The Second World War Read online

  Bomber Command’s offensive power began to increase only when heavy bombers–first Stirlings, then the four-engined Halifaxes and Lancasters–started to replace the Hampdens and Wellingtons. On the night of 3 March 1942, a total of 235 bombers were sent in the first mass attack on a target in France, the Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt on the edge of Paris. It was a legitimate target as it manufactured vehicles for the Wehrmacht. Marker flares were used for the first time, and because there were few anti-aircraft guns around, the bombers were able to go in below 4,000 feet to improve their accuracy. The destruction of the factory complex was great, but 367 French civilians were killed, mainly in housing blocks near by.

  On 28 March, the RAF bombed the north German port of Lübeck, with a mixture of high-explosive bombs and incendiaries, as both Portal and Harris had planned. The old town was burned out. Hitler was outraged. ‘Now terror will be answered with terror,’ his Luftwaffe adjutant records him as saying. Hitler was so furious that he demanded ‘aircraft from the eastern front to be transferred to the west’, but General Jeschonnek, the Luftwaffe chief of staff, managed to persuade him that they could use their bomber formations in northern France. As the British bombing campaign stepped up, however, pressure soon grew to withdraw Luftwaffe fighter formations and heavy flak batteries from the eastern front to defend the Reich. A month after the attack on Lübeck, Bomber Command launched a series of four raids on Rostock, eighty kilometres to the east, causing even greater destruction. Goebbels described it as a ‘Terrorangriff’–a ‘terror attack’–and from then on Bomber Command aircrews were called ‘Terrorflieger’. Harris was now openly defining success by the number of urban acres his bombers had reduced to rubble.

  On the night of 30 May 1942, Harris launched his first thousand-bomber raid, against Cologne. The original target had been Hamburg with its U-boat shipyards, but bad weather forced a change of plan. Churchill, preparing a coup de théâtre, had invited Ambassador John Winant and General ‘Hap’ Arnold, the chief of the United States Army Air Forces, to dinner at Chequers. As his guests sat down at the dining table, the prime minister made his announcement. It was a shameless but irresistible boast in that year of humiliations. Winant sent a cable to Roosevelt saying: ‘England is the place to win the war. Get planes and troops over here as soon as possible.’

  The devastation was great, but still comparatively little by later standards. Some 480 people were killed. Harris, a determined propagandist for Bomber Command, had assembled almost every bomber that could fly, even trainers, to achieve his thousand-bomber figure. He too wanted to impress both the Americans and the Soviet Union. ‘Vengeance Begins!’ was the headline in the Daily Express. Yet Harris knew that he had to mislead the public and even some of his superiors, especially Churchill, who had very mixed feelings, by pretending that their targets were of a military nature, such as oil depots and communications centres. Main railway stations provided his justification for bombing the whole of a city centre. Harris, however, knew that the public was behind him. Only a few lone voices, such as George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, spoke out.

  That August, when Churchill had flown to Moscow to explain to Stalin that an invasion of northern France was out of the question, the bombing of German cities was his strongest card. He was able to argue that the Bomber Command offensive was a form of Second Front. Hitler’s armaments minister Albert Speer expressed the same view. The bombing campaign was the only British action of which Stalin approved. Soviet intelligence was already passing back information from prisoner-of-war interrogations which indicated that the morale of German troops on the eastern front was being undermined by concern for their families at home, under British bombing. Stalin never lost his taste for revenge, especially since around half a million Soviet civilians are estimated to have died as a result of Luftwaffe bombing. Red Army aviation had not developed a strategic bombing arm, so he was content for the British to do the work for them.

  Bomber Command aircraft were now more likely to find their target, with improvements in navigation aids using radio transponder technology to guide them to their objectives. The introduction of Pathfinder aircraft which would identify the target with flares was an innovation, at first strenuously resisted by Harris, until he was overruled by Portal and the air staff. At the same time German anti-aircraft defences had also been strengthened. In Berlin, Hitler ordered the construction of huge concrete flak towers, with batteries of heavy anti-aircraft guns on top.

