Bomber Command (33 page)

On 3 November 1942, Sir Charles Portal submitted a paper to the Chiefs of Staff on the prospects for the bomber offensive.

I am convinced [he wrote] that an Anglo-American bomber force based in the United Kingdom and building up to a peak of 4,000 to 6,000 heavy bombers by 1944 would be capable of reducing the German war potential well below the level at which an Anglo-American invasion of the continent would become practicable.

With such a force at their command, Portal promised, six million German homes could be destroyed, ‘with a proportionate destruction of industrial buildings, sources of power, means of transportation and public utilities’. 25 million Germans would be made homeless. There would be ‘civilian casualties estimated at about 900,000 killed and 1,000,000 seriously injured’. If, as Portal’s biographer argues, his purpose in mounting the bomber offensive was never to kill German civilians as such, then he was now hoping to achieve the most dramatic by-product in the history of strategy.

Sir Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, was openly sceptical about Bomber Command’s ability to fulfil these promises: ‘Experience had shown that built-up areas could stand much more knocking about than had been anticipated,’ he said. And the First Sea Lord was never less than scathing about the bomber offensive. Yet on 31 December 1942 the British Chiefs of Staff jointly endorsed Portal’s proposals, and recommended that ‘we should aim at a force of 3,000 British and American heavy and medium bombers operating from the United Kingdom by the end of 1943’.

Portal unveiled his plan weeks before the great Allied conference at Casablanca. Whatever strategic proposals the service chiefs were considering at this time, Winston Churchill approached Casablanca with one overriding priority: to dissuade the Americans from launching a second front in northern Europe in 1943. The British could scarcely suggest to their allies, still in the first flush of impatience to confront the Nazi war machine, that more delay provided time for the Russian army and the Wehrmacht to destroy each other. But the concept of using 1943 to wage a great bomber offensive specifically to pave the way for the second front gave purpose to prevarication. It was for this reason that the British Chiefs of Staff supported Portal’s paper, and for this reason that
the bomber offensive remained at the forefront of the British war effort in 1943.

The British went to Casablanca with the knowledge that they would have powerful support for their indirect strategy: from the American airmen. Since 1939 the Americans had been studying British bombing with intense interest. The United States Army Air Force envied the RAF’s independent status, and cherished hopes of establishing its own place as a third force, separate but equal, alongside the army and navy. The American airmen’s commitment to air power – and specifically to strategic bombing – matched that of the British.

But they favoured entirely different methods for doing so. Unmoved by Bomber Command’s failures in 1939 and 1940, they believed that the B-17 Flying Fortress was uniquely capable of carrying out an unescorted daylight offensive against Germany: cruising at 260 mph, heavily armed, heavy armoured, and capable of reaching a 33,000-foot ceiling. More important still, they considered that the Norden bomb-sight gave them the tool to carry out a precision campaign against the key elements of the German economy. The Americans rejected the concept of area bombing, of attacking enemy morale, not least because they believed that it had proved ineffective. In 1942, Major Alexander Seversky, one of the foremost American proponents of air power, was already writing:

Another vital lesson – one that has taken even air specialists by surprise – relates to the behaviour of civilian populations under air punishment. It had been generally assumed that aerial bombardment would quickly shatter popular morale, causing deep civilian reactions . . . The progress of this war has tended to indicate that this expectation was unfounded . . .

These facts are significant beyond their psychological interest. They mean that haphazard destruction of cities – sheer blows at morale – are costly and wasteful in relation to the tactical results achieved. Attacks will increasingly be concentrated on military rather than on random human targets. Unplanned vandalism from the air must give way, more and more, to planned, predetermined destruction. More than ever the principal objectives will be the critical aggregates of electric power, aviation industries, dock facilities, essential public utilities and the like.
⁴

