Inferno - Max Hastings [305]
The Möhne was breached by the fourth weapon dropped, the Eder by the third and last available to the attacking Lancasters. Most of the aircraft directed to the Sorpe were shot down en route, and two crews returned home without attacking. The two charges dropped failed to breach the dam, as did another aimed at the Bever, mistakenly identified as the Ennepe. Eight crews failed to return, a punitive casualty rate: six of them fell victims to antiaircraft fire during the low-level flights to and from the Ruhr in bright moonlight, indispensable to bombing accuracy.
The destruction of the Möhne and Eder created a sensation and won the admiration of the world. The moral impact of the attack was enormous, not least on Germany’s leaders, and much enhanced the prestige of Bomber Command. Gibson received a VC. Some of the popular enthusiasm for “the Dambusters” derived from the fact that destroying precision industrial targets seemed a much less morally uncomfortable activity than burning cities and civilians. But the flooding of the Möhne valley killed 545 Germans and 749 foreigners, the latter Ukrainian women slave labourers and French and Belgian POWs. The loss of water imposed only temporary inconvenience upon Ruhr steel production, partly because Harris failed to launch follow-up attacks with conventional bombs to prevent the dams from being repaired. But thereafter the Germans felt obliged to divert substantial resources to reservoir defence. If the economic impact of “the Dambusters’ raid” was limited, the propaganda achievement was great. All those involved richly merited their laurels.
IN 1943, the German economy staggered in the face of the combined pressures of shortages of coal, steel and manpower, compounded by massive destruction in the Ruhr achieved by Bomber Command and the USAAF. This was the first year in which the air offensive inflicted massive damage on the Nazi war machine. The July firestorm in Hamburg, created by the heaviest air raids in history, killed 40,000 people and destroyed 250,000 dwellings. “We were told the British [bombers] would avoid Hamburg because they would need the town and its harbour later on,” one of its traumatised citizens, Mathilde Wolff-Monckeburg, wrote amid the rubble. “We lived in a fool’s paradise.” By extraordinary exertions and the skills of Gen. Erhard Milch, the Luftwaffe managed to double its 1942 aircraft output, producing 2,200 combat aircraft a month by the summer of 1943. But its new models, the He-177 and Me-210, proved failures which wasted vital resources. The later versions of the Bf-109, which with the FW-190 remained the mainstays of Germany’s daylight air defence until the war’s end, were outclassed by Allied fighters. The August 1943 suicide of Luftwaffe chief of staff Hans Jeschonnek represented an admission of his service’s defeat.
Adam Tooze has made an important and persuasive case against Albert Speer’s claims to have created a German armaments production “miracle” between 1942 and 1945. Many of Speer’s crisis expedients failed: for instance, the revolutionary Type XXI U-boat was rushed into production in 1944 so hastily that technical shortcomings rendered it incapable of useful service. A coal and steel famine persisted until the war’s end—the civilian allocation of fuel was cut to a level 15 percent below that of the meagre British domestic ration. Germany lost access to Ukrainian metal ores in 1943. Merely fulfilling ammunition requirements absorbed more than half the army’s steel allocation, together with the services of 450,000 workers; a further 160,000 were building tanks, and 210,000 manufacturing other weapons.
Germany’s 1943 production of 18,300 armoured vehicles was far outstripped by the Allies’ 54,100—29,000 of these Russian—though Reich factories doubled deliveries between autumn 1942 and spring 1943. German ammunition output peaked