Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945

by Patrick Bishop

  In the meantime Harris went about implementing Hurricane, starting with a massive raid on Duisburg. He put together more than a thousand bombers, accompanied by a fighter escort. The Americans sent 1,251 heavy bombers and 749 fighters to Cologne. They attacked during the day and saw not a single Luftwaffe fighter. That night yet another 1,000 RAF aircraft went back to Duisburg. The raids did not have the effect wished for by the Hurricane planners and the town would be bombed several times more before the war was ended.

  Such was the wealth of Harris’s resources that he could also mount an attack on Brunswick the same evening. This was the fifth raid on the town that year and there was no need of another. Bomber Command was running out of urban targets. Its attentions were now turned to places that had not previously seemed worth attacking. Until now Bonn, a small well-preserved town on the banks of the Rhine, had been left alone. It had no importance to the German war effort or to Allied plans. That changed when Air Vice-Marshal R. Harrison, the commander of 3 Group, requested permission to raid it. Some of the Lancasters in Harrison’s force had been fitted with a new radar blind-bombing device called G-H, which in theory enabled bombing to continue even in the worst weather.

  The conditions on 18 October were cloudy enough to test this proposition. Harrison sent 128 Lancasters to Bonn accompanied by Mustang and Spitfire escorts. They flew in ‘vics’ of three, each formation headed by a G-H equipped aircraft. Only one German fighter was seen on the journey but its pilot prudently veered away. The raid was a success. It was an exaggeration to say, as one post-operational report did, that the attack ‘practically wiped out the town’. But it had certainly done severe damage. The university and many public buildings were burned out. The house in which Beethoven lived and composed was saved by the heroism of its caretakers. Seven hundred houses were destroyed and many more damaged; 313 people were killed. The bomb damage was easy to assess. As Bonn had never been targeted before there was no previous wreckage to obscure the picture when the reconnaissance photographs came back. This, it was believed, was one of the reasons why it had been chosen.

  Towns which presented any kind of threat or hindrance to the Allied advance were now in peril. Freiburg, on the banks of the upper Rhine near the French border, had never been attacked by the RAF before. It had no industry to speak of but was the site of a minor rail junction. At the pre-op briefing, Ken Newman and the rest of the crews were told that ‘it had not previously been regarded as a worthwhile target but it had an important railway junction. Moreover … it had been reported that the town was full of German troops poised to repel any Allied attempt to cross the Rhine in that area.’ Allied troops were approaching from the west. Freiburg was protected only by light flak batteries. About 350 aircraft attacked on the night of 27/28 November. They dropped 1,900 tons of bombs which failed to hit the rail junction. They fell instead on the main town, killing 2,088 civilians. Another 858 were reported missing. The soldiers in the town were either well-protected or few in number. Only seventy-five of them were killed. On the run into the target, Newman had seen ‘no opposition whatsoever’. The highlight of the trip for him was the St Elmo’s Fire which flickered over the propellers as they crossed the Channel for home.7

  Anything that lay in the Allied path could now expect annihilation. The historic town of Heilbronn was even more militarily insignificant than Freiburg. It had the misfortune to lie on a main north-south railway line. On the night of 4/5 December, 282 Lancasters of 5 Group dropped 1,254 tons of bombs in the space of a few minutes. The density of the bombardment produced a firestorm which devoured the wooden-framed buildings and killed 7,000 people.

  During the autumn and winter Harris once again came under pressure to broaden the scope of Bomber Command’s attacks. Sir Arthur Tedder, the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, argued for an integrated approach so that ‘various operations should fit into one comprehensive pattern.’ That meant attacks on everything that kept the German war effort going; oil, yes, but also road, rail and river communications and ‘political targets’.8

  Portal supported his view. It was translated into a directive from the Combined Chiefs of Staff on 1 November 1944. Again it listed the petroleum industry as the first priority with the German lines of communication as the second. ‘Important industrial areas’ were only mentioned in third place. This left little room for imaginative interpretation.

  The directive could be could be seen as an implicit criticism of Harris’s singular approach. That was certainly how he took it. Until now he had taken care to avoid a head-on confrontation with Portal. He appears to have reckoned that as long as Bomber Command kept up a reasonable rate of attacks against oil, he would be left alone to pursue his course of wiping out Germany’s largest cities.

  In doing so, he was flouting the wishes of every commander with a say in how the air war should proceed. Harris, though, was undeterrred. His reply to the directive was brusque and unapologetic. He repeated his conviction that targeting individual objectives could never be as effective as area attacks. The dramatically changed situation which gave the Allies command of the air seemed to have had no effect on his prescription of blanket destruction. It only needed the obliteration of twelve more cities, including Berlin, for the job to be done. ‘Are we now to abandon this vast task … just as it nears completion?’ he demanded.9

  This sort of disagreement was intolerable at a crucial stage of the war. If it was allowed to persist the great advantage of air superiority could be dissipated and the opportunity to bring a swift end to the war squandered. Portal, with his customary combination of steeliness and emollience, moved to deflect his turbulent subordinate from a collision course.

  ‘I have, I must confess at times wondered [he wrote in a letter of 12 November] whether the magnetism of the remaining German cities has not in the past tended as much to deflect our bombers from their primary objectives as … tactical and weather difficulties … I would like you to reassure me that this is not so. If I knew you to be as wholehearted in the attack of oil as you have in the past been in the matter of attacking cities I would have little to worry about.’10

  This smooth rebuke produced some results, but they were only temporary. The proportion of operations against oil targets climbed from 6 per cent in October to 24 per cent in November. Harris had responded to the tug on his chain. But he had by no means changed his mind, and did not pretend that he had. On 12 December he wrote a sulky letter to Portal deriding the scientific experts of the Ministry of Economic Warfare for their faith in ‘panacea targets’, his favourite term for specific industrial targets such as the famous ball-bearing works at Schweinfurt whose destruction they claimed would hasten German defeat.

  Portal replied in a tone of weary disappointment. Harris’s belief that oil was another ‘panacea’ was to be regretted. ‘Naturally,’ he wrote, ‘while you hold this view you will be unable to put your heart into the attack on oil.’ The exchanges went on into the New Year with Portal struggling to get his subordinate to do what he was told. It was no good. Harris was immovable; he brought the dispute to a head in mid-January 1945 when he offered his resignation. In his letter he declared he had ‘no faith’ in selective bombing and ‘none whatever in the present oil policy’. But he protested that despite his misgivings he had never failed ‘in any worthwhile efforts to achieve even those things which I knew from the start to be impracticable, once they had been decided upon.’11

  The temptation to call his bluff must have been enormous. Portal resisted it. In his reply he blandly accepted Harris’s assurance. ‘I am very sorry that you do not believe in it,’ he wrote ‘but it is no use my craving for what is evidently unattainable. We must wait until after the end of the war before we can know for certain who was right.’ He went on: ‘I sincerely hope that until then you will continue in command of the force which has done so much towards defeating the enemy and has brought such credit and renown to yourself and to the Air Force.’ Thus Portal not only missed his chance to sack Harris. H
e had also guaranteed him tenure of his job until the end of war.

  How was Harris able to get away with this extraordinary behaviour, which bordered on insubordination? In his time at the head of Bomber Command he had achieved a gilding of prestige that shone as brightly as that emanating from Montgomery and approached the aura of glory that surrounded Churchill himself. He had arrived at the head of Bomber Command when it was sunk in failure and was beginning to be tainted by despair. His effect on the organization had been extraordinary. His aggression and sense of showmanship restored in the crews a faith in their own abilities and a sense of worth about what they were doing. He impressed the public with his obvious confidence and pride in his command’s achievements. Harris had a strong understanding of what propaganda could do for him and his men in the internal bureaucratic battles he fought with as much ferocity and tenacity as he showed towards the Germans.

  He was helped by his proximity to the prime minister. Whether Churchill liked him or not was questionable. But in the end it did not matter. Far more importantly he trusted him and judged him to be the man to do the job. The qualities needed to pursue the biggest bombing campaign ever seen in history were not necessarily attractive or endearing. The task required an ability to inure oneself to death, whether that of an airman or a German civilian. It needed someone who could take in minutes, decisions that merited a year of reflection, and once taken, stick to them, even when the initial evidence suggested that they might be wrong.

  Harris was able to do these things. He belonged outside the normal confines of time and place. Those around him, his staff and his family, maintained loyally that there was a warm and affectionate side to Harris. If so, it is hard to discern in his writings and his actions. The crews who never saw him had a better understanding of who he was. To them, he was remote and unemotional, untouched by the climate of sentimentality that flourished in wartime as a respite from the uncertainties and harshness of existence. That did not mean that they did not trust him or respect him. But nobody would say they loved him.

  Portal’s reaction was probably inevitable. Sacking someone of Harris’s standing at that stage of the war would have disrupted the smooth running of Bomber Command at a crucial period in the campaign. It was still an unfortunate decision. Harris had outlived his usefulness. He had never, as Webster and Frankland drily pointed out, been famous for his farsightedness.

  ‘Sir Arthur Harris’s prestige did not depend on a reputation for good judgement,’ they wrote. ‘He had, after all, opposed the introduction of the incendiary technique, the creation of the Pathfinder Force and the development of the bomb with which the Möhne and Eder dams were breached. He had confidently supposed that the Battle of Berlin could win the war, and he had declared that Bomber Command would be operationally incapable of carrying out the French railway campaign. In all these, and many other judgements, he had been shown to be, or at least by his superiors been supposed to be, wrong and he had repeatedly been overruled, in theory if not always in practice.’12

  Despite all Portal’s pleading and cajoling, Harris continued to direct most of Bomber Command’s efforts against cities. In the remaining months of the war, it devoted only just over a quarter of its energy to attacking oil targets. Attacks on cities, however, made up 36.6 per cent of its effort. In that time it showered 66,482 tons on built-up areas, drenching them in high explosive in a literal demonstration of overkill that often brought minimal military advantage.

  It was an irony that the raid that did most to damage the reputation of Bomber Command after the war was far easier to justify than operations such as those against sleepy, mediaeval backwaters like Freiburg and Heilbronn.

  The attack on Dresden was one of the most carefully considered of Bomber Command’s war. It had its origins in the Thunderclap plan of August 1944 which the official historians judged could ‘be regarded, if only indirectly, as the title deeds’ of the operation.13 By the time it was back on the table for consideration the Allies and the Soviet Union had moved even closer to victory, though how long the end would be in coming was impossible to predict. The operation was carried out in the belief that a major attack on a city that had hitherto escaped serious bombardment would significantly hasten the end of the war. It was essentially devised to create mayhem in the German front-line areas as they faced the Russian offensive developing in the east.

  What was needed, Portal wrote to his deputy Norman Bottomley at the end of January 1945, was ‘one big attack on Berlin and attacks on Dresden, Leipzig, Chemnitz, or any other cities where a severe blitz will not only cause confusion in the evacuation from the East but will also hamper the movement of troops from the West.’14 The object was to destroy infrastructure and create panic, forcing non-combatant men, women and children on to the roads, creating conditions that would stop German soldiers getting to and from the battlefield. It was not a pretty idea. But by this stage of the war it was well within the boundaries which the Allies, and those in whose name they were fighting, thought acceptable.

  18

  Götterdämmerung

  On the morning of Monday, 13 February 1945, Roy Lodge, a twenty-one-year-old bomb-aimer with 51 Squadron and the rest of his crew learned that they were on operations that night. Their job was to mark a target that was as yet unannounced. ‘The normal preparations for an op went ahead,’ he remembered. In the afternoon they heard where they were going. ‘The CO addressed us with, “Gentlemen, your target for tonight is … Dresden,” and the curtain over the map was drawn aside.’ The news caused some whistles and groans. It was the depth of winter and ‘Dresden seemed to be halfway across the world, an eight-and-a-half-hour trip there and back.’

  Lodge, a Cambridge undergraduate before volunteering, read afterwards that some of those who took part in the raid had experienced beforehand ‘a sense of foreboding as though they felt some terrible act was about to be committed.’ For him and his crew, however, ‘Dresden was just another target, though a long, long way away.’

  The normal routine had differed in only one respect. Unusual detail was given about the purpose of the mission. ‘We were told that the Russian armies advancing towards Dresden had been held up; that Dresden was the main base for the German army on that front; that though normally it was not an important industrial town, it would be crammed with German troops and transport; that the Russians had asked Bomber Command to help break German resistance.’1

  Until now Dresden had escaped serious bombardment. But it had been in the Allies’ sights for some months and its attraction as a target had increased as the Russian advance ground westward. During the second half of January, Soviet troops crossed Poland and breached Germany’s eastern border. Germany was now fighting hard on two fronts inside its own territory.

  The Allies gave urgent thought to how their air power could be used to clear the way for the Red Army. It was apparent that the speed of the Soviet advance would have a decisive effect on the length of the war. The view of the influential Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), where all the main intelligence services came together, was that the assault on oil targets should remain the main priority. But they also proposed that a major effort should be made to come to the aid of the Russians. Portal shared their opinion.

  The Russians’ progress was by no means assured. Their advance was threatened by the arrival of German reinforcements from the west. A JIC assessment had predicted that almost half a million men could be moved from Germany’s rapidly shrinking territories to reinforce the Eastern Front. For Hitler, stemming the tide from the east was the overwhelming priority. Of all the Germans’ many enemies it was the Russians who struck real terror into their hearts.

  Churchill was eager to hear the RAF’s ideas for hounding the Germans as they were pushed back. He considered Berlin and ‘other large cities in East Germany’ to be ‘especially attractive targets’. On 27 January, Portal issued orders to Harris and Bomber Command to prepare for an attack. Portal considered that an all-out assault on Berlin would
not produce decisive results. His pessimism was justified a week later when the Americans took on that task. Almost a thousand Fortresses bombarded the capital in daylight in what was effectively a classic area attack. Over two thousand tons of bombs were dropped, half of which were incendiaries. Huge destruction was done to the fabric of the city and nearly three thousand people were killed. But there was no surrender and Berlin staggered on.

  In view of the prime minister’s preferences, it was placed on Bomber Command’s target list. The cities of Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz were also added. A few days later, the Vice-Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Douglas Evill, told the Chiefs of Staff Committee what the RAF were planning. His report placed great emphasis on the potential for exploiting the disruption caused by the large number of evacuees streaming westward through Berlin, Dresden and Leipzig from the German and German-occupied areas that were falling before the advancing Soviet troops. The administrative problems in dealing with them were ‘immense’. The strain on the authorities was doubled by the need to handle the military reinforcements arriving to shore up the crumbling Eastern Front. ‘A series of heavy attacks by day and night upon those administrative and control centres,’ he wrote, ‘is likely to create considerable delays in the deployment of troops … and may well result in establishing a state of chaos in some or all of these centres.’2 Such operations would serve the dual purpose of speeding the Russians’ progress westwards as well as perhaps fulfilling the objective mooted in Thunderclap of creating sufficient panic and despair to persuade the German nation that further resistance was futile.