Bomber Command (8 page)

Yet it is impossible to accept the airmen’s declarations at face value. Trenchard said in 1919 that ‘at present, the moral effect of bombing stands undoubtedly to the material effect in a proportion of twenty to one’, and ever since it had been the prospect of destroying the enemy’s morale, bringing about the collapse of his will to resist by bombing, that lay at the heart of the airmen’s vision of a bomber offensive. Most of them understood perfectly well that attack upon an enemy nation and its morale meant the killing of civilians, but they were reluctant to say so, and even at the height of their offensive in the Second World War, their political masters remained persistently deceitful about revealing the nature of what was being done to Germany. In 1927 and even 1937, it seemed unthinkable to make the kind of mathematical projection carried out as a routine daily exercise at Bomber Command headquarters in 1943, in which ‘Effort’ measured ‘tons of bombs claimed dropped per built-up acre attacked’, ‘Efficiency’ measured ‘acres of devastation per ton of bombs claimed dropped’, and ‘Success’ was calculated by ‘acres of devastation per acre of built-up area attacked’.

No scientific study had been conducted in 1917 (of the sort that would be made so thoroughly and with such startling conclusions in the Second World War) of the effects on British morale and productivity of the German air attacks. Airmen merely remembered the shock and outcry among the civilian population, and the political panic which had ensued. The notion had bitten deep of a ‘soft centre’ at the heart of a nation behind its shield of armies and navies, that air forces might and must attack.

In air operations against production [wrote the future Chief of Air Staff, Group-Captain John Slessor, in 1936] the weight of attack will inevitably fall upon a vitally important, and not by nature very amenable, section of the community – the industrial workers, whose morale and sticking power cannot be expected to equal that of the disciplined soldier. And we should remember that if the moral effect of air bombardment was serious seventeen years ago, it will be immensely more so under modern conditions.
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Perhaps the central conscious or subconscious reason that the RAF devoted so little thought to the successful execution of a precision air attack between the wars was that, on the evidence of the 1917 experience, no very accurate aim seemed necessary to provoke the desired moral collapse. In a memorandum of 1938 the Air Staff distinguished two forms of bombing against: ‘(1) the “precise target”, eg a power station . . . (2) the “target group”, of considerable area in which are concentrated many targets of equal or nearly equal importance on which accurate bombing is not necessary to achieve valuable hits, eg parts of cities, industrial towns, distribution centres or storage areas’. If a few tons of German bombs had caused a major political crisis in London in 1917, it seemed reasonable to assume that many times more bombs on such a ‘target group’ as Berlin would provoke a veritable cataclysm. It is also worth remembering that when airmen conceived a future enemy moral collapse in which a crazed and deprived civilian population roamed the streets shooting and looting and demanding peace behind the back of their own armies, they were not weaving a fantasy but remembering the reality of Germany in 1918, albeit forgetting the military collapse that simultaneously took place.

Yet at a time when fierce public controversy raged around the legitimacy of air bombardment, when there were attempts to outlaw the very existence of the bomber at the international conference table, it would have been unthinkable publicly to debate a strategic air offensive in terms of terrorizing a nation into suing for peace. And this, for all the talk of ‘centres of production
and communication’, was really the point at issue. The RAF’s belief in attacking industrial areas stemmed not from realistic analysis of the prospects of smashing enough industrial plant to break the German economy (although much lip-service was paid to that end), but from belief that the will of industrial workers would collapse when bombs rained around their factories and homes. The pre-war RAF was geared to the execution of a strategic terror bombing campaign and this was at the core of the Trenchard doctrine.

