The Second World War (68 page)

Harris’s commitment to area bombing was also lent credibility by the appearance, at the moment he took command, of a new and greatly improved instrument of attack. The British bombers available at the beginning of the war, the Hampdens, Whitleys and elegant Wellingtons, were inadequate bomb-carriers. Their larger successors, the Stirlings and Manchesters, were also defective because they lacked altitude and power respectively. The Halifax and particularly the Lancaster, however, which appeared in 1942, were bombers of a new generation. The Lancaster, which first flew operationally in March 1942, proved to be capable of carrying enormous bomb-loads, eventually the 10-ton ‘Grand Slam’, over great distances and to be robust enough to withstand heavy attack by German night-fighters without falling from the sky.

At the outset, though, Harris was concerned not with quality but with quantity. His aim was to concentrate the largest possible number of bombers over a German city with the object of overwhelming its defences and firefighting forces. A successful raid on the Paris Renault factory in March prompted him to undertake a raid against the historic Hanseatic town of Lübeck on the Baltic on the night of 28/29 March 1942. He was cold-bloodedly frank about his intentions: ‘It seemed to me better to destroy an industrial town of moderate importance than to fail to destroy a large industrial city. . . . I wanted my crews to be well “blooded” . . . to have a taste of success for a change.’ Lübeck, a gem of medieval timber architecture, burned to the ground, and the raiding forces returned to base 95 per cent intact. The ‘exchange ratio’ persuaded Harris that he had discovered a formula for victory.

On four nights in April Bomber Command repeated its incendiary success at Rostock, another medieval Baltic town; ‘These two attacks’, wrote Harris, ‘brought the total acreage of devastation by bombing in Germany up to 780 acres, and in regard to bombing [on Britain] about squared our account.’ The Luftwaffe retaliated by so-called ‘Baedeker’ (tourist-guide) attacks on the historic towns of Bath, Norwich, Exeter, York and Canterbury. However, it lacked the strength to match Harris’s next escalation, which took the form of an attack by a thousand bombers, the first ‘thousand-bomber raid’, on Cologne in May. By stripping training units and workshops of their machines, Bomber Command concentrated the largest number of aircraft yet seen in German skies over this, the third largest city in the Reich, and burned everything in its centre except the famous cathedral.

The success of Bomber Command’s new tactics depended not only upon increased numbers and improved target-finding but also on a frank adoption of fire-raising methods. Thenceforward its bomb-loads were to contain small incendiaries and large high-explosive containers in the proportion of two to one. At Cologne 600 acres were burned. Thousand-bomber raids on Essen and Bremen in June achieved similar effects; Essen, in the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial centre, had been already attacked eight times between March and April. In the spring and summer of 1943 Bomber Command devoted its efforts to a ‘Battle of the Ruhr’ which multiplied the incendiary effect many times over.

By then the strategic bombing offensive against Germany had become a two-air-force campaign. The United States Army’s Eighth Air Force had arrived in Britain in the spring of 1942 and undertaken its first raid in August, when it attacked marshalling yards at Rouen. The attack was staged in daylight, in accordance with the philosophy worked out over many years before the war by the Army Air Force’s officers. Exercised by the pressing need to destroy hostile naval forces operating in American waters, they had developed both an aircraft and a bombsight designed to deliver large bomb-loads on to small targets with precision in daylight. The Norden bombsight was the most accurate optical instrument yet mounted in a strategic bomber. The bomber which carried it, the B-17, was notable for its long range and heavy defensive armament, the latter central to the American belief that, in the absence of a satisfactory long-range fighter, their bombers could fight their way to and from the target without suffering unacceptable losses. However, the requirements of range and armament placed a heavy penalty on the B-17’s bombload. Under normal circumstances the bombload of a B-17 seldom exceeded 4000lb and in many operations fell as low as 2600lb. Redeployed from a maritime defensive to a continental offensive role, General Ira C. Eaker’s Eighth Air Force was destined for deep-penetration missions by daylight to complement Bomber Command’s night raids into Germany and its occupied territories. By January 1943 Eaker had 500 B-17s available.

The integration of the developing American with the continuing British bombing attacks on Germany was formalised at the Casablanca conference of January 1943 in a ‘Casablanca Directive’, which laid the basis for a ‘combined bomber offensive’ (codenamed Pointblank in May), against key targets. These were defined, in order of priority, as German submarine construction yards, the German aircraft industry, transportation, oil plants and other targets in enemy war industry. The specification of targets disguised, however, a sharp difference of opinion between the British and Americans over operating methods. Eaker rejected British arguments for committing his B-17s to area bombing. He remained convinced that they were best employed in precision attack, against what Harris contemptuously dismissed as ‘panacea targets’. Harris, for his part, refused to be diverted from his chosen method. As a result, the two air forces effectively divided the Casablanca agenda between them, the RAF continuing its night attacks on ‘other targets’, which meant the built-up areas of the major German cities, while the USAAF committed itself to daylight raids on ‘bottlenecks’ in the German economy.

