The death of Walther Wever

On 3 June 1936, at Klotzsche airfield near Dresden, a Heinkel He 70 crashed just after take-off. At the controls was Generalleutnant Walther Wever, Chief of the General Staff of the Luftwaffe. He was killed instantly together with his flight engineer. He was 48. Wever was one of the ablest officers in the German armed forces and one of the architects of the new air force’s doctrine, and he has gone down in history above all as the champion of a four-engined long-range bomber, known as the “Ural bomber”. For a long time it was widely held that his death destroyed any hope the Luftwaffe had of acquiring a strategic bomber force like those of the Allies. Today historians question this view. Far more than the death of a single general decided why Germany went to war without heavy bombers.

A staff officer from the infantry

Walther Wever was born on 11 November 1887 into a family of civil servants at Wilhelmsort in the district of Bydgoszcz (Bromberg), in what was then the Prussian Province of Posen. In 1905 he joined the Prussian Army as an infantry officer cadet. During the First World War he was soon posted to staff duties, and in the autumn of 1917 he joined the operations branch of the Army Supreme Command, headed by Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. German biographers credit him with a share in drawing up the principles of elastic defence that the German army applied on the Western Front in the last years of the war, and with being present at Spa in November 1918, when the fate of Kaiser Wilhelm II was being decided.

In the Reichswehr Wever was a typical member of the staff elite. He worked in the Truppenamt, the camouflaged General Staff, and in 1932 headed its army training branch. He was regarded as calm, hard-working and well liked, a man who knew how to work with others. He had no aviation experience whatsoever. Yet when the Reich Air Ministry was being set up in 1933, the Reichswehr Minister, Werner von Blomberg, gave him to the new service. On 1 September 1933 Colonel Wever took over the Luftkommandoamt, the Air Command Office, which was the nucleus of the General Staff of the still secret Luftwaffe. In his forties he learnt to fly. When the Luftwaffe was officially established on 1 March 1935, Wever became its first Chief of the General Staff. He was promoted to Generalmajor in October 1934 and to Generalleutnant in April 1936.

Doctrine and the “Ural bomber”

In the ministry Wever was one of three pillars, alongside the State Secretary, Erhard Milch, who was in charge of production and organisation, and the head of the Technical Office, Wilhelm Wimmer. Hermann Göring, burdened with a host of other posts, left them considerable freedom in these years. Wever was the theorist of the trio. Under his direction the 1935 manual “The Conduct of the Air War” (Luftwaffendienstvorschrift 16) was produced, which remained the Luftwaffe’s most important doctrinal document for years to come. It was not a simple restatement of the theories of the Italian general Giulio Douhet, according to whom the bombing of cities alone would break the enemy’s will. It rejected terror bombing of the population as an independent method. It saw the main tasks of the air force as the destruction of the enemy air force, strikes against enemy communications and rear areas, support for the army and navy, and attacks on the armaments industry, which Wever considered important in a long war.

It was from this last task that the long-range bomber programme grew. As early as 1934 Wever and Wimmer commissioned designs from Dornier and Junkers for a four-engined bomber that could reach targets far to the east. On the staff it was called the “Ural bomber”, because in a war with the Soviet Union it was to strike at the industry Stalin was building in and beyond the Urals, far from the western frontiers. Prototypes of the Dornier Do 19 and the Junkers Ju 89 were built. They were weak, however: the German engines of the day were too low-powered for such large aircraft to carry a worthwhile bomb load and to defend themselves against fighters. Wever was counting on the next generation. According to some accounts, it was on 3 June 1936 itself that the ministry issued the requirements for a new “Bomber A” with a range of nearly 7,000 kilometres, from which the Heinkel He 177 later emerged.

