Air Marshal Harris tolerated few scruples either, but recognized that a major period of rebuilding was needed before RAF Bomber Command could deliver the weight of force that was needed to have a strategic impact. His belief in air power – that it could dramatically shorten the war and save the lives of many young British – and American – servicemen had not been shaken in the slightest. What had changed was his realization that strategic bombing had to be on a far larger scale than had earlier been appreciated. He needed more bombers – heavy four-engine varieties and especially the new Lancasters that had started to arrive from early 1942. Up to that point, the highest monthly average for aircraft had been 421 bombers available each day, but only 68 of those had been heavies. Ten months later, at the end of 1942, the total figure had been 419, but the number of heavies had risen to 262. It had been an improvement, but creating the size of heavy bomber force Harris envisioned was taking a painfully long time.
Harris also needed more airfields with proper concreted runways that could take the weight of these heavies in all weather conditions; all-grass airfields were no longer sufficient. And he also needed the promised new and improved navigational aids. These were in development, but they were taking time: time to design, manufacture and implement, and time to train crews to use them.
Some successes had been achieved. At the end of May 1942, Harris had launched the first ‘Thousand Bomber Raid’. Bomber Command had only had some four hundred aircraft at the time, but by scouring the Operational Training Units and other commands, and by using a number of largely obsolete aircraft, they had managed to reach the magic number of a thousand bombers. The target had been Cologne and heavy damage had been caused. It had also profoundly shocked Hermann Göring, the C-in-C of the Luftwaffe, and the Nazi leadership. Two more such raids followed and, although it was too risky and stretched resources too tightly to repeat them regularly, Harris had been able to use these attacks to give his command a huge boost and their success had done much to convince sceptics that large-scale strategic bombing had a vital part to play in the ongoing war.
None the less, not until March 1943, after more than a year in the post and with the war already three and a half years old, was Harris at last ready to launch his all-out strategic air offensive against Germany. Expansion had been slow and hugely frustrating. Precious resources had been diverted to the Far East and to the Middle East. Nor had new Lancasters been rolling out of the factories as fast as he would like, but the line on the graph was heading upwards at long last. What’s more, developments in navigational aids were also about to make a significant impact. By the time of the Thousand Bomber Raids, Harris’s crews had been able to use a recently developed aid code-named ‘GEE’. This was a radar pulse system that enabled a navigator on board an aircraft to fix his position by measuring the distance of pulses from three different ground stations in England. First trialled in 1941, it was being fitted into bombers by early 1942. It was a leap forward, although nothing like as accurate as scientists had hoped; its range was short and it was certainly not effective enough to aid blind flying. However, by the spring of 1943, Harris also had two more new and exciting navigational aids to work alongside GEE.
The first of these was ‘Oboe’, which relied on a radio signal pulse repeater in an aircraft linked to two ground stations back in Britain. It had limited range and could handle the signals of no more than six aircraft every hour, but it was accurate and appeared to be impervious to enemy jamming. That just a small number of aircraft were equipped with Oboe was fine, because only a handful were needed to find the target and then drop flares that would mark the way for the bombers following behind. Oboe was placed on the new De Havilland Mosquitoes – twin-engine aircraft, largely made of wood rather than stressed metal, which could fly at over 30,000 feet, so out of range of the flak guns below, and at more than 400 m.p.h. These Mosquitoes were part of the Pathfinder Force (PFF), which had come into being in August 1942. Harris had originally been against the move, as he didn’t want any of his other squadrons to feel that an elite force was being developed – he believed it would be detrimental to fragile morale. However, the PFF had soon proved its worth and, because the bombers were now finding their targets more easily, morale had not taken the dip he had feared. By the spring of 1943, the Pathfinder Force had become a crucial and highly valued part of Bomber Command.
