The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945

by Richard Overy

  The problem for Bomber Command was different. Here unacceptably inaccurate bombing had to be improved to achieve higher concentrations on the chosen urban areas. The introduction of Oboe and H2S contributed to raising the average accuracy of the attacking force, but concentration could be lost if the weather deteriorated or the Pathfinder force missed the aiming point, or German decoys were successful in diverting a proportion of the attacking force. In raids using Oboe in 1943, the number of aircraft which bombed within three miles of the target ranged from 77 per cent against Cologne in July to 32 per cent against Bochum in September, but poor weather prevented evaluation of at least half the raids. Oboe proved to be the more successful of the two methods but could only reach as far as the Ruhr-Rhineland. For H2S operations the scale of accuracy was even longer: 86 per cent against Kassel in October to 2.1 per cent against Berlin on the 31 August. The average for the 23 H2S raids that could be plotted was 32 per cent, a substantial improvement on the Butt Report evidence, but still a low level of concentration.193 Research on the first large-scale blind-bombing raid using H2S in poor weather, against Mannheim-Ludwigshafen on 17–18 November, estimated that perhaps 60 per cent of the attacking aircraft had hit the conurbation itself. These figures indicated that the force had at last adopted a technology and tactics that might reduce the amount of wasted effort. This was partly due to the additional training for Pathfinder navigators organized by the Bombing Development Unit, set up in late 1942, consisting of flights over British cities. These simulated raids showed wide deviation from the putative aiming point, but an average of 50 per cent of ‘hits’ within a three-mile radius (four miles for London). The trials showed that H2S worked well over certain urban targets, but poorly over sprawling urban areas or cities surrounded by hills, as had already been found over Germany. The Operational Research Section of Bomber Command calculated that this was probably the best to be hoped for when bombing cities. Improved though Bomber Command accuracy was from the poor state of 1941, every second bomb was still miles from the aiming point.194

  The problems of weather and bombing accuracy highlight a factor about the bombing war that is seldom given the weight it deserves in assessing what was and was not possible for the forces at the Allies’ disposal. The operations mounted week after week during the last two years of war were of unprecedented scale and complexity, employing some of the war’s most sophisticated equipment. For both air forces the pre-raid preparation required all the conventional demands of battle – tactical, logistical and technical; the intelligence and operational research reports had to be factored into each calculation and the weather closely monitored. Organizing a raid with hundreds of aircraft coordinated over long distances promised all kinds of hazard; pilots had to create formation while avoiding accidents and synchronize their flight with the escorting fighters as far as their range would allow. Along the target run and over the target itself there were precise instructions about combat, evasion, target recognition, heights and speeds. On return there was the process of debriefing crews, coping with casualties and estimating the outcome of the raid. Each battle was self-contained, but for commanders and their crews the campaign was continuous, more so than for almost any other form of combat over the four or five years of war.

  The typical instructions for a Bomber Command raid illustrate the close attention to planning detail and the range of demands made of the crews. Aircraft from four or five bomber Groups were given instructions about force size, composition of the bombload, routes to the destination target (or for the decoy attacks), and the timing of each of five waves of attacking aircraft, which had to drop their bombs within a 20-minute period to maximize impact. There were instructions on ‘Window’, on the Mandrel jammer, radar and wireless use, and the chosen target-marking pattern, which could either be ground-marking with illuminating flares followed by red and/or green target indicators or sky-marking with red and green star flares. The Master Bomber and the supporting Pathfinders had to drop their markers and repeat markers over an 11-minute period, while the main force had to watch for the markers, bomb the centre of them if they could and then turn for home. The whole combat force typically extended for 20 miles, was six miles wide and flew in staggered formation, the highest aircraft some 4,000 feet above the lowest. Crews had to fly low over England, then climb to 14,000–15,000 feet, then increase speed and fly at 18,000–20,000 feet for bombing, finally falling away from the target zone to 12,000 feet, back to 18,000 feet for the return flight across Germany, 12,000 feet again at the European coast, and not below 7,000 feet on crossing back over English territory. Then came the de-briefing interviews, and the PR assessments.195

  The Eighth Air Force derived a lot from British experience, but typical raid preparations and combat showed an even greater awareness of the complexity of the task. The principles guiding target selection dwarfed the simple list of cities and their industrial importance given to Harris. Target selection involved assessing the strategic importance of a target, working out the degree of ‘cushion’ in the economy for substituting or dispersing output, calculating the depth of a target system (how far away a product might be from front-line use), judging the recuperative possibilities of a target, and weighing up its vulnerability and the capacity of the air forces to destroy it by researching its potential structural weaknesses and susceptibility to damage.196 The material was collected and evaluated by the Enemy Objectives Unit based in the American Embassy in London under the leadership of Colonel Richard D’Oyly Hughes, a former British officer who had taken American citizenship in the early 1930s. His team of economists visited British industrial plants to work out the most vulnerable part of each type of target and then applied the knowledge to detailed photographic material on the German equivalent. In the evenings they relaxed from their efforts by working out fruitless statistical teasers – ‘How many sheep are there in Bavaria?’, ‘What is the most economical land route from Gdansk to Gibraltar?’197 Their labours proved most effective with assessments of damage to capital-intensive targets such as oil refineries or synthetic oil and rubber producers. This material was taken and put into operationally useful form for air force units.

