What was the significance if any of Operation Bodenplatte

Operation Bodenplatte was a major air offensive conducted by the Luftwaffe on New Years' Day 1945 over Allied tactical airfields in Western Europe. The German plan was to achieve surprise and blunt Allied tactical airpower on the Western Front and prevent it from being used to attack German forces operating in Belgium and France. Despite some minor successes, Bodenplatte was a failure.

Bodenplatte grew out of a late-war Luftwaffe strategic culture that had to stomach a number of dangerous facts. For one thing, the numerous Allied air-raids as well as the invasion that Germany had by clearly lost air superiority by 1944. One of the big differences between the Western and Eastern fronts in German solders' letters home and other accounts is that Jabos (fighter-bombers) were omnipresent in the Western front. Luftwaffe staff estimates knew of the massive growth in Allied airpower and that prior German efforts to contain the air threat had failed. As Anglo-American airpower grew immeasurably, so too did the Luftwaffe decline both quantitatively and qualitatively as a major force. The loss of veteran pilots, use of ersatz materials in aircraft construction, poor training, fuel constraints, and the approaching obsolescence of the Luftwaffe's frontline aircraft constrained operations. One of the solutions to this crisis, and one not limited to the Luftwaffe, was to look for panacea solutions to the dilemma of a outnumbered Luftwaffe facing very long odds. The General of Fighters Adolf Galland first began to envision a grosse Schlag (great blow) in the late-summer of 1944 in which carefully husbanded fighter forces would meet Anglo-American bombers over Germany in a massive, but limited, attack that would blunt the Allied air offensive and provide the Reich a degree of respite from aerial attack. Galland would exaggerate the importance and groundwork for the grosse Schlag in his postwar memoirs, but this mass attack was a sign of the Luftwaffe thinking that for a brief period, Germany could achieve something close to air superiority, even if temporary.

Galland's grosse Schlag helped pave the way for Bodenplatte as the OKW and Göring sought to relegate a role for the Luftwaffe in the upcoming operation. Some of the reconstituted fighter units Galland had earmarked for grosse Schlag were sent for Wacht am Rhein as were some tactical air units sent from the Eastern front. Although Galland would use the failure of Bodenplatte postwar to justify his planned big blow, Bodenplatte was something of a spiritual successor to it. German military planners recognized that maintaining air superiority was impossible, but the Luftwaffe had enough planes to briefly take command of the air at a concentrated point.

The problems though in transitioning a concentrated air attack from a defensive role to an offensive one though were massive. The decline in pilot training meant that many Luftwaffe pilots lacked the basic skills for navigation. Even though the operation's main architect, Major General Dietrich Peltz, was an experienced bomber commander and tried to incorporate elements such as pathfinder bomber or nightfighter aircraft to guide in inexperienced fliers, these efforts were too little and poorly coordinated with the largely single-seat attack force. The fuel crisis also cut into training, so many of Bodenplatte's pilots were inexperienced at strafing or conducting glide bomb attacks. Moreover, the weather of December 1944 not only delayed Bodenplatte to New Years, but magnified these problems. Newly trained German pilots in 1944 were already having problems flying in good weather conditions, but to conduct a mass airstrike timed to hit Allied airfields at dawn over a distance in winter weather was extremely difficult for this cohort of pilots to accomplish.

On paper, the Luftwaffe did manage to achieve some results in Bodenplatte. They did manage to achieve surprise at a number of Allied airfields and destroy a large number of Allied aircraft on the ground. Historians have never concretely established Anglo-American losses, but Ron Pütz makes an estimate of 305 aircraft destroyed and 190 damaged. The attack also blunted Allied tactical airpower for a week or so after Bodenplatte.

The impact on Allied tactical airpower was transitory. Most of the Anglo-American aircraft were lost on the ground, and by this point in the war, the Allied production machine was more than capable of replacing them. Moreover, blunting Allied tactical airpower did little good when the Wacht am Rhein offensive had already failed. OKW had initially called for an earlier air offensive, but weather conditions in December 1944 prevented it from occurring. Finally, Allied losses in pilots and personnel were relatively small and although air attack is nothing to slough off, Allied tactical airpower could resume its attacks once their pilots had received their replacement aircraft.

The same could not be said of the Luftwaffe's losses in Bodenplatte. Not surprisingly, January weather caused a large number of crashes among the inexperienced single-seat fighters. Pütz estimates that of the 850 fighters and Jabos that participated in Bodenplatte, there were some 271 destroyed and 65 damaged. Of these aircraft losses(both among the fighters and pathfinder aircraft), 213 pilots lost their lives in Bodenplatte and 70 were captured. Many of these losses were tyros, but there were a number of experienced pilots (45) who died in the operation. Allied estimates of Bodenplatte attacks also observed that German strafing and bombing attacks were amateurish and opened up the Luftwaffe pilots to AA fire. Pütz pegs about half of Bodenplatte's losses due to airfield defenses, showing that the Luftwaffe squandered some of their surprise making repeated runs that allowed Allied ground defenses to catch their wind.

Bodenplatte achieved little of any significance in terms of its impact on the ground. The German ground offensive had already been stopped and the subsequent Nordwind offensive was likewise following Rhein's trajectory of initial gains to eventual German defeat. The Luftwaffe's losses in Bodenplatte added further speed to the death spiral of the Luftwaffe fighter force, but this was a process that had been underway for over a year before the operation. Jagflieger critics of Göring like Galland would use Bodenplatte as an example of the Reichsmarshall's dilettantish leadership. This criticism, even if correct when pointing out how Bodenplatte needlessly wasted lives, obscures some of the deeper problems within the Luftwaffe's leadership in the latter period of the war. The grosse Schlag would have probably cost just as dear in manpower and planes had it been implemented and would have done little to reverse Allied air superiority. Prior attempts by the Jagdflieger force to concentrate airpower in 1944 had failed given the growing numbers and experience of Allied fighter escorts. Eight Air Force losses might not have been as easy to replace as the tactical aircraft destroyed on the ground in Bodenplatte, but this would not have been an insurmountable obstacle for Allied planners. The prevalence of the narrative of the grosse Schlag as a lost opportunity among a number of Luftwaffe veterans postwar speaks to the power of what Robert Citino has termed a Totenritt (death ride) in German military culture. Citino observes that Prussian/German generals when faced with defeat sometimes choose to go out in a blaze of glory for the brief chance of achieving a victory against long odds. The chances of a grosse Schlag were slightly better than Bodenplatte, but the odds were clearly stacked against the Germans in either case.

Sources

Caldwell, Donald L. and Richard Muller The Luftwaffe Over Germany. Barnsley : Frontline, 2014.

Manrho, John, and Ron Pütz. Bodenplatte: The Luftwaffe's Last Hope. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2010.

Murray, Williamson. Strategy for Defeat: The Luftwaffe, 1933-1945. Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2002.