Chapter 2

The Bomber War

On the night of 24 July 1943, in the hour before midnight, a fleet of 791 heavily laden Royal Air Force bombers took off from bases in the flat and relatively unpopulated counties of eastern England, and aimed their noses across the North Sea. In their bases at Wangerooge and Heligoland the Luftwaffe’s radar operators could see the stream of aircraft beginning to approach, and they put their night-fighter and anti-aircraft defences on alert. The stream moved steadily eastwards above latitude 54 degrees, and the watching Germans judged that if it turned south before the coast of Schleswig-Holstein, its likely target would be Bremen; but if it crossed the neck of the Danish peninsula before turning south, it would most likely be aiming for Berlin.

At fifteen minutes after midnight, just as the Luftwaffe ground controllers were beginning to plot interception points for their night-fighters, the orderly cluster of traces on their radar screens suddenly and startlingly dissolved into a snowstorm of writhing streaks and dashes. It looked as if the bomber stream, already large, had suddenly multiplied hundreds of times over, and begun to move in all directions at once. The Luftwaffe night-fighter pilots were equally thrown into confusion, for their airborne radar – mounted cumbersomely on their aircraft’s noses like old-fashioned television aerials – had likewise gone haywire.

The cause was a simple technical innovation employed for the first time by RAF Bomber Command: a device called ‘Window’, consisting of strips of tinfoil cut to correspond to the wavelength of German radar frequencies. Dropped in clusters from the bombers at one-minute intervals, ‘Window’ disrupted the defenders’ radar, effectively blinding its operators and the crews of the night-fighters patrolling above them.

Still, the night-fighter pilots had their eyes, and observers on the ground their ears. The former saw yellow marker flares appear in the sky over the mouth of the Elbe river, and then the latter heard the sound of many aircraft swinging south above them, like the distant humming of a huge swarm of bees. At last it was clear that the night’s target was neither Bremen nor Berlin, but Hamburg.

What no one could guess, either among the Luftwaffe defenders or Hamburg’s citizens as they heard the air-raid warnings begin, was that the assault about to be unleashed on the city – a series of bombing raids lasting a week and a half – would be something new and terrible even by the standards of industrialised violence so far experienced in the Second World War. This was Operation Gomorrah, mounted by RAF Bomber Command with the aim of wiping Hamburg from the map of Europe.

The choice of name for the operation was apt. The Book of Genesis tells how the ‘cities of the plain’, Sodom and Gomorrah – the latter means ‘submersion’ – were destroyed by a rain of fire and sulphur from the sky. When Abraham (not Lot, who had been forbidden to look) rose from sleep the morning after the event, and stood on a peak in his mountain fastness, he ‘looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace’; the cities were no more.

Operation Gomorrah consisted of five major and several minor attacks on Hamburg on the nights of 24–5, 27–8, 29–30 July and 2–3 August, and in the daylight hours of 25 and 26 July. Small forces of Mosquitoes followed on days subsequent to the main raids to cause annoyance and take photographs. The two daylight raids were carried out by the United States Eighth Army Air Force, which sent fleets of 230 bombers on each occasion to attack Hamburg’s shipyards and engineering plants. The American raids did not much affect the citizens of Hamburg in their residential areas and city centre, whereas the raids by the RAF most certainly did; these latter had as their aiming point Hamburg’s most central point, the Altstadt – the old city. But it was the Americans who suffered most among the attackers, because angry German fighters were waiting for them in force on each of their daylight raids, and gave the American formations a severe mauling. Nineteen B-17 Flying Fortresses were shot down over Hamburg on 25 July alone.

On the first night of bombing the RAF’s Lancasters, Halifaxes, Stirlings and Wellingtons dropped 2,396 tons of bombs on the city, the majority of them incendiaries. These latter were small bombs filled with highly flammable chemicals, among them magnesium, phosphorus and petroleum jelly. The phosphorus could not be doused with water, and it clung to whatever it splashed over, burning fiercely. Large clusters of incendiaries were dropped to scatter fires across the target area, simultaneously broken apart by high explosive (HE) bombs and thereby made readier for combustion. A proportion of the HE bombs were time-delayed, armed to go off in the hours and sometimes days after the beginning of a raid in order to disrupt efforts by emergency workers to put out fires, rescue the injured, mend water and gas pipes, and shore up unstable buildings.

Bomber Command had quickly grasped the value of incendiaries. During the Blitz on London and other British cities in 1940–1, civil-defence authorities issued warnings about the Luftwaffe’s 2-lb. thermite and magnesium incendiaries. Cigarette cards bore the legend,

The 2lb magnesium bomb does not explode, its only object being to start a fire. It will probably penetrate no further than an attic or an upper floor, setting light to anything within a few feet. Vast numbers of these light bombs can be carried by a single aeroplane, and many more fires started than could be dealt with by fire brigades.

The Blitz lesson had been well learned in retaliation. On the second major attack by the RAF during Operation Gomorrah, during the night of 27–8 July, Hamburg’s fire-fighters were overwhelmed by the torrents of incendiaries that fell on to the city, so many and in such concentration that they initiated a terrifying phenomenon: a firestorm. Fires in different streets progressively joined together, forming into vast pyres of flame that grew rapidly hotter and eventually roared upwards to a height of 7,000 feet, sucking in air from the outlying suburbs at over a hundred miles an hour to fuel their oxygen hunger, creating artificial hurricanes ‘resonating like mighty organs’ as W. G. Sebald put it, which intensified the fires further.¹ It was the first ever firestorm created by bombing, and it caused terrible destruction and loss of life. Its greatest intensity lasted for three hours, snatching up roofs, trees and burning human bodies and sending them whirling into the air. The fires leaped up behind collapsing façades of buildings, roared through the streets, and rolled across squares and open areas ‘in strange rhythms like rolling cylinders’.² The glass windows of tramcars melted, bags of sugar boiled, people trying to flee the oven-like heat of air-raid shelters sank, petrified into grotesque gestures, into the boiling asphalt of the streets.

The bomber crews reported that they could feel the heat of the city’s fires in their aircraft as they made their bombing runs. The next day smoke from the destroyed city rose 25,000 feet into the sky. Little bluish flames still flickered around some of the disfigured corpses. The victims of the first attack were either blown up, suffocated in their air-raid shelters from which the air had been sucked away, or cremated instantly in the raging fires outside. Many bodies were found so shrivelled by the heat that adult corpses had shrunk to the size of infants.³

On this second night raid, 787 bombers had crossed the Denmark peninsula as if intent on Berlin, only to swing back and attack Hamburg from the north-east. This attack was much more accurate than the first, and its high degree of concentration was one of the principal factors in the creation of the devastating firestorm. Some commentators cite also the hot dry July weather as a contributory factor, and the fact that bomb and fire damage from the earlier raids, and strain on the city’s emergency services, made the city more vulnerable.

By the third night attack on 29–30 July the effectiveness of ‘Window’ had diminished because the German defences had worked out ways to take countermeasures, and as a result RAF losses were higher and the bombing less accurate. More night-fighters were allocated to Hamburg’s defence, and with them day-fighters whose pilots adapted themselves to their nocturnal task by taking advantage of the raging fires in the city, flying very high and watching for the bombers underneath them to become silhouettes against the glow.

The fourth and final night raid, on 2–3 August, was the least effective of all because Hamburg lay under thickly piled clouds, the rain from which helped the fire-fighters on the ground while obscuring the target from attackers in the air. Only half the bomber stream could locate the city despite the fact that it was still burning, and none of the marker flares could be seen in the murk. Nevertheless the series of attacks had already done their worst. In over 3,000 sorties above the city in four separate raids, the RAF had dropped more than 9,000 tons of bombs, the majority of them incendiaries. Only eighty-six of its bombers had been lost, a remarkably low rate for which the novelty of Window takes the credit. Bomber Command felt that it had scored an outstanding success; its official historians wrote, ‘the victory was complete. In the earlier months and years of the war it was without precedent, and in those that were still to come it was never excelled’.⁴ This was a sentiment shared at the time by the bomber crews themselves; one said,

The first two raids on Hamburg were so obviously successful to those of us who took part in them. And this was, in itself, unusual. Forgetting the standard line-shooting, one returned from most trips in what I would call a neutral frame of mind. Relief to be back and glad that one more was under your belt – and that was about all. But, with those two to Hamburg, there was an added exhilaration which came from the absolute conviction – actually on the night – that we had pulled off something special.⁵

In Hamburg itself, sentiment was of course very different. No one knows exactly how many died, but at least 45,000 corpses lay among the smoking ruins, with many more injured and traumatised. Half the city had been reduced to rubble – a total of 30,480 buildings according to official contemporary German figures. The shock of the devastating attack was felt across Germany. A tidal wave of one and a quarter million refugees from the city flowed to the very borders of the country during the following months, carrying with them first-hand news of the city’s sufferings.⁶

The Official History remark just quoted – ‘the victory was complete’ – implies that Operation Gomorrah was a high point in RAF Bomber Command’s endeavours in the Second World War. In one sense it was, because the ratio of damage inflicted to losses incurred was so favourable to the bombers. But it was not a high point in terms of tonnages of bombs dropped or devastation caused. Rather, it marked a beginning; the real beginning of the kind of bombing campaign that the British government and its Air Force commanders in the bomber force had been planning since early in the war, but had until then only been able to deliver occasionally and with great effort – as in the first 1,000-bomber raids on Cologne, Essen and Bremen on 30 May, 1 June and 25 June 1942 respectively. That month of effort had effectively been a one-off; such raids could not be repeated for some time afterwards, for the numbers involved had been plumped up considerably by aircraft and crews borrowed from Training Command and (less hazardously) Coastal Command, and as a result losses were unacceptably high – in the Bremen raid forty-nine bombers were lost. It was only in 1943, the fourth year of the war, that the RAF began to have the resources and equipment to bomb on a scale and in a manner required by the philosophy of ‘area bombing’, the official term for attacks aimed at civilian populations.

Those resources continued to mount as the war progressed, and alongside them, from 1943 onwards, the United States Army Air Force likewise grew in strength, contributing greatly to winning control of the European skies. The USAAF did this not by area bombing after the manner of the RAF, but by tactical bombing of key industrial resources for Germany’s defence against air attack, and by fighting the Luftwaffe out of the sky partly by means of its formidably many-gunned Flying Fortress bombers, but more especially its Lightning and Mustang long-range fighter escorts. It was constant policy that, in the European theatre of war the USAAF did not follow the RAF’s example of deliberate targeting of civilians, but concentrated almost wholly on military and industrial targets. In the Japanese theatre matters were otherwise; there the USAAF adopted exactly the RAF technique of incendiary area attacks upon cities.

Allied domination of the European skies was at last so complete that in the final months of bombing, from the autumn of 1944 to the official stand-down of the bombing campaign in April 1945, the Allies were able to fly over enemy territory in greater safety. The same was true in the Pacific theatre; as the US forces came close enough to Japan to mount bombing raids from captured islands, the air defence of the Japanese homeland was almost non-existent. This is a key fact in explaining how it is that the greatest percentage of bombs dropped in the entire war, and therefore the greatest destruction of German and Japanese cities, occurred in the war’s final months – when the war, in the opinion of most qualified commentators, was already won.⁷

This controversial point plays a significant part in the moral assessment of the Allied bombing campaigns, for in addition to the main question about whether deliberate targeting of civilian populations was morally acceptable, the remorseless and continued destruction of German and Japanese cities when victory was near forces one to raise the further question: was there a half-spoken intent on the part of the Allies, and most particularly among those closely associated with the planning and prosecution of the bombing campaigns, to effect what might be called ‘culturecide’ upon the two main Axis powers? Destroying cities meant – in addition to killing and traumatising many tens of thousands of people – destroying monuments, libraries, schools and universities, art galleries, architectural heritage, the cultural precipitate and the organs of corporate life that make an identifiable society.

In 1942 a decision was taken by the War Cabinet and the Air Staff to destroy all of Germany’s cities with populations over 100,000, and among the plans made for post-war Germany – a plan partially implemented by events – was one that saw a territorially divided and diminished Germany turned into a solely agricultural region, with neither the industries nor the economic structure (including the educational and cultural institutions required to service it) to permit the resurrection, as had happened after the First World War, of another powerful and warlike Germany intent upon a European imperium. In the event, Cold War realities – whose imminence was already apparent before the war’s official end in Europe in May 1945 – would have made the victorious Allies anyway quick to abandon this notion, and to see the point of helping Germany to rebuild as an industrial power. But even if the punitive conception of making Germany a farm inhabited by bucolics was one only among a number of suggestions being canvassed on the subject of what to do with post-war Germany, it cannot be allowed the comfortable status of ‘just one of those ideas’. It is diffusely linked with the massive obliterating endeavour of the Allied bombers, and therefore is an idea that must not be left to slip into the shadows of history without an examination of its implications for the great moral question that the Allied bombing raises.⁸ Apart from anything else, ignoring such matters only hands them on a platter to neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists who use them for unsavoury political ends, not for frank inspection of the past and the precepts it offers.

No understanding of questions about the morality of Allied area bombing in the Second World War can be attempted without having before us the following three matters: what actually happened in the bombing war; what was known, thought, intended and hoped by those who carried it out; and what effect it had. These last two points are dealt with in subsequent chapters. Here I now turn, as a necessary preliminary, to give a brief history of the bomber war, as the background of fact for those discussions.

On 3 September 1939, only minutes after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced the British government’s declaration of war on Germany, air-raid sirens sounded over London. Sixty thousand beds had been prepared in the capital’s hospitals for what was expected to be immediate massive air attack, and the apprehensive citizenry might have feared, when they heard that first siren, that 60,000 extra beds would not be sufficient. In the event, it transpired that the air-raid warning was the result of a lone French aviator’s forgetfulness about filing a flight plan.

