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

The shift to city bombing was more or less accidental. In spite of the erroneous ideas of Chamberlain, Baldwin, Churchill, and the rest, the war opened and continued for months with no city bombing at all, for the simple reason that the Germans had no intentions, no plans, and no equipment for strategic bombing. The British, who had the intentions but still lacked the plans and equipment, also held back. After the fall of France, where almost all German bombardment was tactical or psychological with the major exception of the attack on Rotterdam, the Battle of Britain was fought and lost by tactical bombing on shipping and occasional airdromes or airplane factories.

The attack on cities began by accident when a group of German planes which were lost dumped their bomb loads, contrary to orders, on London on August 24, 1940. The RAF retaliated by bombing Berlin the next night. On September 2, 1940, as counterretaliation, Goring announced the beginning of city bombardment for September 7th, but the policy had already begun with a series of attacks on Liverpool after August 28th. The British efforts to counterattack by daylight raids on military objectives in Germany resulted in such losses that the air offensive was shifted to night attacks. This entailed also a shift from industrial targets to indiscriminate bombing of urban areas. This was justified with the wholly mistaken argument that civilian morale was a German weak point and that the destruction of workers’ housing would break this morale. The evidence shows that the German war effort was not weakened in any way by lowering of civilian morale, in spite of the horrors heaped upon it. In 1942 an effort was made to begin “thousand-bomber” raids against a single target in one night, and three of these were carried out, the first at Cologne on May 30th. This was a terrible shock to the Germans, but had little impact on their ability to wage war. Since the British Bomber Command had about 450 first-line bombers, a raid as large as that on Cologne required use of all reserves and training planes, with instructors flying about a quarter of the planes. Of 1,046 planes sent off, 898 reached the target and dropped 1,455 tons of bombs, with 40 planes lost in action and 12 more damaged beyond repair. In the city 474 persons were killed, 565 hospitalized, over 5,000 injured, 45,000 made homeless, and hundreds of factories destroyed, yet the life of the city was back to normal in two weeks, with war production in the city back to normal in about six weeks. The next thousand-plane raid (really 956), on Essen two days after the attack on Cologne, was so ineffective, partly from cloudy weather, that the German air defense did not even report an attack on Essen that night, while reporting attacks on three other Ruhr cities.

Improvements in finding their targets, heavier attacks, and the arrival of the American Eighth Air Force (which inaugurated “round-the-clock bombing” in 1943) increased the damage from strategic bombing of Germany, without reducing the scale of the German war effort. This failure resulted from a number of factors which should be understood. The chief one was that the Western governments had, from 1933 on, entirely misconceived the nature and amount of German munitions production. It was overestimated by a wide margin (twofold or threefold) in 1933-1943, and was underestimated by an equal margin in 1943-1945. The British assumed that there was full industrial mobilization for war in Germany as early as 1938; but this was never achieved and was not even attempted until December 1943.

Consequently, Germany, until the winter of 1944-1945, had a cushion of unmobilized resources which allowed an astonishingly rapid repair of bomb damage and an even more astonishing increase in production of war goods as late as January 1945.

Failure by the Western Powers to analyze the German war economy led to changeable and misguided efforts to attack it. When successful attacks were made on vital objects, such as ball-bearing or chemical plants, they were not followed up, thus giving the Germans time to repair or even to disperse these facilities. Much effort was expended on bombing almost wholly unrewarding targets, such as airfields, submarine pens, ports, railroad yards, tank factories, and others. For a variety of reasons, these targets could not be damaged sufficiently to make substitution or repair impossible. The original decision for the Combined Bomber Offensive in January 1943 gave highest target priority to submarine construction yards. A fraction of the planes and crews used in this unremunerative task could have contributed greatly to defeat the submarine if they had been used in night searches for the submarines themselves on the Atlantic.

As early as June 10, 1943, the Combined Bomber Offensive top priority was shifted from submarine yards to German fighter-plane production, but here the error was made of concentrating on body and assembly plants (of which there were many) instead of on engine factories, which were few and more vulnerable. By April 1944, with production of German fighter planes increasing rapidly, this effort had failed, and the Bomber Offensive at last turned, in May 1944, toward a vulnerable target: airplane-fuel production. To this was added, in October 1944, an attack on the general rail and canal transport system. The fuel attack incidentally disrupted the chemical industry, and this combination, along with transportation, brought the German economic base for war to its knees in February 1945. The delay was partly caused by the lack of determination in concentrating on the targets selected and the constant attraction of the mirage of city bombing. Even after May 1944, when the chief target was fuel factories, only 16 percent of the bombs dropped were aimed at these, and 27 percent were still being thrown away on bombing civilian residences in cities. The importance of choosing the correct target in strategic bombing may be seen from one incidental, and probably accidental, success. The Germans had only one factory producing the Maybach heavy HL engine used in their Tiger and Panther tanks. This was destroyed by an aerial bomb in 1944. This immobilized hundreds of these heavy tanks on the Russian front and contributed substantially to a successful Russian breakthrough.

The British effort to break German civilian morale by area night bombing was an almost complete failure. In fact, one of the inspiring and amazing events of the war was the unflinching spirit under unbearable attack shown by ordinary working people in industrial cities. This was as true in Russia (in Moscow and above all in Leningrad) as it was in Germany or Britain (above all in the dock areas of East London). Attacks on these peoples had a greater influence on the morale of their soldiers fighting on the front than it did on the suffering peoples themselves.

The most extraordinary example of this suffering occurred in the British fire raids on Hamburg in 1943. For more than a week, beginning on July 24th, Hamburg was attacked with a mixture of high-explosive and incendiary bombs so heavily and persistently that entirely new conditions of destruction known as “fire storms” appeared. The air in the city, heated to over a thousand degrees, began to rise rapidly, with the result that ground-level winds of gale or even hurricane force rushed into the city. These winds were so strong as to knock people off their feet or to move flaming beams and walls through the air. The heat was so intense that normally nonflammable substances burned, and fires were ignited yards from any flame. The water supply was destroyed on July 27th, but the flames were too hot for water to be effective: it turned to steam before it could reach naming objects, and all ordinary methods of quenching flames by depriving them of oxygen were made impossible by the storm of fresh air roaring in from the suburbs. Nevertheless, the supply of oxygen could not keep up with the combustion, and great layers of carbon monoxide settled in the shelters and basements, killing the people huddled there. Those who tried to escape through the streets were enveloped in flames as if they were walking through the searing jet of a blowtorch. Some who wrapped themselves in blankets dipped in water from a canal were scalded as the water turned suddenly to steam. Hundreds were cremated, and their ashes dispersed by the winds. No final figures for the destruction were possible until 1951, when they were set by German authorities at 40,000 dead (including 5,000 children), 250,000 houses destroyed (about half the city), with over 1,000,000 persons made homeless. This was the greatest destruction by air attacks on a city until the fire raid on Tokyo of March 9, 1945, which still stands today as the most devastating air attack in human history.