Sowing the Wind
From June 1941 until June 1944, the only means that the Western Allies had of striking at Nazi Germany was by strategic bombing. This strategic bombing diverted some of the Wehrmacht's resources
away from the war with the Soviet Union and so served as the "Second
Front" demanded by Stalin. Yet arguably its more important function was
as a psychological weapon -- and a necessary component in domestic
morale.
At the start of this war, Germany enjoyed significant advantages in terms of air power. Although Hitler initially shied away from deploying it against England, his policy changed and in the second half of 1940, Germany rained death and destruction on the British isles. Indeed Hitler bragged about what he was doing, dismissing the risk of retaliation. He was, as the British Air Marshal Harris so aptly said, sowing the wind.
With the wisdom of hindsight, it is easy to dismiss the impact of Hitler's air war against Britain as paltry. Cities were not vaporized in a single flash as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Great fire-storms did not consume thousands as in Dresden and Hamburg. Yet when it occurred, the destruction that rained down on Great Britain was unprecedented. At the start of the war it was the scale that was unprecedented; at the end of the war it was the technology.
Furthermore, not only did Hitler strike first, he also proudly promised on 4 September 1940:
“And should the Royal Air Force drop two thousand, or three thousand, or four thousand kilograms of bombs, then we will drop 150,000; 180,00; 230,000; 300,000; 400,000; yes, one million kilograms in a single night. And should they declare they will greatly increase their attacks on our cities, then we will erase their cities!"
Hitler failed to deliver -- but not for want of trying.
Although the Luftwaffe had engaged in targeted (if not always accurate and effective) strategic bombing against targets in the UK throughout the summer of 1940, the real offensive -- and one targeting civilians and civilian moral -- began on 7 September 1940. In the first raid of the day, the Germans managed to send 348 bombers escorted by 617 fighters, or nearly 1,000 aircraft.
No one on earth had seen anything like it. Observers on the ground -- not to mention the RAF defenses -- were staggered. The squadron leader of one of the RAF fighter squadrons vectored to intercept the German raid wrote after the fact: "I nearly jumped clean out of my cockpit. Ahead and above a veritable armada of German aircraft... Staffel after Staffel as far as the eye could see... I have never seen so many aircraft in the air all at one time. It was awe-inspiring." [Sandy Johnstone. Spitfire into War. Grafton, 1988. 172-3. Johnstone was CO of No 602 (Spitfire) Squadron] It was not the last raid of the day. What came to be know as "the Blitz" had started and it would last for 57 straight nights and include frequent daylight bombing as well.
Yet the nights were most deadly. Each night hundreds of people died and thousands were made homeless. By the end of September alone the toll was 5,730 killed and nearly 10,000 injured. The destruction to infrastructure was nearly as devastating: hospitals appeared to be targeted (although this was impossible with the navigational equipment and bomb sites employed by the Luftwaffe at this time). Railway lines and stations were rendered unusable. The rubble from shattered houses, shops and factories blocked roads and tram lines. The gas works by the docks was set on fire. Gas, water and electricity lines were broken again and again all over London.
By the end of October, another 6,334 people had been killed and 8,695 seriously injured. By then, 16,000 buildings were totally destroyed and 60,000 badly damaged. People were spending the night in whatever form of air raid shelter they could find, although sleep was hard to come by as the bombers droned overhead, the bombs went off and the sirens of the rescue services wailed. Winter weather brought some respite though not an end to the ordeal, and the intensity of the raids increased again with the spring. A thousand two hundred Londoners were killed and another thousand seriously injured on a single night on 19 April, 1941. On 5 May a new record was set when close to 1,500 lost their lives and nearly 2,000 people were seriously injured in London alone.
Meanwhile, other cities were receiving the same treatment. At the end of 1940, London had been attacked 126 times, Liverpool 60, Birmingham 36, Coventry 21, and Portsmouth and Plymouth each 13, along with lesser numbers of raids on Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Swansee, and Hull. The concentrated raid on Coventry on the night of 14 November was so effective that it gave birth to the word "Coventrize" to mean obliterate. A hundred acres in the city's center had been turned into pure rubble. Casualties per capita were so high that it was calculated the civilians in Coventry that night had a higher chance of being killed the combatants in the entire six years of war. Contemporary reports described Coventry as: "...a city of the dead, utterly devastated." The BBC reported "it is impossible to see where the central streets had been..." [Quoted in Juliet Gardiner. Wartime Britain 1939-1945. Headline, 2004, 351]
By the time Hitler's next unprovoked invasion (this time of an ally) in June 1941 drew his attention and his war machine away to a new theater of war, 43,500 civilians living in Britain had been killed, 71,000 had been seriously injured and another 88,000 less severely injured. At the time, these civilian casualties far exceeded combat casualties. In addition, 2.25 million people had been made homeless. And the ordeal was not over.
