Wings (26 page)

The cadets were eventually sifted into the ‘trades’ in which they would fight the war. Their paths now diverged as they went off to specialized flying, engineering, navigation,
bombing and wireless schools. The lucky ones found themselves on a ship to one of the 333 training schools in Canada, Australia, South Africa, Rhodesia, India and the United States, where they
enjoyed a sybaritic break from the austerity of wartime Britain.

Training was fun and for many a great social adventure. Young men who would normally never have rubbed shoulders as equals found themselves flung together. Assumptions and prejudices tended to
evaporate. Denholm Elliot was at RADA when the war began and volunteered for the RAF on his eighteenth birthday. He found service life ‘rather exciting. I was mixing for the first time with
many different types of men from different strata of society and I found that I was [getting]
on really quite well with them.’ Elliot was shot down and spent most of the
war in a prison camp, before going on to become one of Britain’s best-known actors.

At the end of specialist training everyone was promoted. About two thirds became sergeants. The rest were commissioned as pilot officers. It was here that the submerged issue of class
resurfaced. Despite the supposedly meritocratic nature of the RAF (in the early years, at least), there seemed to have been an institutional conviction that those whose parents were wealthy enough
to send them to fee-paying schools were automatically considered officer material.

They then moved on to Operational Training Units (OTUs), the final stage before being launched into the air battle. It was here that individuals were welded into teams – the crews that
would fly and die together in the cold and dark over occupied Europe. The crew henceforth became the centre of the airman’s existence. Life beyond the base – the world of family and
friends – took on a distant and secondary importance. The process was called ‘crewing up’ and it showed the RAF at its most inventive and imaginative. Instead of trying to apply
scientific methods to decide likely compatibility, the anonymous devisers of the system took an enormous leap of faith and allowed human chemistry to work its magic. Essentially the crews selected
themselves.

The procedure was very straightforward. The requisite numbers of each aircrew category were put in a room together and told to team up. As they were all arriving from different specialist
schools, no one knew anyone in the other categories.
Jack Currie, a sergeant pilot who reached his OTU at the end of 1942, had ‘imagined that the process would be just
as impersonal as most others that we went through in the RAF. I thought I would just see an order on the noticeboard detailing who was crewed with whom. But what happened was quite different. When
we had all paraded in the hangar and the roll had been called, the chief ground instructor got up on a dais. He wished us good morning . . . and said: “Right chaps, sort yourselves
out.”’

Currie looked around, trying not to stare. ‘There were bomb-aimers, navigators, wireless operators and gunners, and I needed one of each to form my crew . . . This was a crowd of
strangers. I had a sudden recollection of standing in a suburban dance hall wondering which girl I should approach. I remembered that it wasn’t always the prettiest or the smartest girl who
made the best companion for the evening. Anyway, this wasn’t the same as choosing a dancing partner, it was more like picking out a sweetheart or a wife, for better or for worse.’

He started off trying to find a navigator and approached a knot of them who were standing chatting together, hoping instinct would guide him to the right one. ‘I couldn’t assess what
his aptitude with a map and dividers might be from his face, or his skill with a sextant from the size of his feet.’ Then he ‘noticed that a wiry little Australian was looking at me
anxiously. He took a few steps forward, eyes puckered in a diffident smile and spoke: “Looking for a good navigator?”’ Currie formed an immediate impression of ‘honesty,
intelligence and nervousness’. They teamed up and soon had acquired the rest of the crew. As they walked off together for a cup of tea, Currie realized that he
‘hadn’t made a single conscious choice’.
¹⁶

Once formed, a crew stood by to await posting to a squadron. The process had been long and expensive. It took about £10,000 to train each crew member, the equivalent of about
£800,000 in today’s money. However, the expense of getting them into battle did not mean that once they got there, their lives would be worth very much.

The revelation of how little Bomber Command was achieving meant operations had been scaled down during the winter of 1941–2 to husband resources and await the arrival of the heavies.

In the spring of 1942 the force was better equipped and had a new, aggressive and ambitious officer at its head. Harris came armed with some new ideas on how bombers should be used. He believed
strongly in the principle of concentration. Instead of smallish numbers of aircraft being despatched to two or three different targets in a night, large numbers would saturate one objective. Harris
favoured fire as the principle tool of destruction. It was easier, he calculated, to burn down a city than to blow it up. Very small, light incendiary bombs were horribly effective when showered on
old buildings. The method would be to first drop high explosive bombs that would rip off roofs and blow down walls, choking the streets with rubble that would hamper the work of firemen and rescue
teams. Then the four-pound magnesium incendiaries
would float down into the wreckage, starting fires that would be whipped up by the winds generated by the blasts. The aim
was, he stated bluntly, to ‘start so many fires at the same time that no fire-fighting services, however efficiently and quickly they were reinforced by the fire brigades of other towns,
could get them under control.’
¹⁷

Harris selected an easy target on which to try out the method. Lübeck, an old Hanseatic port on the Baltic, had only minor strategic importance, but it was easy to find and given that many
of the houses were partly built of wood was easier than most cities to set on fire. On the night of 28–29 March – Palm Sunday – 234 aircraft took off into clear skies and headed
north and east, guided on their way for much of the journey by Gee, with which the first wave of bombers was equipped. Wellingtons made up most of the force with twenty-six Stirlings and twenty-one
Manchesters, the unsatisfactory precursor of the Lancaster. The target was only lightly defended and pilots felt safe enough to bomb from a mere 2,000 feet. More than 400 tons of bombs were
dropped. Of these, two thirds were incendiaries. The aiming point was the centre of the Altstadt, the old town, a quaint jumble of narrow streets and half-timbered houses. They went up like tinder.
Harris had organized the attack into three waves, with the idea that the fires set by the first wave would make it easier for the succeeding one to find and bomb. So it turned out.

