Blackett's War (42 page)
Authors: Stephen Budiansky
Harris was nothing if not consistent: the head of Bomber Command vehemently opposed attacking even the U-boat bases as a diversion of effort from the strategic bombing campaign against the German heartland. But the British Air Staff was willing to apply to the U-boat ports the methods of incendiary-fueled area bombing that Harris had made his trademark. With both First Lord of the Admiralty A. V. Alexander and Churchill now strongly backing the proposal, the War Cabinet on January 11, 1943, agreed
that Bomber Command should make as its first priority the destruction of “the whole area” around the U-boat pens. The RAF raids began the night of January 14 with a strike on L’Orient.
The effort received further endorsement at the highest levels on January 21, when Roosevelt and Churchill, meeting in Casablanca, issued a joint directive for the Allied bomber offensive. The agreement still emphasized that the prime objective of the British-American strategic bombing campaign was “the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened”—which meant keeping the focus of the bomber campaign on striking the German homeland. Eaker, who had a degree in journalism, had written a clever one-page pitch that basically allowed the American and British air forces to keep doing what each wanted to do anyway but presented it as coherent grand strategy. Harris’s night area bombing and the AAF’s daylight “precision” bombing were hardly the same thing, but Eaker hit on a phrase that Churchill seized on at once when he handed him his paper at Casablanca: “If the RAF continues night bombing and we bomb by day, we shall bomb them round the clock and the devil shall get no rest.” Churchill loved the bit about “the devil” and started using the phrase himself.
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The Casablanca directive did also, however, note that besides the priority objectives in Germany there were other targets “of great importance from the political or military” point of view that deserved attention, the U-boat bases in France being the prime example.
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Seven more fire-bombing raids on the French ports followed over the next four weeks. Some parts of L’Orient were hit with one incendiary bomb per square yard. Though civilian casualties were surprisingly light—more than 20,000 of the city’s 40,000 residents evacuated the city after the BBC broadcast a warning to the population in January—fires set by the air raids burned 3,500 of the town’s 5,000 buildings to the ground, all major utilities were knocked out, and almost all of the remaining civilian population fled.
Raids against Saint-Nazaire followed through the spring, with 1,500 tons of incendiaries and 300 tons of high explosives. The town was destroyed in huge blazes that consumed every major building along with workers’ housing, schools, churches, and hospitals. Analysts poring over reconnaissance photos finally managed to identify a dozen direct hits on the submarine
pens: the bombs had left barely visible pockmarks in the concrete. Dönitz summarized the effects of the raids with the contempt they deserved:
The Anglo-Saxons’ attempt to strike down the submarine war was undertaken with all the means available to them. You know that the towns of Saint-Nazaire and L’Orient have been rubbed out as main submarine bases. No dog or cat is left in these towns. But the U-boat shelters remain.
Though the towns were rendered virtually uninhabitable, rail lines and power plants damaged in the raids were quickly repaired. Some critical repair shops and port services were destroyed, but rather than abandoning the bases, Dönitz simply moved those operations into the protective shelter of the concrete pens themselves. A year and a half later even the air commanders abandoned all remaining pretense that the raids had accomplished anything. The attacks had “caused inconvenience,” a U.S. air staff intelligence report concluded in December 1944, “but have never in the long run affected the operational use of the bases.”
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The submarine shelters themselves have defied all subsequent attempts to demolish them: they remain to this day, useless, abandoned, indestructible witnesses to the thoroughness of the Thousand Year Reich and the futility of strategic bombardment as a shortcut to military victories.
THE CIRCULAR LOGIC
of the bomber barons was breathtaking. As Harris saw it, the only things even worth destroying from a military standpoint were the things that his bombers could destroy; if he could not target it, it was not a target in the first place. Even after the Casablanca directive Harris continued to insist that the U-boats were a waste of time. He was either sure enough of his ability to reverse Churchill’s orders or so tone deaf to the politics that he continued to issue forth streams of sarcastic and hyperbolic memoranda disparaging any notion that heavy bombers ought to be used for anything but bombing Germany. The Admiralty’s proposals to bomb the submarine pens and increase the number of sub-hunting VLR aircraft with centimeter-wave ASV radar would leave Bomber Command a “residuary legatee,” left to pick up the scraps to carry out its prime mission after “all the other claimants press for their full, real or fancied, requirements being met,” he furiously insisted in a March 29, 1943, memorandum for the
Anti-U-boat Committee. “The employment of aircraft to attack the fringes rather than the centre of the objective is a highly extravagant process,” he continued:
In view of the very large number of U-boats which the enemy will operate in the coming months, the proportion of his successes which would be eliminated by accepting the Admiralty proposals seems to me to be so small as to be negligible. The effect of them on the Bomber Offensive would be catastrophic.… In the present case it is inevitable that at no distant date the Admiralty will recognise that U-boats can be effectively dealt with only by attacking the sources of their manufacture but by then much time will have been lost and the whole success of the Bomber Offensive, which may have a decisive influence on the success of Russia and even of her remaining in the war, will have been jeopardised.… This in my opinion would be a far greater disaster than the sinking of a few extra merchant ships each week.
Harris dismissed as “purely defensive” the idea of “chasing wild geese on the Bay of Biscay” or otherwise employing long-range aircraft on “seagoing defensive duties.” By contrast, the bomber offensive was “the only effective means open to the United Nations in the immediate future for striking directly at Germany.” Indeed, Harris insisted, it was already close to winning the war: “Opportunities do not last for ever, and we have got so near with the existing bomber force to producing a state of destruction and chaos in Germany insupportable to the enemy, that to let up on it now would give him new encouragement, and would make it very difficult, if not impossible, to catch up again.”
Bomber Command also was in a fight for allocation of centimeter-wave radar sets, which added to Harris’s opposition to U-boat hunting. The same technology was used in a radar system being developed for “blind” bombing through clouds, code-named H2S; in principle this would give the bombardier a picture of a coastline or other ground features below to help locate the target under poor visibility. Harris insisted in his memorandum that the technology was vital to his air campaign against Germany, but unlikely to make much difference to the anti-U-boat effort—incredibly revealing in the process that he did not understand the first thing about radar or the U-boat search problem:
I feel, however, that too much emphasis is being given to the possibility of locating U-boats by means of A.S.V., and too little to the difficulty of attacking them successfully when they are located. Our experience, which is considerable, is that even expert crews find it no easy matter to attack with accuracy even a city by means of H2S. I am therefore rather sceptical of the prospects of inexperienced crews with A.S.V. Indeed, I feel that the provision of aircraft equipped with this apparatus will mark the beginning rather than the end of the difficulties involved in sinking U-boats.
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Blackett penciled “nonsense!” next to that paragraph on his copy. In fact, for both technical and military reasons centimeter-wave radar worked much better as an antisubmarine weapon than as a high-altitude bombing aid. A submarine’s metal conning tower generated a strong and clear radar reflection in the centimeter-wave band: trials had confirmed that the new radars could easily pick out a surfaced U-boat at a range of twelve miles. By contrast, the radar echoes coming off large geographic features when the radars were used for ground mapping in the H2S sets were always vague and extremely difficult to interpret.
Moreover, there was the acute danger that an H2S-equipped bomber would sooner or later be shot down over enemy territory, giving away to the Germans the secret of the new Allied radar; once that happened it would only be a matter of time before they developed countermeasures, including a warning receiver that could alert U-boat crews of an approaching aircraft operating a radar at this new shorter wavelength. That was indeed exactly what did happen. During the second bombing mission flown with the new device, February 2, 1943, a bomber carrying an H2S set was shot down over Rotterdam. A complete report on the new technology reached the highest levels of the German command a few weeks later; work began at once on a centimeter-wave U-boat warning receiver, code-named Naxos. Only some fortuitous technical glitches prevented its being ready in time to thwart the Allies’ major offensive against the U-boats in the Bay of Biscay a few months later, in the summer of 1943.
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IT WAS REMARKABLE
that to Harris, bombing submarine factories in Germany was the only “direct” means of attacking the U-boats while dropping depth charges on them when they were hunted down at sea was going
after “the fringes.” But a year later he would be making similar arguments to oppose the Normandy landings, insisting that the bomber offensive offered the only sure route to victory, and characterizing the imminent seaborne and land offensive against Germany as risky, even unnecessary. (General Alan Brooke, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, noted dryly in his diary after one meeting with Eisenhower and his top commanders preparing for D-Day, “Harris told us how well he might have won the war had it not been for the handicap imposed by the existence of the other two services.”)
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The Admiralty and the Air Staff exchanged increasingly vituperative notes over the bombing of the U-boat bases. Blackett noted in one that if the price to be paid for Harris’s bomber offensive was to delay by six months the launching of a ground campaign in Europe because of a shortage of transport needed to carry troops and supplies across the Atlantic, then “the word ‘offensive’ is as wide of the mark as the word ‘defensive’ when applied to the bombing of U-boat bases.”
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Harris, true to his convictions and his disdain for “panacea bombing,” did not hesitate to join sides with critics who were doubting that the air force was achieving much of anything by attacking L’Orient and Saint-Nazaire. That put him at odds with the U.S. air force as well as with his fellow RAF officers who were directing the operation against the U-boat ports.
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Yet few air senior officers took issue with Harris’s larger point, that the strategic bomber offensive was the core mission and raison d’être of the air forces. Blackett’s involvement in the argument reawakened the previous year’s dispute over bombing policy, and RAF officers closed ranks to defend their service. Blackett probably did not help matters by going toe-to-toe with Harris in an exchange of acerbic memoranda about fundamental war strategy; he began his reply to Harris’s March 29 memorandum, “I have read the paper by A.O.C. in C., Bomber Command, which is coloured by the same fundamentally false strategic conception displayed all through these discussions with the Air Staff.”
Even the new commander of Coastal Command, Air Marshal John Slessor, bridled when Blackett and Williams recommended to the Anti-U-Boat Committee the transfer of VLR aircraft from Bomber Command to increase patrols in the bay. Blackett had not bothered to discuss their paper with Slessor before presenting it to the committee, an amateurish political miscalculation. Slessor, offended, reacted by dismissing the scientists’ calculations of the effectiveness of patrolling the bay as “slide-rule strategy of the worst kind”—and later insinuated that Blackett’s real motive was that
he “was intellectually and temperamentally opposed to the bomber offensive.” In his memoirs Slessor tried to justify his stance by suggesting that Blackett and Williams were simply out of their depth:
The operational research scientists had no stronger supporter than I, and these two were among the best of them. But they must stick to their lasts. Statistics are invaluable in war if they are properly used—in fact you can’t fight a modern war without them. But the Bay offensive was a battle, and a bitterly contested one, and nothing could be more dangerously misleading than to imagine that you can forecast the result of a battle or decide the weapons necessary to use in it, by doing sums. It is not aeroplanes or ships or tanks that win battles; it is the men in them and the men who command them. The most important factors in any battle are the human factors of leadership, morale, courage and skill, which cannot be reduced to any mathematical formula.
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In other words, calculations based on quantifiable data were invaluable—but a commander was always free to ignore them on the grounds that unmeasurable factors were still more important. The fact that Blackett’s and Williams’s “sums” had repeatedly tripled or quintupled the effectiveness of the men and their weapons apparently went right by the air marshal, as did the fact that nothing is more bracing for men’s morale than success.
Blackett was excluded from a meeting of the Anti-U-boat Committee on March 31 on the slim pretext that there were too many attendees. Picking up on Slessor’s line about “slide rule strategy,” Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal, the chief of the Air Staff, told the committee he was reluctant to transfer any aircraft from the bomber offensive to the Battle of the Atlantic based “on a theoretical calculation.” Harris added his familiar scorn and Cherwell backed him up with a sage pronouncement, based on no apparent facts whatsoever, that adding a modest number of aircraft to the bay offensive was unlikely to be effective. Outnumbered and outargued, the Admiralty representatives were forced to accept Portal’s token offer that “inexperienced” bomber crews could be used to continue the raids on the bay ports, as could the U.S. Eighth Air Force on days when clouds obscured the targets in Germany that the Americans hoped to strike with their daylight precision tactics.
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