The assumption behind the provision of thousands of extra hospital beds in London was that Germany would bomb civilian areas indiscriminately, as it had done in the First World War, and as all theorists of air war since 1918 had predicted would be an inevitable feature of future wars. By contrast, RAF Bomber Command was under strict instructions not to attack targets on the mainland of Europe, in order to avoid the risk of civilian casualties. One of the chief reasons for this was that Chamberlain did not want to provoke retaliatory attacks on British cities. And at first both Germany and Britain were restrained towards each other in the matter of bombing, which on the British side anyway started immediately: on 3 September itself, within hours of Chamberlain’s declaration of war on Germany, a group of Hampden and Whitley bombers attempted to find and attack a fleet of German warships reportedly at sea near Wilhelmshaven.⁹ They failed; but even as they returned unblooded from the hunt, a flight of ten Whitley bombers was setting course for the Ruhr – to drop not bombs but leaflets on the civilian population, inviting them to surrender.

Chamberlain’s reluctance to allow bombing that might harm civilians had as its ostensible reason an assurance he had given, two days before the outbreak of war, that Britain would not bomb civilians. The assurance came in response to an appeal by President Roosevelt of the United States that the European nations would not permit ‘bombardment from the air of civilian populations or unfortified cities’. Another – more pragmatic – reason was that Britain was weaker than Germany in the air, and needed time to build strength.

This self-denying ordinance lasted until May 1940; but RAF’s Bomber Command was not fully in a position to deliver major attacks on Germany until 1942, and even then it was 1943 before its campaign was able to reach levels – still not fully sustainable – of the kind desired by its planners and prosecutors. It was only in 1944 that the numbers of bomber crews, bomber aircraft and bombs began to reach those levels.

The weakness of Bomber Command at the beginning of the war was the result of several co-operating causes. At the close of hostilities in 1918 Britain possessed the mightiest air force in the world, but within two years its strength had been reduced by a massive nine-tenths. The reasons were a combination of peacetime expenditure savings, a general revulsion against the idea of war, and the opposition of the Army and Navy to the existence of a separate air force. The nascent air force might have vanished altogether had it not been for the redoubtable independence struggle fought by the RAF’s chief, Sir Hugh Trenchard, and the sudden revival of military anxieties in 1923, induced by France’s occupation of the Ruhr over Germany’s default on reparations. By then the RAF was down to a mere three squadrons from the 382 squadrons of 1918.¹⁰ The Ruhr crisis prompted Parliament to vote a substantial increase in RAF funding, aimed at building within five years a ‘Home Defence Air Force’ of 52 squadrons, two-thirds of them bombers.¹¹

In the event, when Hitler came to power in 1933 the Home Defence Air Force had risen only to 42 squadrons. The Nazi aim of rapidly building an air force was limited by none of the dithering and penny-pinching of British and French attitudes. Germany had a strong civil-aviation sector, dozens of amateur flying clubs, a growing aircraft-manufacturing industry, and secret cadres of pilots trained during the Weimar years. And because the Luftwaffe was starting from scratch it could arm itself with the latest metal monoplanes with retractable undercarriage, very different from the wooden fixed-wheel biplanes still being flown by the British and French air forces.

The RAF had a secret weapon of its own, however: excellent training. This was the legacy of Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, forged during his time as Chief of the Air Staff from 1919 to 1929. Despite the paucity of resources available to his command, Trenchard built an infrastructure that outstripped anything elsewhere in the world: the cadet college for officer pilots at Cranwell, the Staff College for senior personnel at Andover, and a number of other research and training establishments for all aspects of the force’s work. The system of short-service commissions – four years full-time service followed by five years in the reserve – ensured a pool of highly trained pilots who could instantly be called upon in an emergency. When war broke out in September 1939 the RAF could summon more than 700 pilots from among former members of the Oxford University Air Squadron alone.¹²

The destabilising presence of the Nazi regime on the world stage from 1933 onwards, together with the increasingly dangerous situation in the Far East following Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and China, prompted the British government to reconsider its defence policies. In 1934 it announced an enlargement of the RAF to 75 squadrons by 1939. In March 1935 Hermann Goering officially announced the birth of the Luftwaffe, and shortly afterwards Hitler told the British ambassador in Berlin that his new air force was already as large as the RAF. Whether the information was correct or not did not matter; it galvanised London into boosting RAF targets yet again, to 112 squadrons – and not by 1939 but 1937. The aim was to ensure equality of strength with the Luftwaffe by that date, but German rearmament was proceeding much more quickly than London realised, so even with its revamped target RAF strength still lagged behind.

These plans were premised on the old concept of the ‘balance of power’. In October 1935 Italy invaded Abyssinia. This was the last straw for the balance-of-power argument, which rested on arrangements invented long beforehand, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. By the 1930s that structure was fragmenting fast, and the international situation appeared more menacing by the month. By the end of 1935 British policy-makers had at last accepted that war was a greater likelihood than peace, and they began to address themselves seriously to the task of preparing for it. The game of squadron numbers did not meet the situation by itself; new types of aircraft, manufacturing capacity to produce them, and an adequate depth of reserves were all required. The result was a plan called ‘Scheme F’, the first of a series of detailed arrangements to meet all aspects of air-defence needs.¹³

An immediate consequence of Scheme F was that designs of heavy bombers began to appear on drawing-boards. In some of the successor plans, notably Scheme J, priority was given to fighter-aircraft design and production because the need for defence of British air space was recognised as more urgent.¹⁴ In fact it was already the case – luckily, from the point of view of Britain’s solitary survival in the face of German aggression in 1940 – that matters were well advanced in the design of new fighters. Chief among them was the elegant and highly effective Supermarine Spitfire, evolved from the design of a beautiful seaplane which had won the Schneider Trophy (an air-speed prize), and the Hawker Hurricane, the robust gun-platform that so ably played its part in defending the English skies in the fateful summer of 1940.¹⁵ Britain also, and every bit as importantly, had the life-saving technological advantage of radar, without which the Battle of Britain might well have been lost.

Because of Scheme J the heavy bomber designs were left in a much less advanced state, and what RAF Bomber Command had available when war began was nowhere near suited to the task it faced.¹⁶ It consisted of 53 front-line squadrons, each notionally – but only notionally – of 16 aircraft. There was no reserve, which meant that a third of these squadrons had to be withdrawn into non-operational status for training and reinforcement purposes. And the aircraft available – Blenheims, Whitleys, Hampdens, Wellingtons and Battles – were in their different ways too slow, light, under-armed and outdated for the war that broke upon them.¹⁷

To understand how the concept of ‘area bombing’ – targeting civilian populations in urban areas – evolved out of Britain’s clear initial policy of avoiding harm to civilians, one has to know something of how the bomber war itself evolved. This is because in the perilous years 1940–2 Britain had only one resource for carrying the war to Germany, and that was Bomber Command; but, as just remarked, Bomber Command was a largely ineffective instrument while it had only Whitleys, Hampdens and the others at its disposal. The policy of area bombing was a response to a set of problems and a need: problems of navigation and bomb-aiming which made the task of finding and hitting precise targets exceedingly difficult, and the need for a forceful way of delivering blows at Nazi Germany which would hurt it and therefore its will and capacity to make war.

These facts were made plain very early in the war, in the intermittent series of attacks mounted by Bomber Command against German warships in Wilhelmshaven, the Schillig Roads, and the Heligoland Bight, and in reconnaissance flights over northern Germany. Bad weather made these efforts sporadic in the autumn of 1939 and the winter of 1939–40, but they were enough to teach some bitter lessons about the inadequacies of the types of aircraft at Bomber Command’s disposal.

At very first, though, the auguries seemed good; a daylight raid on elements of the German fleet in the Heligoland Bight on 3 December 1939 saw all twenty-four of the attacking Wellingtons survive flak and assaults by ME 109 and 110 fighters. One of the German planes was damaged by return fire from a Wellington, adding to the sense that a tight formation of bombers could defend itself well, given that each Wellington had four machine guns in its rear turret.

But the optimism was premature. Ten days later a Royal Navy submarine damaged two German cruisers in torpedo attacks, and as the cruisers struggled back into the Jade Estuary leading to Wilhelmshaven, a dozen Wellingtons were sent to deliver the coup de grâce. Low clouds covered the sky over the target area, forcing the bombers to fly beneath them, at less than 600 feet. Anti-aircraft fire from warships and armed merchantmen in the estuary did the Wellingtons much damage, but then the barrage suddenly stopped, signifying the arrival of a flock of Messerschmitt 109s. Within minutes five Wellingtons had been shot down, and a sixth was so badly damaged that it crashed on landing when, with great difficulty, it managed to reach its home base in eastern England.

Four days later, on 18 December 1939, twelve out of twenty-four Wellingtons were shot down, again over Wilhelmshaven. It was another daylight attack, this time conducted in brilliant sunshine under a clear blue sky. Indeed the weather was so good that operators of the Luftwaffe’s experimental Freya radar stations at Heligoland and Wangerooge could not believe how suicidally the RAF offered itself to the Messerschmitts stationed nearby.

The attrition rate of 50 per cent on this and the earlier raid was disastrous, not least because Bomber Command was under orders to conserve its forces while reserves were built up and new crews trained. The reasons for the heavy losses were quickly identified. One was that the Wellingtons had fuel tanks in their port wings which were neither self-sealing nor protected by armour plating. Enemy fire directed there either set the Wellington ablaze, or at best drained it of fuel. The Wellington was a rather inflammable aircraft anyway, and hits anywhere could be disastrous. Another reason was that although the Wellington had four rear-mounted machine guns, it was vulnerable to beam attack, a weakness made worse – and this is a third reason – by its low air speed relative to the Messerschmitt fighters, which could easily catch and overtake it, then swing round and mount another assault, with no hope of the Wellington outrunning its attacker.

The Air Officer Commanding No. 3 Group in Bomber Command from which this mauled squadron came, Air Vice-Marshal John Baldwin, was convinced that bombers would be safe if they stayed in tight formation, using their combined fire-power to fend off attackers. It was a doctrine that, later, the United States Army Air Force vigorously adhered to, but with an aeroplane much more likely to make it work: the Flying Fortress B-17, bristling with guns at every angle. Baldwin was sure that inexperience had led his men to break formation during the 18 December débâcle, thus making themselves vulnerable. But Lieutenant-Colonel Carl Schumacher of the Luftwaffe, who had led the attacking Messerschmitts that day, later wrote that although the damage inflicted on some of his fighters was the result of the ‘tight formation and excellent rear-gunners of the Wellington bombers’, it was their discipline that had actually been their undoing; ‘their maintenance of formation and rigid adherence to course,’ Schumacher said, ‘made them easy targets to follow.’¹⁸

The disaster of 18 December showed the Air Staff that they needed to change their thinking, not least about the wisdom of daylight raids. But even as they debated how best to use their limited forces – and their limitations were becoming daily more obvious in every sense – the pace of war forced them up an even steeper learning curve. In April 1940 Germany invaded Norway, and the British and French responded by landing an expeditionary force. The venture was a failure; the Allied force was driven back into the sea within two weeks of arriving. Sorties by Wellingtons and Hampdens against German ships crossing the Skagerrak were brutally repulsed; on 12 April eight out of twelve Hampdens were shot down trying to find the famous German warships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The method of their destruction spoke volumes about their capacity as machines of war. ME 110s simply flew up and took a position parallel to them and a little ahead, a mere hundred or so yards away, thus sitting comfortably out of the Hampdens’ limited line of fire; and then the German rear gunners aimed at the Hampden pilots in their cockpits, and killed them.¹⁹ Following the 12 April débâcle Hampdens were reserved to night operations only.

On the night of 16–17 April a solitary Whitely was despatched to Oslo to bomb the airfield there in the hope of denying it to German squadrons. Only Whitleys among the aircraft at Bomber Command’s disposal had the range to fly that far. The crew had a hard time; navigation was made difficult by cloud cover obscuring vital landmarks, and although the city itself was found under a gap in the cover, its outlying airport was still obscured, and moreover under fog. The crew could see nothing. At that point in the war standing orders were that bombing was to occur only on definite visual identification of a target, to avoid accidental harm to civilians; so the Whitley had to turn for home without attacking.

Although Oslo’s airport was bombed in the next few days by small formations of Whitleys, the range limitation and the navigational difficulties involved were ominous signs. How could deep-penetration attacks on Germany itself be contemplated in the light of these problems? The month of operations over Norway between 9 April and 10 May had seen thirty-three bombers lost, with scarcely anything to show by way of return in damage to the enemy.

But the worst section of the learning curve had yet to be climbed.

During the ‘phoney war’ – the period between September 1939 and May 1940 during which there was no actual ground fighting in western Europe – the squadrons sent to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force provided the Air Staff at home with greatly more matter to ponder. The aircraft in question were all Fairey Battles, classed as ‘light bombers’ or ‘fighter-bombers’ to distinguish them from the Wellingtons, Whitleys and Hampdens which then counted as ‘heavy bombers’. The Battle squadrons formed what was called the Advanced Air Striking Force. Events proved that they were, by a considerable margin, the least effective elements in Britain’s air fleet. On 30 September 1939 five of them flying an ‘armed reconnaissance’ over the Siegfried Line were attacked by ME 109s, and only one got home. Thereafter they flew almost always at night only, and even then kept as much as possible out of harm’s way. Their most adventurous endeavour of the ‘phoney war’ was to drop leaflets over the Rhineland in February 1940. Efforts were vigorously made to replace the Battles with Blenheim light bombers, but by the time the ‘phoney war’ became suddenly real on 10 May 1940 – the day on which the German blitzkrieg in the west began – only two of the Battle squadrons had been replaced by Blenheims.

It was the ferocious defensive fighting between 10 May and the end of the Dunkirk evacuation of the British army on 3 June 1940 that revealed the inadequacies of the Battles, for all that they were flown with extraordinary courage. In the very first day of serious fighting, thirty-two Battles were sent against the German advance through Luxembourg, and thirteen were shot down by anti-aircraft fire. All the rest were damaged. Three hours later a second attack, also of thirty-two Battles, was launched against this dangerous target, and this time Messerschmitts appeared and helped the anti-aircraft batteries to shoot down ten more of them. These were completely unsustainable rates of loss, and yet what the Battles were achieving in return was practically nothing. The image of Polish cavalry galloping at German Panzers comes to mind. The next day, as a result of a Luftwaffe attack, one of the two new Blenheim squadrons was destroyed in its entirety as it stood on the grass of the Vaux airfield near Soissons, its crews drinking tea while they waited for flying orders. That afternoon eight Battles returned to the fray over Luxembourg; only one came back.

A significant consequence of the Wehrmacht thrust into the Low Countries was that on 10 May 1940 Neville Chamberlain resigned, and Winston Churchill took his place in Downing Street. The change-over immediately led to a more assertive use of British air resources. Bomber Command’s first large attack on German soil occurred on the night of 11–12 May, when thirty-six Whitleys and Hampdens set off to bomb the transport links around Mönchengladbach. About half reached the target; of these, three were shot down.

Efforts to halt the German advance necessitated bombing the bridges over the Albert Canal at Maastricht, and repeated and costly efforts were made both by French and British bombers to do so. On 11 May four out of twelve Blenheims, flying from bases in England, were shot down and all the rest damaged, with no effect on the bridges. The next day seven out of nine Blenheims were destroyed in a repeat attack, still without success.

And so the attrition went on, proving beyond any doubt the drastic inadequacies of Britain’s bomber force. The effective end of the Advanced Air Striking Force came on 14 May, the day a major German attack in the Sedan sector surprised the French 2nd Army and rendered the entire circumstance of the war critical for the Allies. In a desperate effort to gain time, the French high command asked for every available French and British bomber to be thrown at the German advance. By the end of that day the French air force had ceased to exist, and Britain’s Advanced Air Striking Force was in tatters, having lost twenty-six out of forty-two aircraft committed to the fray.

The French implored the new British government to send ten more Hurricane squadrons to France, but Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, C-in-C Fighter Command, bluntly told the War Cabinet that Britain could not be saved from invasion unless every available fighter were kept back to maintain air superiority over the Channel. Losses among fighter planes in France had been very high; between the beginning of the invasion on 10 May and the last day of the Dunkirk withdrawal, seventy-one Hurricanes and Gladiators had been lost. But even as early as 14 May Dowding felt that the situation in France was irrecoverable, and was thinking grimly ahead. Churchill, however, had to do something to help not only the French but his own reeling forces; and all he had available was Bomber Command. He ordered it to do what it could from its bases in England.

Bomber Command had already begun to make night attacks on the transport links in the rear of the German advance, in an effort to slow it down and disrupt its supplies. The embargo on attacking other targets near civilian centres still held. But then an event occurred that shocked everyone, and began to loosen the no-civilian-attacks ethos prevailing in most of London’s political and military minds. This crucial event was the Luftwaffe’s bombing of Rotterdam on the same fateful 14 May 1940.

In the days since 10 May the Dutch had been giving their German attackers a difficult time, though outnumbered and outgunned. German landings on the beaches north of The Hague were almost annihilated by extraordinarily courageous Dutch pilots flying outmoded Fokker biplanes. It took three days for the Panzers under General Rudolf Schmidt’s command to arrive at the outskirts of Rotterdam, where exhausted advance units of German paratroops had been pinned down since their initial attack.

Schmidt sent a message to the commander of the Dutch defenders of Rotterdam, Colonel Pieter Willem Scharroo, saying that if the Dutch did not surrender he would summon the Luftwaffe to mount a devastating attack on the city. The German high command was pressing Schmidt urgently to take Rotterdam so that the forces being delayed there could press on towards France through Belgium, thus pre-empting the British landing that was imminently expected on the Dutch coast. Time was of the essence for blitzkrieg, and the Dutch were making the Wehrmacht lose too much of it.

Scharroo had to relay the surrender demand to his government in The Hague, whose ministers replied that they would send a delegation to Rotterdam. The clock was ticking ominously, but Schmidt was prepared to wait; at last he was told that the Dutch delegation would reach the city at 2 p.m. At 1.30 p.m. he sent a signal to Luftflotte 2, one hundred of whose Heinkel 111 bombers had been waiting on standby, to cancel their attack. Alas, five minutes before his message reached Luftflotte 2 HQ the last of those Heinkels had already taken off from their bases near Bremen. By the time Schmidt’s signal was relayed from HQ to the bombers’ controllers at the bases, the bombers were over Dutch territory, and had entered radio silence preparatory to their attack.

Frantic efforts to contact the bombers were repeatedly made by the base controllers, but unavailingly. Schmidt was told of the problem, and alerted his troops to fire red flares the moment they saw the bombers, to make them abort the mission. When the first wave of Heinkels appeared over the city from the south the flares duly went up, but the Heinkel pilots did not notice them; they were too busy searching for their aiming-point in the centre of the old city through the hazy glare of the afternoon sun and the smoke from flak bursts, and too distracted by concentrating on the line of the shining Maas river which was directing them to their target. Fifty-seven aircraft dropped their loads of 250-lb and 500-lb bombs into the city centre, shattering it and setting it on fire; then they climbed away towards the south-east and home.

The leader of the second wave, approaching from the south-west after a long detour, was also concentrating hard on the target area, now marked by fires and pillars of smoke; but perhaps because of the different angle of approach and the better play of light, out of the corner of his eye he saw a red flare, and instantly swung away, radioing ‘Abort! Abort!’ to the following aircraft. He was the only pilot to see a flare, and until his group of Heinkels had returned to base the other crews were astonished by the abrupt cancellation of their attack.

It was, however, too late. The first wave of attackers had dropped one hundred tons of explosives and incendiaries on Rotterdam, killing 900 civilians and reducing the heart of the old city to rubble. Two hours later Rotterdam’s defenders surrendered. In London the next morning, and indeed in every city in the world outside the Axis countries, newspapers blazoned the horror of the attack, claiming 30,000 dead and characterising the German demolition of the old city as an act of unmitigated barbarism.²⁰

As far as the British War Cabinet was concerned, the fact that the Luftwaffe had mounted an area-bombing attack on a city changed the stakes. It was irrelevant that the city was garrisoned and defended; it was crowded with civilians, and the early high casualty estimates made it appear to be an atrocity. Everyone had learned to fear just such an atrocity as a result of bombings in earlier wars, chief among them the Zeppelin and Gotha raids on Britain in the First World War, and the attack on Guernica in the Spanish Civil War.²¹ And it was irrelevant that the bombing of Rotterdam had in one sense been a terrible mistake; the Germans had contemplated, then planned, then actually put into execution, the deliberate and indiscriminate bombing of a city, and the efforts made to abort its execution could not change that.

In fact, German aircraft had already bombed civilian targets in the war. Warsaw in September 1939 was the notable example, but the alchemy of distance made it a different case. In those days the world was a much larger place, and distances were felt to be so great – not just in spatial and temporal terms, but more importantly in psychological ones – that the significance of events was almost always inversely related to them. For that reason the bombing of Warsaw, far away in the east of Europe, did not have the same impact on British sensibilities as the bombing of Rotterdam just across the Channel. As a result of the Rotterdam bombing, indeed on the very day after it – 15 May 1940 – Churchill’s War Cabinet authorised bombing raids east of the Rhine for the first time. That same night ninety-nine bombers took off for the Ruhr, their official targets the oil plants, steel foundries and transport links in the region. There was a tacit understanding that there could be no guarantee of avoiding civilian casualties, but still the Air Staff insisted in their directive to Bomber Command that targets should be identified positively before they were attacked, and added, ‘In no circumstances should night bombing be allowed to degenerate into mere indiscriminate action, which is contrary to the policy of His Majesty’s Government.’ Rotterdam had brought Germany’s home territory under the bomb-sights of the Royal Air Force, but despite it the British still maintained the official appearance of restraint so far as the explicit targeting of civilians was concerned.²²

The limited and largely ineffectual nature of Britain’s bombing efforts in the early stages of the war not only lasted until early 1942, but in fact got worse. The exception was Bomber Command’s work in attacking the ships and barges being gathered for Operation Sealion, Germany’s projected invasion of Britain in the summer of 1940. Here something of a victory could be claimed. The Command’s bombers repeatedly attacked assemblages of German shipping in the Atlantic ports of occupied Europe, and achieved significant results in the process, making a vital contribution to the failure of Hitler’s invasion plans.

Operation Sealion was scheduled to begin on 15 September; on 12 September Germany’s Navy Group West HQ signalled to Berlin: ‘Interruptions caused by the enemy’s air forces, long-range artillery and light naval forces have become a major problem. The harbours of Ostend, Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne cannot be used as night anchorages because of the danger of English bombing and shelling.’ The next line of text doubtless warned Hitler that his invasion plans were very seriously at risk, for it underlined Goering’s failure to conquer the English skies – ‘Units of the British Fleet are now able to operate almost unmolested in the Channel’ – and this was the achievement of RAF Fighter Command in the Battle of Britain. But the contribution of the bombers was clear. ‘Owing to these difficulties,’ Navy Group West HQ continued, ‘further delays are expected in the assembly of the invasion fleet.’ The clear implication was that an invasion could not take place until October at the earliest; by which time the tides and weather would be against it.

Hitler postponed the invasion to 17 September. On the morning of the preceding day Navy Group West HQ sent another signal about the effects of RAF bombing: ‘Considerable casualties have been inflicted on transports in Antwerp. Five transport steamers have been badly damaged, one barge sunk, two cranes destroyed, and an ammunition train blown up. Several sheds are still burning.’ That night bombers sank a flotilla of invasion barges and two transport ships at sea off Boulogne, while all the ports along the coast between Antwerp and Le Havre were subjected to heavy attacks. On the day scheduled for the invasion Navy Group West HQ again signalled Berlin, ‘The very severe bombing together with naval bombardment from across the Channel makes it necessary to disperse the naval and transport vessels already concentrated in the Channel, and to stop further movement of shipping to the invasion ports.’

Hitler had urged Goering to a last all-out endeavour to capture the skies over the Channel and southern England, and the hardest and most famous efforts of RAF Fighter Command’s ‘Few’ followed during the course of that week. When it was at last clear that the Luftwaffe had failed, Hitler ordered the invasion fleet to be dismantled and dispersed, well away from Bomber Command’s attentions.

As this shows, although most glory rightly belongs to the RAF’s hard-pressed fighter pilots – it does not put matters too high to say that for a few critical weeks in the summer of 1940, world history rested in the hands of a few hundred young Britons – nevertheless the bomber crews also played an important role in combating the invasion menace. It was perhaps one of the best moments of the RAF’s bomber war, though it has never been characterised as such.

But Bomber Command’s efforts to hurt Germany by disrupting its communications and industry were greatly less successful. Attacks on canals (which transported a third of German production) and railway marshalling yards were persistent, costly and mainly ineffective. The huge marshalling yards at Hamm, the nerve centre of the German railway system, were attacked eighty-five times in the year June 1940 to June 1941 – that is an average of three times a fortnight – with scarcely any impact on movement of trains.²³ A scheme to drop incendiary bombs on German forests and crops was also tried, but soon abandoned; the surplus numbers of incendiaries manufactured for this endeavour were kept in stock, and later dropped on cities when ‘area bombing’ began in earnest.

The next step towards the all-out war of area bombing occurred on the night of 24–5 August 1940. On that night a group of Luftwaffe bombers accidentally dropped their loads on London. They had been aiming for the Short aircraft factory at Rochester and the nearby oil-storage tanks on the banks of the Thames, but they were off course. The next morning a furious signal from Goering to the headquarters of the luckless bomber group announced that the aircrews responsible were to be transferred to infantry duties straight away.

In London, however, no one knew that the bombing was a mistake. The War Cabinet ordered an immediate retaliation in the interests of boosting home morale, overriding the protests of Bomber Command, which did not feel that it had enough time to prepare. A force of eighty-one bombers was mustered and sent to Berlin the very next night, 25–6 August. Only a third of them claimed to have got there and dropped their bombs on the designated targets; a further third said that they had found Berlin but in the difficult weather could not see well enough to identify their targets; and the rest – save for three aircraft that were lost – either bombed alternative targets or aborted and returned home early.

The material effect of the raid was that a few bombs fell on the outskirts of Berlin, doing scarcely any harm to anything other than Goering’s reputation, for he had been adamant beforehand that the RAF would never be able to bomb the city. Its residents were shocked by the attack, and more so by others that followed in the ensuing weeks. Morale plummeted, a fact reported to London by independent observers. (Later, when Berlin became the subject of a major area-bombing campaign, morale did the exact opposite, rising not falling; proving the paradoxical nature of civilian responses to crisis conditions.) News of the effect on morale encouraged the Air Staff in London to continue attacking Berlin whenever weather and other circumstances permitted, with its electricity and gas supplies as the official targets. ‘The primary aim of these attacks,’ said the relevant Air Staff Directive to Sir Charles Portal, then chief of Bomber Command, ‘will be to cause the greatest possible disturbance and dislocation both to the industrial activities and to the civil population generally in the area.’ Among Bomber Command’s other duties, which during late 1940 and the whole of 1941 involved attempts to bomb the German navy and its dockyards, Berlin was therefore a recurrent target, and with it other industrial and transportation targets in Germany.

The restriction to visually identified targets remained, and with it the official avoidance of deliberate bombing of civilians, though the words ‘the greatest possible disturbance and dislocation . . . to the civil population’ suggest that thought on the matter was evolving. And indeed, as events proved, the days of both restrictions were numbered, because the most significant event in the bombing war during this early period now happened: the promotion on 25 October 1940 of Sir Charles Portal to the position of Chief of the Air Staff, his place as head of Bomber Command being taken by Sir Richard Peirse. With hindsight one can see that Portal’s appointment was a crucial factor in the changes soon to come in Bomber Command strategy; for it was he who, more than anyone else – though enthusiastically supported by Sir Arthur Harris, who succeeded Peirse in early 1942 – led the way to deliberate targeting of civilian populations in Germany’s cities.

The first indication of Portal’s influence in this respect came five days after his appointment as Chief. On that day he sent Peirse his first directive. The directive told Peirse that Bomber Command’s priorities were to be Germany’s oil supplies and its aluminium and component factories. But it also ominously said that regular large-scale attacks were to be carried out on major urban areas and industrial centres, ‘with the primary aim of causing very heavy material destruction which will demonstrate to the enemy the power and severity of air bombardment and the hardship and dislocation which will result from it’.

When Portal’s first directive was issued, no one could have guessed what its words would soon come to mean in real terms; but they had cast a die.

Thus was Portal’s presence announced, less than a week into his new responsibilities. By itself it was not intended to herald a change towards an area-bombing strategy, and it did not amount to a repudiation of the hitherto official policy of eschewing indiscriminate bombing of targets where civilian casualties were likely. This was to come some months later, on 9 July 1941. But between Portal’s first directive and the July 1941 directive, RAF bomber crews gradually became less observant of the restrictions that had hitherto hampered it. Its efforts to bomb industrial and port targets in Germany increasingly, and without censure, caused ‘collateral damage’ to housing and civilian facilities near the factories, marshalling yards, oil installations and harbour-works that it attacked.

The thoughts forming in Portal’s mind were much influenced by the London Blitz, which was already in full swing, having started on 7 September with a large-scale raid on the Docklands area of the city.²⁴ According to one version of events, the Luftwaffe’s switch from bombing Fighter Command airfields to bombing London – thereby easing the pressure on Fighter Command, no small factor in its ability to hold on to English skies, and hence a fatal error by Germany – was part of the tit-for-tat begun by the accidental Luftwaffe bombing of London on 24–5 August, and the RAF’s retaliatory bombing of Berlin on the next and subsequent nights. Hitler had been at his retreat at the Berghof during August, but when Berlin was bombed he returned to the city and summoned to his office Field Marshal Erhard Milch, Inspector-General of the Luftwaffe and Goering’s deputy. Hitler ordered Milch to increase the manufacture of heavy bombs, evidently with a change of bombing tactics in mind. A few days later Hitler addressed a mass rally at the Sportpalast in Berlin, in the course of which he spoke about the RAF bombing raids, saying that since he had driven the British into the channel he had deliberately not responded to the provocation of their bombing raids, but that now, lest they take this as a sign of weakness, he was going to teach them a lesson. In his familiar and carefully rehearsed mounting style of rhetoric, he said to wild acclaim,

If the British air force drops two thousand or three thousand or four thousand kilograms of bombs, then we shall drop a hundred and fifty thousand, two hundred and thirty thousand, three hundred thousand, four hundred thousand, one million kilograms . . . When they say that they will attack our cities, then we will wipe out their cities . . . The hour will come when one of us will break, but it will not be National Socialist Germany!²⁵

No doubt this is part of the explanation for the change of Luftwaffe tactics, but there were other factors too. According to Paul Deichmann, a former Luftwaffe general and author of a post-war study of the Luftwaffe, military reasons were chief among them.²⁶ These were that Luftwaffe intelligence had overestimated the losses of RAF fighters in 11 Group, based to the south and south-east of London, and now wished to draw the fighter reserves of 12 Group into the fray from north of London. Attacking the capital would be the perfect way to do this. Deichmann claimed that he had been personally told as much by Field Marshal Albert von Kesselring, who with his other commanders had been assessing the balance of forces preparatory to launching Operation Sealion.

But the reliability of this account is thrown into doubt by the fact that when the Luftwaffe switched its attack to London, it did so primarily at night, when not only its own fighter escorts were unable to fly, but the RAF fighters found it difficult to fly also. The night-bombing tactic was therefore irrelevant to the object of defeating the British fighter force in the sky, and since it involved no attacks on 12 Group airfields, neither would it destroy it on the ground.

The switch to night bombing is in fact much more plausibly explained by the Luftwaffe’s high losses during the Battle of Britain. In the six weeks between 15 July and 31 August 1940 the Luftwaffe had 621 bombers destroyed, with 344 damaged, a casualty rate of 69 per cent. Add this to the 724 lost or damaged aircraft in the period between 10 May and mid-July – that is, between the invasion of the Low Countries and the beginning of the Battle of Britain – and it becomes evident that the Luftwaffe’s attrition rate was too high to be sustainable. Speaking in 1945, the commander of the German fighters in Luftflotte III, which fought in the Battle of Britain, said that he had urged a change to night attacks early in the battle because of the Luftwaffe’s high losses; he described the battle as ‘a sort of air-Verdun, in which the Germans were at a disadvantage’.²⁷

It is clear enough that the new aim premised by the change to bombing London and other cities – for London was not alone in receiving the visitations of the Luftwaffe from September 1940 onwards – was the hope that it would disrupt British war production and affect ‘morale’. General Jodl had said as early as 30 June 1940 that ‘occasional terror raids announced as “reprisals”, and the depletion of Britain’s food stocks, will paralyse the people’s will to resist, and eventually break it altogether, forcing their government to surrender’.²⁸ Hitler made it clear that he alone would decide if and when bombing should explicitly target civilians, though it was obviously a live option for him; ‘if eight million go mad, it would be a catastrophe; after that even a little invasion would go a long way,’ he remarked.²⁹ But the ostensible target of Luftwaffe bombing was the economic and industrial capacity of Britain, and its governmental institutions. Thus the full force of German bombing was felt by London’s docks, the City, Whitehall, and the dense residential districts of the East End and south London where the capital’s factories were mainly located. When British civilian casualties mounted, Berlin could claim both that they were (to use more recent terminology) ‘collateral damage’, and also revenge for RAF bombing of German civilians.

The Luftwaffe’s effort to disrupt Britain’s economy and pound its population into submission lasted from 7 September 1940 until the German invasion of Russia in May 1941. The result was considerable destruction – one raid alone, on 29 December 1940, almost obliterated the City of London – and by the end of that period there were 30,000 British dead and 50,000 injured. But civilian morale did not break, and the British economy did not falter; war production increased quickly and steadily throughout the period, and continued to do so for the rest of the war.

But no one in Britain took these facts to be any indication of the inadequacy of bombing to bring about the submission of an enemy. As both the British and the Germans knew, the Luftwaffe lacked the means to do worse, because it had no true heavy bomber. One was planned – the Heinkel 177 – and if it had come into existence in large numbers and had been used to assault Britain, the result might have been more like the devastation caused to Germany by the genuinely big heavy bombers that entered Allied service as the war progressed.

Even so, the Blitz was a horrific event, which did much to make the idea of severe retaliation against German cities more acceptable – even, indeed, welcome – to many in the British (and later, when the United States entered the war in December 1941, the American) public at large – though not, as we shall see, to all.

If any one event in the Blitz was especially significant in preparing the ground for the strategy hinted by Portal in his first directive, it was not any of the raids on London, but the devastating attack on Coventry on the night of 14–15 November 1940. The psychological effect of this attack, the largest and most intense air raid of the war to that point, was enormous; but not in shaking British will: rather the contrary. And it turned American and world opinion against Germany even more.

It has been claimed that the War Cabinet knew there was going to be a massive attack on Coventry, but took no action in order to protect its intelligence sources.³⁰ Whether or not this claim is true, the fact is that Bomber Command attempted pre-emptive attacks on Luftwaffe bomber airfields in France and Belgium that night, having at least been told that a major raid was expected on an unnamed British city.³¹ German propaganda after the Coventry attack said that it was a retaliation for RAF bombing of Munich. The Bomber Command War Diaries record a number of raids on unspecified German cities in the preceding two months, and one of them might well have been Munich, but the city is not mentioned by name. When one sets the cultural and (to the Nazis) political importance of Munich alongside the severity of the Coventry raid, the claim comes to have a ring of truth.

The raid on Coventry lasted ten hours, starting at twenty minutes past seven in the evening of 14 November 1940, and ending at a quarter past six the following morning. The German communiqué which described the raid as a retaliation for Munich went on to say that the bombing was targeted at the many military-related engineering works in the city, but contemporary British reports pointed out that because of the heavy anti-aircraft fire that greeted them, the Luftwaffe aircraft had to maintain very high altitudes from which accurate bombing was impossible. The result was that HE and incendiary bombs fell everywhere on the city indiscriminately. Night-fighting skills and technical capacities were still very rudimentary in RAF Fighter Command, which was therefore unable to do much to mitigate the attack.

The German communiqué went on to claim that the raid was the heaviest of the war, with over 500 bombers involved. The damage they did to Coventry was extensive: its fourteenth-century cathedral was destroyed, its tram system smashed, its gas and water supplies put out of action, four and a half thousand of its houses demolished, three-quarters of its factories damaged, and 600 of its citizens killed, with over 800 more injured.

This was not the first attack on Coventry – there had been several minor ones in preceding weeks – and it was not the last; the city was bombed forty-one more times in the course of the war, and had to put up with hundreds of air-raid alarms when Luftwaffe bombers were on their way to other cities. But this was the biggest attack Coventry suffered, and the psychological effect on the nation and its government was profound.

Given that London had been suffering under a nightly blitz since September, the special significance attached to the attack on Coventry in the moonlit middle of November 1940 might seem odd. But as the Official Narrative observes, the Coventry bombing was ‘an occasion of singular importance in the history of air warfare’, because for the first time in history, air power ‘was massively applied against a city of small proportions with the object of ensuring its obliteration’.³²

In the winter of 1940–1 Bomber Command was no bigger than it had been a year before in numbers of front-line aircraft, but it was nevertheless gaining strength as a consequence of the inflow of newly trained aircrews, many of them from the Dominions and colonies (together with several squadrons of French and Polish fliers who had escaped to Britain), and the gearing-up of aircraft and munitions production. The first new heavy four-engined bombers did not begin to arrive in service until later in 1941, bringing teething-troubles with them, but the existing bombers were by now somewhat improved, with self-sealing fuel tanks and armour-plating fitted over vulnerable points.

During this winter and the following spring and summer of 1941, Peirse’s bombers made fitful efforts to find and bomb oil plants, and made many sorties against industrial cities and ports, among them Essen, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Duisberg, Kiel, Hamburg and Bremen. Berlin remained a target whenever opportunity offered, and frequently Bomber Command had to take a part in the vital Battle of the Atlantic, a war of tonnages between German U-boats and merchant convoys crossing from America with vital supplies. So far as results were concerned, Bomber Command’s main thrust against industrial and port targets remained largely ineffectual, and sometimes quite nugatory, as when photographs taken during an air raid supposedly on the giant Krupp armament works in Essen showed that the bombers had flattened a forest instead.

As this incident showed, the worst problems affecting Bomber Command related to navigation and bombing accuracy. Aircrews were wont to claim that they had reached targets and bombed them, though some of them realised that their endeavours were often extremely approximate. In the summer of 1941 Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s scientific adviser, persuaded the latter to have bombing efficiency investigated by a member of the War Cabinet Secretariat, Daniel M. Butt. Butt studied hundreds of photographs taken during and after bombing operations, and compared them with aircrew reports and target orders. His devastating conclusions were published in August 1941. They were that many bomber aircraft never found their targets at all; even in good weather on moonlit nights, only two-fifths of bombers found their targets, but in hazy or rainy weather only one in ten did so. On moonless nights the proportion fell to a hopeless one in fifteen. In all circumstances, of those that reached their designated target only a third of them placed their bombs within five miles of it.³³

On these results, the bombing campaign was a massively wasteful and futile effort. In September 1941 Portal sent Churchill a plan for ‘Coventry-style’ attacks on Germany’s forty-five largest cities, claiming that if a force of 4,000 bombers could be built up and unleashed in this fashion, the war would come to an end in six months. But Churchill, still fuming in response to the Butt Report, replied, ‘It is very debatable whether bombing by itself will be a decisive factor in the present war . . . the most we can say is that it will be a heavy and I trust seriously increasing annoyance.’³⁴ The reasons he gave were that Luftwaffe defences would quite likely overwhelm the bomber attack, that only a quarter of bombs were falling anywhere near their targets, and that anyway the British population had shown that being bombed merely ‘stimulated and strengthened’ civilian resistance.

Portal knew that despite the Butt Report and Churchill’s irritation, Bomber Command was all that Britain had in the way of an offensive arm, so he responded quietly by reminding Churchill that new navigation and bomb-aiming technologies were being devised, and that new heavy bombers were being built to benefit from them. He received in reply a less cantankerous letter assuring him that Bomber Command would continue to receive full support from the War Cabinet for its role.

And by this time its role had come 180 degrees round from the one to which it had been restricted in the war’s opening months. For on 9 July 1941 Portal’s Air Staff – with the sanction of course of the War Cabinet – had issued a new directive to Bomber Command, switching its primary attention from oil and naval targets to ‘dislocating the German transportation system’ and ‘destroying the morale of the civil population as a whole and of the industrial workers in particular’.³⁵ With these fateful words the area bombing campaign became explicit and deliberate policy.³⁶

There was one final step before the area-bombing policy began to take major effect. Sir Richard Peirse was still in charge of Bomber Command, and his Command was still doing its best with inadequate aircraft and navigation aids all through 1941, until a disastrous raid on Berlin on the night of 7–8 November ended his career, and caused a temporary retrenchment in the bombing campaign.

