The Second World War (85 page)

In February 1942, Bomber Command received approval from the Cabinet to pursue an area-target strategy, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris took command. Harris, a great bull of a man with a bristling moustache, had no doubts that the key to victory was the destruction of German cities. This, in his view, would avoid the necessity of sending forces to the continent to take on the Wehrmacht there. As a thick-skinned outsider who had spent a tough life in Rhodesia, Harris saw little reason to compromise towards those he regarded as faint-hearted gentlemen.

Ever since the nights he had spent during the Blitz on the roof of the air ministry watching Luftwaffe bombs fall on London, Harris had longed to strike back, especially with such loads of incendiaries that they would overwhelm the enemy’s fire services. The Blitz on London and other cities had killed 41,000 civilians and injured 137,000 more. Harris was therefore not prepared to take any criticism, or willingly accept other requests from generals or admirals, whom he was convinced had tried to undermine the RAF since its independence. He regarded them as ‘diversionists’ intent on frustrating him from carrying out his key plan.

Harris’s first task was to improve the morale of his aircrew. They had suffered heavy casualties–nearly 5,000 men and 2,331 aircraft in the first two years of the war–for little effect, according to the Butt Report. In many of the earlier raids, more aircrew died than Germans on the ground.

Their lives lacked the glamour of the Spitfire squadrons in the southeast, whose pilots were fêted on their frequent trips to London. Most of the bomber bases were airfields in the flat, windswept countryside of
Lincolnshire and Norfolk, sited there because they lay on the same latitude as Berlin. The aircrew lived in Nissen huts, which smelled of cigarettes and smoke from coke-fired stoves, and rain always seemed to be pattering on the roof. Apart from bacon and eggs for breakfast on returning from a mission, their food consisted of a monotonous routine of macaroni cheese, over-cooked vegetables, beetroot and Spam, and most suffered from constipation. Apart from endless cups of tea, which was rumoured to be laced with bromide to reduce their sexual urges, the only drink was watery beer in dismal pubs, to which they travelled by bicycle or bus on rainy nights. The lucky ones might be accompanied by an innocent young WAAF from the airfield. Others hoped to meet locals or Land Girls at dances.

As in Fighter Command, pilots and aircrew were mostly volunteers. A quarter of them came from countries overrun by the Nazis as well as from the Dominions: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia and South Africa. There were so many Canadians that they formed separate RCAF squadrons, and so later did men from other countries, such as the Poles and French. Some 8,000 Bomber Command aircrew died in training accidents, around a seventh of the total casualties.

When on ‘ops’, they lived with numbing cold, boredom, fear, discomfort and the perpetual noise of aero-engines. Death could come at any moment, whether from flak or a night-fighter. Luck, both good and bad, seemed to dominate all their lives, and many became obsessively superstitious, clinging to personal rituals or talismans, such as a rabbit’s foot or a St Christopher medal. Whatever the target, missions began with a similar routine–the briefing which opened with the words ‘the target for tonight’, radio checks, take-off, circling to assemble formation in the sky, gunners firing test bursts over the Channel, and then the atmosphere in the aircraft tensing as soon as the call came through the intercom: ‘enemy coast ahead’. All aircrew looked forward to the sudden lurch upwards of the aircraft as its heavy load of bombs fell away.

It was a young man’s war. Even a thirty-one-year-old pilot was nicknamed ‘Grandpa’. Everyone had nicknames and there was a great sense of comradeship, but to cope with the death of friends they needed to acquire a certain cynicism or cold-bloodedness to protect themselves from the effects of survivor guilt. The sight of another aircraft on fire produced a mixture of horror and relief that it was someone else. A bomber might return so badly shot up by a night-fighter that the ground crew, on finding the mangled remains of the rear gunner in his turret, ‘
had to hose it out
’. Waiting at dispersal, not knowing whether an ‘op’ was on, or delayed, or even cancelled because of bad weather over the target, created a great strain. Pilots especially were ‘
keyed up like a violin
’, even though they sometimes referred to themselves as ‘
a glorified bus driver
’.

Bomber Command’s offensive power began to increase only when heavy bombers–first Stirlings, then the four-engined Halifaxes and Lancasters–started to replace the Hampdens and Wellingtons. On the night of 3 March 1942, a total of 235 bombers were sent in the first mass attack on a target in France, the Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt on the edge of Paris. It was a legitimate target as it manufactured vehicles for the Wehrmacht. Marker flares were used for the first time, and because there were few anti-aircraft guns around, the bombers were able to go in below 4,000 feet to improve their accuracy. The destruction of the factory complex was great, but 367 French civilians were killed, mainly in housing blocks near by.

On 28 March, the RAF bombed the north German port of Lübeck, with a mixture of high-explosive bombs and incendiaries, as both Portal and Harris had planned. The old town was burned out. Hitler was outraged. ‘
Now terror will be
answered with terror,’ his Luftwaffe adjutant records him as saying. Hitler was so furious that he demanded ‘aircraft from the eastern front to be transferred to the west’, but General Jeschonnek, the Luftwaffe chief of staff, managed to persuade him that they could use their bomber formations in northern France. As the British bombing campaign stepped up, however, pressure soon grew to withdraw Luftwaffe fighter formations and heavy flak batteries from the eastern front to defend the Reich. A month after the attack on Lübeck, Bomber Command launched a series of four raids on Rostock, eighty kilometres to the east, causing even greater destruction. Goebbels described it as a ‘Terrorangriff’–a ‘terror attack’–and from then on Bomber Command aircrews were called ‘Terrorflieger’. Harris was now openly defining success by the number of urban acres his bombers had reduced to rubble.

On the night of 30 May 1942, Harris launched his first thousand-bomber raid, against Cologne. The original target had been Hamburg with its U-boat shipyards, but bad weather forced a change of plan. Churchill, preparing a coup de théâtre, had invited Ambassador John Winant and General ‘Hap’ Arnold, the chief of the United States Army Air Forces, to
dinner at Chequers
. As his guests sat down at the dining table, the prime minister made his announcement. It was a shameless but irresistible boast in that year of humiliations. Winant sent a cable to Roosevelt saying: ‘England is the place to win the war. Get planes and troops over here as soon as possible.’

The devastation was great, but still comparatively little by later standards. Some 480 people were killed. Harris, a determined propagandist for Bomber Command, had assembled almost every bomber that could fly, even trainers, to achieve his thousand-bomber figure. He too wanted to impress both the Americans and the Soviet Union. ‘Vengeance Begins!’
was the headline in the
Daily Express
. Yet Harris knew that he had to mislead the public and even some of his superiors, especially Churchill, who had very mixed feelings, by pretending that their targets were of a military nature, such as oil depots and communications centres. Main railway stations provided his justification for bombing the whole of a city centre. Harris, however, knew that the public was behind him. Only a few lone voices, such as George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, spoke out.

That August, when Churchill had flown to Moscow to explain to Stalin that an invasion of northern France was out of the question, the bombing of German cities was his strongest card. He was able to argue that the Bomber Command offensive was a form of Second Front. Hitler’s armaments minister Albert Speer expressed the same view. The bombing campaign was the only British action of which Stalin approved. Soviet intelligence was already passing back information from prisoner-of-war interrogations which indicated that the morale of German troops on the eastern front was being undermined by concern for their families at home, under British bombing. Stalin never lost his taste for revenge, especially since around half a million Soviet civilians are estimated to have died as a result of Luftwaffe bombing. Red Army aviation had not developed a strategic bombing arm, so he was content for the British to do the work for them.

Bomber Command aircraft were now more likely to find their target, with improvements in navigation aids using radio transponder technology to guide them to their objectives. The introduction of Pathfinder aircraft which would identify the target with flares was an innovation, at first strenuously resisted by Harris, until he was overruled by Portal and the air staff. At the same time German anti-aircraft defences had also been strengthened. In Berlin, Hitler ordered the construction of huge concrete flak towers, with batteries of heavy anti-aircraft guns on top.

Bomber Command casualties mounted relentlessly with the increasing rhythm of sorties over Germany, especially the Ruhr, which was known bitterly as ‘Happy Valley’. Next of kin would receive an official notification and then a letter of condolence from the squadron or station commander. Some time later, personal effects would be returned–cufflinks, clothes, hairbrushes and shaving kit, and if the airman owned a car, then that could be collected.

