Some who had volunteered for flying duties were dismayed when they learned what it was they would be flying. Dennis Field had done his initial instruction on single-engined Harvards and was looking forward to going to a fighter squadron. But as he moved to the next stage of his training ‘a special parade was called and the CO announced that the whole course would be trained for multi-engined aircraft and, we inferred, four-engined bombers. I felt totally deflated at the news. The very little I knew about them gave the impression that I should become a glorified bus driver.’3
It would be some time before the volunteers arrived on operational squadrons. The training could afford to be lengthy and rigorous. There was nothing for them to fly until the big four-engined bombers that had been ordered as part of the pre-war rearmament programme arrived in service. The first of the series – the Short Stirling – started to be fed into squadrons in August 1940, the Halifax in 1941 and the mighty Lancaster not until the beginning of 1942.
In this interim period Bomber Command struggled on with its inadequate Blenheims, Hampdens, Wellingtons and Whitleys, trying to make the Air Staff’s assertions that bombing was capable of inflicting precise and painful damage on the German war machine a reality. In the course of 1941 it lost 1,338 aeroplanes on operations – more than the number of German aircraft the RAF had shot down during the Battle of Britain. Another 154 were destroyed in training and other accidents, a scandalous rate that persisted throughout the war.
The official progress of the campaign was reported in bulletins that conveyed an impression of continuous success. Typical was a broadcast made by Flight Lieutenant J. C. Mackintosh, a Hampden bomb-aimer. His script – almost certainly prepared for him by a Ministry of Information hack – made night-bombing seem like a cool, precise science. It started with the claim that ‘when the war began we were well trained in finding targets in the dark and were therefore never compelled to bomb indiscriminately through the clouds’. He went on to describe a recent attack on an oil refinery. The crew had imagined it would be a tricky target. But the fact that it was sited on a bend in a river which would provide a useful navigational point led them to decide that ‘perhaps, after all, it would not be such a difficult job to find’.
As they entered the target area they located the river, but after three runs through anti-aircraft fire they had still not spotted the objective. Mackintosh called on the skipper to go round again. Then, ‘there it was. The dim outline of an oil refinery wonderfully camouflaged. It was getting more and more into the centre of the sights. I pressed the button and my stick of bombs went hurtling towards Germany’s precious oil. The rear-gunner watched the bombs burst and in a very few seconds those thousands of tons of valuable oil had become hundreds of feet of black and acrid smoke.’4
This was bombing as optimistically imagined in the Air Ministry’s pre-war plans. The reality was much closer to the experience of Eric Woods, a navigator who joined 144 Squadron in the autumn of 1940 and carried out his first operation on the night of 9–10 October. The target was the Krupp factory in Essen, an objective that the RAF would return to again and again.
At the briefing the crews were told to expect only scattered cloud over the town. As they neared their destination ‘it was obvious that the Met people had got it wrong, as a solid mass of cloud was clearly visible below, and as we progressed eastwards we saw that the cloud was becoming denser ahead. We pressed on, but two ominous developments took place. A film of ice appeared on the windscreen and an opaque mass of rime ice began to spread out along the leading edge of each wing.’ The Hampden’s two engines began to splutter as ice worked its way into the fuel lines. ‘There was a hurried conference, since it was pretty obvious that the target was unlikely to be identifiable, so the decision was taken to fly on and see what happened when we reached our ETA [estimated time of arrival]. In the event, at that time we were still in dense cloud, the whole mass being lit up by searchlights sweeping below, with frequent bright flashes which could have been anti-aircraft fire or bomb bursts, I certainly knew not what.’
With the ground invisible a decision was made not to bomb but to head for home, looking for a target of opportunity on the way. Shortly after they turned ‘the cloud began to break up to the west – quite the opposite of what the weatherman had said . . . We did, in fact, fly along the Scheldt Estuary and as we passed over the port of Flushing the navigator let go with our total load and I clearly saw bomb bursts, though I wasn’t sure precisely where they landed.’5 Only three of the twenty Hampdens that set out reached Essen.
The basic problem was navigation. Pre-war planning had assumed that most bombing would take place in daylight. In night-time bombing the navigator became the most important man on board, and he had only basic instruments to get his comrades to the target and back. Before the advent of radio and electronic aids – the Gee, Oboe and H2S systems – the navigator operated like a yachtsman at sea, by dead reckoning, drawing a line between two points on a map and factoring in speed and wind to calculate progress. He gave his pilot a course on take-off and then, if the skies were clear and a moon was shining, looked below for landmarks to check they were on track.
On a trip to Germany they left England over the chalk cliffs of Flamborough Head in Yorkshire, turning right at the Friesian Islands. If the night was clear he might try and get a fix from the stars using a sextant, but only if the pilot was prepared to fly straight and level for long enough, increasing his vulnerability to night-fighter attack. Winds that were forecast failed to blow. Unpredicted ones arrived to whisk them off their course. It was no wonder that German targets were sometimes unaware that they had been the subject of an attempted attack.
Initially, the only real means of measuring success were the reports brought back by the crews. In 1941 some aircraft were fitted with cameras triggered by the release of the bombs. That summer Frederick Lindemann, Churchill’s friend and chief scientific adviser to the Cabinet, initiated an investigation to compare crew reports with the information that could be gleaned from the admittedly blurred and monochrome images available. Lindemann was the son of a German emigré and brilliant, but argumentative and obstinate. He demonstrated his faith in his own judgement by learning to fly to test his theory about how pilots could recover from a spin. He took off, deliberately stalled the aeroplane, spiralled earthwards, then pulled out. The theory was proved and by an act of great bravery the technique became the standard procedure, saving the lives of countless aviators.
The job of analysing the bombing data was given to a clever young assistant, David Bensusan-Butt, a civil servant in the War Cabinet secretariat. He studied more than 600 operational photographs, compared them with the debriefing reports of the crews and arrived at some shocking conclusions. He found that only a third of the aircraft claiming to reach the target did, in fact, do so. Of those recorded as attacking the target, ‘only one in three got within five miles’.6
The Butt Report was a devastating challenge to the Air Staff’s prevailing wisdom and came at a very bad time for the advocates of strategic bombing. All summer the Battle of the Atlantic had been raging, a struggle that was just as vital to Britain’s survival as had been the Battle of Britain. Army and navy critics and some politicians were pressing hard for RAF resources to be switched from what they regarded as the wasteful and ineffective business of bombing Germans to come to the aid of the convoys being sunk willy-nilly by the U-boats of the Kriegsmarine and the Condor bombers of the Luftwaffe.
The reaction of the Air Staff, now headed by Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal, a strategic bombing enthusiast and previously the head of Bomber Command, was to deny the findings and commission another survey. The Directorate of Bombing Operations investigation took as its model the bomb damage caused to British cities by the Blitz. Its conclusion was much more favourable to the bombing lobby. By their calculations, a force of 4,000 bombers would be able to destroy forty-three of the biggest towns in Germany. The message was that far from diverting bombers away
from Germany, more should be thrown into the fight.
It had been shown that estimates of what bombing could achieve were exaggerated. It was now clear – from the example of the Blitz and the failures of the RAF’s bombing of Germany – that there was no such thing as a knockout blow. Instead of abandoning the theory, though, its advocates were in the process of refining it. In place of one devastating punch, the enemy could be defeated by a continuous volley of body shots. The argument was given scientific legs by the indefatigable Lindemann, who, in the spring of 1942, produced a report advocating the abandonment of the futile pursuit of ‘precision bombing’. The air force simply did not have the means of systematically hitting oil refineries, war factories and so on, he argued. The large numbers of four-engined heavy bombers, now starting to arrive on squadrons, and Gee electronic navigation were not going to significantly improve accuracy. What the bolstered force should be concentrating on now was hitting towns.
Lindemann’s report used statistics to make it all sound very simple. The language was bloodless, with no mention of killing. According to the ‘Prof’, as Churchill called him, Britain should have a force of about 10,000 bombers by mid-1943. Each bomber had an average life expectancy of fourteen bombing trips, meaning it could deliver a total load of forty tons. Judging from the data collected in Birmingham, Hull and other blitzed towns, this meant that one bomber could make between 4,000 and 8,000 people homeless. If only half the projected bomber force reached its target, a third of the German population could be ‘dehoused’. Investigation of the British experience ‘seemed to show that having one’s home demolished is most damaging to morale. People seem to mind it more than losing their relatives.’ The report concluded that ‘there seems little doubt that this would break the spirit of the people’.
The debate flowed back and forth with Lindemann’s great rival, the chairman of the Aeronautical Research Committee, Henry Tizard, maintaining the projections were inflated. It was a technical argument. The morality of ‘dehousing’ did not enter the discussion. In the intensity of total war, in the face of the enemy’s utter absence of scruples, pre-war squeamishness about harming civilians had vanished like snow in spring. The debate was settled after the Cabinet asked a High Court judge to weigh the competing views. Mr Justice Singleton concluded that Germany would not be able to stand twelve or eighteen months ‘continuous, intensified and increased bombing, affecting as it must, her war production, her power of resistance, her industries and her will to resist (by which I mean morale)’.7 This view became enshrined as official policy in the Directive issued to Bomber Command on 14 February 1942, which stated that ‘the primary object of your operations should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civilian population and in particular of the industrial workers’.8
Eight days after it was issued, Bomber Command got a new leader. Arthur Harris – ‘Bert’ to his peers, ‘Bomber’ to the public and ‘Butch’ to the crews he led – took over on 20 February 1942. He was undoubtedly the man for the job. He had spent his early years seeking his fortune in Rhodesia, a part of the world he loved, and the crack of an invisible sjambok could often be heard in his dealings with subordinates. After early war service in Africa he joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1915, stayed on in peacetime and, after his service bombing natives on the North-West Frontier and in Iraq, had moved through a succession of staff jobs. He knew Whitehall and its ways from a stint as Director of Plans at the Air Ministry. He also understood and got on with Americans, following a tour as head of the RAF delegation in Washington in 1941.
Harris would later complain that ‘there is a widespread impression that I not only invented the policy of area bombing, but also insisted on carrying it out in the face of a natural reluctance to kill women and children that was felt by everybody else . . . the decision to attack large industrial areas was taken long before I became Commander-in-Chief.’9 He certainly supported the policy with all his heart, pursuing it with dogged determination, even when the progress of the war eroded its value and justification. But it was true that he had not been one of the plan’s progenitors. Its most vehement advocate inside the RAF was his boss, Sir Charles Portal, the short, beaky-nosed, highly intelligent and obsessively hard-working Chief of the Air Staff. If anyone in the RAF was responsible for area bombing it was him. Yet he escaped all the post-war opprobrium and it was Harris who would forever be associated with the flattening of German cities.
Harris was just fifty in the spring of 1942, but looked rather older, due perhaps to a bristly moustache, which added to the initial impression he gave of impatience and irascibility. It was more than an impression. Harris was rude, arrogant, pig-headed. He disliked being challenged and in the words of Bomber Command’s official historians had ‘a tendency to confuse advice with interference, criticism with sabotage and evidence with propaganda’. The belligerence he radiated translated into an intense passion for the business of ‘smashing up the Germans’. He was an eloquent talker and writer and he came up with a succinct description of the situation he inherited. ‘The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else and nobody was going to bomb them,’ he declared in a broadcast. ‘At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and half a dozen other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.’
He arrived at Bomber Command at a moment when the materials were being assembled that would make it possible for the prophesy to be fulfilled. Many squadrons were already equipped with Handley Page Halifaxes and in March 1942 the AVRO Lancaster began to arrive. Both planes were powered by four Merlin engines and they were bigger and stronger than any other bombers in the world. The Halifax got mixed notices from those who flew in it. Wing Commander James ‘Willie’ Tait, one of the great aviators of the Second World War, who commanded three bomber squadrons, hated it. The Mark II, he thought, was ‘far from satisfactory. It had accumulated a weight of extra gear, including a mid-upper turret, and the last straw was the exhaust cowls.’ These emitted flames which provided ‘night-fighters with a good target’ and created drag, which affected handling so that the ‘performance of the loaded aeroplane at operational height on a warm summer’s night can be better described as “waffling” than flying’.10
To a Canadian flier, Ralph Wood, who switched from Whitleys in May 1942, the ‘Hallybag’ was a ‘beautiful four-engined bird’. He occupied the ‘dinky little navigator’s compartment [which] was below and in front of the pilot’s cockpit. You went down a few steps and entered a small section with a navigator’s table down one side, ahead and below the pilot’s feet.’ Wood doubled as front-gunner when needed. His weapon was a twin-barrelled Vickers, mounted on a swivel and stuck through the perspex canopy, which pumped out .303 calibre rifle bullets. They were regarded as ‘pop-guns’ by the crews and were little protection against being shot down by a night-fighter.
The Lancaster inspired universal trust. It was a masterpiece of military aviation design. It was capable of carrying loads of up to about seven tons, yet despite its great strength was fast and manoeuvrable. It could reach nearly 290 mph and was nimble enough to ‘corkscrew’ out of trouble when under attack from a night-fighter. It also had the lowest accident rate of the bombers. Tony Iveson, an ex-fighter pilot who had already notched up about 1,800 hours flying time in many different types before he encountered the ‘Lanc’, remembered it as ‘a lovely aircraft, splendid night and day’.11 Pilot Ken Newman ‘liked the Lanc from the first moment that I climbed aboard’. The cockpit layout was ‘much more sensible than that of the Halifax’ with everything within easy reach.12 It was only in an emergency that the main design fault became apparent. The thick spar that lay across the fuselage supporting the wings had to be clambered over when moving forward and aft, and was an impediment when trying to bale out.
These greatly improved aircraft now had a means of finding their way in the dark. It was called Gee (for the ‘grid’ mapping s
ystem on which it worked) and it sent out radio pulses which were picked up on a cathode-ray tube in the navigator’s cabin. Because of the Earth’s curvature, the range was limited to 350 miles and navigators had to contend with German jamming. Nonetheless, Gee was a great improvement. It set the bombers on a correct course on the outward journey and helped to guide them back home.
The new heavy bombers conveyed a feeling of might and strength that inspired those who flew in them. Noble Frankland thought them ‘incredibly sinister and powerful’. Nobody looking at them could doubt that they meant business.
By now there was a large pool of trained men to fly the ‘heavies’. The aircrews of Bomber Command were an extraordinarily mixed bunch. If the fighter squadrons were a microcosm of British society, bomber squadrons were a microcosm of the English-speaking world. In any crew there might be Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Irishmen, as well as British from all regions and every layer of society. There were also Poles, French and Czechs, eager to do to the Germans what had been done to their own people. Every one of them was a volunteer. Those who put themselves forward for Pathfinder Force, which identified targets for the following bombers, were volunteers twice over. By 1942 the increasing complexity and size of bombers had created distinct roles for each crew member. There were six categories: pilot, navigator, engineer, bomb-aimer, wireless operator and air-gunner. After the initial vetting process, candidates were sent to an Aircrew Selection Centre. On the first day they faced a fairly demanding set of academic tests. These were marked on the spot and those who failed were sent home. The following morning there was a strict medical and anyone less than A1 was weeded out. The aspirant was then quizzed by a panel, a process that was ‘more of a chat than an interview’. If deemed acceptable, the candidate was sworn in, issued with an RAF number, placed on ‘deferred service’ and told to go home and wait.
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