The pause in major operations ordered after the Berlin disaster gave an exhausted, depleted and dispirited force the chance to catch its breath and gather its strength. Over the months that followed the recent volunteers started to arrive in force at their operational squadrons. The first of the new generation of four-engined heavies, the Stirlings and Halifaxes, began to replace their two-engined predecessors. On Christmas Eve, 1941, the first of the Lancasters landed at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire. Soon its blunt, menacing lines would be seen everywhere. Some of the new aircraft carried desperately-needed new electronic navigation aids. By the time Harris took over Bomber Command at the end of February 1942 the force was approaching a position where it could start applying the policies on which those running the war were now agreed.
Shortly before his arrival there was an event which gave heart to the battered squadrons. One day in early March 1942, Peter Johnson visited a bomber station in Nottinghamshire to have lunch with the base commander. Entering the mess he found a group of young officers in the middle of a raucous party. His host explained they were celebrating a ‘wizard prang’ the night before. ‘Come and look at the photos,’ he said. ‘They’re the best ever. Teach those bloody Frogs to play along with the Boche.’
Johnson examined the pictures taken during the raid and agreed they were ‘remarkable indeed’. They showed the Renault works on an island in the Seine just outside Paris, overlaid by a mass of explosions, flares and fires. It looked as if ‘the factory was a complete write-off and that it would hardly be worth the enemy’s while to try to recover significant production from the chaos.’
A shout of ‘NEWS’ cut through the triumphant hubbub. The ‘din of laughter and talk was followed by a chorus of “Ssssshh, ssssshh.” Tankards in hand, everyone gathered round the radiogram … “I bet we’re on first,” said someone. “Unless they’ve murdered ole Hitler!” The cool tones of the BBC announcer gave this, the most outstanding success of Bomber Command in two and a half years, pride of place.’ Johnson was reluctant to drag the CO away from the party and excused himself, pleading an appointment with a visitor from the staff. Ignoring shouts of ‘Fuck the staff!’ and ‘Teach them to fly!’ he departed. He drove away deep in thought. ‘What I had seen was, I realized, something of a “one-off” born of the exceptional success of the night’s operation. But I was very conscious that the camaraderie, the sense of being an exclusive band of brothers, in this, the first wartime bomber squadron I had known was something quite apart from the rest of the service.’ He applied immediately to leave his post commanding the Ossington Advanced Flying Training School and get on to operations.1
The Renault factory at Billancourt had been chosen by the Air Staff on the direction of the War Cabinet. It was turning out an estimated 18,000 lorries a year, most of which went to the German military. This was thought to justify the risk of French civilian casualties. The attack went ahead on the night of 3 March 1942. The results, for the time, were devastating. The operation involved 235 aircraft, the greatest number so far sent on a raid, which arrived in three waves. The attack was opened by a vanguard of the most experienced crews who dropped large numbers of pyrotechnic markers. This was the first, full-scale attempt to use flares to identify targets which the main force could then use to aim at. The bombers went in very low at between 1,000 and 4,000 feet to increase accuracy and minimize the danger to locals. The works were only lightly defended by anti-aircraft guns. A record tonnage of bombs went down and the damage they did was considerable. About 40 per cent of the buildings were destroyed and production was halted for four weeks at a loss of nearly 2,300 trucks.
The precautions against spilling French blood, however, had little effect. Blocks of flats housing the workers were clustered around the factory and 367 people were killed. This was twice as many as had died in any RAF raid on a German city so far. This did not detract from the feeling that the Renault attack was a great success. Heavy damage had been done to a precise target with minimal losses. Only one Wellington failed to return.
But the episode was, as Johnson had realized, far from the normal run of Bomber Command operations. There was no cloud below 10,000 feet and almost full moonlight. Most importantly, all the crews had enjoyed a practically flak-free outing which enabled them to make low-level attacks. These conditions made a reasonable degree of precision possible. This was never going to be the case in Germany and it was in Germany that the big battles would have to be fought.
