How come we never bombed Hitler?

[Rhea]

I realize this is a very basic question, so please forgive my ignorance of WWII history. But can someone give me the details?

Is it because we never knew where he was?
Is it because he was surrounded by civilians?
Is it because we could never get close enough in the current technology?

 

[repoman]

reminds me of the last line of The Battle of Epping Forest by Genesis (It is such a crazy dense song of british references that I really have no idea what the hell it is about otherwise)

"There's no-one left alive - must be draw."
So the Blackcap Barons toss a coin to settle the score.

 

[Bronzeage]

I realize this is a very basic question, so please forgive my ignorance of WWII history. But can someone give me the details?

Is it because we never knew where he was?
Is it because he was surrounded by civilians?
Is it because we could never get close enough in the current technology?

The Allies would have bombed Hitler in blink, if there had been a practical way to do it.

In WW2, the only thing a bomb was certain to hit was the ground. An actual targeting of Hitler would have required intelligence information only found in movies.

In the Pacific Theater, US code breakers could read most Japanese radio transmissions. This allowed them to know the flight path of Admiral Yamamoto's plane. A special mission was flown to specifically target that plane and it was sucessful.

 

[credoconsolans]

Hitler was a moving target. He was erratic, never slept in the same place, never traveled the same way, frequently changed his mind and plans. Even his staff could not keep up with his changes.

There was no way for any long term planning to succeed in bombing him because they couldn't be sure where he was.

There were something like 26 attempts on his life, and a few were suicide bombers, but they never got the chance to get near him.

 

[skepticalbip]

The Allies did bomb the shit out of Berlin - pretty much destroying the city. We just never knew exactly where Hitler was and, even if we had known, bombing during WWII was far from accurate.

 

[SLD]

It just wasn't seriousy considered. For one they couldn't be guaranteed he'd be any particular place at any particular time. Second Hitler always had easy access to bomb shelters. For the most part he would have had ample warning and gone into a shelter. Finally, the allies didn't consider themselves at war against Hitler, but against Germany. They were trying to defeat the entire nation, not merely bring down its leader. They may have liked to kill him if they had the chance, but their thinking was on how to defeat Germany, not merely kill Hitler.

SLD

 

[whichphilosophy]

It just wasn't seriousy considered. For one they couldn't be guaranteed he'd be any particular place at any particular time. Second Hitler always had easy access to bomb shelters. For the most part he would have had ample warning and gone into a shelter. Finally, the allies didn't consider themselves at war against Hitler, but against Germany. They were trying to defeat the entire nation, not merely bring down its leader. They may have liked to kill him if they had the chance, but their thinking was on how to defeat Germany, not merely kill Hitler.

SLD

To kill Hitler would have been a monumental success. Capturing or killing Hitler would have been part of overrunning Germany. The likely reason is lack of technology to pin point him even if his whereabouts were known since he kept changing this.

 

[maxparrish]

Sadly, it would seem that WWII is merely a form of arcane history to many. Anyway, it has always been very difficult to find a means to kill the head of any state during war, even in the two Persian Gulf wars. I don't know of any wartime head of state to have died due to enemy action, other than the few that have been captured during an occupation and executed.

In WWII, targeting of Hitler by almost any military action would have been futile:

1) Strategic bombing had a very limited accuracy measured in thousands of feet and yards.
2) No means of electronic detection existed to pinpoint Hitler's actual location (he used analog land lines for phone conversations).
3) Hitler lived various in housing, including bunkers and tunnels, either out-of-range or immune to allied bombing.

The only allied plan that might have worked was hatched by the British. A sniper team was put through extensive training for a parachute drop near Hitler's Berghof mountain retreat. The team was to infiltrate the heavily forested near the chalet where Hitler took his walks. It was believed that sniper shots would have been well within practical range, and that Hitler could have been dispatched.

The plan, in Nov of 1944, was canceled. By this time it is said that the allies believed that given Hitler's extraordinary military incompetence, he was more valuable alive than dead.

