Inferno - Max Hastings [299]
An aspect of the conflict common to warriors in all three dimensions was that navigation was a life-and-death science. A British Army training report noted that soldiers would forgive almost any fault in their officers except incompetent map reading, which at best wasted energy and at worst got them killed. Ships were sunk by straying carelessly into minefields. Airmen who lost their way, especially over the sea, often died when their fuel ran out. Antisubmarine patrol duty, roaming far out over empty oceans, was a wearisome task, demanding special navigational care: errors killed as many crews as enemy action or mechanical failure. Even when electronic aids and beacons were introduced, a dismaying number of planes fell into the sea because inexpert airmen flew reciprocal courses or were unable to fix their positions in poor weather.
The Germans, Italians and Japanese entered the conflict with highly trained pilots, and until 1942 most of the Luftwaffe’s aircraft were superior to those of the RAF or USAAF; the Japanese and Italians also had some good types. “With the start the Germans had, it was a miracle we ever caught up,” said British bomber group commander Edward Addison. The Luftwaffe’s close support for the Wehrmacht was a key factor in German victories between 1939 and 1942. Göring’s squadrons failed, however, as a strategic bomber force. Before the blitz on Britain, senior airmen of most nations were imbued with a mystical faith. They deluded themselves that societies would succumb to panic in the face of the mere fact of assault from the air; the collapse of morale would provoke industrial disintegration and, thus, defeat. The destruction of Guernica by the Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War, along with the bombing of Nanjing, Warsaw and Rotterdam, promoted delusions about the vulnerability of civilian populations. More protracted experience disproved these, however. “[A] vital lesson—one that has taken even air specialists by surprise,” wrote Maj. Alexander Seversky, a leading American air strategist, in 1942,
relates to the behaviour of civilian populations under air punishment. It had been generally assumed that aerial bombardment would quite quickly shatter popular morale … The progress of this war has tended to indicate that this expectation was unfounded. On the contrary, it now seems clear that despite large casualties and impressive physical destruction, civilians can “take it.” On the whole, indeed, armed forces have been more quickly demoralised by air power than unarmed city dwellers. These facts are significant beyond their psychological interest. They mean that haphazard destruction of cities … is costly and wasteful in relation to the tactical results obtained. Attacks will increasingly be concentrated on military rather than on random human targets. Unplanned vandalism from the air must give way, more and more, to planned, predetermined destruction.
Bombers achieved results only in proportion to the weight of explosives they could drop accurately on designated targets; mass was critical. The Luftwaffe and the Japanese air forces had formidable capabilities for supporting their respective ground forces and navies, as well as for killing refugees and promoting terror, but their aircraft carried small bombloads. The Luftwaffe inflicted pain and destruction during the 1940–41 blitz on Britain, but nowhere near sufficient to make a decisive impact on the ability of Churchill’s nation to continue the war. Thereafter, Germany’s air force suffered a steady decline: when the first generation of Axis airmen was killed off, training of their successors languished. Both the Germans and the Japanese made a critical strategic mistake, to which fuel famine contributed, by failing to allocate resources to sustain a flow of proficient pilots. By