  The typical Eighth Air Force operational procedure reflected a managerial ethos that was quite distinct from British practice. American officers had in many cases been drafted in to the air force from business and professional backgrounds, which prepared them for the vocabulary and categories typical of modern managerial practice. The formal procedure laid down in July 1943 reflected that culture: a conference of key personnel at 4.00 on the afternoon before the operation at which the prospective weather determined the target to be attacked; target folders checked, fighter escort informed; calculation of type and weight of bombs and number of aircraft; notification of assigned combat groups; finally, determination of axis of attack, rendezvous point, route out, initial point (near the target run-in), altitudes, aiming point, rally point (just outside target area), and route back. The resulting field order was then sent by teletype to the combat units involved.198 A second procedure then took place at the airbases of the different bombardment wings with an operational briefing for all commanders and crew for approximately two and a half hours covering the following: plan for formation (general), approximate time for turns, sun position, power settings, intelligence information and weather prospects. Detailed planning was essential because in daytime bombing the force had to fly in tight formation. The Eighth Air Force flew at 25,000 feet, each wing flying in three staggered combat boxes, covering a height of 3,000 feet to maximize the firepower of the group, before breaking into bombing formation in approach to the target. Separate briefings were then held for pilots and co-pilots (16 items), navigators and bombardiers (six items), gunners and radio operators (three items). Watches were then synchronized. At 8 a.m. on the morning of the operation a decision to go ahead or postpone had to be taken based on the current state of the weather. Commanders had an obligation, according to a manual on tactics, ‘to w
ork out each mission in minute detail. The struggle here is of the life and death variety.’199

  Somehow or other all the detailed calculations, operating plans and contingencies had to be mastered and put into effect by the expensively trained crews. There was always to be a gap between the ideal operation laid down by the military bureaucracy that ran the offensives and the reality of combat. Unanticipated factors of all kinds, not least the extent and combativeness of the enemy forces, undermined the best-laid operational procedures. Given the technical sophistication of much of the equipment, the large number of freshmen crews to be initiated on each operation, the vagaries of weather and navigation, it is perhaps surprising that bombing operations achieved as much as they did. Almost all the flight crew were between the ages of 18 and 25, a large number of them between 18 and 21; a few who lied about their age flew heavy bombers aged just 17. Almost nothing of what they experienced in training could prepare them for what happened by day or by night over Germany. For Bomber Command crew there was extreme cold for much of the time unless they wore layer upon layer of protective clothing; there was a numbing tiredness on operations that could last eight or nine hours, using up the body’s natural adrenalin supplies and requiring chemical stimulants (commonly amphetamines); with the decision taken in spring 1942 to have just one pilot, the crew had to hope that one of their number had enough basic flying skills to get them to their target and back if the pilot was killed or incapacitated. There was the constant fear of night-fighters and anti-aircraft fire or of being coned by searchlights, to which large night-time formations added the danger of collision or bombs from the invisible aircraft above in the bomber stream.

  The Eighth Air Force crew had some advantages: the B-17 ‘Flying Fortress’ was less cold to fly in and they were provided with good thermal clothing; each aircraft had a pilot and co-pilot; attacking aircraft were more easily visible, though the limited range of the B-17 machine guns meant that rocket- and cannon-firing fighters could damage the bombers before facing risk themselves. Other factors were shared. The experience was frightening and the accounts of a great many airmen understandably recall fear as a very primary emotion. ‘I was scared all the time,’ recalled one veteran, ‘but I was more scared of letting the rest of the crew see.’ Aircrew were commonly sick as a result of the long, bumpy flights. Their priority was to complete the mission and return to base. ‘You bombed a target and got the hell out and got home, there wasn’t much glamour about it,’ remembered another. Their primary loyalty was to the other crews about them. ‘I never worried about the people down below,’ said one pilot. ‘I was more concerned with the ones in the air.’ This was perhaps an understandable moral concern. The permanent dangers to which an aircrew were exposed and the sheer mental and physical demands of combat, surrounded at times by dead or dying companions, with jammed guns, or engines knocked out, created a temporary nightmare world in which the one hope was that their aircraft and crew would not be next. After the Regensburg raid one American commander who reached Tunisia reported that he and his crew ‘felt the reaction of men who had not expected to see another sunset’. He recommended reducing the standard tour of 30 operations to 25 if crew were not to collapse from the psychological pressure. ‘Survival was our thing,’ concluded one veteran.200

