GERMANY's SITUATION

The Allies early in 1945 hoped to crush Germany that year. It was their expectation that the German army would continue to fight ferociously on the defensive, especially now that it was the German homeland which was being invaded, but there was confidence in victory. The Allied air forces controlled the skies over all the fronts; and although at times the German air force could still muster substantial numbers, the Allies greatly outnumbered them, had better trained and more experienced pilots, and could, when it came to it, replace losses far more easily than the Germans. By this time, furthermore, the air attacks on Germany's synthetic oil plants and the capture of the Romanian oil fields by the Russians had so reduced the supplies available to the German air force that many of its planes simply could not be flown.

Control of the air assured the Allies of full support for their land offensives and the opportunity to attack industrial, transportation, and other targets in the whole area still under German control. What few newly developed jet airplanes the Germans could produce were often destroyed on the ground or simply overwhelmed in the skies. Both the Western Allies and the Soviet Union were producing propeller driven airplanes of improved design in great numbers even as the German air force had, for the most part, concentrated on modified versions of by 1945 obsolescent models of the early war years. In the air, there was obviously a dramatic reversal of the situation from that at the beginning of the war when the Germans had won air superiority first over Poland, then in the Western campaign of 1940 and the Balkan campaign of the spring of 1941, and finally in the first stage of the German attack on Russia. The earlier German insistence on building up a new air force in the face of their treaty commitments and in a world without great fleets of warplanes no longer looked like the “success” which it had been hailed as by many in the 1930s and is still occasionally referred to in the literature.