Bomber Command

Max Hastings

• Verlag: Zenith Press
• Jahr: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781610588638
• Thema: History
• Thema: World War II

Bomber Command's air offensive against the cities of Nazi Germany was one of the most epic campaigns of World War II. More than 56, 000 British and Commonwealth aircrew and 600, 000 Germans died in the course of the RAF's attempt to win the war by bombing. The struggle in the air began meekly in 1939 with only a few Whitleys, Hampdens, and Wellingtons flying blindly through the night on their ill-conceived bombing runs. It ended six years later with 1, 600 Lancasters, Halifaxes, and Mosquitoes, equipped with the best of British wartime technology, blazing whole German cities in a single night. Bomber Command, through its fits and starts, grew into an effective fighting force. In Bomber Command, originally published to critical acclaim in the U.K., famed British military historian Sir Max Hastings offers a captivating analysis of the strategy and decision-making behind one of World War II's most violent episodes. With firsthand descriptions of the experiences of aircrew from 1939 to 1945 - based on one hundred interviews with veterans - and a harrowing narrative of the experiences of Germans on the ground during the September 1944 bombing of Darmstadt, Bomber Command is widely recognized as a classic account of one of the bloodiest campaigns in World War II history. Now back in print in the U.S., this book is an essential addition to any history reader's bookshelf.

I

In the Beginning, Trenchard

British Bomber Policy, 1917–40

“From the time when the first experiments were made in air power during the First World War until the great Bomber Command attack on Dresden and the discharge of the first atomic bombs by the USAAFs thirty years later, the whole development and direction of strategic bombing was a highly and continuously controversial matter…. The controversy raged over the whole field of the offensive which embraced questions of strategic desirability, operational possibility, economic, industrial and moral vulnerability, and legal and moral responsibility….”

—Official History of the Strategic Air Offensive against Germany 1939–45¹

ONE CLEAR MAY MORNING IN 1917, a formation of German Gotha bombers droned high over the Kent coastal town of Folkestone and the neighbouring army camp of Shorncliffe. In the few minutes that followed, their bombs killed 95 people and injured 175. The seventy-four British aircraft which took off to intercept them were able to shoot down only one Gotha. Three weeks later, on 17 June, twenty-one Gothas mounted a second daylight attack. Seven bombers attacked small towns in Kent and Essex, while the remaining fourteen flew on in diamond formation to attack London itself. 162 people were killed and 432 injured. A third attack on 7 July killed 65 people and injured 245. It was the inauguration of strategic air bombardment, the first significant attempt by an air force to take advantage of this third dimension of warfare to pass above protecting armies and navies and strike direct at the nation of the enemy.

The consternation, indeed panic, provoked by the German attack was considerably greater among British politicians and in the Press than among Britons at large. All governments in wartime are nervous about the effects of unexpected shocks on national morale, and the Gothas came at a moment when mounting war-weariness was apparent in Britain. The bombings seemed to signal the inception of a new, ghastly age, vividly foretold as far back as 1908 by England’s most celebrated contemporary prophet, H. G. Wells, in his book The War in the Air. Extraordinary efforts were made to strengthen the air defenses, especially around London. Fighters were recalled from France. Guns and searchlights were deployed for the first time in depth. Lloyd George, the Prime Minister, appointed himself and one of the Empire’s foremost heroes, the rehabilitated Boer General Smuts, as a committee of two, to study how best Britain’s air forces could be reorganized to meet the German threat; above all, to consider whether the national interest was best served by maintaining the air forces as subordinate corps within the British Army and Royal Navy. In the event, Smuts conducted the inquiry single-handed, with the assistance of army and Royal Flying Corps officers. The Smuts Report, as it became known, inspired the creation of the Royal Air Force as an independent service alongside the army and navy. More than this, Smuts sowed the germ of the seed of the vast British strategic air offensive in the Second World War.

