Books

Zeppelin, fly!

Murray Sayle

Bomber Harris: The Authorised Biography Dudley Saward (Cassell/Buchan & Enright £12.95) Bomber Harris and the Strategic Bombing Offensive 1939-1945 Charles Messenger (Arms & Armour £12.95)

he famous air commanders of the 1- Second World War seem to have been, to a man, overly optimistic about what they might accomplish. 'I have promised the Fuehrer', Reichsmarschall Hermann Goer- ing, head of the Luftwaffe, told a sceptical German audience, 'that no enemy bomber will cross the land frontiers of the Reich.' 'We're going to bomb 'em back into the Stone Age', forecast General Curtis E. LeMay, introducing the firestorm techni- que into the war against Japan. 'We can wreck Berlin from end to end if the USAAF will come in on it,' Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, discoverer of the firestorm, advised Prime Minister Win- ston Churchill. 'It will cost between us 400-500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war.'

In the event, none of these dreams was fulfilled, nor have their authors' reputa- tions exactly prospered since. Goering cheated the hangman by suicide, LeMay's campaign for the US Vice-Presidency was laughed into oblivion by a bumper-sticker counter-offensive, 'Bombs Away with Curt LeMay', and Harris, who died only , in April this year, was allegedly slighted by an ungrateful country and denied the honours due to him — Viscount Harris of Tweed, say, or Baron Berlin — for his vital contribution to the victories of 1945.

The truth. is, most of us feel uneasy about strategic bombing, the great technic- al advance of the Second World War, and some of this unease has rubbed off on its principal exponents. The cities they des- troyed have been rebuilt, but in another way their work lives on. On the eve of the 1939-1945 war, all the contestants made the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, and promised to spare the latter. As late as June 1940, the British Government instructed its Air Ministry that 'the attack must be made with reason- able care to avoid undue loss of civil life in the vicinity of the target', and its pilots worried deeply about harming women and children.

Five years later, the civilians themselves were the prime target. The bombing of unarmed and unwarned non-combatants had become not only an acceptable way of waging war but, in the right circumstances, the strategy of choice, a certain war-winner and therefore the humane thing to do. We live to this day with this giant step forward for inhumanity, and so remember with mixed feelings the commanders who first took it. The most influential of them was, beyond doubt, Arthur Travers Harris, 'Bert' to his few friends (he was a with- drawn, work-obsessed man), 'Chopper', 'Butcher' or 'Killer' to his aircrews and, to his countrymen (affectionately, according to the same Winston Churchill) plain 'Bomber Harris'.

Which, by the way, was his country? Harris was born in Cheltenham to parents who had returned from India, as the custom was, specifically for the event. He returned with them soon after and spent his first five years in India, the youngest child of the family of a minor civil servant. He was then sent back, as the custom also was, to be educated in England in a series of seedy preparatory schools and an even obscurer establishment, Allhallows at Honiton in Devon, which he left at 16 without, his biographer says, 'anything which by the widest stretch of imagination could be called an education by today's standards' to go farming in Rhodesia.

In his own apologia pro vita sua pub- lished in 1947, Harris wrote, 'I was, and still am a Rhodesian.' After the war he left England not, he says himself, in a huff, but to return to 'the best of all lives' in Africa, taking up a second career as general manager of the South African Marine Corporation and with it South African citizenship. He was thus one of those Englishmen who come from no recognis- able part or stratum of England, with a shrewd mind uncluttered by religion, re- flection, military tradition or anything much except the immediate job in hand. Seized by a single idea, such a mind is likely to pursue it with quenchless, fanatic- al zeal.

In August 1914, Harris 'like all the other damned fools' joined the 1st Rhodesian Regiment as a boy bugler for the long march into German South-West Africa. `After', as he says, 'we had defeated and collected the Boche', Harris sailed for London, his fare paid by the Rhodesian Government, and enlisted in the infant Royal Flying Corps `to make war in a sitting posture'. After a half-hour's instruc- tion, he qualified as a fighter pilot in November 1915.

Harris arrived just in time to play a part in the world's first strategic bombing offen- sive, the German Zeppelin raids on Lon- don. These had been authorised by the Kaiser himself, at the beginning of 1915, in circumstances which set a pattern for all subsequent strategic bombing. Denied his quick victory the year before, Kaiser Bill faced a war of attrition which his shrewder subjects were be,ginning to suspect Ger- many might lose. He was particularly bitter against his British cousins who had de- clared a blockade with the express inten- tion of starving the Second Reich out. An exciting new weapon was available, the airships which Graf Ferdinand von Zeppe- lin had begun developing as a private venture at the beginning of the century. Even if they did not do much good, they would, the Kaiser reasoned, at least do some harm somewhere.