Portal’s second-in-command on the Air Staff, Wilfrid Freeman, had throughout 1941 been urging Portal to discontinue raids on Berlin on the grounds that they were futile and costly, a view that he felt inclined to apply to much of the Command’s efforts, as indeed the Butt Report confirmed. But Portal’s response was to say that taking a few tens of tons of bombs away from other targets to ‘get four million people out of bed and into the shelters’ in Berlin was worth it. In fact the cost was not merely one of tonnages: loss rates of 16 per cent of aircraft sent to bomb Berlin were experienced in the summer months of 1941, with very little damage to show in return, for on every occasion less than half of the bombers sent found the city.

But on the night of 7–8 November things got even worse. It has been supposed that Peirse wished to rebut Butt by mounting an impressive attack on the German capital, and for that reason mustered the biggest force of the war so far – 392 aircraft, 169 of them detailed to bomb Berlin, the rest to attack a variety of targets between the Atlantic coast and the Ruhr. In the event the weather was worse than expected, and less than half the Berlin force reached the city. Because it was at the extreme end of the range for Wellingtons and Whitleys, and because the poor weather made them suffer heavy icing which caused their straining engines to use up more fuel, most had virtually empty tanks on reaching home. But 12.5 per cent of them did not reach home. Given that the upper limit for a bearable loss rate was 5 per cent this represented not just a failure but a major disaster for Bomber Command.

Portal investigated the failure thoroughly, and in early January 1942 concluded that Peirse had displayed poor judgement in authorising the attacks to go ahead when the weather reports showed that they should be aborted. Within days of Portal’s discussing his findings with Churchill, Peirse was sent to command the nascent air forces in the Far East, and a man of quite different character and talents was summoned to take his place: Sir Arthur Harris.

When Harris took up his post at Bomber Command HQ in High Wycombe on 22 February 1942 he was forty-nine years of age, and looked like a portly and not very friendly bank manager of the old-fashioned type. His appearance completely belied his colourful past. He had left school at the age of seventeen to go to Rhodesia, with the aim of learning how to farm. By the age of twenty-one he was a farm manager, but in the interim had also engaged in gold-mining, cattle-ranching, game-hunting, and driving teams of oxen. At the outbreak of the 1914–18 war he joined the Royal Rhodesian Regiment and walked hundreds of miles through the veld of South-West Africa, hunting Germans. Determined henceforth to ‘go to war sitting down’ he returned to England, mastered the rudiments of flying in a half-hour lesson at Brooklands airfield, and was commissioned into the Royal Flying Corps. He had experience both as a night-fighter shooting down Zeppelins over England, and as a squadron commander on the Western Front. Daily from his cockpit he saw the miles of trenches and mud and struggling men central to that epic struggle, and the sight engendered in him an emphatic belief: that wars should be won from the air. That opinion was unchanged when he took the helm of Bomber Command twenty-five years later.

During the 1920s Harris commanded squadrons in the Middle East and India, and developed techniques of night-bombing with the already obsolescent aircraft then in service, among them the Vickers Virginia two-engined ‘heavy bomber’ biplane. He made the standard ascent of all senior officers through staff college, and served in the Air Ministry and in procurement in the United States, from which he wrote acerbic memoranda about the taste displayed by American military personnel for hot dogs (Harris was a gourmet – indeed perhaps, as his figure suggests, a gourmand). But in between he was Air Officer Commanding Bomber Command’s No. 5 Group, then equipped with the difficult and inadequate Hampdens. His handling of this command, evidenced by his lower than average loss rate despite at the same time showing an appetite for attack, had demonstrated his qualities to Portal before the latter asked him to serve as his deputy on the Air Staff. It was here, evidently, when the two men were in daily contact, that Portal saw in Harris the man he wanted for Bomber Command HQ at High Wycombe, for it cannot be doubted that their thinking about bombing strategy was very close, that Portal’s belief in area bombing as the way to win the war exactly chimed with Harris’s view, and that the policies which issued from the Air Staff under Portal’s leadership indubitably had input from Harris. One night during the Blitz – the night of 29 December 1940 – Harris and Portal went up on the Air Ministry roof to watch the City of London burning under Luftwaffe attack, and saw the dome of St Paul’s ‘standing out in the midst of an ocean of fire’.³⁷ After watching in silence for a time, Harris said to Portal, ‘Well, they are sowing the wind.’³⁸

* * *

The bombing force that Harris took over was still weak, but beginning to grow in strength and capability. It had recently been equipped with a new navigational device called GEE, and with increasing numbers of the new four-engined heavy bombers that first appeared on drawing-boards in 1936. Chief among them was the Avro Lancaster, a remarkably successful aircraft which became the mainstay of the bomber force, and which flew its first operational sorties in March 1942 within weeks of Harris taking office.

Much more pertinent, though, was a new directive from the Air Staff, which had been issued on 14 February 1942 in preparation for Harris’s assumption of command at High Wycombe. It stated in unequivocal terms, ‘The primary object of your operations should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civil population, and in particular on the industrial workers.’³⁹ In the summer of that year a pamphlet was dropped on Germany, purporting to be the text of a broadcast given (in German) by Harris, warning its population of the dire threat it faced:

We are bombing Germany, city by city, and ever more terribly, in order to make it impossible for you to go on with the war. That is our object. We shall pursue it remorselessly. City by city; Lubeck, Rostock, Cologne, Emden, Bremen, Wilhelmshaven, Duisberg, Hamburg – and the list will grow longer and longer. Let the Nazis drag you down to disaster with them if you will. That is for you to decide . . . We are coming by day and by night. No part of the Reich is safe . . . people who work in [factories] live close to them. Therefore we hit your houses, and you.⁴⁰

In fact Harris himself made no such broadcast; it was a propaganda exercise by ‘enthusiastic amateurs’, as Harris called them, in the Political Warfare Department, seeking to profit from the alarm in Germany caused by the first series of raids organised by Harris. The sanguinary tones of the supposed broadcast attracted criticism from those opposed to the idea of ‘saturation’ or ‘carpet’ bombing (terms more accurately descriptive than ‘area bombing’), which annoyed Harris, who took himself to be doing his best to win the war. As it happens, Harris had agreed to the use of his name on the pamphlet without reading it; but nothing in his views would have led him to disagree with its contents anyway.⁴¹

Because Bomber Command’s primary focus was now the ‘enemy civil population’, the Air Staff was eager to experiment with a bombing technique using a high proportion of incendiaries. For this purpose the old Hanseatic city of Lubeck on the Baltic coast was chosen, because it contained many timbered buildings dating from medieval times. As justification for the attack it is always said that Lubeck was the main port for iron ore entering Germany from neutral Sweden, and moreover was home to a U-boat training station. But the timbered medieval buildings were a temptation for incendiary experiments, and therefore on the night of 28–9 March 1942 a force of 234 RAF bombers took off, of which 191 claimed to reach the target. ‘The result,’ writes Denis Richards, ‘was devastation on a scale never before inflicted by Bomber Command; the later raiders could see the conflagration a hundred miles ahead.’⁴² Harris himself wrote, ‘On the night of 28–9 March, the first German city went up in flames.’ A thousand people died in Lubeck; within a month another of the wooden Hanseatic cities was in ashes, this time Rostock, 70 per cent destroyed in three raids between 23 and 26 April. Here the ostensible justification was a persuasive one – there was a Heinkel factory in the city’s southern suburbs.

The outrage in the German leadership at the destruction of these medieval towns inspired the retaliatory ‘Baedeker’ raids on Norwich, Bath, Exeter, York and (later, as a reprisal for the massive Cologne attack of 30–1 May) Canterbury. In fact the Baedeker raids began even before the Rostock bombing; Exeter was attacked on 23 April as a reprisal for the attack on Lubeck, but the fact that Rostock was attacked on the same night angered the Germans more. On 24 April Baron Gustav Braun von Sturm said, ‘We shall go out and bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide’, thus giving the series of raids their name. The Luftwaffe’s reprisals killed 1,637 people, injured 1,760, and destroyed 50,000 buildings, including York’s ancient Guildhall and Bath’s beautiful Assembly Rooms.⁴³ At this stage of the war it might have seemed as if it was not only the Luftwaffe that was sowing the wind; but the balance of power was altering inexorably against Germany in the bombing war, as Harris’s ambitions very soon showed. For Lubeck and Rostock had whetted his appetite for an even greater spectacular: a 1,000-bomber raid to wipe out a city and prove his contention that bombing can win a war by terrifying and pounding a population into surrender. It was also part of his and Portal’s motivation to erase the impression of ineffectiveness left by Peirse on the minds of the War Cabinet. Thus was ‘Operation Millennium’ – the 1,000-bomber raid on Cologne – set in motion.

The effective front-line force that Harris inherited when he first stepped through the doors at Bomber Command HQ in High Wycombe was 600 aircraft. To launch 1,000 aircraft into the sky all at the same time meant that he had to get the support of Training Command, Coastal Command, and Army Co-operation Command. He wrote to their respective chiefs to say that he, with the backing of Portal and the Air Staff, ‘proposed at about the full moon to put over the maximum force of bombers on a single and extremely important town in Germany, with a view to wiping it out in one night, or at least two’.⁴⁴ The city chosen was Hamburg, with Cologne as second choice. Preparations involved ground crews working long hours to make all the aircraft ready, among other things fitting a number of them with GEE equipment, necessitating special training for the navigators who were to use them.

The idea was that by massing 1,000 bombers over a city in the space of an hour and a half, the defences of the city – its fire-fighters and medical services as well as its anti-aircraft batteries – would be overwhelmed, and the concentration of explosive and incendiary power would lay it waste. The fear of collisions among so many aircraft was abated by organising the fleet into three separate bomber streams issued with careful timing instructions; the bombing was to be carried out from 8,000 feet, and the aircraft were loaded with a maximum capacity of incendiaries, among them a seeding of delayed-fuse 4-lb. ‘X’ bombs designed to kill or scare away fire-fighters after they had arrived at the scene of a blaze.

Despite the last-minute withdrawal of Coastal Command aircraft because of Admiralty fears about the effect of their absence on the Atlantic battle, and despite several days of delays occasioned by adverse weather, Harris at last made his choice of which target to attack. It was Cologne. At 9 p.m. on the evening of 30 May his mighty air fleet took off, carrying with it Harris’s hope of persuading his political masters to continue building the air armada he believed could win the war. Interestingly, at this point the available armada was still technically far below what Harris knew would be required for the devastation of Germany by bombs; his first 1,000-bomber fleet contained over 600 Wellingtons, and only seventy-three Lancasters.

Nevertheless the 900 bombers that reached the target between them dropped 915 tons of incendiaries and 840 tons of high explosives. More damage was done to the city on this one night than all previous air raids on it put together. Over 600 acres of the city were flattened, and its gas, water, electricity and transport amenities badly disrupted. Some 13,000 buildings were destroyed, making 45,000 people homeless; but amazingly for an attack of such magnitude, only 469 people were killed – a mark of the level of preparedness of German cities, whose air-raid precautions and shelters were extremely well organised.

British public morale was greatly boosted by the raid, and Harris’s gamble – he had committed his entire front line and all his reserves in one throw of the dice – was vindicated. He had wanted to show what a really big air raid could do, and it was from his point of view an unqualified success. In his memoirs he wrote, ‘My own opinion is that we should never have had a real bomber offensive if it had not been for the 1000 bomber attack on Cologne, an irrefutable demonstration of the power of what was to all intents and purposes a new and untried weapon.’⁴⁵

But what also convinced Churchill and the War Cabinet to continue building Bomber Command’s strength was the fact Harris did not have the resources to repeat such a large attack more than two more times that summer. The second 1,000-bomber attack was against Essen, and was largely unsuccessful because the bomber streams became spread out in time and space, and scattered their loads to little real effect over a wide area of the Ruhr. The third, against Bremen, was less successful still, proving expensive in lost aircraft because the weather was adverse and the inexperienced crews sent to make up numbers suffered badly at the German defenders’ hands.

Harris was experimenting against the day when he had the right bombers in the right numbers to prove his theory that very big bomber formations would overwhelm defences by delivering their loads in a concentrated manner over a short period of time, the aim being to cause destruction, shock and casualties on a scale that would bring about logistical paralysis and the failure of the German will to fight. But in the summer of 1942 his Command was still in the process of re-equipping with the new big bombers, and although the pace of production and training was rising all the time, it had not yet reached the levels he and Portal required. And of course problems remained. The need for better navigation and bomb-aiming was only fitfully being met, with GEE sometimes proving effective and sometimes not, and bomb-sights and aiming effectiveness still far from satisfactory. The War Diaries suggest that between half and three-quarters of bombs dropped in this period were still well off target.⁴⁶ Moreover the German defences were improving all the time; Bomber Command’s average loss rate in the first half of 1942 was 4.3 per cent of sorties, and the percentage kept rising over the rest of the year.