Another new navigational aid just entering service in the spring of 1943 was H2S, effectively the first-ever ground-mapping radar. H2S produced an ‘echo map’ created by radar pulse returns. The ‘map’ was a little crude and required training and skill to use, but, unlike Oboe, it was not limited by range and could be accurate up to around a mile. Nor was it affected by weather.
So, with all-weather runways and navigational instruments that could find targets through cloud, by March 1943 Harris’s force could start bombing both remorselessly and with an accuracy that had earlier eluded them. These were massive strides forward.
Furthermore, bomb-aimers were now using a new bombsight, first designed in 1939, which had finally started to be introduced the previous year. The RAF had begun the war using a bombsight brought in as long ago as 1917. Science had moved on since then – as had aircraft, and the height and speed at which bombers dropped their loads – and, quite simply, the existing bombsight had no longer been good enough. Across the Atlantic, the Americans had developed the superb Norden bombsight, but had been unwilling to release it to the British. Although later details of the Norden were willingly shared, by that time the British had developed their own bombsight. This was the Blackett sight, or, more formally, the Mk XIV Computing Bomb Sight. By March 1943, the Blackett was standard in all bombers and was proving quite a success. It was easy to use and as good as the Norden at levels below 20,000 feet, although above that height it did lose accuracy. However, a new Stabilized Automatic Bomb Sight (SABS) was now also coming into service in limited numbers and was another technological bound forward; it could also be used by the Pathfinder Force.
Nor were these the only technological developments. British scientists were introducing new methods of jamming German radar. ‘Mandrel’ was a device that spread noise to cover the frequencies of the enemy’s Freya radar. ‘Monica’ was a tail-warning radar that could be fitted to bombers; ‘Boozer’ was a radar-warning receiver. There was also ‘Window’ – tens of thousands of tiny strips of tinfoil that could be dropped by the Pathfinders in advance of a raid. These strips, or ‘chaff’, would very effectively jam any radar.
One of the reasons Harris had been forced to wait for enough all-weather airfields was because the Americans needed them too. Expansion of Bomber Command had to go hand in hand with the build-up of American air forces in Britain and, because they too had heavy four-engine bombers that needed airfields with paved runways. Now, however, by the autumn of 1943, the realignment of bases had successfully taken place to accommodate the Americans. Broadly speaking, Bomber Command’s groups were in the north-east of England, with the Americans in the Midlands and East Anglia.
Since the launch of his all-out offensive in March, Harris had been pretty pleased with the way his campaign had been going and remained unwavering in his belief that area bombing alone could bring about the collapse of Nazi Germany. He compiled information on Germany’s cities and towns in his ‘Blue Books’, which he kept at High Wycombe and which he constantly updated and refined. Each city had its own rating in terms of industrial importance. Pie charts and diagrams indicated what section of the city was doing what, and also demonstrated the proportion of its population directly involved with war work and how much the city was dependent on that particular industry. Harris would show his Blue Books to anyone who visited High Wycombe. They were his means of justifying his pursuit of area bombing, and they underlined his basic point: that almost everyone in Germany was up to their neck in it and therefore a justifiable target. It was a neat way of convincing himself, and others, that the wholesale slaughter of vast numbers of German civili
ans was acceptable.
This, too, was underpinned by a simple logic: destroy large numbers of German cities and the factories in and around them, and Germany would no longer be able to manufacture war materiel. Without weapons and munitions, they would be unable to fight. ‘We are bombing Germany, city by city,’ he had written in a pamphlet dropped on Germany the previous summer, ‘in order to make it impossible for you to go on with the war.5 That is our object. We shall pursue it remorselessly.’
He had been as good as his word, and there was no denying that since March the results had been impressive – or at least, far more so than anything that had come before. By July 1943, Harris could call on nearly eight hundred bombers daily, of which more than 80 per cent were now heavies. The Ruhr industrial heartland had taken a hammering. In May, nineteen specially adapted Lancasters carrying a bouncing high-explosive depth charge had destroyed Germany’s two largest dams, the Möhne and Eder, and badly damaged a third, the Sorpe. The levels of devastation had been enormous and the amount of urgent work required to repair and make good the destruction had prompted a vast diversion of men and resources at a time when Germany was losing the battles on the Eastern Front and in the Mediterranean. Repairing the dams had cost the Germans billions of dollars in today’s money.
Then, in the last week of July, some 3,500 aircraft had pummelled Germany’s second city and biggest port, Hamburg, over three consecutive nights. The result had been truly apocalyptic levels of destruction. Some 42,600 German civilians had been killed by Operation GOMORRAH, as the raids on Hamburg had been called – that was more than had died in the entire eight-month Blitz of Britain. A further 37,000 had been wounded and the old Hanseatic city had been all but destroyed as a colossal firestorm had developed – so big, so hellish, that the flames rose to nearly 1,500 feet. Some 6,200 acres out of 8,382 had been erased.
One night during the Blitz, Harris had climbed out on to the roof of the Air Ministry to watch the fires caused by enemy bombing of London’s East End. ‘Well,’ he had muttered before heading back inside, ‘they are sowing the wind.’6 Coventry had provided the template for night-time bombing of an old city, and wave after wave of British bombers continued to pound Hamburg for three nights with grim ruthlessness, helped by the first-ever deployment of Window. Although it had been developed some time earlier, it had not been used for fear that the Germans would adopt it in turn when attacking Britain. It proved devastatingly effective over Hamburg, however. For the first time in a long while, the Germans had had no warning at all that Hamburg was the target.
Such was the overwhelming destruction of Germany’s second city that, combined with the downturn of fortunes in Sicily and at Kursk, it might very well have brought about the end of the war in any generation other than that of the Nazis. The pictures of Hamburg after the firestorm are enough to make anyone gasp, even to this day.
The essential logic of Harris’s stance was undeniable. By launching vast bomber fleets in a strategic air campaign, he was unquestionably ensuring fewer young men had to risk their lives on the ground. The casualty rates among his boys were appalling: in early 1943, only 17 per cent of bomber crews could expect to survive the thirty completed missions of their first tour. None the less, the numbers involved were comparatively small. It was reckoned some forty-eight men on the ground were needed to keep one crew of seven in their Lancaster – forty-eight men who were not staring death in the face each night they flew. This meant that Harris needed only around four thousand men to keep the 570 heavy bombers he had by October 1943 in the air. A single infantry division was about 16,000 men, and an army as many as half a million. In other words, the bomber war was fulfilling the pre-war pledge of using steel not flesh as far as possible. In terms of young men putting their necks on the line as a ratio against damage caused, it was certainly more efficient than relying on vast armies on the ground. That was indisputable.
In other words, by the autumn of 1943 Harris was pleased that his command was finally living up to its billing and starting materially to grind down the Germans’ ability to wage war. And a bombing raid like that on Kassel proved, as far as he was concerned, that his approach was the right one and the Americans’ continued determination to bomb by day and get shot down in droves was a mistake. That, however, was their affair; in the meantime, his command would continue with ever heavier night attacks. And next on his main target list was none other than the capital of the Third Reich itself. With Berlin in ruins, Harris was confident the Germans would soon see sense, in which case there would be no need for a cross-Channel invasion after all.
CHAPTER 6
The Defence of the Reich
CRISIS ALSO GRIPPED much of the senior Luftwaffe command in the summer and autumn of 1943. In many regards, the bombing of Hamburg in July had been the Luftwaffe’s Stalingrad – a terrifying glimpse of Armageddon. ‘A wave of terror radiated from the suffering city,’ noted General der Jagdflieger Adolf Galland, ‘and spread through Germany.1 The glow of fires could be seen for days from a distance of 120 miles.’ Streams of refugees trudged down the roads from Hamburg, while the realization that what had befallen the city could happen elsewhere struck a note of panic throughout the urban civilian population. Berlin was largely evacuated and the country gripped by a palpable sense of doom. Stalingrad had been a traumatic blow, but was 1,000 miles away deep in the Soviet Union. Hamburg was Germany’s second city in the very heart of the Reich. The world had never before witnessed man-made destruction on such a catastrophic level.
Operation GOMORRAH stunned the leadership of the Luftwaffe. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, the commander-in-chief, was at the Wolf’s Lair in Rastenburg in East Prussia, Hitler’s eastern headquarters, when details began to reach him. Teleprinter messages arrived in quick succession revealing increasingly grisly news: entire suburbs erased; twenty-six thousand bodies and counting; a firestorm still raging; widespread panic. Around noon on the 28th, Göring told Feldmarschall Erhard Milch that from now on the main effort of the Luftwaffe was to be focused on the defence of the Reich.
Officially, Milch was State Secretary for Aviation and Inspector General as well as Director of Air Armament. Effectively, he was Göring’s number two, and was also the man responsible for procurement and aircraft production. A brilliant administrator, he was part of the Zentrale Planung, which, as its name suggested, was a central planning committee for all armaments production and which was presided over by Milch, Albert Speer, the Armaments Minister, and Paul Körner, Göring’s secretary. In reality, it was run jointly, and with unquestioned authority, by Speer and Milch. Both men had been determined to streamline the bloated and rivalry-riven armaments industry, which, like most areas of the Nazi state, had proved toxic and corrupt.
Broadly speaking, the Zentrale Planung had achieved those aims. By the summer of 1942, Milch had the three largest aircraft manufacturers on a much tighter leash. Willi Messerschmitt had been forced to give up all managerial control, and upfront payments to any aircraft companies had been cancelled. This had pushed Ernst Heinkel into a purely development role, and the Junkers company had also become more tightly controlled. The days of waste and minimal focus were over. Rationalization measures had been introduced, enabling production figures to rise, while aluminium consumption, for example, had remained the same. Cost was also being driven down. By the early summer of 1943, just as the Mighty Eighth was getting into its stride, German fighter production had risen more than tenfold: from just 200 a month at the end of 1941, Milch had overseen an astonishing rise to 2,200 a month in May 1943. It was an impressive turnaround and, in truth, Milch’s increase in aircraft production rather than Speer’s improved figures for tank production had been most responsible for the so-called recent ‘armaments miracle’.
Yet pilots were being rushed through training, there was a woeful shortage of fuel and, as Milch was all too aware, there were major question marks over the quality of the aircraft now being produced. He had cancelled the Me309, the replacement f
or the Me109, in the spring because flight tests had shown the new fighter would probably have a rate of climb and manoeuvrability inferior to its predecessor; in fact, in trials an Me109 had easily turned far more tightly than the new fighter. In truth, the Me309, as well as other aircraft emerging, simply needed more development time, but that was a luxury the Germans no longer had. As a consequence, the development process was being hurried, corners were being cut, and the net result was aircraft that were falling some way short of what was urgently needed.
The alternative was to stick with what they had, and by keeping with existing models, jigs and machine tools, and cutting down on overheads Milch had been able to increase production significantly. However, there was no getting away from the fact that the Me109, for example, was a mid-1930s fighter whose zenith had been the ‘Emil’ variant, which had reigned supreme in 1940 – a lifetime ago in the context of the war and recent technological advancements. Superior Allied fighter aircraft had followed, knocking the Emil from its lofty perch, so it had been necessary, at the very least, to improve the engine performance. The trouble was, the Me109’s airframe was not really designed to take on any larger engine. Despite this, the most recent Gustav model had been fitted with the latest Daimler-Benz, the DB605, which was 250kg heavier and which performed poorly at low altitudes. It was also a brute to fly initially, which wasn’t good for the mass of young pilots emerging from the training schools with less than an ideal number of hours in their logbooks. Flying straight and level, the Gustav was quick enough, but what it had gained in speed it had lost in manoeuvrability.
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