5

From Poland to the Pacific

THE GREATER PREWAR arming and mobilization of Germany and Japan, and to a lesser extent Italy, had given the Axis a head start over the Allies in air operations. They strafed and bombed mostly underprepared and nearby neighbors, creating overconfidence that soon led inevitably to laxity. Japan, for example, in 1939–1940 spent 72 percent of its entire annual budget on military expenditures. Germany produced more planes in the mid-1930s than either the United States or Great Britain. Even Japan built twice as many aircraft in 1939 as did America. Yet a far more massive Allied effort to match and surpass early Axis leads in both the quality and quantity of fighters and fighter-bombers had already achieved parity by the end of 1942 and clear superiority in transports, fighters, and bombers by late 1943. Again, the entire pulse of World War II mirror-imaged the relative production of and improvements in aircraft between 1939 and 1944.¹

Italian and German aircraft deployed in the Spanish Civil War, and Japanese airplanes over Manchuria, were reportedly both superior and more numerous than those available to the Western democracies. German prewar air transportation was among the world’s best. Yet, quite ominously for the Axis, even by the end of 1940 Japan and Germany together still produced only 60 percent as many aircraft as did a neutral United States and a beleaguered Britain combined, a gap that would widen in 1941. Early border campaigns by Germany had misled the world into believing that the Luftwaffe’s initial edge in the number and quality of planes might be permanent, a reflection of intrinsic Nazi technological, industrial, or even ideological superiority. The ensuing air war over Britain and in Russia and the Mediterranean questioned all such notions by early 1941, and utterly refuted them by late 1942.²

THE LUFTWAFFE, OFFICIALLY little more than four years old, swarmed over Poland from the north, south, and west on September 1, 1939. More than two thousand fighters and dive bombers accompanied the Panzers. German Panzerkampfwagen Mark I and II tanks were already obsolete, but due to close air support these lightweight machines were able to plow through Polish forces and blast supply depots and transportation hubs. The easy victories were declared to be confirmation of the verdict from the recent Spanish Civil War that it was pointless to resist tactical German air power when used in conjunction with armor.

Few critics in late 1939 had bothered to note that a largely disarmed United States possessed, in its peacetime air force, a contemporary four-engine bomber, the B-17, that even in its earliest incarnations was probably as good as or better than the smaller two-engine workhorses of the Luftwaffe. Quite logically the Wehrmacht had assumed a medium bomber might be adequate for hitting its most likely adversaries on either border. Nor was there even much need for an intensive German strategic bombing campaign for the first two weeks of the war. Poland’s assets were almost all deployed in the field and were steadily being destroyed, and were not likely to be quickly or easily replaced by existing Polish reserves or industrial production. Those Polish troops who could not immediately be attacked in eastern Poland would be left to the Soviets.³

Still, both Hitler and Goering saw the propaganda advantages of bombing Warsaw, terrorizing the population, and sending a message to the Western Europeans, who would likely be horrified at the thought of such incendiaries soon raining down on their own civilians. In September 1939, Germany possessed the best-organized and best professionally trained strategic bombing force in the world. Its fighter-escorted, two-engine bombers awed immediate neighbors. Between September 24 and 27, the first European city to be bombed since 1918 was methodically hit with the chief purpose of killing civilians and eroding morale. Between five hundred and one thousand Luftwaffe light and medium bombers ruined about 40 percent of Warsaw’s mostly undefended urban center, resulting in some twenty-five to forty thousand civilian deaths. In the generalized dread of German air power that followed, few speculated whether the Luftwaffe would have had such an easy time had Poland had flak batteries, barrage balloons, and fighter squadrons, or late-model radar stations.

The American aviation hero Charles Lindbergh—himself accorded occasional choreographed visits to the Luftwaffe from 1936 to 1938—had warned the military establishments of Britain and America of the excellence and diversity of the new German aircraft models, supposed reflections of the vitality of Nazism itself. In a personal letter to General “Hap” Arnold written in November 1938, Lindbergh implied wrongly that the Luftwaffe had become nearly invincible: “Germany is undoubtedly the most powerful nation in the world in military aviation and her margin of leadership is increasing with each month that passes. In a number of fields, the Germans are already ahead of us and they are rapidly cutting down whatever lead we now hold in many others.”

Lindbergh, in delusional admiration for German professionalism, was overly impressed by the daring of the Third Reich’s experienced and skilled pilots, and the brilliance of its ground-support tactics. Yet the Luftwaffe hardly warranted his hyperbole, which seemed based more on romantic notions of relative national will and purpose than on military capacity. “The organized vitality of Germany,” Lindbergh still gushed in his autobiography four decades after his visit, “was what most impressed me: the unceasing activity of the people, and the convinced dictatorial direction to create the new factories, airfields, and research laboratories.”

It seems odd that by late 1938 Lindbergh did not seek fundamental comparisons between Luftwaffe bombers and the new American B-17 Flying Fortress, or German transports versus the converted American civilian airliner the DC-3—soon to be rebranded by the military as the C-47—or how well the long-range Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor stacked up against the more versatile and practicable Consolidated PBY Catalina. The Messerschmitt Bf 109 was not all that superior to the new British Supermarine Spitfire. Lindbergh also ignored the fact that German avionics and radar were behind those of their British rivals. German industry did not have a history of mass-assembly production comparable to that of the American automobile industry. And Hermann Goering was certainly not a competent air marshal in the fashion of his prewar counterparts in Great Britain and the United States.⁴

Nonetheless, in the first days of World War II, the Polish campaign seemed tailor-made to frighten the French and British publics. Junkers Ju 87 Stukas, sirens shrieking, made near vertical dives before pulling up from the ground in the last seconds to unload bombs with murderous accuracy on outmanned Polish infantry. Late-model Bf 109 fighters achieved air superiority in a matter of hours, destroying all eight hundred planes of the hapless Polish air force in less than two weeks.⁵

German advances clamped down south from East Prussia and east from eastern Germany and German-annexed Czechoslovakia. There would soon be no chance of strategic withdrawal to the east across the vast expanses of Poland, given that the Soviet Union was set to attack the Poles in just three weeks. That one of the weaker nations on the Eurasian mainland was nearly simultaneously invaded, in surprise fashion by the two neighboring and strongest land powers in the world, was not much considered. Instead, an air-augmented Blitzkrieg—“lightning war,” a term the German strategists themselves did not normally employ—ipso facto was deemed unstoppable by those likely to be next in its path.

German Panzers and infantry could have defeated Poland even without two thousand planes in the skies. Until he met the British Royal Air Force, Goering scarcely grasped that the number of enemy aircraft and pilots destroyed meant little if they could be easily replaced or even expanded at rates comparable to or exceeding those of the Luftwaffe. The blame for such naiveté was mostly Hitler’s, who, despite upping German military expenditures in 1939 to over 20 percent of GDP, never prepared the Wehrmacht or German industry, even psychologically, for something of a quite different magnitude than the European border wars of 1939–1940.

Hitler’s next air assaults against Denmark (April 9, 1940) and Norway (April 9–June 10, 1940) further upped the deadly reputation of German air power, again regardless of the actual quality and number of planes in the skies. The Danes capitulated in six hours and the Norwegians in two months, but the Germans still had not met a comparable air rival. The Luftwaffe could not stop Norwegian shore batteries and British warships from sinking several Kriegsmarine ships, including ten destroyers, almost half of the existing German destroyer fleet. The harsh climate and rough weather of Scandinavia, and the complexity of covering large amphibious operations without carrier forces, suggested that in any offensive operation other than a clear-weather border incursion against a weak neighbor, the Luftwaffe would face real difficulties.⁶

For a variety of reasons, Hitler’s Luftwaffe never could produce en masse heavy bombers similar to the superb American B-17 and the later B-24, or even to first-generation British Stirlings and Halifaxes, and ultimately the remarkable eight-ton-carrying workhorse Avro Lancaster. In a few months after the Norway campaign this shortcoming would prove one of the great weaknesses of the Luftwaffe, and perhaps ensured that it would never be able to bomb Britain into submission, or even much reduce British industrial output. Having impressive medium bombers in 1939 that surprised and terrified outgunned neighbors did not mean competence in long-range strategic bombing across the sea or a thousand miles into the Soviet Union.

German industry had introduced the excellent four-engine Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor as a civilian airliner in 1937, proving that it could build four-engine aircraft with wingspans over one hundred feet. Yet the failure to master heavy bomber production was as much tactical as technological, and was often later blamed on early Luftwaffe air marshals who for a time were supposedly wedded to the flawed idea that the dive-bombing capability of medium bombers could substitute for high-altitude strategic bombing. German strategists had also assumed that blitzkrieg resulted inevitably in short wars that precluded the need for long-term strategic pounding of faraway enemy industry. In part, Hitler was already thinking of miracle weapons such as guided missiles and jet aircraft that might preclude the need for heavy bombers. Yet paradoxically the huge investment in 1943 in jets and the V-rockets made it difficult to continue to fund adequately a heavy bomber program. In part, the dead-end experience of the flawed Heinkel He 177—a rather brilliant experimental design using just two nacelles for what were, in fact, two pairs of coupled engines—perhaps soured designers on the entire idea of pursuing four-engine aircraft. Few aircraft were as theoretically sophisticated and innovative—and unworkable—as the 177.

Early slow and vulnerable four-engine British bombers like the Short Stirling and the Handley Page Halifax were gradually superseded by heavier Avro Lancasters by late 1942. Nonetheless, in terms of reliability, payload, and speed, these early heavies were probably still at least as good as any medium bombers that Germany built until the emergence of the Dornier Do 217 in early 1942. Almost every subsequent German effort at producing reliable four-engine or beefed-up two-engine strategic bombers en masse—whether the Messerschmitt 264 Amerika, the Junkers Ju 290, or the Heinkel He 177 Griffin—would prove wanting. The fact that the Germans kept trying to build heavy bombers suggests that they finally assumed four engines to be usually superior to two-engine designs. Despite the tendency for ever-greater horsepower of individual power plants throughout the war, two engines never supplied quite enough power for heavy bomb loads and extended range.

Hitler himself raged about the failure of the 177: “The garbage plane is, of course, the biggest piece of junk that was probably ever produced.” The Heinkel cost just as many man-hours of labor as the B-17, but, despite possessing impressive payload, speed, and range, was never produced in comparable numbers and lacked the workmanlike reliability of the American bomber. Goering’s idea of deploying four hundred heavy bombers by 1942, and an operational bomber fleet of one thousand planes (largely with the inclusion of problem-plagued Heinkel He 177s) by 1943 remained a fantasy, and a bitter fantasy at that, given the unreliable Heinkel’s marked inferiority to its Allied counterparts. Often the Germans resorted to mythmaking about their unproven prototypes, at times naming the ill-conceived Griffin (and an entire series of failed models) the “Ural Bomber” and the Me 264 the “Amerika,” as if mere brand names could translate into real bombers that would reach Soviet or American industry. It was typical of Nazi Germany’s mythologies that it built a few six-engine prototype bombers (e.g., Junkers Ju 390) but not a single mass-produced practicable four-engine one.⁷

In his dinner conversations Hitler turned to magical solutions to his bomber dilemma: “If I had a bomber capable of flying at more than seven hundred and fifty kilometres an hour, I’d have supremacy everywhere.… I’d annihilate the enemy—for it would be impossible for him to catch up with his loss of production during the period.” Hitler dreamed of uses for weapons that he (and his enemies) never possessed; in contrast, Allied leaders did not fantasize of four-hundred-mile-per-hour bombers, but instead found ever new strategies of utilizing their assets already in production, whether using heavy strategic B-17s and B-24s as tactical ground-support bombers to blast holes in German lines during Operation Cobra in late July 1944 or employing high-level B-29s beginning in March 1945 on low-level incendiary raids over Japan.⁸

Four-engine bombers—given their greater drag, complexity, and maintenance—were not always intrinsically better than two-engine models. Intercontinental airliners today, for example, are trending back to employing two, rather than four engines, given the vast increases in individual engine power and efficiency. But given the status of aeronautical science in the 1940s, to achieve greater bomb tonnage and longer ranges, it was usually necessary to design heavy bombers with four of the standard engines of the era. The excellent German Daimler-Benz DB 603 power plant produced over 1,700 horsepower and allowed the new relatively compact, two-engine Dornier Do 217 bomber to match many of the performance characteristics of heavier American bombers until the emergence of the B-29 (its four mechanically plagued Wright R-3350–23 and R-3550–23A Duplex-Cyclone engines still produced 2,200 hp each). But fewer than two thousand two-engine Do 217s were built. The theory that high-performance two-engine bombers could match their larger four-engine counterparts in speed, range, and bomb load again was never quite proven in World War II.

Finally, in early 1944, the Germans accepted that they simply did not have the ability to build both bombers and fighters, the latter so necessary to protect the homeland from Allied B-17s, B-24s, and Lancasters. Luftwaffe head Goering explained why German bombers virtually ceased to exist later in the war: “But you have to consider that I can always build four or five fighters instead of a four-engine bomber.… For example, what was the drop in production of heavy and medium bombers as compared to the increase in small fighters.” Goering was, of course, correct. But the dilemma was worse than that, given that much of the later astonishing increase in German fighter production while the Third Reich was being bombed was somewhat illusionary: the fighters were often hastily and shoddily manufactured, and the Luftwaffe was not able to provide pilots and fuel for the planes it received.

Despite Hitler’s grand prewar plans, there were no deployable German aircraft carriers at all, and thus no naval aircraft comparable to either the American, British, or Japanese carrier air fleets. Apparently, Hitler believed that naval surface war would always be waged close to the shores of Germany and Italy, and not against the United States and the British Empire, and would thus be within range of Axis land-based aircraft. Like battleships, carriers were expensive to build. They would only draw resources away from both Admiral Raeder’s commitment to battleships and battle cruisers and to an increasingly influential Admiral Doenitz and his dreams of deploying a huge transoceanic fleet of sophisticated U-boats. Unlike other navies, rivalries in the Kriegsmarine were not just between the new advocates of carriers and the defenders of traditional surface ships like battleships and cruisers, but also between U-boats and all types of surface ships.

THE MAY 10, 1940, invasion of France and the Low Countries proved a replay of Poland on a vast scale. Again without warning, Hitler attacked neighbors in relatively clear weather. The relatively brief fighting did not tax supply and logistics. The combined French, Belgian, and Dutch air forces were far more impressive than the Polish, but not enough to alter the results: Germany gained air superiority within days for the advancing Panzers.⁹

In a controversial decision that marked the unambiguous beginning of bombing exclusively civilian targets, the Germans sent 110 Heinkel two-engine bombers to hit Rotterdam. Because of winds and the lack of effective firefighting, the wooden high-rises of the city’s historic center burned and nearly one thousand Dutch citizens were killed and a large but unknown number left homeless—supposedly another clear warning of what resistance to the Wehrmacht might entail for Britain and France in the new age of strategic bombing. RAF Air Commodore Wilf Burnett remembered the event:

When the invasion of Holland took place I was recalled from leave and went on my first operation on 15th May 1940 against mainland Germany. Our target was Dortmund and on the way back we were routed via Rotterdam. The German Air Force had bombed Rotterdam the day before and it was still in flames. I realised then only too well that the phony war was over and that this was for real. By that time the fire services had extinguished a number of fires, but they were still dotted around the whole city. This was the first time I’d ever seen devastation by fires on this scale. We went right over the southern outskirts of Rotterdam at about 6,000 or 7,000 feet, and you could actually smell the smoke from the fires burning on the ground. I was shocked seeing a city in flames like that. Devastation on a scale I had never experienced.¹⁰

By May 10, when the Germans crossed the French border, over four hundred British fighters and bombers were flying over France, with Hurricane fighters and Fairey and Bristol bombers based on French soil near Rheims. While outnumbered and often fighting above hostile ground, British fighters had nearly matched, dogfight for dogfight, the Luftwaffe’s best. German pilots were surprised to discover in initial air fights over Dunkirk that a few of the newly appearing British-based Supermarine Spitfire Mk Is—unlike the more numerous and better-known Hawker Hurricanes—were almost comparable (despite their short range) to the heralded workhorse of the Luftwaffe, the Messerschmitt Bf 109E, in terms of speed, reliability, and climbing rate. In regard to maneuverability and ease of handling, Spitfires were perhaps even superior to, and their less experienced pilots as good as or better than, their German counterparts and veterans of the war in Poland. Spitfires each month were also being produced in greater numbers than 109s, and British pilots were schooled and deployed at a far more rapid rate in superb aircraft requiring less training and skill to operate.

The point is not that in brief encounters British Spitfire pilots proved consistently superior either over Dunkirk or the Channel to their German Bf 109 counterparts. Instead, the lesson is that the Luftwaffe finally met a serious enemy. And this new experience demonstrated that German air power—Stuka dive bombers, fleets of medium and often unescorted bombers, adequate pilot training programs, moderate aircraft production, first-generation radar, ground-breaking use of radio navigation and pathfinder units—was no longer exceptional. And yet it had to be extraordinary to fulfill Hitler’s agendas on the relative cheap. Fortunately for the Germans, the Royal Air Force over France continued to conduct unescorted bomber attacks against German ground deployments, at one point losing two hundred bombers in three days.¹¹

Churchill, in a controversial but ultimately wise decision, at last chose not to reinforce the RAF’s fighter fleet over a sinking France. About a third to a half of the RAF deployable fighters and over two hundred pilots and planes had already been lost in May and early June. The long-expected full showdown between the two air forces would come a few weeks later in mid-summer 1940.

Even in defeat, outnumbered French pilots flying the supposedly outclassed and outnumbered Curtiss P-36 Hawk and the often problem-plagued but superbly maneuverable new Dewoitine D.520, along with British Hurricanes, had lost fewer planes than the Bf 109s they shot down—a harbinger of things to come for the Luftwaffe over Britain. In fact, French fighters outfought the Luftwaffe in almost all categories of fighter performance, albeit largely because many Luftwaffe squadrons were absorbed with ground support of an advancing army. Unfortunately, the Allies did not deploy their excellent planes, superb pilots, and home terrain to full advantage, failing to ensure that their aircraft were well serviced and maintained—and in the air. Numbers and quality of planes were not the only criteria of success. Throughout World War II, far more important were questions of operational efficacy: how many sorties each particular plane flew and to what degree it coordinated its efforts with ground troops. In that regard, the Luftwaffe sent up its planes far more frequently each day, and it used them in ground support of the Panzers far more effectively than did the French in support of their armor.

To the south, French pilots did well against the fighters and bombers of Mussolini’s Regia Aeronautica that soon had been opportunistically sent across the border to France in expectation of piling on a collapsing France and nearly defeated Britain. Again, France’s defeat was not due to substandard French fighters, poor pilots, or a lack of aircraft, but rather to faulty command, sloppy organization, and low morale that had resulted in only a quarter of three thousand available French fighters being deployed in actual battle. Planes flew too infrequently and were not properly serviced; too many were prematurely sent to sanctuaries in North Africa; and too many were held in reserve. Even so, the Germans lost somewhere around 1,400 aircraft to French and British fighters in the air and on the ground, almost as many planes as they would lose in the ensuing defeat in the skies over Britain—losses that would haunt the Luftwaffe a year later in Russia. More important, a complacent Luftwaffe took away another wrong lesson from its air victories in France: German organization, training, and élan could easily nullify disadvantages in aircraft numbers and performance—a myth to be exposed during the Blitz and for the rest of the war.¹²

THE BATTLE OF Britain is often defined as the relatively brief but fierce air war over Britain between July 10 and October 31, 1940. In fact, the “battle” was a yearlong, on-off slog that had begun earlier, in June 1940, and continued until June 1941, when unsustainable German losses and the invasion of Russia ended serious further Luftwaffe efforts to bomb Britain into submission. Other than some temporary setbacks in Norway, a few minor successful French armored counterattacks, and a period of U-boat losses, the utter failure of the Luftwaffe over Britain was the first clear-cut defeat of the German military. The verdict also seemed final: Nazi Germany had no fallback plans for obtaining air superiority over Britain. For the next five years, Hitler looked in vain for miracles to recalibrate the war against Britain. The numerous 1941–1942 defeats of the British in overseas theaters and the later use of V-1 and V-2 rockets against England were never to achieve what the Luftwaffe in 1940 could not.

The Luftwaffe had planned to quickly clear the Channel of the British navy, assure air superiority over the British fighter fleet, and then with impunity systematically bomb British war industries, with particular emphases on ports, shipping, docks, and storehouses. All that was to be the prelude to an amphibious invasion of Great Britain. Germans also might occasionally bomb civilian centers in the manner of Warsaw or Rotterdam to hasten the collapse of British morale. The supposed result would be a veritable walk-in victory by amphibious German forces (Operation Sea Lion). Or, a demoralized and blockaded Britain, without sufficient food or weaponry, would be forced to sue for peace—a reminder to the United States that only accommodation with the Third Reich could exempt it from such an eventual reckoning as well. Absent from the Luftwaffe calculus were intangibles that transcended pilot skill and plane excellence but that were so central in achieving air supremacy: the relative rates of replacing pilots and planes, an air command’s innovation and response to daily changes, the distance of the target from air bases, typical weather conditions, and the concurrent responsibilities of air power in other theaters. In addition, the Germans failed to appreciate that the supremacy of British radar was not so much technological but organizational and practical in placing radar sites in key seams while having the properly trained staffing to interpret the results accurately and then to make the intelligence quickly available to commanders of fighter squadrons.

On the eve of the attack, the British had about three hundred fewer serviceable fighter aircraft than the Germans. The Luftwaffe was wildly optimistic. It had a mostly short trip to British targets from new bases in occupied France and a more distant Norway (which almost immediately proved too far for Bf 109 fighter escorts and too taxing on crews, even for the rarer bombing missions against northern Britain and Scotland). The late summer weather of 1940 should not have posed too much of an impediment. Britain’s air arm was all that was left of Allied air resources, with little chance that Commonwealth planes and pilots, a neutral America, or a pro-German Soviet Union could quickly alter the balance of rival air power. No plane in neutral America’s fighter arsenal of the time—not the P-36, P-39, or P-40—offered any advantage over existing British frontline fighters; production of the adequate P-38 Lightning was stalled, and the two-engine fighter would not see widespread combat until April 1942.

Yet, astonishingly, the British not only defeated the Luftwaffe’s strategic bombing campaign but also dealt it such a crippling blow that by late spring 1941 Hitler would miss especially the 1,600 German aircraft and nearly three thousand Luftwaffe pilots and crews lost over Britain—coming on top of more than 1,400 lost planes in the battle for France. Despite the enormous forces arrayed for Operation Barbarossa and the stepped-up plane production, the Luftwaffe started the campaign markedly weakened, with at least two hundred fewer bombers than it had at the beginning of the May 1940 war against France. While the Soviets had sent supplies to Hitler to fuel his efforts to destroy Britain, British fighters in contrast had eroded the Luftwaffe in a way that lessened the odds of an easy victory in a few months against Russia—one of most important but least heralded contributions of the war.¹³

Conventional wisdom suggests that just a few more days of concentrated German attacks on radar installations and fighter bases might have broken, at least for a while, the RAF fighter screens. But then suddenly, the traditional explanation continues, Hitler, enraged over British retaliatory bombing of Germany—particularly the August 25, 1940, inconsequential raid against Berlin—ordered Goering and his subordinates to switch to nocturnal attacks on London. That unwise early September change in strategy caused much death and destruction, but still did not knock out British industry, while giving the reeling RAF a critical respite from further attack on its airfields and radar.

That conventional explanation for the cause of German defeat over Britain is surely incomplete. More likely, the German failure was ultimately due as much to Hitler’s air marshals’ own flawed strategic and operational thinking, much of which predated the war, as it was to Hitler’s petulant outbursts. German fighter pilots and planes, while more numerous, were not particularly qualitatively or quantitatively superior to British Spitfire squadrons, and in many cases were inferior. In fact, when the battle began in earnest on July 10, 1940, the number of battle-ready, late model, top-flight fighters—Bf 109s versus Spitfires and Hurricanes—favored the British. By late 1940, the Germans were losing more planes per month than were the British, and building fewer—hardly a sustainable proposition for an aggressor soon to invade the Soviet Union.

German bombers were mostly medium, two-engine Heinkel 111s, Dornier Do 17s, and the excellent Junkers 88s—all without impressive bomb loads. German planes over Britain faced worries over fuel shortages. British fighters had more time for interception and dogfighting, and pilots could bail out over friendly territory. British airfields were better developed and perhaps more likely to be paved than German runways in many forward bases of occupied France, which were often makeshift dirt, grass, and gravel. The Germans had unwisely planned an air offensive in late summer on the expectation of an easy victory before the weather worsened and targets became obscured with cloud cover. The British knew their own fickle weather and the unpredictable conditions over Britain better than did the Germans. The latter often assumed that they were intrinsically well acquainted with the vicissitudes of the northern latitudes, only to find the weather to be an unanticipated enemy both over Britain and deep in Russia.¹⁴

London was also not Warsaw or Rotterdam but was outfitted with superior anti-aircraft forces from searchlights and flak batteries to barrage balloons and sophisticated firefighting capabilities. And it was a vast metropolis. In 1939, London was still the largest city in the world, with a population slightly larger than New York’s, at well over eight million inhabitants in the Greater London area. It was also the symbolic center of resistance to the Third Reich and drew in some of the most gifted and courageous pilots from the Dominions as well as volunteers who had escaped from occupied Eastern Europe. Unlike the Poles and Dutch, the British Isles could assume that German bombing was entirely strategic and not designed to accompany ongoing infantry and armor attacks. In other words, they knew in advance that every plane in the sky that crossed the Channel had agendas of bombing their cities or airfields, or defending bombers.

The Blitz was not just the first (and last) German strategic attempt to defeat an enemy entirely with air power, but the first in the history of warfare. Early air power was being asked to do on its own—destroy the British ability to resist—what neither the German army nor navy could come close to doing. The problem was not so much that the Luftwaffe misjudged the obstacles to a successful Blitz, but that in 1940 no air force quite understood what would be required by strategic bombing to reduce an enemy’s entire war-making potential.

RAF Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding was an authentic if often underappreciated tactical genius, who carefully customized the RAF fighter reserve by focusing his high-performance Spitfires on German fighters, and the steadier-firing Hurricanes against slower German bombers. Dowding was willing to endure short-term criticism as British cities sometimes went up in flames and Spitfires ceded initial opportunities to go after the vulnerable and finite number of bombers. Yet by the end of the battle, Hermann Goering’s premier 109s, the backbone of German air power, still suffered more losses than any other Luftwaffe aircraft.¹⁵

In contrast to the steady-handed Dowding, Goering was serially erratic. One postwar American interrogator summed him up thusly: “Lazy, superficial, arrogant, vain, and above all, a bon viveur.” General Heinz Guderian noted of his visits with Goering at his Karin Hall castle: “He either wore red boots of Russian leather with golden spurs—an item of dress scarcely essential to an aviator—or else he would appear at Hitler’s conferences in long trousers and black patent-leather pumps. He was strongly scented and painted his face. His fingers were covered with heavy rings in which were set the many large gems that he loved to display.” No such character would have enjoyed supreme air command in either the British or American air forces. Nor would a Dowding or Hap Arnold take on additional responsibility, as did Goering, for everything from economic planning to occupation policy.¹⁶

In knee-jerk response to Hitler’s own mercurial fits that ignored intelligence reports of bombing effectiveness, Goering alternated his choice of strategic emphases between radar sites and airfields, and industries and civilian centers. Dowding bet correctly that the Luftwaffe bomber fleet, with dwindling fighter escorts, would suffer unsustainable losses before it broke British morale or ruined England’s cities and industries. For almost a century British industry had lagged behind its German counterpart and now had a fraction of the theoretical resources of German-occupied Europe. Nevertheless, throughout the battle it exceeded German aircraft production by more than a two-to-one margin (2,354 to 975 new planes). During the war itself, Britain outproduced Germany in aircraft five of the seven years from 1939 into 1945.¹⁷

German strategic bombing forces never recovered from their utter defeat, and essentially ended their operations over Britain in June 1941, in fear they would have no support to provide to the upcoming German effort in Russia had they continued to battle the RAF. To achieve a mere 5 percent reduction in British military production, the Luftwaffe had lost somewhere between three thousand and four thousand pilots and crews killed, captured, or missing. Whereas the civilian and military casualties of the Battle of Britain were substantial—well over 44,652 British subjects killed, 52,370 wounded—the toll represented less than 10 percent of the Axis casualties in the Stalingrad campaign alone. The British air victory helped to persuade Hitler to turn eastward in his long-standing desire to attack Russia, even without sustainable air supremacy. That blunder ensured the survival of Western resistance. Britain and its army and navy had not suffered the fate of Poland and Western Europe, largely due to its superb pilots and planes and the leadership of Winston Churchill, Hugh Dowding, and an array of British air marshals. It is no exaggeration that the Spitfire ruined Hitler’s entire strategic timetable of 1940–1941 and thereby altered the course of the war.¹⁸

OVER THE NEXT four years, both the Germans and the Russians sought to bomb each other’s economic infrastructure and civilian centers only occasionally. The Luftwaffe in autumn 1942 helped to level Stalingrad—purportedly at one point dropping scrap metal on the defenders when bombs ran low—a distant provincial Soviet city without adequate air defenses. Otherwise the Germans focused their strategic bombing attacks on Leningrad and Moscow, as well as on Russian transportation, oil, and manufacturing sites. In these operations, more than fifty thousand Russian civilians were to die from German bombers, an unheralded number that was greater than the noncombatant toll of the Blitz in Britain.

German bombers could never reach most of the Russian industry that before and during the war had been transferred beyond the Urals, and the Luftwaffe thus had almost no ability to substantially curb Russian military production. The cities that the Germans did target were usually bombed in tactical support of nearby and ongoing infantry attacks, in a blinkered way unimaginable to British and American strategic bombing planners. Similarly, after a few futile attempts to hit Berlin, the occupied cities of Eastern Europe, and especially the oil facilities in Romania, the Soviet Union virtually ignored strategic air operations. Unlike Germany, it could afford to. Due to the expanding Anglo-American air campaign beginning in 1942, Stalin never felt a need to devote more than 15 percent of his aircraft production to multi-engine bombers.¹⁹

Neither of the belligerents on the Eastern Front had developed bombers akin to second-generation Anglo-American heavy Lancasters, B-17s, and B-24s—much less the later huge American B-29 Superfortress. The Russian four-engine Tupolev TB-3 bomber was obsolete—slow, with a small carry weight, and low service ceiling—when the war broke out but was never superseded before the end of the war.²⁰

Even by summer 1941, the Luftwaffe had learned that its limited-range medium bombers could hardly operate successfully against a country about a hundred times larger than Great Britain. The harsh Soviet winter snows hampered high-altitude bombing, hid targets, and compounded maintenance problems. German supply lines lengthened, making it hard to deliver fuel to bombers. A soon-to-be-outnumbered German army meant that the Luftwaffe could hardly spare fighters for escorting sporadic bombing missions against Soviet cities. Once Soviet industry began to supply thousands of top-flight T-34 tanks by late 1942, the Luftwaffe had little choice but to concentrate almost exclusively on ground support and to protect the transportation of armored vehicles and guns from distant German factories to the front.²¹

The Germans had lost the Battle of Britain, but the preeminence of blitzkrieg on the ground still remained largely unquestioned. Russia was no island with surrounding seas impeding the approach of Panzers, so Hitler assumed that rapid armor thrusts, huge encirclements, and tactical air support would still destroy Russian defenses in just a few weeks, just as they had forced the collapse of Polish and Western European ground forces. In the Second Punic War, Hannibal through a bold double pincer movement had surrounded and destroyed a larger Roman army at the Battle of Cannae (216 BC) in southeast Italy. Cannae-like encirclements leading to annihilation had been the dream of every German commander since the birth of the German state, and were apparently embedded into the DNA of the general staff. If the Panzers were let loose on a vast landscape with tactical air superiority, then the Wehrmacht could at will repeat decisive victories like Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War (1870) or Tannenberg in World War I (1914) and destroy the Red Army.