The man now leading the offensive had an ideal service background for the job. Arthur Harris had joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1915 and flown on the Western Front before being given command of a home defence squadron where he acquired a reputation as a pioneer of night flying. Between the wars he served in Iraq, helping keep rebellious tribes in line by bombarding them from the air. He knew how Whitehall worked from stints at the Air Ministry, notably as director of plans in the crucial mid-thirties period. He also understood and got on with Americans, having served as head of the RAF delegation in Washington during 1941.
It was Harris who bore the brunt of post-war revulsion at the destruction of Germany. But no matter how enthusiastically and unswervingly he may have pursued the policy, the idea of pulverizing cities had not originated with him. As he pointed out in his memoirs: ‘There is a widespread impression that I not only invented the policy of area bombing but also insisted on carrying it out in the face of a natural reluctance to kill women and children that was felt by everyone else. The facts are otherwise. Such decisions are not in any case made by Commanders-in-Chief in the field, but by the ministries, the Chiefs of Staff Committee and by the War Cabinet. The decision to attack large industrial areas was taken long before I became Commander-in-Chief.’2
The first directive from the CAS to greet Harris had indeed confirmed the direction that had been set. ‘The primary object of your operations,’ it said, ‘should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular, on the industrial workers.’ Portal was concerned that perhaps the meaning of his orders was not clear enough. He wrote to Air Vice-Marshal Bottomley who had drafted the directive: ‘I suppose it is clear that the aiming points are to be the built-up areas, not, for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories … this must be made clear if it is not already understood.’ He need not have worried. Harris knew very well what was expected of him.
It was Harris’s bad luck to look and sound like a bully whose determination to win took little account of the lives of German civilians or indeed his own men. He was broad, short-sighted and bad-tempered and wore a small, bristling moustache which added to the impression of porcine belligerence. He was easily angered by anything he perceived to be criticism and seemed to relish using the most wounding language in crushing it. He seldom saw any validity in views that did not chime with his own. In the words of the official historians, he had ‘a tendency to confuse advice with interference, criticism with sabotage and evidence with propaganda.’
Harris spent his early years seeking his fortune in Rhodesia, a part of the world he loved, and the crack of an invisible sjambok could often be heard in his dealings with his subordinates. The accuracy of this impression appeared to be confirmed by the nickname bestowed on him by his men. The public might know him as ‘Bomber’ Harris, his peers as ‘Bert’ but to the crews he was ‘Butch’, short for ‘butcher’, in reference to his willingess to spend their lives. Very few of them had a chance to form an opinion based on direct knowledge. Jack Currie and his companions at Wickenby ‘never met our Commander-in-Chief, never saw him, never heard his voice … he was in fact distanced from us by such far echelons of rank and station, that he was a figure more of imagination than reality. Uninhibited by any bounds of truth, we were able to ascribe to him any characteristic that our spirits needed. It pleased us to think of him as utterly callous, indifferent to suffering, and unconcerned about our fate.’ There was, he thought, ‘a paradoxical comfort in serving such a dread commander: no grievance, no
complaint, no criticism could possibly affect him … we chose to believe that Harris lived in utter luxury at Claridge’s, and that with his morning beverage a servant brought him a jewelled dart, which he casually cast at a wall map of Europe above his dressing table. He would then take up the silver scrambler telephone and call High Wycombe. “This is the Commander-in-Chief. The target for tonight is …”’3
As a pilot in 617 Squadron, Tony Iveson felt that the gap that separated him from his chief served to reinforce Harris’s authority. He was ‘a colossus, up there running the show, like Zeus from Olympus.’ He accepted, as most airmen did, the explanation for his decision not to tour bases. ‘If he’d gone to one station he would have had to go to them all and if he was coming they’d be painting stones and parading and all this lark and taking them away from their proper job.’4 This was a deferential age and service life inculcated a reflex respect for seniority. ‘At twenty-two years of age, Harris to me was a God,’ said Jim Berry, another pilot. ‘We used to refer to him in all sorts of ways, but there was an underlying respect for Harris [that] everybody had, I think.’5
On the occasions when he did drop in on the crews he had a galvanizing effect. Reg Fayers was one of the minority who saw and heard him in person. Harris visited Holme-on-Spalding-Moor on 15 September 1943 to talk to 76 Squadron. It was at a time when it was suffering from a worrying incidence of ‘early returns’, the term used for when crews arrived back having failed to bomb. After a forceful speech he asked the crowd for their questions. Fayers, an independent-minded man inclined to scepticism, wrote to his wife that he felt ‘privileged, really, to hear … the boss of the whole show. I even asked him a question. I’ve always been for his ideas … his faith in the efficacy of our bombing is terrific and catching altho’ I’d already caught it. I still think [Bomber Command is] winning this war more certainly than anything else. I pray God I may see peace in six months.’6 The following day Harris went to Elsham Wolds where the crews greeted him with sustained cheering.
Harris understood the value of a touch of menace. But he also knew it was wise to show a softer side from time to time and he could be charming and even gentle with his favourites, such as the beaux idéal of Bomber Command, Cheshire and Gibson. Leonard Cheshire described being summoned shortly after he had been awarded his VC. ‘He sent for me … I thought I’d done something wrong … he was very nice and fatherly and very friendly and I liked him very much.’7
Harris arrived at Bomber Command at a good time. From March 1942, aircraft began to be fitted with a new navigation system called Gee. With Gee, the great problem that dogged Bomber Command’s efforts and limited and defined its activities started to be solved. It worked on a system of radio pulses. Three stations strung out over 200 miles transmitted radio signals which were picked up by a Gee box on board the aircraft. Measuring the time difference between the pulses provided co-ordinates which were displayed on a cathode ray tube in the navigator’s cabin. A competent ‘nav’ could get a fix which, within a few minutes, gave the aircraft’s position to an accuracy of between half a mile and five miles. There were drawbacks. Because of the curvature of the earth, the range of Gee was limited to 350 miles. The Germans soon learned how to jam it, making it unreliable once over the Dutch coast. But Gee set the bombers on a true course on the outward journey and was a great help in bringing them home to base on their return.
Gee was later joined by Oboe, which came into service on 20 December 1942. It also operated on transmissions from ground stations in England but was more accurate. It was claimed that at its best it could hold an aircraft to within sixty-five feet of its position. Oboe got its name from the musical pulse it emitted which was audible to the pilot. Variations from the course were marked by variations in the pulse. As the target approached, a second signal was heard, a series of dashes followed by a series of dots. When the dots stopped, the bomb-aimer pressed his button. The big advantage of Oboe was that it allowed targets to be marked and bombed even in cloudy conditions. Initially, however, the Oboe ground stations could communicate with only a limited number of aircraft.
These aids were supplemented in January 1943 by H2S, a radar device which was carried on board and did not rely on external signals. A transmitter in the aircraft’s belly reflected a picture of the ground below on to a TV screen in the navigator’s cabin. The blips of light that appeared could be difficult to interpret, especially over big cities.
These were great improvements, but they did not mean that Bomber Command was now capable of bombing precisely. What the new technology did was to get aircraft to the target area, rather than pinpoint the target to be hit.
The new aeroplanes, though, were the best any commander could wish for. The faithful but outmoded aircraft of the first, disappointing years of the air war, were disappearing to be replaced by four-engined machines, far bigger than anything that had been seen before.
The first to appear was the Short Stirling which went into service in August 1940. It was eighty-seven feet long and stood very tall, slanting upwards sharply so that the cockpit was nearly twenty-three feet above the tarmac. But the Stirling was also slow, with a maximum speed of 260 mph and its unimpressive 740-mile range and 19,000-feet altitude limit meant it was the poor relation of the bomber fleet. The Avro Manchester made an appearance at the end of 1940 but its underdeveloped Vulture engines made it lethally unreliable and it was soon phased out.
