Blackett's War

by Stephen Budiansky

  With Russia’s entry into the war a year later, the strategic air offensive gained yet another urgent rationale. It was the only way to aid their embattled ally until a second front in Europe could be opened against the Germans. In February 1942, Churchill got the “vigorous” commander he had been seeking to take charge of the air campaign at RAF Bomber Command. “Victory, speedy and complete, awaits the side which first employs air power as it should be employed,” Air Marshal Arthur Harris told Churchill that spring. Harris had no time for what he termed the “panacea mongerers” who advocated half measures and circumscribed attacks on selected targets. They, he scoffed, believed you could “send a bomber to pull the plug on Hitler’s bath so he would die of pneumonia.” Invoking the terrible casualties suffered in the trenches of the First World War, Harris with equally brutal sarcasm dismissed objections that bombing cities was immoral. Anything that would shorten the war, he insisted, would save lives, and a war waged decisively by strategic air attack was an infinite improvement over a war of stalemate slogged out by “morons volunteering to get hung up on the wire and shot in the stomach in the mud of Flanders.”5

  Harris wasted no time putting his ideas into practice. On May 30, 1942, the new Bomber Command chief assembled a 1,000-plane force, pulling several hundred bombers from training units to do so, and ordered them to strike the German city of Cologne. The planes dropped 1,400 tons of bombs, two thirds of the tonnage in the form of incendiaries, over the space of two and a half hours. The resulting fires burned 600 acres of the city to the ground.6

  Churchill would later have doubts; a year later, viewing a film of Allied bombing raids, he leapt up from his chair and exclaimed, “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?” After the Allied firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 Churchill tried to distance himself even further from the policy (leaving an unrepentant Harris “the willing fall guy,” in the words of the historian John Buckley). Even in the spring of 1942, the prime minister had backed away a bit from his earlier view that air power alone could win the war, cautioning Harris that he “must not spoil a good case by overstating it” when Harris insisted on making that argument in one memorandum. But Churchill was nonetheless convinced that Britain and the United States had to find some way to come to grips with Hitler without delay, and strategic air power was the only immediate avenue open to them. The Allies had to show that they were prepared to match the Nazis with equal toughness—and where necessary equal brutality, Churchill believed.7

  The return of the U-boats in midsummer 1942 to the convoy lanes of the Atlantic underscored, however, that there was a competing mission for long-range bombers which might be as important if not even more vital to the war effort. Allied aircraft flying from bases in Newfoundland and Iceland could now cover much of the Atlantic. Yet there remained a 500-mile-wide “air gap” in the middle of the ocean that lay beyond the 600-mile reach of even the longest-range shore-based bombers and flying boats in the antisubmarine squadrons. The crews of American merchant ships already were calling the stretch of deadly unprotected ocean “torpedo junction.” The only way to close the gap was with the same aircraft that the British and now American air forces were counting on to launch their all-out strategic air campaign against Germany.

  The renewed threat to the Atlantic convoys was exacerbated by a dire change in fortune that had meanwhile taken place on the code-breaking front. On February 1, 1942, U-boats in the Atlantic began using a new version of the Enigma machine that had four rotors in place of the previous three, adding another multiple to the mathematical security of the system. The bombes were now useless for breaking the U-boat traffic. Because the U-boats had operated singly in their onslaught along the American coast, the full impact of this loss of intelligence was not immediately felt for the first half of 1942; the U-boats were not forming wolf packs and thus were sending and receiving few radio signals that would have yielded usable intelligence even if they could be broken and read. The main value of reading the U-boat radio traffic was to be able to know where the U-boat patrol lines were being formed, so as to reroute convoys around them.

