In July 2004, a charming elderly gentleman, Willy Schludecker, aged eighty-two, bespectacled, tweed-clad, paid a visit to Northumberland in the far north-east of England. His appearance is that of a retired Lutheran bishop, or perhaps the headmaster of a gentle, but studious Gymnasium.
He was coming to see the village of Bolam, near Morpeth. A memorial window in the church there carries the inscription: ‘This window marks the place where, on 1st May 1942, a bomb dropped from a German aircraft entered the Church but did not explode’. Willy Schludecker had been the bomber pilot flying a Dornier 217 from Holland with the intention of bombing Sunderland, then one of the great shipbuilding areas of Britain. Coming under attack from British fighters, the young Schludecker took a split-second decision to jettison his explosive load. One of the four 1,100-lb bombs bounced through a side-wall of the Saxon church before sliding across the tiled floor.
Joy Scott, four years older than the bomber pilot, was in the village when the explosives fell. ‘It was terrifying. The place shook for five minutes when the bombs dropped. The first bombs blew in the windows of the vicarage. The vicar had got out of bed and the window frame ended up framing him on the bed. The bomber came so low it clipped the trees, which is probably why the bomb that hit the church did not go off.’
A local historian, investigating the night of the bombing, discovered that Herr Schludecker was still alive. When contact had been made, the former pilot wanted to come to the village. ‘He was mortified and decided that he would like to come over and tell the people there that it was not his intention to bomb their church.’ The newspaper, on the morning of 13 July 2004, showed the photograph of old Willy Schludecker holding the arm of Joy Scott outside the sturdy little Saxon church.1
Schludecker’s own nearest city of Cologne on the Rhine was the scene of one of Sir Arthur Harris’s set-piece bombing raids in which Bomber Command proudly flew 1,000 Lancasters over in a single night. The gentleness of the two old people in the July 2004 photograph made it seem totally unimaginable that sophisticated nations should ever have thought to solve their political differences by spending huge sums of money in constructing aeroplanes and explosives for the single purpose of bombing human beings of all ages, and destroying their docks, their factories, their houses, their schools, their hospitals, their altars and their shrines. There had been sieges in the past, from the legendary times of Troy to the horrible Siege of Paris in 1870 when civilians had been caught up in ‘dolorous war’, as Homer calls it. Such atrocities had always been incidental to war’s main business, which was battle between combatants by sea and land. The invention of the aeroplane changed all that. In 1922, the British cabinet had approved the policy of establishing ‘Air Control’ in Iraq. Charles Portal, Arthur Harris and Edward Ellington, the officers who oversaw this policy of cowing the Iraqi population by bombs from the air, were senior officers in the RAF during the run-up to the Second World War. There was an added poignancy in the story of the old Luftwaffe pilot revisiting the English village which he had inadvertently bombed, since, on the day that his visit was reported on the middle pages of the English newspapers, the front pages contained stories of allied air raids on Iraq. Those selfsame targets selected by Portal and Harris in 1922 were still being pounded by expensive Western explosives in the summer of 2004. The policy described sardonically by Field Marshal Wilson as ‘appearing from God knows where, dropping their bombs on God knows what, and going off again God knows where’2 was always going to be popular with politicians, since it could be done with comparatively few casualties – certainly fewer than using infantry to subdue a populace.
Bombing of civilian targets in the First World War had been frequent. The Germans bombed the suburbs of Paris on 14 August 1914. Hitler’s invasion of Russia fell on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the French scoring a direct hit on a circus at Karlsruhe, during a performance: 110, mainly children, were killed. It is not surprising then that in 1939, at the outbreak of war, all British intelligence, and most of the pundits, assumed that Hitler would direct a bombing campaign against London. Sir John Anderson, Home Secretary and chairman of the Committee of Imperial Defence (a pompous man later to give his name to a semi-effective cheap form of air-raid shelter which people could construct in their back gardens), calculated that 2,000 bombs would fall on London in the first twenty-four hours of war. They worked out that 28,000 would be killed by bombing in the first month. Bertrand Russell in Which Way Peace? envisaged the mayhem: ‘London would be one vast raving bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless shriek for peace, the city will be pandemonium.’
