Bomber Command (64 page)

It is impossible to regard this memorandum as anything other than a calculated political attempt by the Prime Minister to distance himself from the bombing of Dresden and the rising controversy surrounding the area offensive. The airmen were not unreasonably angered and dismayed. At Portal’s insistence, Churchill withdrew his paper and substituted a new one, dated 1 April 1945:

It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of the so called ‘area bombing’ of German cities should be reviewed from the point of view of our own interests. If we come into control of an entirely ruined land, there will be a great shortage of accommodation for ourselves and our Allies; and we shall be unable to get housing materials out of Germany for our own needs . . . We must see to it that our attacks do not do more harm to ourselves in the long run than they do to the enemy’s immediate war effort. Pray let me have your views . . .

In the years that followed, many of the airmen who wrote their memoirs – Tedder and Slessor prominent among them – prevari
cated about both area bombing and their own part in it. Harris alone never sought prudent cover, nor made excuse or apology for what his forces had done. ‘I would not regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British grenadier,’ he wrote to Bottomley on 29 March 1945, at the height of his anger about Churchill’s draft memorandum. ‘The feeling over Dresden could easily be explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses.’
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Alone he stood on the parapet of his trench, facing the slings and arrows of posterity with the same unflinching defiance that he had offered to his critics and enemies throughout the bomber offensive.

The Chiefs of Staff formally decreed the ending of area bombing on 16 April 1945. Yet it was intolerable to the airmen that Bomber Command should sit out the last weeks of the war in idleness. Harris’s aircraft bombed Berchtesgaden and a few remaining oil plants, and the coastal guns on the north German island of Wangerooge. One of Bomber Command’s last operations was carried out on 16 April 1945, against the German island fortress of Heligoland, where naval radar first detected Wing-Commander Kellett’s Wellingtons before their terrible defeat five and a half years earlier.

More than 900 aircraft were dispatched, a force great enough to level three cities. There were three aiming-points: the main island, the airfield and the naval base. ‘Marking, from the initial
Oboe
TIs to the last backer-up, was of a high standard, and the Master Bombers kept a tight rein on an enthusiastic Main Force,’ recorded the History, of 8 Group.
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‘The next day, thirty-three Lancasters of 5 Group, six carrying Grand Slams and the remainder Tallboys, sent to flatten anything left standing, reported that the centre of the island was still ablaze.’

The means, which were for so long lacking to fulfil the airmen’s great ambitions, had at last overtaken the ends.

15 » THE BALANCE SHEET

We want – that is, the people who served in Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force and their next of kin – a categorical assurance that the work we did was militarily and strategically justified.

– Wing-Commander Ernest Millington, MP,
House of Commons, 12 March 1946

At the end of the war, Bomber Command received the courtesies of victory. There was a letter from Buckingham Palace for High Wycombe, on receiving the final version of Harris’s beloved Blue Books:

The King has asked me to thank you for the two volumes of Bomb Damage Diagrams which were brought here this morning . . . These reports have been a constant source of interest to His Majesty since they started, and provided an admirable record of the great part played by Bomber Command in winning the war. The King hopes that you will express to those who have compiled the records His Majesty’s appreciation of the neatness and accuracy of the work . . .
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But beneath a thin layer of perfunctory good will, it was soon apparent not only at High Wycombe but throughout Bomber Command, that in the safety of peace the bombers’ part in the war was one that many politicians and civilians would prefer to forget. The laurels and the romantic adulation were reserved for Fighter Command, the defenders. The men of the Army of Occupation
were first awed, then increasingly dismayed, by the devastation of Germany. As more pictures and descriptions of the effects of area bombing appeared in Britain, especially those detailing the destruction of Dresden, public distaste grew. Among the vanquished, those who had launched air attacks on civilians were prominent in the dock at Nuremberg. ‘Was not your purpose in this attack to secure a strategic advantage by terrorization of the people of Rotterdam?’
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asked Sir David Maxwell Fyfe damningly, as he examined Kesselring about his part in the 1940 offensive. ‘I decided on Coventry because there the most targets could be hit within the smallest area,’ declared Goering,
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on trial for his life, with his direction of the Blitz on Britain among the principal prosecution issues. The Reichsmarshal was sentenced to hang. Kesselring went with Milch and Speer to begin a long imprisonment.

Sir Arthur Harris was offered no further employment in the Royal Air Force, and departed for South Africa at the end of 1945. Churchill’s proposal for an honour for Bomber Command’s C-in-C was rejected by the new Prime Minister, Attlee. Only in 1953 did Harris receive a baronetcy, the sort of title more frequently granted to time-serving Members of Parliament. Whatever posterity may make of Harris, he served Churchill well, and gave all that he could offer to the service of the Royal Air Force. It was an oddly ungenerous gesture by the Prime Minister, and tends to support Major Morton’s contention about Churchill’s lack of personal affection for the C-in-C of Bomber Command. Of the offensive as a whole, Churchill had only this to say in the final volume of his war memoirs:

In judging the contribution to victory of strategic air power it should be remembered that this was the first war in which it was fully used. We had to learn from hard-won experience . . . But although the results of the early years fell short of our aims, we forced on the enemy an elaborate, ever-growing but finally insufficient air-defence system which absorbed a large proportion of their total war effort. Before the end, we and the United States had developed striking forces so powerful that they played a major part in the economic collapse of Germany.
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By the last months of the struggle, Churchill the politician was already reasserting himself over Churchill the director of war. When the Americans began to pour thousands of economists and scientists into captured territory to compile their massive Strategic Bombing Survey, the RAF hoped to do likewise. But Churchill curtly rejected their proposals, on the grounds that they would waste skilled manpower. It is difficult to accept his argument at face value. It is easier to believe that he wished to put the strategic air offensive behind him, with as little resort as possible to further statistical fantasies and noisy claims by the airmen. The British Bombing Survey Unit was grudgingly granted token resources. American and British airmen competed for German documents and access to the top captured Nazis, above all Speer, in their anxiety to prove the triumph of ‘precision’ or ‘area’ bombing. Professor Solly Zuckerman, who wrote the final ‘Overall Report’ of the BBSU, had always been an advocate of attacking communications links rather than cities. When his work was completed, it was received without enthusiasm at the Air Ministry, although Zuckerman’s old chief Sir Arthur Tedder was now Chief of Air Staff.

The main fault of commission in the combined bomber offensive [wrote the scientist] would undoubtedly appear as the launching of the offensive against German aircraft assembly plants, and the continuation of ‘area attacks’ on German towns beyond the point where they were necessitated by the operational limitations of inaccuracy in navigation and bombing. Even the more accurate and devastating raids on the Ruhr that took place towards the end of the war were an extravagant means of achieving a fall in steel production compared to the direct attack on communications . . .
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Originally a biologist by training, Zuckerman was staggered to discover, on arriving in Germany at the surrender, that most zoos which had not suffered direct damage were still feeding a full
complement of animals. In Britain such useless mouths had been ruthlessly destroyed early in the war. This was a striking example of the gulf between the desperate plight of Germany as Allied Intelligence had perceived it and the reality as it now emerged. Zuckerman’s ‘Overall Report’ was suppressed by the Air Ministry, as was Sir Arthur Harris’s final dispatch on the work of Bomber Command 1942–45. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic a similar uncertainty and controversy about the bomber offensive broke out among Americans:

Even General Arnold had doubts about how effective the air war had been. The British and American strategic air forces had blasted factories and cities from one end of the Reich to the other. Unquestionably the destruction had not had the effect on the enemy’s war effort that Arnold had expected or hoped for, the effect ‘we all assumed would result’.
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The Royal Air Force entered the Second World War committed to demonstrating that the airdropped bomb was a weapon of unique capabilities. Political, social and professional pressure on the infant service drove the airmen to adopt a messianic approach, and it is precisely for this reason that some historians have argued that the RAF should never have become an independent service in 1918. The airmen, desperately jealous of their freedom, became obsessed with their need for an independent function. Only a strategic-bomber offensive seemed able to provide this.

The technical failings of Bomber Command in the first years of the war were no worse than those of the army and the Royal Navy. The bombers made an important, perhaps critical contribution in 1941 and 1942 to keeping alive the morale of the British people, and to deterring the Americans from a premature second front. The casualties suffered by the airmen would have been far exceeded by the Allied armies if they had been compelled to face the Wehrmacht head-on in 1942 or 1943.

The Allies’ possession of a heavy-bomber force was an important military asset, seen to most advantage in support of
Overlord
.
But Churchill made a major error of judgement in the winter of 1941–42 by committing British industry to the enormous heavy-bomber programme that came to fruition at the end of 1944. The Prime Minister could have achieved his strategic purpose with a far less extravagant outlay of resources. Instead, although they were denied their ‘4,000 Plan’, the airmen were allowed to pursue their own ambitious and partisan war aims. Tizard said after the war: ‘No one thinks now that it would have been possible to defeat Germany by bombing alone. The actual effort expended on bombing Germany, in manpower and resources, was greater than the value in manpower and resources of the damage caused.’

Whether or not this is precisely true, the British investment in Bomber Command was immense. Webster and Frankland suggest that the bomber offensive employed only 7 per cent of the nation’s manpower, but this figure can hardly be accepted literally, since it discounts the exceptional quality and skills of those concerned. It is difficult to compute the exact proportion of the nation’s war effort that was involved, but A. J. P. Taylor, one of the critics of the bomber offensive, argues around one-third. Bomber Command took the cream of Britain’s wartime high technology, and the true cost of a Lancaster fitted with H2S,
Gee
, the Mark XIV bombsight and other supporting equipment was immense. The fact that Britain was compelled to buy from America all its transport aircraft (and enter post-war civil aviation at a serious disadvantage), most of its landing craft, a large proportion of its tanks and vast quantities of ammunition stemmed directly or indirectly from the weight of British industrial effort committed to the bomber offensive. The simple fact was that only America possessed the industrial resources to embark on strategic air warfare on the necessary scale to have decisive results within an acceptable period.

Lord Trenchard is entitled to the undying gratitude of the Royal Air Force for keeping the service in being between the wars, but all the key strategic principles upon which he built air-force doctrine were found wanting. It was a terrible experience to be bombed, but German morale never came near to collapse until the
very end. In any event, as Liddell Hart perceived, morale bombing was incompatible with the Allied doctrine of enforcing unconditional German surrender.

The ‘de-housing’ paper, a document which leaves an ineradicable sense of distaste forever surrounding the name of Lord Cherwell, was itself curiously mealy-mouthed. If moral considerations were to be discarded, the most rational policy for Bomber Command would have been to pursue a campaign overtly directed at killing the largest possible number of Germans, rather than dally with such euphemisms as making them homeless. Supplies of arms were never critically lacking in Germany, but there was a chronic shortage of hands to bear them.

By the spring of 1944, it was clear that Harris’s area-bombing campaign had failed to bring Germany within even distant sight of defeat. That winter, when Harris made clear his continuing commitment to the area offensive despite the contrary directions of the Chief of Air Staff, he should have been sacked. The obliteration of Germany’s cities in the spring of 1945, when all strategic justification had vanished, is a lasting blot on the Allied conduct of the war and on the judgement of senior Allied airmen. ‘We had a surfeit of air staffs,’ Lord Zuckerman has written,
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‘presided over by chiefs who were not called “the air barons” for nothing. They ruled their commands like feudal allegiances. What mattered was the ability to destroy . . .’ By his indecision and weakness in handling Harris and the bomber offensive in the last eight months of the war, Sir Charles Portal disqualified himself from consideration as a great, or even as an effective, commander of air forces, whatever his merits as a joint-service committee-man.