Bomber Command found itself in a state of limbo in the last months of 1941 and the first two months of 1942. The crews were only too aware of the crisis surrounding their commander-in-chief and the failures of the force. Over 3,000 had been casualties during 1941. In December the Directorate of Bombing Operations investigated the views of the Group commanders about the state of the force and found evidence of a feeling of ‘hopelessness and ineffectiveness’ among the operational units, largely on account of the difficulties in navigating and target-marking. When they found a target, the report continued, ‘they stumbled on it more by luck than judgement’.158 The overwhelming evidence that British raids were still widespread and ineffective exposed Bomber Command to close scrutiny by the chiefs of staff. The talk in the interregnum imposed by Peirse’s redeployment was about the possibility of winding up the offensive. In a note on the ‘Use of the Bomber Force’ drafted early in 1942, the government scientist Patrick Blackett speculated that with a few more reverses the navy and army might insist on the ‘dismemberment of the Air Force as a unit’.159 Sir Stafford Cripps, Lord Privy Seal, told the House of Commons late in February 1942, winding up a debate on the current strategic situation, that bombing strategy was among the things under consideration: ‘the Government are fully aware of the other uses to which our resources could be put’.160 The day before this speech the new deputy director of bombing operations, Group Captain Sydney Bufton, fresh from command of a bomber squadron and a champion of concentration and target-marking, warned his superior of the situation now faced by the Command:
At the present time there is a great deal of criticism of our strategic bombing offensive. This is being voiced not only in Army and Navy circles and in Parliament, but also more generally by members of the public. The criticism cannot be countered by promises of results which we expect to obtain in the future, and rightly cannot be met by evidence of any decisive results which our bomber force has achieved in the past. These results so far have been nebulous, inconsistent and indecisive.161
One week before this a new commander-in-chief had been appointed to Bomber Command – Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris.
HARRIS AND THE AMERICANS
Harris was in Washington on the morning the Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941. He had been sent in July as a member of the delegation negotiating for American aircraft deliveries to the RAF. His telegrams back to London said much about his personality. In September he dismissed the prospect of American belligerency – ‘these people are not going to fight … they have nothing to fight with’ – and thought they engaged in ‘plain double cross’ in reducing aircraft allocations to Britain.162 Harris complained to Air Chief Marshal Freeman, vice chief of the air staff, about how hard it was to carry out missionary work ‘with a people so arrogant as to their own ability and infallibility as to be comparable only to the Jews and the Roman Catholics’. The problem, Harris continued, was the American conviction ‘of their own superiority and super efficiency – and of our mental, physical and moral decrepitude’.163 During the morning of 8 December he was summoned to see Henry Stimson, Roosevelt’s Secretary for War, and Robert Lovett, Assistant Secretary for the Army Air Forces, to discuss supplies for Britain in the wake of the Japanese attack. ‘They were dazed,’ Harris wrote to Portal, ‘and Stimson himself hardly able to speak.’ The American politicians asked Harris to give back at once 250 aircraft already supplied to the RAF so that they could defend Hawaii. Harris telegrammed Portal for urgent instructions about what to ‘save from the wreck if wreck is unavoidable’.164 Two weeks later Portal arrived in Washington to attend the first major wartime conference between Roosevelt, Churchill and the Allied military chiefs. During the first week of January 1942, Portal told Harris that he wanted him to replace Peirse; Harris agreed and Churchill approved the appointment, which was made official from 22 February 1942, after Harris had sailed back to England.165
The Japanese attack promised to transform the bombing war more certainly than the German invasion of the Soviet Union because it brought into the conflict a power capable of colossal military output, and an air force already committed to the concept of long-range strategic bombing. Yet the outcome of the Arcadia Conference in Washington between 22 December 1941 and 14 January 1942 left the bomber offensive as one small part of the wider strategic objectives agreed between the two leaders. On the way to the conference Churchill cabled to Roosevelt a long memorandum on Allied strategy, which included a short passage on bombing asking the United States to send at least 20 bomber squadrons to help boost Britain’s offensive. ‘Our own bomber programme,’ he added, ‘has fallen short of our hopes.’166 During the 12 meetings between the British and American teams, however, bombing was discussed only once, when the US side insisted that their bombers would be manned only by American crews, confirming that Britain would get no further heavy bombers from American production.167 In the list of strategic priorities bombing was included as a contribution to item ‘(d)’: ‘wearing down and undermining German resistance by air bombardment, blockade, subversive activities and propaganda’.168 On 7 January Churchill, briefly in Florida for his health, summed up what the two men had agreed. Bombing hardly featured except for Churchill’s fears that the Blitz might be renewed. He assumed that most American air power, including the bombers, would have to focus on the Pacific War for the coming year.169 The role of bombing in Allied strategy for the foreseeable future was regarded as modest and peripheral.
The Americans were not unprepared for involvement in the European bombing war. Indeed as early as 1935 American airmen had begun thinking about building bomber aircraft that could fly across the Atlantic to project long-distance air power against a hostile state. Writing in 1939, General Arnold, Chief of the Army Air Corps, addressed the question ‘Can We Be Bombed?’ and concluded that the answer was yes: ‘We are vulnerable to bombing. Such bombing is feasible.’170 On the day the German army invaded in the west, 10 May 1940, Arnold proposed the development of a new bomber with a 4,000-mile radius of action capable of attacking European ports to disrupt ‘the launching of expeditionary forces against the Western hemisphere’.171 During 1940 and 1941 the US Army Air Forces had been instructed by Arnold to collect detailed intelligence information on German industrial and economic targets, much of it supplied by the British Air Ministry. Consistent with air force thinking, this material was designed to support the idea that attacks against the vulnerable industrial web would unravel the enemy’s capacity to make war. When Roosevelt instructed the American armed forces to draw up a ‘Victory Program’ in the summer of 1941, the air force was asked to prepare a plan of the resources needed to fulfil a strategic air campaign against Germany. In six stifling days in Washington in August 1941, a team assembled by Lt. Colonel Harold George worked day and night to produce a detailed plan for a putative offensive. The result was AWPD-1, a detailed survey of 154 German targets in three key target areas: electric power, fuel oils and communications. Production of 11,800 heavy bombers, to be employed on precision bombing in daylight, was considered sufficient for the task, though the air force currently had only a few hundred. Unlike the RAF, which had never embraced a serious counter-force strategy, the American planners – like the German Air Force in 1940 – assumed that enemy air power would be an essential intermediate target, whose destruction would make the obliteration of the primary objectives possible.172 Morale was not considered a useful target and was not included on the list. Unlike the RAF, the American planners did not argue about the legality of bombing urban targets or hitting civilians.173 The German economic web, with its vital centres, was treated as an abstraction; the metaphor of the ‘social body’ created a language that distanced those planning the bombing from the reality of civilian deaths.
Roosevelt was pleased with the plan. He had supported American air rearmament steadily since 1938 and in spring 1941 authorized a schedule of production which included 500 heavy four-engine bombers a month.174 Despite his appeal in September 1
939 to avoid bombing civilians, he shared Churchill’s uncritical view that bombing was a possible war winner in the face of German aggression. He had a long personal hostility to Germany and the Germans, and an abhorrence of Hitlerism. American reports sent back to Washington at the start of the war in Poland highlighted the ruthless destruction of Polish towns from the air and underlined how shallow had been Hitler’s positive response to Roosevelt’s plea.175 Roosevelt, like Churchill, proved susceptible to the extravagant fears of German air power and scientific ingenuity painted by unreliable intelligence. Since the Munich crisis, when the president had advocated to his Cabinet the idea that European states should bomb Germany in concert to halt Hitler’s aggression, Roosevelt had retained extravagant notions of what air power might achieve. His special adviser Harry Hopkins noted in August 1941 Roosevelt’s conviction that bombing was ‘the only means of gaining a victory’.176 In the United States as in Britain the air forces became the unexpected beneficiaries of political support at the highest level, without which the complaints and blandishments of the other services would have been more difficult to resist.
The sudden coming of war with Japan, Germany and Italy in December 1941 nevertheless exposed how flimsy were the American preparations made so far. The United States possessed no strategic bomber force and had to build one from scratch. Most of the small number of B-17 ‘Flying Fortress’ bombers were stationed in Hawaii and the Philippines to protect against possible Japanese aggression. A real fear was the possibility of air attack either on the Eastern seaboard from German bases or by Japanese carrier aircraft from the Pacific. Civil defence preparations were already in place, organized by the Office of Civilian Defense set up in May 1941, and were activated at once in vulnerable areas on the outbreak of war. War-essential factories in coastal areas were ordered to begin a programme of camouflage and to black out windows with black paper and layers of opaque paint. All aircraft plant, even in areas not obviously exposed to risk, had to prepare concealment and obscurement plans while the American Chemical Warfare Service developed units to distribute a five-mile smokescreen around vulnerable targets.177 Air-raid wardens patrolled Washington streets to enforce the blackout drills, and in June 1942 it was decided that coastal cities should operate a permanent ‘dim-out’ against the threat of air raids, with veiled vehicle lighting and low-visibility street lamps.178
Strict civil defence instructions were issued for the control of traffic during air-raid alerts and in August 1942 the Federal Works Agency produced a 173-page air-raid protection code, covering every subject from behaviour in air-raid shelters to compulsory fire-watching. As in Britain, dispersed sheltering was favoured, with no more than 50 people in any one shelter, but unlike the European experience, basements and cellars were regarded as hazardous. In tall buildings with a reinforced skeleton it was recommended that shelters should be constructed on the upper floors, though not on the top floor; the exact position could be calculated by working out the load-bearing properties of the ceiling once debris had collapsed onto it. The structure of the air-raid precautions system resembled the British, with volunteer auxiliary firemen, fire-watching units, first-aid volunteers, decontamination and rescue battalions.179
The Office of Civilian Defense, run in 1942 by James Landis, a Harvard law professor, was responsible for organizing the volunteer and full-time personnel. Thousands of Americans spent much of the war period engaged in drills and practices that made increasingly less sense as the war went on, though continued speculation about the possibility of German bombing kept the civil defence force in being. In May 1943 there were fears after German defeat in Tunisia that Hitler would seek a propaganda coup by launching bombing aircraft from German submarines against East Coast cities. The gas threat was also an ever-present anxiety. In June 1943 Roosevelt announced that any use of gas by the Axis powers would provoke immediate retaliation ‘throughout the whole extent of the territory’ of the enemy state.180 As in Europe, civil defence was also designed to get the American public to identify with the war effort as democratic participants; since American bombing was predicated on attacking the social and economic web of the enemy, the American people could now be viewed as an active part of the war. The Civilian Defense journal was deliberately titled Civilian Front to reflect war in the modern age. This rationale was explained by Landis in an editorial in 1943:
Civilian Defense is more than insurance for ourselves. It is a military duty. Modern war is not confined to battle lines. It is all the arms, resources and production of one people against all the arms, resources and production of another. A food warehouse or a machine tool plant 3,000 miles from the spot where the land forces are locked in combat is as legitimate a military objective as a pillbox on the battle line … That is our assignment and it is a military assignment as definite as that given an armed task force ordered to take and hold an enemy position.181
Imagination rather than reality shaped these views as they had in pre-war Europe, but in the eyes of the American public they helped to legitimate American bombing of German urban targets when this began early in 1943.
