• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 733 0

‘area bombing’ of German cities should be reviewed from the point of view of our own interests …” This sanitised version was signed on April 1. Churchill was anyway in no doubt that he had ordered a halt to area attacks on cities. He was thus dismayed, soon afterwards, to learn that five hundred Lancasters of Bomber Command had devastated Potsdam. Some five thousand civilians were alleged to have perished, because the population had neglected air-raid precautions, supposing that the city’s architectural treasures granted it immunity from bombardment. Churchill wrote crossly to Archibald Sinclair, the secretary for air, and Portal, “What’s the point of going and blowing down Potsdam?” Portal replied that the Luftwaffe’s operational headquarters had been transferred there, and that the attack was “calculated to hasten the disintegration1073 of enemy resistance.”

The truthful answer to Churchill’s question was that a huge force of British heavy bombers existed, and there was deep reluctance to stand them down as long as German resistance continued. The Red Army had begun to fight the last great battle of the European war for Berlin, a few miles from Potsdam. Churchill’s attitude, displayed in his draft note to Portal of March 28, was characteristic in its impulsiveness, even irrationality. Earlier in the war, he had been a committed supporter of area bombing, though once delivered from the desperate predicament of 1940–41 he never shared the exaggerated faith of the airmen that this could win the war. When the great land campaigns began in Italy and France, he lost interest in Bomber Command. Its contribution might be useful, but was plainly not decisive. It may sound flippant to suggest that Britain’s prime minister was oblivious of the operations of hundreds of heavy aircraft, dealing nightly death and destruction to some of the greatest cities in Europe. Yet amid the huge issues crowding in upon him each day, the air offensive receded into the background—as also, it must be said, did the issue of the Nazi death camps and possible RAF operations to impede their activities. In Churchill’s mind, the fate of the Jews was entwined with that of millions of other European captives of Hitler. The best means of securing their delivery was to win the war as swiftly as possible. Amid the deep shock of the scenes at Bergen-Belsen when it was liberated by the British Army in April, the prime minister hastened to dispatch a delegation of MPs and peers to the concentration camp, to take formal heed of its horrors. But even in the light of unfolding evidence of genocide, the prime minister perceived the camps in the broader context of the Nazi tyranny.

So vast was the scale of the war by 1944–45, so diverse its manifestations, that no human being, even Winston Churchill, could address every aspect with the commitment which some modern critics believe should have been expected of him. How could it have been otherwise? He interested himself in a wider range of affairs than any national leader in history. But many things, including air policy in the last year of the war, were neglected. Commanders were left to do as they thought best. The only important bombing controversy to which Churchill seriously addressed himself from 1942 onwards was that concerning the 1944 assault on the French road and rail network before D-Day, which he was persuaded reluctantly to endorse.

Throughout the war, the direction of the strategic air offensive was impeded by the fact that its achievements were shrouded in mystery. The airmen’s extravagant claims could be assessed only through problematic interpretation of aerial photography, with limited assistance from Ultra signal decrypts. In December 1941, Mr. David Butt’s Cabinet Office report caused the prime minister to accept that the RAF’s campaign against Germany, so prodigious in its demands on national resources, was not achieving commensurate results. Thus the decision was made to change policy, to conduct “area bombing” of cities, in place of ineffectual precision attacks on military and industrial targets.