into a cloud of flame and smoke. One of our mates tried to get in to help them out, but he got badly burnt and in the end he had to jump out.
‘At the end of the terraced houses there was a little brick wall and I went down there to find the navigator and pilot of the Mosquito. They had come straight through the top of the aircraft canopy and had hit this wall. They were just lying there. That’s something which shook me. They were a real mess, but they were still completely in their flying kit, which virtually held them together. And when they put them in a blanket it just folded up into a ball … I have never seen anything like it.’
The next morning was warm and sunny. A group of airmen sat on the lawn ruminating on the events of the night before. Jack Watson was among them. One of the men turned to another. ‘You know, I could see you sitting there in that house burning like that last night.’ It was crass thing to say, but it had been meant as a joke. ‘We used to say stupid things like that,’ Jack explains.
They were young and gauche, and gallows humour provided another release. But the recipient of the comment did not see the funny side; he stood up and walked away. They never saw him again.
Sam Harris (front row, right) and crew
At the end of March 1944 Britain had yet to emerge from a long and harrowing winter, but the newspapers were still trying to kindle optimism in any way possible. The front page of the Daily Mirror led with the story of the Russian Army’s progress across southern Poland under the headline ‘Soviet Racing for Czech Border’, while ‘“Eat Your Words” challenge to MPs’ reported a piece of political brinksmanship by Winston Churchill on the home front to help shore up his coalition government. The Daily Express also found time to report the story of Harry P. Mclean of Windsor, Ontario, who threw $1,000 into the street from his fourth-floor window. ‘I like to see people happy,’ he said.
Happiness on the home front was still in short supply. The British people were enduring their fifth year of war, and rationing had bitten deep. Londoners had just come through a ‘Baby Blitz’, Hitler’s attempt to repeat his terrorisation of the capital four years earlier by dropping 2,000 tonnes of explosive, and feared further attacks. One story that was not reported was the recapture of 73, and subsequent execution of 50, of the 76 Allied prisoners-of-war who had escaped through a tunnel at Stalag Luft III.27
Against this backdrop, Sir Arthur Harris made his way to his operations room in an underground bunker at RAF High Wycombe just before 9 a.m. on 30 March. As he did each day, he greeted the officers of Bomber Command’s Air Staff with a brisk ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’28 sat down at his desk and lit the first in a chain of cigarettes. Peering over his half-moon glasses, he would then growl, ‘Did the Hun do anything last night?’ before taking his opening drag. He would occasionally substitute ‘Boche’ for ‘Hun’, but his dislike of the enemy was never less than clear.
Harris was driven; he took his responsibility so seriously he never dreamt of delegating it, and didn’t take any leave in three and a half years. He was determined to carry out his job to the best of his ability and bore the enormous strain that accompanied it without complaint. Those who worked with him lived in fear of his thunderous roar whenever they were late or failed to answer a question, and he made frequent enemies of politicians and Air Ministry civil servants. But he did not care. Winning the war was what counted.
The three children from his failed first marriage might have found him similarly uncompromising. They were cut from his life – or at least the version of it he gave to his biographer, Henry Probert. Yet the man who made the most combat-hardened Wing Commanders tremble melted at the sight of his five-year-old daughter. Jackie was a regular visitor to High Wycombe, and Joan Dally, a WAAF Corporal in the HQ Met Office, was occasionally asked to look after the little girl when her mother went shopping. ‘Others might have been in awe of him, but I saw a different side of Harris – a kindly father of a little girl. I would sometimes go into his famous office and Jackie would be playing there. I could see by the way he looked at her that he adored her.’29
Once his question about the activities of the Germans had been answered, the morning conference followed a set pattern. Harris read out the report of the previous night’s operations. That March morning there had been no major raids for three nights because of poor weather conditions, so it was brief.
He was followed by Magnus Spence. Making predictions about the weather over a distant patch of Europe based on scant information was a challenge that Spence and his meteorologists faced daily. Harris took a special interest in the forecasts. Joan Dally remembers his frequent visits to the Met Office. ‘He would come in and say things like, “Now, when are you chaps going to find me some decent weather so I can send my boys out?” He always referred to the aircrew as “my boys”. You could tell by the way he spoke about them how much he cared for them. He’d say, “I don’t want my boys to run into bad weather tonight.”’
Spence’s report encouraged Harris to believe in the possibility of some cloud cover towards the south of Germany, and a half moon at its height between an hour past sunset and the small hours of the morning – when the bomber stream would be reaching its target.
Next to speak was a representative of the US Eighth Army Air Force. At the beginning of this offensive Harris had promised a decisive victory with the help of US bombers, but the Americans remained committed to daytime raids and, in public at least, rejected the concept of area bombing. Their heavily defended B-17s – each had six gun ports – flew in tight formations and sought to destroy the Luftwaffe on sight rather than hide from them in the dark. And they boasted that their Norden bombsight was the best in the world.
Though it also brought heavy losses, daylight – in theory – would allow them to locate their targets without the need for Pathfinders. Even though cloud cover regularly obscured their objectives, they steadfastly ignored the facts and maintained that their methods were more accurate, and that their only targets were military sites, factories, docks and other strategic industries. The reality was very different, though; as historian Anthony Verrier points out, precision bombing was a myth, ‘an aspiration which some crews in certain conditions occasionally achieved’.30
After hearing the morning’s reports, Harris’s conclusion was swift: there would be a major raid that night. The target would be an industrial city which had not been bombed for seven months, with factories producing tanks, armoured cars and diesel engines, a large engineering works, two Siemens electrical factories and an aircraft repair facility on the outskirts. It was also a major administrative and communications centre, and the iconic location of huge pre-war rallies filmed by Leni Riefenstahl and screened across Germany. Triumph of the Will both charted and enhanced the rise of the Nazis and the creation of the personality cult around its leader, imbuing the city with symbolic as well as strategic importance.
Nuremberg was a beautiful city with a rich history. Its medieval quarter still boasted an imperial castle which dated back to the twelfth century. Its darker side was reflected in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which formally reduced the status of Jews in Germany to that of non-humans. Hitler had described it as ‘the most German of German cities’, and championed the building of a host of monuments there, designed by Albert Speer, to celebrate the Thousand Year Reich. Destroying these, the railway lines and army barracks, scrambling the lines of communication and obliterating the factories where many of the 426,000 population worked, would strike a uniquely damaging
