Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Piercing the Fog
Speer’s postwar comments that a more sustained attack on the ball-bearing
industry would have led to industrial collapse underlines a fundamental
difficulty in the American situation. Even had American air intelligence
understood the advantages of more attacks, it is unlikely that much more could
have been done. Despite the POINTBLANK directive, Bomber Command was
unwilling to cooperate in attacking what its commander viewed as a panacea
target, although the British Air Ministry exerted considerable pressure in
support of the American attacks on ball bearings.34 The losses of bombers that
Eighth suffered in the August Schweinfurt-Regensburg attack made it
impossible for Americans to return to Schweinfurt on a regular basis. When the
Americans attacked again in October 1943, German efforts to disperse the
industry or to find alternative sources of supply were already underway. The
damage inflicted did not compensate for the temble drubbing that the Eighth’s
bombers took over Schweinfurt in the second raid, nor did it place the Germans
in an impossible situation.
What was occurring in the skies over Germany was an enormous battle of
attrition that played an important role in the air victory of 1944. Allied signals
intelligence and ULTRA were able to pick up the movement of German day
interceptors from the various fronts to defend the skies over the Reich from
American attack. But what intelligence could not fully grasp was the level of
attrition that Eighth’s bombing raids inflicted on the Lufnyafse’s fighter forces,
in part because so few intelligence officers had exposure to flying, much less
air-to-air combat?’ While American intelligence discounted the wilder reports
of bomber crews on the numbers of German fighters shot down, Eighth Air
Force was still too optimistic over the summer and fall 1943 on the damage that
it was inflicting on its foe.36 The Germans suffered serious casualties over this
period, but not enough to blunt the ferocious defense that they were mounting.
The reported level of casualties inflicted on the German fighter force led to
serious miscalculations or at least serious overestimates of the level of success.
Eaker himself suggested that there was evidence of “severe strain and some
signs of eventual collapse.” In Washington, Arnold was suggesting that the
Luftwufe was on the brink of collapse;37 others declared, “Aerial supremacy on
a continental scale had been
American air attacks were severely affecting Germany’s strategic situation,
both in terms of the serious attrition imposed on the Lujiwufe and the effect of
bombing on German aircraft production. American aerial attacks became more
difficult as the Germans shifted production facilities to the east, making bomber
missions longer and more hazardous. Historians have generally tended to
underestimate the impact that American bombing had on the production
capacity of Germany’s aircraft industry, because the Germans counted the repair
of seriously damaged aircraft as new production, thus inflating the reports on
the number of aircraft produced. If historians face difficulties in this area, the
fact that air intelligence personnel during the war experienced the same
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