An American delegation headed by Colonel John Griffith, who had fought with the American anti-Bolshevik intervention force in Russia in 1918, finally secured use of three sites in the liberated area of Ukraine at Poltava, Piryatin and Mirgorod. An American ‘Eastern Command’ was established under Colonel Alfred Kessler, an early replacement for Griffith, who found his anti-Soviet feeling difficult to disguise. After months of planning, ‘Operation Frantic’ finally began on 2 June 1944, by which time the rationale for shuttle-bombing had largely disappeared, thanks to the introduction of the American P-38 and P-51 fighters. The first operation was mounted against targets in southern Germany from bases in Italy occupied by the US Fifteenth Air Force. The commander in the Mediterranean, General Ira Eaker, flew on the first mission to ensure that it enjoyed a high political profile, and he was duly feted on his arrival in the Ukraine. The second operation, flown on 21 June from Eighth Air Force bases in England, was a disaster. A few hours after landing, the 73 B-17 ‘Flying Fortresses’ on the field at Poltava were subjected to a devastating attack by German bombers which flew in low against negligible defences. Colonel Archie Old, commander of the task force, described the attack in a report for the Eighth Air Force commander:
About ten minutes after the first flares were dropped the first bombs started falling and then for almost two hours, the bastards bombed hell out of the flying field, especially that part where the task force B-17s were dispersed. It was one of the most accurate bombing raids that the task force commander has seen or heard of, many thousands of bombs were dropped and approximately 95% of them fell on the flying field … of seventy-three B-17s on the field 100% were either destroyed or damaged.123
Soviet personnel were forced by their commanders to try to combat the effects of the bombing while it was still going on; when it was over, Soviet soldiers picked up the unstable anti-personnel ‘butterfly’ bombs with their bare hands, or shot at them to make them explode. Between 30 and 40 of the soldiers were killed, as well as two Americans. The German commander was Lt. General Rudolf Meister, the man chosen to organize the pinpoint bombing of Soviet power stations the previous year.124 Only a handful of further operations were conducted by Eastern Command, including supply for the Polish Home Army in its uprising against the German occupiers, launched on 1 August 1944. This proved too much for the Soviet regime to stomach and in late August the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, told the Americans that the bases were now needed for the Soviet Air Force. On 4 October Operation Frantic was wound up, though the last American personnel did not leave until June 1945.
The air war on the Eastern Front remained for almost all its course a tactical one. Only 5 per cent of Soviet sorties were made against distant targets; the German Air Force flew a higher proportion of long-range sorties for reconnaissance and occasional bombing missions, and bombed cities in the path of the ground campaign, but did not develop a campaign of independent bombing of military-economic targets despite the growing pressure from Hitler and the air force High Command to do so. The Soviet Air Force was nevertheless not entirely opposed to the development of strategic air power in the future. Andrei Tupolev was allowed to renew work on a heavy four-engine bomber and the result was the Pe-8/TB7, the first modern heavy bomber of the Soviet Air Force; in the end only 91 were ever produced because of the urgent need for front-line aviation, but a few of them took part in the bombing of Helsinki in 1944.125
Tupolev was also given the opportunity to exploit three Boeing B-29 ‘Superfortresses’, interned by the Russians after they landed on Soviet soil following missions over Japan in the summer of 1945. These became the basis for the development of a new Soviet super-bomber, the Tu-4, which ushered the Soviet Union into the strategic air age.126 The head of the MPVO, reflecting on what lessons might be learned from the civil defence effort during the war, favoured retaining all deep shelters against the possibility that bigger and better bombs would be developed in the future from which the Soviet people would need sounder and more extensive shelter.127 While Tupolev worked on the new Soviet super-bomber, Lavrentii Beria, the Minister of the Interior, headed a project to develop the Soviet atomic bomb. When the bomb was successfully detonated on a remote site in central Asia on 29 August 1949, the Soviet Union entered the nuclear age. The heavy bombers, missiles and nuclear weapons of the 1950s overturned the Soviet preference for close-support aviation as the principal way to project air power and presented the new German Federal Republic, in the front line of the Cold War, with a strategic threat unrecognizable from the bombing war on the Eastern Front just a decade before.
Part Two
‘THE GREATEST BATTLE’: ALLIED BOMBERS OVER EUROPE
5
The Sorceror’s Apprentice: Bomber Command 1939–42
On 1 September 1939 President Roosevelt sent an appeal to all the major European powers involved in the crisis over Poland to give a public undertaking that they would abstain from any air attacks against civilians or unfortified cities. The same day Hitler told the American chargé d’affaires in Berlin that this had always been his preference and assured Roosevelt that German aircraft would only attack military objectives. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, gave his guarantee the same day; a joint Anglo-French declaration followed on 3 September, only reserving the right to act as they saw fit if the enemy failed to observe the same restrictions.1 The Polish ambassador in Washington, whose country was already at war, agreed that Polish pilots would be told not to bomb open cities as long as the enemy did the same.2 None of these expressions of goodwill was legally binding in international law.
The idea that bombing warfare could somehow be ‘humanized’ had been explored by a British committee set up in July 1938 with the cumbersome title ‘Limitation of Armaments Committee, Sub-Committee on the Humanisation of Aerial Warfare’. The discussions of the committee, chaired by Sir William Malkin, went round in circles. The terms for a possible international agreement on limiting bombing to military objectives suffered not only from the realistic objection that such terms would be unenforceable in a real war, but from the difficulty of defining what was meant by a military objective. In the end the committee proved more useful in giving the Air Ministry the opportunity to defend the idea that bombing arms factories and armaments workers was as legitimate as a naval blockade, than it was in finding grounds for a diplomatic solution.3 In the absence of international agreement, the RAF was told to abide by The Hague Rules for air warfare, first drafted in 1923 but never ratified, but to do so only as long as the enemy did the same. The rules were spelt out in a Cabinet decision and repeated regularly up to and beyond the outbreak of war: intentional bombing of civilians was illegal; only identifiable military objectives could be attacked from the air; and any such attack must be undertaken without negligent harm to civilians. In August 1939 the Air Ministry concluded that attacks on targets difficult to identify through cloud or at night would also be illegal, as would any operation in which the civil population, hospitals, cultural monuments or historic sites were targeted. An inter-departmental committee, set up the same month to draft detailed instructions on rules of engagement for the British armed forces, stipulated ‘that it is clearly illegal to bombard a populated area in the hope of hitting a legitimate target’.4
These legal limitations reflected decisions taken in military staff talks between the British and French High Commands in the spring of 1939 as they planned for a possible war. In April the two military staffs had agreed only to attack military targets in the narrowest sense of the term, at sea or at the fighting front. British bombers were to be used to help the battle on land, not to attack distant targets in Germany. The French were insistent that the RAF should not attack German cities while the balance of air resources so obviously favoured Germany, and French industry was not yet adequately protected.5 A few days before the outbreak of war the British Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Cyril Newall, warned Air Chief Marshal Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt, commander-in-chief of Bomber Command,
that his activities were bound to be restricted ‘for political reasons’, though Ludlow-Hewitt knew that Bomber Command’s small size and operational difficulties were enough on their own to inhibit offensive action.6 Newall worried that even if the RAF bombed legitimate objectives, the Germans would claim that they had killed civilians. There was strong political pressure to ensure that the democracies were not seen to violate the bombing proscription first. It was decided in October 1939 that only if German aircraft started to kill large numbers of civilians from the air – ‘promiscuous bombardment’ as it was called – would the RAF ‘take the gloves off’.7
Both sides at first stuck to their pledge not to attack targets in each other’s cities where civilians were at risk (though this did not prevent the German Air Force from killing non-combatants during its operations in Poland). Chamberlain had no interest in provoking German bombing of British towns despite appeals from the Polish government in early September to begin bombing Germany as a gesture of assistance.8 It was nonetheless the case that for the first months of the war Bomber Command strained at the leash to be able to do what years of planning had prepared it for. A half-hearted agreement was reached with the French High Command to initiate bombing of the German Ruhr-Rhineland industrial region – usually capitalized in British documents simply as the RUHR– if a sudden German attack threatened Belgium or menaced Franco-British forces decisively, but the French remained cautious about risking German retaliation, even during the invasion in May 1940.9 In the end it was the British who ended the international embargo agreed in September. On the night of 11–12 May, two days after the German invasion in western Europe, 37 medium and light bombers attacked industrial and transport targets in the Rhineland city of München Gladbach (now Mönchengladbach), killing four people, including an Englishwoman who happened to live there. British raids were to continue throughout the war. The last was made on 2–3 May 1945 on the north German port of Kiel, just 36 hours before Allied troops occupied the city.10
‘TAKING THE GLOVES OFF’, 1939–40
The political and legal restrictions imposed on Bomber Command were consistent with the widely held view in Britain that indiscriminate bombing was the hallmark of barbarism, whereas self-restraint was a feature of being civilized. Yet there were also powerful prudential arguments for not undertaking bombing from the start of the war, as the French realized. In the autumn of 1939 Bomber Command was not yet ready to launch any major offensive campaign. For all the talk in the 1930s of developing a ‘striking force’ capable of taking the fight to the enemy heartland, progress in developing the technology of aircraft, bombs, bombsights and navigation aids had been painfully slow. One of Chamberlain’s more desperate acts before the war was to ask Roosevelt on 25 August 1939, a week before his appeal, to supply the American Norden bombsight for British use. Roosevelt declined, not because it would compromise his subsequent appeal to abstain from bombing, but because agreeing to this request would make it seem that the United States had taken sides in the conflict.11 At the outbreak of war Ludlow-Hewitt was well aware of the deficiencies of his force, which had already been exposed when the Air Ministry at last began in 1938 to consider the practicalities of long-range bombing. The gap between ambition and reality was remarkably wide for a force committed to a bombing strategy, a reflection of the poor technical experience of much of the RAF leadership and the failure to define doctrine clearly. There were too few airfields capable of handling heavier aircraft, little experience in bombing training, a shortage of maps of north-west Germany and a total of only 488 bombers of all kinds, including light bombers destined to form part of the Advanced Air Striking Force when it was sent to France in late 1939. ‘Unrestricted air warfare,’ ran an Air Ministry instruction, ‘is not in the interests of Great Britain.’12
RAF Bomber Command dated from the reorganization of the air arm in 1936. Unlike the German Air Force, all bomber units were grouped together under a single commander-in-chief, based at Bomber Command headquarters near High Wycombe, north-west of London. This had important implications for the identity of the Command, because its sole function was to bomb. As a force it was only offensive, and its main duty was to define what targets to bomb, to produce the technology to enable those targets to be destroyed and to train the manpower to do it. This functional identity encouraged Bomber Command to construct a doctrine and a force independent of the army and navy, capable of striking a potential enemy at what was perceived to be their most vulnerable point. The Command was disinclined to accept the role of auxiliary to the requirements of surface forces, and there was almost no planning for army cooperation to match German Air Force doctrine. Right up to the outbreak of war and beyond, the RAF argued that its contribution to the battlefield would be of little significance: attacks on railway communications were regarded as difficult and ineffective, while raids against marching columns of men were deemed to be a waste of bombing resources.13 Instead the Air Ministry drew up what were known as the Western Air Plans, a series of 16 individual plans, some of which committed the bomber force to assist the Admiralty in the war at sea, but none of which committed the bombers to help the army in the field. Only two of the plans were seriously prepared for: W. A.4 involved long-range attacks against communications targets in Germany to slow up a German advance; W. A.5 was for attacks on the German industrial economy, particularly the Ruhr area and the German oil industry.14 An Industrial Intelligence Centre, first established in 1931 under Desmond Morton (later Churchill’s intelligence adviser), drew up lists of vulnerable targets in German industry. Most of them could not be hit from British bases with existing aircraft, but they formed the basis for the RAF insistence that the most efficient use of bomber aircraft was against the enemy home front, not its armed forces.15 Yet vulnerable targets on the home front could not be hit as long as the government insisted on the letter of the law.
The bomber force was organized in September 1939 in five Groups, spread out across east-central England and East Anglia, each Group made up of between six and eight squadrons, a total of 33 in all. Although some of the aircraft were called heavy bombers at the time, the Groups were actually equipped like the German Air Force with twin-engine light or medium bombers. The light bombers made up 16 squadrons, 10 consisting of the Fairey Battle, six of the Bristol Blenheim IV. The Battle emerged from a 1933 requirement for a monoplane light bomber but was obsolescent by 1939 and unsuited to daylight raiding; its operational function was unclear and its striking power negligible. They were sent to France as part of the air expeditionary force but were sitting ducks for German fighters. On 14 May 1940 as many as 40 out of a force of 71 Battles were shot down in a single disastrous operation against the crossings at Sedan in the Ardennes, close to the Belgian border. The Blenheim was developed from 1935 as a fast medium bomber. It was weakly armed but could reach a maximum speed of 266 mph. It could carry only 1,000 lbs of bombs around 700 miles. Its limited range and small bombload made it unsuitable for a strategic role and it played a larger part in the anti-shipping war along the German-occupied northern shores of Europe. Light bombers were sensibly phased out as the war progressed.16
Bomber Command had three principal long-range bombers in 1939, the Vickers Wellington, the Armstrong Whitworth Whitley and the Handley Page Hampden. The Hampden came from a 1932 specification, the Whitley from 1934, making them both considerably older than their German counterparts. The Hampden had a top speed of 255 mph and could carry up to 4,000 lbs of bombs around 600 miles; the Whitley Mark V with Rolls-Royce Merlin engines was the mainstay of Bomber Command in the first year, with a range of 800 miles with 3,000 lbs of bombs and a top speed of 222 mph. They were lightly armed and easy prey on unescorted sorties by day. The most successful of the medium bombers was the Vickers Wellington Mk IC (succeeded in 1941 by the Mk II and III), which made up more than half of Bomber Command’s strategic force by 1942. It was powered by Bristol Pegasus engines, had a top speed of 235 mph and could carry 4,500 lbs of bombs some 600 miles. Its ge
odetic construction – a lattice-like fuselage shell – made it exceptionally robust compared with the Hampden and Whitley, and later marks of the Wellington remained in service throughout the war.17 What the medium bombers lacked were effective navigational aids to match the German electronic systems (navigators and pilots were still taught astral navigation), powerful armament to be able to defend themselves against fighter assault, and bombs of sufficient destructive power. The standard British 250- and 500-lb bombs had a low charge-to-weight ratio (around one-quarter was explosive, against one-half in German bombs), but they also contained less destructive explosive content without the addition of aluminium powder (standard in German bombs), and were prone not to detonate. The standard incendiary bomb was the 4-lb Mk I magnesium bomb, which remained in production, with small modifications, throughout the war. Larger ‘firepot’ bombs were developed in 1939 and 1940, designed to distribute a high number of incendiary devices, but they were plagued with technical difficulties. Only later in the war did Bomber Command acquire heavier oil-based incendiaries.18 The technical level of the force that went to war in 1939 – aircraft, bombs and equipment – can be described charitably as unsophisticated.
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 33