'The Bombing War' - Richard Overy's History

And so the anniversary season continues, with the 75th anniversary of the day Britain and France fell into the trap they thought they had set for Hitler, and declared war on Germany for the sake of Poland. A year later France was an occupied vassal of Germany, and Britain a bankrupt subordinate of the USA. 75 years later both France and Britain are provinces in a German-dominated European Union. And yet it's still not done to wonder if our 1939 declaration of war might have been mistimed. 

 

Of course, in the fine old tradition of British bluster, we didn’t actually do anything to help Poland as it was invaded, bombed, partitioned and abolished. But we did make some speeches, drop bundles of leaflets on German cows in the dark (sometimes the aircrews didn’t bother to undo the bundles, which could then be quite lethal) and move British troops on to the continent, where they could more easily be captured by the Germans.  

 

But that’s another story. The contrast between the myth of 1939-45 and the reality of history is so huge that most people, confronted with any part of the truth, just goggle, gibber and angrily refuse to believe demonstrable facts.

 

Even 75 years later, it’s risky to examine those facts. I hope soon to take a look at Leo McKinstry’s new book on Operation Sealion, the German invasion that never was , and almost certainly never could have been. Mr McKinstry, as far as I can judge from a quick glance, has portrayed the rapid abandonment of this sketchy and undeveloped invasion plan as mainly a triumph of British resolve, organisation, courage, etc.  In my view it was largely called off because of Hitler’s severe lack of interest in such an incredibly risky operation against a country he didn’t much care about, and which posed no significant threat to him. (Compare the colossal resources he deployed against Russia a year later). It was also caused by the reluctance of his own generals and admirals to get involved in such an obvious mare’s nest.

 

It is true that Britain, far from ‘standing alone’ in 1940, had all the resources of the Empire behind her, possessed efficient war industries, had a strong scientific sector and had, thanks to Chamberlain, rearmed quite efficiently for the purposes of home defence (though not for a continental land war).  That is why the RAF was able to defeat the Luftwaffe over Southern England, though things might have been very different , and much worse, if we had committed the RAF to the defence of France a few months earlier.

 

The problem was that, having declared war on Germany in 1939 and promptly been defeated and expelled from the continent in 1940, Britain would have been in a very awkward position if Hitler had defeated the USSR.  At that stage, all realistic hopes of a German defeat would ahve evaporated, and Britain would have had to sue for peace, with no need for an invasion by Germany. As long as Russia remained undefeated, there was still a choice between fighting on and capitulation, and the option of capitulation was rejected in 1940 by Churchill, to his eternal credit. A country which has declared war and failed to win it will not get good or generous terms if it then goes to its rival and asks for peace.

 

If we and France had left Poland to its own devices in April and May 1939, we would not have been in this very tricky position. Non-combatant neutrals have no need to make peace, or seek terms for it.  Hitler would probably have inveigled Poland into an anti-Soviet alliance, with a chunk of Ukraine (yes, Ukraine again - it always comes into these things) as Poland’s prize for joining the attack on Stalin. Records show that Hitler and Ribbentrop did put such a  scheme to Colonel Josef Beck, the thirsty Polish foreign minister, in early 1939. 

 

And perhaps that development might have brought about renewed and serious talks between Britain, France and the USSR. These might have been more successful than the discussions aborted in summer 1939 when it was clear Hitler was willing to offer more to Stalin than we were. Given that we eventually gave Stalin  a free hand over the whole of Central Europe, our gentlemanly hesitancy in 1939 looks rather unwise, but such is history, crammed with the monuments of unpleasant surprises. In any casen entry into the war in alliance with Russia would certainly have had a better chance of success than one in alliance with Colonel Beck. 

 

Anyway, this brings me to my main summer reading project, Richard Overy’s ‘The Bombing War' , now available in a reasonably portable Penguin paperback (though I wish it was easier to navigate the footnotes).

 

Longstanding readers will recall my accounts of Anthony Grayling’s devastating account of the British bombing of Germany ‘Among the Dead Cities’, and of Sir Max Hastings’s excellent ‘Bomber Command’ . Others will,  I hope, recall my championing, on Radio 4 and elsewhere, of Bishop George Bell (who lost two brothers in the Great War) and Major Richard Stokes MC MP (a highly-decorated Great War artillery offficer) , non-pacifist objectors to the deliberate bombing of German civilians. Also some may remember a discussion of the criticisms of the effectiveness of the bombing campaign levelled by Sir Henry Tizard, as described in an interesting series of lectures by C.P.Snow.

 

I get into no end of trouble for my position on this. I am told that I am unpatriotic, even now, for discussing it or for being distressed by the extreme and horrible cruelties inflicted by our bombs on innocent women and children, who could not conceivably be held responsible for Hitler’s crimes. On the contrary, I believe it is the duty of a proper patriot to criticize his country where he believes it to have done wrong.

 

I am told I am defaming the memory of the bomber crews. I have never done so, and never will. They had little idea of what they were doing, died terrible deaths in terrible numbers thanks to the ruthless squandering of life by their commanders, and showed immense personal courage. It is those who, knowing what was being done, ordered them into battle that I blame.

 

I am told that I am equating our bombing of Germany with the German mass murder of the Jews, when I would not dream of making such a comparison,  never have done so and never will. I am told that I am excusing the mass murder of the Jews, when nothing could ever excuse it and I should certainly never attempt to do so. Is it still necessary to say that two wrongs do not make a right, and that one horribly wrong thing may be worse than another horribly wrong thing, and yet they may both still be horribly wrong, examined by themselves as actions?

 

I am told that I wasn’t there. This is true, but Bell, Stokes and Tizard were, and protested,  much as I do and for the same reasons, moral in two cases, practical in one. I hope I should have had their courage. I think I can say that I am sometimes prepared to espouse unpopular causes.

 

I am told that the bombing was necessary because our survival was at stake. It quite simply wasn’t – Hitler had been irreversibly defeated at Stalingrad, and the USA were in the war, long before the mass bombing got under way.

 

I am also told that it was not our policy to kill civilians, and that they died accidentally as a result of attacks on military targets. This is flatly untrue, as I shall shortly show .

 

I am also told that the bombing was justified by its military effect upon Germany, and that it advanced Germany’s defeat. This is , to put it mildly, highly questionable.

 

In the following review (there will be two parts of which this is the first) of Professor Overy’s book, I shall adduce evidence which seems to me to devastate the case of those who continue to claim that the deliberate bombing of German civilians in their homes was militarily or morally justified. I would urge any who wish to attack this view to obtain and read the book before doing so. It is a formidable work of research and marshalled scholarship, dispassionate and carefully referenced:

 

The book ranges over much more than the British bombing of Germany. Did you know, for instance, that the Italian Air Force once bombed Tel Aviv?  Details of German bombing of  the USSR, and accurate accounts of the German bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam in 1939 and 1940, are well worth reading, not least because of the large myths which have grown up around both of these events, quite horrible enough unadorned. The descriptions of the very heavy Allied bombing of German-occupied countries, and the strains this caused to their powerless populations, are particularly painful.

 

But these are things I must urge the reader of Professor Overy’s book to examine for himself or herself.

 

It is the British Empire’s bombing of Germany, and to some extent the parallel American bombing of Germany, which I wish to examine on the grounds of both military effectiveness and morality.

 

It is my view that the facts form a great cloud of witness against this form of warfare, which we must hope is never again adopted by any civilized nation, or indeed by any nation. I used to hold another view. Let us see if I, helped by Richard Overy, can persuade you.

 

On page 243 we learn that the deliberate bombing of cities in World War Two was not a retaliation against Hunnish barbarism, but definitely begun by the RAF, on 11th May 1940, long before the Blitz,  with a  raid on what was then known as Muenchen Gladbach (it is now, for tedious reasons,  known as Moenchengladbach) in western Germany. This was not, as some claim, a response to Germany’s bombing of Rotterdam, because Rotterdam was not bombed  till 14th May. The main reason for the attack seems to have been that Winston Churchill, who favoured bombing in general and had always suported the idea of a separate Air Force,  had taken over from Neville Chamberlain, who opposed the bombing of cities on principle. The town was defined as a military-economic target and the attack was supposed to be in response to Germany’s invasion of the Low Countries, just begun.  

 

The extent of the damage was slight. As discussed here, and particularly dealt with by Max Hastings,  the RAF missed most of its targets hopelessly badly, and its inadequate bombing planes, mostly poorly designed and using outdated tactics, were blasted from the sky by the Luftwaffe in terrible numbers during the early part of combat.

 

On page 254, the language of British leaders began to take on a rather fearsome tone. Winston Churchill speculates in a letter (8th July 1940)  to his friend and Aircraft Production Minister Lord (Max) Beaverbrook that an ‘absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland’ would help to Bring Hitler down. Arthur Harris kept a copy of this letter and told Andrew Boyle in 1979 ‘That was the RAF mandate’.

 

The killing of workers was an explicit policy. In June 1941 (p.257) we find an Air Ministry draft directive saying that ‘Continuous and relentless bombing of these workers and their utility services, over a period of time, will inevitably lower their morale, kill a number of them and thus appreciably reduce their industrial output.

 

In April of the same year (p.258) a policy review urged attacks on ‘working-class ‘ areas. In November that year (also p.258) a memorandum almost certainly written by Harris was asking if the time had not come to strike ‘against the people themselves’.  In May (p.259), the Director of Air Intelligence welcomed an attack on the ‘the livelihood, the homes, the cooking heating, lighting and family life of…the working class’ (they were the lost mobile and most vulnerable to such an attack).

 

In November 1941, Sir Richard Peirse, then Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, told ‘the Thirty Club’ that his planes had nearly a  year been attacking ‘the people themselves’, intentionally.(p.259)

 

‘I mention this because for a long time the Government for excellent reasons has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call Military Targets. …I can assure you, gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples.’  

On the same page it is shown that senior officials knew of the policy but preferred the truth of it not to be widely known in case ‘false and misleading deductions’ were made.

 

A profoundly disturbing Air Staff memorandum(p.265) explicitly desires that towns should me made ‘physically uninhabitable’ and the people in them must be ‘conscious of constant personal danger’. The aim was to produce ‘destruction’ and ‘the fear of death’.

 

Harris himself wrote in April 1942 (p.287)’We have got to kill a lot of Boche before we win this war’. Harris, paradoxically to his credit, never lied to himself or anyone else about what he was doing. He never shied away from his purpose of killing Germans and wanted it acknowledged publicly. Perhaps he suspected that Churchill and others would seek to disavow the policy later.

 

On p.288 you will find details of Lord Cherwell’s famous minute calling for the de-housing of a third of Germany’s population (an aim based on totally wrong and exaggerated ideas of the power of bombing, as it turned out). ‘Investigation seems to show that having one’s house demolished is most damaging to morale’, it said, airily. You might say. You might also say that it would be hard to destroy that many houses intentionally without , equally intentionally, destroying many of their occupants.

 

There is plenty more of this in Professor Overy’s account.  I’ll turn to the effectiveness, or otherwise, of the bombing in a future posting.