The Second World War

by John Keegan

  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.’

  Crisis in Bomber Command

  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 class
es’ 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.

  The arrival of the ‘heavies’

  Harris’s commitment to area bombing was also lent credibility by the appearance, at the moment he took command, of a new and greatly improved instrument of attack. The British bombers available at the beginning of the war, the Hampdens, Whitleys and elegant Wellingtons, were inadequate bomb-carriers. Their larger successors, the Stirlings and Manchesters, were also defective because they lacked altitude and power respectively. The Halifax and particularly the Lancaster, however, which appeared in 1942, were bombers of a new generation. The Lancaster, which first flew operationally in March 1942, proved to be capable of carrying enormous bomb-loads, eventually the 10-ton ‘Grand Slam’, over great distances and to be robust enough to withstand heavy attack by German night-fighters without falling from the sky.

  At the outset, though, Harris was concerned not with quality but with quantity. His aim was to concentrate the largest possible number of bombers over a German city with the object of overwhelming its defences and firefighting forces. A successful raid on the Paris Renault factory in March prompted him to undertake a raid against the historic Hanseatic town of Lübeck on the Baltic on the night of 28/29 March 1942. He was cold-bloodedly frank about his intentions: ‘It seemed to me better to destroy an industrial town of moderate importance than to fail to destroy a large industrial city. . . . I wanted my crews to be well “blooded” . . . to have a taste of success for a change.’ Lübeck, a gem of medieval timber architecture, burned to the ground, and the raiding forces returned to base 95 per cent intact. The ‘exchange ratio’ persuaded Harris that he had discovered a formula for victory.

  On four nights in April Bomber Command repeated its incendiary success at Rostock, another medieval Baltic town; ‘These two attacks’, wrote Harris, ‘brought the total acreage of devastation by bombing in Germany up to 780 acres, and in regard to bombing [on Britain] about squared our account.’ The Luftwaffe retaliated by so-called ‘Baedeker’ (tourist-guide) attacks on the historic towns of Bath, Norwich, Exeter, York and Canterbury. However, it lacked the strength to match Harris’s next escalation, which took the form of an attack by a thousand bombers, the first ‘thousand-bomber raid’, on Cologne in May. By stripping training units and workshops of their machines, Bomber Command concentrated the largest number of aircraft yet seen in German skies over this, the third largest city in the Reich, and burned everything in its centre except the famous cathedral.

  The success of Bomber Command’s new tactics depended not only upon increased numbers and improved target-finding but also on a frank adoption of fire-raising methods. Thenceforward its bomb-loads were to contain small incendiaries and large high-explosive containers in the proportion of two to one. At Cologne 600 acres were burned. Thousand-bomber raids on Essen and Bremen in June achieved similar effects; Essen, in the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial centre, had been already attacked eight times between March and April. In the spring and summer of 1943 Bomber Command devoted its efforts to a ‘Battle of the Ruhr’ which multiplied the incendiary effect many times over.

  By then the strategic bombing offensive against Germany had become a two-air-force campaign. The United States Army’s Eighth Air Force had arrived in Britain in the spring of 1942 and undertaken its first raid in August, when it attacked marshalling yards at Rouen. The attack was staged in daylight, in accordance with the philosophy worked out over many years before the war by the Army Air Force’s officers. Exercised by the pressing need to destroy hostile naval forces operating in American waters, they had developed both an aircraft and a bombsight designed to deliver large bomb-loads on to small targets with precision in daylight. The Norden bombsight was the most accurate optical instrument yet mounted in a strategic bomber. The bomber which carried it, the B-17, was notable for its long range and heavy defensive armament, the latter central to the American belief that, in the absence of a satisfactory long-range fighter, their bombers could fight their way to and from the target without suffering unacceptable losses. However, the requirements of range and armament placed a heavy penalty on the B-17’s bombload. Under normal circumstances the bombload of a B-17 seldom exceeded 4000lb and in many operations fell as low as 2600lb. Redeployed from a maritime defensive to a continental offensive role, General Ira C. Eaker’s Eighth Air Force was destined for deep-penetration missions by daylight to complement Bomber Command’s night raids into Germany and its occupied territories. By January 1943 Eaker had 500 B-17s available.

  The combined bomber offensive

  The integration of the developing American with the continuing British bombing attacks on Germany was formalised at the Casablanca conference of January 1943 in a ‘Casablanca Directive’, which laid the basis for a ‘combined bomber offensive’ (codenamed Pointblank in May), against key targets. These were defined, in order of priority, as German submarine construction yards, the German aircraft industry, transportation, oil plants and other targets in enemy war industry. The specification of targets disguised, however, a sharp difference of opinion between the British and Americans over operating methods. Eaker rejected British arguments for committing his B-17s to area bombing. He rem
ained convinced that they were best employed in precision attack, against what Harris contemptuously dismissed as ‘panacea targets’. Harris, for his part, refused to be diverted from his chosen method. As a result, the two air forces effectively divided the Casablanca agenda between them, the RAF continuing its night attacks on ‘other targets’, which meant the built-up areas of the major German cities, while the USAAF committed itself to daylight raids on ‘bottlenecks’ in the German economy.

  The first ‘bottleneck’ chosen by the economic analysts who advised the USAAF was the ball-bearing plant at Schweinfurt in central Germany, bombed by the Eighth Air Force on 17 August 1943. Analysis suggested that destruction of the factory, from which essential components of the gearing in aircraft, tanks and U-boats were supplied, would cripple German armaments production. The theory was only partially correct, since Germany had alternative sources of supply from another plant at Regensburg and from neutral Sweden, which not only lay outside the Allied targeting area but was also bound to Germany by dependence on coal imports. The practice was almost wholly disastrous. Forced to traverse northern France and half of Germany in daylight without fighter escort, the ‘self-defending’ Flying Fortress formations were devastated by fighter attack. Of the 229 B-17s that had set out, 36 were shot down, an ‘attrition rate’ of 16 per cent, more than three times the rate that Bomber Command had established as ‘acceptable’ for a single mission. When the 24 B-17s lost suffered in the complementary raid on Regensburg were added in, and heavy damage to 100 returning bombers allowed for, it became clear that 17 August had been a day of disaster. The pre-war theory of the self-defending bomber had proved to be a misconception. The Eighth Air Force suspended its deep-penetration missions into Germany for five weeks, and they would not be fully resumed until long-range fighters had been developed to escort the daylight bombers to their targets.