Combined Bomber Offensive

• 1. A Race Against Fighters

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  The Combined Bomber Offensive sent British and American bombers against Germany in a coordinated campaign of strategic bombing during World War II in Europe. In April 1943, Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker added a warning to its master plan. He wrote: "If the growth of the German fighter strength is not arrested quickly, it may become literally impossible to carry out the destruction planned." That single worry shaped what the bombers were told to hit.

  Two allied air forces had to agree on targets while each trusted its own methods. Why did the planners put German fighters ahead of everything else? Which commanders embraced the plan, and which ones bent it to their own purposes? And when the invasion of Northwest Europe arrived, had the bombing delivered what it promised?

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• 2. The Casablanca Directive

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  In 1942, Britain's Ministry of Economic Warfare published the Bombers' Baedeker, which identified three "bottleneck" German industries: oil, communications, and ball bearings. A second edition followed in 1944.

  At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, the Combined Chiefs of Staff agreed to conduct a bomber offensive from the United Kingdom. On the 4th of February 1943, the British Air Ministry turned that agreement into the Casablanca directive. Its stated object was the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic systems. It also aimed to undermine the morale of the German people until their capacity for armed resistance was fatally weakened. Daylight attacks were to be made whenever targets were unsuitable for night attack. The directive wanted heavy losses imposed on the German day fighter force, and it wanted that force kept away from the Russian and Mediterranean theatres.

  Until the middle of 1943, the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Forces had mostly attacked German industry in their own ways. The British favored broad night attacks on industrial areas. The Americans made what they called precision attacks on specific targets. Heavy bombers of the RAF flew chiefly by night and in large numbers. The American effort came by day, in massed formations with escorting fighters. Together they formed a round-the-clock effort, except where weather prevented operations. Only in the latter stages of the war would German fighter defences be so reduced that British bombers could fly by day without risking large losses.

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• 3. The Eaker Plan

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  A Committee of Operations Analysts in the United States began its work on the 9th of December 1942. Its report recommended 18 operations in each three-month phase, with 12 of them expected to succeed. These would strike six vulnerable target systems made up of 76 specific targets. The systems were German submarine yards and bases, the aircraft industry, ball bearing manufacture, oil production, synthetic rubber and tires, and military transport vehicle production.

  In April 1943, an Anglo-American committee under Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker finished the Combined Bomber Offensive plan. Brigadier General Haywood S. Hansell Jr. led the work, and Brigadier General Orvil A. Anderson sat on the committee. The plan projected American bomber strength across four phases, at 944, then 1,192, then 1,746, and finally 2,702 bombers. Those figures ran through the 31st of March 1944.

  One assessment calls Eaker's plan "a document devised to help Arnold get more planes and men for the 8th Air Force," rather than one "designed to affect British operations in any substantive way." General "Hap" Arnold commanded the USAAF.

  The British drafted their own paper in April 1943, titled "The Attack on the GAF," meaning the German Air Force. It called German fighter strength "the most formidable weapon...against our bomber offensive." It recommended attacks on 34 airfields within range of the Rhubarb and Circus operations. It also named ten towns suitable for high-level daytime bombing followed by RAF night attacks, and it may have influenced target selection by the Eighth Air Force.

  The Combined Chiefs of Staff approved the Eaker Plan on the 19th of May 1943. German fighter strength stood alone as the intermediate objective. The primary objectives were submarine yards and bases, the rest of the aircraft industry, ball bearings, and oil, with oil contingent on attacks against Ploiești. Synthetic rubber and tires, and military motor transport vehicles, were secondary. Fewer than four weeks later, a new directive reordered those priorities.

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• 4. Pointblank and Friction

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  The offensive began on the 10th of June 1943, in the middle of the British campaign against Ruhr industry known as the Battle of the Ruhr. Four days later, on the 14th of June, the Combined Chiefs of Staff issued the Pointblank directive, which modified the Casablanca directive. Fighter aircraft factories became the highest-priority targets, because the Western Allied invasion of France could not take place without fighter superiority. The directive ordered RAF Bomber Command and the US Eighth Air Force to bomb specific targets such as aircraft factories. The Quebec Conference upheld the change in August 1943.

  Execution was left to the force commanders, so the British kept making night attacks on most of the German fighter production targets. The listed factories included the Regensburg Messerschmitt plant, attacked at high cost in August. The Schweinfurter Kugellagerwerke ball-bearing works was attacked in October and caused heavy USAAF losses. The Wiener Neustädter Flugzeugwerke produced Bf 109 fighters.

