The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [259]
Although the Blitz on London and other British cities in 1940–41 did not break civilian morale as it was in part intended to do – indeed it stiffened it – the bombing was far lighter and shorter-lived than the retribution against Germany from 1940 to 1945, which certainly did leave very many Germans in despair. Defeatism was ever present, especially after D-Day, but unsurprisingly kept private in a totalitarian state where spreading it was a capital offence. A total of 955,044 tons of bombs were dropped by Bomber Command during the war, and this was bound to have a demoralizing effect, but overall it was the dawning knowledge that Germany not only was not going to win the war after all, but was instead going to be defeated, that wrecked morale in the Reich.70
The second major reason why the Combined Bomber Offensive was justified, as well as ending the rate of increase in German armaments production, was because of the vast number of fighter aircraft that it forced Hitler to keep stationed on the defensive in Germany, when they would have proved invaluable in other places, primarily the all-important Eastern Front. The night before Albert Speer died in 1981, in a hotel room in London, he told the historian Norman Stone that the Allied bombing campaign ‘had caused so many German fighters simply to patrol the skies that there was not enough air power left for the Eastern Front’.71 This was true: by the spring of 1943, just as the Germans needed every weapon they could use for the Kursk offensive, no fewer than 70 per cent of all German fighter aircraft were stationed in the west.72 The Allied bombing campaign also forced the Germans to divert from offensive use as much as one-third of their artillery in anti-aircraft guns, two million men for anti-aircraft defence plus repairing, rebuilding and restoration, building air-raid bunkers and flak towers, and 20 per cent of all ammunition, just in order to protect the Reich from aerial assault.73 ‘German air power declined steadily on the Eastern Front during 1943 and 1944, when over two-thirds of German fighters were sucked into the contest with the [Allied] bombers,’ records Richard Overy. ‘By the end of 1943 there were 55,000 anti-aircraft guns to combat the air offensive – including 75 per cent of the famous 88mm gun, which had doubled with such success as an anti-tank weapon on the Eastern Front.’74 This meant that the Luftwaffe was forced to produce fewer bombers – 18 per cent of the total aircraft produced in 1944, against over 50 per cent in 1942 – even though bombers had hugely aided Hitler in his eastern victories of 1941–2, with their devastation of Russian aerodromes, industry and military installations.
In his 1969 autobiography, Inside the Third Reich, Speer denied that Allied bombing had weakened the German public’s morale, and that the 9 per cent loss of production capacity in 1943 might even have been ‘amply balanced out by increased effort’, but he accepted that the ‘ten thousand anti-aircraft guns [whose barrels] were pointed towards the sky’ in Germany and the west instead ‘could have well been employed in Russia against tanks and other ground targets’.75 More rounds of 88mm or higher-calibre ammunition were produced in 1941–3 for non-tank than for anti-tank purposes, and one-third of Germany’s optical industry and half her electronics industry was engaged in producing gun-sights, radar and communications networks for defence against bombing, leaving front-line troops without infantry walkie-talkies and artillery sound-ranging apparatus, such as the Western Allies were developing.76
The fact that more than ten times the number of Germans died – some 600,000 in all – in the retaliation against the Blitz than Britons who actually died in the Blitz itself echoes the biblical phrase about David