Inferno - Max Hastings [301]
I woke up! The wind had been stronger than I thought and we were flying a course taking us straight over the heavily defended Friesian Islands. We crossed the North Sea still in cloud and it was difficult to get a pinpoint on anything. I spent a lot of time—probably too much—flying up and along the Yorkshire coast hoping to see a break. It was raining heavily … By this time our fuel was very low—only about 20 mins. left—so for the first time I put out an emergency signal PAN-PAN-PAN and in two ticks Linton-on-Ouse came up with a magnetic course. We were then on the verge of abandoning the aircraft. It was a matter of a long time-glide home. We made it, but the refuelling party told me we had virtually nothing left in the tanks.
Throughout 1940–41, naïveté persisted within the RAF about the effectiveness of Bomber Command’s operations. “The briefings were very, very good,” said Ken Owen, a nineteen-year-old navigator. “They made us feel we were going to hit an important target, doing important damage to the Germans. And of course we all listened to the BBC bulletins next morning, which trumpeted our success; there was a tremendous amount of self-delusion. We thought we were knocking hell out of them. Maybe twelve times [out of thirty ‘trips’] I think we bombed the right place; otherwise it was either the wrong place or ploughed fields.”
Despite the limited impact of the strategic air offensive in its early years, most of the RAF’s leaders retained a visionary faith not only in what bombing might do, but also in what it had already accomplished. In September 1942, Air Marshal Sir Wilfred Freeman wrote to Britain’s air chief Sir Charles Portal complaining of the extravagant claims made by some commanders: “In their efforts to attract the limelight they sometimes exaggerate and even falsify facts. The worst offender is C‑in‑C Bomber Command.” Freeman cited claims published in the media about the achievements of some recent raids on Germany: “The damage at [Karlsruhe and Düsseldorf] is described as fantastic. I believe this to be untrue … I suggest that you might … send a circular letter to commanders-in-chief … impressing on them the need to adhere strictly to the unvarnished truth in accounts of operations … I am alarmed about the effect which the present tendencies must shortly have on the good name of the R.A.F.”
But, during the long years before Western Allied armies engaged the Germans in strength, it suited not only the air chiefs, but also Britain’s prime minister and America’s president, to collude in proclaiming the triumphs of bombing. Sir Arthur Harris, who became Bomber Command’s C-in-C in February 1942, said: “Winston’s attitude to bombing was ‘Anything to put up a show.’ If we hadn’t [used Bomber Command] we would only have had the U-boat war, and as he said, defence of our trade routes was not an instrument of war.” Churchill regarded the bomber offensive as a vital weapon in Western relations with Stalin, in some small degree assuaging the Soviet warlord’s bitterness about alleged Anglo-American sluggishness in launching a second front.
Ken Owen flew his first 1942 trip, to Kassel, in a mood of euphoria. “I was in a daze. It was sheer excitement—the briefing, sitting in the aircraft preparing for take-off. There was bright moonlight. We found the target—and plenty of flak. I was far more scared on the second ‘op.’ My feet were cold, I was sweating under my arms. It didn’t take long for two kinds of reputations to be established: first, there were the ‘gen crews’—the real ‘press-on types’; then there were the ones who didn’t like it at all. Two or three were voted most likely to get the chop, some because they were so frightened they were likely to do something stupid … One or two pilots were shit-scared; one or two gunners froze in their turrets. Sometimes people got the chop because