‘It is idle to suppose that [war] can be carried on without fearful injury and violence from which non-combatants as well as combatants suffer. It is still true, nevertheless, that there are recognized limits to what is permissible.’
(George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, speaking in the House of Lords, February 1944)
In the long years between Dunkirk and D-Day, only two parts of the British war machine were in frequent direct contact with the German enemy. The first was the Royal Navy, in its strangely under-reported death grapple with the German U-boat fleet. The second, far better known, was the Royal Air Force, and specifically its bomber squadrons. I was brought up to admire this section of the war effort and to some extent I still do revere the men who took fearful risks as they flew over Germany. I find it hard to imagine the reserves of courage they needed to climb, night after night, into flying deathtraps with a startlingly poor chance of returning home the following morning, and the real prospect of a particularly horrible death.
I wish very much I could still hold the simple opinions I held as a child. One of the fictional heroes of my boyhood was Sergeant Pilot Matt Braddock, VC, a non-commissioned RAF bomber ace. Braddock’s exemplary career was recounted, as if it were the firsthand memoirs of a real person, in the pages of The Victor, a boys’ weekly paper of the period, and also gathered in the pages of a book. The book’s cover was in air force blue.1 It was supposedly narrated by his comrade and navigator George Bourne. Rereading it after more than 50 years I found the stories still very well told, assuming a surprising amount of knowledge on the part of the reader, as well as a sharp understanding of snobbery, officiousness and other human vices. The stark and accurately detailed illustrations portray an ideal of tough and stoical manhood. To read them now is to be taken straight back into that comforting fug of postwar safety, in which so many small boys, whose fathers had faced real peril, harmlessly passed through combat and danger in their imaginations.
In all the stories in this volume, Braddock only once sets out to bomb a city for its own sake. He always has specific military targets, always locates them correctly, partly thanks to a mysterious instinct, partly thanks to George Bourne’s superb navigation skills, and (almost) always manages to identify them and hit them ‘on the nose’. He is certainly not present for ‘Operation Gomorrah’, the bombing of Hamburg in July 1943. In this raid a firestorm was created by the RAF for the first time, and terrible numbers of civilians perished so horribly that the disgusting, distressing details are unknown to most British people, then and since. I mention it particularly because of its ugly, self-righteous codename, suggestive of Biblical divine vengeance against wickedness. No doubt there was plenty of National Socialist wickedness in Hamburg. But there may have been more than one just man dwelling there, too, when the bombs began to fall. Yet if there was, he was just as likely to die as the unjust, and lie rotting for long days in the mountains of rubble while thick clouds of feasting bluebottles settled on the stinking ruins.
I mention it also because it was comparable to the later and better-known horror of Dresden, yet most British people are unaware of it, or have a vague incoherent idea of what happened. In fact, many believe that the Dresden firestorm was more or less unique, a single episode of overzealous action in a generally restrained campaign.
They do not know that there is in fact a long and distressing catalogue of German cities where British bombers deliberately destroyed human life in an ugly and cruel way and on a frightening scale. Dresden was far from unique in its cruelty and terror, deliberately and consciously visited on non-combatants. These events are too ghastly for most of us to absorb or admit, if ever we do discover them. I have included only a very small sample of these horrors in this chapter, having found that most British supporters of the bombing simply cannot absorb them or respond rationally to them. They conflict too strongly with the opinion they have of themselves, and the opinion they have of our country. Their reactions are extremely strange, as I shall try to describe.
The general response of perfectly nice, gentle and well-brought-up British people, polite and kind to neighbours, shocked by rudeness and violence in daily life, is to say illogical things about the Blitz. Introduced to this nasty piece of history, they will say, correctly, that Germans deliberately killed many British civilians in their own homes. They will mention the raid on Coventry, horrible and inexcusable indeed, but small compared with what the RAF would later do to many German cities of similar size. They will rightly condemn this as an uncivilised form of warfare. And they will then absurdly and irrationally use this as an excuse or justification for our doing almost exactly the same thing. The logic remains inescapable. If it was uncivilised for the Germans to do it, and it was, it was uncivilised for us to do it.
Or they will say that the German civilians ‘deserved’ to be crushed, suffocated, dismembered or burned to death in their homes, for having supported (or failed to oppose) Hitler. Yet the bombed areas, chosen because they were tightly packed with the apartment blocks of the urban poor, were those where Social Democrat and Communist voters lived. These were the very people who defied the Nazis to the last, even after the Brownshirt Stormtroopers were on the streets and at the polling stations.
And can we really say that a woman suffocated, or a baby roasted to death in an airless cellar, were responsible for the aggression and crimes of National Socialism? As for other more publicly active citizens, do we imagine that we, as individuals, would have defied the Gestapo state once it was established? Nobody who says this can really believe it. If we did believe that we would have defied the Gestapo and laughed at its beatings and torture, then we would all be very different from the poor timid creatures we really are. (The experience of the Channel Islands suggests that we would have acted much as everyone else did under these threats.) And we would, perhaps, also be more confident about the whole issue. We might even know and admit a good deal more about what was done, because we could be prouder of it. But we do not.
We are proud of what we like to think was done. We are not proud at all of what we secretly suspect was done but would rather not hear about too much. We imagine that such fictional figures as Matt Braddock were real, and that they prosecuted an old-fashioned and chivalrous war. Just as we simultaneously understand – and do not understand – that the war was not as glorious as we think, we simultaneously know – and do not know – what was done in our name during the bombing of Germany.
Even wide-eyed schoolboys, enthralled by war stories as they curled up by the fireside with tales of glory, were given an oblique glimpse of the truth, though if I was meant to understand more at the time, I failed to do so. Braddock takes a fictional part in Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris’s great May 1942 raid on Cologne, the nearest the story comes to admitting the true nature of most RAF bombing.
‘George Bourne’ records, with carefully added moral justification, the Cologne operation:
I heard the crack of exploding anti-aircraft fire. In all my flying experience, I’d never seen such a sight. The Germans had invented blitzes. They had inflicted blitz raids on Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Plymouth, Coventry, Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool. Now we were hitting back.
Great fires were burning. The Rhine, winding through the stricken city, reflected the glare. The flashes of exploding bombs were shooting up everywhere […] We banked into a turn and came round again. There were more big fires. The Rhine looked like a river of fire.
‘I’m glad I’m not down there,’ Tom [Tanner, the bomb-aimer] exclaimed. ‘There won’t be much of the place left.’
‘It’s the only way to win the war,’ said Braddock, grimly. ‘The only way to win a fight is to knock the other fellow down.’2
There is one other hint of a more bitter truth, about the danger of the flyer’s life. Braddock is forever exercising his crew and checking that his machine is properly maintained, precautions which no doubt reduced the danger they faced. But the danger could never be fully overcome, and in many cases it was present even when the enemy was not. The casualty rate was so high that men had to be trained far too quickly for their tasks. Losses in training, as we shall see, were a serious problem. In one curious Braddock story, entitled ‘Daylight Disaster’, men are killed on a stupidly ill-organised exercise when they are made to fly into the strong bright rays of the sun, in close formation. As they return, a ground crew sergeant ‘turned a thumb grimly to the east. “Two of our planes have bought it,” he said grimly. “They collided about ten miles from here. None of the chaps got out alive.”’3 It is noted that the pilots were not novices, and one had flown on 75 missions. What is this bitter little account (perhaps based on real events) doing in such a place? The reader gets a sense of a curtain being very briefly lifted, to reveal a reality far less glorious than the one normally portrayed in such fiction. And it was a reality. Richard Overy records in The Bombing War Sir Richard Peirse (a senior wartime RAF officer) complaining to his colleague Charles Portal that, for every aircraft shot down by the enemy, he was losing six to accidents.4
In the same Braddock story, a lying, boastful commanding officer, ceaselessly exaggerating his own exploits, is shown trying to send Braddock on a dangerous daylight raid because he is jealous of his reputation. It is made astonishingly plain (remember, this book was written for boys aged ten or eleven) that this RAF officer actively hopes Braddock will die. ‘Bourne’ writes: ‘There was no doubt Mandeville had wanted to get Braddock out of the way for good and all.’5 Braddock is in fact wounded while being very nearly shot down by German fighters. This – a deliberate attempt by a senior officer to send a man to his death – is the sort of thing that the young reader might expect an evil Nazi to do. But a British officer?
There is – unsurprisingly – no mention in the Braddock stories of the grave and painful problem of ‘Lack of Moral Fibre’, the term harshly applied by Harris’s RAF to men who became too afraid to fly over Germany any more. Overy records that 3 per cent of flying officers (that is, 3 per cent of those who survived) were removed from flying status before completing 25 operations.6 Some were categorised with those harsh words ‘Lack of Moral Fibre’, humiliated in various ways, stripped of rank and sent off in disgrace to do menial tasks elsewhere. Interestingly, Harris, who squandered appalling numbers of his own men, had a low opinion of the effectiveness of many of his crews. Overy notes that Harris thought only a quarter of his fliers were effective bombers, the rest merely there to give the Germans something to shoot at.7
The late Helen Dunmore’s novella The Greatcoat (2011) is a rare fictional reference to the problem of men losing their nerve during the ‘Good War’, though there is now a large body of work, in fiction and in history, about men unfairly condemned for cowardice in the 1914–18 war. She quotes a song of the time (sung to the tune of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’). It runs, miserably:
We don’t want to go to Chopland
We don’t want to go at all
We don’t want to go to Chopland
Where our chances are f***-all.8
‘Chopland’ is of course Germany, the place where aircrew have a one in two chance of ‘getting the chop’, that is to say, of dying in flames or falling thousands of feet to the hostile earth below. Tired and demoralised crews were sometimes said to ‘have the chop look’, a way of saying they looked as if they had resigned themselves to imminent death, which tended to follow not long afterwards. I have never been able to find any origin for this song, though Helen Dunmore grew up in Beverley, in the East Riding of Yorkshire. This is a short distance from RAF Leconfield, a wartime base for Wellington and Halifax bombers, and the whole area was peppered with temporary RAF fields. It seems likely at least that memories of this sort might have survived into her 1950s childhood in the area.
In C. P. Snow’s autobiographical novel The Light and the Dark (1947), the tragic central character, Roy Calvert, undoubtedly based on a real person, becomes a bomber pilot with the more or less open intention of being killed in combat, having carefully studied the odds. He duly dies.
But Matt Braddock survived. Among his more straightforward missions are accurate – even pinpoint – attacks on the Krupp armament works at Essen, on a secret and fictional German military research station, on a key railway junction, on the real V-1 missile factory at Peenemünde and against a fictional German naval aircraft carrier, Degen. This episode is loosely based on the real and unsuccessful 1942 attempt to bomb the real but unfinished carrier Graf Zeppelin in Gotenhafen (Gdynia). In this tale as in the others, Braddock’s ability to find and hit his targets is astonishing. If only it had also been true to life.
In 1941 the civil servant D. M. (David Miles) Bensusan-Butt was asked to compare reconnaissance photographs with RAF bomber pilots’ claims of damage done by their night-time raids over Germany. Butt was an economist, an admirer and former pupil of Maynard Keynes. He had bitter news for his then chief, Churchill’s favourite scientist, Frederick Lindemann, of whom I shall have much more to say later in this chapter.
In the RAF and the War Cabinet the bombing of Germany was already known to be going badly. One bomber in three was returning to base without even claiming to have hit its primary target. It was even worse than they thought. David Butt found that, of the remaining two thirds, only one third came within five miles of the aiming point. In operations against the Ruhr industrial zone, only one in ten came within five miles. When there was no moon, accuracy plunged still further. Daylight bombing had long ago been found to be impossibly dangerous, with appalling levels of casualties and very little impact. It would remain so until the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) developed long-distance fighters that could escort their bombers to and from their targets.
The curious result of the Butt survey was that the War Cabinet did not decide to abandon this more or less useless and very costly weapon, which would have been a perfectly reasonable conclusion. They chose instead to hit the only targets that were truly hard to miss using the crude navigational devices of the time – entire cities, and those who lived in them.
But that is not what we, who worshipped the war, were led to believe. The story told to me and my schoolfellows was of brave and carefully practised attacks on legitimate military targets. And so we could revere Matt Braddock as a chivalrous exemplar of just war. Like most heroes in the boys’ weeklies of the time, Sergeant Braddock was a teetotal non-smoker, ready to turn his hand to any task, scornful of petty discipline and idle boasting (this was confined to effete and snobbish officers), but stern with his own crew.
The real author is believed to have been a minor genius, Gilbert Lawford Dalton, who specialised in children’s stories about working-class heroes. Without doubt, boys in poor homes would have been moved and encouraged to see such a man respected by the high-ups and portrayed as vital to the war effort. But I, an officer-class child with a piping prep-school voice and Queen-like vowels, was just as captivated.
This perhaps reveals something important about the myth of the war. One claim that was (in my experience) completely true was that it broke down much of the foolish, wasteful snobbery of the prewar years. True, there was a little of it left. I recall a twinge of fear that the ‘hut boys’ in our Devon village, who in the 1950s were living in prefabricated huts left over from the war, might be tougher than I was. We continued to live separate lives and called our meals by different names. But the old lofty contempt was gone. We were fellow countrymen and we recognised it. This feeling – a good legacy of war – lasted until the abolition of grammar schools in the 1960s and 1970s rebuilt the old class divisions.
I was never entirely sure whether the Braddock stories were fact or fiction, or whether Braddock was real or imaginary. Quite certainly I believed Braddock – a rebel against authority who refused a commission – was a man of virtue and courage. I still do. And I think the real originals on which he was based were brave and virtuous as well. I also think their lives were squandered by a commander as ruthless as any of the red-faced butcher generals of World War I. But I think the British people are still quite unable to acknowledge that what they did – which many of them did not fully understand – was morally mistaken.
Much has been written about the British bombing offensive. The best factual survey is Richard Overy’s recent book The Bombing War, mentioned earlier in this chapter and on which I have drawn heavily. I am equally indebted to Anthony Grayling’s devastating account of the British bombing of Germany, Among the Dead Cities (2006), which gives the relentless details of Britain’s incessant and increasingly destructive targeting of German cities until there were almost none left to destroy; and to Sir Max Hastings’s Bomber Command (1979/2010), a refreshingly honest description of the employment of brave men by unimaginative, rigid and sometimes foolish commanders, often on futile and mistaken tasks.9 Also important is the discussion, in Lord Snow’s 1960 Godkin Lectures at Harvard (published as Science and Government in 1961), of the criticisms of the effectiveness of the bombing campaign, mainly levelled by Sir Henry Tizard, discussed later in this chapter.10
The story is a shocking one. Although the information is readily available to those who seek it, most British people prefer to believe that the RAF bombing of Germany was an absolute necessity, morally justified (flatly untrue) and decisive in the outcome of the war (only very partly true at best). Most believe that, where civilians died, this was as unavoidable collateral damage rather than because we had any intention of killing them. This belief is wholly false.
The subject still has the power to ignite fury even in people who were not born when the bombing ended. I am sometimes told that I am unpatriotic, even now, for discussing it or for being distressed by the extreme and horrible cruelties inflicted by our bombs on innocent women and children, who could not conceivably be held responsible for Hitler’s crimes. On the contrary, I believe it is the duty of a proper patriot to criticise his country where he believes it to have done wrong. Here I have to guard myself against attacks which I know will be made on me for departing from the orthodox faith of the ‘Good War’.
I am told, when I criticise the bombing in public, that I am defaming the memory of the bomber crews. I have never done so, and never will. They had little idea of what they were doing, often died terrible deaths in terrible numbers thanks to the ruthless squandering of life by their commanders, and showed immense personal courage. It is those who, knowing what was being done, ordered them into battle, who I blame.
I am told that I am equating our bombing of Germany with the German mass murder of the Jews of Europe. I would not dream of making such a comparison; I never have done so and never will. I am likewise told that I am excusing the mass murder of the Jews by the German state, when nothing could ever excuse it and I should certainly never attempt to do so. Is it still necessary to say that two wrongs do not make a right, and that one horribly wrong thing may be worse than another horribly wrong thing, and yet they may both still be horribly wrong, examined by themselves as actions? It seems so.
The same question arises in discussing the expulsions of Germans from Central Europe, which I examine in the following chapter. This is one of the most awkward questions raised by the whole war. Does war against an appalling, exceptional evil excuse lesser, more commonplace evils committed by your own side? Personally, I think not.
I will be told that I was not there at the time, and am using moral hindsight. This is true. It cannot be otherwise. But that does not mean that it was impossible to criticise or reject these actions at the time. Indeed, courageous persons did so. Bishop George Bell of Chichester (who sought professional military advice from the former soldier, historian, government adviser and military correspondent of The Times, Basil Liddell Hart, before protesting), Major Richard Stokes MP and Sir Henry Tizard were all there at the time. Bell had lost two brothers in World War I. Stokes had fought bravely in that conflict. Tizard’s physical courage, patriotism and devotion to duty are beyond question. All were knowledgeable and responsible people, unquestionably loyal patriots who supported their country in war and loved it in peacetime. All of them protested, much as I do and for the same reasons, moral and practical. They risked much by doing so. They were the conscience of our country, and it will be a great day when their actions are fully recognised as the virtuous, righteous deeds they were.
The first claim of those who support the bombing of German civilians is that, in the decision as to whether to bomb German cities or not to do so, and in the carrying out of that policy, our survival as a country and as a people was at stake.
It quite simply was not so. Even if you believe that Hitler seriously intended to invade this country in 1940 or later, which the evidence shows he did not, the choice was out of Hitler’s hands before the main bombing campaign began in 1942. Germany was by then preoccupied with the war against the Soviet Union, whose eventual end was probably decided by the German failure to take Moscow in December 1941. The final outcome of the German–Soviet war was not altered by British bombing of Germany, which was relatively minor before the 1942 raid on Cologne and did not become intense until well into 1943. By the time significant and sustained bombing had begun, Hitler had been irreversibly defeated at Stalingrad, and the USA was in the war.
Civilian deaths were intended by RAF commanders, who believed with good reason that this was what their political masters desired. They were not the unwanted, reluctantly accepted side effect of another policy, but a deliberate action. Many persist in believing that it was not our policy to kill civilians, and that they died accidentally as a result of attacks on military or industrial targets. This is flatly untrue. Not long after Dunkirk, the language of British leaders began to take on a rather fearsome tone. Winston Churchill speculated in a letter of 8 July 1940 to his friend and Minister of Aircraft Production, the press magnate Lord (Max) Beaverbrook, that an ‘absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland’ would help to bring Hitler down.11 Arthur Harris, later the chief of RAF Bomber Command, realised the significance of these extraordinary words. Perhaps not wholly trusting politicians to defend the actions they had ordered if they later became unpopular or not respectable (as they did), he kept a copy of this letter.
Harris commendably refused a peerage in 1946 because postwar sensitivity had denied his bomber crews a campaign medal. If they could not have a medal, he would not become a lord. Harris, though an unattractive man, emerges from this with some integrity. When a man of his sort was needed to pursue a bloody form of warfare without hesitation, he was welcomed in the councils of the great and treated with courtesy. When, later, a startled and chastened world understood what he had actually done, he was urged to leave by the tradesmen’s entrance. He made it very clear that he knew what was happening, and despised those who had once fawned on him and now dismissed him. They had given him his mandate. As far as he was concerned, they bore the ultimate responsibility.
Even before the end of the war, the British political class were beginning, as Bishop Bell had warned them they would, to wish they had not listened to bad arguments for indefensible actions. Bell’s speech to the House of Lords on 9 February 1944 is often wrongly described as a response to the firebombing of Dresden, which happened a year later. It was in fact a protest against the enormous, incessant bombing of German cities, far greater than the German bombing of British cities, which was then under way. It was not an emotional spasm. The bishop had spent long weeks consulting with experts about the military as well as the moral aspects of the bombing, speaking at length to the then prominent military expert Basil Liddell Hart (whose theories had greatly influenced Neville Chamberlain’s military spending decisions in the late 1930s).
Bell, unlike some who attacked the bombing policy, was emphatically not an absolute pacifist. He said,
Lord Halifax, at the beginning of this war, in reference to this very thing, described war as bloody and brutal. It is idle to suppose that it can be carried on without fearful injury and violence from which non-combatants as well as combatants suffer. It is still true, nevertheless, that there are recognized limits to what is permissible.12
The core of his speech is worth quoting at length because these arguments are so seldom heard. For us, with our hindsight, his intervention has one great, unavoidable flaw. But it is one for which Bell can be wholly excused. He could not have known what we know about the Nazis. It rightly criticises uncivilised methods of war known to us in 1944. It was spoken in total ignorance of the still-greater horrors yet to be uncovered. I believe it is those horrors which have (illogically but understandably) made it difficult for many to feel as strongly as they should feel about this issue.
Bell went on to add (with a total absence of naive pacifism or crude appeals to the emotions, and a severe understanding of the Christian doctrine of ‘just war’):
I turn to the situation in February, 1944, and the terrific devastation by Bomber Command of German towns. I do not forget the Luftwaffe, or its tremendous bombing of Belgrade, Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Portsmouth, Coventry, Canterbury and many other places of military, industrial and cultural importance.
Hitler is a barbarian. There is no decent person on the Allied side who is likely to suggest that we should make him our pattern or attempt to be competitors in that market. It is clear enough that large-scale bombing of enemy towns was begun by the Nazis. I am not arguing that point at all. The question with which I am concerned is this. Do the Government understand the full force of what area bombardment is doing and is destroying now? Are they alive not only to the vastness of the material damage, much of which is irreparable, but also to the harvest they are laying up for the future relationships of the peoples of Europe as well as to its moral implications? The aim of Allied bombing from the air, said the Secretary of State for Air at Plymouth on January 22, is to paralyze German war industry and transport. I recognize the legitimacy of concentrated attack on industrial and military objectives, on airfields and air bases, in view especially of the coming of the Second Front. I fully realize that in attacks on centres of war industry and transport, the killing of civilians when it is the result of bona-fide military activity is inevitable. But there must be a fair balance between the means employed and the purpose achieved. To obliterate a whole town because certain portions contain military and industrial establishments is to reject the balance.
Let me take two crucial instances, Hamburg and Berlin. Hamburg has a population of between one and two million people. It contains targets of immense military and industrial importance. It also happens to be the most democratic town in Germany where the Anti-Nazi opposition was strongest. Injuries to civilians resulting from bona-fide attacks on particular objectives are legitimate according to International Law. But owing to the methods used the whole town is now a ruin. Unutterable destruction and devastation were wrought last autumn. On a very conservative estimate, according to the early German statistics, 28,000 persons were killed. Never before in the history of air warfare was an attack of such weight and persistence carried out against a single industrial concentration. Practically all the buildings, cultural, military, residential, industrial, religious – including the famous University Library with its 800,000 volumes, of which three-quarters have perished – were razed to the ground.
Berlin, the capital of the Reich, is four times the size of Hamburg. The offices of the Government, the military, industrial, war-making establishments in Berlin are a fair target. Injuries to civilians are inevitable. But up to date half Berlin has been destroyed, area by area, the residential and the industrial portions alike. Through the dropping of thousands of tons of bombs, including fire-phosphorus bombs, of extraordinary power, men and women have been lost, overwhelmed in the colossal tornado of smoke, blast and flame. It is said that 74,000 persons have been killed and that 3,000,000 are already homeless. The policy is obliteration, openly acknowledged. That is not a justifiable act of war. Again, Berlin is one of the great centres of art collections in the world. It has a large collection of Oriental and classical sculpture. It has one of the best picture galleries in Europe, comparable to the National Gallery. It has a gallery of modern art better than the Tate, a museum of ethnology without parallel in this country, one of the biggest and best organised libraries – State and university, containing two and a half million books – in the world. Almost all these non-industrial, non-military buildings are grouped together near the old Palace and in the Street of the Linden. The whole of that street, which has been constantly mentioned in the accounts of the raids, has been demolished. It is possible to replace flat houses by mass production. It is not possible so quickly to rebuild libraries or galleries or churches or museums. It is not very easy to rehouse those works of art which have been spared. Those works of art and those libraries will be wanted for the re-education of the Germans after the war. I wonder whether your Lordships realize the loss involved in that.
How is it, then, that this wholesale destruction has come about? The answer is that it is the method used, the method of area bombing. The first outstanding raid of area bombing was, I believe, in the spring of 1942, directed against Lübeck, then against Rostock, followed by the thousand-bomber raid against Cologne at the end of May, 1942. The point I want to bring home, because I doubt whether it is sufficiently realized, is that it is no longer definite military and industrial objectives which are the aim of the bombers, but the whole town, area by area, is plotted carefully out. This area is singled out and plastered on one night; that area is singled out and plastered on another night; a third, a fourth, a fifth area is similarly singled out and plastered night after night, till, to use the language of the Chief of Bomber Command with regard to Berlin, the heart of Nazi Germany ceases to beat. How can there be discrimination in such matters when civilians, monuments, military objectives and industrial objectives all together form the target? How can the bombers aim at anything more than a great space when they see nothing and the bombing is blind?13
But the bishop then went too far. He made a distinction which modern ideological warfare does not permit. When he argued, ‘I am not extenuating the crimes of the Nazis or the responsibility of Germany as a whole in tolerating them for so long, but I should like to add this. I do not believe that His Majesty’s Government desire the annihilation of Germany. They have accepted the distinction between Germany and the Hitlerite State [my emphasis],’ the official record in Hansard notes that ‘Several Noble Lords’ cried out ‘No!’, which, in the sedate and restrained discussions of that body, is little short of a riot.14 As P. G. Wodehouse had also discovered, there were no Germans any more, only Nazis.
Bell had always made this distinction because he was a close friend to many German refugees from Hitler and was keenly aware of the existence of a real and brave opposition to National Socialism. He had helped refugees from Germany and had experienced unfair unpopularity when he protested against Winston Churchill’s absurd and self-defeating ‘collar the lot!’ detention of many fervently anti-Hitler Germans in 1940. He now got himself into deeper trouble. RAF stations in his diocese were coldly hostile to him. Noël Coward had already attacked him (for his objections were not new) in his 1943 satirical song ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans’ (‘Let us treat them very kindly as we would a valued friend / We might send them out some Bishops as a form of lease and lend’).
Churchill is widely believed to have prevented Bell’s promotion to the Archbishopric of Canterbury when that see unexpectedly fell vacant soon afterwards. There is no proof of this, but it is at least not impossible. And many years after his death, Bell’s own church (perhaps still uncomfortable with him) rather shockingly declined to defend him against an ancient, uncorroborated accusation of child abuse, preferring to find him guilty without trial.
Yet he voiced a real, lingering doubt. And though he has never received credit for doing so, his protests undoubtedly helped cause a subtle and deepening embarrassment in the establishment over what had been done. Arthur Harris had astutely expected this. If he ever expressed any opinion of George Bell, I do not know of it. But I suspect that he regarded his protests as honourable in comparison to the words and actions of politicians who first encouraged him and later abandoned him.
In 1979, five years before his death, Arthur Harris told the historian Andrew Boyle that the letter from Churchill to Beaverbrook was ‘the RAF mandate’.15 He would, quite rightly, never forget that responsibility for his actions had gone to the very top.
Yet nowadays we know almost nothing of this controversy. One startling fact is that the deliberate bombing of civilian targets in World War II for its own sake was not, in fact, begun by the Germans. It was one of the first effects of Winston Churchill’s arrival in Downing Street. Neville Chamberlain, like most conservative politicians of his era, was appalled by the idea of such attacks and had held back the RAF from bombing German territory. Churchill was not so restrained. Why did he act? Overy records that the deliberate bombing of cities in World War II was not a retaliation against Hunnish barbarism, but definitely begun by the RAF, on 11 May 1940, long before the Blitz.16 The turning point was a minor, ineffectual RAF raid on the town which was then known as München Gladbach (and is now known as Mönchengladbach) in western Germany. This was not, as some claim, a righteous response to Germany’s notorious bombing of Rotterdam. It cannot have been, because Rotterdam was not bombed until 14 May, three days later. What is more, German bombing of Rotterdam, barbarous as it no doubt was, formed part of a military operation to capture that city. It was not bombing for its own sake, a tactic not used before in the 1939–45 war (though Germany had used it in the Great War).
Some years later, J. M. (James Molony) Spaight, principal secretary at the Air Ministry, would confidently praise the change of policy in a bloodthirsty, triumphal style which now seems quite strange and almost embarrassing. Spaight wrote in a work of 1944, Bombing Vindicated, that
Bomber Command went to war on 11 May, 1940. It had only been fooling with war until then. That is the great date in its war diary: not because of anything spectacular achieved immediately, but because of what was to follow in the fullness of time. In that decision of May 1940, there was implicit the doom of Germany, though we little guessed it then. For a time, however, our offensive, it must be acknowledged, was a rather small affair.17
He went on to say,
Yet, because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic bombing offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May, 1940, the publicity which it deserved. That, surely, was a mistake. It was a splendid decision. It was as heroic, as self-sacrificing, as Russia’s decision to adopt her policy of ‘scorched earth’. It gave Coventry and Birmingham, Sheffield and Southampton, the right to look Kief [Kiev] and Kharkov, Stalingrad and Sebastopol, in the face. Our Soviet allies would have been less critical of our inactivity in 1942 if they had understood what we had done. We should have shouted it from the house-tops instead of keeping silence about it.18
He continued:
It could have harmed us morally only if it were equivalent to an admission that we were the first to bomb towns. It was nothing of the sort. The German airmen were the first to do that in the present war. (They had done it long before, too – at Durango and Guernica in 1937, nay, at London in 1915–18.) It was they, not the British airmen, who created a precedent for ‘war against the civilian population’.19
The precedents from Spain and the 1914 war are correct. However, German bombing of towns since 1939 had in fact been confined to support of other military arms. Warsaw, for example, suffered far more damage from shelling than from air attack.
The München Gladbach attack may have been in some way aimed at impeding or discouraging Germany’s unprovoked and lawless surprise attack on the Netherlands, then reaching its decisive stage. (München Gladbach was defined as a military-economic target.) Harris himself wrote in the American periodical Flying (‘Special Royal Air Force Issue’) for September 1942,
The first British bombs fell on the soil of the German mainland on the night of May 11, 1940, when a force of 18 Whitley bombers attacked railway communications behind the lines of the German advance across Flanders and the Low Countries. Light bombers of the Command, at that time Blenheims, also endeavoured to stem the onrush of the attack by desperate and costly sorties against immediately threatening enemy concentrations.20
But it was a unilateral change of policy.
The damage was slight and made no difference to the war. As Max Hastings has recounted in detail, at this stage of the war and for a long time afterwards, the RAF’s bombing accuracy was pitiful. It missed most of its targets hopelessly badly, and its inadequate bombing planes, generally poorly designed and using outdated tactics, were blasted from the sky by the Luftwaffe in terrible numbers during the early part of the combat.
Meanwhile, there were more ‘mandates’ for the RAF. The killing of German workers soon became an explicit policy. In June 1941 we find an Air Ministry draft directive saying that ‘Continuous and relentless bombing of these workers and their utility services, over a period of time, will inevitably lower their morale, kill a number of them and thus appreciably reduce their industrial output.’21
In April of the same year a policy review urged attacks on ‘working-class’ areas.22 In November that year a memorandum (almost certainly written by Harris) was asking if the time had not come to strike ‘against the people themselves’.23 In May, the Director of Air Intelligence welcomed an attack on ‘the livelihood, the homes, the cooking, heating, lighting and family life of […] the working class’.24 This was because they were the least mobile and most vulnerable to such an attack. Also, their housing was far more densely concentrated than that of the better-off, where explosives and incendiaries alike would do far less damage than they would in zones packed with large blocks of small, crowded flats.
In November 1941, Sir Richard Peirse, by then commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, told the Thirty Club (a private dining club) that his planes had, for nearly a year, been attacking ‘the people themselves’, intentionally.25
Sir Richard was extraordinarily candid both about the policy and about the Government’s pretence that it was not doing what it was doing. But he understood why the Government was not keen to state the truth in public:
I mention this because for a long time the Government for excellent reasons has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call Military Targets. […] I can assure you, gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples [my emphasis].26
Overy also shows that senior officials knew of the policy but preferred the truth of it not to be widely known in case ‘false and misleading deductions’ were made.27
A profoundly disturbing Air Staff memorandum explicitly desires that towns should be made ‘physically uninhabitable’ and the people in them must be ‘conscious of constant personal danger’. The aim was to produce ‘destruction’ and ‘the fear of death’.28
Harris himself wrote in April 1942, ‘We have got to kill a lot of Boche before we win this war.’29 To his credit, Harris never lied to himself or anyone else about what he was doing. He never hid from his purpose of killing Germans and wanted it acknowledged publicly. Being a hard and ruthless man himself, he must have suspected that his equally hard and ruthless political chief might one day seek to disavow the policy.
He sometimes cleverly responded to criticisms of his bombing campaign by comparing it to the British naval blockade of Germany in the 1914 war. He was quite reasonable to do so. This had beyond doubt led to terrible suffering and deaths from malnutrition among innocent German civilians. But they had been slow deaths, indirectly caused, and few to this day realise just what a merciless weapon of war that blockade had been. Interestingly, as we shall see, the blockade was also remembered unapologetically by those who defended the deportations of Germans (mainly women and children) under the Potsdam Agreement. Harris had a perfectly good point. We had abandoned our virtue long before, in an earlier stage of our struggle with the Germans. It is quite unfair to draw back in revulsion, long after the event, from Bomber Command’s actions once you have accepted the methods of the 1914–19 naval blockade. Neither action really fell within the Christian definition of a ‘just war’.
Overy also records the famous minute calling for the ‘de-housing’ of a third of Germany’s population.30 This was written by Churchill’s close friend and chief scientific adviser Frederick Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell. The document was based on totally wrong and exaggerated ideas of the power of bombing, as it later turned out. But at the time it greatly impressed Churchill himself.
