Текст книги "Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943"

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

After the dreadful waste of all the static, defensive land battles of the past four years, air power soon began to be seen as the perfect way to restore movement to warfare. It was the offensive weapon par excellence, striking suddenly and giving the enemy no time to parry the blow by calling up reinforcements. It was also cheap. In the face of widespread cuts in defence spending after the war, Trenchard was able to keep the fledgling RAF intact simply because it was so much cheaper to police the British Empire with a bomber force than it was to launch expeditions by the army on the ground. Trenchard’s vision was to create a long-range bomber force with which Britain could maintain her empire and keep her European neighbours at bay, much as she had done with her navy for most of the previous two hundred years.

However, as theorists like the influential Giulio Douhet pointed out, Britain did not rule the air as she did the sea. Not only that, but air power was fundamentally different from sea power: aeroplanes were not limited in scope or direction of movement, and now even the heart of the British Empire itself was vulnerable. London, ‘the great metropolis until now rejoicing in her inviolability’, could be attacked just as easily as anywhere else. ¹⁴

That fact was not lost on the population of London, which still remembered the panic caused by the 1917 Gotha attacks. During the 1920s and 1930s a succession of lurid novels appeared in which the bombing of London produced swarms of refugees like ‘human rats’, ¹⁵or where in the post-apocalyptic ruins of the city ‘the people lived on the rats and the rats lived on the people’. ¹⁶Films like the 1936 science-fiction movie Things to Comeshowed how bombing would be used in a global war that would eventually destroy civilization throughout the world. The opinions of the professionals were no more reassuring. In 1923 J. F. C. Fuller warned that the dropping of poison gas on London might injure as many as two hundred thousand people in half an hour, and ‘throw the whole city into panic’. ¹⁷Douhet was even more graphic in his predictions, and claimed that bombing a city like London would result in ‘a complete breakdown of the social structure’, which would inevitably lead the people to rise up in revolution against their own government. ¹⁸

All these various prophets of air power singled out London in their descriptions because at that time the British capital was still by far the most powerful city in Europe, and also the one most protected by natural barriers. If London were vulnerable, how much more vulnerable must every other European city be? As a consequence, fear of bombing was fairly universal throughout western Europe between the wars. Even Canada and the USA were not immune to such anxieties, despite their geographical remoteness from any enemy – as was demonstrated by the faintly absurd air-raid scares in Ottawa and New York during the last year of the war, and again in 1942. ¹⁹But it was only in Britain that such concerns reached virtual hysteria. By the 1930s even the most enthusiastic champion of bombing, J. M. Spaight, was forced to admit to a widespread pessimism among his contemporaries, who foresaw ‘a fate comparable to that of Sodom and Gomorrah’ for British cities. ²⁰

As the Second World War approached, the predictions became more and more gloomy. In 1937, the military theorist Sir Malcolm Campbell wrote the following account of the likely outcome of an air raid on London:

First would come hundreds of aeroplanes… each carrying up to a thousand small incendiary bombs. These would be dropped at a rate of one every five seconds, and each machine would leave a string of fires in its wake. If all the fire-fighting appliances in the country were concentrated in the one place, they would not be able to cope with a tenth of the fires that would rage over the whole area attacked. Even if they could, hard on the heels of the fire-raisers would follow fleets of heavy bombing machines, dropping their loads of high-explosive bombs on a city already virtually fated to destruction by fire. And as if that were not enough, then would come other fleets of aircraft to drench the flaming ruins with poison gases. Unless the people could take refuge in safety below ground, the casualties in a city like London must amount to a million or even more, while the material damage would be simply incalculable. The picture is not over-drawn – it is what inevitably will happen to a country which fails to take the elementary precaution of making itself strong enough to hold what it has. ²¹

When such a premonition is extended beyond just one city to ten, twenty, fifty cities, it is no longer a vision of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is a vision of Armageddon.

