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Harris and the Bombing of Germany Commentary No: 369

The publishing of a book on the Lancaster has once again reopened controversy that still surrounds the Bomber Command campaign which was aimed at bombing Germany into the ground during the Second World War.

The war in the air during the Second World War involved Britain fairly continuously. There were several separate campaigns. First came the Battle of Britain, the 70th anniversary of which we will be celebrating this year. In that campaign we thwarted the German intention was to defeat the RAF so that we in Britain could in one way or another be brought to terms by Hitler. Then came the German blitz which subjected London and a number of provincial cities to continuous night bombing that lasted until the following May. It was then that the Germans turned to preparing for Barbarossa, the campaign against Russia. We then started to bomb them. Our initial campaign was hopelessly ineffective. We hadn’t the resources to mount an effective campaign. Then in 1942 we really got going. Two things occurred. Air Marshall Harris was appointed as head of Bomber Command. Secondly a new bomber, the Lancaster, came into service.

The appointment of Harris was key. Since the First World War there had been a school of thought in the RAF which saw the crucial air weapon as the bomber. The theory was that if you had the resources to bomb the hell out of the enemy he would be deterred from bombing you. It was what in the atomic age became the theory of deterrence. The Germans invented it when they resorted to bombing our civilian population during the First World War mainly by using zeppelins. In the RAF Trenchard, the head of the service, adopted it. When the war ended in 1918 Trenchard was busy building a new force of four-engine bombers which were to be situated on airfields in Northern France with the aim of bombing Germany into surrender. That plan never came to fruition because the war ended before it could be fully implemented.

But the idea of the superiority of the bomber remained as the Trenchard orthodoxy. In the 1930s he viewed the build up of Fighter Command under such men as Tizard and Dowding with the greatest suspicion. When the order was given in 1938 to build more fighter s than bombers Trenchard commented that we would lose the next war. But Trenchard had his disciples and one of the more outstanding of them was Arthur Harris.

So when, having won the Battle of Britain, Churchill and his adviser Lindeman who had been made the scientific adviser to the War Cabinet, advised that the only way that Britain could attack Germany was by bombing her, the die was cast. The first attempt to do this following the Blitz was a failure. Harris’ moment was to come.

His arrival at Bomber Command coincided with the production by Chadwick of Avroe Aircraft Company becoming available to the RAF. This was the Lancaster. It was powered by four Rolls Royce Merlin engines, and was an aircraft with superb aerodynamics. It also had a huge lifting capacity. Harris had this new aircraft to launch a really effective bombing campaign against Germany.

To say it was effective doesn’t necessarily mean it was successful as a war winning move. The campaign killed a large number of Germans, around 600,000, but it didn’t put the German arms industry out of action. Figures show that arms output rose steadily even through the last months of the war. There were several reasons for this.

The most important was the impact of Albert Speer who in 1943 was in charge of the German war industry. He was the evil genius of the day. He engineered a huge improvement in the output of industry despite the bombing. His most important step was the building of a large number of underground factories protected by huge concrete bunkers. These were built on a vast scale. They were impervious by all but the 10 ton bombs. They were manned by slave labour with the SS keeping discipline and maintaining output by methods which were peculiar to that elite and ruthless force. No wonder output went up.

But there were other factors at work too. The Lancaster, though an excellent aircraft, was inevitably vulnerable to German night fighters. They became highly organised and effective. Mainly it was the standard ME109 that did the fighting. But their effectiveness was improved by the adoption of a simple invention, fitting the night fighters with an upward firing gun. The drill became for the night fighter pilot to single out his Lancaster target and then to fly underneath it, unobserved, and then to bring his upward firing gun into range. This tactic, codenamed by the Germans ‘Nacht Musik’, or Night Music, proved very effective. It completely eliminated the advantages of the skilled crews with experience. They fell to this weapon just as easily as the novice crew.

The third factor was the decision by Harris to adopt as the main target of his command the capital city of Berlin. This happened at the end of 1943. There was obviously something which attracted Commanders to capital cities. It was the switch to London on September 7th 1940 that took the pressure off 11 Group of Fighter Command. The German attacks on airfields around London which was proving so effective suddenly ceased. Though it was bad news for London, it was amazingly good news for 11 Group. Having to fly a far as London, the ME109s were only left with 10-15 minutes of flying time during which they could protect the German bombers. Then these ME109s had to turn back before the bombers had completed their task if they, the fighters, were going to make it back across the Channel to their bases in France, Another point was that London was to some extent a soft target. The civilians did not, as expected, lose their nerve and force the Government to make peace with Hitler. The switch lost the Germans the battle.

In a sense very much the same thing happened to Harris when he switched the emphasis of the attack from the Ruhr onto Berlin. The journey for the Lancaster was substantially lengthened by having to fly several hundred miles extra on the round trip. They became even more vulnerable to the night fighters.

Had Harris’ campaign actually destroyed the German armaments industry it could well have led to an early end to the war. But Speer’s intervention and Harris’ switch of the target saved the Reich from having to surrender because of the lack of weapons. It was of course terrible that so many German cities were wrecked. Furthermore the death of 600,000 Germans was deplorable. However all these figures have to be seen in context. The Germans managed to kill six million in the Holocaust, in their industrial scale death camps. They also inflicted some twenty million or so casualties on the Russians. War is a terrible thing. It has to be avoided whenever possible.

The book ‘The Lancaster’ by Leo McKinstry is published by John Murray at £20. See also The New Statesman edition of Dec 28th in which there is a major review of the book which covers the Bomber Command campaign very interestingly.

Tony Rudd

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