On the evening after Churchill’s minute was written Portal suggested to him that he should think about it again. The prime minister took the hint and withdrew it, substituting a few days later a few mild sentences repeating his concern about the usefulness of continued area bombing but making no mention of Dresden. ‘We must see to it,’ he wrote on 1 April, ‘that our attacks do not do more harm to ourselves in the long run than they do to the enemies’ immediate war effort.’
The Air Staff was now anyway agreed that area bombing had outlived its usefulness and that ‘at this advanced stage of the war no immediate additional advantage can be gained from [attacks on] the remaining industrial centres of Germany.’ They wished though, to reserve the right to bomb towns near the front if German resistance revived and to strike at population centres in Thuringia if the Nazi leadership made a last stand there.
In the event, no such action was needed. Germany was tottering towards total collapse and the main work of Bomber Command was done. For the remainder of the war the force would mainly be used helping the army and blowing up roads and railways in and around Leipzig and Halle on the German line of retreat.
On 16 April Portal sent a message to Harris that he suggested should be turned into an order of the day. The last paragraph stated that ‘henceforth the main tasks of the strategic air forces will be to afford direct support to the allied armies in the land battle and to continue their offensive against the sea power of the enemy which they have already done so much to destroy. I am confident that Bomber Command will maintain in these final phases of the war in the air over Europe the high standard of skill and devotion that has marked their work since the earliest days of the war.’ With these words the strategic air offensive against Germany effectively came to an end.11
The last area bombing raid of the war had taken place the day before. Five hundred Lancasters and twelve Mosquitoes closed in on Potsdam, the imperial and military town west of Berlin. It was the first time that big bombers had entered the area since Harris had called off the Battle of Berlin in March 1944, when it was realized that they were no match for the German night-fighters. Now they could do as they pleased. The aiming point was a barracks in the centre of the town, once the home of the old Prussian guards regiments. The bombs fell all over the place and as far afield as northern and eastern districts of Berlin. Up to 5,000 people were killed, possibly because many neglected to take shelter thinking, when they heard the air-raid sirens, that the attack was bound for the capital. This was the raid that so impressed Portal when he drove through the ruins a few weeks later and felt both awed and depressed at what had been done on his orders.
The last heavy bomber raids of the war took place on 25 April. One was aimed at Hitler’s Bavarian retreat at Berchtesgaden and the SS barracks nearby. Freddie Hulance, who had been at Dresden, took part. The two operations could not have been more different. Berchtesgaden was a fine example of aerial warfare, precisely applied. Setting off from Lincolnshire, Hulance felt relief that the end of the war seemed only days away, but also apprehension. The target was believed to be one of the most heavily defended in the Reich. All together 359 Lancasters and sixteen Mosquitoes of 1, 5 and 8 Groups were involved. For most of the crews, it was their last operation of the war. There was scattered cloud when they arrived over the Bavarian Alps. ‘We were briefed that we shouldn’t bomb unless we could see the target,’ he remembered, ‘[then] quite suddenly the cloud cleared as I was approaching it so we bombed.’ Hulance watched the ordnance slanting down towards the SS barracks which was ‘pretty well saturated. There was only one building unscathed.’ The crews had been told they would be blowing up the Führer himself. But Hitler was not at home.
Thirty-nine airmen died on operations that day. Most of them were killed during an attack on the coastal batteries on the Friesian island of Wangerooge, in a series of mid-air collisions between friendly aircraft. It was a reminder, if anyone needed one, of the precarious nature of life in Bomber Command.
The last German civilians died when sixty-three Mosquitoes attacked Kiel on the night of 2/3 May. It was feared that ships were waiting to carry troops to Norway to carry on the fight. Bombs fell on the town and eighteen people were killed. Flying Officer R. Catterall, DFC and Flight Sergeant D. J. Beadle were lost carrying out a low-level attack on an airfield. Shortly afterwards the remaining German soldiers left town and Kiel was declared an open city. After carrying away what they could from the central stores, the citizens went home to await the arrival of British and Canadian troops.
The war ended just before Bomber Command dropped its millionth ton of bombs. The final figure was 955,044 tons. The USAAF had delivered a further 395,000 tons. The American troops arriving in the Ruhr valley in April 1945 entered a vast ocean of rubble from which protruded the twisted girders and tortured metal that were all that was left of the factories, foundries and workshops that powered the German war machine. It was destruction on a cosmic scale.
There had been sixty large towns and cities on Harris’s target list. All of them now had been substantially damaged and many almost completely destroyed. Three quarters of Hamburg was razed, 69 per cent of Darmstadt and 64 per cent of Hannover. A third of sprawling Berlin was flattened: 6,427 acres. That compared with the 400 acres of London that the Luftwaffe laid waste. In the infamous raid on Coventry, they had devasted a hundred acres. In Düsseldorf, a town of similar size, Allied bombing had wiped out an area twenty times as large.
Hidden underneath the desert of brick and dust lay the unburied dead. The figure of around 600,000 came to be accepted as the number of German civilians killed by bombing. A post-war enquiry by the German Federal Government’s statistics office, published in 1962, put the total as 593,000.12 The exact number will probably never be known. After heavy raids civil defence workers often piled up the human remains, doused them in petrol and set them on fire to reduce the risk of disease. Whole families were wiped out leaving no one to report their deaths. A further 67,000 were killed in France by air attack according to recent research. In Italy, more than 60,000 are thought to have died.
The number of combatants killed in the bombing was low. The German dead were mostly women, children and the old, those who were left at home when the men of fighting age not needed to run the factories went off to the war. Thus, for every 100 male casualties in Darmstadt, there were 181 females. Many in Britain were prepared to accept the argument that any German adult engaged in war work could be regarded as having placed himself or herself in the firing line. But no definition of what constituted a legitimate target could include children. In Hamburg, 7,000 of the dead were children or adolescent. This slaughter of the young was repeated in numerous urban centres big and small, in roughly the same proportions.
In Freiburg, in the Breisgau region, 252 boys and girls under the age of sixteen were killed, 19 per cent of the total civilian death toll. The old died alongside the women and children, and for the same reasons. When the air war came to Germany they found themselves in the front line. In some cities they made up 22 per cent of the dead. There were many others who lost their lives because of grotesque bad luck. A substantial number of the victims were forced workers from the countries that the Allies were fighting to liberate.13
German history provided a comparison for death on this scale. Official figures claimed that 800,000 people had died directly or indirectly as a result of the Royal Navy’s maritime blockade during the First World War. Included in the figure were the 150,000 who, it was claimed, perished as a result of undernourishment which lowered their defences against the influenza epidemic that ravaged Europe after the war.
But it was the sort of death the victims had suffered that gave the tolls their awesome quality. Death by malnourishment or disease came in stages. It was slow and organic. Death by bombing came in several forms, all of them horrible. It was violence distilled into its most nightmarish form. By the end of the war, raids had been compressed into a few horrific minutes. In Pforzheim there w
as just over a quarter of an hour between the first bomb falling and the last bomber departing, leaving behind a town whose centre had been turned into fire and smoke and glowing ashes. The lucky ones died immediately, from crashing masonry or the effects of blast. The less fortunate burned up, or, cowering in a shelter or cellar, suffocated as the fire consumed the oxygen in the air leaving only carbon monoxide.
The crews had mostly had few doubts about the justice of what they were doing and little sympathy for those they were doing it to. It was nonetheless a relief when, in the last days, Bomber Command was given tasks that gave life rather than took it. Operation Manna was launched to bring relief supplies to western Holland. The population was approaching starvation and many old people had already died. It began at the end of April and lasted until the German surrender. In that time, Lancasters and Mosquitoes flew nearly 3,000 sorties, dropping 7,000 tons of food into an area that was still under German occupation.
Another operation, Exodus, brought particular satisfaction. By the end of the war there were 75,000 British servicemen in German prisoner-of-war camps. It was remembered that after the previous war it had taken nearly two months before all PoWs were repatriated. The RAF offered its Lancasters to speed up the process. Leaflets were dropped over a number of camps telling them to stand by to be liberated. Between 26 April and 7 May, 469 sorties were flown without accident. Each Lancaster could take twenty-six passengers. Many were too shattered by their experience to show much gratitude. Peter Johnson flew a batch from Brussels and stood with the crew at the foot of the ladder to welcome them back home. ‘They were tired and still numb from their freedom. Many were emaciated from lack of proper food. It was queer that not one of those that I brought back said “Thank You” to the crew.’14
Among the the PoWs were 9,838 airmen from Bomber Command, some of whom had been incarcerated since the earliest days of the war. Given the destruction that the aircrews had inflicted on the Reich, the Germans’ treatment of their British and American charges was surprisingly mild and respectful. They could, undoubtedly, be ruthless when needed. No one would forget the mass murder carried out by the Gestapo in March 1944 of fifty PoWs from Stalag Luft III captured in the aftermath of the Great Escape. But unless prisoners looked for trouble, their main enemies for much of the war were boredom, frustration and the psychological chafing caused by enforced communal life.
The Germans quickly established a system of processing captured airmen. The experience of Geoffrey Willatt, whom we last heard of baling out on the night of Sunday, September 5/6 after his Lancaster was shot down by a night-fighter on the way back from Mannheim, was typical.15 He was the only one of the crew to survive. He was soon picked up and taken to Dulag Luft, an interrogation centre near Frankfurt through which most captured aircrew personnel passed.
RAF intelligence officers painted a lurid and not unattractive picture of what could be expected there. The camp was supposed to be an oasis of leisure and luxury, where flighty women and peacetime comforts were employed to loosen the captives’ tongues. The truth, he noted in his diary, bore ‘no resemblance whatsoever’ to what he had been told. There were ‘no parks, no booze, no women, no dances.’ The intelligence was proved right in one respect however. Many prisoners reported being interrogated by sympathetic officers who spoke perfect English and startled them with questions such as ‘and how are Wing Commander Gibson and Wing Commander Cheshire?’ just as they had been warned.16
Geoffrey was then packed with other RAF prisoners into a cattle truck, whose capacity was labelled ‘40 hommes ou 8 chevaux’ and taken by train to the place where he would spend the next eighteen months. Stalag Luft III, carved out of a pine forest at Sagan, about a hundred miles south-east of Berlin, was the hub of the prison system. When he arrived at the North Compound there was a crowd waiting to look over the new arrivals. Some shouted delightedly as they recognized old comrades but ‘mostly [they were] silent, looking at us in the way old prisoners look at new ones (poor b—ers, but lucky devils to have come so recently from home).’ They were a motley bunch dressed in ‘anything from full uniform to loin cloths, and looked incredibly fit with brown bodies and beards.’
By now Stalag Luft III had expanded considerably. In North Compound there were fifteen sleeping huts, fifty yards long, partitioned off into twenty-four rooms. Each held up to six men who slept in bunk beds. Geoffrey made quick character assessments of his fellow-inmates. The British all seemed good types. An American navigator who had been flying with the Canadians, however, was ‘inclined to be self-centred and with an all-embracing prejudice against anything English. The less said the better.’
Geoffrey had nightmares at first, reliving the terror of being shot down, but soon recorded that ‘usually I sleep like a log.’ He learned the camp patois. They, the inmates, were ‘kriegies’, taken from the German word for war prisoner. The guards were ‘goons’ and the English-speaking staff who tried to mingle and snoop were ‘ferrets’. He learned, too quickly, the established routines of the captive’s life. He was among men ‘from nearly every country in the world, Holland, Norway, India, S. America, Denmark, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia.’
It was the custom to walk in twos around the circuit by the side of the warning wire, ten yards from the perimeter fence. Stepping over the wire invited a shot from a watchtower. Too many circuits were ‘apt to accentuate the position of the wire and the smallness of the camp.’
As he grew accustomed to camp life he found that ‘kriegies are influenced enormously by 4 things in this order – mail, weather, food and news, and it’s extraordinary how our spirits are up or down all in a moment.’
The flow of mail was erratic but somehow the system worked. There would be nothing for days on end, and then a welcome flood. Geoffrey was able to keep in touch with his wife Audrey. Her first letter arrived on 11 November. ‘Marvellous feeling,’ he recorded. ‘I can actually see her writing and the paper she wrote on.’
