Bomber Boys. Patrick Bishop

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СКАЧАТЬ of the services. In the bomber station-cluttered east and north there seemed almost as many airmen and-women as there were civilians. ‘By the time I got there Lincoln had turned blue,’ remembered Reg Payne, a wireless operator who was based at Skellingthorpe just outside the city.⁶

      Bomber Command grew and grew as the volunteers arrived in numbers that never slackened even during the darkest hours of its campaign. Behind each man flying, there were many more keeping them in the air. There were fitters and riggers and armourers maintaining the huge aeroplanes. There were WAAFs who drove the crews to their hangars and staffed the operations rooms when ops were on. There were the women who served them their dinner before they took off and, with luck, their breakfast when they returned home. RAF men met and mingled with local women in dance-halls and pubs, flirting with them, sometimes sleeping with them, often marrying them. Homesick young men were adopted by families and would slip away for an afternoon in front of a coal fire in a front parlour that reminded them of the family life they had left behind.

      The many Britons who had seen the RAF going into action, droning overhead on their way to and from Germany and France and Italy, relished the sight. They learned of what they did there from the newspapers and BBC radio for whom Bomber Command’s activities provided the main source of good news for much of the war. The tone of the reports was exultant. ‘The Vengeance Begins!’ was the strapline on the Daily Express front-page story of Monday 1 June 1942 announcing the first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne. The sky over the city was ‘as busy as Piccadilly Circus’. One bomber passed over every six seconds and 3,000 tons of bombs were dropped in ninety minutes [The real figure was 1,455 tons]. It was particularly pleasing to report that the official communiqué from Berlin admitted that ‘great damage’ had been done. ‘Germans squeal “havoc, misery”’ was the headline on the story of how the Nazis had reacted to the raid.

      The RAF had saved the country from invasion by winning the Battle of Britain. It had failed, it was true, to prevent the Blitz. But now, night after night it was carrying the war to the Reich, paying the Germans back in kind and contributing mightily to the downfall of Hitler and the Nazis.

      That was how it was seen by British civilians as they read accounts of devastating attacks on previously obscure towns such as Essen, Duisburg and Gelsenkirchen and great cities like Hamburg and Cologne and, above all, Berlin. This was how it was presented by Harris, a natural propagandist, who strove to create the impression that with each raid the road to victory and peace was one step shorter. This was what was believed by the majority of the men who were flying the aeroplanes. They tended to be bolder and more imaginative than the rest of their contemporaries. Flying was dangerous but they preferred its perils and the relative informality of RAF life to the drudgery of existence as a soldier. In letters and diaries they reveal a high degree of idealism and optimism and a strong sense that they were fighting not only to destroy a present evil but also to lay the foundations of a future good.

      In a letter to the father of his friend Andrew ‘Paddy’ Wilson, who was killed during a raid on Düsseldorf in June 1943, Sergeant John Lobban, the sole survivor of the crew, wrote: ‘They died for the greatest of causes, the freedom of the peace-loving nations and I only wish that fate could have let us play a greater part in bringing the war to a close.’ It had been their first operation.⁷

      Such idealism is found mainly in the young. Many of the Bomber Boys were barely out of their teens, though the almost constant strain they lived with made them seem older. They were called Dougie and Ron and Ken and Reg and Bill. They came from the middle reaches of society and were strongly marked by their time. In their short lives they had felt the numb emotional pain left by the last war and sensed the mounting dread among their elders as the next one approached. They knew what poverty was and had witnessed the cruelties of interwar capitalism. If there was a dominant political outlook among the crews it was a mildly sceptical socialism and belief in social justice. But overlying it always was a profound sense of duty. None of them set out to destroy German cities and few cared to reflect too closely on the effects of their bombs. But like the rest of their generation, they possessed a patriotism and respect for authority that had barely been dented by their knowledge of the First World War. It was easier for them to do what they did because they tended to believe what they were told about the purpose and progress of their struggle. It was an outstanding peculiarity of the strange new conflict they were engaged in that there was no real measure of gain. Armies could gauge success by the amount of ground taken or the number of enemy killed or captured. Navies could do so by the quantity of enemy tonnage sunk. But how did you judge the achievements of a bombing campaign?

      The authorities continually proclaimed the effectiveness of Bomber Command’s actions. Early communiqués created an illusion of extraordinary efficiency, of bombs slanting down on strictly military targets with scientific precision. This optimistic view was based largely on the reports of the pilots dropping the ordnance, an unreliable measure as it was to turn out. It was only after two years of war, when a report based on an analysis of aerial photographs revealed the hopeless inaccuracy of most bombing, that tactics and equipment improved and the gap between reality and propaganda began to close. By the end of the war Bomber Command could obliterate any target it wished to and did so, sometimes flattening towns whose military importance was minuscule. But the value of such destruction was always open to question and afterwards there was disagreement over what it was that Bomber Command had achieved.

      Harris lived another forty years after the last bomb was dropped. Right until his death he fought to persuade the world that his Command’s contribution to victory had been decisive. His arguments were based not so much on the data provided by the American and British official surveys of damage conducted after the war, but more on the word of Hitler’s munitions minister, the silky and self-interested Albert Speer. The surveys themselves failed to settle the arguments that raged throughout the war over how bomber power should be applied and started a new round of controversy. The questions of how much material harm bombing did to the German war effort, and whether the energy and sacrifices involved were worth it, have never been fully answered and never will be.

      It was even more difficult to determine the psychological effect of bombing. Bombs were spiritual as much as physical weapons. Air strategists had been arguing since aeroplanes were invented that the moral power of bombing was as great as anything it did to factories or homes, perhaps much greater. By destroying the will of workers to work, air attacks could do as much effective damage as they did when they smashed up a steelworks or assembly line.

      This convenient belief grew as it became clear that pre-war assumptions about bombing accuracy were absurdly optimistic. The first bombs were aimed at small targets and hit nothing. Better then to aim at a large target and hit something – anything – for in a built-up area no bomb would be wasted. Even if a bomb missed the factory it was aimed at, the chances were it would hit the home of someone who was employed there. It might kill him and his family. Death or fear of death would keep him away from work. If enough bombs were dropped, so the theory ran, workers might eventually turn against their rulers and force them to stop fighting.

      Even before the war the evidence available from the German and Italian bombardments of Madrid and Barcelona suggested that this was not necessarily so. Britain’s own experience of the Blitz pointed to a more startling conclusion: that aerial bombardment could actually toughen resolve and deepen resistance. For much of the war, there was a prevailing belief that Germany would crack if only it was hit hard and often enough. The RAF’s pre-war professional judgement that in a totalitarian state, coercion trumped public opinion, was soon forgotten in the desperation to achieve results.

      The lack of any accurate understanding of what the campaign was achieving was characteristic of the oddly disconnected way in which the war was waged. Even those dropping the bombs felt they were engaged in a surreal exercise. Looking down from a Lancaster or Halifax at Essen or Berlin from 20,000 feet you saw nothing that connected you to the earth you knew, only a diabolical son et lumière of smoke and fire. ‘I would try to tell myself … that this was a city,’ wrote Don СКАЧАТЬ