London was selected, both as the enemy's capital and the biggest target in Europe. Care should be taken, the Kaiser insisted, to attack only military targets, although how this was to be done from a motorised balloon flying two miles high in the middle of the night was not explained. Hypocrisy thus flew with the very first strategic bombing expedition.

The German public, however, were delighted to see that their Supreme War Lord was not just standing there, but doing something. The usual extravagant hopes were raised, and German schoolchildren sang:

England wird abgebrannt. Zeppelin, flieg!

England will be all burnt out. Zeppelin, fly!

In the event, Hauptmann Erich Linnarz at the tiller of LZ38 made the first flight over London on the night of 31 May 1915, and dropped his first bomb, an incendiary, on No. 16 Alkham Road, Stoke Newing- ton, not exactly the command centre of the British Empire, and in fact the residence of Mr and Mrs A. E. Lovell, two lodgers, and the two Lovell children. While Mrs Lovell in her nightie safely evacuated the family, Mr Lovell rode on his son's bicycle to Brooke Road fire station to raise the alarm.

On his pioneer raid Hauptmann Linnarz dropped 87 incendiaries and 25 high explo- sive bombs (the correct proportion, had he but known it, for a firestorm) for a body count of seven, the youngest a girl of three, the damage to property put at £18,396. He near-missed the crowd 'emerging from Greenberg's Picture Palace in Commercial Road, Stepney, which must have been a disappointment. Hauptmann Linnarz may, it has been suggested, have been trying to hit London Bridge, in which case his four miles off-target compares well with the averages achieVed in the next war. In dropping his bombs in a mile-long stick, the heroic Hauptmann has a good claim to be the originator of area bombing as well.

Altogether, the Zeppelin raids, and para- llel ones with Giant and Gotha aeroplanes, killed 741 Londoners, almost all civilians. Fenchurch Street station was hit, and Chelsea Hospital, the Strand Theatre, Gray's Inn, and the Dolphin public house in Lamb's Conduit Street. The effect on British war production was negligible, and, as an observer wrote in 1917, 'we have seen the combative spirit of the people roused and not quelled by the German air raids.'

The observer, Winston Churchill, then Minister of Munitions, added, 'Nothing that we have learned of the capacity of the German population to endure suffering justifies us in assuming that they could be cowed into submission by such methods, or indeed that they would not be rendered more desperately resolved by them . . . It is improbable that any terrorisation of the civil population which could be achieved by air attack would compel the Govern- ment of a great nation to surrender.' (I owe this quote to Max Hastings's masterly Bomber Command, by far the best book on the subject.) But the German raids had considerable side-effects. A cry for reprisals on Berlin was raised, and plans were put in hand for the huge Vickers and Handley-Page bom- bers, which were not, as it turned out, ready until the war was over. More immediate air defence for London was also demanded, and one of the intrepid pilots selected for the work was the newly bewinged Arthur Harris. Flying a BE2C, Harris was one of the first 40 Anti-Zeppelin Night Pilots detailed to defend the capital. He taught himself to fly at night, and was deeply impressed by the difficulty he had in even seeing a Zeppelin, the biggest object that has ever flown, over the blacked-out capital, much less shooting one down.

The other result of the German raids was, of course, the recommendation of General Jan Smuts to Lloyd George that an air force separate from the other ser- vices should be formed, for both offence and defence. Thus was born the RAF, the world's first independent air arm. Smuts, too, had joined the air optimists: 'the day may not be far off when aerial operations with their devastation of enemy lands and destruction of populous centres on a vast scale may become the principal operations of war.'

But had the Kaiser's ground-breaking raids really achieved anything? Yes, says Group-Captain Saward, who was Harris's radar expert at Bomber Command, writing with a commendably passionate loyalty to his old chief and a more questionable one to his ideas. 'Although the raids were, in essence, unsuccessful, by the end of 1916 17,340 officers and men were tied down in the home anti-aircraft services and 12 RFC squadrons, consisting of 2(X) officers, 2,000 other ranks and 11() aircraft, were sta- tioned in England despite„ the urgent need for them in the Somme battle.'

