CHAPTER 17
Britain's part in the bombing campaign against Germany was a product of strategic thinking dating back to the First World War. It became the only way of striking back at Germany after the Fall of France, and area bombing was repeatedly endorsed not only by the Chief of the Air Staff Sir Charles Portal and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, but by the Anglo-American Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was not, then, the independent creation of its most active protagonist, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur 'Bomber' Harris of the RAF's Bomber Command. Remarkably, some of the most vocal critics of Bomber Command clamoured for a premature invasion of Europe, even though as Albert Speer observes in the following pages – and as Stalin himself acknowledged – the bombing campaign constituted, in itself, a Second Front. It was brave of The World at War series to challenge the pious assumptions that held almost unchallenged sway in the 1960s, but as late as 1992, when a statue of Harris was unveiled outside the RAF's church, St Clement Danes in London, it had to be placed under twenty-four-hour guard to protect it from vandalism. I met Sir Arthur near the end of his life and it struck me then, and remains my conviction today, that he was the victim of the same sort of sleight of hand by which the political elite diverted blame for the shocking losses of the First World War on to Field Marshal Haig and his generals. It is grotesque to blame service personnel compelled to redeem the errors of politicians for the casualties they incur and inflict. One may also fairly wonder about the ethics of those who only voiced objections to the bombing campaign once it finally began to kill more Germans than it did Commonwealth aircrew, and who so strongly advocated, as an alternative the sacrifice of countless Allied lives in a premature invasion of Europe.
AIR CHIEF MARSHAL SIR ARTHUR HARRIS
Commander-in-Chief of RAF Bomber Command
Night bombing was necessary because we had no armament that could face up to fighters in daylight, we only had the .303 machine guns. You can't really put a .303 machine gun against fighter cannon, which is the sort of thing that the Germans learned in the Battle of Britain.
GROUP CAPTAIN 'HAMISH' MAHADDIE
RAF Bomber Command Pathfinder Force
We started with a very small, compact Air Force of quite experienced people – but experienced in the basic flying sense, not to any degree in wartime flying. So we had to learn from the very first day and this was a very expensive business in aircrew and aircraft.
AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS
There was hardly any Bomber Command to be efficient at that time. They had few aircraft, they had no navigational aids at all and if you try to be with no navigational aids in daylight it's a bit difficult, but in the darkness it's impossible. The first of the navigational aids arrived just after I got to Bomber Command. What had happened before then was no surprise to me at all, it wouldn't have surprised anybody who's ever flown an aeroplane in the dark or in the daylight. People talk a lot about picking out targets and bombing them, individual small targets – in the European climate? I've come to the conclusion that people who say that sort of thing not only have never been outside, but they've never looked out of a window. We've had in the past two months a very nice mild English winter – how many occasions, looking out of the window or walking out in the garden, could you see up to eighteen to twenty thousand feet? Maybe on two or three days at the most. On how many occasions can you guarantee that you could see down through it, four or five hundred miles away in the other end of Europe? That was the situation – there was no possibility of hitting individual targets consistently until we'd got the navigational, electronic aids that would show those targets up in the dark or through clouds.
MAJOR WILHELM HERGET
German fighter ace with 58 night kills
I did night-fighting from January 1942 and in the beginning you came very often during the full moon and during moonlit times. And that was bad because when the moon was there we could easily see the bomber but the bomber could see us exactly as easily. You had to know what you were attacking, that it was a bomber and not another Messerschmitt or a Junkers 88. I followed a Ju 88 for twenty minutes thinking it was a Lancaster and got very close before I saw it was a Ju 88. I saw underneath only four exhaust flames and thought, Ah, four motors. Nearly a terrible mistake, but that's how it was.
GROUP CAPTAIN MAHADDIE
In the first bombing year, into 1940, three bombs in every hundred got within five miles of the aiming point but not very much more. It wasn't very much better for the next two years until it was quite obvious that we could not find German targets in the face of increased German opposition and all the devices that the Germans had invented by that time. So we had to have a very highly professional look at the method of navigating to the target, then identifying the target and then leaving the load that was carried on the target.
AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS
People easily forget the fact that for over a third of the year we could hardly get in Germany at all because there wasn't any darkness that would take you any further than the German north coast. So if you started on a system of targets you find yourself confronted by these very short summer nights, you can't get to the far distant ones. If you succeed in knocking five out of six, and the sixth one is a very important one, you spend the whole of your time standing by to try and get a favourable opportunity to get at the sixth one, then the nights got too short again, all the first five that you got at would be rebuilt and you had to start all over again.
