Bomber Command (6 page)

On the night of 18 December, there was a knock on the door of Mary Jones’s little flat in Feltwell. It was 37 Squadron’s adjutant, struggling to mask his embarrassment in harshness: ‘You know your husband’s not coming back, don’t you?’ That night Mary dreamt of Harry’s golden hair floating on the sea. She was quickly gone from Feltwell. The station made it apparent that it was anxious to rid itself of its dreadful crop of widows as hastily as possible. It was weeks before she heard confirmation of German radio claims that Harry, with May and Ruse, was a prisoner. It was Christmas 1945 before the Joneses sat down together to eat the pudding that she had made that winter of 1939, and which she stored so hopefully through the six Christmases of war that followed.

Most of the other men who survived 18 December were killed on operations in the years that followed. Bill Macrae, 9 Squadron’s tough little Canadian, died perhaps most pathetically of all, on collecting a Distinguished Flying Cross from Buckingham Palace a few weeks after the Wilhelmshaven raid. After a celebration with his crew, he took off from Weybridge to fly home to Norfolk, and almost immediately crashed into the ground.

But if it had not been Weybridge, the odds were overwhelming that it would have been Cologne, Hanover, Berlin, or Frankfurt, some night in the five years that were to come. The Wilhelmshaven raid was merely a blooding, a minor incident in the first weeks of a long war. Its importance was that it struck a major blow at the strategic and tactical concepts on which the Royal Air Force had based itself for twenty years – although its leaders declined to see the battle in these terms. The Wilhelmshaven raid was the beginning of the confrontation between the theory and practice of warfare that would dominate the long campaign of Bomber Command.

1 » IN THE BEGINNING, TRENCHARD

BRITISH BOMBER POLICY, 1917–40

From the time when the first experiments were made in air power during the First World War until the great Bomber Command attack on Dresden and the discharge of the first atomic bombs by the USAAF thirty years later, the whole development and direction of strategic bombing was a highly and continuously controversial matter . . . The controversy raged over the whole field of the offensive which embraced questions of strategic desirability, operational possibility, economic, industrial and moral vulnerability, and legal and moral responsibility . . .

– Official History of the Strategic Air Offensive against Germany 1939–45
¹

One clear May morning in 1917, a formation of German Gotha bombers droned high over the Kent coastal town of Folkestone and the neighbouring army camp of Shornecliffe. In the few minutes that followed, their bombs killed 95 people and injured 175. The seventy-four British aircraft which took off to intercept them were able to shoot down only one Gotha. Three weeks later, on 17 June, twenty-one Gothas mounted a second daylight attack. Seven bombers attacked small towns in Kent and Essex, while the remaining fourteen flew on in diamond formation to attack London itself. 162 people were killed and 432 injured. A third attack on 7 July killed 65 people and injured 245. It was the inauguration of strategic air
bombardment, the first significant attempt by an air force to take advantage of this third dimension of warfare to pass above protecting armies and navies and strike direct at the nation of the enemy.

The consternation, indeed panic, provoked by the German attack was considerably greater among British politicians and in the press than among Britons at large. All governments in wartime are nervous about the effects of unexpected shocks on national morale, and the Gothas came at a moment when mounting war-weariness was apparent in Britain. The bombings seemed to signal the inception of a new, ghastly age, vividly foretold as far back as 1908 by England’s most celebrated contemporary prophet, H. G. Wells, in his book
The War in the Air
. Extraordinary efforts were made to strengthen the air defences, especially around London. Fighters were recalled from France. Guns and searchlights were deployed for the first time in depth. Lloyd George, the Prime Minister, appointed himself and one of the Empire’s foremost heroes, the rehabilitated Boer General Smuts, as a committee of two, to study how best Britain’s air forces could be reorganized to meet the German threat; above all, to consider whether the national interest was best served by maintaining the air forces as subordinate corps within the British Army and Royal Navy. In the event, Smuts conducted the inquiry single-handed, with the assistance of army and Royal Flying Corps officers. The Smuts Report, as it became known, inspired the creation of the Royal Air Force as an independent service alongside the army and navy. More than this, Smuts sowed the germ of the seed of the vast British strategic air offensive in the Second World War.

Somewhere in the midst of his rather cursory investigation, Smuts became captivated by the vision of air power. He was fascinated by the concept of a New Force in warfare – this, at a moment when in France the Old Forces were achieving the most spectacular and ghastly débâcle in their history. His report, completed on 17 August 1917, formed the foundation on which British airmen would build a complete theory of warfare in the next twenty years:

An air service [Smuts wrote to the War Cabinet] can be used as an independent means of war operations. Nobody that witnessed the attack on London on 11 July could have any doubt on that point . . . As far as can at present be foreseen there is absolutely no limit to the scale of its future independent war use. And the day may not be far off when aerial operations with their devastation of enemy lands and destruction of industrial and populous centres on a vast scale may become the principal operations of war, to which the older forms of military and naval operations may become secondary and subordinate.

The magnitude and significance of the transformation now in progress are not easily recognized. It requires some imagination to realize that next summer, while our Western Front may still be moving forward at a snail’s pace in Belgium and France, the air battle front will be far behind on the Rhine, and that its continuous and intense pressure against the chief industrial centres of the enemy as well as on his lines of communication may form an important factor in bringing about peace.

Here indeed was a vision, and one which sent as great a shock of anger and scorn through the ranks of the generals and admirals as of excitement and enthusiasm through those of the airmen. At another time, the combined hostility of the War Office and the Admiralty would have been enough to kill the Smuts Report without notice. But in the autumn of 1917 the political stock of the leaders of the two established services had sunk to a very low ebb indeed in the eyes of the British Government. Service objections to Smuts’s recommendations were interpreted as rearguard actions to prevent any transfer of forces from their own commands. Lloyd George overruled them. He approved the creation of an ‘Independent Air Force’ to begin bombing operations against Germany at the earliest possible moment. He authorized the buildup of a powerful fighter force in England to meet the German bomber threat. He decreed the union of the Royal Flying Corps and
the Royal Naval Air Service to form the new Royal Air Force from 1 April 1918. The RFC’s commander, Sir Hugh Trenchard, was brought back from France to become the first Chief of Air Staff.

To the Government’s satisfaction, this extraordinary wave of activity produced results. The Germans abandoned daylight bombing in the face of stiffening opposition, and for the rest of the war troubled England with only desultory night attacks by Gothas and Zeppelins. Although the merger of the RFC and the RNAS provoked such heat at high level, on the squadrons themselves it was accomplished without excessive ill will. Trenchard, who had earlier opposed the creation of a Royal Air Force as an independent service, now surprised and confused everybody by the fierce single-mindedness with which he nurtured the fledgling against the army and navy’s rapacious designs. His initial tenure as Chief of Air Staff was short-lived, for he quarrelled with the Air Minister and returned to France to command the Independent Air Force – the Allies’ embryo strategic bombing force – for the remaining months of the war, The 543 tons of explosives his aircraft dropped on Germany before the armistice made only a pinprick impact on the enemy, but enormously enlarged Trenchard’s vision of air power. At the end of the war, after a change of Air Minister, Trenchard returned to England not only as Chief of Air Staff, but as the messiah of the new form of warfare. His passionate belief in the potential of a bomber offensive against an enemy nation was to dominate the Royal Air Force for more than twenty years.

At the armistice, the RAF was larger than the British Army had been in 1914. But in the first months of peace, this vast organization was almost totally dismantled. Like the other two services, the air force found its annual financial estimates cut to the bone. Indeed, throughout the 1920s it would have been difficult for the RAF to resist total dismemberment but for Trenchard’s invention of the new scheme of ‘Air Control’ for some of the wilder frontiers of the Empire, notably Iraq. Trenchard persuaded the Government that rather than maintain expensive standing garrisons of troops and dispatch punitive expeditions against recalcitrant tribesmen,
the RAF could keep them at bay with occasional prescriptions of air attack. In the next twenty years, the RAF’s only operational experience was gained dropping bombs, usually without opposition, on the hillside villages of rebellious peasants. Local Political Officers remained sceptical of Air Control and its achievements, but Trenchard and his followers were convinced that, in the years between the two world wars, it was only their well-publicized activities abroad which sufficed to save the RAF from extinction at home.

Between 1920 and 1938 the air force commanded only an average 17 per cent of Britain’s paltry defence budget. The RAF share fell to a low of less than £11 million in 1922, and never passed £20 million a year until the great drive for rearmament began, in 1935. There was no question in Trenchard’s mind of trying to do everything, of seeking a balanced force. With such tiny resources, he concentrated them where he believed that they mattered – on his bomber squadrons. He was convinced that fighters had no chance of effectively countering a bomber attack, and he grudged every fighter unit that he was compelled to keep in being as a sop to public and political opinion. Trenchard’s air force was to be devoted decisively to strategic rather than tactical ends.

In my view [he wrote, in an important and controversial memorandum to his fellow Chiefs of Staff in May 1928] the object of all three services is the same, to defeat the enemy nation, not merely its army, navy or air force.

For any army to do this, it is almost always necessary as a preliminary step to defeat the enemy’s army, which imposes itself as a barrier that must first be broken down.

It is not, however, necessary for an air force, in order to defeat the enemy nation, to defeat its armed forces first. Air power can dispense with that intermediate step, can pass over the enemy navies and armies, and penetrate the air defences and attack direct the centres of production, transportation and communication from which the enemy war effort is maintained . . . The stronger side, by developing the more powerful offensive, will provoke in his weaker enemy increasingly insistent calls for the protective employment of aircraft. In this way he will throw the enemy on to the defensive and it will be in this manner that air superiority will be obtained, and not by direct destruction of air forces.

In the bitter struggle to retain a
raison d’être
for the RAF as an independent service, Trenchard argued that aircraft provided an opportunity to wage an entirely new kind of war. The army and the Royal Navy greeted his prophecies with memoranda in which conventional courtesies did little to mask withering scorn. But Trenchard was uncrushable. Although often completely inarticulate at a conference table, ‘Boom’ (a nickname his remarkable voice had earned for him) possessed much personal presence and the power of inspiring great affection. Through the 1920s he gathered around himself in the middle ranks of the air force a body of passionate young disciples, not only captured by his vision of air power, but devoted to the old man himself. Portal, Harris, Cochrane and Slessor were among the most prominent. The Hon. Ralph Cochrane, for example, who would be Harris’s outstanding wartime Group commander, met Trenchard in Egypt one day in 1921. Cochrane had joined the Royal Navy in 1908 and flew airships on convoy escort during the First World War. He once tried to hit a German submarine with four 8-lb bombs without successfully convincing either himself or the enemy of the efficacy of air power. He was still an airship man when ‘Boom’ entered his life. ‘Young man,’ said the fatherly Trenchard, ‘you’re wasting your time. Go and learn to fly an aeroplane.’ Within a few years of this Damascene conversion Cochrane was a flight commander in Iraq, where Harris was converting Vernon troop carriers into bombers on his own initiative, and experimenting with the prone position for bomb-aiming.

In the years between the wars, air power and the threat of bombing offensives against great cities became matters of growing public
debate and concern. They provoked an enormous literature, much of it fanciful, on bombers and air defence, on air-raid precautions and the morality of bombing. It is generally accepted that the godfather of air power was the Italian General Giulio Douhet, whose book
The Command of the Air
was published in 1921. Douhet ranks alongside Trenchard and Billy Mitchell in America, the most important advocates of assault on the heart of a nation by self-contained, self-defending bomber formations. Captain Basil Liddell Hart and Colonel J. F. C. Fuller would come to be regarded as the foremost British military thinkers of the twentieth century, and in later life became formidable opponents of Bomber Command’s strategic air offensive. But in 1920 Fuller foresaw that in the next war ‘Fleets of aeroplanes will attack the enemy’s great industrial and governing centres. All these attacks will be made against the civil population in order to compel it to accept the will of the attacker . . .’
²
Liddell Hart wrote in 1925, in his book
Paris, or the Future of War
: