Bomber Command (25 page)

Yet for all his bluntness and supposed pragmatism, it is impossible to accept that Harris was a realist about operational difficulties. From the beginning of the war, he had refused to accept the inadequacy of Bomber Command’s navigation, even when most of his colleagues did so. He was foremost among the self-deluded about the early achievements of bombing. In October 1940 one of the most fanciful Intelligence reports quoted ‘well-informed industrialists’ assessments that 25 per cent of Germany’s productive capacity had been affected by bombing’. Harris wrote to Peirse expressing his delight about ‘the accuracy with which our aircraft hit military objectives as opposed to merely browning towns . . . These summaries serve to impress upon one . . . the by now patent fact that the Air Ministry Publicity department is half-witted.’

Harris complained, as he was to do repeatedly when he became C-in-C, that the Press gave inadequate recognition to Bomber Command’s achievements:

What a riot of publicity would attend such results had they been secured by the Army, and what a catastrophic spate of words if the Navy had succeeded in doing a thousandth as much! Yet when the bombers begin to win the war – and we are the only people that can win it, and we are winning it – what happens? Nix!

Harris suggested that the only possible explanation for the Publicity Department’s passivity was that its staff ‘are all long since dead, and nobody’s noticed it! Naturally enough, nobody would!’

On 1 February 1941, when the Air Ministry was deeply concerned about Scientific Intelligence’s discovery that the Germans
were bomb-aiming by radio beam, Harris as Deputy Chief of the Air Staff wrote crossly:

Are we not tending to lose our sense of proportion over these German beams? . . . We use no beams ourselves but we bomb just as successfully as the Germans bomb, deep into Germany . . . I do not agree that the beams are in fact a serious menace to this country, or that they have proved to be in the past. They are simply aids to navigation, and it is within our experience that such aids are not indispensable to the successful prosecution of bombing expeditions. I could go further and say that they are not even really useful . . . Long may the Bosche beam upon us!

This was the man who was now called upon to lead Bomber Command’s first major operations under the influence of
Gee
, who would resist to the utmost the creation of the Pathfinder Force, who would fight every attempt to transfer the attentions of Bomber Command from area to precision bombing, and who in 1944 professed his astonishment, when he was overruled and compelled to dispatch his aircraft on precision operations, to find that they were perfectly capable of carrying them out.

Harris was an inflexible man, chronically resistant to negotiation and compromise, who treated those who disagreed with him as mortal enemies. He seemed driven, in the words of one historian,
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by an ‘elemental tenacity of purpose’. This was a quality that would earn him many enemies and abrupt dismissal at the end of the war. But it is a most useful characteristic on the battlefield. Harris was a nerveless commander of great forces, and the history of warfare shows that such men are rare. His very insensitivity rendered him proof against shocks and disappointments. He possessed the considerable gifts of clarity of speech and purpose, and from the moment that he became C-in-C at High Wycombe, he infused these into his entire Command. He was never afraid of taking decisions. He made his officers at every level feel that they were now part of a great design instead of merely running a ramshackle air freight service exporting bombs to Germany. If his superiors ever lost confidence in him, or considered that he was failing to meet their hopes and wishes, it was their business to replace him, as so many wartime C-in-Cs were replaced.

When Harris took command, there had been twenty-two directives from the Air Ministry to Bomber Command since the outbreak of war, repeated changes of policy as the planners groped in the darkness for Germany’s economic jugular. Harris was determined that there should be no more of this, no more ‘panacea targets’ such as oil plants or aircraft factories. He believed that there were no short cuts to defeating Germany from the air. It was necessary to concentrate all available forces for the progressive, systematic destruction of the urban areas of the Reich, city block by city block, factory by factory, until the enemy became a nation of troglodytes, scratching in the ruins. This conviction would become his obsession. Given time and technique – and at the beginning of 1942 it was plain that he could expect years – he would demonstrate to the world the force of properly handled strategic air power, and the unique place of the Royal Air Force in the Allied war effort.

Thus Bomber Command became committed to area bombing, and the Government committed to Bomber Command an industrial capacity eventually equal to that devoted to the entire British army, along with the cream of Britain’s wartime high technology.

It remains only to emphasize that the Prime Minister, while he supported the strategic air offensive, shared few of the airmen’s extravagant expectations for it. In 1940 he had supported Bomber Command from necessity. Yet now, with the German army mired in Russia and with America not only an ally but committed to a strategy of ‘Germany first’, why did he persist with a bomber attack in which he had limited strategic faith? The need to sustain the morale of the British people by visible action is a partial
answer. But by far the most convincing reason is that the Prime Minister had already become determined to postpone the opening of a Second Front in Europe until the last possible hour. There was no longer any doubt that the Allies would ultimately win the war. The questions were how soon, and at what cost? Already the Americans with their military innocence and huge resources were pressing for an early invasion of northern Europe to get to grips with the enemy. The Prime Minister was resisting this proposal with all the force at his command. He thwarted first proposals for an invasion in 1942, then others for 1943. He was determined that when the Allies landed in France, it should be under conditions of overwhelming advantage. There must be no great campaign of attrition, such as would be inevitable against an unbroken German army.

Churchill never shared the airmen’s faith that the bomber offensive could eliminate the need for a land campaign to defeat the enemy. But the bombers could enable the western Allies to delay aggressively, while Russia fought out the huge battles that broke the Wehrmacht, that caused the Axis by early 1944 to deploy 240 divisions in the East against 50 in France and the Low Countries. Neither the Russians nor the Americans could flatly be told that the British proposed to fight no campaign in Europe for years to come. If the bomber offensive, fuelled by publicity and boosted with American support, and given formidable but not extravagant supplies of aircraft, met with even moderate destructive success, this would provide convincing evidence of Britain’s commitment to the struggle at a very tolerable cost in British lives. Bomber Command’s 56,000 dead represented, at the end, the lowest possible stake that Britain could be seen to throw on the tables of Europe, when the Russians were counting their dead in millions. The strategic air offensive might thus be interpreted as the greatest panacea of all. Yet if this was indeed in Churchill’s mind when he authorized the area campaign at the beginning of 1942, then Bomber Command fulfilled his hopes in the next two years far more satisfactorily than those of the Royal Air Force.

6 » 50 SQUADRON

LINCOLNSHIRE, 1942

Across the road the homesick Romans made,

The ground-mist thickens to a milky shroud;

Through flat, damp fields call sheep, mourning their dead

In cracked and timeless voices, unutterably sad,

Suffering for all the world, in Lincolnshire.

And I wonder how the Romans liked it here;

Flat fields, no sun, the muddy misty dawn,

And always, above all, the mad rain dripping down,

Rusting sword and helmet, wetting the feet

And soaking to the bone, down to the very heart . . .

Henry Treece, ‘Lincolnshire Bomber Station’

1. Harris Conducts an Overture

1942 was the pivotal year for the Allies in almost every theatre of war. The tide turned at Stalingrad; the Japanese were defeated at Midway; the North African diversion was at last brought within sight of conclusion by the defeat of the Afrika Korps; the Atlantic lifelines were held open in the face of horrifying losses. At this critical time, when the Allies were not yet prepared to confront the Germans in Western Europe, the bomber offensive might have made a central contribution had it been ready to do so. But Bomber Command was still hesitantly gathering its strength. In June, its most effective month, only 6,485 tons of bombs were dropped
against the 15,271 that would fall in the same month of 1943 and the 57,267 tons of June 1944. Thirteen of the squadrons mustered and equipped with such exertions were detached to Coastal Command and the Middle East, leaving just thirty (with an establishment of sixteen aircraft each) in Harris’s front line. He strained credibility when he claimed to the War Cabinet that he controlled only 11 per cent of the RAF and Fleet Air Arm’s front line, for this ignored the vast resources needed to produce, support and operate heavy aircraft compared with fighters. But bomber production was lagging, Stirling and Halifax output had been delayed by repeated teething troubles, and the twin-engined Manchester was proving grossly underpowered. Only the Lancaster showed signs of fulfilling the hopes of the pre-war visionaries of heavy bombers.

Yet in 1942 the mould of the offensive was formed, the image in which Bomber Command would fight and send so many men to die and in which it would be etched into history. With hindsight, it is possible to see that there were two wars between 1939 and 1945. The first was the last war of a past generation. The second was emphatically the first of the new era. Technology was coming of age: radar and the atomic bomb, the jeep and the high-performance aircraft. Somehow even the faces in the photographs look different. A Bomber Command group from, say, Honington in 1939 merges imperceptibly into the sepia shades of Camels and ‘Archie’ and the old Royal Flying Corps. But then study the faces of the Lancaster crews of Harris’s Bomber Command (ironically, for he himself was anything but a modern man): so many of the young faces are already those of the knowing, professional young technocrats of the post-war era, children who have lost their innocence thirty times over Germany, who will vote for the Welfare State in 1945, who are the most highly trained front-line fighters in the history of warfare.

By 1942 most of the pre-war generation of regular aircrew had been killed off, promoted to non-operational posts, or left languishing behind German barbed wire. Now, in the spirit of Kitchener’s New Armies of 1915, the first flower of the volunteers of 1939
were reaching the squadrons. These were the romantic young idealists, almost to a man aspiring fighter pilots, many of them the colonials who would make such an enormous contribution to Bomber Command – New Zealanders, Australians, Canadians. They had trained all over the world for two years or more – some in America, others in Canada, Rhodesia, South Africa.
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The pilots and navigators represented the highest skills – most of the latter had been eliminated from pilot training courses. Bomb-aiming had at last been recognized as a specialist trade for which men were specifically trained. Gunners, wireless operators and flight engineers were taught what they needed to know to use their equipment, and little more.

At the Operational Training Units they were brought together. There was no more arbitrary assembling of men for odd operations: it was clearly understood that the fate of Bomber Command hung on the integrity and mutual confidence of the operational crews, and every possible step was taken to allow like-minded souls to fit together. In the first few days at OTU, a milling herd of assorted aircrew was left to crew up by natural selection:

‘I hear you want a gunner? Can you fly a Wimpey without making me throw up?’

‘We’re looking for a wireless operator and you’re the only bloke here who doesn’t look as if he’s got DTs . . .’

‘Our driver flew into a hill this morning so we wondered if you might do us for a new one . . .’

The accident rate at OTUs was appalling.
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Some courses lost as many as 25 per cent of their trainees before graduation four or five months after arrival. Tour-expired aircrew posted to instruct rapidly learned that flying pupils in tired and often under-maintained bombers was anything but a rest-cure. But at least men were learning new tactical and technical skills at OTU that a year before they were compelled to teach themselves over Germany.

At the end of their training, these rather bewildered but intensely willing young men went to their stations. Little huddles of blue-clad humanity clutching their gas-masks and kitbags stood on some East Anglian railway platform to be collected by a nonchalant MT driver in a three-quarter-ton truck. If they were destined for 5 Group, they fetched up at Newark or the old garrison town of Lincoln. If they were going to 50 Squadron early in 1942, they found themselves driving down the Fosse Way, the old Roman road south-west from Lincoln to Swinderby, the big pre-war station for which 50’s ageing Hampdens took off for Germany. Here, amidst the flat, rich fields of East Anglia, something more than half of them would be making their final homes.