Here we have, in miniature, the argu- ments brought out three decades later, when the bombers were streaming the other way. First, the raids began in frustra- tion, and because the aircraft happened to be available. Then they are supposed to be undermining morale and crippling produc- tion. Finally, they are tying up men and machines which could be used elsewhere, a part of the general war of attrition.

In such wars, as General Westmoreland used to say in Vietnam, someone is even- tually going to get attritted. But it was German morale and the German army that cracked in 1918, not the British, and the collapse began in the German navy, whose men were not in action and had little to do but sit around and talk politics. Group- Captain Saward does not pursue his histor- ical parallel far enough, and neither did the prophets of air apocalypse of the 1920s and 30s, like Bertrand Russell writing in 1936: 'London for several days will be one vast raving bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help, the city will be a pandemonium. What of the Government at Westminster, it will be swept away by an avalanche of terror. Then will the enemy dictate its terms . .

This scenario was quite an imaginative leap 'forward from the attrition of No. 16 Alkham Road, one which haunted many lesser minds than Russell's in the pre-war years. In the event, nothing remotely like it happened in London, where preparations were made to deal with more casualties in the first week than were suffered in the whole six years (63,635), Blitz, buzz bombs and all.

Something like Russell's nightmare (which was inspired by Maj-Gen. J. F. C. Fuller) was eventually realised in Berlin; all, that is, except the last vital bit, where the Government collapses and the enemy, our side in that case, dictates the terms. Safe in his bunker, the Fuehrer proved himself able to take the most appalling civilian casualties without flinching, and he was obeyed to the end. The element of hardening resistance, of rallying support behind the regime, any regime, is one that has to be entered in an honest calculation of the results of attrition from the air. The morality of this form of warfare, as per- ceived from the receiving end, may well he the catalyst that does the hardening.

Much, therefore, depends on the out- look of the people on the ground. Shortly after the First World War, much deocrated young Harris found himself in a situation where strategic air power was undoubtedly achieving results and, for once, on the cheap. He was just packing his bags for his beloved Africa when he was unexpectedly offered a permanent RAF commission as a squadron leader and, a little later, a posting in India, where a new

'No thanks, I never touch spirits'

way of shouldering the white man's burden was being developed.

The peoples on either side of the North- West Frontier of India, as many would-be conquerors keep discovering, reject all outside authority and love to fight. The standard way of dealing with them is to send a punitive expedition to destroy the houses and villages of the disobedient. When Britain had this unenviable responsi- bility, it was rare for an infantry column to reach even the foot of the Khyber Pass without being harassed, ambushed and used for target practice by the locals, for the pure love of sport. If and when the battered survivors reached the scene of the disorder, the guilty men were hardly ever at home to take their punishment.

Here, reasoned the then Sir Hugh Tren- chard, first head of the RAF, was an opening for the new service and its unused bombers left over from the war, and a way of policing the immense territories Britain had rashly taken on as 'mandates' in the peace. A single aircraft could fly to the disturbed area, drop a bomb or two to show the villagers who was boss, land and collar miscreants and be back in 'Pindi or Peshawar for tiffin. 'Air control' worked, and its success went far to save the RAF itself from dismemberment by the dreaded 'Geddes axe' of the 1920s.

Harris's squadron was one of the first to excel at this work, and he was deeply impressed by the occasion on which one 20lb bomb dropped on the grounds of his palace dissuaded the Amir of Afghanistan from invading India. Later, in Palestine, Harris developed a variation of his own called the 'Air Pin', in which a village was warned by air-dropped leaflets that it would be bombed if anyone left, pending the arrival of the police to arrest troublemakers/freedom fighters.

The pilots who pioneered the use of air power against technologically primitive, unorganised people thought that they had made the infantryman obsolete — glad tidings for all Europeans, and especially the British, with their heartfelt slogan 'No More Passchendaeles!' The flaw in the theory, and an insight, perhaps, into Har- ris's thinking, is given by one of his recollections of his time in India: 'As in all the RAF's many operations over savage countries, including Germany, capture by the natives was one of the worst things we had to fear.'

The natives of both Britain and Ger- many were, in the event, well accustomed to the sound of bombs by the time Harris was made head of Bomber Command in February 1942. As early as 1936, Germany and Britain had both laid plans to build a fleet of heavy four-engined bombers, the Germans to deliver the 'knockout blow' as forecast by Russell and Fuller, the British to deter them by threatening to do the same back (40 years on, thinking has changed little about the nuclear rocket threat). But the visionary Luftwaffe General Max Weyer was killed in a crash, and Goering, the one-time fighter ace, thought heavy bombers had no future, for which we should all be truly thankful.

So Britain went on alone, with Harris as Deputy Director the Plans at the Air Minis- try drawing up the specification for what was to become the four-engined Lancaster, pulveriser of German cities. The intention was still deterrence: 'in a war between major air powers it cannot be very long before the gloves come off, the future Air Vice-Marshal Bennett minuted the Air Staff in 1938, but 'we certainly cannot be the first to take them off.'

They came off rather slower than most people expected, with the last twitch deli- vered, as it happened, by Winston Chur- chill. Britain accepted an appeal by Presi- dent Roosevelt to refrain from unrestricted air warfare the day the war started, France 24 hours later, Germany 17 days after- wards. The Germans attacked Warsaw and Rotterdam with twin-engined light bom- bers, both, they said, defended cities in the path of their advancing troops and so their action was within the laws of war.

Then began the Battle of Britain, Goer- ing's attempt to secure air supremacy of Southern England in preparation for inva- sion. Part of the Reichsmarschall's plan was to attack RAF airfields, aircraft factor- ies and oil tank farms; still 'discriminate' bombing, if only just. On 24 August 1940, such a raid intended for Kingston-on- Thames hit the centre of the City by, it seems, a genuine accident — not heavily, but the first time since 1918. Next day Churchill ordered an immediate reprisal, by night, on Berlin.

On 7 SepteMber, after six such raids and an ignored German warning, Hitler ordered the attack, deliberately this time, turned against London, hoping for the long-sought 'knockout blow'. Air Vice- Marshal Keith Park, flying over the burn- ing London docks, later recalled, 'Though I felt very angry, I said "Thank God", because I realised that the methodical Germans had at last switched their attacks from my vital aerodromes on to cities. I felt confident that we would win as long as I could continue to operate the fighter squadrons.' And so it turned out.

A week before Harris took over Bomber Command, the Air Ministry passed down a directive, decided on at the Anglo- American talks in Washington, that opera- tions 'should now be focussed on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular of the industrial workers'. To this day, no convincing evidence has ever been produced that bombing their homes lowers their morale, and there is quite a bit of evidence, Germany's last-ditch resist- ance being only one instance, that the reverse is true. Harris cannot be accused of originating the policy, but it has certainly never had a more enthusiastic exponent.

Bomber Command's offensive against Germany was also the world's first electro- nic war, and both books under discussion cover this complex story well, Messenger's being the more technical. Neither address themselves to another important question: what the people of Britain and allied coun- tries were told, while it was going on, of the nature of the campaign. They were cer- tainly encouraged to believe that it was far more accurate than was, in fact, possible: the communiqués detailing attacks on 'marshalling yards' and 'armaments works' did not specify that the cities containing them were being burnt down by the fire- storm technique, discovered accidentally over Hamburg in 1943, and that, as often as not, no such targets were within the incinerated areas.

Harris, in fact, persistently opposed attacks aimed at strategic war materials, on the ground that 'if you miss an oil plant, you hit nothing, and by their nature they are easy enough to miss.' Conversely, a bomb on a city had to achieve something, but what? Revenge, retribution, rough justice, or some ill-defined 'contribution to victory'?

Saward's claim for his former chief that he was 'one of the greatest commanders in British history' (Marlborough? Cromwell? Nelson?) seems hard to take seriously. Rather, Harris emerges from these pages rather like a château general of the First World War, well-intentioned, stubborn, convinced that where the last attack failed, the next one would surely breakthrough, or the next, or the next . . . and, at least, he was killing Germans.

There was not, in Harris's words, com- parable carnage on the British side; 47,268 aircrew killed or missing, as against 593,000 German civilians. But even the smaller figure is grievous enough in terms of families not fathered and businesses never founded by the brave, technically- minded young men (how many future Clive Sinclairs among them?) who failed to return. Even so, more aircrew were killed than officers in 1914-18.

The heaviest legacy may be the prece- dent, a new variation of the end justifying the means. To quote Messenger: 'Harris, while denying that Bomber Command had ever gone in for terror attacks, argued that attacks on cities were strategically justified if aimed at shortening the war and saving allied lives. It was the same argument used to justify the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it is hard to refute . .

Here we are getting close to, if we have not already arrived at, another Vietnam attitude: 'Kill them all, and let God sort them out.' This line of thinking may, alas, be the crusty Air Marshal's lasting monu- ment.