– conspicuous displays of activity that sustained an appearance of momentum, even when real attainments were modest. As the author has written elsewhere: ‘There must be action, even if not always useful; there must be successes, even if overstated or even imagined; there must be glory, even if undeserved.’ Through those apparently interminable years between Dunkirk and D-Day, again and again the BBC prominently featured in its news bulletins the words ‘Last night aircraft of Bomber Command …’ followed by a roll call of industrial targets attacked in France, Italy, and above all Germany.
In 1940–41 the RAF caused mild embarrassment to the Nazi leadership, which had promised to secure the Reich against such intrusions. Bombing nonetheless inflicted negligible damage upon Hitler’s war effort. Although more aircraft became available during the winter of 1941, poor weather, navigational difficulties and German fighters inflicted punitive casualties upon the attackers, who still made little impact on the enemy below. Thereafter, however, a succession of events took place which progressively transformed the offensive.
In December 1941 the prime minister and the Air Ministry received an independent report from the Cabinet Office, commissioned by Churchill’s personal scientific adviser Lord Cherwell, the former Professor Frederick Lindemann, analysing the effectiveness of British bombing through a study of aiming-point photographs returned by aircrew. This devastating document showed that the average RAF crew on an average night was incapable of identifying any target smaller than a city. In consequence, and after a vexed debate in which practical issues dominated and moral ones did not feature at all, British strategy changed. By a decision for which Cherwell was prime mover in concord with Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, since October 1940 head of the air force, it was agreed that instead of pursuing largely vain efforts to locate power stations, factories and military installations, the RAF would assault entire urban regions.
The principal objective would be to ‘de-house’ and frankly terrorise the German industrial workforce – break the spirit of Hitler’s people – even though the Luftwaffe had conspicuously failed to achieve this against Churchill’s nation. The new policy, known as ‘area bombing’, was never directly avowed to the public, nor indeed to Bomber Command aircrew, who were told that the RAF continued to strike at military and industrial targets, with civilian casualties an incidental, and implicitly regrettable, by-product. This was a falsehood. Between 1942 and 1945, the civilian population of Hitler’s cities was the target of most British bombing.
America’s entry into the war in December 1941 made eventual Allied victory seem certain. Until a continental land campaign began, US air chiefs were as eager as their British counterparts to demonstrate their service’s war-winning capabilities. Daylight operations by American B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators began slowly to reinforce the RAF’s night campaign. The British received early deliveries of a new generation of four-engined heavy bombers – Short Stirlings and Handley-Page Halifaxes, followed by Avro Lancasters – which progressively increased Bomber Command’s striking power. They also acquired ‘Gee’, the first of a succession of electronic aids which improved the accuracy of RAF navigation.
Finally, in February 1942 Sir Arthur Harris became commander-in-chief of Bomber Command. Britain’s inter-service wrangles and clashes of personality inflicted less damage than did those of the United States, and for that matter Germany, upon their own war efforts. They nonetheless absorbed time and energy. The Royal Navy and the RAF disliked and distrusted each other as a matter of course, rivals for resources in an ongoing struggle in which both were frequently rebuked by the prime minister. Many airmen also viewed soldiers with the disdain due to their serial record of defeats.
Harris became the most intemperate squabbler. He regarded with contempt Special Operations Executive, the covert warfare organisation for which a handful of bombers was grudgingly committed to drop arms to the Resistance in Occupied Europe. As for sailors, it was one of his favourite sayings that the three things one should never take on a boat were an umbrella, a wheelbarrow and a naval officer. He fought like a tiger against the diversion of heavy aircraft to support the Battle of the Atlantic, arguing that it was a far more economical use of force to bomb U-Boats in their German construction yards than to waste flying hours searching for them in the vast reaches of the oceans. He described the RAF’s Coastal Command as ‘an obstacle to victory’, despite the importance of its Very Long Range Liberator squadrons in countering U-Boats. Meanwhile the admirals, who had a good case in pleading for more aircraft, spoilt this by insisting that Bomber Command should repeatedly attack the Germans’ concrete submarine pens on the north-west French coast, which were invulnerable to conventional bombs, and heavily defended by flak and fighters.
Harris waged a further ongoing struggle with the Air Ministry, of which much would be seen in the debate about Germany’s dams. The C-in-C of Bomber Command was an elemental force, single-minded in his conviction that he, and he alone, could contrive the defeat of Nazism through the systematic, progressive destruction of Germany’s cities. Alan Brooke, chief of the British Army, recorded characteristic Harris testimony at a chiefs of staff meeting: ‘According to him the only reason why the Russian army has succeeded in advancing is due to the results of the bomber offensive! According to him … we are all preventing him from winning the war. If Bomber Command was left to itself it would make much shorter work of it all!’
Freeman Dyson, a brilliant young scientist who spent much of the war in the Operational Research section of Bomber Command at High Wycombe, characterised his chief as a ‘typical example of a prescientific military man … brutal and unimaginative’. Hyperbole was this glowering figure’s first choice of weapon in exchanges with those who crossed him. This became a kind of madness, and Harris a kind of madman, but in the unwelcome predicament of Britain for much of the Second World War, Churchill recognised that such a figure had important uses. Horace Walpole wrote in the mid-eighteenth century: ‘No great country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go to the lengths that may be necessary.’
Though Harris became the foremost exponent of ‘area bombing’, which has ever since been inseparably identified with his name, he was not its begetter, merely its obsessive implementer. It was widely believed, especially by soldiers and sailors, that Bomber Command’s C-in-C achieved an intimacy with Churchill, by exploiting the proximity of Chequers to his headquarters at High Wycombe, to secure support for his purposes. This view seems unfounded. The prime minister after the war described the airman as ‘a considerable commander’. He rightly judged that Harris instilled in the bomber offensive a dynamic, a sense of purpose, which it had previously lacked. He valued the airman’s skilful exploitation of public relations, conspicuously manifested in his May–June 1942 ‘Thousand Bomber raids’, of which the most famous, or notorious, was directed against Cologne.
Yet the prime minister never much liked ‘Bert’ Harris – as he was known to intimates. ‘There was a certain coarseness about him,’ Churchill observed, implicitly contrasting the airman, who set no store by social graces, with such officers as Sir Harold Alexander, a gentleman in every respect, who became Churchill’s favourite general. Harris, just short of fifty when he assumed command, was the son of an engineer in the Indian Civil Service. He spent much of his youth in southern Africa, and especially Rhodesia, which he came to love. The reverse of the coin of his force of character was a vulgarity of language and behaviour, exemplified by his observation that Britain’s generals would take tanks seriously only ‘when they learned to eat hay and fart’.
He experienced a lunatic moment in January 1943, when he became so incensed by the incidence of venereal disease among aircrew that he issued an edict, without consultation, that every diagnosed sufferer should be obliged to restart from scratch his tour of thirty ‘trips’ to Germany. This monstrous threat, rooted in a notion that shirkers were inviting infection in order to escape from operations, was withdrawn only in June, following the intervention of Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air, who overruled the C-in-C.
Nonetheless, at a time when many others to whom Churchill entrusted high commands – for instance Dill, Wavell, Auchinleck – had proved
