On 17 August 1943, exactly one year after the American Eighth Air Force had flown its first bombing mission of the war, against the railway yards at Rouen, some two hundred of its B-17s crossed into Franconia and bombed the ball-bearing works of Schweinfurt. About half of all German bearing production came from this one small town on the Main. A bearing is an unglamorous thing, a ring of steel balls that lets a shaft turn, but no engine, gun mount or gearbox works without it. The planners had chosen well, and they knew it.
In the Allied target material the largest of the Schweinfurt plants went by the initials VKF, for Vereinigte Kugellagerfabriken, the United Ball-Bearing Works. The company had been formed in 1929, when several Schweinfurt makers were merged. Its parent was the Swedish firm SKF, Svenska Kullagerfabriken, of Gothenburg.
The Parent Company
None of this was a secret. The ownership appears in the ordinary business records of the time, in annual reports and newspaper clippings, and the Hamburg economic archive that kept them lists SKF as the parent without comment. Sweden was neutral. One of its leading industrial firms owned a plant in Germany that the United States was bombing, and from Gothenburg it sold bearings to Germany and to Great Britain at the same time.
After the war the company simply took its owner’s name. In 1953 the Schweinfurt company became the German branch of the SKF group, and it still is.
The Damage and the Repair
The first raid did real harm. When the United States Strategic Bombing Survey examined the industry’s own records after the war, it found that bearing production at Schweinfurt in September 1943 had fallen to about a third of what it had been before the attack. The price had been high as well. Thirty-six bombers did not come home.
The second raid, on 14 October 1943, damaged the plants again and became one of the decisive air battles of the war. Beyond the range of their fighter escort, the bombers were met in strength by German fighters and flak. Much of that flak was served by schoolboys, some 2,500 of them, called up by whole classes from the towns of Franconia; among them was a Bamberg boy whose diary of the raids survives. The losses were so heavy that unescorted deep penetrations were suspended, and Schweinfurt was not attacked again for four months.
The Survey’s account of what the Germans did with those four months reads like a manual. A special commissioner was appointed with unlimited priority over men and materials. The industry was dispersed into smaller sites. The machines, it turned out, had survived the bombs far better than the buildings around them, which the Survey found to be true of nearly every raid it studied. Engineers redesigned equipment to use other kinds of bearing wherever they could. And the Germans drew on the substantial stocks already on hand.
By the autumn of 1944, production had returned to its pre-raid level. The Survey’s conclusion, published on 30 September 1945, was flat: there was “no evidence that the attacks on the ball-bearing industry had any measurable effect on essential war production.”
The man who had organised the German repair saw it differently. Asked by the Allied interrogators which attack would have hurt Germany most, Albert Speer, the armaments minister, answered that the destruction of the bearing industry would have brought armaments production to a complete standstill within months. Both statements stand in the same postwar files. One describes what the bombing did. The other describes what it might have done, had it been repeated.
The Run to Lysekil
There was a third supplier the bombs could not reach.
In the last days of October 1943, a fortnight after the second Schweinfurt raid, a small, fast motor boat called Gay Viking slipped through the German patrols in the Skagerrak and put into the Swedish port of Lysekil. She had been laid down as a gunboat for the Turkish navy, taken over by the British and completed instead as an unarmed merchant vessel with a cargo hold. Her crew, like those of her sisters, were drawn largely from the merchant seamen of Hull. Her cargo home was Swedish steel and SKF ball bearings for British factories.
The operation was called Bridford. It was the idea of George Binney, a former steel executive who had already brought interned Norwegian ships and their cargoes out of Sweden in 1941. Five boats took part. One, Master Standfast, was captured by a German patrol on her first run in November 1943. The others kept sailing between the Humber and Lysekil until March 1944.
So in the same autumn, the American crews flew into Germany to destroy bearings, and British crews ran a blockade to buy them, from the company that owned the factory being bombed.
The Film Executive
What the bombs had not done, the Allies set out to do by other means.
In April 1944 the British and American ministers in Stockholm demanded that Sweden restrict its bearing exports to Germany. The Swedish government refused. Erik Boheman, the senior official of the Swedish foreign ministry, told the American minister that Sweden could not stop the shipments entirely while its trade agreement with Germany ran. He added a practical point: if Sweden gave way, Germany would close the safe-conduct traffic out of Gothenburg on which Swedish overseas trade depended, and if the coming Allied invasion stalled, Sweden would be left at Germany’s mercy.
Washington then went around the government and straight to the company. The man it sent was Stanton Griffis, an executive of Paramount Pictures, acting for the Foreign Economic Administration. From 12 May 1944, while he talked, SKF shipped nothing to Germany. On 8 and 9 June an agreement was signed: SKF would restrict its German deliveries until 12 October, and the Allies would compensate the company for the business it lost. The State Department was careful that the Swedish government should not be, even by implication, a party to it.
On 7 October 1944, five days before the agreement ran out, the British and American ministers handed SKF a joint letter threatening punitive measures. The company’s board answered that it would stop all exports of bearings and bearing machinery to Germany and its allies. In the same exchange SKF asked the two governments for their best efforts to see its property in Germany restored after the war.
The Ledger
Seen from Gothenburg, the year had a certain symmetry. A Swedish company’s German factory had been bombed by one Allied government. Its Swedish factory had sold, through a blockade, to another. Its exports to the enemy had been halted in the end by a purchase agreement and a letter, and within a decade of the peace its Schweinfurt works carried the SKF name.
The bomb cost two raids, many crews and four months of German effort. The purchase cost a contract and a cheque.
Which of the two was the weapon?
