War and Propaganda
Secret History: When Germany Defeated the US and UK
Abstract
Can we Trust Our Leaders? Shameful History
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.George Santayana
Original articles lightly edited. Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 26 September 2006, Friday, 2 October 2009
Britain And America Defeated
Every Englishman knows how the Royal Air Force defeated the German Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain in 1940. Few recognize that the RAF and the Eighth US Air Force were themselves defeated by the Germans. These air forces practised the doctrines preached in the 1920s by Lord Trenchard. Trenchard had been Chief of Air Staff from the RAF’s inception in 1918 until the end of the 1920s, and his influence on the infant air force’s thinking had sunk in deeply. It nearly prevented Britain from having a fighter command at all to win the Battle of Britain. It prevented the victor of that battle, Air Marshal Dowding, from enjoying the honors and rewards showered on other leaders of the RAF at the end of the war. And it has persisted in the RAF’s thinking even since.
Trenchard’s doctrines reached their apogee in the person of Air Marshal “Bomber” Harris, head of Bomber Command and of the strategic air offensive against Germany for most of the war. Harris was thoroughly opposed to any concentration against specific targets. He dismissed those who wanted to concentrate on ball-bearing factories, on synthetic oil plants, railways or submarine bases, as “panacea-mongers”. For him there was only one road to the defeat of Germany, the destruction of Germany’s cities and the killing of so many civilians that the morale of the survivors collapsed. On 7 December, 1943, he wrote:
The Lancasters alone can, by 1 April, 1944, produce in Germany a state of devastation in which surrender is inevitable.
Losses, he estimated, would run at about 5 per cent of the total Lancaster four-engined bomber force. Harris added in November 1944:
We can wreck Berlin end to end if the United States Army Air Forces will come in. It will cost between 400 and 500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war.
On both a counts he was proved wrong. The main thesis he operated on was the “pointblank” directive of 10 June, 1943, which was intended to bring about the destruction of the German air force as a preliminary to the invasion of Europe. Under Harris’s influence, however, the final draft called for the destruction and defeat of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of morale to a point where the capacity for military resistance was fatally weakened. These terms were general enough for Harris to continue the night offensives begun in force in March 1943 over the Ruhr whose targets included Essen, Dortmund and Cologne.
Within two months Harris seemed to have come close to victory. The culmination was the assault on Hamburg. In four attacks between 24 July and 2 August 1943, 60,000 died and the city was destroyed beyond recognition. The cost was 89 aircraft lost and 160 damaged out of 3000 individual aircraft visits to the city. Three months more on this scale, said Albert Speer, and things will inevitably slide downhill. And Erhard Milch, the organizing genius behind the Luftwaffe, in a sudden and uncharacteristic break of morale, confessed:
We have lost the war. Five or six more such attacks and the German people will lay down their arms.
These attacks were simply not forthcoming. Other targets were more difficult to reach and much more difficult to recognize. At the end of August the RAF made three big raids on Berlin. More than 1700 aircraft took part in three attacks. The losses ran at 14 per cent, with 123 lost and 114 damaged. As the targets receded into central and eastern Germany so German air defenses became much more effective. Between 1 July and 1 October, 1943, German fighter strength increased from 1200 to 1500.
On 14 October, 1943, the Eighth US Air Force suffered a major disaster in a daylight attack on the ball bearing factories at Schweinfurt. Of just under 300 bombers, 60 were lost, 17 irreparably damaged, and 121 damaged. In six days, 148 bombers were lost attempting to break through Germany’s air defenses beyond the range of Allied fighter escort. No attacks could continue at that rate of loss. The USAAF retreated to bomb targets within range of fighter escort.
