Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  In fact Bomber Command was doing anything but. Moreover the pinprick attacks did exactly what Chamberlain had always feared: they provoked fierce German retaliation. Between 25 August and 4 September Bomber Command launched five attacks against the German capital following German bomber attacks on the outlying suburbs of London. Hitler pretended to be outraged, although the German air force had already been bombing military and economic targets in other British towns and cities for two months. On 4 September Hitler used the occasion of a speech in Berlin inaugurating wartime relief work to pledge revenge: ‘… we shall obliterate their cities! We shall put a stop to these night pirates, so help us God.’24 Over the following six months the Luftwaffe subjected British cities to the first real independent bomber offensive, killing 40,000 people and destroying wide areas of London, Bristol, Coventry, Liverpool, Glasgow, and a dozen other urban centres. If there remained any moral scruples or strategic second thoughts on the British side about whether they should continue bombing, they were instantly dispelled by the Blitz. The bombing of Germany not only promised the one slim prospect of eventual victory in the absence of powerful allies, but it was also justified in the eyes of the British public as legitimate retaliation for German attacks.

  With the coming of the Blitz the British got the war they had expected all along. The German attacks were costly and terrifying, but the Blitz was not the Super-Armageddon. When Gallup polled Londoners early in 1941 about what made them most depressed that winter, the weather came out ahead of bombing.25 Bombing did little to dent British production, and if anything morale was stiffened rather than reduced. Hitler, who had started the Blitz in a rage at British ‘terrorism’, soon became disillusioned with city bombing. What the Blitz did achieve was the firm commitment of both British and American leaders to the idea that strategic bombing as a way of conducting war was here to stay. The bombing of London shocked world opinion in ways that the bombing of Berlin evidently could not. In thousands of American cinemas the newsreels showed the famous image of St Paul’s cathedral, majestically, incredibly rising above the tide of flame that licked all round it. The American newsman Ed Murrow’s poignant reports of ordinary British courage and tenacity kept alive western optimism at a dark moment of the war. The public perception of the Blitz in the United States perhaps did more than anything to switch American opinion to the view that bombing mattered, and that the United States should do it too.

  During the course of 1941 Roosevelt and his military advisers began seriously to make ready for war. Roosevelt himself was the inspiration behind the planning of a bombing offensive as a central part of American preparation for war. On 4 May 1941 he ordered the production of five hundred heavy-bombers a month – British production was just 498 for the whole of 1941 – in order to achieve what he called ‘command of the air by the democracies’. Money now flowed from the US Treasury to fund the development and production of a vast heavy-bomber force. It is still not entirely clear why Roosevelt, a man of peace and good-neighbourliness, who had long campaigned to get aerial bombing outlawed by international agreement, should have become so enthusiastically committed not just to air power but to its unlimited use against civilians. But there seems little doubt that this is what happened. His confidant Harry Hopkins reported in August 1941 that the President was ‘a believer in bombing as the only means of gaining a victory’. Roosevelt told his Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, that ‘the only way to break the German morale’ was to bomb every small town, to bring war home to the ordinary German.26

  Closer examination shows that Roosevelt had been influenced for some time by the scaremonger’s view of bombing. At the time of Munich, and to the horror of his Cabinet colleagues, he cursed Chamberlain for not circling Germany with bombers and threatening to smash her cities if Hitler did not see sense. Roosevelt had a strong personal dislike of Germans, whom he regarded as arrogant bullies. And he deeply feared their scientific genius and lack of scruple. At another cabinet meeting, in October 1939, he scared his colleagues again with rumours that the Germans had invented a stratospheric bomber that could stay aloft for three days, strewing bombs over American cities, and a concussion bomb that could kill every living thing in Manhattan.27 During 1940 and 1941 American army intelligence fed the President with greatly inflated figures of German aircraft output, which might well explain his enthusiasm for massive American striking power. Germany was believed to be producing 42,500 aircraft in 1941, including a force of twelve thousand long-range bombers, (the true figure was a mere 11,776 aircraft in total, and no truly long-range bomber).28 With a frightening scenario before him of massed air attacks against America’s eastern seaboard, and with a ready willingness to believe that Hitler would not hesitate to bomb America if he could, Roosevelt opted for massive retaliation.

  Without the support of Roosevelt and other senior American politicians for a policy of bombing it is unlikely that it would ever have materialised as one of the key elements in the western war effort. Without Churchill’s championship of ‘a ceaseless and ever growing air bombardment’, whose strategic necessity he regularly endorsed in his correspondence with the American President, Bomber Command would almost certainly have remained auxiliary to the activities of the army and navy.29 Even with such powerful allies, the bombing offensive found the senior services snapping at its heels throughout the period of trial and error. Admirals and generals pleaded with Roosevelt and Churchill to release the bombers to help them overcome the armed power of the Axis at the battlefront. Without the urgent pressure of Soviet demands for a Second Front in 1942, which bombing was used to placate, even Churchill and Roosevelt might have given way. Strategic bombing emerged as a major commitment not from proven operational success but from political necessity. It was chosen by civilians to be used against civilians, in the teeth of strong military opposition.

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  In its early stages the bombing offensive faced a daunting learning curve. Poor technical resources, the long periods of training, the diversion of bomber crews to other pressing objectives, forced a slow build-up of the force. Though Bomber Command was anxious to paint its operations every shade of rose, it proved impossible to disguise the disquieting reality. In the summer of 1941 a British civil servant, D.M. Butt, produced a report for Churchill’s scientific adviser, Lord Cherwell, on the accuracy of Bomber Command attacks on Germany. The resulting report was a devastating indictment of the Command. By examining photographs taken in night attacks over Germany, and extrapolating from the statistics of each operation, Butt concluded that only one aircraft in three got within 5 miles of its target, and in the Ruhr, whose smog-bound industries formed the Command’s main target, the figure was a mere one in ten. On hazy nights, or when the moon was waning, the proportion fell to one in fifteen. Taking conditions as a whole the average proportion of aircraft that managed to make an attack within the 75 square miles surrounding a target was a mere 20 per cent.30 The figures spoke for themselves. Even Churchill was deeply affected. Early in October 1941 he told the Chief of the Air Staff that he deprecated ‘placing unbounded confidence in this means of attack’, though he would stick by the strategy regardless.31 Six months later the Singleton report confirmed these critical conclusions.

  If Bomber Command was handled roughly at home, it met yet stiffer resistance over the skies of Germany. When the first night attacks were made against the Ruhr in May 1940 the German authorities were caught by surprise. Very little specific preparation had been made to meet such attacks, though Germany bristled with anti-aircraft guns. In June 1940 air force General Josef Kammhuber was given the job of constructing a system of air defences against British attacks which became popularly known as the Kammhuber Line. He began modestly enough with a squadron of heavy Messerschmitt fighters, Me-110s, converted to a night-fighter role. They were dependent on whatever the searchlights could pick up in clear weather. German defences were transformed by the addition of radar in the autumn of that year. The large Würzburg radar units were set up
, one in each of a series of grid ‘boxes’ drawn on a map, roughly 20 miles across. Within each box a night-fighter could be directed to intercept any bomber picked up on the screen. A central control room kept each fighter within its sector, circling round, waiting for its prey.32

  The system worked so well that Kammhuber extended it to cover the whole area from Paris to the Danish coast. It was ideally suited to exploit the tactics of Bomber Command attacks. British aircraft approached the target singly, at intervals, giving the night fighters plenty of time to track and attack each one. Bomber Command experienced rising losses – 492 bombers in 1940, 1,034 in 1941. Not all of these losses came from fighter attack. German anti-aircraft guns accounted for a third of them. The manifold dangers of night-flying, often in cloud and with poor navigation equipment, took a depressing toll, even when aircraft had survived the German defences. On 14 July 1941 six aircraft set out for Hannover from Oakington airfield near Cambridge. They all succeeded in returning but found East Anglia shrouded in cloud. Only one made it back to base; another ran out of petrol near the coast, one crashed in the town centre of Northampton, and two more were damaged landing on other airfields.33 By the end of the year losses were running at such a rate that Bomber Command was facing difficulty in replacing aircraft. It seldom had more than a hundred operational at any one time. By the last months of 1941 the bombing offensive was petering out.

