Blackett's War (36 page)

The impatience in Britain to find some way to lash back at the Germans for the pounding the Luftwaffe had visited upon British cities and towns gave an extra impetus to getting the Allied strategic air campaign under way. When Churchill visited devastated neighborhoods of London’s East End during the Blitz, walking amid piles of rubble left from the German bombers, crowds greeted him everywhere with the same cry: “We can take it, but give it ’em back!”
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Churchill frequently asserted that the fight against the U-boats was the only theater where Britain could now lose the war; he also had come to the conclusion that the strategic air campaign was, at least possibly, the only one where the Allies could win, certainly the only way
they could get in some blow against the enemy while the massive buildup for a landing on the European continent slowly proceeded. As early as July 1940 Churchill observed in a minute to his minister of aircraft production:

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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:

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:

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.”
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