Luftwaffe

Unlike the United States Army, the German Wehrmacht had a long standing professional officer corps that had experience going back to the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. While many American career officers had seen action in World War I, the vast majority of Americans entered combat for the first time.

With the fall of Poland, thousands of POWs were taken by the German Army, and millions more before the war was over. The question of what to do with those POWs would lead to some of the worst atrocities of the war.

As the Battle of France progressed, United Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill asked fighter command for more aircraft to send to the continent. Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, recognizing that nothing could be done for France, refused.

By the end of 1944 Germany was losing on all fronts. Her generals, faced with ever increasing armies armed with superior technology, fell back under the combined assaults in Italy, the Eastern Front, and France.

The mainstay of the German bombers was the Heinkel He-111, a two-engined, medium range bomber that carried roughly 5,000 pounds of ordinance. It was a level bomber designed for attacking tactical targets as part of a Blitzkrieg campaign, sort of flying artillery. Its payload was not heavy enough nor its range long enough for sustained operations against civilian targets.

World War I had seen some air raids over England and Germany, but the technology was not yet available to wreak total havoc on the civilian population. The very idea of targeting a civilian population in a time of war was anathema to most of the world’s leaders.