In 1943, the fourth year of the war, the Luftwaffe was still quite capable of inflicting appreciable damage on the Allied bomber formations. This was by no means a foregone conclusion, since at the start of the year the German air defence system was, especially by day, very much undermanned. On the other hand, the bombing war was—with the start of American mass daylight raids on 27 January and even British daylight attacks on Berlin with Mosquitoes on 30 January, with the increase in the RAF’s night raids, and finally with the later opening of a second air-war front in North Africa and southern Italy—now of a new kind. The British and American armaments efforts in the fields of aircraft production and electronics, together with the wider choice of airfields for their bombers, were making their effects felt. For the first time, Germany’s industrial base was being seriously threatened from the air. At the same time a critical situation was developing everywhere on the land fronts in the east and south, and dealing with it meant moving fighter aircraft away from the Reich itself. For the first time, the German daylight fighter force was facing a crisis.
In 1943 the Allies’ strategic bomber fleets dropped 346,1661 of bombs on Germany-occupied territory—450 per cent more than they had in the year before. Of these, 177,2631 fell on Germany alone, compared to 45,0001 in
1942. The new nature of the bombing war could also be seen in the greater concentration of the British bomber streams: while in May 1942 a thousand bombers dropping 1,500 t of bombs on a target had taken an hour and a half, 400 bombers were now releasing the same bomb-load within 15 minutes. The number of those killed in air raids rose from about 6,800 in 1942 to around
100,000 in 1943, and that of civilians wounded from something over 24,000 to around 200,000. In Germany in 1943 approximately 173,000 buildings were destroyed, and 212,000 damaged.368
The new situation was also marked by the expansion of the British night-fighter capability, and the gradual extension of the range of the American daytime escort fighters beyond the western border of Germany. On 15 April came the first major encounter between some 60 American P-47 Thunderbolts and 25 German Focke-Wulf FW 190s over the Scheldt estuary, in which each side lost three fighters and the P-47 showed itself superior to the FW 190 at altitudes above 8,500 m. Goring refused to accept this as a reason for the German losses, sacked the man in charge of fighters in the Holland/Ruhr area, and castigated the German fighter pilots for ‘letting him down’. Only with difficulty could he in the end be persuaded of the shortcomings of the BMW 801 engine at high altitudes.2 On 4 May 79 B-17 Flying Fortresses attacked Antwerp, and were for the first time escorted throughout the trip, out and back and over the target, by an even larger number of fighters. German fighters did in fact shoot down four P-47s, but none of the bombers. The range of the American fighters, without drop-tanks, was still limited to Brussels-Utrecht-Texel. By 28 July P-47s fitted with 75-gallon wing-mounted auxiliary tanks were already reaching a line through Aachen-Arnhem-Zwolle. In October the P-47, now with a 108-gallon belly tank, had a range of some 600 km, reaching Strasbourg-Frankfurt-Hanover-Hamburg. Following their heavy losses at Regensburg and Schweinfurt, the American daylight bombers were for the time being attacking only targets within the range of their escorting fighters, whose numbers had meanwhile risen to 300 operational machines, now including a wing of the twin-boom P-38 Lightnings. Though the latter had an even greater range, they were tactically inferior to the German fighters.3
Other new features of the bombing war over Germany in i943 were the rapid growth of American aircraft numbers, especially in the second half of the year, from 1,671 in June to 4,242 in December, coupled with an average attack strength of 183 bombers in August and 506 in December, or a monthly count ranging from 50 aircraft in January to around 3,000 at year’s-end. The level of the principally American daylight sorties, at more than i2,000, came to one-third that of the mainly British ones by night in 1943. From August onwards there were also more diversionary raids by the RAF, and by the autumn Bomber Command was also able to mount raids in large numbers against two main targets at once, thus splitting up the German fighter defence. A further innovation was the target-marking described earlier, with master bombers directing operations from over the target by R/T; and finally there were the jamming and partial crippling of the German radio and radar (to be discussed later), and the introduction of centimetre-wave navigational and target-locating radars that allowed blind bombing by night and in poor visibility (which, in particular, made the work of the German daylight fighters very difficult).4
Against all this was pitted, as i943 began, a German fighter force that was overstretched after almost four years of operating on all fronts. On
2 Grabmann, ‘Luftverteidigung’, BA-MA ZA 1/2476, 444.
3 Ibid. 433-9; Cooper, German Air Force, 301, 307; Freeman, Mighty Eighth War Diary, 54, 56, i32.
4 Army Air Forces, ii. 663, 689-711; Monthly total of enemy incursions over Reich territory, i Jan. 1943-31 Mar. 1944, App. i to LwFiiSt Ic No. 1337/44 g. Kdos.(Wi), 25 Apr. 1944, BA-MA RL 2 II/520; Grabmann, ‘Luftverteidigung’, BA-MA ZA 1/2476, 437-8, 508 ff.; Freeman, Mighty Eighth War Diary, 133.
