Bomber Command (44 page)

In July 1943, Kammhuber was replaced as GOC XII Air Corps after Hitler rejected his proposals for a massive new radar programme to meet the American air armadas which the general anticipated. Hitler dismissed his forecasts as fantasy, and in November Kammhuber was also removed from his post as General of Night Fighters and sent to Norway. Hajo Hermann, creator of the ‘Wild Boars’, replaced him.

But in the face of an ever less favourable balance of forces, in late 1943 and early 1944 the German night-fighter force came close to the decisive defeat of Bomber Command, just as the Luftwaffe’s day-fighters almost achieved the defeat of the 8th Air Force. It is almost impossible to overvalue the ingenuity and determination with which the German defenders responded to the bomber offensive. Their knowledge of Bomber Command, chiefly derived from prisoner interrogation, was so comprehensive that they proposed to make a film depicting the planning and launching of a British attack, using actors to play the principals, for the training of Luftwaffe units. The script was written and fell into the hands of the Allies in May 1945.

The ‘Wild Boar’ concept created by Hermann was short-lived, for the difficulties of operating single-engined fighters without blind-flying equipment at night proved overwhelming, and losses in landings and accidents became prohibitive. But the ‘Wild Boars’ had shown the way to the new approach of fighting the bombers, and the courage of the pilots who dived into their own searchlights and flak – which often ignored orders not to fire above a given height – to engage the bombers excited the respect of the British. The ‘Wild Boars’ were rapidly eclipsed by the ‘Tame Boars’, twin-engined fighters which were scrambled to orbit a visual beacon as soon as the approximate course of the bomber force was known. The British discovered that the Germans could often predict a raid
by monitoring wireless operators’ signals from all over eastern England during their morning air test, and 100 Group began to broadcast fake test signals on days when Bomber Command was not operating, to confuse the issue. But careful study of the weather predictions usually enabled the Germans to judge whether conditions were right for Harris to attack.

As the British approached Germany, the ground controllers directed the ‘Tame Boars’ into the stream by radio running-commentary. In the final stages of interception, the air turbulence created by hundreds of aircraft warned the fighters that they were close to the British. On a clear night, they then searched visually for the bombers. In moonless conditions they relied upon AI radar – by early 1944 they were being equipped with the
Lichtenstein
SN2, which was impervious to
Window
jamming. The blind spot of the British bombers below the fuselage had always been known to fighter pilots, but they had often been unable to exploit it – until in the autumn of 1943 an ingenious fitter at a Luftwaffe airfield devised the prototype of the deadly
schräge Musik
– ‘jazz music’ – a pair of fixed upward-firing cannon mounted behind the fighter’s cockpit. The pilot had only to slide beneath the bomber and fire a short burst which was almost invariably lethal. A few lucky British survivors who came home to report that they had been flying peacefully over Germany until the world collapsed and they found themselves upside down in a wingless fuselage were treated as ‘line-shooters’. It was not until the end of the war that British aircrew learned of the existence of
schräge Musik
It has been a matter of debate ever since whether the Canadian 6 Group, which alone fitted ventral turrets to many of its Lancasters to cover the blind spot, were justified in sacrificing speed and adding weight to do so.

But the most dramatic transformation of the bomber war in 1943 and 1944 was brought about by the decision of both sides to turn night into day. After years of rigorously blacked-out cities and oceans of darkness across Europe broken only by islands of light around a target, the most dazzling firework display in history now
exploded every night over Germany. British Pathfinders dropped flares to light the target for their markers, while high above them Luftwaffe aircraft were laying their own lines of parachute flares to illuminate the bombers for fighter attack. On cloudy nights when the British were bombing blind, the searchlights arched upwards, seeking to turn the clouds into a layer of light against which the attackers were silhouetted for the fighters: ‘The enemy bombers crawl across them like flies on a table cloth,’ Milch told Speer with satisfaction.
²²
From five Divisional ‘Battle Opera Houses’, the Luftwaffe controllers maintained their running commentary to the fighters, based on information from ground observer stations that was processed and retransmitted inside one minute. The British adopted the most elaborate methods to halt their voices, by jammers mounted in the ‘ABC’ aircraft of Addison’s newly-formed electronic counter-measures force, 100 Group, or by interference from the huge British monitoring station at Kingsdown in Kent, where German-speaking men and women attempted to deceive the fighters into breaking off or landing. When the Germans began to play selected music to direct the fighter pilots instead of voice transmissions, the British sought to match it. As the Germans strengthened their transmissions and altered their frequencies, the British followed them.

