299. The Greatest Force: Rewriting RAF Bomber Command's Legacy
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She tracks her cash flow on a spreadsheet at night. Boring money moves make kind of lame songs, but they sound pretty sweet to your wallet. BNC Bank. Brilliantly boring since 1865. Hello and welcome to Battleground 45 with me, Patrick Bishop.

Our subject today is the strategic bombing campaign, the relentless bombardment of Germany, first by the bomber command of the British Royal Air Force and then supplemented by the might of the US Army Air Forces. After a slow start, the RAF campaign had by 1942 become truly destructive.

and by the end of the war, no German town of any size had escaped the death and destruction. Even before the war was over, mass bombing had become controversial.

Visitors to Germany post-war witnessed how old cities were reduced to rubble could not help but wonder at the morality of a programme that set out to obliterate urban areas and the people who lived in them. To the query as to the ethics of bombing was added another element. How effective was it as a tool of victory? Early surveys seemed to show that it was not quite as damaging to German war industry as propaganda had claimed.

Well, with me today is Marcus Gibson, who's produced a book which aims to revise the, to his mind, inaccurate picture of the strategic bombing campaign as not only morally dubious, but actually also a waste of time, effort and vital resources. His book is called The Greatest Force, How Aryeh Homa Command Rose to Become the Number One Factor in the Destruction of

of Germany in World War II. Well, I suppose the title says it all, doesn't it, Marcus? But before we get into your arguments, can you tell me what drove you

to write this book. You were, or have been for much of your career, a financial journalist. But I think the dedication to the book perhaps gives us a clue, doesn't it? Tell us a little bit about that. Yes, I dedicate the book to four of my relatives who fought in the First and Second World War. My grandfather, father, both doctors, and two uncles, one of whom was in the Far East,

He was the point man for Bletchley Park in Trincomalee, the Royal Navy headquarters there, would you believe, and said he had the most boring war of all. And the other uncle was a navigator in mosquitoes with 613 Squadron based at Lasham in Hampshire.

And he went on the Amiens raid. So I thought it was right to dedicate the book to those four. Yeah, so you've got a strong service background, family history. The Amiens prison raid of February 44, wasn't it? Operation Jericho, that was a spectacular success of pinpoint bombing, which is kind of exactly the opposite of what you're standing up to defend now.

today. Now, really, the verdict of historiography is very much against what you are proposing, isn't it? Can you tell us something about why you think Bomber Command's war and then the

the American bombing force that joined it. Why history has been so unkind to their efforts? Really because Britain has this terrible tradition of undermining and disregarding and sort of eliminating so many of the people who are the most aggressive warriors in a recent war.

You remember that when Nelson destroyed most of Copenhagen, he was greatly criticized at the time. Is it in 1904? I don't think it was. The Battle of Copenhagen. And I felt as though exactly the same happened to Marshal Harris and that he was by far and away the man who had reached the most destruction of any war leader ever.

of any side on Germany during the war. And yet after the war, there was this pain of conscience over the civilian population deaths, even though, of course, the Allied civilian deaths were far greater than any in Germany. How is that so? I mean, just to comparison with the casualties in the Blitz, which were in the region of

60,000 to 70,000, shall we say, UK civilians. And the figure normally cited for German civilians who died as a result of the bombing campaign is closer to 600,000. Just tell us how you... I mean, the bomber has famously said...

You sow the wind and you reap the whirlwind, quoting the Bible. But do you think that was a reasonable kind of proportion? Well, I was entirely reasonable. First of all, German civilians had the option to leave their cities, something which all the 11 million in total slave laborers in the 42,000 labor camps, most of which were in city centers, had no choice.

One could say that, of course. In addition, of course, Harris was right to bomb the city centers because those were the centers of organization of the entire war economy in all the town halls, prisons, libraries, etc. German cities were the centers of the greatest evil. They were not these sort of toy town happy places of the 17th century, which some people today try and paint them as being.

You know, something like 14,000 people were executed by guillotine in 20 German cities during the war. The 300, I believe the true total of German casualties from bombing is nearer to 370,000 people.

