The gesture did something to reinstate Bomber Command’s reputation, particularly with the British public impatient for more rapid progress, but the situation faced by both Bomber Command and the Eighth Air Force in the summer and early autumn of 1942 was more dangerous to the future of the bombing campaign than the crisis in 1941. The summer of 1942 represented a low point in Allied fortunes. The Pacific and southern Asia were dominated by a rampant Japan, held at bay by the victory at Midway in early June, but a formidable obstacle for sustained counter-attack. In North Africa the British Commonwealth forces abandoned most of Libya, lost Tobruk and retreated into Egypt. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel seemed poised to seize the Suez Canal. The Battle of the Atlantic had reached a critical point and on the Eastern Front German forces poured towards the oilfields of the Caucasus and the Volga city of Stalingrad. The many areas of crisis left Allied strategy in confusion and the bombing offensive was the unwitting victim of efforts to plug the many strategic gaps that were opening up with Axis success. Field Marshal Smuts, recruited to Churchill’s War Cabinet, urged the prime minister to send Bomber Command to North Africa where he thought it would do more good.218 To try to allay these pressures Harris wrote direct to Churchill to persuade him that Bomber Command was still the potentially war-winning instrument it had hoped to be two years before:
We ourselves are now at the crossroads. We are free, if we will, to employ our rapidly increasing air strength in the proper manner. In such a manner as would avail to knock Germany out of the War in a matter of months, if we decide upon the right course. If we decide upon the wrong course, then our Air power will now, and increasingly in the future, become inextricably implicated as a subsidiary weapon in the prosecution of vastly protracted and avoidable land and sea campaigns.219
Harris appended a document to show that his force had at present just 36 squadrons with 584 aircraft, or exactly 11 per cent of the entire RAF and Fleet Air Arm, and added that of this percentage half the operational effort went to help the Royal Navy. A few weeks later Harris calculated that his force had dwindled to 22 effective squadrons available for bombing Germany.220
In the last months of 1942 Bomber Command waited to see what the strategic outcome would be. Harris knew that the Command would benefit from a number of technical and tactical innovations that were in the pipeline. As predicted, ‘Gee’ had had a very short life. It was first jammed by German countermeasures on 4 August and a wide network of stations were set up to interfere regularly with the Gee transmissions. Two new systems had been in development at the Telecommunications Research Establishment. The first was known as ‘Oboe’ (the transmission noise resembled the sound of the instrument). Two ground radar transmitters, one at Dover and one at Cromer in Norfolk, emitted pulses which were received by an aircraft transmitter and relayed back to the master station, allowing an exact fix of the plane’s position. When the aircraft was over the aiming point, the second station sent out a bomb-release signal. The system was accurate but could only reach 270 miles into Germany, covering the Ruhr but little else, and could only be used by one aircraft at a time. The second system was a more radical innovation. Taking advantage of the British discovery of the cavity magnetron, which permitted much narrower radar wavelengths, an airborne radar device, H2S, was devised which gave a map of the ground area by recording stronger echoes from built-up areas. This could be used over longer distances and could not be jammed as beams could be. Both instruments were available for operational use in early 1943. Their potential effectiveness was magnified by the fortuitous development of a new fast twin-engine bomber, the de Havilland Mosquito. Begun initially as a private venture in October 1938, the aircraft was uniquely made of wood, and powered by two Rolls-Royce Merlin engines. It was designed as a light bomber and relied on its high speed to avoid enemy fighter interception. The Air Ministry showed little interest until Air Marshal Freeman, in charge of research and development, saw the aircraft late in 1939 and ordered work on a prototype. It first flew on 25 November 1940 and saw operational service a year later, where it was used extensively for daylight bombing. It could fly at almost 400 mph (faster than Battle of Britain fighters) and had a service ceiling of at least 28,000 feet. It was so difficult to intercept that it had lower losses than any other Bomber Command aircraft. Its special operational characteristics made it a natural choice for the new Pathfinder units, but in January 1943 there were still only 16 Mosquitos available as target markers.
