8

Bombing

On the night of 19 March 1940, a group of twenty Hampdens and thirty Whitleys of Bomber Command launched the first RAF bombing raid of the war on Germany. Their target was the German seaplane base of Hornum on the island of Sylt, a few miles west of the Danish border. From here, Luftwaffe seaplanes had been dropping mines in the North Sea. There was great excitement among the bomber crews who had spent the first few months of the war doing nothing more than dropping propaganda leaflets over Germany. Such was the fascination with this first bombing raid that late that night in the House of Commons, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain interrupted the session to announce that RAF bombers were obliterating the German airbase. Members cheered. The newspapers responded with a brace of headlines: ‘Hangars And Oil Tanks Ablaze’ and ‘Night Sky Lit Up’. At last the RAF was dishing it out to the Nazis.

However, when the first aerial photographs of Hornum came back on the day after the raid they told a very different and rather surprising story. The photo interpreters could find no damage whatsoever to the hangars. The Heinkel seaplanes were still on their slipways and the oil tanks were all extant. The interpreters examined the photos over and over again. They considered the possibilities. Had the Luftwaffe managed a remarkable overnight feat of clearing up the destruction? Slowly, they came to an inescapable conclusion. Despite the enthusiastic post-flight debriefings of the crew, who told of blazing hangars and workshops below, the RAF bombers had entirely missed their targets. As a propaganda coup, the Germans invited neutral journalists to visit the base and see for themselves that no damage had been done. But this went unreported in Britain.

The RAF had learned its first depressing lesson about bombing at night. With the rudimentary navigation techniques then available, it was almost impossible to fly for seven or eight hours across a blacked-out and hostile Europe and hit the correct target. Navigation was mostly by sight, identifying landmarks below and charting a course from them. Obviously, cloud cover made this difficult. And bombers flew at high altitude to be above anti-aircraft defences and searchlights; dropping down low to identify a landmark brought obvious risks. Occasionally, crews flying above the clouds could use a sextant to read the stars as a guide to their location, but this took time and required flying on a consistent and level straight line for longer than most pilots felt comfortable doing. From the start of a flight, when an aircraft charted its course, the wind could blow it astray and evasive action like weaving could take it further off course. This was why the Germans had developed their network of Knickebein beams to guide bombers to their targets. But the RAF had nothing like this, so the consequences of its early bombing missions were mostly embarrassing.¹

As soon as Churchill became Prime Minister and the war entered its critical phase, there was much to be done despite the difficulties. RAF bombers were assigned targets of rail junctions and airbases, and set off in their slow-moving aircraft to try to hit them. Mostly they failed. One RAF bomber in late May 1940 was sent to bomb a German airfield in Holland. It hit an electrical storm over the North Sea and became hopelessly lost. Eventually, totally confused, the crew identified what they thought was the Rhine estuary, found what they believed to be the target airfield, dropped their bombs on it, and returned home. When they found themselves over Liverpool, they realised something had gone dreadfully wrong. They had mistaken the Thames estuary for the Rhine and had bombed an RAF airfield by mistake. Bomber crews usually carried out their missions using ‘ETA’, dropping their bombs at the Estimated Time of Arrival over their target, but this meant they were often not just miles off their targets, but were sometimes tens or even hundreds of miles off course.²

Churchill, as ever, closely followed the progress of the bombing attacks on Germany and raised a host of questions and suggestions. Within five days of becoming Prime Minister he authorised a raid on the Ruhr industrial district. He asked what were the types of bombs in use and what improvements could be made to the aircraft? It will be remembered that he had orchestrated the first bombing attacks by primitive canvas and wire aircraft in the First World War, and he had been the minister in charge of the Royal Air Force after the end of that war. During the inter-war years, the RAF needed to find a role to secure its survival as a force that was independent of the army and navy. It did this by emphasising its ability to strike at the enemy. There were two elements to this: to undermine the ability or will of the enemy nation to fight by hitting their homeland (this was known as ‘strategic bombing’); and to hit the enemy’s armies, ammunition dumps, supply lines and operating ability in the field (known as ‘tactical bombing’). This was the era when it was believed ‘the bomber will always get through’, as Stanley Baldwin had said, so maintaining a strong bomber force was intended to deter an enemy from making a first strike. Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff, preached this doctrine and largely defined the shape of the inter-war RAF, which had twice as many bombers as fighters. In the final years of peace, it was realised at the eleventh hour that the RAF’s fighter capability had to be rapidly built up to defend Britain from enemy bombers. It was ironic that the first great success of the RAF in the war was not in the offensive bombing of German military targets, but in the purely defensive action of Sir Hugh Dowding’s Fighter Command in fending off the attacks of Goering’s Luftwaffe and preventing a German invasion in the summer and autumn of 1940. The first RAF heroes were not the bomber crews but the dashing fighter pilots who streaked across the sky in their Spitfires and Hurricanes.

Churchill instinctively recognised that the role of the bomber was to take the offensive action that he so dearly wanted to pursue. In early September 1940, while the Battle of the Britain was still raging above southern England, he wrote in a directive to ministers:

The Navy can lose us the war, but only the Air Force can win it … The Fighters are our salvation, but the Bombers alone provide the means of victory. We must therefore develop the power to carry an ever-increasing volume of explosives to Germany, so as to pulverise the entire industry and scientific structure on which the war effort and economic life of the enemy depend.³

But Churchill’s ambitions for RAF Bomber Command would be totally impossible to achieve for some time to come.

For many months, photographic reconnaissance of sites that had been bombed continued to show that the damage caused was negligible. This was not what the chiefs of Bomber Command wanted to hear and they did not believe it could be true. They came up with a variety of reasons to disprove the photographic evidence. The photographs were of too small a scale to be able to spot the damage. The photo interpreters did not know what they were looking for. Some damage assessments came back with a note in the margin saying simply: ‘I do not accept this report.’ But the morale of the bomber crews who nightly put their lives at risk for what seemed no tangible gain slowly deteriorated. Some parts of Bomber Command did begin seriously to explore ways of improving navigational techniques. But overall, a growing sense of disappointment pervaded the missions. No one was particularly to blame for this. Years of financial cutbacks throughout the 1930s were once again showing through, just as they had in the army and navy. The RAF had poor aircraft. The Hampden could fly at only 155 m.p.h. The bombers could carry only small bomb loads that were largely ineffective even if, by some near miracle, they hit their target. And the crews lacked the navigational training to fly across hundreds of miles of occupied territory at night, often in freezing conditions and without properly pressurised cabins. It was hopeless to expect much from them, so although each night the BBC would broadcast that bombers were striking such-and-such armaments factory, the horrible reality was that it was mostly a waste of time. Frequently, from the dispersal of the bombs dropped, German Intelligence could not only fail to work out what the RAF’s targets had been, but even which part of Germany they had been trying to hit.

Lord Cherwell, as we have seen, was never far from Churchill’s side as his all-purpose scientific adviser. In late 1940, the Prof began to raise doubts in Churchill’s mind about the accuracy of the RAF’s bombing. The following year, Churchill instructed the Prof and a team from his statistical branch to carry out an investigation. David Butt of the War Cabinet secretariat analysed more than six hundred aerial photographs of post-bombing damage taken in June and July 1941. This analysis confirmed Cherwell’s worst fears. When the moon was full, only 40 per cent of planes dropped their bombs within five miles of the target. In the absence of moonlight, a mere 7 per cent, only one out of every fifteen aircraft, got their bombs within five miles of the target. The Butt Report, as it was called, was immediately repudiated by the air marshals. Cherwell agreed that it was not a strictly accurate guide, but he argued that the figures ‘are sufficiently striking to emphasise the supreme importance of improving our navigational methods’.⁴ Churchill later wrote: ‘The air photographs showed how little damage was being done. It also appeared that the crews knew this, and were discouraged by the poor results of so much hazard. Unless we could improve on this there did not seem much use in continuing night bombing.’ He forwarded the report to the new Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, with a covering note: ‘This is a very serious paper, and seems to require your most urgent attention. I await your proposals for action.’⁵ The future of the whole bombing campaign was in the balance.

In truth there was nothing much that Bomber Command could do at this point in time. The technology for improved navigational aids still lay in the future. The only realistic response was to abandon the concept of night-time precision bombing of specific factories or railway yards and to opt instead for the wholesale smashing of German cities on an indiscriminate basis, known as ‘area bombing’ or more colloquially as ‘carpet bombing’. In September, Portal told the Prime Minister that if he were given a force of four thousand heavy bombers, he could bomb different cities each night and ‘break Germany in six months’. This was dangerously close to the wild claims made by Goering in the summer and autumn of 1940 about what his Luftwaffe could do to Britain.

Churchill was in a dilemma. He had largely lost confidence in bombing as a key strategic offensive weapon against Germany. He wrote to Portal: ‘It is very disputable whether bombing by itself will be a decisive factor in the present war. On the contrary, all that we have learnt since the war began shows that its effects, both physical and moral, are greatly exaggerated.’⁶ After all, it was known that the Blitz had failed to destroy Britain’s war economy and in the long run it had only increased the resolve of the British people to fight on. On the other hand, with the Soviet Union now in the war fighting for its survival, it was clear that one of the few ways in which Britain could help its new ally was by striking back through a bombing offensive to undermine the German war machine. The Chiefs of Staff, with Churchill’s backing, had repeatedly stated that this was a major objective of the British war effort. Could it be abandoned now? And who would explain such a reversal of policy to Stalin?

The debate between Churchill and Portal continued. Then, on the night of 7 November 1941, four hundred aircraft were sent by Bomber Command to attack Berlin, the Ruhr and Cologne. Thirty-seven of the bombers, nearly one-tenth of the force, were shot down or failed to return. This was an unsustainable level of loss. Air Marshal Sir Richard Peirse, the commander of Bomber Command, was a guest at Chequers the following night. Churchill told Peirse how worried he was by the rate of casualties. He went further and said to Peirse that ‘he did not think we had done any damage to the enemy lately’. Churchill insisted there must be a break in the bombing offensive in order for Bomber Command to ‘re-gather their strength for the spring’.⁷ This matter was discussed by the War Cabinet and it was agreed that it was pointless to fritter away the bombing fleet in a series of small and largely ineffectual raids. It now became official policy to rest Bomber Command through the winter months. This was a vote of no-confidence in bombing as a strategy to win the war, as well as a vote of no-confidence in Peirse, who was soon removed from his command and sent to the Far East. Churchill needed a new, more dynamic figure to take over Bomber Command and realise the potential of the bombing campaign against Germany.

Arthur Harris was appointed as the new head of Bomber Command in February 1942. Harris shared many of Churchill’s traits. He wanted to take the war to the enemy. He believed totally that you had to take offensive action to win wars. Harris was also a disciple of Trenchard and his belief in the power of bombing. He wanted to bomb German cities as powerfully and as destructively as the strength of his force would allow. This was how to win the war, he believed, hence his nickname, ‘Bomber’ Harris, although his crews knew him as the ‘Butcher’, usually abbreviated to ‘Butch’. He was single-minded about this task – to the point of alienating other senior RAF figures who wanted him to take a more all-round view of the war. He opposed sending his valuable heavy bombers on long-range patrols to hunt down U-boats on the grounds that these were distractions to the main task. (He did let up slightly when it was pointed out to him that if Britain did not win the Battle of the Atlantic, there would be no petrol for his bombers.) Churchill liked his commitment and his realisation that tough things had to be done to win the war. Harris has been a controversial figure ever since, but he was a resolute commander who did not flinch when his own losses mounted horribly, or at the thought of the destruction his crews rained down on German cities. The nature of his character is revealed by a story of his pleasure in driving his two-seater Bentley fast on the roads into and out of London. One evening he was stopped by a traffic policeman who said reproachfully, ‘You might have killed someone, sir.’ Harris replied sombrely, ‘Young man, I kill thousands of people every night.’ He seemed to revel in the hard-man role he had cast for himself.⁸

Bomber Command headquarters, where Harris worked, was at High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, not far from Chequers. In March 1942, Harris paid his first visit to the Prime Minister’s country residence and spent an evening with Churchill. The two got on well, and Harris would have many more invites over the next two years, sometimes for an evening of chat, sometimes for a weekend as part of a larger company. This direct access to Churchill’s ear was an important element in Harris’s growing stature. And it generated much resentment, particularly among the admirals, who thought that Harris was advancing the cause of his command at their expense. But Churchill had confidence in Harris, and Harris took inspiration from their regular conversations. He later wrote: ‘The worse the state of the war was, the greater was the support, enthusiasm, encouragement and constructive criticism from this extraordinary man … He did not mind your expressing views contrary to his own but he was difficult to argue with for the simple reason that he seldom seemed to listen long to sides of the question other than his own.’⁹ Harris soon discovered, as others had done before, that the best way to get a new point across was to write a short two- or three-page note on a subject. The rapport Harris built up with Churchill was based on mutual respect rather than on real friendship, and it waned towards the end of the war. But like General Brooke as CIGS, Harris would stay in his post until final victory, and he was another core member of Churchill’s War Lab.

