by R. V. Jones
As he spoke, I could hardly believe the extent to which he had left himself open, for up to that time I had thought of him as a coldly calculating opponent who would keep himself completely covered. As soon as he had finished I intervened and said to Portal ‘Are we to accept this, Sir? S.A.T. [i.e. Watson-Watt] has said that no electronic device in his experience is more then 20-30% efficient in the early stages of its use. If so, why does he apply this to our use of Window against the Germans, but not to the Germans’ use of Window against us?’ Portal hesitated for a moment as he grappled with my point, and turned to Lindemann for a clarification. Lindemann must have seen at the same moment that Watson-Watt’s position was indefensible, and he explained to Portal the import of what I had said. Portal looked sharply round, pointed his finger at Watson-Watt and said ‘S.A.T., you’re clean-bowled!’ To Watson-Watt’s credit, he replied ‘Not bowled, sir, but caught at the wicket, perhaps!’ and that was the end, or almost the end, of the argument that had started between us nearly six years before, for Portal would have no further debate. He said that he would go straight to the Prime Minister to ask permission to use Window as soon as possible, which was understood to be 1st May.
But there was further delay, probably brought about by continued opposition by Fighter Command and Watson-Watt, for the Chiefs of Staff decided that Window should not be used until Sicily had been invaded. I have never been able to follow the logic of this argument. Portal now pressed for a further meeting of the Chiefs of Staff, with the Prime Minister in the chair, and this took place on 23rd June 1943. It was only the second time I had seen Churchill since the beams meeting of three years before. The intervening occasion had also been concerned, I think, with a discussion of the night defences. I remember that occasion because most of us had assembled in the ante-room to the Cabinet Room, waiting for Winston to appear, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye an individual in a boiler suit come padding into the room; I imagined him to be a Ministry of Works maintenance engineer who had inadvertently strayed into the room full of Generals while looking for some domestic installation such as a hot water radiator. It seemed kindest to pretend not to notice the poor chap, in the hope that he would realize his error and quietly disappear; but to my surprise, he turned out to be the Prime Minister in his famous siren suit and, picking me out from the group, he came straight up to me and said ‘Mr. Jones, very glad to have you here!’
At this final Window meeting, Watson-Watt and I were once again in opposition, for Portal let me state most of the Air Staff case for using Window. Watson-Watt again emphasized the damage to our own night defences but Churchill then turned to Leigh Mallory, head of Fighter Command, pointing out that he was the man who would have to ‘carry the can’ if our defences failed, and what did he think? Leigh Mallory very decently gave the opinion that even though his defences might be neutralized he was now convinced that the advantage lay with saving the casualties in Bomber Command, and that he would take the responsibility. That concluded the argument, and Churchill said ‘Very well, let us open the Window!’ And just as Churchill could say that my appearance at his meeting in June 1940 reminded him of the passage in the Ingoldsby Legend that starts ‘But now one Mr. Jones comes forth and depones’, so could I now counter on Watson-Watt’s behalf from Jane Austen’s Mr. Woodhouse: ‘Open the windows! But, surely Mr. Churchill, nobody would think of opening the windows at Randalls. Nobody could be so imprudent!’
We were still to wait until successful landings were made in Sicily, but this was now a matter of only a few weeks. At the end of the meeting Churchill called me over to him, and asked me, ‘Has Mr. Sandys seen you yet?’ I well knew the importof his question, which must wait till a later chapter, and I had to tell him, ‘No, Sir!’ He frowned deeply and said, ‘Very well. I shall call a Staff Conference next week! Hold yourself in readiness!’
No doubt there would be many who would have some claim to credit if Window was the success we expected it to be, but it was equally clear that if it failed there was one above all others who would get the blame. This was I, for not only had I started the idea but, with fateful justice, I had fought the case right through to the catching out of Watson-Watt and now had scored again with Churchill. Night after night I thought about ways in which Window could go wrong. Might we, for example, be dropping so many metal strips that these would get into the air intake of subsequent bombers and clog their engines? Would the bomber crews drop the packets at the prescribed rates, or would they use too much at one time and too little at another?
I decided that the best hope for good Window discipline was to have the bomber crews fully understand what they had to do, and the best way of informing them was to have some of my own officers lecture on the German night defences to every bomber station. I had at least two very good lecturers in Hugh Smith and Edward Wright (an old friend, and Professor of Mathematics at Aberdeen, who had recently joined me), but the problem was to get them into the Command. In this, I was rather less than honest. I knew the Commander-in-Chief strongly resisted any direct contact between the Air Staff and his bomber crews although the crews were expected to send in reports of any encounters they had with German nightfighters, or any other experiences that might throw light on the German defences, and most of these reports ultimately came to me. I therefore telephoned not the Commander-in-Chief but the amiable Saundby and told him that I thought that I could get much more out of the crews’ reports if two of my chaps could go round the Command and talk to them. At the same time, I said, it would be an opportunity for the crews to hear from us about the latest state of the night defences. ‘That would be difficult,’ Saundby said, ‘because the C.-in-C. doesn’t like anyone from the Air Staff going out to his stations!’ To this I replied, ‘These are good sensible chaps that I’d be sending. One of them is a magnificent model railway maker. In the office here I have a model that he has made of a Great Western County tank engine, in No. 1 gauge. It is coal-fired and super-heated, and you can come along any time yourself and we’ll get it going for you. You can then see whether he’d be alright in going round the Command.’ Saundby immediately said ‘Oh, if he’s a chap like that—that’s different. When do you want them to go?’ And so Smith and Wright spent a hectic fortnight each of them lecturing in at least two stations, and sometimes three, every day.
There was one further attempt to stop the introduction of Window. I do not know whether it was engineered by Watson-Watt, but somehow Herbert Morrison heard about it and was characteristically alarmed by the possibility that we should sustain civilian casualties if the Germans in turn used Window against us. Churchill had therefore to call yet another meeting, on 15th July, when Morrison threatened to raise the question of Window in the War Cabinet. Churchill replied that the matter was too technical for the Cabinet, and that he was personally prepared to accept the responsibility for the decision to introduce Window. It was to be used from 23rd July onwards.
So we were at last to employ Window. Although the only evidence that the Germans must be aware of the principle was that given in the report from Denmark, it was enough to make me wonder whether the Germans were keeping Window in abeyance because they feared that if they were to use it and we were to retaliate, their defences would suffer much more than ours. Following my example with the imaginary German beam conference in 1940, my colleague and ally (later Air Chief Marshal Sir) John Whitworth Jones wrote the minutes of an imaginary German Air Staff conference on the topic ‘Operation Fenster’ (window, in German) in which he portrayed the Luftwaffe’s dilemma. After the war we found this to be very near the truth: from Bruneval onwards they had expected us to use Window, and were mystified by our not employing it or any other technical countermeasure against the Würzburgs, even after we had started to jam the Freyas. They themselves made trials first on the Düppel Estate near Berlin and later over the Baltic in 1942. The effects were so dramatically disastrous that Goering ordered all the relevant reports to be destroyed, and he forbade any further mention of
the matter in case the British might acquire the idea. So for more than a year both we and the Germans had hesitated to use Window against one another in the fear of losing on the exchange.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Hamburg
IN VIEW of my commitment to Window I wanted to watch for the first signs of anything going wrong. I therefore determined to follow the first few raids in detail by listening to the reactions of the German nightfighters and their control stations while the raids were in progress. This was possible because of the excellent ‘Y Service’ station at Kingsdown near Farningham in Kent, run by Wing Commander R. K. Budge; it intercepted many German radio transmissions including the nightfighter radio telephony. We arranged that Rowley Scott-Farnie, Charles Frank and I should all go there for the first night, 23/24th July 1943, on which Window was to be used. We were all set when, some time in the evening, the news came through that the raid had been postponed because of bad weather.
