The Valour and the Horror

INDISCRIMINATE BOMBING:

To the very bitter end, Air Vice Marshall Harris believed his planes would cripple the German war machine, British casualties would be minimal and the German population would beg for surrender.

What really happened was this:

In May, 1942, Harris dispatched 1,000 planes to bomb Cologne; within two weeks, the city was back to normal.

In 1943, he ordered 207,600 tons of bombs dropped on Germany; that year, production of war weapons increased to 72,000. In 1944, bombing quadrupled to 915,000 tons; German war production that year increased to 105,258 weapons.

Not only was German morale undaunted but, according to Dyson, the destruction of their homeland at the end of the war gave the German people "the one thing that they lacked at the beginning, a clean cause to fight for." Goebbels couldn't have done a better job if he had created Bomber Command himself.

In the end, the real victims of the British air offensive were not only factories but families. German deaths from the air war are estimated at almost half a million (460,000), most of them women and children.

"When you saw those carpets of bombs, especially the incendiaries," says Moffat, "they looked like little diamond bracelets down there. I think the thing that saved most of us guys was that it was all so unreal."

At some point during their tour of duty, however, most airmen came to realize the awful intent of their missions. For Moffat, the realization had come at Leipzig. For Harvey, it was during the Battle of Berlin: "It was a very cold, clear night; snow on the ground. And it looked like a Christmas card scene down below. I hadn't seen that before. You could see the houses and the factories and the buildings. We dropped our bombs, and you could see the buildings going up, see the houses exploding, see the bombs going along the street, erupting and blackening the snow. Usually the target was obscured and you didn't get a good view of it. But to watch those houses going and to realize these were your bombs. It was very, very disturbing."

Air Vice Marshall Harris insisted he was just obeying orders:

"There is a widespread impression that I not only invented area bombing but also insisted on carrying it out in the face of the natural reluctance to kill women and children that was felt by everyone else. The facts are otherwise.

"Such decisions of policy are not made by Commanders in' Chief in the field, but by Ministries, by the Chief of Staffs Committee and by the War Cabinet."

The British subscribed to the doctrine of "area" or "indiscriminate" bombing in which wars are won by delivering death and destruction from above. It was an appealing doctrine for two reasons: it avoided the bloody trenches of the First World War, and it offered the hope that war could be avoided by deterrence. If the enemy was frightened enough, went the theory, it would surrender, obviating hand to hand combat. Fifty years later, the doctrine persists in nuclear deterrents, "carpet" bombing and Star Wars.