10 February Lt.-General Hubert Weise, previously in the flak branch and now the Luftwaffe commander responsible for the air defence of the Reich, had at his disposal (ignoring flying-training and factory squadrons) only 145 day fighters and 477 night fighters, strung out along the Dutch and German coast and thus at the edge of Reich territory. Of these, 109 and 298 respectively were in serviceable status. They found themselves facing some 600 serviceable and mostly heavy British bombers and an American force of 300 serviceable bombers and 100 escort fighters.369 Of the Luftwaffe’s other day fighters, 370 were in the west, 254 in the south, and around 400 in the east. In addition, there were roughly 140 twin-engined ‘destroyer’ fighters and 130 night fighters stationed on the other fronts. The low number of daylight fighters allocated to guarding the Reich skies indicates that up to now it had been felt that Germany was relatively safe during the daytime, but is also a sign that the fronts in the south and east were making heavy demands.370
Unlike earlier, when bomber and dive-bomber manufacture had far outstripped that of daylight fighters, the production of offensive and defensive aircraft and the numbers coming from repair in February 1943 were, at 956 compared to 958, almost on a par; deliveries of bombers, ground-attack aircraft, and twin-engined fighters were in that month, at 732, well above those of only 382 to the daylight fighter arm. This shows very clearly that the shift in air armaments, begun in 1942, to a larger share for defence had still not got under way, even though around three fighters could have been built for the outlay on making one medium bomber. The actual strengths of the frontline units even show an excess of 200 offensive aircraft (bombers, destroyers, ground-attack aircraft, fighter-bombers, dive-bombers, and seaplanes), with a total of 2,121 as against 1,910 defensive aircraft.371 When Milch, complaining of the relative neglect of air defence in favour of the bomber arm that was still evident in the spring of 1943, said that none of the damage to towns and factories would have happened and no enemy bombers would have flown over Germany if there had been enough day and night fighters, he was stating the obvious.372 And yet it was precisely at this point that the attacking-action mindset that dominated the German leadership was bolstered by Hitler’s demand for counter-terror at the expense of defensive armaments. To this was added the need to replace the army’s enormous losses of tanks, artillery, and vehicles following the disasters at Stalingrad and in North Africa, and to build aircraft to combat the ever-growing masses of Russian tanks and equip them with cannon.373 After an order from Hitler to give preference to tank manufacture, Saur, as head of the armaments ministry technical office, made a drastic raid on aircraftmanufacturing resources (there was as yet no overall direction of Wehrmacht armament) and hauled technicians and engineers off the production lines at Junkers and Daimler; at the same time Milch was working hard to have Wehrmacht-wide planning in which the Luftwaffe would be given priority.10
Speer did nothing to help the Luftwaffe. With Hitler backing him, Saur prevailed over Milch and a wavering Goring; moreover Hitler was, after the heavy losses of transport aircraft at Stalingrad and in Africa, now also calling for ‘transporters, transporters, and more transporters!’11 The demand seems understandable in the light of the fact that in these two theatres, out of a total of 1,176 transport aircraft held on 10 November 1942, 866 (74 per cent) had been lost during the winter and spring of 1942/3.12 The question now was whether one could have everything all at once.
The high losses of Ju 52 transport planes exacerbated the bottleneck in pilot training that had already developed in the summer of 1942 because of a shortage of fuel; they meant not only a loss of aircraft for training in blind and bad-weather flying, but also of the precious instructors who were to teach the pilots. However, the head of the Luftwaffe general staff, Hans Jeschonnek, was so fixated on the war in the east that he swept aside the disastrous training situation, saying: ‘First we have to beat Russia, then we can get on with training!’13 Of course Jeschonnek knew objectively what the situation was, but he was in thrall to Hitler, who in 1943 was trying to retrieve the initiative in the east; so he channelled part of the fuel that had been earmarked for training to the frontline units, who were also in desperate need of it.14 In spring 1943 only 40 per cent of the amount of fuel needed for training fighter pilots, and 20 per cent of that for bomber pilots, was available.15 No use was made of one possibility for partially compensating for the fuel shortage, that of psychological testing to pick out particularly well-suited pupils for training. Already at the turn of the year 1941/2 Goring had, against the protests of many commandants of advanced flying schools and of the head of air defence, abolished psychological suitability testing and handed the choosing of candidates over to the field-unit and flying-school commanders, because testing was standing in the way of turning out the required number of trained pilots. Attempts by the General der Jagdflieger (general i/c fighters) in 1943 to have tests reintroduced the general of fighters branch No. 673/43 g-, 5 Mar. 1943, BA-MA RL 3/51, 974 ff., and LwFtiSt la No. 03300/43 g. Kdos.(op), i Aug. 1943, ibid. 906 ff.
10 GLM conference, 16 Feb. 1943, BA-MA RL 3/18, 4466 ff.; statement by Walter Hertel, GLM conference, 18 Feb. 1943, ibid. 4467; Irving, Rise and Fall, 198; Boog, Luftwaffenfuhrung, 296; GLM conference, 24 Aug. 1943, BA-MA RL 3/24, 7041-2; see also Below, By Hitler’s Side, 190.
“ Milch diary, 4 and 17 Feb. 1943, BA-MA Nachlafi Milch, N 179; Milch at GLM conference, 9 Feb. 1943, BA-MA RL 3/18, 4375-6; Irving, Rise and Fall, 198.