In fact no British civilian was killed by aerial bombardment until a stray bomb, aiming for the battleships in Scapa Flow – where the old German fleet was scuppered at the end of the First World War – accidentally hit a house and killed James Isbistern, aged twenty-seven, in the village of Waithe Bridge in Loch of Stenness. In the fight between Britain and Germany the policy of bombing civilians was pursued by the British, who mounted their first raid on 11 May 1940. It aimed at targets along the Ruhr the day after Churchill became Prime Minister. The RAF continued, without cessation or interruption, to bomb German civilian targets until the end of the war. It was Churchill who as Secretary for War (combined with air) had directed the first civilian bombings in Iraq in 1922.
The Germans, of course, had taken part in savage aerial attacks on European cities, including Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, and on Rotterdam, The Hague, and such French towns as Nancy during their conquest of Northern Europe during the summer of 1940. It was Britain from which their bombers were held back, for as long as Hitler entertained any hope of a negotiated peace based on the loose general scheme of Germany running Europe and Britain the rest of the world.
Whoever fights monsters, decreed Nietzsche in his prophetic text Beyond Good and Evil, ‘should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster; when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you’.3 The fear of being bombed, and the knowledge that both sides were prepared to bomb, if necessary upon a limitless scale, changed the whole rhetoric of warfare, and the way in which it was conceived by governments and populace alike. The First World War, with its Angels of Mons, its hymns of knightly valour, its need to dignify the muddied, bloodied battlefields with chivalric glow, had been consciously archaic in its way of selling itself to the people. Hence the appalling and shocking contrast, in the more popular songs, as in the war poets, between the florid calls to war by generals and bishops and the reality of shell-shock, amputated limbs, gas and mechanized slaughter. Techniques of slaughter had improved since 1919. Governments would now in 1939 be capable of effective acts of genocide with greater speed and efficiency than previous generations had dreamed of. The Young Turks, killing their million Armenians, had needed to employ armies, with bayonets, rifles, swords. Such grisly means would still be in use during the 1939–45 war. But the invention of the bomber could distance governments and war leaders imaginatively from what they were doing, and in such circumstances, Homeric or Arthurian metaphor came to be displaced by cosier, chummier injunctions to sing along together in the air-raid shelters as the fire-bombs rained down; to take the medicine, to continue business as usual.
One of the ways in which the peoples of the twentieth century made tolerable for themselves the scale of mass slaughter was by invoking the language of heroism. The Heroic Age, as perceived through the literature of Epic and Romance, had been one in which weaponry was primitive and the grim business of battle was dignified by focusing upon the deeds of individual combatants. While the mayhem, the casual and painful deaths of Trojans, Greeks, Persians, Spartans, Geats, Arthurian Celts or Brythons, could be attributed to pitiless Fate or capricious deities, the whole grisly business was redeemed by the personal courage of Hector, Patroclus, Lancelot. At a time when modern warfare became a Malthusian slaughter programme; when tanks, advanced artillery, machine guns could mow down tens of thousands by the day, herding together human beings like animals in a highly mechanized slaughterhouse; when sophisticated explosives could wipe out thousands, regardless of their skills as fighters or their moral fortitude, the linguistic convention was revived that anyone who died in war was a hero. The brave became the valiant. Tens of thousands of mutilated young corpses became the slain. Their unwitting and involuntary deaths were described as sacrifice, even as a Calvary.
