The story of the Reichsluftmacht is often told as a morality play: How the greatest military power in Europe wilfully, and against the advice of many wiser men, bet its future on a misguided doctrine and nearly lost everything. In this account, the young Emperor plays the role of the fool, misled by the conniving and wilfully ignorant while those in the know were silenced. Germany thus invested vast sums in an airfleet that was neither cable to fulfil its mission nor defend its airspace. Reality, as ever, is more complex.
Firstly, though it is true that the emperor was deeply enamoured of aviation, the creation of the Reichsluftmacht as a separate service in 1909 was a bureaucratic maneuver that removed it from the jurisdiction of the member states' jurisdictions and put it on par with the navy under direct imperial command. This meant a centrally governed structure with funding from imperial revenues and no interference from the army commands, many of whom were distrustful of the new technology and unwilling to invest heavily. Considering the fate of many other advanced technologies in the hands of the Bavarian or Saxon army commands, it is not unreasonable to assume that this decision allowed the creation of a serious German air power at all.
The early creation of the German airfleet did give its fathers the opportunity to make the kind of mistakes competitors would learn from. Commitment to lighter-than-air flight would have looked like a winning strategy in 1909, more than a decade before the innovations in engine technology that turned aeroplanes into viable war-winning weapons. With the decision to prioritise airships came a focus their utility – reconnaissance and strategic high-altitude bombing.
This, too, turned out to be a vision of the future that technology failed to realise to the extent its adherents expected. As a concept, it was intuitive and obvious: a zeppelin airship was capable of reaching altitudes beyond the range of anti-air fire or interceptor aeroplanes, and though it was relatively slow, it had the range to reach enemy targets far behind the front and was also quiet (an asset at a time when detection often still relied on engine noise) and stable. Bombs dropped from that height would follow a predictable ballistic path and could thus be targeted like artillery shells whereas the bumpy rides of low-flying, fast aeroplanes required the pilot to bring the weapon almost right onto the target. Early airship development was fast, eventually producing ships capable of carrying upwards of twenty tonnes of bombs over several thousand kilometres. The famous friendly visit of SMLS Frundsberg and Wallenstein to New York in 1927, at the height of the airship armament spiral, even caused concern in the US military. If Germany were to decide to bomb every city on the East Coast, the Joint Chiefs of Staff briefed the President, neither the Navy nor the Army Air Forces would be capable of stopping them. Though Germany led the world in airship technology, Britain, France and Italy also invested heavily in bombing airships and no industrialised nation was without a long-range airship fleet, however small by comparison. It certainly looked like an idea whose time had come.
When advances in materials and engines turned airships into a technological dead end in the late 1920s, Germany had a decade's worth of building schedules still open and nobody in the military establishment had the courage to cancel them. The last bombing airship, SMLS Mansfeld, was launched in 1940 into a world that already had no further need of its kind. Germany was investing millions of marks into the development of bomber aeroplanes that would match the range and altitude of the airship while being faster and more defensible. These, too, backed by the expertise of German industry and the deep pockets of the Reich, proved impressive designs.
If there was a cardinal sin inside the defense establishment of Germany, it was excessive reliance on established players. It was the Zeppelin Aktiengesellschaft with its proven expertise in light materials and powerful aero engines that built the bomber fleets, focusing on the things its engineers knew best: payload, altitude and range. The underlying doctrine remained unchanged. This would now require an investment not only in large bombers – with the enormous six-engined ZAG 35 Kondor astonishing the world by crossing the Atlantic in 1942 – but in fast escort planes that could shield them from interceptors. The resulting planes were miracles of engineering – lightweight, highly manoeuvrable, equipped with powerful engines that could deliver high performance even at 8,000 metres and able to carry enormous fuel loads in ancillary drop tanks. Swarms of these fighters taking to the air from fields near the front would join bomber fleets on their missions, suppressing interception as the big planes flattened their targets.
The failure of this idea is common knowledge today, but at the time it was hard to see how anyone inside the bubble of the bombing profession could have predicted it. The degree of its failure is frequently exaggerated. The complete inability of the vaunted German giant to affect the conduct of the war from the air is an artefact of Russian propaganda more than a reflection of historical fact. The Luftmacht did considerable damage to rail installations and factories throughout the war, drawing resources away from the front and causing supply bottlenecks. The impact of their attacks was less than anticipated partly because the predicted accuracy never materialised – even in perfect visibility, a given bomb could not realistically be targeted on anything smaller than half a kilometre across – and partly because the resilience of modern infrastructure had been underestimated. It was calculated after the war that in order to have the anticipated effect, the German airfleet would have had to be increased sevenfold, consuming a full third of the Reich's military expenditure. This was never feasible.
Yet for all its apparent weaknesses, and caught by war in the middle of generational shift in aeroplanes, the Reichsluftmacht was a formidable foe to the Russians. Even in frontal aviation, Russia's strength and ever the stepchild of German planners, their fighter pilots acquitted themselves well. Powerful engines and nimble machines made them the terror of Russian bombers. Strategic attacks, while not war-winning, were important in degrading enemy effectiveness, and ultimately it was the Luftmacht's strategic reach that delivered Mjölnir to strike the decisive blow of the war. This is hardly a record of failure.
Kerbie, David: Hammerschlag. German Strategic Bombing in the Second Russo-German War, Osprey, London 1998
