Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [149]
If 1940 and 1941 was a period of groping in the dark, literally as well as figuratively, in 1942 the R. A. F. began at last to make a bit of headway. As the spring weather came in, the British mounted greater and greater raids. At the end of May they undertook the first thousand-plane raid, against the city of Cologne.
It was a cast of desperation, with Cologne only incidentally the target. Bomber Command and its new chief, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, were really aiming at the British government and the service chiefs of staff. When Harris took over Bomber Command late in February of 1942, he found he had just over 300 planes in his force. That was few more than Bomber Command had possessed way back in 1940. So far Bomber Command had just not shown enough results to justify a higher priority than it was getting. Harris was to change all that. He was a fervent believer in strategic bombing and he was determined to convert his bosses to his view. He immediately set about planning for an operation that would impress everyone. A thousand planes in one raid, hitting one target, in one night! It seemed magical, but Harris and his staff made it work.
To do it they had to strip Bomber Command’s facilities of everything, and everyone, who could get into the air. Planes were pulled out of repair shops and reserve facilities, pilots called up from training squadrons and from leave, and robbed from Coastal Command. While the preparations went on, the British experimented with better methods; they developed improved guidance systems to bring their planes over the target in more concentrated bunches, they played about with the proper proportions of high-explosive bombs to incendiary bombs. High explosives could knock things apart, then incendiaries could set fires. Then another wave of bombers with more high explosives could knock out the fire-fighters and more incendiaries could compound the devastation. The ideal of destruction would be to create a fire-storm, a fire so hot and so intense that it would suck its own fuel into it and keep itself alive while consuming everything—human and material—around it. It was a long while before the bombers were able to achieve such paroxysms of destruction, but eventually they managed it.
The Cologne raid was a commencement exercise. The R. A. F. put 1,134 aircraft into the air, including decoys and night intruder aircraft, designed to draw off or fight German night interceptors. Something over 900 planes actually bombed Cologne. Forty-four failed to return, which was regarded by the R. A. F. as an acceptable loss rate, though unhappily, most of the losses were among new crews, with the result that premature effort would have to be paid for again farther down the line. In the city, fires raged for two days, and it was several days before the smoke cleared sufficiently for British photo-reconnaissance planes to take pictures so they could assess the damage. It turned out that about 20,000 homes were destroyed or damaged, about 1,500 commercial properties were damaged, and fifty or sixty factories were knocked out, some for short periods, some for longer. Rail and communications were interrupted for as long as two weeks, and vital services—electricity, water, sewage—were disrupted temporarily. Nearly half a million people were homeless, but only about 500 were actually killed or wounded.
The raid was not quite the success Harris had predicted; he had said it would wipe Cologne permanently off the map. He was far off in this. It turned out that to destroy even one city, it had to be raided again and again and again. The British finally realized that to wage a bombing campaign capable of winning the war all by itself, they would need perhaps 6,000 heavy bombers on operations at any given time. They and the Americans together never even came near that figure. Harris also