Perhaps the central flaw of this concept was that it was already obsolete. It rested upon the old assumption of armies as professional bodies, behind which lay the unprotected and undisciplined civilian heart of the nation, divorced from the battle and thus totally unconditioned to take part in it. Yet the essence of warfare since the mid-nineteenth century was that the world had left behind the era of the
condottieri
and entered upon the new age of the nation in arms. The historic gulf between fighting man and civilian had ceased to exist. The age when Jane Austen’s characters could act out their private dramas with scarcely a glancing reference to the great European wars taking place beyond the park gates had vanished. Among the great western powers, it had become impossible to conduct a major war without the support and participation of an overwhelming consensus within the nation. In a fascinating paper which he wrote as Minister of Munitions as far back as 1917, Winston Churchill dismissed the arguments for morale bombing before Trenchard and the airmen had even developed them:

It is improbable that any terrorization of the civil population which could be achieved by air attack would compel the Government of a great nation to surrender. Familiarity with bombardment, a good system of dug-outs or shelters, a strong control by police and military authorities, should be sufficient to preserve the national fighting spirit unimpaired. In our own case, we have seen the combative spirit of the people roused, and not quelled, by the German air raids. Nothing that we have learned of the capacity of the German population to endure suffering justifies us in assuming that they could be cowed into submission by such methods, or indeed, that they would not be rendered more desperately resolved by them. Therefore our air offensive should consistently be directed at striking at the base and communications upon whose structure the fighting power of his armies and his fleets of the sea and of the air depends. Any injury which comes to the civil population from this process of attack must be regarded as incidental and inevitable.

. . . But the indispensable preliminary to all results in the air, as in every other sphere of war, is to defeat the armed forces of the enemy.
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If Churchill’s paper had been made a basic text at the RAF Staff College between the wars, much heartbreak and failure in the first four years of the bomber offensive might have been avoided. The airmen might have addressed themselves intensively to the problems of ground and naval air support, instead of allowing their obsession with an independent role for the RAF to distort the thinking of a generation. They might have focused on the decisive problem of air warfare, the defeat of the enemy’s air force, and thus conceived the need for a long-range fighter in 1933 rather than 1943. Instead, their thinking was directed towards means of by-passing the enemy’s defences, either by the power of the bomber’s guns in daylight, or by using the cover of darkness, in order to attack his allegedly vulnerable heart. The RAF might also have avoided the fatal disparity between their public commitment to precision bombing – which their line aircrew would offer so much devotion and sacrifice to fulfilling when war came – and the half-articulated faith in terror bombing in the higher ranks of the service. The decisive gulf between the alleged function of Bomber Command as a precision-bombing force, and its real nature as an area-bombing one, would be revealed at the end of 1941. Harris, who then became C-in-C with a mandate to conduct a full-blooded area campaign, was far more truly Trenchard’s disciple than those
diligent staff officers at the Air Ministry who continued throughout the war to try to direct Bomber Command’s efforts to the destruction of selected key industrial targets.

In the last five years, and most dramatically in the last two years before the outbreak of war, the face of the British and German air forces changed beyond recognition. As the political sky darkened, the Cabinet approved a succession of Royal Air Force rearmament programmes that tripped upon each other in the haste with which one was overtaken by the next. Air defence loomed larger and larger in Government priorities until by 1938 the RAF share of the combined services budget had risen to 40 per cent from its inter-war average of 17 per cent. Yet the bomber still seized the lion’s share of the available cash: under Scheme A, approved in July 1934, RAF strength in Britain would expand by April 1939 from 316 to 476 bombers, from 156 to 336 fighters. Schemes C, F, H succeeded each other in May 1935, February 1936 and February 1937 respectively. Then in December 1937 there was a sudden check: Sir Thomas Inskip, Minister for the CoOrdination of Defence, declined to accept Scheme J, by which the Air Staff proposed an increased strength of 1,442 bombers and 532 fighters by April 1941. Inskip argued that the total cost would be too great, and that the proportion of fighters was too low. After prolonged debate, in April 1938 the Cabinet finally accepted Scheme L, by which the RAF would reach a strength of 1,352 bombers and 608 first-line fighters by April 1940. Airmen argue that Inskip was an indifferent minister who forced these measures through – at the cost of severe delays in creating a four-engined bomber force – merely for financial and political reasons, because fighters are cheaper than bombers. But modern historians of the Battle of Britain are disposed to believe that it was Inskip’s insistence on higher priority for fighter production that gave Fighter Command the tiny margin of strength by which it achieved victory against the Luftwaffe in 1940. In September 1939, Britain entered the war
with 608 first-line fighters against the 1,215 of the Luftwaffe, and with 536 bombers against 2,130.

