Impact of Allied fighter-bombers

[Nick Beale]

I said a while ago that when I'd found them I'd post some deciphered messages from the German side about the impact of Allied tactical aircraft and here they are (at last)

Two are from III. Flakkorps about Normandy in late August 1944, the third is from 9. SS Pz. Div. about Typhoons vs. Panthers, apparently in the Ardennes battles.

[Jon]

Hi Nick,

Interesting reading, especially the fact it had been noted by the Germans that even a single man in the open could attract a straffing pass. This sort of reading lends great weight to idea that the destruction of moral is just as, if not more important than the destruction of men and materials.
The Typhoon got a special mention, i really think that this plane alone shattered the German foot soldier in Normandy.

[SteveB]

Nick's post seems to refer to earlier exchanges on this theme so I apologise if this has been mentioned before.

There is a very interesting book on this theme "Air Power at the Battlefront - Allied Close Air Support in Europe 1943-45" by Ian Gooderson published in 1998 by Frank Cass ISBN 0-7146-4211-8. It is a quite technical/academic read but based on Allied Operational Research both in Northern Europe and Italy.

Steve

[tcolvin]

Originally Posted by Nick Beale

I said a while ago that when I'd found them I'd post some deciphered messages from the German side about the impact of Allied tactical aircraft and here they are (at last)

Two are from III. Flakkorps about Normandy in late August 1944, the third is from 9. SS Pz. Div. about Typhoons vs. Panthers, apparently in the Ardennes battles.

There is a wealth of information about the impact of Typhoons on both the Wehrmacht and 21 Army Group. OR investigated the effect on enemy morale. Normal infantry became very anxious in the presence of Typhoons because the rockets were an unknown quantity and the subject of rumour. The noise of the plane was frightening, but most alarming was the noise of the rockets leaving the rails at a distance of 300 to 500 yards. Infantry responded by taking cover and staying there for an average of ten minutes. Some tanks were abandoned by their crews. The exception were the GAF Flak gunners who stayed at their guns and exacted a toll.

There is also a wealth of information about the lack of damage caused by Typhoons and CAS in WWII, as we saw on the previous thread from the OR investigation of the Falaise Pocket.

But it was the Flak that destroyed the vulnerable unarmoured Typhoon. 2TAF ORB records 78 aircrew KIA and MIA in February 1945, of which 27 were Typhoon pilots. Aircraft losses numbered 80 of which 30 were Typhoons. For 84 Group supporting 1 Canadian Army the total numbers were 38 pilots and 47 aircraft.

The consequence of this unsustainable loss rate is ignored in the literature. '2nd TAF Volume Three' by Christopher Shores and Chris Thomas published in 2006 makes no mention of the following entry for March 1, 1945 in 84 Group Operations' Log recording a conference during the night with 1 Canadian Army. This conference led to a decision to impose a severe restriction on the "liberal use of aircraft in support roles owing to the shortage of both Typhoon and Spitfire aircraft and the weariness of the pilots. The automatic use of aircraft in the counter-battery role, for instance, would be discontinued during static or semi-static periods, and indeed only accepted in special cases in an advance when our artillery could not take on the role, or if the menace of enemy guns was having a really serious effect. Moreover the prolific use of Rocket Typhoons in cab rank under FCP (Forward Control Post) control would have to be reduced and the scope of the FCP limited to a definite sector of front; for example a Div(ision) or B(riga)de front rather than as at present on an entire Corps front. A further check was to be kept on the acceptance by GCC (Group Control Centre) of targets so that effort would not be wasted". (Brackets contain my explanation).

Shores & Thomas record the disbandment on March 3 of 610 Squadron and of 257 Squadron on March 5, 1945 without drawing any connection with the admission by 2 TAF of their defeat by Flak, which was becoming increasingly concentrated as German territory shrank and supply lines to the Ruhr factories diminished.

So you have the same paradox as with Bomber Command which pointed to the destruction of Germany where Germans were terrified by bombing but output from their underground factories continued. With CAS the fear expressed by the Wehrmacht that you record, and the delight of allied soldiers watching it in operation which I have recorded from several eyewitnesses, went along with recognition that CAS caused negligible damage to the German war effort. Meanwhile Allied cemeteries filled up with horrendous numbers of 21 Army Group soldiers in the Reichswald and Hochwald such that there was a replacement crisis and talk of disbanding more infantry divisions. And unsustainable numbers of Typhoon pilots were being killed whose final months were filled with their own debilitating terror of Flak, and whose deaths necessitated squadron disbandments and severe restiction on CAS availability.