It took a jeering and dismissive tone, implicitly treating moral objections as foolish and weak. ‘Investigation seems to show that having one’s house demolished is most damaging to morale,’ it said, airily and in an unpleasant, facetious and sarcastic fashion.31 In a paradox that will often arise in this argument, it seemed to make no connection between this policy and the fact that so many British people had suffered this fate and had not found it at all amusing. It is still quite a common position taken in arguments on this subject (and this author has had many) to describe German terror raids on Britain with justifiable emotional fury, and then to defend similar and worse actions by our own forces as just punishment for these horrors. It is almost impossible to persuade those who advance such arguments to see that there is any hypocrisy or inconsistency in them. The emotional power of the war, as a modern moral gospel of simple good versus total evil, overcomes both fact and reason. It does so in the minds of people younger than I. Through my parents and teachers, I am far more directly engaged in the history of that war. To those born later, it is far away, and known only through books, films and documentaries. They never saw, as I did almost daily, the gap-toothed streets and lingering traces of air-raid precautions (signs for shelters, emergency fire hydrants, etc.) in the British cities of the 1950s. They did not see the air-raid shelter which was such a fascinating feature of the back garden of my grandfather’s Portsmouth house. For them ‘the war’ is wholly an idea, glittering with chivalry and virtue. This is why it is so hard to criticise, and why it remains so useful to those who wish to start new wars. It may take many decades to overcome it, which means it is all too urgent to start as soon as possible.
While these arguments were happening, and while the aircraft which would put the Lindemann/Harris/Churchill policy fully into effect were still being built, something else was also going on. Set beside the great issues of war and peace, life and death, power and victory, it may seem rather distastefully and even trivially political. But a neglected theme of this controversy is the constant and rather nervous desire of the RAF, and of Bomber Command, to justify their actual existence. They advance the claims of air power as an independent force, rather than (as both Army and Navy have always wanted, and still want) as a handmaid to the Army and Navy, aiding them in their purposes. The bombing of cities as independent targets, unconnected with any ground operations, is a direct outgrowth of this highly questionable view of military science. So is the use of heavy bombers against guerrilla forces in dense forests, or in remote mountains, as was tried in Vietnam and Afghanistan. This has been almost wholly unsuccessful. But it persists, partly because of the belief in the effectiveness of the bombing of Germany, and partly because political leaders prefer it to risking the lives of soldiers. It makes modern wars easier to fight, politically. It does not make them any easier to win, militarily or politically. As well as irrational passions, there are powerful political and military interests lined up on the side of area bombing, long decades after the Lancaster bombers were scrapped and their crews (what remained of them) returned to normal life. In this argument, the warning ‘Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams,’ applies in several different ways.
At the very bottom of it, though, lies the awkward question of what Britain was to do to stay in the war, now that it had been expelled from the European Continent where that war was taking place. There were the heroic and romantic activities of the Special Operations Executive. But it is difficult to claim that these did much more than assert that we were still in the war, and offer some comfort to the conquered peoples of the occupied lands. These activities have since been much romanticised in fiction and film, with beautiful female resistance heroines holding out bravely against the Nazis. And they have been glorified in official histories. But how much use were they?
In the case of the Netherlands, romantic amateurism, combined with foolish rivalry with the Secret Intelligence Service, led to a disaster. Poorly equipped and poorly prepared agents were caught by the Germans and compelled by threats to transmit false messages back to London. These incredibly brave agents followed orders by omitting key call signs from their messages, to warn that they had been captured. But their chiefs in London – selfishly not wanting to believe the horrid truth – ignored the warnings and continued week after week to send men to imprisonment and later to death in the Mauthausen concentration camp. This catastrophe continued for years despite attempts by one SOE official to raise the alarm. The avoidable and dismal sacrifice of precious life and courage is discussed in Last Hope Island (2017) by the American writer Lynne Olson.32 It is barely known about in Britain, for, once again, it contradicts the heroic myth.
It was not the only questionable action in our secret war. One especially perplexing case involves an action which was not technically an SOE operation. But it was known to SOE chiefs (and presumably to Winston Churchill himself). There must be serious moral questions about the rightness of what was done. This was Operation Anthropoid, the assassination by Czech and Slovak soldiers of the German ruler of Bohemia-Moravia, Acting Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich. The gruesome reprisals visited on the Czechs by the Germans were entirely predictable. In fact, they were predicted by the Czech resistance leadership in Prague, who begged the Czech government-in-exile in London to call off the plan. The death of Heydrich brought great misery in return for little if any military or political gain. Indeed, the Czech resistance was almost entirely snuffed out by the actions which the Germans took.
These types of indirect warfare – assassinations, bombing of civilians, starvation blockades – are the sorts of things which happen when nations wish to fight wars but cannot win them by the normal, traditional way of armies fighting armies. In this case, like the bombing of civilians, they arose directly from Britain’s deliberate entry into a war for which it was not physically prepared. It is no use saying they were ‘the only thing we could do’. This was so, but it was predictably so because of deliberate policies we had adopted earlier. They were not ‘the only thing we could have done’, had we thought more carefully about what we were doing as we sauntered so nonchalantly towards a war for which we were utterly unready.
There is little doubt that much of the bombing of Germany was done to please and appease Josef Stalin. Stalin jeered at Churchill for his failure to open a Second Front and to fight Hitler’s armies in Europe, and ceaselessly pressed him to open such a front – something Churchill was politically and militarily reluctant to do. Bombing Germany, though it did not satisfy Stalin’s demands for an invasion, at least reassured him that we were doing something, and so lessened his pressure on us to open a second front. Martin Gilbert records in his biography of Winston Churchill that Churchill boasted to Stalin at their first meeting in August 1942 that he hoped to ‘shatter’ twenty German cities and ‘if need be […] to shatter almost every dwelling in almost every German city’.33 This bombast pleased Stalin and greatly improved the mood of the meetings. Overy also records Stalin’s annoyance that the British and Americans had (in July of that year) abandoned a plan for an invasion of Western Europe originally set for 1942. The Soviet leader was more or less insulting when given this news. But when Churchill promised plentiful bombing, ‘Stalin took over the argument himself and said that homes as well as factories must be destroyed.’34
Pleasing Stalin – or at least avoiding his disfavour – would be one of Winston Churchill’s preoccupations in the years that followed. It was also one motive behind the Heydrich assassination described just above, though this also had much to do with the Czech government-in-exile’s need to establish itself as a belligerent and wipe out the shame of its 1938 capitulation. Stalin had little interest in our wars in the Middle East or in Asia. He was unconcerned about our struggle to protect the transatlantic supply convoys, as long as this did not affect the other convoys bringing Western guns and planes to the Soviet port of Murmansk. But the killing of German civilians, and the disruption of German rule in central Europe, was an effective and practicable way of soothing the Soviet monster’s rages and sulks.
Stalin was our indispensable ally against Hitler, and (like Hitler) a man for whom the killing of innocent people was never a problem. Oddly, Stalin was not (as is widely believed) to blame for the attacks on Dresden in 1945.35 The belief has probably grown as we try to make excuses for an action which even the defenders of Harris find hard to stomach. The Dresden firestorm remains, whether we like it or not, a wholly British and American responsibility.
Soon after his first ill-tempered encounter with Stalin, Churchill was pressed by Harris for a commitment to a bombing offensive. Churchill responded that he was committed to bombing, partly because it would look bad to stop such a major part of Britain’s war effort, but he did not expect it to have decisive results in 1943 or bring the war to an end. But it was, Churchill said, ‘better than doing nothing’.36
But better for whom? This was little more than war by public relations, with actions judged by their political impact and their effect on morale, rather than their military result. Can one kill innocents for the sake of appearances? It seems to go beyond the limits of ‘just war’. Once again, it is not hindsight to suggest that this strategy was morally wrong and militarily futile. It was perfectly possible to see this at the time.
Leo Amery, a War Cabinet member, was not impressed by Harris’s demands for a full-scale bombing attack. Quoting a scientist at the Air Warfare branch, who said the RAF could not hit enough German industry to do decisive damage, Amery wrote: ‘I am aware that this view of night bombing is shared by a very large number of thoughtful people.’37 But this was not a good time for thoughtful people.
In the end, the bombing offensive would prove hugely costly in human life and national treasure. Brave and capable young men, and vastly expensive technology, were hurled into the flames with little material effect. In 1942, for example, the RAF killed 4,900 Germans – two Germans for every expensive bomber (and its valuable, hard-to-train crew) lost. The full figures are even more startling and unimpressive. Harris’s forces dropped 37,192 tons of bombs on Germany. Most missed their targets completely. The raids cost 2,716 bombers, lost on missions or in accidents. The losses among trained men were appalling. Bomber Command itself lost 14,000 from September 1939 to September 1942. During the whole RAF bombing offensive, aircrews suffered a 44 per cent casualty rate.38 This was comparable to the butchery of the worst battles of the Great War. It also meant that many of them were dead long before they could make a considered assessment of their commander, which is perhaps why there is a shortage of memoirs or poems criticising the offensive.
Bomber Command’s loss rate was 41 per cent, with 47,268 of its 135,000 men killed in action (or dying as prisoners of war) and 8,195 killed in accidents. A butcher’s bill on this scale could only be justified by an overpowering need. There was no such need, or any other justification.
The only solid argument that these attacks advanced the war effort is that they diverted aircraft and artillery from the Eastern Front to the defence of the German homeland. This is perfectly true. But a more effective bomber offensive against true military and economic targets, especially fuel plants, would have done the same, and been more use in winning the war. Such an offensive did eventually happen very late in the war, and did huge and rapid damage to the German war effort. We must also realise that the bombing campaign also forced Britain to divert scarce and costly resources – trained men, metals, explosives, fuel, engine manufacturing capacity – from the build-up of its D-Day army. It also diverted men, money, materiel and aircraft from the Battle of the Atlantic, the U-boat war which we could well have lost. As Stephen Roskill wrote in The War at Sea 1939–45,
In the early spring of 1943 we had a very narrow escape from defeat in the Atlantic; had we suffered such a defeat, history would have judged the main cause would have been the lack of two more squadrons of very long-range aircraft for convoy escort duties.39
In May 1942, when Arthur Harris had been assembling aircraft for his highly publicised ‘thousand-bomber raid’ on Cologne, Coastal Command had been one of the few units that had flatly refused to lend any machines for the purpose.
The military high command of the Allies also did not view the night bombing of Germany as being particularly important. Overy notes that the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, at which the USA and Britain hammered out their European strategy, did not really view the bomber offensive as central to victory. He writes, ‘Bombing survived as an option not because it was central to the strategic outlook of the western allies, but because it was secondary.’40
What was it for? The Americans could not understand its purpose. The RAF’s chief, Charles (later Lord) Portal was predicting that his force could kill 900,000 Germans in 18 months, seriously injure a million, destroy six million homes and ‘de-house’ 25 million people (so much for deaths being unintended collateral damage). Overy notes that American fliers were puzzled as to what the RAF’s actual strategic aim was in pursuing this policy.41
The bombing of Germany came too late to ‘save us from invasion’, and so cannot be justified on those grounds.
Arthur Harris admitted that his bomber offensive only started seriously in March 1943.42 This is important because so many people like to claim that the bombing ‘saved Britain from invasion’ or ‘won the war’ or was ‘the only way we could strike back’. Yet the invasion of Britain, never seriously prepared (see Chapter 7), had been cancelled in September 1940. Even if revived, it could never have taken place after the decisive Battle of Stalingrad ended in German defeat and humiliation in early February 1943. After this date, the victory of the USSR over Germany was more or less assured, and Germany certainly could not have contemplated opening up another front by a seaborne assault on the British Isles. The German commander at Stalingrad, Friedrich Paulus, and his armies had been marched off to prison camps before Harris’s offensive really began. As for air attack on cities being our ‘only weapon’ against Germany, we did not use it very much if so. For nearly three years after Dunkirk this ‘sole weapon’ had barely begun to be used. Our central role in the war was to prepare for the Second Front, for which we provided an indispensable base of operations, and to sustain the USSR. There is little doubt that the air war was chosen mainly as a substitute for a second front, for political and propaganda reasons – but not for military ones. Oddly enough, it still fulfils that purpose, allowing uncritical historians to reassure a puzzled people that Britain was in fact a major power in the war between 1940 and 1944.
The military justifications for the bombing were found afterwards and are not very convincing. A moral justification remains elusive. The easiest way to bypass this problem is to state, correctly but ultimately irrelevantly, that the Germans behaved far worse. As the years pass, a real justification becomes harder to find, yet the bombing is still strongly defended. A statue of Arthur Harris has been erected in London, which is highly contentious and has attracted protests. A memorial to Bomber Command, entirely justifiable as a commemoration of human bravery and loss but questionable as a vindication of area bombing, has been built near Hyde Park Corner. On its plinth the inscription quotes from Pericles, ‘Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it,’ which is certainly true. But evidence that the bombing of German civilians actually defended our freedom is hard to find.
The first argument for the bombing is that it had a powerful effect on the German war effort. This is not, in general, true. Claims are often made that ‘Operation Gomorrah’, the firestorm in Hamburg, could have destroyed German morale if it had been replicated in other major cities. Hitler’s favourite, Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s minister of armaments, is said to have held this opinion. But was he correct? The physical damage was indeed appalling and the violent destruction of human life almost beyond the limit of imagination. But in fact Hamburg recovered as a functioning city and port with remarkable speed.43
The attacks also had a very high cost to us, in terms of expensively trained young men killed and costly aircraft destroyed. In 1943, the RAF lost 4,026 aircraft, 2,823 of them in combat. The appalling figures for non-combat losses are easily explained. The death or capture of experienced crews meant more rapid training and many more flying accidents than would have befallen well-trained crews.
It is perfectly true that the Anglo-American bombing offensive diverted German fighters from the eastern front. But the cost in losses of aircraft and men was appallingly high.
Harris ludicrously overestimated the economic damage he was doing. He was livid when contemporary researchers said his attacks had only reduced German economic potential by 9 per cent in 1943.44 He was sure he had done far more damage. But after the war 9 per cent turned out to be an overestimate (see below). The human cost of the war to our own side was appalling. During 1943, Bomber Command lost 15,678 killed or captured, and the US 8th Air Force lost 9,497.
The idea that the bombing might create some sort of revolution against Hitler was often touted. But expert analyses pointed out that Nazi Germany offered no avenue for protest, and the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender (an unexamined policy which may well have prolonged the war for a year or more) completely ruled out the traditional way of ending wars – a more compliant government coming to office and suing for peace.
Should we have done what the Americans did, and bombed by day with long-range fighter escorts?
This is not the place for a long debate on the American daylight bombing, under increasingly heavy and effective long-range fighter escort. But there is no doubt that experience shows that, had the Allies made a determined attack on German oil production and refinery capacity, they would have done far more damage to the Reich’s war effort, far sooner than by any other means. Even so, daylight bombing could often be almost as indiscriminate as night bombing. Overy concedes that many of the American raids were in effect area bombing since they could not achieve the accuracy for pinpoint bombing.
But he contrasts the Americans’ decision to take the war to the Luftwaffe itself (which in the end destroyed German air power) with the RAF’s persistence, to the end, in bombing urban targets. Overy details a costly and ineffective RAF raid in April 1944 against Berlin (too far away, too spread-out and too well defended to allow concentrated attack easily) and Nuremberg. Even Arthur Harris conceded that German night defences were so effective that they might create conditions in which loss rates ‘could not in the end be sustained’. Overy writes, ‘Between November 1943 and March 1944, Bomber Command lost 1,128 aircraft for little evident strategic gain.’45 In the light of modern fury at the alleged use of gas bombs by Syria, it is interesting to note a discussion of possible retaliatory gas attacks, and of how they were contemplated by Winston Churchill, now the hero of modern liberal interventionists who regard the use of gas as a horror inviting immediate punitive war.46 But the gas bombs were not used. They would only have been used, I am sure, in retaliation against such attacks by Germany. But by then there would have been few scruples. In a very telling paragraph, Overy writes,
The RAF staff thought that incendiary and high-explosive raids were more strategically efficient [than gas or germ warfare], in that they destroyed property and equipment and not just people, but in any of these cases – blown apart, burnt alive or asphyxiated – deliberate damage to civilian populations was now taken for granted [my emphasis]. This paved the way for the possibility of using atomic weapons on German targets in 1945 if the war had dragged on late into the year.47
Defenders of bombing German cities might be surprised to find out the identity of the prominent British politician who – in early 1945 – called area bombing ‘acts of terror and wanton destruction’. Overy recounts how on 28 March 1945 Winston Churchill, clearly growing sick of the violence he had unleashed as victory approached and the excuses for it grew thinner, referred to Harris’s bombing tactics (in a memorandum) using these exact words. He urged, none too soon, that attacks turn instead to oil and transport. Harris paid no attention, and right up until 24th April 1945, his bombers continued to drop incendiaries and high explosives on German cities, turning many thousands of civilians into corpses, and making even more into homeless refugees.48
We know how effective – or ineffective – the bombing was because the two major bombing powers, the USA and Britain, both conducted surveys of the effects of bombing after the war.49 Captured Germans tended to agree that bombing of transport links and oil facilities had been crucial, and the bombing of cities comparatively unimportant, in hampering the Nazi war effort.50 It is hard to see why they should have lied about this.
The American survey itself said that city attacks cost only about 2.7 per cent of German economic potential. The whole combined offensive cost a total of 17 per cent of German economic potential by 1944, mostly due to US bombing of selected targets.51 The British report largely concurred, except that it was in some ways even more modest in its claims for area bombing’s effects, especially in the key year of 1944.52 Transport and oil remained the most important targets whoever was looking at the outcome. As Overy writes,
Given the uniformity of opinion on both the German and Allied sides, the one based on experience, the other on extensive research, it is surprising that the effects of bombing have occasioned so much debate ever since. The proximate causes – defeating the German air force and emasculating oil supply and transport – are unlikely to be undermined by further research.53
He quotes a senior RAF officer, Norman Bottomley (Portal’s former deputy during the war), as saying the effect of area bombing was ‘great but never critical’.
Of course it had an impact.54 Industrial workers died, many hours of work were lost, and – most crucially – huge numbers of fighter aircraft were diverted from Italy and Russia. Overy writes: ‘This situation left German armies denuded of air protection at a critical juncture.’55 This might appear to justify bombing civilians in their homes. But it does not. Sustained attacks on actual targets, as opposed to night raids on crowded cities, would have achieved the same effect while greatly shortening the war (as killing civilians did not). The attacks were themselves a diversion of Allied strength from other fronts and aspects of the war, especially the war at sea against the U-boats, which might have been more urgent and more likely to achieve victory. Overy also quotes J. K. (John Kenneth) Galbraith, the noted economist and enthusiast for US participation in the war, as saying the man-hours, aircraft and bombs ‘had cost the American economy far more in output than they had cost Germany’.56 This again suggests that the same resources, used elsewhere, might have inflicted just as much if not more damage on Germany, without the severe moral problems of bombing cities.
Overy’s chapter on the offensive concludes that governments liked bombing because it squandered fewer lives than ground offensives, because they believed it was good for propaganda and morale, and because it made maximum use of new technology. To some extent the continued popularity of bombing was then, and is now, an effect of universal suffrage democracy, whose wars, as we know, are crueller than those of kings. To question it (as I well know) leads swiftly to a questioning of the whole myth of the war, and an unwelcome examination of how we came to be waging a war in Europe against one of the greatest land powers in human history yet had no army in Europe with which to fight it.
The day has not yet come when this conundrum can be calmly discussed in Britain, even though the whole episode began 79 years ago and finished 73 years ago. But it is surprising that Sir Max Hastings’s Bomber Command (first published in 1979) has not begun to change opinions.57 Bomber Command is in many ways a more effective polemic against Arthur Harris’s campaign than Anthony (A. C.) Grayling’s more recent moral treatise Among the Dead Cities. This is because Sir Max’s book is not written as a polemic, but as an engaged and intelligent history of this episode.
The claims of the Harris camp, for the military value of area bombing, are once again thoroughly debunked. The terrible losses of brave aircrew are heartbreakingly described. One officer’s words, those of Flight Lieutenant Denis Hornsey of 76 Squadron, deserve to be read and remembered by all thoughtful people. He wrote in 1943:
If you live on the brink of death yourself, it is as if those who have gone have merely caught an earlier train to the same destination, and whatever that destination is, you will be sharing it soon, since you will almost certainly be catching the next one.58
They knew that they were almost certain to die, and not just die, but die horribly in the dark and the cold, and only a few hours from the comfort of homes which in many cases they had left that morning and to which they would never return. It was a more modern repetition of the horrors of the Somme in 1916, but with even greater poignancy.
Harris’s own obdurate resistance to more effective types of bombing is recorded. A concentrated campaign against German fuel installations might actually have shortened the war in Europe, but Harris resisted such a campaign. Harris’s supporters always claim he shortened the war, but he emphatically did not, not least because he always objected to the use of ‘his’ bombers for such action as the successful raids on the synthetic fuel plants, and the use of his aircraft and crews (much against Harris’s wishes) for bombing in support of the planned D-Day invasion.
Sir Max also deserves much credit for the chapter in which he describes the indefensible destruction of the city of Darmstadt on 11 September 1944 (it was not, in any significant way, a military target) and what it involved for those living there. As I know well, and as I have had confirmed in many exchanges with members of the British public, there is a dogged, almost furious resistance in this country to recognising what we actually did in Germany. I think this is because many people fear and suspect that it was wrong, and prefer their comforting illusions. So they will not open the door that leads to truth. Sir Max’s book is a door that leads to truth. Those open to reconsider the question should try this small sample from the description of the Darmstadt raid:
The first terrible discoveries were made: cellars crammed with suffocated bodies – worse still, with amorphous heaps of melted and charred humanity. There were whole families whose remains could be removed in a laundry basket. Some bodies had shrunk to a quarter of life-size. […] There were blue corpses and purple corpses, black heaps of flesh and protruding bones. Kramer saw a man carrying a sack containing the heads of his entire family.59
Let us now come to the issue of Dresden, and the many other lesser-known cities that suffered terrible fates at our hands. Dresden is a city reasonably well known to me. I take an interest in events there. So on the 65th anniversary of the RAF and USAAF bombing of Dresden in 2010 I was impressed to see that residents of that lovely city had formed a human chain to prevent a demonstration by neo-Nazis. Those neo-Nazis were, shamefully, trying to equate the bombing with the Holocaust. The civilised majority of Dresden citizens were having none of it, just as we should have none of it. Appalling as the bombing was, it was an act of war taken against an aggressor nation, not even remotely the same as the deliberate, cold-blooded industrial slaughter of Europe’s Jews, a unique crime which I hope will remain unique, and which is often falsely compared with lesser horrors by irresponsible propagandists of many kinds.
Wise Germans will have nothing to do with such false equivalence. The citizens of modern Dresden, which has now at least partly recovered from the destruction, and also from nearly 50 years of Communist vandalism and stupidity, are a credit to the German Federal Republic, which has made immense efforts to build a free, law-governed society out of the ruins of Hitler’s Reich. It does not get enough credit for its success. Perhaps now we can see (in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance) how hard it is to build freedom out of the rubble of tyranny, we should pay more attention to the German success.
The Dresden counter-demonstrators were a good example of this, and quite right. Anyone who seeks to excuse or diminish the Holocaust with false comparisons may have the effect of making a repeat of it more likely, however unintentionally. That is why the ‘revisionist’ arguments of some German historians, who seek to equate the Holocaust and bombing, ought to be resisted. Even so, I think we have to admit that the bombing of civilian targets by the RAF during World War II was wrong. We can say this without in any way impugning the undoubted courage of the young men who flew in the bombing missions – and who suffered appalling casualties while doing so. But their commanders, and the politicians who knew full well what was going on, cannot be let off.
Grayling’s powerful work makes, in my view, an unanswerable (and unanswered) case against the bombing of German civilians. Its effects on innocent people were appalling. It cannot be excused as collateral damage. Its military impact does not begin to justify the horrors it brought about. Something like 600,000 people died under the bombing of British and American aircraft, many of them foreign slave labourers who were not in any way to blame for Hitler, who had no choice in where they lived and worked. This is a far greater total than the casualties inflicted on Britain by Germany during the 1940–1 Blitz, in which about 43,000 people died. Grayling deals with all the standard arguments of those who justify the bombing, pointing out that all of these arguments would be a better argument for what the RAF largely did not do – that is, accurate bombing of industrial, economic and military targets. One of the few missions where careful targeting was involved was the rightly famous ‘Dam Busters’ raid, though that did inevitably cause some severe civilian casualties. In this as in other cases, many of them were forced labourers from defeated allied nations. Another was the bombing of the missile factory at Peenemünde. Such targeted bombing, which was also tackled by the USAAF, also at great cost in young lives, did in fact have a much greater effect on the German ability to wage war than the bombing of civilians.
Many other issues flow from this, including the validity of the ‘finest hour’ and ‘glorious struggle’ views of World War II, which seem to me (who once believed them entirely) to grow more threadbare by the year. And I know that many people would simply rather not think about the matter for this very reason. The market for accounts of the Hamburg firestorm is rather limited in Britain. Rehashes of the SOE story, or the SAS, or Dunkirk or D-Day, by contrast, never cease to attract buyers. That is a pity. We need to know what was done in our name, and in my view to be horrified by it, so that we can be sure we are not again reduced to this barbaric and – as it happens – ineffectual form of warfare.
It is my suspicion that the moral shrivelling of Britain since 1945, the increased violence and delinquency, the readiness to accept the abortion massacre, the general coarsening of culture and the growth of callousness have at least something to do with our willingness to shrug off – or even defend – Arthur Harris’s deliberate ‘de-housing’ of German civilians. The British people in 1939, told of what would be done in their name within six years, would have been incredulous and astonished. I am glad at least that people such as Bishop George Bell of Chichester raised powerful voices against it at the time, at some cost to themselves. We owe it to them to revisit the argument.
While I think the moral objections to the bombing are overpowering, and that retaliation for German barbarism simply does not pass as a justification, I know that many seek to defend area bombing as a practical necessity of war. But even at the time, notable military and scientific experts rightly warned that area bombing would not be as effective as claimed, as described by Charles Snow in Science and Government. It contains the factual background to some scenes in Snow’s novel about deep friendship, The Light and the Dark (mentioned earlier in this chapter), in which the World War II plan to bomb German cities, and the Whitehall row about it, forms at first the background and later, rather tragically, the foreground to the final part of the story.
Snow, a scientist and civil servant, was much involved in the British state’s effort to recruit science to prepare for World War II. As a man of the fairly hard left of the time (just how hard is hinted at in another book in the series, Corridors of Power, in which Snow’s semi-autobiographical hero more or less admits to sympathy for the USSR), he longed for Winston Churchill to be in office throughout the late 1930s, believing that a Churchill government would stand up to Hitler.
And he knew several extraordinary figures in the semi-secret world where government, science and politics intersect. One was the fascinating Maurice Hankey, who appears in some of the books as the politician Bevill. The others, who are the principal characters in Science and Government, are Sir Henry Tizard (whom Snow obviously admired greatly) and F. A. (Frederick Alexander) Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell), the mysterious German-born naturalised Briton, scientist and intriguer who became Winston Churchill’s chief scientific adviser. Snow is utterly fair to Lindemann, and seems to have liked him as far as it was possible to do so. He notes that both Lindemann and Tizard were abnormally physically brave, and both proved it by extraordinary flying exploits during World War I. It is amazing that they survived. But it would not be true to say he admired Lindemann.
Tizard and Lindemann quite famously quarrelled over Lindemann’s belief that bombing German civilians would win the war. Lindemann advocated, quite specifically, the bombing of German working-class homes. ‘Middle-class houses have too much space around them and so are bound to waste bombs,’ as Snow explains the view. ‘Factories and “military objectives” had long since been forgotten, except in official bulletins, since they were much too difficult to find and hit.’60 Lindemann argued that, given a total concentration of effort, bombing all the major towns of Germany could destroy 50 per cent of all houses. Snow notes at this point, in a superb and (to me) moving piece of understatement:
It is possible, I suppose, that some time in the future people living in a more benevolent age than ours may turn over the official records and notice that men like us, well-educated by the standards of the day, men fairly kindly by the standards of the day, and often possessed of strong human feelings, made the kind of calculation I have just been describing. […] Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have the right.61
But he returns to the practical point. As well as being wicked, the policy was plain wrong. Tizard said that Lindemann’s estimate of the possible destruction was five times too high. He was supported by Patrick Blackett, a former naval officer who had become a noted physicist high in the scientific councils of the day. He would later win the Nobel Prize in Physics, and be ennobled as Lord Blackett. Blackett independently advised that Lindemann’s estimate was six times too high.62 Both were slightly out. But they were nothing like as wrong as Lindemann was. Lindemann’s estimate of destruction was in fact ten times too high, as the postwar bombing survey revealed. Though Blackett and Tizard were correct, then and later, they might as well not have bothered to argue. Snow records,
The minority view [that of Tizard and Blackett] was not only defeated, but squashed. The atmosphere was more hysterical than is usual in English official life; it had the faint but just perceptible smell of a witch hunt. Tizard was actually called a defeatist.63
Snow understood very well how such merciless blows can be dealt and endured by gentlemen in the stuffy quiet of a Whitehall committee room. He writes: ‘It was not easy, for a man as tough and brave as men are made, and a good deal prouder than most of us, to be called a defeatist.’64
Perhaps worse was the internal exile into which Tizard was forced, denied all further influence despite his great knowledge and experience and exiled to the presidency of Magdalen College in Oxford, his talents wasted at their very peak, and when they were most needed by the country he loved. No, it was not Soviet; there was no Siberian power station, and no bullet in the back of the head. But it was not English, either. And it was, worst of all, a victory for thoughtless noisy stupidity over intelligent and rational policy making.
Yet you will search in vain in most histories of the war for more than tiny passing references to Tizard. If there is another book that describes this moment of official insanity, I do not know where it is. Why is the only considerable account of this battle trapped inside this small, obscure volume that the reader must retrieve from deep in a few impenetrable scholarly libraries? Why is it not taught in schools? Why has nobody written a play about it? I suspect it is because this story, if well known, would undermine the shallow, nonsensical cult of Winston Churchill as the infallible Great Leader, a cult to which, surely, an adult country no longer needs to cling.
Churchill gave his complete support to Lindemann, an unlikely friend, a non-drinking, non-smoking vegetarian with no known sexual relations with anyone, who lived on the whites of eggs, Port Salut cheese and olive oil. He made a strange boon companion for the hard-drinking Edwardian bon vivant prime minister, who is said to have occasionally, teasingly persuaded Lindemann to drink a glass of cognac. And Churchill’s endorsement, sent directly from Downing Street, simply obliterated all opposition.
Shocking as this is, there is an even more worrying postscript. Those who would defend the bombing of German civilians generally subscribe wholly to Churchill-worship and the veneration of the Battle of Britain as the supreme moment of the Finest Hour. Such people would I think agree that the invention of radar and its deployment in the ‘Chain Home’ defensive system on the eve of war was an unmixed blessing which possibly saved this country.
But if Churchill had been in power a few years earlier, there would have been no radar, because his favourite, Frederick Lindemann, would have stopped its development.
The ‘Tizard Committee’ (officially the Committee for the Scientific Study of Air Defence) began meeting in secret in January 1935. Tizard kept it small and concentrated, and picked its members with great care (Blackett being one of them). They decided quickly that radar was the one thing to back. And they began the concentrated, brilliant, exhausting work on it (and on persuading the armed forces that it was what they needed) which would put Britain significantly ahead in its development at a vital moment in world history.65
As Snow says, most of the decisive scientific work (which made radar available to the RAF in the summer of 1940) had been done by the end of 1936. The creation of such devices is slow, and this was an amazing piece of prescience and competence. And yet in 1935, Lindemann had become involved. This was a result of a secret arrangement under which the then prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, agreed to allow Winston Churchill to sit on another secret committee on air defence, one for politicians rather than scientists. With Churchill came Lindemann, who was placed on the Tizard Committee. He very nearly wrecked it. It became full of ‘diatribes by Lindemann, scornful, contemptuous, barely audible, directed against any decision that Tizard had made, was making, or ever would make’.66 Lindemann ‘demanded that [radar] should be put much lower on the priority list and research on other devices given the highest priority’.67
These other devices included wholly impractical plans for infrared detection, and the dropping of parachute mines and bombs in front of hostile aircraft, as if they were ships. Two members of the committee, including Blackett, could bear it no longer and left. This happened after Lindemann had abused Tizard so fiercely that the secretaries ‘had to be sent out of the room’.68
With typical Whitehall cunning, the committee was reconstituted elsewhere and Lindemann was somehow left off it. Radar survived and was ready in time. But what if Churchill had by then been premier? Snow admits the paradox – he and his friends had at the time clamoured for Churchill to be brought back into the Cabinet, to strengthen our war preparations and stiffen our national sinews. But if that had happened, Lindemann would have been able to do to Tizard in 1936 what he did to him in 1942 over bombing – deploy the power of Churchill to crush him. And then what would have happened to radar? It would not have been remotely ready by 1940. Good speeches by Winston Churchill would not have won the Battle of Britain if there had not been radar too.
‘With Lindemann instead of Tizard,’ Snow concludes, ‘it seems at least likely that different technical choices would have been made. If that had been so, I still cannot for the life of me see how the radar system would have been ready in time.’69 This is a striking contrast between what we thought we knew, and what actually happened. It remains little known because we do not wish to know about it. We see our past as a noble legend rather than as a precise history. But in judging how to behave in the present and the future, real history with all its paradoxes is much more use than legend, however uplifting.