Language from Malory’s Morte d’Arthur or Andrew Lang’s Homer tried to hide from the governed and the governors, the generals and the foot soldiers, the fact of which the dictators were all too aware: that human life had become cheap, expendable: that the old metaphysical beliefs in soul or human individuality had all been replaced by various forms of materialism and determinism which made it possible to eliminate human beings on a prodigious scale without any strong underlying intellectual challenge. War was bound to become a projection of Darwinian Fitness rivalry. In the First World War, there were some ‘victories’ and ‘defeats’ in the field, but very few decisive battles. After both sides had demonstrated their willingness to sacrifice tens, hundreds of thousands of young lives month in, month out, the contest became a question of who could bring the winning combination of most active troops and most military hardware. The arrival of over a million Americans in Europe simply crushed the morale of German leadership.
After the First World War, and the resolve of Western leaders that no such wasteful fighting should be repeated on Western soil, there developed the view that science and technology had in any case made obsolete such methods of war as had carved up France and the Low Countries. The few bombs dropped on European cities by the rivals of the Great War left the statesmen in the ensuing two decades convinced that the power that controlled the air would ultimately win the war. Radar, and anti-aircraft technology, had not been pioneered when Stanley Baldwin told the House of Commons in November 1932: ‘the bomber will always get through’.4
If the land battles, however mechanized, could be seen as re-enactments of medieval chivalry, air battles could certainly be seen as tournaments. The Battle of Britain had stopped the German advance, made impossible the Nazi invasion of Kent, and created if not the inevitable outcome of an Allied victory, at least a stay of execution. Dowding’s ‘Few’ of Fighter Command had done something which no land battle could have achieved: brought about a decisive change in the destiny of nations with losses in the low thousands, not the tens of thousands of Mons, Ypres or Passchendaele. Those on both sides who engaged as fighter pilots were heroes in the Homeric mould, individuals who actually made a difference.
Another branch of the Royal Air Force, Bomber Command, called for no less courage on the part of pilots and their crews, but when the war was over, the politicians were sheepish about their achievement. Arthur Harris, C-in-C of Bomber Command, was offered no employment by the RAF in 1945 and left for South Africa. He was not made a peer but offered the minor reward of a baronetcy. No Campaign Medal was struck for the men who took part in the destruction, not only of Germany but of many cities in Holland, France, Italy and Central Europe. The language of heroism could be stretched to include the unfortunates caught up in battles between uniformed combatants in the deserts of North Africa or the beaches of France. But what was heroic about dropping tons of high explosives on medieval churches, on hospitals, on heavily populated and ill-defended towns and cities?
In the trials of the vanquished German leadership at Nuremberg in 1945, it was brazenly taken for granted by the Allies that the bombardment of civilian targets was a war crime. ‘Was not your purpose in this attack to secure a strategic advantage by terrorization of the people of Rotterdam?’ asked Sir David Maxwell Fyfe of General Albert Kesselring, indicted for his part in the defeat of Holland in 1940. Goring, mastermind of the aerial bombardment of Britain in the same year and onwards, admitted: ‘I decided on Coventry because there the most targets could be hit within the smallest area.’5 While the men who directed the bombing of Rotterdam (civilian losses about 840) or Coventry (568 killed during the worst raid, in November 1940, when the cathedral was destroyed; 1,253 killed by air raids during the entire war)6 could be put on trial for their lives, it was perhaps as well that Harris was conveniently in South Africa lest against the British and Dutch losses be placed the 600,000 German civilians who lost their lives, the 3.5 million German homes which were destroyed, the 7.5 million Germans left homeless. By then a variety of justifications had been adduced by the Allied leadership, American as well as British, for the policy of civilian bombing. These justifications included strategic necessity, the shortening of the war, the need to sap enemy morale. None of these reasons could quite stand exposure to the light of common day, once the Army of Occupation moved across Europe and began to see for themselves what Arthur Harris’s Lancasters, Mosquito Mk IVs, Halifax Mk Ills and other ingenious planes, together with American B17 Fortress Mk IIIs, had wrought on people and places. Those who had flown in Bomber Command on dangerous raids through the night in the latter years of the war, and survived, saw themselves as the lucky ones, but also as the heroes of the war. Half the boys who had flown with them in Bomber Command had died. But their senior officers, and above all Harris himself, had assured them that their courageous flights over enemy territory were a vital, perhaps the vital contribution to Allied victory. The men of Bomber Command were kept isolated from others in the air force and by the very nature of their service – cooped up either in planes or back on the ground with their squadron – they had never mingled with the army or navy.
When the fighting was over one small group of bomber pilots in their RAF uniform were sitting in the rubble of some building they had destroyed, smoking a quiet cigarette. The small town or village they had wrecked seemed miles from anywhere and everything was still. It had never occurred to any of these very young men that what they had been asked to do, at such personal risk, was anything but brave, virtuous and necessary. In the distance, they saw, and heard, the arrival of a small army jeep coming up a dusty road. When it reached them, an officer, an English public schoolboy, leaned over his rolled-down window and addressed the little group. His arm took in the devastation, the ruined buildings, the teetering masonry.
‘Did you do this?’ he asked.
The class thing kicked in. These working-class Lincolnshire boys, brought up to habits of deference but resentful of the drawling superiority of the voice which questioned them, said:
‘Yes, sir.’
They expected congratulations – some school slang from a Biggles book or a Magnet magazine which they could snigger about but which would confirm their sense of self-worth.
‘You bastards!’ exclaimed the officer and drove off at speed.7
It was their first indication that the world did not necessarily regard their war work in the same light that they did.
Before war broke out, it was assumed that the German air force would set out to bomb London flat. In fact, severe as the German bombardment of British cities was to become, it was months after the outbreak of war before Germany bombed any civilian targets in Britain. By contrast bombing German cities was part of British policy from the moment Neville Chamberlain lost control of the government. ‘Whatever be the lengths to which others may go, His Majesty’s Government will never resort to the deliberate attack on women and children, and other civilians for purposes of mere terrorism,’ he promised the Commons at the beginning of the war.8 While Churchill approved constant bombing of German civilian targets, German attacks on Britain were always more sporadic, less concentrated.9
By the time the war was at its height and Churchill with his scientific advisers was weighing up the rival merits of different varieties of poison gas to be dropped on German cities, he was able to express in a memo the wish ‘that this matter in the meanwhile will be thought through cold-bloodedly by rational people, and not by these psalm-singing uniformed spoilsports who always encroach on the territory of others’.10 The uniformed psalm-singers were those chiefs of general staff who doubted not merely the morality but the efficacy of civilian bombing.
Blitzkrieg, lightning war, was, in the German language, that deployment of quick strike which had secured such easy victory over all the European countries invaded by their armies. For the British, however, ‘the Blitz’ meant bombing. Since the German air force had no plane which could last longer than 30 minutes over England without running out of fuel, and most German planes had about ten minutes, either to fight or to bomb, before turning for home with even a faint hope of survival, the policy of aerial bombardment was haphazard.
An early, and emblematic, victim of German bombing was the Warwickshire city of Coventry. The place was a palimpsest through which appeared the history of England. On the borders of this West Midland manufacturing town was the large Triumph Motor-cycle Works and the smaller Lee Francis Cycle Works. But Coventry was not one of those nondescript villages such as Manchester or Birmingham which were purely the creation of the Industrial Revolution. There had been a human settlement at ‘Coffa’s Tree’ in the seventh century. The Benedictine abbey had been founded in 1043 by Earl Leofric, and his wife, the Countess Godiva, entered legend by her celebrated naked ride through the city to ‘free the town of Coventry from heavy bondage and servitude’. (The first chronicle to mention the event, more than a century later, speaks of the horse, not the rider, being ‘naked’, that is, saddle-less; but why spoil a good story?)11 The thriving market town swelled to eminence as a meeting-place for trade guilds in the fifteenth century. Shakespeare probably came here from nearby Stratford to see the miracle plays and to hear the Coventry Carol, a Christmas song from those plays. (The great medieval abbey church became a cathedral – the new diocese was carved out of that of Worcester – in 1918.) Between the 1860s and 1914 Coventry became ‘the bicycle capital of the world’. In the post-First World War era, Courtaulds established a vast modern factory manufacturing synthetic fibres. In addition the Gauge and Tool Company was established here by the mid-1930s. The factories were on the outskirts of what remained a charming old town with a Georgian coaching inn, medieval houses, and modern housing developments for its 280,000 inhabitants.
It could be seen as a miniature version of modern England, an individual complex built around a settlement which stretched back through Tudor merchants and medieval monks to Saxon times. The factories were being put to war use even before September 1939. Courtaulds nylon works was producing parachutes. Alfred Herbert Ltd, since Munich, had been working shifts night and day to produce tools for weapons. Aircraft components were being manufactured in Coventry from March 1940. The first German bombs in the area fell on the nearby Ansty aerodrome in June 1940.
The first German bombs on London were dropped by accident on 25 August 1940, when a German pilot released explosives on a civilian target, which had been meant for oil tanks at Thameshaven.12 On 8 November 1940 the RAF bombed Munich. The raid achieved nothing, but it so influenced Hitler that he insisted there should be retaliation.
The German squadron leader gave the following instructions to his men, for the so-called Operation Moonlight Sonata:
Comrades, you are acquainted with the nature and essentials of tonight’s operation. Our task is, with other squadrons, to repay the attack on Munich by the English during the night of 8 November. We shall not repay it in the same manner by smashing up harmless dwelling houses, but we shall do it in such a way that those over there will be completely stunned.
The aim, their squadron leader assured them, was to smash the factories making engine parts, including the Rolls-Royce aero-engine works.13
The 14th of November 1940, a Thursday, was early-closing day in Coventry. The boys of King Henry VIII school played their usual game of rugger. The clergy of St Thomas, and of the cathedral of St Michael, said Evensong. Over high tea the citizens read the Midland Daily Telegraph or listened to Children’s Hour, episode five of Forgotten Island by J. D. Strange. It was shortly after 7 pm that the bombers arrived and dropped about 100 incendiary bombs over the city. Mingled with the incendiaries were a few high explosives.
‘Strangely persistent this raid tonight, Kenneth,’ remarked the vicar of Holy Trinity Church to his curate.14 By nine o’clock many of the factories on the outskirts of town were ablaze – Alfred Herbert Ltd, and the Daimler works in Sandy Lane. The Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital glowed with incendiary bombs. It was at about eight that the first of the incendiaries struck the cathedral. Clergy and people rescued a few treasures – cross, candlesticks, the colours of the 7th Battalion, the Royal Warwickshire Regiment – but by 11 o’clock that night it was clear that the fire-fighters could not rescue the cathedral itself.
Those who saw the raid from afar – Birmingham is eighteen miles away – felt they were witnessing ‘a gigantic sunset’. The next day there was drizzle in the air. It looked, and felt, as if the whole city had been destroyed, even though by the standards of other bombarded cities later in the war, remarkably few people were killed or injured.
There survives an extraordinary recording of the provost and choir of Coventry Cathedral singing the medieval Coventry Carol in the ruins, on Christmas Day 1940. The world heard Provost Hurrand say: ‘I am speaking from the ruins of Coventry Cathedral … Last Christmas we had our wonderful carol services in the glorious building of pink sandstone … with its wide arches and spacious windows, every stone of it loved and treasured by twenty generations of Coventry people. Six weeks ago the enemy came and hurled down fire and destruction upon our city all through the long night … Early this morning, here under these ruins in the lovely little stone chapel built six hundred years ago we began the day as usual with our Christmas communion, worshipping the Christ, believe me, as joyfully as ever before …’
But for all the brave and pious words, more than the sum of 568 lives, a cathedral, a lot of houses and factories and streets and gardens, had been destroyed. The past had gone. In some European cities which suffered similar fates, it was decided, when peace came, to reconstruct an ersatz version of the old building. In Coventry in the 1950s there was a brave attempt to build a new cathedral (Sir Basil Spence, architect) surrounded by the honest but predictable hideousness of a postwar town. In both cases, the past, that accumulation of masonry and memories which accrues its patina through generations, could not be recovered. The Luftwaffe had destroyed old Coventry – Cuffa’s, Godiva’s, Shakespeare’s – as surely as the RAF would remove the life, the guts of German history. Lübeck, Rostock, Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Frankfurt am Main and many other towns were punitively and thoroughly incinerated. Berlin, the Prussian capital and symbol since Bismarck of German unity, was wrecked.
