that suited themselves, their countries’ immunity from invasion from 1941 onwards conferring the luxury of choice, such as the Russians never had, about where and when to engage the Wehrmacht. British caution exasperated US chief of the army George Marshall and his peers. Yet the old prime minister and his chiefs of staff recognised fundamental truths: that Britain and America were sea powers, confronting a great land power. It would be madness to attempt an amphibious return to the continent without command of the air, which could not be secured any time soon. The voice of Churchill, backed by the intellects of his professional military advisers, Portal and Alanbrooke foremost among them, was decisive in delaying D-Day until June 1944, saving hundreds of thousands of American and British lives. Meanwhile, it was vital to the prestige and morale of the Western Allies, and especially those of Churchill’s nation, that Britain should be seen to be carrying the war to Germany by any and every means within its power.
2 HARRIS
A consequence of the Western Allies’ cautious grand strategy, rendered necessary by their slow industrial build-up, was that the Anglo-American air forces, and especially heavy bombers, constituted their most conspicuous military contribution to the defeat of Germany between the fall of France in June 1940 and the invasion of Normandy. Bomber Command’s pre-war estate of twenty-seven British airfields had by 1943 expanded to over a hundred stations, while the RAF’s overall strength grew from 175,692 personnel to over a million men, including a significant proportion of the nation’s best-educated adolescents.
Some senior officers, including the USAAF’s Gen. Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, C-in-C of Bomber Command, believed that air attack on Germany could render redundant a land invasion of the continent. 1943 was the year in which British warmakers drafted plans for Operation Rankin, whereby troops would stage an unopposed deployment to occupy Germany in the event that some combination of bombing, Russian victories and an internal political upheaval precipitated the collapse of the Nazi regime, an abrupt enemy surrender.
Yet, while Winston Churchill committed a lion’s portion of Britain’s industrial effort to the air offensive, he never shared the airmen’s extravagant hopes for it. For a season in 1940, when Britain’s circumstances were desperate, he professed to do so. Once the threat of invasion receded, however, he recognised that, while bombing could importantly weaken the German war machine, it could not hope to avert the necessity for a continental land campaign. The airmen’s most critical contribution until June 1944 was to show Churchill’s people, together with the Americans and – more important still – the embattled Russians, that Britain was carrying the war to the enemy. The prime minister recognised, as his chiefs of staff often did not, the value of ‘military theatre’ – 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
