The air force of Nazi Germany, founded in
1919, with additional limits placed on the German civilian aircraft industry.
The civilian limits were lifted by the 1926 Paris Air Agreement, the same year
that several small airlines were consolidated into a national carrier:
Lufthansa. By 1931 the German military operated four secret fighter squadrons
and eight light-reconnaissance squadrons. From 1933 to 1935 pilots were trained
in “sports clubs” and “glider clubs” run by the Nazi Party Air Corps (NSFK),
the German counterpart of the Osoaviakhim in the Soviet Union. Nearly 20,000
boys and men were already trained by the time the existence of the Luftwaffe
was officially announced by Adolf Hitler in 1935, with World War I fighter ace
Hermann Göring at its head.
The Luftwaffe never planned or developed a
strategic bombing capability after its only strategic bombing advocate, and first
chief of staff, died in 1935. Air doctrine was heavily influenced by the fact
that the first air staff were recruited directly out of the Heer. That gave the
Luftwaffe a lasting bias toward a ground force support and tactical role. As a
result, in the five years before the war the Luftwaffe built up a complement of
medium bombers, dive bombers, and heavy attack fighters, but eschewed design or
production of strategic bombers. Even so, its prewar research was impressive.
By 1939 the Germans were well ahead of their great rivals—the Royal Air Force
(RAF), French Air Force or Armée de l’Air, and Red Army Air Force (VVS) —in
navigation and target-finding aids, as well as ground-to-air controls and
tactical integration with ground forces. However, technical leads were thrown
away over time by incoherent weapons development procedures and political interference
that led to faulty strategic decisions. As a result, Germany and its allies
soon fell behind the RAF, USAAF, and VVS in air technology and production. Even
in the case of jets, the one advanced area where the Germans kept pace with or
bettered the RAF into 1945, development was handicapped by insistence by Adolf
Hitler that all jets must be built with a bombing capability. A general trend
toward comparative technological backwardness was reinforced by the fact that
the Luftwaffe was a fully independent air force: it was not tied to the Heer or
Kriegsmarine, although it retained a ground support bias all through the war.
Also, it was the Nazi arm par excellence: it was led by Nazi-true believers, and
its institutional ethos reflected the Nazi cult of heroic battle, rather than
understanding that air superiority could be achieved and maintained only over
time.
Poor intelligence led the Luftwaffe to
believe that the British aircraft industry was incapable of producing more than
3,000 aircraft in 1939–1940, when in fact the British permanently surpassed
German aircraft production in late 1939. This false view of enemy capabilities
caused the Luftwaffe to overestimate its own strength and to delay mass
production of bombers and fighters until it was too late to make a strategic
difference to the outcome of the war. At the start of FALL WEISS, the invasion
of Poland in September 1939, the Luftwaffe had 4,036 operational frontline
aircraft, of which 1,800 were medium or dive bombers. The Western Allies had
4,100 frontline planes. Luftwaffe command planned ahead based on an assumption
that war would not break out in the West until 1942. That left it at 1936
levels of production when war actually came in September 1939, whereas Britain
was ramping up to full wartime production. The initial advantage enjoyed by the
Luftwaffe was, therefore, not as great as is often stated. It did lead,
however, officially in 1935. The old German air force was abolished under terms
of the Treaty of Versailles in making the changeover to more modern aircraft
types. That gave German pilots an initial advantage in combat from 1939 to
1940, but one squandered during the first two years of the air war as German
aircraft production sputtered along at barely more than peacetime levels. This
went unnoticed by Hitler until 1941, when he finally intervened in aircraft
production. But that was too late to eliminate growing shortfalls in aircraft
in the Mediterranean and on the Eastern Front. Luftwaffe servicing and repair
was also mismanaged and inadequate.