Reg Fayers, who ended up in Stalag Luft I near Barth on the Baltic coast, after being shot down on the night of 25/6 November 1943, received a steady stream of letters from his beloved wife Phyllis. The news of the films she had seen and the mundane goings-on in their home town of Sudbury in Suffolk provided a heartening glimpse of the longed-for life going on hundreds of miles away across the wire.
‘Darling it’s evening time and everywhere is smelling so perfect,’ she wrote on 30 July 1944. ‘I wish we were walking round Brundon [a local beauty spot] or even sitting here together with all our favourite records … darling I love you so very much. Why should this war have to come now?’ There was no doubt in her mind that sooner or later the reunion would come. On 7 October she mentioned the latest movie she had seen, A Guy Named Joe, starring Spencer Tracy and Irene Dunne. ‘I loved every minute of it,’ she wrote. ‘We shall just have to see it when you come home. Darling how are you after all these months? Do you still look the same and talk the same? You will never really change will you? I wished so much that you were with me this morning …’
There were plenty of opportunities to indulge the British preoccupation with the weather. It was sometimes extreme and often uncertain. Geoffrey was able to sunbathe on 1 November. There was more sunbathing early in April the following year but the false spring was followed by a snowfall. ‘Who said the English climate is unpredictable?’ he wrote. In the winter the huts were dismal. There was one stove to a room and barely any coal, which had to be eked out with potato peelings and tea leaves. The cruel east wind stripped the felt from the roof letting in the rain. One night Geoffrey and his room-mates dragged their beds into the corridor to escape the drips and slept in their clothes to keep warm.
Food was restricted to one Red Cross parcel per man per week, supplemented by meagre German rations. The cooking was centralized. Each room was given thirty-five minutes’ use of the one small stove and two pots. Monty, one of Geoffrey’s room-mates, had volunteered to be chef. ‘Little knowing what we were in for we accept,’ he wrote. ‘
We take it in turns to be “Joe” for a day, peeling potatoes, washing up, sweeping out, fetching hot water etc. Not very irksome in itself but tiresome when Monty criticizes all the time…’ Food theft was a shameful crime. ‘This month’s bombshell,’ wrote Geoffrey in September 1944. ‘Someone in the room is “fiddling” bits of food. We seem to be short of milk, margarine and other things … This all sounds petty but is of real importance when every little scrap of food must be rationed out.’ The culprit was eventually caught red-handed and expelled from the room.
The potential for getting on each other’s nerves was enormous. Bad weather meant they were cooped up together, ‘leading to increased friction’. Most of it, he believed, was ‘caused by one person who has no sense of give and take & issues anti-British propaganda at every pore’ – presumably the American navigator. His conduct drove the others ‘out of the room on every possible occasion to lectures on Art, Music, Architecture, Literature & concerts in unheated lecture rooms.’
Anything that relieved the boredom was welcomed. They played football, rugby and cricket. They tried to learn languages and study for the careers they hoped to follow when the war was over. They read enormously from the libraries provided by the Red Cross and mounted dramatic productions. Sagan had a theatre which put on a stream of often ambitious shows. There was a prodigious amount of talent in the ranks of the kriegies. Denholm Elliott, the RADA student turned wireless op who was shot down in the North Sea in September 1943, ended up in Stalag VIII B, near Breslau in Upper Silesia. On learning of the theatrical possibilities he approached ‘a chap called Stanley Platts who later became a professional after the war … he used to talk “lake thet” in a rather sepulchral voice. I said to him “excuse me but I am a student from the Royal Academy and I wondered if …”’ Platts offered him an understudy role in the Patrick Hamilton play Rope. Soon he had all the parts he could want, including Macbeth, and Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. Female roles were something of a speciality. He also played Viola in Twelfth Night. The Germans could not have been more helpful. For the latter production they lent the prisoners costumes from the Breslau Opera House. All this activity was designed to dispel the most lowering aspect of camp life. ‘The unpleasant thing about being a PoW was the uncertainty,’ Denholm Elliott recalled afterwards. ‘When would one be released? In six weeks or sixty years. One didn’t know.’17
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 93