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...beginning receive appropriate attention. For example, Mark Conversino's Fighting with the Soviets provides an in-depth study of U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) and Soviet Air Force relations in World War II and Air Marshal Probert's book, The Forgotten Air War, does a fine job in describing the U.S. and British air cooperation in Southeast Asia. (1)
The Luftwaffe had several important allies in the air war: In particular, Italy, Finland, Hungary, and Rumania made great sacrifices and took heavy losses fighting alongside the Luftwaffe. Yet, despite the thousands of aircraft Germany's allies put into combat, from the far north to the Mediterranean, the relationship between the Luftwaffe and its coalition allies has received little attention. (2) This article is a contribution towards understanding this aspect of the history of aerial warfare.
A full list of Germany's allied air forces, the forces that flew alongside the Luftwaffe or under Luftwaffe command, would include Slovakia, Croatia and Bulgaria alongside the Italians, Rumanians, Finns and Hungarians. However, this article will concentrate on the latter four air forces and their relationship with the Luftwaffe. These four nations not only had moderately large air forces but also had indigenous aircraft industries and significant industrial potential to produce aircraft. On the other hand, the Bulgarian, Slovakian and Croatian contribution to the aerial war was insignificant and none of those nations had an aviation industry that could have made an impact on the war. In this article, I will concentrate on the relationship between the Luftwaffe with its major allies (Italy, Finland, Hungary and Rumania) to include the an overview of the battle performance of allied air forces, German assistance to its major allies and the Luftwaffe's policy towards the aviation industries of its allies. Germany's allies had the potential to deploy significant forces and production capability to support the German war effort. For the most part, the actual and potential force of Germany's allies was ignored or misused by the Luftwaffe throughout the war. Indeed, one of the primary causes for German defeat, and specifically Germany's defeat in the air, was due to the Third Reich's inability to effectively lead a coalition war.
The Luftwaffe's Understanding of Coalition Warfare
Several factors affected the Luftwaffe's relationship to its wartime allies and inhibited the Luftwaffe from developing an effective relationship with allied air forces. First of all was the influence of Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht culture. Before the war, Luftwaffe officers failed to seriously study coalition operations and the Wehrmacht as a whole suffered from a lack of interest in coalition operations within the senior military leadership. Another factor that inhibited Germany's ability to exploit the capability of coalition allies lay in the Nazi concept of Mitteleuropa that guided German foreign relations. Germany's long-term ambition was to fully control the economy of Central Europe, and this vision had no place for technologically advanced allies with aviation industries that could compete with Germany. Finally, the Germans fought under the concept of parallel war, each allied nation would largely fight its own war in its own sector with little strategic coordination or common direction.
In the 1920s, the German army established a three-year general staff course that provided a thorough education for officers in the operational art, and at the operational level of war. The army general staff course covered tactics from battalion to army levels, military history, operational planning, and joint operations. It was arguably the best education in the world in the operational art of combat command. However, very little emphasis was placed on logistics or the industrial-economic side of warfare in the general staff course, and grand strategy--including coalition warfare--was scarcely mentioned. When the Luftwaffe established its general staff academy in 1935, its emphasis--like that of the army's general staff training--was on the operational side of aerial warfare, with little time devoted to grand strategy. War Minister Werner von Blomberg and Luftwaffe Chief of Staff Walter Wever recognized the deficiency of both the army and air force general staff curricula in educating officers to serve as strategists and staff officers for the Wehrmacht. At the urging of both generals, the war ministry established the Wehrmachtakademie in 1935 to educate officers for service on a joint strategic staff. The one-year course, which was intended for a select group of experienced general staff officers drawn from all services, would emphasize grand strategy, war economics, and politics. From 1935 to 1938, only a handful of officers were sent to the course. (3)
The death of Wever in 1936, and the dismissal of von Blomberg in 1938, eliminated the German military's strongest advocates for creating a true Wehrmacht strategic staff. The Wehrmachtakademie was shut down in 1938, largely as a result of interservice rivalry, and of Hermann Goering's dislike of any staff that might interfere with the direction of "his" Luftwaffe and air ministry. When the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) was formed in 1938, it would not be a staff to coordinate grand strategy, but rather a small, personal staff for the Fuhrer. In short, the Wehrmacht never developed a program to produce strategists or any coherent vision of grand strategy. (4)
A central goal of Nazi foreign relations was to ensure German domination of the economies of Central Europe to include Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. Through its foreign trade and investment policies of the 1930s Germany made a conscious effort to push out British and French trade and influence in the region and supplant it with German domination. >From the German viewpoint, countries like Hungary and Rumania that were mainly agricultural lands should produce food for Germany. The Central European nations were also seen as providers of raw materials to German industry. The Central European nations had many of the vital resources that Germany lacked. For example, Rumania was a major off supplier to Germany and Hungary developed its oil fields in the 1930s. Hungary was, as well, one of the world's major producers of bauxite. (5) Besides providing Germany with food and raw materials, the small Central European states were also seen as a market for German industrial goods and machines. Before the outbreak of the war, the German strategy for the economic domination of Central Europe was quite successful. Austria and Czechoslovakia were absorbed into the German Reich and by 1938 Germany had become the dominant economic influence in both Rumania and Hungary. (6)
There was little subtlety in the German policy of asserting its dominance in Central Europe. >From the time Hitler took power the Rumanian and Hungarian governments were highly suspicious of Germany. Rumania had been closely linked with France after World War I and maintained its alliance into the 1930s. (7) Hungary had a strong democratic tradition and valued its trade links with Britain. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the Rumanian and Hungarian governments, Britain and France were far away while Germany was next door. The small nations had to make realistic accommodations with Germany in order to survive so, in 1940 when the Soviet Union occupied the Rumanian province of Bessarabia, the Rumanians had no alternative but to turn to Germany for help in regaining their territory. Hungary could only turn to Germany to adjudicate a return of territory stripped from Hungary by Rumania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in the aftermath of World War I.
In the prewar period, the Wehrmacht and the air ministry devoted virtually no effort to coalition war planning or to discuss coordinated military production with coalition partners. After the Nazi accession to power in 1933, fascist Italy was viewed as a natural ally and in 1933-1934 a group of senior German officers visited Italy to discuss the possibility of standardizing some equipment between the two countries. Yet nothing came of the discussions and the Germans never pressed the issue. (8) Thus, when Italy went to war as Germany's ally in June 1940, none of Italy's major equipment items or their means of communication were compatible with Germany's. Since the Luftwaffe failed to plan for a coalition war with its largest and most obvious ally, there was bound to be even less effort to develop Germany's military relationship with smaller powers. Indeed, prior to the outbreak of the war the Air Ministry's primary interest in the small nations of Central Europe was as a market for obsolete or surplus German aircraft. Germany urgently needed foreign exchange for its rearmament program and became a major aircraft exporter by the mid-1930s. Hungary and Rumania, then rebuilding their air forces, were eager to buy the latest German aircraft models and to obtain licenses to build German equipment. However, before 1938 the air ministry refrained either from selling front-line Luftwaffe aircraft or from allowing license production of its latest models. (9) As a consequence, Rumania was offered Heinkel He 51 fighters in 1935. As the He 51 was already known as one of the Luftwaffe's least successful aircraft and was in the process of being replaced so the Rumanians sensibly rejected the German offer and bought better fighters from the Italians. (10) Yet the Rumanians kept trying to buy modern aircraft from Germany and finally in 1939 the Luftwaffe allowed the Rumanians to buy 24 modern Heinkel He 112 fighters since it was a model that the Luftwaffe had little interest in and was thus approved for export. (11) However, a Rumanian request to buy 50 Ju 87Bs was turned down by the Air Ministry that same year. (12) The story with the Hungarians is similar. Between 1934 and 1940 several Hungarian missions to buy German aircraft resulted in the purchase of some older aircraft considered surplus to the Luftwaffe's needs. In 1939 Rumanian overtures to license-build the Me 109 fighter and Junkers Jumo 211 aircraft engine were rebuffed.
As a result of German arms sales policies, Rumania and Hungary turned to Italy, France, and the United Kingdom to purchase and to license-build aircraft for outfitting their fighter and bomber units. Hungary and Rumania considered Germany an unreliable aircraft supplier and, faced with the German attitude, Hungary, Finland, and Rumania all took steps to improve the capability of their indigenous aircraft industries in order to become as self-sufficient as possible. The Hungarian and Finnish governments opted to license-build fighter planes and some bombers. Hungary started licensed production of the Italian Regianne 2000 fighter and the Caproni Ca 135 bomber before its entry into the war. Finland's state aircraft factory entered into an agreement to license-build the Fokker D XXI fighter in 1937. Rumania took a different tack by developing a modern fighter plane, the IAR 80, for production by the Rumanian state aircraft company. Hungary and Rumania also took steps to design and build their own trainers along with light liaison and reconnaissance aircraft. Hungary and Rumania worked to adapt foreign airframe designs to their own engines, usually variations of license-built French aircraft engines although none of the domestic-designed or license-built aircraft or engines made by Rumania, Hungary or Finland were equal to the German aircraft or engines available in 1939 or 1940. However, German sales and licensing policy combined with a distrust of Germany ensured that, for the small nations, self-sufficiency took precedence over efficiency in the prewar rearmament programs.
Parallel War and Germany's Allies
Germany never developed a clear grand strategy to fight a coalition war. Indeed, Germany's allies had little in common with the Third Reich and each nation allied itself with Germany in order to fulfill very limited war aims. For example, Finland aligned itself...
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