6
The Combined Bomber Offensive: Germany 1943–5
At lunchtime on 18 January 1943, Air Vice Marshal John Slessor, RAF assistant chief of staff, sat on top of the roof of the Anfa Hotel in Casablanca watching ‘the long Atlantic rollers breaking on the beaches’ while he sketched out a compromise agreement between the American and British chiefs of staff over the future of Allied strategy. Chief of Staff Charles Portal then read it through and changed a few words. In the list of strategic commitments jotted in his notebook, Slessor had included: ‘The heaviest possible bomber offensive from the UK against GERMANY direct.’1 His hastily concocted notes were typed up and agreed when the Combined Chiefs of Staff reassembled for the afternoon session and became the basis for the document on Allied strategy endorsed by Roosevelt and Churchill three days later. Slessor elaborated the idea of a heavy-bomber offensive into a full draft directive, and this was presented to the Combined Chiefs on 21 January with only minor changes in the wording. It was approved and the Casablanca Directive for a joint bomber offensive against Germany was released as policy document CCS 166 two days later.2
The Casablanca Conference (14–24 January) came at a critical point for the Allies. Stalin declined to come, being too occupied with the battle of Stalingrad, so the discussions focused on the future of Western Allied strategy. At stake was the balance between expanding the Mediterranean theatre of war, which the United States had joined with the landings of Operation Torch in November 1942, and the plan to open a Second Front in France in 1943 or 1944. For the bomber forces there was more at stake. The conference opened at the end of a period of growing criticism of Bomber Command and the Eighth Air Force; it presented both forces with the opportunity to argue their case for sticking with an independent bombing strategy. This entailed a public-relations exercise to sell bombing to a potentially sceptical audience. General Arnold instructed his staff to prepare detailed statistics, maps, reports and coloured charts for him to take to Casablanca, a list of props that ran to over three pages.3 Harris took pains to ensure that a regular flow of publicity material, including good aerial photographs of damaged cities, reached the American press. The Air Ministry organized an exhibition in Washington in early January 1943, which was visited by Vice President Henry Wallace and later taken to the White House to show to Roosevelt. Wallace, it was reported, was ‘completely sold on the necessity of bombing Germany’ as a result of what he had seen, and keen to pass on his impressions to the president. The RAF delegation in America thought of producing a film to assist Arnold’s efforts to present the bombing offensive to the American public.4 At Casablanca, Arnold fielded a full team with both Eaker and Spaatz in attendance to argue the air force case; Portal had chosen to take Slessor, who was a sociable air force diplomat with planning experience, rather than Harris, whose bluntness would have been out of place in the delicate discussions to follow.
It is difficult to assess whether these propaganda efforts really affected the final decision to approve a combined offensive. The outcome for the two bomber forces was in the end mixed. The Casablanca Directive was a loosely worded document, a set of hopeful intentions rather than a clear plan ‘that could have been made by any schoolboy’, as one senior RAF officer later put it.5 Months went by before a real planning document was produced. It was also designed to fit in with the priorities of the other services and the political leadership. Bombing was accepted at Casablanca as one way of weakening Germany before invasion rather than as an independent offensive in its own right, the same role that the German Air Force had had before the aborted Operation Sea Lion. Bombing survived as an option not because it was central to the strategic outlook of the Western allies, but because it was secondary.
THE CASABLANCA DIRECTIVE
Straightforward as the final decision for CCS 166 has seemed to later historians, the conference highlighted many of the conflicts and arguments that surrounded the bombing campaign in the last months of 1942. The commitment of the two war leaders and their military staffs to a sustained bombing campaign was not a foregone conclusion. Churchill had shown increasing impatience with Bomber Command since August 1942, when he had assured Stalin on his visit to Moscow that a heavy raid on Berlin was imminent. Harris refused to attack the German capital until he had an adequate force at his disposal and the eventual raid, codenamed ‘Tannenberg’, only took place on 17 January, in the middle of the conference, long after Stalin too had lost patience with the constant delays.6 In the end Churchill had to be content with sending Stalin a list of the 16 German cities that had been attacked between July and September 1942. Not until March 1943 did Stalin finally acknowledge the news that Berlin had been raided, more than six months after Churchill’s first promise.7 There was impatience, too, in both London and Washington, with the slow progress of the Eighth Air Force. Churchill thought that American bombers should be allocated to the war at sea and support for the landings of Operation Torch, and the plans for a daylight offensive against Germany be abandoned. In December Spaatz warned Eaker that the Eighth had to start operations ‘projected into Germany’ or face the prospect of diversion to the Mediterranean theatre, but the first American raid on a German target was launched only on 27 January 1943, when 59 bombers attacked the port at Wilhelmshaven three days after the end of the conference.8 Arnold later reported to his chief of staff that at Casablanca he had been put permanently on the defensive by the British and American delegations ‘for not having our heavy bombers bombard Germany’.9