  With the Battle of the Atlantic returning to its familiar patterns in the summer of 1942, the loss of this vital intelligence source was a grievous blow. Worse, though the Allies were woefully unaware of the fact, the B-dienst had almost completely solved a new and supposedly more secure code that the British, American, and Canadian navies had begun using the previous fall to coordinate convoy movements. By March 1942 the Germans were reading as much as 80 percent of the traffic sent in Naval Cypher No. 3, frequently giving them current reports on the locations and sailing plans of convoys.8

  In both Britain and the United States the air staffs controlled the allocation of new bombers and the submarine hunters of RAF Coastal Command and U.S. Army Air Forces I Bomber Command were not high on their priority lists. On February 14, 1942, Admiral King had formally requested the transfer of 400 heavy B-24 Liberators and 900 medium B-25 Mitchell bombers to the navy from current production, but the AAF shot that down at once. “There are no heavy or medium bombers available for diversion to the Navy,” came the reply. The British Air Staff similarly told Coastal Command that Bomber Command had first claim on all new production of Lancaster bombers, the British counterparts of the four-engine Liberator that were just beginning to arrive.9 As of mid-May, Coastal Command’s antisubmarine squadrons had only 44 long-range aircraft, and only 18 of those were the Liberators and Catalina flying boats that had an effective patrol radius of 600 miles from shore; the remaining 26 were Sunderlands with a radius of about 450 miles. The other 198 aircraft available were all old medium-range Hudsons and Whitleys, which at best could reach a little more than 300 miles.10 There was a crucial need both for additional long-range planes and for new “very long range,” or VLR, versions of the largest planes that could close the air gap altogether. VLR aircraft could be produced by stripping some of the armor plate and gun turrets out of Liberators and using the weight saved for extra fuel tanks.

  Late that month Admiral John Tovey, commander-in-chief of the Home Fleet, sent a scathing memorandum protesting the “absolute priority” accorded Bomber Command in the allocation of new aircraft. “Whatever the results of bombing of cities might be,” he wrote, “it could not of itself win the war, whereas the failure of our sea communications would assuredly lose it.” It was difficult to believe, the admiral later added, “that the population of Cologne would notice much difference between a raid of 1,000 bombers and one by 750.” Tovey went so far as to urge the Board of Admiralty to resign en masse unless the navy were given the aircraft it needed to carry on the war against the U-boats.11

  ———

  BEHIND THE TUG-OF-WAR between the navy and the air force for control of long-range aircraft, Blackett and Tizard were locked in a parallel war with their old nemesis Lindemann over the scientific evidence underpinning these competing strategic objectives. Since resigning from the Air Ministry’s advisory committee after his showdown with Lindemann over the German beams in June 1940, Tizard had become a scientific adviser to the Ministry of Aircraft Production. Tizard had been skeptical for some time about the priorities being given to heavy bomber production. In August 1941 Lindemann had assigned a member of his staff, D. M. Butt, to analyze 650 aerial photographs taken by RAF bomber crews on their raids over Germany. The results were appalling and astonishing: only one in five crews who thought they had hit their assigned target had gotten within even five miles of it. “The war is not going to be won by night bombing,” Tizard wrote to Air Marshal Sir Wilfrid Freeman, the chief executive of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, on December 24, 1941. Yet, he added, the current bomber production program “assumes it is.”12

  Early in the new year the Ministry of Home Security enlisted Solly Zuckerman and J. D. Bernal to undertake a quick scientific survey of the effects of the German bombing on the British cities of Hull and Birmingham. On February 17, 1942, Bernal came by to give Tizard a summary of their initial
findings, which only further confirmed Tizard’s doubts that bombing would ever do much of anything of real strategic value. Zuckerman and Bernal had assembled two teams of about forty people each to conduct a thorough block-by-block “bomb census,” tabulating physical damage to buildings, injuries and fatalities, effects on factory production, and overall morale of the civilian population: they covered everything, said Bernal, down to “the number of pints drunk and aspirins bought.” In neither town, they found, “was there any evidence of panic.” Nor had worker productivity suffered. The only reduction in industrial production that had occurred was the direct result of physical damage to plants. Moreover, the actual number of casualties inflicted was remarkably small, given the 717 tons of bombs the Germans had dropped on the two towns during the period examined.13

