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By Root 1718 0

in to make up the talismanic four-figure number – dropped 1,455 tons of high explosive and 915 tons of incendiary bombs, destroying thirty-six factories, killing 500 civilians and injuring 5,000. Some 45,000 civilians were also made homeless.23 As only forty-one planes, in the phrase of the day, ‘failed to return’, it was considered a tremendous success and trumpeted as such in the press. The Times, with pardonable inaccuracy, thundered, ‘Biggest Air Attack of the War. 2,000 Tons of Bombs in 40 Minutes’ and posters were produced with the caption: ‘British Bombers Now Attack Germany a Thousand at a Time!’, so popular was the campaign with the public. It was popular with Churchill too: on 1 June he told the War Cabinet that he congratulated Portal and Harris on the fact that ‘over a thousand [bombers] left this island and almost as many go tonight – Great manifestation of air power. The United States like it very much. Give us bigger action early next month.’24 Eleven days after the Cologne raid, Harris was knighted.

Albert Speer and the Director of Air Armament, Field Marshal Erhard Milch, met Hermann Göring at his Veldenstein Castle in Franconia the morning after the raid on Cologne. They heard Göring being put through on the telephone to the city’s Gauleiter, Joseph Grohé, and telling him: ‘The report from your police commissioner is a stinking lie! I tell you as the Reichsmarschall that the figures cited are simply too high. How can you dare report such fantasies to the Führer!’ He insisted that the number of incendiary bombs reported was ‘many times too high. All wrong!’ and demanded that a new one be sent to Hitler which agreed with his own, much lower estimates. After this rant he showed Speer and Milch – who knew the truth as well as he did – around the Castle, pointing out the ‘magnificent citadel’ he intended to build there. ‘But first of all he wanted to have a reliable air-raid shelter built,’ noted Speer. ‘The plans for that were already drawn up.’25 Göring certainly did not want to be on the receiving end of what had apparently not just happened to Cologne.

The US Eighth Air Force started its major daylight bombing campaign on 17 August 1942, using twelve 1,200hp-engined Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses to attack Rouen’s railway marshalling yards. The raid was led by Brigadier-General Ira C. Eaker flying Yankee Doodle and included Major Paul W. Tibbets Jr, who was later to fly the B-29 which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Planes could fly much closer together in daylight, and could thus protect each other better. The system whereby the British bombed at night and the Americans during the day meant that the Germans had no respite round the clock, with all the greatly increased worry, fear, exhaustion and trauma that that implied. French targets, where fighter cover could be provided, proved easier than the more distant German ones, where it could not always be. Despite their having formidable defences which were constantly being improved – rising to a total of thirteen 0.5-inch machine guns in the B-17G model which bombed Berlin in March 1944 – the Flying Fortresses were in constant danger from German fighters. Nonetheless the B-17G could fly at 287mph at 25,000 feet and carry 3 tons of bombs up to 2,000 miles. Its gunners were protected against sub-zero temperatures with electrically heated boots and gloves, and wore ‘flak aprons’ of manganese steel squares for protection.

After serious initial disagreements over the prioritization of targets, the Casablanca Conference of January 1943 inaugurated the unambiguously codenamed Operation Pointblank, a joint bombing programme designed to intensify ‘the heaviest possible bombing offensive against the German war effort’, to be known as the Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO).26 This established the priority targets as (in descending order): Germany’s U-boat pens, her aircraft industry, railways and roads, her oil industry and then other targets such as Berlin, north Italian industry and warships in harbour. General Eaker, who took over Eighth Air Force from General