Masters of the Air is out on Apple TV or similar, and for those of us who saw “Memphis Belle” when it came out, there may not be that much that is new. Young men and boys flying into storms of steel, death and gore and destruction – and if you’re lucky, a couple of years in STALAG LUFT. Some 40.000 lost their lives if memory serves me right.
Opposing them were the Luftwaffe. In the course of this battle the Luftwaffe was destroyed. Its strength in the West peaked sometime in mid 1943, and by March 1944 it was broken. The factories were full of brand new fighters, but there were not enough pilots to fly them – they had been killed ( it is worth remembering that the experience for the young German pilots was equally desperate, and they died in droves, 70.000 +)
By the autumn of 1944 there was no fuel for the planes (see below) and those that flew were utterly outnumbered. The source for this is “The Luftwaffe War Diaries” (1964) by Cajus Becker, which covers the entire war and devotes a fair amount of space to the air war over Germany. It’s also worth noting how much of Luftwaffe’s strength was ground down in the East (which we always ignore), and also in the South: Germany was fighting on too many fronts.
Very roughly, the British learned early in the war that the undefended bomber would get shot down. They switched to night time bombing and “area attacks” on civilian targets, most infamously Dresden in February 1945, but Hamburg, Nürnberg, München, Berlin etc were all bombed and reduced to rubble to varying degrees. Civilian death toll is disputed, but easily exceeds half a million. The impact on German morale and war effort was small. Despite flying by night, losses were heavy to Luftwaffe night fighters and flak.
The Americans started out by ignoring the British warnings, believing their B-17s and B-24s with their large number of guns would get through without incurring terrible losses. They were proved wrong throughout 1943, and only when the P-51 Mustang took to the skies over Europe in early 1944 were they able to conduct bombing with “reasonable” losses, and conducted raids with 1000 bombers (!). The US Air Force was then able to devastate the aircraft factories, as they had also been doing in 1943 (e.g. the famous and bloody raid on Schweinfurt), but this did not reduce German aircraft output… the factories just dispersed, and a record 25.000 aircraft were produced in 1944 (!).
Then in the autumn of 1944 the US finally concentrated on the oil supply, and this had an immediate and enormous effect on the ability of Germany to fight. They should have done it much sooner. Albert Speer, 1945: “… The American’s attacks, which followed a definite system of assault on industrial targets, were by far the most dangerous. It was in fact these attacks which caused the breakdown of the German armaments industry. The attacks on the chemical industry would have sufficed, without the impact of purely military events, to render Germany defenceless”.
If you’d rather just read a book, try Serenade to the Big bird ( review ) which is very poetic and pacifist – though the author was a pilot who eventually died fighting.
schoutbynacht 