Bomber Command (23 page)

They possessed a new policy – the destruction of Germany’s industrial cities by fire. They had been promised the means to undertake this. They lacked only a basis by which they might measure their achievements. In March 1942 the Prime Minister’s Scientific Adviser, Lord Cherwell, provided this. His paper was not the basis for the bomber offensive – the critical decisions that were to influence British strategy so profoundly for the remainder of the war had already been taken and most of the immense industrial resources required had been committed. But Cherwell’s report provided the final rationalization for the programme Bomber Command was undertaking. It became a significant landmark in the history of the bomber offensive.

The following [Cherwell wrote to the Prime Minister on 30 March 1942] seems a simple method of estimating what we could do by bombing Germany.

Careful analysis of the effects of raids on Birmingham, Hull and elsewhere have shown that, on the average, one ton of bombs dropped on a built-up area demolishes 20–40 dwellings and turns 100–200 people out of house and home.

We know from our experience that we can count on nearly 14 operational sorties per bomber produced. The average lift of the bombers we are going to produce over the next fifteen months will be above three tons. It follows that each of these bombers will in its lifetime drop about forty tons of bombs. If these are dropped on built-up areas they will make 4,000–8,000 people homeless.

In 1938 over 22 million Germans lived in fifty-eight towns of over 100,000 inhabitants, which, with modern equipment, should be easy to find and hit. Our forecast output of heavy bombers (including Wellingtons) between now and the middle of 1943 is about 10,000. If even half the total load of 10,000 bombers were dropped on the built-up areas of these fifty-eight German towns the great majority of their inhabitants (about one-third of the German population) would be turned out of house and home.

Investigation seems to show that having one’s house demolished is most damaging to morale. People seem to mind it more than having their friends or even relatives killed. At Hull signs of strain were evident, though only one-tenth of the houses were demolished. On the above figures we should be able to do ten times as much harm to each of the fifty-eight principal German towns. There seems little doubt that this would break the spirit of the people.

Our calculation assumes, of course, that we really get one-half of our bombs into built-up areas. On the other hand, no account is taken of the large promised American production (6,000 heavy bombers in the period in question). Nor has regard been paid to the inevitable damage to factories, communications, etc., in these towns and the damage by fire, probably accentuated by breakdown of public services.

Sir Charles Portal and Sir Archibald Sinclair reported that they found Lord Cherwell’s paper ‘simple, clear and convincing’,
although they noted that for his projections to be fulfilled, bomber production forecasts would have to be met, 50 per cent of sorties would have to be effective, the loss-rate would have to remain within reasonable proportions, and strategic diversions would have to be avoided. These were large reservations. But the airmen were not about to quarrel with the Prime Minister’s scientific adviser when he offered his energetic support to the bomber offensive, whatever their private uncertainties about some of his reasoning. ‘Lord Cherwell’s minute’, in the words of the official historians, ‘had done no more and no less than to acknowledge a “design and theme” for the air offensive.’
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Cherwell, the erstwhile Professor Lindemann, had been close to the Prime Minister throughout his years in the wilderness in the 1930s, and his fertile mind provided Churchill with many scientific defence ideas with which to belabour supine pre-war governments. Unfortunately, however, Lindemann concentrated his attention on air defence, almost the only area of military preparation in which, under the guidance of Sir Henry Tizard, great strides were being made. Churchill induced the Government to give Lindemann a seat on the Committee for the Study of Aerial Defence, where he at once made himself insufferable. Tizard and his colleagues concluded after much heart-searching that they must risk pouring all the resources at their command into the development of radar. Lindemann’s fatal weakness was that he rarely found it possible to believe in an idea unless he was at least a midwife at its delivery. ‘He suffered from the didactic approach that he himself knew everything worth knowing, and that anything outside his field of knowledge must be wrong,’ said Barnes Wallis.
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Within weeks of his appointment to the Committee, he caused chaos and dismay by insisting that the priority given to radar should be set aside, and that the Government instead concentrate on two brain-children of his own, aerial mines to be cast in the path of oncoming bombers and infra-red beams. His interference was intolerable. Tizard and others resolved the situation in the classic civil service manner, by dissolving the Committee for
Aerial Defence and forming a new body, without Lindemann on it. Momentarily, ‘The Prof’ was eclipsed. But at the outbreak of war he was foremost among those who shared the rewards of personal loyalty to Churchill. He followed his master first into an office at the Admiralty, then into Downing Street with a peerage and in 1942 a seat in the Cabinet as Paymaster-General. He never lost Churchill’s confidence, and wielded immense power for the remainder of the war.

Cherwell was a man of much arrogance, great personal wealth, at ease in the company of the mighty all his life, full of charm when he chose to exercise it. He possessed personal courage, demonstrated by his experiments with spinning aircraft in the First World War. He was a clever man, but had never been quite in the top flight of scientists, and certainly lacked that superlative brilliance which alone can justify sublime conceit in pursuit of one’s own prejudices. Above all, Cherwell was personally vengeful. He never forgot a defeat. Sir Henry Tizard was a doomed man from the day that Cherwell achieved power. The outstanding scientific civil servant of his generation had inflicted on Cherwell the most humiliating reverse of his career, and he would never be forgiven for this.

In the winter of 1940 Tizard delivered himself into Cherwell’s hand. He made a serious error of judgement in declining to acknowledge the existence of the navigational beams by which the Luftwaffe was bombing Britain with alarming accuracy. He was never allowed to forget this, and by the spring of 1942 his influence was waning fast. But in one of his last important interventions in the direction of the war,
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he expressed his deep misgivings about Cherwell’s ‘de-housing’ paper.

Tizard had already shown his scepticism about the weight of resources being devoted to bombing in a memorandum to the Ministry of Aircraft Production dated 12 December 1941, comment
ing on heavy aircraft plans: ‘The war is not going to be won by night bombing,’ he said. ‘This programme assumes that it is.’ Now, on 15 April 1942, he wrote to Lindemann: ‘I am afraid that I think that the way you put the facts as they appear to you is extremely misleading and may lead to entirely wrong decisions being reached, with a consequent disastrous effect on the war. I think, too, that you have got your facts wrong . . .’

Tizard went on to say that he feared that while the RAF’s proposed massive bomber force was being assembled the war might be lost elsewhere for lack of sufficient defensive weapons. He was thinking especially of the Battle of the Atlantic. He also mistrusted Cherwell’s sums. He reckoned that Bomber Command could only hope for 7,000 bombers by mid-1943, not Cherwell’s 10,000. He questioned the crews’ ability to find and hit Cherwell’s fifty-eight towns. He doubted that the next generation of radar navigation and bombing aids would be available much before the spring of 1943. He thought that it was unreasonable to expect more than 25 per cent of bombs lifted to reach their target. All this, he recognized, ‘would certainly be most damaging, but would not be decisive unless in the intervening period Germany was either defeated in the field by Russia, or at least prevented from any substantial further advance’.

I conclude therefore

(a) that a policy of bombing German towns wholesale in order to destroy dwellings cannot have a decisive effect by the middle of 1943, even if all heavy bombers and the great majority of Wellingtons produced are used primarily for this purpose.

(b) That such a policy can only have a decisive effect if carried out on a much bigger scale than is envisaged in [Cherwell’s paper].

Cherwell crushed his critic with considerable scorn ‘My dear Tizard,’ he wrote, ‘many thanks for your note. I would be interested to hear what you think wrong with my simple calculation,
which seemed to me fairly self-evident . . . My paper was intended to show that we really can do a lot of damage by bombing built-up areas with the sort of air force which should be available.’

His own calculations had not been made for statistical analysis, but ‘partly to save the Prime Minister the trouble of making arithmetical calculations’. Whatever disparities there might be between his figures and reality, if Bomber Command concentrated its utmost efforts on Germany’s cities, the effects would be ‘catastrophic’.

