The Second World War Read online

  Göring, humiliated by the Luftwaffe’s weakness against the Allied onslaught, withdrew more fighter groups from the eastern front for home defence. Although this was not one of the stated objectives of the Allies, the effect on the outcome of the war was perhaps far greater than the damage they were inflicting at the time. Not only did Red Army aviation begin to achieve air superiority if not supremacy in places. It also meant that Luftwaffe reconnaissance flights had to be drastically reduced. This in turn allowed the Red Army, especially in the following year, to achieve major successes in maskirovka, or deception operations.

  Although German morale did not break as the Allies had hoped, Goebbels and other leaders were deeply concerned. Nazi propaganda was met by sarcasm in the population. A well-known poem of the time ran:

  Lieber Tommy fliege weiter,

  Wir sind alle Ruhrarbeiter,

  Fliege weiter nach Berlin,

  Die haben alle ‘ja’ geschrien.

  (‘Dear Tommy fly on,

  We are all Ruhr workers,

  Fly on to Berlin,

  They all screamed “yes”.’)

  This was a reference to Goebbels’s speech after Stalingrad in the Sportpalast in Berlin in February 1943 when he whipped up the audience by shouting: ‘Do you want Total War?’ and they all yelled back in the affirmative.

  In that spring of 1943, Allied air losses rose to terrifying levels. Less than one RAF aircrew in five survived a thirty-mission tour. On 17 April the Eighth Air Force over Bremen lost fifteen bombers to German fighters. Eaker, furious at not having received the reinforcements he had been promised, warned General Arnold back in Washington that he was down to a maximum of 123 bombers for a single raid. The Eighth Air Force was simply not in a position to achieve the air supremacy required to ensure the success of a cross-Channel invasion.

  Arnold was in a difficult position. Every theatre of war was demanding more bombers. But in May he sent reinforcements to Britain and a huge programme of airfield construction began in East Anglia. Fresh faces were badly needed since the Eighth Air Force had lost 188 bombers and 1,900 crewmen in its first year of operations. Eaker had finally come round to the urgent need for long-range fighter escorts. The tubby P-47 Thunderbolt had a range no further than the German border.

  On 29 May, the RAF created its first firestorm in a raid on Wuppertal. After the Pathfinders had dropped their marker flares, the leading wave of bombers dropped incendiaries to get fires going before the high-explosive bombs from the next wave blasted open the buildings. The blazing buildings soon created an inferno which sucked in air from all around. Many citizens were asphyxiated by the smoke or lack of oxygen, and in a way they were the lucky ones. Tarmac melted on the streets so people’s shoes stuck fast. Some ran to the river and threw themselves in to protect their bodies from the heat. After the fires had died down, charred bodies were so reduced, with all fat burned, that the burial parties could collect three blackened corpses in a washtub and seven or eight in a zinc bathtub. Some 3,400 people were killed that night. Like the Luftwaffe in 1940, the RAF had discovered that incendiaries were the vital ingredient in mass destruction. They were also lighter than conventional bombs and could be scattered en masse.

  Harris still resented any interruptions to his remorseless campaign against urban targets, especially when he had to divert his bombers to attack U-boat bases. He intensified the bombing of cities, especially those which had already been hit. On 10 June 1943, the Combined Bomber Offensive–Pointblank–began officially. Two weeks later, just over a year after his first thousand-bomber raid, he sent Bomber Command back against Cologne. The incendiaries and bombs began to drop in the early hours of 29 June, the feast of St Peter and St Paul.

  ‘All the inhabitants of the house were in the cellar,’ wrote Albert Beckers. ‘Over us, for some considerable time, aircraft engines made the air vibrate. We were like rabbits in a warren. I was worried about the water pipes–what would happen if they burst, would we all be drowned? The air shook with detonations. We hadn’t felt the hail of incendiaries in the cellar but above us everything was ablaze. Now came the second wave, the explosives. You cannot imagine what it is like to cower in a hole when the air quakes, the eardrums burst from the blast, the light goes out, oxygen runs out and dust and mortar crumble from the ceiling. We had to make our way through the breach into the neighbouring cellar.’

  The journalist Heinz Pettenberg described the panic in the cellars of the house of a friend where 300 people had sought shelter while fires began above. ‘With two other men, Fischer fought like mad to save the house. During the work they often had to go down to prevent a panic among the crazed group in the cellar. Fischer’s wife would blow a whistle and Fischer ran down with the pistol to control the mayhem. All inhibitions had fallen.’

  ‘The Waidmarkt afforded a dreadful spectacle,’ Beckers recounted. ‘Showers of sparks filled the air. Large and small burning pieces of wood floated through the air and alighted on clothes and hair. A little boy who had become separated from his parents stood next to me and pointed out the sparks. It became unbearably hot on that square. The fire whipped up into a wind and oxygen became scarce.’

  In the streets ‘Children were running about looking for their parents,’ wrote a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl. ‘A little girl was leading her mother, who had been blinded during the night, by the hand. By a large pile of rubble I saw a priest, with gritted teeth, desperately claw at the stone, brick by brick, because an explosive bomb had buried his whole family there… We walked through the small, narrow alleys as though through a baking oven and the cellars gave up the smell of burning corpses.’

  ‘Everywhere you heard the screams of the wounded, the desperate calls or knocking of those trapped underground,’ wrote a fourteen-year-old girl from the BDM, the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth. ‘People called out names of the missing and the streets were covered with the dead laid out for identification… Those who came back later stood bewildered in front of what had once been their houses. We had to collect body parts in zinc tubs. It was horrifying and nauseating… two weeks after the raid I was still throwing up.’ Concentration camp prisoners were brought in to retrieve corpses from under collapsed buildings.

  The Sicherheitsdienst reported on reactions to the raid on Cologne, and the damage done to the cathedral. While many people called out for vengeance, the Nazis were alarmed by the reaction of Catholics. ‘This could all have been avoided if we hadn’t started the war,’ said one. ‘The Lord would not have allowed something like this if right had been on our side and we were fighting for a just cause,’ said another. The SD report even went on to say that some people were expressing the view that the bombing of Cologne cathedral and other German churches was somehow connected with the destruction of the synagogues in Germany, and that this was now God’s punishment. After using the destruction to the full in his propaganda and devoting the newsreels to it, Goebbels suddenly had second thoughts, fearing that it might deject the population more than it angered them. The SD found that people were upset by all the propaganda emphasis on destroyed churches and ancient buildings when the authorities said nothing of the suffering of the population, of whom 4,377 had died. Thousands fled the city, and word of the horror spread.

  Harris was determined to increase the pressure, even though he decided to switch his forces away from the Ruhr, which was becoming too well defended. Raids continued relentlessly, with a major offensive against Hamburg beginning on 24 July. For the first time, aluminium foil strips called ‘Window’ were dropped in advance to be picked up by German radar and confuse their defence systems. Bomber Command struck by night, and the Eighth Air Force attacked twice by day. Harris named it Operation Gomorrah. The tragedy for Hamburg’s population was that Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann ordered that nobody could leave the city without special permission, a decision which condemned thousands to death. On the night of 27 July the RAF returned with 722 aircraft. The conditions for conflagration were ideal. It happened to be
the driest and hottest month in the last ten years.

  The mass of incendiaries raining down in a tighter pattern than usual on the eastern side of the city accelerated the conglomeration of individual fires into one gigantic furnace. This created a chimney or volcano of heat which shot into the sky and sucked in hurricane force winds at ground level. This fanned the roaring flames still further. At 17,000 feet, the air-crew could smell roasting flesh. On the ground, the blast of hot air tore off clothes, stripping people naked and setting their hair ablaze. Flesh was desiccated, leaving it like pemmican. As in Wuppertal, tarmac boiled and people became glued to it like insects on a flypaper. Houses would explode into a blaze in a moment. The fire service was rapidly overwhelmed. Those civilians who stayed in cellars suffocated or died from smoke inhalation or carbon-monoxide poisoning. They, according to the Hamburg authorities later, represented between 70 and 80 per cent of the 40,000 people who died. Many of the other bodies were so carbonized that they were never recovered.

  Survivors fled into the countryside and further afield. The local authorities rose to the crisis most impressively, considering the scale of the disaster. News of the horror spread from mouth to mouth across the country after evacuees passed through Berlin, and then were distributed east and south. Many were in a state of nervous breakdown. There were a number of cases of grief-crazed people who had retrieved the shrunken corpses of their children to take with them in a suitcase.

  The shock throughout the Reich has been described as tantamount to a civilian version of Stalingrad. Even Nazi leaders, such as Speer and Generalfeldmarschall Milch, the administrative head of the Luftwaffe, began to think that a similar pattern of bombing might quickly defeat them. Harris, unable to let go, sent in another raid on 29 July, but Bomber Command casualties were much higher, with twenty-eight aircraft lost. A new German fighter group, the Wilde Sau, or Wild Boar, had adopted fresh tactics, attacking the bombers from above, even over the target, while they were silhouetted against the flames. On 2 August another Bomber Command force set forth, only to arrive in the midst of an electrical storm. It was a costly failure, with thirty aircraft lost and little damage caused.

  At the beginning of August, General Eaker, after the intensive bombing of ‘Blitz Week’ and the loss of ninety-seven Fortresses, stood down his bomber crews to rest them before other major missions. His force of B-24 Liberators had meanwhile flown to North Africa, from where they would attack the Ploesti oilfields in Romania. Operation Tidal Wave began on 1 August. To avoid alerting the defenders, no reconnaissance was carried out. Approaching from the Danube Valley, they carried out a low-level attack, which proved to be a bad mistake. The Germans had prepared a ring of 40mm and 20mm flak batteries, and even machine guns on every roof around. The force had maintained radio silence all the way, but the Germans were ready for them. Having broken the American codes, they knew of the raid in advance.

  Flying at low level among the clouds of thick black smoke, the bomber force was ravaged by anti-aircraft fire, then they were jumped by a large force of Luftwaffe fighters stationed near by. Only thirty-three Liberators out of the 178 were in a serviceable state on return. Although they had caused great damage, the Germans drafted in huge numbers of workers, and within a few weeks the refineries were producing more oil than before the raid.

  Another mission imposed from Washington was to take the Eighth Air Force deep into Germany. On 17 August, it attacked the Regensburg Messerschmitt factories with 146 bombers led by Curtis LeMay, and the ball-bearings plant at Schweinfurt with 230. LeMay’s force, which took off in spite of a thick mist, flew on from Regensburg over the Alps to North Africa to confuse the Germans. But the Luftwaffe fighter defences had by then been increased to 400 strong with the withdrawals from the eastern front. LeMay’s force lost fourteen bombers even before it reached Regensburg. A gunner remarked that when listening to everyone praying over the interphone, ‘It sounded like a flying church.’ But at least they were not pursued once they reached the Alps after dropping their bombs.

  The Schweinfurt force, which had been held back until the mist cleared, approached its target several hours late. This disastrous development meant that the German fighters which had attacked LeMay’s group had had time to land, refuel and rearm. Once again, because of their limited range, the Thunderbolt fighters escorting the Schweinfurt Fortresses had to turn back over Belgium, just before the German border. From then on Focke-Wulf and Messerschmitt 109 squadrons rose to the attack from all directions. It is estimated that some 300 were scrambled, far more than had attacked LeMay’s aircraft. The gunners in the Flying Fortresses were soon up to their ankles in empty shell cases as they swivelled their turrets, frantically trying to follow the fighters streaking through the formation. So many aircraft were stricken and so many men were baling out, one airman observed, that it looked ‘like a Parachute invasion’.

  On reaching Schweinfurt, the surviving aircraft were unable to bomb accurately. The formation was in chaos, they were under constant fire with black puffs of flak exploding all around them, and the Germans had screened the target with smoke generators. In any case their 1,000-pound bombs were simply not powerful enough to cause sufficient damage, even when they hit. The Eighth Air Force lost sixty bombers destroyed, and another hundred so badly damaged that they were written off. They also lost nearly 600 aircrew.

  After these losses Churchill renewed his pressure on the USAAF to switch to night-time bombing. Arnold resisted strongly, but he knew that they would still be vulnerable until long-range fighter escorts became available. The leaders of the USAAF were forced to acknowledge that the concept behind the heavily armed Fortress, to which they had clung for far too long, was deeply flawed. The bitter lesson was renewed again when the Eighth Air Force once more ventured beyond fighter cover, to attack Stuttgart. It lost forty-five Fortresses out of 338.

  During the Regensburg–Schweinfurt operation, the Luftwaffe lost forty-seven fighters in the vast air battle, contributing to a total of 334 shot down in August. Even more dangerously, it was losing too many experienced pilots. Their deaths hurt Germany’s defences far more than the damage inflicted by LeMay’s forces on the Messerschmitt factory at Regensburg. On 18 August, after furious recriminations from Hitler for allowing the destruction of Hamburg and other attacks, the Luftwaffe chief of staff General Jeschonnek shot himself. Hitler cared nothing for Jeschonnek. Now he was even more set on developing the Vengeance weapons, the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 rocket. His priority was to inflict greater terror on his enemies.

  Bomber Command, having bombed the V-weapon research base at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast, began the Battle of Berlin. Harris was convinced that, if he could do to the Nazi capital what his aircraft had done to Hamburg, Germany would surrender by 1 April 1944. Hitler, to the despair of General Adolf Galland, the Luftwaffe fighter chief, and Generalfeldmarschall Milch, refused to increase fighter production. His faith in Göring and the Luftwaffe was severely dented. He trusted his massive concrete flak towers to defend Berlin. But although the flak barrage and the criss-cross searchlight beams were terrifying for RAF aircrew approaching the city, anti-aircraft fire accounted for a considerably smaller proportion of their losses than Luftwaffe night-fighters.

  Pathfinder aircraft dropped the red and green marker flares over Berlin, which the Germans nicknamed Christmas Trees. Then Lancasters and Halifaxes carpet-bombed the city from end to end. On Harris’s order, each Lancaster now carried five tons of bombs. ‘The sky arches over Berlin with a blood-red eerie beauty,’ Goebbels wrote in his diary after one of the biggest raids. ‘I can no longer stand looking at it.’ Yet Goebbels was one of the very few Nazi leaders who went out to mingle and chat with the victims of the raids.

  Life was rather harder for ordinary Berliners, trying to get to work on time through rubble-blocked streets, with tram tracks torn up into fantastic shapes, and S-Bahn trains cancelled because of damage to lines. Civilians looked pale and drawn from lack of sleep, as they hurried to ca
tch up. Those bombed out of their apartments either had to move in with friends, or hope to be rehoused by the authorities. The accommodation had usually been confiscated from Jewish families, most of whom had now been ‘sent to the east’. As in most cities, they were able to replace clothes and household utensils at knock-down prices from Jewish homes. Few stopped to wonder about the fate of the former owners.

  Yet a surprising number of Jews, some 5,000 to 7,000, had gone underground and were also known as ‘submarines’. Some were hiding in the city, either in the homes of sympathetic anti-Nazis or in little summer houses on allotments. Those who could easily pass as Aryans had removed the yellow star from their clothes, obtained false papers and mingled with the population. All feared arrest at almost any moment, either by an SA patrol in the street or by Gestapo plain-clothes men guided by a Jewish Greifer, or ‘catcher’, who had been blackmailed into spotting and denouncing ‘submarines’ with the dubious promise that their own family might be saved.

  At night, when the sirens wailed, the population, would file into air-raid shelters, cellars or the vast caverns of the flak towers. They carried thermoses and small cardboard suitcases with sandwiches, their valuables and important documents. With wry Berliner humour, the sirens were called ‘Meyer’s trumpet’, a reference to Göring’s fatuous boast at the beginning of the war that if the RAF ever bombed Berlin, his name was Meyer. The Zoo flak tower in the Tiergarten could hold 18,000 people. The diarist Ursula von Kardorff described it as ‘like a stage-set for the prison scene in Fidelio’. Loving couples embraced on concrete spiral staircases as if taking part in a ‘travesty of a fancy-dress ball’.

  In the ordinary shelters, known as Luftschutzräume, the air smelled rancid as the place became packed with under-washed bodies and the ubiquitous problem of halitosis. Most of the population suffered from bad teeth as a result of vitamin deficiency. Shelters were lit with blue lights, and arrows and lettering on the walls were painted in luminous paint in case the electricity supply failed. In the cellars under buildings where most people took shelter, familes sat in rows facing each other as if in a U-Bahn carriage. As the buildings began to shake from the bombs, some practised strange rituals for survival, such as wrapping their head in a towel. But as buildings above were hit or caught fire, and smoke and dust entered the cellar, hysteria could easily grip those down below. Holes had been knocked through sidewalls, so that they could escape if necessary to the cellars of neighbouring blocks. Foreign workers, identified by a large letter painted on their backs, were forbidden to enter shelters and mix in such intimate circumstances with German women and children.