Somewhere in the midst of his rather cursory investigation, Smuts became captivated by the vision of air power. He was fascinated by the concept of a New Force in warfare—this, at a moment when in France the Old Forces were achieving the most spectacular and ghastly debacle in their history. His report, completed on 17 August 1917, would form the foundation on which British airmen would build a complete theory of warfare in the next twenty years:

An air service [Smuts wrote to the War Cabinet] can be used as an independent means of war operations. Nobody that witnessed the attack on London on 11 July could have any doubt on that point…. As far as can at present be foreseen there is absolutely no limit to the scale of its future independent war use. And the day may not be far off when aerial operations with their devastation of enemy lands and destruction of industrial and populous centers on a vast scale may become the principal operations of war, to which the older forms of military and naval operations may become secondary and subordinate.

The magnitude and significance of the transformation now in progress are not easily recognized. It requires some imagination to realize that next summer, while our Western Front may still be moving forward at a snail’s pace in Belgium and France, the air battle front will be far behind on the Rhine, and that its continuous and intense pressure against the chief industrial centers of the enemy as well as on his lines of communication may form an important factor in bringing about peace.

Here indeed was a vision, and one which sent as great a shock of anger and scorn through the ranks of the generals and admirals as of excitement and enthusiasm through those of the airmen. At another time, the combined hostility of the War Office and the Admiralty would have been enough to kill the Smuts Report without notice. But in the autumn of 1917 the political stock of the leaders of the two established services had sunk to a very low ebb indeed in the eyes of the British Government. Service objections to Smuts’s recommendations were interpreted as rearguard actions to prevent any transfer of forces from their own commands. Lloyd George overruled them. He approved the creation of an “Independent Air Force” to begin bombing operations against Germany at the earliest possible moment. He authorized the build-up of a powerful fighter force in England to meet the German bomber threat. He decreed the union of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service to form the new Royal Air Force from 1 April 1918. The RFC’s commander, Sir Hugh Trenchard, was brought back from France to become the first Chief of Air Staff.

To the Government’s satisfaction, this extraordinary wave of activity produced results. The Germans abandoned daylight bombing in the face of stiffening opposition, and for the rest of the war, troubled England with only desultory night attacks by Gothas and Zeppelins. Although the merger of the RFC and the RNAS had provoked such heat at high level, on the squadrons themselves it was accomplished without excessive ill will. Trenchard, who had earlier opposed the creation of a Royal Air Force as an independent service, now surprised and confused everybody by the fierce single-mindedness with which he adopted the care of his fledgling against the army and navy’s rapacious designs. His initial tenure as Chief of Air Staff was short-lived, for he quarreled with the Air Minister and returned to France to command the Independent Air Force—the Allies’ embryo strategic bombing force—for the remaining months of the war. The 543 tons of explosives his aircraft dropped on Germany before the armistice made only a pinprick impact on the enemy, but enormously enlarged Trenchard’s vision of the potential of air power. At the end of the war, after a change of Air Minister, Trenchard returned to England not only as Chief of Air Staff, but as the messiah of the new form of warfare. Trenchard’s passionate commitment to the concept of a bomber offensive against an enemy nation was to dominate the Royal Air Force for more than twenty years.

At the armistice, the RAF was larger than the British Army had been in 1914. But in the first months of peace, this vast organization was almost totally dismantled. Like the other two services, the air force found its annual financial estimates cut to the bone. Indeed, throughout the 1920s it would have been difficult for the RAF to resist total dismemberment but for Trenchard’s invention of the new scheme of “Air Control” for some of the wilder frontiers of the Empire, notably Iraq. Trenchard persuaded the Government that rather than maintain expensive standing garrisons of troops and dispatch punitive expeditions against recalcitrant tribesmen, the RAF could keep them at bay with occasional prescriptions of air attack. In the next twenty years, the RAF’s only operational experience was gained dropping bombs, usually without opposition, on the hillside villages of rebellious peasants. Local Political Officers remained skeptical of Air Control and its achievements, but Trenchard and his followers were convinced that, in the years between the two world wars, it was only their well-publicized activities abroad which sufficed to save the RAF from extinction at home.

Between 1920 and 1938 the air force commanded only an average 17 percent of Britain’s paltry defense budget. The RAF share fell to a low of less than £11 million in 1922, and never passed £20 million a year until the great drive for rearmament had begun, in 1935. There was no question in Trenchard’s mind of trying to do everything, of seeking a balanced force. With such tiny resources, he concentrated them where he believed that they mattered—on his bomber squadrons. He was convinced that fighters had no chance of effectively countering a bomber attack, and he grudged every fighter unit that he was compelled to keep in being as a sop to public and political opinion. Trenchard’s air force was to be devoted decisively to strategic rather than tactical ends.

In my view [he wrote, in an important and controversial memorandum to his fellow Chiefs of Staff in May 1928] the object of all three services is the same, to defeat the enemy nation, not merely its army, navy or air force.

For any army to do this, it is almost always necessary as a preliminary step to defeat the enemy’s army, which imposes itself as a barrier that must first be broken down.

It is not, however, necessary for an air force, in order to defeat the enemy nation, to defeat its armed forces first. Air power can dispense with that intermediate step, can pass over the enemy navies and armies, and penetrate the air defenses and attack direct the centers of production, transportation and communication from which the enemy war effort is maintained…. The stronger side, by developing the more powerful offensive, will provoke in his weaker enemy increasingly insistent calls for the protective employment of aircraft. In this way he will throw the enemy on to the defensive and it will be in this manner that air superiority will be obtained, and not by direct destruction of air forces.

In the bitter struggle to retain a raison d’être for the RAF as an independent service, Trenchard argued that aircraft provided an opportunity to wage an entirely new kind of war. The army and the Royal Navy greeted his prophecies with memoranda in which conventional courtesies did little to mask withering scorn. But Trenchard was uncrushable. Although often completely inarticulate at a conference table, “Boom” (a nickname his remarkable voice had earned for him) possessed much personal presence and the power of inspiring great affection. Through the 1920s he gathered around himself in the middle ranks of the air force a body of passionate young disciples, not only captured by his vision of air power, but devoted to the old man himself. Portal, Harris, Cochrane and Slessor were among the most prominent. The Hon. Ralph Cochrane, for example, who would be Harris’s outstanding wartime group commander, met Trenchard in Egypt one day in 1921. He had joined the Royal Navy in 1908 and flown airships on convoy escort during the First World War. He had once tried to hit a German submarine with four 8-lb bombs without successfully convincing either himself or the enemy of the efficacy of air power. He was still an airship man when “Boom” entered his life. “Young man,” said the fatherly Trenchard, “you’re wasting your time. Go and learn to fly an airplane.” Within a few years of this Damascene conversion Cochrane was a flight commander in Iraq, where Harris was converting his Vernon troop carriers into bombers on his own initiative, and experimenting with the prone position for bomb-aiming.

In the years between the wars, air power and the threat of bombing offensives against great cities became a matter of growing public debate and concern. It provoked an enormous literature, much of it fanciful, on bombers and air defense, on air-raid precautions and the morality of bombing. It is generally accepted that the godfather of air power was the Italian General Guilo Douhet, whose book The Command of the Air was published in 1921. Douhet ranks alongside Trenchard and Billy Mitchell in America, the most important advocates of assault on the heart of a nation by self-contained, self-defending bomber formations. Captain Basil Liddell Hart and Colonel J. F. C. Fuller would come to be regarded as the foremost British military thinkers of the twentieth century, and in later life became formidable opponents of Bomber Command’s strategic air offensive. But in 1920 Fuller foresaw that in the next war “Fleets of aeroplanes will attack the enemy’s great industrial and governing centers. All these attacks will be made against the civil population in order to compel it to accept the will of the attacker….”² Liddell Hart wrote in 1925, in his book Paris, or the Future of War:

A modern state is such a complex and interdependent fabric that it offers a target highly sensitive to a sudden and overwhelming blow from the air…. Imagine for a moment London, Manchester, Birmingham and half a dozen other great centers simultaneously attacked, the business localities and Fleet Street wrecked, Whitehall a heap of ruins, the slum districts maddened into the impulse to break loose and maraud, the railways cut, factories destroyed. Would not the general will to resist vanish, and what use would be the still determined fractions of the nation, without organization and central direction?³

Here, from a soldier, was a prophecy that Trenchard himself might have hesitated to match. The concept of limitless terror from the air grew throughout the 1920s. In 1925 the Air Staff were asked by the Government to project the casualties in the event of an attack on Britain by the air force of France, with whom British relations were then strained almost to breaking point. They answered: 1,700 killed and 3,300 wounded in the first twenty-four hours; 1,275 killed and 2,475 wounded in the second twenty-four hours; 850 killed and 1,650 wounded in every twenty-four hours thereafter. This was merely a crude projection of the casualties suffered during the German surprise attack of 1917. The War Office was highly critical of the figures, but the public—to whom such forecasts eventually filtered through as rumor—was appalled. There were further anxious questions from politicians. Trenchard and his colleagues declared insistently that the only effective precaution against an enemy bomber attack was the possession of a British bomber force capable of inflicting comparable damage on an enemy. Fighter defense was useless. As late as 1934 the RAF’s fighter squadrons were still outnumbered two to one by the bomber units, and depended heavily on reservists and auxiliaries to provide pilots on mobilization. The Battle of Britain would make the fighter pilot the most glamorous figure in the RAF, but in the years between the wars the bomber pilots considered themselves the elite of the service.

The most celebrated writers of the day launched forth upon the horrors of air attack with a passion a later generation would bring to those of the atomic bomb. Beverley Nichols and A. A. Milne denounced the barbarity. The Times declared in 1933 that “it would be the bankruptcy of statesmanship to admit that it is a legitimate form of warfare for a nation to destroy its rival capital from the air.” Bernard Shaw reflected gloomily on “cities where millions of inhabitants are dependent for light and heat, water and food, on centralized mechanical organs like great steel hearts and arteries that can be smashed in half an hour by a boy in a bomber.”⁴ The Royal Navy, which still clung to the conviction that war could be waged with chivalry, was foremost in the assault on the RAF and its weapons. Admiral of the Fleet Lord Beatty wrote a letter to The Times. Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond delivered a lecture to the Royal United Services Institution in which he declared gloomily that “frightfulness, expressly repudiated in the case of sea warfare, appears to be a fundamental principle in the air.” There was also, however, a highly articulate air lobby, championing the cause of the new force. The airmen themselves argued—as they would reiterate repeatedly for the next half century—that in the age of industrialized mass slaughter it was ridiculous to draw a line at some artificial point between a tank factory and the front line, at which the tank and those responsible for it became morally acceptable targets. A body called “The Hands Off Britain Air Defence League” was distributing pamphlets in 1933: “Why wait for a bomber to leave Berlin at four o’clock and wipe out London at eight? Create a new winged army of long range British bombers to smash the foreign hornets in their nests!”

Air Power has its dreams [wrote one of the RAF’s foremost public advocates, a civil servant at the Air Ministry, Mr. J. M. Spaight]. It knows that its qualities are unique. The armory of the invincible knight of old held no such weapon as that which it wields. It dreams of using its powers to the full. It dreams of victory achieved perhaps by a swift, sudden, overwhelming stroke at the heart and nerve center of a foe, perhaps by a gathering wave of assaults that will submerge the morale and the will to war of the enemy people, perhaps by ventures as yet but dimly apprehended. Its mystery is half its power….⁵

In a remarkable passage of his book Air Power and Cities, the lyrical Mr. Spaight recommended an interesting moral compromise to validate air bombardment of cities: “The destruction of property not strictly classifiable as military should be legitimized under strict conditions designed to prevent loss of life, e.g. by confining bombardments of establishments tenanted only by day (as many large factories are) to the hours of darkness….”