Bomber Command was nevertheless unable to demonstrate after the Cologne raid of late May 1942 that it merited the kind of strategic profile that Harris had argued for in June. The hope that American entry into the war might soon lead to a strengthened bombing effort was undermined by the slow establishment of the Eighth Air Force, which until July did not know whether there would be time to mount any raids against German targets at all before starting direct preparations to aid a cross-Channel invasion. Even more than Bomber Command, the American bomber force lived in the future. The slow build-up of aircraft and personnel postponed any serious possibility of action against Germany into 1943. Table 5.2 shows the build-up of the Eighth Air Force during 1942, but none of the operations it describes took place over Germany.
Table 5.2: Eighth Bomber Command Operational Statistics, August–December 1942
Sources: AFHRA, Maxwell, AL, Eighth Air Force collection, 520.056–188, Statistical Summary of Eighth Air Force Operations, 17 August 1942–8 May 1945; Richard G. Davis, Carl A. Spaatz (Washington, DC: 1993), App 17.
Like the German Air Force and Bomber Command, an operational learning curve had to be followed before crews with no operational experience could be released against improving German defences. Pressure from Washington insisted that Spaatz and Eaker organize a demonstration to satisfy American and British opinion, and Arnold named Independence Day, 4 July, as the day to carry it out. Spaatz had no aircraft of his own, so he recruited six Douglas A-20 light bombers serving with the RAF to make a suicidal attack against four German airfields on the Dutch coast. The RAF colours were painted over and the six aircraft sent off on the morning of the 4 July. By the end, one third of the force was lost, seven aircrew were dead and one a prisoner. Three weeks later a surviving crewman committed suicide. The press on both sides of the Atlantic made the most of the raid, but it was a futile gesture.221 Arnold pressed his commanders to speed up the organization of real operations. The United States bomber offensive was launched on 17 August with an attack by 12 Boeing B-17 ‘Flying Fortress’ bombers on the railway sheds at Rouen in northern France. Eaker flew with the mission, which was protected by RAF fighters. All aircraft returned safely after striking the target. Ten days later, after three more missions over occupied Europe, Eaker reported to Spaatz the current assessments of accuracy. The bomb plots seemed to show that 90 per cent of the bombs dropped fell within a one-mile radius of the aiming point, almost half within 500 yards. He concluded from this that daytime bombing with the Norden bombsight was 10 times more accurate than RAF night-bombing. Limited though this experience was, Eaker, like Harris, thought that Allied bombing by day and night would be adequate ‘completely to dislocate German industry and communications’.222 But unlike the British and German learning curve, the early raids convinced the American side that daylight raids were possible.
While Harris waited for a response from Churchill on the future of the offensive, the prime minister flew to Moscow on 12 August for urgent talks with Stalin. The object was to explain to Stalin why the Western powers had decided in July to abandon the idea of a cross-Channel invasion in 1942. The meeting was famously combative: Stalin argued against every explanation provided by Churchill in insulting terms until the point when Churchill explained the plans for an Anglo-American bomber offensive. Roosevelt’s representative, Averell Harriman, wired back the result to his leader: ‘Stalin took over the argument himself and said that homes as well as factories should be destroyed … Between the two of them they soon destroyed most of the important industrial
cities in Germany.’223 Harris and Spaatz were both fortunate that bombing was still required in summer 1942 as a means to placate the Soviet Union over the failure to open a second front. Although Churchill knew about the poor progress of the offensive, it could not easily be abandoned now that there was to be no cross-Channel operation. On 17 August Churchill asked Portal and Sinclair to lay on an operation against Berlin to show Stalin that he had been in earnest, but he was told that Harris regarded the operation as too costly with only 300 serviceable bombers and a great many inexperienced crews. Though Churchill argued angrily in favour of an attack, Harris told Portal that it would seriously damage the expansion of the Command. ‘As I have frequently pointed out to you,’ he wrote in late August, ‘Bomber Command is now quite definitely too small for the tasks it is expected to carry out.’224
