Bomber Command (17 page)

All through the summer of 1940 there was a surge of directives from the Air Ministry, each overtaking the last with bewildering speed as the Government and the Chiefs of Staff sought to hold back the floodgates of strategic disaster. The first reports from Germany on the effects of British bombing were absurdly optimistic, but warmly welcomed in Whitehall. The Air Ministry directive of 4 June 1940 ordered Portal to press on with the oil attacks. On dark nights when this was impracticable he was instructed to hit targets which would contribute to the ‘continuous interruption and dislocation of German war industry’, particularly in areas where the German aircraft industry was concentrated, notably Hamburg, Bremen, Frankfurt and the Ruhr. In the next paragraph, however, the directive stated emphatically: ‘In no circumstances should night bombing be allowed to degenerate into mere indiscriminate action, which is contrary to the policy of His Majesty’s Government.’

The next directive, on 20 June, relegated oil targets to third priority, below attacks on the German aircraft industry aimed at ‘reducing the scale of air attack on this country’, and below attacks on communications between Germany and her army’s forward areas. On 4 July, these in turn were displaced by a new priority: attack on German shipping in port and at sea. Then on 13 July the aircraft industry was reinstated as the primary target, with oil as the secondary. Portal was told to concentrate the attacks of his force on fewer targets ‘with a view to complete destruction rather
than harassing effect’. To this end, fifteen key installations were listed for priority attention: five aircraft assembly plants, five depots and five oil refineries.

Portal replied to the 13 July directive with a sharp note commenting that of the ten aircraft industry targets, ‘only three can be found with any certainty in moonlight by average crews’. He added, in a most significant subordinate clause, that ‘since almost all the primary first priority targets are isolated and in sparsely inhabited districts, the very high percentage of bombers which inevitably miss the actual target will hit nothing else important and do no damage’. Portal said that he believed in dispersing attacks over the widest possible area of Germany: ‘It largely increases the moral effect of our operations by the alarm and disturbance created over the wider area.’

Here was the seed of the attack on the morale of the German people, of area bombing: a district was to be chosen for bombardment in which was concentrated the highest possible proportion of vital industrial installations. Every hit would be of value, to be sure, but the attack could be launched with the prospect that many bombs which missed industrial targets – the overwhelming majority of those dropped – would hit the homes and shops and cinemas and cafés of the industrial workers and their families upon whom the German war effort must depend. In the eighteen months that followed – and for that matter throughout the next five years – there would be hesitation and much fierce debate about the policy of launching great forces of bombers wholesale against the cities of Germany. But already, in July 1940, the idea had taken root. As will become apparent, it had the wholehearted support of the Prime Minister, whose natural combativeness craved revenge for the laying waste of Coventry and Southampton, and indeed for the rape of Western Europe. But there is a certain irony that it should have been Portal, the cool, calmly reasoning committee chairman whom some considered to lack the iron resolution that marks great captains, who proved to be Trenchard’s first true disciple in the Second World War. It was Portal who sug
gested, on 1 September 1940, that twenty German towns might be ‘proscribed’, just as Slessor had proposed earlier – warned by radio that they would be attacked indiscriminately one by one, following each occasion on which a British town was devastated by the Luftwaffe. It was under Portal that a note was circulated to all Bomber Command aircraft captains, reminding them that ‘. . . in industrial areas there are invariably a very large number of targets. In view of the indiscriminate nature of the German attacks, and in order to reduce the number of bombs brought back . . . every effort should be made to bomb these.’ It was an instruction carrying the obvious inference that it was now preferable to attack anything in Germany than to attack nothing.

The Air Staff were not only surprised and dismayed by Portal’s attitude, but determined to resist his proposals. On 5 September the VCAS, Sir Richard Peirse, wrote to Churchill that he thought there was ‘little doubt that the reason for the effectiveness of our night bombing is that it is planned; and relentless until the particular target is knocked out or dislocated, whereas German night bombing is sporadic and mainly harassing’. In the Air Ministry’s latest directive to Portal on 21 September the priorities for Bomber Command were restated: ‘precision’ attacks on invasion barges, the German aircraft industry and submarine works, German communications and oil resources would continue. The only comfort for Portal’s convictions was a final paragraph authorizing occasional morale attacks on the German capital ‘. . . although there are no objectives in the Berlin area of importance to our major plans . . .’

