Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945

by Patrick Bishop

  The scarecrows were finished. But there were more resilient Germans who were already pressing forward to stake their claim in the new order. Johnson was guided around the ruins by a Herr Singer, a loyal Krupp’s functionary. He arrived in a large chauffeur-driven Mercedes and spoke good English. Total defeat had not crushed his spirits. ‘He aimed to show that Krupp’s was much more than just a firm, it was an institution which for him, outshone all the others in the Ruhr and Rhineland … Governments might come and go, but … Krupp’s would last for ever.’ This was the kind of German that the Allies needed to help relieve them of the burden of reconstruction. Singer, as it turned out, was right and Krupp’s did indeed rise from the ashes.

  The firm had kept good records. This diligence allowed the team to produce a comprehensive report. It was clear that until March 1943, the many raids launched against Essen and Krupp’s had had little effect on production. That came as no surprise. The area’s real ordeal began with the Battle of the Ruhr. Bomber Command launched six major raids on Essen between March and July. Two more heavy attacks were carried out in the spring of 1944. The team concluded that in the period March 1943–April 1944, Krupp’s had suffered a loss of 20 per cent in output. Johnson, who flew in the battle, knew that ‘this was far below what we had been led to expect by British Intelligence at the time.’

  The bombing had produced some apparently spectacular benefits, such as knocking out the locomotive shop in the first raid of the Battle, and the destruction of its heavy shell-making capacity in July. But the successes were specious. Train engines and shells could be made elsewhere in the factories of the conquered territories.

  After six months’ hard research the team arrived at a dismaying conclusion. Over the years bombs might have destroyed or badly damaged 88 per cent of Essen’s housing and killed up to seven thousand people. But in that time, the town’s contribution to the war had not been substantially reduced. Essen had been defeated in the end. But that end had not come until March 1945 when the war had been substantially won. In the crucial period up to the autumn of 1944, by which time the defeat of Germany was not in doubt, Essen and Krupp’s, by bravery and ingenuity, had continued to give valuable assistance to the war effort. Johnson reluctantly ‘had to face the fact that no German unit had gone short of the essentials for making war because of our efforts.’

  The population had suffered but they had endured. There had been breakdowns in electricity, telephones, water, gas and transport but they had been coped with. Food had been rationed but the supplies had held up almost to the end of the war. It could not even be said that morale had suffered badly. Johnson made careful enquiries. His questions met with much equivocation as the survivors were anxious to disassociate themselves from the Nazi Party. However he came to the conclusion that morale had remained unaffected and had even improved until the end of 1944 when it was becoming clear the war was lost. Even then, there was a strong determination among the population to carry on, sustained in part by the Nazis’ manipulation of fears of what would happen to them if the Allies arrived. The work of the Terrorflieger, which lay all around, gave the strongest evidence of what they were capable of. In the end, he concluded, patriotism and a sense of duty were more powerful motivations than fear, just as they had been in Britain. He might have added that the presence of a regime that could be as cruel to its own as it was to its enemies also helped to maintain discipline and cohesion.

  Johnson left Essen in a state of deep depression. ‘It seemed that all that had been done in the long and often terrible summer of 1943 had been in vain. All the agonies and casualties, the numbers of the dead and missing aircrew … the civilian men, women and children we had killed in Germany by our rain of bombs, all this had been for nothing.’

  This view started to take hold soon after the war was over, gaining ground steadily until by the late 1970s it had become for many a sort of dim truth. Anti-nuclear campaigners claimed that by launching the strategic air campaign, politicians and soldiers had crossed a moral Rubicon which had prepared the way for the use of weapons of mass destruction.

  Any criticism, no matter how well meant, was unwelcome to Harris. When the official history of the strategic air offensive appeared in 1961 it brought him little comfort. It ran to four volumes and was a model of thoroughness, incisiveness and fairness. It was sympathetic and respectful towards him, taking his part in at least one of the major controversies with the Air Staff. Before publication, the authors offered to send him a draft so that he could comment, if he wished, in an unofficial capacity. Harris declined. Surely, he argued, he should have been consulted in his official role as commander-in-chief of Bomber Command. This entirely missed the point of the work which both its commissioners and authors were determined would aim for the highest peak of objectivity.

  The authors believed that Bomber Command’s ‘contribution to victory, was, indeed a great one, though in direct terms at least … long delayed.’ The initial attacks up to the spring of 1942 were little more than a nuisance to the Germans although they provided a great uplift to British morale. The persistence of the attacks also forced the Luftwaffe on to the defensive, which severely reduced its ability to bomb Britain. As Bomber Command’s strength grew and its attacks strengthened it soaked up more and more of Germany’s resources. The labour of huge numbers of German workers and foreign slaves was wasted clearing up the mayhem created by the big area attacks. Great effort was devoted to providing anti-aircraft defences and searchlight batteries for the homeland, which might otherwise have been expended on the Eastern Front. The constant attentions of the British and American bombers also hampered weapons research, severely reducing the Germans’ chances of waging chemical or biological warfare.

  In the last year of the war the Command, together with the USAAF, had succeeded in almost completely destroying vital segments of the oil industry, as well as virtually obliterating the communications system. These results had a decisive effect on the outcome of the war. No airman could object to these positive judgements. It was when the authors came to discuss the events of March 1943 to March 1944 that the picture grew more cloudy. The great area offensive, the authors concluded, ‘did not produce direct results commensurate with the hopes once entertained and at times, indeed, feared by the Germans themselves.’ Huge areas of many of Germany’s great towns had been laid waste ‘but the will of the German people was not broken or even significantly impaired and the effect on war production was remarkably small.’ The fact was, the German economy ‘was more resilient than estimated and the German people calmer, more stoical and much more determined than anticipated.’ The authors’ judgement on the economic effects, which stemmed from the research of the British Bombing Survey Unit, has since been convincingly challenged.

  In their conclusions the authors were not attempting to make the case for those who had pressed for the selective approach rather than area bombing. ‘Precision’ attacks alone would not have achieved any better results. The best that could be said for the combined effort was that it had sapped some of the reserve within the German war economy and caused some factories, notably those making aircraft, to be scattered elsewhere. This made them more vulnerable to air attack later on.

  Webster and Frankland’s study was recognized as a landmark in military history. It was calm, finely calibrated and honest. It gave credit where it was due but did not flinch from awkward conclusions. Its judgements did not settle any arguments. But it was foolish to insist that there was only one way to fight a war. Harris did insist, however, and went on doing so until he died.

  He ignored the subtleties of the authors’ analysis and chose to see it as a polemic aimed against him and his men. He claimed they had presented the bombing campaign as a costly failure, an assertion they had never made. The fact that Frankland had flown thirty-six missions as a Bomber Command navigator and had been awarded a DFC did not impress him at all. He told questioners that ‘he wrote it as a junior officer, and there was never a junior chief off
icer who didn’t know better than a commander-in-chief how the show should be run.’ Later though, he was to relent and pay tribute to Frankland and his work in war and in peace. By the time Harris died he had come to believe that no matter how much he might try to enlighten post-war audiences his life’s great work was now seen as ‘an expensive luxury’ and an exercise in ‘carrying out war against the civil population’.

  There were few public voices to defend area bombing let alone to vaunt its achievements and inevitably his was the loudest among them. Periodically, when an anniversary or the appearance of a new publication revived the controversy, he went in to fight for his reputation and, more importantly, that of his men. There were many attempts to ‘set the record straight’; by which he meant to bend public perception to his own version of events. They were expounded in a tart autobiography, Bomber Offensive, which bristled with criticism of his fellow wartime commanders. Any slight on himself or his men provoked a vigorous counter-attack with all the verbal violence he could muster. Harris’s loyalty to those who served under him was deep and genuine. Just before he attended a dinner of ‘Bomber Command Greats’ at the RAF Club in 1976 he gave an interview to a researcher from the Imperial War Museum. He was in poor health, suffering from pneumonia. His doctor had advised him not to go, but Harris ‘told him I was going to that show if I went on a stretcher.’ He was determined, he said, ‘to get the proper amount of credit awarded to my fellows who made such a tremendous contribution towards winning the war, a fact which has been acknowledged by the enemy and the senior British Army Commanders but not otherwise.’6

  It was a difficult task, made more so by his own extravagant promises of what bombing could achieve. He claimed that the strategic air offensive could deliver victory on its own. Anything less than victory was therefore, by his own yardstick, a failure. Even so, Harris never deviated from his opinion that the bombing campaign had been a spectacular success. To support this view he leaned heavily on the evidence of Albert Speer, the German Minister of Wartime Weapon Production for much of the war. Harris seems to have admired Speer and harboured no doubts about his veracity as witness. ‘He knows exactly, and better than anyone, what effect the bombing had,’ he said. The old antagonists appear to have developed a mutual fascination. They corresponded after Speer’s release from Spandau prison and Harris expressed a wish to meet him though the encounter never took place. Speer sent Harris a copy of Inside the Third Reich, his masterpiece of self-justification. According to Harris ‘he said, in his own words, in the inscription of … the book itself, that the strategic bombing of Germany was the greatest lost battle of the war for Germany, greater than all their losses in their retreats from Russia and in the surrender of their armies at Stalingrad.’7

  Harris’s use of Speer’s opinions was selective. During his post-war interrogation he said he found the attacks on city centres ‘incomprehensible’ and considered that ‘area bombing alone would never have been a serious threat.’ Civilian morale, he maintained, ‘was excellent throughout, and resulted in rapid resumption of work after attacks.’8

  In the forty-odd years of his life that remained to him after the war Harris never saw any reason to modify his views. The furore over Dresden did not impress him and in the IWM interview he defended the operation in characteristic terms. ‘People are apt to say “oh poor Dresden, a lovely city solely engaged in producing beautiful little china shepherdesses with frilly skirts.”’ In fact, the city was the last viable governing centre of Germany as well as the last north-south corridor through which German reserves could move to reinforce resistance to both the Russian and Allied advances. What, he wanted to know, was so special about Dresden anyway? Why did no one talk of Lorient and Saint-Nazaire, which were ‘destroyed to an extent where the German admiral in charge … said not so much as a cat remained alive to prowl the midnight ruins?’ Harris suggested his own answer. ‘One can only conclude that the reason is that it was ordered by the Navy and not the Air Force.’

  The RAF was only doing what the senior service had been practising for centuries. ‘People … think that when civilians get killed by bombers that it’s something brand new. It’s not new at all. No navy ever had a strategy except war against a nation as a whole; blockade, deprive the opposing nation of everything that made continuation of living impossible, deprive them of food as well as materials.’ It was, he pointed out, ‘very successful in the First War. In the 1914–18 war it was reputed to have killed about 800,000 Germans. You don’t hear any criticism about that.’

  He denied that Bomber Command had ever aimed ‘particularly at the civilian population. We were aiming at the production of everything that made it possible for the German Armies to continue the war.’ As for what constituted a legitimate human target, Harris had no doubts that munitions workers were fair game and should ‘expect to be treated as active soldiers. Otherwise where do you draw the line?’9

  Harris, as he often complained, had come to be thought of as the man chiefly responsible for the strategic bombing policy. The fact that he was its most vocal defender only intensified this identification in the public’s mind. Some who were at least equally answerable avoided the post-war debates and spared themselves the hostility and opprobrium. Portal, whom Harris himself credited with being the prime mover in launching the bomber offensive, proved particularly agile in avoiding the tentacles of the controversy. In the early and middle phases of the air campaign he had been as enthusiastic as anyone in his advocacy of area bombing, only moving away from the policy once Overlord had changed the strategic landscape. The war was barely over when, addressing pupils at his old school, Winchester, he said he felt the need to correct ‘two curious and widespread fallacies about our night bombing.’ The first, he went on, was ‘that our bombing is really intended to kill and frighten Germans and that we camouflaged this intention by the pretence that we would destroy industry.’ This, as Portal knew better than anyone, was misleading. The intention had been to do both.

  Now he told the boys that ‘any such idea is completely and utterly false.’ By the time he spoke the rough death toll was already known. This carnage, he maintained, ‘was purely incidental and inasmuch as it involved children and women who were taking part in the war we all deplored the necessity for doing it.’10 This struck Peter Johnson as ‘hypocrisy of a fairly high order’. In a bombing war of the sort waged by the RAF innocent death was not incidental. It was inevitable. Whatever he subsequently said, Portal had even, at one point, actually thought it desirable. It was his name on the minute in November 1942 arguing the benefits of killing 900,000 Geman civilians and seriously injuring a million more.11 Yet Portal entered the peacetime world in a shower of praise and garlanded with honours.

  Harris’s frequently repeated views provided his men with a set of ready-made defences when the subject of bombing came up. It is impossible to characterize the feelings of 125,000 men. But there were certain common strands of thought that ran through the reflections of the crews as they looked back on what they had done. Among the crews there were many thoughtful people, and most of them felt able to justify their actions. Surviving the experience did not induce a mood of harsh self-contemplation.

  The Bomber Boys were fighting a new and never-to-be-repeated type of war. Their campaign was open-ended. It was not like a soldier gaining an objective or a sailor sinking a ship. With the advance of aerial photography their achievements became visible. But what did a rash of pockmarks in the ground and a sea of roofless houses mean to the progress of the war? To give some value to the great effort expended, the heavy losses and the great risks endured they had to believe that each trip brought the end at least an inch closer.

  Even the least sensitive had some notion of the effect of their arrival over a German town. It was not hard to imagine the tension as the sirens sounded, the terrified scurry to the shelters, the din of the flak guns, the earth-trembling explosions, the smell of falling plaster and the sound of babies crying.

  To gi
ve meaning to what they did they had to believe they were achieving something and that the good they were doing outweighed the bad. Some might insist that they had no concerns beyond their own survival. That was true during the duration of the operation. But on the ground there was plenty of time in which to think. It was impossible not to consider the bigger picture. Bomber Command had attracted the bravest and the brightest, forward-looking men with questioning and above all positive minds. There were few cynics inside the Lancasters and the Halifaxes. If staying alive was your first priority, why would you join Bomber Command?

  So had it all been worth it? It was something that could only be asked of the living. The question of what Bomber Command had contributed to the war effort was, as Webster and Frankland had shown, complicated and never likely to be settled. The crews could comfort themselves with the unarguable fact that the campaign had seriously undermined Germany’s defences and accelerated the Allies’ victory. Discussion about the way force was focused, and whether different decisions would have produced quicker and better results was barren in the end. There were no lessons to be learned. Area bombing became obsolete with the first nuclear explosion.

  By far the bigger issue, one that was never to go away, was the query that Churchill had raised over Bomber Command’s conduct of the war. To many Bomber Boys the controversy was baffling and dismaying. They had carried out their orders with extraordinary selflessness and were now being asked to feel shame for actions for which they had once been praised. They had answered the public desire for retribution. This did not mean a measured response, proportionate to what Britain had suffered, but punishment that was relentless and merciless and that would stop the Germans from ever doing what they had done again. When it became clear exactly what the Germans had been doing, Bomber Command’s slide from favour seemed all the more unjust.