CHAPTER 37

Air Power in Operation

The air force that Churchill took over in 1940 still wore the blue-grey uniforms and had the same rank structure that he had set up, but it was very different in other ways. Bomber squadrons were headed by wing commanders rather than squadron leaders, and a group captain was likely to command an air station rather than a group, which was led by an air vice-marshal. The pilots were led into battle by squadron leaders and wing commanders, which sounded far more dynamic and modern than majors and colonels, who were associated with living in the past. In contrast to the puttees and stiff collar of T. E. Lawrence’s day, all ranks now wore trousers and tunics with open necks, or the increasingly ubiquitous battledress as used by the army. The service was beginning to recognize the importance of non-pilot aircrew such as observers, radio operators and gunners, and all of them were promoted to at least sergeant in April 1940. Despite Trenchard’s desire for ‘dining-out power’, it had a much more demotic image than the other services. Churchill’s left-wing nephew Esmond Romilly volunteered for it to avoid ‘the interminable drilling, mastery of neatness, submission to all kinds of meaningless routines administered by a legion of officer class petty tyrants that he anticipated in a war which was basically run by English Tories’.¹

As to ground crews, many more skilled men than Halton could produce were needed, to cope with greater sophistication as well as the increasing numbers of aircraft. This could be done by increasing the number of specialised trades, which needed shorter training. In June 1940 alone, 29 new trades were added to the list, including link trainer instructor, radio mechanic, grinder and meteorologist.² Perhaps the most obvious difference from the Churchill/Trenchard force was in its distribution. The force of 1920 had neglected home defence almost completely and the great majority of its active squadrons were based in the empire. By 1940 it tended to concentrate almost obsessively on home defence and strategic bombing to the exclusion of everything else.

On 18 June 1940, reluctantly accepting defeat across the Channel, Churchill told the House of Commons: ‘What General Weygand called the “Battle of France” is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.’ It was a way of minimising the defeat. At the time he was thinking about the threat of invasion and the prospect of paratroops and panzers on British soil, but in the event the phrase came to mean something different, and it changed slightly over the months. At the end of August he spoke to the War Cabinet about the ‘battle for Great Britain’ and early in September it was ‘the 1940 Air Battle of Britain’.³

It was the air battles over southern England, perhaps more than anything else, which established Churchill’s historical reputation as a great war leader; yet his approach to them was far less hands-on than in many other campaigns. It was not lack of technical knowledge which inhibited him, for that never stopped him in any other field. Perhaps he regarded the campaign as purely defensive, and he was certainly thinking about all sorts of offensive strategy during these months. But a fast-moving air campaign of this nature was also far more difficult to follow in detail in the War Room, which did not have the large and specially trained staff of a fighter headquarters. Churchill made a habit of visiting these, and was deeply impressed with the operations room of No 11 Group in September 1940, using a system developed by Dowding in the last few years:

The Group Operations Room was like a small theatre, about sixty feet across, and with two storeys. We took our seats in the Dress Circle. Below us was the large-scale map table, around which perhaps twenty highly-trained young men and women, with their telephone assistants, were assembled. Opposite to us, covering the entire wall, where the theatre curtain would be, was a gigantic blackboard divided into six columns with electric bulbs, for the six fighter stations, each with their squadrons having a sub-column of its own, and also divided by lateral lines. Thus the lowest row of bulbs showed as they were lighted the squadrons which were ‘Standing By’ at two minutes notice, the next row those at ‘Readiness’, five minutes, then at ‘Available’, twenty minutes, then those which had taken off, the next row those which had reported having seen the enemy, the next – with red lights – those which were in action, and the top row those which were returning home. On the left-hand side, in a kind of glass stage-box, were the four or five officers whose duty it was to weigh and measure the information received from our Observer Corps. Radar was still in its infancy, but it gave warning of raids approaching our coast, and the observers, with field glasses and portable telephones, were our main source of information about raiders flying overland. Thousands of messages were therefore received during an action.⁴

These required ‘several roomfuls of experienced people’ to sift them. This was a reference to the Filter Room at Fighter Command Headquarters in Bentley Priory in north-west London, where contradictory data from many sources was assessed before being passed on to the control rooms. An Air Ministry minute stated: ‘the accuracy of filtering is of vital importance. At only one point in the whole vast network of the radar system does the information collected and forwarded by the radar chain assume a tangible form on which fighter action can be taken.’ The Filter Room had only recently become fully efficient with the recruitment of specially trained officers, usually scientists or mathematicians.⁵ Churchill’s Upper War Room in Whitehall would not have been able to handle that kind of data. Perhaps he remembered the more primitive days of 1917, when the anti-aircraft guns were controlled by telephone from the War Office; or the raid of May 1915 when Zeppelin LZ38 dropped 120 bombs across east London, and only one of fifteen aircraft sent out made any contact but did no damage.

During that visit Churchill uncharacteristically ‘watched in silence’ until he asked a question. On a visit to Fighter Command headquarters on 31 August he ‘found it very instructive to watch the officers of the Fighter Command deploying their forces and building up a front at the threatened points’, but there is no sign that he attempted to direct operations.⁶ He also visited 615 Squadron as honorary air commodore, as reported by John Colville: ‘Winston was arrayed in RAF uniform which, curiously enough, suited him well. We inspected the men and machines in pouring rain, watched twelve Hurricanes take off for patrol and went to see the operations room from which the activities of all aircraft in the area are directed.’⁷

Instead of intervening directly on operations, Churchill took much interest in how the RAF was using its resources. At that moment the greatest shortage was in trained pilots. On 18 July he complained about figures showing that only three in ten pilots were with operational squadrons: ‘Thus more pilots are employed giving or receiving instruction than are actually serving on operations.’⁸ On 26 August he delayed a scheme to train aircrews in Canada and South Africa even though the skies over Britain were increasingly crowded and dangerous: ‘Until the issue of the battle becomes clear it would not be right to separate any large portion of our reserve of pilots or of potentially operational machines from the fighting strength of the RAF in this country.’⁹ He deplored ‘the tendency of every station commander … to keep as much in his hands as possible’.¹⁰ Fifty more airfields were needed in addition to 75 already under construction, and he hoped that large numbers of diggers and concrete mixers could be released soon from the construction of coastal defences.¹¹

The RAF had advantages in its fighter aircraft, the Hurricane and the superb Spitfire. Both of them, unlike most contemporary bombers, had been conceived at the right moment and were capable of further development. Their eight-machine-gun armament, however, had less range and destructive power than the 20mm cannon used by the Germans, and British pilots were not well trained in gunnery. But the biggest single advantage was in the use of Radio Direction Finding or RDF, as radar was then known. Following the trial station at Bawdsey which Churchill had seen in 1939, the ‘chain home’ series of 20 stations had been set up after being accelerated by the Munich crisis. A dozen more stations of the ‘Chain Home Low’ were opened by July 1940 to detect low-flying aircraft. But the radar chain only operated outwards, which concerned Churchill. Once the aircraft had crossed the coast they could only be followed visually by members of the part-time Observer Corps, who had ‘done splendid work, but in cloudy weather like yesterday and today, they have the greatest difficulty in functioning accurately’. He pressed for more stations to be set up inland as soon as possible.¹²

In the first phase, which began around 23 June, the German attack was mainly on convoys in the English Channel. On 10 July Churchill was shocked to find that Archibald Sinclair intended to let Sir Hugh Dowding’s term as commander-in-chief of Fighter Command expire and wrote: ‘I have greatly admired the whole of his work in the Fighter Command, and especially in resisting the clamour for numerous air-raid warnings, and the immense pressure to dissipate the fighter strength during the great French battle. In fact he has my full confidence.’¹³ Among other achievements Dowding had set up the control system that Churchill was so impressed with, and he was allowed to stay; later John Colville assessed him as ‘splendid: he stands up to the PM … and is the very antithesis of the complacency with which so many Englishmen are afflicted’.¹⁴ On 10 July the enemy raided the South Wales docks and Churchill was ecstatic with the result, believing the enemy had lost at the rate of five to one.¹⁵ And on 11 August he believed that fighters had shot down 70 enemy aircraft over the Channel, though it was difficult to verify claims for kills over the sea. To Colville ‘He expatiated on the debt we owed to our airmen and claimed that the life of the country depended on their intrepid spirit. What a slender thread, he exclaimed, his voice tremulous with emotion, the greatest of things can hang by!’¹⁶

The second and perhaps the most crucial phase began around the second week of August when the Germans began to attack airfields and aircraft factories, hoping to eliminate Fighter Command in preparation for an invasion. On 15 August Churchill was at Fighter Command headquarters at Stanmore to watch ‘the greatest and most successful air battle of all’. The Germans had launched attacks against targets all over England, hoping to saturate the defences. An attack across the North Sea towards Sunderland was heavily defeated and in all the Luftwaffe lost 75 aircraft (though not ‘well over a hundred’ as Churchill believed), with more damaged, forcing a rethink of tactics. But their campaign against airfields was taking its toll. On visiting Manston near the tip of Kent, Churchill was distressed to find that bomb craters on the landing areas had not yet been cleared.¹⁷ Later he complained that damaged hangars had been left unrepaired at several key airfields.¹⁸ He addressed the House of Commons on 20 August with one of his most famous speeches, praising the ‘brilliant actions’ of the fighter pilots: ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ He was annoyed by American correspondents who tended to underestimate enemy losses – ‘they will find out quite soon enough when the German attack is plainly shown to be repulsed’.¹⁹

On 19 August Churchill complained that there had been several air raid warnings over London in the last few days, but no actual air fighting had taken place there.²⁰ On the 24th some aircraft jettisoned their bombs over the city and the RAF felt justified in retaliating with a raid on Berlin on 25–26 August, which did more psychological than material damage. The Germans, annoyed by this, did indeed switch the attack to London. It was a historic mistake; the raids on airfields and aircraft factories were beginning to bear fruit, and moreover the range of the German fighters only allowed them a few minutes over London. After the first major raid on 7 September, Churchill visited the scene of the damage in the East End and Ismay recalled what had happened as he visited the site of an air raid shelter in which 40 people had been killed: ‘The place was full of people searching for their lost belongings when you arrived. They stormed you, as you got out of the car with cries of “It was good of you to come Winnie. We thought you’d come. We can take it. Give it ’em back.” It was a most moving scene, you broke down completely and I nearly did, and as I was trying to get to you through the press of bodies, I heard an old woman say, “You see, he really cares, he’s crying.”’²¹

A week later Churchill left Chequers to visit the headquarters of No 11 Fighter Group which was charged with the defence of south-east England including London, and witnessed what turned out to be the climax of the battle. After a quiet start, red bulbs showed that most of the squadrons were airborne, and Air Vice-Marshal Park asked Dowding for assistance from another group. Churchill, echoing his question to Gamelin three months earlier, asked Park, ‘What reserves have we?’ and looked grave when he was told ‘There are none.’ But already the battle was won, the bombers were withdrawing and no new attack developed. Churchill went back to Chequers and, according to Ismay, said: ‘Don’t speak to me; I have never been so moved.’²² He slept longer than usual, from 4.30 until 8. When he awoke his secretary John Martin told him, among generally bad news, that the RAF had shot down 183 planes for the loss of fewer than 40. In fact the Germans had lost 58 aircraft, but it was a victory nevertheless.

After the 20th the main threat was the night bomber attack on London, which was not difficult to find from bases in France, and to begin with there was no real means of stopping it. For Churchill personally it gave him a chance to experience the hazards of war. He continued to live in London, moving to the underground Cabinet War Rooms in the most dangerous periods. He visited Chequers at weekends, though he was aware that the Luftwaffe might target him there. Commenting that he did not object to chance ‘but feels it a mistake to be the victim of design’, he took up an offer to use Ditchley Park when conditions made a raid likely.

