Bomber Boys

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.’

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 had never reached Germany at all. The pilot maintained that the navigator, who had been borrowed for the operation, was incompetent and had failed to provide the correct headings to reach the target, resulting in them flying around the North Sea for nearly seven hours. The navigator maintained that the skipper was ‘windy’ and had never intended to carry out the attack. Sergeant W was backed up by three other members of his crew. He was an experienced pilot who had spent seven months on the squadron and whose conduct had until then satisfied his CO. Had he reported the failure to complete the mission it was unlikely that matters would have developed as drastically as they did. As it was, he told the court-martial, ‘after landing and thinking back over the trip, I decided to say nothing about getting lost. In consequence the personal experience report was made out as for a successful trip.’ The worst interpretation was put on his actions. He was found guilty and sentenced to be reduced to the ranks, imprisoned with hard labour for two years and discharged with ignominy from the service. The sentence was cut to six months on appeal.

For all the institutional belief in British resilience, no one in authority was going to tell anyone, civilian or airman, how little the campaign was really achieving. ‘Fortunately,’ wrote Slessor, ‘I think the crews were for the most part sustained by the belief that they were hitting the enemy harder than they actually were.’

The futility of the effort was starkly revealed on the night of 7/8 November. The weather forecast was abysmal, with thick cloud, storms, ice and hail predicted. Sir Richard Peirse nonetheless ordered 392 aircraft, a record number, into attacks on Berlin, Cologne and Mannheim, as well as smaller operations against Boulogne and Ostend. The weather was particularly atrocious along the North Sea routes leading to Berlin. Of the 169 bombers sent to Berlin, less than half got anywhere near it. Those that did, barely scratched the city. The official survey reported damage to one industrial building, two railway premises, a gasometer, two administrative buildings, thirty houses (fourteen of which were destroyed), sixteen garden sheds and one farm building. Eleven people were killed and fourteen injured. Bomber Command however lost twenty-one aircraft, 12.4 per cent of those dispatched. Eighty-eight airmen died; eight for every German killed by their bombs. All together thirty-seven aircraft were lost, 9.7 per cent of the force. This loss was double what had been suffered in any previous night operation. Peirse had gone ahead despite protests, notably from Slessor who had been allowed to withdraw his 5 Group aircraft from the force and send them instead to Cologne. His refusal to cancel the operation seems to have been driven by a desperate desire to achieve results when faith in his leadership was dwindling. It was a gamble rather than a calculated risk and it was taken with the lives of men whose fate he held in trust.

Some of those taking part in the raid had sensed disaster from the beginning. Sergeant John Dobson, only nineteen years old but already one of 218 Squadron’s most experienced pilots, was woken at 6 a.m. on the morning of 7 November, an unusually early hour that suggested that a daylight operation was planned. Half-asleep, crotchety, some of them mildly hungover, the squadron slouched to the briefing room. Dobson sat down and his crew grouped themselves on the chairs around him. There was ‘no greeting, just a plain and dismal silence’. He pulled out his cigarettes from his pyjama pocket and ‘exercised the Skipper’s prerogative of offering each crew member a fag. A sharp, grating sound, puff, puff, puff and then silence once more. The whole room was silent and pent up with a fierce concentration. No celluloid sallies here, no carefree chatter which film-struck spinsters associate with an operational briefing … we were all in the bluest of blue funks so that no one dare speak for fear of voicing with his eyes or gruffness his innermost, uppermost fear of the unknown. More especially today it was felt, because of the unusual hour, which [preyed] heavily on the superstition of fliers.’

Wing Commander Kirkpatrick climbed the three steps to the dais. He was a pre-war regular and his crews liked and trusted him, ‘just the man for any job which would get this damned war over quicker,’ in Dobson’s view. The order of the day that he read out was unlike any other the audience had previously heard. Instead of being given a routine railway junction or gasworks to aim at, the squadron’s mission was directed against a factory twenty miles south-east of Berlin which was believed to be researching experimental weapons. The target was to be completely demolished ‘at all costs’. Should the bombs fail they were to strafe the factory at low level. The success of the mission, he stressed, would obviate great loss of life in the future.

The ‘met’ reports were read out which predicted three storm fronts and blanket cloud over the continent, though this might clear to eight-tenths cover by the time the aircraft arrived giving the captain the option of bombing through the holes in the murk or risking flying below it. The wing commander then went on to confirm what Dobson’s gut had told him. The heavy bomb load meant that it would be touch and go whether there was enough fuel to get them back. The squadron sat ‘entranced and dumb-founded as the words ate like acid into their brain, numbing all senses but that awful emptiness of fear in the stomach.’ They spent the rest of the morning trying to lose themselves in ‘doing those hundred and one … things to keep the mind from death.’ The music on the mess gramophone did nothing to lighten the gloom. Even the liveliest tunes were simply a reminder of a world they might never return to.

At lunch Dobson could not bear to eat. He slipped away early to look over his Wellington, K-Kate. It was raining heavily but he ‘did not pause to collect a greatcoat, feeling somehow that it was superfluous and not in keeping with the dread feeling all around …’ But the weather provided a spurt of hope. ‘I gazed upwards at the lowering clouds whilst the increasing rain stung my pupils and made tiny, salty tears run into my face and aggravated the soreness of my cheeks where I had shaved. Could it be … that ops were scrubbed?’

He ran back to the mess where he met his crew who told him that ops were still very much on. They were coming to the end of their tour and shared his fear of what lay ahead. Speaking on behalf of the rest, the navigator informed Dobson they had decided ‘we are certainly not going to chuck our lives away on this damned death but no glory stunt.’

Dobson went to tell the CO, who came straight to the point. Was Dobson going to join the mutiny? He replied, ‘not without certain trepidation, “no sir.” To see the relief shining in his eyes … was gratitude enough but he rose and patted my shoulder gently, almost fatherly, and said, “Thank you, Dobson.”’

He was allotted a new crew and learned to his dismay that they were ‘sprogs’ straight out of training and virgins when it came to operational flying. He was further alarmed by the discovery that the man flying as ‘second dickey’ or assistant pilot, was an Australian. The prevailing superstition had it that Australians were prone to disaster on their first show.

Dinner was even more depressing than lunch. When they reached the aircraft ‘the rain was falling in an ever-increasing tempo, drumming like bullets on the fuselage.’ Dobson’s misgivings were well-founded. Before they had even crossed the English coast they came under fire from a German intruder. He dived into cloud to escape, emerging in time to see the sky in front twinkling with red stars as the first coastal flak batteries opened up. Dead ahead there was a huge sheet of flame as a bomber exploded. Then it was their turn. Dobson threw the Wellington this way and that ‘but more flak concentrated on us until it seemed as though the whole sky was a mass of flaming, eye-scarring bursts. And the smell like the smell of death itself; cloying, foetid, lingering in … nostrils wide with fear.’ A heavy burst plunged the Wellington into a downward spiral. ‘Completely out of control isn’t fun at any time but in a welter of up-coming flak our predicament was terrible. The crew were in a frenzy, yelling and screaming over the intercom.’ They levelled out at 3,200 feet but were now pinned against the sky by searchlights. Dobson felt ‘the intensity of the beam on one’s face simply sapped the strength from one … the eyes burned like all the fires of hell as I strove to penetrate the terrific vista of light.’

Eventually they left the searchlight batteries behind. They crossed the Dutch border and set course for their objective. Long before they reached Berlin they could see the flak barrage glowing above it. Their target was to the south. As they turned away, two night-fighters bore in on them from ahead and below, riddling the fuselage with tracer. Dobson, a former Hurricane pilot, threw the Wellington into a violent turn, a manoeuvre which had the lucky effect of bringing one attacking Messerschmitt into the front gunner’s sights, just as he was climbing away. ‘Bits began to fly from the fighter as the murderous hail of bullets from the two Brownings, so ably wielded, bit into his fabric, his engines and his tanks … the last we saw of him he was spinning down in a death dive and no pilot got out.’ The other fighter was shaken off in the turn.

