Bomber Boys. Patrick Bishop

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СКАЧАТЬ German submarines and bombers were wreaking terrible damage on the transatlantic convoys carrying the cargoes that kept Britain alive and threatening to sever Britain’s vital ocean links with America. Churchill ordered Portal to concentrate on attacking the yards that built the U-boats and the pens where they sheltered, as well as the factories and bases which produced and housed the maritime bombers. Bomber Command did its best against these targets, and the great German warships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst in their haven at Brest, but the effects were limited. Its aircraft were withdrawn after four months and it was left to Coastal Command and the Royal Navy, aided by improvements in technology and resources, to turn the Battle of the Atlantic Britain’s way.

      The diversion deflected Peirse from his intention to use the improved conditions of spring to systematically pursue oil targets. The ‘oil plan’ had many powerful supporters inside the Air Staff and among civilian specialist strategic advisers. They saw the destruction of synthetic oil plants, which transformed Germany’s rich coal reserves into liquid fuels and lubricants, as a quick way of bringing the enemy to its knees. The plan would swing in and out of favour throughout the war. But the prescription was easier than the practice. Despite the claims of official propaganda, when oil targets were attacked, the results were often miserable. The plants were sited away from the big towns and were hard to find and even harder to destroy or damage. If the bombers missed them, as they usually did, their bombs hit nothing but fields and forests. The new practice of using high-flying Spitfires for photo reconnaissance the morning after a raid allowed an operation’s success to be assessed scientifically rather than relying on the visual reports and blurry night-time images submitted by the crews from onboard cameras. In the absence of hard evidence, optimism about the progress of the campaign had remained high in the upper reaches of the RAF. The daylight pictures showed it to be misplaced. No assumptions could be made about bombing accuracy. The truth, according to Sir John Slessor, who had taken over 5 Group of Bomber Command in May 1941, was that the crews were ‘failing to find and hit any but the most obvious targets on the clearest moonlight nights’.⁵

      It became clear to Portal that, as things stood, the only target that Bomber Command could be guaranteed to find was a largish town. The attacks on London, Coventry, Southampton, Plymouth and elsewhere had provided more than enough justification for retaliating in kind. Britain had suffered an unprecedented loss of innocent life. By the time the Blitz petered out in May 1941, more than 41,000 civilians had been killed and 137,000 injured. Such a policy, Portal now believed, was not simply faute de mieux, but a logical and desirable course of action.

      The new, or rather resumed, thinking was spelled out in another Portal directive to Bomber Command dated 9 July 1941. It stated that a comprehensive review of Germany’s political, economic and military situation disclosed that one of ‘the weakest points in his armour’ lay in the morale of the civilian population. It called for ‘heavy, concentrated and continuous area attacks of large working-class and industrial areas in carefully selected towns’. At the end of August the formula was extended to smaller towns so that they too could experience ‘the direct effect of our offensive’.⁶

      This marked another important step in the shift from scrupulousness to ruthlessness. Before the war the British government had assured the world it had no intention of bombing civilians. Now the RAF had been nudged on to a heading which made the mass killing of civilians inevitable. The faith that was put in the belief that this would produce beneficial results by undermining the Germans’ will to fight on was puzzling. Nothing that had happened in the war to date supported Trenchard’s dictum that the moral effect of bombing was twenty times greater than the material effect. If anything, the experience of Coventry, London and other blitzed towns like Plymouth and Liverpool, suggested the opposite. Yet in the absence of any immediate alternative, what was an ill-founded opinion began to take on the solidity of an iron law of war.

      Trenchard was an old man now but he was still regarded with reverence by the military establishment and his views were treated with respect. In May 1941 he sent a memorandum on the current state of the air war to the Chiefs of Staff. He reduced the complexities of the problems facing the RAF to one simple proposition. It was, he reiterated, all a question of national morale and who could stand their losses best. There was no doubt about the answer. For Trenchard, the ‘outstanding fact’ of the current situation was ‘the ingrained morale of the British nation which is nowhere more strongly manifest than in its ability to stand up to losses and its power to bear the whole strain of war and its casualties.’ History had proved ‘that we have always been able to stand our casualties better than other Nations.’ As for the enemy, ‘all the evidence of the last war and of this, shows that the German nation is peculiarly susceptible to air bombing. While the A.R.P. services are probably organized with typical German efficiency, their total disregard to the well-being of the population tends to a dislocation of ordinary life which has its inevitable reaction on civilian morale. The ordinary people are neither allowed, nor offer, to play their part in rescue or restoration work; virtually imprisoned in their shelters or within the bombed area, they remain passive and easy prey to hysteria and panic without anything to mitigate the inevitable confusion and chaos. There is no joking in the German shelters as in ours, nor the bond which unites the public with A.R.P. and Military services here of all working together in a common cause to defeat the attacks of the enemy.’ This, he concluded ‘is their weak point compared with ourselves and it is at this weak point that we should strike and strike again.’ Such a policy would mean ‘fairly heavy casualties’ for those doing the bombing, but Trenchard had faith in their toughness. In his judgement, ‘the pilots in the last war stood it, and the pilots in this war are even better and, I feel, would welcome a policy of this description.’⁷

      Where Trenchard got his information from was a mystery. At least one pilot had a very different appreciation of the morale question. In the early winter of 1942 when Bomber Command was beginning to bring the war to the German people Guy Gibson was still unconvinced that domestic morale would collapse. ‘We are dealing with the mass pyschology of a nation and a bad nation at that,’ he told Charles Martin, the adjutant of 106 Squadron. ‘It is run, organized and controlled by Gestapo and SS Police … the fact still remains that if they were to give in they would have everything to lose and nothing to gain. I think myself they will fight to the end.’ Gibson had little time for ‘people who go around talking so much bull about the crack appearing and once the crack has appeared the foundation will weaken etc., etc.’⁸

      Most people who were running the war agreed with Trenchard. It would have seemed defeatist to say otherwise. Identifying morale as the main target also provided some hope of progress at a time when there was little to show that Bomber Command was achieving anything. Any scrap of evidence was seized on as proof of the wisdom of this course. In September 1941 the American correspondent William Shirer who knew Nazi Germany well, wrote a piece in the Daily Telegraph saying that attacking war industries was not enough. ‘What [the RAF] must do is to keep the German people in their damp, cold cellars at night, prevent them from sleeping and wear down their nerves. Those nerves are already very thin after seven years of belt-tightening Nazi mobilization for total war. The British should do this every night.’ The cutting was reverently placed in an Air Ministry file. The Ministry of Information maintained its own survey. It had concluded as early as December 1940 that ‘the Germans, for all their present confidence and cockiness will not stand a quarter of the bombing that the British have shown they can take.’

      In the middle of 1941 support for the bombing offensive was sustained by faith rather than evidence, but the absence of a rational foundation for belief meant only that the flame of conviction burned all the brighter. It was not only Portal and the Air Staff who believed. The heads of the navy and the army became fervent converts. At the end of July 1941 they had produced a statement on general British strategy in which they declared their support for Bomber Command’s mission and admitted they were relying on an all-out attack by the RAF to create the conditions for a land invasion and victory. Inter-service jealousy over resources, hitherto a genetic condition, was forgotten as the air force was offered everything it wanted.

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