Bomber Command (47 page)

The contribution Bomber Command has made to the reduction of German Air Force production as given in paragraph 9 of the attached report is remarkably low. I suggest that we should not treat these figures as firm, since the calculations on which they are based must invariably include assumptions based on guesswork. It is inconceivable that Bomber Command, in their attacks on the major industrial centres of Germany, have not caused acute bottlenecks in the production or supply of many items of equipment, eg machine tools, of which we are not aware.

Throughout the war Harris himself was wedded to his headquarters. He seldom left his office, with its barograph on the window-sill monitoring the fickleness of the weather, its charts and graphs on the wall concealed by shutters from insecure visitors. He lunched at home, then returned to his desk. His masters seldom troubled him in the flesh. Portal never came to High
Wycombe. Instead, Harris drove once a week at his usual headlong pace to the Air Ministry for a conference, not infrequently involving the latest round of his feud with Bufton and the Directorate of Bomber Operations. ‘Another paper from DB Ops?’ Saundby would inquire schoolboyishly, lifting Burton’s file from the desk at arm’s length. ‘Tweezers. Pause for nausea.’ Once a month the Group commanders assembled at High Wycombe, their meetings often punctuated by angry exchanges between Bennett and Cochrane. On very rare occasions, such as that recorded at the nadir of 76 Squadron’s fortunes, Harris visited a bomber station. But the vast majority of his crews never saw him. It was not a matter of conviction that he toured stations so little: it was merely that when Bomber Command was laying on a raid almost every night, there was no one at High Wycombe to whom he cared to delegate the vital decisions if he went elsewhere.

The Royal Navy’s most grievous grudge against Harris was that he appeared to possess privileged access to the Prime Minister. Chequers, Churchill’s official country residence, was only a few miles from High Wycombe. Perhaps once in six weeks on a weekend evening, one of the Prime Minister’s staff telephoned to invite Harris to dine. But Harris asserts
¹⁷
that it was unusual for him to be closeted
tête-à-tête
with Churchill, and there is no reason to doubt this. There was usually a large dinner table and general conversation. Later the party adjourned to the house cinema to watch one of the Prime Minister’s favourite films. Churchill called his C-in-C ‘Bert’, or ‘Harris’, or more ebulliently ‘Bomber’, according to his mood. The two men might have five or at most ten minutes’ private conversation. Churchill asked how the campaign was going, and what was planned for the future. Harris certainly used these opportunities to deplore his own shortage of resources and the difficulties of meeting the claims of rival services. But Churchill never gave direct orders to Bomber Command. While Harris frequently expressed his own views on paper to Downing Street, Churchill almost invariably replied, with punctilious protocol, through Portal. Harris was sometimes irked by Churchill’s
impatience with his expositions: ‘I wouldn’t have called Winston a good listener.’
¹⁸

The visits to Chequers gave vent to one of Harris’s few private enthusiasms: driving horses. One day Churchill deplored the internal-combustion engine as the curse of the modern age. ‘I entirely agree, Prime Minister,’ said Harris, ‘and what’s more I think I’m the only man here who lives up to his principles.’ He had driven himself over to lunch in a pony-trap.

But for all the courtesies between them, their respect for each other as dedicated warriors, there is no evidence of real personal warmth between Churchill and Harris, or that their meetings had any influence on the priority accorded to the bomber offensive. Harris, with his horror of ‘panaceas’ and his passion for the concentration of force, despaired of the Prime Minister’s ‘Parergonitis’, as he called it, ‘the search for soft underbellies’ that had filled Churchill with enthusiasm for Gallipoli and North Africa. Harris would never forgive Churchill for his mute disavowal of the strategic offensive at the end of the war, when he declined to authorize a Bomber Command campaign medal.

Churchill, for his part, probably found Harris a convenient tool rather than a convivial companion. He always liked the sense of immediacy that he gained from meeting his C-in-Cs in the field. In most cases they were too far afield to be readily available, but Harris was on hand. Contrary to much that has been written in the past, there is no reason to suppose that the course of the bomber offensive would have been any different if the two men had never met. Churchill invited Harris to dine because he was a keen supporter of bombing for many reasons of his own. He did not become a supporter of bombing because the C-in-C had his ear. There is no evidence that he was impressed by Harris’s extravagant promises. By the spring of 1944 his enthusiasm for bombing was already waning. Harris continued to enjoy the memory of the Prime Minister’s support and protection perhaps more in the minds of others than in reality. If Portal had chosen to put the matter to the test by sacking the C-in-C of Bomber Command at any time from the
spring of 1944 onwards, he might have been surprised how passively Churchill acquiesced.

Harris’s working day at High Wycombe ended at the same time as that of any businessman, around 6 pm. Maddocks and the Bentley took him home to Springfield. Often there were guests to entertain, Americans or Russians to be invited to sit themselves at the stereopticon through which Harris gazed for so many hours on images of the ruined cities of Germany. Some evenings, the Harrises visited their close friends the Maurice Johns, a gynaecologist and his wife who lived next door to Springfield, with whom they could find some kind of release from the war. If they were at home and there were no guests, they dined with Saundby, Weldon and Maze, and in Harris’s words, ‘talked bombing until bedtime’.
¹⁹
Throughout the night the telephone by his bedside rang intermittently with reports of the night’s operations. Harris had the fortunate ability to wake, listen, and instantly fall asleep again. It is one of the ironies of the bomber offensive that while the aircrew fought through the darkness over Germany, while the sleepless cities stood to their guns and searchlights and burst forth in their nightly torment of fire and blast, the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command lay dreamless in his bed among the Buckinghamshire woods.

11 » CONFLICT AND COMPROMISE

1943–44

1. The Battle of Berlin

‘It is my firm belief,’ Sir Arthur Harris wrote to Portal on 12 August 1943, ‘that we are on the verge of a final showdown in the bombing war, and that the next few months will be vital. Opportunities do not knock repeatedly and continuously. I am certain that given average weather and concentration on the main job, we can push Germany over by bombing this year . . .’

It was the immoderation of Harris’s expectations in the autumn of 1943 that provoked the scale of the subsequent disillusionment. If his promises had been less ambitious, his failure to fulfil them might have been forgotten. But until almost the last weeks before the invasion of Europe in June 1944, he continued to argue that Germany could be defeated by bombing alone. In the personal minute to Churchill of 3 November 1943 in which he listed the nineteen cities allegedly totally destroyed by Bomber Command, he went on to make the statement that would haunt his career to the last: ‘We can wreck Berlin from end to end if the USAAF will come in on it. It will cost between 400–500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war.’

This assertion, more than any other that he made throughout the war, surrendered Harris’s reputation to his critics. It cast very serious doubts upon his judgement. Berlin was not to be wrecked ‘from end to end’ in the winter of 1943, and calm analysis of the tactical and industrial realities should have exploded this fantasy
at birth. It is anyway a mystery why Harris supposed that the destruction of Berlin would have caused the collapse of German resistance. By proclaiming his intention to launch the full weight of Bomber Command’s resources against the enemy’s capital, Harris also flaunted his defiance of the
Pointblank
directive. Attacking Berlin had only the most distant relevance to the defeat of the German air force in production, which was supposed to be the first duty of the Allied air offensive. It was absurd to imagine that the Americans were likely to join an attack that would entail renouncing
Pointblank
, which they had largely created. There is some evidence that the extent of the 8th Air Force’s sense of defeat in the wake of Schweinfurt a fortnight earlier was still unknown to the British, and it was only to later historians that it became clear that the winter of 1943 was the critical low-water mark of the USAAF’s fortunes in Europe. But Harris knew the scale of the Americans’ losses. It is remarkable that he imagined they were in the mood to embark on new deep-penetration operations against the most heavily defended city in Europe.

It says much for the respect Harris had built up for his own personality and achievements that the Prime Minister and the Air Staff did not at once lose confidence in a man capable of making such extravagant claims. On 5 November 1943, Air Vice-Marshal F. F. Inglis, Assistant Chief of Air Staff (Intelligence), wrote to Portal commenting on Harris’s letter to Churchill. It is interesting to see the C-in-C’s ideas interpreted by an unflinching admirer:

We are convinced that Bomber Command’s attacks are doing more towards shortening the war than any other offensive including the Russians’ [began Inglis modestly]. The C-in-C’s letter is the letter of a man with ONE AIM, the Tightness of which is his obsession. It is necessary to take this obsession into account because, inevitably, it leads him to make statements which can be criticized even by those who are in sympathy with his plea for more help to finish the job. Its purpose is, apparently, twofold:

(1) To get the Prime Minister’s support to speed up USAAF concentration in the United Kingdom even at the expense of forgoing the strategic offensive from Italy.

(2) To get the Prime Minister to persuade General Eaker to bomb Berlin.

Our plan first to break the German air force defence and then to get on with the war does not appeal to a man who knows that it can be won by immediate offensive action long before our defensive plan has come near to completion. This is why the importance of industries in the Balkans and southern Germany does not appeal to him. Although he speaks of nine-tenths of German industry being nearer Norfolk than Lombardy, we are sure he really means that nine-tenths of the German population is nearer Norfolk, and in the light of our new morale paper which is about to be published, it is the population which is the joint in the German armour. The C-in-C’s spear is in it, but it needs a jolt to drive it home to the heart. Apparently, only the Americans can provide this additional thrust, and we believe he is right to ask for it.

Harris failed to persuade Portal or the Prime Minister to press the Americans to join Bomber Command’s assault on Berlin. He has since said that he would never have embarked on the Battle had he known that 8th Air Force would not take part. But it is impossible to believe that this was ever likely, or would have changed the outcome. The winter weather would have made daylight blind-bombing as indecisive as night blind-bombing, and the heavy losses the Fortresses suffered when they finally attacked Berlin with powerful fighter escort in March 1944 suggest that their casualties would have been appalling if they had begun to do so four months earlier, before the Mustang long-range escort became available in quantity.

But it would be unjust to Harris to suggest that he could have begun his assaul t on 18 November 1943 without the support, indeed the active encouragement, of the Prime Minister and the Chief of Air Staff. Since August 1943, Portal had been asking when
a major attack on Berlin could take place. If Harris flagrantly ignored
Pointblank
to pursue his own concept of air warfare, where was Portal, his superior, the man specifically charged by the Combined Chiefs of Staff with responsibility for
Pointblank
on their behalf? Throughout the autumn American concern about lack of progress with the destruction of the German aircraft industry had been mounting. May 1944, the provisional date for the invasion, was drawing inexorably closer. As its own losses and difficulties grew, the USAAF pressed harder for the full participation of Bomber Command in attacks on the aircraft factories. On 19 October 1943, Bufton, the Director of Bomber Operations, wrote to Portal:

Although General Eaker and the C-in-C Bomber Command had many reasons for not adhering more rigidly to the high priority German Air Force objectives in the Directive, I believe a greater concentration upon them to be possible if political pressure is brushed aside and the Commanders set their minds to the task.

A few days later Portal answered a letter from Arnold in Washington, who had been expressing his concern about the lack of concentration on
Pointblank
:

I would say at the outset that I agree with you that there have been diversions from priority objectives as laid down by the Chiefs of Staff. I had already become apprehensive about this dispersal of our effort. Last week I had a useful meeting with Eaker and Harris and stressed to them the urgency of concentrating the maximum effort on to the defeat of the German air force.

At first, it is difficult to reconcile this letter of Portal with Harris’s opening of the Battle of Berlin less than a month later. The Air Staff had repeatedly reasserted its commitment to
Pointblank
, in the directives to Bomber Command of 10 June and 3 September 1943, signed by the Deputy Chief of Air Staff, Bottomley, who increasingly shared Bufton’s misgivings about Harris.
Portal was not so machiavellian as wantonly to deceive Arnold about Bomber Command’s intentions. How therefore did Harris defy him?