Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945

by Patrick Bishop

  On 4 February, four days after this assessment was delivered, Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt met in the ballroom of the Livadia Palace, the summer residence of the Tsars near Yalta in the Crimea, to discuss the war’s next, crucial phase. On the subject of bombing, the Red Army made a request for air action to hinder the enemy from moving troops to the Eastern Front.

  Four days later this had been translated into the basis of an order. On 8 February, the Air Staff’s targets committee informed Bomber Command, the US Strategic Air Force Command and Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) that ‘the following targets have been selected for their importance in relation to the movements of Evacuees from, and of military forces to, the Eastern Front.’ On the list were Berlin, Dresden and Chemnitz. But it was Dresden that was to be dealt with first.

  The crews, on the whole, were pleased to be doing something to help their Russian allies. The members of the newly-formed 227 Squadron heard about it at the afternoon briefing from their CO, Wing Commander Ernest Millington, who went on to become a Labour MP. In the audience was Freddie Hulance, who had just completed eight operations as a pilot. ‘He announced with some relish,’ he said later, ‘that the target of Dresden had been nominated at the Yalta conference by the Russians who wanted support for their front, which was then about 100 miles to the east.’

  Hulance ‘got a certain amount of satisfaction about supporting the Russians.’ They had ‘born the brunt of the land forces offensive at the time and suffered the worst casualties … not that I in any way had Communist feelings, but they were allies, doing a good job, bringing the war to a more hasty conclusion.’ The rest of the squadron, he believed, felt the same way.3

  The Americans had agreed to help and were scheduled to open the attack on 13 February but the operation was scrubbed due to bad weather. In the end, Bomber Command did most of the work, dispatching 796 Lancasters and nine Mosquitoes in two separate raids that came three hours apart.

  The first wave of 244 bombers, all from 5 Group, took off shortly after 6 p.m. Despite the weakness of the Luftwaffe night-fighter force they took a tortuous route, turning first towards the Ruhr, then along a jinking path designed to keep the German defences constantly guessing as to where they were heading. These deceptions meant the journey was 500 miles longer than the direct route.

  The 5 Group Pathfinders began marking at 10 p.m. local time. Green marker flares were dropped to define the bounds of the city centre, followed by a thousand white magnesium flares to illuminate the ground. Then Mosquitoes swooped down to 2,000 feet to deliver 1,000-pound target indicator canisters whose red flares lit up the aiming point. The planners had chosen the stadium of the city’s most popular football club, just to the west of the River Elbe, as the focus of the attack. There was nothing to put the markers off their aim. Most of the city’s limited anti-aircraft artillery had been moved to sites deemed to be more important and there were only ten night-fighters stationed in the area.

  The main force Lancasters came in at different heights and slightly different approaches to create a zone of destruction that fanned out south and east of the aiming point. The 400 tons of bombs they dropped were a mixture of high explosive which blew down walls and blasted away roofs, and 4-pound incendiaries which set the ruins alight. As the last of the 5 Group aircraft turned away towards home, the fires seemed to be taking hold well.

  Roy Lodge was in the second wave of 529 Lancasters. He was still a hundred miles from the target when the glow from Dresden became visible. ‘As I drew closer I saw the cause of the glow,’ he wrote. ‘Ahead was the most enormous fire. Ahead, and then below us were great patches, pools, areas of flame.’ Lodge’s crew had been detailed to further mark the target but it hardly seemed necessary. ‘We added our own long line of flares to those already across the target … I saw white flashes of bomb explosions and more splashes of sparkling incendiaries. As we completed our run across the target and turned away on our homeward journey, I could see that the pools of flame were joining up into one huge inferno.’

