The Valour and the Horror

The Germans bombed London. The next day the RAF retaliated and bombed Berlin. And so began the "indiscriminate" bombing of cities that would continue throughout the war.

In 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued a secret memorandum to his Chiefs of Staff, ordering "an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers upon the Nazi homeland."

The same year, at the Berlin Sports Palace, Fuhrer Adolph Hitler shrieked, "We will raze their cities to the ground. One of us will break, and it will not be National Socialist Germany."

In late 1942, Churchill appointed Arthur Harris Air Vice Marshall, head of Bomber Command, and charged him with carrying out the government's threat. Like the prime minister, Harris was convinced the air force could win the war; American Air Force commanders agreed. But army chiefs argued that, ultimately, only great land battles would defeat the Nazis, and so, they began preparations for an invasion of Normandy. Until the spring of 1944, these two strategies would wage war side by side, each convinced of its own logic.

Lacking in&endash;flight radar, the British and Canadian bombers could only "precision" bomb in daylight. But without long' range fighter escorts to protect them during day missions, they raided by night, dropping explosives from high altitudes on industrial areas, hoping to hit something-anything-of importance. This was "indiscriminate" or "area" bombing. If they missed, well, they'd make a mess and at least destroy German morale.

In a secret memo, October, 1942, Air Marshall Sir Charles Portal framed Bomber Command's new policy: "I suppose it is clear that the new aiming points are to be the buildup areas, not for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories."

In a meeting with the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Air Vice Marshall Harris enunciated his boss's policy: "We shall destroy Germany's will to fight. Now that we have the planes and crews, in 1943 and 1944 we shall drop one and a quarter million tons of bombs, render 25 million Germans homeless, kill 900,000 and seriously injure one million."

The heyday of "area" bombing would be 1943. The bombers pounded Germany with 48,000 tons of explosives in 1942, and with another 207,600 tons in 1943. Night attacks escalated, targeting Germany's most populous regions: the Ruhr, March to June, 1943; Hamburg, July to November, 1943; Berlin, November, 1943 to March, 1944.

John Terraine, a historian sympathetic to the RAF, described Bomber Command's new secret policy "as a prescription for a massacre, nothing more, nor less." Yet the Canadians were told nothing.

Courtesy of the book The Valour and the Horror, page 97