Johnson heard himself saying: ‘God! The Germans will never forgive us for this.’ In an instant the chancellor’s cheery demeanour vanished. “‘What do you mean, forgive us?” he snapped. “Let me tell you, it’s we who’ll have to forgive the Germans and what’s more I hope we don’t do it too quickly.”21
Wood was only saying what most people felt. That did not mean that there was no controversy about the morality of the bombing campaign. There were politicians and churchmen who shared Johnson’s moral discomfort. It was one of Harris’s rough virtues that he never tried to disguise the aims or consequences of his strategy. The government, however, consistently avoided admitting the full truth about its policy and persistently refused to acknowledge that one of the main purposes of much of Bomber Command’s actions was the destruction of cities themselves. The critics of area bombing were led by Richard Stokes, the loquacious Labour MP for Ipswich. Stokes had no faith in strategic bombing, arguing that the war effort would be better spent in building more ships and fighters, nor in the view that sustained bombing could crush Germany’s spirit. As early as May 1942, he told the Commons: ‘I have been through practically every raid in London and to most of the places that have been badly blitzed and I do not believe for a single moment that you are ever going to destroy the morale of the people by bombing from the air.’ The idea that Germany could be brought down by bombing, he concluded ‘is absolutely puerile’.22
But the core of his objections to the strategic air campaign bombing was ethical. The bombing of Cologne was not only ‘strategic lunacy’ but ‘morally wrong as no real effort was made to limit the targets to military objectives … women and little children are women and little children to me, wherever they live.’ A further immorality, Stokes, argued was that the architects of the campaign were asking good men to do dreadful things. ‘It fills me with absolute nausea,’ he said ‘to think of the filthy task that many of our young men are being invited to carry out.’23
Stokes tried repeatedly to get the government to admit what was going on. On 31 March 1943 he asked the secretary of state for air whether ‘on any occasion instructions had been given to British airmen to engage in area bombing rather than limit their attention to purely military targets.’ Sir Archibald Sinclair replied that ‘the targets of Bomber Command are always military, but night bombing of objectives necessarily involves bombing the area in which they are situated.’24 When he repeated the question in a slightly different form on 1 December, asking him whether ‘the policy of limiting objectives of Bomber Command to targets of military importance has or has not been changed to the bombing of towns and wide areas in which military targets are situated’ he was referred to the previous statement.
Concerns about the campaign were also felt at the opposite end of the political spectrum. In November 1943 the Marquess of Salisbury, a Tory grandee, wrote privately to Sinclair in a troubled frame of mind. He was full of praise for the bravery of the bomber crews but was worried by Harris’s assertion that the campaign would go on ‘until the heart of Nazi Germany ceases to beat’. Salisbury wanted reassurance that this did not give the lie to the government’s repeated assertions that only military and industrial targets were being bombed. The letter asserted that ‘there is a great deal of evidence that makes some of us afraid that we are losing moral superiority to the Germans … of course the Germans began it, but we do not take the devil as our example.’ Three days later Sinclair responded. ‘Our aim [he wrote] is the progressive dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system. I have never pretended that it is possible to pursue this aim without inflicting terrible casualties on the civilian population of Germany. But neither I, nor any responsible spokesman on behalf of the government, has ever gloated over the destruction of German homes.’ This smooth reply made no mention of the several directives issued to Bomber Command in which the destruction of the morale of the German people was identified as a central objective.25
There were dissenting voices from the established Church. The most serious critic was George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, who on 9 February 1944 used his secular pulpit in the House of Lords to dissect government policy. Bell was a veteran anti-Nazi and no pacifist. He accepted that in attacking military and industrial targets the killing of civilians was inevitable. However, he told his fellow-peers, there had to be a fair balance between the means employed and the purpose achieved. ‘To obliterate a whole town because certain portions contain military and industrial establishments is to reject the balance,’ he said. Despite the official sophistry, Bell understood what was going on, even if others did not.
