Of all the lessons drawn from what was thought to be German practice, the possibility of urban destruction was the most important. It was gradually assumed that the German intention was to undermine British morale by inflicting concentrated attacks on ports and industrial cities, reducing the will to work by the destruction of services, amenities and housing, and reducing food supplies. Planners at the Air Ministry described German bombing as the direct opposite of British practice: instead of attempting to hit precise targets, the German Air Force carried out attacks on particular industrial or commercial areas where multiple targets were clustered; German raids were concentrated but too inaccurate for any purpose, it was argued, other than ‘the “blitzkrieg” of fairly extensive regions’.82 Studies of British cities also confirmed that the critical level of damage was inflicted by incendiary bombs dropped in large numbers. Particular attention was paid to the German bombing of London, Coventry and Liverpool, but special studies were commissioned of the bombing of Hull and Birmingham with a view to understanding how fire combined with high explosive affected areas of different housing and population density. Damage was heaviest in the congested working-class districts, which suggested that these were optimum targets. A draft directive from the bombing operations office in the Air Ministry in June 1941 drew heavily from this research on the Blitz: ‘The output of the German heavy industry depends almost exclusively on the workers. Continuous and relentless bombing of these workers and their utility services, over a period of time, will inevitably lower their morale, kill a number of them, and thus appreciably reduce their industrial output.’83
These arguments signalled an important change in the way ‘morale’ was interpreted. The politicians, Churchill included, generally understood morale in political terms: heavy pressure from bombing would induce a social and political collapse, perhaps even a revolution. The German attacks on morale were more clearly economic in intent. In May 1941 the Ministry of Economic Warfare, which had been monitoring the ineffective impact of Bomber Command on precise economic objectives in Germany, sent a memorandum recommending that the RAF abandon military targets and focus instead on economic warfare against major industrial concentrations or ‘whole cities’. The idea stemmed from the effects of German bombing on the British workforce: ‘British experience leads us to believe that loss of output … through absenteeism and other dislocation consequent upon the destruction of workers’ dwellings and shopping centres is likely to be as great as, if not greater than the production loss which we can expect to inflict by heavy damage.’84 Although the hope for a political dividend from bombing was not abandoned entirely, particularly by Churchill, the Air Ministry came to view morale as a barometer of productive performance rather than political outlook. The same term was used to cover both, but by the time morale became a specified objective in July 1941, it was used as a description of economic attrition – a form of ‘industrial blockade’ – in which the working-class population was attacked as an abstract factor of production whose deaths, disablement or absence would have economic consequences.85
By the spring of 1941, the arguments in favour of imitating what was thought to be German practice had come to be widely broadcast and from a variety of different sources. The debt owed to German bombing was evident in the choice of the term ‘Blitz’ to describe the nature of the new strategy. In April 1941 a review of bombing policy recommended ‘carefully planned, concentrated and continuous “BLITZ” attacks delivered on the centre of the working-class area of the German cities and towns’. Notes produced in the Bombing Operations department of the Air Ministry a month later on the use of the bomber force also stressed ‘continuous blitz attacks on the densely populated workers [sic] and industrial areas’.86 Later in 1941, when calculations were made of the ratio between weight of bombs and expected deaths among German workers, the measurements were given as ‘1 Coventry’, ‘2 Coventries’, etc.; an attack on the scale of ‘4 Coventries’ was expected to yield 22,515 German deaths.87 It is important to recognize that the emphasis on killing German workers and destroying their milieu was deliberate, not an unintended consequence of bombing factories. In November 1940 a memorandum on bombing policy, almost certainly penned by Harris, asked whether the time had not come to strike in full force ‘against the people themselves’. In May 1941 the director of Air Intelligence welcomed an attack on ‘the livelihood, the homes, the cooking, heating, lighting and family life of that section of the population which, in any country, is least mobile and most vulnerable to a general air attack – the working class’. The chiefs of staff in June finally endorsed morale attacks that induced ‘fear of death and mutilation’.88 The idea of collateral damage had been turned on its head: instead of the death of workers and the destruction of their housing being a side-effect of hitting factories, damage to factories was a collateral effect of destroying working-class neighbourhoods.
However, deliberate attacks on densely populated areas, aimed at killing workers and disrupting civilian life, once again raised awkward moral questions. A further memorandum drafted in May 1941 by the Director of Bombing Operations pointed out that since October 1940 Churchill had freed Bomber Command from having to bomb with discrimination, so that ‘attacking the workers’ was now permissible. ‘We do not mean by this,’ he continued, ‘that we shall ever profess the German doctrine that terrorism constitutes an effective weapon of war.’ Nevertheless, he recommended that no announcement of the policy should be made, and the details of plans for attacking the population should have very limited circulation; in the wrong hands, ‘all sort of false and misleading deductions might be made’.89 In late November 1941 Sir Richard Peirse, the then commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, addressing a sympathetic audience of the Thirty Club, explained that for almost a year his force had been attacking ‘the people themselves’ intentionally. ‘I mention this,’ he continued, ‘because, for a long time, the Government for excellent reasons has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call Military Targets … I can assure you, Gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples.’90
There were also lessons to learn about how a Blitz attack should be carried out. An Air Staff memorandum on area attack pointed out how unwise it would be ‘if we fail to pick the brains of an enemy who has had so much experience in developing the required technique’.91 The method consisted of a high concentration of incendiary bombs dropped in a short period of time with the use of a target-marking force to indicate the urban area to be devastated. The proportion of incendiaries carried by German bombers was known to vary between 30 and 60 per cent, concentrated in the first attack groups, while RAF bombers carried between 15 and 30 per cent, diluted throughout the force. The critical problem was to drop enough incendiaries to create fires that ran out of control, which meant smothering an area with firebombs. The attack on the City of London on 29 December 1940 was used as the model. The raid started 28 conflagrations, 51 serious fires, 101 medium fires and 1,286 small ones, and it was this level of assault that could be expected to overwhelm the emergency services.92 Detailed evidence from Britain’s other blitzed cities suggested that incendiary bombs had five times the destructive potential of heavy explosive per ton. They were best used, it was suggested by Air Intelligence, against cities with narrow streets and wooden structures. Germany’s old town centres were ‘ideal targets for large-scale incendiary attack’ because German urban areas were denser and taller than their British equivalents. A salvo of 30,000 British 4-lb incendiaries dropped in 20 minutes was regarded as a necessary minimum, though much larger quantities were found to be necessary later on. High explosive was needed to reduce the water supply and ventilate the buildings.93 It was realized in the Air Ministry by the summer of 1941 that to maximize the effect of firebomb attack the equivalent of the German Kampfgruppe 100 was required, skilled in navigation so that it could carry out a fire-raising attack which the following bombers could use for their own navigation.94 Po
rtal used Kampfgruppe 100 as his example when he suggested in August 1941 to the government scientific adviser, Sir Henry Tizard, the need to move to a target-marking system as soon as possible.95
These lessons were learned in the end both slowly and piecemeal. The structure for decision-making in the RAF and the Air Ministry made it difficult to change quickly, while there remained honest differences of opinion about the most effective use for bombers. Major changes in policy over bombing required the approval of the chiefs of staff and Churchill’s Defence Committee. They had to be properly formulated and presented to the Air Council and the Air Staff in the ministry before they could be presented to higher authority. Much of the work on trying to understand German strategy and tactics was dispersed among different departments and usually written up in the first instance by junior staff. This situation improved when a Directorate of Bombing Operations was finally set up under Air Commodore John Baker in September 1940, at the prompting of the then deputy chief of the air staff, Air Marshal Harris. While strategy was decided at the highest level, the operational conduct of Bomber Command was left largely to the discretion of the commander-in-chief, who could modify or ignore instructions from the air staff with which he disagreed. Bombing policy was also subject to external civilian influence. The Ministry of Economic Warfare under the Labour minister Hugh Dalton and the ad hoc Lloyd Committee, set up in 1939 under Geoffrey Lloyd to deal specifically with the German oil situation, could make recommendations to the politicians that simply bypassed the RAF.96 Air policy was not entirely haphazard, but it moved in the first years of war in fits and starts, trapped between exaggerated expectations and a beleaguered reality.
Portal’s successor as commander-in-chief of Bomber Command in October 1940 was Sir Richard Peirse, a senior career airman, who had been vice-chief of staff before his appointment. He was a supporter of precision bombing, though more of a realist about what could be achieved, and not in principle opposed to area bombing. He stuck to the directives that called for attacks on oil, communications and the aircraft industry, but his force remained small and divided between numerous targets. The number of sorties per month fell steadily, exacerbated by the slow supply of bombers and crew and the deteriorating weather, which grounded bombers on both sides through much of December and January. In September 1940 there were 3,597 sorties, by November only 2,039 and in January 1941 only 1,131. Even by the summer of 1941 the figures were little better than they had been a year before, reaching a peak of 3,989 in July.97 The RAF also experienced, like the German Air Force, a high rate of wastage due chiefly to accidents. The Bomber Command Groups had 290 serviceable bombers at the beginning of October 1940, but only 212 at the end of November. Peirse told Portal that for every aircraft shot down by the enemy, he was losing six to accidents.98 Part of the problem he attributed to the declining skill of bomber crews, too many of whom were rushed from the Operational Training Units (OTUs) to the front-line squadrons. The decision to accelerate promotion to allow sergeants to pilot aircraft produced evidence, so it was claimed, of ‘slackness and inefficiency’. A report from 7 Group in January 1941 highlighted poor discipline among recruits from the OTUs: ‘unpunctuality and absence without leave … some of them seem to think they can turn up when they like’.99 For many crewmen in the winter of 1940–41 the reality was to fly long, dangerous operations over German territory in poor weather, with inadequate equipment, returning to bomber stations which were still improvised and poorly lit, and in the knowledge that most of the target photographs they took were of somewhere other than the place to which they had been directed.
The poor performance of Bomber Command owed a good deal to the priorities that had been given to home defence during the summer and autumn of 1940. But since this was one of Britain’s few offensive options, its deficiencies were very public. In early November Churchill complained to Portal that bomb tonnage on Germany was ‘lamentably small’, given the amount of money and material devoted to it: ‘I wish I could persuade you to realize that there is a great failure of quantitative delivery.’ In January 1941 he returned again to attack the ‘stagnant condition’ of the command and its ‘deplorable’ operational performance.100 Peirse was sensitive to the accusations and continued to insist that his force would be a cardinal factor in reducing Germany’s war economy and will to wage war by the spring of 1941, while paradoxically explaining that weather and poor training were likely to inhibit anything his force could do.101 Churchill’s frustration contributed to pushing Bomber Command slowly towards a strategy that favoured city bombing. He tried unsuccessfully to insist that Bomber Command attack Berlin in October. He told Peirse that he hoped his Command would soon be bombing ‘every “Hun corner” every night’.102
In late November 1940 the War Cabinet endorsed a decision to retaliate for the attack on Coventry by bombing a German city indiscriminately. Portal supplied a list of four cities – Hanover, Mannheim, Cologne and Düsseldorf – and told Peirse to mobilize every aircraft he could, even from the training units. Bombing was to continue all night, replicating the German practice of heavy incendiary attack, followed by high explosive, and then further incendiaries. Codenamed ABIGAIL RACHEL, Peirse chose Mannheim as his target and attacked it on 16–17 December ‘based on the experience we have gained from Coventry, Bristol etc.’ But because of poor weather only 101 out of a planned 235 aircraft could be sent. Most claimed to have bombed the target, but in fact the advance group of Wellingtons failed to mark the centre of the city, while other bombers scattered their loads widely over residential areas. There were 34 deaths and 476 houses were destroyed. When Peirse asked whether he could conduct a similar raid against Hanover, Churchill was non-committal.103
The city attacks were not repeated, though not from any moral qualms. The Blitz had finally eroded any serious concern about the morality of bombing the civilians of a state whose air force had killed almost 30,000 British civilians in four months. They were held in abeyance by the striking news given to the Cabinet in mid-December that the small effort against German oil targets had probably reduced German supplies by 15 per cent. The figure was a gross distortion of reality, as photo-reconnaissance intelligence of plants bombed in December made clear, but Portal snatched at the news as a chance to redeem Bomber Command at one of the many critical moments in its survival over the early war years. The air staff worked out that there were enough aircraft to knock out 17 oil plants and that the attack could be repeated every four months to ensure that they remained inoperable.104 The chiefs of staff approved the policy on 7 January 1941 and the War Cabinet a week later, with the rider that in adverse conditions area attacks might be made instead. The decision to focus on a single target made little sense in the light of what had already been learned about the pattern of German bombing, and the failure of the plan was evident within weeks. At the end of February 1941 Peirse had to confess to Portal that he had only been able to attack oil targets on three nights in the whole of January and February; towns had been attacked six times, but most of Bomber Command’s effort had in fact been devoted to German naval and port targets, which were easier to find and hit.105 The oil plan was a peculiar fantasy given the current technical capability and evident inaccuracy of the bomber force. Its failure was masked by the sudden decision taken by Churchill in early March to focus the effort of Bomber Command entirely on the Battle of the Atlantic to try to break the blockade imposed by German sea and air attack. Portal lacked Göring’s political muscle and was unable to resist the diversion. Naval priorities prevailed and for four months Bomber Command began a largely fruitless campaign against German submarine pens and warships.
By the time Bomber Command was permitted to return to priorities in Germany the weight of opinion inside and outside the RAF had consolidated in favour of morale attacks on working-class urban areas. Early in June 1941 the Air Ministry produced a new discussion document rejecting oil as a primary target. What was proposed was a compromise between what remained of the principle of precis
ion and the desire to replicate German area attacks. Using material supplied by the Ministry of Economic Warfare, a concerted attack on railway transport in the Ruhr-Rhineland area was proposed. Precise targets were to be located in city areas so that ‘ “shorts and overs” [which constituted most British bombs] will kill’. For most nights, however, it was proposed that the bomber force be used to attack the industrial workforce in the same Ruhr area.106 Following German practice, it was also suggested that city targets on or near water would be more suitable to make sure that a sufficient proportion of the attacking force could find them. On 9 July the new proposals were issued as a directive to Bomber Command, after the phrase ‘the morals of the German people’ had been altered to read ‘morale’. A list of suitable railway targets was appended with the caveat that for 75 per cent of any month bombers would not be able to see their targets clearly enough for precision; for three-quarters of each month Bomber Command was expected to undertake ‘heavy, concentrated and continuous attacks of working class and industrial areas’.107 There was no certainty how long this directive would remain in force. Peirse complained to Portal about the constant changes in priority: ‘I do not feel I am fully in touch with your ideas. I may be working with you or against you, I am not sure. But it is certainly difficult to work to any plan with this ever-changing background.’108 Peirse came to accept that winning the bombing war required ‘attack of the German people themselves’, and this part of the directive remained in place, in one form or another, for the rest of the war.109
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