Targeting the Third Reich

Air Intelligence and the Allied Bombing Campaigns

Rober S. Ehlers Jr.

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780700621446, 9780700616824
• eBook ISBN: 9780700621811
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Winner: Air Force Historical Foundation Award

When large formations of Allied four-engine bombers finally flew over Europe, it marked the beginning of the end for the Third Reich. Their relentless hammering of Germany—totaling more than 1.4 million missions—took out oil refineries, industries, and transportation infrastructures vital to the Reich’s war effort. While other accounts have focused on operational details, this is the first book to reveal the crucial role of air intelligence in these dramatic campaigns.

Robert Ehlers reexamines these bombings through the lens of both air intelligence and operations, a dual approach that shows how the former was so vital to the latter’s success. Air intelligence was essential to both targeting and damage assessment, and by demonstrating its contributions to the Combined Bomber Offensive of 1943-1945, Ehlers provides a wealth of new insight into the war.

Ehlers describes the close ties that developed between the Royal Air Force’s “precision intelligence” arm and the U.S. Army Air Force’s “precision bombardment” forces, telling how the RAF’s photographic reconnaissance and signals intelligence steered both British and American bombers to the right targets at the right intervals with the right munitions. He shows that the greatest strength of this partnership was its ability to orchestrate all aspects of damage assessment within an effective organizational structure, so that by 1944 senior air commanders—like the RAF’s Arthur “Bomber” Harris and the AAF’s Carl “Tooey” Spaatz—could gauge the accuracy of bombing with a high degree of precision, analyze its effects on the German war effort, and determine its effectiveness in helping the Allies achieve strategic objectives.

Ehlers focuses on three key offensives in 1944—against French and Belgian rail supply lines delivering German troops and supplies to Normandy, against German oil refineries, and against railroads and waterways inside the Reich—that had a disastrous effect on the Nazi war effort. In the process, he underscores the degree to which bombers constituted part of a highly effective combined-arms force, giving Allied armies crucial advantages on the battlefield. Drawing on a huge collection of bomb-damage assessment photographs and a wealth of other archival sources, he shows that the success of these and other efforts can be traced directly to the success of air intelligence.

Providing a deeper and more accurate understanding of the bomber campaigns’ role in the Allied victory, Ehlers’s study testifies to the strategic importance of these efforts in that war and provides a tool for understanding the importance of intelligence operations in future conflicts.

ONE

AIR INTELLIGENCE IN ITS HISTORICAL CONTEXT

In essence, air power is targeting, targeting is intelligence, and intelligence is analyzing the effects of air operations.

—Phillip S. Meilinger, Ten Propositions Regarding Airpower

The Anglo-American aerial bombardment of Germany formed one of the major strategic and operational chapters of the Second World War. The question of its effectiveness in supporting Allied military strategy was surrounded by controversy during the war and in the postwar period, although virtually all historians and other scholars of World War II now recognize Allied air forces played an important role, in conjunction with land and naval forces, in defeating the Axis powers.¹ However, relatively few scholars have thoroughly investigated the full range of reasons for bombing’s effectiveness, including the associated and crucial air intelligence effort. Four broad developments have diverted much of the scholarly effort from a focused and detailed study about how and why bombing contributed so significantly to Allied victory.

The first has been a tendency in recent years to move away from a focus on bombing efficacy to an examination of its ethical dimensions. The bombing effort was at times brutal in its application, but it occurred within the context of a global war set into motion and carried on with incredible brutality by Hitler and his Japanese allies. Yet even though Allied leaders viewed bombing as a key component in their efforts to ensure the survival of the Western democracies, and therefore accepted prima facie its ethical implications, several recent works have strongly criticized its purported moral deficiencies.²

The second factor has its roots in a tendency—less prevalent in recent years—to evaluate bombing effectiveness strictly in isolation, rather than as part of a global war in which air, ground, and naval operations were intertwined and synergistic. Any evaluation of aerial bombardment’s efficacy must occur in this larger combined-arms and combined-operations context. Recent scholarship has made great strides in this direction, particularly with respect to the role of the Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO) in destroying the Luftwaffe and giving Allied air forces air supremacy. In addition, a few books have addressed bombing’s disastrous effects on Germany’s war economy. Nonetheless, they represent only a start in the right direction and fall short in their examination of the role of air intelligence, particularly targeting and damage assessment, in the Reich’s defeat.³

The third factor clouding bombing’s effects and effectiveness has been the tendency among scholars to lump it all together under the rubric of the CBO. However, as John Guilmartin notes, there were in fact several campaigns. These included Bomber Command’s efforts against German cities; the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) unescorted daylight campaign in 1943–1944; Operation ARGUMENT, the USAAF effort in February–April 1944 that ultimately resulted in the Luftwaffe’s defeat; the three transportation offensives from 1943 to 1945 against Axis railroads and inland waterways, first in Italy, then in France and Belgium, and finally in Germany itself; and the oil offensive of 1944–1945. There were also several British campaigns early in the war, including the anti-invasion campaign of 1940–1941 against German-controlled ports and barges on the English Channel, an abortive oil offensive against synthetic oil plants and crude oil refineries in western Germany during roughly the same period, and early night-bombing efforts in 1941–1942.⁴

The crucial link between these disparate campaigns, from an air intelligence standpoint, was the iterative learning process occurring as intelligence personnel recommended targets to their commanders and then assessed the effectiveness of bombing raids. In the process, they honed their analytical skills, giving commanders increasingly accurate damage assessments. They used these analyses to steer ever larger heavy-bomber forces against the most lucrative target sets. The process was gradual and involved many errors in target selection, damage assessment, and judgments about bombing efficacy.

It also involved frequent and outright misuse of intelligence as policy makers and senior commanders pushed their various strategic and operational preferences. This in turn resulted in operational errors as bombers attacked target sets that were not lucrative, attacked too many different kinds of targets simultaneously with inadequate forces, or, as with attacks on ballbearing and electric power plants, failed to attack lucrative target sets with sufficient persistence. Because intelligence was and is such a profoundly political and contestable commodity—and this will become evident throughout the narrative—senior leaders often used intelligence reports for their own purposes until the war’s end. This was perhaps the greatest detractor from an otherwise successful operations-intelligence effort.

The fourth factor keeping scholars from engaging in serious attempts to assess the effectiveness of Allied bombing has to do with the fact that many writings about the CBO have come at the problem from an operator’s perspective. Many of the books in this subgenre are outstanding, but they tend to grapple insufficiently with the larger questions of bombing’s effectiveness and contributions to Allied victory. They also ignore the huge planning and intelligence efforts that went into directing the operational employment of heavy bombers.

The last of these key functions—directing the bombing effort—is a primary concern of this work. The analytical tools allowing senior airmen to provide this guidance, including targeting, damage assessment, and munitions effectiveness assessment, are central to the narrative. So are the thousands of men and women who brought these skills to a peak of effectiveness not since equaled even in the age of jet aircraft, reconnaissance satellites, cruise missiles, and smart bombs. These largely overlooked specialists, who assessed the effects of the hammer blows of bombing on the Nazi war machine and on the basis of those assessments advised commanders on the most effective use of their aircraft, played a vital role in speeding the victory over Germany. Unfortunately, only three chapters in a single book have even begun weaving together the ways in which they used sources and methods, comprising not only reconnaissance photos but also Ultra intercepts, lower-grade cipher systems, debriefings of refugees from the Continent, and several others, to advise commanders on optimum operational employment. Only a handful of other books discuss this effort in more than a cursory fashion.⁵

Air intelligence personnel orchestrated an effort that proved central to the Allied cause because it enabled commanders to direct their bombers against the most lucrative target sets. The two most important were German transportation assets in occupied Europe and the Reich itself—including railroads and inland waterways—and oil assets, which included crude oil refineries and the synthetic oil plants built during the 1930s and early 1940s. From the spring of 1944 to VE Day, air intelligence personnel helped convince commanders to stay focused on these target sets. When viewed in combination with the Allied ground effort, which profited greatly from these air campaigns, the results were impressive. The transportation and oil offensives starved the Germans of fuel and ammunition, making it impossible for them to concentrate and maneuver on a large scale.

By 1944, and even as early as 1942, the Allies had a highly capable and integrated network of intelligence organizations in place. With a few noteworthy exceptions, commanders put recommendations into practice in the guise of various campaigns under the larger umbrella of the CBO. It was no accident that a highly effective air intelligence function, based largely on superb reconnaissance and photointerpretation capabilities pioneered by the British between 1939 and 1942, allowed an expert damage-assessment capability to emerge more than two years before RAF Bomber Command and the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe (USSTAF) had enough bombers to do serious damage to the German war effort. By the time they did, in the spring of 1944, a mature air intelligence organization was in place to help senior airmen steer heavy bombers to vital transportation and oil targets, in addition to a variety of other less significant, but nonetheless important, target sets. By one estimate, the destruction of these key assets shortened the war by at least three months and reduced Allied and Soviet casualty lists by at least a million men.⁶

The air intelligence organization supplying analyses at the root of these successes had a remarkable dualism. It was in many ways an ad hoc structure, created shortly before or during the war, under trying circumstances, to fulfill specific functions. Yet it also benefited from a unique Anglo-American capability to organize the war effort for maximum efficiency and effectiveness.