‘I doubt whether it is sufficiently realized,’ he said, ‘that it is no longer definite military and industrial objectives which are the aim of the bombers but the whole town, area by area, is plotted carefully out. This area is singled out and plastered on one night; that area is singled out and plastered on another night … how can there be discrimination in such matters when civilians, monuments, military objectives and industrial objectives all together form the target?’26
Stokes accepted that his was an unpopular view in parliament but insisted that he spoke for a substantial minority outside it. On 27 May 1943 he asked Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee if he was aware that ‘a growing volume of opinion in this country considers indiscriminate bombing of civilian centres is both morally wrong and strategic lunacy?’ This prompted the Labour member for Doncaster, Evelyn Walkden, to disagree. He declared that whatever Stokes might think ‘the rest of the country admire the RAF.’ Attlee observed that Walkden ‘probably more accurately represents the views of [the people] than the hon. member for Ipswich [Stokes].’27
If by that he meant that the great majority of people were squarely behind the campaign he was right. Speaking in support of Bell in the Lords debate Lord Lang of Lambeth, who had recently retired as archbishop of Canterbury, deplored the idea that anyone should ‘gloat’ over the unfortunate necessity of destroying military objectives and their surrounding neighbourhoods, or regard it as ‘worthy of almost jubilant congratulations’. However he seemed to see ‘a good many signs of the spread of this particular mood … amongst some of our people.’ He had recently received a ‘fairly full correspondence where the language in which this mood is expressed is to me shocking.’ The letters were not from cranks and fanatics but from ‘apparently, sane and sober citizens. This is the kind of thing – “Let them have it, they did it to us, let us do it to them tenfold, pay them back in their own coin,” and all the language with which we are all too familiar.’28
Whatever the misgivings of some clerics and brave mavericks like Stokes, most British people felt no guilt about laying Germany waste. They were not inclined to draw a distinction between Germany and the Nazi state. Their attitude was reflected in a parable written by J. B. Priestley which appeared early in the war and was widely and approvingly circulated. ‘In the middle of a great civilized continent,’ it began, ‘far from the sea which brings a breath of the outer world to freshen men’s minds, secret people dwell. Ever and ever again they become crazed with a spell of hero worship. A leader arises among them who tells them they are greater than the other peoples of the world.’ The secret people of Germany ‘are worse than fools in their folly. When the madness comes upon them, out leaps a primitive, barbarian, beast-like instinct. They kill without pity, rejoicing in blood.’ It ended with a very un-British exhortation. ‘The Hun is at the gate. He will slaughter the women and the children … out then and kill … the extermination of the wild animal is the plain business of Europe’s citizens.’29
As the most visible participants in the war against the Germans, the bomber crews had the overwhelming approval of those they were fighting for. It was essential in sustaining their morale. To ordinary people they were bathed in the same heroic light as the fighter pilots of the Battle of Britain who had gone before them and there were few ethical hesitations about the work they were doing. They were regarded as the finest of their
generation, noble and self-sacrificing, who were dying in the defence of everything that mattered. ‘Andrew will always be remembered by all who knew him as the one of the best of our young men,’ wrote the Rev. T. G. Eakins to the parents of Sergeant A. J. N. Wilson, killed on the night of 11/12 June 1943 over Holland, after only two previous trips. ‘He was a man of vision and high ideals … with a very great love of his home, his parents, his sisters and brother and all the things worthwhile in life. His love of these was so great that he was prepared to sacrifice even himself in order that they might be kept safe.’