12 Murray, Luftwaffe, 155, 163; ‘Operational availability of air units’, BA-MA RL 2 III/721.
13 Gen. Hans-Georg von Seidel, text of talk in 1949, 52, BA-MA Lw 101/3, pt. 2.
14 See Galland, The First and the Last, 136. 15 Irving, Rise and Fall, 200, 403, n.23.
In order to raise the quality of fighter pilots ran into the sand.374 All that was needed now, Milch told Central Planning, was for the Allies to concentrate their bombing raids on the synthetic fuel plants: ‘With them stands or falls our very ability to fight this war.’375 But Goring would not let this worry him. He would rather, he told Milch ‘have a heap of aircraft lying idle [and, one has to add, the pilots for them, even if less well-trained] because of a temporary fuel shortage, than have no aircraft at all.’376 In this situation, and with this attitude to training, there was not the slightest hope of overcoming the handicap that, because of the rushed arms schedule, had existed from the outset of having day-fighter pilots with no training in blind flying.377 In fact, in March 1943 the night-fighter force was 51 short of the number of fully operational crews experienced in blind flying needed to fly the 360 serviceable aircraft. The bomber force was short of 364 crews. Only the Zerstorer force had a surplus, of 33 crews; but these were also needed for giving ground support to the army. With the single-engined fighters there were only 1,187 fully operational pilots for an actual strength of 1,535 machines—meaning that some 350 fighters had to be flown by pilots with only limited operational training (assuming they all had even that). Among the fighter aircraft, however, only 66 per cent were fully serviceable.378
The general of fighters strikingly compared the Reich’s air defence situation to ‘a house without a roof’.379 Milch stressed that any war would be bound to be lost if there was not air superiority in the places where it was needed.380 President Roosevelt had already commented that there was no such superiority, in his message to Congress on 17 September 1943 in which he spoke of Hitler’s having a ‘fortress without a roof’, which meant that it was not impregnable. In fact there had never been a roof, because after the initial blitzkrieg wars Germany had been cradled in soothing security and had never got round to building one. When those in charge recognized—too late—the need for it, the overall war situation was, as Galland writes, making it necessary to ‘use up’ the available fighter forces on the land fronts in the east and south. So long as this roof was not restored and strengthened to cope with the increased demands, 1943 was for Milch ‘a year to sit tight and clench our teeth. The situation will change a lot in 1944, and these basic changes must already begin to appear in the autumn [of 1943].’381
The necessary changes were, however, impeded by the refusal of those whose approval Milch required to face unpalatable facts. When on 4 January 1943 he warned Goring of the danger from the air to Germany from the western Allies and in particular from the high American rate of arms production, and quoted the numbers being produced by the Americans with an output of bombers and fighters several times that of the Luftwaffe, he was called a defeatist. The Americans were, he was told, no different from the rest of the world in what they could do. Gciring had also long refused to listen to the Luftwaffe’s expert on enemy armaments, Oberstingenieur Dietrich Schwencke. For Hitler, too, the adversary’s high arms-production figures were nothing more than enemy propaganda. They both, he and his Reich marshal, certainly knew better.382
A quite grotesque example of this ostrich-like attitude towards what was going around him was Goring’s denial of the existence of long-range American fighters. In the summer of 1943 Speer witnessed a bad-tempered exchange between Gciring and Galland, his general of fighters. The latter had reported to Hitler that a few American escort fighters had been shot down near Aachen, and warned of the consequences if the American managed, using auxiliary tanks, to penetrate deeper into Germany. Hitler had passed on this concern to Goring, who dismissed the report as ‘imaginings’ and ‘bluff’, and tried to persuade him that the aircraft had been shot at and put out of action much further to the west, but because of their great altitude had glided towards the east—that is further into German territory instead of towards their base: which was total nonsense. After Galland persisted with his report, Gciring gave him an official order that the American fighters had not been over Aachen. Goring was undoubtedly clear-sighted enough to comprehend the facts; but as Speer wrote, he was acting in denial, ‘like a bankrupt’.383 For Gdring, the possibility of the range of the American fighter escorts being extended further into Germany seemed not worth discussing, and Hitler too had brusquely rejected it.384 Naturally an attitude like this among the top leadership delayed the adjustment needed to what was really happening in the air over Germany, just as irresponsibly as did the continued stubborn insistence on conducting an offensive air war at the cost of defence. In the end the pressure of reality made a defensive air war unavoidable.
(a) Daylight Fighter Operations
At the beginning of 1943 daylight fighter defence of Reich airspace was based wholly on Jagdgeschwader (JG) 1, deployed as two Gruppen in Holland and two covering the German Bight. Their Me 109s and FW 190s had a maximum flying endurance of hours, and an operating radius of 350-400 km at
8,000-9,000 m, though to make full use of this required landings to refuel.
There was a dense network of airfields for this, though the problem was keeping all of these permanently provided with sufficient ammunition, fuel (which was already rationed), and personnel. In good weather, and with favourable conditions, the operating radius from Holland stretched to roughly Rendsburg-Hamburg-Braunschweig-Frankfurt, and from the German Bight as far as Cologne-Frankfurt-Halle-Berlin. To stiffen the daylight fighter screen over the Reich and protect central Germany and Berlin, Gruppe III of JG 54 of Air Fleet 3 was moved to daylight fighter control Centre; Vienna was protected by calling on operational units from No. 8 fighter flying school (at Bad Voslau). Beyond the range of enemy fighters, sections from more than 16 night-fighter Gruppen could be used to tackle daylight bombers flying without a fighter escort. Now and again operational units from factory self-defence Staffeln also saw action.385 In the first four months of the year the quite modest day-fighter screen cost the Americans flying over Holland, Belgium, and north-west Germany a 6 per-cent loss rate (43 out of 703);386 this was far from enough to dissuade the ever-stronger 8th Air Force from making further attacks.
At that time Galland pressed the view that it would be better, given the great distances that the small numbers of single-engined fighters being put up against the Americans’ daylight bombers had to cover when they were located at the periphery, for them to be stationed centrally. It would be better to deliver a hefty punch from the inside at Geschwader strength than deal a few ineffectual taps with Gruppen from the outside. This would, however, mean accepting that the Americans were going to fly in broad daylight, clearly visible to the population, deep into Germany before they were engaged, or that the fighters would then be quite unable to give cover to the areas at the edge. Goring, for political, propaganda, and psychological reasons, did not, however, want the American bombers flying by day in full view of the German public, and turned down the idea of the fighters being stationed at the centre; he believed the American daylight raids could be got the better of by overcoming the lack of training of the fighter pilots. At the same time, he accused them of ‘miserable failure’, even though during the raid by B-i7s (with a fighter escort) on Bremen just before, on 17 April, they had shot down 16 bombers in spite of considerable difficulties caused by their scattered deployment at bases along the periphery.
The reasons for the overall unsatisfactory performance of the day fighters lay basically in their low numbers and material shortcomings rather than, at this stage, in any lack of will or ability in the pilots. Galland was aware of this when, called upon by Hitler to account for the increasing daylight incursions, he worked out for him that to achieve the necessary concentration of fighters over the Reich he needed three to four times as many fighters as there were
American bombers, and on top of that the same number of fighters as there were enemy escort fighters. Air superiority had to be attained by the fighters before the bombers could be destroyed.387 Goring, and increasingly Hitler (who were together responsible for providing a material strength equal to the tasks and objectives), more and more attributed the setbacks to the alleged inadequacies of the men doing the fighting. During 1943 Goring developed in this respect a kind of Pavlovian reflex, and began insultingly to berate his fighter pilots. When JG 77 was stretched far beyond the limits in Sicily, making vain sorties against a numerically superior foe, he threatened to court-martial one pilot from each Gruppe for cowardice in the face of the enemy.388 And this at a time when the C-in-C South was reporting: ‘Our air force is not strong enough to engage the enemy in large numbers over both Sardinia and Sicily at the same time.’389 Threats like this, though they were hardly carried out, certainly did nothing to boost the morale of the exhausted pilots. Gciring became more and more obsessive in his aversion to the day fighters.
