Maze knew this. However he ‘was twenty years old, a healthy, youthful animal with all a young man’s indifference to such an explanation … Let the lame dogs look after themselves as we shall if the time comes to do so. Meanwhile we live, our “kite” is not knocked about and we are bored.’ Lewis believed that Maze was ‘born impatient’ and seized by the conviction that ‘there was too much fuss in the world. He was prepared to go to any lengths to ensure bombing correctly, but the moment that was over he was desperately anxious to get home in the shortest possible time from a feeling of utter boredom and the knowledge that they had done the job well.’
For the first three operations he followed the flight plan dutifully but on the fourth flew back faster than instructed and was the first bomber to reach the base. After that, T-Tommy was almost invariably the first to touch down. He was in an equal hurry to get into the air. He received regular dressings-down from the squadron commander for breaking the speed limit set on the journey to the runway.
Maze was fun. The ground crews adored him and he held his own at parties. On his twenty-first birthday he took the crew to a pub, ‘got hopelessly drunk, broke one of the cues of the billiard table and went on singing a filthy [song] from his schooldays.’ He might be little older than a schoolboy, but Lewis recognized that ‘there was nothing soft about him.’ He seemed to disdain fear. ‘Look here, Joe, I’m sick to death of you getting frightened all the time,’ he once snapped at the bomb-aimer. ‘It’s like having an old woman sitting next to me.’ When Joe replied that he was ‘not frightened, just a bit apprehensive,’ he was told: ‘Well don’t be.’26
Pilots could feel a responsibility for their crews that transcended their own safety and survival instincts. There were several well-attested cases when skippers had kept a stricken aircraft flying long enough for the others to bale out, even though they knew they would die doing so. Flying Officer Leslie Manser was captain of a Manchester during the Cologne ‘thousand’ raid when it was hit by flak and caught fire. Both pilot and crew could have baled out safely but Manser insisted on trying to get his aircraft and his men home. When it became clear that this was impossible he ordered the others to bale out. The official citation for his Victoria Cross described how ‘a sergeant handed him a parachute but he waved it away, telling [him] to jump at once as he could only hold the aircraft steady for a few seconds more.’ As the crew floated safely to earth they saw the Manchester ‘still carrying their gallant captain, plunge to earth and burst into flames.’ They landed in Holland and five of them managed to evade the Germans and make their way back home.
Perhaps even more extraordinary was the fortitude shown by Flight Sergeant Rawdon Middleton, an Australian Stirling pilot during a raid on the Fiat works at Turin in November 1942. He pressed his attack through a storm of flak and delivered his bombs but was hit by shrapnel which tore out his right eye and ripped away his nose. Despite being barely able to see, or to speak without great pain and loss of blood, he managed to nurse the damaged bomber over the Alps. There was a discussion as to whether they should jump. Middleton, according to his citation, ‘expressed the intention of trying to make the English coast so that his crew could leave the aircraft by parachute,’ even though he knew that owing ‘to his wounds and diminishing strength … by then he would have little or no chance of saving himself.’ When they crossed the English coast there was only five minutes’ worth of petrol left. He ordered the crew to jump. Five of the crew left the aircraft safely while two chose to stay on and help their skipper. The bomber crashed into the sea killing all aboard. Middleton too received the VC. The awards were made easier because there were witnesses alive to tell their remarkable tales. There were surely many other stories of amazing bravery and devotion which will remain buried with the dead.
