Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [133]
During the winter of 1941–42, Churchill had become unhappily conscious of the failure of British “precision bombing” of Germany. He was party to the important change of policy which took place in consequence, largely inspired by his scientific adviser. Lord Cherwell’s intervention about bombing was his most influential of the war. It was a member of his Cabinet Statistical Office staff, an official named David Butt, who produced a devastating report based on a study of British bombers’ aiming-point photographs. This showed that only a small proportion of aircraft were achieving hits within miles, rather than yards, of their targets. Cherwell convinced the prime minister, who was shocked by Butt’s report, that there must be a complete change of tactics. Since, under average weather conditions, RAF night raiders were incapable of dropping an acceptable proportion of bombs on designated industrial objectives, British aircraft must henceforward instead address the smallest aiming points they were capable of identifying: cities. They might thus fulfil the twin objectives of destroying factories and “dehousing” workers, to use Cherwell’s ingenuous phrase. No one in Whitehall explicitly acknowledged that the RAF was thus to undertake the wholesale killing of civilians. But nor did they doubt that this would be the consequence, though British propaganda for the rest of the war shrouded such ugly reality in obfuscation, not least from the aircrew conducting bomber operations at such hazard to themselves.
Churchill always considered himself a realist about the horrors and imperatives of war. Yet as recently as 1937, he had proclaimed his opposition to air attacks upon noncombatants, during a Commons debate on air-raid precautions: “I believe,480” he said, “that if one side in an equal war endeavours to cow and kill the civil population, and the other attacks steadily the military objectives … victory will come to the side … which avoids the horror of making war on the helpless and weak.” Now, however, after thirty months of engagement with an enemy who was prospering mightily by waging war without scruple, Churchill accepted a different view. Bomber Command had failed as a rapier. Instead, it must become a blunt instrument. Operational necessity was deemed to make it essential to set aside moral inhibitions. For many months, indeed years ahead, bombing represented the only means of carrying Britain’s war to Germany. The prime minister approved Cherwell’s new policy.
On February 22, 1942, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris became C-in-C of Bomber Command. Contrary to popular myth, Harris was not the originator of “area bombing.” But he set about implementing the concept with a single-minded fervour which has caused his name to be inextricably linked with it ever since. The first significant event of Harris’s tenure of command was a raid on the Renault truck plant in the Paris suburb of Billancourt. The War Cabinet hoped that this would boost French morale, which seemed unlikely when it emerged that more than four hundred civilians had been killed. On March 28, 134 aircraft carried out a major attack on the old German Hanse town of Lübeck. The coastal target was chosen chiefly because it was easy for crews to find. The closely packed medieval centre was, in Harris’s contemptuous words, “built more like a fire-lighter481 than a human habitation.” The raid left much of Lübeck in flames, and was judged an overwhelming success. Four successive attacks on the port of Rostock in late April achieved similar dramatic results, causing Goebbels to write hysterically in his diary, “Community life