Bomber Command (32 page)

At the end of 1943, Portal produced a subtle proposal: rather than proscribe German cities for destruction, Britain might now declare certain cities immune from attack, in the hope of provoking a panic-stricken flight of refugees towards them. Sinclair was enthusiastic, for his own reasons:

There might . . . be cities which would remain on the list because they contain no industries of war importance, but possess buildings or works of art of exceptional historic or aesthetic value. This would appeal to an important section of public opinion which is concerned about the destruction of such monuments in the bomber offensive.

The Air Staff eventually rejected this idea, chiefly on the grounds that it was impossible to ensure that the listed cities would not be bombed by mistake. It is significant that Sinclair was so eager to appease the cultural critics. The airmen were far more concerned about attacks on their strategy.

What are we doing to try to educate
The Times
? [Slessor, as an Assistant Chief of Air Staff, minuted Bottomley on 9 September 1942] The policy of the paper seems to be, while giving the inevitable lip-service to the exploits of the Air Force, to carefully cut them down as being of no value apart from their contribution to land and sea operations. Fortunately the
Daily Telegraph
continues to champion the cause of Air Power . . .

It was not only the effect of newspaper criticism on politicians and the public that the airmen feared, but a faltering of morale on the bomber stations if crews began to believe that they were being sent to their deaths to no purpose. A 1942 issue of the Russian propaganda paper
Soviet War News
, normally distributed free to service establishments, was banned from all RAF stations when it was found to contain an article entitled ‘Air bombing cannot decide the war’.

Britain’s most distinguished military thinkers of the pre-war era, Major-General J. F. C. Fuller and Captain Basil Liddell Hart, mounted one of the most significant offensives against Bomber Command. Both men had long since turned away from their uncriticial worship of air power in the 1920s. They had been the outstanding theoreticians of the art of
blitzkrieg
, mobile warfare spearheaded by tanks and tactical aircraft, and Germany’s Panzer leaders unashamedly adopted their gospel. Yet now both these men perceived an overwhelming flaw in the concept of a strategic bomber offensive intended to break the enemy’s will to fight, when viewed against the background of the Allied doctrine of Unconditional Surrender, promulgated in January 1943. To what purpose could one terrorize the enemy’s population into demanding peace from its leaders, if there were no terms to be made?
Fuller was appalled by the rising tide of systematic destruction. In August 1943, for example, he drafted an article for the London
Evening Standard
, edited by the radical socialist Michael Foot, in which he heaped insult upon insult against the instigators of the bomber offensive: ‘. . . the worst devastations of the Goths, Vandals, Huns, Seljuks and Mongols pale into insignificance when compared to the material and moral damage now wrought . . .’

Foot wrote to Fuller to say that he lacked the nerve to publish the article.
¹

Basil Liddell Hart drafted a private ‘Reflection’ in the summer of 1942, in the wake of the 1,000 Raid on Cologne:

It will be ironical if the defenders of civilization depend for victory upon the most barbaric, and unskilled, way of winning a war that the modern world has seen . . . We are now counting for victory on success in the way of degrading it to a new low level – as represented by indiscriminate (night) bombing and indiscriminate starvation . . . If our pounding of German cities, by massed night-bombing, proves the decisive factor, it should be a sobering thought that but for Hitler’s folly in attacking Russia (and consequently using up his bomber force there, as well as diverting his resources mainly into other weapons) we
and
the Germans would now be ‘Cologning’ each other’s cities with the advantage on Germany’s side, in this mad competition in mutual devastation . . .

Liddell Hart attacked the bomber offensive in newspaper articles and in his books of the period, but like Fuller he was quite without political influence. Fuller had been discredited in English public life by an eccentric flirtation with the Italian Fascists in the 1930s. Liddell Hart was almost obsessively personally hostile to Churchill. In his papers he noted a conversation with General Sir Frederick Pile, Britain’s flak defence chief, in which Pile allegedly told him that ‘Winston is pinning all his faith to the bombing offensive now. The devastation it causes suits his temperament, and he would be disappointed at a less destructive ending to the war . . .’
Liddell Hart’s own brother-in-law Barry Sullivan was serving with the RAF in Malta, and wrote from the island expressing the fear that the Government ‘has become Frankenstein, dominated by its own creation – the monster of Bomber Command’.
²

Liddell Hart’s opponents would have argued that he was living in a fantasy world in which warfare could still be conducted as an academic chess-game, rather than the reality, in which the Allies and the Axis were fighting to the death for the survival of freedom against the imminent threat of tyranny. No member of Churchill’s government would accord Liddell Hart or Fuller any more respect than was due to private pundits without posts or power. Until the end of the war, they cried in the wilderness.

Most of Britain’s churchmen supported the bomber offensive throughout the war, for much the same reasons that Dr Garbett, the Archbishop of York, advanced for refusing to join protests against area bombing in 1943: ‘Often in life’, he said, ‘there is no clear choice between absolute right and wrong; frequently the choice has to be made of the lesser of two evils, and it is a lesser evil to bomb a war-loving Germany than to sacrifice the lives of our fellow-countrymen who long for peace, and to delay delivering millions now held in slavery . . .’

George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, was unable to accept this compromise. Throughout the war, he was the most persistent and the most celebrated critic of the bomber offensive, to the impotent fury of the British Government. He supported the struggle against Nazi Germany and tactical bombing operations, but he was unrelentingly hostile to area bombing:

I desire to challenge the Government [he told the House of Lords on 9 February 1944 in a characteristic speech] on the policy which directs the bombing of enemy towns on the present scale, especially with reference to civilians who are non-combatants, and non-military and non-industrial objectives . . .

I fully realize that in attacks on centres of war industry and transport the killing of civilians when it is the result of bona fide military activity is inevitable. But there must be a fair balance between the means employed and the purpose achieved. To obliterate a whole town because certain portions contain military and industrial establishments is to reject the balance . . .

The Allies stand for something greater than power. The chief name inscribed on our banner is ‘Law’. It is of supreme importance that we, who, with our Allies, are the Liberators of Europe should so use power that it is always under the control of law. It is because the bombing of enemy towns – this area bombing – raises this issue of bombing unlimited and exclusive that such immense importance is bound to attach to the policy and action of His Majesty’s Government . . .

Bell was the most brilliant and the most articulate of the moral critics of the bomber offensive. It is widely held that his campaign later cost him the archbishopric of Canterbury. But in the midst of war, as Britain’s leaders struggled with their enemies and their allies, their own exhaustion and dwindling resources, it seemed to them intolerable to be assailed from the flanks by the darts and pinpricks of men who shared no part of their enormous responsibilities. At no time after the fall of France did the Allied warlords consider restricting the bomber offensive for moral reasons. At no period did the offensive’s moral critics extend beyond a tiny minority of English men and women. It may be argued that it is a tribute to the survival of the spirit of democracy in wartime that they were able to speak as freely as they did in attacking Bomber Command. Harris believed that the Government made a major error in failing to answer them more frankly: ‘In the House of Commons he [Sinclair] should have been far more forthright than he was . . . There was nothing to be ashamed of, except in the sense that everybody might be ashamed of the sort of thing that has to be done in every war . . .’
³

Sinclair himself told the House of Commons on 4 March 1942: ‘The talk about the futility of bombing is dangerous . . . Well
armed, highly-trained and inflexibly determined, they are the only force upon which we can call on this year, 1942, to strike deadly blows at the heart of Germany.’

2. Casablanca: The Airmen Victorious

It was ironic that just as Harris’s ‘1,000 Raids’ were thrilling and aweing the British public, a worm of doubt about area bombing was beginning to gnaw the minds of some powerful members of the Air Staff. Sir Wilfred Freeman, the Vice-Chief of Air Staff, was especially irked by the gulf between Bomber Command’s real achievements and the public claims made for them. He submitted a memorandum to Portal on the subject on 16 September 1942.

There is an increasing tendency among Commanders-in-Chief to compete for publicity [wrote Freeman]. This is in itself contrary to the best traditions of the service. More serious, however, is the fact that in their efforts to attract the limelight they sometimes exaggerate and even falsify facts. The worst offender is C-in-C Bomber Command . . . This is not the first occasion on which there have been complaints of the way in which Bomber Command exaggerates its achievements.

Harris would have claimed that the fastidious Freeman entirely missed the point about the value of the bomber offensive in 1942. Bomber Command’s principal task and principal achievement had been to impress the British people and their Allies, rather than to damage the enemy. But as U-boat sinkings rose in the Battle of the Atlantic, as calls for heavy aircraft intensified from every theatre of war, was this still enough to justify Bomber Command’s huge claim upon the war effort?

The airmen resisted the navy’s demands for more heavy aircraft, partly on the spurious grounds that it would take months to convert bombers to an anti-submarine role, and fit them with ASV radar. Likewise, when H2S centimetric radar was introduced – one of the decisive technological breakthroughs of the war – the
Admiralty lost its fight for first priority to Bomber Command, and Scientific Intelligence were overruled when they suggested that Coastal Command should be equipped first, because H2S sets lost at sea would be in no danger of capture. Thus, one of the first H2S sets fitted to a bomber was indeed captured by the Germans, and the secrets of its cavity magnetron revealed.

Harris’s argument against the diversion of heavy aircraft to the Atlantic battle was put forward in his long paper to the War Cabinet of 28 June 1942, reviewing the work of Bomber Command:

While it takes approximately some 7,000 hours of flying to destroy one submarine at sea, that was approximately the amount of flying necessary to destroy one third of Cologne . . . The purely defensive use of air power is grossly wasteful. The naval employment of aircraft consists of picking at the fringes of enemy power, of waiting for opportunities that may never occur, and indeed probably never will occur, of looking for needles in a haystack . . .

He was a master of rhetoric. Why search for submarines over hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean, he urged, when Bomber Command could destroy the very factories in which they were built? The admirals could never match his force in debate. Yet it is only necessary to study the course of a single convoy battle in 1942 or 1943 to perceive the extraordinary influence that a heavy aircraft could exert. It was not the submarines that were sunk, but the mere appearance of an aircraft that forced U-boats to dive and frequently thwarted major wolfpack attacks. Adequate numbers of long-range aircraft in 1942 could have turned the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic months earlier. But to spirits such as Lord Cherwell, who supported Harris vigorously, the distant splash of plummeting depth-charges held none of the magic of firing the heart of Germany:

It is difficult to compare quantitatively the damage done to any of the forty-odd big German cities in a 1,000-ton raid with the advantages of sinking one U-boat out of 400 and saving three or four ships out of 5,500 [Cherwell wrote to Churchill on 28 March 1943]. But it will surely be held in Russia as well as here that the bomber offensive must have more immediate effect on the course of the war in 1943 . . .

The importance of keeping Russia in the war now dominated Allied thinking. No one had forgotten the near-catastrophe that followed the Bolsheviks’ negotiated peace with Germany in 1917. In 1942 the War Cabinet cherished the conviction that Moscow needed to be persuaded of British sincerity and support for the Russian struggle. The Russians were understandably contemptuous of the fuss the British made about their Arctic Convoy losses when the Soviet armies were losing hundreds of thousands of men in a single battle. From 1942 onwards, Stalin made his view apparent that only by opening a Second Front in north-west Europe could the Allies make a significant impact on the war in the east. Instead, Churchill offered him the bomber offensive. ‘I am deeply conscious of the giant burden borne by the Russian armies and their unequalled contribution to the common cause,’ the Prime Minister wrote to Stalin on 6 April 1943. ‘I must emphasize that our bombing of Germany will increase in scale month by month . . .’ Throughout the war, Stalin was sent updated copies of Harris’s celebrated ‘Blue Books’, the C-in-C’s personal photograph albums of the wrecked cities of Germany. Beyond a few platitudes congratulating Churchill on the bombing of Berlin, the Russian never seemed much impressed. But the need to support Russia remained a constant chord in the theme of those in Britain and America arguing the case for intensifying the bombing of Germany.