Bomber Command (9 page)

Yet it is important to notice that Fighter Command’s brilliant achievement in 1940 only became possible in a situation in which disaster had befallen British strategy. While the Luftwaffe was trained and equipped for mobile operations from improvised airstrips, the RAF had become deeply wedded to the concept of controlled operations from secure bases. The performance of the 261 Hurricane fighters supporting the 160 Battles of the Advanced Air Striking Force in the Battle of France in 1940 was not impressive. Divorced from Fighter Command’s sophisticated warning and direction system, which could only operate in defence of Britain itself, the British fighter squadrons were at a loss. Had the Battle of France continued for even a few more weeks instead of ending so abruptly in disaster, the RAF’s inability to support the British Army effectively might have been even more embarrassingly exposed.

The composition of the Royal Air Force in 1939 reflected the twenty-year struggle about its purpose: there was a substantial bomber force designed to pursue the airmen’s strategic offensive theories, and a fighter arm equipped with short-range, slightly-built and lightly-armed aircraft called into being almost entirely by public and political pressure, organized solely for the defence of Britain. And whereas politicians, scientists and civil servants had taken the keenest interest in the development of Fighter Command, Bomber Command was the subject of much less public concern, and the airmen were left to develop it largely as they saw fit. Professor R. V. Jones, the scientist who would play so prominent a part in the key radar intelligence discoveries of the war, was one of those who noted Bomber Command’s shortcomings in the last days of peace:

I was . . . astonished by the complacency that existed regarding our ability to navigate at long range at night. The whole of our bombing policy depended on this assumption, but I was assured that by general instrument flying, coupled with navigation by the stars, Bomber Command was confident that it could pinpoint targets in Germany at night, and that there was therefore no need for any such radio aids as I had proposed . . .
¹⁰

Yet the prospect of war concentrates minds wonderfully. In the last months of peace, as urgent inquiries began to flow to the airmen from Whitehall about their state of readiness, about tactical and strategic plans on the outbreak of war, the first tremors of awareness of its desperate plight became apparent within Bomber Command. In the wake of Munich, the C-in-C and the Air Ministry advised the Government that it would be in Britain’s interests to accept any restrictions on bombing that could be internationally agreed. The Joint Planners confirmed this advice on 24 October 1938. A scheme was devised for a raid on Munich by two stand-by squadrons of bombers if the crisis exploded without warning: the Staff predicted 100 per cent losses. In May 1939 the AOC of 3
Group reported to Bomber Command HQ that ‘Dead Reckoning navigation by day above cloud can only be expected to get aircraft within fifty miles of the target.’ In July, Bomber Command’s C-in-C Sir Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt was writing: ‘As things are at present, the gunners have no real confidence in their ability to use this equipment efficiently in war, and captains and crews have, I fear, little confidence in the ability of the gunners to defend them against destruction by enemy aircraft.’ After a generation in which, at Trenchard’s insistence, the RAF had dismissed the need to make provision for fighter escorts for bomber formations, only months before the outbreak of war Ludlow-Hewitt sprang a thunderbolt:

Experience in China and in Spain seems clearly to indicate that with the aircraft in use in these two theatres of war at present, Fighter Escorts are considered absolutely essential for the protection of Bomber aircraft. So far as I am aware this policy runs counter to the view long held by the Air Staff.

It did indeed. There had never been any Bomber Command counterpart of Fighter Command’s Biggin Hill experiment, designed to test equipment under operational conditions. Ludlow-Hewitt pressed in vain for the creation of a Bombing Development Unit. He met Sir Henry Tizard for the first time only on 4 July 1939. More and more airmen were becoming convinced that most, if not all, Bomber Command’s operations would have to be carried out at night, yet the art of night bombing in the RAF was scarcely more technically advanced than blindfold practice at a coconut shy.

As his
coup de théâtre
, final judgement on the RAF’s twenty-year commitment to a strategic bomber offensive, Ludlow-Hewitt informed the Air Ministry before the outbreak of war that if his Command was ordered to undertake an all-out offensive against Germany, he anticipated that his medium bombers – the Blenheims – would be destroyed in three and a half weeks. The heavy bombers – Hampdens, Whitleys and Wellingtons – would be totally destroyed in seven and a half weeks. The Chief of Air Staff, Sir Cyril Newall, reluctantly bowed to the inevitable. On 23 August
1939 he wrote to Ludlow-Hewitt that since it had already been agreed that the odium of inaugurating the air war should be left to the Germans.

Our plans must to some extent be dependent on the initial reaction of the enemy . . . it would be manifestly unwise to expend a high proportion of our best aircraft and crews at the beginning, when there are so many unknown factors in air warfare of which we have to gain experience. This would be all the more undesirable during a phase when for political reasons we are confined to a course of action which is neither economical nor fully effective . . .

This ‘course of action’ committed Bomber Command to attack only definable military targets where there was no reasonable risk of bombs falling on civilians. The British Government hoped fervently to avoid provoking a mass air assault upon their own people. Instead of seeking to convince the politicians that their scruples were misguided, the airmen themselves gratefully assented to a policy that would avoid instantly exposing the inadequacy of Bomber Command at the outbreak of war. The chief tasks of the bomber force, it now appeared, would be precisely those for which no effective preparation had been made at all: attack on the German navy at sea and close support of the British Army in France under Western Air Plan 4b.

Both among his contemporaries and among historians, Sir Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt has incurred hostility and even scorn for his outbreak of realism at one of the most critical, if inglorious, moments of his service’s history. A teetotal Christian Scientist of acute humanitarian sensitivities, he insisted upon being informed personally whenever an aircraft under his command was lost, and invariably spoke personally to the responsible Station Commander. As the RAF prepared to plunge into war, many of his young staff officers were convinced that the austere Ludlow lacked the steel in his soul to lead Bomber Command in battle. And indeed he was replaced on 4 April 1940, before the war began in earnest. But
Ludlow-Hewitt was a highly intelligent man, who made a great contribution by speaking so frankly about the shortcomings of his command. In all forces at war, there is a fear that voicing unpleasant truths may be construed as defeatism. In Bomber Command in the next six years, there would be long periods when men shrank from discussing the emperor’s absence of clothes, of which many of them were silently aware. Most fighting men believe that it is preferable to do something, however undesirable, rather than merely to stand passive. Ludlow’s reluctance to lead Bomber Command on the course which had been set since its birth seemed unmilitary, even old-womanish. His departure from Bomber Command in 1940 was greeted with relief, a sense that at last the real business of conducting the war in the air could begin.

Yet whose judgement was justified by events? It is worth comparing Ludlow-Hewitt’s relentlessly pessimistic minutes with a memorandum written four days after the outbreak of war by one of the young turks, John Slessor, Director of Plans. Slessor said:

Although our numerical inferiority in the air is a most important factor it should not be allowed to obscure other potent considerations. We are now at war with a nation which possesses an imposing façade of armed might, but which, behind that façade, is politically rotten, weak in financial and economic resources, and already heavily engaged on another front [Poland]. The lessons of history prove that victory does not always go to the big battalions. At present we have the initiative. If we seize it now we may gain important results; if we lose it by waiting we shall probably lose more than we gain . . .

It was fortunate for the crews of the first generation of Bomber Command that Ludlow-Hewitt had his way and Slessor did not get his.
⁶

It is one of the small ironies of history that the British, who had forged a strategic bomber force with the specific intention of striking at the urban centres of the enemy, left to the Germans, who had prepared their air force for an army support role, the dubious honour of laying waste the first city blocks. ‘Some amazing stories of the opportunities forgone by Great Britain in observance of the law will be told some day,’ declared an editorial in
The Aeroplane
of 29 March 1940. ‘Pilots, confronted with perfect targets, have had to keep the law, grind their teeth in chagrin, and hope for a change in the temper of the war.’ The writer may have been thinking of Wing-Commander Kellett and his Wellingtons cruising over the German warships in Bau Haven. But in this matter moral restraint and operational expediency marched together. It was to be May 1940 before Bomber Command began to discover in earnest that even when ‘confronted with perfect targets’, it was entirely another matter to hit them.

At the outbreak of war, Britain hastened to accept President Roosevelt’s appeal to the belligerents to renounce the bombing of civilian targets. Bomber Command launched the spasmodic series of attacks on the German fleet; flew scores of monotonous weather, maritime reconnaissance and mining sorties; and sent the Whitleys and Hampdens forth over Germany night after night, inundating the enemy with propaganda leaflets. The CO of 51 Squadron in desperation entered some of his crews for navigation courses at Southampton University. Slessor, the Director of Plans, pressed for more aggressive policies. Although he noted carefully in his memorandum to the Chief of Air Staff on 7 September 1939 that ‘indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations as such will never form part of our policy’, he urged that Bomber Command commence bombing oil plants and power stations in the Ruhr. In the spring of 1940 he put forward a proposal for adapting the RAF’s old Iraqi Air Control techniques by ‘proscribing’ listed German industrial cities, leafleting the population in warning, and then commencing air bombardment.

But throughout the long months of the Phoney War that ended
in May 1940, Government, public and senior airmen alike were very content to stand passive. ‘We are fighting for a moral issue,’ declared a
Daily Mail
editorial in January 1940, denouncing proposals for bombing Germany. ‘We should do nothing unworthy of our cause.’ At an Air Ministry conference as late as 28 April 1940, when the battle of Norway was already all but lost, the Vice-Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshal Peirse, said that since a German bomber effort against Britain would be four times as heavy as anything Bomber Command could mount, ‘it would therefore be foolish to provoke such an attack needlessly unless Bomber Command could promise decisive results’.

In the first months of war the nature of the air force that Trenchard had created was clearly revealed by its deployments. The bulk of the British Army was in France, where it was expected that sooner or later, the great German blow would fall. But whatever their differences on other issues, the airmen were united in their determination that they would not spend the war acting as long-range artillery for the British Army, or for that matter for the Royal Navy. The ‘Advanced Air Striking Force’ that went to France under the command of Air Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Ugly’ Barrett comprised ten squadrons of Battles – 160 aircraft, well known to be the ‘expendables’ of Bomber Command. The overwhelming weight of the Command’s striking power remained at its stations in England, poised for a strategic offensive against Germany. In September 1939 the average daily availability of aircraft stood at 280 out of a total strength of 349 – 77 Wellingtons, 61 Whitleys, 71 Hampdens, 140 Blenheims. The Blenheim ‘medium’ bombers were notionally available for operations as part of the Advanced Air Striking Force, and indeed during the spring of 1940 a number were moved to France. But when the German onslaught descended with the full weight of the Luftwaffe behind it, it was on the Battle and Hurricane squadrons of Barrett’s force that responsibility fell for the direct support of the British army, and tragically inadequate they proved to be. Bomber Command, like Fighter Command, was indeed ‘conserved’ for the future rather than destroyed in the
Battle of France, but as the British army waded into the Channel from the beaches of Dunkirk, the broken battalions which cursed the RAF for its absence could not be expected to understand the airmen’s excellent and historically inevitable reasons why.

The RAF’s misfortune was that it had believed its own publicity. For twenty years it luxuriated in the conviction ‘We are,
ergo
we are capable of a strategic bombing offensive.’ It failed to recognise the principle that any theory or weapon of war is effective only if the means are available to exploit it appropriately. Now, in the first years of war, the RAF became the victim of its own pre-war propaganda. The British army and the Royal Navy vented their spleen upon the air marshals for their inability to fulfil the promises of peace. In reality, the RAF’s strengths were considerable and its qualitative shortcomings were little worse than those of its enemies. In September 1939 the Luftwaffe possessed no bomb larger than 1,100 lb, and was chronically short of hardware because Hitler had halted bomb production in expectation of a short war. Luftwaffe aircraft were experiencing acute technical problems with oxygen equipment and guns freezing at high altitude. The Germans possessed no power-operated turrets for their bombers, their fighter cannon were quite inadequate, and they lacked sufficient reserves of aircraft to back up the imposing strength of their first-line. Above all, the Luftwaffe’s He111, Do17 and even Ju88 bombers were no more capable than Bomber Command’s Hampdens, Whitleys and Wellingtons of operating successfully in daylight at acceptable cost
unless local air superiority had first been obtained
by the defeat of the defending fighter force. At night the Luftwaffe possessed the capability to ‘bomb on the beam’ by radio navigation aids of the kind that Bomber Command so signally lacked. But while Germany won the first air battles of the war, she would lose the Battle of Britain even when operating bombers under massive fighter escort at short range from their bases.