Although the air attacks on Britain became less intense in the period from June 1941 until June 1944, Hitler released his "vengeance weapons," the V1, after the Allied landings in Normandy. By today's standards these may seem primitive, yet by the standards of the day they were revolutionary. The V1 called a "pilotless aircraft" or "flying bomb" by the British media and public was in effective an unsophisticated drone. It had a cruising speed of just 150 mph and flew at an altitude of just 2,000-3,000 feet -- considerably slower than the fighter aircraft of the time. However, they were sent over individually, and very random nature of their attacks (they could not be directed once they were in the air and were simply pointed in roughly the right direction) increased the sense of helplessness on the part of the attacked. It didn't help that the defense against these weapons was out of sight of the civilians being hit; namely, the anti-aircraft batteries and fighters sought to bring them down over the more open countryside south of London. British counter-measures were more effective than one might have expected, with 3,463 V1s being accounted for, but just as many got through to do damage.
Within just three days of their deployment, these new weapons had killed 499 people and seriously injured another 2,000. In addition, they had damaged 137,000 buildings. That converted to 20,000 damaged buildings every 24 hours. The rate of damage was more than twice that endured in the nine-month-long "conventional" Blitz of 1940-1941. In addition to posing a serious
threat to life, limb and property, they also disrupted the war effort,
because each individual bomb set off the air raid warning -- as much as
30 times a day. Some factories stopped sending workers to shelters and took the risk of being hit in order to maintain production. Altogether the V1 killed 6,186 people .
Fortunately for London and the southeast, Hitler didn't have enough V1s to maintain his initial offensive. By the end of August 1944, the assault was visibly tapering off. Yet, almost at once a new danger emerged. It was another of Hitler's "secret" weapons, the V2.
These were real rockets with a range of 225 miles, which fell from 60 to 70 miles high at speeds of 3,600 mph -- faster than the speed of sound. They came in too fast to set off air raid warnings, and the destruction they caused was unprecedented -- an entire block or row of houses could be turned into rubble in an instant, while causing collateral damage in a quarter-mile radius.
The British had no defensive system capable of dealing with these weapons once they were launched; their only hope was to destroy the launch sites. Meanwhile, 36 V2 landed in Britain in September 1944 , 131 in October, 284 in November, 133 in December, 223 in January 1945, 233 in February and 228 in March. On 1 April, the last casualty of Hitler's air war against Britain was killed by a V2 in Orpington, Kent.
Altogether, Hitler's air offensive had killed 60,447 people in the British Isles. Of that 51,509 had fallen victims to conventional bombing, and nearly 9,000 (8,938) to Hitler's "vengeance" weapons, the V1 and V2. Combined the V1s and V2s had managed to damage half of the housing in the British capital. Yet, the vengeance weapons had done little to damage Britain's industrial capacity, much less Britain's ability to wage war. They had, however, greatly strengthened Britain's determination to fight back -- and fostered an attitude that supported, largely without qualms of conscience, the British bombing offensive against Germany.
For the greater part of the war, RAF Bomber Command was viewed by civilians and aircrew alike as the only means of striking at Hitler and paying him for the damage, destruction and misery he had inflicted on British civilians.
they took the war to Hitler.
Their chances of survival were less than fifty percent.
Their average age was 21.
This is the story of just one bomber pilot, his crew and the woman he loved.
It is intended as a tribute to them all.
or Barnes and Noble.
"Where Eagles Never Flew" was the the winner of a Hemingway Award for 20th Century Wartime Fiction and a Maincrest Media Award for Military Fiction. Find out more at: https://crossseaspress.com/where-eagles-never-flew
For more information about all my aviation books visit: https://www.helenapschrader.com/aviation.html
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