The Anglo-Saxon democracies were adept at organizing their war effort, and this was particularly true for air intelligence. Its effectiveness relied on an intellectual infrastructure including highly trained professionals and the world’s best signals intelligence and reconnaissance technologies. Intelligence personnel had the tools and analytical insights necessary to pick target sets most likely to cause maximum damage to Germany’s war effort. Even more important, this capability allowed them to monitor, with great precision, bombing’s progressively powerful effects on the course of the war and to recommend changes in targeting priorities based on meticulous damage reports. Deliberative bodies such as the Combined Strategic Targets Committee (CSTC) allowed commanders to wage the oil and transportation offensives against the Reich on a one-week cycle—with a capacity for the equivalent of time-sensitive targeting—that anyone familiar with the American-NATO Air Tasking Order (ATO) process would recognize immediately.

Several prominent scholars, including Richard Overy, have noted how effectively the Allied air effort leveraged human talent, organizational innovation, engineering prowess, and technological development, bringing airmen and their civilian counterparts together in what proved to be a highly efficient, effective, and relatively harmonious relationship.⁷

Along these lines, the Allies used their unique intelligence talents in ways that were vital and fundamental to Allied victory. Although Carl von Clausewitz warns us that war is neither science nor art, Allied air intelligence personnel brought an abundance of both to the war effort, melding them together in one of the great intelligence efforts, and one of the great intelligence successes, in the history of warfare.⁸ When combined with the unparalleled Allied ability to wage total and industrialized war on a global scale—to conduct “machine war,” as several scholars have called it—the result was a series of bombing campaigns that were effective, focused, and above all relentless. In discussing the American air effort in the Second World War, John Keegan said:

There is an American mystery, the nature of which I can only begin to perceive. . . . If I were obliged to define it, I would say it is the ethos—masculine, pervasive, unrelenting—of work as an end in itself. War is a form of work, and Americans make war, however reluctantly, however unwillingly, in a particularly workmanlike way.⁹

Keegan’s comments apply with equal force to the British air intelligence effort. In this arena, the British were the teachers and the Americans their pupils. The work of British intelligence specialists in the Air Ministry, Central Interpretation Unit (renamed the Allied Central Interpretation Unit once large numbers of Americans began arriving in 1943), Research and Experiments Department Eight (initially under the Ministry of Home Security and later the Air Ministry), Ministry of Economic Warfare, Railway Research Service, and a host of other agencies made this clear, even if their products often became the catalyst for bitter disputes among senior political and military leaders about what all this intelligence meant and how they should use it to greatest effect. The brilliant work at Bletchley Park, where the Allies exploited the German Enigma cipher, was also central to their many successes, including assessments of bombing effects and effectiveness. However, although we already know a great deal about Ultra, which is the subject of dozens of books, we know much less about the other components of the Allied intelligence organization. Accordingly, although Ultra receives significant attention in this work, it gets less than photointerpretation (about which little scholarly works exists) and the ways in which the entire intelligence enterprise came together in support of the bombing campaigns.

The vital attribute air intelligence brought to bear was an ability to make reasoned and accurate judgments about airpower’s effectiveness in hampering the German war effort. This ability increased as the war continued, driven by close cooperation between Anglo-American air intelligence specialists. The air intelligence community’s greatest strength was its ability to orchestrate all aspects of damage assessment within an effective organizational structure. By 1943, this organization could gauge, with precision, the accuracy of bombing, its effects on Germany’s war effort, and its effectiveness in helping the Allies achieve strategic objectives. This proved most true of attacks on specific target sets rather than British city bombing, which was much more difficult to assess in terms of its overall impact on Nazi Germany’s war effort but, as we will see, still very effective.¹⁰