We went back to London in the morning and spent the day in our offices, returning to Kingsdown in the evening. This time the raid was on. The target was Hamburg. About 9 o’clock in the evening we went on watch, sitting alongside the operators who were listening to the Germans, and moving from one operator to another if the other had beckoned to indicate that he was listening to something of interest. We did not hear much that night, because of the distance from Hamburg to Kingsdown, but the few clues that we had suggested that, at least from the point of view of nightfighter interceptions, the raid had gone well. We went to bed at about 4 a.m., and awoke to hear the Bomber Command returns. Out of 791 aircraft only 12 had not come back, a loss rate of 1.5% compared with 6.1% for the six previous attacks on Hamburg. It could thus be argued that Window on that single night had saved between 70 and 80 aircraft.
The target for the following night was Essen, which was better placed for us to listen to the nightfighter radio telephony. It was a Sunday, and Charles Frank and I met at Victoria to catch the train back to Kingsdown. Charles had evidently estimated the number of Bomber Command personnel alive that night who might have been otherwise lost on Hamburg and said ‘Well, there must be something like 300 men alive tonight who but for us would be dead!’ This struck me as a rather odd way of putting it, and I could not help replying ‘Yes, but how many more dead in Hamburg?’ At the time, we had no idea of the casualties in Hamburg, still less of those that were to occur in the next few days.
The Essen raid started normally enough. One of our bombers was shot down a minute after midnight, presumably an early casualty unprotected by Window, since the first aircraft in a smokescreen must always be vulnerable. But soon we heard the ground controls in various states of perplexity, not only in trying to follow our bombers but also their own fighters. One control lost his fighter for eighteen minutes, repeatedly asking him to make the identifying right-left wing waggle (‘Rolf-Lise’) which should have caused his radar echo to wax and wane. I heard the controller getting more and more exasperated, presumably because his Giant Würzburg had fixed on a packet of Window instead of the fighter. Even his most stentorian ‘Rolf-Lise machen!’ produced no response from the Window, while another controller told his aircraft ‘break off, the bombers are multiplying themselves’. A fighter complained that his control could not even tell him whether the bombers were coming from the north or the south. All these fragments indicated that the Kammhuber system was substantially disrupted; and this was reflected in our casualties, which, although substantially greater than those on Hamburg, were still only 23 out of 705 aircraft or 3.3%
On 27/28th July Bomber Command returned to Hamburg, where 17 aircraft out of 722, or 2.4% were lost. There were signs that the German defences were beginning to reorganize, with ground stations giving a running commentary regarding the course and height of our bombers. It happened that a unit of single-engined fighters had been formed in the preceding weeks by Major Hajo Herrmann, with the idea that these might be able to pick out our bombers with the naked eye in the glare created by fires at the target and, fortunately for the German defences, Herrmann’s unit was ready just at the right time. His technique became known as ‘Wilde Sau’ (Wild Sow), and following early successes, his strength was increased to that of a whole Fighter Division.
On this second raid on Hamburg there was spectacular illumination from the fires on the ground, because we had unwittingly created what came to be known as a ‘fire storm’. It was one of those instances where a change of scale produces a disproportionate effect. Once the density of fires exceeds a critical amount over a sufficiently large area the heat of the flames causes the air to rise and cold air to be drawn in from the sides at such a rate that a gale ensues, which thus fans the flames even further. The result is complete devastation and the burning or asphyxiation of every living being who is unfortunate enough to be caught. We had no idea of what we had done until a few weeks afterwards, when I can remember Tom Burgess and Richard Boord, who were responsible for bomb damage Intelligence, putting all the evidence together and concluding that something quite abnormal must have happened.
A third attack was made on the night of 29th/30th July, when the fires were still burning from two days before. That night 27 bombers were lost out of 777: the loss rate was still low—3.5%—but there were signs that the German improvisation was achieving some success, especially with Herrmann’s single-engined fighters over the target. To add to its agony Hamburg was attacked in daylight on 25th and 26th July, by the Eighth Bomber Command of the United States Army Air Force. The final attack was made by Bomber Command on the night of 2nd/3rd August 1943 when we lost 30 bombers out of 740.
In its four major actions Bomber Command had lost 86 bombers out of 3095, a loss rate of 2.8%, compared with the 6.1% that had happened in the six last attacks on Hamburg before the introduction of Window. It is difficult to say how many aircraft had been saved, but the Air Staff estimated that 78 were saved on the first night against Hamburg and 49 on the first raid against Essen. The casualties in Hamburg will never be accurately known, but were at least forty thousand and possibly more than fifty thousand.
Horrible though these figures were, they might have been justified in terms of their effect in shortening the war, had the same terrible policy been pressed home against other cities. The diary of Field Marshal Milch, the head of the Luftwaffe, showed that he warned, ‘These attacks on Hamburg strike deep at our nation’s morale. If we do not succeed in smashing these terror attacks by day and by night very soon, then we must expect a very difficult situation to arise for Germany.’ At a meeting convened by Hiker and addressed by Goebbels on 2nd August, Milch repeatedly interrupted with the outcry, ‘We have lost the war! Finally lost the war!’ And to his own officers a little later he said, ‘It’s much blacker than Speer paints it. If we get just five or six more attacks like these on Hamburg, the German people will just lay down their tools, however great their willpower’ (Irving, The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe, pp. 229-230). Speer must have accepted Milch’s view, for in interrogation after the war he said ‘The first heavy attack on Hamburg in August 1943 made an extraordinary impression. We were of the opinion that a rapid repetition of this type of attack upon another six German towns would inevitably cripple the will to sustain armaments manufacture and war production.’
So Hamburg in a sense was the nearest the area bombing policy came to success. We had started the war morally opposed to the bombing of civilian populations, and now we were pursuing it on a horrifying scale. How had this come about? It was convenient at one time to blame Lord Cherwell, but the fact is that in 1940 he was as keen as any of us to make precision raids on pin-point targets of strategic importance. Portal, too, was of the same mind; through 1941, so long as the myth of our bombing accuracy persisted, he pursued the policy of attacking oil installations, on the argument that if the German Armed Forces could be deprived of fuel their fighting ability would be destroyed. Then had followed the realization that we could not even guarantee to hit towns, let alone individual
factories, and yet Bomber Command was the only weapon that we had which could reduce the German war potential. Given the fact that the Germans had bombed our towns more or less indiscriminately, the decision to bomb German towns was an emotional certainty. Moreover, with the failure of the campaign against oil, the doctrine grew up that attacks on what Bert Harris called ‘panacea targets’ were useless.
The question now was whether area attacks would ultimately destroy the German will and ability to fight. Apart from a few who clung to the immorality of area bombing, most of us answered this question in terms of how many bombers would be required, and lost, and whether we could afford to provide them without seriously weakening other aspects of our effort, such as the provision of aircraft, crews, and equipment for Coastal Command to limit the U-boat threat. Briefly, Lindemann thought that we could and Tizard was much more doubtful; but it was on the grounds of probable effectiveness and not of morality that the battle was fought.
It is easy to show that we probably lost more in airmen’s lives and in expensive bombers and equipment than we did damage to Germany, but such an analysis may be too facile. German production went up spectacularly at a time when we had expected it to fall, a remarkable tribute to the increased determination of the Germans in response to our terrible attacks. But we saw many signs of German technical distress as a result of our bombing—for example, in delays in getting new electronic equipment developed as the radio war exploded—and this also has to be thrown into the balance, along with the large manpower that was tied down in German air defence. Had we realized the improvement in our bombing technique we might have abandoned area bombing earlier, or at least have put more effort into precision attacks at night. The precedent was already with us, for example in the raid that I myself had requested—that on the Zeppelin works at Friedrichshafen on 22nd June 1943. Here we used the Master Bomber technique, and when it was combined with Oboe pathfinding, precision attacks became distinctly feasible. Even without Oboe at Friedrichshafen, the random bombing error was no more than 400 yards. But we had become so indoctrinated with the area policy that few of us realized that Portal’s original oil bombing policy could now have been revived with a hope of success.
