Bomber Command (51 page)

Harris professed himself unshakeably convinced that the only proper, or indeed possible use of his Command was for the area bombing of Germany. The scientists of his Operational Research Section were driven to ever more tortuous statistical efforts to demonstrate that this was indeed the case. While it may be argued that some of Harris’s wartime misjudgements were only revealed with hindsight, in this matter his narrow-mindedness was astonishing. To any balanced observer of the Grand Alliance at the beginning of 1944, it was obvious that all other strategic priorities were dwarfed by the importance of
Overlord
. Any success that the bombers might achieve over Germany that spring and summer by continuing the area offensive would be swept aside by the scale of disaster if the Allies failed to get ashore in Normandy and stay there.

But Harris was not alone in his obsession. Spaatz was convinced that victory over Germany was within his own grasp. He was exasperated by the prospect of giving the Luftwaffe a long respite while his aircraft attacked the French railway system. There was also another, even more critical factor. For two years of war, the USAAF had been groping for the throat of the German war machine, and now at last Spaatz believed that they had found it: the synthetic-oil system. In 1943, Germany’s synthetic-oil plants produced 6.2 million tons of petroleum products from coal, in addition to the 2 million tons imported from Hungary and Rumania. The plants were dispersed among eighty locations, of which twenty-seven were notably important. Many of the targets were within range of 15th Air Force in Italy, if not of 8th Air Force in England, but hitherto the Allies had devoted barely 1 per cent of their entire wartime bombing effort to oil targets.

Now Spaatz’s staff had drawn up a plan for the systematic destruction of Germany’s oil resources by precision bombing. With the coming of the spring weather, with the enormous forces at his command, and with the Mustang to carve a path to the targets, Spaatz believed that he had the means to win the war. Professional rivalry with Harris also loomed large. He was haunted by fear that
Bomber Command might somehow win the laurels while his Fortresses were reduced to running a bomb shuttle for Eisenhower. ‘What worries me is that Harris is being allowed to get off scot-free,’ he complained bitterly to Zuckerman.
¹³
‘He’ll go on bombing Germany and will be given a chance of defeating her before the invasion, while I am put under. Leigh-Mallory’s command . . .’

By February, Tedder was in despair about the obstinacy with which each faction was fighting for its own triumph in the deployment of air resources. Like so much else to do with the strategic air offensive, the final decisions represented a compromise. In March 1944, at the insistence of Portal – who was compelled to issue a direct order to Harris to gain his co-operation – the RAF carried out a series of experiments against the marshalling yards at Trappes, Aulnoye, Le Mans, Amiens/Longueau, Courtrai and Laon. The attacks were a triumph for the aircrew of Bomber Command, who achieved startling success while inflicting far lower civilian casualties than had been predicted. Harris stood confounded by the virtuosity of his own men. His most virulent opposition to the Transport Plan was based on insistence that his crews were incapable of carrying it out. That argument was no longer credible. Furthermore Zuckerman told Tedder that, far from Bomber Command assisting the invasion if its aircraft continued area attacks on Germany until D-Day, in his view they could only hope to reduce enemy production by a maximum of 7 per cent, which could not conceivably be decisive. Churchill persisted with his opposition to the rail bombing until May, but he was overcome by pressure from Washington: Eisenhower had formally notified Roosevelt and Marshall that he considered the Transport Plan indispensable to
Overlord
: ‘There is no other way in which this tremendous air force can help us, during the preparatory period, to get ashore and stay there.’ The Prime Minister at last bowed to the Americans’ insistence. Bomber Command would undertake the principal burden of carrying out the Transport Plan. In March 1944, 70 per cent of British bombs were directed against Germany. In April this proportion fell to well under half; in May, to less than
a quarter; in June to negligible proportions. The ‘panacea merchants’ had triumphed. Harris wrote artlessly in his memoirs: ‘Naturally I did not quarrel with the decision to put the bomber force at the disposal of the invading army once the die had been cast; I knew that the armies could not succeed without them.’
¹⁴

The die had been a long time casting.

But while Harris fought his battle to continue area bombing, Spaatz was arguing in London and by direct appeal to Washington to be permitted to undertake his Oil Plan. On 19 April, Eisenhower authorized him to carry out two experimental attacks against oil plants, chiefly in the hope of bringing the Luftwaffe to battle. The weather was not suitable until 12 May, when Spaatz dispatched 935 bombers and a vast force of escorting fighters, losing forty-six bombers and ten of the escort. Further attacks followed on 28 and 29 May. Speer’s nightmare had at last come to pass. Spaatz had touched the vital nerve of the German economy. In the months that followed, his aircraft were chiefly committed to attacking
Crossbow
targets to impede the German V-weapon attack on England, and providing tactical support for the Allied armies. In June only 11.6 per cent of his effort was launched against oil targets, in July 17 per cent, in August 16.4 per cent. But the results were dramatic. Petroleum available to Germany fell from 927,000 tons in March, to 715,000 tons in May, and 472,000 tons in June. The Luftwaffe’s supplies of aviation spirit fell from 180,000 tons in April, to 50,000 tons in June, and 10,000 tons in August. All Speer’s achievements in the aircraft factories went for nothing. By the late summer of 1944 the Luftwaffe lacked the fuel to fly anything like its available order of battle.

American airmen have lamented ever since the failure of the Allied command to understand the importance of Spaatz’s achievement, to press home the Oil Plan and bring victory by the end of 1944. Bufton was among those at the Air Ministry who opposed the Transport Plan in favour of the Oil Plan. He described Zuckerman’s scheme as ‘a national disaster’.
¹⁵
He and many other airmen believed that the French rail links could have been destroyed with
far less effort, had they been given the task and left to choose their own methods of executing it, by hitting bridges rather than marshalling yards. An American air force evaluation based on railway records concluded in 1945 that ‘The pre D-Day attacks against French rail centres were not necessary, and the 70,000 tons involved could have been devoted to alternative targets.’ The President of SNCF, the French rail network, said that he believed bridge-breaking would have been far more effective than hitting yards. The fact that the Germans indeed suffered enormous difficulties in reinforcing Normandy after D-Day must be attributed in substantial measure to the efforts of the Allied tactical air forces and the French Resistance, in addition to the strategic bombers.

But to make much of the fact that Spaatz’s obsession with the Oil Plan was justified is a misuse of hindsight. By the spring of 1944 the credibility of the ‘bomber barons’ among the leaders of the Grand Alliance had sunk very low. Spaatz privately considered that Harris was ‘all washed up’ after the failure of the Battle of Berlin.
¹⁶
The British, in their turn, noted the yawning chasm between the Americans’ past promises and their achievements. The admiration of politicians and ground commanders for the airmen’s powers of organization and leadership was now eclipsed by cynicism about their failures and their insatiable demands for resources. At one of the vital meetings to discuss the rival merits of the Oil and Transport Plans, Oliver Lawrence of the Ministry of Economic Warfare – who was much respected by both the British and the Americans – said that on his estimate of German oil reserves, even if Spaatz’s attacks were immediately effective against the production plants, it would be four to five months before the results benefited the battlefield. This projection was enough to damn Spaatz’s hopes of undivided concentration of attack. The soldiers wanted results in days and weeks, not months.

The employment of the strategic bombers in the weeks preceding D-Day, and afterwards in support of the armies in Normandy, may today seem cautious and unimaginative. But it was vital
insurance, and reflected a perfectly logical view of strategic priorities by the Combined Chiefs of Staff.
Overlord
had to succeed. Bomber Command and the USAAF were directed to do all in their power to see that it did so, and worked to that end with courage, dedication and professionalism. If their leaders were heard with insufficient respect in the councils of war, they had only their own vast errors of judgement of the past to blame. It is an indulgence of historians and armchair critics to pretend that, in the spring of 1944, there was a better way.

12 » PATHFINDERS: 97 SQUADRON

LINCOLNSHIRE, 1944

‘Usual flares and aircraft shot down on way in,’ Flight-Lieutenant Charles Owen noted in his diary
¹
after a Berlin operation on 26 November 1943:

Target was clear and we could see fires burning from an attack on the previous night. Hundreds of searchlights and very heavy flak, firing mainly into the cones. Flew over Hanover by mistake on return journey, and was coned for seven minutes, lost height from 20,000 to 13,000 feet during evasive action. Several holes in starboard wing and roof of cockpit, and the bomb-aimer wounded slightly in the leg. Also attacked by fighter when coned, but only damage was six inches knocked off one blade of the starboard outer prop.

The night of 16 December 1943 became known as ‘Black Thursday’ among Bomber Command crews, when returning from Berlin they found their bases in England blanketed in impenetrable fog. Owen’s note of his own and 97 Squadron’s experience was typical:

Ten-tenths cloud over target. W/T and
Gee
packed up on way home, so homed across North Sea on D/F loop, which luckily was not jammed. Homed on to base on SBA beam, breaking cloud at 250 feet to find fog, rain and visibility about 300 yards and deteriorating. R/T then packed up, so after circling for ten minutes at 200 feet, landed without permission in appalling conditions. Six other aircraft landed at base, three landed away, three crews baled out when they ran out of fuel, four crashed when trying to land, and one was missing. Quite a night . . .

In order to understand the transformation that came over 97 Squadron and Bomber Command during 1944, the lightening of losses and the breakthrough to remarkable tactical success, it is necessary to remember the mood in which they emerged from winter, and from the Battle of Berlin. After losing one CO over Magdeburg, his successor did not live long enough to enter the squadron record book. Night after night, they took off into freak winds and fog, to face the flak and the night-fighters. A new pilot remembered arriving to join the unit at six o’clock one December evening, and moving into a hut with a crew dressing to operate that night. At 5 am he was awakened by the clatter of boots as the Service Police arrived to collect his dead room-mates’ possessions. There were many acquaintances and few close friends on Bomber Command stations that winter.

97 Squadron dispatched an average of twenty Lancasters a night, and almost invariably lost one, frequently two. On 28 January, of nineteen aircraft that took off for Berlin one returned early, two were lost and one, piloted by a tough Australian named Van Raalte, came home having failed to find ‘The Big City’, bombed Kiel instead, and had his rear gunner decapitated by flak. In the first fortnight of February, they were briefed three times for Berlin, only to have the operations scrubbed by bad weather. When they finally went again on the 15th, they lost one out of seventeen. In March, they lost two out of fourteen against Frankfurt on the 22nd, two out of fourteen against Berlin on the 24th, two out of fourteen against Nuremberg on the 30th.

97 was a Pathfinder squadron, one of Bennett’s Lancaster units, based at Bourn in Cambridgeshire, in a straggling wasteland of mud and Nissen huts, where men slept in their greatcoats to fight the all-pervading damp and cold. But like the rest of Bennett’s men, they took intense pride in their membership of 8 Group, a
perverse pleasure in the ban on publicity about their ‘ops’, in Bennett’s insistence that there should be no stars or professional heroes among his officers. ‘There will be no living VCs in 8 Group,’ the Australian announced in 1942. His edict stood in 1944. But his men cherished the hovering eagle badge that they were forbidden to wear on operations, and the inscribed Pathfinder Certificate that survivors were awarded on completion of their double tour of forty-five operations. Bennett was a humourless, unrelenting officer whom it was hard to like, but difficult not to respect as a professional airman. It was his achievement that he created a genuine Pathfinder spirit among the men of his squadrons, pitchforked into 8 Group from every corner of Bomber Command under all manner of circumstances. They had their share of LMF cases, ‘Fringe merchants’, poor pilots. But for the most part they were conscientious young men. By 1944 Bomber Command’s skills had come a long way from the Stone Age of 1940 and 1941. On most operations the bulk of Main Force bombed within three miles of the Target Indicators. The success or failure of a raid depended overwhelmingly on how these markers were placed, how successfully the Master Bomber corrected those that fell wide, how accurately the Supporters timed their back-up marking throughout the Main Force attack. Bennett’s crews understood all this, and did their utmost to fulfil their commander’s expectations.