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

The arrival of the American strategic air forces and the beginning of the Combined Bomber Offensive in the summer of 1943 gave a new turn to the air attack on Germany. The first great American effort, against Schweinfurt, a city which produced 80 percent of German ball bearings, showed the difficulty of the American aim of precision daylight bombing of military targets (October 14, 1943). A force of 228 heavy bombers dropped 450 tons of explosives on the target, but 62 planes and 599 men failed to return. Such losses could not be sustained, and resulted from the fact that escorting fighter planes were of such short range that they had to turn back at the German border. As a result, Schweinfurt was not bombed again for four months, during which most of its ball-bearing production was dispersed to five small nearby towns. A series of well-aimed attacks after February 21, 1944, cut production about a quarter in the next eight weeks, but this had little influence on Germany’s fighting power.

The figures on German munitions production are revealing. In 1944, when Germany had armed forces of about 150 full divisions of 12,000 men each, it manufactured sufficient armaments to equip completely 250 infantry and 40 panzer divisions. In some cases, full expansion continued into 1945. The total production of munitions in Germany in January 1945 was a quarter larger than in January 1943. Aircraft production in January 1945 was the same as January 1944, and both were almost 40 percent over January 1943. Production of weapons in January 1945 was 4 percent more than the same month of 1944. Production of tanks, with January-February 1942 taken as 100, was up 54 percent in January 1943; up 338 percent in January 1944; and up 457 percent in January 1945. The following figures for actual production of specific items will help to put the strategic bombing of Germany into perspective:

Items

Year

Germany

United Kingdom

Military aircraft

1942

1944

14,200

39,600

23,600

26,500

Tanks

1942 1944

6,300

19,000

8,600

4,600

Heavy trucks

1942 1944

81,000

89,000

109,000

91,000

Heavy antitank guns

1942 1944

2,100

13,800

500

1,900

Antiaircraft guns

1942 1944

4,200

8,200

2,100

200

Machine guns

1942 1944

320,000 790,000

1,510,000

730,000

Small-arms ammunition (rounds)

1942 1944

1,340 million 5,370 million

2,190 million

2,460 million

It would probably not be unfair to say that Germany in January 1945, after two years of heavy air bombardment from the Western Powers, was not only outproducing the United Kingdom on most significant items of military equipment but had also improved its relative position. Some of this, of course, can be attributed to the fact that the United States was taking over production of some items, but the chief cause was the unbelievable economic mobilization of Germany in the year from December 1943 to December 1944. The relative costs of the strategic bombing effort may be shown in figures. The Americans and British together lost 40,000 planes and 158,906 airmen, almost equally divided between them. The Germans suffered about 330,000 civilians killed, almost 1,000,000 injured, and about 8,000,000 made homeless; for the last year and a half of the war over 1,000,000 Germans were employed clearing and repairing bomb damage. All these things contributed indirectly to hamper the German war effort.

The direct contribution of strategic bombing to the war effort came chiefly after September 1944, and was to be found mainly in the disruption of fuel and transportation. Even this could have been avoided if Hitler had been willing to take the advice of his subordinates and adopt proper defensive measures against the Western air attacks. Hitler himself insisted on priority of flak (antiaircraft guns) over fighter planes and of retaliatory bombing of England over defense by German fighter planes, both mistaken decisions. If the men and materials which Germany devoted to its efforts to bomb England had been entirely used for defensive fighter planes, the influence of Allied strategic bombing on the outcome of the war would have been insignificant.

Germany would still have been defeated, because in the long run its position was hopeless, once Hitler attacked Russia while Britain was still undefeated. This defeat arose from the destruction of the German armies in battle, and was made inevitable from the economic point of view by the loss of the Romanian oil supply in August 1944, and the loss of the Ruhr industrial region in April 1945.

One unforeseen (and still largely unrecognized) event in the defeat of Germany’s ground armies was Hitler’s greater resistance to Western than to Soviet advances. It had been assumed, especially in the Kremlin, that Hitler’s hatred of Communism would lead him to weaken his defenses in the west in order to resist more effectively the advance of Russia. He did exactly the opposite. In the late summer of 1944, two-thirds of Germany’s fighting men were resisting the Russians in the east (2,000,000 in all), with 300,000 in Italy and 700,000 elsewhere in the west. By the time of Yalta (February 1, 1945), Germany had 106 divisions in the west (of which 27 were in Italy) facing an equal number of slightly larger divisions of the Western Powers, while they had 133 in the east (24 less than on June 1, 1944), of which only 75 (including 4 armored) faced Russia’s 100 divisions (with 80 more in reserve) along the 600-mile front from the Carpathian Mountains to the Baltic.

This shift in German forces can be explained on military grounds, but the real causes were much deeper and were embedded in the distorted recesses of Hitler’s brain and in the very nature of Nazism. In spite of Hitler’s verbal attacks on Communism, his real hatred was directed at the values and traditions of Western Civilization and at Christian and middle-class ways of life. This hatred impelled him to overrule the objections of his military commanders in order to mobilize all his dwindling reserves of manpower and supplies (especially truck transport and gasoline) to hurl his final offensive effort against the Western Powers on December 16, 1944. This futile effort stopped the Western attack on Germany for two months, but opened the east to annihilating Soviet blows which began on January 12, 1945.

The Western ground attack on Germany was not resumed after the Battle of the Bulge until February 8, 1945. Two months later a pincers was extending eastward, north and south of the Ruhr. On April 1st this closed to complete the encirclement of the great industrial area; seventeen days later Field Marshall Walter Model surrendered his 325,000 Germans and at once killed himself. Ten days later again, the German-Italian forces in Italy, trapped in Lombardy between Army Group C and impassable swamps, sea, and rivers, began to surrender a force about three times as large. On April 28th, Mussolini, on his way to the Swiss frontier with extensive treasure, was captured and killed by Italian guerrillas; his body was taken back to Milan, scene of his earliest triumphs, to hang by the heels in a public square alongside that of his mistress, Clara Petacci. The long-drawn Italian campaign, which had served its purpose by tying down dozens of German divisions in the peninsula, ended with a total of 536,000 German and 312,000 Allied casualties.