Here was the very heart of the debate about area bombing. No one could reasonably argue that Bomber Command could pour explosives on to Germany over a period of years without doing terrible damage. No one with the slightest experience of bombing could dispute that it is a terrifying business to endure it. The reasoned critics of the bomber offensive did not deny that Bomber Command could raze to the ground areas of Germany – they questioned what contribution this would make to final victory, as against applying similiar resources to other sectors of the war effort. Every pound of explosives carried to Germany by Bomber Command cost at least a pound sterling to deliver. No one by this stage of the war disputed that tactical air superiority and tactical bombing were critical in the execution of any naval or military operation, and every aircraft that could be produced was vitally needed on the battlefield.

Tizard was a man who hated headlong confrontation, which ran against a lifetime’s habit of academic circumspection. ‘I should like to make it clear’, he wrote mildly and probably insincerely
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to Cherwell, ‘that I don’t disagree fundamentally with the bombing policy.’ He merely doubted whether it could be effective unless carried out on a scale beyond Britain’s means. He might have expressed himself more forcefully had he known the full extent of the misinformation on which Cherwell founded his original paper. The basis for Cherwell’s projection of the effects of the bombing of England on to Germany’s cities was a report, to be known as ‘The Hull and Birmingham Survey’, then being compiled by two
scientists, Professor Bernal and Professor Zuckerman. Throughout their investigations, Bernal and Zuckerman had been answering a stream of questions from Cherwell’s office, and feeding him on request with fragments of data. But the impression which Cherwell gave in his paper, that he founded his conclusions on a study of Bernal and Zuckerman’s completed investigations, was false. Their report did not appear until 8 April 1942, ten days after Cherwell submitted his paper. Professor (now Lord) Zuckerman has described
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his astonishment when he first saw Cherwell’s minute, years after the war, and found that it drew on ‘Hull and Birmingham’ to argue directly opposed conclusions to those which the survivors had reached. Zuckerman and Bernal wrote: ‘In neither town was there any evidence of panic resulting either from a series of raids or from a single raid . . . In both towns actual raids were, of course, associated with a degree of alarm and anxiety, which cannot in the circumstances be regarded as abnormal, and which in no instance was sufficient to provoke mass anti-social behaviour. There was no measurable effect on the health of either town.’

But Zuckerman and Bernal did not have the ear of the Prime Minister, and nor did Tizard, Blackett or the distinguished scientists who opposed the bomber offensive. Most of Tizard’s apprehensions and predictions proved entirely well-founded. Yet Lord Cherwell, always a devoted advocate of levelling Germany, retained his influence until the end of the war. At Bomber Command headquarters, measurement of acres of built-up area demolished became the standard method of computing the progress of the strategic offensive.

It is important to emphasize, however, that although all the principals were now in agreement about launching a major air attack on Germany’s cities, there was still great unspoken confusion about the results to be sought from doing so. Lord Cherwell hoped to create a nation of refugees, and no doubt also a good many corpses under the rubble, although he was too genteel to say so. The airmen’s aims were more complex and divided. In a paper of 19 September 1941 justifying the 4,000-bomber plan, the Air
Ministry’s Directorate of Bomber Operations said that ‘It must be realized that attack on morale is not a matter of pure killing . . . It is an adaptation, though on a greatly magnified scale, of Air Control.’ Presumably, therefore, DB Ops hoped that after a dose of mass destruction there would be moral collapse in Germany in fear of worse to come, perhaps on the lines suggested by Liddell Hart a generation earlier, with mobs of starved and crazed civilians roaming the streets demanding peace. Sir Charles Portal probably shared this long-term aspiration, but hoped in the short term for drastic reductions in German war production caused by absenteeism and flight from the cities, compounded by direct destruction of industrial plant. Sir Norman Bottomley, Deputy Chief of Air Staff, had composed a long memorandum in his days as SASO at High Wycombe in September 1940, in which he urged that Bomber Command’s aim be ‘primarily to destroy the enemy’s will to win the war, leaving the destruction of his means to win the war as an incidental or indirect task’.