The crew took some of its character from its skipper. But the joint identity was always stronger than the individual. No one in the chain of command was more motivating or inspiring than the collective spirit of seven men engaged in the enterprise of dealing death and trying to cheat it. The crew was where it began and where it ended. Writing to Joan from his dreary base in a mood of self-pity George Hull told her ‘Thank God for the crew … a fierce bond has sprung up between us … we sleep together, we shower together and, yes, we even arrange to occupy adjacent bogs and sing each other into a state of satisfaction.’27
It was the crew that dissolved despair and doubt. Don Charlwood had ‘little belief in the rectitude of our war or any other war,’ when he arrived on his squadron. ‘Nor could I believe that more good than evil would arise from our mass bombing.’ Yet after a few operations he realized his attitude had altered. ‘On the squadron one could not for long admit cynicism, or pessimism, even in the face of the worst. Whatever my frame of mind had been when we had come to Elsham, I realized that now it had changed. Then I had been alone; now I had become one with a crew and a squadron. To demean them was impossible.’28
11
The Big City
After almost four years of war Bomber Command had failed to do any critical damage to Berlin. If one of the main objectives of the strategic air campaign was to destroy German morale then the Big City was the best place to attack. Berlin was protected by its distance from the bomber bases, and by its very size which enabled it to absorb much punishment. It sprawled over more than eighty square miles and the townscape was interspersed with lakes, waterways, parks and woods. The centre was designed for victory parades. Broad boulevards led into spacious squares. There were statues everywhere. As the saying went, even the birdshit was marble. There was no Altmarkt, no wooden-built mediaeval quarter for Harris to burn down.
Despite these drawbacks, he yearned to attack Berlin. He was convinced that an all-out assault on the heart of Nazidom would bring the war to an end. He had used the short summer nights of 1943 to batter the Ruhr. As the hours of darkness lengthened, he intended to exploit the cover they provided to switch the assault to the capital.
Harris’s mission of destroying German cities had been endorsed at the start of the year at the Casablanca conference, when the British and the Americans met to co-ordinate their approach to a war which was now going their way. There, Bomber Command had been told its primary object was the ‘progressive destruction of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their armed resistance is fatally weakened.’
Berlin had been mentioned specifically as a suitable objective for night attack. A few weeks after the conference ended, a directive from the Air Ministry to Harris drew attention to the recent Soviet success at Stalingrad, where, on the last day of January, the bitter siege had ended in German defeat and abject surrender. It passed on the view of the War Cabinet that ‘it is most desirable … that we should rub in the Russian victory by further attacks on Berlin as soon as conditions are favourable.’1 This was probably Churchill talking. In 1942 he had sent several impatient memos demanding to know when the dismantling of Berlin would begin.
All this suited Harris very well. It was in line with previous directives which had given him the latitude to develop the technique of area bombing so that attacks were becoming steadily more devastating, and to his mind, more effective. There was nothing to suggest that he would be expected to pay more attention to the doctrines of the Americans who were by now increasingly active in the air war, albeit in a different role to that adopted by Britain. The Americans attacked by day and maintained their faith in precision operations. The British bombed by night, hitting what they could.
Harris was not against precise attacks on specific targets. The Dams Raid was the proof of that and Bomber Command carried out many other less celebrated but no less effective missions like it. But he believed they were only a subordinate part of the main strategy of bombing Germany’s major cities flat.
His composure was to be badly disturbed by new orders which superseded the Casablanca directive. The Pointblank directive, issued early in Ju
ne, threatened to alter the course of Bomber Command’s war dramatically.
It reflected a harsh new reality in the air war, and the Americans were feeling its impact painfully. The Eighth Air Force had begun flying from England in August 1942. At first it confined its operations to France. The USAAF believed that to be sure of hitting the target it was necessary to bomb in daylight. It was confident that the firepower that its Fortresses and Liberators could bring to bear when grouped in disciplined formations would provide enough protection to make day-time bombing viable without the protection of escorting fighters.
The Americans’ experience in France seemed to justify this confidence. When they started operating in Germany, bombing Wilhelmshaven on 27 January 1943, the results were similarly encouraging. Out of ninety-one bombers sent, only three were lost. It soon became clear that these figures were freakishly low. As operations continued, losses climbed. In May they rose to 6.4 per cent of all attacking aircraft, a level that could not be sustained. Many were victims of flak. But the main threat came from the German fighter force which grew steadily stronger throughout the year.