The crews felt happiest in a Halifax or Lancaster. The Handley Page Halifax began operating in March 1941. It suffered from severe initial design faults but eventually evolved into a fine and trustworthy aircraft. To the Canadian Ralph Wood, who switched from Whitleys in May 1942, the ‘Hallybag’ was a ‘beautiful four-engined bird’. It had three gun turrets, front, mid-upper and rear. It could cruise at 280 mph and carry a bomb load of 8,000 pounds or three and a half tons. It took seven to fly a Halifax; a pilot, navigator, flight engineer, bomb-aimer who was also front gunner, wireless operator, mid-upper gunner and tail gunner.
Wood inhabitated the ‘dinky little navigator’s compartment [which] was below and in front of the pilot’s cockpit. You went down a few steps and entered a small section with a navigator’s table down one side, ahead and below the pilot’s feet.’ Wood doubled as the bomb-aimer/front gunner. A curtain in the nose hid ‘the even smaller compartment where I would huddle with my Mark Fourteen bombsight … when we got reasonably close to the target.’ The gun he was supposed to operate when needed was a Vickers gas-operated. 303 machine gun, which was mounted on a swivel and stuck out through the Perspex nose, high above the bombsight. They were ‘popguns’ in the eyes of the crews, a poor defence against an attacking night-fighter armed with cannons and, Wood had been warned, notorious for jamming. ‘All you had to do was look at it the wrong way and it would plug up on you.’8
The Avro Lancaster was a masterpiece of military aviation design. It was capable of carrying great loads of up to 14,000 pounds. Later special aircraft were adapted to deliver the monstrous 22,000-pound Grand Slam bombs. Despite its phenomenal lifting power it was fast and manoeuvrable. It could reach nearly 290 mph and was nimble enough to corkscrew out of trouble when under attack from a night-fighter, though the technique was far from infallible. It was reliable and safe, with the lowest accident rate of the bombers. Tony Iveson had already notched up about 1,800 hours flying time in many different types when he first flew one. ‘The Lanc was a lovely aircraft,’ he remembered. ‘It was splendid, day or night.’ Ken Newman ‘liked the Lancaster from the first moment that I climbed aboard.’ The cockpit layout ‘was much more sensible than that of the Halifax’ with everything within easy reach. It was only in an emergency that the main design fault became apparent. The thick spar that lay across the fuselage supporting the wings was very difficult to negotiate when moving forward and aft and was a significant impediment in emergencies.
The heavies conveyed a feeling of strength and menace that inspired confidence in those who were to fly them. To the t
rainee bomber crews seeing them for the first time they looked huge and threatening. Noble Frankland thought them ‘incredibly sinister and powerful’, an impression that was deepened by their glistening black surfaces. They were huge, bigger than anything the Germans had, and as impressive as the American Liberators and Fortresses that would soon appear. The Halifax was seventy feet long and had a wing span of 104 feet, long enough for forty men to line up on in group photographs. They were as fast as the Americans and they carried heavier bomb loads. No one looking at them could doubt that they meant business.
Harris’s first major change in operational procedures was to end the practice of splitting up the force and sending it to bomb two or three targets over a protracted period. His study of the German air attacks on Britain convinced him that the Luftwaffe had squandered a great opportunity by not focusing its attacks. The principle now was concentration. Henceforth the pattern was to dispatch as many aircraft as could be mustered against one target. Attack times were shortened which increased the chances of collisions but reduced the time in which the flak gunners had the bombers in their sights. They were aiming for saturation, swamping the defences and overwhelming the emergency services by sheer weight of violence. The method of destruction favoured by Harris was fire. Incendiaries were at least as important as high explosive. It was easier to burn down a city than to blow it up. The purpose of bombs was to rip off roofs and knock down walls, choking the streets with mounds of brick and stone and timber that would cripple the movement of firemen and rescue workers. Then the four-pound incendiaries would float down into the shattered buildings and start blazes that would feed on the winds whipped up by the blasts. The aim was, he said, to start ‘so many fires at the same time that no fire-fighting services, however efficiently and quickly they were reinforced by the fire brigades of other towns, could get them under control.’9
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 64