Bomber Command (34 page)

The plan drawn up by the Operational Committee was endorsed by Portal and Harris in April 1943, with only minor reservations about the prominence given to the submarine bases
on the French coast, which had already proved virtually invulnerable to bombing.

This plan [said its authors] does not attempt to prescribe the major effort of the RAF Bomber Command. It simply recognizes the fact that when precision targets are bombed by the Eighth Air Force in daylight, the effort should be completed and complemented by RAF bombing attacks against the surrounding industrial area at night. Fortunately the industrial areas to be attacked are in most cases identical with the industrial areas which the British Bomber Command has selected for mass destruction anyway . . .

Harris wrote to Eaker on 15 April 1943:

I am in complete agreement with the policy recommended. The effect of linking up precision bombing of selected targets in daylight by an adequate force of the VIII Bomber Command with intensified night-bombing by the RAF will unquestionably cause damage to
matériel
and morale on a scale which the enemy will be unable to sustain.

As regards the detailed presentation, there are naturally some points on which I would lay slightly varied emphasis if I were presenting the case to my own Chief of Staff, but these are of no consequence compared with the major aim, which is to build up the bomber forces in Britain at the maximum pace, and to the size necessary to achieve our common purpose.

At Casablanca it was decided that the Chiefs of Staffs’ authority for the conduct of the Combined Bomber Offensive should be nominally vested in Sir Charles Portal. The allocation of targets and ‘the effective coordination of the forces involved’ was to be ensured ‘by frequent consultation between the Commanders in Chief’. General Arnold in Washington was thoroughly uneasy about this cosy arrangement. On 22 April 1943 he wrote to Portal:

It occurs to me that the time has arrived for the establishment of somewhat more formalized machinery for the closest possible coordination, or rather integration of the two bomber efforts. The increasing complexity of their operations would appear to me as soon to be beyond the capabilities of the commanders, in person, to co-ordinate.

To the British, Arnold’s note and many others that would follow it represents the very Trojan horse that they were determined to keep from their gates. Harris, with his experience of America as head of the RAF delegation in Washington, was one of the first to foresee and prepare to repel American attempts to incorporate Bomber Command in some joint Allied command structure. On land it was inevitable that the Americans would overwhelmingly dominate the war effort. At sea the British still played the principal part in the Mediterranean and were equal copartners in the Atlantic only because the US navy was so heavily committed in the Pacific. In the air, in 1943 America would build 9,615 heavy bombers against Britain’s 3,657; 9,450 twin-engined aircraft against Britain’s 5,565; 10,392 single-engined fighters against Britain’s 8,151. Even to achieve their own existing levels of aircraft production, the British were now compelled to rely entirely on America for transport aircraft, and very heavily for tanks, ammunition and landing-craft. In 1944, American dominance in the air would be even more dramatic.

Bomber Command represented Britain’s last entirely independent contribution to the Allied war effort, gripping the imagination of the British people and much of Occupied Europe. As the enormous buildup of American air power developed in 1943 and 1944, the British were determined to ensure that Harris’s forces were not submerged. High Wycombe always regarded the Casablanca Directive as a general mandate for the future of the bomber offensive, rather than as a specific instruction to be strictly obeyed. A number of staff officers at the Air Ministry were already impressed by the American concept of precision bombing, and sought to press their views upon Portal and Harris. But Bomber Command’s C-in-C considered Casablanca merely an authorization
to continue what he was doing already, and Sir Charles Portal made no attempt to make him think otherwise.

Arnold’s proposals for integrating the British and American bomber offensives were rejected. Probably at Harris’s instigation,
⁶
certain phrases in the draft directive for the Combined Bomber Offensive which was now being refined from the Casablanca Directive were altered, to make an already vaguely worded document woollier still. It was a measure of Churchill’s waning emphasis on the bomber offensive that when the final proposals based on Casablanca and the Eaker Plan, and now christened
Pointblank
, came before the Washington summit of May 1943 for approval, the Prime Minister nodded them through with the brief assertion that it was unnecessary further to discuss bombing policy, since there was virtual British and American agreement. On 10 June 1943 the
Pointblank
Directive was formally issued to Bomber Command and the 8th Air Force. It was to be the basis of the strategic bomber offensive – at least in the minds of the Chiefs of Staff – until the invasion.

