Patrick Bishop - Bomber Boys

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.

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.