The first significant military operations
by the Luftwaffe came during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), as the mainstay
of the Kondor Legion. Luftwaffe pilots engaged elements of the VVS in Spain and
became infamous for the first terror bombing of civilians at Guernica. Next
came an airlift of 2,000 troops into Austria during the Anschluss in 1938. A
shock was felt by the Germans in Poland during FALL WEISS (1939), even though
the Polish Air Force was wholly destroyed, much of it caught by surprise on the
ground. Against a Polish defense mounted by 333 mostly obsolete planes, the
Germans lost 285 aircraft destroyed and another 279 damaged. That should have
served warning about the appalling attrition rates to come against major air forces,
yet German production remained relatively low. During the Phoney War in the
West over the winter of 1939–1940, Hitler directed the Luftwaffe to confine
attacks to coastal shipping and interdiction of the RAF leaflet bombing
campaign in the Ruhr. Just 258 aircraft were devoted to maritime patrol and
interdiction duties at the start of the critical Battle of the Atlantic (1939–
1945). Yet, Göring vehemently opposed development of any naval aviation,
fearing that senior Kriegsmarine commanders would pursued creation of a rival
air force. This obstruction badly damaged German antishipping efforts at a time
when RAF convoy defenses were still primitive. During FALL GELB (1940), it was
principally the Heer that brought about German success. The Luftwaffe played an
important supporting role, however, taking advantage of French dispersal and
British reluctance to commit their full fighter force to the battle on the
continent. As of May 10, 1940, the Luftwaffe thus enjoyed a local numerical
advantage of 2,750 aircraft to 1,200 French aircraft and just 416 RAF planes.
That enabled it to achieve air supremacy over active sectors, and to strafe and
harass enemy columns and armor. In contrast, having squandered the winter with
a leafleting campaign, the RAF dispersed its battle effort by bombing oil and
rail targets in the Ruhr, attacks that contributed nothing to forestalling
swift defeat on the ground in France.
The Luftwaffe did not fare as well later
that summer: having failed to develop a theory or capability for strategic
bombing, the Luftwaffe was unprepared for the campaign asked of it during the
Battle of Britain and the Blitz. The attrition rates suffered over Dunkirk and
then again over Britain in the summer and early fall of 1940 were compounded by
dispersal of squadrons to the Middle East and across the Balkans in 1941. All
that meant that the Luftwaffe was smaller at the outset of BARBAROSSA in June
1941, than when it began FALL GELB in May 1940, despite fielding 1.7 million
personnel. With total operational and tactical surprise achieved in the opening
battles in the east, the Luftwaffe destroyed over 2,000 VVS planes in the first
three days. After two weeks it had destroyed nearly 4,000 VVS planes. However,
the Germans lost 550 aircraft in the same period. During 1942 the Soviet
aircraft industry produced 25,000 aircraft, solely for use against the Germans.
The VVS also took significant deliveries of Western fighters starting late in
the year. Total Allied production that year was over 71,000 aircraft. By
comparison, the Germans produced just 15,000 aircraft of all types, and spread
them over three active fronts: North Africa and the Mediterranean, the German
homeland, and the Eastern Front. The Luftwaffe upheld a wholly tactical support
role in the east, while scrambling to develop or replace an air transport
capacity it sorely lacked. Its loss rate was so high that it never fully
replaced its losses. The Germans thus lost air superiority around Leningrad and
Briansk over the course of 1942. At Kursk, 400 German aircraft faced over 2,000
VVS planes. By mid-1943 Soviet aircraft and pilots had closed the early
technical and training gaps with their German counterparts. Luftwaffe crew
skills deteriorated further as Göring and Hitler insisted on replacing combat
losses by throwing trainer aircraft and instructors into active service.
From mid-1943 many Luftwaffe fighter
Geschwader were drawn away from the east, to be instead attrited by Western air
forces in the Mediterranean, over France, and above Germany. The process began
well before the Normandy campaign, as the Western Allies made engagement of
Luftwaffe fighters and destruction of Germany’s fighter production a top
priority of their Combined Bomber Offensive. The bulk of German fighters and
anti-aircraft artillery, which consumed vast quantities of ammunition, were
defending the Reich by September 1943. Hence, despite ramping up production to
25,000 aircraft in 1943, hardly any increase was experienced on the Eastern
Front. German fighter losses in France and over Germany were so great that by
mid-1944, despite greatly expanded production in the most efficient year of the
war for the German aircraft industry, the Luftwaffe was no longer a major
combat factor on the Eastern Front. Similarly, by mid-1944 half of all
artillery tubes were located in the homeland, in use as anti-aircraft guns
against Western Allied bomber streams. The Luftwaffe was on the defensive
everywhere; airfields and factories were pounded by enemy air forces that
seemed to have more and better planes every month. As pilot and crew casualties
mounted, the Luftwaffe faced better and more experienced enemy pilots in the
east as well as in the west. None of that prevented intense personal conflict
within its top ranks, or with other armed services of the Wehrmacht. An extreme
example was the suicide by Göring’s chief of staff in 1943, on grounds that he
could no longer work with the erratic Reichsmarschall. Göring was indeed
impossible to work with, a fact that severely retarded new aircraft designs and
impeded production of older ones throughout the war.
