Case Studies in the Achievement of Air Superiority - Air Force ...

OPERATION OVERLORD
the blows struck had been so decisive as to allow the strategic air forces to
turn toward their main aim, the assault on the vital centers of war production.”)
The Enemy Objectives Unit attached to the American Embassy, and
the source of much of USSTAF’s intelligence analysis of German targets,
prefaced its assessment of the February attacks with the caveat that it was
still too early to draw definitive conclusions, and then went on to say that
it appeared that single-engine fighter production had fallen from 950 to 250
per month, and twin-engine fighters from 225 to 50 per month. If further
attacks were carried out, they thought single-engine production might be
cut to 15 percent of pre-raid levels.134 There was no less optimism in Washington
where, as late as April 20, the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff for
Intelligence estimated that strategic bombing had reduced single-engine
fighter production in March to less than 500 aircraft, when the actual figure
was just over 1 ,300.135
How could the estimates have gone so far wrong? The intelligence
officers and their commanders seem to have fallen into an old trap-the
tendency to see what one expects to see. Many had high expectations of
the huge impact that would follow concentrated attack on aircraft
production, and that is quite simply what they saw. The evidence from
photo reconnaissance showed over seventy-five percent of the buildings
associated with fighter production damaged in one respect or another.
The difficulty was, as the USSBS Aircraft Industry Division pointed out,
that heavy machinery and tools remained more or less intact.I36 The quality
of intelligence on aircraft production fell off considerably after dispersal
of the industry.
Perhaps the most important culprit was the misunderstanding of the
German economy. It was widely assumed in Allied intelligence circles that
the Germans had been running an efficiently organized, tightly-strung war
economy ever since the promulgation of the Four-Year Plan in 1936. In fact,
nothing of the sort existed until at least late 1942. The failure to spot the
reserves of capacity in the German economy accounted for a good deal of
the overestimation of the effects of strategic bombing in general and of the
attack on the aircraft industry in particular. 13’
The direct consequences of this intelligence failure on the course of
the campaign for air superiority do not appear to have been severe. A mistaken
optimism about the effects of the February raids certainly did not
mean that aircraft factories were thereafter left alone. In fact, as is
explained above, the tonnage of bombs dropped on those factories in
March, April, and May of 1944 was much greater than in February. The
decision to emphasize attrition in strategic air action was greatly influenced
by the mistaken certainty of success in the February attacks, but it cannot
be said that this was an incorrect decision. Given the Luftwaffe’s poor
training position, and the obvious need to keep its frontline strength down,
a policy of attrition made great sense regardless of what was happening to
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