The first major demonstrations of the new technique came with attacks on Lübeck and Rostock. Lübeck, as Harris admitted, was not a vital target, although it housed a a medium-sized port and a U-boat building yard. It was chosen because it was relatively simple to find and, given the part-wooden construction of many of the houses, ‘easier than most cities to set on fire’. The raid was launched on the night of 28 March, and the aiming point was the centre of the Altstadt, the old quarter where the streets were narrow and crooked and the buildings were highly flammable. A separate attack was mounted on a machine-tool works. Two thirds of the 300 tons of bombs that were dropped were incendiaries. As well as the small magnesium incendiaries, the load included a thirty-pound bomb designed to fling benzol and rubber in a ten-yard radius from the point of impact. In mounting the attack Harris was testing a theory. The main object ‘was to learn to what extent a first wave of aircraft could guide a second wave to the aiming point by starting a conflagration.’ He ordered ‘a half an hour interval between the two waves in order to allow the fires to get a good hold before the second wave arrived.’10
The fact that Bomber Command was now engaged unapologetically in area bombing was acknowledged by a change of terminology so that it now gauged success in terms of acres destroyed. Analysis of reconnaissance photographs suggested that 190 acres of Lübeck had been devastated, or 30 per cent of the town’s built-up area. Most appeared to have been consumed by fire. This reckoning was an overestimate but not a wild one. The German survey counted 3,401 buildings destroyed or seriously damaged. Of those, all but 331 were houses and flats. The attack destroyed a factory which made oxygen equipment for U-boats. But it also ruined the Marienkirche, a church of great religious and architectural importance. Up to 320 people were killed, the heaviest death toll in a raid on Germany so far, but still far short of the 1,500 who had been killed in London on the night of 10 May 1941. The weakness of the town’s defences meant Bomber Command’s losses were relatively light, twelve aircraft out of the 234 sent out, most of which appear to have been knocked down en route. Harris was delighted with the results. He had, he wrote later, ‘conclusively proved that even the small force I had then could destroy the greater part of a town of secondary importance.’11
A month later four raids were aimed in quick succession at Rostock, culminating on the night of 26/27 April. Rostock was a town much like Lübeck, on the water and with a combustible old centre. Incendiaries made up most of the bomb load. All together, by Bomber Command’s calculations, the attacks destroyed 60 per cent of the main town area. Again the crew losses had been low. About 200 Germans were killed, a figure that would have been considerably higher if many had not fled after the first raids. A Heinkel factory on the southern edge of town was singled out for special attention by separate forces, including Guy Gibson’s 106 Squadron. This double-thrust combining an attempted high-explosive precision attack, Billancourt-style, with a general area attack with incendiaries was to become common practice.
The main weight of the raids, though, fell on the town itself. Josef Goebbels tried to salvage what propaganda advantage he could from the devastation by describing the action as a Terrorangriff, a terror attack. The term would stick and those who were carrying them out soon became Terrorflieger or terror flyers. Germans suffering these attacks or hearing about them agreed. But far away in California, one German had no doubts about the brutal justice of the raids. ‘I think of Coventry, and I have no objection to the lesson that everything must be paid for,’ said Thomas Mann, the great novelist and son of Lübeck in a radio broadcast. ‘Did Germany believe that she would never have to pay for the atrocities that her leap into barbarism seemed to allow?’12 Harris calculated that the two attacks had devastated 780 acres. He reckoned that Bomber Command had now ‘about squared our account with Germany’.13 By that he meant that it had inflicted as much destruction and death on Germany as the Luftwaffe had on Britain. German bombing had wrecked about 400 acres of London and 100 acres of Coventry, apart from the damage done to other blitzed cities.14
The Lübeck and Rostock raids had been relatively small. By the end of May, Harris was ready for his first spectacular. He knew the value of publicity and the prestige it could bring to him and his command. He wanted to demonstrate to the world the growing power of the bombing fleet. He set out to mount an operation that would impress his superiors, attract the admiration of the Americans and Russians who were now Britain’s allies, bring cheer to British civilians, and frighten Germany. The logic of concentration suggested that the more bombers that could be dispatched on one mission the better. The figure of one thousand carried a certain poetic potency.
He took the idea to Churchill and Portal who gave enthusiastic approval and the planning began. Harris had only a little over 400 fully operational aircraft and crews at his immediate disposal and struggled to reach the magic number. Many machines and men came from operational training and conversion units.
This was essentially a huge and risky experiment which if it succeeded would set the pattern for the future. To handle the huge number of aircraft, it was decided they would fly in a ‘bomber stream’. This, theoretically, would bring important defensive and offensive advantages. Every aircraft would follow the same route at staggered times, flying in different air corridors to reduce the risk of collisions. Thus, it was hoped, the vulnerability of the fleet to the German night-fighters who were growing increasingly active, operating in defensive boxes on the main approach routes, would be limited. It would also reduce the time over target and exposure to the defending flak batteries. At the same time, the bomber stream would deliver a continuous torrent of bombs that would overwhelm the defences and cause maximum disruption and terror creating the best conditions for apocalyptic conflagrations.
The first ‘thousand’ raid took place on the clear, moonlit Saturday night of the 30/31 May 1942. The target was Cologne, Germany’s third largest city. It had been subjected to many raids, most recently in March when, in the first successful Gee-led raid, 135 aircraft had attacked the city doing considerable damage and killing sixty-two people. Now seven times that number were launched against it. Harris’s message to the departing crews left no doubt about the significance of the operation. ‘The force of which you form a part tonight is at least twice the size and has at least four times the carrying capacity of the largest air force ever before concentrated on one objective,’ he declared. ‘You have an opportunity therefore to strike a blow at the enemy which will resound, not only throughout Germany, but throughout the world.’ All together, 1,047 aircraft took part in the raid including seventy-three of the new Lancasters. They carried 1,455 tons of bombs of which two thirds were incendiaries. The aim was to set Cologne ablaze. The city’s configuration with broad streets and modern buildings meant that fires did not take hold with the same hungry energy as they did in the old Hanseatic towns. The damage was still impressive. According to local records 3,330 buildings were destroyed, 2,090 seriously damaged and 7,420 lightly damaged, almost all by fire. The flames were indiscriminate. The conflagration devoured 13,010 homes, mostly apartments, and seriously damaged 6,360 more. Nine hospitals, seventeen churches, sixteen schools and four university buildings as well as numerous other premises that could not be considered military or industrial targets were burnt or blasted down. Ralph Wood, looking down from his Halifax, saw what seemed to be the ‘red hot embers of a huge bonfire’. The German records list damage being done to seventeen water mains, five gas mains, thirty-two electricity cables and twelve main telephone routes. The only military building mentioned is a flak installation.
The death toll established a new record. At least 469 people were killed. Of these 411 were civilians and 58 military, most of whom had been manning flak batteries. The RAF traumatized Cologne in the same way that some eighteen months before the Luftwaffe had traumatized Coventry. Some 45,000 people had been ‘bombed out’. As in Coventry, many fled the city, about a fifth of the 700,000 population according to l
ocal estimates. As in Coventry, the raid created a symbol of destruction and suffering in the form of a ruined cathedral.