ALBERT SPEER
Hitler's Armaments Minister
In some way the most important mistake was to get us accustomed from attack to attack to the heavier bombing. If there would have been a longer time between raids and you would have done with one stroke, very heavy bombing, then possibly the result on our morale would have been heavier.
AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS
I never engaged in these idiotic pamphlet-dropping exercises. They only served two purposes really – they gave the German defences endless practice in getting ready for it, and apart from that they supplied a considerable quantity of toilet paper to the Germans.
GROUP CAPTAIN MAHADDIE
At the time the Chiefs of Staff were almost committed to carving up Bomber Command as we knew it. It wasn't a very big force, just a few hundred aircraft, but the majority of the aircraft were obviously destined for the Navy through Coastal Command and the majority of the remainder would have gone to the Middle East. Harris devised this 'Thousand Plan' – he scraped up a thousand aircraft, not only from his command but he begged and borrowed them from every command, and he was able to demonstrate with that one raid on Cologne how valuable strategic bombing could be to the war effort.*39
MAJOR HERGET
About your British pilots – I really can say they were more than brave, and what they did in reality helped you win the war. Once when they won the Battle of Britain, when only the pilots of the Spitfires and the Hurricanes were defending their country, and the next time the bombing campaign because they were destroying in the night, which was very harmful because the people couldn't sleep. The difficulty in what you had to do at first was starting as early as possible, flying one after another – we had it very easy, we could just shoot down one after another. So you made the bomber stream shorter – in twenty minutes they were gone.
AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS
There was no greater risk than putting up a thousand than there was in putting up twenty or thirty, except the proportion of casualties would probably be less, and that proved to be the case. I was trying to show them what could be achieved with something approaching an adequate force, and that it would be achieved without abnormal casualties. Actually the casualties turned out precisely the same as my operation-research people said would occur, and they were considerably lower than anybody else expected. The risk would be heavier sending over fewer machines for the defences to compete with. One of the main ideas of sending over the bigger attack was to overwhelm the defences, and that's exactly what occurred.
FRAU CHANTRAIN
Cologne Red Cross
When the sirens sounded everyone went into air-raid shelters and it was a short attack. The sirens sounded about ten o'clock and in half an hour Cologne lay practically in ruins – I came out of the air-raid shelter and Cologne was a wall of flames. I tried to get to my station but it was very difficult to reach it because Cologne was built with pretty narrow streets and the balconies were on fire and falling in the streets. The digging parties hauled the dead people out and laid them at the side of the road. Those who had been killed by high-explosive bombs were propped up, their skin was a grey, pallid colour and their hair stood off their heads like wire nails. And of those who had died of incendiaries you could only find bits of bone, which were gathered up in washtubs, big zinc baths. The cruellest thing was when you had a friend in these houses; you saw the bones lying there or you knew they were underneath. That was unbelievably horrible. Mothers came to me who had themselves very severe burns who were scarcely capable of life, with their children in their arms, and begged for help. We saw it was pointless – the children were beyond help. The soldiers on leave from the front came and asked after their relatives and you had to tell them they are dead – your wife is dead, your children are dead, your grandparents are dead.
ALBERT SPEER
We really didn't expect in 1942 such a heavy raid would take place. We were only used to smaller attacks and when I got the news that about thousand bombers were attacking Cologne it was incredible for us, but it was accepted afterwards and we tried to convince Goring who didn't want to believe it. In Cologne the morale of the people was not shattered too much, it was more like shock, a shock which passed away.
GROUP CAPTAIN MAHADDIE
If you couldn't get the German worker in his factory it was just as easy to knock him off in his bed, and if his old Granny on the seat by the door got the chop that's hard luck, it doesn't bother me in the least. I'll tell you what bothers me a lot more, which is four or five million Jews that were pushed into gas ovens. Something that also affected me and lasted me throughout the war was Rotterdam, an undefended town that burned for ten days and was the first route marker that Bomber Command ever used. You'd see those fires from the Humber, or you saw them from the Wash, and that was a pretty terrific thing to watch a city burn for a week.
AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS
My interpretation of Point Blank*40 was to bomb individual targets when we could find them, and hit them. It was to give first priority to the requirements of the Army. Area bombing very often took place because we were trying to find some particular targets and the Americans them-selves would be the first to admit that very often their bombing was area bombing. I contend that we did just about as much accurate pin-point bombing when we could, when conditions served, when the navigational aids were there to make it possible, just as much as the Americans did.
ALBERT SPEER
I know that there is much argument about this question of bombing was a good or bad. One can't overestimate the results of the bombing attacks enough, because what is always forgotten is that we were forced to build up a strong defence and all these anti-aircraft guns which were stationed in every town, because we never knew what town would be the next. We had all the ammunition stocked there for a heavy air attack of several hours: they had to shoot for several hours, and not run out of ammunition. But apart from that, the damage done was diminishing my production I should say by twenty or thirty per cent and that much more output of tanks or ammunition and of U-boats and so on, of course, would have been, for you, quite visible counter action.
AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS
The majority of people in this country were only too glad to see Germany get a dose of what she'd been handing out to everybody else, hoping she would get away with it. Obviously you always get some people that object to anything. After all a lot of people, including myself, have the strongest objection to war. People talk about morality and war – tell me some action of war that is moral? People say you mustn't do anything to civilians – good Lord, what's happened to civilians in every besieged city of the past? Haven't they always been starved to surrender and bombarded into surrender? What's the difference between bombarding them with guns and bombarding the cities where they're manufacturing the weapons and ammunition?
GROUP CAPTAIN MAHADDIE
Before we had H2S [ground-mapping radar first used in January 1943] we had extremely good navigators, selected navigators, and this was the essence of the whole Pathfinder thing. These navigators were able to get much closer to the aiming point than we had previously. Then we laid great lanes of flares, hundreds of flares, and even if we missed the aiming point we could identify some very positive feature on the ground like a lake or a bend in the river, and from there we could creep on to the target and put flares down, different-coloured flares. Then later on we got target indicators and they fell to the ground looking just like a bunch of grapes or a chandelier. The Germans called them Christmas trees.
ALBERT SPEER
I was often on the flak tower to see the air raids and the most impressive was perhaps the helplessness you felt that all the anti-aircraft guns which were shooting didn't reach the planes. The planes you could see in the searchlight, but they followed the raid undisturbed and then you saw what we called the Christmas trees that was the sign of the Pathfinders and then you saw the blast of bombs very far away and you knew then that there had been something disastrous to us.
AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS
The effectiveness of the first Hamburg raid was due to at last getting permission to use something we'd had in the bag for a long time, which was known as 'window' – the dropping of clouds of aluminium paper strips, which completely upset not only the German location apparatus but also their gun-aiming apparatus. Later on in the war, we had a similar argument trying to get the magnetron valve released to us. We could have done much better if we'd had it released much earlier, but we got it in the end. That was an essential aid to bombing small targets under the weather conditions which normally prevailed. There's always reluctance, and very wrongly placed I think, on the grounds that if you spring a surprise on the enemy he may make one himself and come back at you with it. War isn't done that way. If you've got something that's a surprise, use it before the other fellow's learned how to, because you can be quite certain that if you're being very clever over some electronic gadget, the enemy are not such fools that they are not probably on the same lines and likely to have the same thing or something even better coming up in the lift shortly*41
BEN WITTER
Hamburg journalist
I was standing in my house and looked for a moment through the window. I heard no sirens but it was no longer night, it was light as day and as I saw this the first bombs began and I took my parents into our cellar, which was not reinforced and it seemed as though its walls were moving all the time. When we didn't hear any more bomb explosions I climbed up the stairs of the cellar and found that the roof was on fire and with the help of other people put it out. Then I went on my bicycle to the editorial office and couldn't see anything because the daylight which the so-called Christmas trees had created was over and it was night again and there were clouds of smoke. The next day people made a pilgrimage to this part of the city and were very curious. They thought it was the heaviest attack but then came even heavier attacks. I didn't go on my bicycle again but by car and I saw people running away, they were burning like torches and our car was jolting over dead people. Because of the heat the bodies had shrunk and we thought they were children, but they were adults. This attack was concentrated on an area where many working men lived but which also contained a lot of factories. The whole area was crossed by canals and most of the people tried to leap down into them but the water was on fire. It was burning because very many small ships had exploded and oil had been released into the water and people who were themselves on fire jumped into it. Some kind of chemical must have been in it because they burned, swam, burned and went under.
ALBERT SPEER
The population after heavy attacks like Hamburg were extremely shocked, but the shock is not going above a certain degree. I think this degree is overridden by events, when people can't take any more they're just getting numb, there's no more psychological reaction, and when I was seeing them going through the streets in the morning to work they were going like ghosts, they looked terribly bad but in some way like automata they went there. I had this experience mainly in the Ruhr valley where almost every night there were bombing alarms for weeks and weeks and only when it was pouring rain they maybe had one night's sleep. But work went on there in spite of that, morale was still there. But one can't say it was morale – it was German.
MAJOR HERGET
Colonel Hajo Herrmann had the idea of using bomber pilots on Messerschmitt 109s to fly at night because they knew about instrument flying, but a bomber pilot is not a fighter pilot and when he is looking mainly at his instruments he is not looking outside. We were fighters, we were looking outside the whole time. The instruments even in the nighttime didn't interest me. I watched them when I was starting and when I was landing, but during the whole flight only to see if I was flying in the right direction. 'Wild Boar' was good if the weather was good but it was wrong to order them to fly in the 109s when the weather was bad, when they were landing in the wrong place or they jumped out. They jumped because they didn't know where they were or they didn't know how deep the clouds were. Very many pilots died because they didn't jump.*42
FLIGHT LIEUTENANT WILLIAM REID, VC
61 Squadron Bomber Command, night of 3 November 1943
Although I was hit in the shoulder it just felt like a numbness, you know, hit with a hammer and not painful or anything. I didn't see any sense in saying I was wounded in case they all thought, He'll pop off any minute now. We flew on again and set the same course but I had no windscreen in front. In some ways this was lucky because my head had been cut up above the helmet and it was bleeding pretty badly, but the cold air coming in – it was minus twenty-eight degrees – froze it up, made it chill up quickly, so it stopped bleeding. I thought it was flak but the rear gunner said, 'Oh, no, it was an Me 110,' and I thought at the time, You should really have said right away. Well, the next time it was again just as startling and trying evasive action we probably lost about another two thousand feet and we couldn't talk because the intercom was shot away. There were some shells going off which I found out later had gone right down the plane and made quite a number of holes in the plane and they hit the magnetic compass and the giro compass. The trimming tabs had been shot off the plane and this meant that you had to hold the stick right back. Well, because my shoulder was wounded this arm was pretty weak and the engineer held it with his other uninjured hand and so we combined to keep the plane straight and level.
WYNFORD VAUGHAN-THOMAS
BBC radio reporter, Berlin raid 3 September 1943
The night comes down and suddenly you take off and in the dusk you go tearing down the runway and you rise and slowly you circle. You still have your riding lights on and far off in the distance a single searchlight guiding you, moving back and forth, and you look behind you and the sky is full of fire coming up to join you. Aircraft rendezvousing in the sky and then the flood started to pour out away into this mystery of Europe. From there on all lighting went out and you could see back in the night sky, rising and falling behind you, the wings of other Lancasters. You got nearer and nearer the searchlight screen right along the Dutch coast and suddenly you were among it. In those days nineteen thousand feet was terrific; we were wearing oxygen masks and as we had on board a four thousand-pound bomb we couldn't get much higher and so you had to go in among these waving searchlights. And honestly I felt like a shrimp moving among luminous seaweed, and up the beams came pumping the flak.
MAJOR HERGET
I saw the bomber very late and I tried to attack, but I was much too quick. I had about double the speed and could only dive and go underneath and then – how to brake without brakes? You had to wait until the plane came along again and I had to fly so slow until the Handley Page could overtake me that I nearly could not handle my Me 110 any more. Then I saw the Handley Page and I was more than surprised when I saw something like a big cannon coming out from underneath and it was pointing at me, so I thought they must have seen me and now I must shoot as quickly as possible. This I did and then the plane exploded because it was full of bombs and then I fell from six thousand five hundred metres and I nearly had to jump out of my plane because I was spinning around all the time. I said to my navigator, 'If we pass two thousand metres then we jump out. I'll tell you, I'll give the order.' We had just passed the two thousand-metre mark on the altimeter when the plane went into a vertical dive and I took the stick and tried to get it out of the dive by force. In the meantime the moon came out and I saw already the tops of the trees when I was able to pull out and climb again. If you have to leave the Messerschmitt by parachute there are two tails, which is difficult if you are spinning. I know very many pilots who have lost an arm, a leg or were dead from hitting the tail. So I was very happy to be still alive and after that I was telling all my pilots never, never to attack the bombs in the body – shoot in the motor.
WYNFORD VAUGHAN-THOMAS
You look and behind you could see the whole sky clearing and a mass of black specks following you. Ahead, in a bullring of light, you could see the whole of the Berlin searchlights and again this awful moment when you crawled in among them, the whole thing was a light nightmare, there were tracer bullets going past you, there was flak coming up and we were dropping the big cookie and the ritual took over. You could hear the captain chanting, 'Steady,' and then of course, 'Bombs away.' You followed it down, it was as if honestly a jewel had been thrown on black velvet, it sparkled, it shone. The whole of Berlin looked the most beautiful dazzling sight you ever saw until you realised this was civilisation burning below you. And in that moment, a slow East Anglian voice came on the intercom saying, 'Fighter attacking, sir.' The whole aircraft seemed to be filled with fumes and the captain calmed the whole thing down, the heroism of coolness. The East Anglian rear gunner had it absolutely taped and the captain held the whole crew together. You saw the tracer of bullets drop right below the nose and another burst of gunfire and the cool voice saying, 'Night-fighter shot down.' Everybody shouted, 'Isn't he lovely, there he goes,' and he went down like a burning piece of oily waste rag and my eye went lower down and it fell into this festering mess below, and suddenly the other side of the bullring came up, cloud came round again and I realised I'd been through Berlin.
ALBERT SPEER
I don't know how much, how strong you would have been if you could succeed really in destroying Berlin, which is a large area, much larger than any other town in Germany. Theoretically if you would have succeeded in destroying Berlin as you did with Hamburg it would have been disastrous for Germany, I think that is certain. Berlin did suffer heavy raids but this was like bombing several towns, because I was in Berlin at this time: if you had a bombing on one part of Berlin the other part was not involved, the distance was too large.
AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS
The casualties in the Battle of Berlin were no more than we would have suffered if we'd gone anywhere else in Germany. People seem to forget that Bomber Command fought a thousand battles during the war and you can't succeed in every one. I'm not saying the Battle of Berlin was a defeat or anything like a defeat – I think it was a major contribution towards the defeat of Germany. After all we didn't like when six hundred acres of London went up the spout – six thousand acres of Berlin went up, and Berlin's a much smaller city than London.*43
PILOT OFFICER NOBLE FRANKLAND
RAF Bomber Command
The people I fought with in the war were in my view all heroes: they were tremendous believers in what we were trying to do. There was an amazing spirit of dedication to the task in hand; this was very moving and a tremendous inspiration. Whose idea it was you can never trace, but it was a sort of infection, and this applied to people who came from all over the world, and Bomber Command was an extraordinarily cosmopolitan sort of command. By the time I was in it about forty per cent of it came from overseas, mostly from New Zealand, Australia and Canada, but also from many other countries, and not all British. There were lots of Czechs and Poles serving in Bomber Command and the spirit of dedication was moving.
GROUP CAPTAIN MAHADDIE
Despite the fact that Harris didn't come and see us and hand out cigarettes or anything else, he sent the most amazing signals. One I'll always remember, and this was something you read out to your crews at briefing, this one said, 'Tonight you go to the big city' – that's Berlin – 'you have the opportunity to light a fire in the belly of the enemy and burn his black heart out.' Well, after the crews stopped cheering a thing like that they didn't want aircraft. Just fill their pockets with bombs and point them towards Berlin and they'd take off on their own.
AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS
There were high losses on one occasion, on a Nuremberg raid, but on other occasions the losses were not more than we expected, everybody expected, including the crews themselves. And they were the sort of losses that the ground forces had put up with in the first war, and the only reason they didn't have to put up with [them] in the second war [was] because of the bombing of Germany and the tactical bombing in front of them. And if you want confirmation of that ask General Montgomery – he knows. The boys we had were the pick of the litter and they were just full of guts and they deserved credit for what they did, and they get precious little credit for it.*44
ALBERT SPEER
Hitler's reaction to the bombing was typical for him, he always wanted to see somebody else is responsible for a failure and not him, and so in this case it was Goring who was responsible. And more, he really started to attack Goring for the failure of the air defence and I was sometimes present when he really shouted at him and was telling him that it's disastrous how he failed. But of course Goring was not so responsible. Of course the output of our industry was at its highest peak in July 1944 but that was due to the steel reserve and then the output topped and in September/October we were at the end of everything. I wrote several memorandums to Hitler in which he was told we can't continue any more. He usually said, 'You will do it' and 'I think it's not as bad as that' and 'We had many situations before which were very catastrophic and we pulled through, we will pull through this situation too.'