As a result, when Harris asked Churchill for a ‘firm and final decision’ on 4 September about the future of the bomber offensive, he received a guarded response. Churchill remained committed to bombing Germany, since he could not easily terminate such a conspicuous element of Britain’s war effort, but he thought it would have no decisive results in 1943 nor bring the war to an end; ‘better than doing nothing,’ he concluded.225 This was a view widely shared in military and political circles by the autumn of 1942, for whom the chief priority was breaking the submarine blockade, using bombers if necessary, and supporting American participation in the ground offensives planned for North Africa and Europe. Leo Amery, one of Churchill’s Cabinet colleagues, found the Harris memorandum ‘entirely unconvincing’ and thought bombers should be used for ‘tactical co-operation with the army and navy’.226 One of the scientists at the Air Warfare Analysis Section warned the Air Ministry that Bomber Command could not hit enough of Germany industry to do any decisive damage. ‘I am aware that this view of night bombing,’ he continued, ‘is shared by a very large number of thoughtful people.’227 When the chiefs of staff considered the future of the bombing campaign in November 1942, Portal was subjected to a hostile cross-examination by his colleagues. General Alan Brooke, chief of the imperial general staff, thought the air force lacked a clear plan of campaign, underestimated the German defences, exaggerated the possible bomblift and overstated the damage likely with blind bombing. The one slim advantage, he concluded, was its political value, bringing ‘the horrors of war home to the German people’.228
Harris took out his own frustration on others. He deplored the decision by the Canadian bomber squadrons, which composed a growing fraction of the Command, ‘to huddle into a corner by themselves’, even more the prospect of supplying them with Lancaster bombers at the expense of British crews.229 He was scathing about the American Eighth Air Force, despite the public image of friendly collaboration, for taking airfields in East Anglia away from British squadrons, forcing them to fly dangerous return routes to bases further west and north, and without contributing ‘the smallest assistance’ to the bombing campaign against Germany. He asked the Air Ministry to challenge American leaders to state categorically ‘whether it is their intention to proceed with the air bombardment of Germany’, and, if so, when it would start. If no adequate answer was forthcoming, Harris recommended taking some of the airfields back, to which the Ministry gave qualified agreement.230 To Portal he sent a bitterly sarcastic denunciation of the efforts to divert his force to what he called panacea targets: ‘In sum,’ he concluded, ‘they spell the end of our effective Bomber offensive against Germany.’ He spent the rest of the war grimly contesting every attempt by what he called ‘Panacea Target mongers’ and ‘Diversionists’ to prevent him bombing city areas.231
There was little that Bomber Command could do over the autumn months to still the chorus of complaints. Evidence from attacks on Germany showed that despite the advent of the Pathfinders, levels of accuracy were still strikingly low. In December 1942 the government scientist Henry Tizard asked the Command for details of its performance in recent weeks against Ruhr targets and was told that in good weather around one-third of bombs were landing within three miles of the aiming point, but in most raids the figure was still 15 per cent, and sometimes zero.232 Surveys of raids on Mainz and Munich showed a wide spread of bombs, with most incendiaries destined for Munich falling in open country. ‘There is at the present time,’ wrote Bufton in response to these findings, ‘a lack of grasp throughout the Command of a common tactical doctrine.’233 There was also no effective way of measuring what impact the bombing was having on the German economy, military machine and popular morale. During 1942 the Command dropped 37,192 tons of bombs on German soil compared with 22,996 in 1941, but not only did most of these bombs fail to hit the target area, the raids cost some 2,716 bombers lost on operations or through accident.234 The first scientific analysis of a major raid was supplied in November 1942 by division RE8 of the Research and Experiments Department, which used British models to calculate the likely degree of homelessness, lost man-months and financial cost of the 1,000-bomber raid on Cologne seven months before. The first statistical assessments of acreage destroyed and of the ratio between high-explosive and incendiary damage were only ready in January 1943.235 Until then, claims that cities had been wiped out or obliterated were mere guesswork. In fact, during 1942 the damage to German economy and society remained limited. A small number of spectacular raids in the late spring had not been sustained and the German civil defence and repair organization coped with the consequences with little pressure. The German economy cushioned the bombing and expanded weapons output by more than 50 per cent during the year. Post-war calculations in the US Bombing Survey suggested a loss of potential overall production of 2.5 per cent due to British bombing, or roughly half the impact of the German Blitz on Britain. During the course of 1942 4,900 Germans had been killed, two for every bomber lost.236 The one solid achievement was to compel the German enemy to divert aircraft, guns and ammunition to defence against bombing, when they could have been used for the fighting fronts in Italy and Russia.
At the chiefs of staff meeting on 18 November 1942, Churchill opened the discussion on bombing with the remark that at the moment it had ‘petered out’. He continued that the answer was not megalomania – a none-too-oblique reference to Harris – but a more modest and achievable programme.237 There are a number of familiar explanations given for the failure to produce an operationally effective and sustained bomber offensive in the first three years of war – economic restraints on aircraft production, the demands of other theatres, the long programme of training and preparation – but none of them is sufficient to understand why evident tactical, operational and technical changes were not made sooner and consistently or a clear and convincing plan devised (or indeed why the whole strategy was not abandoned in favour of using the resources more productively). By the autumn of 1942 neither the British nor American air forces had a bombing plan beyond destroying working-class districts and attacking a limited number of industrial objectives in western Germany, and no effective effort had been made to evaluate what even this modest programme might achieve strategically. The British War Cabinet finally asked the Joint Planning Staff to draw up a bombing plan in late August 1942, but nothing was approved before the end of the year.238 Roosevelt the same month ordered Arnold to produce a comprehensive plan for the future air war, and the result, AWPD-42, was the clearest outline yet produced of how a bombing offensive should be organized and with what object, though it was still not a definite operational directive. Arnold complained to Harry Hopkins a few weeks later that what was still missing was ‘a simple, direct plan, tied to a definite date’.239 American frustration at the lack of strategic direction and the slow build-up of the Eighth Air Force made Arnold decide to send Spaatz to join Eisenhower in North Africa with a view to eventually making him overall commander of all American air forces in Europe. Spaatz was reluctant to lose operational control of the Eighth Air Force, which was now taken over by Eaker, while the start of operations in Africa, as had been feared, diverted the bombing effo
rt to the Battle of the Atlantic and postponed even longer the start of American bombing over Germany.240
The most remarkable failure in the British offensive was the slow development of target-finding and marking, the dilatory development of effective electronic aids, marker bombs and bombsights, and the inability to relate means and ends more rationally to maximize effectiveness and cope with enemy defences. The lengthy learning curve cost Bomber Command 14,000 dead from September 1939 to September 1942. A central explanation is the poorly defined relationship between the Air Ministry, the Air Staff and the commanding officers. A great deal of responsibility was delegated to the commander-in-chief, which in turn was delegated to the Group commanders in the field. This created a wide gap between the essential scientific and tactical evaluation available from the staff in the Ministry and the officers whose task it was to organize operations. The Ministry of Economic Warfare in a letter to the Air Minister observed that this gap reduced the prospect of learning from experience and of collectively evaluating the best use to be made of the bomber force. The Ministry wanted a greater say in bombing operations, and was thus a scarcely neutral observer, but the predicament was a real one, made worse by Harris’s strident defence of his independence.241 At the same time, directives were worked out by Ministry officials for the Air Staff with too little reference to the commanders in the field on questions of technical requirements and operational feasibility, and with no clearly articulated strategy behind them, since this was not the officials’ job. The result, as a memorandum produced in May 1942 suggested, was ‘considerable criticism and loss of faith on both sides’.242 The crews were caught between these two poles, asked to perform impossible tasks, taking high casualties and receiving little explanation for the wider purpose of their missions. Bufton, himself a former squadron commander, summed up this sense of frustration: ‘They feel that they can do more than they are doing; they grope somewhat blindly in an effort to find where the failure lies.’243
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 41