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Bombing of Germany, but These Were Almost Entirely Theoretical

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Bombing of Germany, but These Were Almost Entirely Theoretical Unit xn THE BOMBER OFFENSIVE (See also Total War, "The Western Hemisphere," ch. 23, pp. 489-508) In spite of its great enthusiasm for strategic bombing the RAF was woefully ill-equipped to undertake a bombing offensive against Germany when the war began. For the first two years of the war Bomber Command was small, badly equipped and capable only of delivering pinpricks to the enemy. This is somewhat surprising given that the ability to mount a strategic bombing offensive was the raison d'etre for the RAF as .an independent force. Strategic bombing was above and beyond the spheres of activity of the Army and the Navy, and this fact made it possible for the RAF to resist the attempts by the other two services to suhordinate it to their command during the inter-war years. For all the talk of "the bomber always gets through" the RAF only had about 200 Wellingtons, Whitleys and Hampdens available for operations on a daily average, which was totally inadequate for an effective attack on Germany. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Men like Inskip, as Minister for the Coordination of Defence, and Air Vice-Marshal Peck favoured fighters over bombers, the one for economic, the other for professional reasons. Financial exigencies diverted the RAF from its self-appointed role into an essentially defensive posture. This alone made the glorious victory of the Battle of Britain possible. At the beginning of the war Bomber Command cooked up a series of plans for the bombing of Germany, but these were almost entirely theoretical. It was uncertain ho\V these plans could be executed, or whether they were even feasible. They had no idea of the effectiveness of German air defences. They were uncertain whether they could find, let alone hit, the appointed targets. There was also no way of assessing likely physical damage, and even less the effect on German morale. They were proposing something completely new in the art of warfare and they had to learn as they went along. A strategic air offensive was therefore a gamble for which the British were not yet ready. Moreover the Government did not wish to risk the opprobrium of being the first to unleash large-scale bombing attacks in which many civilians were bound to be killed. The early experience of daylight bombing was hardly encouraging. Daylight raids on enemy shipping provided very costly and the results disappointingly meagre. Bomber Command therefore began night actions, at first dropping leaflets which did little harm and 85 where the accuracy of aiming was hardly important. Next, the same principle was applied with bombs and the strategy of "area bombing" began -- indiscriminate bombing by night designed to undermine enemy morale. "Terror bombing" might be a less roundabout description of this strategy. Area bombing was dictated not only by the inability of Bomber Command to find and hit specific targets, but also by the desire of members of the War Cabinet to seek revenge for the German bombs which had fallen on Britain. This was hardly a sound foundation for an effective strategy, and the only positive result was that it showed up the inadequacy of Bomber Command's operational effectiveness, and therefore acted as a further stimulus for research and improvement of radar, navigational techniques, accuracy, and the size of the bomber fleet. The experience of the first phase of the bombing offensive was hardly encouraging. By April 1941 the average error of a properly aimed bomb was 1000 yards. In August, only one in ten of the bombers in the attacks on the Ruhr actually got within 5 miles of their targets. Indiscriminate bombing in the hope of undermining morale seemed to be the only answer. An analysis of the results was not encouraging either: the material damage done was not yet signf icant, and the effect on enemy morale see med to be the reverse of what was expected. Terror bombing strengthened Germany's will to resist, and was a godsend to Goebbels and his propagandists. On the other hand, Britain had to show Germany and the rest of the world that it was actually fighting a war, and Bomber Command was the only force which could attack Germany Reasons directly. After 22 June 1941 and the German attack on the Soviet for Bombing Union, this concern was most important, for the Soviets were quick to point out that they were doing almost all the dying and insistently demanded a Second Front. The bomber offensive was thus in part a means of calming a not unjustifiably disgruntled ally. 1942 saw a distinct• improvement in the quality of Bomber Command, but little change in quantity. New and better planes, such as the Lancaster and Mosquito, were brought into service. New direction-finding devices, such as "Gee", "Oboe" and "H2S", were enormously helpful, although their range was limited, and the Germans were quick to jam transmissions and used them to pin-point RAF bombers. The Pathfinder Force also improved the effectiveness of night-time bombing. The single pilot policy meant that more aircraft could be put into the air at any given time. In "Bomber" Harris February 1942 Air Marshal "Bomber" Harris became Commander-in-Chief of a much more professional Bomber Command. At the time of Harris's appointment the war was going very badly for the Allies. Churchill was becoming disillusioned with Bomber Command. He wanted results, and he wanted them immediately. On 3 March 1942 a highly successful raid on the Renault factory near Paris seemed to offer real hope that a bomber offensive could be effective. Flares were used to make 86 precision bombing possible. Only one bomber out of 235 was lost in the raid. Churchill's principal scientific advisor and close friend, Professor F.A. Lindemann (Lord Cherwell, or "the Prof") was so carried away by the Renault raid that he made extravagant and wholly unjustified claims for the efficacy of a bomber offensive, which succeeded in convincing Churchill. On 14 February the War Cabinet issued a directive on a bomber offensive which said that the campaign was to be "focussed on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular on the industrial workers." Area bombing was to begin in earnest. Harris believed that the secret of success lay in mass attacks. On 30 May 1942 he mounted the first of his "1000 bomber raids" against Cologne. The 1046 bombers in the attack were almost alt that Bomber Command could muster. The results were Cologne, encouraging. However, further mass raids against Essen and Essen and Bremen in June were disappointing. The bombing was wildly Bremen inaccurate, and the RAF lost far too many planes. Without control of German airspace losses were becoming unacceptable. The RAF had no fighters with sufficient range to escort the bombers deep into German territory. The "Circus" operations near the French border, designed to use bombers to lure German fighters into the air where they could be destroyed by RAF fighters, were not successful and did much to increase the ill-feeling between Bomber Command and Fighter Command. "Circus" did divert many Focke-Wulf l 90's from other theatres, but they were not destroyed in sufficient numbers to make any real impact. The skies over Germany remained as dangerous as ever. The Bremen raid on 26 June 1942 was the last Thousand Bomber Raid until 1944. Bomber Command lacked the aircraft and the personnel to carry on with raids on this scale. Critics of Bomber Command began to regard raids with less than a thousand bombers as insignificant. Harris continued to believe that he could win the war from 18,000 feet, but he did begin to realise that the great day would have to be postponed untiJ Bomber Command had fully learnt the lessons of the Thousand Bomber Raids, had developed better techniques for navigation and aiming, and had greatly increased the number of aircraft. The Casablanca Directive In January 1943 Churchill and Roosevelt met at Casablanca with their Combined Chiefs of Staff. One result of the conference was the di rec ti ve on Allied bombing policy. Whereas "Bomber" Harris believed that the war could be won by a bomber offensive, the directive argued that it could only soften up Germany to the point when the ground forces could finish off the job. The directive stated: "Your primary object will be the progressive 87 destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened". Primary objectives in order of priority were: (a) German submarine construction yards; (b) German aircraft industry: (c) Transportation; (d) Oil Plants: (e) Other targets in enemy war industry. In addition, the directive called for continuous pressure on enemy morale and the destruction of its fighter force. Almost at once differences arose about the interpretation of the directives. "Bomber" Harris changed the wording of the directive Varying from "and the undermining of the morale of the German people" to Interpretations "aimed at undermining the morale of the German people" and used this as sanction from on high for continued area bombing. The Americans were more scrupulous and emphasised military and industrial targets as listed in the Casablanca directive. At the Washington Conference in May 1943 the Prime Minister and the President approved the "Pointblank" plan whereby both precision daytime bombing, as advocated by the American Eighth Air Force, and nighttime area bombing, as advocated by Harris, were accepted as complementary strategies. American daylight raids had proved to be very costly, and the damage done was not very great.
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