The Second World War Page 61
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The Battle of the Atlantic and Strategic Bombing
1942–1943
The success of the Royal Navy and the RAF in sinking supply ships for Rommel’s Afrika Korps in the autumn of 1941 had prompted Hitler to order the transfer of U-boats from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and its approaches. Admiral Dönitz objected bitterly, but to little avail. These U-boats in the Mediterranean enjoyed some conspicuous successes with the sinking in November of the carrier HMS Ark Royal and the battleship HMS Barham, but the contribution of Ultra to the Eighth Army’s survival in North Africa was considerable.
The US Navy’s chief of staff, Admiral Ernest King, was reluctant to impose a convoy system along America’s east coast, even though the country was now at war with Germany. Admiral Dönitz ordered some of his Type IX U-boats to the area, where they were to target ships, especially oil tankers, at night against the bright lights along the coastline. Losses were so high that King, under pressure from General Marshall, was forced to introduce escorted convoys at the beginning of April. The Germans then switched their attacks to the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.
In February 1942, the Kriegsmarine added a fourth rotor to their Enigma machines. Bletchley called the new system ‘Shark’, and struggled for months without success to break it. To make matters worse, the Germans then cracked the Admiralty code known as Naval Cipher 3, which exchanged convoy details with the Americans. Although the British suspected by August that it had been broken, the Admiralty inexplicably carried on using it for another ten months with disastrous consequences.
A total of 1,100 ships were sunk in 1942, with 173 in June alone. But at the end of October an Enigma machine with its settings was seized from a sinking submarine in the eastern Mediterranean. And by mid-December the codebreakers at Bletchley were into Shark. Convoys could once again be rerouted to avoid wolfpacks, and anti-submarine aircraft from Canada, Iceland and the United Kingdom could be guided to U-boat assembly areas. This forced the wolfpacks to concentrate in the mid-Atlantic ‘black gap’ which was out of range of shore-based aircraft.
To extend his U-boats’ range and time at sea, Grossadmiral Dönitz, who had been promoted when he replaced Raeder as chief of the Kriegsmarine, introduced ‘milch cow’ submarines to refuel and rearm his wolf-packs. In December he even sent several of his U-boats into the Indian Ocean. During Operation Torch, U-173 sank three ships of the invasion fleet off Casablanca, and the following night U-130, captained by Ernst Kals, sank another three.
All this time, the ‘Hell Run’ of the Arctic convoys continued. In the summer months the nights were so short that escorts and merchant vessels alike suffered constant air attacks from Luftwaffe bases in northern Norway. As well as U-boats, the Kriegsmarine sent out heavy destroyers from anchorages in the fjords. In winter, the superstructure of the ships became buried in ice, which had to be chipped away with axes. And the crew of any ship which sank stood little chance if they had to jump into the sea. They died of hypothermia in three minutes.
Churchill, determined to improve security for the Russia-bound convoys, had wanted to invade and hold northern Norway with Operation Jupiter. Ever since the autumn of 1941, he had been worrying his chiefs of staff with plans for a landing there. Time and again they returned with sound arguments on why it was impracticable. They lacked the shipping and the warships, and it was too far for air cover. Churchill returned to the charge again in May 1942. In July he had an idea that this would be a suitable task for the Canadian Corps on the grounds that its men were used to harsh weather. General Andrew McNaughton, its commander, estimated that he would need ‘five divisions, twenty squadrons and a large fleet’. Churchill wanted to send McNaughton to Moscow to discuss the project with Stalin. It would take the firm opposition of the Canadians and the chiefs of staff before the prime minister allowed the matter to drop many months later. In Washington, General Marshall was also totally opposed to such a dispersion of effort.
On 31 December 1942, Convoy JW-51B bound for Murmansk was attacked off the North Cape by the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, the Lützow and six destroyers. Four of the Royal Navy escorts immediately turned towards them. Although one of their destroyers HMS Achates and a minesweeper were sunk, they damaged the Hipper and sank a German destroyer. Having chased off a superior force, the escorts, led by HMS Onslow, managed to shepherd the convoy to its destination.
At the Casablanca conference in January 1943, U-boat bases and shipyards were designated as priority objectives for Bomber Command. On 13 February, Lorient, one of the main bases on the French Atlantic coast, was bombed heavily. Saint-Nazaire was also attacked. But despite the huge quantity of bombs dropped, usually 1,000 tons a time, the ferro-concrete shelters were too strong. It was found to be more effective to lay large quantities of mines off the Brittany coast.
Improvements in the radar mounted on anti-submarine Liberators and Sunderlands soon began to have an effect. The Bay of Biscay became a killing ground for Coastal Command squadrons, operating from south-west England. Yet the wolfpacks in the ‘black gap’ continued to take a heavy toll. In March 1943, in heavy seas, the fast-moving Convoy HX-229 overtook the slower SC-122. This presented the wolfpacks with ninety merchantmen as targets, protected by only sixteen escort vessels. Dönitz had concentrated thirty-eight U-boats in the area, and during the night of 20 March they sank twenty-one ships. Only the arrival of Liberators flying from Iceland the next morning saved the surviving ships of the two convoys.
Dönitz by now had 240 operational U-boats. On 30 April, he concentrated fifty-one of them between Greenland and Newfoundland to intercept Convoy ONS-5. But, with Bletchley having broken the Shark code, five extra destroyers were despatched from St John’s, and Royal Can adian Air Force Catalinas stood by. Long-range Liberators now narrowed the ‘black gap’, and escort vessels were being equipped with a new high-frequency direction-finding system, which could locate U-boats on the surface up to sixty-five kilometres away. Convoys included escort carriers, destroyers and corvettes armed with a new device called Hedgehog, which fired depth-charges ahead of the ship, rather than just dropping them off the stern. During the first week of May, Dönitz’s U-boats intercepted the convoy. They sank thirteen ships, but the counter-attack by escorts and aircraft sank seven U-boats. This forced Dönitz to call off the rest.
During May, he was obliged to accept that his massed wolfpack tactic was not working. A group of thirty-three U-boats tried to attack Convoy SC-130. They failed to sink a single ship and five of the submarines were lost. One of them, U-954, was sunk by a Liberator from Coastal Command. All the crew were killed, including Dönitz’s twenty-one-year-old son, Peter. Altogether the Kriegsmarine lost thirty-three U-boats during that month. On 24 May, Dönitz ordered almost all his submarines in the North Atlantic to pull out and take up station south of the Azores. Churchill’s greatest worry was now behind him. With the U-boat menace now drastically reduced, the build-up of American troops for an invasion of Europe could also begin.
Hitler had seen the U-boat campaign against Britain as a just revenge for the blockade of Germany during the First World War. In a similar way the British saw their strategic bombing campaign against Germany as vengeance for the ‘Blitz’ on London. There was also a large element of revenge for Nazi crimes elsewhere. But the main impetus came from British weakness, and the inability to strike back in any other way.
On 29 June 1940, just after the French defeat, Churchill had acknowledged that a naval blockade of Germany was no longer possible. ‘In which case,’ he added, ‘the sole decisive weapon in our hands would be overwhelming air attack on Germany.’ The strategic bombing offensive had already begun on 15 May, when ninety-nine bombers attacked oil installations in the Ruhr. But the first year of Bomber Command’s attacks proved largely ineffective. Churchill was horrified in late September 1941 when he received the Butt Report, which estimated from photo-reconnaissance that only one aircraft in five dropped their bombs within five miles of the targ
et.
The chief of the air staff, Air Chief Marshal Portal, had recently written a paper for the prime minister, advocating a heavy bomber force of 4,000 aircraft to break German morale. Portal, a highly intelligent man, was not put off by Churchill’s dismay and anger at the Butt Report. He countered with the unanswerable argument that the British army was in no position to defeat Germany. Only the RAF could hope to weaken Germany fatally for the day when Britain returned to the continent of Europe. Churchill retorted with a reminder of the RAF’s exaggerated claims from before the war about the decisive effects of bombing. At that time, the picture painted of ‘air destruction was so exaggerated that it depressed the statesmen responsible for the prewar policy, and played a definite part in the desertion of Czechoslovakia in August 1938’.
Churchill might well have rammed the point home that the RAF’s claims had much to do with its rivalry with the army and the Royal Navy. Bombing raids against Germany in the First World War had been both wasteful and ineffective. The new-born RAF fought for its survival with preposterously exaggerated claims of the damage inflicted, especially on civilian morale. Since 1918, its justification for remaining as an independent service was based on the argument that bombing was a strategic capability. This established ‘a pattern of exaggeration that ultimately would help to create a gap between RAF declaratory policy and its actual capabilities’. Churchill, however, was loath to reject the advantages offered by Bomber Command. With his deep sense of history, he was all too conscious of Britain’s traditional strategy of avoiding a direct confrontation on the soil of Europe until the enemy had been severely weakened at sea and at the periphery. Above all, he was determined to avoid another First World War bloodbath.
For Churchill, the most urgent need during the nightly Luftwaffe attacks on Britain in 1940 and the spring of 1941 was to be able to reassure a disenchanted and weary public that Britain was hitting back. And at a time when the army was reeling under the disasters of Greece, Crete and Rommel’s advance in North Africa, the RAF’s theory of offensive air power enunciated by its first chief of the air staff, Lord Trenchard–‘to bomb them harder than they do us’–was too attractive to question. The fact that Trenchard’s own bombing force in the First World War had suffered massive casualties to little avail was not mentioned. Nor was the clear implication that the strategy was aimed essentially at the civilian population ‘for moral effect’, just as the Luftwaffe’s had been. The truth in any case was that bombing remained so inaccurate that only area targets, such as densely populated cities, could be considered.
Unlike the Luftwaffe, which had retained close tactical co-operation with the German army, the RAF had distanced itself as far as possible from the other two services in its over-extended war of independence, and it rejected the concept of close support. Inter-service suspicions intensified during the 1930s. Both the British army and the Royal Navy questioned the morality and legality of the RAF’s proposed bombing strategy. The Admiralty even described the bombing of towns as ‘revolting and un-English’. The RAF protested hotly that ‘baby-killing’ was not its aim. Yet its continuing emphasis on attacking enemy morale hardly indicated an alternative.
On the outbreak of war, Bomber Command had been a long way behind Fighter Command in its readiness to carry out its stated mission. Not only were its aircraft inadequate, but navigation, intelligence, photo-reconnaissance and target-acquisition systems had been badly neglected. Bomber Command had also failed to foresee the effectiveness of German air defence.
At the beginning of the war, RAF commanders were told that the ‘intentional bombardment of civil populations as such is illegal’. This was in response to President Roosevelt’s appeal to combatant nations to avoid bombing cities. Bombing missions over Germany were restricted to ineffective attacks on shipping and harbours and dropping propaganda leaflets. Even after the Luftwaffe’s assaults on cities such as Warsaw, and later Rotterdam, the policy did not change until after the Luftwaffe bombed London by mistake on the night of 24 August 1940, instead of the Thames estuary ports. Churchill’s order to retaliate, as already mentioned, led to the beginning of the Blitz on London and to the easing of target restrictions on the RAF. Yet, despite all of Bomber Command’s claims during the inter-war years, its force of Wellingtons and Handley Page Hampdens proved incapable of defending themselves against fighters, of finding their targets even in daylight, and, even when they did, of inflicting significant damage. The humiliation for the RAF was considerable.
Churchill, fortifying himself with a wholly optimistic idea of Germany’s economic vulnerability, pushed ahead with plans to increase the strength of Bomber Command. When estimating the possibility of achieving victory through bombing alone, the failure of the Luftwaffe’s offensive against Britain to destroy either infrastructure or civilian morale was discounted. German oil production and aircraft factories, however, proved too small as targets for the haphazard reality of aerial bombing. So Portal, arguing that the German attacks on London in 1940 allowed Britain to ‘take the gloves off’, proposed reverting to the old RAF mantra of creating a ‘moral effect’ by bombing cities, which the service knew it could hit. Churchill agreed. And on 16 December 1940, a month after the destruction of Coventry, Bomber Command launched its first deliberate ‘area raid’ on Mannheim.
The increasingly desperate situation in the Battle of the Atlantic then forced Bomber Command to concentrate on U-boat pens, building yards and factories producing the Focke-Wulf Condor aircraft used against convoys. But in July 1941 the arguments within the RAF for the area bombing of cities intensified, supported passionately by Lord Trenchard. There was a mistaken conviction that German morale was much more brittle than British, and that Germans were bound to crack under a relentless night-time campaign. The Butt Report on bombing inaccuracy soon afterwards convinced even the critics that there was no option but to go for area targets.
In February 1942, Bomber Command received approval from the Cabinet to pursue an area-target strategy, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris took command. Harris, a great bull of a man with a bristling moustache, had no doubts that the key to victory was the destruction of German cities. This, in his view, would avoid the necessity of sending forces to the continent to take on the Wehrmacht there. As a thick-skinned outsider who had spent a tough life in Rhodesia, Harris saw little reason to compromise towards those he regarded as faint-hearted gentlemen.
Ever since the nights he had spent during the Blitz on the roof of the air ministry watching Luftwaffe bombs fall on London, Harris had longed to strike back, especially with such loads of incendiaries that they would overwhelm the enemy’s fire services. The Blitz on London and other cities had killed 41,000 civilians and injured 137,000 more. Harris was therefore not prepared to take any criticism, or willingly accept other requests from generals or admirals, whom he was convinced had tried to undermine the RAF since its independence. He regarded them as ‘diversionists’ intent on frustrating him from carrying out his key plan.
Harris’s first task was to improve the morale of his aircrew. They had suffered heavy casualties–nearly 5,000 men and 2,331 aircraft in the first two years of the war–for little effect, according to the Butt Report. In many of the earlier raids, more aircrew died than Germans on the ground.
Their lives lacked the glamour of the Spitfire squadrons in the southeast, whose pilots were fêted on their frequent trips to London. Most of the bomber bases were airfields in the flat, windswept countryside of Lincolnshire and Norfolk, sited there because they lay on the same latitude as Berlin. The aircrew lived in Nissen huts, which smelled of cigarettes and smoke from coke-fired stoves, and rain always seemed to be pattering on the roof. Apart from bacon and eggs for breakfast on returning from a mission, their food consisted of a monotonous routine of macaroni cheese, over-cooked vegetables, beetroot and Spam, and most suffered from constipation. Apart from endless cups of tea, which was rumoured to be laced with bromide to reduce their sexual urges, the only drink was wat
ery beer in dismal pubs, to which they travelled by bicycle or bus on rainy nights. The lucky ones might be accompanied by an innocent young WAAF from the airfield. Others hoped to meet locals or Land Girls at dances.
As in Fighter Command, pilots and aircrew were mostly volunteers. A quarter of them came from countries overrun by the Nazis as well as from the Dominions: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia and South Africa. There were so many Canadians that they formed separate RCAF squadrons, and so later did men from other countries, such as the Poles and French. Some 8,000 Bomber Command aircrew died in training accidents, around a seventh of the total casualties.
When on ‘ops’, they lived with numbing cold, boredom, fear, discomfort and the perpetual noise of aero-engines. Death could come at any moment, whether from flak or a night-fighter. Luck, both good and bad, seemed to dominate all their lives, and many became obsessively superstitious, clinging to personal rituals or talismans, such as a rabbit’s foot or a St Christopher medal. Whatever the target, missions began with a similar routine–the briefing which opened with the words ‘the target for tonight’, radio checks, take-off, circling to assemble formation in the sky, gunners firing test bursts over the Channel, and then the atmosphere in the aircraft tensing as soon as the call came through the intercom: ‘enemy coast ahead’. All aircrew looked forward to the sudden lurch upwards of the aircraft as its heavy load of bombs fell away.
It was a young man’s war. Even a thirty-one-year-old pilot was nicknamed ‘Grandpa’. Everyone had nicknames and there was a great sense of comradeship, but to cope with the death of friends they needed to acquire a certain cynicism or cold-bloodedness to protect themselves from the effects of survivor guilt. The sight of another aircraft on fire produced a mixture of horror and relief that it was someone else. A bomber might return so badly shot up by a night-fighter that the ground crew, on finding the mangled remains of the rear gunner in his turret, ‘had to hose it out’. Waiting at dispersal, not knowing whether an ‘op’ was on, or delayed, or even cancelled because of bad weather over the target, created a great strain. Pilots especially were ‘keyed up like a violin’, even though they sometimes referred to themselves as ‘a glorified bus driver’.