Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

When these victorious armies broke into Germany, late in 1944, the Nazis were still holding the survivors of 8,000,000 enslaved civilian workers, 10,000,000 Jews, 5,750,000 Russian prisoners of war, and millions of prisoners from other armies. Over half of the Jews and Russians and several millions of the others, possibly 12,000,000 in all, were killed by murder, overwork, or deliberate neglect before final victory in the spring of 1945. The work of these enslaved and exploited millions allowed the great majority of Germans to escape the economic stringencies of the war. While the standards of living of the British were pushed downward by rationing and shortages to levels where energy and work were hampered, and at a time when German-occupied countries were frequently forced below the subsistence level, German standards of living were, on the average, higher than they had been since 1928, and the mobilization of Germans for work or war service was less stringent than in any other major combatant country. This was especially true of women and nonessential workers. By mid-1943, for example, the number of persons in domestic service in Germany was only about 8 percent less than four years earlier, while in Britain over the same four years the reduction was 67 percent. Over the same period the number of workers in heavy industry increased 68.5 percent in Britain, but only 18.8 percent in Germany. In August 1944, Albert Speer, minister of armaments and war production and one of the few rational figures in high position in Germany, estimated that there were still 7.7 million unproductive employees in Germany, including 1.4 million in domestic service. The number of women mobilized for war production in the first four years of the conflict was 2.25 million in Britain compared to 182,000 in Germany.

This relative ease of the Germans in the midst of history’s most destructive war was possible because of the convergence of a number of factors of which the most significant were the slowness of industrial mobilization, the ruthless looting of occupied areas, and the working to death of millions of enslaved peoples. As one consequence of this situation, recognition that the war was lost came to the Germans, as it came to Hitler, relatively late and with surprising suddenness, but the leaders of the armed forces recognized their hopeless position a year, or even two years, before the end. Fear of Hitler’s terror prevented them from taking any steps to end the war or even from mentioning it to Hitler, from fear of his rage; and their efforts to kill Hitler, though persistent, were pathetically incompetent.

Thus Hitler’s fanatical devotion to destruction made surrender impossible and drove the war on to its bitter end. This bitterness was carried to the majority of Germans by the Combined Bomber Offensive, approved by the Combined Chiefs of Staff on June 10, 1943. Before this offensive the bombardment of Germany from the air was of little significance. In the whole war almost 1.5 million tons of bombs were dropped on Germany, but only 15,000 of this fell in 1940, and about 46,000 in 1941. The 1942 figure, even with the help of the United States Eighth Air Force, was only 7,000 tons higher than that for 1941. Thus 95 percent of the total bombs dropped on Germany in the war fell after January 1943.

The Combined Bomber Offensive was an effort to carry out the largely erroneous ideas of an Italian general, Giulio Douhet, whose most significant achievement was a book, The Command of the Air: An Essay on the Art of Aerial Warfare , published in Italian in 1921. In this and other works, Douhet made a series of claims and assumptions which were almost totally wrong and had a pernicious influence on subsequent history. These included the following: (1) that the defensive supremacy prevailing in land warfare in 1916 would continue, and, accordingly, no decision could be reached by ground combat; (2) that air forces, on the contrary, had an offensive supremacy against which no defense was possible; (3) that decision in war, accordingly, could be reached by air forces alone and could be reached, on that basis, within the first twenty-four hours of a future war; (4) that all air power must be devoted to such strategic purposes (immediate total defeat of the enemy) and must not allow themselves to become involved, on a tactical basis, with ground or naval forces; (5) that aerial victory would be achieved by the immediate and total collapse of civilian morale under minimal bombardment; (6) accordingly, that attack by air must be directed at civilians in enemy cities, with poison gas as the chief weapon supplemented by incendiary bombs but with high-explosive bombs unnecessary beyond a minimum and token amount of about twenty tons. (Any city, he felt, would be destroyed totally by 500 tons of bombs, mostly gas.)

To this nonsense Douhet added a number of subsidiary ideas, including the following: (1) war must begin with a preemptive (first) strike from the air on enemy cities without any formal declaration of war; (2) since antiaircraft guns are totally ineffective and fighter planes are almost equally futile, bombers do not need high speed and will never need escort by fighter planes; and (3) since whole cities will collapse immediately, there is no problem of target selection, no need for economic warfare or economic mobilization, and little need for concern for replacements or reserves of planes or other equipment.

On their face these ideas seem so unconvincing that it is almost inconceivable that they played a major role in twentieth-century history, but they did play such a role, and made a substantial contribution toward forming the new age in which we live. These ideas were almost wholly ignored in the Soviet Union and were largely rejected in Germany; they created great controversy in France; and were accepted to a large extent among airmen in Britain and the United States. Wherever they were accepted they led airmen to struggle to escape from tactical operations by getting free from the other services (land or sea) by the creation of a third service, the independent air force.

Acceptance of Douhetism by civilian leaders in France and England was one of the chief factors in appeasement and especially in the Munich surrender of September 1938. Baldwin reflected these ideas in November 1932, when he said: “I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.… When the next war comes, and European civilization is wiped out, as it will be, and by no force more than that force, then do not let them lay blame on the old men.” In September 1938, the Chamberlain government reflected these ideas and prepared the way to Munich by issuing 35 million gas masks to city dwellers.

And as a consequence of Douhetism among British and American airmen, the strategic bombing of Germany was mishandled from the beginning until almost the end of the war. Correctly, such strategic bombing should have been based on careful analysis of the German war economy to pick out the one or two critical items which were essential to the war effort. These items were probably ball bearings, aviation fuels, and chemicals, all of them essential and all of them concentrated. After the war German General Gotthard Heinrici said that the war would have ended a year earlier if Allied bombing had been concentrated on ammonia plants. Whether this is correct or not, the fact remains that strategic bombing was largely a failure, and was so from poor choice of targets and from long intervals between repeated attacks. Relentless daily bombardment, with heavy fighter escort, day after day, in spite of losses, with absolute refusal to be distracted to area or city bombing because of losses or shifting ideas might have made a weighty contribution to the defeat of Germany and shortened the war substantially. As it was, the contribution by strategic bombing to the defeat of Germany was relatively incidental, in spite of the terrible losses suffered in the effort.