17
Tallboys and Tirpitz
The great advances in methods and technology Bomber Command had achieved meant it was now able to strike targets that had previously eluded it. At the top of this list came the battleship Tirpitz. In the autumn of 1944, it was lying in Kaa Fjord in northern Norway, threatening the vital Arctic convoys that supplied the Soviet war effort. It was the most powerful warship in the Western Hemisphere. It could steam at nearly 40 mph and was armed with eight fifteen-inch guns, twelve six-inch guns and about eighty flak guns. In the course of the war it had survived more than thirty aerial attacks, largely thanks to its heavy armour, which seemed proof against the bombs of the Fleet Air Arm and RAF. In September, two squadrons, 9 and 617, were ordered to the Soviet Union to launch their attack. The trip made an interesting diversion for Ralph Briars, who left with 617 from Woodhall on the evening of 11 September, crossing Norway and Sweden and landing at an island airfield near Archangel. The crews were put up in an old river steamer. While they waited for suitable weather, they were fed on eggs and spam. Mutual incomprehension did not stop them making friends with the Russians, who swapped their cap badges for cigarettes. The authorities laid on entertainment for the three nights they were there; films, concerts and dances. The movies were earnest sagas with interminable battle scenes. The dances were better. The band could even play ‘The Lambeth Walk’.
It was all very different from Woodhall Spa. They were looked after by local staff who lived in primitive huts around the airfield. The women were baffled by requests for hot water to shave in. The men spent much of the time playing cards, breaking off occasionally to supervise their wives’ labour as they lugged away logs that floated down the river and chopped them up for firewood. The crews found the Russians ‘kindly, generous hosts’ and good sportsmen, too. They played football and the base side trounced them seven-nil.1 On 15 September the weather cleared and the Lancasters, loaded with 12,000-pound Tallboy bombs and ‘Johnny Walker’ mines designed to blow up under the battleship’s hull, took off. Tony Iveson remembered seeing the battleship clearly outlined, ‘black against the cliff and the snowy mountains, but at the same time I saw the smoke generators start up all round the cliffs and by the time we got to bombing height there was just a sea of cloud beneath us.’ The Tirpitz was badly damaged but still afloat. Two months later the RAF went back again. By now the Tirpitz had moved to the sheltered waters of Tromsø on the west coast of Norway. One attempt at the end of October was thwarted by low cloud. On 12 November they tried again. The thirty Lancasters of 9 and 617 squadrons that mounted the attack had been specially modified so as to be able to reach Tromsø from Lossiemouth in the north of Scotland. All armour plating as well as the mid-upper and front gun turrets were removed. They were also fitted with improved-performance Merlin T24 engines. Loaded with a Tallboy, they were just capable of making the twelve-and-a-half-hour round trip.
Tony Iveson and seventeen other 617 Squadron crews were set to take off at 2 a.m. They lined up while the hoarfrost was swept from the wings then ‘off we went, up past the Orkneys and the Shetlands to about 65 north, seven east when we turned towards Norway.’ As dawn came up he ‘saw another Lancaster, silhouetted, so I formated on him.’ It was his CO, James Tait. They headed for a lake that had been designated as the rendezvous point. As they circled it, ‘Lancaster after Lancaster came out of the dark western sky and joined us.’ Tait fired a Verey light, the signal for the last leg of the operation to begin and they set off for Tromsø. As morning broke ‘it was absolutely gin clear. You could see for miles and below the white-topped mountains and the blue, blue sea.’ Their first thought was that the conditions could not have been more perfect for bombing. Their second was that they were equally favourable for the German fighter unit that was believed to be stationed in the area.