Am I alone in seeing a connection between the vulnerability of the Typhoon to Flak and its use of the inaccurate RP and lobbed bomb to the great and blood-soaked difficulty experienced by 21 Army Group in getting into Germany let alone Berlin which was of course taken by the Russians.

[Graham Boak]

March 1945 is ten months of near-continuous action, and the end of the war is clearly near. It is hardly surprising that operations were being cut back (no-one wants to be the last man killed) or that units were being disbanded because of losses - have you not read any description about the state of the British Infantry Divisions at this stage, or even sooner?

The rate of losses on the Continent is indeed recognised in 2nd TAF, and other works on the Typhoon. Consider the reference to the rebuild programme, and the withdrawal of aircraft from training units. But this is war, Mr. Colvin. One Typhoon loss per day in a month? It hardly compares with the Battle of Britain, does it? Or the defence of Malta, with many fewer units? Or any other period in the war with equivalent operational pressure and continuous action. Please consider the context of your statements.

[Nick Beale]

First off, if you are to cite the percentage of 2 TAF losses which were Typhoons then you need also to say what percentage of 2 TAF assets the type represented. It would also help to break down the losses by cause (and ditto for the tac support Spitfires). Similarly, if you're going to use a term like "unsustainable" then this needs to be set against the projected supply of replacement aircraft and pilots and the expected duration of the war.

Britain's manpower shortages were becoming apparent in Normandy (D'Este discusses this at some length but could not find answers on some crucial points re reserves in the UK). I believe that British divisions were being amalgamated and disbanded from Summer 1944 onward and certainly RAF Squadrons ditto in early 1945 (but this didn't seem to preclude the rotation of 2 TAF units to Armament Practice Camps in the UK) but as you say, German-held territory was shrinking fast by then.

There is another issue of context: the acceptability of losses will vary according to a commander's perception of what those losses are buying. (This board has seen a heated debate in the past about how Luftwaffe losses in France in 1940 exceeded those in the Battle of Britain. But in the former case much France was conquered and the country put out of the war - Germany's objectives were achieved in other words. In the latter, the Germans lost a lot of men and aircraft and came away with what?)

I feel that you fixate on direct destruction and morale effects while overlooking the disruption and paralysis produced by air attack or, yes, the fear of it. The less freely an army and (crucially) its supplies can move, the greater its disadvantage against an enemy not likewise handicapped. That is surely something more than your "negligible damage to the German war effort." Strategically, the same holds true for goods and materials in an industrial economy. Germany's "underground factories" (most of which were probably some component sub-contractor in an old tunnel) may have produced the goods but there is ample evidence of the difficulty of distributing them or of bringing sub-assemblies together into a finished product, or getting one vital bit for (say) an aircraft when the transport links were smashed or under interdiction by those "defeated" Typhoons, Spitfires, P-47s and P-51s.

And the material you have cited does not, to my eyes, amount to any kind of "admission of defeat" by Flak. It does however look like a recognition that German Flak was exacting a cost which cold not be justified by the results being obtained from some specific types of employment of close support aircraft. And the literature has often mentioned the Allied Generals' concerns that their troops were becoming hooked on air support and wouldn't make a move without it.

You speak of "Flak, which was becoming increasingly concentrated as German territory shrank and supply lines to the Ruhr factories diminished." Were not German guns often abandoned owing to lack of vehicles to move them and fuel to move the vehicles? Did ammunition and spare parts not have to brought to where they were needed? Did the raw materials to make them not have to reach the factories? Any "advantage" secured by the events leading up to the encirclement of the Ruhr was in reality a last gasp, dangerous for those who had finally to stifle it but not "sustainable."

21 Army Group's performance has been extensively debated (D'Este again or Max Hastings) and the reasons advanced for its perceived shortcomings are numerous but the British national resolve to have no more Sommes or Passchendaeles seems to be high on the list, alongside Montgomery's methodical approach and painstaking preparation.

