Joey Jacobson's War

by Peter J. Usher

  Doubters asked whether these findings were typical, and suggested that if navigation was the problem, it was most likely due to poor training or improperly maintained or utilized equipment. Senior air staff asked squadrons to submit systematic reports to headquarters on the numbers of aircraft failing to reach the target. The problem of wind-finding was singled out. Ascertaining wind direction and speed in the dark and cloud, without visible landmarks below, was difficult. Meteorological forecasting was still in its infancy. The longer the crews fly toward the target, and the higher they climb in the atmosphere, the less certain can they be that wind direction and speed continue to be as reported on takeoff, or as forecast to be en route. In short, crews become less likely to know where they are and where they are going. Astro-navigation can, over time, confirm the course of the aircraft independently of wind-finding, but not its exact location. Not all air observers had been fully trained in astro-navigation, and fewer still had enough experience to be good at it. Better sextants were promised, but they were in short supply.

  Although crews reported difficulties in finding their targets, they believed they had bombed them successfully when they did. On return, crews described the bomb flashes and fires they saw below to the intelligence officers who interviewed them. Yet even on clear nights they could only speculate about exactly where these had occurred and what damage they might have done. And they could only hope that they had not been deceived by dummy installations and decoy fires. Bomber aircraft were not yet equipped with night cameras, but with disturbing frequency, subsequent daytime photos of target areas taken by fighter aircraft reconnaissance forays failed to verify crew reports.

  Nearly every night of operations, a few aircraft did not return. Some were shot down over enemy territory, according to German reports via the International Red Cross in Geneva. Others were lost without trace – perhaps so badly damaged by enemy fire that they couldn’t make it back across the North Sea, or perhaps unable to find their way across those dark waters. Navigation errors, whether the result of impossible weather conditions at night, or of simple blunders like reading a compass or radio direction signal in reverse, could be fatal. Both aircraft and crews were being lost faster than they could be replaced until the spring of 1941, when freshly trained Canadians began arriving in numbers. Nagging suspicions mounted at all levels of the Command – from crews to commanders – about the effectiveness of bombing raids, but there was little willingness to acknowledge them. Initial reactions were defensive, and excuses were found.

  None of these problems was known to the British public. Every day the newspapers carried Air Ministry announcements of the ferocity of the previous night’s attacks on German targets, the number of aircraft dispatched, and even the number lost in the effort. Readers were left to infer that much damage had been inflicted, but these reports said nothing about the actual effects of the bombing.

  During the first year of the air war, the men charged with executing Bomber Command’s offensive – the crews, the squadron leaders, the group commanders, and the staff specialists – were learning by experience about the difficulties and hazards they faced, and how to deal with them. They shared personal and anecdotal experiences informally in the sergeant’s quarters and the officer’s quarters. They also discussed lessons learned at periodic group and specialist conferences, many of these devoted to navigation and bomb-aiming. They applied themselves with ingenuity and resourcefulness to solve the problems they saw. As air force men, they had always put a premium on flying experience, especially for leadership, with little regard for engineering and even less for science, which they regarded as civilian concerns. They were practical men, consumed with the day-to-day problems of operations, and not much given to theory or theoreticians. Their work was not yet systematic.

  In September 1940, a year into the war, a Bomber Development Unit was established for the purpose of investigating the causes of bombing errors, the problems of night bombing, navigation, and wind-finding, trials for new bombs and bombsights, and the development of new methods of attack. The Unit was expected to apply modern scientific methods, quantitative assessment and statistics, not to aeronautics, and not only to the development of new weapons and instruments but also to improving their deployment through combat tactics. Yet there were military men who doubted the utility of this approach and were wary of civilian encroachment. Some feared that the identification of “technical and scientific” personnel in the Unit’s terms of reference would be “seized upon by our civilian brethren to stock the BDU with a mass of bowler hats, probably chuck-outs from other establishments.”1

  Those bowler hats would become known as the “boffins,” the Air Ministry’s civilian scientists who developed all kinds of ideas they thought worth testing. Some of these ideas were bizarre and cost the lives of aircrews, but others became lifesavers and war winners. The Unit’s first report, issued in November, addressed methods of wind-finding. It challenged some current approaches and called for improvement of pilot and navigational skills. Many senior navigation officers decried its tone and questioned its findings, seeing them as impugning the work of those on the front line.

  Over a year into the war, a very English ethos of amateurism continued to prevail at the unit level. The premium was on gallant effort, even if it led more often than not to heroic failure. The sure thread, from the charge of the Light Brigade through the Somme to Dunkirk, and from Scott’s failed assault on the South Pole to Mallory’s failed attempt on the summit of Everest, remained unbroken.2 There was faith in Britain’s indomitable spirit, and comfort in its people’s seeming capacity to muddle through against heavy odds, but Bomber Command’s task was not to avoid defeat but to find a way to win.

  Unable to achieve precision bombing of its assigned targets, Bomber Command was soon directed to resort to the strategy it had always advocated: the “continuous interruption and dislocation” of industry, although night bombing was not to be allowed to “degenerate into mere indiscriminate action.”3 The opportunity for a quick knockout blow had passed, if indeed it had ever existed. By midsummer, Bomber Command had to concentrate its attacks on the more immediate threat of invasion. Its primary targets were now the Channel ports in France and Belgium, although it mounted a few raids on German cities in retaliation for the bombing of London. One of the more desperate (and entirely unsuccessful) measures envisaged in the summer of 1940 was setting fire to Germany’s crops and forests with incendiary bombs. Summing up the first year of war at the end of September, Bomber Command’s senior air staff officer lamented that the diversion of its squadrons to defensive tasks prevented it from inflicting sufficient force to crack Germany’s civilian morale and political will to fight. Yet if the offensive was so far without notable success, it was also without unbearable cost. Night bombing losses continued at less than 2 percent during the summer of 1940, grievous but within replacement capacity for both aircraft and crews.

  As winter approached, the Air Ministry decided that:

  if bombing is to have its full moral effect it must on occasion produce heavy material destruction. … it is desired that regular concentrated attacks should be made on objectives in large towns and centres of industry, with the primary aim of causing very heavy material destruction which will demonstrate to the enemy the power and severity of air bombardment and the hardship and dislocation which will result from it.4

  And so, step by step, and as much from necessity as conviction, precision bombing became area bombing, material effect became moral effect, and the by-product of attack became the end product. But even these alternatives required a large force that could overcome Germany’s air defences and concentrate sufficient bomb tonnage in a target area. Yet the actual force rarely amounted to more than a hundred aircraft on any night, and these were often dispersed over several targets in the hope that the unpredictability and diversity of its attacks would sap German morale and reduce the vulnerability of the bombers to Germany’s air defences. The cost of dispersal, ho
wever, was insufficient concentration of force over any one target to cause any significant damage, especially because the bomb load of each aircraft could destroy little more than a few houses. It would take a very long time to reduce Germany to rubble at that rate. That Bomber Command’s nightly raids would even set off enough air raid alarms to disrupt the sleep of Germany’s industrial workforce remained wishful thinking.

  As winter set in, the weather deteriorated, and many crews turned back or failed to find the target. Bomber Command took risks, not so much to achieve specific vital war objectives, but to keep the offensive going. Yet its attacks were of little consequence except perhaps to spur Germany to retaliate (and in the winter of 1940–41 the Luftwaffe was by far the more accomplished bomber force), and to improve its air defences.

  In January 1941, Bomber Command was charged with destroying Germany’s synthetic oil production by means of concentrated attacks under ideal weather conditions. These conditions were rare, and successful operations rarer. Two months later, in the face of rising shipping losses in the North Atlantic, Bomber Command was redirected to attack Germany’s naval docks, shipyards, and submarine bases. This new directive also called for something else: that priority “should be given to those [targets] in Germany which lie in congested areas where the greatest moral effect is likely to result.”5 In this way, bombs that missed the primary aiming point would not be wasted, as sometimes happened against more isolated military and industrial facilities. Conveniently for Bomber Command, the most heavily industrialized and populated areas of Germany were concentrated in the Ruhr, and thus within range of its aircraft. Crews were now authorized to bomb secondary targets such as city centres and built-up areas if they could not find the primary target, and so maximize the effectiveness of each raid. If Germany’s factories, railways, and naval yards could not be destroyed by bombs, perhaps the morale of those who worked in them could be. The indifferent results of the previous winter’s night operations would not be repeated, or so it was hoped.

  Four months later, on 9 July, the Air Council provided new direction to Bomber Command, this time to unleash a wide-ranging attack on Germany’s strategic war industries and transport systems. The objective was to inflict a crippling, if not fatal, blow to Germany’s capacity to wage war, whether on the ground, in the air, or at sea. This was the green light that the most fervent proponents of strategic bombing had been waiting for. In fact, it was they themselves who flashed the green light. At a conference of Bomber Command’s senior air ranks five weeks before, the retired Lord Trenchard had been invited to open the proceedings, where he reiterated his long-held view on the importance of cracking Germany’s morale by bombing its cities. No German should regard himself safe from the reach of the Royal Air Force, he said. Precise targets should be secondary. All nodded in agreement and, after Trenchard left the meeting, they set about drafting what would become their new directive. They observed that they would have to draft the paper very carefully to secure the political support of the prime minister’s Defence Committee, and if it were adopted, “the presentation of news concerning the results of the attacks would have to be carefully handled to ensure a favourable reception in this country and to avoid undue disclosure of our intentions to the enemy.”6

  Germany’s strategic air offensive against Britain during the previous winter had already rendered the public mood more receptive.

  On any given night in the summer of 1941, Bomber Command could theoretically draw on about 450 serviceable night bombers with crews, or about a 50 percent increase since the beginning of the war. In fact, accounting for crew leave, sickness, and detachments for training or ferrying, not more than 80 percent of that number was actually available on any given night, and the highest number of sorties on a single night to that point was 364. The average bomb weight per aircraft was just over two thousand pounds. This was not a large or effective enough force to do serious damage. Moreover, the old problems of navigation, target finding, bomb-aiming, and unforeseen bad weather remained unsolved, even as evidence mounted of Germany’s improved air defences. Meanwhile, monthly loss rates had risen to 2 and even 3 percent. Could Britain’s factories and the Empire’s air training programs replace these losses and yet expand the offensive? Bomber Command and its allies in the Air Ministry continued to exaggerate the accuracy and power of the bomber force and its ability to inflict the necessary pain on Germany. Bomber Command continued to take insufficient account of the operational difficulties that confronted it, hoping the offensive would be saved by technical solutions that were months or years away. The Command continued to prefer misleading and over-interpreted intelligence from sources in Germany over what its own airborne reconnaissance photography was beginning to reveal.

  This was the situation in which Britain would begin to attack Germany itself, in aid of its new Russian ally, until there could be a second front on the ground. These were the resources with which Lord Trenchard’s doctrine would be put to the test. Thus began in earnest the strategic air offensive against Germany, a campaign of increasing ferocity and effectiveness over the next four years. What until then had been little more than a program of nuisance raids would become devastation, but it would take a while. In the meantime, Bomber Command would have to fix the many problems that had been either unforeseen or wishfully ignored up to the previous year. As the newly arrived Canadians would soon learn, wars are fought with the resources one has, not those one wishes for.

  Eighteen

  Initiation

  Arrived on 106 sq with Roger & rec’d a warm reception from all the gang on 6 course at Finningley – Pop Miller & other Canadians – it was a grand feeling seeing the boys again – cool – confident, cheery. … I got all my old confidence & zip back again watching the fellows prepare for a raid on Kiel – 18 crews taking off – the boys all kid each other – take it easy & act as if there was nothing to it – that’s the cool confident spirit that is the backbone of our victory spirit. (JJD 2 August 1941)

  All planes returned from Kiel safely – it’s thrilling to be on an operational station – everybody is informal – friendly – natural – you live from day to day – learn to accept & look at danger coolly, calmly & without fear – amazing what we are capable of doing when we get down to it – hard to believe that I once shivered at the word – death –

  (JJD 3 August 1941)

  Was billeted with Roger at Woodhall Spa – an old widow with a nice home in a quiet village – Mrs. Lettice looks like a good scout …

  (JJD 4 August 1941)

  In his first letter home, Joe described Woodhall Spa as a charming and peaceful little English village. He immediately recognized in Clara Lettice the same good-hearted motherly qualities of Mrs. Graham, his landlady in Preston two years before. Mrs. Lettice had taken him and Roger in, he said,

  because we were Canadians and wanted to stay together. We have a lovely room – a magnificent feather bed and are quite at home.

  Mrs. Lettice has taken us quite to heart. She stays awake worrying about us every night we fly. Then she has tea, or coffee – bread, butter & jam for us when we wearily plod in about 8 o’clock in the morning.

  … When we fly we get chocolate – an orange, raisins, biscuits, gum, tea and sweets to eat on the trip – we give her chocolate and cigarettes so we are all happy. When I get a package I take it downstairs and we pool our resources and have a real feed – the old lady is a real good scout and Roger & I have a lot of fun when we are around.

  The only difficulty here is that there is no running water. She fills up the basin for us – but it is hard to wash your feet. We discovered a bath in a special shed behind the house and after a week in this home we have decided that Roger will use the bath first – he needs it most – there are no toilets either which means it is rather awkward with only one under the bed bowl for two – if you get what I mean – but we manage. …

  (JJL 10 August 1941)

  Alone among the drab, austere agricultural villages of the
Lincolnshire fens, Woodhall Spa was a charming, if modest, resort destination. The supposed curative powers of the local waters had led to the development of the spa, which in turn led to the redesign of the town centre by a London architect. By the turn of the century, several hotels and gift shops lined the newly laid out Broadway. Woodhall Spa, three miles north of RAF Coningsby, was one of several towns in which flying crew were billeted, dispersal being a key method of reducing the risk of aircrew coming under enemy air attack while on the ground.

  About one-third of Bomber Command’s night bombing force consisted of the Hampdens of 5 Group. 106 Squadron, which had been relocated to Coningsby in February, was one of seven Hampden-equipped squadrons in 5 Group. Squadrons were the smallest self-sustaining units of the air force for the purposes of aircraft maintenance and repair, administration, and provision of the necessaries for its members. Nominally they were twenty-four aircraft in strength, with a staff of perhaps thirty crews, led by a wing commander, and subdivided into three “flights” led by squadron leaders. Supporting them was a far greater number of mechanics, storekeepers, cooks, and drivers, so the total complement of a squadron amounted to several hundred people.

  Stations consisted of a single aerodrome shared by two squadrons, under the charge of a group commander, with his own administrative and technical staff, including meteorologists, intelligence officers, and navigation specialists. 106 Squadron shared RAF Coningsby with 97 Squadron, also in 5 Group but recently converted to the new heavy Manchester bombers. In July these aircraft had been grounded due to recurring engine problems.

  Joe with Roger Rousseau in front of Mrs. Lettice’s house, Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, late 1941. (Canadian Jewish Archives)