Bomber Command (61 page)

Portal finally got his way in Quebec, not least because American attention was now overwhelmingly focused on the Pacific. The British, with their Bomber Command, were to have a last opportunity to make an independent contribution to the defeat of Germany. On 14 September, Arnold and Portal issued a new joint
directive on behalf of the Chiefs of Staff to Sir Norman Bottomley, Deputy Chief of Air Staff, and General Spaatz, the USAAF’s commander in Europe. Control of the strategic-bomber forces henceforth reverted from SHAEF to Bottomley and Spaatz as representatives of Portal and Arnold. The priority of
Pointblank
‘to bring about the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and economic systems’ was reasserted, save only that the Luftwaffe had ceased to be an important consideration. Support of the armies remained a major responsibility, and ‘important industrial areas’ were to be attacked ‘when weather or tactical conditions are unsuitable for operations against specific primary objectives’.

It was a clumsy command arrangement, which placed Portal at one remove from his notoriously wayward C-in-C. But the directive issued by Bottomley and Spaatz to Bomber Command and 8th Air Force on 25 September, translating the Chiefs of Staff’s instructions into formal orders, ranks among the most emphatic and specific of the war. There were no more wordy equivocations: oil became sole First Priority target, with transport links, tank and vehicle production as Second Priority. Perfunctory mention was also made of area targets, in the same terms as in the directive of 14 September.

The new orders were a disappointment to Sir Arthur Tedder, Deputy Supreme Commander at SHAEF. He had fought a fierce battle to concentrate the air attack on Germany’s rail and water transport links. Tedder was persuaded by the evidence presented to him by Professor Zuckerman and others that what the pre-
Overlord
bombing had achieved in breaking French transport links could now be repeated against those of Germany, producing speedy and dramatic paralysis reaching forward to the battlefield. But to be effective, Tedder’s Transport Plan called for the concentration of bomber effort. This was never achieved. During the winter of 1944 the 8th Air Force poured bombs on to marshalling yards and communication centres by H2X when the weather was too bad for oil targets, but in reality this amounted to nothing more than
American participation in the area-bombing campaign on the cities. Germany’s rail and water links were indeed hit with devastating effect by all the strategic air forces, including a series of notable precision attacks by Bomber Command, three of which breached the Dortmund–Ems Canal. But it was only in March 1945 that the effects of transport bombing became terminal for German industry. Most of the senior airmen and the members of the Combined Strategic Targets Committee had become wholehearted advocates of the oil offensive. It was their view which prevailed in Quebec, and to their purposes that 8th Air Force addressed its dedicated efforts in the winter of 1944.

Awareness seems only slowly to have grown on Sir Charles Portal, back in London, that Bomber Command was contributing less than its utmost energies to fulfilling the September directive. As Arnhem was fought and lost and the Allied ground offensive slithered into its wretched winter lassitude, Harris’s aircraft were hitting again and again at Germany’s cities. In the last three months of 1944, the C-in-C waged his last and greatest Battle of the Ruhr, with complete and terrible success within his chosen compass. 14,254 sorties were dispatched to the great industrial centres at which he had hammered for so long – Duisburg, Essen, Cologne, Düsseldorf and their lesser brethren. 60,830 tons of bombs were dropped – 85 per cent high-explosive now, for almost anything that would burn in these towns had long since gone to Harris’s bonfires. Only 136 aircraft were lost. The transmitting stations for
Oboe
advanced into Europe with the armies, vastly extending the range of accurately-guided marking. With the decline in the defences, accuracy and concentration rose among the great bomber force of more than a thousand ‘heavies’ which now set forth nightly. With the fall in casualties, aircrew experience and competence rose.

Yet in October, 6 per cent of Harris’s effort was directed against oil targets, less than in June. Between July and September 1944, 11 per cent of Bomber Command’s sorties were dispatched to oil plants, 20 per cent to cities. Between October and December, 14
per cent went to oil, 58 per cent to the cities. It was impossible to believe that Harris was applying himself to the September directive. He had merely returned to the great area-bombing campaign precisely where he left it in April, despite the almost unanimous conviction of the Air Staff that the policy had long been overtaken by events. Harris now embarked on a correspondence with Portal in defence of his convictions and policy, in the course of which the Chief of Air Staff first requested, then demanded, and at last pleaded with Harris to obey the orders he had been given.

Harris fired his opening salvo in this last great bombing controversy of the war on 1 November 1944. In a letter to Portal, he violently protested the range of demands on his forces, ‘the number of cooks now engaged in stirring the broth’. The Admiralty and the ball-bearing experts were tunnelling at his resources again, ‘and even the nearly defunct SOE
¹⁶
has raised its bloody head and produced what I hope is now its final death rattle . . .’

. . . in the past eighteen months, Bomber Command has virtually destroyed forty-five out of the leading sixty German cities. In spite of invasion diversions we have so far managed to keep up and even to exceed our average of two and a half cities devastated a month . . . There are not many industrial centres of population now left intact. Are we going to abandon this vast task, which the Germans themselves have long admitted to be their worst headache, just as it nears completion?

To complete his great design, said Harris, all that was required was the destruction of Magdeburg, Halle, Leipzig, Dresden, Chemnitz, Nuremberg, Munich, Coblenz, Karlsruhe and the surviving areas of Berlin and Hanover. Portal replied on 5 November: ‘At the risk of your dubbing me “another panacea merchant”, I believe the air offensive against oil gives us by far the best hope of complete victory in the next few months . . .’ The next day, Harris
dispatched a long answer in which he expressed his agreement about the importance of the oil plan, and offered tactical justification for the launching of great raids on Cologne and Bochum, which had been questioned by Portal. But, on the 12th, Portal returned to the fray:

You refer to a plan for the destruction of the sixty leading German cities, and to your efforts to keep up with, and even to exceed, your average of two and a half such cities devastated each month; I know that you have long felt such a plan to be the most effective way of bringing about the collapse of Germany. Knowing this, I have, I must confess, at times wondered whether the magnetism of the remaining German cities has not in the past tended as much to deflect our bombers from their primary objectives as the tactical and weather difficulties which you described so fully in your letter of 1 November. I would like you to reassure me that this is not so. If I knew you to be as wholehearted in the attack on oil as in the past you have been in the matter of attacking cities, I would have little to worry about . . .

In November the weight of bombs delivered against oil targets increased to 24.6 per cent of all Bomber Command effort, and even outstripped the 8th Air Force’s tonnage at the end of the month. But by 12 December, Harris was once more writing to Portal to declare his renewed scepticism about the value of the oil offensive. ‘The MEW experts have never failed to overstate their case on “panaceas” . . . The oil plan has already displayed similar symptoms.’ Portal replied on 22 December that he was ‘profoundly disappointed that you still appear to feel that the oil plan is just another “panacea” . . . Naturally, while you hold this view you will be unable to put your heart into the attack on oil.’ Harris replied on 28 December:

It has always been my custom to leave no stone unturned to get my views across, but when the decision is made I carry it out to the utmost and to the best of my ability. I am sorry that you should doubt this, and surprised indeed if you can point to any precedent in support of your statement. I can certainly quote precedent in the opposite sense.

This was truculence of a very high order, even by the standards of Sir Arthur Harris. Yet instead of seeking now to exert his authority, Portal chose to try to continue a rational debate with his C-in-C about the merits of razing cities: ‘While area bombing, if it could have been continued long enough and in sufficient weight, might in the end have forced the enemy to capitulate,’ he wrote on 8 January 1945, ‘his counter-measures would have prevented us from maintaining such a policy to the decisive point.’

But for the favourable air situation created by the Americans, said Portal, ‘it is possible that the night blitzing of German cities would by now have been too costly to sustain upon a heavy scale’. Here was a remarkable admission from the British Chief of Air Staff – that it was only the success of American air policy which had spared that of Britain from visible and humiliating defeat. Not surprisingly, Harris totally rejected Portal’s criticism of the area campaign. He now asserted flatly that he had no faith in selective bombing, ‘and none whatever in this present oil policy’.

Then he threw down the glove.

I will not willingly lay myself open again to the charge that the lack of success of a policy which I have declared at the outset . . . not to contain the seeds of success is, after the event, due to my not having tried. That situation is simply one of heads I lose, tails you win, and it is an intolerable situation . . . I therefore ask you to consider whether it is best for the prosecution of the war and the success of our arms, which alone matters, that I should remain in this situation . . .

In their judgement on the C-in-C of Bomber Command, the British official historians wrote:

Sir Arthur Harris made a habit of seeing only one side of a question and then of exaggerating it. He had a tendency to confuse advice with interference, criticism with sabotage and evidence with propaganda. He resisted innovations and was seldom open to persuasion. He was sceptical of the Air Staff in general, and of many officers who served upon it he was openly contemptuous. Seeing all issues in terms of black and white, he was impatient of any other possibility, and having taken upon himself tremendous responsibilities, he expected similar powers to be conferred.
²

Harris saw his own role in the ultimate Trenchardian sense, as the independent director of a campaign that he was entitled to wage in his own way for as long as he possessed the confidence of his superiors. He had now made it brutally apparent that if Bomber Command was to advance from an area force to a precision one, he himself must be sacked. The moment of truth had come for Portal.

Yet in these last months of war, how could the British public be reconciled to the dismissal of ‘Bomber’ Harris, whom Press, newsreel and radio publicity had built into one of the most celebrated British leaders of the war? It has been often and emphatically argued above that the great difficulty throughout the bomber offensive was to find any sensibly defined and generally acceptable criteria by which success or failure might be measured. Even after the war, it was to prove difficult to do so. For what specific defeat was Harris now to be sacked? It was unthinkable to reveal the nature, far less the course, of the dissension between the Chief of Air Staff and his C-in-C.

In all this it is important to stress what was at stake. No one familiar with the tactical and weather problems could have expected Bomber Command’s aircraft to maintain an unbroken offensive against Germany’s oil plants – the Americans failed to do so, despite their total commitment to the policy. Throughout the winter, the Allied armies were pressing their own urgent and almost compulsory demands on the strategic-bomber force. There were targets to be attacked at the behest of the Admiralty, alarmed
by a late surge in U-boat activity, and at the urging of the politicians with their own preoccupations. Tedder himself pressed for a concentrated attack on the Ruhr in October, the
Hurricane
plan. But having made allowances for all these elements, there were still many mornings when Harris sat at his desk confronted with a long list of targets of every kind, together with a weather forecast that – as usual throughout the war – made the C-in-C’s decision a matter of the most open judgement. And again and again, Harris came down in favour of attacking a city rather than oil plants. He believed that the use of massed bomber squadrons against oil installations was a waste of the power at his command.

The difference between the actual and potential effort Bomber Command concentrated on oil targets may have been only a matter of ten or twenty thousand sorties. But it is essential to reiterate what dramatic consequences might have stemmed from a real determination by Harris to put everything into oil, and even fractionally to increase Bomber Command’s contribution: ‘By the narrowest of margins, the strategic air offensive failed to smash Germany’s economy by this one method of attack,’ wrote the economist Professor Milward.
³
‘The most successful operation of the entire Allied strategical air warfare was against Germany’s fuel supply,’ wrote Galland of the Luftwaffe. ‘Looking back, it is difficult to understand why the Allies started this undertaking so late . . .’
⁴
‘Thus the Allies threw away success when it was already in their hands,’ wrote Speer, of the slackening of the oil offensive as far back as the summer of 1944. ‘Had they continued the attacks of March and April with the same energy, we would quickly have been at our last gasp.’
⁵