And if you compare that to say that 250,000 who definitely died in Warsaw, you know, or the probable north of 150,000 in Stalingrad, maybe and maybe the 1.2 million who died and starved in Leningrad. These are small numbers. The death toll in Gresden was certainly barely over 10,000.

and the 12,000 mostly Jewish women slave laborers who survived the war because of the raid and the chaos that ensued outnumbered the so-called innocent German civilians who died in that raid. You should also remember that just down the road from Dresden, which I visited in 1991 and had a good look around, is the city of Breslau. And of course, Breslau was surrounded by, I think, 30,000 Russian artillery shells. And by the end of the three-month siege, one of the worst

of all, between 30,000 and 80,000 Germans were dead, either in the city or in the poorly winter march westwards to get away. So Dresden got off lightly, no doubt about it. I think that it really boils down to two things. One is I'm interested in your thoughts about

how this picture, which has come to be accepted, you quote various, like the Canadian Museum, where the rubric is basically that this was pretty much a waste of time and morally dubious. And that theme is there from the very beginning, isn't it? Starting with Churchill himself, who, after Dresden, tries to put some distance between himself and

and the operation, and then the various books on Bomber Command's war, which come out subsequently, tend to reinforce this. And some of the people who are writing them are in a very good position to know what went on. I'm thinking particularly of Noble Franklin, who was the joint author of the official history of the strategic bombing campaign, who'd served as a navigator, who I once met, actually. I interviewed him for my book about it.

Bomber Command. Now, he'd done a full tour as a navigator and was also a very, very distinguished historian and ended up being director of the Imperial War Museum. Now, he, like you, and I think like most of us, doesn't argue or take issue with the idea that we had to use whatever weapons were in our hands in order to bring the war to Germany. But he also, at

Leaving aside the morality, he also, in the three, actually four-volume book, which he co-wrote with Charles Webster, Sir Charles Webster, comes to the conclusion that it's a pretty mixed picture, and lots of mistakes were made. The

effectiveness of Bomber Command was pretty limited in the first years of the war and rather kind of pours cold water on the idea that this was a decisive factor, one of several decisive factors in the Allied victory. Now, this, of course, produced an explosive response from Arthur Harris when the book came out. But tell us why you think that Noble Franklin's

views are mistaken. Well, dare I say it, you know, Noah Franklin was a great man, no doubt about it. But I think he looked at his official history of bomber command, looked at the effectiveness of various raids and various aircraft and various people.

What he didn't do was look at the totality. Well, the remit for his book did not include reviewing the totality of the effects, the total effects, the cascade of disastrous consequences for the Germans, many of them indirect and not recognized at the time, certainly not until quite recently, which Bomber Command's campaign inflicted on Germany.

First of all, Harris was absolutely right to bomb city centers, not only because of the organizational damage, as I mentioned, but because there were thousands of German small companies, something I wrote about very extensively for 40 years for the Financial Times, etc., which were destroyed. And they're often making two, five, ten vital components.

all the way for submarines, aircraft and tanks. And it was very difficult to replace those parts and components. And so many of the intelligent German army and air force people say the crucial lack of components, which bomber command inflicted, was the greatest problem for them in maintaining military capability. It ranges from tungsten ticks,

to create sophisticated pieces of metal, all the way through to radar components, which the RAF pretty much destroyed during the raid of Berlin, and also the Kriegsmarine depot at Tetlow, which the RAF completely destroyed, and meant that really from thereafter, the German Kriegsmarine and the U-boats were blind,

because they had no radar sets that really worked. I mean, I could go on, but the indirect effects... Sorry, can I just come in there? Because it seems to me that you're making a very good point here, which is that we tend to concentrate on German heavy war industry, the Ruhr campaign in particular. And, you know, one of the salient impressions that comes out from the sort of post-war surveys is the surprise that people got when they saw that, like, a Crooks battery, okay...

It's been sort of pretty badly knocked about, but it's still actually in operation. So I think you're saying that kind of distorts the picture and not enough attention has been paid to all these smaller works, which are producing maybe not sort of enormous volumes, but the less eye-catching stuff that actually makes the German war machine work. Oh, yes. I mean, also you discovered recently in Ukraine, it's not the lack of artillery, it's the chronic lack of artillery shells.

that have handicapped the defence of Ukraine. And similarly, the British Army in about 1941, 1942 maybe, our tanks in North Africa came to a grinding halt because we didn't have any of the spare parts in Cairo which the tanks needed to perform. So the British were not alone in discovering this problem. And one of the things which Air Marshal Wilfred Freeman, the man who pioneered, ensured that the Mosquito bomber would be developed,

One of the critical things he did was to ensure that 20% of RAF factories made spare parts. And thereafter, the RAF Bomber Command suffered almost no dereliction due to that flood of supply. I suppose the key point

if I may, is that Air Marshal Harris was right to bomb city centres and not just the small number of big assembly plants making tanks and artillery, for example, because

For this reason, that would have meant the Germans only needed to create a small defense force around, say, 100, 200 factories. But by creating a nationwide devastating bombing campaign, he then forced the Germans into creating an absolutely gigantic nationwide defense system so that

You know, 2 million people, 80% of the aircraft, 80% of the 88mm guns all had to be withdrawn from the front lines, which crippled their offensive capability, by the way, just to try and save their cities.

Yes, I think that's an interesting perspective because it's not just Germany, it's the conquest as well, isn't it? And it has huge effects on the disposal of manpower, etc. As you say, vast numbers of men who might have been in the front line or even if they weren't in the front line, they might have been in war factories, were now needed to man anti-aircraft batteries, etc. in order to protect the civilian population. So it's really a kind of political decision as much as a military one.

Tell me something about the genesis of the area bombing, so-called area bombing policy, because in my book, I felt that Harris, who's someone we'll talk about a bit later on, that he really got the blame for something which was not of his making and that his boss, Sir Charles Portal, Peter Portal, who was chief of the air staff, was an early and very vociferous proponent

proponent of bombing cities, yet he managed to escape with his reputation pretty much intact after the war. Yes, the three warlords of the Allied bombing campaign was Churchill, who was enormously in favour, at least until Dresden. He was indeed from the First World War, as you probably know. Sir Charles Portal, another great man responsible for the RAF in World War II, probably the most difficult job.

job of all and thirdly Air Marshal Harris who was had a curiously had an army background and was certain that what he was doing was the right thing but it should also be remembered those those were the three who pushed it through against massive oppositions you know from the Royal Navy and the army who wanted the resources to go to them and not to bomb a command largely

It should also be remembered that whilst Harris was an inflexible man in many ways, and he did make mistakes when he did, when he was told by Eisenhower to bomb pre-war

pre-D-Day targets for the British Army, he did so with gusto and did it extremely well. But only to be fair, Marcus, only after a great deal of pressure was brought to bear on him by Churchill, among others, who was extremely reluctant to switch away from area bombing to

earlier on to bombing oil facilities, etc. And indeed, then, the actual transportation campaign, he was resistant to that. As you rightly say, when he did take it up, he did it very well, as you'd expect. But he certainly didn't do it without some reluctance, initially, at least.

No, that is certainly true. He also did not want to bomb the U-boat pens, which are heavily fortified and invulnerable, but he was forced to do it. He didn't really want to do the raid on Dresden or the three other cities at the end of the war, and it was no less than the Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who ordered, because Churchill was on his way to the Yalta Conference, who actually ordered the raid.

And if you ask 99% of people who ordered the raid on Dresden, almost everyone thinks it's Harris. And of course, he didn't. Yeah. Well, lots of food for thought there. Do join us in part two when Marcus will continue developing his arguments.

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Welcome back. There's also a big diplomatic element in a way, isn't there, in this strategic bombing campaign, given that once Russia was in the war, for a protracted period, it was doing all the fighting and all of the dying. And this produced, of course, endless complaints from Moscow, from Stalin, saying, why aren't you helping us? This at least was something that the Allies could point to and say, no, we are helping you.

So it had that element, a positive element to it from the Allied point of view as well. Most certainly. No, we were not capable of launching any invasion, as you know, until 1944. And any attempt to have done so, as we know from Dieppe, would have been just a catastrophe and a waste of everything. Additionally, Stalin is a rather creepy figure, to say the least.

And he sternly refused to have any British or Allied aircraft on his soil for most of the war because, of course, he didn't want the conditions inside Russia, which were fearful, to be exposed to the Western alliance. In addition, of course, the Soviet Union, his campaign to win the war was so horrifically misjudged and the frontal assaults.

by infantry in daytime with no smoke screen or anything and led to the most gigantic wastage of resources. He fought the war in the most costly and worst way, I think it would be fair to say. What do you say to the

naval and army argument that RAF resources and bomber commands resources in particular could have been put to better use, say, in the Battle of the Atlantic. Now, was it actually feasible for Lancaster bombers and Halifax bombers to be used in

in an effective way, defending convoys, etc. Well, it turned out that the coastal command, with their Wellingtons and Sunderlands and others, managed to push back the U-boats eventually from the western approaches and from the Irish Sea and parts of the North Atlantic. And the crunch came when a very small number of, as you know, Liberator bombers, along with the Royal Navy escort groups, finally put pay to the U-boats.

But there's a German historian who's looked at this and said that it was the RAF attacks on the component plants for U-boats, which was the number one factor in limiting the number of U-boats being produced. And of course, you know, with the Type 21, the super U-boat late in the war, it was almost all of bomber command's activities in destroying the canals and the supply chain.

that wrecked the development of that U-boat. I think only a handful went to sea and only two went on a single operational patrol. They made about 130 of them, I think, of that number. The problem mostly lies, I think the RAF Bomber Command took up about 12% of Britain's total war resource, as far as I know. And of course, the Lancaster bombers and the crews, they were not trained for pinpoint bombing of U-boats out in the Atlantic. They were designed for bombing cities.

And it wasn't until the Liberator bomber came along that we really found the aircraft to do that job. And I think there was an instance when two Lancaster squadrons were diverted to Northern Ireland and they were not very effective, unfortunately. And neither was the Mosquito, funny enough. Yeah, I mean, we were, to a large extent, the prisoners of that interwar operation.

policy the bombing credo the idea that bombers could win wars etc so resources are uniquely actually in the european theater went into these big four engine bombers which their uses were quite limited it has to be said again you know you know land war they're not much use there either as was shown in d-day i mean good at flattening con etc but in san lor but uh

but not actually terrifically effective in terms of actually destroying in a kind of coherent and effective way enemy armor, enemy personnel, etc. So I think there's not much, I think the point is often made, there's not much you could actually do except bomb cities, given the structure of the RAF and the policy going forward at the beginning of the war.

Well, Patrick, may I just interject there? It seems quite clear that the biggest enemy of the Tiger tank was the Lancaster bomber and not the T-34 or the Russian anti-tank guy. I think something like a third of all Tiger tanks were not made due to interruptions in supply. And there were only 100 Tiger tanks for the Battle of Kursk.

So it's an interesting point. Also, of course, I believe in one of the, uh, I forget one of in 1944, after the invasion, the RAF did bomb the front lines of the German armed forces and they, they more or less broke up six of the nine front lines. And they, they did manage to destroy tens of thousands of landmines in front of the German lines. And they decalibrated the guns on, on Russian tanks. Um,

etc. No, it wasn't a total breakthrough, but it was a great assistance to Montgomery's army, although not a complete one, that is true. As I was saying earlier, even before the war was over, the image of how we were going to present our war was very much in the minds of Churchill in particular. And he took the decision to that he was not going to play up the role of Bomber Command, even though he'd been very supportive, as you say, throughout the war.

So we have the Dresden incident when he starts saying there may be some queries over the morality of this operation subsequently. And of course, in his victory speech, Bomber Command, despite having shouldered a vast amount of the burden in casualties in particular, we should always remember of the 125,000 men who passed through Bomber Command, half were killed, extraordinary casualty rate. They only rated a few lines higher

Do you think that's sort of peculiar to the British? I'm thinking about the way that Dresden was handled in propaganda terms or indeed in folk memory terms because it was a joint Anglo-American operation. Yet the Americans don't seem to have gone in for the same hand-wringing and examination of conscience that we've certainly seen in Britain over Dresden in particular, which has come to symbolize really the whole city bombing movement.

No, I think you're absolutely right. Well, of course, if one goes to France or Poland or the Czech Republic, they are not in the least bit doubt about the effectiveness of Bomber Command. And they, you know, as I said, when I went to the memorial opening in 2012, the most moved people I thought at the event were

with not even the RAF veterans, it was the men from Poland, East Europe, and France, and other countries who'd suffered under Nazi rule, and they had no doubt whatsoever that the sacrifice of the RAF crews and the effectiveness of the campaign was total and justified.