It must be stressed at this point that not everybody believed that such destruction was inevitable. There had been many and varied attempts to ban bombing ever since the first Hague Peace Conference in 1899 but, as is so often the case with such conferences, the proposals were always rejected by too many of the countries that really mattered. ²²

In one famous instance, in March 1933, the peace conference at the League of Nations took up the question of firebombing. Poison gas had already been banned in 1926 because its uncontrollable nature threatened the lives of innocent civilians; it was argued now that fires caused by incendiaries were every bit as uncontrollable as gas when dropped on city targets, so should also be banned. Everyone agreed, and for a while it looked as though firebombing would indeed be banned. The conference was already working out the practical details when, in October that year, the newly elected Adolf Hitler walked out and withdrew from the League of Nations. Without Germany, the ban meant nothing. Ironically, Hitler’s action had ensured the death of hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen. ²³

* * *

Over the next few years the whole world rearmed itself, and rapidly sank back into the quicksand of war. It is difficult now, even with hindsight, to see how another world war could have been avoided after the Nazis took power in Germany. Repeated attempts to mollify Hitler at the negotiating table proved a waste of time: the entire doctrine of the Nazi Party was centred on preparing for war. ²⁴By 1937 the newly formed Luftwaffe was rehearsing its tactics with the bombing of republican towns like Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. In the spring of 1938 Hitler annexed Austria. In 1939, despite frantic British attempts at appeasement, he marched into Czechoslovakia. In September he invaded Poland, followed by Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France. In just under ten months Hitler and his allies had taken control of virtually the whole of mainland Europe.

Despite all the dire predictions of the 1930s, the war in the air was fairly restrained until this point. At the outbreak of hostilities President Roosevelt had appealed to both sides to renounce the ‘bombardment from the air of civilian populations and unfortified cities’, and both sides had hastened to agree. ²⁵Neither wished to provoke the ire of the world’s greatest industrial nation.

The British in particular promised that they would ‘never resort to the deliberate attack on women and children and other civilians for purposes of mere terrorism’, ²⁶and for a long time they kept their promise. During the six-month lull between the invasions of Poland and Norway, the RAF took serious losses in coastal raids on the German Navy: these were completely unsuccessful because they were forbidden to attack ships when they were at their most vulnerable – in port – because of the possibility of hitting civilians. During the battle for Norway air crew were instructed not to use any bombs, just their machine-guns to avoid hitting innocent bystanders. ²⁷For all Britain’s refusal to ratify international agreements on bombing, she began the war with admirable, if somewhat unrealistic, restraint.

With the exception of the bombing of Warsaw in 1939, Germany exercised similar control. It made no sense to destroy the cities and industries of the countries she wanted to occupy, and Hitler had no intention of provoking America into renouncing its neutrality. In any case the Luftwaffe was overwhelmingly a tacticalair force – it confined its activities mostly to the battle zone, by dive-bombing and strafing opposing troops. The strategicbombing they carried out was generally directed at the destruction of enemy airfields and transport links, not civilian populations.

The change came during the invasion of the Low Countries in May 1940, when the Germans surrounded the Dutch port of Rotterdam. The general in command of the 39th Panzer Korps told the Dutch defenders that unless they capitulated immediately the city would suffer ‘complete destruction’ by German bombers. ²⁸The following day, when negotiations between the two sides broke down, the Luftwaffe was dispatched to keep the general’s promise. Soon a hail of bombs was falling on the heart of the old city, setting large areas on fire. Later it became apparent that the Dutch garrison had surrendered before the air strike had taken place, but the order to recall the bombers came too late to save the city. That evening, while the houses still burned, the German Army entered Rotterdam just as they had entered Warsaw, unopposed.

The bombing of Rotterdam had sealed the Wehrmacht’s success in Holland, but it was a propaganda disaster for Germany. Over the next few days reports appeared across the world claiming that as many as thirty thousand civilians had been killed (although in reality the figure was more like a thousand). ²⁹Outraged, the British lifted some of their restrictions on bombing military targets inside Germany. On 15 May, the day after Rotterdam was bombed, Churchill sent ninety-nine bombers to attack rail and oil installations east of the Rhine. A few days later thirty were sent to attack the Blohm & Voss shipyards in Hamburg – the first of 213 attacks on the city. While a handful of bombs did hit the shipyards, in the darkness most fell in residential areas around the Reeperbahn, and thirty-four people were killed. The German press immediately hailed it as a ‘ruthless terror attack on the civilian population’. ³⁰

So began Britain’s strategic bombing campaign against Germany: a long-term systematic effort to destroy all German rail links, oil installations, airfields, armaments factories, metal foundries, stockpiles of raw material – in fact, anything of military value. Hitler responded, predictably, by ordering his air force to prepare for a full-scale air offensive against Britain, as a reprisal for the attacks on Germany and as preparation for a cross-Channel invasion of the British Isles. The battle for mainland Europe was over. The battle of Britain was about to begin.

* * *

Britain was the last piece in Hitler’s jigsaw of western Europe, and his generals set about trying to conquer it in much the same way as they had conquered the rest of the continent. Their first task was to achieve command of the air, which meant destroying as many Royal Air Force planes and airfields as possible. Only after they had gained complete air supremacy would a cross-Channel invasion be possible.

When the Luftwaffe made their first bombing sorties over Britain in June 1940, an atmosphere of relative restraint still surrounded the bombing war. Hitler explicitly forbade his air force to attack London and other cities, partly because he had promised not to make war against women and children and partly because he wanted his forces to concentrate on the targets that mattered. ³¹At first the Luftwaffe attacked in daylight, but when German losses began to mount they were forced to switch to night attacks.

This was where both sides finally lost what was left of the mutual restraint with which they had started the war. In the dark, the German bombs increasingly missed their intended targets and fell on residential areas; then, on the evening of 24 August 1940, a dozen German bombers veered off course and accidentally dropped their bombs on central London. In retaliation, Churchill immediately ordered his bombers to attack Berlin. Although the raid caused little material damage it infuriated Hitler, who told a mass rally about ten days later, ‘If they attack our cities, we will simply erase theirs.’ ³²In reprisal for the Berlin attack, he ordered Hermann Goering to stop attacking purely military targets and concentrate on London.

There has been speculation that Churchill ordered the attack on Berlin deliberately to provoke this response in his enemy. The RAF was under serious threat at the time, and it was only after the Luftwaffe switched to area bombing that it could recover. If this was the case, then it was an expensive gamble. London suffered seventy-one major raids during the Blitz, and twenty thousand men, women and children lost their lives.

Attacks on towns across Britain soon followed. In November the Luftwaffe destroyed Coventry, and Hitler was so impressed that he coined a new verb, coventriren– ‘to coventrate’. Over the next six months the Luftwaffe attempted to ‘coventrate’ Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Bristol, Swansea, Cardiff, Glasgow and Belfast. Britain responded by targeting places in Germany where the centres of industry were surrounded by densely populated residential areas. The idea was that even if the factories were not destroyed, the homes of those who worked in them would be. If this was not officially a policy of ‘area bombing’, in practice that was exactly what it was. The pinpoint targeting of specific installations was simply not possible: from 15,000 feet, in the dark, it was considered accurate if an aircraft bombed within five miles of its aiming point. On 12 December 1940 the British government gave up all pretence when Winston Churchill ordered the bombing of Mannheim: for the first time the British had designated the city as the target, rather than anything specific within it. As the British official history of the bombing war points out, with the advent of such area bombing, ‘The fiction that the bombers were attacking military objectives in the towns was officially abandoned.’ ³³

It was an almost exact copy of what had happened in the First World War: a few piecemeal attacks, leading to a German offensive on Britain, and gradually the initial restraint exercised by both sides was whittled away to nothing. The only difference between the two wars was in scale. On 17 September 1940 alone the Luftwaffe unloaded more than 350 tons of bombs on London – more than the total dropped on the whole of Britain throughout the First World War. By the following April, they were able to drop more than a thousand tons of high explosive on the British capital in a single night. During the nine months of the Blitz more than forty thousand British people were killed, and a quarter of a million homes destroyed, leaving three-quarters of a million homeless. ³⁴All the terrifying pre-war predictions were beginning to come true.

And yet, in one respect, the prophets of air power seemed to have got it wrong. Contrary to the message preached by all the theorists before the war, the morale of the British people was not broken by the ordeal they had been through. If anything, they had become more determined, and their response to the bombings was vengeful rather than fearful. Politicians clamoured for retaliatory strikes against German cities; their speeches were echoed in the newspapers, which were filled with indignant leader columns requiring the RAF to fly to Berlin and give as good as Britain was getting. ³⁵

As Hitler turned his attention to Russia, and the raids on Britain petered out, the leaders of the bruised and battered RAF were given the space they needed to plan their revenge. The air force was still too weak to take the fight to the heart of the Reich, but it was obvious that Britain was now in the war for the long term. Over the next eighteen months the RAF would build its strength to create the most formidable bomber force the world had yet seen. Just as she had in the First World War, Britain now set her sights on a huge bombing campaign to destroy the German infrastructure. The only difference was that this time there would be no armistice to save the German people from British wrath.

To carry out this bombing campaign, the Air Ministry looked for a new commander-in-chief to lead Bomber Command. The man they settled on was an experienced and determined airman named Sir Arthur Harris. Over the next three years he would preside over the greatest, most systematic destruction of population centres the world has ever known, and in the process would become one of Britain’s most controversial war figures. The climax of his reign, when the world began to believe that his air force might even win the war single-handedly, was the bombing of Hamburg.

7. The Grand Alliance

… they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind

Hosea 8:7 ¹

Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris took over the reins of Bomber Command at the end of a very low period for the RAF. For the previous six months the RAF staff had been suffering a serious crisis of confidence: their insistence that ‘the bomber will always get through’ had proved wrong, their accuracy when they did get through was appalling, and their losses had been heavy. ²In two years of bombing they had not even dented the German war economy – although they did not yet know how truly ineffective they had been – and they had killed only as many Germans as they had lost in air crew. One British defence scientist of the time calculated that only a single German died for every five tons of bombs dropped – a hopeless waste of resources even if one agreed with the brutal realities of area bombing. ³Critics of Bomber Command were appearing throughout the British establishment. Even Churchill was sceptical about bombing: ‘Its effects, both physical and moral, have been greatly exaggerated,’ he said in September 1941. ‘The most we can say is that it will be a heavy and I trust a seriously increasing annoyance’ to the Germans. ⁴

By the spring of 1942, however, this was beginning to change. Brand new planes were rolling off the production lines, such as the Avro Lancaster, which could carry twice the load of almost any other bomber in existence, and the De Havilland Mosquito, which could fly higher and faster than even most German fighters. New radio technology was being developed to improve navigation, and new bomb-sights were being produced to improve the RAF’s appalling accuracy record. To accompany these changes, the RAF had been on a massive recruitment drive, transferring men from the other armed forces, and drafting some from previously reserved occupations to swell its ranks for the years to come.

So, when Harris first arrived at Bomber Command Headquarters in High Wycombe many of the problems that had plagued his predecessors were already well on the way to being solved. What was needed now was a determined leader, capable of making wise use of the formidable weapon in his hands. It is easy to see why Harris was chosen for the job: while his wisdom might sometimes have been called into question, not even his fiercest critics would have accused him of lacking determination.

Arthur Harris was born in Cheltenham, in 1892. His father, who was a civil servant in the British Raj, always wanted him to go into the army – which the young Arthur Harris was dead set against. After a series of arguments, he left home at the age of sixteen and travelled to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where he tried his hand at farming, gold mining and driving horse teams. It is ironic that after all this he should have joined the army anyway, but six years later, at the outbreak of the First World War, that was what he did. In 1915, after taking part in the fight for German West Africa, he made his way back to Britain and joined the Royal Flying Corps – then part of the army – and began a lifelong relationship with aeroplanes. Over the next twenty years he flew everything from night fighters to flying boats. He ended the First World War as a major, with the Air Force Cross, and went on to command squadrons of bombers in some of the furthest-flung outposts of the empire under Trenchard’s Air Control scheme. Eventually, in 1933, he returned to England and worked his way through the ranks of the Air Ministry, until he became Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command mid-way through the Second World War. ⁵

By all accounts Harris was a forceful man, possessed of almost boundless energy and a bluntness that verged upon rudeness. He despised the other armed services, and was fond of saying that the army would never understand the value of tanks as a replacement for the cavalry until they could be made to ‘eat hay and shit’. ⁶He had a dry, cutting sense of humour, and did not suffer fools gladly. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor he was called by a friend in New Jersey who wanted advice on how to defend his factory against incendiaries. Harris told him to get a long-handled shovel and throw any out of the window – then went on to say that he should wrap it up and send it to Harris, who ‘would eat it and every incendiary bomb that fell on America in the war’. ⁷His aggressive nature was reflected in the way he drove. Late one night, while racing his Bentley between London and High Wycombe, he was stopped by a policeman who reproached him: ‘You might have killed somebody, sir.’ Whereupon Harris replied, ‘Young man, I kill thousands of people every night!’ ⁸

Harris made few friends, but those he had remained loyal to him throughout their lives. The Chief of Air Staff, Charles Portal, had been his friend for years, as had many of his subordinates – particularly Robert Saundby and Ralph Cochrane, who had first served with him in Iraq in 1922, and Don Bennett, who had served with him in a flying-boat squadron at the end of the 1920s. His plain speaking also made him friends in the American air force, especially General Ira Eaker, who shared many of the same problems when it came to dealing with the other armed services. Most importantly, however, he inspired a fanatical devotion among the air crews who served under him, many of whom vociferously defend him to this day. To them he was known as ‘Butcher’ Harris, or ‘Butch’ for short – a man who would always get the job done, however distasteful it might seem to others, and whose first concern was to provide his men with the right equipment and resources to do their job.

Harris was a staunch disciple of Trenchard, and firmly believed that if enough concentrated misery could be inflicted on the cities of Germany over the next eighteen months the Nazis would be compelled to surrender. One of his first actions after taking command was to appear on a newsreel in which he said, in clipped tones, ‘There are a lot of people who say that bombing cannot win the war. My answer to that is that it has never been tried yet. We shall see.’ ⁹He had no qualms about area bombing, and remained unapologetic about it to the end of his life. ‘If the Germans had gone on using the same force for several nights against London,’ he said, after the war, ‘… the fire tornado they would have raised would have been worse than anything that happened later in Hamburg, and the whole of London would have gone as Hamburg went.’ ¹⁰

Right from the start, Harris’s aim was to attack the very heart of the Reich: Berlin, the capital city; Hamburg, the centre of shipbuilding and trade; and the Ruhr valley, Germany’s industrial heartland. But the RAF was not strong enough yet to make a serious impact on such heavily defended targets, so he concentrated instead on demonstrating to the world what British bombers were capable of once they were deployed in force. The aim was threefold: to quieten the critics at home, to show support for the Russians, and to demonstrate to the Germans what lay in store for them if they continued the war.

The targets he picked were two medieval cities on the Baltic coast of Germany: Lübeck and Rostock. Both seem to have been chosen for their vulnerability rather than their strategic importance: their crowded wooden buildings were highly flammable, and would provide a perfect opportunity for Harris to test his belief that the incendiary, rather than high explosive, was the most efficient means of destroying a city. As Harris said, the closely packed Hanseatic town of Lübeck was built ‘more like a fire-lighter than a human habitation’, and when 234 aircraft firebombed it on 28 March 1942 60 per cent of the old city was consumed. ¹¹More than a thousand people lost their lives in the worst single attack on a German city so far.

A month later, a series of similar attacks was launched on Rostock, which again destroyed about 60 per cent of the city centre by fire. As German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels stated in his diary, community life had come to an abrupt end: ‘The situation in the city is in some sections catastrophic.’ ¹²Later Harris justified the attack by pointing to the Heinkel aircraft factory on the outskirts of the town, but the real victory was psychological. While the British had failed to make any real impact on major targets, like Berlin or the cities of the Ruhr, they had proved their worth against smaller targets. Here, at last, was a demonstration to the world that the power of the RAF was on the rise.

