The Valour and the Horror

"Sixty-six 6 Group aircraft set off. Eight returned early. Over the target, the bombers encountered ten-tenths cloud. Equipment failures resulted in an almost total lack of marking by the Pathfinders. Ther bombers had little choice but to drop their bombs on estimated positions. ....The crews did their best. But, according to city records, only one bomb landed in Levrkusen; the rest were scattered about the surrounding countryside.... four Halifaxes and one Stirling didn't come home, 1.9 per cent of the force. But three of the missing aircraft were from6 Group, representing a 5 per cent loss for the Canadians....."
Reap the Whirlwind:178

Area bombing:

"Harris had written one of his typically cogent papers on the subject in January, 1944. He declared that Bomber Command could best support the forthcoming invasion by continuing to do what it was already doing:

The effects of strategic bombing are cumulative. The more that productive resources are put out of action, the harder it is to maintain output in those that survive. It is easy to forget, however, that the process of rehabilitiation if the offensive stops or weakens is similarly cumulative. To put it shortly, the bomber offensive is sound policy only if the rate of destruction is greater than the rate of repair. It is hard to estimate the extent to which Germany would recoup industrially in, say, a six month break in bombing. It would certainly be sufficient to enable her to take a very different view of her prospects on land, on sea and in the air. Indeed it is true to say that if the German army survives the present crisis in Russian (and if it fails to do this, Overlord will in any case be superfluous). The cessation of bombing even temporarily would make her military position far from hopeless. What the Russians have done and what we ourselves hope to do on land is fundamentally made possible oly by the acute shortage of manpower and munitions which strategic bombing has produced, and by the preoccupation of nearly three-quarters of the enemby fighter force with the defence of Germany proper."

Reap the Whirlwind: 236

November 22, 1943
Target - Berlin

A total of 764 aircraft set out. The return rate for the Canadians was 10% compared to 8.9% for the others. More than 3000 industrial buildings and homes were wrecked and some 2000 citizens killed. "Fifty thousand troops had to be diverted from their normal duties and sent into the city to help with the clean-up work."
Reap the Whirlwind: 178-9
Losses suggest the vulnerabilities of the various aircraft: 2.3 for Lancasters, 4.2 for Halifaxes, 10% for Stirlings.

Harris withdrew the Stirlings from his area bombing raids on Berlin. They suffered too many casualties from flak. Some of the Stirling units were transferred to Transport Command, and saw service as glider tugs in the invasion of Normandy. In April, 1944, the bomber offensive was harnessed to the needs of Overlord. In March, 70 per cent of the bombs dropped by Bomber Command were on German target; by Mayit was 25 per cent, by June, close to 0. Not until September when Eisenhower relinquished control of the British and American heavy-bomber forces would the offensive against Germany itself resume.

Before the invasion, The Canadian Group was involved in bombing transportation targets.

"The accuracy of Bomber Command's bombing in support of the D-Day invasion build-up would be one of the surprises of that period of the war, and no one appears to have been more surprised than Harris himself. Like most mortals, Harris saw every situation in the context of his own ambitions. Although he wanted to win the war as much as the next man, he wanted to do it his way, by the strategic area-bombing of German cities....
Reap the Whirlwind: 235-6

"On March 4, [Harris] received his orders. Bomber Coimmand was to mount a series of pre-invasion attacks on railway targets, activating the "Transportation Plan" that had been under discussion for months. It called for widespread damage to the railways around the proposed landing area, so the Germans would be unable to use them to bring up reinforcements or supplies. The first target was the marshalling yards at Trappes, sourthwest of Paris. The question that gnawed at the planners was whether Bomber Command could do the job without killing French and Belgian civilians in their thousands..."
Reap the Whirlwind: 237

The attacks followed on March 6/7, 1944. Of the 263 aircraft sent to bomb Trappes in the first pre-invasion ops, nearly half, 124, were from 6 Group.:

"In the bright moonlight the marshalling yards were clearly visible and we saw our bombs fall directly on the target," writes Dick Garrity, a 431 Squadron navigator who participated in the raid. The sortie was indeed a spectacular success with the tracks rapidly transformed into a tangled network of steel and most of the sheds and rollin g stock wrecked or severely damaged. Practically no damage was done to the town. And not one 6 Group aircraft was lost on this operation despite the presence of four flak batteries in the vicinity."

Reap the Whirlwind: 237

Personal reminisence:/Canadian air force-Brit relations

"As far as Garrity's crew was concerned,the return to England [after the March 7 Trappes raid] was the worst part of the trip: "We were diverted south because of fog conditions at Croft," he recalls. "As we had dropped below the cloud base in preparation for landing, I was unable to get a Gee fix and a new course to our diversionary base. Finding ourselves low on fuel,we landed at Chipping Warden, an OUT. There the orderly officer informed the crew that no accommodation was available for them.They had to bunk down in armchairs and on the floor." "In the morning," adds Garrity, "I learned from a very embarrassed orderly officer that standing orders from the CO prevented him from making quarters available to us, all because of a bad experience with an operation crew who had gotten royally drunk after a rough trip."

Reap the Whirlwind: 237-8

Valour and Horror, Second World War, Canadian history, World War II, W.W.II