The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

On 1 April 1943 Colonel Dietrich Peltz was appointed Angriffsführer England (Attack Leader England) with instructions to find ways of reviving the enervated bombing campaign. He was a successful commander with experience of the 1940–41 bombing and was soon to be promoted general at the remarkably young age of 29. His reputation was his undoing. In May he was appointed Inspector of Bombers and in June a sudden emergency in the Mediterranean saw him transferred away from the revived England campaign before anything had been achieved. During his absence the airmen responsible for the anti-shipping campaign tried to get the promised new resources allocated instead to the blockade strategy on the grounds that land bombing had never proven its worth. In conjunction with the promised new submarines and the use of new long-range aircraft it was argued that the level of tonnage attrition might reach 1.5 million tonnes a month, enough to seriously damage Anglo-American invasion plans.²²⁶ Some sense of the frustration felt by those in charge of the air-sea effort was expressed in a facetious letter to Hans Jeschonnek in early September 1943. ‘If for example,’ wrote the Fliegerführer Atlantik, Lt General Ulrich Kessler, ‘bombs are dropped on an English country house where dances are taking place, there is little possibility of killing anyone of importance, since Churchill doesn’t dance…’. But bombs on ships, he continued, ‘is the deciding factor in this war’.²²⁷ By the time the letter arrived, Jeschonnek had killed himself, unable to bear the continued pressure of coping with air force failures after the successful Allied raid on the air force research station at Peenemünde in August.

The attempt to shift strategy once again to a naval-air blockade failed to convince either Hitler or Göring. Peltz returned to his role as Angriffsführer and succeeded in scraping together 524 bombers and fighter-bombers for the renewed ‘England-Attack’, of which 462 were serviceable. The aircraft were mainly the older Ju88s and Dornier Do217s, and a handful of He177 heavy bombers. The promised new equipment failed to materialize. The standard of training and preparation for long-range attacks was known to be poor, and serviceability rates were low. Peltz relied on the target-marking Kampfgruppe 66, who had greater experience of city bombing, though they could still be misled by British countermeasures. To increase the damage, the aircraft were to carry 70 per cent incendiaries, as British bombers did.²²⁸ On 1 December Hitler approved renewed operations for ‘long-range warfare against England’. Göring saw the campaign as an opportunity to show once again what the air force could do. ‘If we succeed in carrying out vengeance on the sharpest scale,’ he announced, ‘this will exercise the greatest effect on the war-weariness of the English people, stronger than anything else.’²²⁹

On 21 January 1944 the first raid of ‘Operation Steinbock’ was flown against London. One of the German casualties that night was an He177, the first time the Allies had ever seen a German heavy bomber over London. Out of the 500 tonnes destined for the city only 30 tonnes reached the target. Of the 14 raids on London between January and April, only 4 delivered even half the destined tonnage in the right place. A typically abortive operation was undertaken by 13 He177s on 13 February: one burst a tyre on takeoff, eight turned back with engine trouble, one flew to Norwich by mistake and then jettisoned its bombload in the Zuyder Zee, and three reached London, where one was shot down. Attacks on Bristol and Hull failed to find the cities at all. On the nights when the pathfinders succeeded in reaching the target, there was a significant concentration of bombing. In London there were 890 deaths, the highest level of casualty since May 1941.²³⁰ In the February raids the German crews used for the first time thousands of small strips of foiled paper known by the codename Düppel (first used by the RAF under the codename ‘Window’ for the devastating attack on Hamburg in July 1943). Though intended to blind British radar, it did not stop night-fighters and anti-aircraft fire from exacting a high toll on the attacking force.²³¹ Losses of between 5 and 8 per cent for a force that could not be replenished led to the collapse of the renewed campaign after a few weeks. The last attack, on Falmouth in Cornwall, took place on 29 May. By that stage Peltz had just 107 aircraft left, far too few to pose any threat to the Allied invasion of France, which took place a week later.