Bomber Command (49 page)

Harris almost got his 15,000 Lancaster sorties from the Battle
of Berlin – 14,562, to be exact – but not without a bitter struggle that intensified through the winter months. Portal’s concern and the pressure from the Americans was growing. There was no evidence of a collapse of the German defences, no slackening of losses, no holocaust engulfing Berlin. Yet still Harris resisted every proposal to shift the weight of his attack to those cities in which the aircraft industry was concentrated:

It is naturally impossible to state with arithmetical precision the acreage of German built-up area which must be destroyed to produce capitulation [he wrote to the Air Ministry on 28 December 1943]. However . . . it is surely impossible to believe that an increase by more than one half of existing devastation within four months could be sustained by Germany without total collapse.

In the Air Ministry directives of 14 and 28 January and 17 February 1944, Air Marshal Bottomley yet again forcefully urged the C-in-C of Bomber Command to address himself to the aircraft industry:

It is confirmed and emphasized that the closest co-ordination is essential to the successful prosecution of the Combined Bomber Offensive [Bottomley wrote on 14 January] and that without it, the reduction of the German fighter strength which is a prerequisite to the launching of
Overlord
as well as to the effective conduct of
Pointblank
may not be achieved in the time available. I am accordingly to request that you adhere to the spirit of the directive forwarded in the Air Ministry letter dated 10 June 1943, and that you attack, as far as practicable, those industrial centres associated with the German fighter air-frame and ball-bearing industry.

Harris’s resolute refusal to attack the German ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt had become the central
casus belli
of his escalating struggle with the Air Ministry. ‘So far Bomber Command has done far more than was planned or could have been expected
to give effect to
Pointblank
,’ he wrote. ‘I cannot continue this process and in addition carry out the part of the programme specifically allocated to the Americans.’

Bufton, the Director of Bomber Operations, was now foremost among those who believed that whatever tactical difficulties they were experiencing, the Americans’ concept of strategic bombing by precision attack on key industrial targets was far more promising than Bomber Command’s area offensive. He was exasperated by Harris’s repeatedly successful defiance of Air Ministry instructions:

The C-in-C states that there can be little doubt that the enemy would be caused to capitulate by the destruction of between 40 and 50 per cent of the principal German towns, and that the Lancaster force alone should be sufficient, but only just sufficient, to produce in Germany by 1 April 1944 a state of devastation in which surrender is inevitable [he wrote to Portal, early in January]. I am of the opinion that it would be sounder for Bomber Command to subordinate as far as may be necessary their efforts to achieve a quick victory in favour of helping the Americans to deploy their strength so that the Combined Bomber forces (and
Overlord
) may together achieve a certain victory.

One January morning at the Air Ministry, as Bufton waited to see the Chief of Air Staff, Portal’s Personal Staff Officer, Bill Dry, emerged from the office and murmured to Bufton: ‘They’re all gunning for Bert Harris.’ The Americans, the Ministry of Economic Warfare and key departments of the Air Ministry were growing exasperated by the C-in-C of Bomber Command. The baldness of Harris’s refusals to change policy added insult to insubordination. ‘What do you think about the C-in-C then, Bufton?’ Portal asked the Director of Bomber Operations that morning in King Charles Street. ‘Do you think it might be good to have a change?’ Bufton recalls that he told Portal he was opposed to sacking Harris, which is remarkable. But the C-in-C of Bomber Command had achieved
enormous prestige in the years of Hamburg and Cologne. To remove him now would be a great shock to public and service opinion. Nor was it yet apparent how far he was willing to go in defiance of orders. Harris was not sacked. Towards the end of February he grudgingly diverted his forces to carry out a series of moderately successful attacks in support of the American ‘Big Week’ onslaught on the German aircraft industry. But the overwhelming weight of Bomber Command’s effort continued to be directed towards the area offensive.

If Portal and his colleagues had been confident of an alternative policy for Bomber Command, it is likely that Harris would have been sacked in January 1944. In the Air Ministry hostility to his behaviour was hardening. But how much visible success was an attack on the German aircraft industry under a new C-in-C likely to achieve, to compensate for the seismic shock of Harris’s dismissal? What were the prospects of a definable, decisive success against key selected German industrial targets, as an alternative to Harris’s assault on German cities? The Air Staff wavered on these questions. They knew that they now doubted the efficacy of area bombing, but they did not know what they should substitute for it. It was their indecision that saved Harris, the one man unswervingly certain of his objectives and intentions. It required iron resolution to dismiss him, and Portal was not the man for confrontation if it could be avoided. Harris continued his battle.

It was only because Bomber Command was now receiving plentiful supplies of aircraft and crews that he could sustain his terrible losses into the New Year and the spring. Harris’s average daily availability of aircraft, almost all ‘heavies’, rose from 948 in November 1943 to 1,043 in March 1944. It is important to remember that losses had to fall below 4 per cent for a crew to have a favourable chance of completing a tour of operations. In January 1944, Harris was losing 6.1 per cent of aircraft dispatched to Berlin, 7.2 per cent of those which went to Stettin, Brunswick and Magdeburg. On one operation against Leipzig in February he lost seventy-
eight aircraft missing, 9.5 per cent of those dispatched. On 24 March he lost seventy-two aircraft – 9.1 per cent of those dispatched – against Berlin on a night of unpredicted fierce winds that blew much of the stream over the most heavily defended flak belts in Germany. It was not an unbroken slaughter: sometimes the diversions and ‘spoofs’ succeeded, the night-fighters failed to engage. On the night of 26 March, 705 aircraft went to Essen and only nine were lost. On the night of 1 March, 557 went to Stuttgart and only four were lost. But on 30 March 1944, Bomber Command suffered its worst single disaster of the war, when ninety-six of the 795 aircraft dispatched to Nuremberg – 11.8 per cent – failed to return. Twelve more aircraft were fatally damaged.

The Nuremberg raid is one of Harris’s most bitter memories, not for itself but for what posterity has made of it. The official historians, among others, have declared that it signalled the collapse of Harris’s personal attempt to defeat Germany by razing her cities to ashes. Harris remarks
⁵
that it is surprising that his forces did not suffer a score of Nurembergs. This was not a unique disaster, but a night on which an unhappy coincidence of clear skies to guide the fighters, and bad tactical planning that gave the German controllers an uncommonly easy task, led to losses that were statistically a little worse than those at Leipzig and Berlin in previous weeks. The Nuremberg casualties were in themselves acceptable in the context of Bomber Command’s overall loss rate and the supply of replacement aircraft and crews.

But time had run out on Harris. He had commanded the centre of the stage for more than two years. Now other war machines were waiting impatiently in the wings: armies and fleets were gathering themselves for the invasion that dominated the minds of the leaders of the Grand Alliance. The generals and admirals had never cared for the ‘bomber barons’ and their all-consuming proposals. Now, at last, bombing operations were to be formally subordinated to the Supreme Allied Commanders to support the invasion. From 14 April 1944, Harris and Eaker would take their orders from Eisenhower.

Bomber Command conducted further spasmodic operations against Germany through the late spring and summer of 1944, and amid these Harris could comfort himself with the delusion that if the invasion had not overtaken him, his attack on Germany could have continued. Indeed it is probably true that it would have done, for a few more weeks. But at the Air Ministry’s morning conferences, reports of Bomber Command’s overnight casualties were greeted with growing dismay. In the year since Harris began his ‘battles’, Bomber Command had lost 4,160 aircraft missing and crashed in England. His failure to bring Germany to her knees, and the cost of his failure, had become embarrassingly evident to every man but himself. And in a letter to the Air Ministry on 7 April 1944, he came as close as ever in his life to conceding that he was in deep trouble.

The strength of the German defences [he wrote] would in time reach a point at which night-bombing attacks by existing methods and types of heavy bomber would involve percentage casualty rates which could not in the long run be sustained . . . We have not yet reached that point, but tactical innovations which have so far postponed it are now practically exhausted . . .

This was the preamble to a demand for ten squadrons of night-fighters, to support his bombers. It was the final admission of defeat for the Trenchard doctrine. First Bomber Command, then the Luftwaffe, then 8th Air Force had proved that daylight air bombardment was intolerably costly unless air superiority had first been attained. Now Bomber Command had discovered that even night operations against Germany could no longer be continued on their existing basis unless the enemy’s night-fighter force could be neutralised. The tactical possibilities of the single concentrated bomber stream protected by
Window
were exhausted. Bomber Command was in a dilemma: to achieve decisive destruction it was necessary to attack a target repeatedly. Yet to do so was tactical suicide. Only once, at Hamburg, did the debut of
Window
provide
the momentary tactical advantage to make possible a succession of saturation bombardments.

To the end of his life, Harris continued to argue that, had he been given the resources he sought, and been permitted to continue his assault on Germany into the summer of 1944, the war could have been ended months sooner. But many of his fellow airmen disagreed with him. ‘He was a gambler doubling up on each losing throw,’ said Bufton, looking back on the Battle of Berlin.
⁶
‘In the operational sense, the Battle of Berlin was more than a failure. It was a defeat,’ wrote Webster and Frankland.
⁷
‘Berlin won,’ said Sir Ralph Cochrane,
⁸
AOC of 5 Group. ‘It was just too tough a nut.’

The compulsory transfer of Bomber Command to tactical operations in support of the invasion, which Harris resisted so bitterly, saved him from confronting the reality of his own defeat. He had inflicted a series of catastrophes upon the enemy. But he had failed to achieve the decisive, war-winning thrust that lay at the heart of all his Trenchardian hopes.

2. The American Breakthrough

On the day of the second disastrous American Schweinfurt operation, 16 October 1943, Arnold in Washington cabled to Eaker that the Luftwaffe appeared to be on the verge of collapse. Even in the wake of Schweinfurt, Eaker claimed ungrammatically that the Luftwaffe’s victory had been ‘the last final struggle of a monster in his death throes’. But in reality, the Americans had suffered an overwhelming and traumatic defeat. They had lost 148 aircraft in four operations. In the face of the Luftwaffe’s massed fighter assaults with cannon, rockets and bombs against their formations, the Fortresses and Liberators were taking intolerable punishment. Morale sagged in a manner unknown to Bomber Command at any period of the war. Attempts to revive aircrew spirit with periods of ‘Rest and Recuperation’ at Miami Beach, Atlantic City and Santa Monica were scrapped when these were found to increase men’s
reluctance to return to operations. The practice of force-landing damaged aircraft in neutral territory became sufficiently common to cause serious controversy – by the summer of 1944 there were 94 8th Air Force crews interned in Sweden and 101 in Switzerland.

The Norden bombsight was useless in the persistent overcast of the European winter. While Harris fought the Battle of Berlin by night, the 8th Air Force, and the newly-formed 15th Air Force operating under Spaatz’s direction from Italy, were reduced to limited-penetration blind-bombing missions by H2X, the American adaptation of H2S. In reality if not in theory, the Americans spent much of the winter of 1943–44 engaged in area-bombing operations. In the words of the American official historians: ‘It seemed better to bomb low-priority targets frequently, even with less than precision accuracy, than not to bomb at all.’
⁹

But with their limitless resources and unshakeable determination to succeed, the Americans persisted. The main handicap of their operations in the summer and autumn of 1943 had been that their fighter escort of Thunderbolts and Lightnings lacked the performance to meet the Luftwaffe on equal terms, and were compelled by lack of range to turn home at the German frontier. The Germans were thus able to choose their own time and place to fall on the bombers. But in the wake of Schweinfurt, Arnold directed that the 8th and 15th Air Forces should be given absolute priority for supplies of the remarkable new P-51B Mustang long-range fighter. The Mustang had originally been ordered from its American makers by the RAF in 1940. When it was delivered in 1942, they were disappointed by its lack of power. Rolls-Royce tried an experiment, replacing its Allison engine with one of their own Merlins. After various disappointments and modifications, they found themselves testing an aircraft that most airmen and designers had thought impossible, with the reach to fly deep into Germany equipped with disposable long-range drop-tanks, and with a speed of 455 mph at 30,000 feet that enabled the Mustang to match or out-perform every German fighter when it got there.