The extraordinary difference the Mustangs would make to the balance of the air war became apparent in a few days in February 1944, which became known as Big Week. Between 20 and 25 February the Eighth Air Force carried out thirteen major strikes against fifteen centres of the German air industry. The 1,000 bombers had with them an almost equal number of fighter escorts. Faced with the destruction of their infrastructure, the Luftwaffe, as General Carl Spaatz, commander of the American strategic air forces in Europe had calculated, had no choice but to come up to meet them. In the fighting, the Americans claim to have destroyed more than 600 German interceptors for losses on their side of 210 bombers and thirty-eight fighters. These figures were of course extremely unreliable but whatever the precise details one thing was undeniable. American operations may not have devastated the German aircraft industry which showed astonishing resilience in continuing to produce machines. But the punishment they inflicted on the existing machines and the men flying in them could not be sustained. The grinding attrition continued through March as the Eighth expanded its operations to Berlin. The American bombers suffered heavily in the process but the huge increase in the number of crews and aircraft pouring into the theatre meant the losses could be more easily absorbed. After Big Week the Luftwaffe’s daytime ascendancy was finished and the force in general gradually and inexorably lost control of the skies.
Looking back, General Joseph ‘Beppo’ Schmid, who commanded the fighter group 1 Jagdkorps from September 1943 to November 1944, recorded that as early as March ‘the numeric superiority of enemy fighters had become so great that fighting became most difficult for our own units.’ The supply of aircraft and men could not keep up with the losses so that ‘the alacrity or fighting spirit of the [airmen] was generally below the average.’ Germany was fighting an air war on three fronts, in Russia and the Mediterranean as well as Western Europe, with limited and declining resources. The Luftwaffe pilots were courageous and highly motivated but they were often poorly trained compared with their Allied counterparts. Many of their casualties were caused by crashes. The Luftwaffe General Adolf Galland calculated that in the first quarter of 1944, more than 1,000 pilots were lost from the day-fighter force including some their finest. He concluded that ‘each incursion of the enemy is costing us some fifty aircrews. The time has come when our weapon is in sight of collapse.’4
The success of the Mustangs raised the question of whether Bomber Command should follow the Americans’ example. By switching to daylight bombing the RAF could benefit from the air superiority established by the American escorts and reinforce it with their own short-range fighters. The Air Staff thought seriously about this dramatic change of course. Harris, however, was opposed to the idea. The new American methods retained the tight formation and the defensive field of fire as the basis of its tactics. The great advance was that now each group had the additional protection of a phalanx of aggressive, free-ranging fighters buzzing around it ready to swoop on any enemy aircraft that dared to approach.
Harris argued that the system only worked because of the higher operational ceiling of the American aircraft, which allowed them both to hold station and avoid the worst of the German ground artillery. The British bombers were different. Even the easy-handling Lancasters were incapable of keeping formation at heights above nineteen thousand feet. At that altitude they would be vulnerable to flak and any savings gained from the protection offered by the fighter escort would be cancelled out by losses from ground fire. In any case, if such an important decision was implemented, the preparations needed would mean it would be a very long time before it started producing results. The arguments now seem glib and flimsy. No effort was made to put his assertion to the test. Far greater difficulties had been encountered and overcome. Harris may not have set Bomber Command on its original course. But once established, he followed it relentlessly and distrusted ideas that seemed to take it in a different direction. The shift from night to day was far too radical a change for him to accept without protest. Inevitably, he came up with some suggestions of his own.
His solution was to establish during the hours of darkness the same degree of air superiority that the Americans had achieved by day. Harris had been appealing for a force of long-range night-fighters to support his command since the summer of 1943 but had been consistently turned down by the Air Staff. Harris believed that Mosquitoes could do the same job as the American escorts and asked that ten squadrons of them should be supplied to Bomber Command. In April 1944, he was allowed three. They proved to be far less effective than their American counterparts. In the seventeen months from December 1943 to the end of the war, the fighter squadrons of 100 Group, which escorted Bomber Command, destroyed less than 270 enemy aircraft. Equipment was part of the problem. The onboard radar they carried had difficulty tracking any aircraft and when it did, could not distinguish between friend or foe.
The Mosquito was many things but it was not a long-range escort fighter. The absence of such a machine from the RAF’s front-line force was due, in part at least, to the obstinacy of Portal. From the start of the war he had stuck to his view that stamina could only be increased at the expense of performance and agility. Once a long-range fighter met its German short-range opponent, the German was bound to win. The Americans had tried to persuade him otherwise, even modifying some Spitfires so they could fly the Atlantic. Portal’s usually agile mind was unmoved. Pressure to switch to day bombing slackened but it never went away. But in the spring of 1944, the debate was shunted aside by the approach of D-Day.
In March Bomber Command began preparatory operations in France. The targets were small compared to those that it was used to attacking in Germany, and often lightly defended. The emphasis now was on avoiding civilian casualties. Churchill the Francophile was particularly distressed at the thought of spilling French blood, which he feared might ‘smear the good name of the Royal Air Force across the world.’ But try as they might to spare the innocent, it could not always be done. The civilian death toll proved tragically the argument that even with the best intentions and the greatest care, in a bombing war non-combatants inevitably died.
On the night of 9 April, 239 aircraft, most of them Halifaxes, arrived over Lille, an important road and rail crossroads in northern France. Their mission was to destroy the Lille-Délivrance goods station. There was a full moon. The bombs devastated the railway complex, destroying most of the wagons lying in the sidings and tearing up the tracks. But they also fell in the narrow streets housing the cheminots who worked on the railways, which lined the yards. The bloodshed was on the scale inflicted in an area attack, with 456 dead and many wounded. In the district of Lomme, 5,000 houses were destroyed or damaged. To those searching through the smoking rubble for loved ones the drone of the bombers overhead did not seem like the sound of liberation. Less than ten days later another sizeable raid was mounted on marshalling yards at Noisy-Le-Sec. Again great damage was done to the complex but again friendly civilians paid for the success with 464 killed and 370 injured.
Despite these horrible but inevitable mistakes, the crews felt uplifted by the work they were doing. The prospect of the invasion cheered everyone. An end, no matter how remote, was at last in sight. Now they really could start to believe that each mission accelerated victory. Their bombs would help to liberate France and save the lives of many of their own soldiers. As the casualty figures declined and the number of operations carried out without loss grew, their hopes rose that they might be there to celebrate victory.
The operations they were engaged in reminded them of why they had joined. There were some spectacular successes that suggested that Bomber Command, for so long a blunt weapon, was at last evolving into a sharp instrument of efficient and useful destruction. On the night of 5/6 April, 144 Lancasters of 5 Group attacked and completely destroyed an aircraft factory at Toulouse. The accuracy of the attack was attributed to the precision of the marking which for the first time had been carried out by a Mosquito flying at low leve
l. The pilot was Leonard Cheshire who had been applying his innovative intelligence and considerable energy to improving bombing accuracy. The problem at this stage was less with bomb-aiming than with marking. Much of the latter was being carried out by Mosquitoes equipped with the Oboe blind-bombing radar device, which told the pilot where the target indicator should be dropped. This was an advance on earlier methods but still far from infallible. Cheshire’s idea was to cast the Mosquito in yet another role. Using its great speed and nimbleness it would be possible, he claimed, to fly in very low and drop the marker by sight alone, eschewing radar and relying only on the bombsight.
At Toulouse he put his theory to the test. He and his co-pilot Flying Officer Pat Kelly made two passes over the factory before releasing red spot markers. Lancaster crews higher in the sky dropped more indicators, which now burned brightly from the heart of the target. The main force then went in, demolishing or heavily damaging nearly all the buildings in the target area. Even with all the care and skill this was not a surgical strike. Bombs struck about a hundred houses near the factory killing twenty-two.
These successes did not come without cost. On the night of 3 May, a force of 346 Lancasters lead by Mosquitoes went to bomb a German military camp near the village of Mailly, south of Châlonsen-Champagne. The target was well marked by Cheshire but the order for the main force to attack was drowned out by an American forces broadcast and in the delay caused by the confusion German fighters arrived. In the ensuing carnage forty-two Lancasters were lost.
As Overlord opened, Bomber Command’s might was displayed in the southern skies of England. On the night of 5/6 June, the inhabitants of the south of England looked up to watch an apparently seamless carpet of bombers rolling overhead towards the beaches and cliffs of Normandy. Harris had amassed more than a thousand aircraft, Lancasters, Halifaxes and Mosquitoes, laden with bombs to pulverize the coastal batteries sunk into the dunes behind the tranquil, low-built fishing villages that for centuries had managed to avoid Europe’s swirling wars. The weather favoured Hitler. Only two of the ten targets, Ouistreham and La Pernelle, were free of cloud. The rest were bombed blind using Oboe. In the course of the night 5,000 tons of bombs were dropped, the greatest quantity in the war so far. A thousand bombers were in the air again the following night smashing railway and road junctions to prevent the Germans rushing troops to the beach-heads.
So it went on. The destructive power of the Allies was enhanced by the deployment of a new super-bomb, the Tallboy, another invention of Professor Barnes Wallis whose bouncing bomb had made the Dams Raid possible. It weighed 12,000 pounds and was sleekly designed to drive deep into the earth before exploding, creating an earthquake effect that produced a crater that needed 5,000 tons of earth to fill. On the night of 8/9 June 617 Squadron, led by Leonard Cheshire, set off to attack a railway tunnel near Saumur, in the Loire valley. A German Panzer force was expected to pass through heading towards the Normandy beach-head from its garrison in the south. The area was marked by flares by four Lancasters, then Cheshire and two other outstanding master bombers, Squadron Leader David Shannon and Flight Lieutenant Gerry Fawke, dived in low to place their red spot markers at the mouth of the tunnel. The subsequent bombing was reasonably accurate. The reconnaissance photographs show two direct hits on the railway lines that gouged out enormous craters in the cutting leading to the tunnel. Even greater devastation was caused by a bomb which speared through the roof of the tunnel entrance, bringing down an avalanche of rock and dirt. This took a major effort to clear and the progress of the Panzers to Normandy was, for the time being, halted.
The role of the British and American air forces was crucial to the success of Overlord. In the space of a few months Bomber Command had gone from the wretched and harrowing business of pounding cities to the cleaner work of destroying an army in the field. For once they were dropping bombs on an enemy that was wearing uniform. More and more, they were operating in daylight. Between the invasion and the middle of August, 17,580 out of the command’s 46,824 sorties were outside the hours of darkness.
Their activities transformed the battlefield. On 18 June they successfully carried out a huge attack on five villages east of Caen which lay across the British line of advance. Twelve days later at Villers-Bocage they obliterated a crucial road junction through which two Panzer divisions were expected to pass on their way to launching a counterattack at the point in the line where the British and American armies met. As a result, the German operation was abandoned. Offering close support to the men on the ground carried inevitable dangers. Confusion, inaccuracy and human error combined to create some black incidents when British and American bombs fell on Allied troops. But given the colossal scale of the enterprise, perhaps the real surprise was that there were not more of them.
The crews now felt an engagement with the battlefield that they had never experienced before. On 30 July, Ken Newman set off to bomb six German positions in the Villers-Bocage-Caumont area which were holding up the American advance. He was forced down to 2,000 feet to get below the cloud. The low altitude made him nervous, and the fact that ‘the twenty-four of us from Wickenby were all trying to get into the same small airspace at the same time and I had to keep moving the aircraft around to avoid a collision.’ But then the markers went down and he witnessed a phenomenon which he ‘had never seen before, or ever saw again. We were so low that I was able to see the pressure wave of every exploding bomb – a bright red ring expanding rapidly outwards like ripples on the surface of the water.’ Newman decided to risk staying low to witness the spectacle and the navigator and wireless operator came forward to share the experience. It was ‘exciting to see the hundreds of Allied tanks, their crews waving madly at us … I waggled our wings in acknowledgement.’ At that moment ‘we all felt that we had done something to help our Army colleagues in Normandy and wished them every good fortune.’5
Despite the care taken over civilian casualties the bloodshed continued. On one particularly appalling occasion, the catastrophe was due to incompetence rather than accident. On 5 September, Bomber Command was sent to Le Havre. The retreating Germans had left garrisons in several Channel ports with orders to hold them for as long as they could stand and fight. When Harry Yates and his crew heard that 75 Squadron were on the raid their first reaction was relief. They had expected to be briefed for Dortmund, a particularly daunting target in their experience. By comparison ‘a brief excursion to occupied France was a cakewalk.’
They were further cheered by the assurance that the raid ‘would trigger the liberation of Le Havre and save the lives of countless British soldiers.’ The local population had been warned by leaflet drops to vacate the town. The only ones underneath their bombs would be the diehard German soldiers. Later Yates was to reflect on the ‘total trust we put in the facts as they were presented to us. I doubt if anybody had a single insubordinate thought about them or about the safety of the local populace. Our competence did not extend to such matters. That was the preserve of high-flying staff officers at Bomber Command and the Group HQs.’
The operation went off smoothly. The bombs fell with remarkable accuracy. In the Plough and Harrow, the Mepal local, that night Yates and his crew all ‘thought the same. It was a job well done. We wouldn’t be going back.’6
It fact the intelligence had been disastrously wrong. Few Germans were left in the target area. Much worse, the French population were concentrated in the old part of town, the district in which most of the 6,000 bombs that were dropped fell. Three thousand men, women and children died.
As well as their contribution to the success of the Normandy landings the crews were also helping to make the Home Front safer. Throughout the high summer they flew missions against V1 flying bomb sites and stores, reducing the Germans’ ability to bombard London and other British cities. The sites were small and hard to hit and despite the enormous expenditure of effort the Germans still managed to launch bombs in significant numbers long after D-Day. By 15 July, 2,579 ha
d fallen on England, about half of them on London. The determination of the crews, British and American, to stop them was measured by the casualties. About 3,000 airmen were killed in attacks on V-weapon targets. Leonard Cheshire’s last operational mission was against a site at Mimoyecques on 6 July. After that he was ordered to take a rest, along with three other leading 617 Squadron officers, all of them veterans of the Dams Raid.
They were withdrawing from a battlefield that was becoming decreasingly dangerous for airmen. As the Allied beach-head widened, German day-fighters faded from the Normandy skies. On some days major operations on land and in the air proceeded without a German aircraft being seen. Bomber Command continued to suffer casualties. Flak was still lethal, especially over the ports. Ralph Briars, a gunner with 617 Squadron, was happy to note that there were no fighters near Le Havre when they went to drop Tallboys on the E-boat pens on 14 June. ‘Target quiet until a few minutes before dropping,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Then they let loose bags of light and medium flak … as bomb left, flak hit starboard inner engine and top turret, gunner OK, engine had to be feathered.’ The danger, he recorded with satisfaction, was worth it. ‘U-boat pens, twenty-five feet thick, were hit. Good bombing.’
There were still night-fighters to worry about. During a number of operations mounted against synthetic oil plants in Germany during June, July and August, the normal levels of losses obtained. But overall the trend was heartening. During the period the casualty rate fell to a level that the crews would have considered trifling six months before. Only 1.6 per cent of the force dispatched were lost. Nonetheless, that still amounted to 727 aircraft.
Germany had fallen to the back of the minds of the Bomber Boys during their welcome French diversion. Only one major operation had been launched against a German city, when Stuttgart was laid waste in three nights in late July. But as the nights lengthened and the Allies moved eastwards, the respite drew to a close. Once again Bomber Command turned back to its task of destroying the Reich.
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 89