The RAF’s principal weapon was the four-engined Lancaster bomber, backed by smaller forces of Stirlings, Wellingtons and Manchesters. The initial attacks on the cities were made by Pathfinder squadrons guided by a system of radio beams operated by ground controllers, known as “Oboe”, and identifying their targets by airborne radar, code named “H2S”, which showed a city’s outline on a screen. Having found the target, Pathfinders dropped flares and incendiaries to mark the target area. Against them the Germans operated at first a system of night fighter “boxes”, each with early warning radar, airborne radar and ground controllers working on radio telephone hook-ups. But ground controllers could easily be deceived and German radar with its half-meter waveband was easily jammable.
To counter this the Germans introduced different tactics. Parachute flares and star shells were used to light up the sky over the bombers’ targets and make visual attack easier. The next step was to feed German night fighters into the main bomber stream as it crossed the coast. Ground control gave continuous commentaries on the bomber stream, and once contact was made the night fighters attacked individually, using airborne radar. Soon the night fighters had infra-red detectors and receivers to home on the Pathfinder H2S transmitters. Jammers were brought in against Oboe and H2S. And night fighter intruder groups followed the returning bombers over their home airfields.
The British fought back by jamming the running commentaries, or breaking into the German radio telephone frequencies to give misleading instructions to German pilots. But once the main bomber stream was located and the bombers caught by the German night fighters they had little chance. They were unarmored, slow, had only small calibre machine guns, belched flame from their exhausts, and beaconed their presence by their radar transmissions. Only deception, concentration over the target area, or simply luck could save them. Outnumbered, out gunned, out paced, as the losses mounted, morale sank so low that Air Vice-Marshal Bennet could write of air crews “baulking at the jump”.
Enormous quantities of bombs were ditched in the North Sea and the number actually dropped on the markers was negligible. The casualty rate was more than the daily average strength of Bomber Command during the period. The expectation of life of the average crew was fourteen sorties in a “tour” of thirty.
Harris’s offensive on Berlin began on 18 November, 1944. Between November and March, 9,111 sorties were made against Berlin and 11,000 against other targets. Month by month the losses steadily climbed. Only nine bombers were lost in that first attack on Berlin out of 444 aircraft, though 23 were lost in a disastrous attack that same night on Mannheim. In December, losses were running at 4.8 per cent, though 40 bombers, 8.7 per cent of the total force, were lost in the first attack of that month. In January 1944, losses against Berlin rose to 6.1 per cent, against other targets’ 7.2 per cent. The following month in attacks against Leipzig and Berlin, losses stood at 9.5 per cent and 4.8 per cent respectively—120 aircraft out of nearly 1700. The worst disaster struck on 30 March 1944, when 795 aircraft attacked Nuremberg. Of the total force, 94 were lost and 71 damaged.
On 7 April, Harris admitted defeat. The strength of the German air defenses, he wrote, would in time reach the point where night bombing attacks would involve casualty rates which could not in the long run be sustained. Tactical innovations were finally exhausted.
The defeat was worse than he knew. Despite the bombing offensive, Berlin’s arms production rose steadily throughout the period, as did the strength of the German night fighter force. Berlin was not wrecked end to end, nor did the attack cost Germany the war. Actual British losses were below Harris’s estimate, though the rate of loss was rising steadily above it. Mass attacks were brought for the time being to a dead halt. The RAF was diverted to bombing targets more directly related to Roundup, the coming invasion of Europe. A revived Eighth US Air Force, already reinforced in number and provided with P51 long-range Mustang fighter escorts, took up the bombing of selective targets, the “panacea policy” Harris had always rejected. On 24 February, 1944, 266 US and 734 RAF bombers attacked Schweinfurt and avenged the defeat of the previous year.
Yet all the time Harris had a faster, more accurate weapon to his hand in the Mosquito, which could outpace the German fighters, carry a surprisingly heavy bomb load and whose losses were running at 0.4 per cent. But the Mosquito project never fitted the Air Ministry’s shibboleths. Like Fighter Command, its success came despite rather than because of the RAF Establishment, whose obsession with a doctrine they lacked the technology to implement destroyed so much yet failed to achieve its objective.
in The Observer supplement, May 1972.