A special concern for Goring, one that, with an eye to the impression created on the public, was also a domestic-policy issue, was the daylight incursions by the RAF’s Mosquitoes: flying high and fast, they were at first beyond the reach of German fighters, and being made of wood gave only a weak radar echo. As light bombers and reconnaissance aircraft they could admittedly not cause any great direct damage; but they were quite simply a nuisance—they triggered off air-raid warnings along their flight path that interrupted industrial production; they made the flak fire off pointless rounds; and in the hours of darkness the night fighters chased after them in vain. Very dangerous indeed were the Pathfinder Mosquitoes, equipped with precision navigational instruments which placed target indicators for the heavy bombers with great accuracy, and the long-range Mosquito night fighters which strafed German airfields at low level with all guns blazing, and frequently shot down the German night fighters as they were landing. The two Mosquitoes shot down by Maj. Helmut Lent and Oberleutnant Lothar Linke on 20 and 21 April 1943 were the victims of pure chance.390 Goring thought of instituting bonuses for downing Mosquitoes, and looked for a ‘specially smart’ commander to lead the fight against them.391 As a result, Jagdgeschwader 25 and 50, equipped mostly with specially boosted Me 109s for high-altitude and high-speed interception, were raised and led by Maj. Herbert Ihlefeld and Maj. Hermann Graf, two veteran commanders from the eastern front. JG 50 was also intended to develop ways of attacking the American heavy bomber formations, for example, with 210-mm rockets. The two Geschwader hardly reached Gruppe strength, and were disbanded in
December and November 1943 respectively since they had produced no meaningful results and the machines and pilots were needed elsewhere.392 On 8 November 1943 Goring had resignedly to tell the Gauleiters that ‘for the time being’ the Mosquitoes could not be caught.393
‘Test Unit 25’, comprising two Staffeln and formed in spring 1943, played a leading role in developing and testing ways and means for combating the American day-bomber formations. Tests were carried out with 210-mm rockets, to be fired into the formations by light and heavy fighters; with fitting 37-mm Flak-18 and Flak-43 guns in bomber-destroyers and Ju 88s, and with installing the 50-mm AFV cannon in the Me 410 (which proved unsatisfactory because of its 850-kg weight, poor accuracy at 1,000 m, frequent jamming, and the slowness of the gun platform); with fitting 30-mm MK 103 and MK 108 cannon; with Hs 293 H glider bombs to be air-launched by FW 190 fighters; with parachute bombs of various calibres and rockets, to be dropped by destroyers and bombers and fired by fighters, respectively; with aerial-release containers holding 105 SD-2 delayed-action bombs (known to the Allies as ‘butterfly bombs’); and so on. In summer and autumn 1943 all of these were still at the experimental stage. Not all turned out to be useable. In the case of the bombs there was the problem of detonating them: as there were no proximity fuses available, attempts were made to achieve accurate bombing of the American formation by using acoustic, altimetric, and delayed-action fuses—though all in vain.394
The actual number of day fighters for use over the Reich increased only slowly, and was boosted by the creation in April 1943 of Jagdgeschwader 11. It rose from 154 fighters on 10 April to 292 on 30 June, and those in serviceable status from 120 to 238.395 Since it could be assumed that the range of the American escort fighters would increase, it had to be ensured (with experience during the Battle of Britain in mind) that the enemy fighter cover was fully engaged before an attack was made on the bombers. Thus, a crucial part of air defence was formations of light fighters to keep the enemy fighter escorts busy so that heavy fighters coming up behind them could make their attack on the bombers as far as possible unhindered. The ‘light’ fighters were Me 109GS with two 13-mm MG-131 machine-guns mounted centrally above the engine and a 20-mm MG-151 firing through the propeller shaft, while the ‘heavies’ were Me i09s and FW i90s with additional 20-mm wing-mounted weapons. One Gruppe of each Geschwader under Luftwaffe C-in-C Centre was to specialize in high-altitude combat as a ‘light fighter Gruppe’ and be positioned forward, and a heavy group was to follow up from the rear once the fighter escorts had been engaged. This procedure was at first very successful.396
The beefing-up of the fighter defences (which was being constantly monitored by the enemy)397 brought them greater success in May and June
1943. When the Americans attacked targets in Wilhelmshaven and Emden on 21 May, 10 per cent of their bombers were shot down; on 13 June over Bremen and Kiel the casualty rate was even over 14 per cent; and at Htils on 22 June it was 8.8 per cent.398 On 14 May over IJmuiden, all ten of the attacking B-26 Marauder medium bombers were destroyed. The impression was that the forward fighter defence was working well. Staffel 10 of JG ii, equipped with FW 190s, was set up at Aalborg to intercept the courier flights from England to Sweden. Newly formed factory units swelled the strength of industry’s ‘self-protection squadrons’ and scratch fighter units to deal with reconnaissance aircraft: the very latest fighters, brand-new from the factory, stood a better chance against the Mosquitoes than the older types from the training squadrons. The Luftwaffe’s test establishment at Rechlin, too, raised an operational unit. Sections from the fighter-training Geschwader 106 at Lachen-Speyersdorf, i07 at Nancy, and ii0 at Altenburg were roped in to defend the homeland by day. Fighter Command Ostmark, formed on i2 June and placed under 5th Fighter Division at Schleifiheim, took over from Luftgau Command XVII (Vienna) the control of fighters and management of airspace in its area.399
