The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [251]
Between March 1943 and April 1944 the Krupp factory in the Ruhr lost 20 per cent of production, which was ‘far below’ what British propaganda was making out at the time, but very significant nonetheless.32 Yet that was only one site, and overall the results were mixed: in Essen, although 88 per cent of its housing had been destroyed or badly damaged, and 7,000 inhabitants killed, the intensive post-war investigations discovered that production had somehow continued, through German bravery and ingenuity, until March 1945, when it was overrun. At the end of January 1945 Albert Speer found that in 1944 Allied bombing had meant that Germany produced 35 per cent fewer tanks than he had wanted to build and Germany required, as well as 31 per cent fewer aircraft and 42 per cent fewer lorries.33 In a sense those figures alone justify the Allies’ CBO, as we have already seen what the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were capable of achieving in counter-attack when they had enough tanks and aircraft.
The debate about strategic bombing has all too often centred on its failure significantly to lessen actual German armaments production, but that is based on a false premise. What the campaign needed to do was to curtail the rate of increase in armaments production by which the Germans could have prolonged, or even won, the war, and this it achieved triumphantly, as is shown in Figure 1. The tragic reality was that area as well as precision bombing was necessary to halt Speer’s miracle, although by 1944 the RAF ought to have switched to concentrating more on Luftwaffe factories, which could be targeted with a far higher degree of accuracy than in 1940. The estimation that the entire Combined Bomber Offensive of 1944 reduced German gross industrial production by only 10 per cent seems damning, in view of the sacrifice in Allied servicemen’s lives, the cost in resources in building the 21,000 bombers that were destroyed and of course the deaths by bombing of around 720,000 German, Italian and French civilians throughout the war.34 Yet the entire campaign took up only about 7 per cent of Britain’s war effort, and so was militarily justified.
In late July and early August 1943, four bombing raids on Hamburg over ten days codenamed Gomorrah led to the deaths of between 30,000 and 50,000 people.35 On 27 July a navigational error sent 787 RAF planes 2 miles to the east of the intended target, Hamburg’s city centre, and over the closely packed tenement buildings of its working population instead. The release of thousands of strips of aluminium
German armament production, 1942–1944 (Jan 1942 = 100)
foil, codenamed Window, blinded the radar on which the German night-fighters and anti-aircraft artillery depended, allowing the raiders more time to do their work. Hamburg had been experiencing a freak heatwave and the hot, dry weather, when combined with the flames from high-explosive and incendiary bombs, created a firestorm inferno that reached 1,600 Celsius and reduced to ashes all in its path. It was said that the orange luminosity from fires that raged, largely unfought, for forty-eight hours could be seen 120 miles away.
The surviving population of 1.8 million fled the city, spreading panic throughout the region. ‘Hamburg had put the fear of God in me,’ admitted Speer, who predicted to Hitler that ‘a series of attacks of this sort, extended to six more major cities, would bring Germany’s armaments production to a total halt.’ The Führer merely replied: ‘You’ll straighten all that out again.’36 Goebbels was as worried as Speer, writing in his diary of the:
most serious consequences both for the civilian population and for armaments production. This attack