Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945

by Patrick Bishop

  There is no doubt that they felt slighted, even betrayed. Being the men they were these sentiments were submerged. The ordinary crew members were not inclined to make a fuss in public. But behind closed doors their true feelings could emerge. A speech by Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir William Dickson, at 5 Group’s first post-war reunion, thirty years after the war ended, gives an idea of their sense of hurt and a frank appreciation of what they saw as their own worth. Dickson, who had served on the Joint Planning Committee, was in a good position to put their achievements in the context of the whole struggle. Why, he asked, had the reunion been arranged after all these years? It was partly due to ‘a growing feeling that time is moving on and that it is now high time … to celebrate the group’s spirit and achievements.’ But, he thought, ‘it may also have something to do with a growing resentment and indignation, shared by the whole Air Force and many outside it, towards some who belittle the strategic air offensive against Germany. Some of these little people try to turn the truth upside down to sell their books or for some vested interest. We particularly resent the argument that the offensive was ineffective and caused needless casualties.’

  The role given to Bomber Command after 1940, was ‘a vital part of our grand strategy’. Those who criticise Bomber Command, he said, ‘completely fail to appreciate the war situation or to put themselves in the place of those who bore the frightful responsibility for the conduct of the war. We were facing an enemy who was waging … unlimited war to gain his ends. In unlimited war it is a fight to the death between the whole of each nation. The alternative is surrender. The whole of the German nation was mobilized to destroy our nation and the Russian nation. Germany was all powerful on land, but the war-making potential of German industry was [its] Achilles’ heel. Thanks to the foresight of Trenchard, and those who built on his ideas both here and in America, we had the means to attack that heel.’

  Dickson then reeled off the list of the Bomber Boys’ achievements. Their mission began to have decisive effect, he reckoned, early in 1942 when intensive operations forced the German High Command to concentrate on the air defence of Germany and give up hope that they could rebuild their bomber fleet and launch a new Blitz on Britain. The priority given to defending the Reich meant that outside it, the Allies eventually achieved air superiority. Without that superiority, the campaigns in Africa and Italy could not have succeeded as they did and Overlord would have been impossible. It also meant that on the Eastern Front, the German army was deprived of the air support to which it had been accustomed in its western campaigns. If they had the might of the Luftwaffe behind them, Russia would have been defeated. ‘That,’ he declared, ‘should be sufficient answer to those who question the importance and achievements of the strategic air offensive.’

  But there was more. Towards the end of the war, the weight and accuracy of the air offensive was such that it was close to accomplishing the Casablanca directive – the destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system. It so weakened the enemy’s military system that even with all their fighting skill, the Germans could not hold up the advance of the Allied and Russian armies. ‘The Strategic Air Offensive,’ he judged, ‘had in fact brought about the utter defeat of Germany, and if it had not been maintained with great determination by all concerned in it, Germany must have won the war.’

  There was a word about the criticism of civilian casualties. ‘That criticism should not be pinned on the air offensive,’ he maintained. ‘It should be pinned on the horror of war itself, especially on unlimited war in which there are no non-combatants and there is no front line.’ Compared with the twenty million deaths caused by the German invasion of Russia, ‘the civilian casualties caused by the air offensive were astoundingly small. They were a regrettable but unavoidable necessity because the German war making potential was essentially the prime military objective of Allied strategy.’

  This was a formidable array of achievements. Why then was the celebration of them so muted? Dickson had one explanation. ‘It is hard,’ he said, ‘to convey by spoken or written word, the military glory of air operations … of course there were conspicuous operations which hit the headlines and stirred the nation. But neither the public then or today have any real idea of what was involved in bomber operations.’12

  Noble Frankland had another. It was partly the fault, he believed, of the government’s propagandists. ‘The handling of Bomber Command by the official public relations experts had particularly unfortunate consequences,’ he wrote. ‘Apart from the general glossing over of all failures and the constant exaggeration of all successes … there was a more or less constant concealment of the aims and implications of the campaign that was being waged. Attacks on great towns were announced, but somehow or other, especially when questions were asked, the impression was given that specific targets such as armament factories and the like were being aimed at. The damage to the residential and central areas, which were in reality the main aim of the area attacks, was ascribed to what could unfortunately not be avoided if the factories and so on were to be hit.’

  The result was that from an early stage in the war the impression was created that Bomber Command had the skill to target a weapons plant or some other plainly worthy target when in fact it could not. When, as occasionally happened, it was admitted that the town itself was the target, the impression was created that this had been chosen in preference to an objective that everyone would recognize as legitimate. Frankland concluded that ‘from what one can only assume was a fear of moral indignation, moral indignation was created and in time more than moral indignation. The ultimate reaction was a deep feeling of shock, in the sense of surprise.’13 It was Frankland who gave the crews the best justification for their war. ‘The great immorality open to us in 1940 and 1941,’ he told the Royal United Services Institution in December 1961, ‘was to lose the war against Hitler’s Germany. To have abandoned the only means of direct attack which we had at our disposal would have been a long step in that direction.’ This sound judgement was gratefully repeated by his comrades many times in the subsequent years.

  There was no great desire among the public for reminders of what had been done on its behalf. Once the reality of the war started to fade there seemed something incongruous and disturbing about the bombing campaign, something unBritish. Britain owned a great empire but its citizens like to think that it had been acquired without violence. They regarded themselves as mild and peaceable people who only took up arms when someone provoked them beyond endurance. Germany had certainly done that. But had the reaction been disproportionate?

  Bomber Command was never taken to British hearts in quite the way that Fighter Command had been. It was too large for one thing and its aircraft too gargantuan. Fighter Command was of a cherishable size. The Spitfire was a very British aircraft. It was neat and agile without being flashy. It was small but it was powerful, like Britain itself. The Lancasters and Halifaxes were giants.

  The entertainment industry sensed the public coolness. During the war there had been a series of films celebrating the Command. Movies like Target for Tonight (1941) which showed Britain wreaking righteous and specific vengeance on Germany and The Way to the Stars (1945) were great successes. The handful of post-war films tended to concentrate on the emotional damage done to the crews by their experiences rather than the damage they did to the enemy.

  In the case of Appointment in London, which appeared eight years after the war, this owed something to the fact that the men who made it knew the reality of what they were portraying. Aubrey Baring, one of the producers, won a DFC as a fighter pilot and had gone on to fly in the Pathfinder Force. The screenplay and music were written by John Wooldridge who was a much-decorated PFF Mosquito pilot. The film starred Dirk Bogarde as Wing Commander Tim Mason, the disciplinarian leader of a Lancaster squadron which had been sustaining heavy losses, and was set at the opening of the Battle of Berlin. Mason is on the edge of a breakdown having completed ninety
operations yet is obsessively determined to carry on. The character was thought to owe much to Guy Gibson, who was Wooldridge’s friend.

  The best-known film about Bomber Command was The Dambusters which came out in 1954. Here was a subject that could wholeheartedly celebrate the skill and heroism of Bomber Command for feats which were untainted by controversy. The same was true of 633 Squadron (1964). It was based on a novel which portrayed a fictitious Mosquito squadron in the summer of 1944, attacking a factory at the head of a Norwegian fjord which manufactured fuel needed for the Germans’ V2 rocket programme. There was nothing showing fleets of bombers dropping hundreds of tons of high explosives on densely packed cities, let alone the terrible consequences on the ground.

  As the years passed, Bomber Command faded from the public memory. The time of the bombers was short. In 1918 they seemed like the future of warfare. By 1946 their day had passed and would never come again. Monuments to their transience lay all over the northern and eastern counties of Britain. The runways of hastily-built aerodromes were ploughed up and the concrete carted away for hardcore. Beet and barley reclaimed the soil. Survivors returning to their old bases found only the odd humpbacked Nissen hut or hangar converted into a store or barn, or a decaying watchtower standing in the middle of a field to stir their memories.

  In 1958 Don Charlwood went back to Elsham Wolds. The cement was peeling from the brick gate pillars and the guardhouse was in ruins. But from fifty yards away the mess still looked inhabited. ‘I walked through the rain,’ he wrote ‘and went in at the open door, all at once anticipating the smell of beer and bacon and wet greatcoats, the sound of voices. But down the long room lay ploughs and harrows and bags of superphosphate … I stood very still. Somewhere hens were clucking and rain gurgled off the roof. There were no other sounds at all. Something in the room eluded me; a deafness shut me from messages on the dusty air. I walked quickly into the rain, groping for understanding of our silenced activity, the purpose of all the courage and devotion I had once seen.’14

  The old stations made an evocative image. The film Twelve O’clock High opens with an American veteran returning four years after the war to his old base, which like Elsham has reverted to farmland. Cows graze next to the weed-infested landing strip where a tattered windsock hangs. The story that follows is set in 1942 when the American air force had just begun operations. It describes the fortunes of a bomber group which is suffering heavy losses and is undergoing a crisis in morale. The treatment is frank about the disillusioning effect of losses on the men and their commander. But essentially the film is a celebration of the Eighth Air Force and its achievements, which in the eyes of the makers were among the great American military successes of the war. The film, starring Gregory Peck, appeared in 1949.

  It was produced by Darryl Zanuck, one of the great Hollywood powers of the time. It was, like all his productions, made in the expectation of commercial success. Film-makers later in the century were cautious about making movies about recently ended wars. Twelve O’clock High did well at the box office. It was one sign that Americans had no qualms about the air war. A clue to the reason for their equanimity is contained in the film’s opening credits, which declared: ‘This motion picture is dedicated to those Americans both living and dead whose gallant effort made possible daylight precision bombing. They were the only Americans fighting in Europe in the fall of 1942. They stood alone against the enemy, and against doubts from home and abroad.’

  The American insistence that they were engaged in precision bombing proved to be a magic shield against criticism. The truth was, as Frankland pointed out, that whatever they said they were doing, the effects were often much the same and the difference between an RAF area attack and a USAAF ‘precision’ attack could be minimal. As a senior American air force officer joked at a post-war seminar on the campaign, the RAF carried out precision attacks on area targets, while the USAAF carried out area attacks on precision targets. Nor did the American scruples extend to operations in Japan where the fire-bombing of Tokyo brought the principle of area bombing to perfection.

  The Eighth Air Force suffered none of the criticism that was aimed at Bomber Command after the war. Its leaders went on to what were the most important military posts of the Cold War era, commanding the strategic bomber fleets that would wage a nuclear war. To some extent, the fact that the American air force had dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan made the debate on the validity and morality of its activities in the European theatre redundant. The American Second World War fliers continued to be honoured and their actions explained in sympathetic films like Memphis Belle which described the lives of one Eighth Air Force crew.

  In Britain though, the controversy was never laid to rest. New books and documentaries kept the embers of the debate smouldering. As long as Harris was alive the arguments would continue. During the war he had been a remote figure to his crews and to many of those he worked with. In peacetime they began to feel protective towards him. On his ninetieth birthday he received a message from veterans of 12 and 626 Squadrons, once based at Wickenby, which must have warmed his leathery old heart. ‘Few of us met you in those days,’ it ran, ‘but we hope you were aware that your messages which were read to us in the briefing room stirred many a young heart and strengthened many an apprehensive young airman … We are grateful for all you have done to remind those who would prefer to forget, what we did and what we achieved and of the enormous cost.’15

  He spoke at many Bomber Command veterans’ dinners, always delivering the same message to his ‘old lags’ of all ranks: that they had never been given proper recognition for their decisive part in the defeat of Hitler. As long as he was alive, for good or bad, he was determined to go on making their case. During the war he had never had the time to engage in much human contact with his men. He made up for it in peacetime. After each reunion he would, as Michael Beetham remembered, ‘sit late into the night with a word for everyone and outlasting most.’16

  Harris’s last great public appearance was on 4 September 1982 at the Guildhall in London to honour his presidency of the Bomber Command Association and to mark his ninetieth birthday. The evening ended with Hamish Mahaddie reciting to a spellbound hall Noel Coward’s ‘Lie in the Dark and Listen’. He died at his home beside the Thames at Goring on 5 April 1984, a few days before his ninety-second birthday. The presidency of the association passed to Michael Beetham, by now a senior RAF officer. ‘The vilification that went on of Bert Harris was deeply resented among all of us,’ he said. ‘We were determined to do something about it.’ St Clement Danes in the Strand is the church of the RAF. A statue of Lord Dowding, the chief of Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain, already stood before it. Beetham and and a group of other veterans decided that Harris deserved a statue of his own.

  The plan was announced in September 1991. Harris was seven years dead but his reputation was as incendiary as ever. Enough time had now passed for Germans to feel they had a say in the matter. The mayor of Pforzheim was the first to protest followed by his colleagues in Cologne, Hamburg and Dresden. An attempt was made to enlist the support of the City Council of Coventry with which Dresden was twinned. The German media seized on the story and Harris’s detractors in Britain publicly repeated their condemnations and criticisms. The statue was unveiled by the Queen Mother on 31 May 1992. It was, as was pointed out, the fiftieth anniversary of Harris’s first spectacular, the thousand-bomber raid against Cologne. The monument cost £100,000, most of which came from ex-Bomber Boys or other past and present members of the RAF. A large group of protesters stood behind police cordons as the Queen Mother performed the ceremony. During it, a lone Lancaster flew overhead. After the ceremony was over and the crowds had dispersed, someone daubed the dull, eight-foot-high bronze with red paint. ‘That was quickly cleared up,’ Michael Beetham recalled. ‘What I found was the most touching thing was that the following day there was a wreath from the people of the East End, in gratitude. That did more for morale than anythin
g. They were the people who suffered and they were grateful.’17

  The statue, like the man it represents, is open to different interpretations. Harris stands upright, his chest jutting forward and his eyes staring confidently ahead. Is it the pose of a supremely arrogant man, faithful to his own blind vision whatever the cost? Or does the stiff way he holds himself show something more admirable; fortitude, and the determination to carry out a terrible but necessary task?

  The elderly men standing in the early summer sunshine fervently believed the latter. They came from all walks of life. When the war was over there was little room in the ranks of the RAF. Not many wanted to stay on. They were volunteers, civilians in uniform who had joined up to serve their country and were eager to go back to the world they had left six extraordinary years previously. A bomb-aimer’s or navigator’s brevet won no favours when looking for jobs. The world was full of servicemen with good wars behind them. One wing commander with a DFC could only find a job working front of house at the Odeon, Swiss Cottage.

  When it came time for the Bomber Boys to say goodbye to each other, the partings were painful. Each crew was a social patchwork stitched from men of every class and background. Fear, mutual dependence and the chemistry that had attracted each to the other during crewing-up, welded them into a nucleus, bound together by respect and a form of love.

  In the first decade or two of peace they drifted apart. But in late middle age as mortality once again beckoned, many felt the need to look out their old comrades. Early in 1985 Dennis Steiner learned that 170 Squadron which had shared Hemswell with his squadron, 150, were to dedicate a memorial at the base to the crews who had not returned. Through the 170 Squadron association he was able to get back in touch with three surviving crewmates and they were reunited at the service. They found each other stouter and somewhat worn by time but they could still see their old companions behind the lined faces and grey hair. Hemswell was closed and run down but intact. Like naughty schoolboys they managed to get in by forcing a side door and wandering through the old rooms, dusty and forlorn and haunted by memories.