The Bristol Beaufighter arrived in the nick of time for the RAF. With a reasonable top speed, heavy armament, and good range, the Beau served as a multirole fighter-bomber and night fighter. In the latter role, the Beaufighter functioned as both an interceptor of German nocturnal raiders as well as an escort for Bomber Command’s missions over Western Europe.
They told me when they cut the ready wheat,
The hares are suddenly homeless and afraid,
And aimlessly sicle the stubble with scared feet,
Finding no place in sunlight or shade.
It’s morning and the Hampdens have returned.
The crews are home, have stretched and laughed and gone,
Whence the planes came and the Chance-light burned
The sun has ridden the sky and made the dawn.
He walks distraught, circling the landing ground,
Waiting the last one home that won’t come back,
And like those hares, he wanders round and round,
Lost and desolate on the close cropped track.
—“Missing,” by Herbert Corby
EVEN AS FIGHTER COMMAND FOUGHT to protect the skies over Southern England, Bomber Command took the first baby steps forward to bring the war home to the German people. The counteroffensive—in the best Douhet fashion—started with a whimper instead of a bang, mainly as a result of a complete lack realistic prewar preparation for the mechanics of bombing cities hundreds of miles from England.
At the start of the war, the RAF lacked a truly effective long-range strategic bomber. The Bristol Blenheim was among the mediocre twin-engine designs that formed the backbone of Britain’s offensive aviation.
In mid-1940, Bomber Command was a flat-out mess. Its squadrons lacked everything from decent aircraft to effective navigational aids and useful payload capacities. The crews were green as grass, and every time they’d been thrown into the fray, bad things happened. The first days of the war proved that when the RAF sent its first raids against German naval targets, it lost most of the aircraft dispatched.
During the Battle of France, the light bomber squadrons sent to try and blunt the panzer penetrations in Holland and Belgium ran into a firestorm of flak and Bf-109s. Flying fossilized aircraft like the virtually defenseless Fairey Battle, these brave crews died in droves to no strategic purpose.
As the Battle of Britain unfolded, Bomber Command’s best aircraft was the Vickers Wellington. Twin-engined, fabric-covering its rugged geodetic frame, the “Wimpy,” as the crews affectionately called it, could carry 4,500 pounds of bombs to targets almost a thousand miles away. Armed with only six .303-caliber light machine guns, the Wellington could hardly defend itself against determined daylight interceptors, a fact the Luftwaffe drove home repeatedly in 1939. In December of that year, three Wellington squadrons attempted to bomb Schillig Roads and Wilhelmshaven, only to lose ten Wimpys, with another three badly damaged. After that, Bomber Command abandoned long-range unescorted daylight raids against Germany. Such missions just proved too costly with the aircraft available, and the RAF could not maintain the loss rate of crews and bombers.
Initially, the RAF’s ability to strike back at Germany was limited not only by the aircraft in its inventory, but by the technology required to get its bombers to their target areas at night. The RAF had trained throughout the 1930s as a daylight bombing force. When the first Blenheim and Wellington raids resulted in unsustainable losses, night bombing looked to be the only way for Britain to strike back at Germany. Much would have to be learned and developed on the job. In the meantime, the aircrews paid for that process with their lives.
The Vickers Wellington was the closest thing to a heavy strategic bomber the RAF could field at the outset of the war. It would dominate Bomber Command’s squadrons for almost the first three years of the war.
With its rugged construction, reliable engines and ability to carry a good payload, the Wellington was the indispensable weapon of the nocturnal air war. Yet, when used in daylight operations, their light defensive armament made them easy prey for Axis interceptors.
A 1,000-pound bomb about to be loaded aboard a Wellington. The British developed a whole range of specialized ordnance designed to maximize the destruction wrought on German cities. From incendiaries to start fires to “blockbuster” bombs intended to destroy water, sewer, and gas mains, the RAF became the leading agent of urban devastation.
Besides the Wellington, Bomber Command fielded a motley collection of mediocre early 1930s designs, such as the Armstrong-Whitworth Whitley and the Handley Page Hampden. In 1936, the RAF asked the British aircraft industry to build a true long-range strategic bomber. The Short Stirling and the Avro Manchester resulted from that process, but four years later neither had yet reached operational status. Bad luck and poor design decisions hampered the development of both bombers. The Stirling prototype crashed during its maiden flight in 1939, underscoring multiple issues that took many months to sort out. The Manchester didn’t have much more success. Equipped with four engines powering two propellers, the aircraft had a distressing habit of spontaneously combusting while in flight.
The missions flown against Germany in 1940 highlighted the problems of nocturnal long-range bombing. First, navigation played a vital factor in the success of any raid. Throughout the fall, a large proportion of crews could not locate their targets in the dark. Given how few aircraft were available for offensive operations in 1940, every bomber that failed to find its way in the dark whittled down Bomber Command’s ability to do serious harm to the Germans. Not that much harm was being done by those aircraft that found their targets. Post-strike reconnaissance photos showed that few bombs fell within a mile of where they were intended. Such accuracy did not lend itself to surgical, precision strikes.
Another case study in mediocrity: the Armstrong-Whitworth Whitley equipped many Bomber Command squadrons at the start of the war. Totally inadequate for the strategic campaign against Germany, the shortage of modern bombers forced it to remain in service well past its prime.
The Messerschmitt Bf-110 came into its own as a night interceptor. Equipped with two 20mm cannons mounted in the fuselage behind the pilot and set to fire upward at a forty-five degree angle, the 110 crews would attack British bombers from their vulnerable bellies. The Bf-110 also carried an airborne radar system that could help the pilot hone in on a target after being guided to the stream by ground controllers. The Luftwaffe’s night fighter force remained a deadly effective threat until late 1944.
What to do about these issues? That question plagued Bomber Command through 1942 as it struggled to re-equip and train for the task at hand. But in 1940, the British bomber crews lived in the shadow of their own technological and material shortcomings. Not much could be accomplished in that environment, except to lay the foundation for future operations through hard-won experience and the blood of the young crews.
There would be hope and successes in the future, but in 1940 the pipeline looked pretty empty. Bomber Command settled into its role with the aircraft it went to war with in 1939, which meant the young men sent aloft night after night paid the price for the prewar neglect. Nevertheless, Churchill was right: Bomber Command served as the only way Britain could wield offensive action against Germany in 1940. Its army could never face the Wehrmacht alone; the navy could win the Battle of the Atlantic and secure the Mediterranean, but its ships could not defeat Germany.
As a result, Churchill and most of his senior military advisors agreed that Bomber Command gave the country the best chance of ultimate victory. In October 1940, Chief of the Air Staff Sir Charles Portal sent Bomber Command a directive that essentially served as a blueprint for its operations for the remainder of the war. There would be two top priority targets: German morale and Germany’s oil industry. British air planners studied Nazi Germany’s wartime economy and concluded the weak link was its oil infrastructure. Should the synthetic fuel refineries be destroyed, the panzers could not roll. The Heinkels could not fly.
One of Bomber Command’s more numerous medium bombers at the start of the war, the Handley Page Hampden was such an ergonomic nightmare that its crews called it the “Flying Suitcase.” Shoehorned into tight confines within its narrow fuselage, the RAF airmen could drag aloft four thousands pounds of bombs over a radius of action of about five hundred miles. Armed with only four (later six) popgun .303-caliber machine guns, it was meat on the table for Luftwaffe interceptors when used in daylight. Out of necessity, the Hampden soldiered on until late 1942. By the time they were withdrawn from front-line service, half had been lost in operational accidents or in combat over the Third Reich.
A Bomber Command crew mounts up at sunset. Though Douhet and other theorists believed a strategic bombing campaign could bring about a cheap victory, the reality turned out to be vastly different. This young RAF crew had about a 75 percent chance of dying, being wounded, or falling into German hands.
The Avro Manchester offered a glimmer of hope that Bomber Command might receive new first-rate long-range aircraft with which to pummel Germany. Powered by four engines linked to a pair of propellers, the Manchester never met expectations. Fussy, complex, and prone to fatal engine fires, the Manchester equipped only a tiny number of Bomber Command squadrons. Its greatest contribution to the war effort was to serve as the first design stepping stone to the much more successful Lancaster.
The Blackburn Botha represented one of the worst design failures that plagued the British aircraft industry in the late 1930s. Intended to be a four-seat reconnaissance aircraft and torpedo bomber, the Botha was dangerously underpowered and difficult to fly. It proved to be unsuitable for front-line operations and was relegated to anti-submarine patrol work until replaced by other, more successful aircraft.
When the Blenheim, Hampden, and Wellingtons sent over Germany in 1939 ended up getting shot down in droves by the Luftwaffe’s air defenses, the British Air Ministry went searching for a new medium bomber that could survive such daylight operations. The Bristol Buckingham was the product of that search. It took two years to get the Buckingham in the air, and despite its top speed of over three hundred miles per hour, the RAF no longer really needed a daylight medium bomber. It represented another diversion of effort and resources at a time when Bomber Command was struggling desperately to expand in the face of production issues and incredibly high losses.
The British would fight fire with fire. The London Blitz and all the devastation the Germans had wrought on the Kingdom’s capital had removed whatever moral qualms the British leadership had at pursuing the destruction of Germany’s cities and killing its civilian populace. The gloves came off that October, and in the years to come, the German people would feel the wrath for Warsaw, Rotterdam, and London a hundredfold. Douhet’s cold vision of future air warfare would become Germany’s reality for five long years.
Nevertheless, there were problems with assaulting morale by killing civilians. First, the British looked back in time and saw how the German home front collapsed in 1918 and concluded that Germany’s people would not be able to put up with the hardship of area attacks on their cities. The British made the same mistake Goering and Hitler made in September 1940 and completely underestimated the resolve of those upon which the bombs fell. National morale, never an easy thing to gauge in the first place, served as an elusive objective, a will-of-the-wisp sort of target that could be chased but never really seized. In 1940, however, this was unclear, and the men making the decisions believed pounding German cities to rubble would cause systemic collapse and the end to World War II.
The oil industry, on the other hand, formed the weak link in Germany’s war machine, and no doubt its facilities were legitimate military targets with no moral ambiguity surrounding their destruction. Unfortunately for the British, these targets tended to be isolated, away from cities and small enough to defy even the best bombing accuracy the RAF crews could offer early in the war. Additionally, most of the major oil facilities, such as Ploesti, lay in Eastern Europe and were either out of range to Bomber Command’s early war aircraft or left the crews dangerously exposed to interception for lengthy periods of time. As a result, the targets in 1940 and 1941 tended to be “industrial centers”—cities with lots of factories where falling bombs were likely to do some damage no matter how far off the intended mark they landed.
Through November and December 1940, Bomber Command embarked on its new, well-defined campaign. Five raids were launched against Berlin, three more against Hamburg. All eight combined managed to put fewer than six hundred individual sorties over Germany, resulting in little damage and quite a few RAF losses. After one particularly rough night in which Bomber Command lost eleven planes, Churchill personally despaired over such casualties and made it clear to the RAF’s leadership that they could not be sustained.
In 1941, the first of the four-engined bombers finally reached operational status. The Short Stirling finally flew its first combat mission in February 1941. Ironically, Bomber Command sent these new aircraft against Rotterdam. Throughout the year, Stirlings arrived in dribs and drabs, but there were never enough to equip more than a couple of squadrons. Same with the Manchesters, whose operational record did not merit the effort and treasure devoted to the project.
The Short Stirling was the first long-ranged four engine aircraft to join Bomber Command. Entering service in 1941, its pilots discovered that at altitude, the Stirling could actually outmaneuver Ju-88 and Bf-110 interceptors, something the later Halifax and Lancaster could not do.
Fortunately, in March 1941, the first Handley Page Halifax squadron flew a mission against German naval targets at Le Havre, France. Over seven years in development, the Halifax represented the first effective four-engined bomber to achieve operational status in Europe. Capable of carrying an astonishing 13,500-pound bomb load over seven hundred miles to its target and back, the Halifax gave the RAF its first aerial sledgehammer with which to batter Germany’s cities. The problem was that there weren’t enough of them to make a difference. Throughout the year, Bomber Command averaged only twenty-three operational Halifaxes between two squadrons. Teething troubles and technical bugs kept the serviceability rates down.
In desperation, the British turned to the United States for help and purchased a squadron’s worth of Boeing B-17Cs. Dubbed the Fortress I, these rugged, long-legged bombers gave the RAF high hopes. Once operational with 90 Squadron, a whole array of problems cropped up with them. First, the manually operated defensive guns turned out to be almost useless in battle. The fuselage blisters had to be opened in order to use those guns, which exposed the crew to freezing cold temperatures at high altitude. The Fortress I also lacked armor protection. Disappointed, 90 Squadron flew only fifty-one sorties before handing their Forts over to Coastal Command in September 1941. On one mission to Bremen, not a single Boeing even hit the city during their high-altitude bomb runs.
A formation of Hampden bombers over England. The crews of this poorly defended medium bomber faced long odds of survival over Germany.
The demand for offensive aircraft was so great that the RAF ordered hundreds of Lockheed Hudsons to fill the gap the British aviation industry could not close. Used in reconnaissance, light bomber, and anti-submarine warfare roles, the Hudson gave good service through the early years of the war.
The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress arrived in the RAF inventory in 1941 with great expectations for its combat performance. Both the Americans supporting the RAF Fort program and the British themselves were terribly disappointed with the early B-17’s performance. The waist blisters, when opened at 20,000 feet, made the fuselage as cold as the Arctic in the dead of winter. Equipment failures were common, and the Norden bombsight failed to perform as advertised. They saw very limited service with one squadron before being withdrawn.
On the night of November 7–8, 1941, Bomber Command launched four hundred aircraft against targets all over Europe. The crews flew missions to mine Oslo harbor in Norway and bomb Berlin and other cities in Germany. Thirty-seven bombers and 120 airmen went down that night, victims of anti-aircraft fire and the Luftwaffe’s growing night fighter capabilities. In Berlin, the attack wrecked 390 homes and killed nine civilians.
Wellingtons not only served in Bomber Command, but also functioned as antisubmarine patrol aircraft as well as search and rescue birds.
In the early years of the war, the RAF’s near-single-minded focus on the strategic air war against Germany and the industrial build-up required to support it came at the expense of the daylight, tactical level-bombing capabilities. The British purchased the North American B-25 Mitchell to help fill this need.
The initial expansion of Bomber Command was hampered by delayed design development, production problems, and the failure of some key projects, including the Avro Manchester. In the 1930s, the British aviation industry struggled to bring to production an entire crop of new bombers, such as the Short Stirling, which took five years to go from concept to combat operational. As these growing pains hampered the expansion of the force, the older designs, such as these Blenheims, were forced to remain in front-line service long after they had become obsolete.
For a year, a patchwork force of obsolescent medium bombers carried the fight to Germany’s cities with very little results for the effort. As the campaign continued, it became clear that better aircraft and better equipment would be needed to inflict substantial damage on targets in the Third Reich. The first glimmer of hope arrived on the wings of the outstanding Handley Page Halifax, a powerful and effective four-engine bomber that reached operational status in March 1941. Available in very limited numbers through that year, the Halifax eventually became the second-most numerous aircraft in Bomber Command’s arsenal behind the Avro Lancaster.
The Consolidated Liberator ended up being one of the most successful of the Lend-Lease bombers employed by the RAF. Used both as a bomber as well as an anti-submarine patrol aircraft with Coastal Command, the Liberator’s heavy ordnance load and long range played a valuable role in operations in Europe and the Mediterranean.
The early export variant of the B-24 was called the Consolidated LB-30. Lacking power turrets and many of the features found on the later B-24D model, the LB-30 saw limited service. Many were later converted into transports.
The night spelled utter disaster for the British. The nation had pinned its hopes on Douhet’s theories and had undertaken a massive effort to expand bomber command so that it would ultimately field a force of some four thousand aircraft. Yet, the expansion had gone slowly, and what raids reached their targets had yet to inspire much hope that serious damage could be inflicted. A change was needed. A few months later, in February 1942, Sir Arthur Harris was appointed the new chief of Bomber Command. Single-minded, directed, and energetic, Harris believed wholeheartedly in the concept of area bombing. In the months to come, he would reshape Bomber Command from the struggling, fledgling force it was into a formidable weapon that could lay waste to entire cities. He did it with such ruthlessness of purpose that his own men, upon whose shoulders the campaign depended, sometimes called him “Butcher Harris,” especially on those mornings when dozens of bombers failed to return home from the dark skies over Nazi Germany.
Striking back. In 1940, the British had no other way to launch a counteroffensive against Germany besides Bomber Command’s aircraft and crews. Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, sent a directive to the RAF that October that laid the foundations for the British strategic bombing campaign for the next five years. German morale would be the primary target, and destroying the Third Reich’s cities would be the means to strike at it. Killing civilians had become official British policy.
Bombing up a Wellington the afternoon before a night mission. Until the arrival of the Halifax and the Lancaster, the Wellington remained the most versatile and effective bomber in the RAF’s inventory.
Nevertheless, the stage was set. Bomber Command had a new leader. New weapons, including the deadly 4,000-pound “blockbuster” bomb, had been perfected. New tactics, new countermeasures, and new aircraft would soon reach operational status. As they did, Germany’s population would be in the crosshairs in what became the largest air war in human history.
