Bomber Command (46 page)

It became Saundby’s responsibility to organize the detailed planning of the operation. He had given every German city its piscine codename: Berlin was WHITEBAIT, Munich CATFISH, Nuremberg GRAYLING. Now he reached for the WEAVERFISH file on Hamburg. The key staff officers dispersed around the Operations Room to maps and telephones – most important, to talk to Bennett, commanding the Pathfinders, and to Cochrane, commanding 5 Group. Each man detested the other, and invariably contested any tactical suggestion offered by his rival. Bennett planned a route for his Mosquito ‘Light Night Striking Force’ to divert the defences. In telephone consultation with Saundby, he discussed the Main Force’s course changes as they crossed Europe, aimed at concealing until the last possible moment the real objective of the attack. Addison’s 100 Group was alerted to lay on its jammers and night-fighters. There might be weather problems in certain areas of England – perhaps 4 Group, in Yorkshire, was having difficulties clearing snow from its runways. On the wall, lights flickered like Christmas-tree illuminations on the great map that indicated the serviceability of Bomber Command’s stations. Some squadrons might be ordered to carry extra fuel if they faced bad-weather landings on their return. Perhaps two hours after Harris left The Hole, Saundby had noted precise routes, bombloads, take-off times and aiming-points in his meticulous handwriting, ready to be typed up for the C-in-C’s final
approval. Aiming-points were not infrequently changed late in the morning, as a concession to
Pointblank
. It looked better on paper to send the Pathfinders to mark an airframe plant or a tank factory, however meaningless such distinctions became over the target. Then each Group Commander addressed his own conference, mirroring Harris’s ‘Morning Prayers’, and the High Wycombe staff dispersed to their offices under the beech trees, to fix details department by department.

For the handful of senior officers directly concerned with the planning of operations, High Wycombe was a fascinating posting at the very heart of the war. For those of less exalted rank, it was a staid, formal, claustrophobic place, darkened by the overhanging trees that dripped endlessly in the rain, corseted by the strictures of service bureaucracy. There were many elderly men like ‘Daddy’ Dawes, the Senior Personnel Staff Officer who controlled postings throughout Bomber Command, and relished every moment of his absolute power over so many men and women’s service careers. The pace of work was hard, broken only by prolonged spells of bad weather that halted operations. There were none of the excitements and compensations of the operational stations. In their spare hours they walked across the fields to The Plough at Speen or hitch-hiked into London. Everybody who could, lived off the base. Young wing-commanders posted to High Wycombe from ‘ops’ yearned to escape. Their opinions and advice were seldom heeded amidst so much ‘brass’.

Perhaps the most preposterously unsuitable appointment at High Wycombe throughout the war was that of the Chaplain, Rev. John Collins, in future years the arch-radical opponent of Britain’s nuclear bomb, and even in wartime a permanent thorn in the side of authority.

Bomber Command Headquarters [he wrote afterwards] was perhaps the most soul-destroying, the most depressing of the . . . places in which I had to serve. For there, in contrast with the natural beauty of the surroundings, the evil . . . policy of the carpet bombing of German cities was planned . . . The majority of the personnel were simply clerks in uniform, for most of whom any interest or glamour in being attached to Bomber Command headquarters had long since gone; and those not of this category were mainly officers who had been taken off operational duties or deadbeats.
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It was Collins who invited the socialist Minister of Aircraft Production, Sir Stafford Cripps, to give a talk at High Wycombe on the unlikely theme ‘Is God My Co-Pilot?’, which enraged the C-in-C and his staff, because Cripps suggested that officers

. . . should send men on a bombing mission only if, with a clear conscience, they were convinced that such a mission was morally justified as well as justified on grounds of military strategy and tactics. At question time, he was accused by one or two officers of saying things that, if heeded, might threaten discipline and hinder the war effort . . . The chairman found an excuse to call the meeting to an abrupt end.
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Harris fought back by sending Harry Weldon to give a lecture on ‘The Ethics of Bombing’, at which according to Collins attendance by all ranks was compulsory. When it ended, Collins stood up and said that he presumed he had misunderstood Weldon’s title, which should have been ‘The Bombing of Ethics’. It is difficult to understand how Harris and his chaplain stood each other’s company in the same camp for the remainder of the war.

On the squadrons the bomber offensive was conducted without any great emotion except that of fear. But the staff at High Wycombe sought constantly to instil in the aircrew a suitable enthusiasm for their work. The Intelligence Department issued Briefing Notes for groups and squadrons. This is a sample from September 1943:

The history of MANNHEIM symbolizes on a small scale the evil history of Germany. The old town, decent and dignified, was designed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a setting for a riverside castle – the largest in Germany – for one of the innumerable but reasonably inoffensive little German states. Today it is one of the most important industrial centres of Hitler’s Reich, its atmosphere darkened with the smoke of engineering plants and polluted by enormous chemical works. Vital war industries which together employ one-third of the total population (430,000) of MANNHEIM and its satellite town LUDWIGSHAVEN. It is as though WINDSOR had sprouted a malignant growth of war factories, and one-and-a-half square miles of chemical works covered the playing-fields of ETON.
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The report goes on to assess the damage done by Bomber Command’s latest attack, quoting a German broadcaster named Karl Rumpf:

The egregious RUMPF . . . rounded off his tale of woe with a tragedy enacted in the NATIONAL THEATRE in the centre of the town. It appears that this institution opened its new season on the night preceding the attack. The first night doubtless had an enthusiastic reception, but the following night all too literally brought the house down.
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Reports such as this made little impact on aircrew, but perhaps did something for the enlightenment and enthusiasm of the vast army of ground staff supporting the offensive. Just as it was the ground-based men and women who wrote the poems eulogizing the deeds of the aircrew, so it was they who also took the keenest interest in the Germany that they never saw.

Target Intelligence was one of the most vital departments at High Wycombe, and because Intelligence proved to have been the cardinal weakness of Bomber Command’s offensive against Germany, it is necessary to explain at some length precisely how High Wycombe assessed the success or failure of their attacks. Harris’s staff share responsibility for the huge misconceptions surrounding the strategic offensive with the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Economic Warfare, which failed at the outset to grasp the complexities of the German economy; the Secret Service,
which never appears to have controlled agents inside Germany capable of providing useful economic Intelligence; and the Foreign Office, which throughout the war believed that the morale of the German people was crumbling. MEW and the Air Ministry never understood how widely critical industries were scattered: only 48 per cent of plant was located in the fifty-eight towns attacked in strength by Bomber Command, and by 1943 Speer and Milch were working energetically towards still greater dispersal, and locating vital assembly-lines underground. Although Hamburg was the third city of the Greater Reich, it accounted for only 3.6 per cent of Germany’s production.

By far the most effective damage-assessment organization Britain possessed was RE8, the research department of the Ministry of Home Security, which reached its conclusions by projecting the British experience of lost production, absenteeism, de-housing and wrecked services in 1940 on to Germany’s cities. RE8 computed the number of German buildings lost or damaged beyond repair – 212,000 by the end of 1943 – with consistent accuracy. Its judgements on the probable injury to German production were also remarkably sound. The tragedy was that the airmen simply declined to believe them.

A typical Bomber Command Air Staff Intelligence report of February 1944, headed ‘The Progress of the RAF bomber offensive against German Industry, 7 March 1943 – 31 December 1943’ began with the following remarkable assertion: ‘This paper is based on figures issued by RE8, but owing to difficulties in assessing certain factors, RE8 state that the calculated industrial loss is as much as 65 per cent underestimated.’
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In its six-monthly review of the achievements of the bomber offensive in mid-1943, the Ministry of Economic Warfare suggested that German production was 15 per cent down on the previous year, and in the Ruhr, 35 per cent down. By the end of 1943 it estimated that German output had fallen a further 10 per cent. As has been explained above,
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MEW believed that this supposed loss represented a net absolute drain on war production, which was far from the truth. By mid-1944 its analysts argued that Axis war production was being destroyed faster than it could be replaced.

These figures were, of course, largely based on information provided by the Royal Air Force. Instead of grasping that aerial photographs overestimated damage – for instance by making buildings with collapsed roofs appear a total loss, while in fact the machinery beneath them could often be cleared of rubble and become operational again within days – High Wycombe argued that vertical air reconnaissance must conceal vast damage. The staff never made adequate allowance for the fact that the weight of area attacks was always directed against city centres, while industry lay in the suburbs.

It is important to remember that all but the most senior officers at High Wycombe were as much amateurs, civilians in uniform, as the men who flew the aircraft. An officer of the key Target Intelligence department INT I recalled later: ‘We made up the damage-assessment techniques as we went along, because there was no precedent for what we were doing.’ The fatal error by the scientists and statisticians was their determination to establish an absolute mathematical relationship between acres of urban devastation (of which they were accurately informed) and loss of production to the German war economy. Bomber Command built its great edifice of self-delusion about the plight of the German war machine on an astonishing foundation of graphs and projections. In 1943 the staff recorded that ‘Efficiency’ – as measured by ‘acres of target devastated per ton of bombs claimed dropped’ – had risen from 0.038 at the end of 1942 to 0.126 by October 1943. ‘Success’, measured by ‘acres destroyed per acre attacked’, had risen from 0.032 in 1942 to 0.249 in 1943. Reports are strewn with such headings as ‘Average monthly increase in number of industrial workers attacked’. From February 1944, High Wycombe announced, ‘The “Labour Target” now takes the place of the “Area Target”, its dimensions being the number of industrial workers
(which means exclusively factory workers) multiplied by the period of time which is being considered . . .’ Another Air Staff Intelligence report dated 19 February 1944 stated that in 1943

. . . it will be seen that the enemy has
irretrievably lost
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1,000,000 man
years
.
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This represents no less than 36 per cent of the industrial effort that would have been put out by these towns if they had remained unmolested . . . Expressing these losses in another way, 2,400,000,000 man-hours have been lost for an expenditure of 116,500 tons of bombs claimed dropped, and this amounts to an average return for every ton of bombs dropped of 20,500 lost man-hours, or rather more than one quarter of the time spent in building a Lancaster . . . This being so, a Lancaster has only to go to a German city once to wipe off its own capital cost, and the results of all subsequent sorties will be clear profit . . .
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Bomber Command Intelligence projected that by 1 April 1944, 33,760 acres – 40 per cent of 89,000 acres attacked – should have been destroyed, if average bomb tonnage remained static. But on the other hand, if the average monthly tonnage could be increased from 13,350 to 21,270, then 50 per cent of the 89,000 acres attacked could be destroyed . . .

The samples above are typical of the acres of paper filled by the Intelligence Staffs throughout the bomber offensive, and they are a powerful indication of Bomber Command’s diminishing grasp on the reality of the German economy in 1943–44. Seldom in the history of warfare have attempts been made to measure victory or defeat by such remarkable mathematical yardsticks as those conceived in the huts and bunkers under the beech trees at High Wycombe.

But long before RE8’s much more modest estimates had been reached and submitted, before even High Wycombe’s own projections were compiled, Harris had been given an immediate pro
visional summary of results achieved, on the basis of reconnaissance photographs. Target Intelligence believed that the officer who presented this each day gave a persistently optimistic picture of what had been done. Harris seemed to make judgements from his own interpretation of the photographs on his desk. He frequently assessed a target destroyed which later proved to be merely damaged. Target Intelligence might suspect the truth, but its staff seem to have been unwilling forcefully to assert it. ‘Has Eaker seen these?’ Harris would say when some choice reconnaissance photographs of disroofed German urban areas appeared on his desk, and dispatch them for the American’s delectation. Harris and his staff were guilty of the same error as those earlier generals in Flanders who were so awed by the magnificence of their own barrages that they found it inconceivable that the enemy could have survived them. Nor were these delusions confined to High Wycombe. On 2 February 1944, for instance, Air Vice-Marshal W. A. Coryton, Assistant Chief of Air Staff (Operations), wrote to Portal, commenting on a Ministry of Economic Warfare report: