Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (18 page)

But the Luftwaffe’s task was much harder. To begin with, there were the usual hurdles of range and endurance, especially for twin-engine medium bombers; if RAF Blenheims and Wellingtons could not reach very far into France and Germany, then equally Dorniers and Heinkels could not reach far into Britain—or stay very long once they got there.
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Aside from the gigantic target of London and some special maritime targets such as Harwich and Portsmouth, the greater part of British industry was located farther north and west. The main shipyards were all there, and so were many of the vital coalfields. Apart from lighter vessels in the south, the Royal Navy positioned its heavier warships and its Atlantic escort squadrons in northern Ireland, Liverpool, the Clyde, and the Orkneys. And while the Midlands contained many factories, the late Victorian structure of British manufacturing meant that they were scattered across a very large area. Even on a rare moonlit night (which also made the German planes most vulnerable to RAF fighters), the rigidly kept blackout meant it was difficult for German pilots to find out where their appointed target was; on cloudy nights, the natural temptation was to dump their bombs somewhere in the area and run
for home. Most of those bombs dropped harmlessly into fields, though not a few of them struck a school, a hospital, or a row of workers’ houses.

Finally, although German air intelligence had assembled a portfolio of British industrial and infrastructural targets before the war, there hardly seems to have been much pattern in the Luftwaffe’s nighttime campaign. The bombing of London eased the pressure not only upon RAF bases but also upon the manufacturing regions, yet the slightly later attacks upon Birmingham, Coventry, Bristol, Exeter, the Tyne, Plymouth, and South Wales, although inflicting damage, were too scattered and sporadic to have a strategic impact. During the spring of 1942 there occurred another case of mutual stupidity by each side’s air commands. In late March the RAF planners inexplicably ordered a raid upon the ancient, wooden-framed Hanseatic city of Lubeck, so enraging Hitler that he ordered retaliatory raids upon British cathedral and university cities (the so-called Baedeker raids) such as York and Norwich, and on May 3, 1942, the medieval heart of Exeter’s town center was bombed to bits. Such raids had no strategic purpose whatsoever. They simply wasted bombs (and crews) and inflamed hatreds. In retrospect, as will be seen in the rest of this chapter, the most important industrial targets by far were the Rolls-Royce engine factories in Derby and the Spitfire and Lancaster assembly lines (often with “shadow factories” built even farther away, in north Wales or northwest England). A flailing, retributionist bombing offensive against cathedral cities simply lacked strategic purpose and took the focus away from the need to cripple Britain’s rising aircraft production. Total aircraft production figures tell it all: 15,000 planes were built in 1940, 20,000 in 1941, and 23,000 in 1942.
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The Blitz upon Britain’s cities did two other things: it steadily inured people to the coming of indiscriminate aerial bombing, and it aroused a yearning to hit back at Germany’s population. Churchill’s most popular speeches in this period were those in which he warned the German people that if they continued to follow the heinous Nazi leadership (what choice had they?), they would in turn suffer from what had been done to Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, and Coventry. In recent years it has become quite fashionable to denounce the Anglo-American strategic air offensive against Germany as a special form of
holocaust—and there is indeed severe criticism to be leveled at it, as will be discussed below. It is only proper to remember that “terror bombing” first took place when Japanese, Italian, and especially German bomb bays opened upon civilian populations below.

RAF Bomber Command’s aerial offensive against German targets encountered many of the same problems that the Luftwaffe had faced beforehand. The early months of the war had not been auspicious for a service that for over two decades had advertised the benefits of independent strategic bombing. It carried out some early limited raids over western parts of Germany, was forced by bomber casualties to abandon daytime raids, and then found nighttime bombing over Germany full of difficulties; the usually thick clouds hid Wellington bombers from enemy fighters but also hid enemy targets, and detection aids, if any, were primitive. After May 1940, Italy’s entry into the struggle meant that an increasing number of RAF squadrons, including modern medium bomber squadrons, had to be diverted to the Mediterranean. And everyone—Coastal Command, the Fleet Air Arm, Fighter Command, the tactical commands across the Middle East and India—was screaming for more trained pilots and aircrews.

Still, by the end of 1940, and for another two years, Bomber Command occupied a very special place in British grand strategy. With the fall of France and much of the rest of western Europe, Britain and its Empire stood alone against the Axis, with the United States and the Soviet Union watching on the sidelines. In almost all respects its posture had to be a defensive one: to protect the merchant shipping convoys from the U-boats, to head off the German surface raiders, to blunt the Luftwaffe’s nighttime attacks upon British cities and factories, to hold out against vastly larger Italian forces in Africa and the Mediterranean, and (if possible) to try to send some reinforcements to India and the Far East in response to Japan’s piecemeal aggressions. Repeated and ever larger aerial attacks against Germany, by contrast, were the proof that Britain could hurt the foe and was serious about winning. This was hugely important in Churchill’s relationships with Roosevelt and Stalin, and immensely helpful in sustaining British domestic morale. Not only that, a successful bombing campaign
would
weaken Germany’s fighting strength, perhaps not to the extent that dedicated airpower advocates believed (i.e., bringing enemy collapse through
bombing alone), but certainly sufficient to make the reconquest of Europe—when it came—somewhat easier. Even those British admirals and generals skeptical of Bomber Command’s claims had to agree that wrecking German shipyards, hitting aircraft factories, and disrupting gun production were jolly good things.

The question was, could a successful bombing campaign be accomplished? The answer was no in 1941, and no again in 1942. Bomber Command sorties went out night after night, sometimes diverted to attacks upon German battle cruisers in Brest or the U-boat pens, but always returning to the assault upon the enemy heartland. But the extraordinary courage of the crews in being willing to undertake those appalling journeys, to lose many friends and colleagues in the night and then to go out again, was no guarantee of operational success if the right tools were not at hand to match the strategic doctrine. If the RAF’s aircraft had limited range (and even when they had more range), usually couldn’t see the targets, and possessed inadequate navigational and target-setting instruments, then there was little chance of damaging the foe’s massive industrial strength even if he had no night fighter and flak defenses with which to hit back. With increasingly enormous antiaircraft barrages driving the bombers to fly at ever higher altitudes, the level of accuracy tumbled further. By the spring of 1941 the Air Staff was assuming a theoretical average error of drop of 1,000 yards, which was dismaying enough. However, in the rigorously compiled internal Butt Report of August 1941, based upon new day-after photographic reconnaissance, it was found that in a series of raids on the Ruhr only one-tenth of the RAF’s bombers found their way even to within 5 miles of their assigned targets. This evidence really shook Churchill’s faith in bombing. While he might continue to boast of the air offensive publicly, he was withering in his reply to the Air Staff’s plea for a war-winning force of four thousand heavy bombers, pointing out that increased accuracy
alone
would quadruple their capacity to damage Germany. He also, for the first time, privately admitted that “all we have learnt since the war began shows that [bombing’s] effects, both physical and moral, are greatly exaggerated.”
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The RAF’s response was to concede that “the only target on which the night force could inflict effective damage was a whole German town,” which clearly implied a shift toward indiscriminate bombing.
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It is from this time onward that increasing stress was placed upon weakening the enemy’s morale, whatever that meant. Moreover, the means of mass destruction were increasing fast. What damage could hundreds of the newer, powerful Lancasters inflict if let loose over the Third Reich? Also, the British scientific establishment was beginning, with RAF funding, to develop a series of top-secret directional aids to navigation and target identification—code-named Gee, Oboe, and H2S—that were increasingly capable of getting the bombers closer to the target. So, too, were the new RAF Pathfinder squadrons, specifically trained to fly ahead of the main bombing force and identify the target with flares and explosives. The British authorities also decided, a little later, to authorize the dropping of odd strips of aluminum (called variously “window,” “snowflake” or “chaff”) that blurred the enemy’s radar screen. And in the midst of these many improvements, on February 22, 1942, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris became C in C, Bomber Command, and the service received its most implacable advocate of the sustained and general bombing of Germany.

