Bomber Boys. Patrick Bishop
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the air. It had apparently been hit by an anti-aircraft shell, most likely in its bomb bay …’ He learned later that the pilot had been Alec Elliot, his best friend on the squadron with whom he had passed many nights in the pub and played innumerable games of crib while waiting in the crew room.1
After enduring such experiences the crews were reluctant to believe that their efforts were being wasted. To be able to carry on it was necessary to persuade oneself that the risks were worth it. From the air it was impossible to know whether or not a raid had succeeded. The sight of big fires burning below was taken as a measure of success. But they could not know what these blazes were. The Germans soon suspected that the attacking aircraft had often only the haziest idea of their whereabouts. They developed a system of decoy fires which they hoped the arriving aircraft would mistake for the target. It worked very well. Many a crew returned home satisfied they had carried out their mission after bombing empty countryside.
A different sort of deception was being perpetrated on the home front. Government propaganda painted a picture of continuous success. A broadcast by Flight Lieutenant J. C. Mackintosh, a bomb-aimer in a Hampden, made night bombing sound like a cool, precise science. His script started with the bold assertion that ‘when the war began we were well-trained in finding targets in the dark and were therefore never compelled to bomb indiscriminately through the clouds.’ He went on to describe a recent attack on an oil refinery. At first, the crew thought it a tricky target. But the fact that it was sited near a bend on a river which would provide a useful navigational reference caused them to decide that ‘perhaps, after all, it would not be such a difficult job to find.’ As they entered the target area they located the river but after three runs through anti-aircraft fire had still not spotted the objective. Mackintosh gamely called on the skipper to go round once more. Then, ‘there it was. The dim outline of an oil refinery wonderfully camouflaged. It was getting more and more into the centre of the sights. I pressed the button and my stick of bombs went hurtling towards Germany’s precious oil. The rear gunner watched the bombs burst and in a very few seconds those thousands of tons of valuable oil had become hundreds of feet of black and acrid smoke.’2
This was strategic bombing as dreamt of by the Air Ministry planners. But it was rare indeed that events followed Mackintosh’s script. A more typical experience was that of Eric Woods, who had joined the RAF before the war as a reservist and qualified as a navigator before being sent to 144 Squadron. His first operation was on the night of 9/10 October 1940 and the target was the Krupp factory in Essen, one of the first of many that would be launched against this citadel of German military industry. At the briefing the crews were told they could expect only scattered cloud over the target. But ‘from the outset it was obvious that the Met people had got it wrong as a solid mass of cloud was clearly visible below and as we progressed eastwards we saw that the cloud was becoming denser ahead. We pressed on but two ominous developments took place: a film of ice appeared on the windscreen and an opaque mass of rime ice began to spread out along the leading edge of each wing.’ His Hampden’s twin engines started to run rough as ice found its way into the fuel inlet system. ‘There was a hurried conference since it was pretty obvious that the target was unlikely to be identifiable, so the decision was taken to fly on and see what happened when we reached our ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival). In the event at that time we were still in dense cloud, the whole mass being lit up by searchlights sweeping below, with frequent bright flashes which could have been anti-aircraft fire or bomb bursts, I certainly knew not what.’ With no sight of the ground and dreadful weather conditions a decision was made not to bomb but to seek some alternative target on the way home. As they headed homewards ‘the cloud began to break up to the west, quite the opposite to what the weatherman had said … we did in fact fly along the Scheldt estuary and as we passed over the port of Flushing the navigator let go with our total load and I clearly saw bomb bursts though I wasn’t sure precisely where they landed.’3 Only three of the aircraft that set out reached their target.
The basic problem remained navigation. There was no accurate means of directing the bombers to faraway targets and none would arrive until March 1942. In the meantime, navigators relied on dead reckoning and the main instrumental aid was the sextant. This was still the pioneer age of bombing. ‘The aircraft were without heating and the cold was appalling,’ wrote Doug Mourton later. ‘The crews flew clothed in layers of silk, wool and leather and yet they were still bitterly cold. Vital systems jammed, wings iced up for lack of adequate de-icing gear [and] guns froze …’ The navigator gave his pilot a course on take-off and then, if he was lucky and the skies were clear, looked out for landmarks to check if they were on track. When visiting Germany they left England’s shores over Flamborough Head then scoured the sea below for the Friesian Islands off the Dutch coast, where German night-fighters lurked, straining to get at the raiders. If the conditions were right, the navigator might use his sextant to obtain a fix from the stars, but only if the pilot was willing to fly straight and level long enough. The crews were given a weather forecast before leaving, but they were notoriously unreliable. Predicted winds failed to blow and unpredicted ones drove the bombers hopelessly off course. It was no wonder that German targets were sometimes unaware that they had been the subject of an attempted attack.
The gap between what was expected of the RAF and what it could in fact deliver was enormous. The man whose task it was to narrow it was Charles Portal, appointed to the top air force post of Chief of the Air Staff (CAS) in October 1940 at the young age of forty-seven. The promotion came after a brief, six-month stint as the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command. He was to stay in his post for the rest of the war. Portal was short and stocky, with a lean, creased face, hooded eyes and a large, hooked nose which gave him the look of one of the falcons he had reared when a schoolboy at Winchester. He was at Christ Church, Oxford, when the war broke out in 1914, and immediately suspended his studies to go to France as a motorcyclist with the Royal Engineers. In 1915 he joined the Royal Flying Corps and finished the war as a lieutenant-colonel. His intellectual gifts and boundless capacity for work ensured that his subsequent climb was sure and fast. His character and demeanour contrasted sharply with that of Arthur Harris. He hid his feelings behind a mask of scrupulous courtesy and expressed himself quietly and subtly. Whereas Harris was capable of rough bonhomie, Portal never unbent. Those around him noticed that beyond his family he had no close friends, gently repelling company when he dined at the Travellers’ Club at the end of his long working day.
Portal’s part in the policy of attacking whole cities, ‘area bombing’ in the bureaucratic euphemism of the day, is little known or remembered nowadays, while Harris’s name will be linked to it for ever. But his enthusiasm for the project was, at the outset at least, just as great as that of his subordinate and he was prepared to express himself forcefully in support of it even when Churchill’s faith faltered.
As head of Bomber Command at the start of the Blitz he sympathized with the public desire for revenge and had joined Churchill in urging reprisals on a reluctant Air Staff. On arriving at the top, he stressed the need to destroy the resolve of the German people by smashing their towns and cities. The rhythms of Bomber Command’s activities would vary from time to time as it was diverted to deal with various threats and crises. But, until the run-up to D-Day, this was to be the central theme of the air war.
In successive directives Portal continued to point his men towards industrial and military targets. But great emphasis was given to the will-sapping potential that he claimed would result. On 30 October 1940, as London prepared to endure its 53rd night of continuous bombardment, he wrote to Sir Richard Peirse who had replaced him as C-in-C, Bomber Command, that
the time seems particularly opportune to make a definite attempt with our offensive to affect the morale of the German people when they can no longer expect an early victory and are faced with the near approach of winter and the certainty of a long war … if bombing is to have its full moral effect, it must on occasions produce heavy material destruction. Widespread light attacks are more likely to produce contempt for bombing than fear of it. I am therefore directed to say that as an alternative to attacks designed for material destruction against our primary objectives, it is desired that regular concentrated attacks shall be made on objectives in large towns and centres of industry with the prime aim of causing heavy material destruction, which will demonstrate to the enemy the power and severity of air bombardment and the hardship and dislocation