  This was not an exaggeration. The attack had created a firestorm that was to engulf the old city centre. The morning brought no reprieve. More than 300 American Fortresses dropped 771 tons of bombs, aiming at the railway yards which had been outside the RAF’s bombing area. At the same time, to intensify the chaos, some of their Mustang fighter escorts shot up road traffic. When the ordeal finally ended, according to the latest best estimate, between 25,000 and 40,000 people had been killed.4

  The scenes the crews had witnessed were impressive but not necessarily indicative of enormous loss of life. Looking back, Lodge chiefly remembered he and his comrades as afterwards feeling ‘tired, of course, excited by what we had seen and done, awed by the enormous destructive power that we had demonstrated.’ But it did not seem to him that they had taken part in ‘an especially historic event’. Bill Farquharson, who was flying with 115 Squadron, arrived in the middle of the main force when the target was already ablaze. ‘At the time it didn’t strike me as being a heavy raid,’ he said.5

  Dresden was unusual only in that it went off so well. It was, as it turned out, a disastrous success. The death toll was on a par with that resulting from the first firestorm, created some eighteen months previously at Hamburg, which was regarded at the time as a great victory. But by the time the war was over Hamburg was only a memory to a few non-Germans. The horror of Dresden was still fresh and raw when the last shot was fired. Such a devastating act so close to the dawning of peace seemed particularly brutal and gratuitous. How could killing on such a scale be justified when the end was in sight? The simple answer was that the end was not in sight. No one could know when the war would finish and in the middle of February 1945 there was no indication that the Germans would not fight on until the death of the last Nazi.

  Even while fires still burned in the ruins of the old city, unease was mounting about the raid. On 17 February a report by Associated Press, the main American news agency, from Supreme Allied Headquarters stated that the ‘Allied Air Chiefs’ had made a decision to ‘adopt deliberate terror bombing of German population centres as a ruthless expedient to hastening Hitler’s doom.’ It cited recent attacks on ‘residential sections’ of Dresden, as well as Berlin and Chemnitz as evidence that the campaign was already under way. This dispatch was widely distributed and broadcast and though quickly suppressed it made a strong impression. It was especially disturbing to American audiences who had received continual official assurances that their air force was a precision instrument which was applied only to select targets. The stir the story created was thought sufficiently damaging to merit a clarification from the US Secretary of War, General George C. Marshall, who issued a counter-statement emphasizing that the attack on Dresden had taken place at the request of the Russians.

  The controversy, initially at least, made little impression on the crews. They were anxious to press on. Although the final date of the war was unguessable it was clear that the Germans were beaten. There were odd, cheering signs that lifted their spirits. Flying over Sweden, Dennis Steiner and his crew were buoyed to see below them lines of tracer hosing up in the form of a V for Victory sign.

  When a crew finished a tour they could now reasonably hope that they would not have to do another. Harry Yates’s thirtieth op was a trip to a place he had never heard of before, Vohwinkel in the Ruhr, where the target was the marshalling yards. Crews were specially apprehensive on their last trip. The loss rate may have dropped to just below 1 per cent. But inside a squadron, the deaths of friends and comrades were as real and painful as ever, and despite the weakness of the Luftwaffe, people were still dying.

  At the briefing before Yates’s final trip, the route map was heavily spattered with red blobs indicating the whereabouts of flak batteries. Over the target they met sustained and accurate anti-aircraft fire which disrupted the bomber stream, breaking up its coherence. They ‘rocked through the dirty air, anxious like everybody about our proximity to othe
r kites.’ The bombing was ragged and the high wind further diluted the concentration. The bombs missed the rail junctions, even largely failed to hit the town.

  Yates and his friends did not care. ‘We came away with joy and relief bubbling up as irresistibly as champagne from a shaken bottle … no words were wasted on the bombing we had just witnessed. The time had come to celebrate the fact of being alive.’ As they headed home ‘a party atmosphere swept through the aircraft. We crossed Holland at 5,000 feet while the boys bawled a gloriously crass ditty into the intercom. The coffee came out.’ His New Zealander navigator, Bill Birnie, proposed a toast: ‘To us.’ Yates offered his own. “‘To our future,” I said, realizing as I pronounced the word that I had not allowed myself such unqualified optimism for the last twenty weeks.’ They came to a halt at the end of the runway at Mepal to ‘wild, triumphant cheering.’ Yates had climbed aboard his aircraft ‘proud of who we were and what we were doing.’ This was how most of the men in Bomber Command felt.6

  Peter Johnson was one of the few who had contemporaneous doubts about the morality of carrying on the bombing. By March 1945 he was commanding 97 (Pathfinder Force) Squadron. On the sixteenth he woke up in his room at Coningsby feeling that the ‘smell of victory was in the air.’ Operations were on that night and he assumed that he would be marking an oil target in eastern Germany or Czechoslovakia. At the briefing he learned that they were in fact going to Würzburg, which had not until then been subjected to a major attack. He asked the squadron intelligence officer what was the significance of the target and was told ‘nothing very much’. There were ‘no big factories’, just ‘a bit of a railway junction’.

  Johnson was too busy making preparations to give the matter much thought. He and his crew, using sophisticated blind-bombing techniqes, would be first on the target, dropping primary indicators. Soon after, magnesium flares would light up the bombing area for seven or eight minutes allowing Mosquitoes to swoop in low and mark the exact point for the bombing force to aim at. By now they could be reasonably assured of success. His group had ‘perfected an elaborate method of bombing towns [that] ensured that bombs were evenly distributed over the target area and conducive, with the huge numbers of incendiaries used, to the production of a firestorm … this was the treatment we were to mete out at Würzburg.’

  Johnson was a believer in the virtue of Bomber Command and the necessity of the strategic bombing campaign, for which he had specifically volunteered. He had been untouched by the murmurs of doubt that had from time to time emanated from churchmen and the benches of parliament. ‘Such criticism,’ he thought, ‘had come from quarters unable or unwilling to suggest new or alternative policies to win the war and they had cut little ice with the general public and went unnoticed in Bomber Command.’

  Johnson had been unconcerned by the Dresden operation which he had not flown on but had helped to plan. It was, he thought, ‘a potent blow in assisting our Russian allies who had borne so much of the burden of war and suffered so appallingly from German atrocities in their homeland.’ But as he lay uneasily on his narrow bed that afternoon awaiting the Würzburg operation he found it ‘difficult to justify the deliberated destruction of a small city whose military value to the enemy seemed negligible.’ The victims would certainly include some prominent Nazis. The majority though, ‘would be the young and the old, many of them refugees from other disasters, non-combatants in the truest sense.’ As the minutes slipped away towards H-Hour he found he ‘simply could not shut my eyes to this, nor could I convince myself that “success” in our attack would make the slightest contribution to bringing the war to an end nor to saving casualties among our armies on the continent.’ Johnson decided he wanted none of it. But how could he find a way out? As squadron commander he could choose whether to fly or not. But if he felt the mission was wrong he could hardly, with a clear conscience, order others to carry it out. In addition, to refuse to give the necessary orders would constitute mutiny, followed by a court-martial, severe punishment and disgrace, and penury for his family. It would shock the squadron and possibly deflate their morale. When he finally made up his mind, the deciding factor was fear of being accused, or at least suspected, of LMF. The point he was trying to make would be blotted out by the stain of cowardice.

  Sick with misgivings, he took himself to the final briefing, conducted by Air Vice-Marshal H. A. Constantine, who had taken over 5 Group in January and was anxious to make an impression. He stressed that ‘the war was not over and the task of Bomber Command was as important ever.’ When Constantine asked if there were any questions, Johnson spoke up. Was there, he wanted to know, any special reason for the attack? “‘I’ve said it’s an important railway centre,” he said (it wasn’t), “and also there are thousands of houses totally undamaged sheltering tens of thousands of Germans. I hope that will not be the case tomorrow, which will be another nail in the enemy’s coffin.”’

  Constantine’s hopes were satisfied and Johnson’s fears realized. The Würzburg raid was devastating. More than 1,100 tons of bombs were dropped in a little over a quarter of an hour, landing with exemplary accuracy. The authors of Bomber Command’s war diaries noted that ‘Würzburg contained little industry and this was an area attack.’ The historic heart of the city was burned out. Nearly nine tenths of its buildings were destroyed. The number of dead was never decided. It lay somewhere between four and five thousand.

  By now Bomber Command could wreak blanket destruction virtually at will. This had been demonstrated ten days after the Dresden raid when it visited Pforzheim. Hitherto the town had not been considered important enough to attack. On the night of 23/24 February, it dropped about 1,800 tons of bombs, a huge quantity, on a compact area measuring three kilometres by one and a half. In the resulting crucible, according to the local official report, ‘more than 17,000 [a quarter of the population] met their death in a hurricane of fire and explosions.’ This was probably the third heaviest air raid death toll in Germany during the war after Hamburg and Dresden.7 To the crews though, it was just another raid. They were told at the pre-operational briefing that it was being targeted because it contained a factory making clockwork mechanisms that were used by the Luftwaffe.

  The raid stoked up hatred and rage against the RAF. Three weeks afterwards seven British airmen who had baled out after being shot down were marched through Pforzheim on their way to a prisoner of war camp. They were settling down for the night in a school building in a village outside the town when a mob turned up outside. They had been sent there by a senior Nazi official in Pforzheim, Hans Christian Knab, in a ‘demonstration of public outrage.’ Three of the airmen managed to run away but the remaining four were dragged to a cemetery and shot dead. One of the three escapees was recaptured and held in a police station. A Major Niklas of the Volksturm (home guard) turned up and demanded he be handed over. The police complied. The prisoner was given up to a crowd that had gathered outside and was beaten, then shot by a member of the Hitler Youth. The two other airmen survived to give evidence in the subsequent military trial. Knab and Niklas were hanged.8

  As the end grew closer, disquiet mounted at the conduct of the bombing campaign. It was Dresden that marked the stealthy change of heart. The first indication of how the aircrews would be regarded by the post-war world came from the pen of Churchill. On 28 March 1945 he sent a minute to Portal and the Chiefs of Staff Committee which questioned the usefulness of further area bombing. It is remarkable in its frank acceptance of the real purpose of such operations. It also shows a politician’s worldly appreciation of how certain acts of war were likely to be viewed once the smoke had cleared from the battlefield. ‘It seems to me [he wrote] that the moment has come when the question of the bombing of the German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land.’ This was common sense. Continuing to knock down German houses at this point merely added to the Allies’ post-war headac
hes. It was they who would have to look after the welfare of the defeated nation. He might have added that flattening towns made the job of the advancing armies harder as the rubble provided cover for the defending forces.

  But hidden in the middle of what was a workaday communication was a sentence that bore no relation to the surrounding subject matter. ‘The destruction of Dresden,’ Churchill wrote, ‘remains a serious query against the conduct of the Allied bombing.’9 With these charged words the prime minister signalled the arrival of a controversy that is still alive today.

  This statement was disingenuous and hypocritical whichever way it was looked at. As the official history pointed out, it ignored the fact that Dresden had happened six weeks before, when the situation had been much more uncertain. The plan of attacking important cities in eastern Germany had been approved at all levels the previous year and had Churchill’s enthusiastic backing. This was consistent with his attitude of the previous four years, whereby he had been firmly supportive of Harris’s dogged mission, whatever doubts he might have from time to time as to the utility of the violence. Now he appeared to be changing his tune.

  It did not take much imagination to foresee the trouble ahead. Once the war was over the world would have the chance to see what strategic bombing had done to Germany. It would shock even the most fervent advocate of revenge. Some of it was, as Churchill had admitted in the minute, terror bombing. Yet the official position was that the Allies had been engaged in no such thing. As recently as early March, Richard Stokes, the Labour MP who had persistently and bravely questioned the conduct of the campaign, had once again returned to the subject. Was terror bombing, he demanded of Sir Archibald Sinclair, the air minister, the policy of the RAF? Sinclair replied with what now seems spurious indignation. ‘It does not do the Honourable Member justice to come here to this House and suggest that there are a lot of Air Marshals or pilots or anyone else sitting in a room trying to think how many German women and children they can kill,’ he said.10