When the Luftwaffe made their first bombing sorties over Britain in June 1940, an atmosphere of relative restraint still surrounded the bombing war. Hitler explicitly forbade his air force to attack London and other cities, partly because he had promised not to make war against women and children and partly because he wanted his forces to concentrate on the targets that mattered. 31At first the Luftwaffe attacked in daylight, but when German losses began to mount they were forced to switch to night attacks.
This was where both sides finally lost what was left of the mutual restraint with which they had started the war. In the dark, the German bombs increasingly missed their intended targets and fell on residential areas; then, on the evening of 24 August 1940, a dozen German bombers veered off course and accidentally dropped their bombs on central London. In retaliation, Churchill immediately ordered his bombers to attack Berlin. Although the raid caused little material damage it infuriated Hitler, who told a mass rally about ten days later, ‘If they attack our cities, we will simply erase theirs.’ 32In reprisal for the Berlin attack, he ordered Hermann Goering to stop attacking purely military targets and concentrate on London.
There has been speculation that Churchill ordered the attack on Berlin deliberately to provoke this response in his enemy. The RAF was under serious threat at the time, and it was only after the Luftwaffe switched to area bombing that it could recover. If this was the case, then it was an expensive gamble. London suffered seventy-one major raids during the Blitz, and twenty thousand men, women and children lost their lives.
Attacks on towns across Britain soon followed. In November the Luftwaffe destroyed Coventry, and Hitler was so impressed that he coined a new verb, coventriren– ‘to coventrate’. Over the next six months the Luftwaffe attempted to ‘coventrate’ Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Bristol, Swansea, Cardiff, Glasgow and Belfast. Britain responded by targeting places in Germany where the centres of industry were surrounded by densely populated residential areas. The idea was that even if the factories were not destroyed, the homes of those who worked in them would be. If this was not officially a policy of ‘area bombing’, in practice that was exactly what it was. The pinpoint targeting of specific installations was simply not possible: from 15,000 feet, in the dark, it was considered accurate if an aircraft bombed within five miles of its aiming point. On 12 December 1940 the British government gave up all pretence when Winston Churchill ordered the bombing of Mannheim: for the first time the British had designated the city as the target, rather than anything specific within it. As the British official history of the bombing war points out, with the advent of such area bombing, ‘The fiction that the bombers were attacking military objectives in the towns was officially abandoned.’ 33
It was an almost exact copy of what had happened in the First World War: a few piecemeal attacks, leading to a German offensive on Britain, and gradually the initial restraint exercised by both sides was whittled away to nothing. The only difference between the two wars was in scale. On 17 September 1940 alone the Luftwaffe unloaded more than 350 tons of bombs on London – more than the total dropped on the whole of Britain throughout the First World War. By the following April, they were able to drop more than a thousand tons of high explosive on the British capital in a single night. During the nine months of the Blitz more than forty thousand British people were killed, and a quarter of a million homes destroyed, leaving three-quarters of a million homeless. 34All the terrifying pre-war predictions were beginning to come true.
And yet, in one respect, the prophets of air power seemed to have got it wrong. Contrary to the message preached by all the theorists before the war, the morale of the British people was not broken by the ordeal they had been through. If anything, they had become more determined, and their response to the bombings was vengeful rather than fearful. Politicians clamoured for retaliatory strikes against German cities; their speeches were echoed in the newspapers, which were filled with indignant leader columns requiring the RAF to fly to Berlin and give as good as Britain was getting. 35
As Hitler turned his attention to Russia, and the raids on Britain petered out, the leaders of the bruised and battered RAF were given the space they needed to plan their revenge. The air force was still too weak to take the fight to the heart of the Reich, but it was obvious that Britain was now in the war for the long term. Over the next eighteen months the RAF would build its strength to create the most formidable bomber force the world had yet seen. Just as she had in the First World War, Britain now set her sights on a huge bombing campaign to destroy the German infrastructure. The only difference was that this time there would be no armistice to save the German people from British wrath.
To carry out this bombing campaign, the Air Ministry looked for a new commander-in-chief to lead Bomber Command. The man they settled on was an experienced and determined airman named Sir Arthur Harris. Over the next three years he would preside over the greatest, most systematic destruction of population centres the world has ever known, and in the process would become one of Britain’s most controversial war figures. The climax of his reign, when the world began to believe that his air force might even win the war single-handedly, was the bombing of Hamburg.
7. The Grand Alliance
… they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind
Hosea 8:7 1
Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris took over the reins of Bomber Command at the end of a very low period for the RAF. For the previous six months the RAF staff had been suffering a serious crisis of confidence: their insistence that ‘the bomber will always get through’ had proved wrong, their accuracy when they did get through was appalling, and their losses had been heavy. 2In two years of bombing they had not even dented the German war economy – although they did not yet know how truly ineffective they had been – and they had killed only as many Germans as they had lost in air crew. One British defence scientist of the time calculated that only a single German died for every five tons of bombs dropped – a hopeless waste of resources even if one agreed with the brutal realities of area bombing. 3Critics of Bomber Command were appearing throughout the British establishment. Even Churchill was sceptical about bombing: ‘Its effects, both physical and moral, have been greatly exaggerated,’ he said in September 1941. ‘The most we can say is that it will be a heavy and I trust a seriously increasing annoyance’ to the Germans. 4
By the spring of 1942, however, this was beginning to change. Brand new planes were rolling off the production lines, such as the Avro Lancaster, which could carry twice the load of almost any other bomber in existence, and the De Havilland Mosquito, which could fly higher and faster than even most German fighters. New radio technology was being developed to improve navigation, and new bomb-sights were being produced to improve the RAF’s appalling accuracy record. To accompany these changes, the RAF had been on a massive recruitment drive, transferring men from the other armed forces, and drafting some from previously reserved occupations to swell its ranks for the years to come.
So, when Harris first arrived at Bomber Command Headquarters in High Wycombe many of the problems that had plagued his predecessors were already well on the way to being solved. What was needed now was a determined leader, capable of making wise use of the formidable weapon in his hands. It is easy to see why Harris was chosen for the job: while his wisdom might sometimes have been called into question, not even his fiercest critics would have accused him of lacking determination.