When they arrived, the Tirpitz appeared to have been taken by surprise. There was no smokescreen. It was a Sunday and many of the crew were ashore. Iveson and the rest of 617 Squadron dropped their bombs within the space of four minutes from 15,000 feet. Their Lancasters were fitted with a new, computer-assisted bombsight. The Tallboys fell away ‘on a beautiful, steady course. After the fourteenth bomb they weren’t able to plot any more because there was so much smoke and muck around.’ The accuracy was extraordinary. There were two direct hits on the battleship and three near misses. Within six minutes of the first strike she was on her side. Within eleven minutes she had capsized but was unable to sink completely because of the shallowness of the water. Nearly a thousand sailors were killed or injured out of the ship’s company of 1,900 men, including the captain and most of the officers. The attackers suffered only one casualty. A Lancaster of 9 Squadron, which arrived shortly after 617, was damaged by flak but landed safely in Sweden. The German fighters that Iveson had feared took off too late to intercept the bombers.2
By now the Tallboys were a key element in Bomber Command’s arsenal, allowing them to hit important strategic targets with devastating effect and at reduced risk. Unlike the ‘cookie’ which resembled a giant oil-drum, the Tallboy looked like a proper bomb. It was twenty-one feet long, made out of special steel casing, and was shaped aerodynamically with four stabilizer fins that made it spin on its axis as it fell. It was designed for deep penetration, so that on detonation it set up a ripple of shock waves that destroyed the target from its foundations.
Tallboys had been dropped first by Leonard Cheshire and David Shannon in their celebrated attack on the railway tunnel at Saumur during the Normandy landings. Their effectiveness was demonstrated again on the night of 23/24 September against the Dortmund–Ems canal, a vital waterway. The banks of both branches of the canal were breached and a six-mile stretch of it was drained. Most of the damage was done by bombs dropped by 617 Squadron. Ralph Briars took part in the raid and his diary entry for the night is a reminder that although the Luftwaffe was severely weakened Bomber Command’s operations were very far from being risk free. ‘Had first shaking when two kites collided off coast,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Queer things, red, green and yellow flares, enormous flak bursts, kites going down without combat – no tracer used by fighters, I guess. Spot fire just under cloud, had several tries to bomb, but it became covered just before release so we brought it back. Felt tired and shaken on return, curse the darkness.’ Reading this entry many years later he thought he detected in it ‘just a hint of bother’. It revealed, he suspected, the advent of ‘the Twitch’, which he had noticed in airmen who had been flying too long.3 Fourteen Lancasters, more than 10 per cent of the force, failed to make it back from this operation.
By the end of 1944 the Allied airforces had achieved virtual mastery of the skies of Europe. But despite the efforts of the bombers against the German aircraft industry, it was still managing to function, and at a remarkably brisk pace. In September the production of single-engined fighters reached a new high. By the end of the year the overall number of aircraft had climbed to 3,300. As Germany by then had a much smaller area to defend, this force, in theory at least, could be used with more concentration and therefore with more effect.
These statistics disguised the hopeless situation facing the Luftwaffe. There was no shortage of aircraft. But there was a desperate lack of fuel to propel them and men to fly them. As summer faded, the shortage of petrol made a mockery of the abundance of equipment. In August 1944, Germany was still managing to meet 65 per cent of its aviation spirit needs. By February 1945 the figure had fallen to 5 per cent. Starved of fuel, ground down by relentless attrition, the Luftwaffe could no longer exert any control over the direction of events in the air or on the ground.
It seemed obvious that the Allies’ air power would best be used in trying to turn off the fuel tap completely. This was how the Americans saw it. They had been bombing oil targets since March. Bomber Command also had dedicated much of its energy during the Normandy campaign to hitting synthetic oil plants in the Ruhr. Oil had been a favourite target of RAF planners since the start of the
war, and continued to be until they were persuaded that the difficulty of finding and hitting installations and the losses this entailed outweighed the results. Now the tactical landscape held far fewer perils.
The new approach was spelled out in a directive of 25 September 1944. It listed, in order of priority, Bomber Command’s targets. The first was the ‘petroleum industry, with special emphasis on petrol (gasoline) including storage.’ Next came the German rail, river and canal systems, followed by tank and lorry factories.
The emphasis on oil had the approval of Portal and the Air Staff. It did not please Harris, whose independence had been restored after Bomber Command was detached from Eisenhower’s control in September. The new realities appeared to have done nothing to modify his belief that the continued bombing of cities was the fastest way to end the war. He had always derided the ‘oily boys’ who preached that cutting the fuel pipeline was the key to victory. There had been many occasions when he had enjoyed the satisfaction of being able to point out that their theories, however logical, were easier to expound than to put into practice. Now the goal seemed within reach. Harris, though, remained deeply and aggressively sceptical.
He was, he recorded in his memoir, ‘altogether opposed to this further diversion, which, as I saw it, would only prolong the respite which the German industrial cities had gained from the use of the bombers in a tactical role [i.e. in the Normandy campaign]. I did not think we had any right to give up a method of attack which was indisputably doing the enemy enormous harm, for the sake of prosecuting a new scheme the success of which was far from assured.’ He admitted in retrospect that, as it turned out, the offensive against oil was a ‘complete success’, and shamelessly claimed credit on behalf of Bomber Command for its contribution to the result. Nonetheless, he was determined to have the last word. The advocates of the strategy may have been right, he argued, but they were right for the wrong reasons. At the time he had raised his objections, ‘it was [not] reasonable … to expect that the campaign would succeed.’ What the Allied strategists had done was to ‘bet on an outsider, and it happened to win the race.’4
Like it or not, the oily boys had carried the argument. Harris hated losing, but he knew the advantages of a tactical withdrawal. He proceeded against a list of oil targets but managed by imaginative interpretation of the directive to carry on battering cities at the same time, achieving, he boasted, ‘a destruction rate of two and a half a month’. He also maintained his aversion to day operations, even though they were now both effective and comparatively trouble-free, and seemed to order them only reluctantly.
The Luftwaffe, though apparently dying, was still capable of causing lethal damage with its last kicks. On 16 December the German army launched its desperate counter-offensive through the Ardennes. On New Year’s Day 1945, the Luftwaffe made its contribution to the action. Somehow it scraped together more than 750 fighters and enough fuel to get them into battle. The operation was mounted in complete secrecy and there was astonishment when they arrived at seventeen Allied airfields in the Lowlands and France. They destroyed 150 aircraft and killed forty-six people, most of whom were working on the ground. It was an impressive act of defiance but in the long term achieved nothing. The German losses were disastrous; 270 aircraft lost and 260 aircrew killed. Adolf Galland regarded this as the last gasp of his beloved air force. ‘The Luftwaffe received its death blow at the Ardennes offensive,’ he wrote.5
Even before this catastrophe German aircraft were decreasingly seen in the skies. On their way to Cologne at the end of October 1944, Harry Yates and his crew in S-Sugar were startled to see an unfamiliar silhouette flash in front of them, climbing out of nowhere at an impossible speed and angle. It was an Me 262 jet, one of the few that the Luftwaffe managed to get airborne. This was the only visual sighting of any German aircraft by 75 Squadron in the forty-six sorties it had flown in the previous four days. The main enemy now was flak. Shortly before this encounter and just as they approached the target Yates watched the end of two aircraft ahead of him in the stream. ‘One of them carved a fiery trail down into the cloud. There seemed to be a reasonable chance that one of them would get out. The other … took a direct hit in the bomb bay and in the blink of an eye was a ball of shocking white and orange, expanding violently outwards across a large area of sky and then petering out into a sickeningly slow drift to earth.’ He looked away, reflecting that ‘sometimes the cynical view was right. It was all a matter of luck. Every kite had its bomb doors open. One small splinter of flak hitting S-Sugar’s cookie or incendiaries would bring the same end to us.’
As they went into the bombing run they ‘entered a furious hailstorm of red-hot metal. An instant later there was an explosion between us, unseen but no distance away.’ The aircraft convulsed and Yates felt something solid and fast-moving smash into it. The Perspex panel above the pilot’s seat blew out, blasting freezing air through the fuselage. Yates felt a ‘flood tide of fear’. The thing he dreaded was finally happening to him. But the Lancaster flew on unperturbed and Yates’s pounding heart subsided.6
Bomber Command’s work rate was extraordinary. In the last three months of 1944 it dropped 163,000 tons of bombs and would drop even more in 1945. This deluge would have been even heavier if the munitions could have kept up with demand. The thought, energy and sacrifice of the early years had produced a creation of terrifying power and efficiency. Harris was determined that it should go on being put to the use for which he believed it was intended.
