Dresden (15 page)

The big attack on the City of London had been planned as a nine-hour operation, which might have caused incalculably more widespread damage, but in fact it was abandoned after three hours. Dense cloud had developed over the bombers' home bases in northern France, making the intended shuttle operation impossible. The weather worsened further overnight, eventually turning to snow and grounding the entire German bomber fleet. Fate had intervened, as it had done before and would so often again. The consequences of a firestorm in London—many thousands dead from blast, fire, and suffocation, and the heart of a huge city wiped from the earth—would have been incalculable. The Luftwaffe would never come so close again. Now it was the RAF's turn.

According to Albert Speer, Hitler's personal architect and later chief of war production, if in 1940–41 the Führer failed to destroy the capital of the British Empire, it was not through lack of desire. After dinner one night in 1940 he “worked himself up to a frenzy of destructiveness” and demanded of his guests:

London proved itself, at least at the tail end of 1940, a lucky city. Due to the curtailment of the raid, and the fact that, because it was a weekend, the City was virtually uninhabited, “only” 160 civilians died. Twenty-five firefighters also lost their lives. Unscientific as the concept of good or ill fortune may be, it was to be proved in raid after raid that chance events, and the operation of providence in the shape of the weather, were often mightier arbiters of a bombed city's fate than its defenses, the enemy planners' intentions, the numbers of attacking aircraft, or even the skills of their bomber crews.

Arthur Harris wrote afterward:

The future chief of Bomber Command was certainly learning lessons.

From September 1940 to March 1941 the Luftwaffe's bombers would launch raids on targets in Britain as far apart as London and
Liverpool, Gosport and Glasgow, killing more than forty thousand British civilians. Between September 9, 1940, and New Year's Day, 1941, London was attacked on fifty-seven nights. Fourteen thousand of its inhabitants died, a rate of around 250 fatalities for each day of bombing. These are impressively grim figures, even compared with the later British bombing of German cities. In 1944 the average daily death toll caused by Allied bombing within the Reich's borders was 127. This was to rise dramatically only during the final terrible endgame of 1944–45, when German military decline and massive increases in the frequency and efficiency of Bomber Command's operations drove death rates in the Reich, at nearly ten times that figure, to truly apocalyptic levels.

More than a year would pass before Arthur Harris could begin to turn his own crisp prophecy into fierce reality, but in the meantime he had forgotten nothing of what he had heard, seen, or felt during the winter England's cities burned. Especially after the Coventry raid, the British government successfully appealed to the court of world opinion. The seemingly wanton destruction of a fine medieval city center, and above all a great house of God, appalled neutral opinion, in the United States and elsewhere, and did much to win over doubters to the British cause. There was little discussion of the heavy concentration of war industries in Coventry.

As for senior RAF officers, they left outrage to the journalists and got on with the cold, quiet business of examining how the Germans had managed what was in strictly military terms a signal success. As Harris explained, “It would have taken Bomber Command much longer to learn how to attack Germany if it had not been for the lessons of the German attack on Britain.”

 

FROM THE SPRING OF
1941,
Hitler's bombers would ease off on their raids over Britain, for despite the hopes of many Germans that their country, dominant in Europe, would now bask in peace and prosperity, the Führer had other uses for them.

Hitler was planning further conquests, and for them he needed his air force. There would be new work for the Luftwaffe to do in the conquests of Greece and Yugoslavia, and from late June 1941 in the vast, treacherous spaces of the Soviet Union, where battle swallowed men,
tanks, and aircraft alike at a rate unknown in modern history. The Luftwaffe's bombers did not cease their London raids until May 1941 (the last attack included a direct hit on the House of Commons), and would return to Britain from time to time, but never in the same strength or with the same devastating effect as during the winter they had set England's cities ablaze.

From now on, the roles gradually reversed. Britain moved onto the offensive in the air. In consequence, the story of the RAF's part in the war against the Third Reich became largely the story of Bomber Command; of the production and use of Wellingtons and Halifaxes and above all the powerful Lancaster four-engined bombers against German targets. As for the Luftwaffe, very soon its fighters, hitherto cast in an invasion-support role, would have to take over major and previously unaccustomed responsibility for dealing with that increasingly destructive British bomber offensive.

“FIRE AND THE SWORD,”
as the grim phrase has it, have always belonged together. Whether to drive the enemy from his stronghold, or deprive him of shelter, or to destroy his morale, organized burning was always one of the nastier methods of waging war; indiscriminate, impersonal, killing and maiming its victims in terrible ways. It was, nevertheless, permitted under the rules of conflict, though arousing almost universal horror. Who could forget the burning of Atlanta, the destructive climax of the American Civil War? Or the manmade fire that in 1631 consumed the ancient, treasure-laden German city of Magdeburg after its sack by the Imperial army, leaving six thousand charred corpses in its ruins? Or the thousands of rebellious Catholic peasants and their families who perished in the towns and villages of the Vendée during the 1790s as the armies of revolutionary France systematically burned and pillaged the entire province into submission?

Centuries before the Second World War, filled projectiles had already been invented that released oil or petroleum to set fires. As witness the bomb-throwing Prussian grenadiers of the siege of Dresden in 1760, by the eighteenth century they were in fact commonplace. Once aircraft began to be used for military purposes, it was no great imaginative leap to adapt this kind of simple but cruelly effective weaponry for dropping from a great height onto human habitations, defensive emplacements, or workplaces. A bomb filled with high explosives would blow up, causing damage and death through the explosion and the violent distribution of shattered metal in the immediate vicinity, but by and large that was it. The great advantage with the much smaller incendiary device was that it could, if dropped
in sufficient quantities and in a sufficient density, create limitless damage over an ever-expanding area. This could be achieved through the calculated spreading of individual fires and their eventual joining together into a burning mass, so extremely hot and so wide in extent that no fire brigade could bring it under control.

The chief challenges were twofold: first, to devise a way in which the bomb could be made to start burning well away from the aircraft; and second, once it had, to ensure that after impact with the target it continued burning until the fire could catch and spread.

The Germans came up with two basic designs. One, a fairly thin-skinned oil-filled bomb (
Flammenbombe
) was constructed simply so as to explode on impact with buildings or other objects on the ground. The other, the
Phosphorbrandbombe
, contained a mix of phosphorus and petroleum, which (because of the phosphorus element) would burst into flames after being exposed to contact with the air. German civilians tended to refer to all incendiaries as phosphor bombs, although only in a few cases was the terrifying, blister-inducing substance used as any more than an aid to initial ignition. The mixes and host casings were so conceived as to ensure that most incendiaries would burn for between eight and thirty minutes once ignited.

Later in the war the incendiaries were combined in “clusters,” that, with the aid of a small explosive charge, would break apart on or shortly before impact, thus scattering a number of burning bombs over the immediate area and increasing the chances of their combining quickly to make a larger fire. There were many modifications in the delivery methods, and science found alternative choices of fire-inducing fillers, but these were the two basic principles that dominated the production of the incendiaries used in air attacks by both sides throughout the Second World War.

The British, who had begun the war with a modus operandi almost exclusively based on the use of high-explosive (HE) bombs, aiming at specific industrial, fuel, and transport targets, quickly understood the potential of incendiaries, and caught up with the Germans over time.

On the night of December 16–17, 1940, the British mounted a bombing raid on the German city of Mannheim. Perhaps deliberately, the operation was officially designated as “revenge” for the immolation of Coventry and other English provincial cities, the planes carried
what for Bomber Command at that stage of the war were unusually large quantities of incendiary bombs—the standard British four-pound magnesium “stick,” eighteen inches long and weighted at one end to direct its fall. It was somewhat unreliable in both aim and flammability, but en masse it did its job. Mannheim was attacked with a force of 134 bombers, the largest number yet sent against an individual target. This was also the first time Bomber Command had sent its forces against the heart of a specific urban area rather than an individual factory or airfield or other military installation. Another ethical threshold crossed, this time as a result of Coventry. Almost five hundred buildings were destroyed, 47 people were killed, and 1,266 people were made homeless.

Research and development proceeded rapidly. A young Cambridge University chemistry graduate, Vaughan Southam, was one of those recruited straight into the Ministry of Aircraft Production to accelerate and facilitate the development and production of incendiary bombs for the RAF. These youthful tweed-jacketed progress chasers (called “ginger groups”) were given powers to overrule, where necessary, both factory managers and regular civil servants, which caused a predictable tension in an industrial and bureaucratic culture where age and experience conferred authority.

As Mr. Southam explained, “We had to make sure the bombs didn't take too long to burn through, because the RAF didn't want the Germans to have enough time to pick them up and throw them out of the window.” In fact, the basic designs weren't considered in themselves sufficiently nasty, by either side in the contest. He added:

The bombs Mr. Southam worked on were both manufactured and tested in the lowlands of Scotland. There lay the testing ranges, and also the factories where the incendiary bombs themselves were assembled. “Young Scots lassies” did the work.

Special tests were held just north of London in Watford, at the Building Research Department. They often created mock-ups of typical German dwellings, with German furniture—the backdrops to enemy civilians' everyday lives—enabling the researchers to tailor the incendiaries as closely as possible to the buildings they would be destroying.

The Americans, after they entered the bombing war against German territory in 1943, went even further. They constructed several German-style buildings at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, where chemical and biological weapons were developed, even going to the great trouble and expense of re-creating a “German apartment block” designed by a German refugee architect, Erich Mendelssohn. On these buildings, incendiary bombs were systematically tested.

In what became known as fire raids, the role of the high-explosive “general purpose” bomb, following the example of Coventry, was to knock out the utilities and block or crater the access roads to the point of impassibility. The conventional bomb would penetrate the roofs of buildings, thus facilitating both the access of the incendiaries that followed and also, by creating openings to the outside air, ensuring the drafts that would enable the fires so caused to grow and spread as quickly as possible. The last was very important. Thermite (a heat-producing mixture of powdered iron oxide and aluminum) created its own oxygen, so did not need an air supply to start burning, but after a minute or two, having activated the magnesium, the Thermite would go out. If the incendiary was to earn its keep, it had then to ignite the area around itself. For this, drafts were essential.

