The Valour and the Horror

BOMBING THE NAZI HOMELAND

In that bloody, relentless winter of 1943/44, Bomber Command set its sights on Berlin, Germany's capital and Hitler's stronghold. In fulfilment of his slogan, "Victory Through Air Power," Harris vowed to devastate Berlin as completely as Hamburg: "We are going to produce in Germany . by the first of April, 1944, a state of devastation in which surrender is inevitable."

Beginning in November, 1943, there would be 16 major raids on Berlin. On one February night alone, 1,000 Lancasters released 2,500 tons of explosives on the city. By the end of March, 1944, 50,000 tons of bombs would hit Berlin.

The airmen called Berlin "The Holy City": it was the most I heavily defended target in Germany, over 2,000 direct air miles from the British bases, at the limit of the Lancaster's reach. To get there, the planes had to fly even farther, detouring r hundreds of miles to avoid German anti&endash;aircraft defences.

To save weight and thus increase the fuel and bomb-loads, Air Vice Marshall Harris wanted to strip back the defences of the planes, remove some of the protective armour and reduce the gunners" ammunition.

Freeman Dyson suggested another way to save weight: rip out the aerodynamically awkward turrets and eliminate the mid-upper and tail gunners from the crew, along with their heavy weapons. According to statistics, Dyson said, gunners could not defend the bombers against night&endash;fighters, which most often attacked from the gunner's blind spot, below the plane.

"Privately, I had another reason for wanting to rip out the turrets," writes Dyson. "Even if the change did not result in saving a single bomber, it would at least save the lives of the gunners."

But to remove the gun turrets flew in the face of the romantic image of the gunner riding shotgun for his crewmates. The armour went; the ammunition was cut back; the turrets and gunners stayed.

The airmen assigned to the Berlin raids watched their friends disappear one by one. New crews arrived, were sent out and went missing before anyone got to know them: names were chalked up on the order&endash;of&endash;battle board, erased and replaced the next day. In the first three months of 1944, Harvey's squadron lost 20 crews.

"When I look back on those casualty figures today it seems incredible that I survived," says Harvey, "but at the time, I never measured the odds. Such faith belongs to the young and without it, I suppose, few would have flown. Viewed today it smacks of arrogance, conceit and stupidity. I can only admit that as I flew more and more raids, I grew more and more contemptuous of the dangers."

It a good thing that Harvey was young.

And a good thing Jim Moffat was resigned to death.

In August, 1943, having finished gunnery school, Moffat joined a squadron that had just firebombed Hamburg. In their first few raids on Berlin, their plane was coned twice and was hit with flak that left 300 holes in the fuselage. But Moffat survived. In an accident of fate, he was moved from the mid-upper turret to the tail gun. On the next trip, his replacement was killed by bullets from a German night&endash;fighter.

The tail turret was a tight and dangerous fit for the lanky Moffat. His long legs cramped into position, making unfolding and bailing out of the rear turret next to impossible. In an emergency, he planned instead to push open the doors to the belly of the plane and crawl to the escape hatch in the middle. Normally, the tail gunner's parachute hung on a wall near the doors. To save time, Moffat wore the chute whenever he was in the air. If worst came to worst, he would jump to safety.

Officially, the word was that airmen had an excellent chance of survival if the plane were shot down. They would simply jump through the escape hatch, pull the rip cord on their parachutes and float down to earth.

The facts suggested otherwise: 50 percent of crew shot down in an American bomber escaped; from the older types of British night bombers such as the Halifax and the Stirling, 25 percent escaped; from the Lancaster, 15 percent.

At the time of the Berlin raids, Bomber Command was rapidly phasing out the old bombers and converting the squadrons to Lancasters, which had escape hatches only 22 inches wide-2 inches narrower than in the Halifax. According to statistician Dyson, "The missing 2 inches probably cost the lives of several thousand boys."

After much lobbying, led by Mike O'Loughlin, a colleague of Freeman Dyson, Bomber Command agreed to enlarge the hatch but the new design would not become standard until the very end of the war.

Moffat had one chance in seven of getting out of the plane alive.

The airmen who flew the Lancasters over Berlin accepted the air force propaganda that they could bail out alive. They also accepted the view that each raid on Berlin brought them one step closer to winning the most decisive battle of the war.

"What they were told was untrue," says Dyson. "By January, 1944, the battle was lost. I had seen the bomb patterns, which showed bombs scattered over an enormous area." German records support Dyson's contention that, far from being smart bombs, most were hit and miss. In one particular raid, bombers inadvertently hit 47 surrounding villages within a 30 mile radius of the intended target, Berlin.

"We merely showered incendiary bombs over the city," admits Dyson, "with a small fraction of high&endash;explosive bombs to discourage fire-fighters. Important factories were protected by fire fighting teams. Civilian housing and shops could be left to burn. Photographic reconnaissance a few weeks later showed factories producing as usual amid the rubble of burnt homes."

In February, 1944, Moffat's crew was sent to bomb Leipzig. The briefing for that mission forced him, for the first time, to confront the reality of what Bomber Command was doing.

"Normally they would say, you have a primary and a secondary target. Your primary target is the ball&endash;bearing factory, or the submarine yards, or whatever. But this time, the primary target was the railway yards.

"The CO said, 'Okay, fellas, now you remember, the other night we bombed Berlin. Now all those people are on trains trying to get out of Berlin and they're going through the big railway centre.' That's when it hit me that we were actually choosing to bomb people instead of military targets.

"I thought, Oh my God! They're telling us to aim for these people as a primary target. I knew we had been killing people, accidentally, because there were bombs going off all over the place. There was no way we couldn't kill them. But that was the first time it drove home to me that it was Bomber Command's aim to kill people."