Another letter of condolence from Dorothy Courtney Roberts, a family friend, recorded her pride that she ‘knew him first as a boy at home and then as a Royal Air Force pilot – manly and with high ideals. That is how I shall always think of him … God grant that we shall never forget the sacrifice that he with so many others made for us and our country.’30
A waiting father’s anxiety and pre-emptive grief could be numbed a little by the thought that if his boy had been killed he had died in a great cause. Writing in February 1945 to Squadron Leader the Rev. George Martin, the Pathfinder Group chaplain who tirelessly corresponded in detail with every grieving mother, father, wife, sibling and sweetheart, Mr Seymour Legge still did not know whether his son was dead or alive. He was prepared for the worst. ‘We feel that the country would lose as well as ourselves if this should be the last we ever hear from him,’ he wrote. ‘He had no need to enter the RAF as he was in a reserved occupation. But after the loss of his wife in the 1940 air raids, he felt he could delay no longer. He is one of those who make this land of ours worth preserving.’31 His son, Flying Officer K. C. S. Legge, disappeared without trace while on a Mosquito sortie to Berlin.
The RAF had from the beginning been well aware of the propaganda value of its operations. The RAF Film Unit had a staff of cameramen who went along on selected raids and provided dramatic pictures for the newsreels. Newspapers and the BBC covered Bomber Command’s work in reverential detail and romanticized those who flew in it. Even the left-wing New Statesman magazine presented the crews as ‘Glamour Boys’, a title previously bestowed on the pilots of Fighter Command whose virtue had been unquestionable. Newspaper and radio correspondents sometimes accompanied the crews on raids taking the same risks and dying the same deaths. On the night of 2/3 December 1943, J. M. B. Grieg of the Daily Mail and Norman Stockton of the Sydney Sun were killed in separate aircraft with 460 Squadron on a raid on Berlin.
The BBC took a more detached approach than the newspapers, and correspondents were urged to report the bombing campaign in a ‘scientific’ way. The corporation took its time getting one of its men aboard a bomber. The first to accompany a crew on a Bomber Command raid was Richard Dimbleby, who went with Guy Gibson in a 106 Squadron attack on Berlin on the night of 16/17 January 1943. The capital had not been bombed for more than a year. Despite the BBC’s strictures, Dimbleby’s broadcast left no doubt about his admiration for the Bomber Boys and the justice of their fight. They took off from Syerston just after 4.30 p.m. ‘It was a big show as heavy bomber ops go,’ he reported later. ‘It was also quite a long raid as the Wing Commander who took me [Gibson] stayed over Berlin for half an hour. The flak was hot but it has been hotter. For me it was a pretty hair-raising experience and I was glad when it was over though I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. But we must all remember that these men do it as a regular routine job.’
The journey out was relatively uneventful. But they ‘knew well enough when [they] were approaching Berlin’.
There was a complete ring of powerful searchlights, waving and crossing. Though it seemed to me that when many of our bombers were over the city, many of our lights were doused. There was also intense flak. First of all they didn’t seem to be aiming at us. It was bursting away to starboard and away to port in thick yellow clusters and dark, smoky puffs. As we turned in for our first run across the city it closed right around us. For a moment it seemed impossible that we could miss it. And one burst lifted us in the air as if a giant hand had pushed up the belly of the machine. But we flew on, and just then another Lancaster dropped a load of incendiaries. And where a moment before there had been a dark patch of the city, a dazzling silver pattern spread itself. A rectangle of brilliant lights, hundreds, thousands of them, winking and gleaming and lighting the outlines of the city around them. As though this unloading had been the signal, score after score of fire bombs went down and all over the dark face of the German capital these great incandescent flowerbeds spread themselves. It was a fascinating sight. As I watched and tried to photograph the flares with a cine camera, I saw the pinpoints merge and the white glare turning to a dull, ugly red as the fires of bricks and mortars and wood spread from the chemical flares. We flew over the city three times for more than half an hour while the guns sought us out and failed to hit us. At last our bomb-aimer sighted his objective below, and for one unpleasant minute we flew steady and straight. Then he pressed the button and the biggest bomb of the evening, our three-and-a-half-tonner, fell away and down. I didn’t see it burst but I know what a giant bomb does and I couldn’t help wondering whether anywhere in the area of its devastation, such a man as Hitler, Goering or Himmler or Goebbels might be cowering in a shelter. It was engrossing to realize that the Nazi leaders and their ministries were only a few thousand feet from us. And that this shimmering mass of flares and bombs and gun flashes was their stronghold.
In this way Dimbleby linked the attack directly to the possible harm it might do to the certified villains of the war. Few of his listeners could have failed to visualize its likely consequences for ordinary Germans. But nor would they have doubted his support for the ‘six brave, cool and exceedingly skillful men’ he flew with and the righteousness of Bomber Command’s campaign. Dimbleby went on to make another nineteen trips, a remarkable feat of courage by a non-combatant.
‘Perhaps I am shooting a line for them,’ he finished up, ‘but I think that somebody ought to. They and their magnificent Lancasters, and all the others like them, are taking the war right into Germany. They have been attacking, giving their lives in attack since the first day of the war … “Per Ardua ad Astra” is the RAF motto and perhaps I can translate it as “through hardship to the stars”. I understand the hardship now. And I’m proud to have seen the stars with them.32
The crews made a good impression on normally sceptical outsiders. Martha Gellhorn, a stern opponent of the glamorization or sentimentalization of war, softened when she came to write her piece for Collier’s after a week with the crews in November 1943. The Bomber Boys touched her well-hidden maternal side. The pilot of one crew she interviewed just before they took off was ‘twenty-one and tall and thin, with a face far too sensitive for this business’. The others were ‘polite and kind and far away. Talk was nonsense now. Every man went tight and concentrated into himself, waiting and ready for the job ahead, and the seven of them who were going together made a solid unit, and anyone who had not done what they did and would never go where they were going could not understand and had no right to intrude.’ She stayed up to await their return and watched the survivors setting off for breakfast ‘with mussed hair and weary faces, dirty sweaters under their flying suits, sleep-bright eyes, making humble comradely little jokes, and eating their saved-up chocolate bars.’33
Gellhorn, a sophisticated and sceptical American, saw the crews in much the same way as they were viewed by the British public. Their gentle image was a total contrast to the grim task they had been set to do. They were waging a war of aggression, but there was little in their demeanour to show it. Portrayals of them emphasized their passivity, tolerance and innate good nature.
This was nothing more than the truth, judging by an RAF internal recording captured during a raid on Essen in April 1943. The names of the men and the identity of their squadron are not known. The three dominant voices aboard T-Tommy reveal a typical medley of backgrounds and accents. The bomb-aimer sounds what used to be calle
d ‘educated’. The navigator speaks in rich Yorkshire. The pilot’s genial tones are harder to place but, at a guess, he is from suburban London. The flight engineer, who says only a few words, could be from anywhere. The matter-of-factness everyone displays seems astounding and also rather humbling to modern ears attuned to a risk-free world.
It begins just after they drop their bombs and turn to flee the target area.
BOMB-AIMER: Bombs gone.
PILOT: OK.
NAVIGATOR: Have the bombs gone?
PILOT: Yes.
(In the background can be heard the thump of flak, which intensifies and slackens throughout the recording. There is also the harsh ebb and flow of oxygenated breathing.)
NAVIGATOR: OK. Well, I can read my watch in the searchlight. That’s 21.54. The idea is to steer oh-two-zero.
PILOT: Oh-two-zero, OK.
NAVIGATOR: Flak directly beneath us. And searchlights underneath us too.
PILOT: Come on T for Tommy. Get cracking.
NAVIGATOR: Watch your height.
PILOT: I’m watching everything … How many searchlights would you call that?
NAVIGATOR: Too many, I reckon.
PILOT: Couple of thousand.
NAVIGATOR: Yeah, searching for us … bastards.
PILOT: (as a searchlight fixes them): Oh hell …
BOMB-AIMER: Certainly illuminates things, don’t it?
PILOT: (breathing heavily): Sure does. (Pause.) I could do with a pint.
BOMB-AIMER: They’re firing at us now.
PILOT: (mildly interested): Are they?
(There is a big explosion.)
PILOT: That’s close.
NAVIGATOR: Well, it’s coming close, I can feel it.
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 70