Hitler’s personal interventions and odd
theories—for instance, in favor of jet bombers—further aggravated severe
irrationalities in aircraft design and production schedules. This problem was
eased somewhat from 1943 by the succession of Erhard Milch to the position of chief
of staff. Milch was a technically competent man who greatly increased fighter
production into 1944, when Albert Speer took over the aircraft industry and
stretched production to even greater levels. Improved production was achieved
by cutting back on bombers and transports, in favor of ramping up output of
earlier model fighters that were already outclassed by new planes in all major
enemy air forces. Without a strategic bomber force the Luftwaffe had been
unable to punish Britain sufficiently to drive that country from the war in
1940. Germans now paid the price in blood and destroyed cities from 1943 to
1945, as the RAF and USAAF flew from Great Britain, and later also from Italy,
to destroy dozens of German cities. Nor could the Germans knock out Soviet
factories relocated far behind the combat lines, not even at the deepest extent
of Wehrmacht penetration on the Eastern Front in 1942. Germany had devoted too
much of its limited material and intellectual resources and war production to
the Luftwaffe, without developing a decisive air weapon or a sufficient defense
to successfully fend off superior and far more numerous enemy aircraft. A
fundamental structural flaw was Luftwaffe political isolation within the
Wehrmacht and the Nazi political system. The latter was a by-product of
Göring’s chronic scheming, which was outmatched by Nazi rivals as his
performance and that of the Luftwaffe declined in tandem. That left the
Luftwaffe without a clientele base in the war economy or political support when
Hitler turned against it, scapegoating the air force for Germany’s overall
strategic failure.
Unknown to the general German population,
Luftwaffe thinking about civil defense dating to 1934 assumed that enemy
bombers would always get through. With their usual ruthlessness, prewar Nazi
and German state planners set out secret lists of cities to receive funds for
priority defense and building of bomb shelters, based on their importance to
the future war economy rather than exposure of citizens. They also prepared
lists of German towns deemed “expendable.” When the bombers came, wave upon
wave or in long streams, even in the priority cities there were never enough
bomb shelters. The Party stepped in to build some shelters to fill the gap, but
as sirens wailed terrified civilians were crammed into the few public shelters
that existed. Those who could ran inside the huge and nearly invulnerable, but
stifling, Flak towers (Flaktürme) in the few key cities that had them. Most
just huddled in some nearby basement that was no protection against high
explosive bombs. Worse, these basements were connected by tunnels so that
people might run from cellar to cellar in front of the bombs, and poisonous
carbon monoxide was channeled into cellars to silently kill those inside. Slave
laborers, who comprised most foreigners in Germany by 1944, were provided no
shelter whatever. They remained in the street when the bombs fell, and suffered
commensurately enormous casualties. Most harmful to civilians was that civil
air defense (“Zivlier Luftschutz”) was left to the Luftwaffe to organize as a
military matter. The air force was too decentralized, grossly inefficient, and
politically weakened late in the war to obtain or manage the men or material
resources needed for the job. Instead, the Luftwaffe turned to women and the
Hitler Jungend to crew its forests of anti-aircraft guns. These were
concentrated in the Ruhr Valley and other industrial areas, then later around
Berlin and other repeated urban targets of Allied air raids.