  Blackett talked to Bernal around the same time and did a few pages of penciled arithmetic. In the ten months from August 1940 to June 1941, the Luftwaffe had dropped 50,000 tons of bombs, an average of 5,000 a month. The number of civilian deaths was 40,000, or 4,000 a month; that worked out to 0.8 persons killed per ton of bombs. Experiments Zuckerman had earlier carried out using monkeys and goats to test the blast and concus-sion effects of explosions found that British bombs were about half as effective as German bombs of the same weight, which had a thinner casing and more explosive. Also, because British bombers had a greater distance to fly to reach their targets, the resulting navigational difficulties meant that British aircrews were—as Butt’s photographic analysis had shown—at best half as likely as the Germans to drop their payloads on built-up areas of their target cities. In the eight months prior to February 15, 1942, RAF Bomber Command had dropped 2,000 tons of bombs a month; that worked out to 2,000 × 1/2 × 1/2 × 0.8 = 400 German civilians killed a month. Blackett noted that this was almost exactly the same as the number of British airmen killed in the 728 planes shot down carrying out the raids over that same period. (After the war, when the actual figures on German casualties became available, Blackett found that even his estimate had been optimistic; only 200 civilians had been killed a month by the British bombing raids in 1941.) He also calculated that the total decline in industrial production from the air attacks on Britain was less than 1 percent: factory output for the country in April 1941 had been affected more by the Easter holiday than by the German bombs that fell during that month.14

  Blackett showed his figures to Tizard the same day that Tizard met with Bernal, February 17. The next day Tizard sent a note to the minister of aircraft production:

  I say emphatically as a conclusion, that a calm dispassionate review of the facts will reveal that the present policy of bombing Germany is wrong; that we must put our maximum effort first in destroying the enemy’s sea communications and preserving our own; that we can only do so by operating aircraft over sea on a very much larger scale than we have done hitherto, and that we shall be forced to use much long range aircraft.… The heavy scale [of strategic bombing] will only be justified and economic at the concluding stages of the war when (or if) we are fortunate enough to have defeated the enemy at sea and to have command of it. Until that time is ripe, everything is to be lost by concentrating on this bombing offensive instead of by concentrating on the sea problem.15

  A few days later Tizard sent a letter to Freeman. He reiterated the key point that the Air Staff had not even begun to grasp the scale of bombing needed to yield even minimal results. The air marshal’s reply made it clear that Blackett and Tizard had thrust themselves into a political arena where facts that conflicted with policy would simply be ignored, and those who raised them would be regarded as disloyal:

  My dear HT, I have read your personal letter to me about bombing, and my first reaction is that you have been seeing too much of Professor Blackett.… Is not Blackett biting the hand that fed him?

  Not long after that Tizard arrived at his desk one morning to find a transcript of a German radio broadcast that had denounced the latest British bombing attacks. Attached was a note from Freeman: “Like you, the Germans are very anxious for us to stop raiding their towns.”16

  Lindemann sided strongly with the Air Staff. Faced with Zuckerman and Bernal’s conclusive finding that bombing did not inflict very many casualties, Lindemann decided with magnificently circular reasoning that bombing must therefore be effective for other reasons. He proposed that the real purpose of strategic bombing was to “dehouse” the enemy workforce; this would cause production and morale to collapse. On March 30, Lindemann—now Lord Cherwell, having been rewarded by Churchill with a peerage—circulated a memorandum to the War Cabinet in which he concluded that one third of the entire population of Germany could be “turned out of their house and home” by an Allied strategic bombing offensive that employed a force of 10,000 heavy bombers to target the fifty-eight German cities with a population of 100,000 or more:

  Investigation seems to show that having one’s house demolished is most damaging to morale. People seem to mind it more than having their friends or even relatives killed. At Hull signs of strain were evident, though only one-tenth of the houses were demolished. On the above figures we should be able to do ten times as much harm to each of the 58 principal German towns. There seems little doubt this would break the spirit of the people.17

  It was only after the war that Zuckerman and Bernal discovered how completely Cherwell had misrepresented their findings about civilian morale in Hull and Birmingham. Their study, which Cherwell had asked for a preliminary report on, had concluded almost exactly the opposite of what he was arguing in his memorandum.