As the peril increased in the months after Casablanca, the commander of the Eighth Air Force, Brigadier-General Ira C. Eaker, made a plan to deal with it. He proposed a combined American-British bombing offensive to crush the reviving German air force and win air superiority for the Allies.
Pointblank framed the means of achieving this crucial goal. It reasserted the American belief in precision bombing by concentrating effort on selected targets which if attacked effectively would have a devastating effect on German military operations. To achieve success it was essential to first sweep the German fighters from the skies. This was stated in the first draft of the directive, issued on 3 June, with a clarity that left no room for misunderstanding. It ordered the American and British forces ‘to seek the destruction of enemy fighters in the air and on the ground’. That meant attacking factories that made airframes, engines and ball-bearings, repair facilities, component stores and anything else that kept the Luftwaffe flying.
The approach made clear sense. By establishing air superiority, the job of the Allied air forces would become much easier and safer and their efforts more efficient. It was the obvious lesson to be learned from the defeat of the German air force in the Battle of Britain. One of the reasons the Luftwaffe lost was that they switched the force of their attacks away from airfields and aviation factories and on to towns, giving the RAF a lifesaving respite.
Harris did not see it that way. He regarded the Eaker approach as desirable but unattainable and therefore a waste of effort and resources. His response was to mount a slogging, bureaucratic rearguard action of the type he excelled at. In doing so, he had the passive backing of Portal, even though Portal had been party to the drafting of Pointblank. He nonetheless allowed his subordinate to interpret the new orders in a way which contradicted their intention. Portal’s indulgent attitude was in part a bow to reality. Harris enjoyed close relations with Churchill and made use of the proximity of Bomber Command’s headquarters at High Wycombe to the prime minister’s country retreat at Chequers to visit him at least once a week. A head-on confrontation would do no one any good. Bomber Command continued to pursue its mission along the lines laid down at Casablanca and the work of destroying the German air force fell largely on the shoulders of the Americans.
Harris laid out his plans for Berlin in a minute to Churchill on 3 November 1943. They were bold, even by his extravagant standards. Whatever he thought of American methods he was eager to have their aircraft in on the attack. With their help, he declared, ‘we can wreck Berlin from end to end … it will cost between us 400–500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war.’2 The Americans were sceptical, as Harris must have known they would be. He was later to use their negative response to dodge the blame for what was to be recognized by everyone but himself as a dreadful defeat.
Harris’s confidence had been bolstered by the successes of Bomber Command’s summer campaign culminating in the raids of July and August that destroyed Hamburg and spelled out what ‘undermining the morale of the German people’ would mean in practice. The Hamburg raids showed what the RAF was now capable of. Two thirds of the population, about 1,200,000 people, were evacuated from the city or left under their own steam, leaving the rubble to a core of heroic defenders. The unsurpassed horror of what happened was beyond the control of even the Nazi propaganda apparatus. Bomber Command had managed to frighten Germany. Adolf Galland, the Battle of Britain Luftwaffe pilot who at the time was inspector of fighters at the German air ministry, wrote later that a ‘wave of terror radiated from the suffering city and spread through Germany … In every large town people said “what happened to Hamburg yesterday can happen to us tomorrow”… After Hamburg in the wide circle of the political and military command could be heard the words: “The war is lost.”’3
The Nazi leadership was now seriously concerned about how much punishment the population would be able to absorb. Hitler’s munitions minister Albert Speer said at his post-war interrogation that ‘we were of the opinion that a rapid repetition of this type of attack upon another six German towns would inevitably cripple the will to sustain armament manufacture and war production.’ He reported to the Führer his opinion that ‘a continuation of these attacks might bring about a rapid end to the war.’4 But as Speer learned, it was unwise to underestimate the resilience of civilian morale. The majority of workers who fled Hamburg returned soon after. It was calculated later that less than two months of production had been lost.
Gains in the bombing war tended to be temporary. An important element in the Hamburg raids had been the use of Window which gave the attackers a strong initial advantage over the German defences. But the brief history of military aviation showed that new developments were quickly neutralized by counter-measures. The rule was to be proved again.