Yes, I was there as well. In fact, I took a bit of a part in that, getting a memorial. Listeners may not know this, but after the war, there was no, the various slights, I think you can put it like that, done to Bomber Command veterans. There was no campaign medal, and there was no memorial in London to them until very late in the day, 2012, the result of a campaign in which I played a small part. But that was a very moving occasion, wasn't it? And I think

you can say that in terms of memorialization, justice has been done. And now with your book, it would seem the history of Bomber Command is going to be looked at in a different and more positive way. Do you think there might be some closure with the publication of your book? Well, funny enough, yes, I do. I hope there are many more better historians and research journalists out there than me. But I came across the...

the initial, you know, the raid reports, the overnight raid reports from 1940, in which the Germans were aghast at the amount of damage being done, that the great marshalling yards, railway marshalling yards at Ham in the Rhineland had been, you know, severely damaged.

5% of their oil supply appeared to be being cut off, canals, dams burst, etc. And of course, it was in December 1942, as a result of what historians call minor damage, for heaven's sake, that led to Hitler's decision to trigger the V-weapons program.

amongst other things. And also, of course, all of his subsequent advanced aircraft, he insisted, should have a dive bombing capability, which, of course, completely crippled their performance. So this and all these other indirect effects of bomber command need to be seen in context and the gigantic way in which they really did cripple Germany's ability to make war.

Have you had any contact with veterans? Are there any survivors of Bomber Command? When I was doing my research, it was way back at the beginning of the 21st century, and they were flying off to the Great Mess in the sky in large numbers then. Have you actually spoken to anyone who did fly in a

in a Lancor Halifax? Yes, not recently. I think there's probably less than 50 left, maybe even 20. There is the well-known, the Mosquito Pilot, who is 104, who was at the RAF Club, I think, for a dinner a few weeks ago. And he speaks very fluently about this. But as far as I know, in my experience, all of the veterans I did speak to, not in great depth, unlike you and your exceptional books on the subject,

they were all very much in favour and were certain of what they were doing was right and justified. I think that's right. There was very little... Well, I think there was soul-searching, but I think there was very little regret

or uneasy consciences from any of the people I spoke to, and they're all thoroughly decent men. I think this is an aspect that we've always got to remember of the awfulness of the experience of being a Poma crew member, and the extraordinary stoicism and resolve they showed when they were going willingly, they were all volunteers, into the teeth of the worst theatres of the war. And, of course, you know, we were...

a democratic country, they were not going there under coercion, and yet they showed just the same grip and just the same courage as their totalitarian opponents. Yes, the 55,000 who died, the nearly half of whom did not survive the war, was dreadfully costly. One has to say, though, that that human loss was not in vain. That's one of the chief things I want to get across, that those countries

fantastic men who've all volunteered and who died and who served. Their achievement was, in my view, the number one factor in knocking Germany out of the war, and that's it. Whether the far greater number who were killed in World War I on the front lines...

whether their sacrifice was anything like as good, I doubt. So there is that much to be said about it. And I do not, I have a whole chapter in the book looking at what German cities were like in the Second World War. They were, as I say, places of the greatest evil.

And the idea that we must now be sorry for the Germans or sorry for the civilians. Yes, children innocent. Yes, the 200,000 dissidents who were locked up from 1933 onwards. They're completely innocent. But the rest of them, I have to say, the answer is almost definitely not or mostly not.

The 1.2 million people who worked for the Reichsbahn, they absolutely knew what was going on with the deportation trains to the four death camps in Poland. It took a great deal of effort, exercise, infrastructure, planning to do all that. And they knew that no one was coming back, not even a postcard. It was an open secret across much of Germany, not to mention the, as I say, the

the terrible conditions for slave laborers, the 11 million in total who were forced or brought slave laborers who told in terrible conditions. So the fact we must now feel sorry for the Germans is, I think, completely wrong.

So I think we could sum up by saying that your argument on that front, on the moral morality front, is that the lesser evil of bombing cities was justified in view of the effect it had in defeating the great evil, the enormous evil of Nazism. Okay, we're going to wrap it up there. Thank you very much for coming on to the show, Marcus. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

I just want to reiterate, Marcus has written The Greatest Force, how RAF Bomber Command rose to become the number one factor in the destruction of Germany in World War II. On sale now. Go out and get it. Okay, that's it for me from this week. Do join us next Wednesday for another episode of Battleground 45. Goodbye.