Joey Jacobson's War

by Peter J. Usher

  Joe had had the summer of his lifetime. He liked England, and he admired the English, even if he found them hard to love. He was exhilarated by operational training, and especially by flying. The war was for him not only a struggle of good against evil, it was also a contest, not unlike a long, drawn-out hockey or football game. He engaged people easily, as he had in Preston and the West. He sounded opinion in the shops and the pubs, read the newspapers voraciously, and talked endlessly with his fellow servicemen about their training and equipment. He wanted to understand the public mood, how England was organizing for war, and the technical and strategic necessities for winning it. If he overestimated the English public’s unity of purpose and commitment in “the people’s war,” it was more likely because it bolstered his own than because he had uncritically accepted the government and media line.

  Writing letters was a way of organizing his thoughts on those issues of crucial importance to him. BCATP training had made a Canadian of him. Operational training gave him a Commonwealth perspective. He gained a sense of solidarity with the other Dominions, which seemed, like Canada and in contrast to Britain, more fortunately blessed by modernity and prosperity, and less burdened by class distinction.

  It was Joe’s good fortune to have family in England and a home to visit that was in complete contrast to life at his station. Most Canadians were not so lucky. For Joe, Midfield was a refuge. At Finningley, his work in the air was demanding and dangerous. Off duty he threw himself into rugged sports by day, and rowdy pub sessions at night. All the while he was forging a fellowship of airmen and a fraternity of air observers. Leave time in London was a non-stop round of searching out friends, going to plays, and wandering the streets. Joe loved London. To him it was the world’s greatest city and he couldn’t get enough of it. At Midfield he could reconnect with mannered and cultivated people (particularly the women), and through them indirectly with his own family in Montreal. He engaged in cultured conversation in the garden and at table, and he enjoyed the comforts of a good home well supplied with whisky and cigars.

  Moreover, there was tennis, swimming, picnics, and dinners with Janine. She was a girl he could be proud to take for a nice dinner at the Midland Hotel in Manchester. She was classy, but their relationship remained platonic, whatever longings they had for each other. Janine was too close to being family, and too well supervised at Midfield. And Joe wanted no commitments, especially in wartime. Better Cecily from afar, perhaps, than Janine close by. Midfield gave Joe grounding and stability, kept him on the straight and level, and it would continue to do so. For three months in the spring and summer of 1941, Joe caromed between the intensity and dangers of training at Finningley, the delights of London, and the refuge and intimacy of Midfield.

  What lay in store for Joe, and how well was he prepared for it? Much of his flying at Finningley had constituted a refresher course in navigation, bombing, and gunnery, although in larger aircraft. His night flying training had consisted of two navigation flights and one bombing practice. He had completed three practice raids averaging four hours each. Joe’s operational training was typical of what the other trainees from Canada got.

  Night flying had been limited at OTUs all summer due to the short period of night darkness, landing field limitations, and restrictions on non-operational flying. There were still many ground instructors with no operational experience who taught navigation and meteorology from a theoretical rather than practical perspective. Flying training was insufficiently realistic. Flying was not done at operational heights, there was little or no engagement with searchlight batteries, and even the final training flights were considerably shorter than operational flights would be. Air observers had no in-flight mentors because, unlike the situation with pilots and WO/AGs, there was only one per aircraft. Parachute practice was limited to jumping off a wall, there being enough ways of losing highly trained men without adding live jumps from the air. Not included at all in the curriculum was radio navigation because the RAF had not thought it necessary to develop the appropriate devices and systems for that until far too late, and in any event long after the Luftwaffe had done so.

  Canadians would now make a significant contribution to Bomber Command’s offensive. Close to two thousand Canadian graduates of the Air Training Program had arrived in Britain by May. Nearly a quarter of them were air observers, more than the British AO schools had graduated by that time. The roughly 275 Canadian air observers who had arrived in March and April passed out of operational training in June and July, just as Bomber Command’s strategic air offensive was being ramped up. Those Canadian air observers were a major addition to Bomber Command’s total strength of about five hundred aircrews, not only in numbers but also in their qualifications as navigators. If their map-reading skills needed improvement, they were thought to be strong in the other skills, especially astro-navigation. They had arrived in numbers none too soon, as there were already glimmerings within Bomber Command that too many bombs were falling far from their intended targets.

  Their experience in operational training had made them more aware of themselves as Canadians, and perhaps reinforced their confidence and swagger. They were about to enter combat in a branch of service that seemed the freest of stale ideas and ancient traditions. They had become more aware of the dangers they would face, although still less aware of the technical challenges they would face as navigators over Germany.

  Yet circumstances were changing fast. Could Bomber Command keep pace? Certainly the Air Training Program had not been. The gap between the content of air training in Canada and the realities of the bomber war in Europe had been getting wider. And operational training in Britain at that point was barely closing it, if at all. In the summer of 1941, there were high expectations of Bomber Command, and high public support for its announced offensive. Fighter Command had saved the country from invasion in 1940. Could Bomber Command win the war for Britain in 1941?

  Target for Tonight recruiting poster. (Wikimedia Commons)

  Part Three

  Night Bombing

  It is on the destruction of enemy industries and above all on the lowering of [enemy] morale caused by bombing that the ultimate victory rests.

  — Air Chief Marshal Hugh Trenchard, Statement to the Parliamentary Committee for Imperial Defence, 1923

  No power on earth can protect the man in the street from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.

  — Stanley Baldwin, Lord President of the Council, House of Commons, 10 November 1932

  Seventeen

  Bomber Command

  It all seemed simple enough. According to Lord Trenchard, marshal of the Royal Air Force, bombing would do the trick, and according to Britain’s Acting Prime Minister Baldwin, nothing could stop it. Aerial bombing was touted by its proponents, and feared by the media and politicians, as the inevitable consequence and the decisive factor in any future war. In the late 1930s, German, Italian, and Japanese aircraft bombed defenceless towns in Spain, Ethiopia, and China. Photos and accounts of the destruction and panic aroused public horror in the Western democracies. England itself had suffered occasional aerial bombardment during the Great War. Being unprepared, there had been no defence, and considerable panic resulted among civilians, even if there was little material damage.

  The RAF, a separate service, saw air power not simply as a tactical means of supporting army or naval operations, or even of attacking enemy forces directly. Air power would instead be the decisive factor in war because it provided the means of attacking the source of the enemy’s armed strength: its factories, transport, communications, and cities. The objective was to defeat the enemy nation, not merely its armed forces, by means of a quick and decisive strategic offensive. The RAF needed a large fleet of heavy bombers to reach distant targets and deliver this “knockout blow,” which, its proponents argued, would also avert the catastrophic slaughter in the trenches of the previous war.

  Unlike more traditional forms o
f military engagement, strategic bombing doctrines remained at the level of theory. During the 1920s, the RAF was engaged mainly in containing insurgencies at the outposts of empire in Iraq and the Northwest Frontier. These attacks on camps and villages armed with rifles had made aerial bombardment seem like a piece of cake. They provided no useful operational experience of a full-fledged strategic bombing offensive against a technically advanced enemy nation. Nor was there yet any evidence that civilian morale would crack under a sustained bombing campaign, much less that Britain could count on this happening more quickly in the nations with whom it might be at war than among its own civilian population. Neither Britain’s political leaders, nor the chiefs of staff, nor even the Air Ministry fully endorsed the RAF’s strategic offence doctrine. The public largely opposed preparations for war, and money was short.

  Nonetheless, the RAF prepared itself for a strategic bombing war. When, in 1932, international negotiations to limit aerial bombing ended in failure, the RAF promptly drew up specifications for modern bombers able to carry heavy loads to distant targets. In 1934 the RAF embarked on an expansion program to construct dozens of new airfields across the British island fortress. The next year, the RAF was reorganized, with Bomber Command established to conduct the strategic offensive (Fighter Command would be the RAF’s defensive arm, and Coastal Command would be responsible for coastal defence and anti-shipping offensives). The third pillar of expansion was to recruit and train the great number of men needed to operate a sophisticated bomber force. New training schools were established in Britain, and many more were added in Canada under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. What aspiring aircrew would learn in their training, and what they would not learn, was rooted in the doctrines and practices of the Royal Air Force as these had developed for better or worse since the 1920s.

  The RAF introduced three new bombers into service just before the war. These were the Wellingtons, Whitleys, and Hampdens, each incorporating the latest features of aircraft technology: all-metal, low-wing, twin-engine monoplanes, with complex electrical and hydraulic systems, equipped with variable-pitch propellers and retractable landing gear. These aircraft would finally and definitively replace the biplane bombers of First World War design.

  The last and fastest of the three was the Hampden, which entered service in 1938. It seemed to promise much, but delivered somewhat less. It could carry a two-thousand-pound bomb load to a target as far as six hundred miles away, although it took four hours to do so. The Handley-Page Hampden quickly earned the nickname “flying suitcase” on account of its narrow, boxy, flat-sided fuselage. Its long, slim tail boom, and its manoeuv-rability in flight lent it the appearance of a dragonfly. Three feet wide, the Hampden seemed more like a fighter-bomber than the larger Whitley and Wellington bombers in the main force. Many pilots liked flying it, despite an alarming tendency for uncontrollable sideslip.

  Yet none of these bombers fully loaded could reach much beyond the factories of northwestern Germany. Berlin was near the limit of range, but with little more than half the bomb load. The RAF had not addressed the problem of actually finding any of these targets after several hours’ flying time from England in conditions other than cloudless daylight, despite being aware of it since the Great War. The new bombers were also thinly armoured and lightly armed: their machine guns fired bullets the calibre of a hunting rifle. Wellingtons and Whitleys had power-operated gun turrets, thought (wrongly) to provide a decisive defensive advantage. Hampdens did not.

  At the outbreak of war, the RAF had established five to six squadrons of each type, amounting to less than three hundred aircraft in total. About 80 percent might have been available for action on any given day. This was the force that would put theory into practice. But how would these new airplanes fare in combat? The power and capabilities of military aircraft had progressed rapidly on both sides during the rearmament period of the late 1930s. The RAF’s front-line bombers were already becoming outdated by the time they were brought into active service. They were nearly defenceless against by then faster and more heavily armed German fighter aircraft. Without long-range fighter escorts to support them, which the RAF did not have, the bombers were easy targets in daylight. The RAF had not installed radio navigation aids in its bombers, even though such aids were already in use in civil aviation in Europe. Radar, then only a ground-based defensive system, was just coming into use.

  The view that “the bomber will always get through” still gripped the public and the media in 1939. The Air Ministry was less sure, and was hedging its bets for a long war, and even Bomber Command’s commander-in-chief, Air Chief Marshall Sir Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt, had his doubts. Yet whether Bomber Command could actually deliver a “knockout blow,” it was not authorized to do so. The Air Ministry’s instructions governing both air and naval bombardment, issued the week before war was declared, specified that the intentional targeting of civilian populations was illegal. Thus, during the first seven months of the war, Bomber Command’s offensive operations were limited to naval targets at sea. These became increasingly difficult to locate as weather conditions deteriorated and daylight hours diminished with the onset of winter. All that Bomber Command dropped on Germany itself that winter were propaganda leaflets.

  In clear weather on the afternoon of 18 December 1939, twenty-four Wellington bombers set out in formation to attack the naval facilities at Wilhelmshaven on Germany’s northwest coast. Luftwaffe fighters picked off most of them, and only seven returned to England unscathed. This was not Bomber Command’s first catastrophic daylight raid, but it was the worst, and it put an end to the idea that a daylight formation could defend itself against modern German fighter aircraft. Evidently the bomber did not always get through, and indeed might have a less than even chance of doing so, at least in daylight. This inescapable conclusion prompted the most crucial tactical change of the long strategic air offensive: to conduct it by bombing at night.

  Bomber Command was forced to resort to night bombing with aircraft unequipped for it, and crews untrained for it. Pre-war aircrews rarely flew in darkness or bad weather, both of which prevailed in Europe in winter. Flying was essentially visual, aided only by radio contact with ground stations. Cross-country exercises in Britain provided little guide to navigating long distances over blacked-out territory, except to confirm that it was quite possible for crews to get lost even over home territory. There was no long-distance flying training over the sea.

  Then, in May and June 1940, the strategic situation was stunningly reversed as Germany attacked and defeated its western neighbours. Germany could project its air and naval power from anywhere on Europe’s Atlantic coast between northern Norway and southern France. London was now an easy target for the Luftwaffe’s new forward bases just across the Channel. Germany’s military and industrial targets, on the other hand, were several hours’ flying time from England, and Berlin considerably further distant. With the British Army chased off the Continent, only Bomber Command could carry the fight directly to Germany. Yet to do so effectively, it required newer, heavier bombers: aircraft that could carry a large bomb load for a long distance, equipped with the navigational and bomb-aiming technology to locate and hit a target accurately and with effect. Unfortunately, the heavy bomber program begun in 1936 would not even begin to provide combat-ready aircraft until 1941. Until then, the Wellingtons, Hampdens, and Whitleys would have to carry the attack.

  Night bombing of Germany began in May 1940. Raids that summer were small and intermittent, and generally confined to the “moon period” of approximately nine nights around the full moon, especially when clear weather was forecast. Bomber Command was just then learning from its tactical support in the defence of France that its aircraft had difficulty targeting small objectives on moonless nights, even at low altitudes. At higher altitudes on such nights, crews could not map-read their way over the darkened landscape below, and neither could they rely confidently on dead reckoning or radio fixes to find their way because both b
ecame less accurate with distance from base. Crews fortunate enough to find the target area then had to “stooge” around for some time to get a visual fix on their specific target (such as an oil production or storage facility, an aircraft factory, or a railway hub), which might well be obscured by industrial haze. This could mean spending a half-hour or so in a blacked-out target area, perhaps aided by releasing a flare that might illuminate the target but also reveal their own presence. Crews unable to identify and confirm their target were instructed to bring their bombs back.

  Bomber Command was still using 250- and 500-pound general-purpose (GP) bombs of First World War vintage. On account of their high proportion of metal casing to explosive, these bombs delivered a modest blast for their weight (if they actually detonated), and could not penetrate armour plate or hardened concrete. GP bombs could destroy a house, cause severe structural damage to a few more, and break windows over a city block or two. So a lot of them would be needed to do serious damage to a large factory or to naval yards. And they would have to be well placed, which was the exception, not the rule.

  All through 1940 there was considerable discussion in Bomber Command of high-level tactics and objectives: optimum targets, levels of force or concentration required, and routing of attacks. Commanders knew the number of aircraft sent to various targets and the weight of bombs dropped, but very little about the effectiveness of these attacks. An initial assessment made in November, six months into the night bombing campaign, suggested that only 35 percent of the aircraft dispatched were actually reaching their primary target.