The Air War over Germany

The air war over Germany was an outgrowth of the German air war over much of Europe.  When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939 they introduced a new dimension to warfare:  the employment of massive air power in direct support of ground troops.  Airplanes had become a part of warfare during the first World War, but in 1918 aerial combat was still in its infancy.  Machine guns had been placed in fighter aircraft, and dogfights were part of the action.  World War I planes occasionally strafed targets on the ground, but bombing missions often consisted of nothing more than pilots throwing grenades or other explosive devices out of the cockpit by hand.  Airplanes were valuable as reconnaissance tools, but like tanks, aircraft had yet to become dominant factors in battle.

World War I, however, did provide a huge impetus to the development of aviation.  Charles Lindbergh’s famous flight across the Atlantic in 1927 was a milestone, but real advances in aircraft design and manufacture began to appear in the 1930s.  Aircraft engines became far more powerful; aircraft bodies were made of metal rather than wood and cloth; aerodynamic features were incorporated into designs, giving aircraft greater speed, maneuverability, and range; aviation fuels and lubricants were improved; and some of the world’s most famous and durable aircraft, such as the Douglas DC-3, were developed during the 1930s.  Brilliant engineers such as Howard Hughes pushed the limits of what planes were capable of.

All the major nations—the United States, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, Great Britain, Italy, and others—poured millions of dollars and thousands of hours of research into aircraft development.  Although much of that work was devoted to creating aircraft for carrying passengers or mail over ever-longer distances, aircraft were also being widely developed for military use.  By 1940 large, powerful multi-engine aircraft were capable of carrying thousands of pounds of armaments and bombs over the battlefield.

Early in the war, use of the airplane in direct support of ground troops was seen as an acceptable and logical extension of other battlefield support weapons such as artillery, machine guns, and tanks.  But the use of airplanes against nonmilitary targets was at first approached gingerly by all sides.  Early in the war care was taken to avoid even accidental striking of civilian targets, and very early in the conflict an uproar resulted when a few stray bombs landed in a schoolyard not far from a factory.  But when the German Luftwaffe bombed cities such as Amsterdam, and when, following the Battle of Britain, Air Marshal Hermann Göring commenced what became known as the blitz of London, the use of bomber aircraft against civilian targets came into widespread use, and the resulting devastation was enormous.

As the German army became more deeply mired in its campaign against the Soviet Union, British and American air forces undertook a massive air campaign against Germany that accelerated from 1943 through 1945.  In May 1943, the first thousand-plane raid was conducted against the German city of Cologne, and all that was left standing in the heart of that old city was a huge Romanesque cathedral that had been strong enough to withstand the bombings.  The cloud of smoke and ashes arising over the city of Cologne was visible from as far away as the English Channel.  Hundreds of civilians were dead, and casualties numbered in the thousands.

As the air war progressed, the British and Americans developed detailed strategies for attacking Germany’s war-making capability.  The use of radar and other navigation devices and improved bombsights were meant to increase the accuracy of air attacks, but a combination of weather, German fighters, antiaircraft guns, and ordinary human error left bombing accuracy a goal to be desired rather than a real accomplishment.  Bombs often fell miles from their targets, and sometimes even the wrong cities were attacked, as when one squadron that headed for Dresden in 1945 wound up instead bombing the Czech city of Prague.

Priority targets for British and American pilots included aircraft plants, oil refineries, factories, transportation centers and facilities, military installations, and other war-related centers.  But as German defenses were worn down and allied capabilities continued to grow, dozens of German cities were bombed more or less indiscriminately.  In a raid on the city of Kassel, for example, the industrial targets received only minor damage whereas 90 percent of the city’s homes were hit.  Toward the end of the war, raids that killed thousands of individuals occurred on a regular basis.

The most famous, or perhaps infamous, raid of the European war occurred at the city of Dresden in February 1945.  The war was clearly winding down at that point as Russian armies were advancing in the East, and American, British, and French forces were rapidly approaching the Rhine and Germany itself.  Dresden was a picturesque old city, sometimes called the Florence of the North, and although it did have some minor military-related manufacturing, it was by no means an industrial city.  Many of the antiaircraft defenses had been removed from the Dresden area to reinforce the cities in the Ruhr industrial region.  Citizens of Dresden had come to believe that the city might be spared.  They were wrong.

The city of Dresden had become clogged by tens of thousands of refugees fleeing from the advancing Russian armies to the east.  The attacks on Dresden began at night when Mosquito bombers dropped thousands of incendiary flares on the city to mark it as a target for the following bombers, and to start fires throughout the city.  Heavy British Lancaster and Haviland bombers followed, dropping tons of high-explosive bombs on the city.  The following day, while the fires still raged, American B-17 aircraft flew over and dumped more tons of bombs on the city.  Those daylight attacks were followed by yet more British bombers.  By the time the raids ended, Dresden lay in ruins, and thousands of civilians were dead, including many of the refugees who had wandered into the city seeking safety.  Although the exact number of casualties was impossible to determine, they numbered in the tens of thousands.

Hundreds of books have been written about the European war; many of those have focused on the air war, and a number particularly on Dresden.  Whatever justification for the devastating attacks may have existed at the time, the legacy of the air war rightly or wrongly served as a propaganda tool for the Soviet-dominated Communist governments of Eastern Europe in the postwar period.  Even Western writers such as Major General John F. C. Fuller have deplored what they called the excesses of the Allied bombing campaigns.  Postwar peace and understanding, they have written, cannot be constructed upon piles of rubble and the graves of hundreds of thousands of people.

After the war studies were done to try to determine the overall effectiveness of the air campaigns of the Second World War.  Different authorities have come to different conclusions, but a consensus seems to have determined that the costs of the air war to the victims significantly outweighed the benefits to the victors.  Sadly, that lesson was difficult to absorb, as the massive bombings of North Vietnam during that conflict later demonstrated.

Home Front | Updated September 6, 2007