Still, no one on the navy staff had thought of it, either. “The problem forced itself on our notice,” said Blackett, only when the operational researchers began exploring the tangential question Cherwell had raised about the relative effectiveness of escorts. “As in most of the important cases … the really vital problems were found by the operational research groups themselves rather than given them to solve by the Service operational staffs.”10
THE U.S. EIGHTH AIR FORCE’S ENTHUSIASM for bombing the German submarine bases on the Bay of Biscay, which Morse had encountered during his visit to England in the fall of 1942, was the bastard offspring of mixed motives.
The rapid buildup of the American B-17 and B-24 forces in England since the summer had exposed glaring deficiencies in the organization, training, and abilities of the bomber units. There was no lack of enthusiastic volunteers: the Army Air Forces had so many recruits that by the end of 1942 it had a backlog of 100,000 men awaiting flight training and even enlisted technical positions were so oversubscribed that air force officers estimated they already had all the candidates they needed for the next two years of all-out expansion. In December 1942 voluntary enlistment in the AAF was ended.11 “The Romance of the Air,” remarked the novelist E. M. Forster in a letter he wrote his friend and fellow writer Christopher Isherwood, “is war’s last beauty parlor.”12
The problem facing the AAF was how to train all of those eager young men fast enough to get them into combat units. Its solution was a kind of assembly-line education that seemed to teach almost nothing. Demoralized instructors, most of them civilian teachers promised rank, promotion, and the chance to put their talents to use serving their country, found themselves wearing private’s stripes and delivering canned lectures they were ordered to follow by rote. One student pilot remembered the eight classes a day he attended as “the saddest, poorest, most incomplete” attempt at education he ever experienced in his life, “the maximum of predigested information in the minimum time.”13
Deployed to England, the crews were ill-prepared and their aircraft plagued with mechanical problems. An inspection report found radio operators who could not send and receive Morse code at the minimum rate of eighteen words per minute, gunners unfamiliar with how to operate their turrets or track a rapidly closing fighter, pilots who had scant experience flying at high altitudes, bombardiers who could not read maps. Most of all, commanders concluded, the men just needed some toughening up, which could only come from actual combat experience of flying through flak and enemy fighters, enduring the freezing cold and low oxygen of high altitude in unheated and unpressurized cabins. From this perspective, bombing the Bay of Biscay ports, which were much closer than targets in Germany, offered an opportunity for the American crews to get their feet wet.14
Meanwhile, criticisms in the American press about the slow pace of the Eighth Air Force’s buildup were making the U.S. air force commanders and their political masters in Washington worried. In November 1942,
H. H. “Hap” Arnold, the commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces, told General Eaker he was sending from Washington an officer especially qualified for the task of “writing up and presenting to the American public” the success of the heavy bombers to date and explaining their ability to “crush Germany’s capacity to wage war at its source.” A few months later the assistant secretary of war for air, Robert Lovett, nervously called Eaker’s attention to a recent article in Reader’s Digest questioning why the American strategic bombers were not yet doing the great things that had been promised of them.15 Lovett and Arnold were both eager for some stories that would offer quick proof of the value of U.S. strategic air power to the war effort, and deflect pressures to divert aircraft to other uses or to other theaters such as North Africa, where the airmen would not have the same opportunity to achieve the decisive victory through air power—alone—that they so fervently believed in.
In truth, neither the Eighth Air Force nor the RAF commanders were ever that enthusiastic, deep down, about the operation against the U-boat pens. But they understood politics, too, and thought it might at least divert attention away from the worse prospect of having more of the heavy bombers diverted to antisubmarine patrols. Like Churchill, Roosevelt was also pressing for action in the fall of 1942 to stem the losses of merchant shipping. Eaker confidently assured the president that with 1,000 bombers he could reduce German submarine operations in the Atlantic by 60 percent by destroying the Bay of Biscay bases. Since he had far fewer than that number he was probably hedging his promise to deliver results, while also sensing an opportunity to get more airplanes. In mid-October, with General Dwight D. Eisenhower calling for the defeat of the U-boats as “one of the basic requirements to the winning of the war,” Eaker again pointed to bombing the U-boat bases as the best way to get the job done. “Given enough bombers here we can destroy the submarines where they are built and launched more economically than looking for a needle in a haystack—a submarine in the Atlantic.”16
On October 21, Eaker carried out the first raid, sending 90 B-24s and B-17s against L’Orient. Only 15 planes reached the target, the rest turning back because of bad weather. Over the next ten weeks the Eighth Air Force carried out nine more attacks on the U-boat ports, dropping 1,500 tons of bombs and losing 28 aircraft and 300 crewmen killed, wounded, or missing in the process. Analysts examining the attack photographs found that only 6 percent of the bombs dropped by the American aircrews fell in the “target area,” and even that was being generous, since, as they acknowledged, it was based on “a very liberal interpretation of the word ‘Target,’ and it includes all hits and craters which can be seen.”17
The AAF’s own scientific experts had pointed out from the start that the concrete roofs of the submarine pens were virtually indestructible and that the related services that supported the port operations were widely spread out in the French towns, so that bombs which missed their target would fall on little of any consequence. “Based upon experimental data, involving tests conducted during the past year in the United States, it is my opinion that none of the U.S. bombs now available to this Command are capable of perforating the roofs of these pens, at least from any practicable bombing height,” the VIII Bomber Command’s operations research section noted on December 8.18 A report by the British Ministry of Economic Warfare reached the same conclusion earlier. A memorandum by the British Air Staff in November also noted that the amount of fuel, water, electricity, and general supplies required by the bases was such a small percentage of the total available in each of the port cities that even widespread destruction of the towns themselves would have little effect on U-boat operations from their ports.19
Hoping for better results, U.S. air commanders ordered the 31 B-17s assigned to a raid on Saint-Nazaire on November 9 to fly as low as 7,500 feet to improve bombing accuracy. It was practically suicidal. Three planes were shot down and 22 damaged by flak. Once again the photographic interpreters strained to find any evidence that their bombs had done any damage at all. Only 75 of the 344 bombs dropped even showed up on strike and reconnaissance photos of the entire target area; of those, only 8 fell within 600 feet of the port facilities or workshops the planes had been assigned to hit. Saint-Nazaire was hit by five heavy raids in early November; according to agents’ reports the port was back in full operation two weeks later.20
Harris was nothing if not consistent: the head of Bomber Command vehemently opposed attacking even the U-boat bases as a diversion of effort from the strategic bombing campaign against the German heartland. But the British Air Staff was willing to apply to the U-boat ports the methods of incendiary-fueled area bombing that Harris had made his trademark. With both First Lord of the Admiralty A. V. Alexander and Churchill now strongly backing the proposal, the War Cabinet on January 11, 1943, agreed that Bomber Command should make as its first priority the destruction of “the whole area” around the U-boat pens. The RAF raids began the night of January 14 with a strike on L’Orient.
The ef
fort received further endorsement at the highest levels on January 21, when Roosevelt and Churchill, meeting in Casablanca, issued a joint directive for the Allied bomber offensive. The agreement still emphasized that the prime objective of the British-American strategic bombing campaign was “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”—which meant keeping the focus of the bomber campaign on striking the German homeland. Eaker, who had a degree in journalism, had written a clever one-page pitch that basically allowed the American and British air forces to keep doing what each wanted to do anyway but presented it as coherent grand strategy. Harris’s night area bombing and the AAF’s daylight “precision” bombing were hardly the same thing, but Eaker hit on a phrase that Churchill seized on at once when he handed him his paper at Casablanca: “If the RAF continues night bombing and we bomb by day, we shall bomb them round the clock and the devil shall get no rest.” Churchill loved the bit about “the devil” and started using the phrase himself.21
The Casablanca directive did also, however, note that besides the priority objectives in Germany there were other targets “of great importance from the political or military” point of view that deserved attention, the U-boat bases in France being the prime example.22 Seven more firebombing raids on the French ports followed over the next four weeks. Some parts of L’Orient were hit with one incendiary bomb per square yard. Though civilian casualties were surprisingly light—more than 20,000 of the city’s 40,000 residents evacuated the city after the BBC broadcast a warning to the population in January—fires set by the air raids burned 3,500 of the town’s 5,000 buildings to the ground, all major utilities were knocked out, and almost all of the remaining civilian population fled.
Raids against Saint-Nazaire followed through the spring, with 1,500 tons of incendiaries and 300 tons of high explosives. The town was destroyed in huge blazes that consumed every major building along with workers’ housing, schools, churches, and hospitals. Analysts poring over reconnaissance photos finally managed to identify a dozen direct hits on the submarine pens: the bombs had left barely visible pockmarks in the concrete. Dönitz summarized the effects of the raids with the contempt they deserved:
The Anglo-Saxons’ attempt to strike down the submarine war was undertaken with all the means available to them. You know that the towns of Saint-Nazaire and L’Orient have been rubbed out as main submarine bases. No dog or cat is left in these towns. But the U-boat shelters remain.
Though the towns were rendered virtually uninhabitable, rail lines and power plants damaged in the raids were quickly repaired. Some critical repair shops and port services were destroyed, but rather than abandoning the bases, Dönitz simply moved those operations into the protective shelter of the concrete pens themselves. A year and a half later even the air commanders abandoned all remaining pretense that the raids had accomplished anything. The attacks had “caused inconvenience,” a U.S. air staff intelligence report concluded in December 1944, “but have never in the long run affected the operational use of the bases.”23
The submarine shelters themselves have defied all subsequent attempts to demolish them: they remain to this day, useless, abandoned, indestructible witnesses to the thoroughness of the Thousand Year Reich and the futility of strategic bombardment as a shortcut to military victories.
THE CIRCULAR LOGIC of the bomber barons was breathtaking. As Harris saw it, the only things even worth destroying from a military standpoint were the things that his bombers could destroy; if he could not target it, it was not a target in the first place. Even after the Casablanca directive Harris continued to insist that the U-boats were a waste of time. He was either sure enough of his ability to reverse Churchill’s orders or so tone deaf to the politics that he continued to issue forth streams of sarcastic and hyperbolic memoranda disparaging any notion that heavy bombers ought to be used for anything but bombing Germany. The Admiralty’s proposals to bomb the submarine pens and increase the number of sub-hunting VLR aircraft with centimeter-wave ASV radar would leave Bomber Command a “residuary legatee,” left to pick up the scraps to carry out its prime mission after “all the other claimants press for their full, real or fancied, requirements being met,” he furiously insisted in a March 29, 1943, memorandum for the Anti-U-boat Committee. “The employment of aircraft to attack the fringes rather than the centre of the objective is a highly extravagant process,” he continued:
In view of the very large number of U-boats which the enemy will operate in the coming months, the proportion of his successes which would be eliminated by accepting the Admiralty proposals seems to me to be so small as to be negligible. The effect of them on the Bomber Offensive would be catastrophic.… In the present case it is inevitable that at no distant date the Admiralty will recognise that U-boats can be effectively dealt with only by attacking the sources of their manufacture but by then much time will have been lost and the whole success of the Bomber Offensive, which may have a decisive influence on the success of Russia and even of her remaining in the war, will have been jeopardised.… This in my opinion would be a far greater disaster than the sinking of a few extra merchant ships each week.
Harris dismissed as “purely defensive” the idea of “chasing wild geese on the Bay of Biscay” or otherwise employing long-range aircraft on “seagoing defensive duties.” By contrast, the bomber offensive was “the only effective means open to the United Nations in the immediate future for striking directly at Germany.” Indeed, Harris insisted, it was already close to winning the war: “Opportunities do not last for ever, and we have got so near with the existing bomber force to producing a state of destruction and chaos in Germany insupportable to the enemy, that to let up on it now would give him new encouragement, and would make it very difficult, if not impossible, to catch up again.”
Bomber Command also was in a fight for allocation of centimeter-wave radar sets, which added to Harris’s opposition to U-boat hunting. The same technology was used in a radar system being developed for “blind” bombing through clouds, code-named H2S; in principle this would give the bombardier a picture of a coastline or other ground features below to help locate the target under poor visibility. Harris insisted in his memorandum that the technology was vital to his air campaign against Germany, but unlikely to make much difference to the anti-U-boat effort—incredibly revealing in the process that he did not understand the first thing about radar or the U-boat search problem:
I feel, however, that too much emphasis is being given to the possibility of locating U-boats by means of A.S.V., and too little to the difficulty of attacking them successfully when they are located. Our experience, which is considerable, is that even expert crews find it no easy matter to attack with accuracy even a city by means of H2S. I am therefore rather sceptical of the prospects of inexperienced crews with A.S.V. Indeed, I feel that the provision of aircraft equipped with this apparatus will mark the beginning rather than the end of the difficulties involved in sinking U-boats.24
Blackett penciled “nonsense!” next to that paragraph on his copy. In fact, for both technical and military reasons centimeter-wave radar worked much better as an antisubmarine weapon than as a high-altitude bombing aid. A submarine’s metal conning tower generated a strong and clear radar reflection in the centimeter-wave band: trials had confirmed that the new radars could easily pick out a surfaced U-boat at a range of twelve miles. By contrast, the radar echoes coming off large geographic features when the radars were used for ground mapping in the H2S sets were always vague and extremely difficult to interpret.
Moreover, there was the acute danger that an H2S-equipped bomber would sooner or later be shot down over enemy territory, giving away to the Germans the secret of the new Allied radar; once that happened it would only be a matter of time before they developed countermeasures, including a warning receiver that could alert U-
boat crews of an approaching aircraft operating a radar at this new shorter wavelength. That was indeed exactly what did happen. During the second bombing mission flown with the new device, February 2, 1943, a bomber carrying an H2S set was shot down over Rotterdam. A complete report on the new technology reached the highest levels of the German command a few weeks later; work began at once on a centimeter-wave U-boat warning receiver, code-named Naxos. Only some fortuitous technical glitches prevented its being ready in time to thwart the Allies’ major offensive against the U-boats in the Bay of Biscay a few months later, in the summer of 1943.25
IT WAS REMARKABLE that to Harris, bombing submarine factories in Germany was the only “direct” means of attacking the U-boats while dropping depth charges on them when they were hunted down at sea was going after “the fringes.” But a year later he would be making similar arguments to oppose the Normandy landings, insisting that the bomber offensive offered the only sure route to victory, and characterizing the imminent seaborne and land offensive against Germany as risky, even unnecessary. (General Alan Brooke, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, noted dryly in his diary after one meeting with Eisenhower and his top commanders preparing for D-Day, “Harris told us how well he might have won the war had it not been for the handicap imposed by the existence of the other two services.”)26
The Admiralty and the Air Staff exchanged increasingly vituperative notes over the bombing of the U-boat bases. Blackett noted in one that if the price to be paid for Harris’s bomber offensive was to delay by six months the launching of a ground campaign in Europe because of a shortage of transport needed to carry troops and supplies across the Atlantic, then “the word ‘offensive’ is as wide of the mark as the word ‘defensive’ when applied to the bombing of U-boat bases.”27
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