  The fortunes of the campaign were revived dramatically in the spring of 1942. It is usual to attribute this renaissance to the extraordinary impact of the man appointed as Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command on 23 February that year, Air Marshal Arthur ‘Bert’ Harris. Though there are other explanations of a technical and tactical nature, there can be little doubt about the striking effect that Harris’s arrival had on the force. He was fifty years old when he assumed command, the son of a civil servant in the India Service. He began his military career, improbably, as bugler in the 1st Rhodesian Regiment, established in 1914 with the onset of the Great War. He later joined the Royal Flying Corps, survived, and continued as a career airman between the wars. He was an enthusiast for bombing in the 1930s, helping to steer the plans for what became the first generation of heavy-bombers, the Wellington, Stirling and Halifax. At the outbreak of war he held the conviction that ‘the surest way to win a war is to destroy the enemy’s war potential’, and that this could only be done with the heavy-bomber, concentrated in great numbers.34 He had a clear grasp of the limitations of bombing, particularly as it had been conducted since 1940, combined with a resolute belief in its ultimate vindication. It was this quiet confidence that perhaps explains his effect on the Command, for he was not a flamboyant man. Very few flyers ever got to see him; he was reserved, even dour; he suffered fools not at all. From the moment he assumed office he doggedly defended bombing strategy from its detractors, while he patiently set about creating a force of sufficient size, operational effectiveness and technical sophistication to carry out the task for which he felt Bomber Command was best equipped, the destruction of Germany’s industrial areas.

  Much has been written about Harris’s responsibility for the so-called ‘area bombing’, the practice of attacking whole cities rather than specific targets. After the war he carried the blame for launching a campaign of indiscriminate terror-bombing against Germany’s urban areas in the pursuit of a strategic chimera, the critical fracturing of morale. Neither of these accusations carries conviction. The strategy of area bombing was already in place months before Harris took command. It was the product of operational reality. The inaccuracy of attacks on single factories or rail centres forced Bomber Command to adopt a policy designed to cause general disruption and the demoralisation of the factory workers. In May 1941 Lord Trenchard, Chief of Air Staff until 1930, sent Churchill a memorandum on how best to conduct air warfare, which reiterated his hoary dictum that morale was what mattered most, spiced up with the view that Germans were particularly prone to ‘hysteria and panic’. The report was read approvingly by the service chiefs, and in July Bomber Command was directed to attack ‘German Transportation and Morale’.35 In February 1942, a week before Harris’s appointment, Bomber Command was formally directed to concentrate all its efforts ‘on the morale of the enemy civil population’.36 Harris, then, inherited a commitment to area bombing; he did not originate it. Neither did Harris have the slightest doubt that ‘morale’ was a hopelessly ill-thought-out objective, a ‘counsel of despair’, he later recalled. He had no confidence that German morale was as brittle as his colleagues hoped, and even if it was he doubted that any strategic good would come of its collapse, ‘with the concentration camp round the corner’.37 Harris stuck to his view that Germany’s material ability to wage war was what counted, and this could be undermined only by heavy and persistent bombing of industrial centres – factories, transport facilities, supporting services and workers’ housing. Demoralisation was, in Harris’s view, a by-product of the war of attrition against the German economy.

  This was the campaign that Harris waged. It involved civilian deaths, though few people, Harris included, would have found this as unacceptable in 1942 as it properly appears to the liberal conscience today. Indeed Harris’s choice of targets and the new technology which at last became available in 1942 made a high level of civilian casualties unavoidable. Harris took up his appointment in Bomber Command at just the time that the new heavy-bombers, at whose conception he had played a key part, came of age. In February 1942 there were just 69; by the end of the year almost two thousand had been produced, including 178 of the new four-engined Lancaster, which became the mainstay of Bomber Command for the rest of the war. The ‘heavies’ made it possible to carry very much larger bomb-loads very much farther, and to concentrate a great weight of both high explosive and incendiary bombs against a major industrial centre. It was concentration of force that Harris wanted to achieve. Just before he assumed command a new radio navigation device, known by the codeword ‘Gee’, was introduced. It was one of a number of target-finding devices hastily developed by British scientists in the early years of war. Its range was short – barely as far as the Ruhr – and on the first raid when it was used, against Essen on the night of 8 March, the target was missed altogether. Gee did not improve bombing accuracy very greatly, but it did allow Harris to concentrate his force. Bombers no longer had to run the gauntlet of the Kammhuber Line in vulnerable isolation – with the help of Gee they swept across the German coast in a great stream, swamping German defences, and arriving, in most cases, all together over the target area.

  Harris himself made a number of operational improvements. He insisted that bombers should carry a specially trained bomb-aimer to relieve the harassed navigator of this extra burden. He began to organise a group of elite crews – ‘Pathfinders’ – to lead the attacking force and to illuminate the target for the bombers that followed. But he realised that Bomber Command in 1942 was still in its infancy. He saw 1942 as an experimental year, until the force could be provided with large numbers of heavy aircraft and the more effective navigation aids which he knew were in the pipeline. Without this equipment Bomber Command had little chance of redeeming its tarnished reputation.

  One great advantage Harris enjoyed over his predecessors was that in 1942 Bomber Command was no longer fighting alone. During the course of that year the United States began to organise its own air forces in Britain with the object of hitting hard at Germany as soon as the force was trained and assembled. This was easier said than done. It took months after Pearl Harbor to agree a strategy for Anglo-American forces. The initial aim of setting up a huge force of heavy-bombers had to be modified on account of the more urgent demands for equipment in the Pacific and North Africa. Not until June did General Carl Spaatz arrive in London to set up the 8th air force, and it was by then assumed that all the bombers would do would be to soften up Germany before ground forces stormed across the English Channel in the following spring. Spaatz was followed only slowly by men and machines. For much of
1942 and 1943 the 8th air force relied on British station equipment, radar and communications. The main bomber force had to be flown from the United States across the inhospitable Arctic, first to Goose Bay in northern Canada, then in small groups to Greenland, then Iceland and finally to northern Scotland. One-fifteenth of the force was lost in the icy waters and glacial landscape before it even reached Britain. By the end of August 1942 only 119 bombers had reached their destination.

  The 8th air force, for all the painful delays in its establishment, was a blood transfusion for the bombing campaign. It was not just that American airmen, brash, confident, eager for combat, brought a breath of fresh air to a stale campaign. It was also that they brought with them the enthusiastic conviction that bombing, whatever its limitations hitherto, was the answer to destroying German power. Unlike the British, American airmen believed that the destruction of Germany’s vital industries, her transport system and her fuel supply could be precisely calculated in terms of aircraft despatched and bomb tonnages dropped. The source of that conviction was the technology available. American bombing forces were composed largely of the Boeing B-17 ‘Flying Fortress’ which had been developed as early as 1935. It was robust, had a high ceiling and long range and was so heavily armed that it was assumed that it could fly in daylight and defend itself effectively on the wing. Flying by day meant a better view of the target; the use of the Norden bomb-sight, which the American air force refused to pass on to the RAF, increased accuracy even more. Bombing tests in the United States demonstrated not quite the ability to hit a ‘pickle-barrel’ that some American airmen claimed, but were claimed to be more than satisfactory.38 Armed with equipment for accurate, daylight bombardment, the 8th air force deliberately distinguished their practice of ‘precision bombing’ of individual targets from the more random efforts of the Royal Air Force. The choice of daylight tactics would prevent the two forces from treading on each other’s toes: the RAF bombed industrial areas by night, the 8th air force would pick off factories and railway stations and oil depots by day.