also at some bomber stations, headed ‘STOP BOMBING CIVILIANS’, together with a demand from the C-in-C for the identification and indictment for treason of its authors, essentially for highlighting inconvenient truths.
Portal replied on the 9th: ‘It does not appear that prosecution of the authors for circulating [this pamphlet] among civilians would have the slightest chance of success. No court would be likely to hold that it was an offence to advocate that bombing should be confined as far as possible to military objectives. You suggest that this pamphlet comes under the heading of subversion when addressed to an individual in the Service. Even if this is technically correct I do not think it would be prudent to maintain in public that a pamphlet such as this, maintaining a moderately-worded statement of the case against civilian bombing, is likely to incite aircrew to disobey orders … We can however reduce the likelihood of such opinions gaining ground by emphasizing in our publicity industrial damage rather than the destruction of civilian dwellings.’ The RAF’s chief of staff replied to another incontinent note from the C-in-C of Bomber Command: ‘I feel bound to tell you frankly that I do not regard it as either a credit to your intelligence or a contribution to winning the war. It is in my opinion wrong in both tone and substance.’
How did Harris retain his job until 1945, when he displayed an unreason and insubordination that few other senior officers would have dared to indulge? He possessed in full measure the quality of ‘grip’ indispensable to successful commanders in war. Propaganda elevated Harris into a famous figure, and such people become ever harder to sack. He was a man of steel, certain of his purposes when many others, including Portal, wavered and doubted about how the air offensive should best be conducted. ‘Peter’ Portal, as he was known to intimates, possessed an intellect unusual among service officers of any rank, including chiefs of staff. He was a brilliant diplomat, especially in conducting relations with the Americans, whom Harris privately regarded with contempt. But he was also often indecisive. Portal did not oppose area bombing, indeed presided over its inception. He merely favoured leavening fire-raising attacks on cities with precision strikes whenever suitable targets could be identified, and means found to hit them.
Nobody in high places was sufficiently assured of the superior merit of any alternative strategy, or of any more effective commander at High Wycombe, to remove Harris. Later in the war, extraordinary though it may seem when hundreds of bombers continued to fly forth nightly to broadcast death and destruction, the prime minister lost interest in the air offensive: it is striking how little mention Bomber Command receives in the final volumes of Churchill’s memoirs. Once the great land campaigns got under way, armies and the fate of nations entirely eclipsed air forces as the focus of his attention. In the early months of 1943, however, Harris was near the zenith of his fame and importance. He was playing a role more conspicuous than that of any other British commander towards encompassing the destruction of Nazism. Without Harris, without Bomber Command, until June 1944 there would have been only Gen. Sir Bernard Montgomery and his Eighth Army, the North African and thereafter Italian ‘sideshows’.
In January 1943, when President Franklin Roosevelt and the US chiefs of staff met Churchill and the British chiefs in newly liberated Casablanca, the British achieved one of their last diplomatic triumphs of the war, before American dominance of policy and strategy became explicit. The US team unwillingly accepted that there would be no Western Allied invasion of north-west Europe that year. Instead, there would be amphibious assaults on Sicily and probably thereafter Italy, together with a ‘combined bomber offensive’ on Germany by the two air forces. The consequent so-called Casablanca Directive ordered British and American air chiefs: ‘Your primary aim will be the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.’
In the event, no ‘combined’ offensive took place; instead, there was a competition between the US and British air forces. Sir Arthur Harris paid mere lip service to Casablanca’s emphasis on refined targeting. His aircraft continued to heap fire and destruction on Germany’s cities by night, while in daylight the USAAF claimed to pursue precision bombing of identified weak points in the Nazi war economy. Because, in reality, American bombing proved highly imprecise, especially in poor weather, hapless German civilians saw little distinction between the rival strategies. Moreover, intelligence about enemy industry remained a weakness of the strategic air offensive from beginning to end.
In February 1943, Harris stood on the brink of a new campaign to deploy almost the entire resources of his Command against the industrial cities of north-west Germany, which would become known as the Battle of the Ruhr. The enthusiasm of others – within the Ministry of Economic Warfare, the Air Ministry, the Admiralty and even Downing Street – for more selective targeting roused his scorn. Portal, Bufton and some other airmen regarded extremely seriously the Casablanca Directive: they strove to identify and attack choke points in the German industrial machine. Any such proposals, however, encountered savage resistance from Harris’s headquarters at High Wycombe to the diversion of aircraft from ‘area bombing’. Until the last weeks before Guy Gibson and his men set forth on what would become the most applauded operation of Bomber Command’s five-year campaign, its commander-in-chief wanted ‘his’ aircraft, ‘his’ offensive, to have nothing to do with it.
3 THE ‘PANACEA MERCHANTS’
As far back as October 1937, RAF planners identified Germany’s water resources – dams and reservoirs – as a vulnerability in the Nazi industrial machine. Bomber Command initially focused on nineteen Ruhr power stations and twenty-six coking plants, which its staff believed could be destroyed by three thousand bombing sorties. This would allegedly bring Nazi war production to a standstill, in return for an anticipated loss of 176 British aircraft. Then the Air Targets Sub-Committee of Major Desmond Morton’s Industrial Intelligence Centre took a hand, highlighting the dependence of electricity generation, mining and coking activities upon water supply. Morton’s cell urged that the mere breaching of two dams, the Möhne and the nearby Sorpe, could achieve the desired outcome, a prospective war-winner, for far less expenditure of effort.
It was meaningless, however, for planners to focus upon any target system unless means existed to attack it, which they certainly then did not. Destruction of the Möhne, composed of almost a million cubic feet of masonry, was admitted to be ‘highly problematic’ at a time when the RAF’s heaviest aircraft, the Heyford, carried only 500-lb bombs. In March 1938 it was agreed that the significance of the dams made it worth exploring ‘newly-developed weapons’ with which they might be attacked. But, as the engineer Barnes Wallis often later complained, while the RAF was doctrinally committed to strategic bombing, its planners gave negligible attention to the ballistic challenges involved in the demolition of large structures.
Britain’s airmen were imbued with a faith that the mere fact of subjecting an enemy nation to bombing would cause its people, and even perhaps its industrial plant, to crumble before them. ‘In air operations against production,’ wrote Gp. Capt. John Slessor, a future head of the RAF, in 1936, ‘the weight of attack will invariably fall upon a vitally important, and not by nature very amenable, section of the community – the industrial workers, whose morale and sticking power cannot be expected to equal that of the disciplined soldier.’ The intention of Britain’s airmen to play a decisive and independent role in achieving victory over Germany relied for fulfilment more on expectations of the havoc that terrorisation of civilians would wreak than on any rational analysis of the weight of attack necessary to cripple the Nazi industrial machine.
In the cases of the Möhne and the Sorpe, experts at the Air Ministry’s research department at Woolwich warned: ‘If the policy to attack dams is accepted, the [Ordnance] Committee are of the opinion that the development of a propelled piercing bomb of high capacity would be essential to ensure the requisite velocity and flight … Even then its success would be highly problematical.’ Subsequent debate concluded that, given the low standard of aiming accuracy achieved by RAF bomber pilots in peacetime, before they were even exposed to enemy fire, a successful