The American bombing campaign took a long time to evolve. The Eighth Air Force was activated on 28 January 1942 in Savannah, Georgia, under the initial command of Colonel Asa Duncan. Because of the commitment made at the Arcadia Conference to mount an invasion of Europe, or possibly North Africa, during the coming year, the Eighth Air Force was expected to play an air support role as well as prepare for strategic operations from airfields in England. Arnold sent Colonel Ira Eaker to Britain to establish contact with Bomber Command and to learn about its operations. Eaker met Harris in Washington before they both left in late February and an immediate rapport was established between the two men, despite the differences in their personality: Eaker was diffident and earnest, Harris opinionated and brusque. Eaker arrived in London on 21 February, a day before Harris assumed command at High Wycombe. After a period staying with Harris, Eaker in April set up an American headquarters in the nearby Wycombe Abbey School for Girls, after the pupils had been forced to leave. Codenamed PINETREE, the site became the command centre for the Eighth Bomber Command, with Eaker (now Brig. General) as its commander, but as yet with no aircraft or personnel.182 It was made clear from the start that the American force was not under RAF command, though it was expected to learn a great deal from British experience. Eaker wrote to Harris later in the summer that he regarded him as ‘the senior member in our firm – the older brother in our bomber team’.183 Arnold appointed Maj. General Carl Spaatz, one of the most senior American airmen, as overall commander of the Eighth Air Force, including its fighter, reconnaissance and service branches, but Spaatz remained in the United States for five months while the air force organization was established, the training programmes initiated, and the service and procurement system organized. He finally took over from Duncan on 10 May 1942.184 Both Eaker and Spaatz were selected by Arnold because they had shared with him the struggle to establish American air forces during the years of isolation and both supported his view of the strategic importance of independent air power. Spaatz had visited Britain in July and August 1940 and had been unimpressed by what appeared to be indiscriminate German night-bombing, but impressed by the possibility that daylight bombing in close formation could afford sufficient protection against fighter penetration and achieve greater bombing precision.185 These were lessons that governed the operational and tactical development of the American bomber force in 1942 and 1943.
The first echelon of American Air Force personnel arrived on 11 May, a second one a week later, but the first 180 aircraft only arrived in mid-July, and just 40 were heavy bombers. American planning, unlike British, had to be based from the start on the assumption that an invasion might take place somewhere in 1942, so that most of the initial aircraft deliveries were of light or medium bombers for army support roles at the expense of a strategic bombing capability.186 Until the decision taken by Churchill and Roosevelt in July 1942, against strong America
n objection, to undertake a limited invasion in North Africa (codenamed ‘Torch’), American air planning had to be based on the assumption that a landing in France would be undertaken before October. The result would have been to divert American aircraft almost entirely to a role in support of surface forces, and this possibility compromised the early efforts to turn the Eighth Air Force into a principally strategic force. The prospect of an invasion of Europe (codenamed ‘Sledgehammer’) also prompted the head of the American military mission (Special Observer Group) appointed in spring 1941, Maj. General James Chaney, to insist that Eaker and Spaatz integrate with his organization rather than set up a new independent command. The jurisdictional battle was resolved only because Eaker refused to be based in London under Chaney’s close supervision. The arguments over invasion also affected relations with the British, who tried to insist for the sake of operational efficiency that American fighter aircraft be absorbed into RAF Fighter Command and that at least 400 American heavy bombers should be given in the first instance to Bomber Command, which could utilize them immediately. Arnold visited London in late May 1942 and succeeded in reducing this demand to a tentative 54 but could not promise that American-flown bombers would be in action much before the autumn.187 He found London very different from his last visit during the Blitz: ‘men, women and children have lost that expression of dreaded expectancy,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘they have a cheerful look on their faces … Pianos are playing, men are whistling. London is changed.’188 He returned to Washington with enough achieved to prevent the further emasculation of the Eighth Air Force’s still non-existent capability.
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 39