Airpower offers a seductively simple solution to many foreign policy problems. Its use allows policymakers to signal resolve, deliver substantial firepower on target, avoid protracted and costly ground campaigns, and, at least when employed against adversaries with relatively few air defenses, minimize the risk of electorally unpopular casualties. Yet, as a professor of mine once said, there is a difference between doing something and getting something done. And in many cases, it seems that the use of independent airpower is done in pursuit of the former as opposed to the latter. Air campaigns such as Linebacker and Rolling Thunder, for example, failed to halt North Vietnamese aggression. Meanwhile, cases of more successful independent air campaigns, such as those employed against Libya in 2011 and against ISIS since 2014, were actually not independent at all. These air missions only bore fruit due to the presence of indigenous ground elements capable of capitalizing on their effects on target. But this post is not an attempt to litigate the value of independent airpower writ large. Rather, the goal is to provide a basic assessment of the Allied Combined Bomber Offensive (otherwise known as Operation Pointblank) against Germany in World War Two. It was arguably the first major independent air campaign in history, and it thus offers interesting and useful lessons for contemporary debates around airpower.
During the interwar period, bombers were thought to be contributing to a fundamental transformation in warfare. Early American airpower advocate William “Billy” Mitchell, for example, contended that the ability of aircraft to strike behind enemy lines largely rendered armies superfluous. Italian theorist Giulio Douhet, arguably the father of strategic bombing, was even more extreme in his enthusiasm. He asserted that land warfare between large conventional armies was obsolete, easy victory could be achieved by bombing population centers, and the bomber “would always get through.” Neither of these men were entirely incorrect. Airpower did alter war, enabling more responsive logistics, the use of paratroopers, and the development of devastating ground support platforms. However, they overestimated the capabilities of a still relatively new platform, and they forgot that militaries continually adapt to novel threats.
The deficiency of their views was quickly revealed by the less than stellar impact of the Combined Bomber Offensive against Germany during the early years of World War Two. The early missions of the bomber offensive resulted in fairly lackluster results, with Allied aircraft only reducing German shipbuilding by 35%, electrical power and chemical production by 10%-15%, and mining output by a paltry 3% over the course of the war. In large part this was due to inefficient targeting and a failure to account for German efforts to circumvent the constraints imposed by Allied bombing. American planners at the beginning of the war massively overestimated the accuracy of their bombers, and both American and British planners repeatedly failed to prioritize targets or correctly coordinate with each other. It is thus unsurprising that the memoirs of Albert Speer, Hitler’s Armaments Minister, are replete with statements of utter bewilderment at Allied targeting. Speer contends that as early as September 1942, the British could have shut down most of the production in the Ruhr by concentrating on the dams of the Ruhr Valley. Instead, “They divided their forces and that same night destroyed the Eder Valley dam, although it had nothing whatsoever to do with the supply of water to the Ruhr.” In April 1944, the Allies came close to completely crippling German ball bearing production, but to Speer’s amazement, “the attacks on the ball-bearing industry ceased abruptly. Thus, the Allies threw away success when it was already in their hands.” But even when Allied bombers concentrated their ordinance against major industrial hubs, such as during Operation Gomorrah, the firebombing of Hamburg to apocalyptic levels, they only reduced output in the city by 30%.
The Allies also failed to significantly degrade civilian morale, as Nazi propaganda was able to more than compensate. Indeed, one German analyst argues that “there was an almost mystic belief that victory could be won by sheer sacrifice.” And these failures came at a cost. Over 40% of America’s wartime budget was dedicated to airpower, and bomber crews suffered heavy attrition rates throughout most of the conflict. During a single October 14, 1943 raid on Schweinfurt, for example, almost 30% of the force was lost. During 1943 alone, the U.S. and Britain lost 25,175 personnel over Germany, and this was in large part due to the obstinacy of senior leadership who continued to believe that bombers did not require fighter escorts. It was not until 1944, when longer range P-47s and P-51s were deployed to protect bomber formations, that attrition rates dropped appreciably. Yet even this transformation was delayed by antiquated doctrine, as the extremely capable P-51, which was available as early as 1939, was not employed as an escort until after the poorly conceived YB-40, a slow and unwieldy up-armed bomber, had been tried.
Despite the disappointing showing of early missions, strategic bombing did begin to play a more decisive role later in the war. Perhaps its biggest achievement was the destruction of the Luftwaffe through attrition. As Lt. Col. Peter Faber points out, the bombers served as effective bait, luring German fighters up into the air to be destroyed by Allied escorts. This was especially true after fighter pilots were given permission to freely hunt German planes instead of remaining strictly with the bombers. Even if the Germans were able to replace the planes lost in battle, they could not replace the skilled pilots that were killed, eventually granting the Allies air supremacy over Europe and helping facilitate D-Day, the liberation of France, and the subsequent invasion of Germany. The air campaign also forced the Germans to reallocate a large amount of their production toward civil defense, decreasing their output of weaponry and equipment. It also required the Nazis to concentrate their airpower in Germany in order to protect the homeland, thus limiting the number of planes deployed to the Western and Eastern Fronts.
Moreover, the effect on German industry was greater than simple statistics might suggest. For one, Allied intelligence and prowess improved throughout the course of the war, allowing Allied aircrews to avoid some of the targeting mistakes that occurred early on. But more importantly, the German economy simply couldn’t cope with the continued, and ever-growing, bombing campaign. German industry and its workers were relying on superhuman efforts to continue going, but these efforts could not be maintained indefinitely. Workers were terrorized and sleep deprived, hurting their efficiency, and the use of slave labor could only go so far in compensating for the increasing strains on German labor. Furthermore, bombings forced workers to help in reconstruction, keeping them from supporting more productive enterprises. Thus the aforementioned statistics suggesting that bombing missions had relatively low efficacy early in the war likely overstate German resilience, which, just as bankruptcy, degrades gradually and then suddenly. Indeed, by July of 1944, 98% of German fuel production had been destroyed, and only a small percentage of production capacity could be rebuilt. There was also little else that could be accomplished during the early months of the war. The large investments in air power may not have been efficient insofar as their costs exceeded the value they destroyed on the German side, but this was ultimately not a problem because U.S. industrial capacity was so much greater than Germany’s that Washington could afford to be wasteful. This is especially true because bombers offered the only reliable way to strike German targets until a land invasion became possible, and the landings at Normandy would likely not have occurred absent the air dominance achieved through the air campaign.
In short, the Combined Bomber Offensive played a central role in assuring Allied victory, but it was hardly an unalloyed success. While strategic bombing may have been a necessary component of Allied victory, it was very far from sufficient. The campaign decidedly failed to quickly break German morale or productive capacity, even as it did constrain German output. Moreover, the overly optimistic assessments of interwar theorists meant that the requisite intelligence and targeting capabilities were completely absent early in the war. Ironically, the bombers were arguably most effective at conducting a mission they were not even attempting to fulfill: baiting German fighters to come up and be destroyed, thus contributing to the attrition of the Luftwaffe. Bombing was a key enabler of Allied success; it was not, however, a panacea. It worked best when supporting broader operational and strategic objectives, and it only produced meaningful results when combined with actionable intelligence and coherent strategic coordination.
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