Inferno - Max Hastings [306]
This makes it all more remarkable that, in the face of so many handicaps and misjudgements, German forces were able to sustain a ferocious resistance until May 1945. In assessing the Third Reich’s industrial experience and the work of Speer and Milch—Jeschonnek’s successor as Luftwaffe chief of staff—historical revisionism can be overdone. By 1943, and indeed earlier, the Reich was set upon a course that could lead only to economic collapse. But Allied soldiers fighting the Germans would have derived little comfort from this knowledge as they faced devastating artillery and mortar barrages, and strove to challenge Tigers and Panthers with their own inferior tanks.
The critical weakness of the Allied bomber offensive was poor intelligence, which caused it to become, in Churchill’s rueful words, a bludgeon rather than a rapier. Ultra offered little help in divining what was happening inside Germany, because most industrial data was transmitted on paper or by landline rather than radio. Even as the destructive power of the RAF and USAAF grew, the “bomber barons” remained ill-informed about the choke points of Nazi industry, which Sir Arthur Harris was anyway little interested in identifying. Having embarked on a campaign to wreck Germany’s cities, he sustained this with obsessive dedication until 1945. The USAAF, doctrinally committed to precision bombing, devoted much more energy to pinpointing key target systems: in August and October 1943, for instance, the Eighth Air Force suffered shocking casualties attacking ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt, with indifferent success. On the first raid 147 of 376 aircraft were lost, and on the second 60 out of 291, with a further 142 damaged.
These disasters increased Harris’s contempt for precision bombing of what he called “panacea targets.” It has been justly observed that, although the British leadership at the Casablanca conference in January 1943 mandated a combined bomber offensive, what actually took place was a competition between the RAF and USAAF, each independently pursuing its own doctrine. Adam Tooze believes that Harris’s “Battle of the Ruhr,” which began with an attack on Essen on 5 March 1943, came close to achieving a decisive victory by wrecking German coal and steel production. Göring expressed astonishment that the Allies did not continue their attacks on the Ruhr, “because there we are in some places having to deal with production bottlenecks that present enormous dangers,” as Goebbels recorded. But Bomber Command underrated the importance of maintaining pressure on industrial cities already attacked, which Harris too readily erased from his target list on the evidence of aerial photographs showing roofless buildings.
In July 1943 Harris, supposing the Ruhr sufficiently devastated, shifted Bomber Command’s focus of attack first to Hamburg, then to Berlin. Over Hitler’s capital his squadrons, operating at extreme range in winter weather against a huge and widely dispersed target area, suffered severely—losses on every mission rose to an unacceptable average of more than 5 percent. At the end of 1943, Bomber Command headquarters dispatched a report to all its groups and stations, proclaiming in the most fanciful terms the results of its attacks: “These raids on the German capital do indeed mark the beginning of the end … The Nazis’ military and industrial organization, and above all their morale, have by these attacks suffered a deadly wound from which they cannot recover.”
On 7 December, Harris wrote to the prime minister, asserting that if he could deliver a further 15,000 Lancaster sorties against Germany’s major cities, the Nazi regime would collapse by 1 April 1944. Bomber Command almost fulfilled his appointed mission quota, but Germany’s resistance remained unbroken. The C-in-C’s extravagant predictions damaged his credibility with the prime minister and the service chiefs, including Sir Charles Portal. By the early