Churchill’s task was an unhappy one. At one and the same time he was to repudiate Stalin’s accusations of bad faith and announce that there could be no Second Front. The meeting went badly from the start. Churchill outlined in detail the reasons for abandoning any prospect of helping Russia in 1942, and promised an offensive at some point in 1943. Stalin argued with everything, bluntly, ‘almost to the point of insult’: ‘You can’t win wars if you aren’t willing to take risks’; ‘You must not be so afraid of the Germans.’5 Sullen and restless, Stalin rejected all Churchill’s arguments, but accepted that he could not actually force the west to come to combat. It was at this point, with the discussion deadlocked, that Churchill revealed what the west could actually offer: the heavy bombing of Germany and Operation Torch, an Anglo-American landing in North Africa late in 1942.
The mood of the meeting lightened. Stalin liked Torch. He saw straight away that it would secure the defeat of Rommel, and speed up the withdrawal of Italy from the war. But what he liked most was the bombing. The American envoy, Averell Harriman, who was present throughout the meeting, wired Roosevelt the following day that the mention of bombing elicited ‘the first agreement between the two men’.6 Stalin came to life for the first time in the conference. He told Churchill to bomb homes as well as factories; he suggested the best urban targets. ‘Between the two of them’, Harriman continued, ‘they soon had destroyed most of the important industrial cities of Germany.’ The tension eased. Stalin accepted that the British could, as Churchill put it, only ‘pay our way by bombing Germany’. His visitor promised a ‘ruthless’ bombardment to shatter the morale of the German people.7 After four hours the meeting broke up with more cordiality than it had started with.
There were three more days of meetings. Great pressure was exerted to get Churchill to change his mind about a Second Front. Stalin returned to the theme of Britain’s yellow streak, her manifest ‘reluctance to fight on the ground’, remarks which drew from Churchill such a heated and dignified rebuttal that Stalin was provoked to his famous response: ‘Your words are of no importance. What is important is your spirit!’8 But by the end of the visit relations between the two leaders were better than Churchill could have hoped. On the evening before Churchill’s departure, 15 August, Stalin took the unprecedented step of inviting his guest to visit his private apartment. A long dinner, liberally accompanied by every kind of alcohol, created a more relaxed atmosphere, though Stalin still flung taunts at British courage (‘Has the British Navy no sense of glory?’). At one o’clock in the morning Stalin began to eat heavily from a sucking pig, at what was his usual dinner hour. At 2.30 with a splitting headache, Churchill made his farewells, and flew off exhausted from Moscow airport three hours later. When he arrived in Cairo he told officers of the 8th army of his renewed commitment to bombing: ‘Germany has asked for this bombing warfare … her country will be laid to ruins.’ On his return to London he ordered RAF statistics to be sent to Stalin, and called for the large-scale reinforcement of Britain’s heavy bomber forces.9 For the moment bombing constituted the Second Front.
* * *
Churchill had always been an enthusiast for bombing. In World War I, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he authorised the early bombing attacks by Britain’s fledgling air forces against the German Zeppelin bases in Germany. As Minister for War in 1919 he defended the newly formed Royal Air Force from the predatory claims of the army and navy, who resented the parvenu service, and hoped to stifle its claims to independence.10 During the 1930s it was Churchill who led the campaign to increase British air rearmament to match German strengths. Where Chamberlain as Prime Minister refused to unleash the air weapon, Churchill had no such scruples. Only five days after he became Prime Minister in 1940, on 15 May, he ordered the restrictions on British bombing lifted, and Britain embarked on a five-year campaign of air bombardment against Germany. It was Churchill’s view, expressed in the bleak summer of 1940, that the only thing that would defeat Hitler was ‘an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers upon the Nazi homeland’.11
For all Churchill’s uncritical enthusiasm for air power, the whole strategy of the bombing offensive was shot through with paradoxes. At the time when Churchill promised Stalin his ‘ruthless’ campaign the whole issue of bombing was in the balance. Little had been achieved by the offensive between the summer of 1940 and the spring of 1942. Churchill told the Chief of Air Staff in March that bombing was probably ‘better than doing nothing’, but after all the extravagant expectations, which he had done much to fuel, it would clearly not be ‘decisive’.12 There was strong pressure from the other services in Britain and the United States to disperse the bombing forces to support the land and naval campaigns in the Pacific and the Mediterranean. In May 1942 a committee of inquiry into bombing accuracy headed by Judge John Singleton revealed that fewer than a quarter of the bombs dropped fell within 5 miles of the designated target, and only 30 per cent hit built-up areas.13 Powerful voices began to urge a diversion of manpower and industrial capacity away from the unproductive bombing effort and towards building a large army which could provide, in the end, an effective Second Front. When Churchill made his promise to Stalin, as a means to sweeten the bitter pills he had prescribed, the effect was to lend bombing political support at a critical moment in its evolution.
The paradox of British bombing ran deeper than this. With the important exception of the United States, none of the other warring states saw much merit in long-range ‘strategic’ bombing. On Stalin’s own initiative the heavy-bomber development programme in the Soviet Union was wound up in 1937, and the hapless designers, headed by Alexander Tupolev, shunted into a labour camp, where they continued their work from behind barbed wire. Experience in the Spanish Civil War, where Soviet pilots fought for the Republican side against Franco in 1936, had convinced Stalin that aircraft were best employed at the front-line, helping the army. German and French observers arrived at more or less the same conclusions. During the Spanish Civil War the German air force tried out in combat their new dive-bomber, the Junkers Ju-87, with its fearful siren that heralded the coming bomb. The aircraft was the brainchild of Colonel Ernst Udet, a larger-than-life aviator who thrilled cinema audiences in the 1920s with his flying stunts, and was a noted cartoonist. His support for Hitler’s cause brought him the job of directing production for the German air force. His infatuation with aerial acrobatics led to the neglect of long-range bombardment in favour of smaller bombers that could dive down and destroy even small targets on the battlefield.14 When the head of the German air force, Hermann Göring, insisted that Germany develop a long-range four-engined bomber as well, Udet told the German designers that it, too, had to be able to dive, an instruction that held up its development for three years.15 When war broke out Germany gave priority to air force cooperation with the army, a strategy that persisted there and in the Soviet Union right to the war’s end.
Why, then, did Britain and the United States fly in the face of conventional military wisdom and persist with bombing? At best the answer is a patchwork. Public opinion in both states was unusually susceptible to the science-fiction view of air power, first popularised by writers such as H.G. Wells, whose War in the Air, published in London as long ago as 1908, painted a lurid picture of ‘German air fleets’ destroying ‘the whole fabric of civilisation’.16 Wells was father to a whole generation of scaremongers, who traded on popular anxiety that bombing was somehow a uniquely unendurable experience. Writing in the American journal Liberty in December 1931, the retired head of the Irish Free State air corps, Colonel James Fitzmaurice, offered ‘An Expert’s Prophetic Vision of the Super-Armageddon That May Destroy Civilization’:
A Hideous shower of death and destruction falls screeching and screaming through space and atmosphere to the helpless, thickly populated earth below.
The shock of the hit is appalling. Great buildings totter and tumble in the dust like a mean and frail set of ninepins … The survivors, now mer
ely demoralized masses of demented humanity, scatter caution to the winds. They are seized by a demoniacal frenzy of terror. They tear off their gas masks, soon absorb the poisonous fumes, and expire in horrible agony, cursing the fate that did not destroy them hurriedly and without warning in the first awful explosions.17
This was hardly a basis for military strategy. Yet British airmen and politicians stuck by the view in the inter-war years that indiscriminate bombing, to achieve a rapid ‘knock-out blow’, was likely to be the central feature of the next war. To counter the threat of bombing you needed bombers of your own. The roots of postwar deterrence reach back to the British decision in the 1930s to build a powerful striking force of bombers to frighten potential enemies into restraint.18
There were, to be sure, more solid reasons for pursuing bombing than fear of being its victim. No one wanted to repeat the awful bloodletting of the Great War. A bombing war, for all its manifold horrors, promised a quicker, cleaner conflict. Colonel Fitzmaurice comforted his readers with the reassurance that his ‘Super-Armageddon’ would end wars of attrition once and for all, ensuring they were ‘buried securely in the mud, slush, and war cemeteries of Flanders’. In comparison with the wastage of young lives in the trench stalemate, bombing might bring a week of horror followed by surrender. Here was war on the cheap, saving not only lives, but money: an economical strategy to appeal to the democratic taxpayer and the parsimonious treasury alike.
All of this begged a very large question: what should the bombers bomb? In Germany and France, with politically powerful armies, the issue was easily resolved: aircraft attacked enemy aircraft, and when they had finished doing that they bombed enemy armies. This met the Clausewitzian test of war, the concentration of effort against the military forces of the enemy. But British and American airmen, much freer from the smothering constraints of old-established armies, wanted a strategy that gave them real independence, one that complemented the novelty and modernity of the weapon itself. They chose what became known as ‘strategic’ bombing, to distinguish it from mere ‘tactical’ bombing in support of armies and navies. The target of the strategic bomber was the very heart of the enemy state, its home population and economy. The Great War had opened the way to a new kind of conflict, total war, in which the distinction between civilian and soldier was said to have been eliminated. The bomber was the instrument of total war par excellence, capable of pulverising the industries of the enemy and terrorising the enemy population into surrender. Air strategists were fond of using the analogy of the human body. Bombing did not just weaken the military limbs of the victim, but destroyed the nerve centres, the heart, the brain, the arteries (lungs remained a curiously neglected metaphor) – the very ability of a nation to make war at all.19
Much of this was fantasy. In the 1920s the RAF, and in particular its overbearing, truculent commander, Sir Hugh Trenchard, clung to the quite unproven assertion that the moral effect of bombing was twenty times greater than the effect of material damage. It was an assumption that lingered on past Trenchard’s retirement in 1930. Though air leaders in Britain, and later in the United States, hesitated to urge attacks on civilian populations for the sake of terror, the whole logic of independent, strategic bombing was to crush popular willingness and capacity to wage war. If there was not quite a straight line between Trenchard’s dogmatic views on morale and the ghastly apotheosis of bombing at Hiroshima, the curve was barely noticeable. For those airmen with qualms about attacking civilians, there developed in the 1930s a second assumption, that bombers could precisely attack selected economic targets, whose destruction would dry up the supply of arms and drain away the material lifeblood of the enemy’s armed forces. Whatever the justification, the object of attack was the home front and not the military shield in front of it. For all of the 1930s, and even in the early years of war, this strategy was technically unfeasible and operationally amateur. Nevertheless in December 1937 British Bomber Command was ordered to plan for the destruction of the German economy through bombing, and from that date the groundwork was laid for what became the Combined Bomber Offensive launched in 1943.
When British airmen came to think seriously about targets in Germany, they were faced with a bewildering choice. The Air Ministry drew up a broad list of objectives, the so-called Western Air Plans, which included in Plan w5 instructions for ‘Attacking Enemy’s Manufacturing Resources in the Ruhr, Rhineland and Saar’. The question still had to be resolved about which of these resources might prove the most strategically profitable. At first Bomber Command favoured the German electric power system; then during 1938 oil, chemicals, the metals industry, the engineering and armaments industry and transport were added to the list. Priority was given to electricity supply and oil in the area of the Ruhr, which was home to the greatest concentration of German heavy industry, and was the easiest to reach from air bases in southern England or France.20
This was whistling in the dark, and Bomber Command knew it. For all the exaggerated claims attached to bombing strategy, woefully little was done in the 1930s to prepare the bombing campaign. When war broke out in September 1939 Bomber Command had a mere 488 light-bombers, whose range was generally too poor to reach even the Ruhr from British bases, and whose bomb-loads were too small to do more than insignificant damage. There were no effective bomb-sights; there were few bombs bigger than 250 pounds; only a handful of bases in Britain could handle the larger aircraft; and there was even a severe shortage of maps for navigating in north-west Europe. Bombing trials betrayed a wide margin of inaccuracy even when bombing in bright sunlight from a few thousand feet with no enemy interference. Though there was better equipment in the pipeline, it was still years away. At the onset of war Bomber Command recognised that bombing attacks over Germany would be virtually suicidal, and reluctantly accepted the order to use bombers as the French and Germans did, in support of the battle on land.21
Even had Bomber Command been more prepared to attack Germany’s industrial heartland, the government would have prevented it. In London, and in Paris, the politicians were terrified lest war should unleash Germany’s ‘knock-out blow’. It was what they had expected throughout the last years of peace, that Germany would launch a merciless assault with gas, germ bombs and explosives to paralyse western capitals and bring the war to a hasty, despairing conclusion. At the very moment that Chamberlain publicly declared war on the morning of 3 September, the air raid sirens sounded in London. People dived into ditches and trenches, scrambled to put on their gas masks, cowered in underground sanctuaries. It was a false alarm, triggered by the approach of two friendly aircraft (there were similar panics in Berlin and Paris), but it was symptomatic of the deeper fear that a foe as apparently ruthless and evil as Hitler would not hesitate to bomb civilians into surrender when it suited him. Chamberlain insisted that Bomber Command do nothing against Germany that might provoke retaliation.
Bomber Command might well have remained in limbo had it not been for the catastrophes that overtook the British war effort in the spring of 1940. The British defeat in Norway in April brought the fall of Chamberlain. In his place came a man much less scrupulous about the use of force. When the Germans broke through into northern France and threatened to inflict a disastrous defeat on Allied armies, Churchill searched desperately for anything that might halt the onslaught. Bomber Command, chafing at the bit, offered the prospect of hitting the German homeland, even perhaps of drawing the German air forces away from the land battle to defend Germany against the bombing threat. Churchill grasped at the straw. Following a devastating attack by the Luftwaffe on the Dutch port of Rotterdam on 15 May, Churchill ordered Bomber Command to begin a long-range offensive against German industrial and military targets in the Ruhr. On the night of 15-16 May a force of 96 twin-engined bombers was dispatched to destroy oil and power installations. The Ruhr was shrouded in its usual industrial haze and was thickly defended with anti-aircraft guns. Only 24 crews later claimed even to have found the target area, and six aircraft f
ailed to return. It was an inauspicious baptism of fire.22
The early bombing of Germany demonstrated all the limitations of Bomber Command. Daylight raids were soon abandoned once it was found that some attacks suffered the loss of almost the entire force. Bombing by night, on the other hand, though safer for the crews, could only be attempted when it was clear and moonlit. Without the moon it was difficult to locate the area of the target, let alone the target itself, and without the clear night sky navigation by the stars was impossible. There were no radio navigation aids, no radar, not even effective bomb-sights. So inaccurate was British bombing that German intelligence had considerable difficulty in grasping exactly what strategy the British were pursuing. The offensive was continued only because, following the defeat of French and British forces in June 1940, there was no other way left for Britain to demonstrate to the world her willingness to continue fighting: ‘We are hitting that man hard,’ Churchill wired Roosevelt at the end of July.23
Why the Allies Won Page 16