Brian Frow was now a pilot with 408 Squadron which was charged with dropping parachute flares to light up the target for the main force. ‘At briefing we were told that the aiming point for 5 Group was the square in front of Cologne Cathedral,’ he wrote. This was ‘a bow to realism; it was well known that in area attacks against cities at night, the bomb pattern followed the design of a triangle, with the apex at the aiming point, widening and falling back along the inbound track of the raid.’ After the first bombs landed the aiming point was covered by dust and smoke, making accurate aiming impossible. There was also a tendency for anxious crews to release their bombs early. By taking the cathedral as a landmark the bomb load would fall into the densest part of the city where the maximum destruction would be achieved. Afterwards, Konrad Adenauer who had been the anti-Nazi mayor of the city, wrote that ‘there was no gas, no water, no electric current and no means of transport. The bridges across the Rhine had been destroyed. There were mountains of rubble in the streets. Everywhere there were gigantic areas of debris from bombed and shelled buildings. With its razed churches, many of them almost a thousand years old, its bombed-out cathedral, with the ruins of once beautiful bridges sticking up out of the Rhine, and the vast expanses of derelict houses, Cologne was a ghost city.’ The damage was light compared with what was to come. It was, in Frow’s words, merely ‘a foretaste of what was to befall the Hun’.15
These attacks met with noisy approval from the British press and public. Even George Orwell’s tender conscience was untroubled by what was going on. The Germans, he warned, in a radio broadcast a few days after the raid, deserved no quarter. ‘In 1940, when the Germans were bombing Britain, they did not expect retaliation on a very heavy scale,’ he said. ‘[They] were not afraid to boast in their propaganda about the slaughter of civilians which they were bringing about and the terror which their raids aroused. Now, when the tables are turned, they are beginning to cry out against the whole business of aerial bombing, which they declare to be both cruel and useless. The people of this country are not revengeful, but they remember what happened to themselves two years ago, and they remember how the Germans talked when they thought themselves safe from retaliation.’
It was not until the following spring that mammoth raids became routine. Bomber Command was still growing and simply did not have the strength to maintain a tempo of heavy attacks. Cologne, was, in the opinion of Hamish Mahaddie, then a pilot with 7 Squadron who was to go on to be a leading figure in the foundation of the Pathfinder Force, something of a ‘con trick’, whose main purpose was to establish the feasibility of such an exercise and by extension the value of the strategic bombing campaign.16 If so, the ruse worked. Cologne and the raids that preceded it went a long way to silencing the doubters and establishing strategic bombing solidly at the heart of Allied war planning.
The successes of the first phase of the Harris era were, however, relative. Gee had improved navigation but not transformed it. The bomber fleets still had difficulty finding the target. The arrival of the Pathfinders brought a further, important improvement. The Pathfinder Force was not a Harris invention and he opposed it with all the considerable vigour he could muster against ideas which were not his own. The principle was that to aid accuracy an elite unit formed from the best crews would fly ahead of the main force and illuminate aiming points with target-marking bombs for the following aircraft to aim at.
The concept had been raised inside the Air Ministry at the end of 1941 before Harris took over and was promoted by a powerful Air Staff lobby. It was led by Group Captain Syd Bufton, the director of bomber operations at the Air Ministry. He had commanded 10 Squadron early in the war and pioneered a technique of using his best crews to locate targets with flares. The Australian Don Bennett, who was to command the force, remembered Harris fighting ‘tooth and nail to try and stop it’. He ‘argued that the best crews were too valuable and that putting them out in front to lead the rest … would also expose them to greater risk. The losses amongst your best crews would be so high that it would be prohibitive. In other words you’d lead all the force with a good bunch of people in front but not for long because the leaders would be shot down and lost.’ Bennett’s solution to this problem was to surround the half a dozen or so Pathfinder Force (PFF) crews with a phalanx of ‘supporters’ to help bear the brunt of the flak. The system worked and PFF losses were no worse and in fact slighly better than those of the main force. The other objection, a valid one as Bennett admitted, was that skimming off outstanding leaders would weaken squadrons as well as denting their morale. ‘Naturally they all looked to their squadron commander and to have their squadron commander whisked away down to headquarters Pathfinder Force … may have been a great honour to the person concerned but it was a tremendous loss to the squadron.’17
Harris’s opposition was supported by all his group commanders. But it was clear to Portal that despite the recent technological improvements and successes, Bomber Command’s efficiency was still severely limited and anything that offered the hope of improvement should be tried. He backed the Air Staff view and Harris was ordered to drop his objections and form the new force. He did not concede quietly. He insisted that instead of selecting the best crews, the PFF would be made up of four ordinary squadrons, one from each night bomber group. Portal, knowing when to cede ground, agreed.