The air forces’ case at Casablanca had to be made to a disillusioned audience and it had to be made as far as possible together. Yet from the autumn of 1942 there were evident strains in the relationship between the RAF and the US Army Air Forces, despite the public commitment to combined operations. Both air forces realized that bombing had to be presented as a more coherent strategic option than it had offered for much of 1942. In September 1942 Portal and Slessor drew up a paper on ‘Future Strategy’, which argued for a combined offensive that would create the conditions for an easier invasion of Continental Europe by weakening German resistance and might knock Italy out of the war entirely, but no effort was made to articulate what kind of bombing was needed and against which targets.10 Arnold bemoaned the absence of any definite plan from a British air force ‘without strength in any one place to win decisively’.11 On 19 September 1942 his planning staff in Washington produced a detailed operational plan, AWPD-42, which resembled the British commitment to wearing Germany down prior to a land invasion, but spelt out in fine detail how this was to be achieved. The American plan committed their bomber force to bomb by day a list of 177 targets vital to the German war effort, dropping 132,090 tons of bombs on 66,045 operational sorties; the seven chosen target systems were the German Air Force, submarine building, communications, electric power, oil, alumina and synthetic rubber. A counter-force strategy against the German fighter fleet was described as a key intermediate aim, whose achievement would make it possible to complete the rest of the programme in time for invasion, but counter-force strategy never appealed to the RAF.12 Portal told Arnold politely that he had read AWPD-42 ‘with great interest’, but it does not seem to have brought the two sides to a common view except that bombing mattered to ultimate victory. Arnold complained to the American Joint Chiefs at Casablanca that the British in his view seemed incapable of thinking in global strategic terms but simply chased ‘the next operation’; he did not think the British ‘had ever had a definite bombing program’, and at his insistence the Combined Chiefs of Staff were asked to draft a priority bombing programme, which provided the trigger for the Casablanca Directive a few days later. Even this amounted to a compromise between the British statement of general aims about undermining German morale and American articulation of a list of priority targets.13
The most awkward issue at Casablanca was the argument over daylight bombing. This had been a running sore through 1942 as the Eighth Air Force built up its capability. Churchill was strongly scepti
cal of the claim that daylight bombing would work. Neither the RAF nor the German Air Force had been able to sustain daylight operations against effective fighter and anti-aircraft defences, and until January 1943 the Eighth Air Force had only flown against light resistance in France. Churchill began a sustained campaign in autumn 1942 to persuade the American side that day-bombing was too risky over Germany: ‘They will probably experience a heavy disaster,’ he minuted to Portal, ‘as soon as they do.’14 Churchill thought it more sensible for American bombers and crew to be converted for night work and integrated with Bomber Command. In October he asked Dwight D. Eisenhower, recently appointed Supreme Commander for Operation Torch, if American bombers could not be changed over to night-fighting.15 On the advice of both Portal and Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Air Minister, Churchill restrained himself from pressing the point too far in case the American leadership decided to switch their bombing effort to another theatre. RAF leaders waited to see what would happen with daylight attacks before deciding whether to insist that the American Air Force accept the alternative of night-bombing.16 The American Air Force delegates at Casablanca knew that this was an argument they had to win. After clearing the request with Eisenhower on 13 January, Arnold invited Eaker to fly to Morocco to help him present the case for the American offensive. Arnold warned him at once that Churchill had already suggested to Roosevelt that the Eighth Air Force switch to night-bombing under RAF control. Eaker was asked to draft notes for ‘The Case for Day Bombing’; he prepared a one-page synopsis with seven principal arguments to show to Churchill and a fuller version to help Arnold influence the Combined Chiefs of Staff.17
Although it was unlikely that Churchill would get his way, given the weight of British and American opinion in favour of trying out the day-bombing experiment, the risk existed that Roosevelt would be too preoccupied with other issues to notice. At a high-level discussion with the president on 18 January, Eisenhower and Spaatz secured agreement that neither bomber force should have the right to ‘alter the technique or method of operating’ of the other. American fears that Harris might be placed in overall command of a joint bomber offensive were set aside by the decision to make Portal, who was a popular choice with the Americans, the nominal director of the whole bombing campaign.18 On 20 January Eaker was given a brief appointment to see Churchill so that he could present his paper. Churchill greeted him dressed up in the uniform of an RAF air commodore and the two men sat down on a couch to talk. The prime minister read aloud the page-long list of reasons for day-bombing. Eaker later recalled that when he came to the sentence about round-the-clock bombing, Churchill ‘rolled the words off his tongue as if they were tasty morsels’.19 Later that day Churchill was heard to remark, ‘Eaker almost convinced me’, but he had nonetheless agreed to give day-bombing over Germany a preliminary trial. At a meeting that evening Roosevelt and the army chief of staff, General Marshall, also gave daylight bombing their blessing and the following day Slessor was able to draft his directive for bombing by day and by night, one of the few features of the subsequent combined campaign on which both sides were agreed.20
The records of the many discussions held at Casablanca give little hint of the arguments over bombing taking place in the wings. In the minutes of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff the bombing campaign was mentioned briefly only three times; during the plenary sessions bombing was discussed on only two occasions, again at no length. In the list of priorities finally agreed by the Combined Chiefs the critical issues were the commitment to an invasion of Italian territory in the Mediterranean and an eventual campaign in north-west Europe, for which bombing would be a necessary prelude to maximize the chances of success for a major combined-arms operation. Churchill telegraphed the War Cabinet from Morocco the results of the conference, but included no mention of bombing.21 The army and navy commanders at Casablanca devoted almost nothing in their memoirs to the arguments over bomber strategy. The projection of air power against Germany was essentially subsidiary to the wider strategic intention of re-occupying Europe during 1943 and 1944. The Casablanca Directive itself was a brief set of instructions to destroy and dislocate the German ‘military, industrial and economic system’ and to undermine the morale of the German people to the point where the German power of resistance was ‘fatally weakened’. This was worded in terms that were permissive rather than prescriptive, and its force was immediately compromised by the list of other tasks bombing could be called upon to perform: bombing the submarine bases in France; attacking Berlin to keep the Russians happy; a campaign against Italy when required; objectives of fleeting importance (including German naval vessels); and full support ‘whenever Allied Armies re-enter the Continent’.22 This was a wish-list that encouraged the continued dispersion of Allied bomber forces.
When Eaker arrived back in England on 26 January he ordered the first American raid on Germany for the following day, and then dined that night with Harris to discuss what had happened. Two days later Norman Bottomley, the deputy chief of staff, was asked to send the new directive to Bomber Command. His original letter included the decision to make Portal responsible for the strategic direction of the bomber offensive, but Portal thought it more prudent not to advertise the change to his prickly subordinate, and on 4 February Harris was sent only the Casablanca Directive.23 Although it was suggested that the new directive replaced the one issued to Bomber Command in February 1942, it is clear that Harris did not regard it as anything more than a statement of intent. In his memoirs Slessor described the Casablanca Directive, which he had drafted, as a policy statement rather than a proper directive.24 Both air forces could read into it what they wanted.
A COMBINED OFFENSIVE? JANUARY–JULY 1943
In the last months of 1942 the term ‘combined offensive’ began to be used more commonly. In August 1942 the Joint Planning Staff had drawn up recommendations for a concerted Anglo-American programme of bombing which provided the background for the eventual directive at Casablanca.25 The preamble to AWPD-42 stipulated that the offensive was ‘a combined effort’ of the two air forces, the one concentrating on destroying precision objectives by day, the RAF on night-bombing of areas to break down morale. The passage was underlined to give it added force.26 The combination was little more than a marriage of convenience. American air forces based their planning and preparation on isolating and destroying Germany’s key industrial and economic targets and eliminating German air power – much as the German Air Force had done against Britain – while Bomber Command continued, when able, its unremitting destruction of the central areas of German industrial cities.
Like any marriage of convenience, the partners had separate beds. There had been suggestions before Casablanca that there should be a single commander for the bomber offensive. Arnold wanted a supreme air commander for the whole European theatre, but the British preferred separate commands in Britain and the Mediterranean, and Arnold waited for almost a year before appointing Spaatz as supreme commander of all American strategic and tactical air forces in Europe in the face of British objections.27 The decision to accept bombing by day and by night underlined the need for two separate organizations, and although Portal had been given overall responsibility for coordinating the bomber offensive, he was not in command of either the Eighth Air Force or Bomber Command. This produced an awkward structure in which it remained unclear exactly the limits of Portal’s power or the degree of collaboration between the two Allied bomber forces. Eaker had made it evident well before the Casablanca Conference that he did not regard the Eighth Air Force as in any sense under British command, though he did submit plans to Portal for approval and looked to him for protection from the demands of other theatres and services. ‘We always feel,’ Eaker wrote to Portal in late August 1943, ‘that our guardian and greatest friend is away when you are absent.’28 The American air forces in Britain found the formal command lines all the way back to Washington difficult to operate smoothly; in turn air force officials in the US capital were often poorly i
nformed about conditions in Europe, and frustrated by the long distances. Eaker relied on Portal to supply bases and equipment and benefited from the chief of staff’s familiarity with the offensive and with the political arguments that surrounded it. Harris had none of these difficulties. He communicated regularly with Portal and Churchill in defence of his command prerogatives and tolerated as little interference as possible. The two air forces maintained liaison staff at each other’s headquarters, and on occasion collaborated on a common target, but there was no mechanism for shared command. The American mission statement for the offensive described the bombing as ‘a joint assignment, completely complementary’, which it was, but it remained combined in name rather than fact.29
The divide between the two air forces was explicit on the question of their strategic priorities. The Casablanca Directive required little adjustment for Bomber Command, which had been attacking German morale and destroying industrial cities for several years with the aim of fatally weakening the enemy. Harris remained doggedly resistant to the idea that specific target systems were strategically valuable in themselves and hostile to the diversion of his force for other purposes. Bomber Command was committed to accruing a growing register of destruction in German cities in the hope that the attrition might at some unspecified point and in an indefinable way weaken German capacity to wage war to the point of collapse. Harris, unlike the American Air Force commanders, remained convinced that bombing, combined with Soviet pressure, would bring victory in 1944 without the need for an expensive ground invasion.30
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 42