Bomber Command (35 page)

Harris’s stated reason for opposing Bufton was that morale would suffer throughout Bomber Command if an elite force was created within it:

I wanted six Pathfinder forces – one in every group. Having only one, we were told to send all the best crews to it. Imagine the feelings of squadron commanders on being told to hand them over! Portal had no right to overrule me on the advice of a junior staff officer whose only qualification was that he had dropped a few leaflets on Europe at the beginning of the war.
¹³

‘I don’t think that the formation of a First XV at a school makes the small boys play rugger any less enthusiastically,’ remarked Sir Henry Tizard, in answer to Harris’s objections. Throughout the early summer of 1942 there was a series of acrimonious meetings at High Wycombe. Harris and his group commanders were hostile, but, as Bufton pointed out, not one of them had operational experience over Germany. It was a new and entirely unwelcome experience for the C-in-C, who kept dissent at High Wycombe to a minimum, to be thus harried by a junior officer. The morning after one fierce conference, as Bufton walked up the steps of the Air Ministry in King Charles Street, Harris’s Bentley drew up at its usual relentless rush, and the C-in-C sprang out, noticing the staff officer without enthusiasm as he passed: ‘Morning, Bufton. And what are you going to do to me today?’

Harris began to lose the battle when the file was passed to
Freeman, the Vice-Chief of Air Staff. A consensus clearly emerged at the Air Ministry that whatever the problems of a ‘Target-Finding Force’, it offered better prospects than the existing system of ‘Raid Leaders’ evolved in the spring, using arbitrarily-selected line squadrons to mark for the Main Force with incendiaries. In July 1942 Harris learnt that he had lost his case.

But there were still some rearguard actions that the C-in-C could win. First, he would not have the new Group called a ‘Target-Finding Force’. They would be considered primarily as route guides, ‘Pathfinders’. When a proposal was put forward that they should be commanded by the dashing spirit of 2 Group, Basil Embry, Harris would have none of it. His critics said that it was because he feared that Embry would prove as self-willed as himself. In any event, Harris’s choice for the command of PFF – No. 8 Group, as it became – was a young Australian group captain named Donald Bennett. Bennett served under Harris in flying-boats before the war, left the RAF to fly for Imperial Airways, and created a reputation as one of the most brilliant technical airmen of his generation: an outstanding pilot, a superb navigator who was also capable of stripping a wireless set or overhauling an engine. Bennett spent the early months of the war as one of the directors of the trans-Atlantic ferry, flying aircraft from America to Britain. After his return to the RAF he commanded a Halifax squadron until he was shot down attacking the
Tirpitz
in a Norwegian fjord, and made a successful escape through Sweden. He was still only thirty-two, twenty years younger than his fellow group commanders. The important reservations about Bennett were that he had no large-scale administrative experience, yet he would be immediately responsible for a hundred aircraft and their huge supporting organization, ultimately for nineteen squadrons. He was a difficult and arrogant ‘loner’ who gained much respect but very little personal affection everywhere that he went. He made no secret of his satisfaction and conviction that his appointment represented the eclipse of the ‘gentlemen’ and the arrival of the ‘players’. Yet Harris overcame widespread service objections to get Bennett his
job, and kept him in it until the end of the war. In a letter to the Prime Minister soon after 8 Group was formed, Harris described its new commander as ‘one of the most efficient and finest youngsters I have ever come across in the Service’.

PFF would never get all the resources that it believed it needed. According to Bennett himself,
¹⁴
4 and 6 Groups loyally sent him the best crews they could muster, but the other Group AOCs were half-hearted, to say the least, in providing their share of men for secondment to PFF. Bennett and Harris fought a tough battle with the Treasury and the Air Ministry to gain some special recognition for PFF crews, who it was decided should do forty-five trips instead of the usual thirty in their tour, to make the most of their experience. In the end, in addition to the Pathfinder badge which was always genuinely coveted by the aircrew, Pathfinders were granted a step-up in rank and pay for as long as they were on ‘ops’, to be dropped when they finished their tours. They did not, however, get the pick of the aircraft. The five squadrons of Pathfinders that were operational by the beginning of 1943 flew the general Bomber Command mixture of Stirlings, Halifaxes, Lancasters and the new Mosquitoes.

In the last months of 1942 the concentration of bombs dropped by Harris’s forces improved marginally with the introduction of the Pathfinders, despite appalling operating weather. A few Main Force crews still ignored the PFF markers and sought their own identification of the target as a matter of pride and genuine conviction that their own judgement was better; but the vast majority were immensely relieved to see the Target Indicators glowing at the heart of a city, marking the aiming-point. Inevitably now, when PFF marked the wrong place, the whole of Bomber Command likewise went awry. There was an embarrassing night when they were sent to Saarbrücken, but the Pathfinders marked nearby Saarlouis in error, and the unfortunate town was duly devastated, while Saarbrücken scarcely received a bomb. The Pathfinder Force developed and was trained to mark for the area offensive and not – as Bufton and others had hoped – to pave the
way towards precision bombing. There would be many nights of scattered marking and thus scattered bombing; blind-marking techniques through cloud never reached a satisfactory degree of effectiveness, even with the new generation of radar aids. But the Pathfinders contributed immensely to the enhanced capability of Bomber Command in 1943.

By far the most important rivals at the turn of 1942–43 were two new radar aids, H2S and
Oboe
. H2S was the first airborne radar set that could paint a shadowy image of the ground below on a cathode ray tube for its operator in an aircraft above. It held out the prospect of identifying targets through cloud, although like
Gee
– and as Tizard emphatically warned – it would never prove the talisman, the precious blind-bombing tool which the airmen always sought. H2S sets came into use gradually through 1943, and were issued initially to Pathfinder units. They suffered considerable teething trouble, and always performed best in the vicinity of bodies of water which showed up clearly on their screens. But, unlike
Gee
, they operated on a 10-cm waveband that could not be jammed by the German defences.

The second device was indeed a vital blind-bombing aid.
Oboe
was a brilliantly sophisticated variation of the system by which the Germans had bombed England in 1940. An aircraft flew at the end of a beam laid by a ground station, like a conker on a string whirled around a child’s head. Its bombs or markers were released at the exact point of intersection with another beam from a second ground station. There was no scope for visual error. The device proved accurate to a remarkable 600 yards on tests over Lorient and St Nazaire in December 1942.
Oboe
suffered only two limitations: Bomber Command possessed only two sets of ground stations, and could thus control only twelve
Oboe
aircraft an hour over the target. It was necessary to have Pathfinder heavy bombers constantly available to ‘back up’ the
Oboe
markers if there was any lapse in the visibility of these during the Main Force attack. The second difficulty was more serious: owing to the curvature of the earth,
Oboe
beams could only reach aircraft at limited range from
their English ground stations. They could get to the Ruhr, but not much further. Until the Allied advance into Europe in 1944, British attacks on more distant targets had to rely on
Gee
, H2S and pilot judgement for their success. As will become apparent, these were not enough.

But beyond
Oboe
, Harris was now being equipped with the perfect aircraft to carry it, the twin-engined De Havilland Mosquito, which could mark from 28,000 feet to get the utmost range from the device. Since the prototype Mosquito showed its 350 mph promise, rival Commands of the RAF had been struggling fiercely for priority on supplies. It became the best night-fighter of the war, and it could also take a 4,000-lb bomb to Berlin while giving ordinary German fighters only the flimsiest chance of catching it. Mosquito casualties over Germany were negligible, a fraction of those suffered by the ‘heavies’. The aircraft was a delight to fly. In its bomber role it carried no armament, relying solely on speed for survival. From 1943, it became a vital element in Bomber Command operations, first spearheading the Pathfinder force, later carrying out diversionary raids and Intruder operations against German fighter airfields.

There is a school of thought which argues that if Bomber Command had been equipped with an enormous force of Mosquitoes, these could have struck Germany for a fraction of the cost of the heavy-bomber offensive. But apart from the difficulties of reversing the heavy-aircraft programme at this stage, it is doubtful if there were enough carpenters in England physically to build an all-Mosquito force. The requirement for pilots and navigators would have been enormous. To suggest that the Mosquito could single-handed have solved the problems of Bomber Command is an improper use of hindsight. But the RAF made maximum use of all the ‘Mossies’ that it could get.

The winter of 1942–43 saw other, less dramatic innovations in tactics and equipment. It had at last been recognized that bright moonlight made bombers too vulnerable to fighters, and now the ‘Met’ men sought broken cloud and dark nights for operations. For
the first time, the Pathfinders were given specially-designed Target Indicators, varicoloured projectiles that were big enough and bright enough to be seen from great height amidst the smoke and haze of a burning city. The ‘plate rack’ principle of sending aircraft in to attack at varying heights came into general use. The ‘streaming’ policy for concentrating aircraft over the target was intensified. Bombers were being fitted with
Boozer
to give early warning of gun and searchlight radar, and with
Monica
, which detected other aircraft closing in. The first of the immense range of radio counter-measures against the German defences was being employed by Group-Captain Addison’s 80 Wing, which would ultimately flower into a fully-fledged Group – No. 100.

Now, at the beginning of 1943, Harris wrote: ‘At long last we were ready and equipped.’
¹⁵
He identified the start of his real strategic offensive as the night of 5 March 1943, when 442 aircraft of Bomber Command attacked Essen under
Oboe
marking laid by the Pathfinder Force. The winter months of sporadic skirmishing against Berlin, and the impenetrable U-boat pens at Lorient and St Nazaire were over. He was free to launch the first of the three great ‘battles’ which made 1943 the most famous and the bloodiest year of the British air offensive: the Ruhr, Hamburg and Berlin. These represented the central thrusts of the campaign, Bomber Command’s attempt to bring a devastating concentration of force to bear on selected regions of Germany. March 1943 to March 1944 would be Harris’s year of astonishing independence and personal power.

8 » 76 SQUADRON

YORKSHIRE, 1943

If you live on the brink of death yourself, it is as if those who have gone have merely caught an earlier train to the same destination, and whatever that destination is, you will be sharing it soon, since you will almost certainly be catching the next one.

F/Lt Denis Hornsey, 76 Squadron, 1943

1. The Ruhr

Although history now remembers the Ruhr as one of Harris’s three great ‘battles’ of 1943, the crews of Bomber Command who carried out its forty-three major attacks between 5 March and 12 July had no such privilege of hindsight. They only knew that they flew night after night to some of the most heavily defended targets in Germany. Some of these – Stettin, Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart – were not even in the Ruhr. The campaign was by its nature incapable of yielding any visible proof of victory. The American official historians have written:

The heavy bomber offensive was an impersonal sort of war, and monotonous in its own peculiar way . . . Rarely was a single mission or series of missions decisive; whatever earlier they had taught of sudden paralysis of a nation by strategic bombardment, in actual practice the forces available in 1942–43 were quite inadequate for such Douhet-like tactics.
¹

To the bomber crews, the only reality was the intensity of the struggle. In the four and a half months of the Battle of the Ruhr, Harris lost almost a thousand aircraft missing over Germany and crashed in England. His men learnt to hate and fear the ferocity of the defences of ‘Happy Valley’, most especially the wall of flak and light surrounding Essen and the great Krupp works. They were riddled by gunfire and mauled by the German night-fighter force, now approaching its zenith. They made bomb run after bomb run struggling to avoid the urge to flinch and turn aside before reaching their aiming-point, the instinct which created a chronic ‘creepback’ of bombs falling short or wide on every raid. In the dense mass of heavy aircraft closing on the target, they learned to fear collision, sometimes even to know the terror of seeing another aircraft directly above them with its bomb doors open. They came to take for granted the vast conflagrations reaching across the cities of Germany which seemed the wonder of the age at Cologne a year before.