The destruction of Lübeck and Rostock was merely a taste of things to come. On 30 May Harris launched the first thousand bomber raid of the war. The target was originally supposed to be Hamburg, concentrating as many bombers in one attack as the port normally saw in a year, but the city was temporarily reprieved when the weather over the German coast deteriorated, and the target was switched to Cologne. That night 1,046 aircraft took off for the north Rhineland, and within a few hours had dropped 2,000 tons of bombs on the city. An estimated 3,300 houses were destroyed in the attack, along with thirty-six factories, and 469 people were killed, most of them civilians. Twelve thousand separate fires raged through the city, the gas mains exploded, the water mains were severed, and all transport systems were put into such disarray that the disruption was still felt months later. ¹³But, most importantly, the RAF had achieved a major propaganda success. The magic figure of a thousand bombers was far greater than anything the Luftwaffe could achieve, and when Britain was falling behind their enemy in every other arena of the war this was an important morale boost for her people.

* * *

A second morale boost occurred later in the summer of 1942, when the Americans entered the fray. The USA had officially joined the war shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941, but she was by no means ready for it. Like her British allies, she had been slow to arm. While Germany had been rapidly building her air force since 1935, and Japan likewise throughout the 1930s, it was not until 10 July 1940 that Roosevelt convinced Congress to spend an extra $5 billion on war production. Slowly the world’s greatest industrial giant began the long process of building her army’s air force. By the time the Axis powers declared war against America in December 1941, she was producing some 26,000 military aeroplanes per year, compared to Britain’s 20,000 and Germany’s 11,000. Even so, without experienced crews to fly them it would take eighteen months before the Americans could deploy in force over the skies of northern Europe.

The overall commander of the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) was Lieutenant-General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, the son of a Pennsylvanian doctor. Arnold had learned to fly before the First World War when he joined the Aeronautical Division of the US Army Signal Corps, and at one point had even held the world altitude record. Throughout the First World War he ran the army’s aviation schools, and rose steadily through the ranks until, in 1938, he became head of the Army Air Corps.

If Butch Harris was an uncompromising commander, Hap Arnold was positively severe. He drove his staff relentlessly, and is reputed to have given one officer such a dressing-down that he slumped dead over Arnold’s desk from a heart-attack. Impatient, austere, unceasingly demanding, he would rarely tolerate any form of failure or delay, regardless of whether there was a good reason for it or not. However, like Harris, he was widely respected as a man who got things done, and he had many friends within the air force. Also like Harris, he proved shrewd in his choice of subordinates, and surrounded himself with brilliant and energetic people like Carl Spaatz, Ira Eaker and Fred Anderson.

By the time of the Hamburg raids, Arnold’s representative in Britain was Ira Eaker, commander of the US Eighth Air Force. The contrast between Arnold and Eaker was stark. While Arnold was brusque, Eaker was thoughtful and likeable, and spent many years conducting what amounted to public relations for the USAAF. He was a highly educated man, and had attended Georgetown University, Columbia University, and the University of Southern California. Despite their differences in character the two men seem to have got on well, to the extent that they were able to write three books on military aviation together.

Early in 1942, Eaker was dispatched to Britain to set about creating an organization capable of taking the fight to Germany. From the beginning he and his entourage were welcomed by the British, who immediately handed over several airfields for their use. There has been some suggestion that British friendliness in those early days was governed by ulterior motives, and that what they really wanted was to assimilate the fledgling USAAF into a combined air force firmly under British control. However, it seems much more likely that they were simply glad to accept a new ally, and willing to pass on as much help and advice as was necessary to get them operational as soon as possible. And their help was considerable: the RAF immediately shared its radar and communications systems, as well as vital intelligence; British Spitfires were put at the USAAF’s disposal, both for fighter escort and to carry out weather reconnaissance; fuel trucks and other equipment were donated to US air bases; US airmen were given places on RAF training courses; British resources were used to help build new air bases, and the list goes on.