In the words of Frankland and Webster, the official historians of the British strategic air offensive, there was now general agreement that

. . . if there was to be any strategic bombing at all, civilians would be killed; hospitals, churches and cultural monuments would be hit. The Air Staff, as represented by its Vice Chief, Sir Richard Peirse, believed that what was inevitable was also desirable only in so far as it remained a by-product of the primary intention to hit a military target in the sense of a power station, a marshalling yard or an oil plant. Bomber Command, as represented by its Commander-in-Chief, Sir Charles Portal, now believed that this by-product should become an end-product. He believed that the time had come to launch a direct attack on the German people themselves. He believed that this course had been justified by previous German actions, and that it would be justified as a strategy in the outcome.
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Portal’s biographer is unable to accept the official historians’ interpretation of the C-in-C’s attitude:

It seems to carry the suggestion that Portal favoured the deliberate killing and maiming of civilians as a major strategy . . . Portal was not at this time, however, nor did he ever become an advocate of killing civilians. He became, while it was the most practicable policy, an advocate of destroying industrial towns.
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Some of the moral issues that are forever entangled in the story of Bomber Command will be discussed in more detail later. Here it is sufficient to say that to his colleagues and contemporaries it seemed that Portal’s recommendations amounted to commencing indiscriminate air warfare, and a significant minority opposed them for this very reason. Yet to most of those around him in the RAF Portal seemed absolutely right and the Air Ministry absolutely wrong. Every morning at High Wycombe they studied the results of the previous night’s operations, in which a hundred or more crews had stumbled through the night sky over Germany, searching for an oil plant or a factory which Portal suspected that they seldom reached. After months of this the power of the Third Reich was visibly undiminished. Yet in England the Luftwaffe had bombed recklessly from Birmingham and Coventry to Plymouth and London, and all around lay the ruins and the corpses. No one in England that winter of 1940 cared to suggest aloud that morale
was cracking under the Blitz, and indeed it never did. But deep in his heart, each man knew the terror of hearing the bombs whistling down, the shuddering crump and the roar of falling masonry, the agony of expectation before the explosion. If Englishmen were thus moved by air bombardment, it seemed reasonable to expect that Germans would be still more so. Much of the reasoning that led to the mass morale bombing of Germany took place in the silence of men’s minds, and was never articulated in minutes or memoranda.

On 4 October 1940, Sir Cyril Newall was retired as Chief of Air Staff and replaced by Sir Charles Portal. Sir Richard Peirse, one of the foremost advocates of ‘precision’ bombing, became C-in-C of Bomber Command. Portal could now unquestionably have secured the launching of an area bombing campaign. Churchill would not only have endorsed such a proposal, but was urging it himself throughout the winter of 1940 and spring of 1941: ‘We have seen what inconvenience the attack on the British civilian population has caused us,’ he wrote to the Air Ministry on 2 November 1940, ‘and there is no reason why the enemy should be freed from all such embarrassments.’

But Portal made no effort immediately to test his faith in area bombing. For the next year he allowed Bomber Command to continue on the course which had been set in May 1940, attempting precision attacks on chosen industrial objectives. Only when this policy was universally agreed to have failed would it finally be abandoned.

From October 1940 until early March 1941 oil remained the first priority of Bomber Command whenever the weather allowed. The attacks on invasion barges continued into the winter. It is unlikely that the loss of an estimated 12 per cent of their fleet played a decisive part in the German cancellation of the invasion of England. But it is important not to underestimate Bomber Command’s contribution, compelling Hitler to acknowledge that the RAF still possessed striking power to match the defensive strength of its fighters. There is little doubt that in 1939 the Nazi leaders believed that
Goering’s Luftwaffe could prevent any enemy aircraft from attacking the Reich. Bomber Command’s incursions into Germany in 1940 and 1941 may have been erratic and materially ineffectual. But they played a part in asserting the reality of Britain’s survival in the minds of the German people and their rulers.

Portal’s concern with attacking German morale was embodied only as a secondary priority in the Air Ministry directive to Peirse of 30 October 1940, ordering him to attack Berlin and other German towns.

. . . with such regularity as you may find practicable . . . As many heavy bombers as possible should be detailed for the attack, carrying high-explosive, incendiary and delay-action bombs with perhaps an occasional mine. The aim of the first sorties should be to cause fires, either on or in the vicinity of the targets so that they should carry a high proportion of incendiary bombs . . . The objectives considered most suitable for these concentrated attacks are the sources of power, such as electricity generating stations and gas plants, and centres of communication; but where primary targets such as the oil and aircraft industry objectives are suitably placed in the centres of the towns or populated districts, they also might be selected.

Portal always suffered from a measure of intelligent indecision and now he was divided between his hopes that the attack on German oil would provide a ‘quick death clinch’ with Germany, as he put it, and his doubts about Bomber Command’s ability to bring this about. He was still undecided in December 1940 when the Lloyd Committee on German oil resources made its remarkable report, asserting that Bomber Command had already achieved a 15 per cent cut in enemy fuel availability. This had allegedly been achieved by the dropping of only 539 tons of bombs, 6.7 per cent of Bomber Command’s effort since the summer.

Since in reality the Germans were scarcely aware that their oil resources were supposed to have been the object of a systematic bomber assault, it is a measure of the inadequacy of British econ
omic Intelligence that the Lloyd Committee could reach these conclusions. It is even more remarkable that Portal and the airmen allowed themselves to accept them. Yet not only did they do so, but they allowed the report to become the basis for Bomber Command’s continued attack on oil throughout the spring of 1941, despite the Prime Minister’s scepticism. They were simply desperate for good news of bombing, and when it came they received it uncritically. To allow themselves to believe the truth seemed a betrayal of scores of careers dedicated to the fulfilment of the Trenchard doctrine.

It is often suggested that in August 1941 Bomber Command received a quite unexpected thunderbolt when it was learnt that only a tiny proportion of crews were bombing within miles of their targets. Yet throughout the winter of 1940 there were few grounds for illusions at High Wycombe about what was taking place over Germany. As early as October Peirse, the urbane advocate of British ‘planned’ bombing, reckoned that somewhere around one in five of his crews found their primary target on a given night. Projections for the success of the oil offensive required at least 50 per cent of sorties to be successful. Arthur Harris at 5 Group, perpetually sanguine, continued to assert his faith in his crews’ navigation. But Coningham at 4 Group, who only a few months earlier said that he expected the same precision from night bombing as from day, now admitted that ‘for my part, I have little idea of what the Whitleys do, and it causes me considerable anxiety’. Most significant, however, were the results of the first careful analysis of target photographs. Gelsenkirchen oil refineries, the objects of repeated attacks, appeared virtually undamaged. Mannheim, to which 10 Squadron and so many others had been dispatched for the Coventry retaliation attack of 16 December, was scarcely scarred. It was concluded that it had become a matter of urgency to equip every possible aircraft with night cameras, in order to determine decisively who did and did not reach his target. Yet in the face of the overwhelming evidence of its crews’ inability to achieve success, Bomber Command was launched once more upon
the oil offensive. Peirse’s squadrons continued to struggle in futility over Germany – now receiving much increased oil imports from Rumania – all that winter and through the spring of 1941.

It was the rapid escalation of the Battle of the Atlantic which at last diverted Bomber Command from the oil offensive. In the face of mounting U-boat successes and the strategic threat posed by German capital ships, on 9 March 1941 Peirse received a new directive from the Air Ministry, ordering him to concentrate all his resources on the task of supporting the Royal Navy in the war at sea, by attacking the U-boat bases at St Nazaire, Bordeaux and Lorient in France, by mining the German approaches, and by bombing the ports and construction yards. Portal’s letter to Peirse on the new policy, dated 1 March 1941, was a sad throwback to the worst traditions of the RAF. Its temper may have been influenced by his own disappointment at the failure of Bomber Command: ‘A very high proportion of bomber effort will inevitably be required to pull the Admiralty out of the mess they have got into . . .’ That summer, it would have been more credible to inquire whether Bomber Command, at this sorry point of its fortunes, was capable of affording the Admiralty any useful support at all in the vital struggle to save Britain from starvation.