[Franek Grabowski]

Well, this discussion is slightly turning into what if scheme. Frankly, we cannot make an alternative scheme, we can only make some estimates of effectiveness. This has been already done, and we can see the effects in the development process of post war weapon systems. It is obvious that Flak was extremelly effective, so it remained in use. Fighter bombers also proven their capabilities and they practically killed classic bombers. There were several attempts made to reduce the role of aviation just over the battlefield because of high losses inflicted by defences, the last idea being F-16 CAS I believe, but in the end ground attack aviation always returned in a glory. So, the one must assume Typhoons were both effective and suffered tremendous losses. The latter probably could have been reduced by a more sophisticated design, but there was neither time nor resources available.
Army is another matter, another set of people, another industry and politics. There were several problems with introducing both new designs and tactics with far more people not being able to understand what the modern warfare is.
That said, I would love to read comments of Zetterling on those documents!

[tcolvin]

Originally Posted by Franek Grabowski

Well, this discussion is slightly turning into what if scheme. Frankly, we cannot make an alternative scheme, we can only make some estimates of effectiveness. This has been already done, and we can see the effects in the development process of post war weapon systems. It is obvious that Flak was extremelly effective, so it remained in use. Fighter bombers also proven their capabilities and they practically killed classic bombers. There were several attempts made to reduce the role of aviation just over the battlefield because of high losses inflicted by defences, the last idea being F-16 CAS I believe, but in the end ground attack aviation always returned in a glory. So, the one must assume Typhoons were both effective and suffered tremendous losses. The latter probably could have been reduced by a more sophisticated design, but there was neither time nor resources available.
Army is another matter, another set of people, another industry and politics. There were several problems with introducing both new designs and tactics with far more people not being able to understand what the modern warfare is.
That said, I would love to read comments of Zetterling on those documents!

I don't understand the reference to Zetterling.

But I do understand, and try to avoid, what if schemes.
Let me put my thinking in a series of statements devoid of what ifs.
1. The key to military effectiveness is all-arms. Its exponents succeeded, and those that didn't failed; Monash in WWI, Blitzkrieg in 1939/40, Zhukov in 1944/45 were successful. The allies in WWII were unsuccessful. The performance of British and American armies in WWII suffered because of shortcomings in all-arms. You in Poland, by the way, paid the price of that deficiency in blood from 1944 to 1980.
2. All-arms is the combination of infantry with artillery, armour and air.
3. Monash won by combining excellent Commonwealth infantry, the much improved MkV tank, first-rate artillery, but so-so air support. This was the one shortcoming, but the rest was enough to defeat the German army.
4. The shortcoming in WWI air support is the key to understanding the problems of 2TAF's junky Typhoons.
5. The RFC/RAF's losses of unarmoured Camels and DH5s in CAS (close air support) devastated morale and was never forgotten, especially by the top brass in the RAF in the 190s and 30s who had experienced it.
6. The German Schlachtstaffeln, however, had half-decent CAS aircraft: Halberstadt CLII and CLIV, Hannover CLIII and Junkers J-1, which was an armoured aircraft in the tradition of the HS129, IL-2 and the USAF A10.
7. The German problem in 1918 was their lack of a tank. That was fatal. It was rectified by 1939 and added to the rest of their successful all-arms tactics which they maintained.
8. The British were in the act of rectifying their CAS weakness when the war ended. The armoured Sopwith Salamander was on test and would, I suppose, have matched the J-1 and provided the RAF with some satisfactory experience to temper the unalloyed horror that stuck.
9. The British never officially examined the reasons why they won WWI. Everyone had his own idea. No lessons were learned. All-arms fragmented away, with the RAF and the Tank Corps promoted by arseholes like Liddell-Hart arguing that speed was everything and the army that was used to travelling at 3mph would never 'get it' and would never modernise its thinking which was stuck in the mud of the Somme and Passchendael.
10. The RN got its aviation back in the late 30s. The Army never did.
11. The RAF was not interested in CAS. The Tank Corps was not interested in infantry support. The result was the ineffably bad unarmoured but fast Typhoon and the bad poorly armoured but ast tanks like the Crusader and Sherman.
12. The war in the west was won at great expense of blood and material by the simple combination of the allied infantry and the artillery's FOO (forward observation officer). The guns levelled the German defences which the infantry occupied, again and again. It was slow and costly because there were no tanks (with the exception of very few Churchill VII) and no aircraft that could survive against Rheinmetall-Borsig and Krupp. The tanks were held back ready to 'exploit' the gap which the infantry were supposed to make without benefit of well-armoured tanks and CAS. These were the tactics of the lunatic asylum.
13. Tedder and Coningham waged war on the army. They said the army was 'drugged with air '. They said the army had its own weapons - rifles, artillery and tanks - and should learn to stand on their own feet like men and stop whining for air support. BC had better things to do incinerating German cities. The tanks by the way agreed with the RAF. They had the same vision. Typhoons hopped over the front line and careered about in the rear areas shooting up the German army in exactly the same way the tanks had been taught to think by Liddell Hart of exploiting.
14. I could go on and on and on, but you have enough to understand the hypothesis. The absence of an army air force equipped with armoured dive bombers and CAS - updated Sopwith Salamanders resembling the Hs129 and A10 with the pilot and vitals protected behind rolled or cast armour - and the absence of enough Churchill MkVII infantry tanks to provide the attacking infantry with a large calibre aimed weapon, condemned the allied armed forces to ineffectiveness. Compare and contrast them with the Soviet armed forces. The Soviets studied WWI, and learned and implemented its lessons. They built excellent machine pistols, tanks, artillery, and CAS aircraft. And they copied the all-arms tactics that Monash had invented at Arras on July 4, 1918.