The American airmen had got what they wanted: their orders to embark upon a precision-bombing offensive. From the beginning of 1943, 8th Air Force strength grew steadily from a daily average of 73 heavy bombers available in February to the 279 dispatched on a single operation in May. The Americans’ hopes and ambitions for the destruction of German industry were based on the same blend of ignorance, optimism and astonishing statistical projections as those of the British, unrelieved by the RAF’s additional hopes for damaging enemy morale. The first priority of the 8th Air Force was to destroy the German air force in production. With unbounded courage and hope its leaders addressed themselves to their task.

But just as the Americans would ignore the phrases about attacking German morale embodied in
Pointblank
, so Sir Arthur Harris proposed to disregard the implication which the directive’s creators certainly intended, that Bomber Command should address itself specifically to areas in which the key German target systems
were found. Long before Casablanca or even before Cologne, Harris conceived his campaign for the systematic laying-waste of Germany’s cities, and he never had the slightest intention of being deflected from it. In
Pointblank
‘he was able to discover a mandate for pursuing the policy upon which he was in any case resolved . . . For most of 1943 there was no combined offensive, but, on the contrary, a bombing competition.’
⁷
Harris was in many ways a much more shrewd political animal than has generally been recognized. Although he sometimes damaged his own cause by his appalling exaggerations, he understood one prime principle of bureaucratic manoeuvre: that by agreeing to a course of action loudly and often enough in public, it is possible in reality to do something entirely different. Harris’s letters to Eaker were effusive in their expressions of common purpose. Harris was certainly sincere in wanting to see a large American strategic bomber force irrevocably committed to the assault on Germany. But beyond this, he treated the
Pointblank
Directive as a harmless plaything for the Ministry of Economic Warfare and the Air Staff.

In 1943 he would have a devastating strike force under his command. He would use it to hit the cities of Germany. His only concession to
Pointblank
. was that when his aircraft attacked an urban centre, he was at pains to catalogue for the Air Ministry and for the Americans the aircraft factories or aero-engine plants or oil refineries which it contained, and which were scheduled for destruction in
Pointblank
.

There is one more essential dimension of the Combined Bomber Offensive in 1943: while the soldiers regarded the strategic air offensive at best as subordinate, at worst as irrelevant to grand strategy, both Harris and Spaatz still believed that in the year left to them before D-Day, their forces could defeat Germany without a land campaign. To both men and to many of their subordinates, the role allotted to them in
Pointblank
as mere harbingers of the invasion forces fell far short of their hopes. The lasting significance of Casablanca and of
Pointblank
was that it confirmed the air forces’ claims upon a huge share of their nations’ resources for the
bomber offensive. Now Harris and Spaatz, each in his own way, set out to prove that by air power alone they could bring Germany to its knees.

3. The Tools of Darkness

In Winston Churchill’s
History of the Second World War
; it is remarkable that even long after the event, he retained his contempt for the techniques of the Luftwaffe in 1940, and especially for the German
Knickebein
navigational beams:

With their logical minds and deliberate large-scale planning [he wrote] the German Air Command staked their fortunes in this sphere on a device which . . . they thought would do us in. Therefore they did not trouble to train the ordinary bomber pilots, as ours had been trained, in the difficult art of navigation. A far simpler and surer method, lending itself to drill and large numbers producing results wholesale by irresistible science, attracted alike their minds and their nature. The German pilots followed the beam as the German people followed the Führer. They had nothing else to follow.
⁸

Yet the techniques of which Churchill wrote with such scorn,
Knickebein
and
X-Gerat
and the ‘pathfinder’ concept of Kampfgruppe 100 of the Luftwaffe, were precisely those which Bomber Command sought in vain to match throughout 1940 and 1941. Only in 1942 did
Gee
come into service, and by August it was being jammed by the Germans everywhere beyond the coastline of Occupied Europe. Only at the beginning of 1943 was Bomber Command at last equipped with the new generation of radio and radar aids that made it possible to strike with real force at Germany, to bring the bomber offensive out of its cottage-industry phase into the age of automated mass destruction.