But more important than mere numbers were the aircraft types in production and coming off the drawing board. It is impossible to overstate the significance of production policy decisions taken before the outbreak of war in both Britain and Germany, decisions that would have a decisive effect on the struggle in the air right through to 1945. Although the Luftwaffe achieved overwhelming superiority over the RAF in both quantity and quality in the mid-1930s, in the last two years before war, British designers were creating aircraft that Germany proved disastrously unable to match in 1942, 1943, even 1944. In 1936 the Air Staff issued specifications P13/36 and B/12/36 for four-engined heavy bombers and twin-engined ‘heavy-medium’ bombers that brought into being, in 1941, the Stirling, the Halifax, the Manchester and its ultimate modification, the Lancaster. Whatever debate is possible about the proportion of national resources ultimately devoted to heavy-bomber production, and about the manner in which the bomber force was employed, it is difficult to dispute the value to the British war effort of possessing heavy aircraft with capabilities no other nation in the world could match, although the best brains in German industry struggled to do so.

The heavy bomber was the visible expression of the RAF’s determination to make a contribution to the war independent of the other two services, as was the weakness of its air–ground and air–sea coordination techniques. Germany and France, on the other hand, had throughout the 1930s devoted their resources to producing light and medium bombers primarily for army support, and both the German Army and the Luftwaffe were deeply imbued with the doctrines of mobile warfare preached by De Gaulle, Guderian and Liddell Hart. From the Stuka in 1939 to Hitler’s obsession with the jet Me262 as a fighter-bomber in 1944, German planes were preoccupied with tactical air power. Yet they would pay the price in due time for their lack of an adequate four-engined long-range bomber.

The American Flying Fortress, designed as a strategic bomber, achieved remarkable performance and carried enormous defensive armament only at the cost of carrying a severely limited bombload. The early Flying Fortress also lacked the power-operated turrets which proved a vital advance in aircraft defence – albeit still insufficient to make the day bomber self-defending.

But in Britain, until the new generation of ‘heavies’ began to come off the production line – and with aircraft of such radical design there were inevitable serious teething troubles – the RAF was obliged to go to war with stop-gap bombers of much less satisfactory pedigree – the twin-engined Hampden, Blenheim, Whitley and Wellington, and worst of all the single-engined Battle. The Battle was an unwanted aircraft in 1933, yet such was the pressure to increase the RAF’s numbers in the last days of peace that its production was even accelerated: 3,100 Battles were produced before the end of 1940. As the pre-war expansion schemes reached their climax with Scheme M, approved in November 1938, there was no possibility of meeting the requirements with new designs. Instead, bombers such as the Battle and the Blenheim, already known to be quite outclassed for modern warfare, continued to pour off the production lines. It seemed better to have something than to have nothing, at least in Whitehall. Those who would be flying the Battles and Blenheims in action were not consulted.

In 1936 the old area organization of the Air Defence of Great Britain was abolished and replaced by functional commands: Bomber, Fighter, Training and Coastal. Bomber Command’s squadrons were redeployed, moving from the stations in southern England that they had occupied throughout the 1920s when the Government was looking with such alarm towards France, taking up the eastern airfields closest to Germany, from which they would fight the Second World War, and ranging southwards from 4 Group in Yorkshire to 2 and 3 Groups
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in Norfolk.

It is extraordinary how rapidly the nature of air war changed in the last years of peace, so much so that few airmen themselves understood what had happened. In March 1939, chafing noisily from his retirement, Trenchard deplored ‘the continuous clamouring for defence measures’ from an ignorant and optimistic public. Yet the German Me109 and the British Spitfire could now overtake bombers at interception speeds of better than 150 mph. Most important of all, the birth of radar had overnight transformed the power of the defence to plot an attacking bomber and direct fighters to intercept it. The dominance that radar was to achieve over aerial warfare between 1939 and 1945 cannot be overemphasized, nor can the contribution of Watson-Watt, its inventor, and Sir Henry Tizard, the brilliant scientific civil servant whose Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence was largely responsible for bringing Britain’s radar network into being. It was Tizard who personally presided over the critical ‘Biggin Hill Experiment’ in 1938, when the fighter station was used as a laboratory for creating the Fighter Direction organization, linking radar to the defending aircraft, which made victory possible in the Battle of Britain.