Bomber Command (19 page)

The flak over Berlin was very accurate and the searchlights held us at 18,000, AA going off all around us – I bet we’re full of holes. The shells keep bursting in front of us, and me being in front with the bomb sight, kept getting the smoke in my eyes. Was I scared? I’ll say I was scared! I let our bombs go in the middle of the city. I hope they helped our war effort. I could not see where they landed . . .

It was still the Stone Age of bombing, but this would now be elevated to Britain’s principal weapon of war.

4 » CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE

1941–42

‘Then shall the right aiming thunderbolts go abroad; and from the clouds, as from a well-drawn bow, shall they fly to the mark’ Wisdom v:21

– from the Air Ministry handbook
Bomber Command
, 1941

What took place in the mind of Winston Churchill to cause the man who wrote in 1917 ‘it is improbable that any terrorization of the civil population which could be achieved by air attack would compel the Government of a great nation to surrender’, to become, by the end of 1941, the foremost political advocate of bombing cities? ‘The bombers alone provide the means of victory,’ he wrote on 3 September 1940. From the outset Churchill was doubtful of the efficacy of the Air Staff’s ‘precision’ attacks on oil and communications. He demanded retaliation for the blitz on Britain, an attack on German morale that was no more than a euphemism for bombing the cities of Germany. On 20 October 1940, in the midst of the Luftwaffe’s night attacks on Britain, he minuted the Air Minister Sir Archibald Sinclair:

I am deeply concerned with the non-expansion, and indeed contraction of our bomber force which must be expected between now and April or May next, according to present policy. Surely an effort should be made to increase our bomb-dropping capacity during this period . . . Is it not possible to organize a second-line bomber force which, especially in the dark of the moon, would discharge bombs from a considerable and safe height upon the nearest large built-up area of Germany, which contains military targets in abundance? The Ruhr, of course, is obviously indicated . . . I ask that a wholehearted effort shall be made to cart a large number of bombs into Germany by a second-line organization such as I have suggested, and under conditions in which admittedly no special accuracy could be obtained.

Most men found during the course of the war that whatever moments of rage and passion they might suffer at the sight of a blitzed building or in the heat of battle, as the months and years went by it was impossible to sustain a white-hot hatred for the enemy. War became a job, a routine of its own, as much as peace. But Winston Churchill never for a moment lost his passion, his detestation of all things that belonged to the enemy. The force of his hatred for the German people and their leaders contributed immensely to his triumph as a war leader. His determination that Britain should survive and finally destroy the nation that had brought such misery upon the world never faltered. It would not have occurred to him to permit the maltreatment of a prisoner, or to tolerate excess in the government of captured German territory. Once Germans ceased to be enemies in arms, he had no further interest in them. But as he gazed out across the map of Europe at the Third Reich during the six years of war, he sought to bring fire and slaughter without scruple upon the German people. It is doubtful whether at any time after the fall of France he debated whether killing German civilians was a moral exercise. He was concerned only with what was strategically desirable and tactically possible. After the war, in a note to a former staff officer of Bomber Command, Churchill scribbled: ‘We should never allow ourselves to apologize for what we did to Germany.’
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Whatever he may have written elsewhere for public consumption, there is no reason to suppose that Churchill ever suffered a moment’s private misgiving about the course and consequences of the strategic air offensive.

It is important to dwell on Churchill’s personal attitude to the bombing of Germany, because it will be necessary to emphasize the extent to which the elevation of Bomber Command to its prime place in the British war effort was his personal decision, in the face of intense and important opposition. The bomber offensive would consume a lion’s share of Britain’s industrial resources – the exact proportion will never be known, but Mr. A. J. P. Taylor suggests more than one-third.
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Alternative claims on production were pressed with fierce determination. To give some impression of the debate that took place, it is helpful to take certain events out of order, and to consider as an entity discussions that took place between August 1941 and the spring of 1942. In these months the future of the strategic bomber offensive was decided. Once the great Allied commitment had been made, it has been insufficiently recognized to what extent the Chiefs of Staff in 1944 and 1945, in greatly changed circumstances, were the prisoners of the vast investment in industrial effort and national prestige which had already been made in the strategic bomber forces. In early 1942 the destruction of Germany’s cities was still many months away. But their ultimate fate had already been decided.

Throughout the winter of 1940–41 and into the spring, the Prime Minister followed closely the progress of the bomber offensive – the raid on Mannheim, the attacks on the
Scharnhorst
and the
Gneisenau
, the debate between Portal and the Air Ministry and subsequently between Peirse and Portal about bombing policy. He was aware of the shortcomings in the results that had been achieved. He was disturbed by 2 Group’s losses in the RAF’s continuing effort to maintain some sort of daylight bomber effort, and by the inability of Bomber Command to do decisive damage even against the coastal invasion barge concentrations, whose photographs he studied personally. But it is doubtful whether he understood the full extent of the failure: the near-farce of many sorties; the overwhelming majority of crews who never came within miles of the target; the repeated attempts to bomb on ETA; the paltry fruits of the immense effort against the oil plants. Then
one morning in August 1941 he was presented with a report by Mr D. M. Butt of the Cabinet Secretariat on the current performance of Bomber Command against targets in France and Germany. Its conclusions seem to have been a great shock to him, and would have decisive repercussions for the future of the bomber offensive.

Mr Butt was directed to carry out his independent investigation by Lord Cherwell, the Prime Minister’s personal scientific adviser and the most powerful
éminence grise
in Downing Street. Cherwell had been doubtful for some time about the results being achieved by British bombing, and Mr Butt’s conclusions exceeded his worst fears. On any given night of operations, it was already understood that around a third of all aircraft returned without claiming to have attacked their primary target. So Mr Butt analysed only the target photographs and reports relating to the remaining two-thirds of crews who had allegedly bombed their targets, during the preceding two months of June and July 1941. He reported that of these, only one-third came within five miles of the aiming point. Against the Ruhr this proportion fell to one-tenth. At a moment when perceptive airmen already foresaw the end of moonlit bombing operations as German night-fighter activity intensified, Mr Butt found that moonlight was indispensable to the pilots of Bomber Command: two crews in five came within five miles of their targets on full-moon nights; this ratio fell to one in fifteen on moonless ones.

The Royal Air Force was not disposed to make much of the Butt Report. Sir Richard Peirse, who had already achieved a reputation for assertive overconfidence about the work of his Command, found its conclusions incompatible with the degree of damage he believed had been done to Germany, and thus simply unacceptable. Air Vice-Marshal Carr, now AOC of 4 Group, argued that ‘lack of a photograph of the precise target should not be regarded as conclusive proof that the aircraft failed to attack its proper objective.’ Air Vice-Marshal Saundby, SASO at High Wycombe, noted that the weather had been especially bad in the months studied by Butt, and also suggested rather improbably that squadron commanders
tended to give cameras to those crews in whom they had least confidence. All this reflected a natural exasperation on the part of the airmen, who found themselves being reminded by a Whitehall civil servant of a situation of which they had been broadly aware for many months.

But however thoroughly Bomber Command’s doings were understood within the ranks of the Royal Air Force, Butt came as a major revelation to one man: the Prime Minister. On 3 September 1942 he dispatched a personal note to the Chief of Air Staff with a copy of the report: ‘This is a very serious paper, and seems to require your most urgent attention. I await your proposals for action.’

The submission of the Butt Report marked the low-water mark in the wartime fortunes of Bomber Command. Since September 1939 its crews had sought to attack warships in harbour and at sea, oil installations and factories, power stations and airfields, by day and by night. In almost all these things, they were now being asked to accept, they had failed. The
Scharnhorst
and the
Gneisenau
had been slightly damaged. One brave pilot’s efforts won him the Victoria Cross and closed the Dortmund–Ems Canal for ten days in 1940. 100,000 tons of coastal shipping were sunk by air-dropped mines. A wide variety of industrial plants bore superficial scars. The Focke–Wulf aircraft factory in Bremen and a number of other important factories had begun to disperse their operations, more in anticipation of the future than because of the damage of the past. A few thousand German civilians had been killed, and immense labour was being diverted to the construction of air raid shelters. Flak and searchlight defences were being greatly strengthened. Some oil plants had been temporarily shut down by bomb damage, but at no cost to the German war economy. It was fortunate for the airmen that they did not know more than this; of the huge slack capacity in the German economy, the single-shift working that still prevailed in most major factories. Far fewer women were employed than in England. Germans had more to eat (and would continue to do so almost until the end of the war), could buy a far wider range of consumer goods and possessed
vastly more machine tools than the British. What the German armed forces lacked in equipment was the result of maladministration and not of any shortage of manufacturing capacity or raw materials. The German economy had been geared for a short war, and had scarcely even begun to exert itself. It has been said that if Britain had understood in 1941 how powerful and how effortless was the German industrial machine, what enormous untapped potential it possessed, how widely its resources were dispersed, no one could have contemplated the overwhelming task of attempting to crush it by bombing. But the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Economic Warfare did not know this. They believed that Germany was under immense strain. Perhaps most important of all, the airmen were still imbued with the mystic faith which sustained them through the interwar years, that the mere act of bombing was having effects upon the enemy out of all proportion to any hits achieved on economic objectives. The chronic lack of clear thinking that had dogged bombing policy since the end of the First World War persisted even in the face of the most convincing evidence. When the airmen pressed their case for the bomber assault upon the German nation, they believed that they were battering a door already loose upon its hinges.

But even if the exact realities of the situation in Germany and the failure of initial bomber offensive were not known, before the Butt Report reached Whitehall, Bomber Command and the massive industrial commitment to heavy bombers were already being assailed in powerful quarters. The Americans in particular, with their own observers in Germany, were deeply sceptical. Their military attaché in London, General Raymond Lee, recorded in his diary a meeting that August of 1941:

I lunched at the Dorchester as the guest of Colonel Lamer, who had Moore-Brabazon, the [junior] Air Minister, and four Air Marshals, together with Royce and myself . . . As soon as the coffee was served, Moore-Brabazon began to talk about how essential it was that the British should have hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, more long-range bombers with which to bring Germany down. Finally, he turned to me and asked me what my opinion was. I told him that I was no expert, but so far as my observation went, the British had no proof yet that their bombing had been any more effective than the German bombing of England, and that I thought they were asking the United States for a good deal when they wanted it to divest itself of all its bombers, and devote a lot of production capacity to the construction of more bombers, thereby committing the United States to the policy of reducing Germany by bombing, without affording sufficient proof that this was possible. I pointed out that the Luftwaffe under the most favourable conditions had failed to paralyse the British or reduce this country to impotence in over a year of attack, at very short range, and when its energies were not engaged elsewhere. So why, I asked, should the RAF believe they could bring down Germany at a greater range and with its targets very much more dispersed than those in England and protected by very much better anti-aircraft defences now than the British had here last year. I built on absolutely sure ground here because I have had a little time to study the statistics on the damage done to Britain in the seven months between 1 June and 31 December 1940, and it is really surprisingly small . . .
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