BOMBER COMMAND

See Also: BOFFIN vs. BOFFIN; CARS Air-Bound Shadows; CHURCH OF ENGLAND CHURCHES St Clement Danes, The Royal Air Force; THE SANDMAN & THE ZUCKERMAN; THE SECOND WORLD WAR; WEST GERMANY's MIDWIFE

The men who occupied the senior ranks of the Royal Air Force during the Second World War had fought in the First. Most of them had experienced the carnage of the trenches before joining the Royal Flying Corps, which had been the service's predecessor. For many of them it was imperative that warfare should never again have such high mortality rates.

In 1936 a Committee of Air Offence was set up at the instigation Harry Wimperis, the Air Ministry's Director of Scientific Research. This body was chaired by Henry Tizard. He also headed the Committee of Defence, which had commissioned Robert Watson-Watt to develop the radio location system that was to become known as radar. Bomber Command was unresponsive to the offence committee's ideas and so was technically ill-equipped when Britain entered the Second World War.

In April 1940 Charles Portal was appointed to be the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command. The following month Germany invaded France and the Low Countries. In Britain the Chamberlain government collapsed and Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. He demanded that more air cover should be provided for the Allied forces that were retreating in Europe. Sir Archibald Sinclair, who was a close friend of the new premier, sought to fulfil this wish. Air Chief Marshal Dowding of Fighter Command appreciated that, for the short- to medium-term, aircraft were far more valuable to Britain's survival than ground forces were. He sought to resist what he perceived as being the sacrifice of the nation's key military assets for the sake of boosting short-term morale. Sir Archibald's support of the use of Spitfire fighter aircraft in the theatre irreparably damaged his working relationship with Dowding. At Bomber Command, Portal resisted the call for its Blenheim medium-sized bombers to be used, as such would have led to the destruction of most of the aircraft. The service's large bombers were used for night-time raids. These had little impact beyond creating the feeling that some resistance was being mounted.

The Luftwaffe dropped its first bombs on London. On 25 August Bomber Command responded in kind against Berlin. In reaction to this, Adolf Hitler ordered his air force to concentrate its efforts against the British capital. The first major Luftwaffe raid on London took place on 7 September. This was a strategic mistake. The effective approach would have been first to destroy Fighter Command's sector stations and then to proceed against the city at will.

In October 1940 Portal was appointed as the Chief of the Air Staff. Churchill was given to dealing with his Chiefs of Staff in a robust, challenging manner. However, as a result of his deep involvement in the Gallipolli debacle (1915), he never overrode any of them on a matter of high strategy. With the exception of the months that followed the D-Day landings, Portal was to determine the Royal Air Force's actions for the rest of the war. Following the fall of France, he ensured that Bomber Command's resources were concentrated on making night raids. He developed a good relationship with Sinclair. In March 1942 the Admiralty made a concerted attempt to divert the Command's resources into conducting long-range reconnaissance missions over the Atlantic in order to look for U-boats. Sir Archibald resisted this effort successfully.

Bomber Command's attempts to make precision attacks upon Germany's military forces and economic targets had a minimal effect. The Cabinet endorsed Frederick Lindemann's March 1942 dehousing memorandum; it was more effective to strike at tens of thousands of dwellings than a single factory. The strategy sought to make as many Germans homeless as possible by bombing housing in the principal industrial centres. This approach remained in place until almost the war's end. In February Sir Arthur Harris had been appointed as the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command. The dehousing campaign accorded with his deep suspicion of any attempt to try to win the war by striking out a key aspect of the German war machine. He believed that, as a complete entity, it was flexible enough to be able to recuperate from losing any of its individual aspects. He believed that the Nazis could be defeated only by having so many elements of its war economy collapse that a tipping point would be reached at which its recovery would become impossible. Portal and Harris were to conduct rigorous debates with one another over strategy. However, the latter was an admirer of his commander's abilities and always deferred to him ultimately.

At the time of Harris's appointment, the Command had a small offensive capacity. Its bombers were being called upon to conduct non-bombing duties. The dehousing strategy was set in place without those who did so knowing how the Allies capacity to bomb was going to increase exponentially.

In May 1942 the first 1000-bomber raid was made from Britain. The target was Cologne. The damage inflicted upon the city was minor. However, the operation provided a major boost to morale within Bomber Command.

In late 1942 aircraft from the US 8th Air Force started to make sorties from the UK against Germany. The Americans were only able to operate during daylight. This limited their effectiveness because there were not yet any long-range fighters available that could help protect them over Germany. The R.A.F. had received its first Mustang fighters in April. However, the aircraft's Allison aero engines had delivered insufficient power. The Rolls-Royce Merlin 61 engine had already proven itself in the Hurricane and the Spitfire. One had been fitted into a Mustang and had transformed the fighter. However, in order to accommodate it, the aircraft had had to undergo a redesign. This meant that its introduction into service was delayed.

In January 1943 Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt held a summit at Casablanca. There, they agreed that Bomber Command should conduct raids at night and the 8th during daytime.

Better navigational equipment, such as the H2S radar system, and enhanced bombs started to be used by the Allies. In 1943 Bomber Command's raids began to inflict substantive damage. Up until then the impact had been relatively tokenistic. During the spring of 1943 the Ruhr was subjected to a couple of months intense aerial bombardment. In July 1943 Hamburg was bombed continuously for three days. This triggered the first instance of a major urban firestorm. During the summer production of the Mustang III started in the United States. Following its delivery to Britain, this fighter proved to be able to provide a raised degree of cover for the bombers that were operating over Europe.

Technical advances were not only being made on the Allied side. The Germans improved the effectiveness of their anti-aircraft defences. Over the winter of 1943-4 the Allies waged a sustained airborne campaign against Berlin. The forces protecting the city were able to counter this with such effect that the very high mortality level of Allied airmen was judged to be intolerable and the operation was ended.

In May 1944 the B.B.C. radio programme Monday Night At Eight broadcast a spoof German news bulletin that was read out by the popular broadcaster Wilfred Pickles. It included the line Three of our night-fighters and two of our cities are missing. (Sir) William Haley (1901-1987), the Corporation's new Director-General, made clear his displeasure at the tastelessness of the joke.

In 1944 George Bell the Bishop of Chichester delivered a speech in the Lords in which he spoke out against the blanket bombing of German cities. No l Coward may have written the song Let s Not Be Beastly To The Germans in response. The prelate spoke with the military strategist Liddell Hart before speaking out on the bombing campaign.

The P51-D Mustang was introduced into service in May 1944. The aircraft was able to carry additional fuel in drop tanks. This meant that they could fly further and that the bombers they escorted had a higher level of protection.

In autumn 1944 Bomber Command resumed its autonomy. Operation Thunderbolt involved Allied aerial bombing being focused on the principal urban centres of eastern and central of Germany. The purpose of this was to try to facilitate the Red Army's westwards advance by preventing the German forces from being able to assume a consolidated position. During the winter of 1944-5 Harris made it clear to Portal that he believed that the Command's resources should be applied against industrial areas across Germany. However, Portal insisted that bombing should be conducted in a targeted manner. Harris complied. Eisenhower's Command requested that a major attack should be conducted upon Dresden. The raid took place on 13-14 February 1945. When Churchill appreciated the awfulness of what had been done, he was deeply shocked. He wrote to Harris expressing his anger. The air force officer, for his part, was to state that he had commanded the attack but that, if the matter had been left to him, he would have used Bomber Command's resources in an alternative manner that he believed would have been more effective.

The Allied bombing campaign against Germany acted as a major drain on the Axis country's military resources. It undermined the state's ability to conduct war beyond its own borders. The Nazi leadership, through not giving a higher priority to the defence of the nation's urban centres, gave Bomber Command the opportunity to participate in atrocities such as the bombings of Hamburg and Dresden. As the successful defence of Berlin (1943-4) proved, the Allied bombers ability to strike could have been neutralised in part. Through a blend of callousness, incompetence and their own internal rivalries, the Nazis chose not to assign the personnel, the armaments, or the technical resources that could have furnished more effective defences for Germany's urban population. By so doing, they unwittingly hastened their regime's demise.

In 1992 the sculpture of Sir Arthur Bomber Harris was unveiled outside St Clement Danes, the R.A.F. church on the Strand. There were shouts of murderer. For several months afterwards it was furnished with 24-hour security.

During the war 125,000 men served in Bomber Command. 8,305 were killed during training missions and 47,268 died during operations. 15,661 of the dead were from overseas dominions. (The U.S.A.F. lost 26,000 men)

The Command's base's were in the east coast counties of East Anglia and Yorkshire. It dropped 1m tons of bombs, killing 600,000 civilians in Germany and 120,000 in Italy and France. 6427 acres of German cities were destroyed (the Luftwaffe had levelled 400 acres of London).

Location: The statue of Arthur Harris. In front of St Clement Danes, Strand, WC2R 1DH. Perhaps London's most controversial statue. (brown, blue)

The Aircrew Association

Website: www.aircrew.org.uk

David Backhouse 2024