Bomber Command (7 page)

A modern state is such a complex and interdependent fabric that it offers a target highly sensitive to a sudden and overwhelming blow from the air . . . Imagine for a moment London, Manchester, Birmingham and half a dozen other great centres simultaneously attacked, the business localities and Fleet Street wrecked, Whitehall a heap of ruins, the slum districts maddened into the impulse to break loose and maraud, the railways cut, factories destroyed. Would not the general will to resist vanish, and what use would be the still determined fractions of the nation, without organization and central direction?
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Here, from a soldier, was a prophecy that Trenchard himself might have hesitated to match. The concept of limitless terror from the air grew throughout the 1920s. In 1925 the Air Staff were asked by the Government to project the casualties in the event of an attack on Britain by the air force of France, with whom British relations were then strained almost to breaking point. They answered: 1,700 killed and 3,300 wounded in the first twenty-four
hours; 1,275 killed and 2,475 wounded in the second twenty-four hours; 850 killed and 1,650 wounded in every twenty-four hours thereafter. This was merely a crude projection of casualties suffered during the German surprise attack of 1917. The War Office was highly critical of the Air Staff’s figures, but the public – to whom such forecasts eventually filtered through – was appalled. There were further anxious questions from politicians. Trenchard and his colleagues declared insistently that the only effective precaution against bomber attack was the possession of a British bomber force capable of inflicting comparable damage on an enemy. Fighter defence was useless. As late as 1934 the RAF’s fighter squadrons were still outnumbered two to one by bomber units, and depended heavily on reservists and auxiliaries to provide aircrew on mobilization. The Battle of Britain would make the fighter pilot the most glamorous figure in the RAF, but in the years between the wars the bomber crews considered themselves the elite of the service.

The most celebrated writers of the day launched forth upon the horrors of air attack with the passion a later generation would bring to those of the atomic bomb. Beverley Nichols and A. A. Milne denounced its barbarity.
The Times
declared in 1933 that ‘it would be the bankruptcy of statesmanship to admit that it is a legitimate form of warfare for a nation to destroy its rival capital from the air’. Bernard Shaw reflected gloomily on ‘cities where millions of inhabitants are dependent for light and heat, water and food, on centralized mechanical organs like great steel hearts and arteries that can be smashed in half an hour by a boy in a bomber’.
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The Royal Navy, which still clung to the conviction that war could be waged with chivalry, was foremost in the assault on the RAF and its weapons. Admiral of the Fleet Lord Beatty wrote a letter to
The Times
. Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond delivered a lecture to the Royal United Services Institution in which he declared disdainfully that ‘frightfulness, expressly repudiated in the case of sea warfare, appears to be a fundamental principle in the air’.

There was also, however, a highly articulate air lobby, champi
oning the cause of the new force. The airmen themselves argued – as they would reiterate repeatedly for the next half century – that in the age of industrialized mass slaughter it was ridiculous to draw an artificial line at some point between a tank factory and the front line, where the tank and those responsible for it became morally acceptable targets. A body called ‘The Hands Off Britain Air Defence League’ was distributing pamphlets in 1933: ‘Why wait for a bomber to leave Berlin at four o’clock and wipe out London at eight? Create a new winged army of long range British bombers to smash the foreign hornets in their nests!’

Air Power has its dreams [wrote one of the RAF’s foremost public advocates, a civil servant at the Air Ministry, Mr J. M. Spaight]. It knows that its qualities are unique. The armoury of the invincible knight of old held no such weapon as that which it wields. It dreams of using its powers to the full. It dreams of victory achieved perhaps by a swift, sudden, overwhelming stroke at the heart and nerve centre of a foe, perhaps by a gathering wave of assaults that will submerge the morale and the will to war of the enemy people, perhaps by ventures as yet but dimly apprehended. Its mystery is half its power . . .
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In one passage of his book
Air Power and Cities
, the lyrical Mr Spaight recommended an interesting moral compromise to validate air bombardment of cities: ‘The destruction of property not strictly classifiable as military should be legitimized under strict conditions designed to prevent loss of life, eg by confining bombardments of establishments tenanted only by day (as many large factories are) to the hours of darkness . . .’

In the last decade before the Second World War, it is no exaggeration to say that the threat of aerial bombardment and the difficulties of defence against it became a public obsession in Britain and France – in Germany propaganda was already too dominant for any similar neurosis to develop. Americans could view the development of air power with detachment, conscious that no likely enemy bomber force possessed the range to reach
their shores. For the rest of the civilized world, a horrifying vision was conjured up by the apostles of air power. Baldwin, Britain’s former Prime Minister and a prominent member of the Coalition Cabinet, confirmed the worst fears of many people when he addressed the House of Commons on 10 November 1932, winding up a debate on international affairs:

I think it is well for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through. The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves. I just mention that . . . so that people may realize what is waiting for them when the next war comes.

One cannot help reflecting that, after the hundreds of millions of years during which the human race has been on this earth, it is only within our generation that we have secured the mastery of the air. I certainly do not know how the youth of the world may feel, but it is not a cheerful thought to the older men that, having got that mastery of the air, we are going to defile the earth from the air as we have defiled the soil during all the years that mankind has been on it. This is a question for the younger men far more than for us. They are the men who fly in the air.

‘By 1933, and even more by 1934, Baldwin had developed what can best be described as the “Armada Complex” ’ in the words of a political historian of these years.
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‘The Defence of the Realm – particularly from the air – was his personal and almost total obsession.’

Thus the Royal Air Force and its bombers stood at the very heart of the political and public debate between the wars. Yet in 1941, after two years in action, it was to come as a paralysing shock to
Britain’s leaders to discover that Bomber Command was not only incapable of bombing a precise objective, but even of locating a given enemy city by night. The theory of the self-defending daylight bomber formation had been tested and found wanting over the Heligoland Bight and would finally be proved untenable by the American 8th Air Force. Seldom in the history of warfare has a force been so sure of the end it sought – fulfilment of the Trenchard doctrine – and yet so ignorant of how this might be achieved, as the RAF between the wars.

As a bomber squadron commander, Wing-Commander Arthur Harris explored such techniques as marking a target at night with flares, but was compelled to abandon the experiment because the flares then available were quite inadequate for the task. Harris and his contemporary Charles Portal, who would be Chief of Air Staff for much of the war, competed fiercely year after year for squadron bombing trophies, but the exercises for which these were awarded bore as much relation to the reality of wartime bomber operations as a funfair rifle-range to the front line at Stalingrad. Although efforts were made to improve the quality of weather forecasting, there was no attempt to face the fact that wartime operations would inevitably take place in differing conditions for much of the year, that indeed the weather would dominate the conduct of the entire bomber offensive. Before 1939 crews simply did not fly in bad weather. Cross-country flying exercises over England taught them nothing about the difficulties of navigating at night for long distances over blacked-out countries, for they grew accustomed to following railway lines and city lights. In the last two years before the war, 478 Bomber Command crews force-landed on exercises in England, having lost their way. Realistic training might have been carried out over the Atlantic or the North Sea, but the loss of aircraft and crews that would undoubtedly have ensued was quite unacceptable in the climate of peace.

These were the years when if there was to be any hope of striking effectively against Germany when war came, it was vital to build a comprehensive intelligence picture of the German economy.
But as late as 1938, the British Secret Service budget was only equal to the annual cost of running one destroyer. Economics were scarcely comprehended outside the ranks of a few specialists. A very small branch of Air Intelligence was created to study targeting under a retired squadron leader. The Secret Service officer Major Desmond Morton controlled the Industrial Intelligence Centre, but devoted the weight of his limited resources to the study of arms-related industries rather than to assessing the broad industrial potential of the German economy.

Until the mid-1930s at least, the Air Staff showed no awareness of the speed with which aircraft technology was changing. Specifications were issued for biplanes a few miles an hour faster than those already in service, when designers were already feeling their way towards the 400 mph, retractable-undercarriage, monoplanes that would dominate the war. Because there had been no scientific analysis of the problems of destroying a modern aircraft, there was no understanding of the need for heavy-calibre automatic weapons on both fighters and bombers – the inadequate .303 machine-gun was the basis of all RAF armament at the outbreak of war, and until the end of the war in Bomber Command. Barnes Wallis, the Vickers designer who later became famous as the creator of the dambusting bomb and other remarkable weapons, notes that it was not until after the outbreak of war that there was any understanding in the RAF of the need for big bombs because there had been no analysis of the problems of destroying large structures.
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Most senior officers preferred to see a load of ten 200-lb bombs on an aircraft rather than one 2,000-lb bomb, according to Wallis, because they thus increased the chance of hitting a target at least with something. For the first three years of the war, the RAF used an explosive markedly inferior to that of the Luftwaffe, having failed to develop anything comparable for itself in twenty years of peace. When Wallis first proposed the creation of really big bombs in the 1930s, Air Ministry ‘experts’ replied that they doubted whether it was possible properly to detonate large quantities of explosive in a bomb, and argued that it would probably fizzle out
with a mere damp-squib effect. Likewise, the development of bombsights was lamentably sluggish. The early Mark 7 automatic bombsight, with which the RAF went to war, lacked any facility for taking account of an aircraft’s gyrations on its bombing run, and required a pilot to make an absolutely steady approach to the target – a suicidal concept under operational conditions.

The RAF trained for more than two decades guided only by a Trenchardian faith that it would somehow be ‘all right on the night’. The Air Staff stand condemned for failure to inspire advanced aircraft design – the Spitfire, the Hurricane and the Mosquito are the most famous examples of aircraft that reached production only thanks to independent initiatives by British manufacturers. In his anxiety to create a strong organizational base for the new RAF, Trenchard devoted a surprisingly generous proportion of his budget to the building of solid, elegant stations and the staffing of an overweight Air Ministry, while almost totally neglecting research and development. There were three Air Ministry officials for every aircraft in squadron service, and in the 1920s one-fifth of the RAF’s budget was spent on buildings. It is possible to blame the politicians for all the quantitative shortcomings of the RAF at the outbreak of war, but the airmen themselves must accept overwhelming responsibility for the qualitative failures.

Much of the above has been often remarked. Yet there has never been a satisfactory explanation of
why
these huge omissions were made by men who, contrary to later allegations, were neither knaves nor fools. Many of them stemmed directly or indirectly from a reluctance openly to discuss the real nature of a strategic bomber offensive. Both in those years and up to the present day, RAF officers have asserted that they were planning for an attack on the industrial infrastructure of the enemy, by destroying his factories and vital installations. Air Vice-Marshal Sir John Steel, later Bomber Command’s first C-in-C, declared in 1928 that ‘there has been a lot of nonsense talked about killing women and children. Every objective I have given my bombers is a point of military importance which the guns would shell if they could
reach it. Otherwise the pilots, if captured, would be liable to be treated as war criminals.’ Both the pre-war plans of Bomber Command and the early operations of war undertaken by its crews invariably specified strategic targets: factories, rail yards, power stations.