The Bomber Will Always Get Through

B-17 Flying Fortresses from the 398th Bombardment Group flying a bombing mission to Neumünster, Germany, on 13 April 1945.

 A few thoughts on a topic which came up the other day. I have been reading about warfare since I was knee high to a grenadier. I've learned over the years to take a lot of things with a grain of salt. But the accolades gathered by the proponents of strategic bombardment have always troubled me somewhat. I'm a fighter guy, I never cared for the bomber Mafia, even though the progeny all attended elementary school at a place named for one of the bomber's biggest champions.

That being said, here's what I think, supported by some evidence, some, perhaps a lot, is my opinion, guided by study and observation...

I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through. The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves… If the conscience of the young men should ever come to feel, with regard to this one instrument [bombing] that it is evil and should go, the thing will be done; but if they do not feel like that – well, as I say, the future is in their hands. But when the next war comes, and European civilisation is wiped out, as it will be, and by no force more than that force, then do not let them lay blame on the old men. Let them remember that they, principally, or they alone, are responsible for the terrors that have fallen upon the earth. - Stanley Baldwin, 10 November 1932 (Source)

When I was a kid, I learned that the 8th Air Force was a major factor in the defeat of Nazi Germany and that one of the reasons the Germans lost the war is that they had no strategic bombers.

Formation of German He-111 bombers during the Battle of Britain.

The truth of the matter lies somewhere between those two statements.

The German Air Force (Luftwaffe) was essentially built from the ground up as the Germans were barred from possessing an air force by the Versailles Treaty of 1919. When the Germans began to rearm, in direct violation of the Treat of Versailles (one of those "scraps of paper" that dictators deride and liberal politicians think is Holy Writ), they built the Luftwaffe for one purpose and one purpose alone, to provide support for the German army.

The twin-engined bombers would range behind the lines destroying supply depots, front line airbases, and other infrastructure targets. The goal being to disrupt the enemy army's logistical tail and to suppress the enemy air force to give the Luftwaffe free rein at the front.

Single engine dive bombers would act as flying artillery to provide direct support to German army ground units.

Fighter aircraft were used to protect the bombers and to engage targets of opportunity on the ground once air superiority was attained. Also, to engage any enemy fighters which managed to get airborne, which was rare in the early days of the war.

Once the enemy air forces were destroyed, usually on the ground in the first few days of the offensive, the Germans were free to concentrate their attacks on the enemy army. These air attacks along with tanks on the ground making wide ranging pincer attacks would eventually surround and destroy large elements of the enemy's ground forces. With the enemy military defeated and large swaths of ground seized by the German army, the enemy government would capitulate.

As happened in Poland, in Denmark, in Norway, in Belgium, in the Netherlands, and then in France. However this model did not work in two instances: Britain and the Soviet Union.

The islands of the United Kingdom are separated from the continent of Europe by the English Channel which is a formidable military obstacle. You couldn't seize bridges over it (and there were no tunnels under it in 1940), therefore the German army had no means to come to grips with the British forces which survived after Dunkirk.

So if one part of the tactical battle model can't be used (the army) that leaves the air forces. What can they do by themselves? The Germans figured that if they could suppress the Royal Air Force to the point where the Germans had air superiority over the Channel, well then the army could jump on their fleet of improvised barges and cross the Channel. Then the army supplemented by their flying artillery could go to work. Of course, the Luftwaffe would need to fight off that pesky (and large) Royal Navy as well. The German navy was minuscule compared to the British Home Fleet, those naval units dedicated to control of the seas around Britain.

The Germans discovered that destroying an air force and its infrastructure from the air (without their own army putting pressure on that air force as well) was no easy proposition, especially with aircraft designed for short range attacks. They would also be going up against an enemy that was expecting them, no chance of anything beyond a tactical surprise (like what time of day and the direction of the attack). The Germans had a tactical air force, not a strategic air force designed for long range attacks against an enemy not immediately to one's front.

