All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [304]
These disasters increased Harris’s contempt for precision bombing of what he called ‘panacea targets’. It has been justly observed that, although the British leadership at the Casablanca conference in January 1943 mandated a combined bomber offensive, what actually took place was a competition between the RAF and USAAF, each independently pursuing its own doctrine. Adam Tooze believes that Harris’s ‘Battle of the Ruhr’, which began with an attack on Essen on 5 March 1943, came close to achieving a decisive victory, by wrecking German coal and steel production. Goering expressed astonishment that the Allies did not continue their attacks on the Ruhr, ‘because there we are in some places having to deal with production bottlenecks that present enormous dangers’, as Goebbels recorded. But Bomber Command underrated the importance of maintaining pressure on industrial cities already attacked, which Harris too readily erased from his target list on the evidence of aerial photographs showing roofless buildings.
In July 1943 Harris, supposing the Ruhr sufficiently devastated, shifted Bomber Command’s focus of attack first to Hamburg, then to Berlin. Over Hitler’s capital his squadrons, operating at extreme range in winter weather against a huge and widely dispersed target area, suffered severely – losses on every mission rose to an unacceptable average of more than 5 per cent. At the end of 1943, Bomber Command headquarters dispatched a report to all its groups and stations, proclaiming in the most fanciful terms the results of its attacks: ‘These raids on the German capital do indeed mark the beginning of the end … The Nazis’ military and industrial organization, and above all their morale, have by these attacks suffered a deadly wound from which they cannot recover.’
On 7 December, Harris wrote to the prime minister, asserting that if he could deliver a further 15,000 Lancaster sorties against Germany’s major cities, the Nazi regime would collapse by 1 April 1944. Bomber Command almost fulfilled his appointed mission quota, but Germany’s resistance remained unbroken. The C-in-C’s extravagant predictions damaged his credibility with the prime minister and the service chiefs, including Sir Charles Portal. By the early spring of 1944, when Bomber Command was diverted to join the USAAF in attacking pre-invasion targets in France, its casualties in the ‘Battle of Berlin’ had become prohibitive. But Harris’s iron will enabled him later that summer to renew his assault on Germany’s cities, which continued until April 1945.
Bombing did not make the decisive impact upon civilian morale that the British aspired to achieve: factories continued to produce and orders to be obeyed, just as in Britain in 1940–41. It was always an irony, rooted in brashly chauvinistic assumptions, that the RAF set out to do to Germany just what the Luftwaffe had failed to do to Churchill’s people. But the misery of urban Germans became very great; the Nazi regime was driven to increasingly desperate expedients to explain to its own people their vulnerability to air assault. Newspaper headlines after the May 1943 dams raid asserted that it was ‘the work of Jews’. The public was unconvinced: security police reported that many citizens merely asked why the Luftwaffe was incapable of such achievements. In June a municipal foreman in Hagen watched a British night raid on nearby Wuppertal: