Bomber Command (22 page)

This was a brilliant commentary on the reality of war, expounding principles of universal application to its conduct. Churchill was not withdrawing his support from the bomber offensive, indeed he would confirm the commitment of great resources to it in the months that followed. He was serving notice of the moderation of his own expectations.

But what now was Bomber Command to seek to achieve? Since the autumn of 1940, the Air Staff had tacitly conceded that daylight operations against Germany were not a feasible proposition, although many airmen nourished long-term hopes of their resumption. There might be occasional precision attacks by day or by night when opportunity arose and when certain targets demanded urgent attention, but the Butt Report had conclusively demonstrated that the majority of Bomber Command’s crews could not find and hit a precise target at night.

For the first time in air force history [wrote the official historians] the first and paramount problem of night operations was seen at the highest level to be not merely a question of bomb aiming, though that difficulty remained, but of navigation. While the bombers were still not within five miles of the aiming-point, it was a matter of academic interest as to whether a bomb could be aimed with an error of 300, 600, or 1,000 yards.

Left to themselves, it is reasonable to suppose that the airmen would have continued to dispatch bombers to attack precise targets in Germany, maintaining their private conviction that even if these missed their targets by miles, the trauma of air bombardment would somehow cause Germany to crumble. But now they were compelled to face the reality of the Butt Report and the illogic of bombing strategy. A new policy had become inevitable.

5 » THE COMING OF AREA BOMBING

1942

‘Moderation in war is imbecility.’

Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher

The decision was taken at the end of 1941 that, since a city was the highest common factor which most crews could identify on a given night under average conditions, Bomber Command would abandon its efforts to hit precision industrial targets and address itself simply to attacking the urban areas of Germany. Although spasmodic precision attacks would take place for the rest of the war, of the total tonnage of bombs dropped by Bomber Command throughout its campaign, three-quarters were directed against urban targets. The area attack was thus by far the most significant of Bomber Command’s war.

The Prime Minister had always been doubtful about the RAF’s alleged ‘precision’ offensive, the search for vital economic arteries, what Harris would later scornfully call ‘panacea’ targets. The concept of attacking whole cities rather than individual installations held no moral terrors for Churchill, although, as the War Cabinet had agreed in March 1941, there was no need to announce publicly any change in policy. Portal had been one of the earliest advocates of attacking German morale, and in the wake of the Butt Report he required no convincing that the way to do this was to launch the heaviest possible attack on urban areas.

Throughout 1941 this process had been getting under way.
Although specific aiming-points were given to every crew, it was thoroughly if tacitly understood that most were merely carting explosives to the surrounding city areas. Now this reality would be recognized and the campaign greatly intensified. The only lingering division of opinion within the Royal Air Force lay between those who accepted the need to embark on area bombing merely as a necessary tactical expedient until the means to undertake a new precision attack became available, and those who regarded the policy as an end in itself. Much more will be heard from both these factions.

As far as it is possible to discover, there was no moral debate in Downing Street or the Air Ministry about the launching of the offensive on the cities. No one acquainted with the reality of war had ever supposed that it was possible to conduct any sort of bombing campaign without incidental civilian casualties. Whether it was morally any different to kill civilians incidentally, as Bomber Command had done hitherto, or deliberately as they would now begin to do, was a very nice question indeed. Churchill himself in his 1917 memorandum argued that the killing of civilians should remain an unavoidable side-effect rather a deliberate policy. The Americans were to justify their bombing operations in these terms throughout the war, even when the civilian death toll from their attacks reached extravagant heights. The British official historians have little patience with moral hair-splitting on this issue:

There was, for example, a school of thought which maintained that, although it was morally permissible to attack specific targets such as factories, oil plants and railway centres even at an incidental risk to life and property, it was immoral to attack that life and property. In other words, the implication was that targets in or near towns could be attacked but that towns themselves could not . . . It was, indeed, an argument which was generally put forward without operational factors in mind or even in sight . . .
¹