In his first few months as head of Bomber Command, Harris orchestrated a few stunts to publicise and promote his new role. In April, a force of low-flying heavy bombers struck deep inside Germany at the U-boat engine production plant in Augsburg. For his daring and courage, the leader of the raid, Squadron Leader J.D. Nettleton, won the Victoria Cross. Then, after getting Churchill’s agreement at a nocturnal session at Chequers, Harris launched the first ‘thousand-bomber’ raid of the war on the night of 30 May 1942 against the city of Cologne. This was lauded by the press and the newsreels, who were delighted that Britain was hitting back hard. Headlines talked of ‘The Biggest Bombing Raid In History’. Both the Americans and the Russians were impressed. In fact, Harris had managed to rustle up the magic number of a thousand bombers only by deploying all his reserves, including every available training plane. Instructors as well as trainees flew on the raid. It was a huge risk but it paid off. Morale in Bomber Command shot up overnight. The damage to Cologne, though less than was claimed, was considerable. However, two later huge raids proved far less effective. A thousand bombers tried to hit the Krupp armaments factories at Essen in the Ruhr in June. But the target was more difficult to find and the bombs were widely dispersed. And nine hundred bombers targeted Bremen at the end of June, inflicting severe damage on the port but suffering substantial losses, too. Harris had put Bomber Command on the map, but raids on this scale could not be sustained and he had to settle for far more modest sorties for some time to come.

In early 1942, just as Harris was taking over at Bomber Command, there was an intensification of the debate about the bombing offensive. Cherwell once again took the initiative and instituted an investigation led by two scientists, Solly Zuckerman and J.D. Bernal. Zuckerman, as we have seen, had already carried out research into the impact of bombs on human beings and on their physical surroundings. Now, he and Bernal studied the German bombing of Birmingham and Hull with a view to finding some general principles for the impact of a bombing campaign upon urban centres. Cherwell kept in close touch with Zuckerman and Bernal, but before they had completed their research, he wrote a paper which he sent to Churchill on 30 March. In this he claimed that one ton of bombs dropped on a built-up area demolished between twenty and forty houses and turned ‘100–200 people out of house and home’. So if each of Britain’s new heavy bombers were to drop about forty tons of bombs during its service life, then each would make between four thousand and eight thousand people homeless. He then calculated that if only half of the bombers in a force of ten thousand aircraft dropped their bombs on the biggest cities in the German Reich, ‘about one third of the German population’ would be made homeless. He concluded that the area bombing of German cities could therefore ‘break the spirit of the people’ and prompt a breakdown of communications and supply lines and the collapse of public services.¹⁰ In other words, bombing could definitely help the Allies win the war against Germany.

Cherwell’s paper is often said to be the prime document that persuaded Churchill to restart the bombing offensive. In fact, it provoked great controversy at the time and has continued to do so ever since. The debate about the impact of bombing opened up the old rivalry between Cherwell and Tizard, whose disagreement had first erupted nearly two years before, in the summer of 1940. Tizard criticised the mathematics by which Cherwell had made his calculations and challenged his assumption that there would ever be a force of ten thousand heavy bombers. He told Cherwell: ‘I am afraid that I think the way you put the facts as they appear to you is extremely misleading and may lead to entirely wrong decisions being reached with a consequent disastrous effect on the war. I think, too, that you have got your facts wrong.’ Professor Blackett, the doyen of Operational Research, also weighed into the debate. He said he thought Cherwell’s estimate of what could be achieved was ‘at least six hundred percent too high’.¹¹

Cherwell wasn’t the type to take a rebuke like this sitting down. He had Churchill’s ear and he continued to press his case, claiming that his figures had merely been presented in a way that meant Churchill did not need to do the mathematical calculations himself. As we have seen, this was typical of the way Cherwell presented his papers to a Prime Minister who found mathematical explanations too complex to follow. In the end, of course, it was Churchill who had to take the final decision when it came to resolving the argument for competing claims to limited resources. And he took the side of Cherwell and Harris, against Tizard and Blackett. The official historians of the bombing offensive concluded that, because of his position when he submitted this note, ‘Cherwell’s intervention was of great importance. It did much to insure the concept of strategic bombing in its hour of crisis.’¹² The bombing offensive against Germany was on again. Area bombing was the new policy, and this time Bomber Command had a combative leader with great ambitions for his growing fleet of bombers.

There is no doubt that part of what lay behind Churchill’s decision was his desire to show Stalin and the Soviet people that, while there was no second front in Europe, at least Britain was striking hard at the heart of the Nazi war machine. Accordingly, Churchill decided to make a personal visit to Stalin and to explain this face to face to the Soviet war leader. After his momentous visit to Cairo in August 1942 when he set the 8th Army on the path to victory (see Chapter 6), Churchill took an overnight flight in his uncomfortable Liberator bomber to Teheran. From there, he took another long, gruelling flight to Moscow, skirting the fighting that was raging below. He was accompanied by Averill Harriman, representing the US President, and the British Chiefs of Staff. The Soviets had been pleading for a second front to be opened in France, so Churchill’s principal mission was to explain why this could not be done, and to sell Operation Torch and the importance of the renewed bombing campaign to the Russian leader. It was, as Churchill confessed to Roosevelt, ‘a somewhat raw job’, but he wanted to express his personal support by taking the long, arduous route to Moscow in order to explain exactly what Stalin’s allies were doing to help him in the gargantuan struggle playing out on the Eastern Front.

A few hours after his arrival in Moscow, on the evening of 12 August, Churchill had his first meeting with Stalin in the Kremlin. It lasted four hours. Stalin told Churchill about the immensity of the struggle the Red Army were engaged in along the Eastern Front. He said German troops were now beginning to press on the industrial city of Stalingrad on the river Volga. For his part, Churchill wanted to get all the bad news about not opening a second front over with first. As he listened, Stalin became glum and grew restless. He cheered up when he heard about the plans for the Torch landings in North Africa. When they went on to discuss the bombing offensive, Stalin said that he attached the greatest importance to this strategy and that he knew the air raids were having a tremendous effect upon morale in Germany. Churchill promised he would press on with the raids and would ‘show no mercy’ to the German people. Stalin smiled and said, ‘May God prosper this undertaking.’¹³ So far, so good.

The next meeting did not go well. It started at 11 p.m. in the Kremlin. Stalin accused Churchill and the British Army of being frightened of the Germans, and claimed that Britain and the United States had failed to deliver the supplies promised to Russia, keeping the best for themselves. Then he accused Britain and the United States of reneging on firm promises to launch the second front in Europe. Churchill stood his ground and disagreed point by point. The dictator was not used to being contradicted. At one point, Churchill raised his voice and said in a passionate outburst that he had come a long way to establish good relations with Stalin and that victory must not be undermined by disagreements that could benefit only the enemy. Before this could be translated, Stalin responded by saying that he liked the tone of Churchill’s speech. But it was clear that Stalin’s position had hardened, and this did not look good for Anglo-Soviet relations.

The following night, Stalin hosted a dinner for his guests. A lavish banquet was served and several toasts were washed down with vodka. Churchill sat on Stalin’s right, and although no serious business was done, the Soviet leader seemed in a far more friendly mood. The issue of Churchill’s hostility to the birth of the Soviet Union came up and Churchill openly admitted this had been the case. Stalin smiled and Churchill asked, ‘Have you forgiven me?’ Stalin replied, ‘All that is in the past and the past belongs to God.’¹⁴ When Churchill left, exhausted, at 1.30 p.m. (Stalin’s late-night hours even outdid his own), Stalin insisted on escorting him through endless corridors and staircases to the Kremlin’s front door. The British Ambassador had to trot to keep up with the two leaders, and he later said that he had never known Stalin do this for any other guest.

During the next day, General Brooke, Air Marshal Arthur Tedder and General Wavell (who was there because he spoke fluent Russian) had detailed talks with their Soviet military counterparts. The discussions did not go well. When the British delegation asked for information, they were repeatedly told that the Soviet chiefs had ‘no authority’ to release such details. Instead, they kept repeating that they wanted a second front now. After the openness and informality of relations with their American allies, these talks were a very different affair. Brooke was particularly annoyed by the Russians and brought the series of meetings to an abrupt conclusion.

On the final evening, Churchill went once again to the Kremlin for a last hour with Stalin at 7 p.m. As Churchill got up to leave, Stalin became very chummy and invited him back to his private apartment for some drinks. There, in the Soviet leader’s private dining room, his aged housekeeper began to assemble a meal. Stalin’s pretty young daughter appeared and laid the table while her father uncorked an impressive array of bottles. With just Stalin, Molotov (the Soviet Foreign Minister) and Churchill present, each with his own translator, the two war leaders and one-time political foes talked on into the night. Occasionally they argued but always in a good-humoured way. No doubt the quality of the wine helped. Churchill talked about one of his pet projects, to invade northern Norway in order to create an easier passage for the Arctic convoys. They discussed the collectivisation of Soviet farming that Stalin had forced through in the pre-war years at the cost of millions of lives. At about 1 a.m., a huge suckling pig was brought in. Churchill finally left at about two-thirty. He felt that his mission to Moscow had been accomplished. He had built up a rapport with the Soviet leader.

As Churchill departed by air at dawn, only a couple of hours later, he was exhausted and, unusually for him, he had a splitting headache. Over the next few days, he had time to reflect on his meetings in Moscow. He had been seriously offended by some of what Stalin had said, especially about Britain’s cowardice in the face of the Nazis. And he was genuinely puzzled by the fluctuations in Stalin’s mood. On the other hand, he appreciated that, with the Wehrmacht only fifty miles from Moscow and the huge struggle with Nazi Germany nearing its climax, the news he had brought had been a bitter blow to the Soviet leader. More than anything, Churchill now realised that the Anglo-American leadership must push their war machines and their men to the maximum in their campaigns in North Africa and in the bombing of Germany. The bombing offensive now took on a political role as well as being a military tool. Everything that could be done must be done to help their Soviet allies defeat the Nazi invaders.

So Churchill returned to Britain with renewed enthusiasm for the bombing offensive. Within weeks, he had agreed to increase Bomber Command from thirty-two to fifty operational squadrons. He gave support to Harris in his internal struggles within the RAF. But once again, conflicting priorities held back any dramatic developments and no further thousand-bomber raids took place that year. The war against the U-boats continued to raise questions about the deployment of long-range bombers over the Atlantic. And the war in North Africa dominated Churchill’s and the nation’s attention. Furthermore, the promised arrival of large numbers of US bombers failed to materialise during 1942. All the bombing raids on Germany that Churchill had eagerly boasted about to Stalin were carried out by the RAF with their meagre, but growing, resources.

Most importantly for the future of the bombing campaign, a series of significant developments took place in 1942. First, there were major advances in technology that enabled RAF bombers to find their targets with far greater accuracy. In an attack upon the Renault factory near Paris, in March 1942, a new navigational aid called ‘Gee’ was used for the first time. Gee had been developed by scientists at the Telecommunication Research Establishment (TRE) near Swanage in Dorset. Every Sunday, open meetings were held at TRE between operational flying officers and the scientists, and everyone, regardless of rank or status, was encouraged to speak their mind. They were known as the ‘Sunday Soviets’. At one of these meetings in June 1940, a senior staff officer had deplored the inadequate results of the RAF’s bombing missions. In response, one of the scientists came up with an old notion that had been partly developed before the war for sending out a set of pulses as a blind-landing aid. A group set to work to improve this system and eventually came up with Gee. A series of pulses was sent from three transmitting towers in southern Britain. As the signals from the first tower hit those from the other two, they created a lattice-type network extending for a few hundred miles across Northern Europe. A navigator on board his aircraft could then pick up these signals with a cathode-ray tube and read where he was on a chart that marked the grid of beams across Europe. Gee was accurate to within two miles. This was an enormous advance over navigating by identifying landmarks below or taking readings from the stars above. Gee was also better than the German Knickebein system and its follow-ups because the British grid covered the whole of Europe and the beams were not intended to guide aircraft to one particular spot. But the RAF was worried about one of its planes coming down over occupied Europe and the cathode-ray tube and accompanying charts falling into enemy hands. The Germans might then be able to figure out how the system worked and could even try to distort the pulses. So an elaborate deception was set up whereby it was leaked to the Germans through double agents working in Britain that the RAF now had a ‘J’ system (which sounded close to ‘G’), based on the German Knickebein beams. A set of meaningless beams was duly transmitted and German Intelligence spent some time tracking them down and twisting them, while failing to identify the pulses that made up the new Gee system. Gee was successfully used for some years and remained in use after the war with the RAF and as an aid for shipping.

In addition to the development of this navigational aid, the RAF also needed a more precise blind-bombing guide, which would enable aircraft not just to bomb one part of a city, but to find and bomb a particular factory or military installation. Once again, it was the scientists at TRE who came up with the solution. It was called ‘Oboe’. This system was based on two radar transmitters, one in Norfolk, known as ‘Cat’, and one in Kent, known as ‘Mouse’. The two stations were linked and transmitted synchronised pulses. The pilot flew along the Cat beam across Europe towards the target. The operators of the Mouse beam could follow the aircraft and calculate its precise location. When it was over the target, they would transmit a signal to the plane’s navigator, who would drop the bombs. Oboe had an accuracy of about a hundred yards, which was of a different order to anything that had gone before. When Oboe became operational in 1943, it was used by accurate Pathfinder aircraft, like the super-fast de Havilland Mosquito. These aircraft identified and hit the target with flares or incendiaries that the other bombers would then use as location finders.

Both Gee and Oboe were real achievements for the scientists, more strikes for Churchill’s wizards. But they had their limitations. Gee had a range of about 450 miles from the British coast and Oboe about 250 miles. This was good enough to hit the Ruhr and many other prime targets, but not enough to penetrate the whole of occupied Europe. Something better was still needed.

Despite his call for improved navigational aids, Cherwell himself was not involved with the development of Gee and Oboe. He was however closely involved with the development of a new radar mapping system code-named ‘H2S’. This was carried inside aircraft and at first utilised the revolutionary cavity magnetron, which enabled radars to work on a wavelength of 10cm, rather than 150cm as before. Aircraft that were equipped with it could pick up buildings and the general landscape much more clearly. A rotating radar scanner was fitted in a cupola below the belly of a heavy bomber and the navigator read the landscape below on a circular screen. First trials took place at the end of 1941. The team trying to develop this radar mapping system encountered immense difficulties, including the crash of the prototype bomber in which it was installed. Many of the leaders of the research team were killed in that accident. More delays followed when the RAF chiefs decided that the cavity magnetron was so secret that it must not fall into the hands of the enemy and therefore could not be flown over occupied territory in case the plane crashed and it was recovered by German scientists. So an alternative device, the Klystron, was developed instead that was closer to known existing German technology. The debate within the Air Staff continued as to whether the concept of radar mapping could ever work effectively, but Cherwell continued to support it and, on his advice, so did Churchill. In June 1942, Churchill issued one of his typical instructions to the Secretary for the Air, calling for far greater effort in the manufacture of the new equipment and the training of crews in its use. He insisted that ‘nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of this’.¹⁵ The many doubters would almost certainly have killed off the development of the ground-mapping radar system without Cherwell’s enthusiasm and Churchill’s support. It finally came into operational use in 1943 and refinements continued to be made throughout the war.

During 1942, another key development took place, the arrival of the first of a new generation of heavy bombers. Bomber Command had begun the war with their two-engined Whitleys and Hampdens, later joined by the more robust Wellington. But bombing on the scale that was now needed required far larger aircraft that could carry much heavier bomb loads. Britain’s pre-war aircraft industry was lucky to have some visionary designers like Reginald Mitchell, who had designed the superlative Spitfire, and Roy Chadwick, who worked for the Avro company. Chadwick had already designed the two-engined Manchester bomber but decided it was too small to fit the bill, so he set to work on a four-engined giant that could carry more than three times the bomb load of the conventional bombers of the day up to a distance of two thousand miles. He used four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, the same brilliant engine that was used in the Spitfire, to power his new beast, which was called the Lancaster. These new heavy bombers were designed to be mass produced and in early 1942 they began to come off the Avro production line, but still only in small numbers. It was not until the end of the year that the Lancaster and the other four-engined heavies, the Stirling and the Halifax, were available in significant numbers. The arrival of these heavies was similar in its impact to the arrival of jumbo jets to a later generation. Their vast scale seemed to dwarf almost everything that had flown before. Five thousand Lancasters would be built and the aircraft would come to symbolise the British bombing offensive against Germany, just as Boeing’s B-17 ‘Flying Fortress’ came to represent the American bombing campaign.

At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill fully endorsed the bombing strategy. Their directive to the British and American bomber commanders, which was approved by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, stated: ‘Your primary objective will be the progressive destruction of the German military industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their armed resistance is fatally weakened.’¹⁶ A list of targets then followed, including submarine yards, aircraft factories, oil refineries, rubber and tyre plants, and factories for military transport. With American bombers now arriving in England in large numbers at last, and with all the improvements in technology and design, the bombing offensive would take off again during 1943. Churchill was keen to keep Stalin well informed of progress. He regularly sent him books of aerial photos of bomb-damage assessments. When congratulating the Soviet leader on his victory at Stalingrad, Churchill added, almost as a postscript: ‘We last night dropped 142 tons of high explosives and 218 tons of incendiaries on Berlin.’ Stalin replied: ‘I wish the British Air Force further successes, most particularly in bombing Berlin.’¹⁷

The bombing offensive that now started in earnest against Germany was based on a strategy of RAF Bomber Command bombing by night, and the US Army Air Force (US AAF) bombing by day. The Americans had the Flying Fortress, which, with eight mounted heavy machine guns in four turrets and armour plating in the fuselage, was regarded as powerful enough to withstand attacks from enemy fighters. And the Americans had a bomb sight known as the ‘Norden’ that they regarded as supremely precise. ‘You can drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from ten thousand feet’ was the popular boast about the Norden. But it needed to be used in clear skies in daylight. The Americans rejected the policy of area bombing, which they thought was ineffective. Instead, they wanted to go for planned, precise attacks upon key elements of the German war economy that would cause maximum disruption. Churchill initially thought this was impossible to achieve, and along with Harris and his Chiefs of Staff wanted the Americans to join the night-time bombing campaign, adding their vast scale to the efforts of the RAF. But at Casablanca, Churchill met with General Ira Eaker, the commander of the USAAF in Britain. Eaker persuaded Churchill that by bombing around the clock, the combined RAF–USAAF operation would ‘give the devils [i.e. the Germans] no rest’.¹⁸ And so the strategy of twenty-four-hour bombing was endorsed, with the Americans going for precision bombing by day and the RAF opting for area bombing by night.

Harris could now at last take advantage of the advances in technology and make use of the growing supply of Lancasters. As Max Hastings has written, only in early 1943 did all the latest radio and radar equipment and the supply of heavy bombers enable Harris ‘to bring the bomber offensive out of its cottage industry phase into the age of automated mass destruction’.¹⁹ Most of the older, obsolete aircraft were pensioned off and his main force of about five hundred bombers was in a far better state to strike at the enemy than a year before. The spring offensive began on 5 March with an assault upon one of Harris’s favourite targets, the giant Krupp armaments factory at Essen. Mosquitoes equipped with Oboe acted as Pathfinders to locate the target. The raid was a success, with a third of the force dropping its bombs within three miles of the aiming point, and 160 acres of Essen were flattened. But the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland, was well defended. As more raids on ‘Happy Valley’, as the bomber crews sarcastically called it, followed over the next three months, the number of bombers being shot down by radar-assisted German night fighters grew to alarming levels. Then, in July, Harris tried something new.

The scientists had come up with another simple innovation, the dropping of thousands of small metal foil strips which totally blinded the enemy radar. It was known as ‘Window’. The technique had been worked out earlier, but Cherwell had pointed out that, as there was no known remedy for this, if the RAF tried out Window over Germany, the Luftwaffe was bound to use it when it next bombed Britain. Its use was delayed, and again it needed Churchill to intervene to settle the dispute. ‘Let us open the window!’ he ordered at the end of June, and on 24 July Window was used for the first time in a heavy raid on Hamburg. It was a total success. The night fighters completely failed to find the bombers and the mission was carried out with copybook precision. The US bombers followed up this initial attack with two days of daylight bombing on Hamburg. Then the RAF returned on the 27th and dropped incendiaries on the city. Fires were started that raged for days, strengthened by two further raids by Bomber Command over the next week. The devastation was extreme. The fires reached temperatures of a thousand degrees centigrade, and as the heat rose it sucked in more oxygen, creating whirlwinds or hurricanes of flame in a deadly, blazing inferno. Buildings disappeared in the firestorm. Bodies were incinerated. When the fires abated, it was estimated that 42,000 civilians had been killed, a million had fled into surrounding areas, and twenty-two square kilometres of the city had been razed to the ground. Forty thousand houses and more than five hundred factories had ceased to exist. The chief of the Hamburg fire brigade captured the terrible inferno on colour film which provides a permanent record of the terror of the fire raids.²⁰

The Nazi leadership was truly shaken for the first time. Goebbels confided in his diary that the bombing of Hamburg was a ‘catastrophe, the extent of which simply staggers the imagination’. Albert Speer, who had become Minister for War Production in February 1942, later said he told Hitler that if the Allies had mounted similar attacks against six cities in quick succession, German war production might have collapsed.²¹ For Harris, of course, this was a triumphant success, but Bomber Command was wary about returning to the same location night after night, in case enemy fighters were waiting, and the terrible carnage of Hamburg was not replayed on other German cities until towards the very end of the war.

As the American fleet of heavy bombers grew in Britain, the debate about the objectives of the bombing campaign continued. After a discussion in Washington which Churchill, unusually for him, nodded through without challenge, the Combined Chiefs of Staff agreed to pursue Operation Pointblank. This summarised the objectives of the bombing and clearly shows that American influence dominated. A priority was given to targets relating to the German aircraft industry, with both factories and airbases to be attacked to eliminate the threat from the German fighters. Other industrial targets were also listed, and Pointblank referred to the need to try to destroy German morale. Harris seized on this last point to justify the continuation of area bombing, which he was convinced would win the war. On the other hand, the American commanders, Hap Arnold in Washington and General Carl Spaatz, head of the 8th Air Force in Britain, used Pointblank to justify precision attacks on industrial targets. From the start, the two bombing efforts increasingly went their separate ways.

Through the autumn and winter of 1943, Bomber Command turned its focus to what became known as the ‘Battle of Berlin’. Twenty thousand sorties were flown against the German capital. Harris was supremely confident that this was the best way to defeat the Nazi war effort. But the city was out of range of Oboe so the crews relied upon H2S radar to identify their targets, a far more difficult tool to use effectively. Air defences grew in scale and expertise around the city. Huge towers were built to house powerful 88mm anti-aircraft guns. Losses mounted. Harris predicted to Churchill in November that ‘We can wreck Berlin from end to end if the USAAF will come in on it. It will cost [us] between 400–500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war.’²² This was a rash claim that was used later against Harris. But by now Churchill did not interfere much in the development of air policy. He left it to Harris and his team to select targets and to pursue their aims. Harris became an increasingly rare visitor to Chequers. However, in March 1944, RAF losses from night-time bombing of Germany rose again to unacceptable levels of about 5 per cent of total aircraft. On one raid on Nuremberg it was as high as 9 per cent. With these levels, crews could not expect, statistically, to survive a single tour of duty. A pause was called in the bombing offensive. By now, fortunately for the crews, other priorities had arisen.

American confidence in the firepower of their Flying Fortress had proved not to be justified. Their daylight raids, flown unescorted over Germany, were subject to intense harassment from German fighters. Large numbers of B-17s were shot down and each aircraft down meant the loss of the ten members of its crew. Following their policy of hitting key targets, the US 8th Army Air Force based in Britain flew a series of raids in October 1943, culminating in an attack on the ball-bearing factory in Schweinfurt, deep in the heart of Germany. On the night of 14 October, 60 aircraft out of 291 on the raid were shot down. During that week, the Americans lost a total of 148 bombers. The US bombing offensive against Germany was postponed until long-range fighters were available to escort the bombers. This finally came about in the spring of 1944, when the P-51 Mustang was fitted with long-range fuel tanks, enabling it to fly all the way to Berlin and back. The sleek, silver Mustangs could defend the bombers from attack by enemy fighters, and on their return were told to seek out ‘targets of opportunity’, which usually meant swooping down to attack enemy aircraft on the ground. Only now did the Allies win daylight air supremacy over Germany. The story goes that when Goering looked up and saw enemy fighters over the skies of the German capital he pronounced: ‘The jig is up,’ meaning the war was lost.

The RAF had not entirely given up on daylight precision raids, although Harris was bitterly opposed to them as they distracted from the heavy area bombing that he favoured. Tension grew between the Ministry of Economic Warfare, which wanted to set targets whose destruction it believed would be critical to German’s war economy, and Harris, who demanded the right to select his own targets. The ministry identified the dams that supplied the water and produced much of the electricity for the Ruhr as a key economic target. In early 1943, the inventor Barnes Wallis developed a way of spinning cylindrical, depth-charge-type bombs that could be dropped by low-flying Lancasters as ‘bouncing bombs’. The idea was to bounce them over the German defences and destroy the dams. Harris was initially hostile, describing bouncing bombs as ‘the maddest proposition as a weapon that we have yet come across’. He allowed one aircraft to be used for experimental purposes, but was not prepared to hand over any more of his precious Lancasters.²³

However, on meeting Barnes Wallis in person, Harris was persuaded to give the idea a go. He agreed to create a special team, 617 Squadron, to train in the use of the bouncing bombs, and he suggested putting Wing Commander Guy Gibson in charge. Gibson was allowed to select his own elite crews from across Bomber Command. The attacks took place on 16 May 1943 and involved low-level precision flying across Holland and Germany by nineteen Lancasters. The heroics of the Dam Busters’ raid, in which the bouncing bombs were dropped from only sixty feet, are now well known mainly from the triumphalist feature film that became a war classic in the 1950s.²⁴ The Mohne Dam was successfully breached and the Eder was damaged. However, the critical third dam at Sorpe was left intact and the power supply to the industries of the Ruhr was maintained. Despite this, Albert Speer later wrote that if the attack had been followed up, it could have ended the war that year.²⁵ The raid was immensely popular with the British press and public, and Guy Gibson was awarded a Victoria Cross for his heroism in leading the mission. However, as eight of his best crews had been lost in the raid, a 40 per cent loss rate, Harris concluded that such missions were not worth the cost. The ultimate lesson he took from this daring raid was of the need to maintain instead the policy of area bombing.

An aircraft more suited to low-level precision flying was the twin-engined Mosquito. With a top speed of nearly 400 m.p.h., it could out-fly just about anything in the pre-jet era. The frame of the Mosquito was built out of wood to get around the shortage of metal in wartime Britain. It was produced in large numbers but was in heavy demand for a variety of roles: as a night fighter, for photo reconnaissance, as a Pathfinder and as a light bomber. The Mosquito was used for several extraordinary operations. The most daring of these was a raid on the prison in the northern French town of Amiens on 18 February 1944. British Intelligence wanted to rescue a group of French Resistance leaders who were about to be executed by the Gestapo. A squadron of Mosquitoes was tasked with knocking down the walls of the prison, but in such a way as not to harm most of the prisoners, who would then be able to escape. The mission was called ‘Operation Jericho’. Such accuracy would be difficult to attain even in today’s era of GPS-guided missiles, but the Mosquito squadron achieved its objective with a superb display of flying. The planes approached fast and low, at about fifty feet, and hit the prison walls with pinpoint accuracy. Some prisoners were inevitably killed but over 250 French prisoners escaped in the resulting confusion.

Churchill loved to hear of missions like this. They were the RAF equivalent of commando raids. Soon he became involved in one debate which did not attract much attention at the time, but has since taken on major significance. In the summer of 1944, more and more shocking stories leaked out of occupied Europe about a terrible extermination camp in Poland where hundreds of thousands of Jews were being sent. Some of the thousands arriving each day were picked out by the SS guards as fit and able and were assigned to a brutal work camp, where most did not survive for long. The majority were sent straight to gas chambers, where they were killed. Their bodies were then burned in giant crematoria. The whole camp had been laid out with chilling efficiency to process and kill on an industrial scale – up to twelve thousand people each day. Its name was Auschwitz.

On 6 July 1944, the Jewish Agency sent two senior representatives to meet Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, in London. They reported a sudden increase in the number of people being taken to Auschwitz as the Nazis geared up to exterminate the Jews of Hungary. They calculated that one and a half million Jews had already been killed. During the meeting, they made a formal request to bomb the camp. Eden passed this request on to Churchill, who had been a supporter of the Zionist cause since his visit to Palestine in 1921. He was shocked by the appalling estimates of the number of deaths. Churchill responded the following day by saying he agreed with the request to bomb the camp and wrote: ‘Get anything you can out of the Air Force, and invoke me if necessary.’²⁶ Eden duly passed the request on to Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Minister for the Air.

There were several obvious difficulties with such a proposal. First, of course, the precise location of the camp had to be identified. Then a way of bombing it that minimised the risks to the inmates had to be found. The RAF considered the proposition and also considered bombing the railway lines leading to the camp. They concluded that although precision raids had been carried out in France, an attack on such a small target in distant Poland was virtually impossible. If it could be done at all, it could be achieved only by transferring much sought-after Mosquitoes from other essential duties. It was a critical point in the war. The Allies had still not broken out from the bridgehead they had established in Normandy. Flying bombs were being fired on London every day and the effort to locate and destroy their launch sites was a major priority. Neither Churchill nor Eden pressed the case and the request to bomb the camp was dropped as impractical. In an ironic twist, in July 1944, aerial reconnaissance photos were taken of the Monowitz chemical plant in Poland. Just outside this plant was the giant complex of Auschwitz–Birkenau. The camp was caught in perfect detail on the aerial photos. On one set, a train has just arrived and the SS are in the process of separating those who are disembarking. But the photo interpreters were not looking for an extermination camp and they never identified Auschwitz as such at the time. So the Allies did have a record of the exact location and layout of Auschwitz – even the gas chambers and ovens can clearly be seen.

In recent debates about the Holocaust, there has been much criticism of the Allies for their failure to bomb the extermination camps. The reality is that even if they had analysed the pictures correctly, a bombing raid against Auschwitz would still have been an immensely difficult mission to carry out. Although in retrospect it seems criminally negligent that the Allies did nothing to prevent the mass murder of the Holocaust from continuing, at the time there were simply too many other military priorities in the war effort.²⁷

In early 1944, all Allied planning became dominated by the preparations for the D-Day landings in Normandy, Operation Overlord. A new debate began as to what role the Allied bombers should play in this huge operation. Harris and his American counterpart, Spaatz, persisted in their view that bombing Germany was the main way in which the bombers could contribute towards the success of D-Day, by undermining German war production and civilian morale. But there was considerable scepticism among the army commanders about the claims of the bomber barons. There was no sign yet of the predicted collapse of the German war economy (as we shall see later, output was actually increasing) or breakdown of support for the war among the German people. General Eisenhower, who was appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces for the invasion of France, insisted he must take direct command of the strategic bombing force. He wanted it to take on a new role.

Solly Zuckerman, the scientist who had studied the impact of German bombing on Birmingham and Hull, had gone on to analyse the impact of Allied bombing on enemy targets in North Africa, Sicily and southern Italy. This research had shown the devastating military consequences of bombing the railway networks. Zuckerman’s work was enthusiastically taken up by Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, head of the RAF in the Mediterranean, who was appointed Eisenhower’s deputy. Zuckerman and Tedder drew up a plan for the bombing of railway marshalling yards across northern France and Belgium so that the Germans could not rush reserves to the area where the landings had taken place. This became known as the ‘Transport Plan’. Eisenhower wanted to take command of the British and American bombers based in Britain as a tactical bombing force. Harris and Spaatz resisted this with all their energy. But Harris had few friends left in the Air Ministry, where officials had grown weary of his adversarial nature. He regarded any official who was not 100 per cent behind him as someone who was against him. It was reported that when he passed one particular civil servant in the Air Ministry he said: ‘Good morning, Abrahams, and what have you done to impede the war effort today?’²⁸ Neither was his cause helped by the inflated claims he repeatedly made for the success of his bombing campaign.

Churchill did not want to see the RAF fall under direct American command, and Cherwell was opposed to giving up the bombing offensive against Germany. It fell to Churchill himself eventually to come up with a compromise. Tedder was to have control of RAF’s Bomber Command in the months before Overlord. This was acceptable to Eisenhower, and everyone was happy, except Harris. But Cherwell foresaw another problem. He calculated that bombing the French railways could kill up to forty thousand French civilians. Churchill took up this cause, worried that killing so many French men and women was not a good way to start a campaign to liberate their country. He wrote to Eisenhower in April that ‘this might be held to be an act of very great severity’ against Britain and America’s ‘friends’. The question was appealed to the President, who wrote back to Churchill: ‘However regrettable the attendant loss of civilian lives is, I am not prepared to impose from this distance any restriction on military action by the responsible commanders that in their opinion might militate against the success of Overlord or cause additional loss of life to our Allied forces of invasion.’ Roosevelt’s response was, as Churchill later wrote, ‘decisive’.²⁹ The Prime Minister raised no further objections. It was a sign of how far power and decision-making had shifted from the British to the Americans. Overlord was an American-led operation. The US commanders were calling the shots. And the President gave them his full support.

For several months, the heavy bombers targeted the railways of north-western Europe with great success. Coastal defences and other communication hubs were additional targets. Although as many as twelve thousand French and Belgian civilians were killed in the run-up to D-Day, this number was a lot less than had been feared. And the disruption caused inside France made it difficult for the German Army to bring up reserves in the wake of the invasion. The new tactical deployment of the bombing fleet made a major contribution to the success of this next vital chapter in the war.

Churchill’s lack of interest in the bombing offensive in Germany from the summer of 1943 onwards is reflected in the lack of space he devotes to it in his war memoir–history.³⁰ This was partly down to his ambivalence about the role of bombing and partly down to the post-war debate about the wisdom and morality of the bombing campaign at the time when he was writing. But Churchill’s influence was still to be felt over the final stages of the bombing offensive.

During 1944, the USAAF targeted German synthetic-oil production plants with stunning success and showed how effective the strategy called for in the Pointblank directive could be. The fuel supplies available to Hitler’s army and air force were drastically reduced. The Allies now enjoyed total air superiority over Germany, with the surviving aircraft of the Luftwaffe largely grounded by their lack of fuel. Late in 1944, Bomber Command resumed its earlier policy of area bombing German cities by night. As the Red Army advanced westwards through Poland and approached the German border, there was a debate about how the bombers could be used in a way that would assist their progress. On 25 January 1945, a Joint Intelligence Committee report sent to Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff suggested using the heavy bombing force against targets south and east of Berlin. It was claimed this would disrupt troop reinforcements heading for the front, hamper the German administrative and military machine, and could even have ‘a decisive effect on the length of the war’. Churchill discussed this with Archibald Sinclair and urged him to follow the recommendations and report back. Sinclair asked his staff to investigate the possibilities, explaining that Churchill was keen on ‘blasting the Germans in their retreat from Breslau’.³¹ This was reinforced when the Allied leaders met in early February at Yalta. Here the Soviet Chiefs of Staff made a formal request for British and American bombers to be used to paralyse German movements behind their retreating army.

The consequence of this was the combined bombing operation against the city of Dresden on the night of 13 February and over the following days. On the first night, a force of 900 RAF bombers dropped nearly 1500 tons of high explosive and over 1000 tons of incendiaries on the city. Hours later, US bombers followed this up with a massive daylight raid on the city. And that night the RAF returned. Once again, as in Hamburg, giant firestorms were ignited that destroyed vast areas of the city, leaving chaos and destruction in their wake. Dresden was an ancient city, a centre of art and culture, but much of its architecture was utterly destroyed in the flames. Days after the raid, photo interpreters were still unable to assess the damage because a pall of smoke hung across the city.

Dresden was packed with refugees fleeing the advancing Red Army, so it is impossible to know precisely how many people died. Estimates range from thirty thousand to about one hundred thousand. Whatever the true figure, the scale of destruction was immense and began to provoke revulsion. One news correspondent spoke of the ‘deliberate terror bombing’ of German cities. His report was censored in Britain but created a stir in the United States, where General Marshall made it clear that the raid was a consequence of a direct request from the Russians. Churchill had been involved in only the most generalised way by encouraging the implementation of an intelligence report to bomb eastern Germany. He had not mentioned Dresden specifically in conversations or in written minutes. But even he judged it was time to distance himself from the bombing campaign against Germany. In a memo on 28 March 1945, after he had been shown accounts of the raid, he wrote:

It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed … The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of allied bombing … I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.³²

The wheel had come full circle. Churchill, who in 1940 had believed that the RAF could win the war, and who had backed his scientific and military advisers in their arguments in favour of area bombing, was now veering away from the terrible consequences of this policy, calling for more precise targeting of military objectives. The time to reassess had come.

So was the bombing offensive worthwhile? Questions about both the effectiveness of bombing Germany and the morality of killing civilians have raged since the last Lancaster returned from Dresden. In all, about 600,000 men, women and children were killed in the bombing of Germany, with about 20 per cent of homes in German cities damaged by aerial bombardment. But the morale of the population did not break until the very last months of the war, and this was caused more by the realisation that defeat was imminent, with the Red Army advancing relentlessly into Germany from the east and Allied troops advancing rapidly from the west. Moreover, although there is still much debate about this, the German war economy actually increased its output during the years of the bombing offensive. Armament production increased by about 80 per cent in 1942; by another 20 per cent in 1943; and by a further 40 per cent in the first six months of 1944. In other words it roughly trebled over the two and a half years. But part of this is explained by the fact that the German economy was geared to fighting a short, successful war in 1940 and 1941 and was by no means fully mobilised in those years. There was much spare capacity to call upon. The Nazi creed believed, for instance, that women should be mothers and wives, not industrial labourers, in the early years of war. Women were not deployed at first to anything like the same extent as they were in Britain and would later be in the United States. Also, by the end of the war, the German war machine was able to draw upon the forced labour of millions of slaves who were brought to the Reich from occupied territories and put to work, often in appalling conditions. Albert Speer claimed that the indiscriminate bombing of vast tracts of German cities was not the best strategy for the Allied bombers. He insisted that if the Allies had pressed on with their bombing of key targets like the ball-bearing factories, or had mounted a series of devastating raids like the fire raids on Hamburg, then the bombing offensive would have had far greater impact. On the other hand, specific elements of the bombing campaign had very clear and damaging results. The attacks on oil refineries and synthetic-oil production plants in 1944 led to serious fuel shortages which undermined the German Army’s ability to fight in the final campaigns of the war. Moreover, the bombing kept about one million soldiers at home to man anti-aircraft defences, equivalent to about fifty divisions which otherwise could have swayed the war on the Eastern Front or in Normandy. Another one and a half million workers were tied up clearing rubble and in reconstruction simply to allow life to go on.

Ultimately, it is an ethical decision as to whether the bombing campaign against Germany was justified or was a war crime. Certainly, Churchill was an advocate of the campaign, albeit an uncertain and questioning one at times. Cherwell and ‘Bomber’ Harris were its chief protagonists. It’s interesting to note that in the moral climate of the war the argument against bombing was made not on ethical but on practical grounds. Was it worth the massive effort in industrial output and in the lives of the RAF crews? After all, as was said over and over again during the war, it was the Germans who had started bombing cities, and the memories of Warsaw, Rotterdam, and the Blitz on London and Coventry were strong in everyone’s minds. Harris told the newsreel cameras, ‘They who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind,’ and most Britons at the time felt he was right. Churchill was encouraged to ‘give one back’ to Hitler. And, in purely numerical terms, how does one compare the 600,000 German civilians who died as a consequence of Allied bombs with the two million Germans who died at the hands of advancing Soviet soldiers at the end of the war? Or with the six million Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust? Or with the US bombing offensive in Japan? Of course, that campaign culminated in the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which prompted the final Japanese surrender and the end of the war.

The arguments will rage on. Churchill, as the final decision-maker in the British war machine, must take his share of the responsibility for the adoption of the policy of area bombing and its consequences. He definitely listened too closely to Cherwell and did not pay enough heed to other advisers who argued a contrary point of view. But this was all about practicalities and effectiveness, not about the morality of bombing. At the end of the war, when he was perhaps reflecting more on the verdict of history than he had done earlier, Churchill distanced himself from the bombing campaign. Air Chief Marshal Harris was left out of the principal victory celebrations and no campaign medal was ever given to the crews of Bomber Command, despite the courage they had shown and the losses they had endured – 57,000 airmen killed during the war. Even the erection of a statue to Harris in London fifty years after the end of the war created intense controversy. The bombing offensive against Germany without doubt remains the most heavily criticised element of British strategy during the Second World War. Any evaluation of Churchill’s reputation as a war leader will forever be bound up with it.