  Bomber Command casualties mounted relentlessly with the increasing rhythm of sorties over Germany, especially the Ruhr, which was known bitterly as ‘Happy Valley’. Next of kin would receive an official notification and then a letter of condolence from the squadron or station commander. Some time later, personal effects would be returned–cufflinks, clothes, hairbrushes and shaving kit, and if the airman owned a car, then that could be collected.

  ‘The worst thing is seeing the flak,’ wrote the twenty-four-year-old Wing Commander Guy Gibson, who led 617 Squadron in the ‘Dambuster’ raid on the night of 16 May 1943. ‘You must leave your imagination behind or it will do you harm.’ Feeling the flak was of course even worse. ‘A shell bursting beneath you lifts the plane about fifty feet upwards in the air,’ observed the actor Denholm Elliott, then serving as a wireless operator in a Halifax. ‘You certainly find instant religion.’

  The unsung casualties were those who broke down before the end of their thirty-mission tour. LMF, or Lacking in Moral Fibre, was the RAF phrase for cowardice or battle shock. For most of the war, the RAF appears to have been even more callous than the army in its treatment of psychological casualties. Altogether, 2,989 flight personnel in Bomber Command were diagnosed with combat stress. Just over a third were pilots. Most striking of all, training appears to have been an even more stressful form of flying than night bombing.

  In the summer of 1942, the US Eighth Air Force began to assemble in Britain. Major General Carl A. Spaatz had arrived in May to direct all US air operations in Europe, and the Eighth’s bomber force was commanded by Brigadier General Ira C. Eaker. To the astonishment of the RAF, who had tried it and suffered, the Americans announced that their bombing campaign would be by daylight.

  The US Army Air Forces avoided the RAF’s contentious theory of destroying enemy morale. Its leaders claimed that, with their Norden bombsight, they would carry out precision bombing on ‘key nodes’ of the enemy’s ‘industrial fabric’. But target intelligence was an inexact science, and to achieve such accuracy they would also need perfect visibility and a clearly identifiable objective which was not too strongly defended. Claims of bombing so accurate that they could ‘hit a pickle-barrel’ seldom matched the reality of widely scattered bombs on the ground. Pilots weaving to avoid flak upset the sensitive gyroscopes on the Norden bombsight, and to expect the bomb-aimer to remain calm as he entered all the data required was optimistic, assuming that he could see the target in the first place through all the smoke, cloud and haze. American bombing patterns were no better than those of the RAF.

  Having armed their B-17s with heavy machine guns in turrets, the USAAF assumed that by flying at high altitude in tight formations it could ward off fighter attacks with interlocking fields of fire. But inexperienced gunners were more likely to hit other aircraft in their formation rather than attacking Messerschmitts. Spaatz had not considered fighter escorts were necessary, even though as early as the mid-1920s the US Army Air Service, as it then was, had tested auxiliary droppable fuel tanks to give them the extra range. Like the British before them, they had dismissed the lessons of air warfare from the Spanish Civil War and China. All these lessons would soon become apparent once the Eighth Air Force began to fly missions over Germany.

  At first, Spaatz wisely decided to restrict his inexperienced crews to comparatively easy raids over France. On 17 August, a dozen B-17 Flying Fortresses took off on their first mission led by Eaker. Spaatz had wanted to go himself, but as he was privy to Ultra this idea was quashed. Th
e bombers’ target was the marshalling yards at Rouen in northern France, which was close enough to allow them Spitfire fighter cover. There were no anti-aircraft defences, and their Spitfire escorts chased off some Messerschmitts on the return journey. The crews returned to a hero’s welcome from journalists and rowdy celebrations. But Churchill and Portal were concerned about the slow build-up of American bomber strength in Britain, and by their dogged insistence on daylight bombing. The delay was largely caused by aircraft and men being diverted to the Mediterranean to assist Twelfth Air Force operations in North Africa.

  With General Arnold at its head, the USAAF had expanded with astonishing speed. In the early days, it was blessed with close friendships at the top. The RAF, on the other hand, was often riven by disputes, largely caused by Harris’s bloody-minded obstinacy and his detestation of the air staff, whom he regarded as even more feeble-minded than the hated army and Royal Navy. Harris openly derided the ‘oilys’, as he called the supporters of bombing fuel installations, and the ‘panacea mongers’ who demanded attacks on other specific targets. Yet American daylight precision-bombing dogma was almost equally fixed. Even the reality of European weather with impenetrable cloud would not budge USAAF commanders from convincing themselves that they were hitting the target.

  During the crisis in the Battle of the Atlantic from late 1942, both Bomber Command and the Eighth Air Force concentrated on the U-boat pens on France’s Atlantic coast. But the massive concrete constructions proved impenetrable to their bombs even when they scored direct hits, which was fairly rare in the terrible weather of that winter. The port towns around them, Saint-Nazaire and Lorient, on the other hand, were smashed to pieces. In retrospect, the only consolation for the Allies was that this vast diversion of concrete greatly slowed the building of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, a series of coastal defences to guard against the invasion of northern Europe.

  During the Eighth’s raid on the pens at Saint-Nazaire on 23 November, the Luftwaffe tried new tactics against the Fortresses. Up until then German pilots had always attacked from behind, but on this occasion, using thirty of the new Focke-Wulf 190s, they attacked head on, wing tip to wing tip. It took great nerve and skill on the part of the fighter pilot, but the Fortress’s Plexiglass nose containing the bomb-aimer remained the most vulnerable spot. For the crew in the forward part of the bomber, it was terrifying.

  Just like RAF aircrew, the Americans found it hard to take the waiting, and then the cancellation or aborting of missions as a result of bad weather. On only two or three days out of ten was visibility good enough to see the target. American bomber boys also had their own superstitions and rituals, whether wearing a sweater backwards, carrying good-luck coins or flying in the same plane. They hated it when they were transferred to a replacement aircraft.

  The freezing winds, especially for the waist-gunners at open doors, were numbing. Some of the crew had electrically heated boots, gloves and overalls, but they seldom worked consistently. In the first year of operations, more men suffered from frostbite injuries than from combat wounds. Turret gunners, unable to leave their cramped position for several hours over enemy territory had to urinate in their trousers. The damp patches soon froze. If a gun jammed, men would tear off their gloves to clear the obstruction, and skin from their fingers would stick hard to the frozen metal. And any man badly wounded by flak splinters or cannon fire was likely to die of hypothermia before the stricken aircraft reached base. If enemy fire knocked out the oxygen supply, men would collapse until the pilot managed to bring the aircraft back to below 20,000 feet. Although deaths resulting from anoxia came to fewer than a hundred, a majority of aircrew had suffered from it at some time or another.

  In thick cloud, there were numerous mid-air collisions, and many aircraft crashed on returning to base in bad weather. But the greatest shock was to see another aircraft, just ahead or to the side, disintegrate in a giant ball of fire. Not surprisingly many of the pilots turned to whisky in the evenings to calm their nerves, hoping not to suffer the recurrent nightmares which affected more and more men. They dreamed of comrades badly mutilated, of engines on fire or of fuselages riddled by cannon fire.

  As with the RAF, combat fatigue became a common experience, or, in their own words, men became ‘flak-happy’ or suffered the ‘Focke-Wulf jitters’. Many had the ‘shakes’, and some suffered from fainting spells, temporary blindness or even catatonia. These were predictable reactions to the stress caused by helplessness in extreme danger. In some cases, reactions were delayed. Men would seem to have overcome terrible experiences, then go to pieces several weeks later. Few statistics on psychological breakdown are available or reliable, because commanders wanted to conceal the problem.

  Major Curtis LeMay, who had just arrived with the 305th Bombing Group, was appalled to find that American pilots over the target would jink and weave to avoid flak and thus throw their bombing aim out entirely. In the view of the combative LeMay, who was later the model for General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, this made the whole exercise worthless. So he ordered his pilots to fly straight and true in their bombing run. Air reconnaissance showed that on the Saint-Nazaire raid of 23 November, the 305th had doubled the usual number of direct hits. Yet even with LeMay’s improvement, fewer than 3 per cent of bombs were falling within a thousand feet of the target. The USAAF’s initial claims of ‘pickle-barrel’ bombing looked over-ambitious to say the least. LeMay then adopted a different system. He put his best navigators and bombardiers in the lead planes, took the Norden bombsight out of all the rest and told their captains to drop their load only when the leaders released theirs. But, even then, the spread of the aircraft formation meant that many bombs would fall wide of the target, however accurate the leaders might be.

  The combination of German flak batteries, now firing in ‘boxes’, and more aggressive enemy fighter attacks reduced bombing accuracy still further. A tight formation for defence against fighters also meant a more concentrated target for flak from the ground. As a historian of the American bombing campaign put it: ‘The Eighth Air Force would never find a way to bomb with maximum precision and maximum protection. This threw it into a conundrum that led irrevocably to carpet bombing, with some bombs hitting the target and the rest spilling all over the place. It was combat realities, not prewar theory, that led the Eighth inexorably in the direction of Bomber Harris’s indiscriminate area attacks.’

  At the Casablanca conference in January 1943, General Eaker was told by General Arnold that Roosevelt had agreed to switch the Eighth Air Force to night bombing with the RAF. Eaker tried to convince Churchill that daylight bombing was more effective. He claimed that his bombers were knocking down at least two or three German fighters for every aircraft lost, a claim that the British knew to be totally untrue. But Churchill said nothing, because Portal had persuaded him in advance not to fight the Americans on the subject of daylight bombing. The combination of the USAAF attacking by day and the RAF by night was turned into a virtuous compromise of ‘round-the-clock’ bombing.

  The Allies agreed on a bombing directive which stated that the ‘primary objective will be the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened’. Harris, of course, saw this as the seal of approval of his own strategy. And although Portal was to direct the ‘Combined Bomber Offensive’, the key decisions would be taken by Eaker and Harris, who could pick and choose their targets.

  Even with agreement on this bombing directive, which was known as Pointblank, the Combined Bomber Offensive was anything but combined, even though Harris and Eaker got on well together and Harris had done all he could to help the Eighth Air Force get up and running. Directed partly by General Marshall to prepare for the invasion of Europe, Eaker was to focus on the destruction of the Luftwaffe, both aircraft factories on the ground and fighters in the air. Harris,
on the other hand, simply intended to carry on as usual, smashing cities while just paying lip-service to the priority of attacking military targets. He delighted in showing off his large leather-bound ‘blue books’ to important visitors at his headquarters at High Wycombe. They were filled with charts and graphs depicting the importance of his target cities and the area destroyed. Harris’s anger and resentment continued to increase with his conviction that Bomber Command was not receiving the attention and the respect that it deserved.

  On 16 January 1943, just as the Battle for Stalingrad was approaching its grim and frozen end, Bomber Command carried out the first of a series of raids on Berlin. It was also the first raid to use Pathfinder aircraft dropping markers. Eleven days later, the Eighth Air Force attacked targets in Germany for the first time as they went for U-boat construction yards on the northern coasts. A month after that they returned to Wilhelmshaven, with eight journalists on board, including Walter Cronkite. Soon the film director William Wyler and the actor Clark Gable were flying with the Eighth Air Force, adding a glamour that RAF Bomber Command could never hope to match. Harris’s longing for newspaper coverage was dwarfed by the public relations efforts of Spaatz and Eaker.

  On 5 March, Bomber Command returned to attacking the industrial heartland of Germany, especially Essen. The raid on 12 March destroyed the panzer construction shop, which delayed production of both Tiger and Panther tanks, thus contributing to the postponement of the great Kursk Offensive. The Eighth Air Force soon followed to join what was called the Battle of the Ruhr, and the total of casualties rose to 21,000 Germans killed.