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June 28 - October 23, 2023
To distinguish themselves from the British, the Americans asked to be judged by what they aimed at, not by what they hit.
When the people who are the targets of their malice are forced to fight for their very survival, they will, if they are strong enough, fight with unhinged fury, with the aim of completely crushing the enemy
One of the most controversial air operations of the war, code-named Clarion, was aimed at undefended or lightly defended targets all over the Reich.
The Air Force leaders pronounced Clarion a “spectacular success” and a repeat performance was scheduled for March 3. But follow-up intelligence indicated mission failure:
But Spaatz canceled the March operation and began concentrating almost exclusively on what had been his three salient late-war objectives: destroying Germany’s oil industry, dislocating its rail system, and providing support for Eisenhower’s armies.
In the annals of the Eighth Air Force, April 10 is “the day of the great jet massacre.”
This was one of the most wide-sweeping social research projects ever undertaken, a massive fact-finding effort that yielded over 208 published reports. These volumes make the American air war over the Reich “among the most brilliantly illuminated military campaigns of all time.”
The United States Strategic Bomb Survey
The survey’s directors were faced with an unprecedented task. As Hanson Baldwin of the New York Times observed, “Probably for the first time in history a military campaign is undergoing a minute examination and critique from an official, but predominantly civilian board.”
The oil campaign “clipped the wings of the Luftwaffe” and impaired the Wehrmacht’s mobility, preventing it from protecting coal resources that powered the synthetic plants.
For the first time in modern history the economy of a world power had been utterly destroyed, and along with it, all of that country’s major cities.
Prominent journalists and historians have insisted that strategic bombing failed to curtail German production and that urban bombing actually strengthened the will of the German people to resist. And these critics cite the findings of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey as support for their conclusions.
How that survey’s conclusions came to be widely misrepresented is one of the puzzles of modern military scholarship.
In his understandable opposition to President Lyndon Johnson’s first large-scale bombing of North Vietnam, Operation Rolling Thunder, Galbraith insisted that strategic bombing had never worked, not in Vietnam, not in Korea, not even in World War II.
Speer was the person Galbraith and Ball had most wanted to see, the “miracle man” who possessed unsurpassed information about the inner workings of the military economy he had run with near dictatorial powers in the final years of the war.
Realizing the game was up, Speer agreed to what amounted to seven days of exhaustive interviews—our “bombing high school,” the Reichsminister called their marathon sessions.
Murray pointed out in his important book, The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938–39. “Rather, it occurred because the Germans were able to exploit ruthlessly the resources of the occupied and neutral countries within their sphere of control.”
What significance does this new interpretation of the German war economy have for understanding the bomber war? If mobilization already was in full swing in 1942, then Spaatz and Tedder were at least partially right. Although Germany’s entire economic fabric was not stretched tight by 1944, at least two vital areas were: oil and transportation. This made them perfect target systems when they were finally hit, Germany having no reserves of either gasoline or rolling stock to replace what was lost to the bombers.
At Flensburg, Albert Speer argued that World War II was preeminently an “economic war,” a war between rival production systems, and that it “was decided through attacks from the air,”
“The losses inflicted by the American and British air fleets,” Speer said, “constituted for Germany the greatest lost battle of the war,” and it was the Americans, he emphasized, who delivered the most telling blows. There is good reason to question Speer’s testimony to American Air Force interrogators. Knowing he would soon be tried as a war criminal, he was surely tempted to tell them what they wanted to hear—that American economic bombing was more effective than British area bombing. But Speer told British interrogators exactly the same thing. “The American attacks, which followed a
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The World War II record of the Eighth Air Force is mixed. Early in the war, its target planning was abysmal.
In miscalculating the ability of the unfortunately named Fortress to stand up to the Luftwaffe, American air planners needlessly sacrificed the lives of young men who were unable to fully appreciate the desperate nature of their missions.
The Allied bombing effort in World War II has been more closely scrutinized than any other military operation in history, but almost none of its critics points out one of its most dangerous shortcomings: the failure to place air operations—what to bomb, how to bomb, and when to bomb—under closer civilian scrutiny. The Allies had air commanders of surpassing ability, but they were given too loose a leash.
Of all branches of the American armed forces, only submarine crews in the Pacific had a higher fatality rate: almost 23 percent.
In the Eighth Air Force, the pioneers of 1942–43 paid the heaviest cost. Only one in five of these fliers completed their tours of duty.
Luftwaffe loss rates were exceeded only by U-boat crews, and, by some estimates, were higher.
The overwhelming majority of those killed and maimed were women, the elderly, and children under five years of age; most children over that age had been evacuated to the countryside.
After the war, Yale University psychologist Irving Janis led a wide-ranging investigation of the psychological effects of urban bombing and reached the same conclusion as American Air Force doctors who had treated distressed bomber boys at clinics in England: people on the front lines do not “adapt” or become habituated to life-threatening conditions. There is no such thing as “getting used to it.” Chronic tension and anxiety only increase with further exposure to anxiety-inducing situations.
Terror bombing was founded on a flawed understanding of how people react to crushing catastrophes, and on an impossibly optimistic view of the German people’s opportunities to revolt. The fantasy of terror bombing was not, as Freeman Dyson claimed, that it depressed morale. The fantasy was that depressed morale would have war-ending consequences.
It would be wrong, however, to criminalize the behavior of Carl Spaatz and Frederick Anderson. If these commanders are guilty of anything it is of misjudging the depths of Nazi unreason.
The Eighth Air Force engaged in terror bombing for four weeks. The RAF conducted terror raids for three years. But in fairness to Britain’s Bomber Command, all area bombing was not morale bombing, and all British bombing was not area bombing.
And here is where World War II holds a lesson for humanity. The Nazis did not think of themselves as savages, and that made them irredeemable. But as Orwell wrote: “If we see ourselves as the savages we are, some improvement is possible, or at least thinkable.”
At peak strength the Eighth Air Force had approximately 200,000 personnel, 2,800 heavy bombers, and over 1,400 fighter planes. There were 40 bombardment groups and fifteen fighter groups. More than 350,000 Americans served in the Eighth during the war. Seventeen Medals of Honor were awarded to its crewmen, and the Eighth had 261 fighter aces. By comparison, at maximum strength the Fifteenth Air Force had 1,190 bombers.
Only in Berlin one had the sense that not just a city but a nation, and with it, an ugly idea, had come to ruin.
Heading toward Le Havre, the bombers descended to 500 feet to give the airmen a close-up view of some of the cities they had wrecked. “I grabbed a spot near one of the waist windows so I could see Germany once more from the air,” recalled Oscar Richard. Passing over the corpse of a German city, Richard remarked to the men sitting next to him, “That could be us. That could be America. Nobody said we had to win this war.”
On August 6, after receiving authority from Washington, Spaatz ordered his former Eighth Air Force pilot Paul Tibbets to drop a uranium bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, a more powerful plutonium bomb obliterated over half the city of Nagasaki. Spaatz then told Doolittle that if he wanted to get his Eighth Air Force in combat with the Japanese he had better organize an operation for the next day, for the war would soon be over. Doolittle had been assigned 720 B-29s and many of them were war-ready, but he stood them down. “If the war’s over,” he told Spaatz, “I will not risk one airplane nor
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(16) The crew of the Memphis Belle, led by Capt. Robert Morgan (front, left), return from their twenty-fifth mission on May 17, 1943. They were the first Eighth Air Force crew to complete their required twenty-five missions and return to the United States. Hollywood director William Wyler flew with them and produced the famous film documentary The Memphis Belle.
(34) The air war went badly for the Eighth until the arrival in late 1943 of the P-51 Mustang, a long-range fighter that could escort the bombers all the way to Berlin.
(37) Most marshaling yards were located in or near city centers, making it virtually impossible to bomb them without causing major damage in residential neighborhoods nearby.
