Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [134]
The chief merit of the “Thousand Raid,” together with others that followed against Essen and Bremen, lay less in the injury they inflicted upon the Third Reich—a small fraction of that achieved in 1944–45—than in the public impression of Britain striking back, albeit in a fashion which rendered the squeamish uncomfortable. Some 474 Germans died in the “Thousand Raid” on Cologne, but on June 2 the New York Times claimed that the death toll was 20,000. Churchill cabled Roosevelt: “I hope you were impressed482 with our mass air attack on Cologne. There is plenty more to come.”
Throughout 1942 and 1943, British propaganda waxed lyrical about the achievements of the bomber offensive. Churchill dispatched a stream of messages to Stalin, emphasising the devastation. The British people were not, on the whole, strident in yearning for revenge upon Germany’s civilian population. But many sometimes succumbed to the sensations of Londoner Vere Hodgson, who wrote: “As I lay in bed the other night483 I heard the deep purr of our bombers winging their way to Hamburg … This is a comfortable feeling. I turned lazily in bed and glowed at the thought, going back in my mind to those awful months when to hear noise overhead was to know that the Germans were going to pour death and destruction on us … One cannot help feeling that it is good for the Germans to know what it feels like. Perhaps they won’t put the machine in motion again so light-heartedly.”
Later in the war, when great Allied armies took the field, Churchill’s enthusiasm for bombing ebbed. But in 1942 he enthused about the strategic offensive because he had nothing else. Again contrary to popular delusion, he never found Sir Arthur Harris a soulmate. The airman sometimes dined at Chequers, because his headquarters at High Wycombe was conveniently close. But Desmond Morton was among those who believed that the prime minister thought Harris an impressive leader of air forces, but an unsympathetic personality. Churchill said of Bomber Command’s C-in-C after the war: “a considerable commander—but there was a certain coarseness about him.”484 In the bad times, however—and 1942 was a very bad time—he recognised Harris as a man of steel, at a time when many other commanders bent and snapped under the responsibilities with which he entrusted them.
From the outset, area bombing incurred criticism on both strategic and moral grounds, both inside and outside Parliament. Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party and deputy prime minister, was a persistent private critic, on both moral and pragmatic grounds. He stressed the value of bombers in support of ground and naval operations. In the public domain, the New Statesman argued that it was perverse to heap praise485 on the fortitude of the civilian population of Malta in enduring Axis air attack, without perceiving the lesson for Britain’s own forces attacking Germany. “The disaster of this policy486 is not only that it is futile,” the distinguished scientist Professor A. V. Hill, MP for Cambridge University, told the House of Commons, “but that it is extremely wasteful, and will become increasingly wasteful as time goes on.” But Hill’s words reflected only a modest minority opinion.
There was a powerful case for accepting the necessity for area bombing. A major British industrial commitment was made to creating a massive force of heavy aircraft. This attained fulfilment only in the very different strategic circumstances of 1944–45. The most pertinent criticism of 1942–43 bombing policy was that the airmen’s fervour to demonstrate that their service could make a decisive independent impact on the war caused them to resist, to the point of obsession, calls for diversions of heavy aircraft to other purposes, above all the Battle of the Atlantic. John Kennedy wrote in May 1942 that the bomber offensive