Despite the 25 September directive, 53 per cent of Bomber Command’s effort in the last three months of 1944 had gone into flattening cities. Oil targets accounted for 14 per cent while the rest was expended on railways and canals, enemy troops and fortifications and naval and other objectives. Some of the targets were old Bomber Command favourites. So far they had escaped total destruction. But now, in its new might, the RAF was returning to finally cross them off its list. On the night of 6/7 October it was Bremen’s turn. It had been visited on the first night of the war when a handful of Whitley bombers scattered a harmless cargo of leaflets over its rooftops. It was attacked about seventy times thereafter and had been the objective of a ‘thousand’ raid. This time only 262 Lancasters took part, dropping 1,021 tons of bombs. What was left of Bremen’s war industry went up in flames, including the two Focke-Wulf factories. Sixty-five people were killed and 766 wounded, a low figure that suggests that most people had fled. Bremen was effectively dead. The bombers had no need to go back again.
The name of Essen had once induced dread in the crews. Now they could attack it with virtual impunity and did so in two huge attacks thirty-six hours apart at the end of October. By now incendiaries did not always make up the bulk of the bomb loads. In some towns, it was reckoned that everything that could burn, had burned in previous raids and high explosive was more effective. By the time the raids were over, Essen had ceased to be an important centre of war production, though this was not the end of its ordeal.
These attacks were easy to justify. Germany had patently lost the war yet still could not bring itself to surrender. Every extra day meant more Allied casualties. The attacks on oil targets were proceeding but the beneficial results were not yet visible. Anything that persuaded Germans of the hopelessness of their situation was worth doing. In the Ruhr, which lay in the path of the Allied armies, dogged workers and their directors were continuing to try to make weapons for a struggle that had already been lost. Operation Hurricane was devised by the Allied planners to address that problem. Its purpose was spelled out in a directive of 13 October 1944 to Harris. It read: ‘In order to demonstrate to the enemy in Germany generally the overwhelming superiority of the Allied Air Forces in this theatre … the intention is to apply within the shortest practical period the maximum effort of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command and the VIIIth United States Bomber Command against objectives in the densely populated Ruhr.’ The object was, in the words of the official history, ‘to cause mass panic, havoc and disorganiz
ation in the Ruhr Valley, to disrupt the immediate German front-line communications by driving the railheads back east of the Rhine and to demonstrate to the Germans the futility of further resistance.’
This was not intended to replace oil targets as the principal object of the American and British air forces’ attentions. However it did mark a further advance in another plan which had been under consideration as the Allies pondered how to use their massive superiority to its best advantage.
Portal had asked the Air Staff in July 1944 for their thoughts on how the bombing war should proceed. They had ceased to believe that bombing on its own could create a decisive collapse of German morale. However a ‘blow of catastrophic force’ delivered at the right moment, and taken in conjunction with defeats on other fronts, might persuade the population that there was no further point in holding out. That right moment would only come when Germans generally believed that the Nazi system was collapsing and total defeat was imminent. The object of the attack would not be to destroy Germany entirely but to preserve what little remained. In other words, it was to hasten surrender rather than induce defeat. An orderly surrender would avert the risk of the breakdown of central military and civil authority with all the problems that would create for the invading Allies. The memorandum gave a cautiously optimistic appraisal of the effects of a ‘catastrophic blow’ against Berlin, which as the centre of government and the home of 5 per cent of the population was the obvious target. But it also suggested that ‘immense devastation could be produced if the entire attack was concentrated on a single big town other than Berlin and the effect would be especially great if the town was one hitherto relatively undamaged.’ This proposal, which became known as the Thunderclap plan, was passed on to the Chiefs of Staff. It was received unenthusiastically by their planners who did not feel it ‘likely to achieve any worthwhile degree of success’ at that time. They did, however, recommend that it should be placed before the Chiefs of Staff when conditions seemed more promising.
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 90