Americans believed that the German blitz on Britain might have succeeded had it been properly planned. They argued throughout the war, and indeed through Vietnam a generation later, that incidental civilian casualties in the course of precision bombing were acceptable in a way that deliberate slaughter was not. The 8th Air Force flew its first mission to Rouen marshalling yards on 17 August 1942. From then until the end of the year, the Fortresses flew a further twenty-six operations over Europe, losing only thirty-two aircraft in 1,547 sorties, a missing rate of under 2 per cent. American gunners submitted a flood of claims for enemy fighters destroyed, surpassing even the wild estimates of the RAF early in the war. On 27 August 1942, Ira Eaker, commanding the 8th Air Force, was already predicting that 40 per cent of his Fortresses’ bombs could be dropped within five hundred yards of the aiming-point. He believed that ten bomber groups in 1942 reinforced by a further ten by June 1943 would be adequate ‘coupled with the British night-bombing effort, completely to dislocate German industry and commerce and to remove from the enemy the means for waging successful warfare’. General Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz endorsed Eaker’s enthusiasm. The USAAF’s great bubble of optimism, matching that of the RAF two years earlier, was airborne. It would be a year before it was brutally exploded.

An uncommitted observer would quickly have perceived that no radical conclusions could be drawn from the early American bomber operations in the autumn of 1942. The formation attacks did some damage to their targets, but they also scattered bombs among the French civilian population in an alarming manner. The Norden sight, so impressive in clear American summer skies,
became entirely useless in overcast European ones. From October 1942 to January 1943 almost half of all American bomber sorties were uncompleted. Above all, not a single 8th Air Force aircraft crossed the border of Germany. The Americans operated during this working-up period entirely against short-range targets under Spitfire escort, which the British advised the Americans was essential. The buildup of the 8th Air Force was also persistently delayed. Throughout the autumn and winter of 1942, as fast as bomber groups could be equipped and assembled in England, they were transferred to support Allied operations in North Africa. By January 1943, Eaker could muster scarcely eighty bombers at his British bases.

Yet by the coming of the Casablanca Conference, the British airmen were as eager as the Americans to make common cause of their enthusiasm for the 8th Air Force’s slender achievements. A number of British airmen, including even Sir Arthur Harris himself, were so impressed by the American experience that they began a renewed flirtation with the concept of daylight bombing. On 11 December 1942 Harris wrote to the AOC of 4 Group:

I think everybody is much too apprehensive about daylight operations . . . I have never been apprehensive about the ability of the heavy bomber to look after itself in daylight vis a vis the fighter . . . I want daylight operations started as soon as you are ready against lightly-defended targets . . . There is not the least doubt in my mind that if we and all the available Americans started daylight attacks against the less heavily defended targets in Germany by big formations of heavy bombers now, we should knock the German fighter force out of the sky in two or three months, by the simple process of shooting them down . . . It has all along been our experience that whenever the rear gunner, even at night, sees the enemy fighter first, he either destroys it or the fighter refuses to come in and attack.
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While this note severely damages Harris’s claims to be a realistic judge of the operational facts of life over Germany, it also
indicates the mood that prevailed among some British airmen after the early American sorties. The British fell over themselves to be complimentary. The notes survive for a public speech of Sir Archibald Sinclair, delivered on 12 October 1942. He eulogized ‘the prodigies of’ – the word ‘accurate’ is here crossed out, and ‘daylight’ substituted – ‘daylight bombing which the US Bomber Air Force have already begun to achieve’. On 17 October, eight squadrons of Lancasters staged a daring daylight attack on the Schneider Armament Works at Le Creusot, and returned with the loss of only one aircraft. Bomber Command was now equipped and trained for night operations, and no abrupt change of policy was possible. But some British airmen were thinking furiously.

The Americans, for their part, were largely indifferent to what Bomber Command did or did not do over Germany, provided that the USAAF had its chance to win the war by a precision-bombing offensive before Allied armies landed in France. Spaatz and Eaker might have no faith in area bombing, but they had no intention of saying anything publicly that might endanger the solid front presented by Allied airmen to their naval and military counterparts. General ‘Hap’ Arnold, Commanding General of the USAAF, was to display growing concern and indeed anger about the lack of coordination between Bomber Command and the 8th Air Force, but Spaatz and Eaker were at pains to take no controversial part in a debate on issues so close to the hearts of British airmen. Throughout the war, the two generals enjoyed almost continuously harmonious relations with the British. They understood each other’s difficulties perfectly. Harris’s struggle with the Royal Navy was mirrored by the USAAF’s difficulties with Admiral King, the Chief of Naval Operations, who was fighting for priority for the Pacific. As early as July 1942, Eisenhower was indicating that he hoped to use the 8th Air Force to support ground operations, a prospect totally at odds with the ambitions of the American airmen.

Harris sought to support the American airmen in their inter-service struggles with as much loyalty as they offered him in his difficulties with British colleagues and with Arnold in Washington.
In the file of Harris’s correspondence with the Prime Minister there is an undated memorandum from the winter of 1942–43 headed ‘Most Secret and Strictly Personal’, in which Harris urges Churchill to support Eaker and Spaatz in their difficulties with the US Navy and Army. ‘My American air friends are despondent,’ he wrote. Among his fellow airmen, Harris laboured constantly for a united front: ‘We can defeat the enemy if we are not defeated by our friends,’ he wrote to Arnold in August 1942.

Thus the Allied airmen came to Casablanca in January 1943 united in their determination to fight for a mandate for the growth of the bomber offensive. In the event it did not prove necessary to do so. Once the British had got their way about the major strategic decision taken at the conference, the postponement until 1944 of Operation
Overlord
– the invasion of northern Europe – in favour of Operation
Husky
– a step-by-step advance through Sicily and Italy – it was apparent that the Allies must continue the bombing campaign as the only major offensive against Germany. Churchill withdrew his objections to the American daylight attack, which he personally believed was doomed, after an appeal by Ira Eaker. It was agreed that the goal of the Combined Bomber Offensive, as it would henceforth be known, should be ‘to weaken Germany’s war-making capacity to the point to which invasion would become possible’.

In reality, of course, this was the airmen’s phrase: the soldiers would never have acknowledged the implication that invasion could not take place until strategic bombing had achieved some definable and decisive effect on Germany; the armies would be launched upon the invasion when the generals and statesmen saw fit, and their only major concern was that tactical air supremacy should be maintained around the battlefield. If Sir Charles Portal had ever believed that the war could be won by bombing alone, he no longer did so. At Casablanca he said emphatically that it was necessary ‘to exert the maximum pressure on Germany by land operations; air bombardment alone was not sufficient’.

The Casablanca Directive – CCS 166/I/D from the Combined Chiefs of Staff to Air Marshal Harris and General Eaker – ordered
them to embark on the demolition of a range of German target systems as essential preliminaries to D-Day. First on the list, with the Battle of the Atlantic still foremost in the Allies’ concerns, came submarine yards and bases. Then followed the German air force, its factories and depots. After these, ball-bearings, of which it was thought that Germany could be deprived with limited bomber effort against a handful of vital targets; oil; synthetic rubber and tyres; and military transport. The opening phrase of the directive reflected the intended marriage of British and American bombing policies:

Your primary aim will be 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 . . .

After the preamble, most of the detailed thinking in the directive about the German economy was American. It had been essential for the British to defer to the Americans’ precision-bombing ambitions in order to gain their own objectives at Casablanca. In the months following the conference, an Operational Committee produced what became known as the Eaker Plan, intended to transform the Casablanca Directive into realistic orders for Bomber Command and the 8th Air Force. The Eaker Plan reflected some of that general’s astonishingly vivid projections. If the 8th Air Force could be built up to a strength of 1,746 aircraft by 1 January 1944, and 2,702 aircraft by 1 April 1944, Eaker promised that German submarine construction could be reduced by 89 per cent; fighter construction by 43 per cent; bomber construction by 65 per cent; ball-bearings by 76 per cent; synthetic rubber production by 50 per cent. ‘These figures’, he added, ‘are conservative and can be absolutely relied upon.’