Bomber Boys. Patrick Bishop

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.

      They approved the building of heavy bombers as a first priority ‘for only the heavy bomber can produce the conditions under which other offensive force can be employed.’ They endorsed the view that the focus of attack should be ‘on civilian morale with the intensity and continuity which are essential if a final breakdown is to be produced.’ If the plan was pursued ‘on a vast scale, the whole structure upon which the German forces are based, the economic system, the machinery for production and destruction, the morale of the nation will be destroyed.’ This was just the ‘bull about the crack appearing’ that Gibson had found so unconvincing.

      Soon afterwards an attempt was made to translate what were instinctive suppositions into hard formulae. In September 1941 the Directorate of Bomber Operations at the Air Ministry began working on a new plan. In an important departure from previous practice it was based not on what Bomber Command might do, but on what the Luftwaffe had already done. By analysing the damage caused by German air attacks on London, Coventry, and other English towns, the planners came up with a yardstick of what was needed to mount an all-out offensive on German towns.

      They used an ‘index of activity’ to gauge the effects of bombing on a town’s ability to function. Coventry, it was reckoned, had suffered a 63 per cent reduction in its index of activity the morning after the raid. The calculation included not just physical destruction but also psychological damage; fear and demoralization. It had taken Coventry thirty-five days to recover. Four or five follow-up attacks on the same scale, it was reckoned, would have crippled the city’s ability to operate. A sixth raid would have put it ‘beyond all hope of recovery’.

      Using the same encouraging extrapolations that were always employed with such calculations, it concluded that if 4,000 bombers were directed against forty-three towns with populations of 100,000 or more, Germany would be finished. At the time, the average daily availability of bombers was just over 500. Portal approved the plan and passed it on to the prime minister promising ‘decisive results’ in six months if he was given the aircraft required.

      But Churchill’s initial enthusiasm was faltering. A minute study of reconnaissance photographs ordered by Churchill’s scientific adviser Lord Cherwell had revealed in undeniable detail the blindness of the bombing effort. The work was carried out by D. R. Butt, a civil servant with the Cabinet secretariat. His job was to analyse photographs taken on one hundred night attacks during June and July 1941. The results, published in August 1941, were dismaying. The essential finding was that of those crews claiming to have attacked a target in Germany, only one in four got within five miles of it. Over the Ruhr the proportion was one in ten. The statistics related only to aircraft recorded as attacking the target. One third of the crews failed to get within five miles of it.

      These figures, if true, were shocking and at Bomber Command, Sir Richard Peirse and his senior officers tried to dispute them. Churchill, however, had been persuaded. He was in no mood then, to give a positive reception to another plan based on the unverifiable. His view was summed up in a pessimistic minute of 27 September that contradicted everything he had previously said as prime minister on the subject of bombing. ‘It is very disputable whether bombing by itself will be a decisive factor in the present war. On the contrary, all that we have learnt since the war shows that its effects, both physical and moral, are greatly exaggerated.’

      These words caused great anxiety to Portal and his men. Churchill appeared to be saying that he had no confidence in their approach to the air war. Portal took several days thinking about his response. His reply, when it came, was robust. He told the prime minister that it was too soon to come to such a definite conclusion as a serious bombing campaign had yet to begin. It was difficult to believe that any country could withstand indefinitely the scale of attack contemplated in the new plan. German air raids in the previous year caused death or serious injury to 93,000 British civilians. This result had been achieved with a small fraction of the bomb load Bomber Command hoped to employ in 1943. He repeated what had now become an article of faith. ‘The consensus of informed opinion,’ he declared, ‘is that German morale is much more vulnerable to bombing than our own.’

      Portal was calling Churchill’s bluff. The prime minister’s doubts had come very late in the day. The whole bomber programme, aircraft production, aircrew training and technical developments were based on the understanding articulated by the Chiefs of Staff back on 31 July that bombing on an unprecedented scale was the weapon Britain had to depend on to bring victory. He pointed out that if Churchill had ‘ceased to believe in the efficacy of the bomber as a war-winning weapon’ then a new plan would have to be produced. This would mean a complete reshaping of the RAF’s main effort and remove it from the battlefield for many months to come. Britain would be denied its only means of waging war on the enemy’s own territory.

      Churchill had no real choice but to back down and he did so, but not before sounding a sour cautionary note. ‘I deprecate,’ he wrote on 7 October, ‘placing unbounded confidence in this means of attack and still more in expressing that confidence in terms of arithmetic.’ In the end, he concluded, ‘the only plan is to persevere’.

      This period marked the lowest point in Bomber Command’s war, a demoralizing period of costly experimentation. In its short life, aerial warfare had gained enormous importance in the minds of politicians, soldiers and the public. But no one yet understood exactly what it was for. Defending the failures of the early years Slessor reminded a post-war audience that ‘this was the first air war (his emphasis.) … we had embarked upon it, not only with totally inadequate weapons and woefully incomplete intelligence about our enemy but with virtually no experience whatever to guide us.’⁹ Operations had never achieved a consistent tempo as the emphasis shifted from target to target and even, as the Battle of the Atlantic broke out, from land to sea with squadrons being transferred temporarily or permanently to Coastal Command. Throughout the year preconceived expansion plans had to give way to the constant diversion of aircraft and crew to other theatres.

      During 1941, 1,341 aircraft were lost on operations, meaning that the average first-line strength had been destroyed roughly two and a half times over. These great sacrifices failed to make any significant impression on Germany. The ports of Hamburg, Kiel and Bremen had suffered some damage, but the Ruhr, the heart of Germany’s war industry, remained almost completely intact. Bomber Command’s main achievement had been to give heart to the Blitz-battered British people. As it did so, its own morale was beginning to fray. In 106 Squadron, where Michael Wood was piloting a Hampden, ‘there was a story going around that the accounts related by one of our crews were suspect and did not tie up with the accounts of the target area put forward by the rest of the squadron. The CO became suspicious and arranged to plot the course of the aircraft in question. From the information gathered, it transpired that the aircraft was flying up and down the North Sea dropping their bombs in the drink and, after the necessary time lapse, flying back to base.’ Wood never verified the story. But the fact that it was doing the rounds was indicative of the low mood.

      One pilot from 144 Squadron was court-martialled for a similar-sounding incident. Sergeant W, a married man with two young children who had been a grocer in civilian life before joining the RAF in 1938, was accused of ‘failing to use his utmost exertions’ to carry out orders. He had been detailed to attack Frankfurt on the night of 22/23 July 1941. On his return, he reported that the mission had been successful. A few days later, the navigator on the trip informed a senior officer that they