Air Campaign 011 - Battle of Berlin 1943-44. Bomber Harris' Gamble to End the War (2019) COMP.pdf

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C A M P A I G N
A I R
BATTLE OF BERLIN
1943–44
RICHARD WORRALL
|
Bomber Harris’ gamble to end the war
I L LU S T R AT E D B Y G R A H A M T U R N E R
A I R C A M PA I G N
BATTLE OF BERLIN
1943–44
Bomber Harris’ gamble to end the war
RICHARD WORRALL
I LLU STR ATED BY GR AHAM T UR NE R
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHRONOLOGY
ATTACKER’S CAPABILITIES
DEFENDER’S CAPABILITIES
CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVES
THE CAMPAIGN
AFTERMATH AND ANALYSIS
FURTHER READING
INDEX
4
8
11
22
34
46
85
93
95
4
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Air Marshal Sir Arthur
Harris, C-in-C Bomber
Command (February
1942–September 1945).
After leading his force to
successes in 1942, such
as the 1,000 bomber raid
on Cologne, and
throughout 1943 with the
battles of the Ruhr and
Hamburg, Harris’
reputation among the
senior Air Staff lowered
considerably during the
Battle of Berlin. (Photo by
Leonard McCombe/
Picture Post/Hulton
Archive/Getty Images)
From late 1943 into early 1944, a titanic struggle raged in the night skies over Germany
between RAF Bomber Command and the Luftwaffe’s night-fighter squadrons. These battles
were all part of an air campaign, the Battle of Berlin, which had been undertaken by the
Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) Bomber Command Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris
with one simple, ambitious aim in mind: the defeat of the Third Reich. Involving a major
effort by the Royal Air Force over a period of six months, it was designed as the ultimate
application of strategic airpower, in which an enemy was to be eliminated by bombing alone.
The history of Bomber Command has been extensively written about, yet there are
comparatively few accounts that cover the Battle of Berlin as a single episode. This is a
surprising omission, for this was a campaign of massive implications and equally enormous
proportions. It began with a false start, with three attacks in August/September 1943,
before Harris suspended the campaign until the middle of November. After this, it became
a sustained effort, fought in bitter winter weather, in which Bomber Command went to the
German capital a total of 16 times. For aircrew veterans, the struggle against Berlin would
be remembered as an increasingly hard, desperate slog. At the highest level, among Britain’s
senior civilian and military leadership, it became increasingly controversial and divisive.
Indeed, the campaign was as notable for its behind-the-scenes infighting within the Royal
Air Force as it was for its nightly dice with the air defences of the Third Reich.
The Battle of Berlin was the absolute fulfilment of beliefs that Harris, the foremost ‘Bomber
Baron’, had long expressed. Becoming the C-in-C of Bomber Command in February 1942,
his first year would be partially spent explaining that strategic bombing was
the
decisive war-
winning weapon; his second year would be spent proving this notion. In June 1942 Harris
gave a televised talk to
Pathé News
and famously declared:
The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb
everybody else and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and
half a hundred other places they put that rather naive theory into operation. They sowed
5
Air Marshal Sir Richard
Peirse, C-in-C Bomber
Command (October
1940–January 1942). He
was sacked for pushing
ahead with a Berlin
operation on 7/8
November 1941 in bad
weather, which resulted
in heavy aircraft losses.
(Photo by Fred Morley/
Fox Photos/Getty Images)
the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind. Cologne, Lübeck, Rostock – those
are only just the beginning...Now we are beginning to pass to the real offensive. We cannot
send a thousand aircraft a time over Germany every time as yet. But the time will come when
we can do so...There’s a lot of people who say that bombing can never win a war. Well, my
answer to that is that it has never been tried yet. And we shall see.
Behind the belligerent expressions, what Harris was alluding to was that strategic bombing
was in its infancy. It was to be a new way of fighting, a way of avoiding a repeat of the bloody
catastrophe of trench warfare along the Western Front. Therefore, in summer 1943, the
attempt to win the war by destroying Berlin had no precedent to indicate its success, but,
equally, nothing would indicate its ultimate failure either. This was to be the high point of
the war for the ‘Bomber Barons’, yet it would prove to be a watershed: in attempting an
independent way of finishing the war they would in fact finish their force’s role as a purely
strategic bomber force. For after spring 1944 Bomber Command’s efforts became integrated
into the wider efforts of the Allied powers to defeat Nazi Germany on land.
Bomber Command’s campaign against Berlin was to be no ‘clean’ campaign of
progressively degrading an enemy’s air defence assets and key military and industrial targets,
but was instead designed to destroy the many areas of the Greater Berlin region. Aimed at
the civilian population, area bombing’s fundamental intention was to destroy the means
by which they could participate in Germany’s war economy through the destruction of
a city’s public utilities, workers’ housing, transportation, and electrical and gas supplies,
not to mention breaking their will to work. This meant primarily attacking town centres,
not specific industrial suburbs. Area bombing was also designed to divert the efforts of
Germany’s civilian population away from armaments production and towards reconstruction
and rubble clearance, while important war factories, industrial plants and oil refineries would
also be caught up in the general destruction. Consequently, through area bombing, Bomber
Command was aiming to fulfil the Casablanca Directive, the instruction on bombing policy
that had been agreed by the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCOS) at the Casablanca Conference
in January 1943, which stated:

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