The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

In London anxiety remained that at some point Hitler might launch a macabre bombing finale as his empire crumbled around him. Churchill had worried in 1943 that the bombing of the dams in the Ruhr might provoke Germany to attack Britain’s water supply.²³⁷ The discovery of the V-weapons’ threat fuelled the fears that Germany had not yet exhausted its arsenal of scientific surprises. Secret intelligence suggested that the enemy was developing an even larger rocket with a 20-ton warhead as well as a chemical fluid which would be dropped from aircraft and ignited in order to suck the oxygen out of the air and cause mass suffocation.²³⁸ In March 1945 Portal had to reassure Churchill that a German spoiling attack on the Houses of Parliament was improbable. On 29 March the chiefs of staff considered the possibility of a once-and-for-all suicide attack by all the remaining German aircraft, but thought it unlikely since few German aircraft could now reach London from what remained of German-controlled territory. On 5 April 1945 Churchill still needed to be reassured by the military chiefs that a last throw by Hitler with bacteriological and chemical bombs was unlikely, though it could not be entirely ruled out.²³⁹ Historians have speculated on the existence of so-called ‘dirty bombs’ in Germany in 1944–5, using the waste material from Germany’s failed nuclear research programme. There is some evidence that small spherical bombs containing radioactive waste were stored in the Mittelbau-Dora works at Nordhausen, where the A4 rockets were being produced, but it is not conclusive. A case has recently been made that German scientists did finally achieve some form of atomic reaction at the very end of the war, but even if true, atomic weapons were still far away from operational realization.²⁴⁰ By the end of 1944 the capacity of German aircraft to deliver anything significant in British airspace was negligible.

The failure of the German Air Force to return to strategic bombing after the summer of 1941 was not the product of an unwillingness to pursue an independent air strategy but a result of the heavy demands made of German forces on the many fighting fronts that opened up over the next three years. Combined operations became the principal focus of air force activity. If the Soviet Union had been defeated in 1941, as Hitler had hoped, then a renewed air offensive would almost certainly have been the outcome, despite Hitler’s own reservations about the strategic effect of independent bombing, which he expressed to Goebbels in April 1942:

the munitions industry… cannot be interfered with effectively by air raids. We learned that lesson during our raids on English armament centres in the autumn of 1940… Usually the prescribed targets are not hit; often the fliers unload their bombs on fields camouflaged as plants…²⁴¹

A fresh air offensive would nevertheless have required a substantial increase in bomber output and the development of more technically sophisticated aircraft, bombs and navigation aids. It is striking that despite the efforts to upgrade and modernize the German bomber force in the years 1941 to 1944, almost none of the vaunted new generation of aircraft proved of operational value. Aircraft production stagnated in 1941 and 1942, bomber output in particular; according to Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel in one of his post-war interrogations, ‘a sort of vacuum was created’ where aeronautical innovation was concerned.²⁴² It cannot be certain that a renewed bomber offensive would have had the technological edge or scale that it enjoyed in 1940.