Chastise. Max Hastings

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Chastise - Max  Hastings


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‘combined’ offensive took place; instead, there was a competition between the US and British air forces. Sir Arthur Harris paid mere lip service to Casablanca’s emphasis on refined targeting. His aircraft continued to heap fire and destruction on Germany’s cities by night, while in daylight the USAAF claimed to pursue precision bombing of identified weak points in the Nazi war economy. Because, in reality, American bombing proved highly imprecise, especially in poor weather, hapless German civilians saw little distinction between the rival strategies. Moreover, intelligence about enemy industry remained a weakness of the strategic air offensive from beginning to end.

      3 THE ‘PANACEA MERCHANTS’

      As far back as October 1937, RAF planners identified Germany’s water resources – dams and reservoirs – as a vulnerability in the Nazi industrial machine. Bomber Command initially focused on nineteen Ruhr power stations and twenty-six coking plants, which its staff believed could be destroyed by three thousand bombing sorties. This would allegedly bring Nazi war production to a standstill, in return for an anticipated loss of 176 British aircraft. Then the Air Targets Sub-Committee of Major Desmond Morton’s Industrial Intelligence Centre took a hand, highlighting the dependence of electricity generation, mining and coking activities upon water supply. Morton’s cell urged that the mere breaching of two dams, the Möhne and the nearby Sorpe, could achieve the desired outcome, a prospective war-winner, for far less expenditure of effort.

      Britain’s airmen were imbued with a faith that the mere fact of subjecting an enemy nation to bombing would cause its people, and even perhaps its industrial plant, to crumble before them. ‘In air operations against production,’ wrote Gp. Capt. John Slessor, a future head of the RAF, in 1936, ‘the weight of attack will invariably fall upon a vitally important, and not by nature very amenable, section of the community – the industrial workers, whose morale and sticking power cannot be expected to equal that of the disciplined soldier.’ The intention of Britain’s airmen to play a decisive and independent role in achieving victory over Germany relied for fulfilment more on expectations of the havoc that terrorisation of civilians would wreak than on any rational analysis of the weight of attack necessary to cripple the Nazi industrial machine.

      In the cases of the Möhne and the Sorpe, experts at the Air Ministry’s research department at Woolwich warned: ‘If the policy to attack dams is accepted, the [Ordnance] Committee are of the opinion that the development of a propelled piercing bomb of high capacity would be essential to ensure the requisite velocity and flight … Even then its success would be highly problematical.’ Subsequent debate concluded that, given the low standard of aiming accuracy achieved by RAF bomber pilots in peacetime, before they were even exposed to enemy fire, a successful attack on Germany’s dams was impracticable.

      Through the early war years, both the Air Staff and British economic warfare researchers sustained enthusiasm for striking at the enemy’s water resources. The Ruhr and its industries accounted for a quarter of the Reich’s entire consumption, much of this derived from the Möhne reservoir. The Air Targets Sub-Committee was told that its destruction would create ‘enormous damage’, affecting hydro-generating stations. The ‘low-lying Ruhr valley would be flooded, so that railways, important bridges, pumping stations and industrial chemical plants would be rendered inoperative’.

      In June 1940, amid the crisis of the fall of France, Bomber Command groped for means of striking back at the victorious Nazis. Its senior air staff officer, Gp. Capt. Norman Bottomley, again urged the merit of breaching enemy dams. On 3 July, Portal, then Bomber Command’s C-in-C, wrote to the Air Ministry pinpointing a key target. Surely, he said, ‘the time has arrived when we should make arrangements for the destruction of the Möhne Dam … I am given to understand that almost all the industrial activity of the Ruhr depends upon [it].’ He suggested a possible torpedo attack by Hampden bombers, or high-level bombing attack against the ‘dry’ side of the Möhne’s wall.

      The weapons available to pursue the airmen’s ambitions remained inadequate in quality as well as quantity. The Hampden bombers mentioned by Portal could carry nothing like heavy enough ordnance to dent, far less breach, the Möhne. A December 1940 study of German bombing of the UK concluded, a trifle ungrammatically: ‘comparison of the Results … with that obtained by [RAF] General Purpose bombs against similar enemy targets left no doubt as to the inefficiency of our bombs’. GP bombs contained too little explosive, yet until the end of the war Britain’s airmen continued to risk and sacrifice their lives to drop more than half a million of them. The 4,000-lb HC – High-Capacity – bombs introduced in 1941, and known to aircrew as ‘cookies’, were relatively efficient wreckers of urban areas: sixty-eight thousand were dropped in the course of the offensive. They were useless, however, against such huge structures as dams.


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