By 1943 the Luftwaffe included hundreds of
thousands of ground personnel engaged in air defense of the Reich, as Germany
faced thousand bomber raids and round-the-clock bombing. Those facts were
pointed to by Winston Churchill in 1943 when protesting directly to Stalin that
the air campaign constituted an effective “second front,” well before the
landings in Normandy. As German infantry losses mounted, pressure was brought
to bear to surrender some of the Luftwaffe’s many nonflying personnel for the
frontlines. Some 200,000 were transferred to the Heer in 1943. Göring’s waning
political influence was still strong enough in 1944 to ensure that additional
infantry units were formed as Luftwaffe field divisions that remained under his
control. Most were armed into 1943 with captured Czech, French, or Soviet guns,
along with various German PAK anti-aircraft guns and horse-towed anti-tank
guns. They were not consistently organized until 1944, and were never effective
or highly ranked in the Heer’s order of battle. In addition to erosion of
Luftwaffe manpower on the ground, bomber pilots were transferred to fighter
units without real success, and suffered high casualties. The effects of poor
planning were felt across the board from the second half of 1944, as fighter
production peaked, but there were not enough trained pilots to man new
squadrons, while fuel and other supplies reached critically low levels by the
autumn. Morale and performance thereafter plummeted in inverse relation to
rising battle losses.
The Luftwaffe was progressively overmatched
on all fronts from 1943: in Africa and Italy, over the Balkans, in the skies of
France and Germany, and all along the Eastern Front. Each of the three main
enemy air industries—the RAF, USAAF, and VVS—on its own outproduced Germany’s
aircraft industry. The Luftwaffe continued to produce many older types of
outmoded fighters such as the Ju-88 and Me-109. Failure to stop enemy bombers
meant that many of these planes were destroyed on the ground or in factories,
so that the fighter loss rate reached an astonishing 73 percent of monthly
strength throughout 1944, the peak months of fighter production. The Luftwaffe
was the first air force to deploy operational jets, but it produced these in
paltry numbers and far too late in the war to have any effect on its outcome.
Senior Luftwaffe and political leadership also delayed development of jets by
arguing over whether they should be used primarily as bombers or fighters, with
Hitler insisting on the former. That meant that those aircraft actually
produced had serious design flaws. In any case, there was hardly fuel for
aircraft of any kind by early 1945, as the skies over Germany grew dark with
enemy heavy bomber fleets and “Jabos” hunted ground forces and Panzers at will.
Toward the end, Hitler took more personal
charge of the air war, as he did all aspects of the German war effort. His
limited knowledge and bias toward steering resources to the Heer, matched with
absolute personal conviction about his own military insights—though these seldom
rose above the level of vulgar misunderstanding—exacerbated extant problems in
the organization of the Luftwaffe. For instance, he insisted that anti-aircraft
guns would suffice to defend cities from bombers and never sanctioned a system
of air defense-in-depth. He also utterly failed to appreciate that the air war
could be won only by constant and routine daily operations. Instead, he
resented what he saw as “hoarding” of reserves, then flung these away in grand
but futile spectaculars such as the Ardennes offensive. He also wasted precious
resources on supposed Wunderwaffen. Hitler’s growing disgust with Luftwaffe
failures led to an order in 1944 to disband the air force and replace it with a
huge anti-aircraft army to defend Germany. Only Göring’s residual call on past
Nazi Party and personal glories in the first years of the war prevented this
bizarre Führer order from being carried out.
The defeat of the Luftwaffe was total at all
levels, in tandem with the final and utter military rout of Nazi Germany. Its
failure was exacerbated by Göring’s and Hitler’s personal idiosyncracies and
interference, but it had much deeper structural causes. The German air force
failed to develop a strong bomber arm, leading to a fundamental imbalance that
was never corrected; it fell behind in the “battle of the beams” and radar war;
it worked on too many and too radical new designs even as it delayed full war
production until it was too late to correct for the growing Allied lead; it
lost control of training even as it received more fighters, with the end result
that pilot wastage rose dramatically in 1944.
Suggested
Reading: M. Cooper, The German Air Force: Anatomy
of Failure (1981); John Killen, The Luftwaffe: A History (1967; 2003);
Williamson Murray, Luftwaffe (1985); Richard Overy, Göring: The Iron Man
(1984).
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