‘
The worst thing is seeing
the flak,’ wrote the twenty-four-year-old Wing Commander Guy Gibson, who led 617 Squadron in the ‘Dambuster’ raid on the night of 16 May 1943. ‘You must leave your imagination behind or it will do you harm.’ Feeling the flak was of course even worse.
‘A shell bursting beneath you
lifts the plane about fifty feet upwards in the
air,’ observed the actor Denholm Elliott, then serving as a wireless operator in a Halifax. ‘You certainly find instant religion.’

The unsung casualties were those who broke down before the end of their thirty-mission tour. LMF, or Lacking in Moral Fibre, was the RAF phrase for cowardice or battle shock. For most of the war, the RAF appears to have been even more callous than the army in its treatment of psychological casualties. Altogether, 2,989 flight personnel in Bomber Command were diagnosed with combat stress. Just over a third were pilots. Most striking of all, training appears to have been an even more stressful form of flying than night bombing.

In the summer of 1942, the US Eighth Air Force began to assemble in Britain. Major General Carl A. Spaatz had arrived in May to direct all US air operations in Europe, and the Eighth’s bomber force was commanded by Brigadier General Ira C. Eaker. To the astonishment of the RAF, who had tried it and suffered, the Americans announced that their bombing campaign would be by daylight.

The US Army Air Forces avoided the RAF’s contentious theory of destroying enemy morale. Its leaders claimed that, with their Norden bombsight, they would carry out precision bombing on ‘key nodes’ of the enemy’s ‘industrial fabric’. But target intelligence was an inexact science, and to achieve such accuracy they would also need perfect visibility and a clearly identifiable objective which was not too strongly defended. Claims of bombing so accurate that they could ‘hit a pickle-barrel’ seldom matched the reality of widely scattered bombs on the ground. Pilots weaving to avoid flak upset the sensitive gyroscopes on the Norden bombsight, and to expect the bomb-aimer to remain calm as he entered all the data required was optimistic, assuming that he could see the target in the first place through all the smoke, cloud and haze. American bombing patterns were no better than those of the RAF.

Having armed their B-17s with heavy machine guns in turrets, the USAAF assumed that by flying at high altitude in tight formations it could ward off fighter attacks with interlocking fields of fire. But inexperienced gunners were more likely to hit other aircraft in their formation rather than attacking Messerschmitts. Spaatz had not considered fighter escorts were necessary, even though as early as the mid-1920s the US Army Air Service, as it then was, had tested auxiliary droppable fuel tanks to give them the extra range. Like the British before them, they had dismissed the lessons of air warfare from the Spanish Civil War and China. All these lessons would soon become apparent once
the Eighth Air Force
began to fly missions over Germany.

At first, Spaatz wisely decided to restrict his inexperienced crews to
comparatively easy raids over France. On 17 August, a dozen B-17 Flying Fortresses took off on their first mission led by Eaker. Spaatz had wanted to go himself, but as he was privy to Ultra this idea was quashed. The bombers’ target was the marshalling yards at Rouen in northern France, which was close enough to allow them Spitfire fighter cover. There were no anti-aircraft defences, and their Spitfire escorts chased off some Messerschmitts on the return journey. The crews returned to a hero’s welcome from journalists and rowdy celebrations. But Churchill and Portal were concerned about the slow build-up of American bomber strength in Britain, and by their dogged insistence on daylight bombing. The delay was largely caused by aircraft and men being diverted to the Mediterranean to assist Twelfth Air Force operations in North Africa.

With General Arnold at its head, the USAAF had expanded with astonishing speed. In the early days, it was blessed with close friendships at the top. The RAF, on the other hand, was often riven by disputes, largely caused by Harris’s bloody-minded obstinacy and his detestation of the air staff, whom he regarded as even more feeble-minded than the hated army and Royal Navy. Harris openly derided the ‘oilys’, as he called the supporters of bombing fuel installations, and the ‘panacea mongers’ who demanded attacks on other specific targets. Yet American daylight precision-bombing dogma was almost equally fixed. Even the reality of European weather with impenetrable cloud would not budge USAAF commanders from convincing themselves that they were hitting the target.