 By the autumn of 1944, Dresde...

Discussion about bombing cities in eastern Germany was always related to the progress of Soviet forces and the possibility of helping their advance by a display of Allied airpower.

Though Harris later argued at the height of the Cold War that the request to bomb Dresden had come “from the other side of the Iron Curtain,” there can be no doubt that the plan was always a Western one.

Consistent with the new directive, Spaatz ordered a major daylight raid on Berlin on February 3, 1945, with 1,000 B-17 Flying Fortresses and almost 1,000 fighters. For once he ordered the aircraft to attack the center of the city along the lines first suggested in Operation Thunderclap, despite Doolittle’s unhappiness about the deliberate targeting of civilian areas. On the operational directive Spaatz scrawled, “Beat ’em up!” (though much later he chose to remember the raid as just another military target). The toll was high for an American raid, indeed the highest German death toll from any of the raids on the capital. An estimated 2,890 were killed and 120,000 rendered temporarily homeless. A second heavy raid on Berlin with 1,135 bombers was made on February 26.134 On February 6, Chemnitz was also hit, by 474 American bombers; on February 14–15 a second attack was made by Bomber Command with 499 Lancasters, though cloud obscured the city and most bombs fell wide of it; a further raid was made by the Eighth Air Force on March 2. Seen from this perspective, it is evident that the raid on Dresden was made as part of a series of agreed attacks on the cities of eastern Germany. All of these raids, and not just the attack on Dresden, were undertaken in the full knowledge that these cities were filled with civilian refugees from farther east, and that their destruction was likely to cause not just dislocation but high casualties as well.

The Dresden raid on February 13–14, 1945, was carried out by Bomber Command in two successive waves with 796 Lancasters, carrying 2,646 tons of bombs (including 1,181 tons of incendiaries). Dresden’s light defenses resulted first all from the transfer of antiaircraft artillery to the Eastern Front and second from a successful diversionary raid that attracted the nearby night fighters away from the city. The first wave was not very effective, but the follow-up raid with the bulk of the Lancaster force in clear conditions achieved an exceptional level of concentration. Low humidity and dry, cold weather, combined with a very large number of small fires quickly started, proved ideal conditions for the generation of another firestorm. The flames consumed fifteen square miles of the city, an area that exceeded the damage at Hamburg. Recent estimates from a historical commission in Dresden have confirmed that the original figure suggested by the city’s police president in March 1945 of approximately 25,000 dead is the best available estimate. Out of 220,000 homes, 75,000 were destroyed.135 The firestorm, like the Hamburg conflagration, left bodies mummified or reduced to ash, making the final count difficult. A further 1,858 skeletons were unearthed when the city was slowly rebuilt after 1945. The aiming point in this, as in all area attacks, was the historic city center, which was entirely burnt out. The next day the Eighth Air Force carried out its first raid on the marshaling...

Unlike any of the other major raids in the last months of the war, the Dresden attack had immediate repercussions on Allied opinion. Two days after the raid an RAF officer at SHAEF headquarters gave a news conference in which he talked about bombing cities deliberately to cause panic and destroy morale. An Associated Press correspondent, Howard Cowan, filed a report successfully past the SHAEF censor, and by February 18 the American press was full of the news that the Allies had at last decided “to adopt deliberate terror bombing.” Arnold was compelled to run a campaign to reassure the American public that Dresden had been attacked, like Chemnitz, as a major communications center, entirely consistent with American bombing policy.136 It was hard to stifle the debate. Goebbels released to the neutral press news that 250,000 people had been killed in Dresden (by the judicious addition of an additional zero to the provisional casualty estimate). In Britain and America news of the death toll was soon public knowledge. The Bombing Restrictions Committee in London publicized the figure of 250,000 at once and provoked a furious correspondence accusing the committee of acting as the mout...

It is possible that the publicity surrounding bombing as a result of Dresden worried Churchill as he contemplated a general election at some point in the next few months; it probably reflected his persistent ambivalence about bombing ever since its first disappointments in 1940 and 1941; or it may be that he finally realized, as Allied forces now poured into the broken cities of the Ruhr, just what bombing had done (on March 26 he lunched on the banks of the Rhine with General Bernard Montgomery, commander of the British 21st Army Group) and was affected by its enormity, as he had been when he wandered through British cities during the Blitz.

Whatever Churchill’s misgivings, British city bombing continued in ways that were evidently punitive in nature and excessive in scale. Just ten days after Dresden, Bomber Command attacked the small town of Pforzheim. The marking worked well and the bombers dropped their loads from just 8,000 feet (instead of 18,000–20,000 feet on raids against defended targets); the subsequent conflagration consumed 83 percent of the city area, until then the worst in any raid of the war, and killed an estimated 17,600 people, though the death toll, the third highest in the European bombing war, has never had the publicity accorded to Dresden. The ruins of Cologne, hit by more than 250 wartime raids, were raked over again by a massive Bomber Command attack on March 2 by over 700 Lancasters, just four days before it was occupied by American forces. Essen suffered the same fate on March 11, with a macabre finale by over 1,000 bombers dropping 4,661 tons on a desolate landscape only hours before it fell to the advancing army.

On March 16–17, 1,127 tons of bombs were dropped on the small medieval city of Würzburg, killing between 4,000 and 5,000 people and destroying 89 percent of the city, a wartime record. Hildesheim was half destroyed on March 22 (the town center “should make a good fire,” the crews were told).140 The small city of Paderborn was destroyed on March 27, and half of Plauen on April 10–11.

The American air forces wound down operations in April 1945. Much of the bombing since the February attacks was tactical in nature, directed at almost any target that could be deemed an element of German resistance. Operation Clarion was carried out with mixed success against a range of smaller communications targets. On April 5 all objectives were defined henceforth as tactical, but American bombing of the shrinking German area reached a crescendo, with 46,628 tons dropped in nineteen days of raiding, almost the same weight dropped during the German Blitz, but in just three weeks.

Spaatz attended the surrender ceremony in Berlin on May 8 as the senior air commander in Europe. The Soviet delegation, however, refused to allow him to sign as the equal of Marshal Zhukov, the conqueror of Berlin, and he had to add his name underneath as a witness.

RE8 produced a report on May 25, 1945, two weeks after the German surrender, titled “Area Attack Against Japan,” recommending that since everything easily combustible had already been burned down, Bomber Command should use 4,000-pound blast bombs to destroy any urban areas or industrial targets still standing. From previous analysis carried out on the vulnerability of Japanese housing, it was calculated that each bomb would destroy more than ten built-up acres, whereas in Germany the figure had been only 1.5.

The provisional conclusions among the cohort of German airmen, engineers, and ministerial staff subject to interrogation were almost unanimous. A British intelligence assessment, “Factors in Germany’s Defeat,” produced by May 17, included an interrogation with Adolf Galland, who ranked the offensive against transport, then oil, then the air force as the most decisive.152 In mid-June a full report of interrogation extracts was produced by the director of American air force intelligence at SHAEF, George C. McDonald. They also showed that the three critical targets were considered to be oil facilities (“The general opinion of the German leaders is that the attack on synthetic oil was the decisive factor”), communications (“brought about the final disruption of the German war effort”), and the German Air Force—achieved through attacks on aircraft production, airfields, and combat attrition.153 Göring thought the collapse of oil supply to be the single most critical factor—“without fuel, nobody can conduct a war”—while Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister for armaments and war production, ranked communications at the top of the list of critical targets. Erhard Milch, Göring’s deputy at the Air Ministry, ranked “synthetic oil plants and railway communications” together.154 On area bombing the German judgment was largely negative. It did not “cause the collapse of the German people” and was regarded, according to McDonald, as “the least important of the major target complexes.” When G...

In all twenty-one cities studied, war production expanded faster than it had done in a control cohort of fourteen cities not subject to attack.

Given the uniformity of opinion on both the German and Allied side, the one based on experience, the other on extensive research, it is surprising that the effects of bombing have occasioned so much debate ever since. The proximate causes—defeating the German Air Force and emasculating oil supply and transport—are unlikely to be undermined by further research.

The Hungarian émigré economist Nicholas Kaldor, a member of the USSBS team, argued that the critical factors in choosing economic targets were the degree of “cushion,” the degree of “depth,” and the degree of “vulnerability.” The first was governed by the existing elasticity of the economy in terms of finding additional or substitute resources for those lost to bombing; the second measured the extent to which a particular product or resource was close to actual military use, since the farther back in the production chain, the longer the time before bombing would affect military performance; the third was governed by the extent to which concentrated, and relatively inflexible, capital industries could be effectively destroyed from the air.165 Kaldor and his economist colleagues argued that for most of the war period Germany had a large cushion of resources of capital stock, labor, and raw materials that could be allocated to sustaining war production. His conclusion was based partly on the assumption, now generally regarded by historians as invalid, that Hitler did not order full-scale mobilization until 1944. The degree of allocation of productive resources to war purposes was in fact high from the start of the war, but many of the economies of scale characteristic of large-scale industrial production became effective only by 1942–43, while the unanticipated length of the campaign against the Soviet Union distorted war production plans at a critical juncture in 1941–42.

Yet Kaldor was not wrong to argue that a cushion existed. The index of armaments output showed that German production increased threefold between 1941 and 1944, despite all the bombing; some individual categories of weapon expanded more than this, fighter aircraft by a factor of thirteen, tanks by a factor of five, heavy guns by a factor of four.167 As a result of the conquest of much of continental Europe, Germany had access to large resources beyond her borders. Although this also involved economic costs to Germany, occupation meant that over 119 billion marks were contributed to Germany’s war budget, one-quarter of all the costs of the armed forces; 7.9 million forced workers and prisoners of war were compelled to work in Germany, while an estimated 20 million more worked on orders for the German war effort in the occupied zones.168 Moreover, German technical and organizational ingenuity made it possible to find substitute products or productive capacity even for “bottleneck” industries like ball bearings, where, as Kaldor argued, the target had “run away” by the time the Allies attacked it again in 1944.169 The German economy, wrote the USSBS economist John Kenneth Galbraith in an early evaluation, was “expanding and resilient, not static and brittle.”

It is difficult not to argue that the U.S. air forces had a surer strategic grasp and a clearer set of strategic objectives than did Bomber Command. Counterforce operations and the search for target systems that would unhinge the enemy’s military efforts were central elements in American wartime air doctrine. The RAF, by contrast, thought of airpower more as a form of blockade, and was never enthusiastic about counterforce operations or attacks on transport, though both had been adopted in the Mediterranean campaign. The defeat of the German Air Force over Germany and the massive dislocation of German transport were primarily American achievements.

It has never proved possible to calculate the number of workers killed, rather than nonworkers (elderly, women with families, children, etc.), but some sense of the limitations of any such assessment can be found in the death statistics in Hamburg, where on the night of the firestorm in 1943 that killed over 18,000 people, only 280 were killed in the factory district, away from the main area of bombing.171 Workers were not always the most likely victims, but even if the estimated total of 350,000 German dead from bombing were all workers, that would still have represented only 1.6 percent of the German industrial and rural workforce, some of whom would have been killed by American daytime bombs rather than by the RAF.

German records show that absenteeism as a direct result of bombing made up 4.5 percent of hours lost at the height of the bombing in 1944; an additional 10.8 percent of hours were lost due to illness or leave, though these may well have been a response to circumstances caused by bombing. Figures of hours lost due to bombing were higher in targeted industries (7.9 percent in shipbuilding, 10.6 percent in vehicle production), but much of this loss was the result of precise attacks by day rather than by Bomber Command at night.

As in the British case, the critical factor was the distorting effect that bombing had on German strategy once it became necessary to divert large resources to the military combat against the air offensive. Bombing, as Speer recognized, really did come to constitute a “Second Front” by 1943, preventing German military leaders from using airpower effectively at the fighting front as they had done in all the campaigns from 1939 to 1941. Failure in Russia, in the Mediterranean theater, and against the Allied invasion of France owed a great deal to the fact that German fighter aircraft, guns, ammunition, and radar equipment were tied up in the Reich. This had not necessarily been the Allied intention, which focused on unhinging the domestic war effort, but it undoubtedly contributed to the military outcome at the fighting fronts throughout the last three years of war and compensated for whatever weaknesses might have existed in Allied combat experience or skills.

The combined offensive distorted German military strategy by imposing a heavy cost in active and passive antiaircraft defense. One of the keys to Germany’s early battlefield successes was the employment of fighters, fighter-bombers, and medium bombers in support of ground forces. The Allied bombing forced the German leadership to switch aircraft back to the defense of the Reich and to reduce sharply the proportion of output devoted to frontline bombers and fighter-bombers, as table 3.3 demonstrates. This had the immediate effect of limiting severely the offensive airpower available on the battlefield.

In early 1943, 59 percent of German fighters were in the Western theater facing the bombing; in January 1944, 68 percent; by October 1944, 81 percent. At the beginning of 1944 German aircraft available on the Soviet front were little more than the number a year before, in the Mediterranean theater they were 40 percent fewer, but in defense of Germany the number increased by 82 percent. The same was true for the distribution of antiaircraft guns: in the summer of 1944 there were 2,172 batteries of light and heavy antiaircraft artillery on the home front, but only 443 batteries in the Mediterranean theater, and 301 on the whole of the Eastern Front.176 This situation left German armies denuded of air protection at a critical juncture of the ground war on the Eastern and Mediterranean fronts,

For the German war effort the costs of all forms of air defense by 1943–44 were substantial in terms of both manpower and equipment. The antiaircraft service absorbed 255,000 people in 1940, but 889,000 at its peak in 1944; the 14,400 heavy and 42,000 light guns by 1944 required production of 4,000 new guns a month, and antiaircraft units consumed one-fifth of all ammunition, half the production of the electronics industry, and one-third of all optical equipment.177 The passive civil defense personnel numbered around 900,000 (supported by 15 million members of the Air Defense League); the numbers involved in post-raid clearance fluctuated over time, but they totaled by 1944 in the hundreds of thousands. Civil defense and medical equipment had to be maintained in the face of wide losses, hospitals had to be built and repaired, and fire services expanded. Few of those involved would have been potential soldiers, but many would have been potential war workers, if they were not already combining civil defense activities with paid work. This does not mean that civilians were ipso facto legitimate targets, but as in the British case, it shows that bombing compelled German resources to be allocated in ways that directly affected German military potential at the fighting front and the pattern of strategic choices. Without bombing, Germany would have been as free to optimize the use of resources and to conduct the military war effort as was the United States. The military consequen...

In RAF Bomber Command, 47,268 were killed in action (or died as prisoners of war) and 8,195 in accidents. According to Harris, an estimated 135,000 flew in combat with Bomber Command, a loss rate of 41 percent. Total RAF dead during the war from all causes totaled 101,223, so that Bomber Command deaths amounted to 54.7 percent of all RAF losses.180 Of these, the largest non-British contingent was composed of Canadians, 9,919 of whom died in Bomber Command.181 Total wastage of Bomber Command aircraft from all causes was 16,454.182 American heavy bomber losses against Germany totaled 10,152 between 1942 and 1945, and the total killed in all theaters against Germany was 30,099.

Frankfurt. Largely roofless. Looks like Pompeii magnified.

The civil defense structure built up in Germany in the 1930s was from the outset more military in character than its British counterpart. The purpose of preparations for a possible bombing war was not simply to provide adequate protection from gas and bombs but to use air-raid precautions as a form of collective social mobilization. Civil defense was a community obligation that matched the wider claims of the German dictatorship to have created a rearmed and psychologically reinvigorated people after years in the democratic wilderness. By 1939, 15 million Germans had joined the Luftschutzbund; by 1942 there were 22 million, almost one-quarter of the population.

The arguments over responsibility continued into the war as Himmler sought to exploit civil defense as an instrument for internal security as much as civil protection.8 The emergency services were in July 1942 turned into the Air Protection Police (Luftschutzpolizei) to make clear that they served the police authorities, not the air force. Such dualism was characteristic of the institutional competition provoked in the Third Reich by the efforts of the party and the SS to penetrate or subvert or substitute conventional forms of authority.

The fire service was decentralized before 1933, the responsibility of local cities or provinces, with no technical compatibility between the different forces in equipment, hydrants, or hose couplings, and was dependent on a large number of volunteer auxiliaries. In 1933 the Air Ministry began a program to encourage manufacturers to standardize fire-service equipment. In Prussia, the largest German province, fire and police services were tied more closely together and instructions on standardized practices and technical standards were introduced; these were confirmed in the 1935 Air Protection Law. In 1936 the Interior Ministry planned to extend the Air Ministry guidelines to other provinces in order to promote national standards. Himmler, however, wanted the fire service under his control as chief of police and prepared legislation to create a National Fire Service, run on standard lines defined by the police authorities and including both professional firemen and volunteers. A National Fire Service Law came into force on December 23, 1938, dissolving all existing fire services and placing the new national organization under the control of the Order Police. Firemen were now to be known as fire defense police (Feuerschutzpolizei), the volunteers as police auxiliaries.10 By 1940 standard and interchangeable equipment was available, including a single model light-alloy hose coupling that could be used for all types of hoses, and three standard pump appliances.11 In the end, t...

The one major difference between German practice and that of other European states was the legal compulsion to seek shelter during a raid, which almost certainly contributed to reducing casualties in the first war years.

On May 10, 1940, the first bombs fell on the south German city of Freiburg im Breisgau, killing fifty-seven people, including thirteen children. The German press deplored the evidence of Allied butchery, but the town had been bombed in error by three German aircraft that had lost their way on a flight to attack the French town of Dijon on the first day of the German offensive. Freiburg was later bombed twenty-five times by Allied aircraft.32 It was the following night, on May 11, that the first British bombs fell on the Rhineland; from then on across the summer months bombs fell on a German urban target almost every night. Since the raids were small and the bombing was scattered, the principal effect was to trigger the alarm system over wide parts of western Germany, compelling the population to seek shelter. In Münster in Westphalia there were 157 alarms in 1940, lasting a total of 295 hours, all but 7 of them at night.33 The onset of bombing did not, however, signal the onset of a frontline mentality. Bombing was geographically restricted and distributed in small packets over villages as well as major cities. German propaganda immediately began to condemn the attacks as simple terror bombing, but this was also the view of the German Air Force, which assumed on the basis of the random pattern of the bombs that the British object must be to terrorize the population rather than attack the war economy. This thinking dominated German perception of the Allied offensive for muc...