I am sure that without the work of many unknown experts at Bletchley Park…the turning point of the Battle of the Atlantic could not have come as it did in May 1943, but months, perhaps many months, later. In that case the Allied invasion of Normandy could not have been possible in June 1944, and there would have ensued a chain of developments very different from the ones which we have experienced.

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Belatedly, Ultra began affecting the air war on both the tactical and the strategic levels. British decoding capabilities during the Battle of Britain did not provide major help to Fighter Command. Similarly, for the first three years of Bomber Command’s war over the Continent, Ultra yielded little useful intelligence. On the other hand, throughout 1942 and 1943, Ultra provided valuable insights into what the Germans and Italians were doing in the Mediterranean and supplied Allied naval and air commanders with detailed, specific information on the movement of Axis convoys from Italy to North Africa. By March 1943, Anglo-American air forces operating in the Mediterranean had succeeded in shutting down Axis seaborne convoys to Tunisia. Allied information was so good, in fact, that after a convoy had been hit, the German air corps located in Tunisia reported to its higher headquarters, ironically in a message that was intercepted and decoded:

The enemy activity today in the air and on the sea must in [the] view of Fliegerkorps Tunis, lead to the conclusion that the course envisaged for convoy D and C was betrayed to the enemy. At 0845 hours a comparatively strong four-engine aircraft formation was north of Bizerte. Also a warship formation consisting of light cruisers and destroyers lay north of Bizerte, although no enemy warships had been sighted in the sea area for weeks.

As was to be the case throughout the war, the Germans then drew the conclusion that traitors either in their own high command or elsewhere–in this case, in the Commando Supremo, the Italian high command–had betrayed the course of the convoys.

In the battles for control of the air over Sicily, Ultra proved equally beneficial. It enabled the Allies to take advantage of German fuel and ammunition shortages and to spot Axis dispositions on the airfields of Sicily and southern Italy.

In regard to U.S. strategic bombing, however, Ultra may have exerted a counterproductive influence in 1943. Luftwaffe message-traffic intercepts indicated quite correctly how seriously Allied air attacks were affecting the German air wing, but these intercepts may have prompted Lt. Gen. Ira Eaker, the U.S. Eighth Air Force’s commander, to go to the well once too often. The second great attack on Schweinfurt in October 1943, as well as the other great bomber raids of that month, proved disastrous for the Eighth Air Force crews who flew the missions. The Eighth lost sixty bombers in the Schweinfurt run.

Moreover, the U.S. Army Air Forces’ theories about the vulnerability of the German economy to precision bombing proved somewhat unrealistic. While bomber attacks did inflict heavy damage on German aircraft factories, the industry was in no sense destroyed. Likewise, attacks on ball-bearing plants failed to have a decisive impact. True, damage to Schweinfurt caused the Germans some difficulties, but the batterings that the Eighth’s bombers sustained in the August and October raids were such that, despite intelligence information that the Germans would be back in business quickly, the Eighth could not afford to again repeat the mission.

In 1944, however, the Eighth’s capabilities and target selection changed. Most important, the Eighth Air Force received long-range fighter support to make deep penetration raids possible. The initial emphasis in American strategic bombing attacks in late winter and early spring 1944 lay first on hitting the German aircraft industry and then on preparing the way for the invasion of the Continent. In May, Lt. Gen. Carl Spaatz, commander in chief of U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, persuaded Allied commander Dwight D. Eisenhower that he possessed sufficient bomber strength to support both the invasion and a new offensive that would be aimed at taking out Germany’s oil industry. In attacking that industry, Spaatz hit the Germans at their most vulnerable economic point. Not only did attacks on the oil facilities have an immediate impact on the Wehrmacht’s mobility, but fuel shortages soon prevented the Germans from training a new generation of pilots to replace those who were lost in the air battles of the spring.

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