  The success of bombing operations depended almost entirely on the quality and training of the crews, but the pressures to which they were subject placed often insupportable demands on their psychological equilibrium. This situation arose not only because of the natural stresses of combat, but because of the curious social situation in which bomber crew found themselves. Although regularly recruited for operations which provided hours of tension and endeavour, once back at base it might be days, sometimes longer, before the next operation. In that interval crews were free to go to the local town, meet girls, reunite with wives or partners, enjoy a variety of forms of recreation. Cinema attendance at Eighth Air Force bases reached a million a month by November 1943, stage-show attendance 150,000.201 This meant that bomber crew had a cycle of relief and anxiety distinct from the emotional pattern of ground combat troops. In the first years of the offensive survival rates were low, so that life at base was also about reconciling the loss of companions, relishing survival and anticipating the next operation. Casualties were high not only from combat but because of routine flying accidents. In Bomber Command some 6,000 crew were killed in accidents in 1943–4; the Eighth Air Force suffered in 1943 as many as 8,800 losses in combat and a further 2,000 from non-combat accidents.202 Death or German imprisonment was more common than serious injury, which numbered only 1,315 in the Eighth Air Force up to the end of 1943, mostly to the hands, neck and head. The American statistical record described those who had finished their tour of 30 operations and returned to the United States as ‘Happy Warriors’; they were certainly lucky warriors, constituting less than one-fifth of the crews sent to Europe.

  The one form of often hidden casualty which bombing encouraged was psychiatric. The stress of combat, or combat fatigue, was not in doubt. Questionnaires from the USAAF Psychological Branch to squadron commanders found that they valued ‘judgment’ and ‘emotional control’ far higher than practical skills among cohorts of incoming pilots.203 The psychological reaction to flying stress depended partly on the personality of the individual crew member, partly on the nature of the experiences or dangers to which he had been exposed. Most crew on a tour of 25 or 30 operations died before they reached their total. Of those who survived, a small proportion became medical casualties as a result of stress, but almost all suffered from some degree of fear-induced anxiety, which was observed to get worse the longer the operational tour lasted. American psychiatrists reported heavy drinking, psychosomatic disorders and long periods of depression among crew who carried on flying.204 In Bomber Command the tendency was to blame any exaggerated state of anxiety on ‘lack of moral fibre’ (LMF), a stigma designed as an emasculating deterrent to any sign of weakness. Harris thought that among his crews only a quarter were effective bombers, the rest merely there to give German anti-aircraft guns something to shoot at.205 Air force medical staff, on the other hand, found that there were very few records of cowardice, despite the popular fear among aircrew that they might be regarded that way if they broke down. In both the RAF and the Eighth Air Force it came to be recognized that regular air operations induced particular forms of neurosis which had little to do with a lack of spirit and everything to do with the harsh experiences of daily flying. Eighth Air Force was instructed to rest and rotate tired crews but to isolate those whose behaviour might contaminate the efficiency of their unit. These cases were divided between the categories of ‘flying fatigue’ and ‘lack of moral fibre’. To the former there was no stigma attached, but the latter were to be removed from flying status, stripped of their commission and sent home in disgrace.206 Those who developed serious psychoneurotic symptoms were sent to special hospitals to undergo narcosis therapy, and many were subsequently returned to duty including combat flying. By early 1944 it was found that around 3 per cent of flying officers (of those who survived) were removed from flying status before completing a tour of 25 operations.207

  In Bomber Command the treatment of flying fatigue could be much harsher if unit commanders were prejudiced against the idea of psychiatric casualty.208 But like the Eighth Air Force, a system of classification came into use which allowed the neuropsychiatrists in the RAF medical service to distinguish between those with neurotic conditions capable of diagnosis and possible treatment and those classified as ‘waverers’, defined as fully fit but fearful. Flying stress was accepted as an understandable reaction to ‘severe combats, crash landings, “bale-outs” and “shaky-dos” in general’. Those who ended up in front of the psychiatrist were classified in four categories based on a predisposition to neurotic behaviour (usually defined by character assessments or family history) and degree of flying stress. Those with a high predisposition or a high level of stress were deemed
to be medical casualties and withdrawn from flying without penalty. Those with low predisposition but marked flying stress or those with neither predisposition nor serious evidence of stress were defined as lacking in confidence, and a judgement had to be made about whether they were also guilty of ‘lack of moral fibre’. It was never easy, as one RAF psychiatrist put it, to tell ‘whether a man’s inability to continue flying is his fault or his misfortune, whether in fact it is due to simple lack of confidence or of courage, or whether it results from nervous predisposition or illness outside his control’.209

  These were fateful decisions for the men involved, since those deemed not to be medical cases (approximately 25 per cent of those referred for assessment) were dealt with by an executive board which tended to assume cowardice on the part of the men in front of them. Yet the medical casebooks show that individuals were often subjected to a series of traumatic combat experiences sufficient to challenge the mental stability of even the toughest character:

  Flight engineer, 20 raids, 150 operational flying hours: ‘He had been badly shot up on four occasions. On the last of these, after being attacked by a night-fighter, the port engine of his machine caught fire, the mid-upper gunner was badly injured and the rear gunner was killed … The rear-gunner’s body was burning and motionless … He had to use an axe to hack off bits of the blazing turret and also parts of the rear-gunner’s clothing and body, finally letting the slip-stream blow them all away … The wireless, the hydraulics and the tyres had all gone and a crash-landing was made … 10 days later he was in a nervous state with tremulous hands and sweaty palms. He had some headaches, felt unable to relax, was depressed, preoccupied and unable to concentrate. His appetite was bad … When I asked him how he would sum up his feelings in one word, he said “fear”.’210