Bomber Offensive

Arthur Harris

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Aviation
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781473812604
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Biografías militares

The Royal Air Force commander of bombing operations during WWII offers an insider's view of his legendary career in this classic military memoir. Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris remains a controversial figure in the history of the RAF. While many vilify him for his merciless carpet bombing of Germany, others believe that his contributions to Allied victory are grossly undervalued. In Bomber Offensive, Harris candidly describes how he led the men of Bomber Command in the face of appalling casualties, his fierce disagreements with higher authority, and the complicated relationship he had with Winston Churchill. Written soon after the close of the Second World War, Harris's memoirs reveals the man behind the Allied bombing offensive that destroyed the Nazi war machine, but also many beautiful and historic cities, such as Dresden. His defense of these total war tactics stands in stark contrast to modern military policy, which considers such indiscriminate killing a war crime.

CONTENTS

I. FACING THE WAR

Arrival in England from Palestine in 1939. Certainty of war. Appointment as Air Officer Commanding No. 5 Bomber Group. My service career. Previous experience of air war. The last war and “police bombing” in the East. The years of disarmament. The Army Staff College. A journey to America. Palestine and Montgomery. Looking ahead to a bomber’s war.

II. THE FIRST BOMBING

The Hampdens of 5 Group. The bomber groups. Operational Training. Ludlow-Hewitt. A change of command. The leaflet raids. The magnetic mine. 5 Group’s minelaying. Our defenceless aircraft. The Battle of France. The Battle of Britain and the invasion barges. The beginnings of strategic bombing.

III. IN THE AIR MINISTRY AND U.S.A.

Appointed Deputy Chief of the Air Staff. Cutting down our staff. The Blitz in London. We plan for 4000 bombers. Strategic bombing a British idea. The Air Force and the Army. Lunatic weapons. A visit to America. “Imperial Troops.” Bomber Command’s operations.

IV. BOMBER COMMAND

Appointed C.-in-C. Bomber Command. The bomber force in 1942. What we were up against. The need for speed. Attacking German morale. Area and Precision bombing. Previous failures. Target finding by night. Using the wrong bombs. Early bombing tactics. The principle of concentration. The lesson of the Blitz. Bombing policy.

V. THE PRELIMINARY PHASE

A year of preparation. The first navigational aid. The history of Gee. Excessive optimism about its use. Experiments over the Isle of Man and Wales. Building up the force. Thirteen squadrons taken from Bomber Command for Coastal Command and overseas. The failure of the Manchester. The Lancaster produced by accident. Some critical operations. The thousand bomber attack on Cologne. A night of suspense. Churchill hears the result. A spurious broadcast.

VI. GETTING THE WEAPONS

Failure of an attack on Essen. The enemy defences increase. New radar devices. Oboe and H2S. Experiments and modifications. The Pathfinder Force. Arguments against its formation. Jamming the enemy’s radar. The use of “Window” forbidden. The expansion of the force. First attacks on Berlin. Attacks on U-boat bases. The minelaying campaign. Attacks on North Italy.

VII. THE OFFENSIVE UNDER WAY

The main offensive begins. A successful attack on Essen. The Battle of the Ruhr. Showing the results to the world. Field Marshal Smuts sees the bomb-damage. Winston Churchill and the offensive. Propaganda in the R.A.F. The Mohne and Eder dams. More new equipment. The Civil Service.

VIII. LONG RANGE ATTACKS

Targets in Eastern Germany. The use of H2S. Tactics and marking. The destruction of Hamburg. The Ethics of bombing. The jamming war begins. Peenemunde and the V-weapons. The Battle of Berlin. A revolution in tactics. The invasion of Europe ends the campaign of strategic bombing.

IX. THE INVASION OF EUROPE

The Atlantic Wall. Appreciation of the situation. The heavy bomber made invasion possible. Attacks on French railways. Precision bombing and the master bomber. The Operational Research Section. The coastal guns. Other tactical targets. The feint attack on the Pas de Calais. The 12,000 lb. bomb. Daylight operations. Close support of the army. The capture of the channel ports. The flying bombs. A night-fighter lands in England.

X. THE OFFENSIVE AGAINST OIL

Panacea Targets. A molybdenum mine. Ball-bearing factories. Tactical objections. The raid on Ploesti. G.H. The Ministry of Economic Warfare. The oil offensive begins. Miraculously good weather. The results of the campaign.

XI. THE FINAL PHASE

An overwhelming Force. The capture of Walcheren. The attack on German industrial cities resumed. Shortage of high explosive bombs. The second battle of the Ruhr. The Dortmund-Ems and Mittelland canals. The collapse of German industry. Dresden. A cancelled attack on Berlin. New methods of bombing. More tactical developments. The defeat of the German defences. The dispersal of German industry and underground factories. Runstedt’s counter-offensive. The sinking of the Tirpitz. Views on battleships. Sea power exerted by Bomber Command.

XII. SUMMING UP AND THE WAR OF THE FUTURE

A Bombing Survey. The effects of bombing. The Japanese war. Bomber Command’s casualties. Obsolete weapons in future wars. Atomic explosives. Battleships and the atom bomb. A single service.

INDEX

Chapter One

FACING THE WAR

Arriving in England from Palestine in 1939. Certainty of war. Appointment as Air Officer Commanding No. 5 Bomber Group. My service career. Previous experience of air war. The last war and “police bombing” in the East. The years of disarmament. The Army Staff College. A journey to America. Palestine and Montgomery. Looking ahead to a bomber’s war.

IN THE SUMMER of 1939 I was on my way home from Palestine, where I had been Air Officer Commanding R.A.F. Palestine and Transjordan during one of the worst of the periodical rebellions resulting from the Anglo-Jewish-Arab controversy. I had had there a busy year teaching the British army the advantages, and the rebels the effectiveness of air power. My wife and I returned by ship and arrived off Plymouth on a bright and blustery day. As we rounded the breakwater, some naval multiple pom-poms—“Chicago pianos”—resumed their firing at sleeve targets towed by an aircraft. I was depressed to see how ineffective the shooting was. But, by contrast, after being abroad for a year, I was struck by the warlike preparations on every hand as we sailed up the Channel to Tilbury. I remember my wife asking what was the purpose of the circular patterns in the foredecking of the ship; I told her that it covered the sites which had been stiffened for deck armament; the ship was obviously destined to be an armed cruiser in the event of war. She was in fact the Rawalpindi, and lies now at the bottom of the Denmark Straits, an unpardonable sacrifice, like so many of these poor armed merchant cruisers, to the parsimony of governments.

I was convinced that we should be at war within a matter of weeks. As a professional fighting man I knew that I had absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose by war. If the regular first-line fighting man is young enough when war breaks out he is inevitably killed or crippled during the period when the nation is getting its national forces ready to come to the support of the regular forces. If he is too old for active service or a specialist he will be employed on the staff or in high command. Whatever may be the result of the war it is a foregone conclusion that he will lose by it. For if the war is won, there will be a wholesale retrenchment of regular forces. This always happens after every major war, when it is assumed that everybody will be too tired for another major war within at least the next ten years. He will then in all probability be no more than half or two-thirds of the way through a normal service career, but he will nevertheless be thrown on the beach, a beach to which he is an absolute stranger and where he will find the utmost difficulty in picking up a living for himself and his family; moreover he will be at the wrong age to make another start. If the war is lost, he will be led to the nearest lamp-post and hanged, or given a debased pension. Those are the alternatives which major wars offer to the regular serving man, and to call him a militarist in the sense that he desires and encourages war in order to serve his own interests is nonsense. Yet it is a view widely held and disseminated by the loose thinking of interested parties and political demagogues, who blame the fighting man to conceal their own folly.

Before I undertook any new task at all I was determined to get a week or two’s rest; all the more so because I knew how close we were to war and how difficult it would be in any war to get even such rest as is physically necessary. We went to our friends in Norfolk, Jean and Adeline Tresfon. Jean had been an officer in the Dutch army, and became a naturalised Englishman shortly after the 1914–1918 war. He is quite one of the ablest men I have ever met. He farms 1200 acres in Norfolk; it is better farming than I have seen anywhere in this country—and I am a bit of a farmer myself—but he does it as a spare-time job, a hobby, betweeen running half a dozen big firms and factories. It was nice to be back in the green countryside in the late summer.

On September 3rd, 1939, we were still with the Tresfons. We sat round the log-fire and listened to Chamberlain’s uninspired and uninspiring broadcast; when he announced that we were now at war with Germany he was about as stirring as a schoolmaster confirming the fact that mumps had broken out in his prep. school. A lifeless call to the blood and tears, the toil and sweat of war. There was silence at the end of his speech, until Jean Tresfon turned to me and said: “How long will this one be?” I drew a bow at a venture and answered: “Five years.” I do not know why I said five years, except that I knew we could not hope to reach our full effort before five years and that it would take at least our full effort to stop the Boche and considerably more to beat him.

I then went to the telephone and rang up Portal and told him that I wanted a job. I had finished with my holiday, no matter what might be said to the contrary. There was complete chaos on the telephone lines and I only got through to the Air Ministry by demanding “immediate priority”—a meaningless term and quite unauthorised, but one which had the. desired effect. I had the mortification of kicking my heels for some days, which seemed like years, before I received a message telling me to report to the Air Ministry. There Portal, after ringing up Ludlow-Hewitt, Commander-in-Chief, Bomber Command, told me to go and take over command of No. 5 Group of Bomber Command at Grantham the next day, which I did. My task was made none the easier by the fact that neither the Command nor the Air Ministry had thought of informing the Air Officer then commanding the Group that I was on my way to take over from him. As he was an old personal friend of mine and an officer for whom I have always had the greatest admiration and regard, it was for the moment an unpleasant situation, only relieved by the way he took it. He was fulminating against the idiotic procedure of bowling the useless 250 lb. bomb on to German battleships from a height of a few feet, which was what Bomber Command was doing at that time.

As I drove myself and my traps in a small borrowed Austin from Norwich to Grantham, which is without exception the worst cross-country route in England, I pondered on the really frightful and frightening military prospects of the nation. I knew that we had nothing to fight with, and that France had less; we at any rate had the heart to fight, but the French had not, rotted to the core as they were with the worst type of politician and politically-minded serving officer. I knew—how could I fail to know after two years of the Army Staff College and five years on the Committee of Imperial Defence and Joint Planning Committee?—that the navy had no idea beyond the long-defunct battleship; year after year they had reasserted in Parliament and outside it, with an entirely unjustifiable confidence, that the submarine threat was a busted flush and had been finally and effectively mastered; every year they reasserted that aircraft could be no threat whatsoever to any form of naval operation. I had seen the army preening itself, even as early as 1927, on having reduced the machine-gun content of its formations to near the 1914 level, and its artillery to such a point that at one time, by 1918 standards, I think they had about enough left to cover a limited advance on a front of a mile. By 1927 they had also succeeded, though not without opposition, in abolishing the Royal Tank Corps. They could thereafter settle down to what, I believe, was known as “real soldiering.” I knew well enough the army’s plan of campaign; it was a replica of the opening phases of the war in August, 1914, or as exact a one as could be produced, with the help, it almost seemed, of the original blueprints, even to the point of “paying rent for the same trenches.” But I also knew that the best of the army itself had no faith in that plan, and none whatever in the French army; they had agreed to adopt the same old plan again only because the French had intimated that they wouldn’t fight at all if we didn’t agree with their ideas. The French had also got us virtually to promise that in the event of an invasion of France we would use the whole of our bomber force to protect the frontier; they had no idea that a bomber force could be used for any purpose whatever except as long range artillery in support of their army. Their air force was hopelessly deficient in every way, a dire state for which their politicians were responsible. Their air force, too, was in complete subservience to their army.

I had every reason to know what the Germans possessed in the way of aircraft, tanks, artillery and anti-tank weapons, and I was also familiar with their ideas of warfare; on the other side an old and valued soldier friend had told me that we had only one type of tank that was any good, and only one serviceable tank of this type. No one would have thought that a quarter of a century before we had actually invented and been the first to exploit the tank. I was convinced that in these circumstances we were going to be thrown out of the Continent neck and crop just as soon as it suited the Boche to do it, but like everybody else I had not foreseen the possibility of the long “phoney-war” period. To say that I was depressed by the prospect was to put it mildly.

Apart from everything else, a rule had been first tacitly and then explicitly in force for some twenty years which could not have been more effectively designed to secure our unreadiness for war. This was the iniquitous “Ten Year Rule,” as it was called. After the 1914–1918 war the Chiefs of Staff sought political guidance on which to base the establishments and plans of the three services. They were told to base their plans on the assumption that there would be “no major war for ten years.” That was a simple and, at the time when it was made, justifiable ruling. But that rule remained in force year after year, and no one had observed the logical conclusion that the progressive plans should thereafter have been based on an amended ruling that there would be no major war within nine years, within eight years, and so on each year, to zero. Until Hitler was already in power the passage of the years was ignored, and as year succeeded year each was still assumed to be the first of the ten years of immunity from any major war. Then, with all the services still, through force majeure on the part of the Treasury, basing their plans on this ruling, it was in force one day and completely abrogated the next. It was this absurd procedure, as much as anything else, which had brought the Royal Air Force and the other services to the position they were in in 1939, when everything we had—and that was little—was in the shopwindow, with nothing behind it.

In 1923 there was a panic about the size of the French Air Force and the French occupation of the Ruhr. The French could safely ignore our protests, and they did, because we had no force with which to back them. In particular, the French had, in the previous year, 128 air squadrons, while our whole front line strength amounted to 371 aircraft. The Salisbury Committee, a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence over which Lord Salisbury presided, looked into the matter and recommended that the Air Defence of Great Britain should always be strong enough to protect us against air attack by the strongest air force within striking distance. The home defence squadrons were to be increased to 52—the whole front line strength of the R.A.F. at home and abroad was then 34 squadrons. At the same time the Salisbury Committee stopped a naïve scheme of the War Office which would have left the Air Ministry powerless to control anything except civil aviation, research and experiment, and the supply of aircraft, presumably for the use of the War Office. The perennial row between the Admiralty and the Air Ministry over the Fleet Air Arm was also smoothed over for a time, and, in fact, the Royal Air Force was given permission to exist. So far so...