But for all the enormous effort that was mounted, Bomber Command never succeeded in totally breaking the controllers’ communications with the fighters. When the Luftwaffe failed to intercept, it was almost invariably because the ground controllers had been deceived by the bombers’ course changes, or by the ‘spoof’ force of Mosquitoes
Windowing
to resemble a Main Force attack. The Germans never got the measure of the Mosquitoes, even with the introduction in 1943 of a limited number of Ju88s boosted with nitrous oxide that were specifically intended for Mosquito interception. In the night-fighter squadrons, a pilot who shot down a Mosquito was allowed to count it as two ‘victories’.

By the end of 1943 the radar war was also reaching a new pitch of intensity. The Germans were impressed, almost awed, by their
examination of captured British H2S sets and of the cavity magnetrons that they contained. But having grasped the principle upon which the H2S aircraft dropped their blind markers, they embarked upon the herculean task of altering the H2S silhouette of the countryside around some key targets, for example by laying great strips of metal on rafts on the lakes around Berlin. They also devised
Naxos
, a night-fighter radar which from early 1944 could home on H2S transmissions from British aircraft, and which at last caused Bomber Command to order that sets should only be switched on at short intervals over enemy territory. Just as British bombers were fitted with
Monica
, which gave radar warning of aircraft approaching from the rear, so the Luftwaffe in turn fitted its fighters with
Flensburg
, which homed on
Monica
, and eventually led to its withdrawal. The Germans also began plotting the radar ‘flames’ from Allied IFF transmissions, about which Dr Jones and British Scientific Intelligence had been warning Bomber Command in vain for more than two years. Many crews were still convinced that IFF was capable of interfering with German radar, and kept their sets switched on from take-off to landing. Yet only in the spring of 1944 did the irrefutable evidence of Scientific Intelligence – supported by ‘Ultra’ intercepted German signals, of which the Luftwaffe’s were throughout the war the most readily decipherable – compel Bomber Command to accept the reality of the threat and order crews to discontinue IFF emissions over enemy territory.

Yet whatever tactical antidotes Bomber Command could devise, by the winter of 1943 darkness no longer offered effective protection for the bomber, just as a few months earlier it had ceased to provide any safety for the cities of Germany. The night-fighter had achieved an alarming tactical dominance. It was the good fortune of the British that the leaders of Germany still had no grasp of the significance of the Luftwaffe’s achievement. The bulk of the Reich’s resources for the war against the bomber continued to be devoted to flak, searchlights and smoke generators. Something like a million people, albeit many of them women and schoolboys, were manning the defences each night. 10,000 of Germany’s excellent
88-mm guns which, as Sir Arthur Harris has often remarked, would otherwise have been deployed against the advancing Russian tanks, were placed around the cities, supported by thousands more light flak guns. Their chief value was that they were alleged to boost the morale of the civilian population, and they encouraged the bombers to fly high and bomb wide. In 1940 the Luftwaffe computed that it expended 2,313 heavy and 2,458 light flak shells for every bomber destroyed, a ratio which increased later in the war.
²³
One-third of the entire German optical industry was working to produce antiaircraft defence equipment, half the electronics industry was building radar sets, most of them for the flak and the 7,000 searchlights supporting the guns. All this was a formidable drain on German industry, and its value to the Allies must not be underestimated. Fifteen years after the war, Speer read the American official history of the USAAF’s strategic bomber offensive, which expresses doubts about its achievement. He wrote in his secret diary in Spandau prison:

It seems to me that the book misses the decisive point. Like all other accounts of the bombing that I have so far seen, it places its emphasis on the destruction that air raids inflicted on German industrial potential and thus upon armaments. In reality the losses were not quite so serious . . . The real importance of the air war consisted in the fact that it opened a second front long before the invasion of Europe. That front was the skies over Germany . . . The unpredictability of the attacks made the front gigantic . . . Defence against air attacks required the production of thousands of antiaircraft guns, the stockpiling of tremendous quantities of ammunition all over the country, and holding in readiness hundreds of thousands of soldiers . . . As far as I can judge from the accounts I have read, no one has yet seen that this was the greatest lost battle on the German side . . .
²⁴

It is essential to quote this passage in any account of the bomber offensive, because the most enthusiastic defenders of the
achievements of bombing, including Sir Arthur Harris himself, cite it among the principal testimony supporting their case. But in his memoirs
Inside the Third Reich
, published long after he wrote these words, Speer forcefully reasserted the view he took in his 1945–46 interrogations, that bombing was ineffective in cracking Germany until the closing phase of the war. Speer was a manager, not a strategist. The balance of evidence suggests that in his Spandau writing, he overstated the importance of the German resources devoted to air defence, and underestimated the drain on the Allies of mounting the bomber offensive.

Germany’s tragedy in the air war was that she lacked a coherent strategy, because of the lack of support and direction from the top. Her defences relied upon compromises and expedients. The resources that the Luftwaffe devoted to night-fighters were paltry by the standards of its own overall strength, far less when considered against the strength of the Allied air forces. Yet by the spring of 1944, in the face of every possible handicap, the German night-fighter force had inflicted a series of devastating blows on Bomber Command, culminating in the destruction of 108
²⁵
aircraft on the Nuremberg raid of 30 March 1944.

However angered and dismayed were the leaders of Germany by Allied bombing, they never considered it sufficiently mortal a threat to order a major withdrawal of aircraft from the eastern front to meet, it. But had they done so, had they lavished a fraction of the resources devoted to futile aircraft development or even ground defences upon the night-fighters of the Reich, had Jeschonnek or Goering forcefully supported Speer and Milch in their efforts to gain priority for home-fighter defence, Bomber Command might by the winter of 1943 have suffered losses that would have brought its offensive against Germany to an abrupt conclusion.

10 » BOMBER COMMAND HEADQUARTERS

BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, 1943–44

Even in the bleakest nights of the bomber offensive it is remarkable how little dismay rippled the calm routine of Bomber Command headquarters at High Wycombe. Looking back over the war years later, staff officers remembered the thrill of excitement and triumph that ran through them all at the news of the ‘1,000 Raid’ on Cologne and the breaking of the Ruhr dams by 617 Squadron. In the wake of Hamburg in August 1943, there was a euphoric period ‘when we really believed that we’d got it in the bag’.
¹
But beyond these false dawns, there were few high surges or steep plunges of morale and enthusiasm. Week in and week out, eventually year in and year out, they walked or bicycled from their familiar billets in the morning to the quiet offices on No. 1 Site, poured forth the stream of orders and memoranda that clattered down the teletypes to Groups and Stations to launch seven thousand young men into the night sky over Germany and the following morning garnered the paper harvest of signals and scrambled telephone messages, still-damp reconnaissance prints and provisional bomb-tonnage figures by which success or failure was measured. Their absolute remoteness from the battlefront has led some historians to compare High Wycombe with the French châteaux from which the generals of the First World War directed Passchendaele and the Somme, to liken Sir Arthur Harris to Sir Douglas Haig.
²

Harris’s eventual fall from grace was inevitable. He tossed too many hostages to fortune with his wildly exaggerated claims and
promises, and attacked too many powerful interests with reckless rudeness. He was a warrior to the roots of his soul. He sought to engage and destroy the enemy by every means at his command, and it was this quality in him that undoubtedly appealed to Churchill, a like spirit. Harris had never been asked to determine the morality or desirability of a bomber offensive. He had been appointed to attack Germany. If he fought fiercely for resources and support, this was not merely his privilege, but his duty. If he lost the confidence of the Prime Minister or the Air Staff, it was their business to sack him.