They failed to destroy the RAF, so they started bombing cities. The first attack was a mistake, the second was deliberate in response to an RAF raid on a German city (which was in response to the mistaken dropping of bombs on London).

In the Soviet Union the problem was one of scale. The German military worked very well in the smaller confines of Western Europe (anything west of Russia in this context). Countries smaller than, or roughly the same size as, Germany, were fairly "easy meat" for the well-trained German military machine. (There was a lot of re-training necessary after the attack on Poland, where the Germans took unexpectedly heavy casualties from the tough Polish army.)

But the Soviet Union was huge, stretching along a front of eight hundred miles from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and covering eleven time zones from the border with what used to be Poland* to Siberia. While much of the Red Army was in the forward zone facing the Germans and their allies (Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary), there were a lot more further away, out of range of the Luftwaffe.

When the Germans attacked they did destroy most of the Red Air Force in the west on the ground (destroying many obsolete machines), they also killed and captured literally hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers. But they couldn't quite get around them deep enough to cut them all off. Enough fell back to keep the fight going. The Luftwaffe swarmed through the skies, but many of their best crews had been lost over England the year before. They had nothing to reach deep into Soviet Russia to try and stem the rising tide of Soviet reinforcements and destroy Soviet infrastructure.

But even had they had the reach, what good would it have done?

Hard to say, but if we look at the western Allies, the British and the Americans, we see lots and lots of four-engine bombers, capable of reaching deep into Germany, eventually. But not until they had fighter aircraft capable of going the distance with the bombers.

In the '20s and '30s bomber designs were such that the pundits of many air forces thought that the bomber was unstoppable as the current crop of fighter aircraft couldn't attain the speed of the bombers, nor the altitude. Well of course fighter design caught up and most fighters were far faster than bombers and could attain the same altitudes.

So machine guns were added to the bombers, as many as ten .50-caliber gun emplacements in a B-17 (at least three of which mounted dual .50s - upper, belly, and tail emplacements - later a fourth in a "chin" turret). Surely with a group of bombers in a tight formation enemy fighters would be unable to get into the dense bomber formations.

Yet they did. Prior to receiving fighter escorts bomber formations suffered losses at an unsustainable rate (16% in 1942-43), soon there wouldn't be enough bombers to carry bombs deep into Germany (or even into France for that matter). It was statistically impossible in those years for a crew to survive the 25 missions required to complete a tour of duty.

Eventually though, long range fighter aircraft (specifically the P-51) were available in sufficient numbers to escort American daylight bombers all the way to their targets and then home again. The British never did develop a long range fighter along the same lines as the P-51, primarily because they were committed to bombing Germany at night.

British bombing was directed at area targets such as industrial areas, which were nearly always situated near towns and cities. British bombing was, in reality, directed at German civilians. They couldn't bomb in large, coordinated formations due to the primitive navigation aids available at the time. Rather the British bombers came in a stream of individual aircraft, one after the other.

Pathfinder bombers would go in first to mark the target and were equipped with state of the art navigation equipment to do so. Unfortunately, state of the art wasn't very good at the time. The pathfinders could find a city but had trouble pinpointing factories and the like.

So the pathfinders would drop their special incendiary target markers and the following bombers would try to drop their bombs on those markers. Later bombers in the stream would drop on the fires started by the earlier drops. It was all very random in reality.

The Americans were determined to perform precision, daylight raids over Germany. Initial raids didn't have much luck as the defending fighters and anti-aircraft cannon took a heavy toll of the attackers. Once the P-51 came into action, bomber casualties did drop but were still heavy enough to cause some concern in Allied command circles. But not among the bomber generals themselves, being thoroughly steeped in the theories of Douhet, Mitchell, and others. The bomber would always get through, right?

Well, enough did get through to kill thousands of civilians and military personnel in the target areas. In addition, the Germans had to expend a lot of resources to defend the Fatherland from the attacks. Personnel manning radar networks, fighters, searchlights, and fighter aircraft (both day and night fighters) consumed resources that could have been better employed in Russia, and later France.

Albert Speer (Hitler's Minister of Armaments and War Production from 1942 onward) claimed after the war that Allied bombing did indeed disrupt German production. However, due to his efforts German production actually increased until the second half of 1944, which coincides with the Allied landings in Normandy. Now a ground army would also increase the pressure on the German military.

My point in all this is that the strategic bombing of Germany, the thought that airpower alone could end the war was a chimera. It took the efforts of land, naval, and air forces to defeat Nazi Germany (with the Soviet Union doing the bulk of the heavy lifting for most of the war on the ground).

One could also argue that the indiscriminate bombing of civilians (deliberately at night, perhaps unintentionally by day) did not break the will of the Germans to continue fighting. No more so than the Luftwaffe's terror bombing of British cities after 1940 induced the British to quit.

Remember this sentence from that Baldwin quote above?

The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.

Absolutely ineffective for either side. The very thought of intentionally killing civilians was (and remains) anathema to many.

What about Japan you might ask? Didn't the bombings by B-29s (to include the atomic bombs) convince the Japanese to surrender without having to invade Japan itself?

Yes, but only after the Navy had pretty much cut Japan off from all their sources of oil and other imported war materials. Only after the Marine Corps, the Army, the Army Air Forces, and Navy had captured numerous islands on the way to Japan. The Japanese Navy and merchant marine was mostly on the bottom of the sea by 1945.

With all this power closing in on Japan, the Japanese were cornered. Once the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki occurred, the Japanese leadership (prodded by the emperor) realized that they only had two choices: surrender or in all likelihood cease to exist as a nation.

While it is true that air and sea power obviated the need to invade the Japanese home islands, that was only after most of the territory the Japanese had conquered earlier in the war had been liberated, again by combined land, sea, and air power.

Combined arms was, and still is, the answer in warfare. No single arm can conquer an enemy.

My conclusion is that the indiscriminate killing of civilians was neither necessary nor strictly legal. (Various conventions and treaties governing armed conflict were in place before World War II but were rather weak, in my opinion, when it came to aerial warfare. See here.) The bombing of tactical targets, that is strictly military targets, was, in conjunction with ground forces a necessary and useful form of combat.

One might even argue that the bombing of French rail networks prior to the Normandy invasion was absolutely justified in military terms, regardless of the death and suffering inflicted on the French civilian population. Those deaths were not intentional, the deaths of Spanish, Polish, British, Chinese, Russian, German, and Japanese civilians in most cases of strategic bombing were intentional (again, in my opinion) and could have been avoided. Would the war have lasted longer? Possibly, but who can say with any certainty?

I am still conflicted over the use of strategic bombing in World War II. I can see its usefulness in some contexts, I can see that in many instances it comes very close to what I would consider to be "war crimes." (That bit is in quotes because war itself is a crime. On the gripping hand, if you don't want your population slaughtered, don't attack other nations.)

Remember this piece of that opening Baldwin quote?

If the conscience of the young men should ever come to feel, with regard to this one instrument [bombing] that it is evil and should go, the thing will be done; but if they do not feel like that – well, as I say, the future is in their hands. But when the next war comes, and European civilisation is wiped out, as it will be, and by no force more than that force, then do not let them lay blame on the old men. (Emphasis mine.)

Pardon my French, but bullshit, the young can only do as they are told in warfare, or they suffer the consequences. It is always the old men, the captains of industry, the government officials, and the flag officers who make these decisions. (The young do commit war crimes as well, but typically in the heat of battle.)

War crimes trials are seldom held for the victors. After all, who would hold a victorious nation responsible? The defeated?

Tough questions. What say you?

And yes, be nice.**

Ruins of Guernica (1937)
(Source)

* In the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, the Germans got the western half of Poland, the Soviets got the eastern half, once the Germans had pretty much done all of the fighting. The Reds marched in as the Poles were on the ropes, not down yet, not quite out, the Soviets stabbed them in the back.

** Which I add in light of a certain brouhaha which occurred in the comments recently, which were subsequently deleted. Heat of passion and all that, but I'm sure some of you saw that.