  The Germans fought back with deception as well as fighters. Near Essen they built the Krupp decoy site, the Kruppsche Nachtscheinanlage, a large night-time decoy meant to divert Allied airstrikes from the real production site of the arms factory.

  In July 1943, the USAAF coordinated a raid on the same location as the RAF for the first time. Two daylight missions were to hit U-boat pens and yards in Hamburg after the RAF's opening raid. Fires from the night's bombing obscured the targets. The Americans were "not keen to follow immediately on the heels of RAF raids in the future because of the smoke problem."

  At the Cairo Conference, Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, complained about a three-month delay in the offensive. Losses in the first months of Pointblank and lower-than-planned American bomber production had caused it. The Americans asked to place the offensive under a single Allied strategic air commander. The British refused, since they did not want to be part of a decision they judged unwise and purely American in origin. In October 1943, after Arnold submitted a plan for the most effective exploitation of the offensive, the Allied chiefs signed orders to raid aircraft industries in southern Germany and Austria. That same month, the commander of RAF Bomber Command put his own view of the campaign's purpose in writing.

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• 5. Harris and the Cities

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  Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, commander in chief of RAF Bomber Command, wrote to his superior in October 1943. He urged the British government to be honest with the public about the purpose of the offensive. The aim, he wrote, was "the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized life throughout Germany." He added that destroyed houses, lost lives, and a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale were accepted and intended aims, not by-products of attempts to hit factories.

  The wording of both the Casablanca and Pointblank directives gave Harris enough leeway to continue night-time area bombardment of industrial cities. That campaign struck the factories and, indirectly through the destruction of housing, the factory workers.

  On the 13th of February 1944, the Combined Chiefs issued a new plan for the offensive that no longer included German morale in its objective. Harris later wrote that the subject of morale had been dropped, and that the number of cities with targets still gave him a wide range of choice. "The new instructions therefore made no difference," he said. He also protested that the plan was not "a reasonable operation of war," and the Air Staff had to order him to bomb the Pointblank targets at Schweinfurt.

  Between the 18th of November 1943 and the 31st of March 1944, RAF Bomber Command fought the Battle of Berlin. It consisted of 16 major raids on the German capital, mixed with many other raids across Germany to make British operations less predictable. In those 16 raids the RAF destroyed around 4,500 acres of Berlin, about 18 square kilometres, for the loss of 300 aircraft. Harris had planned to reduce most of the city to rubble, break German morale, and so win the war.

  During the battle, the British lost 1,047 bombers across all their bombing operations in Europe, and a further 1,682 aircraft were damaged. The period ended with the disastrous raid on Nuremberg on the 30th of March 1944. Losses of 7-12% of the aircraft committed to large raids were unsustainable. The official British historians judged the campaign an operational defeat for the RAF. Harris then had to commit his heavy bombers to Transport Plan attacks on lines of communication in France, in preparation for the Normandy landings. The RAF would not return to the systematic destruction of Germany until the last quarter of 1944.

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• 6. Escorts and Big Week

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  On Black Thursday, the 14th of October 1943, the USAAF lost about a quarter of the aircraft it sent out. It then stopped strikes deep into Germany until an escort could follow the bombers to their targets and back. In 1944 the bombers returned, now escorted by Republic P-47 Thunderbolts and North American P-51 Mustangs. Eaker gave the order to "Destroy the enemy air force wherever you find them, in the air, on the ground and in the factories."

  At the start of 1944, Major General Jimmy Doolittle replaced Eaker as commander of the Eighth Air Force. Doolittle changed a USAAF policy that had required escorting fighters to stay with the bombers at all times. With his permission, some fighters flew ahead of the bombers' combat box formations to clear the skies of Luftwaffe opposition. The freedom cost the Germans heavily. The less maneuverable Zerstörergeschwader, or "destroyer wings" of twin-engined heavy fighters, suffered badly. So did their replacement, the Sturmgruppen, flying heavily armed and armored Fw 190s. After the bombers had hit their targets, the American fighters could strafe German airfields and transport infrastructure on the way home.

  Soon after Doolittle took command, the plan issued on the 13th of February received the code name Argument. Once the weather turned favorable on the 19th of February, the USAAF launched Operation Argument. Between the 20th and the 25th of February 1944 it became known as Big Week. Massed bombers, protected by P-47s and P-51s, attacked the German aircraft industry. The aim was to lure the Luftwaffe into a decisive battle for air superiority.

  The historians Charles Webster and Noble Frankland judged that Big Week and the attacks that followed reduced the Luftwaffe's fighting capacity. The threat to strategic targets left German fighters no alternative but to defend them. Yet they wrote that "the combat was primarily fought and certainly won" by the American long-range fighters. The commanders had still not agreed on what the bombers should do for the invasion itself.

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• 7. The Overlord Argument

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  Air Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, who would command the tactical element of the invasion air forces, was assigned on the 26th of June 1943 to draft the Overlord air plan. The initial plan omitted any requirement to seek air superiority before the landings. Instead it called for bombing communications targets as the primary task, and rail yards and repair facilities as the secondary one.

  At the meeting of the 14th of February 1944, Leigh-Mallory claimed that German fighters would defend the rail yards and be defeated there. If they did not, air superiority would be won over the D-Day beaches. Harris replied that German rail traffic would still be sufficient to supply the invasion defenses. Spaatz proposed attacks on German industry, which would force the fighters to move away from the Overlord beaches to defend the plants. Tedder concluded that a committee should study the targeting, but when it met in March, no consensus was reached.

  On the 25th of March 1944, Portal chaired a meeting of the generals and restated that air superiority remained the highest priority. He said the pre-invasion rail attacks only needed to reduce traffic enough for tactical air power to hinder enemy defenses during the first five weeks of Overlord. Sir John Kennedy and Andrew Noble countered that the military share of rail traffic was so small that no amount of bombing would significantly affect operations. Spaatz again proposed an oil plan to force the enemy to cut oil consumption. Eisenhower was concerned that British Army transportation experts had not been consulted. He still decided that, apart from the attack on the German air force, the transportation plan offered the only reasonable chance of an important air contribution to the land battle. Control of all air operations passed to Eisenhower at noon on the 14th of April.

  Doubts persisted. Very few German fighters rose to contest the early attacks on French rail yards, and the Ninth Air Force had dropped 33,000 tons of bombs on French railway targets through April. In May 1944, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt that he was not convinced of the wisdom of the plan. Eisenhower meanwhile let Spaatz test whether the Luftwaffe would defend oil targets more heavily. On trial raids of the 12th and the 28th of May, German fighters defended the oil targets heavily. When the invasion had not begun during the good weather of May, Luftwaffe fighters in France were recalled to defend industry in the Reich.

  The German plan was to wait for the invasion and then redeploy fighters to unused French air bases on the cue words "Threatening Danger West." Josef Priller and his wingman Heinz Wodarczyk, flying Fw 190As of Jagdgeschwader 26, were among those due to be recalled. They flew two of the very sparse Luftwaffe day sorties over the Normandy beaches on D-day. On the 7th and the 8th of June, the Luftwaffe began redeploying roughly 600 aircraft to France to attack the Normandy bridgehead.

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• 8. What the Bombs Achieved

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  In September 1944, monthly German single-engine fighter production reached its wartime peak of 3031 aircraft. William R. Emerson noted that output in the first quarter of 1944 was 30% higher than in the third quarter of 1943. It doubled in the second quarter of 1944 and tripled by the third. Total single-engine fighter production for 1944 reached 25,860 Me 109s and Fw 190s.

  Operation Pointblank showed that German aircraft and ball bearings plants were not very vulnerable to air attack. Production of synthetic rubber, ammunition, nitrogen, and ethyl fluid was concentrated in fewer factories and would probably have been much easier to damage. After Pointblank, Germany dispersed its aircraft industry across 729 medium and very small plants, some of them in tunnels, caves, and mines.

  Still, the operation did reduce the Luftwaffe's threat to the Allies. By the Normandy landings, the Luftwaffe had only 80 operational aircraft on the North French coast. They managed about 250 combat sorties on D-day, against 13,743 Allied sorties.

  Pointblank operations ended on the fifth day of the invasion. German rocket weapons became the highest priority of the offensive in June 1944, and the oil campaign took that place in September. On the 1st of November, the Combined Strategic Targets Committee approved Tedder's proposal to keep oil as the top priority and place Germany's rail system second. On the 12th of April 1945, Strategic Bombing Directive No. 4 ended the strategic bombing campaign in Europe.

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