In the days following the raid the images brought back by aircraft from the RAF’s Photo Reconnaissance Unit were studied eagerly. The story they told was very different from
the catalogue of failure analysed by David Bensusan-Butt. For once an air raid had achieved what it set out to do. The purpose had been, unashamedly, to lay waste the town and that is
what had happened, by and large. It was calculated that 190 acres of Lübeck – 30 per cent of the built-up area – had been burned down. It was an overestimate, but not a wild one.
By the Germans’ reckoning, 3,401 buildings had been destroyed or seriously damaged. Among them was a factory that made oxygen equipment for U-boats. But the beautiful Marienkirche had also
gone up in the conflagration. Up to 320 people were killed, the largest number in a raid on Germany so far, but still considerably fewer than the more than 1,400 who died when the Luftwaffe blitzed
London on the night of 10–11 May 1941. Only twelve aircraft were lost, most on the outward journey.

Harris was delighted. Even with the limited force of obsolescent aircraft available, the formula of concentration plus incendiaries, when applied to a target the size of a town, produced
devastating results. He repeated the feat a month later with four raids in quick succession on Rostock, another old Hanseatic town.

By the end of May Harris was ready for a real spectacular. He understood the power of publicity and was keen to mount an operation that would win him and his men attention and prestige, as well
as boosting British morale. He hit on the idea of launching a ‘thousand-bomber raid’. The phrase would resonate in the press in Britain and across the Atlantic. He took the idea to
Churchill. The Prime Minister was a sucker for a grand gesture. The project was irresistible. The problem
was that Harris had nothing like a thousand serviceable bombers
standing by. To reach the magic number he had to drag in aircraft and crews from Operational Training Units.

On the night of 30–31 May, a bright, clear, moonlit night, the great raid was launched. There were 1,047 aircraft, most of them old types, but including seventy-three Lancasters. The
volume of aircraft meant they had to move in a ‘bomber stream’, flying through different air corridors to reduce the risk of collisions. The target was Cologne, Germany’s third
largest city and an important industrial centre. In his departing address to the crews, Harris left them in no doubt about the significance of the mission. The force, he told them, was ‘at
least twice the size and has at least four times the carrying capacity of the largest air force ever before concentrated on one objective.’ They were making history. ‘You have an
opportunity,’ he declared, ‘to strike a blow at the enemy which will resound, not only throughout Germany but throughout the world.’

They were carrying 1,455 tons of bombs, two thirds of which were incendiaries, and the results were awe-inspiring. One airman, Ralph Wood, looking down from his Halifax, saw what looked like
‘the embers of a huge bonfire’. The conflagration destroyed more than 13,000 homes, mostly apartments, and seriously damaged 6,360 more. Nine hospitals, seventeen churches, sixteen
schools and four university buildings were either burnt or blown down. The death toll set a new record: at least 469 people were killed, almost all of them civilians.

News of the raid was received with enthusiasm by a British public eager for revenge for Coventry. It was, for the time being, exceptional. Bomber Command did not have the
men or machines to keep up the tempo, and a rhythm of regular mass raids would not be established until the following year. The importance of the Cologne raid was that it established the
feasibility of the concept, and by extension the value of the strategic bombing campaign. Henceforth, strategic bombing was at the heart of Allied war planning. It meant a crucial prioritization in
the allocation of resources. Aircraft that were dedicated to blasting Germany could not be used in other theatres, even one so vital to Britain’s survival as the war being fought in the sea
lanes of the Atlantic.

The Battle of the Atlantic could be said to have begun in the first days of the war. It would be just as vital for Britain’s survival as a free nation as the Battle of
Britain. Aircraft had a crucial part to play if the struggle was to be won. Unlike their counterparts in Fighter Command, Coastal Command and the Fleet Air Arm went into the contest woefully
equipped, and although a procurement programme promised better days to come, it would be some time before they arrived.

Coastal Command’s duties, as laid out in 1937, were ‘trade protection, reconnaissance and co-operation with the Royal Navy’. Of these, ‘trade protection’ would be
the most important. The innocuous phrase disguised the enormity of what was at stake. ‘Dominating all our power to carry on the war, or even keep ourselves alive, lay our mastery of the ocean
routes and the free approach and entry to our ports,’ observed Winston Churchill.
¹
What that meant was that unless Britain could keep the
sea lanes to the Americas open, the
war machine would sputter to a halt for lack of fuel and the population would start to starve.

Remarkably little attention was paid in the interwar years to the business of securing the trade routes. The experience of the spring of 1917, when U-boats sank almost a million tons of shipping
in a single month, had been soon forgotten. Then, it had seemed possible to the First Sea Lord, Admiral Jellicoe, that the war might be lost if no antidote were found to the German submarines. One
was: the adoption of a convoy system where merchantmen sailed protected by warships and, latterly, air escorts. By the time the new war started, new technology had arrived and convoys were out of
fashion. The development of Asdic – underwater sonic detection – had advanced to the point where the naval staff felt able to state that ‘the submarine should never again be able
to present us with the problem we were faced with in 1917’.
²
The Admiralty was therefore confident that only a small air element would be
needed to handle the underwater threat. As to attack by enemy aircraft, the development of the multiple pom-pom gun was thought to be an adequate defence and deterrent.