They went on. Dobson had to drop through a thick layer of clouds, ‘so solid, so absolutely like a new earth that one wanted to step out on them and walk,’ to have any chance of finding the target. By the time the Wellington emerged only 2,000 feet were showing on the altimeter. Ahead they could see parachute flares, and artillery flashes lit up the target area. Bert Faltham, the navigator-cum-bomb-aimer now took charge. As he led them in the flak increased in intensity until ‘the sky around and ahead was a vast, twinkling maelstrom of light.’ At last Faltham called out, ‘Bombs gone Skip!’ and the Wellington’s 3,500-pound load fell away. Dobson climbed, taking ‘what seemed like a leaden century’ to reach 18,000 feet where he levelled off.

About an hour and a half from home Dobson allowed himself to start thinking that they might just make it. Then the sky ahead reddened with a flak barrage which flared up and died away before he could identify its location. Suddenly there was ‘a terrific crack, like a whip going hard against naked flesh, whilst a gale roared through the hole the flak had created … a nucleus of bursts held us in their thrall, smashing into the fuselage at every point, tearing huge gaps …’ For the next forty-five minutes Dobson fought to keep the aircraft steady but it started to slide into what seemed like a final descent. He gave the order to bale out. ‘One by one the crew filed past my seat and dropped through the opening at my feet. When the last one … had vanished I trimmed Kate, tail heavy, so that in a few moments her nose would come up and she would spin in to her complete destruction. Then, still holding the stick, I slid from my seat and as the aircraft swayed slowly backwards I fell forward through the hole in the manner approved. The time was 05.00 … Height 1,500 feet.’

Such was the end of K-Kate, one of thirty-seven aircraft lost that night. Peirse’s determination to restore his and his command’s reputation had brought disaster. Two months later he was removed. The Berlin calamity prompted the War Cabinet to put an end to big raids for the rest of the winter to preserve lives and aircraft and allow the new policy to take shape. In the coming months only limited operations with small numbers of aircraft were sanctioned. It was to be another fourteen months before Berlin was attacked again.

6 Enter ‘Butch’ (#ulink_12cf1e7a-b6f7-5997-8e30-8314f1c3f269)

Though it might not have appeared so to despondent crews that winter, Bomber Command’s overall prospects were slowly improving. The Bomber Boys rarely caught a glimpse of the big picture. But during the second half of 1941 the wider war had taken on a new and encouraging direction. The German invasion of Russia in June had transformed the Soviet Union from an enemy to an ally. With the entry of the United States into the conflict after the 7 December attack on Pearl Harbor, all the riches of America were unlocked for use in the fight against the Nazis.

The pause in major operations ordered after the Berlin disaster gave an exhausted, depleted and dispirited force the chance to catch its breath and gather its strength. Over the months that followed the recent volunteers started to arrive in force at their operational squadrons. The first of the new generation of four-engined heavies, the Stirlings and Halifaxes, began to replace their two-engined predecessors. On Christmas Eve, 1941, the first of the Lancasters landed at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire. Soon its blunt, menacing lines would be seen everywhere. Some of the new aircraft carried desperately-needed new electronic navigation aids. By the time Harris took over Bomber Command at the end of February 1942 the force was approaching a position where it could start applying the policies on which those running the war were now agreed.

Shortly before his arrival there was an event which gave heart to the battered squadrons. One day in early March 1942, Peter Johnson visited a bomber station in Nottinghamshire to have lunch with the base commander. Entering the mess he found a group of young officers in the middle of a raucous party. His host explained they were celebrating a ‘wizard prang’ the night before. ‘Come and look at the photos,’ he said. ‘They’re the best ever. Teach those bloody Frogs to play along with the Boche.’