Under the existing system, the Germans’ first line of defence had been the curtain of night-fighters based at aerodromes back from the North Sea and Channel coasts. As the incoming bombers passed through the radar ‘boxes’ of the Kammhuber line, they were picked up on the German radar screens. Ground controllers would then direct individual fighter areas on to their quarry.
‘[He] would tell you,’ said Peter Spoden, a German night-fighter pilot, “‘We have a target for you five miles ahead … turn left now, a little bit more to the left. Higher, higher, speed up. Four miles, three miles, two miles. And if the ground controller was clever he brought the target up above you so that you were in the dark below and you [could] see the British bomber as a kind of silhouette. The first [thing] you saw were the eight flames from the exhaust from the four engines. Then you were closing in …’ The arrangements were strictly localized and the night-fighter squadrons were manned by veteran Experten who appreciated the decorations and promotions arising from their relatively easy victories.
The method, though, had its limitations. The men flying the Messerschmitt 109s and 110s felt just the same determination to defend their homes and families as had their RAF counterparts during the Battle of Britain. Peter Spoden was an eighteen-year-old student at Hamburg University when the RAF bombed his home town of Essen in 1940. Like many young Germans he had learned to fly gliders at the air schools originally set up by the Nazis to circumvent restrictions on military activity. After the raid he joined the Luftwaffe with the specific intention of becoming a night-fighter pilot. He shared the frustration of the younger pilots at the limitations imposed by the system. He was flying in a box named ‘Orion’ over Rügen Island when the great Hamburg raid went in. ‘I could see Hamburg. I could see the immense fire and I also could see closer to me two or three four-engined planes like moths against the cloud … I told my controller, “please let me go” but he did not have any radar reception there … I asked him again, “I can see them, I can see them.” I was an eager young pilot and I had not had any great success at the time.’5 Permission was refused. For Spoden and his
peers, the arrival of Window inadvertently created just the freedom of action they sought.
The confusion it had sown was alarming, but temporary. The Germans responded quickly and cleverly. The controllers learned to follow the cloud of Window as it formed on their screens and deduce from that the direction and likely objective of the bomber stream. As the raid developed, fighters were summoned from all over to harass the raiders as they converged on the target. Over the city the fighters would use whatever light was available from the searchlights, fires and marker flares to locate their quarry as they flew straight and level on the last crucial minutes of the bombing run. It was dangerous work. The flak batteries were supposed to keep their fire below a certain height but such instructions could be forgotten in the heat of battle. They harried and struck at the intruders all the way back, with gratifying effectiveness.
The efficiency of the German defences was further improved by the arrival of new aircraft. By early 1944, Junker 88s had mostly replaced Messerschmitt 110s as the standard aircraft of the night-fighter force. Their ability to find their targets was greatly improved by onboard radar and their killing capacity increased by a new armament which arrived in the summer of 1943. These were cannons, known as Schräge Musik, which were angled to fire upwards and slightly forward. The tactic was to slink up below the victim and fire a burst into its belly, heavy with high explosive and incendiaries. The resulting explosion could prove fatal to attacker and quarry alike.
The strengthened German fighter force was therefore as much a danger to the British as it was to the Americans. Once they came within range of a fighter there was little a bomber could do to defend itself. A fully-laden Lancaster could only manage an airspeed of 180 knots on the way out and 210 on the return. Their .303 machine guns were not a serious weapon. The only defence was the corkscrew and that was only intermittently effective against a smaller and more nimble opponent. As Noble Frankland knew from bitter experience, once located, the odds were heavily against the bombers. The truth was that ‘outpaced, outmanoeuvred and outgunned by the German night-fighters and in a generally highly inflammable and explosive condition, these black monsters presented an ideal target to any fighter pilot who could find them, and it was the night-fighters which caused the overwhelming majority of the losses sustained by Bomber Command in the Battle of Berlin.’ At this stage of the war the figure stood at about 70 per cent.6
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 76