The increasingly fierce American daylight raids and the British night bombing were making it important to make better use of the existing defence organization, simplifying and centralizing it (especially since ever-wider areas were being involved). Yet on 24 May Hitler had already turned down a proposal from the commanding general of XII Air Force Corps, Josef Kammhuber, who was responsible for day - and night-fighter defence, that the two be combined (on the model of British Fighter Command) under a fighter fleet with three fighter corps each of two fighter divisions; Hitler considered the estimates of Allied armament production on which this was based to be too high. Goring, who was also present on that occasion and had already in early January been given the relevant armaments figures by Milch, offered no protest, even though he had originally approved the plan.400 On 21 June he rejected a second proposal by Kammhuber for a single organization covering day and night fighters, using the same radar gears, and for forming a fighter fleet comprising only two fighter corps as a central command for the fighter defence over Germany and up to the Channel and Atlantic coast; he did not see this as urgent, though he appreciated that splitting up day - and night-fighter defence between Luftwaffe Commander Centre and Air Fleet 3 could not be sustained in the long run. The (functional) fighter fleet would make the (regional) air fleets superfluous. Underlying this was the showing of consideration for the head of Air Fleet 3, Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, who was jealously guarding his domain. Though Gdring was balking at a completely new command structure, he knew quite well that the existing one was untenable; so it was agreed that the generals of day and night fighters, Galland and Kammhuber, together with the Luftwaffe Commander Centre Weise, would each for their own arm (with Weise dealing with flak) work out proposals for a command organization.401 On 29 June 1943 Milch presented to Goring his report on a tour of inspection, from 7 to 12 June, of Air Fleet 3 and XII Air Corps.402 In this he repeated the main thrust of Kammhuber’s proposal, calling for a fighter strength of 650 to 800 machines—four times as many as there were bombers attacking by day at the time—and felt that defence by daylight would be secured if this demand was met. He too suggested a single command over the day and night fighters, plus a functional structure for the Luftwaffe modelled on the British. This was going too far, and on 3 July Gciring turned down everything. Kammhuber, Milch, and Galland might well be unanimous in wanting a three - to fourfold strengthening of the daylight fighter force, but they could not prevail; much worse would have to happen first.403
The main reason they could not get themselves listened to—apart from the demands of citadel (the German attack on the Kursk Salient)—was the heavy loss of fighters in combat against the superior Allied air forces in the Mediterranean, and the switching of most new fighter production on Hitler’s orders to that theatre.404 These losses, mostly on the ground due to airfields being evacuated too late during the retreat in North Africa/Tunisia in the first half of 1943, were so high that fighter units there at the time had twice to be re-equipped with new machines. This explains why, in spite of a total of 7,477 Me 109 and FW 190 day fighters being supplied from the factories during the first eight months of 1943, few were available for stiffening units defending the airspace over the Reich and in the west. British intelligence was aware at all times of the German fighter defence being overtaxed by the demands made by all theatres, especially that in the south.405
The slim chance of an adequate reinforcement of the day-fighter force in Germany, and the capacity of the American four-engined bombers to take a great deal of punishment, led in July 1943 to the decision to withdraw Zerstorer units from the land fronts, including the south, and raise new ones to defend the homeland. These units had in fact to be scraped together. In 2nd Fighter Division’s area, ZG 26 commanded by Maj. Karl Boehm-Tettelbach was created from the staff and III/ZG 26 of Air Fleet 2 in the south and I and III/ ZG i on the eastern front. The Me 410 bomber-destroyer was, by fitting two DB 603 engines, given a 60 km/h performance edge over the Me 110 G. The former had two 20-mm cannons, and four 210-mm rockets that could be fired in pairs from outside the range of the enemy aircrafts’ weapons. The latter sometimes carried a 50-mm anti-tank cannon, which proved far too heavy and, as has been mentioned earlier, frequently jammed. ZG 76 was newly formed in 5th Fighter Division in southern Germany with personnel from I/NJG 101 and a reconnaissance wing, and equipped with Me 410s. A second Gruppe was added to this, so that by October 1943 the Geschwader was finally operational. Because American escort fighters were penetrating ever further into Germany, Boehm-Tettelbach’s Geschwader soon had to be shifted further east since his Zerstorer were helpless against them. In the end the same was true for those of ZG 76 as well, which were armed with 210-mm rockets and 30-mm, 37-mm, and 50-mm cannon.406
In the summer of 1943 further strengthening of the fighter forces in Luftwaffe Commander Centre’s area was possible only to a minor extent or for a limited time. The only new formation, IV/JG 3, came to Air Fleet 2 in the south in July, to return to Neubiberg to 5th Fighter Division in September. For a while Jagdgeschwader 26 was moved from Air Fleet 3 to Luftwaffe Commander Centre’s 2nd and ist Fighter Divisions.407 After the heavy air raids on Hamburg, Wiener Neustadt, Regensburg, Schweinfurt, and Peenemiinde a series of fighter units were switched to the Reich, including I/JG 27 from Air Fleet 3, II/JG 27 from the southern front, and II/JG 51 from the eastern front, plus temporarily I/JG 25 from Norway.408 In August Luftwaffe Commander Centre also received, of all the senior commanders, the largest share of fighters and bomber-destroyers coming from new production and repair.409 In October a ‘Sturmstaffel’ of FW 190s was formed in JG 1; the aircraft had armour at the front, two 13-mm and 20-mm machine-guns above the engine, and two wing-mounted 20-mm guns. These very heavy fighters were meant to bring the four-engined bombers down at close range using their massive firepower, and if necessary to ram them. This last was, however, left to the judgement of the pilots, who did not need to sacrifice their own lives but could bail out.410 At Bad Zwischenahn, 20/JG i began its battle against the reconnaissance aircraft and heavy bombers with the Me 163 B rocket-powered fighter, a technically far from mature design; at the same time the unit was tasked with developing the basic tactical and technical principles for employing and piloting these aircraft.411 The most important addition to the fighter strength by day lay, however, in the two Zerstcirergeschwader 26 and 76 mentioned earlier, mustering together 6O Gruppen.
