Wings (24 page)

By the end of the day the same satisfaction was being felt all across Fighter Command. Wreckage of German aircraft and burned bodies lay in fields, lanes and streets all over south-east England.
The figure of destroyed aircraft was given: 183 – a considerable exaggeration, as the true figure was nearer 60. RAF losses were light: 25 aircraft lost and 13 pilots killed.

This mauling did not cause the Luftwaffe to abandon its attacks. It had learned the lesson, however, that air superiority was not achievable, and the Spitfires and
Hurricanes that came out to attack them were not – as German intelligence reports persisted in claiming – the last scrapings of the RAF barrel. By the end of October the daytime bomber
attacks ceased and the Germans concentrated on the marginal policy of bringing about a collapse of morale by nocturnal blitz.

Thus ended one of the great battles of history. The pilots had not simply blunted Hitler’s invasion plans, which were half-hearted at the best of times. Their achievement was more
strategically significant – and glorious – than that.

The victory lit a beacon of hope. This was the first time since German territorial expansion began in 1938 that Hitler’s forces had suffered a major defeat. Out of this came practical
consequences that would profoundly affect the course of the war. The most crucial effect was that – as Churchill always intended – our performance persuaded the Americans that we were
worthy partners in the event of them joining the conflict. It was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, of course, that pushed America into the war. But it was the survival of Britain as a
base that allowed the United States to fight in Europe.

There was also a moral aspect to the Battle of Britain that reached beyond mere realpolitik. It was a great triumph of the spirit that exalted the value of doing the right thing, no matter how
painful and costly that might have seemed at the time. That summer, the British people were truly as they liked to
imagine themselves – unperturbed, generous-spirited,
heroic in a modest sort of way. And it was the RAF, the pilots in the air and the crews supporting them on the ground, who had led the nation in this finest hour.

In Churchill’s famous speech of 20 August 1940 there is a passage that no one now remembers. While praising the fighter pilots, he also emphasized that ‘we must
never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their
attacks, often under the heaviest fire, often with serious loss, with deliberate careful discrimination, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the
Nazi power.’

Almost every assertion in this statement was untrue. The RAF’s navigational ability was embryonic and targets were located as much by luck as judgement. The aiming of bombs was rudimentary
and the damage they inflicted trifling. Only the parts of the Prime Minister’s speech referring to the regularity of operations and the losses suffered were correct.

For most of its short life, bombing had been the RAF’s
raison d’être.
When the campaign was finally launched at the start of the Battle of France
it was a severe disappointment and continued to be so for another two years. Culpability lay not with the crews but with the aircraft they flew and the navigational devices, bomb sights and bombs
available to them. The senior officers who had talked up bombing as a war-winning device must also take some of the blame.

The start of the Blitz generated a hatred of Germany that had previously been latent or absent. On 14 November 1940 the city of Coventry was devastated with more than 40,000 homes destroyed or
damaged, 554 people killed and nearly a thousand seriously injured. The attack created an upsurge in popular pressure for retaliation and revenge. Before Coventry there were some – perhaps
many – who felt it was unwise to provoke the Germans. Afterwards most shared the view of the young man who told a Mass Observation reporter: ‘We’re fighting gangsters, so
we’ve got to be gangsters ourselves. We’ve been gentlemen too long.’
¹
From now on the bombing of Germany had the backing of the
nation, even when everybody knew what that meant for the townsfolk of Cologne, Hamburg and the Ruhr, names that soon became very familiar from the radio and press bulletins.

Bombing also satisfied another need. It showed that Britain could still do something, even when it had no soldiers in the field to face the enemy. Allied armies would later pursue German armies
through North Africa, Italy, France and the Lowlands. But for much of the war the Strategic Air Campaign, as it
became known, was the only way of striking directly at the
enemy’s territory.

It was generally accepted that Germany would have to be defeated at home if the Nazi plague was to be eradicated. Bombing was a good – and for the time being the only – way to start.
Churchill summed it up in a phrase: ‘The fighters are our salvation, but the bombers alone provide the means of victory.’

Some of the flood of young men clamouring to join the RAF were glad to be channelled off to Bomber Command. ‘I thought that the defence of Great Britain was over and the next step was to
smash the Germans up,’ said Noble Frankland, a young Oxford undergraduate and member of the University Air Squadron. ‘I was quite keen to take part in smashing up the Germans, which I
think was a fairly common sort of instinct, but I actually had the opportunity to do it.’
²

Others, however, brought up like so many would-be aviators on the Biggles novels of Captain W. E. Johns, and inspired by the deeds of the Fighter Boys, longed to be flying Spitfires and
Hurricanes. After the Battle of Britain the call for fighter pilots dwindled. The demands of the Strategic Air Campaign meant the majority of men who flew with the RAF in the war did so with Bomber
Command.

Some who had volunteered for flying duties were dismayed when they learned what it was they would be flying. Dennis Field had done his initial instruction on single-engined Harvards and was
looking forward to going to a fighter squadron. But as he moved to the next stage of his training
‘a special parade was called and the CO announced that the whole course
would be trained for multi-engined aircraft and, we inferred, four-engined bombers. I felt totally deflated at the news. The very little I knew about them gave the impression that I should become a
glorified bus driver.’
³

It would be some time before the volunteers arrived on operational squadrons. The training could afford to be lengthy and rigorous. There was nothing for them to fly until the big four-engined
bombers that had been ordered as part of the pre-war rearmament programme arrived in service. The first of the series – the Short Stirling – started to be fed into squadrons in August
1940, the Halifax in 1941 and the mighty Lancaster not until the beginning of 1942.

In this interim period Bomber Command struggled on with its inadequate Blenheims, Hampdens, Wellingtons and Whitleys, trying to make the Air Staff’s assertions that bombing was capable of
inflicting precise and painful damage on the German war machine a reality. In the course of 1941 it lost 1,338 aeroplanes on operations – more than the number of German aircraft the RAF had
shot down during the Battle of Britain. Another 154 were destroyed in training and other accidents, a scandalous rate that persisted throughout the war.

The official progress of the campaign was reported in bulletins that conveyed an impression of continuous success. Typical was a broadcast made by Flight Lieutenant J. C. Mackintosh, a Hampden
bomb-aimer. His script – almost certainly prepared for him by a Ministry of Information hack – made night-bombing seem like a cool, precise science. It started with the
claim that ‘when the war began we were well trained in finding targets in the dark and were therefore never compelled to bomb indiscriminately through the clouds’. He went
on to describe a recent attack on an oil refinery. The crew had imagined it would be a tricky target. But the fact that it was sited on a bend in a river which would provide a useful navigational
point led them to decide that ‘perhaps, after all, it would not be such a difficult job to find’.

As they entered the target area they located the river, but after three runs through anti-aircraft fire they had still not spotted the objective. Mackintosh called on the skipper to go round
again. Then, ‘there it was. The dim outline of an oil refinery wonderfully camouflaged. It was getting more and more into the centre of the sights. I pressed the button and my stick of bombs
went hurtling towards Germany’s precious oil. The rear-gunner watched the bombs burst and in a very few seconds those thousands of tons of valuable oil had become hundreds of feet of black
and acrid smoke.’
⁴

This was bombing as optimistically imagined in the Air Ministry’s pre-war plans. The reality was much closer to the experience of Eric Woods, a navigator who joined 144 Squadron in the
autumn of 1940 and carried out his first operation on the night of 9–10 October. The target was the Krupp factory in Essen, an objective that the RAF would return to again and again.

At the briefing the crews were told to expect only scattered cloud over the town. As they neared their destination ‘it was obvious that the Met people had got it wrong, as a solid mass
of cloud was clearly visible below, and as we progressed eastwards we saw that the cloud was becoming denser ahead. We pressed on, but two ominous developments took place. A
film of ice appeared on the windscreen and an opaque mass of rime ice began to spread out along the leading edge of each wing.’ The Hampden’s two engines began to splutter as ice worked
its way into the fuel lines. ‘There was a hurried conference, since it was pretty obvious that the target was unlikely to be identifiable, so the decision was taken to fly on and see what
happened when we reached our ETA [estimated time of arrival]. In the event, at that time we were still in dense cloud, the whole mass being lit up by searchlights sweeping below, with frequent
bright flashes which could have been anti-aircraft fire or bomb bursts, I certainly knew not what.’

With the ground invisible a decision was made not to bomb but to head for home, looking for a target of opportunity on the way. Shortly after they turned ‘the cloud began to break up to
the west – quite the opposite of what the weatherman had said . . . We did, in fact, fly along the Scheldt Estuary and as we passed over the port of Flushing the navigator let go with our
total load and I clearly saw bomb bursts, though I wasn’t sure precisely where they landed.’
⁵
Only three of the twenty Hampdens that
set out reached Essen.

The basic problem was navigation. Pre-war planning had assumed that most bombing would take place in daylight. In night-time bombing the navigator became the most important man on board, and he
had only basic instruments to get his comrades to the target and back. Before the advent of radio
and electronic aids – the Gee, Oboe and H2S systems – the
navigator operated like a yachtsman at sea, by dead reckoning, drawing a line between two points on a map and factoring in speed and wind to calculate progress. He gave his pilot a course on
take-off and then, if the skies were clear and a moon was shining, looked below for landmarks to check they were on track.

On a trip to Germany they left England over the chalk cliffs of Flamborough Head in Yorkshire, turning right at the Friesian Islands. If the night was clear he might try and get a fix from the
stars using a sextant, but only if the pilot was prepared to fly straight and level for long enough, increasing his vulnerability to night-fighter attack. Winds that were forecast failed to blow.
Unpredicted ones arrived to whisk them off their course. It was no wonder that German targets were sometimes unaware that they had been the subject of an attempted attack.

Initially, the only real means of measuring success were the reports brought back by the crews. In 1941 some aircraft were fitted with cameras triggered by the release of the bombs. That summer
Frederick Lindemann, Churchill’s friend and chief scientific adviser to the Cabinet, initiated an investigation to compare crew reports with the information that could be gleaned from the
admittedly blurred and monochrome images available. Lindemann was the son of a German emigré and brilliant, but argumentative and obstinate. He demonstrated his faith in his own judgement by
learning to fly to test his theory about how pilots could recover from a spin. He took
off, deliberately stalled the aeroplane, spiralled earthwards, then pulled out. The
theory was proved and by an act of great bravery the technique became the standard procedure, saving the lives of countless aviators.

The job of analysing the bombing data was given to a clever young assistant, David Bensusan-Butt, a civil servant in the War Cabinet secretariat. He studied more than 600 operational
photographs, compared them with the debriefing reports of the crews and arrived at some shocking conclusions. He found that only a third of the aircraft claiming to reach the target did, in fact,
do so. Of those recorded as attacking the target, ‘only one in three got within five miles’.
⁶