Battlefields (2001) s01e03 Episode Script
Bomber
The aerial assault on Dresden in 1945 was the famous climax of the British bombing campaign against Germany, Bomber Command had become an awesome war machine, intent on destroying whole cities and their populations in a single night, But this is not how it was meant to be, The bombers had started the war aiming to hit only military targets, without causing civilian casualties, This is the story of how Bomber Command was forced to reinvent itself and the price that had to be paid in both German civilians and British aircrew, 55,000 members of Bomber Command died between 1939 and 1945, the heaviest loss rate of any single branch of the British armed forces.
Dangerous at the time, controversial ever since, no specific medal was awarded for the bombing campaign, highlighting the ambivalence surrounding the young men who risked their lives nightly, heroes to some, "terror fliers" to others.
I don't believe in hindsight at all.
We did what we did at the time.
It had to be done.
If you dwelt on it on a personal basis, then you couldn't do a job at all.
Up until the Second World War, Britain's bombers had been lulled into a false sense of superiority, They'd mainly flown against undefended targets, In 1939, Bomber Command saw itself at the cutting edge of modern war, the "cavalry of the clouds" who would strike straight at the enemy military machine virtually unopposed but they were in for a terrible shock, Flying by day, the British bombers were an easy target for German defences, When they first encountered enemy fighters, on two raids in December 1939, 21 out of the 36 bombers and their crews failed to return, These loss rates were unsustainably high and daylight raids were immediately abandoned, From now on Bomber Command would fly by night, a task for which it was totally unprepared, It was tough.
We were pioneering.
We were thrown in at the deep end.
Nobody knew, really, what was happening.
We had no sophisticated radar aids.
Our navigation was done by looking over the side of the aircraft to try and see where we were.
If it was ten tenths cloud, that obviously was no good.
Consequently, you finished up miles away from where you intended to be.
At first, difficulties in the air were overshadowed by the dramas unfolding elsewhere in the war, But the British Army's expulsion from Europe in the summer of 1940 left Bomber Command as the only force capable of taking the war directly to Germany, Now the pressure was really on.
The whole country looked to the bombers for success.
Night after night, anything up to 200 planes set out for Nazi Europe, Their targets were precision military and industrial objectives such as oil plants, railway yards, aircraft factories and docks, The industry of the Ruhr Valley was singled out for special attention, Despite the difficulties of night flying, the campaign appeared to start well and the propaganda films proclaimed Bomber Command's success, Yes, it was a smasher.
Right onto it.
Caused a hell of a big fire.
Buckets of smoke.
On the first anniversary of the outbreak of war, Churchill expressed confidence to his Cabinet, saying, "The bombers alone provide the means of victory," Such confidence didn't last, This is the Cabinet Room in Churchill's underground headquarters beneath Whitehall.
By 1941, doubts about how well Bomber Command was really doing had begun to emerge down here.
Germany had not merely failed to collapse.
It was so healthy that it had gone on to invade Russia.
Reconnaissance photographs suggested that much of the bombing propaganda might be rather wide of the mark.
German bombers, on the other hand, were definitely hitting their targets, Britain had suffered terribly in the Blitz and the nation burned, The Government was worried, Germany seemed to be winning this war of aerial destruction, Lord Cherwell, one of Churchill's key scientific advisers, commissioned a civil servant named DM Butt to examine over 600 target photos taken during the summer of 1941, For a campaign supposedly based on precision bombing, his criteria were absurdly loose, Butt counted a dropped bomb as a hit if it fell within five miles of the target, Even by Butt's generous standards of what could be called a hit, the results were truly appalling.
Over Germany as a whole, only one in four planes had hit their targets.
In the crucial Ruhr Valley, centre of German industrial production, that proportion fell to as low as one in fifteen.
All this failure had been at a cost of some 700 British bombers and their crews, The first time I lost a good pal, I went out into York determined to get absolutely blotto.
I can't remember how much I drank but I remained horribly stone-cold sober.
But after that, you just You just said "Well, that's tough" and forgot them.
You had to.
I mean, each aircraft that didn't come back, that was seven people missing.
I mean, the night I was shot down we lost six aircraft from our squadron.
42 people straight out, like that.
It's You can't bother to think about people who went.
Those who survived to fly again each found their own way of warding off fate, We had a mascot, of course, in the aircraft.
I had a personal one.
I had a little a little pink stuffed horse, which I kept in my pocket.
And you found every member of the aircrew had something which they carried.
I even knew one chap who used to carry a pair of his girlfriend's knickers in his pocket.
You never thought you wouldn't come back.
It would never happen to you.
To the other bloke, not you.
You had confidence in the rest of the crew.
And you knew very well that you you would come back.
The findings of the Butt Report forced Churchill to halt all raids on Germany at the end of 1941, Whitehall was in crisis, The one weapon that the British had to take the war to the enemy was virtually useless, As the crews rested, the politicians debated their future, The Army and Navy argued that Bomber Command's men and resources should be redirected to them, and for a time it looked as if they might win the day, But Lord Cherwell had a new role for the "cavalry of the clouds", Cherwell had studied the effects of the Blitz on Britain and concluded that Bomber Command should give up trying to hit the factories and military bases of the German war machine.
Its new target should be the German people.
Bomber Command itself had independently come to the same grim conclusion and was already gearing up for the new offensive, This was area bombing, the priority targeting of whole cities, and specifically their populations, in the hope of breaking German morale, It was the only policy that in 1942 Bomber Command had any hope of delivering, Yet its real aims remained vague, There were those who hoped for a moral collapse, while others believed that German industry would fold as its workforce was progressively dehoused.
Underlying it all was the conviction that something vital would eventually collapse under the sheer weight of bombs, Churchill restarted the bombing campaign early in 1942, Bomber Command would still have to fly occasional precision raids, but area bombing of cities was the real goal, Whatever the target, getting bombs to Germany was a daunting task, You had to be an idiot If you didn't appreciate that it was dangerous to fly in a military aeroplane, apart from operating against an enemy.
If you just take a bomber you're getting into an Aeroplane that's loaded with high-octane aviation fuel, a mass of bombs, plus a lot of oxygen bottles with compressed oxygen in.
The first time you did it you might be a bit apprehensive, but I think my main concern always was "Don't let the other chaps down.
" It was the same with everybody.
Whatever we were thinking we kept to ourselves and we didn't show it.
As well as a new policy, Bomber Command also had a new boss, Arthur Harris was appointed in February 1942, He embodied the latest ideas, believing the bomber to be a blunt weapon of war only suitable for hitting large-scale targets, Eventually he would earn the nickname "Bomber" Harris, There cannot be a more controversial statue in the whole of London, Then, as now, Harris was a man who inspired extremes of emotion.
He had something of the swaggering ruthless manner of an Elizabethan buccaneer, with a dry wit and a very short fuse.
His critics found him unrefined and rude, lacking in sensitivity, impatient, and almost totally inflexible, Yet he was regarded with great affection by his men, who identified with his earthy directness and his iron sense of purpose.
He possessed the unwavering belief that heavy bombing of the enemy's cities could, and would, win the war, Cometh the man, cometh the hour.
Harris was the man with the resolution, the courage, the guts, to drive on and build Bomber Command up into the tremendous force that it eventually became.
He was the best commander that we ever had.
He was a super chap and his first concern, and his last concern, was for us.
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 and London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put that rather naive theory into operation.
They sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.
War in the air was dominated by technology and the Germans had taken the lead in this arms race in which small advances in equipment could make the difference between victory and defeat.
Fortunately for Harris, his force had been given priority for research and development after Dunkirk and the new equipment was just beginning to come on line, It was a bomber that was built for the job.
It was the best bomber we had by a long way.
Beautifully designed.
Most pilots, I think, would tell you that it was a pilot's dream.
It was easy to fly.
Even the engineers could fly it, so it had to be.
Harris called it his jewel in the crown.
His sword, his flaming sword, I think he called it.
The Lancaster was the best of the New generation of four-engined heavy bombers and quickly became the workhorse of Harris's force, It was capable of carrying huge bomb loads, eventually up to ten tons, and taking more enemy fire without falling out of the sky if you could get the fully loaded plane off the ground to start with, On take-off the pilot usually operated the throttles himself and opened them up almost to full power.
The engineer's hand would be behind him and then he would let go.
The engineer pushed it up the rest of the way so that he had both hands to haul the thing off.
It was all brute force and and hard work.
I've spent most of my professional career walking about battlefields, but this is altogether different, What really strikes me is how difficult it would have been to bail out, especially if the aircraft was on fire or out of control.
The main escape hatch is down there by the bomb aimer's position.