  Blackett went to see him. Cherwell, he recalled, did not try to dispute Blackett’s calculations about the direct effects of bombing. But it was clear he was once again enraptured with one of his pet ideas. It was the first time Blackett was fully confronted with this side of the Prof’s character, “his almost fanatical belief in some particular operation or gadget to the almost total exclusion of wider considerations,” Blackett later wrote. “Bombing to him then seemed the one and only useful operation of the war.… Never have I encountered such a fanatical belief in the efficacy of bombing.” Cherwell went so far as to insist that any diversion of aircraft to any other purpose would be a “disastrous mistake.”18

  When Cherwell’s paper proposing the air campaign to “dehouse” the German population was circulated to the Admiralty on April 8 for official comment, Blackett was asked by Admiral Godfrey, the director of naval intelligence, to prepare a “full factual examination of this problem” in his capacity as chief advisor for operational research. Blackett in his response reiterated the calculations he had shown Tizard earlier and also presented some new data concluding that if even a quarter of the 4,000 bomber sorties which could be flown each month by the summer of 1942 were diverted instead to antisubmarine operations, it would save a million tons of Allied shipping a year.19

  Tizard and Blackett also realized that Cherwell had hugely overstated—by 600 percent—the quantity of bombs that could be delivered against German cities even if the entire forecasted production of heavy bombers over the following eighteen months was devoted exclusively to the job. Cherwell had in effect assumed that every bomber scheduled to be produced would be instantly available and by the end of the eighteen months would already have carried out the twenty bombing missions that were the average operational life of each aircraft. It was a ridiculous arithmetical mistake. Again, subsequent history showed that Blackett and Tizard had been too cautious in their critique: Cherwell had overestimated not by 600 percent but by more than 1,000 percent.20

  It all fell on deaf ears. “I do not think that, in secret politics, I have ever seen a minority view so unpopular,” C. P. Snow would write of the episode.21 Blackett made a wan joke that if anyone at the Air Ministry during this time “added two and two together to make four,” suspicions would arise that “he has been talking to Tizard and Blackett” and was “not to be trusted.”22

  Blackett began keeping a file of sardonic observations a
bout official attitudes and the military mind; a quotation he had run across in a Spanish anarchist newspaper he thought might perfectly summarize the reaction he had received to one study: “Let us have no more of these miserable statistics, which only paralyse the brain and freeze the blood.”23 He also filed away an anonymous and extremely incendiary paper he had been sent around this time that was full of an insider’s scathing appraisal of Churchill; it noted how Churchill used his dazzling oratorical skills to avoid hard facts, how he browbeat his military advisers to agree with his decisions and then used them as scapegoats when things went wrong, how he worried subordinates about small details and demanded immediate answers or reports which frequently turned out to be wrong because of the haste with which they were prepared, how even his wide knowledge and experience was often more a danger than an asset: “His judgment is very unreliable and in spite of his study and past service he has never understood naval warfare, in which his interest is extremely doubtful.”24

  The hard feelings—and a sense of failure—about the fight over strategic bombing haunted Blackett the rest of his life. As he wrote in an article in Scientific American in 1961, it was his one great regret about his wartime service:

  So far as I know, it was the first time a modern nation had deliberately planned a major military campaign against the enemy’s civilian population rather than against his armed forces. During my youth in the Navy in World War I such an operation would have been inconceivable.… If the Allied air effort had been used more intelligently, if more aircraft had been supplied for the Battle of the Atlantic and to support the land fighting in Africa and later in France, if the bombing of Germany had been carried out with the attrition of enemy defences in mind rather than the razing of cities to the ground, I believe the war could have been won half a year or even a year earlier. The only major campaign in modern history in which the traditional military doctrine of waging war against the enemy’s armed forces was abandoned for a planned attack on its civilian life was a disastrous flop, and I am sure that Tizard felt the same way. If we had only been more persuasive and had forced people to believe our simple arithmetic, if we had fought officialdom more cleverly and lobbied ministers more vigorously, might we not have changed this decision?25