Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [135]
Cherwell supported Harris in resisting calls for the reinforcement of Coastal Command, but they were both surely wrong. Evidence is strong that even a few extra squadrons could have achieved more in fighting the U-boats, a deadly menace well into 1943, than they did over Germany in the same period. But the navy made its case without much skill or subtlety. Admiral Sir John Tovey, C-in-C Home Fleet, denounced the bomber offensive as “a luxury, not necessity.” His words infuriated the prime minister, who was also irked by Tovey’s reluctance to hazard his ships within reach of Norwegian-based German airpower. He described Tovey as “a stubborn and obstinate man,”488 and was delighted when in May 1943 he was replaced by the supposedly more aggressive Adm. Sir Bruce Fraser. The admirals’ difficulty was that, while their service’s function of holding open the sea routes to the United States, Russia, Malta, Egypt and India was indispensable, it was also defensive. As Churchill said, the fleet was responsible for saving Britain from losing the war and played a more distinguished part than either of Britain’s other services in 1942, but could not win it. The Admiralty damaged its own case by insisting that the RAF lavish immense effort, and accept heavy casualties, on bombing the impregnable U-boat pens of northwest France in and patrolling the Bay of Biscay. The sailors would have done better to emphasize the issue of direct air cover for the Atlantic convoy routes, which drastically impeded the operations of German submarines.
Churchill thought better of the Royal Navy as a fighting service than he did of most of its commanders. They seemed relentlessly negative towards his most cherished projects. He was justifiably angry that the admirals had ignored repeated urgings to master techniques for refuelling warships at sea, thus severely restricting the endurance of capital ships. But, even after the loss of Prince of Wales and Repulse, he remained cavalier about their vulnerability to air attack. Most of his naval commanders were fine professional seamen, whom Britain was fortunate to have. It was galling for them to have their courage implicitly and even explicitly impugned, when they were merely anxious to avoid gratuitous losses of big ships which would take years to replace. Nonetheless, like the generals, the admirals might have shown more understanding of the prime minister’s fundamental purpose: to demonstrate that Britain could carry the fight to the enemy, and to do more than merely survive blockade and air bombardment.
Herein lay the case for the bomber offensive. Churchill seems right to have endorsed this, when Britain’s armed forces were accomplishing so little elsewhere; but he was mistaken to have allowed it to achieve absolute priority in the RAF’s worldwide commitments. Concentration of force is important, but so too is a prudent division of resources between critical fronts, of which the Atlantic campaign was assuredly one. By a characteristic irony of war, Churchill enthused most about bombing Germany during 1941–42, when it achieved least. Thereafter, he lost interest. In 1943, Bomber Command began to do serious damage to Ruhr industries, and might have achieved important results if the economic direction of Harris’s operations had been more imaginative. In 1944–45, its impact on Germany’s cities became devastating. But more intelligent American targeting policies enabled the USAAF to achieve the critical victories of the air war, against the Luftwaffe and German synthetic oil plants. The last volume of Churchill’s war memoirs mentions Bomber Command only once, in passing and critically.
On April 1, 1942, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt: “I find it very difficult to get over