Bomber Command (63 page)

The strategic-bomber offensive contributed overwhelmingly to the destruction of Germany’s ability to continue the war after the spring of 1945. It remains a matter for speculation whether the German army would have been capable of prolonging its resistance thereafter, even had it been provided with more weapons with which to do so. This seems extraordinarily doubtful. Even in the midst of disaster, tank production was maintained almost to the end, although the tactical air forces made it difficult to move finished armour from the works to the battlefield. Jet aircraft continued to be produced underground despite the best efforts of the Allied bombers, and shortage of fuel and pilots contributed more than bombing to preventing their effective use in the air.

By the end of January 1945, Germany’s gas, power, water and rail systems were in chaos. Fuel of every kind was in desperately short supply on the battlefield and across the nation. Railway signalling and telephone systems and industrial communications had almost totally broken down. Yet the strategic-bomber offensive continued for ten more weeks. It became overwhelmingly an area
attack in the final stages, because beyond maintaining the ruin of the oil plants there were pitifully few selective targets to justify the employment of the huge air forces available. In one of the most telling phrases of his correspondence with Portal the previous autumn, Harris declared: ‘In Bomber Command we have always worked on the assumption that bombing anything in Germany is better than bombing nothing.’ Whatever their post-war assertions of principle, in these months the American airmen joined wholeheartedly with the British in devastating the last remaining undestroyed cities of Germany, because to leave their great forces idle on the ground seemed an intolerable alternative.

The Americans erected a smokescreen of strategic bluster to blur their part in the area-bombing campaign, which was much less attractive than Harris’s open commitment. Even before the Americans unleashed the ultimate area attacks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the distinction between the respective national bombing policies had grown to seem very threadbare indeed. But in January 1945 the 8th Air Force’s commander, Ira Eaker, could still declare fervently that ‘We should never allow the history of this war to convict us of throwing the strategic bomber at the man in the street.’
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General Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz, until March 1945 the senior American airman in Europe, consistently opposed proposals that were openly terroristic, such as
Thunderclap
in the summer of 1944, but proved perfectly willing to commit his aircraft to bombing cities if some credible window-dressing could be erected around their purpose, such as ‘blind-bombing of transportation centres’. By early 1945 the 8th Air Force had achieved an average circular probable error of two miles on operations guided by H2S. All its blind-bombing missions through the winter of 1944, therefore, amounted in reality if not in name to area bombing. Yet still the American official historians wrote:

It is not surprising that proposals for all-out attacks on Berlin, the Ruhr or other critical areas of Germany always seemed to come from the British, who had undergone the German raids of 1940–41, and were now enduring the punishment of VIs and V2s. All proposals frankly aimed at breaking the morale of the German people met the consistent opposition of General Spaatz, who repeatedly raised the moral issue involved, and American air force headquarters in Washington strongly supported him on the ground that such operations were contrary to air force policy and national ideals.
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Throughout the war the American airmen were driven by determination to win their place as an independent third service alongside the army and navy. Spaatz had gained a great degree of freedom to prosecute the war in his own way by the end of 1944, and great forces with which to set about doing so. He was determined to concede nothing to the RAF in the bombing competition that continued until the end of the war, and as Harris heaped explosives on to Germany’s cities in the last stages Spaatz’s bombers matched the British ruin for ruin.

It was the most futile and the most distasteful phase of the bomber offensive, and it was also that in which the airmen disastrously damaged their place in history. They did not then know the exact date upon which Germany would concede defeat, but it was apparent for months beforehand that the end was so close that the razing of cities could do nothing to hasten it. The vast American fire-raising attacks on Japan, in which Lemay’s Superfortresses killed 84,000 people in a day before the atomic bomb was heard of, have somehow escaped the widespread attention of posterity. But the attacks on Dresden by Bomber Command and the American 8th Air Force between 13 and 15 February 1945, which destroyed the city and killed a minimum of 30,000 and perhaps as many as 100,000 people, aroused a revulsion even in the dying days of the war which has not been diminished by the passing of a generation.

It is ironic that while Harris and Spaatz must accept chief responsibility for continuing the area offensive after it ceased to
have any strategic relevance, the Allied attack on Dresden cannot be laid at their doors. Dresden had indeed been on Harris’s target lists for months, but the impetus finally to launch the raid on the great East German city came from the Prime Minister and the Chief of Air Staff. Since the end of 1943, with the exception of his role in the pre-
Overlord
debate, Churchill had displayed diminishing interest in bombing, as so many other great issues of war and diplomacy unfolded around him. He continued occasionally to invite Harris to dine,
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but as has been suggested above, the C-in-C’s real influence upon and protection from the Prime Minister may not have been nearly as great as both Portal and Harris supposed, by the winter of 1944.

Yet now, as Churchill prepared to leave for Yalta for the last major Allied conference of the European war, he turned almost impulsively to consider what evidence he could offer the Russians of Western support for their great offensives in the East. He talked to Sinclair on the night of 25 January 1945. The next day the Air Minister informed the Air Staff that the Prime Minister wanted to know Bomber Command’s proposals for ‘blasting the Germans in their retreat from Breslau’. The old
Thunderclap
plan for delivering a series of overwhelming raids to bring about the collapse of German morale was taken out and dusted down. Yet Portal was not at all keen to divert the Allies’ massed air resources from the tasks he considered pre-eminent: hitting jet-aircraft factories, and maintaining the ruin of Germany’s oil plants. He said that he thought the Allies might merely commit ‘available effort’ to ‘one big attack on Berlin, and attacks on Dresden, Leipzig, Chemnitz, or any other cities where a severe blitz will not only cause confusion in the evacuation from the east, but will also hamper the movement of troops from the west’. Sinclair submitted a long memorandum to the Prime Minister outlining these possibilities. He received a crisp reply:

I did not ask you last night about plans for harrying the German retreat from Breslau. On the contrary, I asked whether Berlin, and no doubt other large cities in East Germany, should not now be considered especially attractive targets. I am glad that this is ‘under examination’. Pray report to me tomorrow what is going to be done.

Sir Norman Bottomley forthwith dispatched an official letter to Harris, pointing out the implications of the Russian advance, and reporting that Portal favoured one big attack on Berlin, with related operations against Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz, ‘subject to the overriding claims of oil and other approved targets within the current directive’. At Yalta on 4 February the Russians submitted a memorandum in which they formally requested strategic air attacks against Germany’s eastern communications, especially such centres as Berlin and Leipzig. On 6 February, Portal signalled Bottomley that the Air Ministry proposals for the eastern air attacks had been approved by the Chiefs of Staff. Thus on the night of 13 February Bomber Command launched its great fire-raising attack on Dresden, to be followed up by those of the 8th Air Force. Little but the railway yards escaped destruction. Chemnitz was fired the next night. Berlin, already heavily attacked by the 8th Air Force earlier in the month, was hit with devastating effect on the night of 24 February by Bomber Command. It is important to stress that to those who planned and directed it, the raid on Dresden was no different from scores of other operations mounted during the years of war. Bomber Command’s attacks had reached an extraordinary pitch of technical efficiency, but it was impossible to anticipate the firestorm which developed, multiplying the usual devastation and deaths a hundredfold. To the staff at High Wycombe, Dresden was simply another German town. Here are Bomber Command’s hitherto unpublished briefing notes, issued to Groups and squadrons on the eve of the Dresden raid:

Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester, is also far the largest unbombed built-up area the enemy has got. In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westwards and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium, not only to give shelter to workers, refugees and troops alike, but to house the administrative services displaced from other areas. At one time well known for its china, Dresden has developed into an industrial city of first-class importance, and like any large city with its multiplicity of telephone and rail facilities, is of major value for controlling the defence of that part of the front now threatened by Marshal Koniev’s breakthrough.

The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front, to prevent the use of the city in the way of further advance, and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.
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Much of this, of course, was fantasy. Dresden was not a city of major industrial significance. And unlike so many of Bomber Command’s targets of the past five years which had been mere names to the British public, symbols of Nazi power such as Nuremberg or of enemy industrial might such as Essen, Dresden was a city which an important section of educated Englishmen had heard of, read about, visited. Since the eighteenth century, the old town had stood for all that was finest, most beautiful and cultured in Germany, a haven where Trollopian heroines sought exile, visited by generations of young English noblemen on the Grand Tour. For the first time since the bomber offensive began, on the news of the destruction of Dresden, a major wave of anger and dismay swept through Whitehall and the Air Ministry, echoed in Parliament, and finally reached the gates of High Wycombe. Urgent questions were asked by important people about the reasons for destroying the city.

Concern was heightened by the release of an Associated Press dispatch from SHAEF on 17 February, in which a correspondent reported that ‘Allied air chiefs’ had at last embarked on ‘deliberate terror bombing of German population centres as a ruthless expedient to hasten doom’. The attacks on Dresden, Chemnitz and
Berlin had been launched ‘for the avowed purpose of heaping more confusion on Nazi road and rail traffic, and to sap German morale’. This dispatch – which of course was perfectly accurate, although its news was three years old – was hastily suppressed by the censor in Britain. But it had already been widely distributed in America, causing a major public controversy whose echoes soon reached London. Popular concern might have been even greater had it been known that at the end of February the entire resources of British and American tactical and strategic air power were committed briefly to the execution of the consciously terroristic American operation
Clarion
, attacking local transport centres the length of Germany in a kind of inverted
Thunderclap
, designed to create moral collapse by bringing the war into even the smallest centres of population.
Clarion
tailed off without achieving any measurable success. Concentrated attacks on the cities, the airmen believed, were a more effective method of sowing despondency than widely dispersed local raids.

But February 1945 marked the moment when farsighted airmen and politicians began to perceive that history might judge the achievements of strategic air power with less enthusiasm than their own Target Intelligence departments. General Marshall asserted publicly that Dresden had been bombed at the specific request of the Russians. In the midst of the controversy, General Arnold cabled Spaatz, seeking to be informed of the distinction between ‘morale bombing’ and radar attacks on transportation targets in urban areas. Spaatz replied that ‘he had not departed from the historic American policy in Europe, even in the case, of Berlin, and Arnold expressed himself as entirely satisfied with the explanation’.
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This, of course, was cant. But its incessant repetition would do much to spare Spaatz and Eaker from the criticism heaped upon Harris in the post-war era.

Churchill also sensed the new climate. On 28 March 1945 he composed a memorandum for the Chiefs of Staff Committee and the Chief of Air Staff:

It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land. We shall not, for instance, be able to get housing materials out of Germany for our own needs because some temporary provision would have to be made for the Germans themselves. The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. I am of the opinion that military objectives must henceforward be more strictly studied in our own interests rather than that of the enemy. The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.