GROUP CAPTAIN MAHADDIE
My own interpretation of weaving was very slight. I liked to let my gunners get a good look but I didn't like to get too far off course. I just banked slightly to give the gunners a good view underneath; I moved off maybe ten degrees to port or starboard during this manoeuvre. The corkscrew was much more violent. I was discussing this with Willy Herget in Germany recently and this did put the night-fighters off because you made a very violent manoeuvre, activated by the gunner himself. If he saw a fighter closing in he immediately said, 'Corkscrew port' or 'Corkscrew starboard' and then you threw the aircraft into a quite violent corkscrew manoeuvre. Just imagine you're following round a quarter of a mile radius tunnel and you went down and then up and followed the corkscrew motion right around until you lost the fighter.
MAJOR HERGET
Usually I only had two successes in one night and then I landed, but that night I was in the middle of the bomber stream, I was flying through the propeller wash and my plane was shaking and so I dived on the first plane in front, the next to the right, the next to the left. I was shooting between the two motors, it was a Lancaster, and to the left another Lancaster, I shot again between two motors, only a short time, sometimes I needed only four to eight bullets until the plane was burning. I had five successes against aircraft with bombs on the way to Frankfurt and now on the way back I found another three. The last one was the hardest because the Lancaster saw me because I came from the direction of Frankfurt, which was one big fire. I came from right underneath and was firing in the body until it crashed to earth. At that time I was thirty-three years of age and I was not able to climb out by myself, to get out of the plane. They had to lift me out.*45
FLIGHT LIEUTENANT WILLIAM REID, VC
617 Squadron, July 1944
There was a tremendous noise and this stick of bombs came down through us from above. One of the bombs went through the port wing and the engine started to fall off and then another bomb must have gone between the cabin and the mid-upper gunner because it severed the controls. The rudders went sloppy and I shouted, 'Stand by to bail out' and then, 'Bail out' and the plane started to fall. Chunky Stewart, my engineer, handed me my parachute and then he took his own and headed into the front bay to bale out. You just open the hatch and drop out. By this time it was spinning down and this tremendous noise of engines getting faster and faster and I couldn't get out of my seat. I tried to open the side window, although the props are quite close to you there, but I couldn't get out of there either and then I forced the stick forward and got out of my seat and I remembered the dinghy escape hatch which is above the pilot, behind, and as I turned the handle in the dinghy escape hatch the whole nose must have come off because the next thing it was quietness and I was falling through the air.
MAJOR HERGET
I was shot down in the night of 14–15 June 1944 by a Mosquito, burning, sitting three minutes in the burning Ju 88 and not being able to jump out. If you're sitting in a burning plane it's a horrible feeling and I was praying to the Lord and asked him if this was my last minute. Then a voice said to me, 'If you believe, no' and in the same second my mechanic could open the door to the ground in the Ju 88 and we could all jump out.
AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS
What we've always claimed in the service was that we had asked originally for a first line of four thousand, with which we could knock out Germany. When we got down to the real bomber offensive it really only lasted for a year, with one quarter of that number. 1 know people say today, 'Bombing will never achieve what people will claim for it.' There was a long period in the peace when the people went about saying bombing can never sink a battleship – look what happened to battleships, what did any of them do except sink under air attack? They said bombing could never win a war – well, two bombs defeated Japan. It's quite true they were atom bombs but the atom bomb is only the equivalent.
URSULA GRAY
Dresden resident, post-war wife of author J Glenn Gray
The only idea was to get out in an open space and our house was situated close to a beautiful area called The Great Garden, which had lovely old oak trees, three hundred years old, and beautiful little pavilions. By that time already there were buildings falling apart and you had to make your way over stones and rubble and killed people and you just didn't care – you stepped on whatever you could just to get out and away from it all. Many other people already had gathered. They had the same idea, to get away from the burning houses, from that ocean of fire and bombing, and huddled up under the trees. While we were sitting there they sent bombs which kind of illuminated the city in red and green and for a moment it was a very strange picture. I will never forget it: it looked like the windows of a cathedral. After this raid was over the city was just an ocean of fire, thousands and thousands of people killed, killed right beside us, around us, and screams and smells. The most gruesome picture was the nakedness of the people killed by the bombing: the tornado or the air pressure of the bombs had apparently torn their clothes to shreds.
AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS
It could have been more effective if we'd had the number we'd always asked for doing the job, and if we hadn't had so many diversions. But the diversions up to a point were necessary – everything in the aid of the armies was first priority and very rightly so. I'm quite sure of one thing, with the lesson of Japan in mind, it could have been fairly simple to knock Germany out without an invading force. Whether that would have been the proper thing to do in those circumstances I don't know, because maybe the result would have been that the Russians would have finished up sunning themselves on the beaches of Spain and Portugal.