Bomber Command (48 page)

There are two answers. First, while history now sees the Battle of Berlin from November 1943 to March 1944 as a single entity – Harris’s last undiluted effort to win the war by area bombing – at no time in these months did the Air Staff see the Battle in this light. A continuous struggle was being waged to induce Harris to conform to the objectives of
Pointblank
, although nowhere was it suggested that Harris could not devote part of his available effort to attacks on the German capital. There was never a conscious surrender by the Air Ministry to Harris’s point of view. He staved off his opponents on a week-by-week basis: with explanations of weather and tactical difficulties, fierce argument about policy, and undisguised prevarication. Meanwhile, each night he launched his aircraft against his chosen targets. He fought with such success that it was not until the end of February 1944 that Bomber Command at last staged five operations specifically directed against elements of the German aircraft industry. But throughout the winter the Air Staff had been waiting in almost daily expectation of Harris’s acquiescence to his orders.

The second critical figure in the struggle was the Prime Minister. Since Casablanca, he had displayed little interest in
Pointblank
. Bomber Command no longer occupied the prominent place in his mind that it possessed in 1940 and 1941. But he was still greatly attracted by bringing fire and the sword upon Germany’s cities, and he was delighted by Harris’s triumph at Hamburg. Throughout the war, Churchill pressed for more and greater attacks on Berlin. On several occasions Harris sensibly cooled his master’s impatience. Now the airman promised to raze the Nazi capital. Churchill may not have shared his C-in-C’s expectations about knocking Germany out of the war, but he was attracted by the vision of Berlin engulfed by a second firestorm. To a man who had not studied the difficulties closely, it seemed perfectly possible for Bomber Command, with its ever-increasing force of heavy aircraft
and extraordinary new range of tactics and technology, to inflict a catastrophe on Berlin to match ‘Operation Gomorrah’. By any measure, this would be a great victory, and a savage blow to the Nazi regime. Portal was increasingly dismayed by Harris’s obduracy, but it was already apparent that the only way to defeat the wilfulness of Bomber Command’s C-in-C was to sack him. Churchill would never have endorsed such an action in the winter of 1943. Portal knew this and Harris knew this. On 18 November, Bomber Command embarked on the Battle of Berlin.

Like the earlier ‘battles’ of 1943, this was not to be merely an assault on a single city, but a convenient title for a sustained struggle embracing targets all over Germany. Between the first attack on Berlin on 18 November and the end of the series at Nuremberg on 30 March 1944, Bomber Command mounted 9,111 sorties against the German capital in sixteen major attacks, and 11,113 sorties against other cities, notably Mannheim, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Leipzig, Brunswick and Schweinfurt. Bomber Command lost 1,047 aircraft missing – 5.1 per cent of sorties dispatched – and a further 1,682 damaged or written off. After the second operation, it became apparent that it was intolerable to dispatch the wretched Stirlings against the devastating German defences, and they were removed from the attack on Berlin, as were most of the Halifaxes a few weeks later. The Stirlings were shortly afterwards withdrawn from all operations against Germany. The Battle of Berlin was fought overwhelmingly by Lancasters, with support from the Mosquitoes, which flew 2,034 sorties for the loss of only ten aircraft, an astonishing tribute to the light bomber’s invulnerability. For the crews of the Lancasters, the Battle of Berlin was a nightmare. Northern Germany seldom enjoyed clear weather in mid-winter, and that year conditions were exceptionally bad. Night after night, Bomber Command took off through the rain, sometimes through the snow, into the upper atmosphere’s freak winds and sudden icing conditions, loaded to the aircraft’s limits with bombs and fuel for the 1,150-mile round trip. Very early in the Battle, Pathfinders began to report seeing
crews dumping their 4,000-lb ‘cookies’ in the North Sea to gain height and speed.

By grossly underestimating the Germans’ resilience [wrote a Pathfinder navigator] Command had given the impression that the war was almost over. Tactically, because of the longer nights, this was the only feasible time of the year for making regular deep penetrations. Psychologically and physically it was the worst. Long hours at sub-zero temperatures dulled the brain, reflexes were slowed and mistakes were made. Frostbite was common even among pilots and navigators; with the cabin that cold, conditions elsewhere in the aircraft had to be experienced to be believed . . . If there was one time in an operational tour when the crew felt they needed the best the aircraft could offer, it was on a sortie to Berlin. Crews could get neither height nor performance with the new all-up weight, and although performance was improved by getting rid of bombs either over the North Sea or Germany, psychologically the damage was already done. Pilots had lost confidence in their aircraft, and crews who elsewhere would not have hesitated to go over the centre of the town became ‘fringe merchants’.
¹

Command ordered the rewiring of bomb-release circuits so that the photoflash exploded automatically when a pilot released his ‘cookie’, to put an end to dumping. The heavily-laden bombers were now meeting the German night-fighter force at the summit of its wartime effectiveness and strength. An enormous effort was mounted to thwart it. 100 Group’s Intruder Mosquitoes sought out the night-fighters around their airfields, while
Serrate
Mosquitoes stalked the skies equipped with radar that homed on the German
Lichtenstein
transmissions. German-speaking men and women broadcast false orders to the fighters by the
Corona
technique, attacked their radio-telephone communications with
Cigar
jamming, interrupted the controllers with
Tinsel
transmissions. Halifaxes and Stirlings flew diversionary mining operations off the
coast while OTUs and HCUs sent their aircraft to make
Bullseye
training flights over the North Sea to divert German early-warning systems. Airborne and ground-based
Mandrel
jammers sought to fog enemy radar frequencies, Bennett’s Mosquito Light Night Striking Force flew spoof raids, dropping fake fighter-flares and route-markers,
Windowing
their way to a city upon which they dropped Target Indicators and 4,000-lb ‘cookies’ to drive the population to their shelters and simulate the opening of a Main Force attack. All these techniques contributed something sometimes to diverting the defences, but none of them was sufficiently successful consistently to protect the bombers. Again and again the fighters broke into the stream and inflicted punishing casualties. Berlin, above all, was a very difficult target to conceal. For the last hundred miles of the route, it was clear that Bomber Command could be going nowhere else. The sky was lit by exploding aircraft as frozen gunners, numbed in their turrets, missed the shadow slipping below the fuselage that a few seconds later consigned them to oblivion.

But that winter, it was over the target itself that the bombers’ difficulties became intolerable. Again and again, they fought their way to Berlin to find the city sheathed in impenetrable cloud. It was far beyond
Oboe
range. Unlike Hamburg, it represented no clearly defined H2S image. The difficulties of marking were enormous. The Germans had created huge, effective decoy fires. In the first attacks, the parachute sky-markers – cascading pyrotechnic candles – disappeared into the overcast within seconds. Later in the Battle, 8 Group evolved their ‘Berlin Method’, sustaining a barrage of both ground-and sky-markers throughout the twenty-five minutes or less of the attack. Crews were instructed to bomb on the ground-markers where they could see them, on the sky-markers where they could not. In the first six major attacks on Berlin that winter only 400 of 2,650 aircraft dispatched reported sighting the ground-markers. The remainder bombed the sky-markers – or sometimes no markers at all – and came home without glimpsing the target. More serious even than the crews’ inability to see what they were attacking by night was Photographic Reconnaissance’s inability to pierce the overcast by day to discover what they had or had not achieved. From November 1943 to March 1944, of thirty-seven PRU sorties to Berlin, only two were successful.

Yet throughout the battle, Bomber Command HQ continued to circulate to groups and stations the most melodramatic reports of the damage achieved in Berlin. On 29 December 1943, Air Staff Intelligence at High Wycombe distributed a progress report which asserted that a minimum of 320,000 Berliners had been de-housed,

. . . and the word ‘minimum’ cannot be repeated too often in connection with any estimates based on the present photographic cover . . . Estimates of 500,000 to 800,000 are quite likely to be nearer the truth than the calculations made above . . . The following paragraphs describe the damage (in central Berlin only) as a London newspaper might have described it if the Luftwaffe had succeeded in inflicting corresponding damage in the central London area:

Government buildings in Whitehall have suffered severely. The Treasury is largely destroyed and the Foreign Office partially gutted. Scotland Yard is a soot-blackened ruin and so is the Ministry of Transport. The Cabinet Offices at No. 10 Downing Street are roofless, and fire has destroyed half of No. 11. Many other well-known landmarks in central London have disappeared. The British Museum Library and University buildings have been damaged. The Albert Hall and Drury Lane Theatre are smouldering wrecks. Big office blocks like Shell-Mex House and Bush House have been burnt out. The Ritz Hotel is no more, and fire has damaged part of the Savoy. The Café Royal is gutted from roof to basement . . . Railway stations everywhere are besieged by crowds of evacuees, but many of them are so badly damaged that few trains, or none at all, are able to leave . . . It is difficult indeed to imagine devastation on such a scale in a modern capital.
²

High Wycombe’s Intelligence Section waxed lyrical for six pages on the situation in Berlin. When Bomber Command began its great
assault, it was justified on the grounds that the city contained some critical elements of the German war effort: one-tenth of all aero-engines and precision instruments, one-third of the electrical engineering output, a quarter of all tanks and half of all field artillery were built in Berlin. But the metropolitan area extended over 883 square miles. It was an impossible undertaking effectively to saturate this with bombs in winter weather amidst the most formidable defences in Europe. Ministries and other public buildings were indeed razed to the ground. The Allkett tank plants were damaged. The Siemens electrical works were hit. The leaders of Germany including Speer and Milch were initially appalled by what Bomber Command was doing and threatened to do. But Berlin’s industries continued to produce war material in scarcely diminished quantities, while the wreckage of a thousand British bombers littered the north German countryside. Harris set out to achieve a second Hamburg. He came nowhere near this. Goebbels wrote on 28 November:

The British are greatly overestimating the damage done to Berlin. Naturally it is terrible, but there is no question of 25 per cent of the capital no longer existing. The English naturally want to furnish their public with a propaganda morsel. I have every reason to want them to believe this and therefore forbid any denial. The sooner London is convinced that there is nothing left of Berlin, the sooner they will stop their air offensive against the Reich capital.
³

Since 1943 there has been acid controversy among airmen about the Pathfinders’ alleged failure to mark their targets satisfactorily that winter. In reality, 8 Group did all that could be expected of themselves and their equipment. Their crews were often little better qualified or more experienced than those of Main Force, and were almost as prone to the problem of ‘Creep-back’, for all Bennett’s harsh comments about Main Force letting down his men by ‘baulking the jump’ and bombing short. Looking back on the battle a year later, Bennett claimed that Bomber Command’s crews
failed to destroy Berlin because they did not press home their attacks: ‘There can be no doubt that a very large number of crews failed to carry out their attacks in their customary determined manner,’ he wrote to Harris. The Pathfinders’ AOC claimed that 50 per cent of Main Force never even troubled to use their bombsights.

It is certainly true that crews’ determination suffered in the winter of 1943–44. Cochrane considered this the only moment of the bomber offensive at which morale was slipping dangerously: ‘One of my squadrons had cracked and another was cracking until I took firm action.’
⁴
But flagging morale was not responsible for Bomber Command’s failure to destroy Berlin. The truth was that the city was too sprawling to lend itself to a second ‘Operation Gomorrah’; too deep in Germany to achieve the same sort of concentrated attack against heavy opposition; and too difficult to hit accurately by H2S. H2S was never an adequate tool for blind bombing, and throughout the war Bomber Command failed to achieve satisfactory results by bombing sky-markers, the ‘Wanganui’ technique, as Bennett had codenamed it. Even if markers were satisfactorily placed on release, in a high wind they could be miles off-target within seconds. It is unreasonable to claim that the Pathfinders were responsible for Main Force’s failure, just as it was wrong for the Pathfinders to blame Main Force. The operation was simply beyond Bomber Command’s capabilities.

Harris and his staff should have recognized this, but they did not. As late as 7 December 1943, when the difficulties of the task had become abundantly clear, Harris declared that by 1 April 1944 he could bring about the collapse of Germany if he was able to launch 15,000 Lancaster sorties against her vital cities. If it is necessary to acquit the C-in-C of Bomber Command of personal ambition, surely this extraordinary statement must do so. No man with the slightest instinct for professional self-preservation would have committed himself so recklessly to a specific date by which he would personally have won the war.