Chastise: The Dambusters Story 1943. Max Hastings
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to the last Frenchman” have attained considerable currency.’
Thoughtful British people saw that in almost three years since Dunkirk in June 1940 their army had accomplished relatively little, while the Russians endured the most terrible and costly experiences in the history of war. In 1942 Winston Churchill’s reputation as a war leader fell to its lowest ebb, in the face of new British humiliations. The sister of RAF pilot John Hopgood, a future dambuster, was an ATS officer who wrote to her mother in August that she had been cheered by the proclaimed success of the recent Dieppe raid: ‘the feeling that at last we were taking the offensive and that my uniform would mean something. A feeling I had very strongly at the beginning of the war, but it has gradually diminished since we have been on the defensive. This is not the talk of a defeatist, but I think it is the truth which most of us have experienced lately. I hope that [Dieppe] was a dress rehearsal and that the performance [D-Day in France] will follow shortly.’ Which, of course, it did not.
Belated successes in North Africa delivered Churchill from a real threat of eviction from his post as minister of defence. It was plain that the German flood tide on the Eastern Front was ebbing; that the Russians had survived the decisive crisis of their struggle. But the British people had seen little about their own war effort in which to take pride since the RAF’s sublime triumph in the 1940 Battle of Britain. An unusually reflective young airman afterwards looked back upon an early-1943 conversation with friends: ‘It was pleasant to sit there and rest a while and think that the worst was behind … The evening had been pleasant and we had practically “won” the war. But we wouldn’t have been so pleased if we had known of the big battles that were to be fought; the heavy casualties to be borne … The tide had turned, but it was a leap year tide.’ This was Guy Gibson, who in those days led 106 Squadron of the RAF’s Bomber Command.
It is hard to overstate the impatience felt by millions on both sides of the Atlantic for action against Hitler on a scale to match the efforts and sacrifices of ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin’s Red Army. The Western Allied leadership was prosecuting the war at a pace that suited themselves, their countries’ immunity from invasion from 1941 onwards conferring the luxury of choice, such as the Russians never had, about where and when to engage the Wehrmacht. British caution exasperated US chief of the army George Marshall and his peers. Yet the old prime minister and his chiefs of staff recognised fundamental truths: that Britain and America were sea powers, confronting a great land power. It would be madness to attempt an amphibious return to the continent without command of the air, which could not be secured any time soon. The voice of Churchill, backed by the intellects of his professional military advisers, Portal and Alanbrooke foremost among them, was decisive in delaying D-Day until June 1944, saving hundreds of thousands of American and British lives. Meanwhile, it was vital to the prestige and morale of the Western Allies, and especially those of Churchill’s nation, that Britain should be seen to be carrying the war to Germany by any and every means within its power.
2 HARRIS
A consequence of the Western Allies’ cautious grand strategy, rendered necessary by their slow industrial build-up, was that the Anglo-American air forces, and especially heavy bombers, constituted their most conspicuous military contribution to the defeat of Germany between the fall of France in June 1940 and the invasion of Normandy. Bomber Command’s pre-war estate of twenty-seven British airfields had by 1943 expanded to over a hundred stations, while the RAF’s overall strength grew from 175,692 personnel to over a million men, including a significant proportion of the nation’s best-educated adolescents.
Some senior officers, including the USAAF’s Gen. Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, C-in-C of Bomber Command, believed that air attack on Germany could render redundant a land invasion of the continent. 1943 was the year in which British warmakers drafted plans for Operation Rankin, whereby troops would stage an unopposed deployment to occupy Germany in the event that some combination of bombing, Russian victories and an internal political upheaval precipitated the collapse of the Nazi regime, an abrupt enemy surrender.
Yet, while Winston Churchill committed a lion’s portion of Britain’s industrial effort to the air offensive, he never shared the airmen’s extravagant hopes for it. For a season in 1940, when Britain’s circumstances were desperate, he professed to do so. Once the threat of invasion receded, however, he recognised that, while bombing could importantly weaken the German war machine, it could not hope to avert the necessity for a continental land campaign. The airmen’s most critical contribution until June 1944 was to show Churchill’s people, together with the Americans and – more important still – the embattled Russians, that Britain was carrying the war to the enemy. The prime minister recognised, as his chiefs of staff often did not, the value of ‘military theatre’ – conspicuous displays of activity that sustained an appearance of momentum, even when real attainments were modest. As the author has written elsewhere: ‘There must be action, even if not always useful; there must be successes, even if overstated or even imagined; there must be glory, even if undeserved.’ Through those apparently interminable years between Dunkirk and D-Day, again and again the BBC prominently featured in its news bulletins the words ‘Last night aircraft of Bomber Command …’ followed by a roll call of industrial targets attacked in France, Italy, and above all Germany.
In 1940–41 the RAF caused mild embarrassment to the Nazi leadership, which had promised to secure the Reich against such intrusions. Bombing nonetheless inflicted negligible damage upon Hitler’s war effort. Although more aircraft became available during the winter of 1941, poor weather, navigational difficulties and German fighters inflicted punitive casualties upon the attackers, who still made little impact on the enemy below. Thereafter, however, a succession of events took place which progressively transformed the offensive.
In December 1941 the prime minister and the Air Ministry received an independent report from the Cabinet Office, commissioned by Churchill’s personal scientific adviser Lord Cherwell, the former Professor Frederick Lindemann, analysing the effectiveness of British bombing through a study of aiming-point photographs returned by aircrew. This devastating document showed that the average RAF crew on an average night was incapable of identifying any target smaller than a city. In consequence, and after a vexed debate in which practical issues dominated and moral ones did not feature at all, British strategy changed. By a decision for which Cherwell was prime mover in concord with Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, since October 1940 head of the air force, it was agreed that instead of pursuing largely vain efforts to locate power stations, factories and military installations, the RAF would assault entire urban regions.
The principal objective would be to ‘de-house’ and frankly terrorise the German industrial workforce – break the spirit of Hitler’s people – even though the Luftwaffe had conspicuously failed to achieve this against Churchill’s nation. The new policy, known as ‘area bombing’, was never directly avowed to the public, nor indeed to Bomber Command aircrew, who were told that the RAF continued to strike at military and industrial targets, with civilian casualties an incidental, and implicitly regrettable, by-product. This was a falsehood. Between 1942 and 1945, the civilian population of Hitler’s cities was the target of most British bombing.
America’s entry into the war in December 1941 made eventual Allied victory seem certain. Until a continental land campaign began, US air chiefs were as eager as their British counterparts to demonstrate their service’s war-winning capabilities. Daylight operations by American B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators began slowly to reinforce the RAF’s night campaign. The British received early deliveries of a new generation of four-engined heavy bombers – Short Stirlings and Handley-Page Halifaxes, followed by Avro Lancasters – which progressively increased Bomber Command’s striking power. They also acquired ‘Gee’, the first of a succession of electronic aids which improved the accuracy of RAF navigation.
Finally, in February 1942 Sir Arthur Harris became commander-in-chief of Bomber Command. Britain’s inter-service wrangles and clashes of personality inflicted less damage than did those of the United States, and for that matter Germany, upon their own war efforts. They nonetheless absorbed time and energy. The Royal Navy and the RAF disliked and distrusted each other