In the last decade before the Second World War, it is no exaggeration to say that the threat of aerial bombardment and the possibilities of defense against it became a public obsession in Britain and France—in Germany propaganda had already too far eclipsed free debate to allow any similar national neurosis to develop. Americans alone could view aerial bombardment with detachment, conscious that no likely enemy bomber force possessed the range to reach their shores. For the rest of the civilized world, it was a horrifying vision that the apostles of air power laid before them. Baldwin, Britain’s former Prime Minister and a prominent member of the Coalition Cabinet, confirmed the worst fears of the world when he addressed the House of Commons on 10 November 1932, winding up a debate on international affairs:

I think it is well for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through. The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves. I just mention that … so that people may realize what is waiting for them when the next war comes.

One cannot help reflecting that, after the hundreds of millions of years during which the human race has been on this earth, it is only within our generation that we have secured the mastery of the air. I certainly do not know how the youth of the world may feel, but it is not a cheerful thought to the older men that, having got that mastery of the air, we are going to defile the earth from the air as we have defiled the soil during all the years that mankind has been on it. This is a question for the younger men far more than for us. They are the men who fly in the air.

“By 1933, and even more by 1934, Baldwin had developed what can best be described as the ‘Armada Complex,’ ” in the words of a political historian of these years.⁶ “The Defense of the Realm—particularly from the air—was his personal and almost total obsession.”

Thus the Royal Air Force and its bombers stood at the very heart of the political and public debate between the wars. Yet in 1941, after two years in action, it was to come as a paralyzing shock to Britain’s leaders to discover that Bomber Command was not only incapable of bombing a precise objective, but even of locating a given enemy city by night. The theory of the self-defending daylight bomber formation had been tested and found wanting over the Heligoland Bight and would be finally exploded by the American 8th Air Force. Seldom in the history of warfare has a force been so sure of the end it sought—fulfillment of the Trenchard doctrine—and yet so ignorant of how this might be achieved, as the RAF between the wars.

As a bomber squadron commander, Arthur Harris explored such techniques as marking a target at night, but was compelled to abandon the experiment because the flares then available were quite inadequate for the task. Harris and his contemporary Charles Portal, who would be Chief of Air Staff for much of the war, competed fiercely year after year for squadron bombing trophies, but the exercises for which these were awarded bore as much relation to the reality of wartime bomber operations as a funfair rifle-range to the front line at Stalingrad. Although efforts were made to improve the quality of weather forecasting, there was no attempt to face the fact that wartime...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Prologue: Norfolk and Heligoland Bight, 18 December 1939
• Chapter I: In the Beginning, Trenchard: British Bomber Policy, 1917–40
• Chapter II: 82 Squadron, Norfolk, 1940–41
• Chapter III: 10 Squadron, Yorkshire, 1940–41
• Chapter IV: Crisis of Confidence, 1941–42
• Chapter V: The Coming of Area Bombing, 1942
• Chapter VI: 50 Squadron, Lincolnshire, 1942
• Chapter VII: Protest and Policy, 1942–43
• Chapter VIII: 76 Squadron, Yorkshire, 1943
• Chapter IX: The Other Side of the Hill: Germany 1940–44
• Chapter X: Bomber Command Headquarters, Buckinghamshire
• Chapter XI: Conflict and Compromise, 1943–44
• Chapter XII: Pathfinders: 97 Squadron, Lincolnshire, 1944
• Chapter XIII: “A Quiet Trip All Round”: Darmstadt, 11/12 September 1944
• Chapter XIV: Saturation
• Chapter XV: The Balance Sheet
• Appendix A: Bomber Command sorties dispatched and aircraft missing and written off, 1939–45
• Appendix B: Specifications and performance of the principal aircraft of Bomber Command and Luftwaffe night-fighters, 1939–45
• Appendix C: The Target Indicator Board at Bomber Command HQ, High Wycombe, at the beginning of February 1945
• Appendix D: Comparison of British and German production of selected armaments, 1940–44
• Appendix E: Schedule of German cities subjected to area attack by Bomber Command, 1942–45
• Appendix F: Comparison of Allied and German aircraft production, 1939–45
• Bibliography and a note on sources
• Notes and references
• Glossary of ranks, abbreviations and codenames
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Dedication
• Photo Insert
• Copyright Page