Like many of the failed attempts on Hitler's life, speculations on the historical "what if" has inspired alternative histories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Foxley#Sniper_attack_plan

 

[iolo]

By about 1943 Hitler was so drugged-up and silly that it probably did us more good to leave him alive, even if we'd known how to get him, which we didn't. Even to hit a railway was more that most of Bomber Command could accomplish.

 

[Rhea]

Thanks, everyone. I appreciate the discussion. I was pondering this in the context of today's wars and the expectation that we should be able to just bomb and kill the key characters except when they are cowardly and hide "among civilians". I wondered if there had been previous leaders who did NOT hide among civilians as one of the means of protection, and still maintain the ability to be a political leader. I realized at this point I didn't even know the historical wisdom of whether this was done in prominent cases.

 

[4321lynx]

Thanks, everyone. I appreciate the discussion. I was pondering this in the context of today's wars and the expectation that we should be able to just bomb and kill the key characters except when they are cowardly and hide "among civilians". I wondered if there had been previous leaders who did NOT hide among civilians as one of the means of protection, and still maintain the ability to be a political leader. I realized at this point I didn't even know the historical wisdom of whether this was done in prominent cases.

As far as Allied concern for German civilians goes, you should read about the Dresden raids at the end of tjhe war, a good account, albeit with a great deal of pro-Allied "spin", is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II

Bear in mind the preceding German (now conveniently labelled Nazi) attitude to killing civilians such as Jews, Gypsies, and inhabitants of Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union in the preceding 5 years of war. The saying in Britain where the civilian victims of the German Blitz were well remembered at the end of it all was "The only good German is a dead German".

 

[Rhea]

Interesting - yeah, so "there are no civilians." I did have a little bit of history on that... my in-laws are German and MIL was present in Berlin throughout the war. FIL was from an area of Germany/Poland dispute - i.e. next to Dresden. They immigrated here just after the war.

 

[bilby]

Killing an enemy leader by aerial bombing is pretty much impossible to achieve; even with today's technology, it would require incredible luck, as well as excellent intelligence on the movements of the target.

The US couldn't (or at least, didn't) take out Saddam Hussein in that way, despite targeting his palaces and other suspected locations with smart bombs; and this despite having total air supremacy, laser and GPS guided munitions, and massive numbers of aircraft based within easy flying range of anywhere in Iraq.

In WWII, the allies had a LOT of opposition in the air, and routinely suffered heavy losses during air raids - particularly daylight raids, which were the only ones that had enough accuracy to hit a given factory complex, rail junction or suburb. Precision bombing in the 1940s meant hitting the right town, not the right building.

The Germans had some success with more precise bombing using dive bombers, but these were extremely vulnerable to enemy aircraft, and while they were effective where air superiority could be assured, they proved far less effective over areas such as southern England. The Battle of Britain was an attempt to take out the RAF using 'precision' bombing of airfields; but an individual RAF ground crewman on an airfield under attack had a very good chance of surviving such an attack even if his only shelter was a slit trench; a heavily reinforced bunker, such as those used by Hitler, would be very hard to hit - and the death of a given occupant would be impossible to assure.

The move from attacking airfields, ports and military facilities to the bombing of civilian populations was a tactical and strategic error indulged by both sides in the war (although the 'blitz' raids on London did concentrate to some degree on the docks of the East End, which were a military target that just happened to be surrounded by dense civilian housing - including the house my dad was living in at the time); The doctrine was that killing, or at least un-housing, the workforce would cut industrial production and cause panic, alarm and despondency, but the reality was that such attacks strengthened the resolve of the civilian population - the loss of production caused by killing workers or damaging factories was more than counterbalanced by the fact that the survivors were inspired to work longer and harder so as not to let themselves be beaten.