On 7 October the Night Air Defence Committee began to meet under Churchill’s chairmanship. It included representatives of the services and ministries involved, but the most prominent members were Dowding as head of Fighter Command, until he was superseded by Sholto Douglas; Sir Frederick Pile of the army’s Anti-Aircraft Command which manned the guns; and Robert Watson-Watt, the inventor of radar, though Lindemann was also present. Churchill was comparatively silent, though he usually concluded the meeting with a series of orders. Over the next few months it looked at numerous ideas. Churchill naturally pushed his own favourites, the rockets and mines, and the project was codenamed ‘Mutton’. After many delays it was tried on the night of 19 April with no apparent result. Sholto Douglas explained to him on 20 April:

I have an idea that you think I am not really trying with ‘Mutton’. This is not the case. I do believe that on fine nights there is a better chance of getting down Huns with Beaufighters plus AI; and in such conditions, when there is competition between Beaufighters and ‘Mutton’ for [Ground Controlled Interception] facilities, I have ruled that the Beaufighters must have preference. On the other hand, in non-moonlight periods or in bad weather when there is a stream of enemy aircraft coming in, I think that ‘Mutton’ may prove to be more profitable.

Experiments with one squadron were inconclusive, and finally Douglas pointed out that a Beaufigher squadron operating from the same airfield had shot down 40 enemy aircraft while Mutton claimed one, plus five probables. Other schemes included ‘cats-eye’ fighters, single seaters in which the pilot relied on his own vision; Albino or free barrage balloons as suggested by the Admiralty, which could only be used in ideal weather conditions and had a tendency to drift into enemy territory; Turbinlite or airborne searchlights; and intruder operations over the enemy airfields.²³

From the first meeting of the committee, however, the real solution was clear and only had to be developed. Lindemann’s infra-red beams were set aside and radar was to be developed as fast as possible. The fixed stations had proved invaluable in the daylight Battle of Britain, but at night they could only guide an aircraft to the general area of the target. Part of the answer was to be found in directing the fighters more closely to the enemy aircraft, known as ground controlled interception and codenamed Jessie, and stations were set up during the next few months. This was to be supplemented by Airborne Interception or AI radar, fitted to the aircraft itself. As early as June 1940 Robert Watson Watt had sent a report for the Prime Minister, and Ismay arranged for a ‘plain language version of it’ to be produced by Lindemann for Churchill’s consumption. It stated that ‘Using RDF methods alone at night, only very skilled men will be able to exploit AI at the present stage of development.’ Another problem was that the current night fighter, the obsolete Blenheim, was too slow to overtake the enemy. The new and faster Bristol Beaufighter still had its teething troubles, as Lindemann reported to Churchill: ‘It now appears that despite an extra 30 miles an hour the Beaufighter has proved no more successful than the Blenheim. In consequence of this the view is at last gaining ground that the failure to make interceptions with AI is due not to lack of speed but to the fact that the enemy becomes aware that he is being pursued and jinks away.’

Watson Watt was right about the difficulties of operating the early set; C. F. Rawnsley described his introduction to it in his squadron:

A low buzzing sound came from somewhere in the depths of the equipment. On each tube there appeared a luminous green line, horizontal on one tube and vertical on the other. These, Cape explained, were what were called time traces. He twiddled one of the knobs, and across the lines little diamonds of light came into being. These represented the echoes … from the target in front. … The distance from one end of the trace would tell us the range of the target. … We were going to have to juggle around with a lot of blips, deducing from their appearance the various ranges and bearing, and so interpret the position and movement of the target.²⁴

At last on the night of 12–13 December a successful interception took place and it was reported to Churchill: ‘The enemy aircraft was seen to turn almost vertical with left wing down and to enter in a steep dive. The pilot followed him down to 6,000 feet’ – but in fact the aircraft was not destroyed. By that time there were 57 Beaufighters with the squadrons compared with 85 Blenheims.²⁵

As the defences slowly developed, London endured its Blitz throughout the winter of 1940–41, as did other cities such as Liverpool and Coventry. The night offensive came to an end in May 1941, partly because the German aircraft were needed to attack the Soviet Union, but the new methods had played a key part. On 12 May Douglas stated that ‘AI, assisted by CGI, was the most profitable means of night interception. For this reason everything possible should be done to accelerate the provision of Beaufighters for use in night fighting.’ Churchill decreed that this should be implemented.²⁶

Churchill turned to the Night Air Defence Committee yet again in March 1943, believing that ‘we must be prepared to meet a heavier scale of enemy air attack on this country since, he believed, such a course was being forced upon the Germans by our own energetic and successful air offensive’.²⁷ But this only came to the ‘Baedeker’ raids against provincial towns of little strategic importance, which began in April.

The Battle of Britain and the Blitz were the ultimate vindication for Churchill’s policy of maintaining the independent air force in 1919 – otherwise the nation might have been saddled with the old policy of naval aircraft meeting the enemy over the sea and the army fighting them over the land. But they were unique battles, paralleled only by the allied air offensives against Germany and Japan, in which the defenders were the losers – though not entirely because of air power in either case.

General Brooke claimed that ‘every operation we were engaged in was a “combined” one’ involving all the services, but that was less true of the bomber offensive against Germany in which only the RAF was involved, alongside Commonwealth and allied air forces. In May 1940 Churchill was still convinced that it was far better to bomb military targets when he told the War Cabinet: ‘In attacking this country they would find it far more profitable to concentrate on specific military targets.’²⁸ But he had not forgotten his aim to attack Germany and in July 1940, when the Fall of France was hardly completed, he contrasted the situation with 1914 and told Beaverbrook:

The blockade is broken and Hitler has Asia and probably Africa to draw from. Should he be repulsed here or not try invasion, he will recoil eastward, and we have nothing to stop him. But there is one thing that will bring him back and bring him down, and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.²⁹

But it was not so simple. On 13/14 August eleven out of twelve Blenheims were lost over Holland and daylight raids were generally catastrophic, so night bombing was the only alternative.³⁰ Churchill claimed in a memorandum of September 1940: ‘The navy can lose us the war, but only the air force can win it. Therefore, our supreme effort must be to gain overwhelming mastery in the air. Fighters are our salvation, but the bombers alone can provide the means of victory. We must therefore develop the power to carry an ever-increasing volume of explosives to Germany, so as to pulverize her entire industry and scientific structure on which the war effort and economic life of the enemy depends …’.³¹

At the end of August Churchill asserted: ‘The reason why our aircraft are able to bomb Germany accurately by night is because they have superior navigational training.’³² This was wildly optimistic; RAF navigational training was still very backward, partly because the Churchill/Trenchard Air Ministry had dispensed with observers – the grade was only re-established in 1937 but had low status to start with. There was some attempt to use astro-navigation techniques but that was difficult at speed, and there was no specialised navigation branch until 1942, by which time radio aids were coming into use.

There were plenty of other signs that a bomber offensive would not be easy. On 5 September, just before the major bombing of London began, Churchill observed: ‘How very differently this air attack which is now raging has turned out from what we imagined it would be before the war. More than 150,000 beds have stood open and, thank God, empty in our war hospitals for a whole year. … So far as the air attack is concerned, up to the present we have found it far less severe than what we prepared ourselves to endure and what we are still ready, if necessary, to endure.’³³ On 8 October he told the House of Commons: ‘On that particular Thursday night 180 persons were killed in London as a result of 251 tons of bombs. That is to say, it took one ton of bombs to kill three quarters of a person … therefore, the deadliness of the attack in this war appears to be only one-thirteenth of that of 1914–18.’³⁴

Later Sir Arthur Harris used the 8 July memorandum as justification for his indiscriminate bombing campaign, but at the time Churchill was not thinking of war against civilians – he still tended to believe, as in 1917, that ‘It is improbable that any terrorization of the civil population which could be achieved by air attack would compel the government of a great nation to surrender.’ In contrast to the ‘indiscriminate bombing by night of our built-up areas’ into which the Germans had ‘relapsed’, he told parliament: ‘We should be foolish to shift off those military targets which the skill of our navigators enable us to find with a great measure of success’ and that ‘Our object must be to inflict the maximum harm on her war-making capacity. That is the only object that we shall pursue.’³⁵ But after the Luftwaffe made a devastating raid on Coventry on 14 November he ordered Operation Abigail, for ‘the most destructive possible bombing attack against a selected German town’. Two hundred aircraft were to be involved, though no attack up to then had used more than 80. It was to be a town ‘of some industrial importance’ and Mannheim was chosen out of a shortlist of four. It took place on the night of 16/17 December, but the city centre was largely undamaged and seven bombers were lost against 43 German civilians. Churchill was undeterred, writing on 30 December: ‘We must … increase our bomb deliveries on Germany, and it appears that some of the types and patterns most adapted to this are not coming forward as we had hoped.’³⁶ The year ended with ‘the most serious and precise of many melancholy reports we are having of our air bombing’ from the US naval attaché in Berlin who claimed that raids had done ‘little damage’.³⁷

Lindemann commissioned a report on bombing accuracy by a Mr Butt of the War Cabinet Secretariat and the results, produced in August 1941, were devastating – an analysis of photographs taken from nearly 350 aircraft showed that only one bomb in three fell within five miles of the target. Lindemann told Churchill: ‘however inaccurate the figures may be, they are sufficiently striking to emphasise the supreme importance of improving our navigational methods’. Churchill commented to Portal that this was ‘a very serious paper, and seems to require your most urgent attention’.³⁸ By October Churchill had begun to moderate his expectations and wrote to Portal:

The Air Staff would make a mistake to put their claim too high. Before the war we were greatly misled by the pictures they painted of the destruction that would be wrought by air raids. This is illustrated by the fact that 750,000 beds were actually provided for air raid casualties, never more than 6,000 being required. The picture of air destruction was so exaggerated that it depressed the statesmen responsible for the pre-war policy, and played a definite part in the desertion of Czechoslovakia in August 1938. Again, the Air Staff, after the war had begun, taught us sedulously to believe that, if the enemy acquired the Low Countries, to say nothing of France, our position would be impossible owing to the air attacks. However, by not paying too much attention to such ideas, we have found quite a good means of keeping going.

He concluded that ‘he is an unwise man who thinks there is any certain method of winning this war, or indeed any other war between equals in strength. The only plan is to persevere.’³⁹

It was increasingly clear that precision night bombing was not an option, so the only alternative left, apart from abandoning the idea altogether, was mass bombing of cities. By September there was a plan for a force of 4,000 bombers which Churchill endorsed with a certain amount of scepticism, warning Portal: ‘Even if all the towns of Germany were rendered largely uninhabitable or even that war industry could not be carried on, it does not follow that the military control would be weakened or even that war industry could not be carried on …’.⁴⁰

The picture changed at the beginning of 1942 when Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris was appointed to head Bomber Command. He was a dedicated, uncompromising and ruthless character – qualities which appealed to Churchill, though he never warmed to the man personally. Like Trenchard, Harris was inarticulate and used an academic, Harry Weldon of Magdalen College Oxford, to express his thoughts. He was dedicated to area bombing and dismissed all attempts to single out individual targets or industries as ‘panaceas’. New aircraft were becoming available with the four-engined Stirling, Halifax and especially the Lancaster replacing the Wellington as the mainstay of the force. Navigational accuracy began to improve with radio and radar aids such as GEE, Loran and H2S. By 1945 95 per cent of aircraft were dropping their bombs within three miles of the aiming point, though it was still not precision bombing except for occasional specialised raids. On 30 May 1942 a force of a thousand bombers, gathered only by emptying the training bases, pounded Cologne with great psychological effect. It was followed by equally large raids on Essen and Bremen, though none of them did huge damage and the training programme had to be reinstated. Even so, Churchill was still ambivalent about the offensive at the end of 1942:

In the days when we were fighting alone, we answered the question ‘How are you going to win the war?’ by saying. ‘We will shatter Germany by bombing.’ Since then the enormous injuries inflicted on the German army by the Russians, and the accession of the manpower and munitions of the United States, have rendered other possibilities open. … We must regard the bomber offensive against Germany at least as a feature in breaking her war-will second only to the largest military operations which can be conducted on the continent until that war-will is broken.⁴¹

However, he used the campaign to justify his reluctance to set up a second front, telling Stalin in April 1942: ‘I must emphasize that our bombing of Germany will increase in scale month by month’ and sending him photographs of wrecked cities – though the dictator was not impressed.⁴²

At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 the Americans agreed to use their Eighth Air Force for daylight bombing of Germany in addition to the British effort. In March 1943 Bomber Command began the Battle of the Ruhr with attacks on Germany’s industrial heartland, which also happened to be reasonably close to British bases. It had some success, as even those most sceptical about the bombing campaign conceded: ‘Reading contemporary accounts, there can be no doubt that the Battle of the Ruhr marked a turning point in the history of the German war economy, which has been grossly underestimated by post-war accounts.’⁴³ That summer Churchill dismissed fears that the use of ‘window’, metal strips dropped from aircraft to block the radar, would be taken up by the Germans and used against the allies, with the words, ‘Let us open the window!’ The result was a devastating raid on Hamburg in July, which caused a firestorm and destroyed large areas of the city for the loss of twelve bombers out of 728. Harris claimed in August: ‘We are on the verge of a final showdown in the bombing war, and the next few months will be vital.’ In November he wrote to Churchill listing 19 cities already destroyed, and claimed: ‘We can wreck Berlin from end to end if the USAAF will come in on it.’⁴⁴ In fact the American Army Air Force did not agree but the Berlin offensive went ahead anyway with Churchill’s support, giving relief to the industries of the Ruhr but making little contribution to the war effort. In attacks on Berlin and other cities the RAF lost more than a thousand aircraft from November 1943 to March 1944. After that the bombers were switched to targets in preparation for the Normandy invasion, despite protests from Harris.

The offensive resumed in September with more success, partly because the American daylight bombers were now escorted by Mustang fighters which challenged the Luftwaffe and gave air superiority. As the war approached its end it was clear that Harris, built up by the press as the uncompromising hero of the campaign, was out of control. Portal began to have increasing doubts about area bombing, wondering ‘whether the magnetism of the remaining German cities has not in the past tended as much to deflect our bombers from their primary objectives as the tactical and weather difficulties’. Harris replied strongly: ‘It has always been my custom to leave no stone unturned to get my views across, but when the decision is made I carry it out to the best of my ability. I am sorry that you should doubt this.’ The controversy became so intense that the writers of the post-war official history were banned from publishing the letters, but Harris had his way.⁴⁵ Churchill was drawn in after the controversial attack on Dresden on 13 February. He wrote at the end of March: ‘It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed,’ though he later toned this down under pressure from the airmen.

Supporters of the air offensive claimed that it was an alternative to the Battles of the Somme and Ypres, but it led to the deaths of 55,573 airmen, mostly highly intelligent, trained and motivated young men who might have become leaders of the future. It tended to undermine the allies’ moral case with indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas. It took up between seven per cent and a third of British effort, according to which figures one accepts, and most historians believe it was an overall failure. Churchill distanced himself from the campaign after the war, refusing a medal for the aircrews and a peerage for Harris. He had good reasons for going ahead with the bombing in the early stages and slightly less good ones for continuing it, but he too failed to control ‘Bomber’ Harris and must take some of the blame for the campaign’s faults.