European Aviation History

 No one was more closely associated with the RAF's bomber offensive than Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris. He is still widely known as "Bomber Harris" and he headed Bomber Command from February 1942 until the end of the war. Although hardly alone responsible for the RAF's bomber strategy, Harris was an enthusiastic and unapologetic advocate of area bombing. His reputation suffered in the post-war world, however, and he was far from popular with his crews. Below a closer look. Harris will be forever associated with the bombing campaign he masterminded, lead and furiously defended to the end of his days. However, strategic bombing was not invented by Harris and despite what its detractors allege, it was far from useless. It was the Second Front the Soviets demanded. It did degrade Germany's ability to wage war. It enabled the Allies to attain air superiority during the land offensive from June 1944 to May 1945. It helped shorten the war and so saved uncounted li...

After the attack on the Ruhr Dams, the second most famous achievement of 617 Squadron was the probably sinking of the German Battleship Tirpitz. By the time 617 was tasked with her destruction, she had withstood more than 30 other attacks by conventional bombers, dive-bombers, torpedo planes, and mini-submarines. But 617 Squadron also found the Tirpitz a tough nut to crack. It took them three tries.    The Tirpitz was the terror of the Royal Navy because she was the largest battleship ever launched by a European power. She possessed tremendous firepower in eight 15-inch, twelve 6-inch, 16 4-inch and 28 smaller calibre guns. Despite being heavily armored, she had a top speed of 30 knots -- faster than any British battleship. Clearly, if she got in among the convoys, she would wreck havoc, and the Royal Navy were determined to prevent that. From 1942 onwards, the Tirpitz was based in Norway, threatening the convoys that kept the Soviet Union supplied with the munitions and equi...

  617 Squadron took on the toughest targets -- the Ruhr Dams, the battleship Tirpitz, U-boat pens, the V1 and V2 launch sites -- yet in two years of operation only one target killed the squadron's CO. It might just have been bad luck, of course, but on 15 September 1943 an attack on this target resulted in the loss of six of the nine aircraft sent against it. At 62%, this represented the highest percentage loss of any 617 operation.  It was the Dortmund-Ems Canal.   The Dortmund-Ems Canal -- what the Germans call the Mittelland Kanal -- was a 160-mile-long  infrastructure link between the ports of the Baltic and North Seas and the industrial heart of German. The barges that traveled sedately upon its waters carried enormous quantities of coal and iron ore from the East, including from Poland and Sweden, to the steel plants and foundries of the Ruhr. It also transported finished arms and ammunition to the Eastern Front and prefabricated parts for U-boats being assembl...

Despite routinely being accused of doing only "area bombing" one of the most precise -- and arguably the most effective RAF raid of WWII -- was the RAF attack of 16/17 May 1943 on the Ruhr Dams. The raid was immortalized in the post-war film "The Dam Busters."   It all started with Barnes Wallis, an innovative engineer. At the outbreak of the war, Wallis was already 52 and recognized as one of the leading aircraft designers of his generation, but he found himself wondering what he -- as an engineer -- could do to shorten a war that he knew would be horrible. Freed from work on any specific project, he started to experiment with a variety of ideas. No longer tied to government specifications, his imagination took flight, and while many of his ideas were dismissed by contemporaries as impractical if not ridiculous, Wallis' philosophy was to see criticism as a stimulus to keep perfecting an idea. (Below Barnes Wallis) He also spent time studying the industrial ...

It has become a cliche to claim that the RAF conducted "area bombing" at night and the USAF conducted "precision bombing" by daylight. As with most cliches, there is a kernel of truth in it, but it is also a gross oversimplification. It is certainly true that after taking over as C-in-C of Bomber Command, Air Marshal "Bomber" Harris embraced the idea of whole-scale destruction and scorned most efforts to attack specific targets as pointless. However, it is wrong to claim that the RAF as a whole never attempted or achieved precision.  For a start, the RAF began the war with a doctrine of strategic bombing that was not materially different from that of the USAAF. Furthermore the crews -- and the public -- were religiously assured that all targets were "legitimate military targets" and that the objective in all bombing was to obtain the greatest possible accuracy and minimize collateral civilian damage. Indeed, the RAF's failure to achieve the a...

  Based on aerial reconnaissance following 617's first assault, British intelligence wrongly concluded that the German Battleship Tirpitz was still serviceable. Only after the war did the British learn that 617's first raid had in fact rendered the great battleship incapable of conducting operations. On the misconception that the Tirpitz might yet sally forth to wreck havoc on the convoys bound for Russia, 617 was again ordered to "sink the Tirpitz ."   Meanwhile, under cover of low cloud, the Germans towed the Tirpitz down to Altenfjord, where the Germans moored it as a floating gun-battery to deter allied landings. Discovered there by British reconnaissance aircraft shortly after Oct 15, the move seemed to support the thesis that the ship was still seaworthy, i.e. that it had not been seriously damaged in the earlier raid. The move, however, put the German battleship with in range of Lancasters operating from the tip of Scotland --provided they had new, more powerf...