If you look at pictures of German cities immediately after VE Day, the striking thing is that even in areas where no buildings are left standing, the streets between the piles of rubble are thronged with people. People are hard to kill; In Dresden, the city was completely razed, but 90% of those present at the time of the raids survived. A 10% death toll is horrifying, but it represents a 90% chance of failure if your raid is targeted at a single person - and the chance of failure is higher still if he is afforded special protection in the best shelters (which Hitler was), and if his presence at the target was uncertain.

Even a nuclear strike would not be sure to kill a specific targeted individual; about 50% of the people in Hiroshima when that city was nuked survived. Assassination requires more subtle tools than strategic bombing to have a good chance of success, even with technologies not available to the allies in the European Theatre in WWII.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Führer_Headquarters

Hitler at various times during WW2 had various headquarters, and some were very well fortified. Plus from time to time he travelled around in a special train all movements well guarded by extreme secrecy. He spent much time at the Wolf's lair in Prussia near Poland in well fortified bunkers, hard to bomb. Above links to a list of various headquarter sites, not all actually used. Having survived a number of assassination attempts, Hitler was very paranoid and extreme secrecy was the rule as far as his movements and where-abouts were concerned. Some known sites were in fact bombed, for example Oversalzburg was attack by the RAF with 400 bombers in two waves.

There were in fact several plans to assassinate Hitler, none effective

One of the first actual British plans to assassinate Hitler was to bomb the special train "Amerika" (in 1943 renamed "Brandenburg") he travelled in; SOE had extensive experience of derailing trains using explosives. The plan was dropped because Hitler's schedule was too irregular and unpredictable: stations were only informed of his arrival a few minutes beforehand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Foxley

Ultimately a sniper attack was considered to be the method most likely to succeed. In Summer 1944, a German who had been part of Hitler's personal guard at the Berghof had been taken prisoner in Normandy. He revealed that at the Berghof, Hitler always took a 20-minute morning walk at around the same time (after 10:00). Hitler liked to be left alone during this walk, leaving him unprotected near some woods, where he was out of sight of sentry posts. When Hitler was at the Berghof, a Nazi flag visible from a cafe in the nearby town was flown.
The basic plan was to assassinate Hitler during his morning exercise, as he walked unprotected to the tea-house in the Berghof compound.

 

[Malintent]

I've said it elsewhere recently and I will say it again.
I am of the opinion that the way to eliminate the 'unique threats' of the modern world, is to take a WWII approach. bomb the shit out of the country until the infrastructure is gone, and all the people are either dead or demanding their government unconditionally surrender. And then permanently take the fucking land and all the resources... no babysitting.. no installations of temporary governments... Welcome to the Middle Eastern States of America. You are all citizens, those left alive. enjoy your freedom and pay your taxes. If you see something, say something (or get invaded again).

 

[bilby]

I've said it elsewhere recently and I will say it again.
I am of the opinion that the way to eliminate the 'unique threats' of the modern world, is to take a WWII approach. bomb the shit out of the country until the infrastructure is gone, and all the people are either dead or demanding their government unconditionally surrender. And then permanently take the fucking land and all the resources... no babysitting.. no installations of temporary governments... Welcome to the Middle Eastern States of America. You are all citizens, those left alive. enjoy your freedom and pay your taxes. If you see something, say something (or get invaded again).

You can say it as often as you like; it won't change the fact that being bombed makes civilian populations LESS inclined to surrender.

The Germans didn't surrender until after Russian tank and infantry forces had occupied their capital city; allied troops on the ground had control of the vast majority of their territory, and their leader was dead.

The doctrine in 1938 was that 'The bomber will always get through', and that mass civilian casualties and the destruction of homes, schools, hospitals and factories would remove the will of the people to fight.

The reality, when the Luftwaffe bombed England, and when the RAF, USAAF and USAF bombed Germany, was that the air raids actually increased the desire of the survivors to fight back against their enemies.

The only way to take over a country is to have troops on the ground in large numbers; and even then, the result is invariably an underground freedom fighter campaign against the invaders, using exactly the tactics you are presumably seeking to eliminate - terrorist bombings and shootings not only in the occupied zone, but also in the homeland of the invaders.

Your plan appears to be based on a purely fictional and/or theoretical grasp of the responses of peoples to being dominated militarily; real world history tells us that it is not just ineffective, but actually counterproductive.

No matter how gratifying it might be to imagine that your enemies are suffering at your hands, it will never stop them from being your enemies - until the last one is dead.

Your plan can only succeed by total genocide. In my book, that makes it a bad plan; and I and many others would happily take up arms against a world power that tried to exterminate its way to global domination (as indeed we did in the 1940s).

 

[Sarpedon]

While the bombing reduced the ability of the Germans to resist, it was the Soviet Fucking Army that broke their spirit, and made them fall all over themselves in order to surrender to us. Of course, Americans of a certain kidney like to pretend that we won that war all by ourselves. The sad truth is that the Soviet Union did most of the work beating Germany, and their entry into the war against Japan was a big blow that might have been enough to end it without the atom bomb, had we given it some time.

I think Germany and Japan were uniquely broken in spirit after WWII, in ways that were unlike any other defeat in recent memory. They both came to what they thought was the very edge of victory: Leningrad and Stalingrad beseiged, Moscow just over the horizon, France and Poland crushed, the British driven from Europe, the Chinese government fleeing to Szechuan, fortress singapore taken, the american fleet destroyed, an american army captured in the Philipines: Everything was going their way. And then, in three long bloody years, they lost it all. Compare this with the invasion of Iraq, which was so sudden, swift and obviously one sided that the Iraqi people didn't actually feel defeated, because they never experienced the same sort of defeat.

The situation in Syria is obviously quite different, as the people there seem to be quite demoralized after this long war, and Daesh isn't really an indiginous movement that would be infected by the dispirit of the populace.

 

[Sarpedon]

Also, I need to point out how long it took to put together a bombing raid back in the day. It took a lot of staff work and hours of briefings before the planes even took off. After take off, the planes would have to assemble in formation before heading off, which would also take hours. Then of course, it took a couple hours to fly to Germany, with the Germans forewarned by Radar. Then there'd be a long time flying over Germany if one was going to Berlin or Obersalzburg (Hitler NEVER visited the bombed out western German cities, during the war he never got close to the fighting, until the fighting got close to him). The point of all this is that with all this time, it was very hard to keep your intelligence current. Even if you are told that Hitler is in X place, there's no guarantee he'd be there 12, 16 hours later when you can finally get the bombers there. And the Germans had literally hours of warning of a bomb raid. Various tricks were used to keep them from predicting WHICH city would be struck, but there was no hiding a thousand-plane bomber formation. He'd get a warning of a possible raid hours in advance, and all he had to do would be to hang out near his bunker, ready to go down the stairs if it was confirmed that it was heading for him.

Furthermore, these raids were very costly in men and aircraft, right up until 1945, when the war was soon to be won anyway. Big raids would routinely lose up to 100 planes, especially before the long range P-51 was introduced. At ten men a plane, these were enormous casualties. To suffer that for a tiny chance to kill a single man would simply be both militarily wasteful, as well as simply immoral.

When they killed Yamamoto, they knew what plane he was flying on, and his course, and could scramble a couple of fighters to do it. Fighter sorties were relatively easy to put together. Heydrich was gotten by resistance assassins on the ground, which was the only real viable option for targeted killing in those days.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

One of the big problems for Germany late in the war was the relentless bombing of Germany's refineries, coal gasification plants and transportation system. Plus the fall of Germany's Romanian controlled oil fields. By the end of the war, gasoline and aviation fuel was very hard to come by. So bombing did have an effect but it took time and relied on the practical elimination of the luftwaffe as an effective force.

 

[couch_sloth]

By about 1943 Hitler was so drugged-up and silly that it probably did us more good to leave him alive, even if we'd known how to get him, which we didn't. Even to hit a railway was more that most of Bomber Command could accomplish.

I remember reading someplace, that in the latter part of the war the Allies began to believe that it would end sooner if Hitler remained in power.