It would have been a real scramble to get there, especially for the radio operator and the navigator.
The men sitting up here at least had one another's proximity to sustain them, But they had one very Ionely comrade.
Tail-end Charlie sat uncomfortably in the front line of Harris's war, He wore twice as much clothing as his companions, eventually electrically heated, because the outside temperature often fell to as little as -40 degrees centigrade.
Matters weren't improved by the practice of taking out of one of the Perspex panels, to improve visibility.
The one advantage with being back here is that it was easy to bail out, always assuming that the turrets still worked and that he had time to put on his parachute.
All tail-end Charlie had to do was to spin his turret round and to fall backwards into the abyss.
Armed with his new weapon, and the policy for its use, Harris decided to open his campaign with a soft target.
He explained later, "It seemed to me better to destroy a town of moderate industrial importance "than to fail to destroy a large industrial city.
"I wanted my crews to be well blooded, as they say in fox-hunting, "and to have the taste of success for a change.
" The blooding took place on 28th March 1942, over the ancient coastal city of Lubeck, which had few defences, The wooden buildings burnt easily, destroying most of the old city centre, 312 people were killed and over 15,000 lost their homes, Another similar soft target, Rostock, was next to burn, further stoking the growing reputation and morale of Bomber Command, The main reason why Lubeck and Rostock burnt so brightly was a step forward in the arms race.
Harris had seen the value of fire while watching the Blitz himself, and from now on the bulk of each bomb load consisted not of high explosive but of incendiaries like this, little fire bombs, packed with phosphorus and scattered in their thousands.
Between them, these bombs set fire to buildings and burst inside them to spread the flames ever more widely.
The job now was to get as many as possible to the heart of Germany, The biggest force that Bomber Command had sent out on a single raid so far had been 234, Harris now risked everything on one extraordinary raid, to prove that bombing was THE weapon of war, Hamburg had been the first choice but was cloudy overhead.
The people of Cologne, on the other hand, had enjoyed a fine spring day under clear skies.
Their city had been the second option after Hamburg.
Now it was to be the target of the greatest air raid the world had yet seen.
1,046 bombers would fly together from 52 airfields, It was a huge gamble, If it went wrong, Harris could lose much of his force and Bomber Command would be ruined for good.
The briefing officer said that a very experienced man had done a lot of sums and he had come to the conclusion that there would only be two aircraft destroyed in a collision.
Someone at the back said, "Yes, but which two?" And there was a roar of laughter at that.
Light, medium and heavy bombers, every available plane that could fly did fly, Many novice crews were plucked prematurely from their training units to make up the numbers, Only an hour from base, they approached the continent, It's the stress factor that you can't imagine now, that you had then, crossing the enemy coast.
From then on, you were at risk.
You just kept looking all the time.
Your your head kept going round.
You did it on trains very often, without thinking.
You sort of automatically, if you were drifting away, your head kept going round as though you were doing a search.
The 1,000 bombers were packed together, to burst through the defences and shorten the time over the target, You obviously felt the aircraft fly very, very close.
You felt the draught as they went across the top of you, for instance.
Without actually seeing them, you just felt that an aircraft had flown very, very near to you.
There were three aiming points at Cologne, each a mile apart, to ensure that a huge area of the city would be obliterated, Now the propaganda films had something real to boast about, The aircraft from which these were taken arrived halfway through the attack, The incendiaries have begun their work well, Large fires are burning, It is difficult to judge how great the fires are, taken from 20,000 feet, but the area is about six square miles, You can judge from that how big some of those fires would be on the ground, Hitler, fearing the effect the devastation could have on the nation's morale, ordered Cologne's inhabitants not to mention the raid outside the city, on pain of death, Remarkably, as predicted, only two planes collided, In total, 40 aircraft were lost, We may now shrink from such stark arithmetic but at the time that was not a bad result for German casualties, of 469 killed, over 5,000 injured and more than 45,000 made homeless.
Yet, even then, there were those who argued that such methods were morally unjustifiable.
The strategist Basil Liddell Hart called them barbaric and unskilled, Later, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, argued that there should be a better balance between means employed and purpose achieved, Harris himself was unabashed, When the storm bursts over Germany they will look back to the days of Lubeck and Rostock and Cologne as a man caught in the blasts of a hurricane will look back to the gentle zephyrs of last summer.
There are 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.