Bombing with intelligent tactical purpose was not really of interest to Harris. In February 1943, for example, he enlisted the help of his old colleague, now Chief of Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal to resist the conversion of thirty Lancaster bombers to carry a new spinning bomb devised by the scientist Barnes Wallis.15 The bouncing bomb, if it worked, would burst the Ruhr dams and flood the industrial heartland of Germany. The ingenuity, the sheer brilliance, of Wallis must have been one of the things which repelled Harris’s very crude personality. He dismissed Wallis’s invention as ‘just about the maddest proposition as a weapon that we have yet come across’.16 ‘My boys’ lives are too precious to be wasted on your crazy notions.’17 He was eventually converted. The damage inflicted upon two of the Ruhr dams on the night of 16/17 May 1943 was substantial but the third dam was not breached. The Dam Busters had not quite succeeded in wiping out the bulk of the German mining and manufacturing strength in one audacious raid. But this sort of precision bombing, focusing on single achievable objectives, never appealed to Harris. When asked to consider targeting the rubber factories of Hanover, for example, he said: ‘I distrust experts and specialists on “panacea” commodities … for example a fortnight after we were told Germany was nearly on the rocks for oil she staged the biggest campaign in history [Russia] using billions of gallons.’ He preferred to ignore the ‘panacea merchants’18 and concentrate on huge destructive plans of what came to be known as ‘area bombing’.
As early as his appointment in 1942 Harris was telling readers of the Daily Express: ‘If I could send 1,000 bombers to Germany every night, it would end the war by the autumn. We are going to bomb Germany incessantly … the day is coming when the USA and ourselves will put over such a force that the Germans will scream for mercy.’19 He had learnt in Iraq that Arab villages could be bombed into submission. The examples of the courage and fortitude of people in Glasgow, Coventry, Plymouth, Liverpool and hosts of other British towns, including London, with its defiant photographic self-image of St Paul’s surviving the smoke and flames, gave him no pause. He began with medieval towns, not because they had the smallest strategic importance but because, being built of wood, they burnt well. Lübeck and Rostock went up like matchsticks. Over Cologne in May 1942 Harris had his dream fulfilled – 1,000 bombers in one raid.
Workers in the Ruhr had chanted the song:
Tommy, please don’t drop that bomb;
All we are is miners, Tom.
Berlin’s where you want to drop it,
They said ‘Yes’ so let them cop it.