This seems facile, for it is simply to assert that in warfare moral debate is irrelevant when operational requirements are at stake.
Civilized nations, including the western Allies in the Second World War, have customarily waged war by a code which assumes that while all war corrupts, total war corrupts totally. They have sought thus to modify the worst excesses of the slaughter, most especially by avoiding the deliberate killing of non-combatants. The airmen of the Second World War argued that the Royal Navy’s blockade in the First World War had killed civilians by starvation as surely as did their own bombs a generation later. Likewise, coastal bombardment by naval squadrons inflicted severe civilian casualties, but had always been an accepted feature of warfare. Extreme apostles of air warfare such as Mr J. M. Spaight in his book
Bombing Vindicated
, published in 1944, argued that ‘The justification of air bombardment is that it is essentially
defensive
in purpose. You kill and destroy to save yourself from being killed or destroyed . . . It would be suicide, normally, for a bomber formation to approach its target at a height at which precision of aim would be certain.’ Yet a significant number of people felt that by embarking on a systematic attack against cities occupied largely by non-combatants in the traditional sense, the Allies sacrificed something of their own moral case and that they contributed substantially to the widespread moral collapse that took place in the Second World War, most especially in the treatment of prisoners and civilians. More of this will be heard later, in 1942 and 1943, as the nature of the Allied air offensive slowly became clear to the public in Britain and America.

The official historians dismiss the moral question overhanging area bombing with the simple assertion that by the winter of 1941 the only choice offered to the Royal Air Force was between area bombing and no bombing at all. Yet there was a third choice – to persist, in the face of whatever difficulties, in attempting to hit precision targets, supported by the growing range of radio and radar navigational and bomb-aiming targets that were already in the pipeline. There was also a fourth, and more realistic alternative: faced by the fact that Britain’s bombers were incapable of a precision campaign, there was no compulsion upon the
Government to authorize the huge bomber programme that was now to be undertaken. Aircraft could have been transferred to the Battle of the Atlantic and the Middle and Far East where they were so urgently needed, and many British strategists would have wholeheartedly defended the decision to move them. There was a genuine moral and strategic dilemma facing the Government in the winter of 1941 about future bombing policy. Thus there were alternatives to the area campaign, albeit at great cost to the
amour propre
of the RAF.

But in those icy months of debate, when Britain lay scarred by the Luftwaffe’s blitz, labouring amidst the trauma of almost total catastrophe on every front, conscious of the appalling suffering that Nazi Germany was inflicting upon the world, the directors of the Allied war effort could scarcely be expected to perceive all these issues quite as clearly as they appeared to a generation of liberals thirty years later. The moral opposition to area bombing came from a small, if articulate, minority. The people of Britain might not be crying aloud for vengeance upon the women and children of Germany with quite the fervour that some British politicians supposed, but it is most unlikely that they would have opposed area bombing if they had been allowed to vote on it. Mr Geoffrey Shakespeare, Liberal MP for Norwich, wrote to Sir Archibald Sinclair in May 1942: ‘Incidentally I am all for the bombing of working class areas of German cities. I am Cromwellian – I believe in “slaying in the name of the Lord”, because I do not believe you will ever bring home to the civil population of Germany the horrors of war until they have been tested in this way.’

Whatever reaction Shakespeare’s remarks may inspire today, they were perfectly acceptable among any but the most radical company in 1941 and 1942. The enthusiastic publicity accorded to the bomber offensive played an important role in keeping hope alive among the British people until at least June 1944.

Between the delivery of the Butt Report and the beginning of the concentrated attack on Germany’s cities in the early spring of 1942, there was a pause. At the very moment when the Air Staff were brought face to face with the failure of their efforts, Bomber Command’s casualties began to rise alarmingly. In the first eighteen nights of August 1941, 107 aircraft were lost. In September, 76 aircraft were missing and another 62 crashed inside England, out of 2,621 dispatched. In October, 68 were missing and 40 crashed out of 2,501 dispatched. On the night of 7 November, 37 aircraft were lost out of 400 dispatched. 12.5 per cent of those sent to Berlin, 13 per cent of those sent to Mannheim and 21 per cent of those sent to the Ruhr failed to return. Only those sent to targets in France came home relatively unscathed.

Including those aircraft which crashed inside England, the entire front line of Bomber Command had been statistically wiped out in less than four months. Throughout 1941, an aircraft was lost for every ten tons of bombs dropped. Bomber Command would suffer far more severely in 1943, but by then the scale of the war had expanded enormously. In 1941 it was unthinkable to continue operations at this rate of attrition when the Butt Report made it clear that no significant results were being achieved. There was also a serious loss of confidence in Sir Richard Peirse’s direction of Bomber Command. He seemed to have little grasp of operational realities, and he was a convenient scapegoat. On 13 November 1941 the Air Ministry instructed him to curtail drastically the scale of sorties against Germany, especially in bad weather. The War Cabinet, stated the directive, ‘have stressed the necessity for conserving our resources in order to build a strong force to be available by the spring of next year’. That winter, the most significant of Bomber Command’s operations were again launched against the
Scharnhorst
and the
Gneisenau
, to little effect, but with a dramatic fall in loss rates. The bomb figures fell from 4,242 tons dropped by Bomber Command in August 1941 to 1,011 tons in February 1942.

It is true that the strength of Bomber Command gained little on paper from this respite, because it suffered a constant drain of squadrons transferred to Coastal Command to support the Battle of the Atlantic, and to prop up Britain’s ailing fortunes in the Middle and Far East. There was also the abrupt loss of the expected American contribution to British bomber strength, when the United States entered the war and at once appropriated almost all domestic aircraft production for her own needs. But in these months the Whitleys and Blenheims were being rapidly phased out, and the new generation of ‘heavies’ was beginning to arrive. American Venturas and Bostons were replacing the unlamented Blenheims. Later there would be the Mosquito, Geoffrey De Haviland’s superb all-plywood light bomber and night fighter which the Air Minsitry had spurned in their enthusiasm for all-metal airframes, but which De Havilands developed on their own initiative into the two-seat aircraft capable of carrying a 4,000-lb bomb to Berlin at 265 mph. It was already apparent that the twin-engined Avro Manchester was a disappointment, but Avro’s designer Roy Chadwick conceived the notion of solving its lack of power problems by stretching the wings and adding two more engines to the same fuselage. The result was the Avro Lancaster, which promised to be one of the outstanding successes of wartime aircraft design when it entered service. The new four-engined Short Stirlings and Handley-Page Halifaxes would look inadequate in 1943 and 1944 – Stirling’s pitiful 16,500-foot ceiling was quite inadequate for operations over Germany – but in 1941 and 1942 they were a vast improvement on what had gone before.

The spring of 1942, for which the air marshals were delaying, promised not only better weather and the first substantial deliveries of four-engined bombers from the factories, but above all the means to navigate with improved accuracy over Germany. The scientists had devised a radio-pulse system, codenamed
Gee
, by which the navigator of an aircraft could fix his position by reference to three transmitting stations in England.
Gee
had been tested over Germany in 1941, effectively if dangerously, since one set had
already been lost with an aircraft, compromising its security. The scientists believed that when
Gee
was issued in quantity to Bomber Command early in 1942 it would take the Germans six months to devise effective jamming methods, and by the autumn they hoped to introduce still more advanced British devices. At this early stage, some of the scientists and airmen had hopes that
Gee
would prove accurate enough to become a blind-bombing device. Even if it did not, for the first time the bomber crews would have the means to find their way to Germany however severe the cloud masking pinpoint landmarks. Now that the immense technological needs of the air war had been identified, the scientists of the Telecommunications Research Establishment were giving birth to the range of equipment that by the end of the war would make Bomber Command overwhelmingly the most technically complex weapon in the hands of the Allies. Even now, at the end of 1941, with
Gee
in prospect the airmen could wait for the spring without impatience.