[Graham Boak]

• Agreed – but totally uncontroversial, I think?
• As above
• Ah, no. I think the blockade and the arrival of the Americans made the German defeat inevitable. See 6. (As an aside, so Monash was the only general, amongst all those on the Western Front, who saw things properly? I think it was more due to the entire staff finally learning the lessons of the preceding years, and being given the tools to put them into practice. And it was the excellent ‘Commonwealth’ infantry….I think your prejudices are showing.)
• Not agreed, but certainly arguable.
• Devastated morale? Arguable again, I think. I haven’t come across it in my readings about RAF thinking postwar, though there may well be some truth in it. How does the concept of this being never forgotten fit with your first sentence in 9? However, the DH 5 was never more than a very minor player, so why mention it?
• Half-decent and few. You appear to have a built-in assumption that the British air support was not effective, which doesn’t seem to be backed by the comments of the time. I don’t know that it has been demonstrated that the German air support, even though it had theoretically more capable aircraft, was actually much more effective.
• see 3 above. The German “all-arms tactics” were not that successful in mid-war. The late German successes were due to changes in their tactics, particularly the Strumtruppen prefiguring the blitzkrieg approach. This inspired the thinking of post-war theorists such as Liddell-Hart: see later.
• The Salamander was not an equivalent to the J-1. It was basically an armoured Snipe. Just as the armoured Typhoon of 1944 was just an armoured version of the 1942 fighter. You seem to have missed this point throughout – the Typhoon was not unarmoured in 2 TAF. However, as demonstrated by the German use (and losses) of armoured Fw.190, the benefit of heavily-armoured aircraft over the battlefield is debatable. The losses due to ground fire are reduced but the resulting aircraft are cumbersome and losses due to enemy fighters go up. Fine if you can rely on total air superiority – as the A-10 can. Without that, you might like to reconsider the value of the Russian armoured CAS aircraft. Over 30000 Il 2s were built, but no more than 5000 were maintained in service throughout the war because of a level of losses that would make Western commanders blanch. Some simple maths suggest that 5000 a/c in front-line service needs a similar number in training and support units, giving an average loss rate of 5000 a/c per year. Half of these will be non-combat, suggesting an AVERAGE combat loss over the whole war (early months of low service numbers and stationary winters included) of over 200 a/c a month. Yes, this does need adjusting to allow for true sortie numbers and utilisation. But so does any simple measure used to denigrate 2 TAF’s Typhoons. Incidentally, this morning I noted a reference to 350 Typhoons lost in the Normandy battles only – not properly statistically referenced, I’m afraid – but see Nick Beale’s comments above.
• Does all the thinking that was carried out after WW1 not count in your book? Just because they came up with different answers to yours does not mean that thinking did not occur. Your derision of Liddell Hart doesn’t seem to be backed by the general adoption of mechanisation, nor by the successes gained using his ideas of indirect approach by generals such as Guderian or Connor. Or, for that matter, Zhukov and Schwartzkopp.
• Much of the disastrous use of the FAA in the early stages of WW2, and its lack of decent types later, was due to the inability of the Admiralty to produce a decent aircraft specification, or use properly the tools it had. Cunningham excepted. As long as the RAF controlled the FAA it was equipped with types that compared well to land-based aircraft – often basically the same types. Look what happened afterwards. Thanks goodness the Army didn’t get control of the RAF – there’d have been less priority given to radar and the design of the defensive networks that saved us in 1940. One very relevant reference may be Futtrell’s The US Force in Korea, where discussion is presented about the US Marine Corps’ very high proportion of CAS, with much lower AVERAGE support provided to equivalent Army units. The USArmy was pressing for dedicated support units: the fallacy of which is well analysed.
• The RAF provided the Army between the wars with the type of support aircraft it was asked for. A lack of joined-up thinking in the British High Command, surely, but a dual failure, not one to be laid at the feet of the RAF alone. The RAF did experiment with dive-bombing in the early 1930s, but came to different conclusions as to its general desirability.
• The Sherman was designed to US requirements, and on its entry to service was an excellent tank, well-balanced in all features. It was retained too long without significant improvements, but I think the US Ordnance Board must carry the responsibility for that, with its own misconceptions. As for the other tanks: I’ve no desire to excessively defend the poor products of the British tank industry, but the main British tank in Normandy was the Cromwell, and this was equivalent to the most common German tank there, the Pz. Mk.IV. Not every German tank was a Tiger, despite impressions given (and clearly received). At the end of the Normandy battles, the US breakthrough on the right, and its sweeping advances across France, could only have been made by fast mechanised divisions and operational practice that Liddell-Hart, Guderian and Rommel would have recognised. It would have been less possible with the slow overweight under-gunned Churchill, no less vulnerable to those deadly German anti-tank guns.
• This really is a series of gross and insulting misrepresentations. It was Coningham and Tedder who worked with the desert Armies to establish all-arms operation, of exactly the kind you glowingly describe, and developed the tactics and co-operation that worked so well then and afterwards. It was Montgomery, with his meat-grinder approach to infantry, who separated the closeness of the staffs for the Normandy operations, leading to some friction during 1944. However, you will find the Army’s own officers criticising the Allied foot-soldier for relying too much on air support before advancing: Tedder was echoing these comments. Neither officer was involved with Bomber Command at all: both were immersed in all-arms co-operation. As for the derisive dismissal of interdiction missions: I refer you back to the references presented in this series of discussions.
• I understand your hypothesis, which at the core has some merit that few would contradict nowadays, but beyond this you are misunderstanding and distorting history to fit prejudices rather than presenting a reasoned case.

Before going overboard on Western Allies BAD Russians GOOD (purely in military terms, of course), it might be worth adding that wherever a post-war Western-trained Army has met a Russian-trained Army on a conventional battlefield, it is the Russian-trained Army that has lost. But then perhaps the post-war Russian equipment and doctrines were not the equal of their wartime counterparts?

[tcolvin]

Originally Posted by Graham Boak

• The Salamander was not an equivalent to the J-1. It was basically an armoured Snipe. Just as the armoured Typhoon of 1944 was just an armoured version of the 1942 fighter. You seem to have missed this point throughout – the Typhoon was not unarmoured in 2 TAF.

I haven't had time to absorb the rest of your interesting reply.
But one thing stands out. You're right. In my mind the Typhoon was completely unarmoured apart from the usual fighter's armour of a rear seat back, perhaps an armoured seat and a bullet-proof windscreen.
So please define the armour you say was fitted to the CAS Typhoon, and please explain how, if his plane was armoured, the following could happen to Sqn Ldr. Eric Roberts, CO of 609 Squadron on March 9, 1945; (extract from Frank Ziegler's book on 609 Squadron; my additions are in the brackets); "Because of the lowered cloud base I checked with Baldy (Gp Capt. Johnny Baldwin) as to whether to attack, and received the expected OK owing to the scarcity of Flak (big NB). Turning west, I spotted the barges and led the boys down. At the bottom of the dive I saw a machine-gun on the barge I was aiming at open up and almost immediately felt the engine hit. This is it! Panic! Or not so much panic as a feeling of futility at getting hacked down on such a stopgap show. The motor stopped when I had climbed to 1,500 ft, and I jettisoned the hood ......"
One 10cent 7.92mm bullet downed Robert's Typhoon, and sent him to the Stalag. And you say his Typhoon was armoured?
You must know Schwabedissen's book; 'The Russian Air Force in the eyes of German Commanders'. "General der Flakartillerie a.D Wolfgang Pickert adds that the IL-2 was impervious to light 20-mm armour-piercing or 37-mm shells. The same views are expressd by General der Infanterie von der Groben, who emphasisies the nose armour and remarks that direct hits with 20-mm shells frequently had no effect on the plane".
The IL-2 is what I call armoured.
Over.