The Second World War (67 page)

Korten’s belated attempt to endow the Luftwaffe with a strategic capability was motivated by the belief, which he shared with Speer, the Armaments Minister, that the Red Army’s assumption of the offensive in 1943 might be offset by a counter-offensive against its industrial rear. In short the crisis had obliged him to take up the policy which a generation of British and American airmen had adopted and refined at leisure. While he was forced into the expedient of hastily adapting medium-range bombers and retraining their crews for ‘penetration’ operations – operations which short-term emergencies would, in the event, deny him the chance to undertake – Harris already commanded a thousand-strong fleet of four-engined bombers developed over many years specifically for penetration missions.

Britain’s commitment to the concept of strategic bombing can, indeed, be traced to the last years of the First World War. Even though the ‘Independent Air Force’ of 1918 succeeded in dropping only 534 tons of bombs on German territory its strategy was already informed by the idea that the direct attack of the enemy’s rear was the correct role for an air force. That idea was to be elaborated by the Italian airman, Giulio Douhet, into a coherent philosophy of airpower, equivalent in scope to Mahan’s philosophy of seapower during the 1920s. Meanwhile, without benefit of elaborate theory, the Royal Air Force was creating the first ‘air navy’ of strategic bombers that the world had seen. The roots of its operational function lay in a study prepared by the ‘father’ of the Royal Air Force, Sir Hugh Trenchard, for the Allied Supreme War Council in the last months of the First World War. ‘There are two factors,’ he wrote then, ‘moral and material effect – the object being to obtain the maximum of each. The best means to this end is to attack the industrial centres where you (a) Do military and vital damage by striking at the centres of war material; (b) Achieve the maximum effect on the morale by striking at the most sensitive part of the German population – namely the working class.’

By advocating this simple and brutal strategy – to bomb factories and terrorise those who worked there and lived nearby – Trenchard proposed to extend to general warfare a principle so far admitted by civilised nations only in the siege of cities. In siege warfare armies had always operated by the code that citizens who chose to remain within a city’s walls after siege was laid thereby exposed themselves to its hardships: starvation, bombardment and, once the walls had been breached and the offer of capitulation refused, rapine and pillage. The almost uncontested generalisation of siege-warfare morality demonstrates both how closely the First World War had come to resemble siege on a continental scale and how grossly its prosecution had blunted the sensitivities of war leaders, civilian and military alike. Indeed, Trenchard’s proposals went almost uncontested: they met no principled objection among the Western Allies at the time; and once the war was over they influenced governments in Britain and France by prompting policies designed to avert ‘air raids’, minimise their effect or maximise the capacity of their own air forces to mount such raids against a future enemy. Thus, at Versailles, the Allies insisted on the abolition of the German air force in perpetuity; but by 1932 the British Stanley Baldwin, then a prominent member of the coalition government, was gloomily conceding that ‘the bomber would always get through’, while the leaders of the Royal Air Force were battling relentlessly for the expansion of the bomber fleet, even at the cost of depriving the home air defences of fighter squadrons.

The RAF’s commitment to bombing was rooted in the conviction that attack was the best form of defence. Air Marshal John Slessor, the Air Staff’s Chief of Plans in the late thirties, expressed his service’s views in classic form when he argued that an offensive against enemy territory would have the immediate effect of forcing the enemy air force on to the defensive and the secondary, indirect, but ultimately decisive effect of crushing the enemy army’s capacity to wage war. In
Airpower and Armies
(1936) he wrote: ‘It is difficult to resist at least the conclusion that air bombardment on anything approaching an intensive scale, if it can be maintained even at irregular intervals for any length of time, can today restrict the output from war industry to a degree which would make it quite impossible to meet the immense requirements of an army on the 1918 model, in weapons, ammunition and warlike stores of almost every kind.’

So acute and general were the fears that the prospect of strategic bombing aroused at the outset of the Second World War – fears very greatly enhanced by the international left’s brilliantly orchestrated condemnation of the bombing of Republican towns by Franco’s air force and the expeditionary squadrons of his German and Italian allies during the Spanish Civil War, of which Picasso’s
Guernica
is the key document – that paradoxically even Hitler joined in an unspoken agreement between the major combatants not to be the first to breach the moral (and self-interested) embargo against it.

Hitler did not extend the embargo to exclude attacks on countries unable to retaliate – hence the bombings of Warsaw in September 1939 and Rotterdam in May 1940 – or on military targets in those that could. The bombing of military targets including airfields, naval ports and railway centres was legitimate under the most traditional conventions of war. However, until midsummer 1940 all held each other’s cities inviolate. Even at the outset of the Battle of Britain, Hitler insisted that attacks be confined to airfields and to targets that might be deemed military, like London Docks. Such restrictions became increasingly difficult to observe, however, as the Battle of Britain protracted without the prospect of outcome. As the argument for ‘making the RAF fight’ intensified, entailing direct attack on populated targets, Hitler looked for means to justify breaching the embargo. In his victory speech to the Reichstag on 19 July he had publicised the notion that Freiburg-in-Breisgau had already been bombed by the French or the British air force (Goebbels had inculpated both); in fact it had been mistakenly attacked on 10 May by an errant flight of the Luftwaffe. When on 24 August another vagrant Luftwaffe crew bombed East London in error, provoking a retaliatory raid next night by the RAF on Berlin, he seized the opportunity to announce that the gloves were off. ‘When [the British] declare that they will increase their attacks on our cities [Churchill had not done so], then we will raze their cities to the ground. We will stop the handiwork of these air pirates,’ he told an ecstatic audience in the Berlin Sports Palace on 4 September; ‘the hour will come when one of us will break and it will not be National Socialist Germany.’

British Bomber Command altogether lacked the power to bring Germany to breaking-point when it began its bombing campaign in earnest in the winter of 1940. When it impertinently bombed Munich on the anniversary of Hitler’s Beer Hall
Putsch
of 8 November 1923, the Luftwaffe retaliated by raiding the industrial city of Coventry, destroying or damaging 60,000 buildings. In an attempted escalation of tit-for-tat the RAF attacked Mannheim on the night of 20 December, but it largely missed the city and caused only a twenty-fifth of the damage Coventry had suffered, if the score is reckoned by the tally of civilian casualties – 23 dead to 568 – which, gruesomely, was to be the measure of strategic bombing success thenceforward. Since the Mannheim raid was an exercise in ‘area bombing’ or direct attack on civilians in all but name, Bomber Command now found itself in the unenviable position of having descended to the same moral level as the Luftwaffe, while lacking the means to equal, let alone exceed, the Luftwaffe’s area bombing capacity. Throughout the ‘blitz’ winter of 1940-1 London and other British cities burned by the acre; on 29 December 1940 the Luftwaffe started 1500 fires in the City of London alone, destroying much of the remaining fabric of the streets familiar to Samuel Pepys, Christopher Wren and Samuel Johnson. No German city suffered equivalent damage during 1940 or even 1941. To all intents, Bomber Command, the service Churchill had told the War Cabinet on 3 September 1940 ‘must claim the first place over the Navy or the Army’, was and would remain for months to come ‘little more than a ramshackle air freight service exporting bombs to Germany’.

The most shaming index of its incapacity was the ‘exchange ratio’ between aircrew and German civilians killed in the course of bombing raids during 1941; the number of the former actually exceeded that of the latter. The imbalance had several explanations. One was material: the poor quality of British bombing aircraft, which as yet lacked the speed, range, height and power to deliver large bomb-loads on to distant targets. Another was geographical: to reach Germany – as yet only western Germany – the bombers had to overfly France, Belgium or Holland, where the Germans had already begun to deploy a formidable defensive screen of fighters and anti-aircraft guns. The third, and most important, explanation was technological: committed to bombing by night, since the RAF did not have the long-range fighter escorts necessary to protect bombers on daylight raids, Bomber Command lacked the navigational equipment not merely to find its designated targets – factories, marshalling yards, power stations – within the cities against which it flew but even the cities themselves. The suspicion that Bomber Command was bombing ‘wide’, even wild, was confirmed with exactitude by a study prepared at the suggestion of Churchill’s scientific adviser, Lord Cherwell, in August 1941. The Butt Report’s main findings were: ‘of those aircraft attacking their targets, only one in three got within five miles . . . over the French ports the proportion was two in three; over Germany as a whole . . . one in four; over the Ruhr [the heartland of German industry and Bomber Command’s principal target area] it was only one in ten.’

During 1941, when 700 aircraft failed to return from operations, Bomber Command’s crews in short were dying largely in order to crater the German countryside. Set beside the hopes reposed in it by Churchill and the British people as their only means of bringing the war directly to Hitler’s doorstep, this realisation was bound to precipitate a crisis. At the end of 1941 the crisis occurred. As early as 8 July 1941 Churchill had written: ‘There is one thing that will bring [Hitler] down, and that is an absolutely devastating exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.’ Goaded by Churchill, the RAF first of all committed itself to a programme of building up Bomber Command to a strength of 4000 heavy bombers (when the daily total of serviceable machines was only 700); after that target was recognised to be unattainable, it brought itself to accept that the bombers it already deployed must in future be used to kill German civilians, since the factories in which they worked could not be hit with precision. On 14 February the Air Staff issued a directive emphasising that henceforward operations ‘should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civilian population and in particular of industrial workers’. Lest the point not be taken, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal wrote the following day: ‘I suppose it is clear that the new aiming points are to be the built-up [residential] areas, not, for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories. . . . This is to be made quite clear if it is not already understood.’

It was appropriate that it should have been Portal, the intellectual patrician, who revealed the central idea of area bombing, for it depended ultimately upon class bias – the judgement that the latent discontents of the proletariat were the Achilles heel of an industrial state. Liddell Hart, writing in 1925, had envisaged ‘the slum districts maddened into the impulse to break loose and maraud’ by bombing attack, thereby dramatising Trenchard’s first statement of the theory in 1918. The preconceptions of all three were determined by the ruling classes’ prevailing fear of insurrection, perhaps leading to revolution, which the success of the Bolsheviks in war-torn Russia had rekindled throughout Europe after 1917. Events would prove that it was the proletariat’s endurance of suffering – particularly of ‘dehousing’ which Cherwell advocated in an important paper of March 1942 – that the effects of area bombing would most powerfully stimulate; but in early 1942 the proletariat’s class enemies – as Marx would have identified them – had contrary expectations. The ‘bomber barons’ embarked on their campaign against the German working class in the firm belief that they would thereby provoke the same breach between it and its rulers that the ordeal of the First World War had brought about in tsarist Russia.

There was a strong flavour of class reaction too in the Air Staff’s choice of agent to implement the new policy. Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris was a commander of coarse single-mindedness. He had neither intellectual doubt nor moral scruple about the rightness of the area bombing policy and was to seek by every means – increasing bomber numbers, refining technical bombing aids, elaborating deception measures – to maximise its effectiveness. ‘There are a lot of people who say that bombing cannot win the war,’ he told an interviewer soon after taking command at High Wycombe, the bomber headquarters, on 22 February 1942. ‘My reply is that it has never been tried yet. We shall see.’

He was fortunate to assume command at a moment when the first navigational aid to more accurate bombing, ‘Gee’, was about to come into service. ‘Gee’ resembled the ‘beam’ system by which the Luftwaffe had been guided to British targets in 1940-1. It transmitted two pairs of radio signals which allowed a receiving aircraft to plot its precise position on a gridded chart and so release its bombs at a preordained point. ‘Gee’ was followed in December by the precision-bombing device ‘Oboe’, which was subsequently fitted to Pathfinder Mosquitos, and in January 1943 by H2S, a radar set that gave the navigator a picture of the ground beneath the aircraft with its salient landmarks.

All three navigational aids were greatly to improve Bomber Command’s target-finding capacity, though it was the formation of the specialist Pathfinder squadrons in August 1942 which achieved the decisive advance. The Pathfinders, equipped with a mixture of aircraft that included the new, fast and high-flying Mosquito light bombers, preceded the bomber waves to ‘mark’ and ‘back up’ the target with incendiaries and flares, starting fires into which the main force then dropped its loads. Harris fiercely opposed the creation of the Pathfinder units. He believed they deprived the ordinary bomber squadrons of their natural leaders (the same argument was used by British generals against the formation of commando units) and also diminished the size of the area bombing force. However, he was rapidly obliged to withdraw his objections when the Pathfinders demonstrated how much more effectively they found targets than the unspecialised crews of Bomber Command.