The first ‘bottleneck’ chosen by the economic analysts who advised the USAAF was the ball-bearing plant at Schweinfurt in central Germany, bombed by the Eighth Air Force on 17 August 1943. Analysis suggested that destruction of the factory, from which essential components of the gearing in aircraft, tanks and U-boats were supplied, would cripple German armaments production. The theory was only partially correct, since Germany had alternative sources of supply from another plant at Regensburg and from neutral Sweden, which not only lay outside the Allied targeting area but was also bound to Germany by dependence on coal imports. The practice was almost wholly disastrous. Forced to traverse northern France and half of Germany in daylight without fighter escort, the ‘self-defending’ Flying Fortress formations were devastated by fighter attack. Of the 229 B-17s that had set out, 36 were shot down, an ‘attrition rate’ of 16 per cent, more than three times the rate that Bomber Command had established as ‘acceptable’ for a single mission. When the 24 B-17s lost suffered in the complementary raid on Regensburg were added in, and heavy damage to 100 returning bombers allowed for, it became clear that 17 August had been a day of disaster. The pre-war theory of the self-defending bomber had proved to be a misconception. The Eighth Air Force suspended its deep-penetration missions into Germany for five weeks, and they would not be fully resumed until long-range fighters had been developed to escort the daylight bombers to their targets.

While the American campaign hung fire, the British had been spreading destruction even more widely across the cities of western Germany. The ‘Battle of the Ruhr’, which lasted from March to July, involved nearly 800 aircraft in 18,000 sorties (individual missions) which dropped 58,000 tons of bombs on Germany’s industrial heartland. In May and August Harris was also obliged to mount two ‘panacea’ missions, both of which were brilliant successes. In the first a specially trained squadron, 617, destroyed the Möhne and Eder dams, which supplied the Ruhr with much of its hydroelectricity; in August a major raid laid waste the laboratories and engineering workshops at Peenemünde, on the Baltic coast, where intelligence sources had revealed that Germany’s arsenal of secret pilotless missiles was being built.

More to Harris’s taste, however, was the four-night raid on Hamburg in July, which provoked a ‘firestorm’ and burned to cinders the heart of the great North German port covering 62,000 acres. A firestorm is not an effect that a bombing force can achieve at will; it requires a particular combination of prevailing weather conditions and the overwhelming of civil defences. When such circumstances are present, however, the consequences are catastrophic. A central conflagration feeds on oxygen drawn from the periphery by winds which reach cyclone speed, suffocating shelterers in cellars and bunkers, sucking debris into the vortex and raising temperatures to a level where everything inflammable burns as if by spontaneous combustion. Such conditions prevailed in Hamburg between 24 and 30 July 1943. There had been a long period of hot, dry weather, the initial bombardment broke the water mains in 847 places, and soon the core temperature of the fire reached 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. When it eventually burned itself out, only 20 per cent of Hamburg’s buildings remained intact; 40 million tons of rubble clogged the city’s centre, and 30,000 of its inhabitants were dead. In some areas of the city the total of fatal casualties among the inhabitants exceeded 30 per cent; 20 per cent of the dead were children, and female deaths were higher than male by 40 per cent.

When the toll of Hamburg’s bombing victims throughout the war was calculated it was found to be only 13 per cent lower than the proportion of battle deaths among soldiers recruited from the city between 1939 and 1945; and the majority had died in the great raids of July 1943. Hamburg was not the RAF’s only firestorm. It was to achieve the same effect, if with lower casualties, in October at Kassel, where fires burned for seven days. Later Würzburg (4000 dead), Darmstadt (6000 dead), Heilbronn (7000 dead), Wuppertal (7000 dead), Weser (9000 dead) and Magdeburg (12,000 dead) would also burn in the same way.

Hamburg, however, encouraged Harris to set his sights beyond Germany’s western periphery of industrial cities and Hanseatic ports. Berlin had been one of Bomber Command’s first targets when it assumed a retaliatory role during the Luftwaffe’s ‘blitz’ on London. In November 1943 Harris decided to make it his crews’ main target during the coming season of long nights, which were their best protection against German fighter attack. It had last been attacked in January 1942 but was thereafter left off the targeting list because of its long distance from Bomber Command’s bases and its strong defences, which combined to make the ‘attrition rate’ on Berlin raids exceptionally high. Probing attacks mounted in August and September suggested, however, that the German capital had become a softer target than hitherto to Harris’s greatly strengthened bombing force, and on the night of 18-19 November 1943 it committed itself to the ‘Battle of Berlin’.

Between that night and 2 March 1944 it mounted sixteen major raids on the city. No more than 200 acres of its built-up area had been damaged in all the raids mounted by the RAF since August 1940, and it continued to function normally as the capital not only of the Reich but of Hitler’s Europe. It remained a major industrial, administrative and cultural centre: its great hotels, restaurants and theatres flourished; so too, did life in its elegant residential districts, like Dahlem, home of
haut-bourgeois
opposition to Hitler. ‘Missie’ Vassiltchikov, an Anglophile White Russian refugee in Berlin, and a close friend of Adam von Trott, one of the principal conspirators in the July Plot, found pre-war life scarcely interrupted at all by ‘enemy action’ (the phrase used in Britain to denote the cause of bombing deaths) until late 1943. She continued to dine, dance and absent herself from work in Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry on such pretexts as attending the last great German aristocratic wedding of the war years at Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen right up until the moment when the Battle of Berlin began.

Then the clouds of war drew in fast. Goebbels, as Gauleiter of Berlin, persuaded one million of its four and a half million inhabitants to leave before Bomber Command’s main attacks began. Those who remained then began to undergo the most sustained experience of air attack undergone by any city population throughout the Second World War. Berlin did not suffer firestorm; having been built largely in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with wide streets and many open spaces, it resisted conflagration. Nevertheless its relentless drenching with high explosive and incendiaries, six times in January alone, resulted in devastation. Although only 6000 Berliners were killed in the Battle proper, thanks to the solid construction of shelters in eleven enormous concrete ‘flak towers’, 1.5 million were made homeless and 2000 acres of the city were ruined by the end of March 1944.

When the battle was then called off, however, it was not only because Harris’s aircraft were needed to help in the preparation for D-Day. Even he had been brought to accept that, in the ‘exchange ratio’ between the attrition of Berlin’s fabric and defences and that of his bomber crews, Berlin had suffered less. Though by March 1944 he disposed of a daily average of 1000 serviceable bombers, losses on raids had risen above the ‘acceptable’ maximum of 5 per cent and had sometimes touched 10 per cent (on the most costly of all raids, ironically not against Berlin but against Nuremberg on 30 March 1944, it exceeded 11 per cent). Since bomber crews were obliged to fly thirty missions before qualifying for rest, each faced the probability, in statistical terms, of being shot down before a tour was completed. In practice, crews who had flown more than five missions achieved a much higher survival rate than novices, who figured disproportionately among the ‘acceptable’ 5 per cent lost. When the attrition rate rose towards 10 per cent, however, even experienced crews were killed. The survivors sensed doom, and there was a corresponding decline in morale, indicated by bombing ‘short’ and premature return to base.

The rise in the attrition rate testified to the short-term success of German defensive measures. As the bombers penetrated more deeply into Germany, their exposure to German flak and fighter attack increased. In the early days of night bombing the Luftwaffe had found as much difficulty in intercepting the RAF as the RAF had had in combating the German night ‘blitz’ of 1940-1. During 1942, however, its success rose sharply as a result of improvements in the control of fighters, as well as in their armament and equipment. Flak, though it badly frightened the bomber crews, was a lesser means of destruction. Anti-aircraft gunfire could not touch the Mosquitoes of the Pathfinder Force flying at 30,000 feet; but fighters attacked at a range of 400 feet, once they had been guided to the target. From October 1940 onwards in Holland, Bomber Command’s natural approach route to the Reich, the Germans began to deploy, on the so-called Kammhuber Line, a force of radar-equipped night-fighters which were guided to the intruders by ground radar ‘Würzburg’ stations. The RAF retaliated by equipping their aircraft with radar detection devices, by increasing the density of their bomber streams to present fighters with a smaller target, and eventually (July 1943) by dropping metallic chaff, ‘Window’ – first used in the Hamburg raids – to cause radar interference. Eventually all these expedients were overcome: the Germans became adept at using Bomber Command’s electronic emissions as target indicators, at refining their radar sets to overcome Window, and at increasing the density of their own fighter formations to match that of the bomber streams. At the end of 1943, ‘Tame Boar’ squadrons of radar-equipped night-fighters were being supplemented by strong forces of ‘Wild Boar’ day-fighters flying as night-fighters; lacking radar, they were guided towards the bombers by radio and light beacons and then attacked in the illumination provided by flak and searchlights.