Harris in August 1943 was telling Portal: ‘we are on the verge of a final showdown in the bombing war’, but after nearly two years more of his bombing raids, Germany had still not caved in. By the end of the war, Harris had ordered 14,562 sorties over Berlin. He dropped more bombs on the German capital alone, 33,390 tons, than were dropped on the whole of Britain throughout the war. The suffering of the people of Hamburg, Dresden and ultimately Berlin was on a scale unseen in any British city, since the devastation was so much more widespread, the havoc and destruction more absolute, the casualties so hugely greater. One reason for this in Berlin was that the city was filling up with foreign workers – as many as 800,000 had arrived by 1943 – to replace factory workers who were now dying, in uniform, at the Russian Front. Many of these workers were slaves, and the Gestapo made sure that none of them came near an air-raid shelter. Tens of thousands died in RAF raids.20
Although Berlin was on fire for much of the time in the closing months of the war it never reached the stage of the total inferno which engulfed, for example, Hamburg. One witness recollected, nevertheless: ‘the air-raids kept on getting worse. Sometimes the whole city was on fire. At times, you could not differentiate between night and day. When you went outside you had to have a wet cloth over your face because there was so much dust and dirt in the air that it was impossible to breathe … incendiary bombs fell by the thousands every day.’21
The bombing of London in the closing weeks of 1940 and the beginning of 1941 had an extraordinary effect upon its population. Naturally, there was some panic, and much distress, but the universal mayhem predicted by the Anderson Committee simply did not happen. People huddled in the Underground stations. The authorities forbade them to do so, but the authorities were defied. ‘We was always singin’,’ one woman told the Thames Television World at War programme, ‘always happy, just like there was no war at all, I remember one night when the big guns started …’
The tension of the atmosphere, and the fires themselves, created an extraordinary collective response. In one of the most remarkable novels to come out of the Second World War, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, the author evokes the atmosphere of the blacked-out streets, the smell of burning and death … ‘From the moment of waking you tasted the sweet autumn not less because of the acridity on the tongue and nostrils; and as the singed dust settled and smoke diluted you felt more and more called upon to observe the daytime as a pure and curious holiday from fear.’ Shops had BUSINESS AS USUAL defiantly posted outside them when they had been bombed. Bombed-out civil servants dictated to their secretaries, typewriters perched on their knees, on benches in St James’s Park. ‘The very soil of the city’, wrote Bowen, ‘seemed to generate more strength: in parks and the outsize dahlias, velvet and wine, and the trees on which each vein in each yellow leaf stretched out perfect against the sun emblazoned the idea of the finest hour.’22
London was bombed on seventy-six nights in succession during that autumn and over 40,000 people were killed. There were more than 1,500 fires burning in and around the Square Mile in December 1940. The heart of the City was destroyed, but St Paul’s survived.
Churchill visited the East End to inspect the damage, for, as always happened in bombed cities, it was the poorer areas, with the most densely and cheaply built housing, closer to factories and docks, which were most easily destroyed. ‘I can remember,’ one woman recalled, ‘just off of Green Street and there were crowds of women there trying to get their bits and pieces out of houses … Churchill called out, “We can take it!” and the women told him what he could take in no uncertain terms.’23
In Germany, open defiance of authority such as this would have been punished by instant arrest. But as in England, the bombing strengthened the desire to carry on as normal. ‘Noble, patient, deep pious and solid Germany’, as Thomas Carlyle had called it,24 continued in its virtue and piety. For example, when the RAF bombers destroyed the Treasury in Berlin, and with it every Berliner’s tax documents, they continued to pay their taxes.25
On the night of Harris’s thousand-bomber onslaught on Cologne, the morale of the people was terribly shaken. A hospital doctor recalled: ‘We were all shaking with fear, many of the patients were crying, many people actually caught fire and were running round like live torches.’ Amazingly, however, the survivors doggedly went on with life, just as Londoners did. The summer raid over Hamburg in July 1943, conducted in extreme heat, led in effect to a tornado of fire which took possession of the whole city. Ben Witter, a Hamburg journalist who witnessed the raid, recollected: ‘The water by the docks was on fire. It is difficult to explain why the water was burning, there were many ships more in the canals. They had exploded; burning oil was on the water and the people who were themselves on fire jumped into it; they burned and swam, burnt and went under.’ A Hamburg fire officer, Hans Brunswig, said: ‘Most people were killed by the fierce heat: the temperature in some places reached 1,000 degrees centigrade.’26 Over a million and a quarter people fled from Hamburg. On 20 August 1943 Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, the Man in Despair, saw a group of such refugees trying to force their way on to a train in Upper Bavaria. As they do so a cardboard suitcase bursts open ‘and spills its contents. Toys, a manicure case, singed underwear. And last of all, the roasted corpse of a child, shrunk like a mummy, which its half-deranged mother has been carrying about with her, the relic of a past that was still intact a few days ago.’27
Thirty thousand people died during that raid in Hamburg. Albert Speer believed at the time that six more such raids would finish the war. But there were many more such raids across Germany, and Germany did not cave in, even after American bombers joined the RAF, and, in the words of one US pilot, ‘England was just an airport really.’28 Only when the Red Army reached Berlin was it actually defeated.
By March 1945, when the beautiful city of Dresden had been destroyed by Harris with the scarcely calculated loss of between 30,000 and 100,000 human lives, many of them refugees, even Churchill was concluding: ‘The moment has come when the question of the bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror … should be revised … The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.’ Harris remained impertinent and uncomprehending. ‘In Bomber Command we have always worked on the assumption that bombing anything in Germany is better than bombing nothing.’29
How could such a lunatic idea have been allowed to prevail? Given that this was Harris’s viewpoint, how come he was not arrested as a murderer? One reason was that he was personally a frightening man. In January 1945, when told to abandon ‘area bombing’ and concentrate his attacks on oil targets, he simply refused, challenging Portal to dismiss him. Portal did not dare.
The second reason is that the bombing of Germany has to be understood in the general context of the war campaign. Germany had been set on a course of outright victory and conquest until Dowding in the summer of 1940 held off the fighter pilots of the Luftwaffe, and granted Britain a stay of execution. No invasion of Britain could take place until the spring of 1941, and by then Hitler had conceived his plan, executed on 22 June, of invading Russia.
The British options, when it came to fighting Germany in the years following Dunkirk, were distinctly limited. Even after the United States entered the war, even after Stalin’s Russia joined the Alliance, the invasion of France, or other territories occupied by Hitler, on a Second Front (i.e. second to the Eastern Front where the Wehrmacht and the Red Army fought it out) was not deemed by Churchill to be a practical possibility. Hence his doggedly wise refusal to open up a Second Front until the summer of 1944 and his insistence that the war be pursued first in North Africa, then in the Mediterranean and then, with painful slowness, in Italy. The German army, on the traditional battlefields of Northern Europe, could not be reached by British troops since they had been sent home in fishing skips and pleasure steamers from Dunkirk. This frustrating fact is part of the reason for the decision to attack the comparatively easy targets of German cities by air. One says ‘comparatively’ since, as has already been emphasized, the men of Bomber Command were required to take terrible risks. Their losses, out of the 125,000 who served, were 59,423 killed and missing, a mortality rate of 47.5 per cent. The strategic air offensive of 1940–41 killed many members of the RAF, and in 1941 the RAF lost a bomber for every 25 tons of bombs dropped.
The arrival of Harris as C-in-C boosted morale not only in Bomber Command in 1942 but in a Britain where, after three years of fighting, disaster had followed disaster. The church bells rang in England on 15 November 1942 to celebrate the victory of General Sir Bernard Montgomery and the Eighth Army at El Alamein. It was a victory born of the patient accumulation of huge superiority in the numbers of British troops, tanks and guns. Up to that moment in the desert, the brilliant Rommel, the Desert Fox, had reversed all the earlier victories over the Italians. Tobruk had fallen on 20 June – 33,000 British troops surrendered. The Germans had conquered Greece in early April 1941. On 27 May, after some of the bloodiest fighting of the war, Crete was lost.
Against this background, the attempts of Bomber Command to subdue Nazi Germany could be seen as welcome. English cinema audiences cheered the bombing of Cologne, just as Irish cinema audiences had cheered the bombing of Coventry. Such was the frenzied and desperate condition into which the war had excited the human race, that bombing was seen by some as liberation. The Man in Despair, Reck-Malleczewen, said to his diary: ‘Is it not the absolute height of tragedy, simply inconceivable shame, that just those Germans who are left of the best of them, who have been prisoners of this herd of evil-tempered apes for twelve years, should wish and pray for the defeat of their own country, for the sake of that same country?’30
And Joe Horn, once a concentration-camp prisoner, later a businessman in New Jersey, recalled: ‘The first time I saw bombers in the sky, I was a kid in Buchenwald, dressed in a striped suit and completely demoralized. The bombers gave us hope and led to the realization that this unrelenting nightmare could end sometime.’31