Nevertheless there could be no remission of the bombing war; one of the chief factors in necessitating its continuation at the highest possible intensity was that Russia was in desperate straits, and needed its Western allies to do everything they could to distract as much of Germany’s attention from the Eastern Front as they could.⁴⁷

The first task was to make Bomber Command’s efforts count for more by addressing the deficiencies in navigation. Against Harris’s initial resistance the Air Staff formed a special group, the Pathfinder Force, to achieve excellence in navigation and to lead bombing raids to their targets, there to mark them with flares and to drop incendiaries so that following bombers could use the resulting fires as aiming-points.⁴⁸

The Pathfinders had a sticky start, the first raids they led going badly astray. Indeed on the very first of them the force they led ended by bombing a village in Denmark instead of their proper target, which was a submarine yard in Flensburg on the Baltic coast. To make matters worse, German scientists had now worked out how to jam GEE. Even when the Pathfinders began to find their targets with a higher degree of accuracy, as in the attack on Nuremberg on the night of 28–9 August 1942, ill luck still seemed to dog Bomber Command’s efforts; 14 per cent of the bombers on this raid were lost, a disastrous number. The main victims were the now-ageing Wellingtons, still forming one-third of the bomber force, but failing badly in their contest with German air defences. Their replacements – the Halifaxes, Lancasters and Stirlings (these latter, with their inability to make good altitude, a rather unsuccessful aircraft) – were still feeling their way into service.

Bomber Command might have welcomed some relief in this transitional period, as new aircraft and techniques were coming on stream, but events in the wider war would not permit them to have it. The fighting in North Africa was intensifying, and the Command had to include Italy in its work. Genoa, Milan, Turin and other targets took up the bulk of its efforts in the autumn months of 1942; 1,646 sorties were flown against Italy, with a loss rate of only 3.7 per cent. The Italian raids were understandably popular with aircrews, who found the defences they encountered there much weaker than German ones.

By the end of 1942 keen-eyed spectators could see that the tide was turning in the war in almost all its aspects, and Bomber Command was not excepted. In Russia the Germans were suffering major setbacks, prefiguring the terrible nemesis of Hitler’s aggressions. While Allied arms were beginning to enjoy success in North Africa – Montgomery’s offensive at El Alamein began on 23 October, and the Anglo-American landings in French North Africa took place in November – Bomber Command was beginning to feel the effect of new technologies designed to solve its navigation and bomb-aiming problems. These were OBOE, a long-distance wireless navigational aid directing aircraft to their targets, and H2S, a radar system for recognising what lay below an aircraft, so that it could locate its target from above and aim more accurately. OBOE could only direct a few aircraft at a time, but with the Pathfinder Force finding its feet this was not too great a restriction. H2S promised greater effectiveness all round, but especially in bad weather. Gadgets were becoming available for countering German defence technology too, among them a means of jamming German radar.

These advances came not a moment too soon. Bomber Command’s loss rate had crept up to 6.7 per cent by the autumn of 1942 (recall that the maximum acceptable rate was 5 percent, and even that was too high: it meant lives as well as aircraft lost), and most of the increase was owed to the growing effectiveness of the Luftwaffe’s night-fighters. But things were changing. What Harris in his memoirs called ‘the preliminary phase’ was over; he could now contemplate mounting a proper offensive. The new heavy bombers were entering Bomber Command’s squadrons in real force as 1943 dawned. During the preceding year, leaving aside the artificially concocted 1,000-bomber raids, the average maximum force that could be sent against a target was 250 aircraft, with a large admixture of the increasingly obsolescent types. In the first months of 1943 the average was 450 aircraft, almost all of the new large four-engined type.⁴⁹ Two-thirds of the squadrons in Bomber Command were equipped with Lancasters and Halifaxes by the spring of 1943, and by that year’s end there were sixty-five operational bomber squadrons, four of them equipped with the fast, high-flying wooden Mosquitoes, which were superbly adapted for the tasks of reconnaissance, pathfinding, target marking, and photography after the event. This was a major boost in offensive power; the new heavy aircraft carried more than double the bomb load of the old – two and a half tons as against one ton. Accompanied by improved Pathfinder performance and the new technological aids, this increase in striking capability represented a sea-change.⁵⁰

And this was just part of a continuing increase in strength; the curve was reaching upwards on an ever steeper slope. By March 1944 an average of 1,000 aircraft was available each day to Harris, by then all of the heavy type.⁵¹

In all, Portal and Harris could hope for a much more effective year in 1943. Harris was especially keen to prove his theory, long since abandoned by Churchill and the War Cabinet, and by now perhaps only half held by Portal, that intense bombing could win the war by itself. Although Churchill no longer agreed with Harris on this point, he nevertheless remained convinced that bombing was an important element of the war effort. At the Casablanca Conference held at the beginning of that year (14–23 January 1943), he and President Roosevelt of the United States decided that round-the-clock bombing of Germany was an important adjunct of their aim to invade Europe, first through Sicily in 1943, and then through France in 1944.

As this last point shows, a highly important added factor was by then in the picture. This was that the United States Army Air Force had entered the bombing war against Germany too, its contributions increasing during 1943. Its efforts were tentative at first, and attended by heavy losses because its aircraft bombed by day and did not yet have long-range fighter-plane protection. But by the beginning of 1944 the American bomber force was having a powerful effect.

In fact, units of the US Eighth Army Air Force had first arrived in Britain in 1942 under the command of General Ira Eaker, but they needed time to prepare, and their first bombing raid was not carried out until 17 August 1942, a modest affair comprising eighteen B-17s under Spitfire escort, which bombed a factory near Rouen in France. By the end of the air war in April 1945 the presence of the USAAF was a decisive factor; the ‘Mighty Eighth’, as its England-based bomber force came to be called, was then deploying 200,000 personnel in the European theatre, and could put 2,000 aircraft into the air at any one time, its raids defended by the exceptionally effective Mustang and Lightning long-range fighters. But all this was yet to come.

Harris could not embark on an all-out bombing war on Germany straight away, though, because his Command was called upon to help in the Battle of the Atlantic by attacking Germany’s submarine bases. Harris believed in advance that these attacks would be a futile distraction – and so indeed they proved; the submarine pens lay under impenetrable masses of concrete, and were unaffected by bombing, though the French coastal towns and populations around them were not. Harris fumed, eager to use his new resources to pound Germany itself.

At last, in March, he was able to return his attention to this task. Between 5 March and the end of July 1943 Harris waged what he called ‘the Battle of the Ruhr’, aimed at causing maximum damage and disruption to the industrial cities of the Ruhr valley, and the workers who lived in them. It began with an attack on Essen, where the huge Krupps armament factories were situated, and continued with repeated visits to Essen, Duisberg and Bochum. In the longer nights of the early part of the battle, Harris sent his bombers elsewhere in Germany also – to Berlin, Kiel, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Mannheim among other targets – but as the days shortened, making the longer flights into Germany more hazardous, he concentrated more intensively on the Ruhr, and caused great material damage to its towns: Dortmund and Mulheim were devastated, as were Wuppertal and Elbefeld, and Bochum and Oberhausen were not much less severely handled. In the attack on Elbefeld on 24–5 June, in which 630 bombers took part, more than 1,800 people were killed.

If anything showed the increasing power of Bomber Command’s attacks, it was the fact that when 600 of its aircraft bombed Cologne on the night of 3–4 July, they did more damage than the previous year’s 1,000-bomber raid, in the process killing 4,400 people. A repeat attack five nights later added greatly to the process of ‘dehousing’ the city’s population; the two raids destroyed the homes of 350,000 people in all. One of the express aims of the campaign was to create paralysing logistical difficulties for the Nazi authorities in having to deal with so many people dead, injured, bereft of homes and domestic resources – and of course to reduce the effectiveness of the survivors in their factory work.⁵²

It seems impossible to believe that these attacks could not have had an effect on industrial output and therefore the German capacity to wage war. Yet – in ways and for reasons to be discussed later – whatever the disruption and inconvenience, until close to the end of the war German industrial production continued to rise. Bomb damage to factories was repaired within days or at most weeks, and output resumed.

Even the most spectacular of the bombing achievements of 1943 – the Dam Buster raid – did not have the desired effect of crippling German industrial activity. The raid was an amazing feat of technology coupled with great flying skill and courage. Its heroes were Barnes Wallis, the eccentric genius who invented many unusual and sometimes effective devices of war, in this instance the celebrated ‘bouncing bomb’, and Guy Gibson – who won the VC for the feat – and his crews, who had to fly very low into the teeth of anti-aircraft fire to drop their bouncing bombs accurately. Eight of the nineteen aircraft that carried out the attack were lost; 52 out of their 133 aircrew were killed, and three captured.

In the event, the breaches in the Mohne and Eder dams (the Soper dam could not be breached) did not shut off the electricity supply to the Ruhr industries, and although 1,294 people died in the rush of water from the breached dams, the figure is tiny in comparison to the hope that many towns would be drowned by flooding. The Official History states that ‘the total effect was small’; its chief result was to raise morale mightily at home among the war-benighted British.⁵³

If the Dam Buster raid was spectacular, the already described Hamburg attacks known as ‘Operation Gomorrah’ were equally so from Bomber Command’s point of view. What placed their measure of destructiveness and death above that of such badly hit Ruhr towns as Wuppertal and Elbefeld was the firestorm caused by the intense concentration of bombs dropped. The Hamburg experience reinforced Harris’s conviction that bombing was par excellence the war-winning weapon, and he was determined to continue his efforts to prove it.

But events elsewhere in the war prevented Harris from mounting any more ‘Hamburgs’ for the time being. The situation in Italy was poised on a knife-edge, and the War Cabinet wanted Bomber Command to turn its attention to Milan, Turin and Genoa. This was no hardship to Bomber Command’s crews; they greatly preferred north Italy to Germany. The loss rate on raids there was very low, in large part because when bombing started the defenders’ searchlights became stationary and the anti-aircraft guns stopped firing, suggesting that their crews knew where the better part of valour lay. Fighter defences in the Italian skies, likewise, were effectively non-existent.

Harris claimed that Bomber Command’s activities in Italy were the reason for Mussolini’s fall. Doubtless they were part of the reason; but there were many factors at play, and it is not clear that bombing in north Italy was individually more significant than any of those others. Allied air forces were operating over southern and central Italy with great intensity, and British and American troops were fighting their way up the peninsula. Moreover, the Italian population at large did not have, and perhaps throughout the war had never had, an appetite for Mussolini’s war. Most of the fighting done in their country was by Germans.

But when the effects of Bomber Command’s work over Milan and the other cities were surveyed soon afterwards, the extent of the damage it had caused was painfully clear. In Milan the factories of Alfa Romeo, Pirelli, Breda and Isotto-Fraschini among others had all been badly damaged; so had the city itself, and within it some of its treasures. La Scala opera house was damaged, and at the church of Santa Maria della Grazie just one wall remained standing – the wall bearing Leonardo’s mural of the Last Supper.⁵⁴

The Ruhr attacks, ‘Operation Gomorrah’, and the success of endeavours in Italy to which Bomber Command had contributed, led Churchill to write to Harris on 11 October, ‘The War Cabinet have asked me to convey to you their compliments on the recent successes of Bomber Command . . . Your Command, with the day-bomber formations of the 8th Air Force fighting alongside it, is playing a foremost part in the converging attack on Germany now being conducted by the forces of the United Nations on a prodigious scale.’ Churchill also had in mind the fact that Harris’s bombers had also achieved success in a precision-bombing raid on Peenemunde, where Hitler’s secret weapons were being developed, and had continued to inflict damage on German cities, among them Nuremberg, several times attacked and badly damaged during 1943. Harris circulated Churchill’s letter to the whole of Bomber Command, together with his reply, in which he said, ‘It is an unfailing sense of strength to us to realise that every bomb which leaves the racks makes smoother the path of the armies of the United Nations as they close in to the kill.’⁵⁵

Heartened by this exchange, Harris decided that the time had come to put his theory about the war-winning capacity of bombing to a yet fuller test. The obvious target for a ‘Hamburg’ was Berlin, which until then had not been as hard hit as the cities of western and northern Germany because of its great distance from the bomber airfields of eastern England – it was nearly twice as far away as the cities of the Ruhr. Distance meant opportunity for the German defences, especially its night-fighters, and of course it also posed greater difficulties of navigation and greater strain on the nerves of RAF crews. But as the longer nights of the autumn of 1943 approached, Harris made his plans for an assault on Berlin, and on the night of 18–19 November he launched it, calling it ‘the Battle of Berlin’. By this time he had a regular daily average of 800 bombers at his disposal, and the navigational technologies that had become available at the beginning of the year were now operating with efficiency and effectiveness. He felt that he had a real chance to show what a powerful bomber force could do. He wrote in optimistic and excited vein to Churchill saying, ‘We can wreck Berlin from end to end . . . It will cost us between 400–500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war.’

In the four months November 1943–March 1944 repeated heavy attacks were made on Germany’s capital. Much damage was done, and in just two nights of raids early on – those of 22–3 and 23–4 November – 9,000 Berliners were killed or injured. Increasing use of H2S meant that the bomber stream did not have to fly along a corridor of marker flares to their target, thus showing Luftwaffe night-fighters where to find them. And Harris’s increased resources meant that he could send decoy raids of several hundred aircraft against other cities, and also use a special force of fighters on ‘Intruder’ missions to distract the Luftwaffe night-fighters, and to jam its radar with a variety of electronic countermeasure devices which the RAF’s scientists were at constant pains to invent.

Enthused by the early promise of the Berlin campaign, Harris wrote to the Air Staff, iterating his claim that his bombers could win the war by themselves provided that Lancaster production and maintenance was given the highest priority, that the successful navigational aids now available were produced more rapidly so that all – or as many as possible – of his bombers could individually have them; and that he be allowed so to organise missions that the rate of loss be kept below 5 per cent. In effect the letter was a repeat of Harris’s consistently held view that if Bomber Command’s needs were given priority, and if he were given operational latitude, there would be no need for a land invasion of the European continent, which meant a bloody infantry war to conquer Germany. Bombing would, he insisted, do it by itself.

Churchill’s War Cabinet, and the Chiefs of Staff committee which advised it, did not stint Harris, but equally its members – Churchill included – still did not believe that bombing alone would win the war. The most they thought it would do would be to weaken Germany. And despite all the advantages accruing to Harris in aircraft numbers and technical advances, the Berlin campaign was nowhere near the success he had hoped. One reason was that Bomber Command could not even then manage to ‘wreck Berlin’ by itself. The words Harris had actually written to Churchill before the campaign were, ‘We can wreck Berlin from end to end if the USAAF will come in on it.’ This was unrealistic. One problem was that the USAAF was still not in a position to manage so deep a penetration of Germany. This, remember, was November 1943, and the long-range fighter planes needed by the American bombers for protection during their daylight attacks were only just becoming available in operational terms. At that point the Flying Fortress echelons, for all their formidable armament, were still finding their war a too costly one. Moreover, American bombers attacked by day because US policy in the European theatre remained strictly focused on precision attacks upon vital military and industrial targets, so General Ira Eaker would anyway not have been permitted to join Harris’s attempt to obliterate Berlin.

All these factors meant in practical terms that the periods elapsing between each of Harris’s attacks, even when they took place on successive nights, gave Berlin’s population time to recover, despite the great material damage to the city’s fabric. To add to the problems for Bomber Command, weather conditions were consistently against its Berlin forays, and after the promising early attacks there were a number that became diffused over target, with a rising percentage of bombs falling harmlessly in the Brandenburg countryside. On the raid of 16–17 December a disaster overtook the bombers when they returned to their bases, finding the weather there so bad that twenty-nine Lancasters crashed. Some of the crews parachuted to safety, but 140 crewmen died.

Harris’s big campaign against Berlin lasted until March 1944, and took place amidst continued heavy bombing of many other cities in Germany. It did not destroy German morale or bring the Nazi regime to its knees. Its cost to Bomber Command was high in numbers of aircraft and air crews lost; and as a result most commentators, and the Official History, conclude that ‘the Battle of Berlin’ was a failure. ‘The Luftwaffe hurt Bomber Command more than Bomber Command hurt Berlin’ was how one commentator summarised matters,⁵⁶ and the Official History’s judgement was painfully brusque in going further: ‘The Battle of Berlin was more than a failure, it was a defeat’.⁵⁷ One of the primary reasons was that the Luftwaffe’s night-fighter and ground-defence forces had proved too effective. If circumstances elsewhere were not changing, the outcome of the ‘Battle of Berlin’ would have been major grounds for rethinking by everyone involved in the RAF’s bomber campaign.⁵⁸

By February 1944 the USAAF was ready to contribute greatly more to the bomber war over Germany than had hitherto been possible. In 1943 it had made a courageous and hazardous start on its daylight mission, suffering terrible casualties during its ill-fated attacks on a crucial industrial bottle-neck in the German war economy, the ball-bearing factory in Schweinfurt. The attacks took place on 17 August and 14 October 1943, and the Eighth Army Air Force lost 120 bombers in the process. The October débâcle in effect amounted to a great victory for the Luftwaffe, which by this means forced the Eighth to suspend its daylight operations over Germany. During the course of 1943 the Eighth’s bombers increasingly received protection from P-38 Lightning and P-47 Thunderbolt fighters, fine aircraft but still not able to accompany the bombers far enough into Germany to make daylight raids less than potentially suicidal. But in the first months of 1944 the Eighth began to have at its disposal the outstanding Mustang fighter, powered by Rolls-Royce Merlin engines and capable of flying with the bombers all the way to Berlin and back. This meant that it could start making a really major contribution.

With this resource the picture changed. At the Casablanca Conference a year before, in January 1943, the Allied leaders had called for round-the-clock bombing of Germany. Harris had without success asked for it in his Berlin campaign; now at last it was going to be possible, and in a co-ordinated and cohesive way known as the ‘Combined Bomber Offensive’. Between February 1944 and the stand-down of the air campaign in April 1945 – with the important exception of the summer of 1944, when the American and British bomber forces switched to tactical (that is, battlefield) bombing in the weeks before D-Day and the summer months following it – their joint forces could together pound the German homeland, and they did so with constantly increasing ferocity.

One main target of the co-ordinated assault was the Luftwaffe, by means of attacks on the factories that produced its aircraft and spare parts. The first manifestation of the new arrangement was ‘Big Week’, commencing 19 February 1944 with an 800-aircraft night raid by RAF Bomber Command on Leipzig, home to four Messerschmitt factories and a ball-bearing plant. The Americans followed next day with 200 aircraft, a further 800 of its bombers raiding a variety of other cities at the same time. The RAF bombed the city, the USAAF bombed the factories. The pattern thus set continued for the remainder of the week, with hundreds of aircraft from Bomber Command attacking at night, and hundreds of aircraft from the Eighth Army Air Force attacking by day, unleashing an almost incessant rain of bombs on Germany. Stuttgart, Brunswick, Halberstadt, Regensburg, Schweinfurt and Augsburg were just some among the aiming-points of major raids. Augsburg’s ancient city centre – to take just one example of the effects – was obliterated in the Bomber Command attack of 25–6 February 1944.

‘Big Week’ was just the start. The combined offensive might as well be called ‘big year’, given that it continued, on either side of the D-Day period of tactical bombing, as it started – only more so. In fact when the period of tactical bombing ended and the attacks on the German homeland resumed in full force in the autumn of 1944, the effect was massively greater, because by then the Allied air forces had virtual control of the skies, and their aircraft and munitions factories had kept on producing matériel in ever greater quantities. What had happened at Augsburg at the end of February, and what happened to Frankfurt at the beginning of March – ‘a blow,’ as Frankfurt’s own municipal report put it, ‘which simply ended the existence of the Frankfurt which had been built up since the Middle Ages’⁵⁹ – was to be the fate of many German towns, bombed and so far unbombed, before the order came to stop the bombing in April 1945.

Harris did not want to switch from the area bombing of cities to tactical bombing in support of ‘Operation Overlord’, the Allied invasion of Normandy. He had consistently believed and argued that bombing would make a land invasion unnecessary; but even when, in January 1944, he recognised that Overlord was an inevitability, he protested in writing that his force was not adapted to tactical bombing and must be allowed to continue to weaken the German heartland. ‘It can be stated without fear of contradiction that the heavy bomber is a first-class strategic weapon and one of the least effective tactical weapons,’ he said in a lecture as late as 15 May 1944, given to the headquarters of 21 Army Group at which Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery was present.⁶⁰

Portal in the end had to order Harris to collaborate with the planning for Operation Overlord. At a meeting on 25 March attended by the RAF’s highest command and the scientific adviser Professor Zuckermann, a plan was drawn up for presentation to Churchill, based on the idea of bombing key rail centres in France and Belgium. The advantage was that it promised paralysis of German battlefield logistics; the disadvantage was that it risked French and Belgian civilian casualties. Portal estimated that the acceptable upper limit of such casualties would be 10,000 people. Legend has it that one of those present – Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory – remarked that he did not want to go down to posterity as a man who had killed thousands of Frenchman, to which Harris growled in reply, ‘What makes you think you’re going down to posterity?’⁶¹

Harris reserved his greatest scorn for what he called ‘panacea’ plans – plans premised on the idea that a single factor would win the war: attacks on oil facilities, attacks on ball-bearing factories, and – as in this plan – attacks on railway communications. He wrote to a personal friend,

Our worst headache has been a panacea plan devised by a civilian professor whose peacetime forte is the study of the sexual aberrations of the higher apes. Starting from this sound military basis he devised a scheme to employ almost the entire British and US bomber forces for three months or more in the destruction of targets mainly in France and Belgium.⁶²

But Harris was a military man, and once he had been given an order and had lost the argument against it, he obeyed it to his best ability. His bombers went to war on the railway network of France and Belgium on 18 April 1944, mounting sixty such attacks between then and D-Day, and earning Portal’s plaudits and Churchill’s gratitude that ‘care had been taken to avoid heavy civilian casualties’. This showed that RAF Bomber Command could conduct precision attacks avoiding civilian deaths as much as possible: a point much to be borne in mind.

In fact the tactical work of the two bomber forces was a major success overall, and in its way greatly more effective as a contribution to winning the war than the years of urban area bombing beforehand. In addition to railway centres, the bombers attacked airfields, munitions dumps and military encampments. Harris was still able to mount area attacks against a variety of German cities on moonless nights, arguing (plausibly enough) that it stopped the Germans from sending anti-aircraft defences to France. But the main thrust of the air attack was tailored to the needs of the impending invasion, including – in the immediate run-up to it – bombing of coastal batteries and defences. On the night of 4–5 June, Bomber Command dropped its greatest load of the war to date, battering the coastal defences – over 5,000 tons of bombs. The navy was shelling the same target at the same time, and between the two forces nine out of the Germans’ ten Normandy batteries were rendered incapable of sustained fire.⁶³

In the weeks after D-Day, Bomber Command flew over 3,500 sorties to interdict German communications, scoring notable successes – just one example of which, early in the invasion, was its delaying a shipment of Panzers travelling to the front by train, by precision bombing of a railway tunnel. All this work was undertaken at a very low loss rate. It included close tactical support of troops on the ground, and attacks on German naval units attempting to disrupt supplies across the Channel. Rather like its successes against the German invasion fleet of 1940, Bomber Command’s part in the invasion of 1944 might be one of its chief glories of the war.

At the time, though, Harris was itching to resume area bombing, and another panacea – a return to the idea of hurting German oil supplies – served only to irritate him. But it too was an order, and Bomber Command duly joined the Eighth in attempting to limit the flow of fuel to Germany’s tanks and aircraft. Losses were brutally high on these raids – on one of them, to Wesseling, nearly a third of the attacking aircraft were lost – and it was almost a relief to both air forces that the needs of the tactical situation recalled them from oil targets deep in Germany to military and transport targets in France.

The success of Allied air power in this period was in part a matter of sheer numbers. Between them the two air forces mustered 14,000 aircraft of all types, and the Luftwaffe faced them with 1,000. In a telling remark on this disparity in strength, Denis Richards in his history of the bombing war says, ‘So overwhelming was the air superiority of the Allies . . . that once substantial ground forces and their supplies had been successfully landed and positioned for battle, the issue could hardly be in doubt.’⁶⁴ The circumstances, remember, were that Soviet forces were making headway in the east too. The Germans were capable – and proved it – of prolonging the battle by means of their formidable abilities and determination, especially in the east where fighting to the death seemed vastly preferable to submitting to a vengeful and brutal enemy.

But the inevitability of an Allied victory was by this time – the autumn of 1944 – plain to all who could count and add. For even though at this stage of the war German military production was still increasing, it had no chance of competing with the overwhelming productive power of the Allies, chief among them the United States; nor did it have the manpower reserves to last much longer, whereas the manpower of America and the British Empire, then still just intact, was far from being exhausted. So the war was effectively won by the end of summer 1944; no one on the Allied side believed anything other than that victory was a matter of time. The Allied determination to have nothing but unconditional surrender was one factor in ensuring that seven more months of bitter fighting remained; demanding unconditional surrender leaves defenders with a sense of nothing to lose, though in fact the loss Germany thereby incurred was tremendous. It was in this period that Bomber Command dropped more than a third of the total tonnage of bombs it unleashed on Germany in the entire war; and it was in this period that it turned its attention to towns and cities until then unscathed, in search of targets where enough was still standing to make it worthwhile to knock them down.

In mid-September 1944, Bomber Command returned to the control of the Air Staff in its new combined Allied guise, having been under General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s orders for the main period of the invasion. The nights were beginning to draw in; long nights meant safer conditions for flying into Germany to bomb. Harris wrote to Churchill to say that because of the tactical support given to the ground war following D-Day, Germany itself had been given a ‘considerable breather’ and must now be attacked again, using the Allies’ vast air superiority to ‘knock Germany finally flat’. Churchill replied that although he continued to disagree that bombing could do it all alone, he liked Harris’s spirit, and encouraged him in his intent: ‘I am all for cracking everything in now on to Germany that can be spared from the battlefields.’⁶⁵

These words were music to Harris’s ears, and gave him what he needed to ignore the thrust of a new directive issued to him on 25 September, expressly requiring him to regard oil installations and communications as his primary objective, and only secondarily the ‘general industrial capacity’ of Germany, which in effect meant cities. These latter raids were meant to be carried out whenever weather or other conditions made attacks on the primary oil targets difficult. In the light of Churchill’s encouragement, however, Harris took his ‘secondary’ target orders to be in effect a carte blanche to resume area attacks. It was operationally up to him to decide whether conditions were right for precision bombing of oil installations, or whether it would be better to attack cities. He now had a mighty force; it gave him, on an average day, 1,400 bombers almost all of the best type: Lancasters and Halifaxes, supported by Mosquitoes. (By April 1945 this figure rose to 1,600 operational bombers per day.) Technology had continued to develop too, making navigation and bombing accuracy ever better. And the Luftwaffe had been defeated during the invasion months, and was now a rump of its former self.

This all meant that, from Harris’s point of view, conditions were perfect for the demolition of Germany’s cities. He did not hesitate to take advantage of them. Nothing better reveals his intentions than the fact that only 6 per cent of the bombs his Command dropped in the war’s final months were on oil targets. Harris’s superiors kept pressing him to attack oil, and he kept attacking cities: already devastated Cologne was visited by 733 bombers in the daylight hours of 28 October, by 905 bombers on 30–1 October, and by 493 bombers on 31 October–1 November. This was a bombing of rubble into powder. Losses to the attacking force were 0.4 per cent; the cities were all but defenceless.

Portal’s efforts to keep Harris’s mind on oil targets resulted in a strengthened restatement of the oil directive, issued on 1 November. Intelligence assessments then, and evaluation after the war aided by Albert Speer’s own accounts of the situation in Germany, showed that oil was absolutely the crucial consideration. Yet Harris could not be budged from his disdain for ‘panaceas’. After receiving Portal’s reissued directive he replied that weather and circumstances were the decisive factors in choosing targets, so that when weather was against precision raids on refineries and the like, ‘bombing anything in Germany was better than bombing nothing’. Moreover, he continued, although he disagreed with the ‘panacea merchants’ he was doing his best to attack oil – though there were fifteen major German cities not yet attacked, and he was convinced that completing the ‘city programme’ would be a greater factor in hastening the war’s end than anything the Allied ground forces could do. The fifteen unscathed major German cities on his destruction list included Dresden.⁶⁶

Portal replied, ‘I have at times wondered whether the magnetism of the remaining German cities has not in the past tended as much to deflect our bombers from their primary objectives as the tactical and weather difficulties you describe.’ Evidently Portal, from his more senior position, had learned to see a wider war. In response Harris had a trump card, apart from Churchill’s support; it was the claim that in the interests of his crews’ safety, he had to keep the German defences guessing about where the next attack would be; if they were all on oil installations, the defence could be concentrated, and Bomber Command losses – now very low – would rise dramatically. Portal attempted yet again to get Harris to focus on oil, and the quarrel between them escalated – until Harris forced Portal’s hand by hinting that Portal should dismiss him if he, Portal, disagreed with the way he, Harris, was running his war. Portal replied soothingly, saying that he could of course continue to ‘flatten some at least of the cities Harris had been naming’⁶⁷ but (rather forlornly) trusting that Harris would do his best on oil.

Thus the cities scheduled for demolition on Harris’s list met their fate. Attacks on oil did indeed increase in January 1945, but an intervention by no less than Churchill boosted Harris’s city-demolition plan. The Prime Minister wanted Bomber Command to do something to interfere with the German retreat from Breslau in the face of the Soviet advance. Portal sought the agreement of the Allied Chiefs of Staff for a big attack on Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz, where ‘a severe blitz will not only cause confusion in the evacuation from the East but also hamper the movement of troops from the West’.⁶⁸ On 3 February the US Eighth Air Force attacked Berlin as part of this endeavour, mounting one of their biggest raids: 1,000 bombers, with railway and administrative sites as their primary targets. The devastation was enormous and the German authorities said that 25,000 Berliners were killed. After ten days of bad weather the next major effort took place – this time against Dresden.

Eight hundred RAF bombers attacked on the night of 13–14 February 1944; and the next day and the day after, the Americans followed with 300 and 200 aircraft respectively. The Americans aimed at the railway marshalling yards, but the RAF night attack of the 13–14 used a stadium in the city centre as its aiming-point. The majority of bombs dropped in Bomber Command’s night attack were incendiaries, 650,000 of them. The firestorm that resulted wiped out the Baroque city, and killed somewhere in the region of 25,000 people.⁶⁹

The destruction of Dresden was an epochal moment. Suddenly and markedly, attitudes to the whole strategy of area bombing changed among those who had supported or at least tolerated it throughout its employment. An outcry went up in Germany of course, but the first effect was the shock felt in the United States when the words of an RAF intelligence officer were quoted by an American war correspondent covering Allied HQ. The RAF officer told a press briefing that the Allied Air Chiefs were employing a strategy of ‘deliberate terror bombing of German population centres as a ruthless expedient of hastening Hitler’s doom’.⁷⁰ The words reached front pages in the United States, but were censored in England.

But the risk that public concern over the destruction of Dresden would escalate into a major problem for the Allied governments was defused by something even more horrifying: the news of what was found when Belsen, Buchenwald and other camps were liberated by Allied troops. Newsreel footage from the concentration camps hugely revived anger and hostility towards Germany. For many in this mood, the area bombing in general and the destruction of Dresden in particular seemed no more than just punishment.

Churchill, however, had for some time been pondering the possibility that Germany and its army might be needed in a forthcoming struggle against the Soviet Union, and news of the destruction of Dresden gave him disturbing second thoughts. In the weeks that followed Dresden, other historical cities found themselves subjected to seemingly arbitrary attack, their residents bemusedly convinced that they were bombed for the simple reason that they had not already been bombed, and that the huge number of RAF bombers needed something to do (the USAAF bombers were still mainly attacking oil and transport targets – and helping to win the war thereby). Such cities as Worms, Mainz, Würzburg, Hildesheim, Gladbeck, Hanau and Dulmen were among them.⁷¹ These facts seemed cumulatively to weigh on Churchill’s mind. No doubt too Sir Anthony Eden, his Foreign Secretary, and others had been making him think more carefully about the post-war world, and about the problems of reconstruction and social order in post-war Germany in particular. At last he wrote to Portal and the other Chiefs of Staff on 28 March, in a minute quoted by the Official Historians: ‘It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land. The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.’⁷²

The effect of this minute has been a source of controversy ever since, and will be discussed again in the course of these chapters. But area bombing virtually ceased after Churchill sent it, and the last raid by RAF heavy bombers took place just over three weeks later, on 25–6 April.

As soon as Bomber Command’s war was over, it began the much more agreeable humanitarian task of ferrying relief supplies to the devastated regions of Europe, and bringing prisoners of war back home to Britain.

The main thrust of this story has so far been about RAF Bomber Command for the good reason that until early 1944 it carried the bulk of the air war to Germany. In 1943, but especially from early 1944, the US Eighth Air Force joined it as a major player, and to the American intervention is owed the destruction of the Luftwaffe in the air by combat, and its disablement on the ground by choking its fuel supplies.

As noted already, the attitudes and strategies of the Eighth Army Air Force differed both officially and in practice from that of Bomber Command. Where most of the latter’s campaign consisted of area bombing of population centres, the Americans attempted more precise targeting, flying by day so that they could see the marshalling yards, bridges, oil plants and factories they were aiming to hit. They did not eschew area bombing entirely in the European theatre of war, but officially it was not their way.

When elements of the US Army Air Force began arriving in Britain in 1942 the USAAF overall commander, Lieutenant-General ‘Hap’ Arnold, the commander of its forces in Britain, Major-General Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz, and the commander of the bomber groups in those forces, Brigadier-General Ira Eaker, were all of one mind, both with each other and with Portal and Harris, about the war-winning potential of bombing. But the Americans differed greatly from their British counterparts in their view of how that was to be done. For them the right way was the destruction of key aspects of the enemy’s industrial capacity. For the British, after the failures of the early years of the war, it was by attacking enemy ‘morale’.

The American strategy of bombing in daylight was justified by their belief that the massive firepower of their aircraft, flying in tight ‘boxed’ formations, would keep enemy fighters away. The Flying Fortresses carried heavier-calibre guns than did British aircraft – .5 as opposed to .33 – and more of them, providing overlapping fields of fire from the tail, the upper, lower and beam waist positions, and the nose. The power of the .5 machine gun was formidable, and much respected by Luftwaffe fighter pilots. But the latter quickly got the measure of the way American bomber formations sought to defend themselves, and the Americans as quickly therefore learned the shortcomings of their tactics. This was the main reason why the Eighth’s attack on Germany itself, apart from the catastrophic Schweinfurt raids of 1943, had in effect to wait until Mustang escorts were available to protect their raids from January 1944 onwards.

Because their greater protective plating and armament added weight and reduced space, the American aircraft carried at most only half the bombing load of the RAF’s heavies. This was true when the mainstay of Bomber Command was the Wellington, when the Eighth Air Force was arriving and making its tentative start in 1942; and the disparity was greater still when Bomber Command’s superlative Lancasters were the mainstay of the British attack, with the Eighth continuing to operate B-17 and B-24 Fortresses. (American air forces in Europe and North Africa did not receive the B-29 ‘Superfortress’, which operated only in the Pacific theatre.) But great bomb weight was not necessarily a decisive factor in precision bombing, and nor was exceptionally large numbers of aircraft. Because of the demands on the USAAF in North Africa and the Pacific, its concentration of aircraft in the European theatre did not reach high levels until 1944.

For all these reasons, therefore, it was RAF Bomber Command that did the main work in pounding Germany for most of the war, and that is why histories tend to devote more pages to its activities. But in doing so, they overlook the crucial role of the US Eighth Army Air Force in defeating the Luftwaffe. It is worth repeating that the Eighth did this by attacking the factories that produced it, by fighting it out of the air, and – crucially – by bombing the sources of the fuel it needed to fly, which was the single most significant factor in grounding the Luftwaffe in the closing phase of the war.

But they also overlook the astonishing contrast between the strategy of the American bombing campaign in Europe and the strategy of the American bombing campaign over Japan. Hereby hangs a tale. For whereas American bombers in Europe concentrated on precision attacks, over Japan they resorted to wholly indiscriminate area raids.

A bombing campaign over the home islands of Japan was not an option for US forces until the Mariana Islands were in their possession. From the autumn of 1943 efforts were made to attack Japanese factories in Manchuria and Kyushu from bases in China, but the effort was a limited one, partly because the B-29s had to compete with Chinese forces for supplies of fuel and bombs being brought laboriously from India. That meant they could only mount a couple of strikes each month, and the overall effect of these efforts was minor. When in November 1944 long-range attacks could be launched against the Japanese islands from Tinian, Saipan and Guam, the China-based B-29s were transferred to join the campaign.

But it was in March 1945 that the main thrust of sustained American heavy air attacks against Japan really began. They were seen as subserving both the primary objective of forcing Japan to surrender without an invasion, and reducing the Japanese ‘will to resist’ as a preliminary to invasion should one prove necessary. The remit given to the USAAF was ‘disruption of railroad and transportation system by daylight attacks, coupled with destruction of cities by night and bad-weather attacks’⁷³ In the event, the city attacks came first; the ‘urban area attacks were initiated in force in March 1945, the railroad attack was just getting under way when the war ended [in August 1945]’.⁷⁴

The reason for the delay between November 1944, when the airfields on the captured Marianas became operational, and March 1945, when the area bombing of Japanese cities began, was one of logistics: at first the bombers available in the Marianas were few, and the Japanese fighter resistance was still significant enough to limit their activities. The small forces of bombers dropped their loads in daylight from very high altitudes – 30,000 feet – in an effort to disrupt Japanese aircraft production, but at best they managed to get only 10 per cent of their bombs near their targets.

In March 1945 the strategy changed. The remit described above was issued, and more aircraft had become available for its realisation. It was also by now recognised that Japanese fighters were far less effective at night; so the area-bombing campaign started with night-time incendiary attacks on the four principal Japanese cities of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe, all of them made of wood. The bombers flew in at low altitude – 7,000 feet – which allowed them to carry heavier loads of incendiaries, and to bomb more accurately. The commander of XXI Bomber Command was General Curtis E. LeMay, to whom the credit is given for devising the strategy of low-level night attacks. He ordered his B-29 Superfortresses to be stripped of some of their guns so that they could carry even more incendiaries.

The first attack took place on the night of 9–10 March 1945. It was against Tokyo, which received 1,667 tons of incendiary bombs on fifteen square miles of its most densely populated districts. They were burned to the ground in a ferocious firestorm that killed more than 85,000 people.⁷⁵ The death and destruction here was greater than that caused by either of the atom bombs dropped in August that year on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the most destructive of the area attacks apart from the atom bombings, but the others that followed – in which over 9,000 tons of incendiaries fell on the remaining three principal cities, destroying thirty-one square miles of them – were devastating enough.

Over the next five months General LeMay extended the area-bombing campaign across Japan. In all, according to the US Strategic Bombing Survey for the Pacific theatre, nearly half of the built-up areas of sixty-six Japanese cities was destroyed. Adding the casualties from the atom-bomb attacks, a total of 330,000 people were killed and a further 460,000 injured. ‘The principal cause of civilian deaths,’ says the US Survey, ‘was burns.’⁷⁶

The consummation of the area bombing of Japan was of course the dropping, on 6 and 9 August 1945 respectively, of single atom bombs on each of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Between them the two atomic blasts killed 100,000 people and destroyed half the buildings in each city. The US Strategic Bombing Survey paid particular attention to the effects of these attacks, given the immense curiosity of the US government about the capacities of its new weapon – a curiosity for which there were significant reasons, some obvious and some controversial. The Survey Report descends to detailed scrutiny of such things as the effect (for example) of the difference made to radiation burns by whether the victim was wearing clothes or not. Authorities in Washington were especially interested in the Survey’s conclusion that ‘the damage and casualties caused at Hiroshima by the one atomic bomb dropped from a single plane would have required 220 B-29s carrying 1,200 tons of incendiary bombs, 400 tons of high explosives, and 500 tons of anti-personnel fragmentation bombs, if conventional weapons, rather than an atomic bomb, had been used’.⁷⁷

The atom-bomb attacks cause grave concern for many about the morality of United States area bombing over Japan, just as the firebombing of Dresden does for RAF Bomber Command and the US Eight Air Force, which accompanied it. These attacks stand out because of special circumstances – the beauty and cultural importance of Dresden; the first use of the stupendous power of the atom as a weapon. But they do not differ in principle from the firebombings of Tokyo and Hamburg, or any other area-bomb attacks on German and Japanese cities. Except, perhaps in one respect: that if area bombing is a moral crime, then the bombings in the last six months of the war in both the European and Japanese theatres of war have what lawyers call an aggravated character – an intensified moral questionability, partly because victory was no longer genuinely doubtful, and partly because the motives for dropping the atom bombs might have been additional to realisation of the Allied war aims regarding Japan.⁷⁸

Such is the story of the bombing war. The next task is to see what effect it had on those beneath the bombers and their bombs in Germany and Japan.