The British were very much on the defensive, at sea as well as on land. Port Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory had been heavily damaged by Japanese air attacks, but, when the Japanese carrier force and its escorts entered the Indian Ocean and attacked Colombo in Ceylon in April 1942, Somerville had withdrawn his fleet to the Maldives, the defences of Colombo held out and the Japanese were beaten off, and, although Japanese carrier-borne aircraft searched for the Eastern Fleet and sank two heavy cruisers on their way to join it followed by a light aircraft carrier, the Hermes,on 9 April, they failed to find the main fleet and withdrew. This was, in hindsight, the critical point in the Far Eastern sea war for the Royal Navy, for, had the Japanese succeeded in finding Somerville’s fleet, they would surely have destroyed it and there would have been little to prevent them from landing on and capturing Ceylon with its vital naval bases of Colombo and Trincomalee. As it was, the Battle of Midway, in June of that year, meant that the Japanese could never again attempt to dominate the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal, and the British hoped that they could begin to slowly rebuild their naval strength and prepare to go over to the offensive, although they had to accept that increasingly the Allied naval effort in the Far East would depend upon American, rather than their own, ships.
In the event, the American dominance of the eastern seas was even greater than the British expected. Far from Somerville’s fleet being reinforced, he found himself having to detach ships for convoys to Malta, then for Operation Torch and again for the invasion of Italy, while still retaining responsibility for the protection of sea traffic from the Cape along the east coast of Africa to the Gulf. Although Admiral Nagumo’s carrier force had been eliminated at Midway, the Japanese Combined Fleet remained a powerful threat, and an American request for a British carrier in late 1942 was to spark off another inter-Allied spat. The British agreed to provide a carrier to Admiral Halsey in the Pacific but pointed out that, as there would be no British land-based maintenance facilities within range, the carrier’s aircraft should be American rather than British and the conversion of the ship’s launching and recovery equipment, and the retraining of the aircrew, would take some time. Admiral King, never an Anglophile, took this as an indication that the British were unwilling to help and many harsh words were exchanged before HMS Victorious, with American aircraft flown by British Fleet Air Arm crews, appeared in the Pacific in May 1943. Once the Japanese were forced out of Guadalcanal, they could still spring unpleasant surprises but their merchant navy was never going to be big enough to support their extensive conquests, and, however many Allied ships they managed to sink, Allied, and particularly American, powers of recovery and replacement were always going to outstrip theirs. By mid-1943, although the Royal Navy presence was still little more than an anti-submarine escort force, the balance had shifted irreversibly and American naval task forces, which included British, Australian and New Zealand ships under command, were increasingly able to support the US Navy’s island-hopping and MacArthur’s more conventional strategy, and in particular to construct naval bases and anchorages as they went along.
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Russia had not been a naval power since the Japanese had destroyed her Far Eastern and Baltic Fleets at the Battle of Tsushima in 1904. Then the Japanese had sunk seven Russian battleships, four cruisers and five destroyers and had taken the surrender of four more battleships and numerous smaller craft. Other Russian ships had run aground, collided with each other or been interned in neutral ports. The British-trained Japanese navy and its British-built ships lost three torpedo boats sunk, and eight other ships, torpedo boats and destroyers, damaged. The Japanese lost 117 sailors killed, the Russians 5,000. It was the most overwhelming naval victory since Trafalgar and the end of Russian naval pretensions to anything much more than coastal defence and control of the eastern Baltic, with a number of river flotillas. In the run-up to the Second World War, the Soviet navy was regarded as purely defensive, and, although in 1938 a naval expansion and building programme was ordered, few ships were actually built and those that were completed were of obsolete design and their crews, like those of the navy as a whole, badly trained. In the whole of the war, the total shipbuilding output of the USSR was but two light cruisers, nineteen destroyers, fifty-four submarines and around 800 torpedo boats and other small craft. But, although not a world power in naval terms, the USSR did have a sizeable minesweeping fleet and a significant merchant marine, and amongst the many aspects of Lend-Lease that annoyed the Royal Navy was the refusal of the Russian navy to sweep mine-free corridors for the Arctic convoys, or to enable its merchant vessels to carry some of the equipment being delivered. In naval terms, therefore, while Russian submarines sank a (minuscule) quantity of Axis tonnage, her surface fleet played little or no part in the war against Germany. None the less, after the shock the Japanese had received when they fought the Russians in 1939, Tojo and his successors were careful not to antagonize the USSR, despite German requests. When the USSR eventually declared war on Japan on 8 August 1945, two days after the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the Soviet Pacific Fleet played a major part in a series of amphibious and airborne operations by the Red Army that captured the ports of Darien and Port Arthur and occupied the Kuriles, southern Sakhalin and North Korea, in support of the Russians’ concern that it should be they, and not the Western allies, who would control those areas when hostilities ended. While later, in the Cold War years, the Soviets would create a powerful blue water navy, it was their army and air force which fought and won their Great Patriotic War.
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One of the few aspects of British defence policy that had received some attention and reasonable funding between the wars was the air defence of Great Britain. This was partly the result of a widely held view that aerial bombing would be far more effective than it actually turned out to be – ‘The bomber will always get through’ – and partly because many British policy-makers, or those who influenced policy, thought that air power would obviate the need for a costly and bloody campaign on land. Besides, aviation was modern and visible, there was general public support for aircraft rather than for ships and soldiers, and in any case, unlike ships, aircraft could be rolled off the assembly lines relatively quickly. All this meant that at the outbreak of war there were sufficient air defence aircraft (fighters) – just – to ensure that the Luftwaffe did not win air superiority over the Channel and hence could not produce the conditions for an invasion. When the Germans turned their attention away from airfields and aircraft production to cities – the Blitz – the limitations of the Luftwaffe were exposed: it didn’t have enough bombers and those it did have couldn’t carry enough bombs. The exponents of winning a war from the air were right when they said that a bomber could wreak unimaginable damage and terrify the recipients of its load of high explosive, but they were only right if that bomber was unopposed. Provide air defence in the form of radar detection, fighters, anti-aircraft guns and barrage balloons, and the power of the bomber was much reduced. Londoners (along with the residents of all the other British cities targeted) survived the Blitz not because they were plucky, determined, brave and patriotic – although of course many of them were – but because the Luftwaffe simply could not drop enough explosive on the right targets to bring economic and social activity to a halt, nor to kill or injure enough civilians to make the population demand a halt to the war.
With France out of the war, the end of the Battle of Britain and the Luftwaffe putting its energies into preparing for Barbarossa rather than air raids on England, the Royal Air Force could concentrate on four main roles: tactical support for the army on land; assistance to the navy with antisubmarine patrols; transport of men and materials including, later, gliders and parachute troops; and strategic bombing. Of all the principal combatants, only the British and the Americans had given the idea of strategic bombing much thought, and only those two countries had in production or on the drawing board aircraft sufficiently modern to carry it out. S
trategic bombing might be defined as the attacking of an enemy from the air with the intention of destroying his economy, his communications, his industries, his morale, his ability to continue the war, or any combination of those aims. It is carried out independently, that is, it is not necessarily waged in conjunction with any land or sea campaign, although it may be planned to help or enhance the operations of the armies or navies. With the French surrender and the humiliating defeat of British forces in Norway, France, Greece and Crete, the only way the British could hit back at the Germans in their own country was by strategic bombing. The greatest difficulty was not getting to Germany – the RAF had aircraft that could go there and back – nor the lack of long-range fighters to escort and protect the bombers – that would be rectified in time – but that to damage or destroy an enemy’s economy, industry, communications and the rest you have to be able to hit a precise target. Blowing up a railway bridge or a marshalling yard or an armaments factory by dropping bombs on it will do great harm to the enemy’s capacity to make war. However, a bomb landing in the river beside the bridge, in a field alongside the railway yard or on a building a mile away from the factory may prove a considerable irritation, but is not why it is carried hundreds of miles over hostile territory, and the reality was that in the early days the RAF was very bad indeed at hitting point targets, or indeed at finding its way to anywhere near the target it was supposed to be attacking.
The problem was largely one of navigation; the early radio direction-finding aids were primitive by later standards and much map-reading was by dead reckoning and following landmarks – the coast, rivers, railway lines. Cities were blacked out and while a ‘bombers’ moon’ – a full moon in a clear sky – helped navigation it also helped the air defence fighters sent up to intercept. One of the problems was that following bombers would use the explosions or fires caused by the aircraft in front of them as an aiming mark, and, as those often released their loads too early, there was a reverse creep whereby successive salvoes of bombs landed farther and farther from the target. The direction given to the RAF’s Bomber Command varied as the war progressed. Once the Battle of Britain was over, it was ordered to concentrate on bombing synthetic oil plants, then the emphasis was switched to German commerce raiders in port, U-boats and U-boat pens, and, finally, to German military capacity, industry and civilian morale. In late 1940 the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Peirse, calculated himself that for targets at short range one in three of his aircraft found it, and at longer ranges only one in five. Navigation for the bombers by day was, of course, far easier than at night but it was easier for the defenders too and very soon almost all bombing raids were carried out at night. For no real reason other than the problem of navigation, the RAF bombed military targets on clear moonlit nights, and cities on nights when the weather was such that only an area target could be attacked. German air defence – not just anti-aircraft guns and searchlights over the targets but also the radar-directed guns and fighter aircraft which harried British bombers all the way in from the coast of occupied Europe and all the way back to it – was robust and RAF losses were horrific, far worse than anything sustained by the army or the navy, and, when in the period 7 July to 10 November 1941 Bomber Command lost 526 aircraft for what seemed like little return, even the air marshals began to wonder about what they were doing.
The Butt Report, compiled by an Air Ministry civil servant, one D. M. Butt, merely made matters worse. Having analysed thousands of operational reports, aircraft logs, squadron war diaries and aerial photographs of targets attacked in the summer of 1941, Butt showed that on clear moonlit nights only one in four bombers had dropped their bombs within five miles of its target, and on nights with no moon only one in twenty. Not only did this demonstrate a lamentable inability to find the target, but also that within five miles might as well be within fifty miles if the target was a precise installation, bridge, building or railway junction. The War Cabinet ordered a halt to the bombing campaign while all took stock. Although the Butt Report went no lower than the Air Staff and commanders-in-chief, its findings inevitably trickled down, and, while men in uniform will do their utmost if their objective seems achievable, they are less ready to risk their lives if they appear to be accomplishing nothing. Much debate ensued between those who questioned the considerable resources of men, money and industrial capacity devoted to Bomber Command and those exponents of air power who insisted that, if the RAF was given the right aircraft and enough of them, Germany could be brought to her knees. The suggestion that the alternative was a long and bloody land campaign, reminiscent of the first war, was particularly persuasive in Churchill’s eyes, and the bomber barons got their way. Peirse was duly sacked and replaced by Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, more and better aircraft were planned and technical developments were accelerated. The War Cabinet’s direction to Bomber Command was that its efforts were now ‘to be focussed on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular of the industrial workers’. That was unequivocal: if the RAF could not hit specific military point targets – because the technology to allow them to do so did not exist – then its aircraft would attack the cities, large enough targets for a bomb dropped anywhere to do damage.
Attacking cities meant dealing out death and destruction to men, women and children, the old and the infirm, soldiers and civilians alike. In 1939 the view in the RAF was that, if an attack on a target endangered civilians, then the target should not be attacked, and there were even arguments as to whether it was permissible to attack private, as opposed to government, property. These gentlemanly attitudes did not last long, and, while some service officers and politicians still had doubts as to the morality of the deliberate targeting of civilians, the Germans had set a precedent, although they may not have intended to. When the bombing offensive got into its stride, particularly with the advent of the Lancaster and Halifax four-engined bombers, better navigational aids, the use of Pathfinders – specially selected aircrew who marked the target for the following bombers – and bombs which contained 1,000lb of high explosive, the destruction wreaked seemed to be enormous.
The raids on Hamburg, Germany’s second city and a major port, in July and August 1943, Operation Gomorrah, were intended by Harris to utterly destroy a city and its people, with the aim of persuading the Germans that, unless they sued for peace, the process would continue with other cities. The so-called Battle of Hamburg opened on the night of 24/25 July when 791 bombers of the RAF attacked the city, using for the first time ‘windows’ to confuse German radar.* Twelve aircraft were lost, a far better result than in the bombing offensive against the Ruhr that had just ended, 2,300 tons of bombs were dropped, much damage was caused to residential areas and fires were started all over the city. The following day 127 B-17 Flying Fortress aircraft of the American Eighth Air Force, based in the UK since 1942, set out to attack the Hamburg shipyards and an aero-engine factory. Smoke from the fires of the previous night and smoke screens laid by the defenders made it almost impossible to identify the targets, and, although 350 tons of bombs were dropped in the area of the shipyards, little damage was caused and the USAAF lost nineteen aircraft of the 114 that actually got to Hamburg.
The operations against Hamburg emphasized the different philosophies of the RAF and USAAF. The British, as we have seen, found that flying by day was too costly, but that precision targets were hard to hit by night and so had taken to attacking area targets – in effect, cities. The Americans thought that it would be more productive (and morally more acceptable) to attack precision targets and that their aircraft would allow them to do this by day by flying above the maximum range of anti-aircraft fire. Hence when both air forces worked together, the RAF operated by night and the USAAF by day.† As it was, on the night of 25/26 July Hamburg was left to burn and the RAF bombed Essen instead and then the USAAF mounted another day raid on Monday, 26 July, when it again tried to destroy the shipyards and aero-engine factory. Neither of t
hese could be seen clearly, and so the American aircraft dropped 118 tons of bombs on an electricity-generating station instead, leaving half of the city without power. Then, on the night of 27/28 July, the RAF returned and 787 aircraft dropped 2,326 tons of bombs on the city. Humid weather and a brisk wind fanned the flames and created a firestorm, whereby a fierce updraught sucked the oxygen in from surrounding areas and the pillars of fire created spread to other buildings. The heat was so intense that those residents not burned died through lack of oxygen, and by the time the RAF came back again on the night of 29/30 July the fire and rescue crews were spread so thinly over the city that they were quite unable to cope, even if road access for fire engines had not been blocked by falling buildings, and the 2,000 tons dropped by 707 aircraft merely added to the carnage and the fires which raged out of control. A final attack on the city, by 740 RAF aircraft on the night of 2/3 August, was unable to achieve very much as bad weather prevented most of the bombers from reaching their targets.
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