The Secret Agent by Stephan Talty Page B

Luftwaffe, rarely seen over France or the rest of the occupied Europe, took to the air in large numbers to protect the refineries, shooting down the American and British planes at a steady clip. Half of the Air Force’s casualties, including 26,000 dead, were suffered by the Eighth Air Force, the “Mighty Eighth,” who flew most of the missions at Erickson’s targets. Between June and August, 1944, the Eighth lost 1,022 heavy bombers, half of its fleet, and 665 of its fighters. An American briefing officer, after detailing a daily mission for one bomber crew, offered them this advice: “Consider yourself dead.”
    Faced with the destruction of the synthetic plants, Albert Speer pulled 350,000 men from other assignments and ordered them to repair the facilities at all costs. The “successful prosecution of the war,” Speer informed his Commissioner General for Emergency Measures, pivoted on the “reconstruction of these plants.” The refinery at Leuna had a 5,000-strong team simply for fighting fires after the raids. Special oil tanks were made with concrete liners to protect them from flying shrapnel; blast walls were built around compressors and the other key components that kept the plants running. The workers in the Berlin ministries began hearing a new motto from the War Production department: “Everything for oil.”
    Meanwhile, Eisenhower was becoming convinced that the attacks were weakening the still-formidable Wehrmacht. “We were most anxious to continue the destruction of German industry, with emphasis on oil,” he wrote in Crusade in Europe . “General Spaatz convinced me that as Germany became progressively embarrassed by her diminished oil reserves, the effect upon the land battle would be most profound and the eventual winning of the war would be correspondingly hastened.”
    In the industrial heartland of the Ruhr, Erickson guided 1600 planes to the benzol plants which produced the fuel for the terrifying V-1 and V-2 rockets, obliterating them. By 1944, the facilities at Leuna had been bombed “at least 25 times with thousands of bombs” and were “a total wreck.” Erickson began hearing from his contacts in Germany about the onslaught. “The Americans and the British know more about the oil plants than I can believe,” one told him. Another admitted that “the precision of the bombing is one of the most remarkable things that the German army has witnessed.”
    While visiting one plant, Erickson learned that Joseph Goebbels had recently visited to cheer up the workers, depressed by the constant bombardment. The American made note of which buildings had survived and what they contained; he touched compressors and other machinery melted by the heat of the fires; he watched as the Slavs and doomed Jews worked feverishly to repair the plant. One manager of a refinery pulled Erickson aside and complained, “The damage… is unbelievable.” The ripples from the bombing spread outward through the industries that needed oil to make their products: chemicals, rubber, munitions. The same hydrogenation plants that were turning coal into fuel were also producing the compounds – synthetic methanol, synthetic ammonia and nitric acid—used in high-explosive bombs.
    The destruction inevitably changed the Nazis’ strategy for the war. In early, 1944, the German High Command, along with most of Europe, suspected the Allies were planning an invasion of Europe later that year. To stop it, Göring had always envisioned waves of Luftwaffe fighters attacking the enemy battalions in the days and weeks after the amphibious landing. As rumors of an impending D-Day swept Europe in the spring and summer of 1944, he contemplated transferring some of his planes to Calais and the coast of France. But after a great deal of thought, Göring decided against it. “No such transfer was possible,” wrote the historian