None of this actually solved the basic operational dilemma: how to get control of the air over Germany so as to be able to eliminate the Nazi industrial machine. The idea that this might
not
be possible was absent from Bomber Command’s mind. All that was needed now, it was argued, was the systematic application of further force, chiefly by the RAF’s own efforts, although the coming to Britain of the USAAF in 1943, with its own conviction of the centrality of strategic bombing, was hugely welcome. If the American air generals Henry “Hap” Arnold, Carl Spaatz, and Ira Eaker needed the Air Staff’s strong support for their European strategy, the RAF definitely required senior American airmen to keep up the pressure for the strategic bombing campaign. At Casablanca, the Anglo-American air chiefs stood firm together.

Harris was a remarkable character who was both much loved and much hated; he was as strong and egotistical as MacArthur or George Patton and just as aggressive. Like those two, he recognized the need for display, hence the coming in 1942 of Bomber Command’s much-acclaimed “Thousand Bomber Raids.” By scraping together training squadrons and second-line units, he managed to dispatch 1,046 bombers against Cologne on the night of May 30—a chiefly symbolic raid, although the city also possessed light industries and occupied a key spot
on the lower Rhine. Six hundred acres of that ancient city were flattened, at a cost of forty bombers (3.8 percent). Other such raids followed against Essen and then Bremen, though repeatedly cloudy conditions and the higher losses among the training squadrons forced Harris to abandon such spectacles for a while. Still, he had made his point: he had an independent tool for killing Germans and hurting the Third Reich. This gave him the elbow room for the RAF’s three great campaigns of 1943–44: the Battle of the Ruhr, the Battle of Hamburg, and the Battle of Berlin.

The results of these three battles, taken together, show how difficult it was (and still is) to offer a balanced assessment of Britain’s strategic bombing campaign and why Bomber Command was allowed to do what it did for so long. The Battle of the Ruhr consisted of no fewer than forty-three major raids between March and July 1943 and did massive, indiscriminate damage to Essen, Aachen, Duisburg, Dortmund, Bochum, Duesseldorf, and Barmen-Wuppertal (90 percent of the last named was flattened in one attack in May). Helped by the Oboe directional system and by the Pathfinders, Bomber Command’s accuracy had improved; its planes could certainly reach their target cities, stay in the air longer, and scatter their incendiaries and larger bombs (by this stage some of the newer Lancasters carried 8,000-pound high-explosive bombs). And the losses of RAF aircraft and crews, although steadily rising, were matched by continual reinforcements.

Perhaps Harris should have stopped there and not sent his bombers farther afield. There were two good arguments for constraining his campaign in this way, of which the first, of course, was geography. Whereas Britain’s main steelworks (Sheffield, Doncaster) were a long way north, much of Germany’s heavy industry was in the west of the country. Thus Bomber Command’s squadrons only had to run a relatively short gauntlet of antiaircraft fire and Luftwaffe night fighters. Second, as the historian Adam Tooze has recently pointed out, the Ruhr bombings really were hurting that part of the German war economy, and much more than the later critics of the overall strategic air offensive have understood.
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While there may not have been pinpoint bombing of specific factories, the RAF was unloading an awful lot of bombs onto great concentrations of strategic industrial manufacture. Spaatz, when he heard American visitors criticize Britain’s limited war
efforts in 1943, was very quick to remind them that Bomber Command was the
only
force in the western camp that was directly hurting Germany.

But Harris wanted to move forward. To his delight, the Battle of Hamburg was a further advertisement for mass bombing. Between July and November 1943 a staggering 17,000 bomber sorties were flown against that great port city and others in the western parts of Germany, under the name of Operation Gomorrah. The initial raid, on July 24, was terrifying: 791 RAF bombers, including 374 Lancasters, screened by the aluminum “window” strips, directed by Oboe, led by Pathfinders, and aided by clear weather, pounded the center of that historic Hanseatic—and, traditionally, very Anglophile—city. There was no rest for Hamburg over the next few weeks, since the USAAF joined in, as did Mosquito fighter-bombers that had been specially modified to carry 4,000-pound bombs. Then the main force of Bomber Command struck, again and again, at German targets as the summer unfolded. On August 17, Harris sent 597 Lancasters to attack the Reich’s experimental flying-bomb station at Peenemuende.