Again forgotten was the fact that the Soviets’ newfound allies, the British and Americans, soon established an ability to bomb Germany, in lieu of an immediate second ground front in the West. The Luftwaffe, in contrast, had no such strategic air partners. The Italians or Japanese were hardly able to take up the slack and bomb Russian or British plants. In the Armageddon of the Eastern Front, the Soviet Union simply had far better and more useful allies than did the Third Reich.

On the first day of invasion the Luftwaffe, in perhaps exaggerated style, claimed that it had destroyed over two thousand Soviet aircraft. Within a week the toll rose to over four thousand. By winter 1941, much of the original Russian air force of summer had ceased to exist. The Germans boasted that they had destroyed over twenty thousand Russian planes in 1941 alone. Although Russia would eventually lose almost ninety thousand combat aircraft on the Eastern Front, its industry would produce 150,000 planes in addition to eighteen thousand Lend-Lease models sent from Great Britain and the United States. The Luftwaffe racked up astounding numbers of destroyed Russian aircraft, suffering far fewer lost planes that were nonetheless far less easily replaced.²²

The initial Russian air losses were mostly obsolete planes. Unfortunately for the Luftwaffe, by late 1942 an array of Soviet Yakovlev, Lavochkin, and Ilyushin fighters and fighter-bombers began appearing by the thousands. They were nearly comparable to the Germans’ Bf 109, and in some cases, even to newer Fw 190 models. Nearly five thousand of the supposedly obsolete P-39 American Airacobra were provided through Lend-Lease and became a favorite Russian ground-support fighter, given its durability and 37 mm cannon—yet another example of how close Allied cooperation maximized collective resources in a way unimaginable among the Axis. As in the manner of the German shock at the superb Russian T-34 tank, the Luftwaffe had no inkling that Soviet science and industry could produce thousands of first-rate Russian aircraft to fly ground-support roles. The Russians often ignored conventional doctrines of achieving air superiority as a first priority. Soviet air planners were not overly worried about destroying the Luftwaffe in higher-altitude dogfights but instead sought to overwhelm German planes nearer the battlefield, regardless of the staggering cost in Russian pilots and planes.²³

The rest of the air war in the East followed a familiar script: Russians—fighting over familiar terrain and initially enjoying shorter interior lines, more plentiful fuel, greater production of quality aircraft, and vastly superior manpower—finally matched the Luftwaffe, and by 1944 were eventually able to overwhelm it. Two additional unexpected developments contributed to the Soviet air rebound. By early 1943, Anglo-American bombing sorties over occupied Europe and Germany had tripled. That now-existential threat forced the Luftwaffe to redeploy thousands of fighters to defend the homeland, along with thousands of anti-aircraft batteries, just as next-generation, medium-range American Thunderbolt and Lightning fighters were beginning to enter the war. German weapons production increasingly was forced to focus on air defenses, with less emphasis on tanks and field artillery, at precisely the time German armies in the East were desperately in need of more armor and big guns. Stalin harped on the absence of a second front in Western Europe in 1943, but he largely kept silent about the help that the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign offered in reducing numbers of German anti-tank guns and Luftwaffe ground-support sorties, not to mention the necessity of redeploying Wehrmacht air and anti-aircraft assets to meet the Allied invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and Italy.²⁴

THE ASSUMPTIONS OF 1939–1940 that there could be a “moral” and scientifically precise targeting of military-industrial complexes soon gave way to the area bombing of civilian centers, a few of them without much strategic importance. That alarmists and appeasers were wrong in 1939 about the likely damage from strategic bombing did not mean that they would not be right by 1944.

Through 1941, effective precision bombing was beyond the technological capacity of either Allied or Axis contemporary bombers. A prewar French bombing manual had warned (and had been largely ignored) that there was little more than a one in nine chance of hitting a target with any accuracy from even ten thousand feet. In Germany, there was little angst about indiscriminate bombing of Warsaw, Rotterdam, or Paris, given that there was little air defense and less likelihood of retaliation against the Third Reich. Later during the initial phases of the Battle of Britain, Hitler did temporarily restrict Luftwaffe targeting because of fears of reprisals against German cities by the RAF Bomber Command. But he quickly dropped that reluctance, in anger over inconsequential British bombing attacks on Berlin, and, even more likely, because the Luftwaffe believed that firebombing the British capital might either break British will or consume British dock facilities and industry.²⁵

Undeterred by the prior Blitz, the British began hitting western Germany in earnest in early 1942, even with fleets still dominated by often outdated or inadequate medium two-engine bombers (Wellingtons, Whitleys, Hampdens, and Manchesters), and almost exclusively at night. Apparently the retreat from Dunkirk, the Russian demands for a second front, the current American investment in strategic air power, and the sheer force of personality of volatile Air Marshal Arthur Harris had steadily upped Bomber Command’s share of scarce resources.

For all the impediments to these early attempts at strategic bombing, Harris sometimes achieved frightening early results. In operations like the “thousand plane” raid over Cologne on May 30–31, 1942, Bomber Command razed six hundred acres of the urban center and sent over a hundred thousand civilians fleeing the city, while losing around forty-three bombers. An elated Harris—to be known widely to the public as “Bomber” Harris—felt that he now had hit on the right formula to destroy the Third Reich, especially given that the new superb Lancaster four-engine bombers (that composed only 7 percent of the bomber fleet over Cologne) were scheduled to appear in even greater numbers by early 1943. In the March 1943 raid on the Ruhr city of Essen, home to the Krupp arms works, a huge force of 442 British bombers put most of their bombs, the majority of them incendiaries, squarely on the urban center with small losses of their own.

The British believed that the Germans could not stop Bomber Command when its heavy bombers flew with maximum bomb loads (often with incendiaries mixed in) at night, guided by hyperbolic navigation (based on differences in the timing between the reception of two radio signals) called Gee, and with radar H2S enhancement, a method of radar scanning of ground targets while airborne. Night missions meant less need for offensive armament, and thus less weight and smaller plane crews (seven crewmen, on average, for most four-engine bombers) than on the American B-17s (usually ten crewmen) bombing in daylight. There were certainly fewer British losses when a heavy bomber went down. Harris’s arguments could at times become hard to refute: if area bombing did not tangibly disrupt an urban center’s contribution to the war effort, then it was justified on intangible grounds of ruining enemy morale, “dehousing” civilian workers, causing civic havoc, and forcing huge expenditures in civil defense and diversions of ground assets.

Still, at least for the first years of the bombing campaign, there was little evidence that the German public was turning against Hitler because of British incendiaries. As Hitler himself supposedly put it, “these air raids don’t bother me. I only laugh at them. The less the population has to lose, the more fanatically it will fight.… People fight fanatically only when they have the war at their own front doors. That’s how people are. Now even the worst idiot realized that his house will never be rebuilt unless we win.”²⁶

Left unsaid was Harris’s Old Testament sense of righteous anger that fueled Bomber Command, as well as a feeling of vengeance that the bullying Germans were finally receiving long overdue payback in the only way that the British were able to provide at that point in the war. In his most famous remark of the conflict, Harris presciently summed up his future directive: “The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”

Harris was not exaggerating. When he took over Bomber Command in mid-1941, he had just sixty-nine heavy four-engine bombers at his disposal. When the war ended he could easily put two thousand in the air. From March 5 to July 13, 1943, mostly British bomber forces pounded the entire Ruhr Valley, eventually torching Bochum, Cologne, Dortmund, Duisburg, Dusseldorf, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Krefeld, Muelheim, and Wuppertal, as well as dams on the Moehne and Eder Rivers. Despite the ongoing reorganization of German industry by Albert Speer, key production in steel and armaments declined at precisely the time new armor and artillery were desperately needed on the Eastern Front.²⁷

The Americans (who knew little of what the Luftwaffe had done to Warsaw or Belgrade) initially disagreed with area bombing, even though they arrived in Britain in midsummer 1942 without the precision bombing experience of either the British or Germans. They quickly began to hit Europe during the day with allegedly high-precision “Flying Fortress” B-17s, setting the stage for both a unified Allied strategy of twenty-four-hour, day-and-night attacks and an acrimonious clash of air doctrines. The Americans argued that their better-armed B-17Gs, equipped with a specialized crew of ten, and with nine heavy machine guns, exempted them from serious fighter attack. (In aggregate, some seven hundred .50 caliber machine guns of a collective bombing group were directed at fighters.) Americans also pointed to their vaunted (though overhyped) Norden bombsights, claiming that they could hit strategic industries with near pinpoint accuracy. Yet the British continued to achieve more lethal results through area bombing, and ignored American pretenses of targeting only military targets to spare collateral damage.

Strategic Bombing in Europe

The later week-long incineration of Hamburg (“Operation Gomorrah”) in July 1943, by nighttime British Lancasters and, to a lesser extent, daytime American B-17s, was supposedly a successful model of Allied cooperation to come, given the frightening fact that forty thousand Germans lost their lives and thousands more were displaced. In fact, the Americans played only a supporting role in the city’s destruction. A perfect, if not somewhat accidental, storm of disasters seemed to have accounted for the horrendous German losses. The element of surprise and unusual high summer winds, as well as unexpected approaches over the empty ocean and the first widespread use of chaff as a radar countermeasure, allowed the bombers to arrive often undetected and to create a singular firestorm that would not normally occur over other targets. The British offered little moral posturing about their area bombing. In contrast, the Americans stuck to the pretense that they were bombing only industrial targets with precision accuracy, even though the vast majority of their ordnance missed the assigned targets due to the frequent reliance on unreliable radar targeting as well as the inability of the Norden bombsight to correct adequately for wind and clouds under combat conditions.²⁸

By employing technological breakthroughs, like detachable auxiliary gasoline drop tanks to increase the range of fighter escorts and better radar that improved navigation, the Americans became more like the British than the British like the Americans. In fact, at war’s end, the use of the world’s most sophisticated bomber, the gargantuan B-29, had not evolved much beyond British-style night area bombing. The B-29s were designed as high-altitude, daylight mission precision bombers, but by 1945 they had become huge incarnations of Lancasters, and they were achieving the same fiery results on the unfortunate enemy below.

At the November 1943 Tehran Conference, the United States announced that its two strategies for defeating the Third Reich were an Allied landing in 1944 on the French coast, and both night and day bombing deep into the German homeland by the Americans and the British. Both were responses to the impossible Russian demands for an immediate opening of a second front in Western Europe against the Germany army. Years after the war, Marshal Vasilii Chuikov, one of the liberators of Berlin, still illustrated deep-seated Soviet suspicions and ignored the role of Allied bombing: “The long delay in the opening of the second front caused us, Soviet soldiers, to understand the actions of our Western allies much more correctly than they were represented in the messages full of endless soothing promises which the statesmen of the West fed to us.” Nonetheless, the more the Soviets complained of inaction, the more the Western Allies bombed.²⁹

As late as mid-1943 the air war was still going poorly for the Allies, as both bomber losses and German munitions production climbed. British bombers for a while were surprised by the effective combination of German night fighters, sophisticated searchlights, flak batteries, improved radar grids, and the transfers of experienced fighter pilots, mostly flying later-model Fw 190s and Bf 109s, from the Russian front. In any case, the assertions of British air marshal “Bomber” Harris that by late 1943 or early 1944 strategic bombing might win the war proved impossible. As bombers flew far more deeply into Germany, their exposure to fighters only increased and losses mounted. Later, the “Black Sunday” raid of August 1, 1943, by B-24 Liberators based in Libya against the Romanian oil fields and refineries at Ploesti proved an ungodly disaster. The Americans believed that they could come in low at one hundred feet or less, in full surprise, and thus with certainty of hitting their flammable targets. In fact, the Germans and Romanians were waiting with one of the most sophisticated anti-aircraft defenses of the war. Of the 178 B-24s that took off, fifty-three were lost and fifty-five were damaged. Around 660 crewmen were killed, captured, missing, or interned in neutral countries. Only thirty-three of the 178 bombers returned to Libya without damage; the majority of the survivors landed with nearly ruined planes or made emergency landings throughout the Mediterranean. The ill-named Operation “Tidal Wave” was one of the few strategic bombing raids of the war in which more crewmen were lost to air defenses than civilians to bombs. Damage to Ploesti from the August 1 raid was neither lasting nor severe enough to curtail German oil supplies.³⁰

Not much later, the “Black Week” of October 9–14, 1943, should have rendered the entire American heavy bomber campaign ineffective, or at least the idea of long-range and mostly unescorted daylight bombing operations deep into the Reich and its allies. One hundred and forty-eight B-17s were shot down or damaged on a second great mission over Schweinfurt (after losing sixty bombers and another ninety damaged on the initial August 17, 1943, raid)—20 percent of the entire force. Six hundred American crewmen were killed or captured. In October alone, twenty-eight bombers on average were lost on every mission. B-17 gunner Elmer Bendiner later wrote, “all across Germany, Holland and Belgium the terrible landscape of burning planes unrolled beneath us. It seemed that we were littering Europe with our dead.”³¹

Long-range missions may have been somewhat curtailed, but they were not stopped entirely, especially since there were few other avenues before June 1944 of fulfilling Allied promises to the Soviet Union of opening a major second front. The bombers did occasionally inflict considerable strategic damage, and relief was felt to be on the horizon with the advent of longer-range escorts. Even the costliest and most infamous of the long-range precision raids—the first Schweinfurt-Regensburg mission of August 17, 1943, against the ball-bearing and Bf 109 aircraft works—probably resulted in disrupting half the production at both plants. American replacement crews and planes may have made up for the losses, as the US architects of bombing felt that they were at least hitting targets or thinning out the Luftwaffe, or both.³²

A year later, by summer 1944, the British and Americans were clearly winning the air war. They were losing far fewer bombers per raid, and upping the numbers of fighter escorts, while German fighter forces lost half their strength each month, nullifying their own huge increases in fighter production. By focusing far more on attacking fuel supplies (mostly oil and synthetic oil plants), transportation, and the aircraft industry, sizable formations of British and American bombers—escorted by hundreds of high-performance Thunderbolts and Mustangs with drop tanks and permission to range widely to hunt down German fighters rather than stay close to their bombers—finally wore the Luftwaffe out. Spitfires, with drop tanks, should have played a far more prominent role over Germany. But a series of wrong-headed decisions kept them out of long-range escort service until 1944, largely due to old prejudices, dating back to the Spanish Civil War, that bombers, especially at night, could get through without fighter support. In addition, the British lapse was stubbornness on the part of senior RAF commanders who ignored evidence quite early on that, with rather easy adjustments and modifications, the Spitfire could have become an excellent long-range escort fighter. By contrast, the Americans had never experienced the trauma of a Blitz and felt no need to hold back their fighters to protect their own homeland.³³

In May 1944 alone, the Luftwaffe wrote off half of its total single-engine fighter aircraft and a quarter of all its vaunted Bf 109 and fw 190 pilots. In the first five months alone of 1944, the Luftwaffe lost the equivalent of its entire pilot strength. For the last nine months of the war, the Allies enjoyed complete air supremacy. They systematically destroyed over 60 percent of the largest German cities, even if they were still unable to prevent increases in German production of war materiel brought on by radical changes in the German economy and workforce. Nevertheless, by war’s end about 1.8 million German workers had been transferred out of factories to repair bombing damage to the Third Reich’s oil facilities and transportation networks. Bombing did not just stop the mobility of trains and tanks but also disrupted German productivity by turning skilled factory laborers into repair workers.³⁴

The final successful nine months of Allied bombing must be balanced against the prior failures of the British (other than the Battle of the Ruhr) and then of the Americans between 1940 and 1943. That savage trade-off has framed the postwar controversy about strategic bombing for the past seventy years. Altogether, over 160,000 British and American bomber crewmen were killed, wounded, or captured. In the case of British Bomber Command, about half of all bomber crewmen deployed over Europe were casualties, rates that exceeded trench warfare in World War I and even topped the fatality percentages of those Japanese who volunteered (or were forced) to join kamikaze forces. The Americans lost forty thousand dead airmen and six thousand destroyed bombers, and spent $43 billion on strategic bombing. The catastrophic losses of Allied bomber crews have in part deflected (along with recent more optimistic reassessments of damage done to German industry) the moral question of incinerating hundreds of thousands of German civilians, many of them not directly involved in the war effort. Deciphering the ethical calculus of strategic bombing is almost impossible, given the ongoing slaughter of nearly twenty-seven million on the Eastern Front, the smokestacks of Auschwitz, the inability of the Allies to invade France until mid-1944, the need for a second front to placate Stalin, and the relative ineffectiveness prior to the summer of 1944 of seriously hurting the operation of the Third Reich in other Western theaters such as Italy.³⁵

The Allies accepted that their ultimate campaign against German synthetic fuel and transportation facilities had been as effective in weakening the Wehrmacht as area bombing of cities to “dehouse” civilians probably had not been. For Allied ground commanders who advanced through the wreckage of bombed-out German urban areas, area bombing did not make strategic sense, and seemed a barbaric and vain enterprise. A month before the Germans surrendered, General George S. Patton noted in his diary the common consensus of Army generals: “We all feel that indiscriminate bombing has no military value and is cruel and wasteful, and that all such efforts should always be on purely military targets and on selected communities which are scarce. In the case of Germany, it would be on oil.”³⁶

Neither the Russians, the British, nor the Americans would have reached Germany in March and April 1945 had not Allied bombers first nearly wrecked German oil and transportation, and ended Luftwaffe ground support, making it impossible for Panzer divisions to travel by day. Bombing was to be assessed not just in often cruelly curtailing German production but also in wasting Wehrmacht assets from the Atlantic to the Eastern Front and hastening the liberation of millions from the slave and extermination camps of the Third Reich. Or as the historian Williamson Murray—who has argued that strategic bombing ranked with the Eastern Front as one of the two chief causes of the Allied victory—summed up the effect of the Anglo-American strategic bombing effort on the Luftwaffe: “There were no decisive moments or clear-cut victories. Rather, the American pressure put the German fighters in a meat-grinder battle of attrition both in terms of pilots and of materiel. It was the cumulative effect of that intense pressure that in the final analysis enabled the Western Powers to gain air superiority over Europe; that achievement must be counted among the decisive victories of World War II.”³⁷

THE MEDITERRANEAN LIES at the intersection of three continents, where three great religions arose, and it is the gateway to global commerce from Gibraltar through the Suez Canal. Its historical importance should have made it an immediate Axis air priority, one enhanced by early momentum. The Iberian coast was pro-German. After summer 1940, the southern French shoreline was likewise nominally allied to Hitler. Italy was an Axis power. Germans, Italians, and Bulgarians occupied Greece in June of 1941. Turkey was neutral but, until the battle at Stalingrad, seemed to lean toward Germany. Palestine’s Arabs were pro-German as well. Italy and Vichy France initially controlled most of North Africa from the Atlantic to the Egyptian border. Not since Roman times had so much of the Mediterranean Sea and coastline been in the orbit of a single alliance.

Yet the Axis powers never consistently obtained sustained superiority and never at all supremacy in the skies. That fact doomed all their subsequent efforts to occupy North Africa from Morocco to Suez, either to cut off British imperial trade or to link up with the Japanese. After the Operation Torch landings in Algeria and Morocco in November 1942, the Americans and the British quickly were able to bring in a great number of aircraft, either directly on escort carriers from the United States or from existing bases in Great Britain. By spring 1943, the Americans and the British had over two thousand operational fighters and bombers in North Africa alone.³⁸

Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941 had originally drawn some Luftwaffe squadrons eastward, and shorted German air power in North Africa and Italy, although not as much as one would have thought, given the growing quagmire in the Soviet Union. In addition, the Italians and later the Germans ignored the chances of an early and perhaps easy invasion of Malta, and, with mounting troubles in Russia, seem to have lost any chance to coerce Fascist Spain to allow a land attack on Gibraltar. Despite the seesaw Mediterranean air war and the long-term forces arraying against Germany, Hitler had transferred Field Marshal Kesselring and the air power of Luftflotte 2 on November 15, 1941, from the Soviet Union to Italy. Kesselring, over the ensuing months, gradually reestablished parity and occasionally even air superiority over Malta. He had planned to assault the island (Operation Herkules) in a stepped-up effort to supply German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, at least until the plan was abandoned in November 1942 after Rommel’s failure at El Alamein.

Even before the arrival of the Americans, the British had developed several fighter bases from Gibraltar to Cyprus. Those centers made Mediterranean Sea routes more dangerous to Axis transports than the counterpart Axis air bases on Sicily and Crete were to the Allies. Before Operation Barbarossa, the Germans had demonstrated that they could invade and occupy Mediterranean islands from the Dodecanese to Crete; after December 1942, they fought mostly a Mediterranean war to stabilize the North African front and interrupt Allied maritime trade rather than to absorb Egypt and Suez. But by May 1943, some 230,000 German and Italian soldiers had surrendered, ending the air war for North Africa and robbing the Third Reich of some of its best divisions in a loss of manpower nearly comparable to that in the final weeks at Stalingrad. Allied air power was the one constant that initially kept ill-prepared British troops alive and later kept well-prepared British and American forces on the offensive.

The Americans were not so interested in protecting imperial trade as in bombing new targets in Europe. They saw their bases in the Allied Mediterranean as especially suited for conducting long-range bombing against eastern portions of the Third Reich. Fewer Luftwaffe fighters were deployed on the southern trajectories into Germany. The weather pathways from Allied home bases in the Mediterranean were often clearer or at least more predictable. Targets in Eastern Europe—especially oil fields in Romania—were well in range in a way not so true for sorties from Britain. And B-24 Liberators, which enjoyed greater range but were more vulnerable than the B-17s to German fighters, were well suited for the southern bases. By November 1943, there were nearly a thousand four-engine American bombers operating out of North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, giving the British-American round-the-clock bombing campaign yet another dimension.³⁹

Allied Mediterranean forces, however, failed to use enormous advantages in tactical and strategic air power to affect in any significant degree ground operations in Italy. The Mediterranean Allied Air Forces (MAAF) of 1944–1945 controlled the skies over Italy; by 1944, over five thousand strategic and tactical Allied aircraft were operational. German armored forces increasingly were obliged to travel only by night. By 1944, most rail shipments southward through the Brenner Pass were subject to steady air assault. Any German troops not entrenched risked serial strafing. Nonetheless, the Allies were never able to translate such air supremacy into strategic victory in Italy, largely because of rough terrain; frequent rain and flooding; diversions of troops to France; brutal but inspired German ground leadership under Field Marshal Kesselring; the lack of a coordinated supreme Allied air, land, and sea command; and the often questionable American generalship of Lieutenant General Mark Clark, who oversaw American and later Allied operations. Italy became a sad case study on the limitations of even overwhelming advantages in tactical air power.⁴⁰

NAVAL AIR POWER played a limited role in the European theater despite the greater concentrations of forces. France was defeated before it could finish its two planned aircraft fleet carriers.^* Despite grandiose plans, Germany and Italy never launched any of their envisioned flattops. In contrast, Britain started the war with six fleet carriers under construction, and six to seven in operation. At Taranto (November 11–12, 1940) and Cape Matapan (March 28, 1941), British naval aircraft helped to damage the Italian battleship fleet, which had unfortunate consequences for the Italian effort in North Africa and against Malta by discouraging offensive operations beyond Italian waters. British Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers also helped to sink the German marquee battleship Bismarck (May 27, 1941). The Italian fleet was rendered largely impotent by the end of 1942, and German surface ships by early 1943. Carriers were free to provide air cover for Allied amphibious operations in North Africa, Sicily, and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. After D-Day there was little need for naval air support for ground troops, and British and American escort carriers were mostly used to hunt down vestigial German U-boats and protect convoys between North America and Great Britain.⁴¹

The vast—and often calmer—expanses of the Pacific were a far different story. Japan started the war with ten aircraft carriers, a number that exceeded the combined Pacific carrier fleets of the British and Americans. The American Pacific carrier fleet was fortuitously at sea on the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but the Allies’ strategy of island hopping on the way to the Japanese mainland ensured that American carriers participated in almost every major land and naval engagement after that.

One theme perhaps characterized the entire naval air war in the Pacific: in major carrier air encounters—the battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, the Eastern Solomons, Cape Esperance, Santa Cruz, the Philippine Sea, and Leyte Gulf—the result was either an American tactical or strategic victory, or at least a draw. In fact, American carriers never lost a single carrier-to-carrier air battle against their Imperial Japanese enemies, despite entering the war in December 1941 with only four fleet carriers (USS Hornet, USS Enterprise, USS Lexington, and USS Saratoga) in the Pacific. (The USS Wasp was not transferred from the Atlantic until June 1942.) Yet by November 1942, despite the great victory at Midway and the loss of four Japanese carriers, for a time only the Enterprise was left operational in the Pacific.

Several consistent themes characterized the spectacular American naval air success. First, like Japan and Great Britain, the United States was a pioneer in naval aviation and had long experience with carriers between the wars. American admirals were widely trained, did not craft overly complex plans involving ruse and deception, in the manner of the Japanese, and managed even in hard-fought battles to avoid catastrophic losses. As a result, the Americans never lost more than one fleet carrier in any single engagement. Altogether, during four years of war, the Americans sank twenty Japanese carriers of various sizes and models, while losing eleven carriers, only four of which were fleet carriers.

Second, the United States built some twenty-two fleet carriers to Japan’s sixteen of all categories (light and fleet) during the war. America’s new Essex-class carriers—ninety aircraft, thirty-three knots maximum speed, 27,100 tons standard displacement, and nearly nine hundred feet long—were qualitatively superior to any carrier in the world. Even more important, the Americans in astounding fashion built on the eve and during the war over 150 fleet, light, and escort carriers. They also continually increased their number of carrier pilots, while Japan’s naval aviation forces insidiously decreased, due both to greater carrier and plane losses and to far shorter and less successful pilot training.⁴²

Japanese carriers faced far more enemy submarines and surface ships than did their American counterparts. The Americans were far more adept at repair and maintenance of their carrier fleet and replacement of lost aircrews. After the Battle of the Coral Sea (May 4–8, 1942), the badly damaged Yorktown was made seaworthy and refitted in just sixty-eight hours at Pearl Harbor. In contrast, the crippled Shokaku and the plane-depleted Zuikaku took months to be repaired or refitted with air-crews—a fact with terrible consequences for the Japanese a month later at the Battle of Midway. Had the fallout from the Battle of the Coral Sea been reversed, the Imperial Japanese Navy might have fought at Midway with six fleet carriers to the Americans’ two.

America could also afford to commission new battleships (10 between April 1941 and April 1944) without shortchanging its carrier fleet. The Japanese did not come close to matching that number. Japan entered the war with ten battleships, while building just two more, the seventy-two-thousand-ton behemoths Musashi and Yamato. They were the two largest, most costly warships in the world, but proved relatively useless in battle before being swarmed by American carrier planes and sunk. The estimated construction costs of a Yamato or Musashi battleship were around 160–170 million Japanese yen each. For such a sum, the Imperial Japanese Navy might have built ten of its latest excellent Akizuki-class destroyers (approximately 18 million yen apiece), invaluable in escorting merchant ships and waging antisubmarine warfare, and considered among the best destroyers built during the war. A fleet of twenty of them would have done far more damage than the twin Yamato-class white elephants that sucked resources from Japanese naval air programs and often sat idle for want of fuel.⁴³

Japan began the war with fighters and torpedo bombers that were largely as good as or better than their American counterparts. Yet in less than two years after Pearl Harbor, American carriers were mostly supplied with Hellcat fighters, updated Dauntless and Helldiver dive bombers, and Avenger torpedo planes. In terms of speed, armament, performance, and survivability, these second-generation fighters and bombers were mostly superior to all their Japanese fighter, dive, and torpedo bomber counterparts.

The comparative rate of production of new naval aircraft made it utterly impossible for Japan to achieve numerical parity. In Japan’s peak production year of 1944, it manufactured a total of 28,180 military aircraft, quite an impressive number had Japan been at war only with China or perhaps just Britain or the Soviet Union. Although budgeting for a two-front war, that same year America sent ninety-six thousand new planes abroad to Europe and the Pacific. By war’s end, the US Navy’s carrier fleet and support bases alone had received eighty thousand planes, which was more aircraft than Japan produced for all branches of its military during the entire war. Such production reflected vast industrial disparities. In terms of steel and coal, America had outproduced Japan by margins of well over ten-to-one. Oil output was even more dramatically one-sided: the United States entered the war pumping over seven hundred times more domestic oil per year than Japan. Japan ranked twenty-second in the world in oil production in 1941; the United States, first. Without adequate supplies of refined fuels, the Japanese could never build, operate, or train carrier forces comparable to those of the British and Americans.⁴⁴

Japan increasingly shorted its ground forces in order to seek parity with the American and British air and naval forces in the Pacific. Although the output and productivity of the Japanese economy (more analogous to the Soviet than the Italian) is sometimes underrated by historians, Japan’s huge investment in air and naval power still did not achieve parity with the Anglo-Americans, but it helped to explain why a chronically ill-supplied Japanese army in China and Burma was never quite able to achieve any of its long-term objectives.⁴⁵

By mid- to late 1943, the US Navy had attained complete air superiority in the Pacific. American carrier pilots were free to engage in critical multifaceted missions without much worry of competing enemy naval air power. They hunted down Japanese ships and transports, raided Japanese land facilities on islands and the homeland, and provided air support for American amphibious operations and bombing missions. In fact, American carriers and their aircraft suffered more losses from Japanese surface ships, submarines, and land-based kamikazes than from Japanese naval air attacks. Not a single American fleet carrier was lost after 1942.

Carrier planes also facilitated the creation of land-based air forces. American carriers for eight months continually supplied Wildcats and dive bombers to the Marines’ “Cactus Air Force” on Guadalcanal. The key conquest of the Marianas (June–August 1944) was due entirely to American naval air superiority; no territorial loss so hurt Japan’s war effort as the establishment of B-29 bases on Guam, Saipan, and Tinian, which soon would guarantee fire raids on the Japanese mainland. When news reached Fleet Admiral Osami Nagano of the loss of the Marianas, he lamented, “Hell is on us.”⁴⁶

Carrier war completely inverted the logic of aviation. As a general rule, planes had to become more powerful and better designed to achieve greater attack ranges. That fact was ostensibly true of naval aircraft as well as land-based planes. But carriers could uniquely advance the air base closer to the enemy—even while planes were in the air—thus adding a second dimension to the operational range of carrier-based fighters and tactical bombers that was impossible for land-based aircraft.

The air wars in the Pacific and Atlantic were, of course, radically dissimilar. Japanese naval air power posed an entirely different and originally greater threat to British and American ships than did Axis land-based air forces. But in both theaters, the Allies by mid-1944 had largely neutralized all sources of Axis air power and achieved air supremacy. That reality ensured that the British and Americans were increasingly free to use their huge fleets to mount amphibious invasions and strike enemy bases almost anywhere they chose.

Voltaire reportedly wrote that “God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best.”⁴⁷ In the case of the air war, by 1944 the Allies had sent out both the most planes and the best-trained pilots, and crushed what had been the best air forces in the world when the war began in 1939. That achievement unleashed hundreds of thousands of planes against unprotected civilians and soldiers on the ground and at sea, which had been the intent of air power in the first place.

In traditional ground and sea theaters of World War II, technological and operational progress continued at an astonishing pace. Because air power was a revolutionary weapon and in constant cycles of technological change and response, weapons of the air—rockets, jets, huge four-engine bombers—by 1945 seemed from another planet in comparison to those of 1939. Likewise, air munitions and tactics matched revolutionary changes in aircraft, with the result that no one in 1939 could have dreamed of atomic bombs and kamikaze suicide planes used as veritable cruise missiles. In the next chapter, a paradox arises about how air power ended the fighting in the Pacific in World War II: at precisely the moment when air forces had at last dominated the war and were savagely used to incinerate hundreds of thousands of workers and civilians, their existential lethality also abruptly finished the conflict, saving millions more.

* Fleet carriers usually displaced between eighteen and thirty-five thousand tons and were armed with about eighty to one hundred aircraft; light carriers were much smaller (about ten to fifteen thousand tons), and carried about half the number of aircraft. Escort or jeep carriers were even smaller—about ten thousand tons in displacement with fifteen to twenty-five planes.