The Pathfinder argument shone a light on the battle of ideas about how the strategic air campaign should be fought. Those who backed the PFF regarded area bombing as a temporary measure which could be dropped once improved technology and expertise allowed the RAF to perfect the technique of precise attack. Those who opposed believed city-battering was an end in itself which, if pursued hard enough, was the surest path to hastening victory. It was a debate that was to continue until the end.
At this point, Portal was firmly on the side of obliteration. The entry of America into the war had greatly increased the potential assets available to conduct a massive strategic bomber campaign. The first American aircraft and crews arrived in Britain at the beginning of 1942 and in August began their initial, tentative sorties, bombing rail yards, not in Germany but in France. American bombing doctrine was very different from that of the RAF. The United States Army Air Force believed firmly in the achievability of precise bombing on carefully chosen military and industrial targets. To maximize accuracy, they were organized chiefly to bomb in daylight.
These factors were to complicate the evolution of a harmonized Anglo-American approach. For a time, though, it seemed to Portal that it would soon be possible to muster giant air armadas against the Reich. In the autumn of 1942, he told the Chiefs of Staff that if the bomber force could be greatly expanded to between 4,000 and 6,000 aircraft, devastating results could be achieved. Scientific analysis of the impact of bombs on Britain had produced some plausible-seeming projections of the effects on Germany of an all-out campaign. Portal claimed that if 50,000 tons of bombs could be delivered each month in 1943, rising to 90,000 tons by the end of 1944, the effects would be catastrophic for Germany. Twenty-five million Germans would be made homeless, 900,000 would be killed and one million seriously injured. By the middle of 1944 these tonnages were indeed being achieved, and with far fewer aircraft than had been thought necessary. The results were less catastrophic than predicted. But there was no doubt that Portal regarded such imagined destruction would speed victory.
There was to be no question of Bomber Command suspending its activities until ideal force levels had been achieved. In between the peaks of its campaign there was almost continuous activity as crews dropped mines in the sea and carried out minor raids on secondary targets. These activities could be as dangerous as any other, as Denholm Elliott, the young RADA hopeful turned wireless operator, found out on the night of 23/24 September 1942.
He had recently arrived at 76 Squadron and on his third operation was ordered of
f with the rest of his crew in their Halifax, K-King, to bomb the submarine base at Sylt, a spit of land poking into the North Sea. The trip, he remembered, got off to a bad start. ‘As we were walking out to the plane the engineer who had been servicing it said “What are you?” I said, “I’m wireless op for K for King.” He said, “Oh dear, oh dear,” and I asked “Why?” “Well [he replied] the last wireless operator for K for King got a cannon shell up his backside.” That didn’t encourage me too much.’ Elliott did not improve morale by telling his crewmates that he had had a dream the previous night in which they were shot down.
They came in low over the target at 1,000 feet. ‘This was the first time I was actually encountering anti-aircraft fire and it really was a most unpleasant sensation,’ – he remembered. ‘A shell bursting beneath you lifts the plane about fifty feet upwards in the air. You certainly find instant religion.’
Then Elliott felt ‘the most enormous explosion … the port outer engine was on fire … all the lights went out. I was fumbling desperately to find the wire clippers to send a distress signal on the automatic SOS but the plane was going down and there just wasn’t time. I just jumped out of my seat which was at the very front of the plane and tore to the middle of the aircraft, as it was going down, and got into the ditching position with your feet up against the central spar and your hands behind your neck to take the shock.’ As he passed the navigator, who was also taking up crash stations, ‘he sort of grinned in a sickly way … that was the last time I saw him.’
Elliott’s skipper, Squadron Leader Barnard, managed to put K-King down on the North Sea with the smallest of bumps. But water immediately flooded into the fuselage as they fought to get the escape hatch open. ‘I’m afraid I was very ungentlemanly,’ Elliott confessed. ‘I was scrambling over everybody else to get out. As far I was concerned there was no question of a polite “after you, my dear Charles …”’
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 65