The crash at Klotzsche

On 3 June 1936 Wever flew from Berlin to Dresden to give a lecture at the air war academy at Klotzsche. He wanted to return to the capital the same day for the state funeral of General Karl Litzmann, a First World War hero and NSDAP activist. The lecture ran over and the departure was hurried. Wever, who preferred to fly himself even though he had a pilot at his disposal, took off in a fast Heinkel He 70 courier aircraft. According to the findings of the investigation, the aileron locks, which immobilised the ailerons while the aircraft was parked, had not been removed before take-off. Just after leaving the ground the machine dropped a wing, turned over on to its back and crashed into a field beyond the airfield. Wever and his flight engineer were killed instantly. According to some accounts he had been warned the day before that he was not yet sufficiently familiar with the type.

The regime staged the funeral on 6 June with great pomp, and Göring escorted the widow. Wever’s name was given to one of the Luftwaffe’s bomber wings, to barracks and to streets. He was succeeded as chief of staff by General Albert Kesselring, and the Technical Office was soon taken over by the First World War fighter ace Ernst Udet, an enthusiast for dive-bombers but a man with no training for running technology and industry. Göring began to meddle more and more in air force affairs and to play his generals off against one another. The harmonious cooperation of 1933–1936 was at an end.

Did his death rob Germany of strategic bombers?

In the spring of 1937 Göring, on the advice of Kesselring and Milch, halted the Ural bomber programme. Milch later recalled that Göring said at the time that the Führer would not ask how big his bombers were, but how many there were. The Luftwaffe concentrated on twin-engined medium bombers such as the Heinkel He 111, the Dornier Do 17 and the Junkers Ju 88, and on the Junkers Ju 87 dive-bomber. From this arose after the war a belief that is still repeated in popular works today: had Wever lived, the Luftwaffe would have had heavy bombers and could have destroyed the industry of Britain in 1940–1941, and then that of the Soviet Union. The view was spread above all by former Luftwaffe officers writing after the war for American historians, for whom it was convenient to blame defeat on chance rather than on the mistakes of the leadership.

Historians of the German air force such as James Corum, Williamson Murray and Richard Overy consider this picture exaggerated. First, Wever was no zealot of strategic bombing. His manual treated it as one of several tasks, and support for the ground forces occupied an important place in it. Second, the obstacles were technical and economic. In the mid-1930s Germany lacked engines with the power heavy bombers needed, it was short of aluminium and fuel, and the material for one heavy bomber could build two or three medium ones. Hitler needed large numbers of aircraft quickly, to deter his neighbours and to fight short campaigns on the continent. Third, the programme Wever himself had launched did not die with him. The “Bomber A” requirements remained in force and led to the construction of the He 177. Its failure stemmed from decisions taken later: from an innovative but unreliable arrangement of coupled engines, and from the absurd requirement that a heavy bomber should be able to attack in a dive. Some German authors even argue that Wever himself had begun to cut back the Ural bomber programme shortly before his death, although this is not a widely accepted view.

It is also worth remembering that the Allied strategic forces did not come into being overnight. The American Boeing B-17 first flew in 1935, and it was in 1936 that the British ordered the designs for four-engined bombers that did not enter combat until 1941–1942. The British and American bombing offensive against Germany absorbed a huge share of both powers’ industry and became truly dangerous only in 1943–1944. It is hard to believe that Germany, with its shortages of raw materials, could have done the same if only one general had survived an air crash. Wever’s death was a loss to the Luftwaffe, above all because it was thereafter without an able organiser capable of thinking about war in the longer term. But it was not the only reason Germany failed to build a fleet of heavy bombers.

On the road to war

A few weeks after Wever’s death the Spanish Civil War broke out. German transport aircraft ferried General Franco’s troops from Morocco to Spain, and in the autumn of 1936 the Condor Legion under General Hugo Sperrle went into action. In Spain the Luftwaffe tested fighters, bombers and dive-bombers, as well as cooperation between aircraft and ground forces, which brought it great successes in Poland in September 1939 and in the West in May 1940. The lack of heavy bombers made itself felt only in the Battle of Britain and in the East, where the Luftwaffe was unable to attack systematically the Soviet factories that had been moved beyond the Volga and to the Urals. Wever’s son, also named Walther, was killed as a fighter pilot in April 1945, in the last weeks of the war to whose preparation his father had devoted the final years of his life.