THE AIR OFFENSIVE:
STRATEGIC BOMBING
By Steven Stoneman
390th Memorial Museum Foundation
"The Navy can lose us the war," declared British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill in September 1940, "but only the Air Force can win
it." (1) At that bleak juncture in the war with Germany, the bomber must have
appeared the sole weapon that would enable Great Britain to eventually take the offensive
against the Nazi war lords in Berlin. Later in the conflict, when massive Soviet and
American and armies coalesced, a more traditional kind of attack could be posited. But
even later in World War II, bomber assaults would continue to be seen by the Western
Allies as a vital weapon for crushing German military power. The strategic bombing
offensive which lasted for five full years, has been designated as "probably the most
continuous and grueling operation of war ever carried out." (2) The degree to which
American and British strategic bombing of German cities, vital industries, and military
targets contributed to Germany's defeat, however, has been a matter of angry recrimination
among scholars and political and military leaders over the past half-century of critical
examination.
The legacy of formal warfare contained no precedents for aerial strategic bombardment. At
the time of World War I, a few German Zepplins and very primitive heavy bombers had
carried out small raids against London, but these attacks were small in scope and caused
more anger than damage, but they did spark arguments over the propriety and morality of
this new military innovation.
In the interwar period between the two great global conflicts, a few select strategic
thinkers argued that large, manned long-range bombers would prove crucial in the next
contest of arms in Europe. The Italian thinker, General Giulio Douhet, became particularly
noted for urging mass terror-bombing of cities to break the morale of entire national
populations. But at the decision-making level of major European governments, only the
British had formally embraced this new innovation in warfare. During the twenties and
thirties, the Royal Air Force became wedded to the notion of bombing as the right weapon
to reinforce the outcome of Britain's time-tested instrumentality of warfare, the economic
blockade. It is a fact that British thinkers were constricted by doubts as to the morality
of mass bombing, doubts that lasted well into the Second World War. As the mid-1930s came
about, there were widening fears about the prospect that an ascendant Nazi Germany would
hurl her aerial legions against London and Paris with even greater effect as these two
great Western seats of government and culture were more vulnerable targets than the more
dispersed German cities.
The RAF tenaciously adhered to its offensive strategy as war clouds began to gather on the
European horizon. The proper manner of averting destructive Nazi raids would be to possess
a formidable deterrent offensive force and, if necessary, to strike first. In the planning
years 1936-1937, the British Air Ministry hammered out plans for the acquisition of a vast
fleet of four-engine high-altitude long-range strategic bombers which would be the
superior of any rival air force in Europe. Bomber Command, as it came to be called, was to
be furnished with a total of ninety squadrons consisting of 1442 aircraft by l942. The
ruling British Cabinet sharply curtailed this concept for reasons of economy and shifted
the main emphasis to the acquisition of fighter aircraft for defensive purposes, which
could be obtained sooner and at less cost. After the diplomatic denouement at Munich in
1938 starkly revealed Britain's offensive and defensive vulnerability in the air, an even
greater emphasis was given to the manufacture of Supermarine Spitfires and Hawker
Hurricanes for home defense of the British Isles. This course of action was to prove of
vital positive importance during the Battle of Britain where RAF Fighter Command prevented
the German Luftwaffe from gaining control of the skies above Great Britain as the
necessary prelude to a German invasion of the Home Islands. The simultaneous development
of radar in British laboratories gave to that country the flexibility of deploying RAF
fighters to where German formations were located instead of widely roaming the skies over
southeast England in futile search for enemy raiders.
Wise as these allocations of money and materiel were for the survival of Britain, it
nevertheless meant further delays in the acquisition of the proposed heavy bomber
flotilla. When Germany commenced hostilities in September 1939, Britain had only 33
operational squadrons rather than the ninety called for in 1937, and half of these
contained obsolescent aircraft. Bomber Command and the British government accordingly
avoided any offensive attacks against Nazi Germany as long as possible because of the
expected massive retaliation by Germany against British cities. These sentiments were
strongly shared by the appeasement-oriented French government, as that country was even
more traumatized by the prospect of a second major war with Germany in a generation and
also shared a common border with that expansionist power. Seven months were to elapse
before Bomber Command attacked its first German land target and that initial assault was
hardly more than a mere gesture.
Nevertheless, the British were favored in a contest with Germany for the Third Reich was
even less prepared than London to wage successful offensive strategic aerial warfare. The
Luftwaffe had the largest bomber force in Continental Europe. But as contrasted with the
British, the German Air Force was designed for a different primary function. It was to
serve as a tactical air arm to the advancing German Army (the Wermacht). They had not
prepared for the mission of mass attacks against enemy cities or industrial targets.
Accordingly, neither the British nor the Germans were capable of hurling a very effective
aerial blow at each other during the first year of World War II. The swift defeat of the
French armed forces by the Wermacht and the Luftwaffe in May-June 1940 gave the Germans a
significant opportunity to try to defeat the RAF. The acquisition of Belgian and French
bases made possible the provision of fighter cover for the German Air Forces' medium and
light bombers over southeast Britain. But the chance to inflict a knockout blow on the
British Air Force was fumbled. RAF Fighter Command managed to deny control of British
airspace to the Luftwaffe in the daytime.
Furthermore, the night bombing "blitz" against British cities proved relatively
ineffectual. The night attacks against British urban and industrial centers in southeast
England caused a great deal of damage but they failed to inhibit British production or
assault British morale in any significant way. Many contemporary observers asserted that
the leading effect of the German aerial campaign was to stiffen British resistance and the
desire to retaliate against the Nazis. In mid-1941 the German air blitz was halted as the
entire German war machine was relocated to the east in preparation for the assault on the
Soviet Union. It was never to be aimed back at Britain in any truly threatening way for
the duration of the war (notwithstanding the German V-weapon campaign of l944).
At the same time, the British government had been searching for an appropriate strategic
bombing policy of their own. During the course of the futile Battle of France, they had
undertaken a few small attacks on strategic German targets such as oil refineries and
railroad marshaling yards. In August of l940 they had hit Berlin with a highly visible
pinprick raid. This was in retaliation for German attacks, probably unintentionally, on
the city of London. It was decided very early on in the campaign, owing to heavy RAF
losses in daylight attacks, that Bomber Command could not sustain the magnitude of losses
inflicted upon it during daylight assaults on German targets. Henceforth, all missions
flown against Nazi German industries and military targets by the RAF would be under the
cover of darkness. The RAF had reached the same conclusions as the Luftwaffe in response
to losses over Britain during daylight attacks.
In the final analysis, this new policy brought about an even more fundamental shift in the
entire campaign against Germany by air. Until then, Bomber Command had relied on pinpoint
precision bombing against targets which were of central importance to the German war
effort. "Indiscriminate" or "terror" bombing on wide areas containing
civilian populations was widely condemned as barbaric, among the public and policy makers
alike. After the German blitz of 1940-1941, it was also seen as futile as well as immoral.
Britain was as determined as ever to meet the Nazi menace after the Luftwaffe attacks. As
a British staff paper observed, "Our own experience indicates the local and transient
effects of concentrated attacks on centers of population." (3) Accordingly, Bomber
Command was given the pre-eminent overriding objective of the destruction of Germany's
synthetic oil refineries. Regrettably, however, the primitive state of the art of aerial
navigation doomed precision bombing at night to virtual failure. This was especially true
of Germany which possessed some of the world's worst weather conditions on a frequent
basis. Unless this condition could be rectified forthwith, the shift to nighttime
bombardment would eventually force the discarding of attempted precision bombing in favor
of a search for larger (easier) targets.
Senior government members (including Prime Minister Churchill) had previously expressed
doubts about precision bombing from the inception of the war with Germany. They were
partially motivated by skepticism over their (or anyone's) ability to locate and destroy
small, scattered targets. They also possessed doubts about the alleged frailty of German
morale. They believed (correctly as it turned out) that German citizens loyal to their
government would probably express the same defiance under fire as did English citizens in
the recent blitz. Nevertheless, there was still widespread sentiment among analysts and
British public opinion that the opposite was true.
The Ministry of Information declared at the end of the blitz, "All the evidence goes
to prove that the Germans for all their present confidence and cockiness will not stand a
quarter of the bombing that the British have shown they can take." (4) This
controversy lasted the entire duration of World War II and is still argued to this day.
Regardless of this, there was certainly a bitter disposition among Britishers to want to
inflict back on the Nazis what they had inflicted on British citizens in London, Coventry,
and Southhampton, among other locales. One member of Parliament declared "...I do not
believe you will ever bring home to the civil population of Germany the horrors of war
until they have become tasted in this way." (5)
Accordingly, by the mid-point of 1941 the British Chiefs of Staff discarded oil in favor
of morale as Germany's principal weakness. Bomber Command was ordered to lash out at towns
and cities instead of individual economic targets. To this end, aircraft production was
hastened by giving new long-range four-engine bombers first priority in the production
schedule. The general move to embrace a posture of "area bombing" (the new
designation for what had been referred to as "indiscriminate bombing") was
reinforced by a recently concluded study of photographs which persuasively showed that
only approximately 20 percent of attacking British bombers had been getting within a
radius of five miles of their supposed targets. (6) With such unambiguous evidence as
this, there was scant hope that the proponents of precision bombing would ever regain the
ascendancy, though they kept on trying, seeing the process as one of long-term evolution,
with better results possible later on down the line.
It was not merely precision bombing, unfortunately, that was suffering from caustic
criticism as the year 1941 came to an end. Nothing less than the entire strategic air
offensive against Germany was in peril. Denunciations emanated from assorted sectors. Some
individuals emphasized the fact that eighteen months of pounding the Third Reich had had
little effect on German production and German morale. Others said outright that the whole
undertaking was futile, wasteful, and/or immoral. Other quarters asserted that the U-boat
menace on the high seas was by far the greater threat and that resources should be shifted
from the failed bombing campaign over Germany to the decimation of the only real vessels
on sea or in the air that had the real potential of strangulating Great Britain. Other
observers contended that with both the Soviet Union and the United States in the war as
1942 opened, new and heretofore unmentioned approaches to defeating the Nazis ought to be
entertained and discussed. Within the British government itself, disquietudes about
strategic bombing which had been ventilated within its ranks for a long time now came out
into the open in a much more public debate on the topic.
The matter was poignantly joined in the War Cabinet's Defense Committee in April 1942 when
Churchill's scientific advisor Lord Cherwell expounded a powerful memorandum calling for
the escalation of current aerial area bombardment. Cherwell asserted that a vastly
increased effort in this regard would transform one-third of the current population of
Nazi Germany into homeless refugees within fifteen months. This "de-housing"
undertaking, aimed at the fifty-eight largest German centers of population, would, as
Cherwell perceived it, "break the spirit of the people." He believed that the
annihilation of that many homes would be the most difficult burden for the population to
bear. The British science advisor's course of action was predicated on giving new bomber
production top priority in British industry and having ten thousand new bombers during the
upcoming fifteen months. (7)
Cherwell's opponents in the Defense Committee lashed out acerbically at the reliability of
his demonstrated thinking. Sir Henry Tizard saw the figures presented by Cherwell as five
times too optimistic, and contended that the area bombing scheme could not work unless it
was on a scale vastly beyond the industrial capacity of Great Britain. Tizard argued for
the curtailment of strategic bombing and favored stepped-up attacks on U-boat facilities
and the factories that produced these vessels in their home ports, a sort of maritime
strategic bombing campaign. Post World War II studies would show that Tizard's arguments
held far more substance than those of Cherwell. However, Prime Minister Churchill favored
his science advisor's concept, albeit in a somewhat modified form. Needless to say, the
brand new head of Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris, strongly favored Cherwell's course of
action and labeled precision bombing advocates as "panacea-mongers." During the
calendar year 1942 Harris contended that Cherwell's course was doable. In May and June of
that year, he carried out three spectacular thousand bomber raids on Cologne, Essen, and
Bremen. These Herculean undertakings laid to rest the doubts of many critics even though
it was argued by skeptics that the effects of the raids were themselves debatable.
Additionally, a variety of new navigational aids were coming into being at this time that
would enhance the "precision" aspects of Allied bombing. A navigational system
called "Gee," utilizing three radar pulse transmitters, went into use early in
1942 but within six months the Germans had learned to jam it successfully. A blind-bombing
device code-named "Oboe" was soon added; radar transmitting stations dispatched
the attacking bomber along a beam, and kept track of its location by means of a device
that measured its ground speed. Upon reaching the invisible target, the ground station
notified the crew by a special signal, so that in effect the bombs were dropped by a
ground crewman back in England. With the debut of "Oboe" the so- called age of
visual bombing virtually came to an end. Although "Oboe" was used till the end
of the war, it was vulnerable to German jamming, and it could be employed for only a small
number of aircraft. For large raids against entire cities, a new blind bombing device was
shortly added to the British arsenal of electronic aids. The so-called H2S system, an
airborne radar set with a downward pointing transmitter, permitted the navigators and
bombardiers to "see" through the clouds and darkness underneath them. The key
element in the H2S was the cavity magnetron, a small and simple device invented in 1940 by
a pair of physicists at Birmingham University. The magnetron, it has been contended,
"probably had a more decisive effect on the war than any other single new
weapon." It generated a formidable high-frequency beam which made possible microwave
radar, a vastly improved type of which replaced the older longer-wave radar in fighter
planes and ships as well as in bombers. H2S permitted Bomber Command to find certain types
of targets at night with astounding accuracy. Employed for the first instance over Hamburg
in January 1943, the RAF staggered that city with a 12forceful blow. It was soon
successfully used in the antisubmarine campaign as well as on land. One new tactical
device was adopted in 1943: the assembly of the Pathfinder Force, a specialized group of
pilots and navigators assigned to delineate targets for the masses of bombers that would
follow behind them. (8)
The brand new Avro Lancaster long-range heavy bomber, designed as far back as 1936,
entered the RAF in the year 1942. The aircraft greatly exceeded the speed, range, and bomb
payload capacity of the two predecessor four-engine bombers of the RAF, the Halifax and
the Sterling. The United States, for its part, had encountered unexpected production
hurdles for her democratic ally in Europe. The desperate new needs of the hard-pressed
Soviet Air Force and the domestic need of a substantial U.S. buildup of its own air force
took away (for a time) many of the new planes originally earmarked for Britain. Although
the nascent United States Eighth Air Force in Britain carried out a few raids on Nazi
targets in France from August 1942 onward, these were mainly pinprick attacks and it was
not until 1943 that the United States Army Air Forces threw their full weight into the
offensive. And it was playing a whole new game with regard to the kind of air war that it
was going to fight. American strategists and generals had watched the European air war for
well over two years now. With characteristic American optimism, U.S. leaders firmly
believed that Nazi production could be successfully interdicted from the air in daylight
precision pinpoint bombing attacks. It eventually became irrevocably tied to this concept.
(9) To deal with the inevitable Luftwaffe attacks on its formations by day, the Eighth Air
Force would employ the Boeing B-17 "Flying Fortress" aircraft bomber where eight
crewmen out of ten in each aircraft would man defensive machine guns to ward off the
inevitably fierce Luftwaffe attacks. This necessarily entailed earmarking a large number
of the B-17 crew members for purely defensive purposes. This arrangement also meant a
reduced bomb payload for hitting the enemy so that the gunners and their defensive weapons
could be accommodated. This limited the bomb load of a B-17 to 6000 to 8000 pounds per
aircraft, as contrasted with the Lancaster's capacity for hauling 12,000 pounds of bombs
per plane. The American Captains of the Air saw Britain's aerial bombardment of whole
urban areas as a destructive waste of finite resources, impelled more by a lust for
vengeance than by any levelheaded plan of action for destroying Nazi power (Of course it
should be recalled that American cities on the U.S. east coast had not been devastated by
the Luftwaffe in a German blitz as had their English counterparts; this doubtless accounts
in some measure for the pronounced antiseptic detachment of American strategists and
leaders). Anyway, throughout the year 1943 the two Western air armadas alternated over
Germany by day and by night, seeming to be rivals rather than a coordinated unit in a
combined offensive air war.
The effect of the RAF's nighttime bombing was clearly the more spectacular in its
appearance as contrasted with its plodding American counterpart. One of the central
climaxes of its aerial activities was the firebombing of Hamburg in July and August of
1943. One week of fire raids destroyed a large portion of the city, exiled over a million
of its inhabitants to refuge outside the city limits, and killed over 40,000 people or
two- thirds as many people as died in the Nazi blitz against British cities during the
entire war. Later in the year, a series of similar RAF night attacks on Berlin had a
comparable impact (although the total carnage and dead was somewhat less than that of
Hamburg). Yet despite these annihilations German morale did not collapse and Nazi weapons
production kept increasing. The expectations of the proponents of area bombing were very
much a mistake. This stemmed from an earlier erroneous appraisal of German morale as
easily breakable. The structure of the German economy was seen to be verging on collapse;
in fact it contained a major degree of slack and like the German population, it was able
to take the terrible pounding of the British with remarkable resiliency.
If the heavy RAF attacks on German urban centers occasioned much frustration for the
British, the American daylight attacks threatened total disaster for the U.S. Eighth Air
Force. As mentioned, the heavily-armed B-17 Flying Fortresses also flew in very close
formations to one another and supplied protection from the Luftwaffe via massed defensive
firepower. But their attrition became frightful and losses continued to rise dangerously.
This tendency reached a climax in mid- and late 1943 at the time of the massive American
attack on the ball bearing plants at Schweinfurt. In the course of six days during that
year the U.S. lost 148 Boeing B-17s -- a veritable massacre and a loss too great for the
Americans to bear, by any reasonable calculation. Daylight bombing had to be suspended for
several months thereafter. To the British proponents of nighttime area bombardment, the
slaughter of the American Flying Fortresses was conclusive evidence that they had followed
the proper course of action; they urged that the remaining U.S. air power (plus the
cornucopia of newly produced aircraft from America's safe factories) be subsumed under RAF
guidance for missions at night.
But the U.S. air armada in England was neither equipped nor trained for such a
transformation. Notwithstanding their recent calamities, the Americans defiantly believed
that their English brothers were still on the wrong track. Senior American officials in
London and Washington looked for a way out of their tribulations. What was needed was a
superior U.S. fighter aircraft of sufficient long range to escort the B-17s and other
bombers to their targets and eventually sweep the skies of German interceptors. The
solution was found in January 1944 in the form of the North American P-51D Mustang
aircraft. When the United States resumed day bombardment raids in February 1944, the
momentum swung sharply away from the Germans. American losses (from both fighters and
flak) fell to bearable levels and the German fighters were gradually driven from the
skies. By May of 1944 the U.S. bombing force was concentrating again on Germany's oil
reserves, this time with overwhelming effectiveness. The British soon thereafter
coordinated some of their nighttime attacks with the Eighth Air Force's big push by day.
Together they produced a German gasoline shortfall that virtually grounded the Luftwaffe
in the last full year of the war (and made possible the D-Day Normandy landing
unmolested). This opened the most devastating phase of the air war: the round-the-clock
combination of both precision and area bombardment by both of the two great allied air
forces that terminated only with the final German surrender on May 8, 1945.
Yet no subject matter from World War II has remained as mired in controversy as the degree
to which Allied strategic bombing contributed to the ultimate Allied victory in that
global conflagration. After World War II, Sir Henry Tizard openly repudiated strategic
bombing as a complete failure that injured Great Britain more than it did Nazi Germany. In
the opinion of Tizard, Great Britain's overall investment of manpower and resources in the
aerial assault surpassed the amount of damage inflicted on the enemy. Even more than that,
contended Tizard, this needlessly expended materiel and manpower might have been utilized
in more productive endeavors such as fighting the all-important U-boat menace to Great
Britain or in the more rapid and prolific Allied manufacture of landing craft, so vital to
the outcome of the conflict in both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. In addition to
Tizard, other postwar studies show that German production continued to defy the Allied
aerial onslaught by continuing its output. Efforts to destroy entire sectors of the German
economy like ball-bearing production were complete failures. In 1943, bombing curtailed
Germany's industrial output by only about 9 percent. In 1944 the comparable statistic was
17 percent. And less than half of this reduction was in armaments alone. (10)
Nevertheless, the Allied bombing initiative cannot be dismissed quite so easily. The
British-American attacks on Nazi oil facilities helped clear the skies of German aircraft
both during and after the Normandy landings, as mentioned earlier. This move guaranteed
the success of the Herculean cross-Channel undertaking. The attacks by both parties on
rocket assembly and launching bases drastically curtailed the success of the V- weapons
campaign in 1944. Additionally, the Anglo-American air flotillas achieved a long series of
INDIRECT effects that would be hard to measure but that are no less significant for being
that. From the onset of the campaign in earnest (mid-1942 onward) a large portion of
Germany's manpower and resources had to be earmarked to the endless tasks of
reconstruction of wrecked factories and public utilities. As many as a million and a half
workers were employed in these grim undertakings in mid-1944, and many of these persons
were skilled workers urgently needed elsewhere. Also, by 1943 between 60 and 70 percent of
the Luftwaffe was facing westward to meet the aerial onslaught from England (and later
Italy). These forces consisted of fighter interceptors whose construction by German
factories came at the expense of ground-support attack aircraft so urgently needed on the
all-important Russian front. The statistics from the war bear these developments out.
Production of fighter aircraft (namely ME-109s and FW-190s) increased fivefold from 1942
to 1944, while bomber production was cut in half. This made any resumption of the
1940-1941 aerial blitz out of the question (the V-weapons campaign proceeded in 1944, but
at a much-reduced level of intensity and destruction). And as mentioned earlier, the great
D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944 was able to take place almost completely unmolested from
the air. Also, in 1942 to 1945, over 1.5 million artillery gunners were manning 10,000
German antiaircraft (flak) guns which took a very heavy toll on RAF and U.S. heavy
bombers. These vital weapons and their crews were diverted from use against the Soviet
forces on the Russian front. In a very concrete manner, then, Allied strategic bombing
interfered with the German war effort in a more than tangential ways. What it failed to
do, though, was destroy German morale, that is, to destroy the German people's will to
work under adversity and endure Allied punishment. As Albert Speer, the Nazi armaments
minister declared (after the war), "The powers of resistance of the German people
were underestimated and no account was taken of the fatalistic frame of mind which a civil
population acquires after numerous air raids." (11) Even after the Germans lost
control of their airspace by mid-1944, there were still few signs of a serious
deterioration of German morale.
The strategic bombing offensive, after all is said and done, then, made a major
contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany. The Allied aerial onslaught might have been
even more effective if its engineers had not placed such stubborn faith in the fraility of
German morale. According to Speer, again, it was the American pinpoint precision bombing
that had the greatest effect. "The American attacks," he wrote, "which
followed a definite system of assaults on industrial targets, were by far the most
dangerous. It was in fact these attacks which caused the breakdown of the German armaments
industry." (12)
ENDNOTES
1.J.R.M. Butler Grand Strategy (London, 1964), Volume III, p. 523. 2.C. Webster and N.
Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany 1939-1945 (London, 1961), Volume I,
p. 144. 3.Gordon Wright The Ordeal of Total War (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p.
176. 4.Webster and Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, Volume I, p. 169. 5.Webster and
Frankland, Volume III, p. 115. 6.Wright, Ordeal of Total War, p. 177. 7.Butler, Grand
Strategy, Volume III, p. 526. 8.Wright, Ordeal of Total War, p. 178. 9.Wright., p. 179.
10.Wright, p. 181. 11.Webster and Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, Volume IV, p. 383.
12.Webster and Frankland, p. 383.
Dedicated to the Memory of Walter Stoneman
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