Finest Years (35 page)

On 22 February 1942, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris became C-in-C of Bomber Command. Contrary to popular myth, Harris was not the originator of ‘area bombing'. But he set about implementing the concept with a single-minded fervour which has caused his name to be inextricably linked with it ever since. The first significant event of Harris's tenure of command was a raid on the Renault truck plant in the Paris suburb of Billancourt. The war cabinet hoped that this would boost French morale, which seemed unlikely when it emerged that more than 400 civilians had been killed. On 28 March, 134 aircraft carried out a major attack upon the old German Hanse town of Lübeck. The coastal target was chosen chiefly because it was easy for crews to find. The closely packed medieval centre was, in Harris's contemptuous words, ‘built more like a fire-lighter than a human habitation'. The raid left much of Lübeck in flames, and was judged an overwhelming success. Four successive attacks on the port of Rostock in late April achieved similar dramatic results, causing Goebbels to write hysterically in his diary: ‘Community life in Rostock is almost at an end.' On 30 May, Harris staged an extraordinary
coup de théâtre
. Enlisting the aid of training and Coastal Command aircraft
he dispatched 1,046 bombers against the great city of Cologne, inflicting massive damage.

The chief merit of the ‘Thousand Raid', together with others that followed against Essen and Bremen, lay less in the injury they inflicted upon the Third Reich—a small fraction of that achieved in 1944—45

—than in the public impression of Britain striking back, albeit in a fashion which rendered the squeamish uncomfortable. Some 474 Germans died in the ‘Thousand Raid' on Cologne, but on 2 June the
New York Times
claimed that the death toll was 20,000. Churchill cabled Roosevelt: ‘
I hope you were
impressed with our mass air attack on Cologne. There is plenty more to come.'

Throughout 1942 and 1943, British propaganda waxed lyrical about the achievements of the bomber offensive. Churchill dispatched a stream of messages to Stalin, emphasising the devastation achieved by the RAF. The British people were not, on the whole, strident in yearning for revenge upon Germany's civilian population. But many sometimes succumbed to the sensations of Londoner Vere Hodgson, who wrote: ‘
As I lay in bed
the other night I heard the deep purr of our bombers winging their way to Hamburg…This is a comfortable feeling. I turned lazily in bed and glowed at the thought, going back in my mind to those awful months when to hear noise overhead was to know that the Germans were going to pour death and destruction on us…One cannot help feeling that it is good for the Germans to know what it feels like. Perhaps they won't put the machine in motion again so light-heartedly.'

Later in the war, when great Allied armies took the field, Churchill's enthusiasm for bombing ebbed. But in 1942 he enthused about the strategic offensive because he had nothing else. Again contrary to popular delusion, he never found Sir Arthur Harris a soulmate. The airman sometimes dined at Chequers, because his headquarters at High Wycombe was conveniently close. But Desmond Morton was among those who believed that the prime minister thought Harris an impressive leader of air forces, but an unsympathetic personality. Churchill said of Bomber Command's C-in-C after the war: ‘
a considerable commander
—but there was a certain coarseness about
him'. In the bad times, however—and 1942 was a very bad time—he recognised Harris as a man of steel, at a time when many other commanders bent and snapped under the responsibilities with which he entrusted them.

From the outset, area bombing incurred criticism on both strategic and moral grounds, both inside and outside Parliament. Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party and deputy prime minister, was a persistent private critic, on both moral and pragmatic grounds. He stressed the value of bombers in support of ground and naval operations. In the public domain, the
New Statesman
argued that it was
perverse to heap praise
on the fortitude of the civilian population of Malta in enduring Axis air attack, without perceiving the lesson for Britain's own forces attacking Germany. ‘
The disaster of this policy
is not only that it is futile,' the distinguished scientist Professor A.V. Hill, MP for Cambridge University, told the House of Commons, ‘but that it is extremely wasteful, and will become increasingly wasteful as time goes on.' But Hill's words reflected only a modest minority opinion.

There was a powerful case for accepting the necessity for area bombing. A major British industrial commitment was made to creating a massive force of heavy aircraft. This attained fulfilment only in the very different strategic circumstances of 1944—45. The most pertinent criticism of 1942—43 bombing policy was that the airmen's fervour to demonstrate that their service could make a decisive independent impact on the war caused them to resist, to the point of obsession, calls for diversions of heavy aircraft to other purposes, above all the Battle of the Atlantic. John Kennedy wrote in May 1942 that the bomber offensive ‘
can be implemented only
at severe cost to our command of the sea and our military operations on land. I have just been looking at an old paper of [Winston's], written in Sept.1940, which begins “the Navy can lose us the war, but only the Air Force can win it…” I am convinced that events will prove this to have been a profound delusion.'

Cherwell supported Harris in resisting calls for the reinforcement of Coastal Command, but they were both surely wrong. Evidence is strong that even a few extra squadrons could have achieved more in
fighting the U-boats, a deadly menace well into 1943, than they did over Germany in the same period. But the navy made its case without much skill or subtlety. Admiral Sir John Tovey, C-in-C Home Fleet, denounced the bomber offensive as ‘a luxury, not necessity'. His words infuriated the prime minister, who was also irked by Tovey's reluctance to hazard his ships within reach of Norwegian-based German air power. He described Tovey as ‘
a stubborn and obstinate man
', and was delighted when in May 1943 he was replaced by the supposedly more aggressive Sir Bruce Fraser. The admirals' difficulty was that while their service's function of holding open the sea routes to the US, Russia, Malta, Egypt and India was indispensable, it was also defensive. As Churchill said, the fleet was responsible for saving Britain from losing the war, but its ships could not win it. The Admiralty damaged its own case by insisting that the RAF lavish immense effort, and accept heavy casualties, bombing the impregnable U-boat pens of north-west France, and patrolling the Bay of Biscay. The sailors would have done better to emphasise the critical issue of direct air cover for the Atlantic convoy routes, which drastically impeded the operations of German submarines.

Churchill thought better of the Royal Navy as a fighting service than he did of most of its commanders. They seemed relentlessly negative towards his most cherished projects. He was justifiably angry that, despite repeated encouragement, the navy had failed to master techniques for refuelling warships at sea, thus severely restricting the endurance of capital ships. But, even after the loss of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
, he remained cavalier about their vulnerability to air attack. Most of his naval commanders were fine professional seamen, whom Britain was fortunate to have. It was galling for them to have their courage implicitly and even explicitly impugned, when they were justly anxious to avoid gratuitous losses of big ships which would take years to replace. Nonetheless, like the generals, the admirals might have shown more understanding of the prime minister's fundamental purpose: to demonstrate that Britain was willing and able to carry the fight to the fight to the enemy; to do more than merely survive blockeade and air bombardment.

Herein lay the case for the bomber offensive. Churchill seems right to have endorsed this, when Britain's armed forces were accomplishing so little elsewhere, but mistaken to have allowed it to achieve absolute priority in the RAF's worldwide commitments. Concentration of force is important, but so too is a prudent division of resources between critical fronts, of which the Atlantic campaign was assuredly one. By a characteristic irony of war, Churchill enthused most about bombing Germany during 1941—42, when it achieved least. Thereafter, he lost interest. In 1943, Bomber Command began to make a real impact on Ruhr industries, and might have achieved important results if the economic direction of Harris's operations had been more imaginative. In 1944—45, its impact on Germany's cities became devastating, but American targeting policies enabled the USAAF to achieve the critical victories of the air war, against the Luftwaffe and German synthetic oil plants. The last volume of Churchill's war memoirs mentions Bomber Command only once, in passing and critically.

On 1 April 1942, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt: ‘
I find it very difficult
to get over Singapore, but I hope we shall redeem it ere long.' Instead, however, bad news kept coming. On the 4th a Japanese battle fleet, ranging the Indian Ocean, launched planes to bomb Ceylon. In the days that followed, enemy aircraft sank two Royal Navy cruisers and the carrier
Hermes
. Mandalay fell, and it was plain that the British must withdraw across the Chindwin river out of Burma, into north-east India. Malta was in desperate straits, under relentless Axis air attack. Convoys to Russia were suffering shocking losses from German air and U-boat attack: PQ13 in April lost five ships out of nine. Only eight ships of twenty-three dispatched in the next convoy reached their destination, fourteen having been turned back by pack ice. Churchill urged Stalin to provide more air and sea cover for the Royal Navy in the later stages of the Arctic passage, but the Russians lacked both means and competence. There was also little goodwill. British sailors and airmen venturing ashore at Murmansk and Archangel were disgusted by the frigidity of their
reception. Nowhere, it seemed, did the sun shine upon British endeavours. That spring, Alan Brooke found the prime minister very difficult: ‘
CIGS says WSC is
often in a very nasty mood these days,' noted John Kennedy on 7 April.

Even at this dire period of the war, it was remarkable how many newspaper column inches were devoted to the needs and prospects of post-war reconstruction. This galled the prime minister. He expressed exasperation at having to bother with what he called ‘
hypothetical post-war problems
in the middle of a struggle when the same amount of thought concentrated on the question of types of aeroplane might have produced much more result'. Yet many ordinary citizens found the war a less rewarding, more dispiriting experience than did Winston Churchill. The present seemed endurable only by looking beyond it to a better future.

Articles and correspondence constantly appeared in print, addressing one aspect or another of a world without war. As early as 4 September 1940, a letter-writer to
The Times
named P.C. Loftus urged that ‘this nation not be found unprepared for peace as we were found unprepared for war'. A correspondent signing himself ‘Sailor' wrote to the
New Statesman
on 21 February 1942: ‘Men wonder what they are fighting for. The old empty jingoisms about “Freedom” and “Homeland” no longer satisfy. There is a suspicion that all will not be well after the peace—that, after all, we are fighting for property and private interests.' The prominent socialist intellectual Harold Laski complained of Churchill's refusal to declare a commitment to social change: ‘
He does not seem to see
that the steps we take now necessarily determine the shape of the society we shall enter when the war is over.' A
Statesman
editorial said: ‘
It is difficult to find
any alert & active member of the Labour Party who does not believe that the end of the war will find the forces of privilege more strongly entrenched in power than they were at the beginning.'

Such sentiments, a gnawing dissatisfaction with British society, extended well beyond the confines of the political left. ‘
This nation has become
very soft,' John Kennedy wrote sadly in his diary on 23 February 1942. ‘The people do not want to fight for the Empire.
Mostly, I suppose, they do not care whether they have an empire or not so long as they have an easy and quiet life. They do not realise that German domination will be very unpleasant…I think something more is wanted on the political side. There is a great lack of any sense of urgency everywhere. We do not know what we are fighting for. The Atlantic Charter is not good enough an ideal up against the fanaticism of the Germans and the Japs.' Officers commanding two army primary training centres told a morale investigator that the great majority of their recruits ‘
lack enthusiasm and interest
in the war and betray ignorance of the issues involved in it'.

On 6 March 1942, an editorial in the
Spectator
declared: ‘The national fibre is today unmistakably different from what it was in those days of 1940 which the Prime Minister could speak of, in accents which carried universal conviction, as our finest hour. No one can pretend that we are living through our finest hour today.' The writer, like his counterpart on the
New Statesman
, felt that the British people lacked a core of belief to move them, as the Russian people were moved: ‘Why do men and women in Britain today wait for inspiration from outside? Why are they listening for a voice? Have we no voice within us? Are we ignorant of what is needed?'

In May 1942, America's
Fortune
magazine published an entire issue about the post-war world. Henry Luce, proprietor of
Fortune
, invited Britain's Foreign Secretary to contribute an article about his own country's vision. Eden declined, prompting an official in the American department of the Foreign Office, one C.R. King, to express dismay. It seemed to him a serious mistake to snub Luce. Yet he recognised the problem. Eden had no idea what to say: ‘I do not know that HMG have formulated (much less announced) any ideas on these problems beyond those that find expression in the Atlantic Charter.' King added that there was wide agreement in the United States ‘
that America will emerge
, after total victory, militarily and economically supreme'. The
Economist
challenged Churchill in an editorial: ‘
When has the Prime Minister
made one of his great and compelling speeches on the theme, not of world strategy, but of the hopes and fears of the British people? So long as he is silent,
Conservatism, the dominant political attitude in Britain, is silent, and Americans inevitably believe that maybe the Conservatives are out to do nothing but conserve.'