The day-fighter force did in fact, in August 1943, have an average actual complement of 588 day fighters and 103 destroyers, with 399 and 63 respectively of these fully operational; but this soon fell off as a result of the American raids on fighter factories that started in the summer; according to Milch, these cut output by around 25 per cent.412 Taken overall the temporary boosting of numbers was, when seen against the increasing threat, of only minor significance. It did, however, bring momentary successes, as when in the American attack on Schweinfurt and Regensburg on 17 August close on 20 per cent of the bombers were shot down, and large-scale American daylight raids against Germany were halted for a while. In all, the day-fighter force defending German airspace in August, while suffering 25 losses of its own, laid claim to 35 certain and 130 probable kills.413 When the Americans raided Emden by day on 27 September, with fighters protecting their bombers for the whole flight and over the target, only seven bombers (about 3 per cent) were shot down for ii German losses; during a second, unescorted raid on Schweinfurt on i4 October, on the other hand, the Americans again lost around 26 per cent.414 Yet there was no stopping the massive American incursions by day, for the aircraft available were insufficient to build up big wings to oppose them. The defence would have scored more successes if the
German fighter units still spread out separately along the periphery had been gathered together centrally deep inland, since for facing ever-larger numbers of American bombers the answer was to ‘fight quantity with quantity’.57
The population in many places got the impression that the German fighters appeared in the sky only when the raid was already over. The American bombers were, it seemed, flying in peacetime display formation (a misinterpretation of the combat boxes and combat wings58 used as a self-defence tactic) unhindered across the skies of Germany. This was what Hitler said to Goring, when, as ‘spokesman for the German people’, he summoned him on 5 October to receive a two-hour-long lecture on ‘the importance of defending his people’, and demanded that he, ‘whatever the cost, stop the massive attacks by day’.59 Raging at the lack of success against the heavily armed American daylight bombers, he once asked Goring scathingly whether Galland had taken out ‘an insurance policy’ with the enemy.60 Behind these tirades there were also the Gauleiters, coming to Hitler via Martin Bormann with their constant criticisms of the Luftwaffe. They had by now gained for themselves a kind of right to make proposals on matters of homeland air defence.61
During three big commanders’ conferences held on 7-9 October on the subject of air defence and attack, Gciring passed on this pressure from Hitler and the Gauleiters to the officers mainly responsible for these.62 On the 7th, in connection with the failure at Emden, he called for the fighters to make mass sorties with large formations, using whole-Geschwader attacks instead of dogfighting by individual experts. Attacking in formation had, however, scarcely been practised, and for the increasingly less well-trained pilots it was not a simple matter. Gciring refused to make any allowances for the fighters on the grounds of poor visibility or bad weather, and demanded that they attack with no holds barred, irrespective of weather or losses to themselves (all of which was far easier said than done, since most of the day-fighter pilots had had no training in flying blind). But come what may, they were to attack the enemy unceasingly; only if the fighter pilots attacked without holding back, and had won back the trust they had lost with the German people, would he want to wear his decorations again. The German public, he said, did not give a damn for fighter losses, and would answer: ‘come and count how many thousand dead we’ve got!’ Galland might be able to put up with this; he, Goring, couldn’t. Something had ‘gone awry’ among the day-fighter pilots; They were being timid, and some of the most highly decorated of them were ‘always belly-aching’. They were not getting close enough to the bombers. Milch, who started by feeling that this judgement on the day-fighter pilots was
57 Galland, The First and the Last, 249.
58 See Germany and the Second World War, vi. 594. 59 Irving, Rise and Fall, 241.
60 Irving, Goring (German edn), 607.
61 Luftwaffe Commander Centre No. 4150/43 geh.(op 2), 15 July 1943, BA-MA RL 19/113.
62 Reich marshal’s conferences, 7 and 8 Oct., BA-MA RL 3/60, 5622-720 and 5721-835, and 9 Oct., ibid., RL 3/61, 6279-319. On that of 7 Oct. see in particular 5647, 5652 ff., 5665 ff., 5672 ff., 5679 ff., 5681 ff., 5686 ff., 5689-90, 5697 ff., 5711 ff.; Westermann, Ground-based Defenses, 412-17.
‘too harsh’, and that they were ‘no cowards’, then however fell in with Goring’s reproaches, and called for court-martials and ‘shooting’ in individual cases. This would get talked about, and ensure the proper fighting spirit. Goring’s orders were that every pilot was to make three sorties to engage the enemy during each raid.415 He demanded that after firing their rockets they should not turn for home but should try to shoot down a bomber. They must not jettison their drop-tanks too soon. Goring wanted to make the fighter force into ‘an avenging corps... attacking the enemy wherever it sees them, no matter how strong they are or in what position they are’. The greatest and most important battles had been won ‘by attacking from the most hopeless positions’.
He then turned to some of the things the fighters were lacking. The 30-mm cannon was still not in operational use; this had been demonstrated to Hitler at Rechlin in July 1939, but the Generalluftzeugmeister at the time, Ernst Udet, had scant interest in planes carrying this heavy-calibre cannon and had cancelled, as being unnecessary, the pre-war trials at the Tarnewitz test centre on shooting down heavy bombers with this kind of armament.416 Goring also blamed himself for not having realized the importance of the B-17 Flying Fortress soon enough, and not having given the fighter force powerful armament. This stemmed in part, he said apologetically, from his view formed via fighting in the First World War, when the very idea of ‘a bomber wandering round the sky inside Germany would have been nonsensical’. He complained vehemently about the way the development and production of new aircraft types had been handled. Here, it was Generalluftzeugmeister’s office by which he had ‘been told the most lies... I have never yet been so betrayed, so lied to, so robbed right, left, and centre as by the GL, who has no equal in this world’. The Generalluftzeugmeister’s office ought to be awarded ‘the conjurer’s crown’. When experts came to him ‘with graphs, then I know... they’re trying to deceive me. And when they want to step up the deception, they add three colours to them.’417 Udet was ‘the destroyer of the Luftwaffe’ and was the one to blame in the ‘GL outfit’, together with Generalingenieure Giinter Tschersich, Gottfried A. Reidenbach, and August Ploch, who he announced two days later were to be court-martialled.418 He went on to complain bitterly that there was no German aircraft built from wood, like the British Mosquito. He would like ‘the swine’ whom he felt was responsible for this ‘to be hung from the next tree’.
In the end he did, however, realize that with the machines they had the fighter pilots could not achieve marvels, as the enemy was ‘gradually outstripping them’. To make up for the material shortcomings, he was doing what Hitler was aiming at with his new principles for promotions in the
Wehrmacht67—mobilizing the utmost of the troops’ mental and physical powers. In future, young men with the most fighting spirit would be given units to command, irrespective of seniority. What was needed was ‘daredevils’, not ‘tired old stallions’; he would sooner have them than an experienced ‘Knight’s Cross wearer who just laid in wait’. It was unfortunate that the day-fighter pilots were not as skilled as the bomber pilots in flying blind, but they must at least change over to attacking in formation, even if dogfighting on their own was more likely to win them a decoration.
On 8 October68 Goring repeated yet again that the Luftwaffe had to be ‘gingered up’ to become a ‘vengeance corps’. To keep a better eye on leadership qualities and the combat keenness of pilots and unit commanders, Galland suggested the use of ‘flying commissars’ and the installation of automatic gun cameras. Instead of attacking from straight ahead, which had so far attracted the least casualties, he now supported attacking the wings of the bomber formations, working in groups and from behind. This promised better success since, as Gciring stressed, the main objective had to remain destroying as many aircraft as possible so as to stir up public opinion in America against continuing with raids that brought heavy losses. To placate Germany’s own population they had already, in the case of Hamburg, knowingly claimed more enemy losses than was actually the case. The bomber-destroyers should not operate within the range of enemy fighter escorts, but as far as possible be stationed so as to attack the bomber formations beyond this. Flying whole groups of fighters through solid cloud in tight formation was, however, still a major problem, Galland said. There were also complaints about the shortage of parts for repairing damaged aircraft; everything was being sent to the production lines (so that Hitler could be impressed with high output figures). The ‘general of troop technology’ office had already been set up in May 1943 to help remedy this state of affairs.69 The British intelligence service was not unaware of this spare-parts problem; one of its reports described how repairs on other aircraft were being set back to deal with day and night fighters, so that parts in short supply could be taken from the one to install in the other— ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’. There were said to be plans to work an 84-hour week in the fighter-repair workshops.70 There were also references during the conference to the gaps and inconsistencies in reports on enemy strength and incursions, and on the increasingly urgent need for ‘guidance from below’, meaning among other things the aircraft early-warning system which had already been discussed the day before. In the conference on 9 October Goring, who with Milch had so far been laying emphasis on the priority of defending
67 Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Offizierkorps: Anciennitat und Beforderung, 276, 286-95, 303-13; Boog, ‘Offizierkorps der Luftwaffe’, 290-305.
68 Reich marshal’s conference, 8 Oct. 1943, BA-MA RL 3/60, 5784; for more on this conference, see ibid., 5714, 5725 ff., 5735 ff., 5757, 5764, 5781 ff., 5790 ff.
69 Boog, Luftwaffenfuhrung, 23, 39, 276-8, 299, 302-3, 366, 479, 566, 634.
70 Secret report on the German air force for the period 11-16 Oct. 1943, O. I.C./S. I. 739, PRO, ADM 223/170.
The homeland, switched to the conduct of the offensive bombing war and ordered the monthly output of bombers to be stepped up from 600 to 900 machines. ‘If I can set light to only a few British homes, I shall feel better.’419 He wanted the enemy attacked in the west, south, and north.420
Goring’s conferences in September/October 1943 reveal a dwindling of optimism about the day-fighter defences and, under pressure from Hitler and public criticism, and encouraged by a few small successes by German fighter-bombers against England, a shift in emphasis towards going back onto the offensive. This can already be sensed from the tone of his conversations with Galland, commanding the fighters, on the one hand, and with Dietrich Peltz, leading the attack on Britain, on the other: it was benevolent towards the latter, irritated with the former. Goring was hoping that going onto the offensive would restore the Luftwaffe’s prestige. While it does not seem entirely clear what decisive action might have been taken to regain air supremacy, the tendency towards mobilizing the troops’ remaining mental reserves into a fanatical lust for battle, as a sort of substitute for that, is very evident. This was the simplest way of escaping the general feeling of helplessness, the impotence that Goring disguised by saying that ‘there were still no set ways of conducting day - and night-fighter defence’. The enemy was constantly coming up with new attack methods, and this made a standard tactic impossible; so one must remain flexible.421 There was thus a realization of the inferiority in material terms, and that the day fighters were being tactically overloaded, and there was criticism of the inaccuracy of the early-warning service and of it being split up between the Luftgaue, XII Air Corps, and the Reichsflugmeldedienst; but no practical measures were taken to improve matters. ‘At the present time the flyers and the flak each have their own assessment of the situation in the air, so things are handled separately’, Josef ‘Beppo’ Schmid, general commanding the home air defence corps, explained as late as 4 January 1944; he hoped to see a defence corps controlling all the various forces.422 The minutes of the Reich marshal’s conferences show very little sign of the systematic approach to the various problems that is so evident in records of meetings of senior commanders in the British and American air forces. Instead we find a great many ad hoc decisions being taken, and matters of opinion on even the tiniest detail being discussed when they should have been dealt with in subordinate bodies and certainly not by the commander-in-chief of one of the armed services. Goring waffled his way through the meetings, with constant appeals to National Socialist beliefs and exhortations for fighting spirit, and with the muddled language he used betraying his poor grasp of tactical and technical matters and the extent to which he was trapped within his outdated experience of fighting in the First
World War. His was a ‘romantic’ style of leadership. In the outside world he nonetheless continued to enjoy the sympathy of wide sections of the public, even—as his visits there showed—in cities in the Rhineland that had suffered particularly badly in the bombing.75 More and more, however, he directed his Luftwaffe like a gambler going for bust. Occasionally he even took over direct control of the fighter formations, as, for instance, during one American raid when he sent the German fighters chasing the sound of their own engines back and forth all over Germany. The episode went down in the annals of the air defence of the Reich as ‘the Raid on Fort Kopenick’ (in German, a ‘Captain of Kopenick’ is someone who manages to hoodwink the public); distrusting even those commanding the fighter force, he had ignored the advice of experts.76
It is instructive to consider how the German day fighters went about their task. They were often sent up to do battle in the worst possible (though quite usual for Europe) weather conditions, while the American bombers were flying out and back at altitudes of 7,000-8,000 m, above the bad weather and the rain, snow, and danger of icing; the bombers, well equipped with navigation and bomb-aiming devices, were able to carry out effective attacks and in most cases land back at their bases with no great difficulty. The German day-fighter aircrew and aircraft were ill-prepared for coping with bad weather; they lacked blind-flying instruments and training, which after a few trials and the successes of the early war years had been deemed unnecessary for single-engined day fighters. Because German air-war doctrine had from the very beginning attached less value to the defensive fighters than to the offensive bomber arm, the effort devoted to training had always been niggardly, not least because additional blind-flying training would have slowed down production of the required numbers of fighter pilots (and the rapid rate of build-up of the Luftwaffe in the pre-war and early war years ruled that out). Training in bad-weather flying—resumed, too late, in the summer of1943—was, however, constantly hampered by the shortage of time, aircraft, and fuel.77 As a result, most day-fighter pilots had little competence in flying on instruments or landing in bad weather. Nor had they mastered assembling in large formations (a skill that had been forgotten since the Battle of Britain), formation flying at Geschwader strength, or flying through solid cloud cover. If this became necessary, then attacks en masse were no longer attempted; they could be made only in much smaller groups, and this—given the defensive firepower of the dense bomber formations and the superior numbers and performance of the American escort fighters—brought high losses. Younger, inexperienced pilots often tried to escape the American fighters by diving away, unaware that
75 Reich marshal’s conference in Deelen, 23 Oct. 1943, BA-MA RL 3/61, 6119 ff.; Grabmann, ‘Luftverteidigung’, BA-MA ZA 1/2476, 462-3.
76 Galland, The First and the Last, 233-5.
77 Generalleutnant a. D. Gerd von Massow, Die Jagdfliegerausbildung in der ehemaligen deutschen Luftwaffe 1925-1945, MS of Nov. 1955, 17, 23, 31-2 (private coll.); App. 2 to Gen. d.Fl. Ausb.(Ia) No. 110/44 g. Kdos. Chefs. No. 1/44, 27 Jan. 1944, BA-MA NachlaB Kreipe, N 141; Galland, The First and the Last, 228-230.
As the design of their Me 109 limited them to 600 km/h in a dive their opponent could catch up with them and shoot them down. As a result a psychosis, dubbed ‘fighter funk’, developed among the less experienced pilots.78
Breaking off combat like this—‘clearing off’, in the pilots’ jargon— had been forbidden by Gciring, on pain of ‘the severest punishment’.79 On the first possible occasion, as he related to his senior officers, he made this clear to the pilots of 3rd Fighter Division at Arnhem-Deelen.80 ‘Clearing off’ was as cowardly as the expression ‘leaving it to others’ was irresponsible and shabby. ‘The fighters escorting the enemy bombers’, he said, were ‘no reason for not destroying the bombers.’ The important thing here was to take off and attack in formation. He wanted no cowards in his Luftwaffe: ‘I get rid of them.’ In using tough language like this Goring was surely only suppressing his own uncomfortable awareness that he was sending inadequately trained pilots out to face a superior foe. He had, he boasted to his officers a few hours later, spoken in this vein wherever he went during his current tour inspecting the troops. The public wanted to see bombers being shot down, and he himself wanted to have not just ordinary soldiers, but ‘warriors’.81 His speeches were the usual mixture of abuse and appeals to morale. Every step must be taken at once to combat a ‘negative attitude to the war and its outcome’ and defeatist talk within the fighter force. It seemed, besides, that in order to raise spirits hopes were already being placed on splits between the Allies and the Soviet Union.82 Goring further demanded that the single-engined fighters henceforth be stationed far enough forward to intercept the bombers before they reached their targets in the Reich.
The accumulation of Goring’s insulting accusations against the fighter pilots finally led to a confrontation with the general of the fighter arm. When, during one conference, the Reich marshal called them ‘pampered’ and unworthy of their high decorations—they had been failures as early as the Battle of Britain, where many of their commanders had ‘faked their reports’ to get their Knight’s Crosses—Galland ripped his own Cross from his collar and slammed it down on the table in front of a speechless Gciring; he did not wear his war decorations again for the following six months, and other officers followed suit.83
Goring’s prime demand was that the day fighters should before all else shoot down the bombers. When, in autumn 1943, the American fighter escorts (whose existence Gciring had initially refused to believe in) were already penetrating as far as Hamburg-Hanover-Kassel-Frankfurt, this strict order could no longer be followed, because the German pilots had first of all to break through the fighter screen. Tactics changed fast in the war in the air. The same
78 Toliver and Constable, Galland, 228-9; Galland, The First and the Last, 242-3.
79 Reich marshal’s conference, 23 Oct. 1943, BA-MA RL 3/61, 6111-45.
80 Ibid., BA-MA RL 3/61, 6091-110, esp. 6100, 6102, 6106; Bracke, tJbermacht, 167-8.
81 Reich marshal’s conference, 23 Oct. 1943, BA-MA RL 3/61, 6111-45.
82 KTB I Fighter Corps, commanders’ conferences, 20 Nov. 1943, 214, BA-MA RL 8/92, and 28 Dec. 1943, 32, BA-MA RL 8/93.
83 Galland, The First and the Last, 257-8; Winter, Adler, 138.
Applied to the initially favoured head-on attack on the bombers, which in early 1943 Galland had described as the most effective;423 by now, however, the American had fitted chin turrets to the nose of their B-i7s, so that an attack from behind seemed more promising. The battle orders of 10 April 1943 were replaced by those issued on 3 September the same year424 by the general of the fighter arm to fighter and destroyer units working in air defence. With immediate effect, only ‘bombers flying in formation’ were to be attacked, and then in each case by whole fighter formations until the bomber formation had been broken up. Only aircraft armed with rockets were, after ‘successful firing’ of the rockets, permitted to break away and finish off individual, crippled bombers. Factory flights and squadrons, night fighters brought in to assist, and operational units from training squadrons—who, because they were in action only sporadically, were in any case not trained to operate in large formations— were allowed to tackle these targets. No further exceptions to the rule were permitted. Those infringing this order were ‘to be court-martialled on the grounds of disobedience having serious consequences for the security of the Reich’. Court-martial for cowardice in the face of the enemy was also in store for pilots who, ‘without valid reason, fail to close in to the prescribed minimum distance’ of 400 m when attacking from behind425 and 800 m in an exceptional attack from head-on. If the bombers nonetheless broke through, they were to be prevented from bombing their targets ‘with all possible means’. Irrespective of which unit aircraft belonged to, they must be made ready for action again at once whenever they landed to refuel and replenish their ammunition. The attack on the bombers must be continued ‘even during the fiercest fire’ from the flak. Twin-engined ‘shadower’ aircraft were put up to maintain surveillance of the bombers and constantly pass details of their strength, location, height, and course to the fighter squadrons. One can appreciate what it meant to a fighter pilot to tackle a large American formation of 27 Flying Fortresses when one realizes that this would have a firepower of around 350 heavy, 12.7-mm machine-guns, at least 200 of which would have an effective range of more than 900 m to the rear, from where the German fighters now generally made their attack.
World History