It might be thought that once area bombing was introduced, ‘browning’ a city became a relatively simple exercise. But until the very end of the war it remained a very difficult test of navigating
and bomb-aiming skill. A modern British historian argues that ‘the one gleaming lesson of twentieth-century warfare is that strategy follows, and does not precede, the scientist and the technician’.
⁹
It is patently true that the bomber proved unable to play a decisive part in war until armed with devastating scientific weapons, yet one may also claim that the strategic air offensive proves the reverse of the argument. Many of the new tools that became available in 1943 only did so because Bomber Command’s needs were belatedly identified, just as were those of Fighter Command in 1936. The scientists at the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Malvern applied themselves to solve the proven operational problems of 1940 and 1941. The fruit of their labour was a remarkable triumph for British technology – until the end of the war the Americans were almost totally dependent on British electronic devices to wage their own air offensive.

It was Harris’s good luck that at the beginning of 1943 he could take advantage of the new generation of equipment just as his force of heavy bombers began its major expansion. In the words of the official historians: ‘The air attack on Germany in 1943 increased so much in weight and efficiency that it became something quite different from anything that had preceded it.’
¹⁰
Harris himself acknowledged that in 1942 he had merely scratched at the roof of Germany: ‘So ended a year of preparation’, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘in which very little material damage had been done to the enemy which he could not repair from his own resources, but in which we had obtained or had in near prospect what was required to strike him to the ground, and learned how to use it.’
¹¹

The first vital innovation to match the techniques of the Luftwaffe had been introduced in August 1942: the Pathfinder Force was born. Henceforth, on almost every operation of the offensive, the ‘Main Force’ squadrons of Bomber Command were preceded to their target by the PFF, dropping aerial route markers to guide the stream across Germany, then marking the target by a range of increasingly sophisticated techniques, some visual, some ‘blind’ by radar.

The creation of the Pathfinders was preceded by one of the most bad-tempered debates of the war between the Air Ministry and Harris. He had nursed a contempt for staff officers since his days as Deputy Chief of Air Staff early in the war. He believed emphatically that subordinates should know their place, which was executing the orders of their superiors:

My first impression on arriving at the Air Ministry was that the staff of every department was fantastically bloated. Junior officers were to my mind quite needlessly named directors of this and that, and they all imagined themselves as commanders in the field of the commands they were supposed to direct – a very nice job, too, because they thought – mistakenly – that they were running the show without having to take the responsibility for the results.

I looked upon C-in-Cs in the field as responsible people who were not to be bothered by the trumpery opinions of young Jacks-in-office . . .
¹²

Harris reserved his most virulent disdain for the Air Ministry’s Directorate of Bomber Operations, whose staff acted as the Chief of Air Staff’s personal advisers and agents in all matters relating to bombing policy. The Director in 1942 was Air Commodore J. W. Baker, shortly to be succeeded by his then Deputy, Group-Captain S. O. Bufton, whom we last met commanding 10 Squadron at Leeming in 1940. Ever since his nights over Germany in a Whitley, and subsequently commanding 76 Halifax Squadron, Bufton had been preoccupied by the problems of target location and marking. Back in 1941 he asked for barometrically-fused flares to ignite above the target. He and his crews experimented with such desperate gambits as firing coded Very cartridges when an aircraft positively identified the target. Now, at the Air Ministry, Bufton became convinced that Bomber Command’s squadrons must have a specially trained ‘Target-Finding Force’ to lead them across Germany. It is significant that Bufton was dedicated to the concept of precision bombing, and had the gravest doubts about the value of
area attack. He enjoyed close relations with the American 8th Air Force, perhaps not least because of his faith in its objectives, if not its tactics. He was prominent among those at the Air Ministry who regarded area attack as a necessary last resort only until the techniques became available to make Bomber Command a precision-bombing force. It was partly because the creation of a ‘Target-Finding Force’ might bring this day closer that Bufton advocated it so passionately. It was perhaps for the same reason that Harris fought the proposal tooth and nail. He had no intention of opening the door an inch to the ‘panacea merchants’.