But so, as the RAF began to realize, was a revision of its entire modus operandi.

 

AIR MARSHAL ARTHUR HARRIS,
late deputy chief of Air Staff and (from June 1941) head of the British air mission in Washington, was appointed commander in chief of RAF Bomber Command on February 22, 1942. It was a post he retained until four months after
the end of the war in Europe. His doughty person became so closely associated with the theory and practice of “area bombing” that it seems almost a pity to point out that this policy had already been adopted months before Harris started the job that made him one of the most famous—or notorious—figures of the Second World War.

Harris took over an organization that possessed, according to him, only 378 aircraft, of which 68 were “heavy” four-engined bombers. Moreover, though Bomber Command was extremely popular with the general public (to whom it represented the only British force properly “hitting back” at the Germans), within government circles serious questions were being asked about Bomber Command's effectiveness. Under pressure from the prime minister's scientific adviser, Frederick Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell), a civil servant belonging to the War Cabinet Secretariat, by the name of Mr. Butt, had been authorized to carry out a searching inquiry into the real effectiveness of Bomber Command's highly publicized night-bombing sorties over Germany and occupied Europe.

Butt examined hundreds of photographs captured by on-board cameras during bombers' attacking approaches in June and July 1941. For comparison, Mr. Butt also combed through summaries of operations, navigational reports, and so on. His conclusions horrified his masters. The most shocking was that, of the aircraft recorded as hitting the target, only one in three had actually gotten within three miles. The news got worse: This figure included the French ports, where two out of three bombs dropped fulfilled this rather generous requirement. Over Germany as a whole, it was only one in four, and over the vitally important Ruhr industrial area,
one in ten
. The success rate was reasonable at full moon, but plunged when the moon was new. Clear conditions enabled half of the bombs to get within distance of the target, but haze reduced the number again to one in ten. Intense antiaircraft fire further reduced the number of “on-target” sorties.

Even more discouraging was that these figures applied only to those 30 percent of aircraft that came within five miles of the target.

In short, a huge proportion even of the aircraft previously credited with successful attacks had in fact dropped their loads in open country.

Not surprisingly, Butt's figures were dismissed as too pessimistic, especially by Bomber Command. Then headed by Sir Richard Peirse, Bomber Command already found itself faced with difficult changes in
its role. For most of the first half of 1941, on Churchill's orders, it had turned to tasks connected with the Battle of the Atlantic—bombing ports on the French and German coasts, U-boat pens, dockyards, and, where they could be found, German surface raiders.

On July 9 a new government directive had sent Bomber Command's aircraft deeper into Germany and revealed yet more cruelly its lack of capacity for on-target, destructive—and therefore cost-effective—night bombing. Not only were the raids inaccurate and ineffective to a proven degree, but casualty rates among aircrew had started to rise.

In 1940 the Germans had a very underdeveloped air defense, with only forty defensive fighters at its disposal. By the late summer of 1941 the system had been dramatically augmented, especially around key areas such as the Ruhr. In the first eighteen nights of August 1941, some 107 British aircraft were lost; in September, a total of 138 (62 crashed inside England); and in October, 108. A shocking 12.5 percent of those sent to Berlin, 13 percent of those sent to Mannheim, and 21 percent of those bombing the Ruhr did not come home. Added to these figures was the implication, from the Butt report, that these raids were not just costly in money, men, and aircraft, but near enough futile. They just weren't hitting much. On November 13, 1941, Bomber Command was ordered to halt long-range operations. This was, for the moment, a serious admission of failure.

However, with no progress on any land front, and the public still shocked and embittered by the effects of the Blitz, there was no question that, in the longer term, bombing Germany—“hitting back”—remained a key component in the machinery of morale maintenance. As a result, whatever the concern felt in government circles about the effectiveness of Bomber Command's raids, this was not the message put out by the Ministry of Information. Newsreels and skillfully made documentary films such as
Target for Tonight
(released in August 1941) had served to convince most British civilians, and many Americans also, that the RAF was doing an excellent job over Germany. They did not know that so far more RAF aircrew had been lost over Germany than enemy civilians killed on the ground.

Meanwhile, the bombers could not be left inactive. Bomber Command's major operations in that midwinter period were against the elusive German warships, the
Scharnhorst
and the
Gneisenau
in
their secure anchorage at Brest, and the publicity spotlight was accordingly turned on those. Through the winter there were discussions about the future role of the strategic bomber.

Churchill might instinctively want to keep the bombers in the air, but there were those in government, and in the navy and Coastal Command in particular, who felt that the vast sums expended on building and crewing heavy bombers simply represented money better spent elsewhere. In North Africa, British forces were struggling against a new and cunning adversary, the German general Rommel. After Pearl Harbor, they faced a rampant Japanese enemy in Asia. The second-in-command of the Far Eastern Fleet, Admiral Willis, wrote following the fall of Singapore: