There was also widespread popular support for the argument that Hitler’s Germany was so wicked that any methods, even if they were morally questionable, should be used to destroy it. This was true across the political spectrum, even among those who had campaigned for peace in the 1930s. In an article on ‘Nazism and Civilisation’, Sir Charles Trevelyan, who had once advocated mass resistance to war, defined the war as a necessary crusade against a barbarous system that had discarded ‘all moral, international and public law’ and had bombed women and children.50 Philip Noel-Baker, director of the International Peace campaign in the late 1930s, observed that the bombing of Germany, of which he approved, was almost civilized ‘compared to the concentration camp and to the Himmler terror’. In a newspaper article just after the onset of the Blitz he pointed out that Hitler had smashed ‘every last remnant of the Laws of War’ and that British hands were now free to take any measures to ‘bring his monstrous aggression to an end’.51 A leading member of the Women’s League for Peace and Freedom, which had publicly condemned bombing in the 1930s, abandoned her pacifism in 1940 on the grounds that ‘Nazism is a menace of evil corruption and lying and of all the forces of evil’, which could only be eradicated by the use of force. When pacifist clergy lobbied the archbishops of Canterbury and York in 1940 to condemn the British use of bombing, they received the following reply: ‘… the moral issue involved in the victory of the allies is of greater importance than the harsh fact of fighting by methods that one deplores’.52 Many prominent churchmen, politicians and intellectuals, who might have condemned bombing under different circumstances, supported it as a necessary evil. Already predisposed to see the German threat in crude moral terms, it was a relatively simple step to the argument that the greater moral obligation was to secure the continued freedom of the West than to abstain from killing German civilians.
The British government and the RAF leadership were nevertheless aware that it was necessary to present the bombing as distinct from German practice to avoid the accusation that the British were no less barbarous than the Germans. In late April 1940 the Minister for Air, Sir Samuel Hoare, stated in a radio broadcast that the British would never imitate the enemy’s ‘dastardly conduct’: ‘We will not bomb open towns. We will not attempt to defeat the Germans by terrorizing their women and children.’53 When the decision was finally taken on 15 May to start bombing, Churchill advised the Ministry of Information to publish a discreet press release on German killing of civilians from the air in France and the Low Countries, but to say nothing about British retaliation.54 Pilots were at first instructed to ensure they could identify and hit specific targets before bombing them. Emphasis was put in every subsequent discussion on RAF bombing that it was directed only at military targets, even though the term was stretched almost to meaninglessness by the long list of economic and social objectives eventually classified as military, and the decision in October 1940 to permit the targeting of morale through attacks on city areas.55 Throughout the war the public presentation of the bombing offensive in Parliament and in the press never deviated from the claim that the RAF only bombed military targets, unlike the enemy. When attacks against ‘industrial populations’ was included in a draft directive in August 1942, the Air Ministry insisted that the term be altered to ‘industrial centres’ to avoid the impression that civilians were deliberate targets, ‘which is contrary to the principles of international law – such as they are’.56 When Air Marshal Harris tried to persuade the Air Ministry in the autumn of 1943 to be more honest in their publicity about bombing by showing that killing civilian workers was a stated aim of the bombing campaign, the Ministry refused to change. ‘It is desirable,’ ran the reply, ‘to present the bomber offensive in such a light as to provoke the minimum of public controversy.’57 Discretion was always observed in describing British bombing as directed at military targets, even to the crews who could see the real results of later raids that obliterated whole cities.
Much of the argument about whether to bomb or what to bomb was rendered void by the reality of Bomber Command’s offensive across the summer months of 1940. The optimistic intelligence reports were belied by the evidence of just how little Bomber Command could do with limited numbers and a small bomblift. Taking the gloves off revealed not a clenched fist but a limp hand. In late May priority was given to oil (Western Air Plan W.A.6) and communications targets, since their destruction was expected to affect the campaign in France directly. After the French defeat the priority given to oil remained in place, but a new directive on 20 June added the German aircraft industry to the list and suggested the firebombing of forests to induce a food crisis in Germany (it was argued that game driven from the forests by fire would be forced to eat the crops on the surrounding farmland). On 30 July Bomber Command was also directed to hit electric power stations where they could be located easily by night, while over the whole summer raids had to be carried out on targets in the ports from which an invasion might be launched.58 Between June and August the modest bombload of 2,806 tons was divided between these eight different objectives, spread across northern France, the Low Countries and northern Germany, a little under one-quarter of the tonnage directed at enemy airfields.59 The constant shifts in priority prevented the Command from focusing on any one target system. Most operations had to be conducted in unfavourable conditions when the primary target was obscured by haze or cloud or shrouded by the blackout. Irregular, small-scale, dispersed and difficult to assess, the early raids had the sole merit of forcing large numbers of Germans in north-west Germany to seek shelter during the summer nights until ways were devised by German civil defence to minimize the time lost because of the alarms.
The large number of German targets and sudden shifts in allocation required a tactical approach that reduced even further any prospect of serious damage. In most cases only 20–30 aircraft were dispatched to each location, and only a fraction allocated to each specific target on the assumption that a handful of bombs dropped by five or six aircraft would be enough to do effective damage. Out of 89 attacks made on Hamburg in 1940, 58 were made with fewer than 10 aircraft.60 Most bombs carried were high explosive; incendiaries were spread in small quantities throughout the attacking force, which eliminated any prospect of a concentrated fire-raising operation. The number of bombers available for sorties declined over the summer months after the losses sustained in the Battle of France and because of the need to divert bomber aircraft to training units. The total number of sorties carried out between June and August was 8,681, but over 1,000 were against targets in France and the Low Countries, and around two-fifths were light-bomber sorties. The tonnage of bombs dropped was just 0.9 per cent of the tonnage dropped by Bomber Command in the same months in 1944.61
It soon became clear that the bombs were dropped with no particular accuracy. In the absence of electronic navigation or an effective bombsight, Portal’s claim that bombing would be inherently inaccurate proved entirely justified. A photographic survey of bombing raids on the German aircraft industry in July 1940 found that out of 10 attacks only a couple of hangars had been destroyed; out of 31 oil installations bombed, only one appeared damaged.62 An American eyewitness account of an RAF attempt to bomb a Daimler-Benz factory in Stuttgart highlighted the exceptional efforts bomber pilots made to identify their target, circling the city for half an hour, but reported that not a single one of the bombs they subsequently dropped hit the plant.63 One Bomber Command pilot later wrote that precise objectives in summer 1940 ‘were pointless’ when crews could not even find the city they were supposed to target.64 Most RAF bombs dropped in the German countryside, but even those deliberately dropped on forests between June and August 1940, following repeated pressure from Churchill to try to burn down German woodland, failed to ignite a fire. Experiments with setting fire to woods or crops continued for more than a year, when it was finally conceded that even under ideal climatic conditions most incendiaries burnt only the few inches around where they landed.65
Little of this problem was due to German defences. As the British were themselves to find during the Blitz, little preparation had been made for the defence against night-bombing. German anti-aircraft fire could force enemy aircraft to fly higher at night but could hit them mainly by chance, and this despite a formidable array of anti-aircraft weapons. By June 1940 there were 3,095 heavy guns, 9,815 light guns and 4,035 searchlights organized into defensive zones around the vulnerable industrial areas. Guns were moved back from the frontier areas following the defeat of France, strengthening the home defence even more. Yet between January and June 1940 only two aircraft were claimed from anti-aircraft fire, and in August and September not a single one. The principal effect was to force the attacking bombers to break formation, exacerbating the existing dispersion of the British effort.66 Most of Bomber Command’s problems were self-inflicted. A post-war presentation of the early bombing effort by an official of the British Bombing Survey Unit in 1946 concluded that the forces were too small, the weapons incapable of a high degree of damage, targets could not be found, and too much effort was devoted to subsidiary operations: ‘great call on Air Force,’ ran the lecture notes, ‘to attack and destroy targets beyond its power’.67
Under these circumstances it is perhaps surprising that the offensive was continued at all. Its survival owed much to the confidence of Bomber Command’s new commander-in-chief, Charles Portal, that bombing would eventually deliver strategic dividends. Portal was a successful career airman who began flying in the First World War and was among the first airmen to drop bombs on German soil. He played a key part in building up RAF strength in the late 1930s as director of organization. He was in charge of training when he was called to command the bombing war in April 1940. He was widely respected – ‘honest and unprejudiced’ according to one former colleague, ‘not much small talk’ according to another – and liked by Americans for his straightforward character and shrewd intelligence. A shy man who lunched alone day after day at the same London club, the private man was sealed off from his staff. He was convinced that bombing was a more effective way to wage modern war and remained a staunch defender of the bombing force when he was appointed chief of the air staff in October 1940.68 He argued steadily through the summer months that Bomber Command should be allowed to do what it had been prepared for, despite all the operational difficulties, and he shielded the force from criticism through the years that followed.
The second factor was the unstinting support of Churchill whose interest in bombing waxed through the months after the fall of France. He asked to be informed about the operational performance of Bomber Command and intervened in every aspect of its activities, from the supply of bombers and bombs to the plan to burn down forests. His enthusiasm for bombing was a creature of the emergency facing Britain during the summer and autumn of 1940 when British forces had to demonstrate to the United States and to the peoples of occupied Europe that they still had some capacity for offensive action, however limited. It was also necessary to impress the British public that military action against Germany had not been abandoned after the evacuation from Dunkirk in late May and early June.69 On 8 July Churchill wrote to the Minister of Aircraft Production, Lord Beaverbrook, summing up his view of how bombing could help decisively in the overthrow of Hitler: ‘But there is one thing that will bring him back and bring him down, and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.’70 The choice of words was unfortunate and Churchill’s comment has contributed to the recent debate about whether the bombing campaign from the outset had a genocidal purpose.71 This is almost certainly not what Churchill had in mind, since he wrote the letter months before the onset of the Blitz (this did prompt in him a rhetorical language of violent retribution). He also reproduced it later on in his history of the war, when he had had time to reflect on what to leave out, and indeed deliberately omitted much of the story of British bombing and his part in it.72 But it did express Churchill’s desperate hope that bombing Germany was perhaps, as RAF leaders had repeatedly asserted, one possible means to compel Hitler to abandon invasion plans or even to dislocate the German war effort decisively. Harris kept a copy of the Beaverbrook letter with him after the war; ‘That was the RAF mandate,’ he told the biographer Andrew Boyle in 1979, shortly before his death.73
From the point of view of British strategy, approval of bombing was a decision that came at a high price. Bomber Command achieved negligible results against German targets and invited German retaliation. In early September Hitler finally responded to British attacks by permitting a campaign against London and other cities which dwarfed anything that could be done in return. It is possible that the Blitz would have been launched anyway, as British air leaders had expected, but it is also possible that without a British bombing campaign, British cities might have been spared the full horrors of the winter of 1940–41.
GERMAN LESSONS: 1940–41
The onset of heavy German night-bombing in September 1940 showed Bomber Command at last what a serious bombing offensive looked like. Attacks were made with hundreds of bomber aircraft concentrated against a single target, while diversionary or nuisance raids were made to confuse the defences and create widespread disruption. Heavy use of incendiaries contrasted with the British preference for high-explosive bombs, and produced widespread area damage. At first the RAF thought the German campaign was flawed because they assumed the attacks were designed to terrorize the population. A survey of ‘Lessons to be Learned from German Mistakes’, produced two weeks after the first heavy raid on London, concluded that ‘the indiscriminate attack of cities is invariably uneconomical’, a view with which German air commanders would have concurred.74 But it soon became clear that the pattern was to attack ports, food supplies and the aircraft industry, and the evident ability of German bombers to attack at will and achieve a relatively high concentration of hits turned the RAF towards the idea of learning lessons from what the Germans got right. After nine months the Air Ministry arrived at the view that regular ‘Blitz’ attacks on German city areas demonstrated the most profitable use to which Bomber Command could be put.75 The shift in 1941 and 1942 to a policy of ‘area’ bombing came about not as a result of the poor accuracy achieved in attacks on specific objectives, as is usually suggested, but as a result of copying the Germans.
The German offensive was from this point of view a valuable learning tool, since it was difficult to evaluate clearly what Bomber Command was itself achieving over Germany. From June 1940 onwards, Britain was cut off from Europe by German military successes. Until the autumn the RAF relied on hearsay and occasional news reports to form a picture of the effects of British bombing. The sustained German attacks could now be used to assess with greater scientific, technical and statistical precision exactly what an air raid might achieve. The programme of evaluation began almost immediately. In late September 1940 the Research and Experiments Department of the Ministry of Home Security supplied a detailed study of the effects of German bombs on different types of target – oil storage, gas works, power stations, aircraft factories, and so on – and reached a conclusion that was to have far-reaching consequences for the development of Bomber Command’s offensive. ‘It is axiomatic,’ ran the report, ‘that fire will always be the optimum agent for the complete destruction of buildings, factories etc.’ The department recommended using high-explosive bombs to create the ‘essential draught conditions’ in damaged buildings, followed by heavy incendiary loads, and completed with more high explosive to hamper the enemy emergency services.76 The evidence that concentrated use of incendiaries was the most effective form of air assault against large industrial centres gradually emerged as the key lesson to be learned from the experience of the Blitz. It was the seed from which area bombing slowly germinated during the year that followed.
The work of the Research and Experiments Department made an essential contribution to understanding what bombing could achieve. The departm
ent was set up in spring 1939 to help the Home Office evaluate the effects of bombing and was run by the former director of the Building Research Station, Dr Reginald Stradling. He co-opted scientists and statisticians onto the staff, including the zoologist Solly Zuckerman and the physicist (and former pacifist) J. D. Bernal. In November 1941 Bernal established division RE8 to supply the Air Ministry directly with calculations on the effects of German bombs on British cities, the productive loss caused by bombing and the likely impact of British bombing on German cities.77 This work was supplemented by the Air Warfare Analysis Section, which looked at the weight and type of bombs to be dropped, and by the work of the Road Research Laboratory and Building Research Laboratory, both of which helped to estimate the nature of bomb damage and the vulnerability of German building structures.78 Bombing research was in its infancy during the Blitz, but it benefited from the long experience in the 1930s of recruiting senior scientists to work on particular aspects of air warfare.79 Although the relationship between scientists and airmen was never formalized, the Air Ministry knew that it needed scientific input not only to provide effective technology (particularly radar and navigation aids) but to be able to make better sense of operations. Research questions were usually framed by the air staff and the subsequent expert reports circulated to those who needed them; sometimes it was the experts who took the initiative. This was particularly the case with the German-born Oxford physicist Frederick Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell), who was recruited by Churchill in 1939 to form a small statistical section in the Admiralty, and then followed Churchill to Downing Street in 1940. Lindemann took a special interest in bombing and was perhaps more responsible than anyone in keeping Churchill abreast of the many problems faced by Bomber Command in its early years.80 His Statistical Section began at once in September 1940 to produce accurate figures on the damage inflicted by German bombs, and to relate those figures to the density of urban population in different city zones. These figures were then applied to German cities, to try to determine the areas where the highest damage could be done in terms of lives lost and houses destroyed.81 Why Lindemann was so committed to the idea of destroying the country of his birth has never been clear, but he played an important part in deriving conclusions about German bombing and projecting them onto potential German targets.
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 35