Perhaps the thing damage assessments made most clear about the bombing campaigns known collectively as the CBO was the steadily increasing and ultimately pervasive friction they created in the German war effort. By the summer of 1944, this friction was ubiquitous. From increasingly severe fuel shortages in the Luftwaffe and German army; to the constant delays, equipment losses, and casualties German troops experienced in conducting tactical maneuvers as well as movements to or between the various fighting fronts; to the ammunition shortages of the war’s final months; and a myriad of other ways, Allied bombers were the creators of friction the Nazi war machine par excellence. This process began with Bomber Command attacks and accelerated as the Americans joined the effort in ever larger numbers. The friction they created made even simple tasks difficult or impossible. Clausewitz’s description of friction is particularly well suited to describing bombing’s effects on the Wehrmacht. In war, Clausewitz said,

Friction is the only concept that more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper. . . . Action in war is like movement in a resistant element. Just as the simplest and most natural of movements, walking, cannot easily be performed in water, so in war it is difficult for normal efforts to achieve even moderate results.¹¹

For the Germans after spring 1944, the resistant element was increasingly like molasses rather than water.¹²

Despite extraordinary repair efforts, the Germans fell further and further behind in the hopeless race to counter disastrous bombing-induced friction in virtually every facet of their war effort. Tactical movements that took a few days while the Germans owned the skies over Europe took two weeks or more once the marshaling yards, inland waterways, and bridges of western and central Europe came under concerted attack. As they arrived at the fighting fronts, German troops often discovered that bombing had created serious fuel shortages, making the Kampfgruppe-level tactical maneuvers at which they excelled nearly impossible. Reichsbahn managers and their counterparts who ran synthetic oil plants worked under increasingly nightmarish conditions, trying to carry out basic functions—moving soldiers, fuel, ammunition, and coal by rail on the one hand, and producing aviation and motor fuel on the other—while devoting huge numbers of workers to repair bomb damage. After the war, Albert Speer said between 200,000 and 300,000 laborers were engaged in repairing synthetic oil plants, and even this huge effort proved inadequate.¹³ The Germans were resourceful adversaries, but they could not keep up with the increasing tempo of bombing and the friction it created, which overwhelmed their efforts at the fighting fronts, in the railway centers, at the oil plants, and virtually everywhere else.

This friction played an extremely significant role in the Allied victory, but it did not by any means do so alone. Bombing never became the warwinning instrument envisioned in the writings of Douhet, Trenchard, and Mitchell. It helped win the war in combination with soldiers, whose role was fundamental to Allied victory. The growing Allied expertise in planning and executing combined and in joint operations allowed heavy bombers to play an increasingly vital role not only at the military-strategic level, but also in operational and tactical engagements, by starving the Germans of fuel, transport, and ammunition and by providing direct support to ground forces in the opening stages of major offensives.

Omer Bartov, Russell Hart, and Christopher Duffy have coined similar phrases to describe what happened to the German army on the Western and Eastern fronts as a result of the pervasive fuel shortages brought on by bombing: demodernization, demotorization, and demechanization.¹⁴ German commanders were forced to send their trucks, which were supposed to move soldiers quickly from one spot to the next, to forage for fuel and ammunition instead, often at night and over great distances, to provide armored and motorized vehicles and artillery with at least the bare minimum of tactical maneuver and firepower ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• CHAPTER ONE: Air Intelligence in Its Historical Context
• CHAPTER TWO: The Great War and the Beginnings of Air Intelligence
• CHAPTER THREE: Lessons Learned, Unlearned, and Forgotten: Analyses of Aerial Bombardment in World War I and Their Consequences
• CHAPTER FOUR: Retrenchment and Advance: Air Intelligence Developments in the Early Interwar Period, 1919–1933
• CHAPTER FIVE: The Pace Quickens: Air Intelligence Developments in the Late Interwar Period, 1933–1941
• CHAPTER SIX: Air Intelligence Grows to Adolescence: British Developments, 1939–1941
• CHAPTER SEVEN: The Shift to Night Area Bombing: Air Intelligence, Doctrinal Evolution, and Operational Change, 1941–1942
• CHAPTER EIGHT: Air Intelligence Reaches Maturity, January 1943–January 1944
• CHAPTER NINE: Transportation Campaigns: Bombing, Air Intelligence, and the Defeat of German Armies in France, 1944
• CHAPTER TEN: The Attack on Oil, April–December 1944: Air Intelligence, Bombing, and the Acceleration of German Defeat in the Field
• CHAPTER ELEVEN: Endgame, November 1944–May 1945: Air Intelligence, the Final Destruction of Oil and Transportation Assets, and the Defeat of the Wehrmacht
• CHAPTER TWELVE: Retrospective
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover