The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [244]
When war broke out, the Luftwaffe’s bombing of Warsaw in September 1939 and of Rotterdam and Louvain in May 1940 made it clear that Germany did not intend to abide by the ‘civilized’ view of warfare that confined targets to military assets attacked in daylight. Further raids on Coventry (on 15 November 1940), Belgrade (in April 1941, when 17,000 people were killed), Hull and even unarmed beauty spots like Bath (where more than 400 people died over three nights in April 1942) confirmed this. As the Luftwaffe bomber General Werner Baumbach later recalled: ‘Hitler talked about “extirpating” the English towns, and propaganda coined the word “coventrizing” for the maximum degree of destruction which was deemed to have been inflicted on Germany.’4 Yet simply because the Nazis had adopted ruthless methods of warfare, it did not follow that their foes ought to have as well.
The RAF’s Bomber Command wing was founded in 1936, based in High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire and at the outbreak of war it consisted of thirty-three squadrons comprising 488 aircraft. Initially these were planes with too short a flying range to reach even the Ruhr industrial basin – the closest German targets worth bombing – and with bomb-loads too small to cause much damage even if they had managed to get there and back. Even worse, in the words of Richard Overy:
There were no effective bomb-sights; there were few bombs bigger than 250 pounds; only a handful of bases in Britain could handle the larger aircraft; and there was even a shortage of maps for navigating in north-west Europe. Bombing trials betrayed a wide margin of inaccuracy even when bombing in bright sunlight from a few thousand feet with no enemy interference.5
It was an unpromising start from which to try to force the Third Reich to its knees. With a general lack of navigational aids, target-marking and aiming equipment and carrying capacity, Bomber Command was initially forced into the strategy of attacking cities, effectively through the lack of a realistic alternative. After a raid on Berlin in which most of the bombs fell on farms in the surrounding countryside, rather than on the capital itself, Berliners joked: ‘Now they are trying to starve us out!’
Once Bomber Command had suffered unacceptably high – sometimes as much as 50 per cent – losses in daylight raids on largely coastal targets such as Heligoland and Wilhelmshaven at the start of the war, it switched to night-time bombing instead, with a serious reduction in accuracy. Bomber Command pilots had not expected or been intensively trained for night-bombing, and the navigational aids were basic, yet after victory was won in the battle of Britain in the autumn of 1940 the emphasis turned from Fighter Command defence to Bomber Command attack. By then an altogether more offensively minded Churchill had replaced Chamberlain, whose government had even discouraged the bombing of Germany’s Black Forest on the ground that ‘so much of it was private property’.6 The bombing of Germany – even if inaccurate and at night – gave an immense morale boost to Britons, who felt that they were at last taking the war directly to the enemy. There was also a tangible sense that after Dunkirk and the battle of Britain the bombing offensive was the only possible way for Britain to show