Harris now intensified the offensive, sending hundreds of crews out to pound Germany night after night, Each man had to do a standard tour of 30 raids, before time off as an instructor, but, with loss rates at around five per cent per trip, the odds of making it through were hardly favourable, There had never been a campaign quite like it, Aircrew didn't fly every evening and on stand-down nights enjoyed themselves in the pub with games and singsongs, and sometimes with girls who found it hard to say no to a boy who might be dead a day later.
Some crews drank and womanised furiously, driving off to Lincoln, Nottingham or even London for serious binges, From best bitter to fighters and flak, all in a long day's work.
It was a sort of Jekyll and Hyde existence, really.
It was funny to be if you weren't on the night following, to be able to just ride your bike among the fields and think, "It's not many hours since we were in another completely different world altogether.
" You had to have two caps, one to enjoy yourself and one to get serious.
You were As a crew you were like a family.
You were together the whole time, you were very intimate in everything you did.
Each other's life was in your hands, as it were.
You all worked together as a team.
And that's why you survived.
The ultimate test of a crew was in the last few minutes before they dropped their bomb load, The bombing run was one of the only times that you flew straight and level for a set period of time.
It was the most nerve-racking part part of the journey.
To fly towards a target which was literally ringed with cones of searchlights and the flak going up into where they all met, it was quite scary.
You had to forget everything else except that little red spot down on the ground in front of you and don't listen to anything, just ignore everything.
It was just between you and the pilot now.
You just guided the pilot with curt orders, either "Left, left"or"Right"or"Keep the darn thing steady" or something like that until your cross wires hit the actual marker that you were aiming at on the ground.
Then away went the bombs.
Then you have to continue for a further period while the photograph is taken.
An on-board camera photographed where the bombs hit, illuminated by a huge flash charge dropped at the same time, Without this photo, the raid would not count towards the 30-trip tour and the crew would have to go again, It was the most intense period during the whole trip.
It was the ultimate thing that we had to do.
I mean, that was it.
It's what we were there for, to get that particular spot on the map.
Once everything had gone and the flash had gone it was usually the rear gunner who said, "Let's get the hell out of here!" It was a sort of a ritual that you did.
And that was it.
While bombers and bombs had been improving, navigation technology lagged behind, Now the boffins came up with new radio and radar systems to help the bombers find their targets even in bad weather, The crews were improving, too, From August 1942, an elite force called the Pathfinders was sent ahead to lay markers on the target or above the clouds that covered it for the main force to aim at, Some of the Pathfinders used this plane, the DeHavilland Mosquito, perhaps the only bomber to be held in higher affection than the Lancaster.
What was special about the Mosquito is that it was made almost entirely of wood, bonded together in strips using a revolutionary secret glue.
While most of Britain's factories were hard at work making conventional metal bombers the country's furniture and joinery shops could help make the Mosquito, It was just like getting out of a truck into a sports car.
It was gorgeous.
It was fast, manoeuvrable, I mean, good gracious! What could catch them? As well as path-finding, Bomber Command's Mosquitoes specialized in reconnaissance and nuisance raids, High-flying and fast, they suffered few losses unlike the heavy bombers, whose casualties were increasing as the Germans improved their defences, Stretching across northern Germany was now a formidable line of interconnected radar stations, searchlights, flak guns and night-fighters, In most cases we got them by surprise.
We came from the dark below and then if you realise that it is an enemy plane so, as a night-fighter, you had to be very fast, look, see, shoot.
It was within split seconds.
Then get away.
If you could see a fighter first and fire on it first invariably I say invariably, but probably eight times out of ten, it would clear off, it wouldn't attack you because they wanted a sitting duck and they were no more heroes than we were.
If that didn't work, the only option was gut-wrenching aerobatics, The order came from somebody, and it could be from anybody in the crew who spotted the fighter, wherever he was, "corkscrew port" or "starboard, go".
And immediately you went right over, on a wing over, till your wings were almost vertical, and straight down as hard as you could go.
When the airspeed reached somewhere around 350, 400 The wings were supposed to drop off at 300 but they never did.
You rolled off the other way and then climbed as steep as you could up on your tail until you were almost stalling and round again and down again.
So you went through the sky like a corkscrew.
However good the crews were becoming Bomber Command's losses were now surpassing 10,000 men per year, Britain desperately needed another breakthrough in the arms race, The next step forward was simple but ingenious.
Thousands of strips of aluminium foil, Codename Window, were released from bombers.
They were picked up by German radar and fooled it into thinking that the aluminium cloud was another bomber.
Window was simple, cheap to produce and it gave the British a decisive edge, It was first used in July 1943 on Hamburg and the defence was hopelessly confused with a mass of bombers, some real and some illusory, When we got there I couldn't believe what I saw, because the searchlights were aimlessly waffling about.
Some of them were even shining parallel to the ground.
So we knew immediately that this bloomin' simple stuff, Window, was working.
I could see Hamburg, I could see the immense fire, and I also could see, closer to me, two, three, four, five, four-engined planes.
I told my controller, "Please let me go.
" He did not have any reception, he did not have any radar reception.
So I wanted to go there.
"No, you cannot go there, you have to stay here.
" I ask him again.
"Ask Berlin! I see them, I see them.
" Well, I wasn't allowed to go.
All the radars, by all the controllers, including the anti-aircrafts, were seriously jammed by Windows.
With the enemy rendered defenceless, the 800 bombers enjoyed an easy run to the target, The damage was so severe that the Germans coined a new word, firestorm, It was a freak condition caused by the dry summer and the closeness of the buildings, in which a vortex of fire swept the city, annihilating everything in its path, Not only were key industrial targets destroyed but some 30,000 civilians perished, At last, Harris's policy of area bombing had reached its full terrible potential, Albert Speer, the German armaments minister, wrote, "Six more Hamburgs and the war's over," Harris believed that he was bringing Germany to its knees.
His next, and he hoped final target, would be Berlin.
He bragged that once he destroyed the capital of Hitler's 1,000-year Reich, the war would be won.
The battle for Berlin began on 18th November 1943, But it was immediately clear that it was going to be no Hamburg, I think I can say that it was the Berlin ones which were the worst, because of the distance and of the enormity of the target and of the defences.
Berlin is more than 600 miles away from Britain, half as far again as Bomber Command's normal targets, The German defences were also learning how to unscramble the confusion caused by Window, And the winter of 1943-44 was one of the coldest on record, We had icing problems on our aircraft.
Out over the North Sea we were picking up ice.
Once you start to get ice on your wings it gets thicker and thicker.
You can almost see it building.
Once it reaches a certain stage, of course, it destroys the lift on your aircraft.
Down you go.
Those who eventually reached Berlin found that it was the most heavily defended place on earth, Flak towers like this bristled with guns, given radar direction from another tower nearby.
They were virtually indestructible.
This one has survived the bombing, Russian attacks at the war's end and postwar attempts at demolition.
Flak gave a terrifying greeting to the bombers' stream over the German capital.
There was barrage flak over a target, which could hit you or not hit you.
And there was predicted flak.
Now, the predicted flak was connected to their radar, as was their master beam.
They were blue as opposed to the others, which were yellow.
They just went up and stood still.
Then they just flicked straight on to an aircraft.
If that locked on to you, you knew you were in for trouble.
But you cannot fly straight and level for any length of time, covered by searchlights, and get away with it.
You're their target now.
They're rubbing their hands.
Everything is pointing at you now.
The radar's on to you and they can't miss.
You got a small flash.
Not like you see on the movies, a big bang.
A small flash and then the smoke.
But, of course, out of that smoke you've got hundreds of chunks of hot metal, some of which I still have inside me.
In ten seconds you can get cut to ribbons by shrapnel, I can tell you.
That's how we met our demise.
I should imagine that's how everybody who was shot down met their demise or because the aeroplane was totally destroyed.
I've seen them just fall out of the sky.
Great chunk of metal, bits falling off it, and searchlights following it to the ground.
That was the way of things.
The battle of Berlin was turning against the British, Devastation here on the ground was severe, but the weather and the layout of the buildings meant that there was no firestorm.
Although one fifth of Berliners lost their homes, their will was not broken, Far from it, As with Britain during the Blitz, air attack largely stiffened their resolve, Salvation for Harris, and for Bomber Command over Berlin, came from an unlikely quarter.
Early in 1944, Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Europe, was nearly ready.
General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, wanted bomber support.
He pulled Bomber Command off Berlin and sent it to join its American counterpart, the US Army Air Force, over occupied France.
Harris fiercely resisted this move away from Germany, He was convinced that the invasion of Normandy was unnecessary and his men not up to the job of precision support, Harris didn't think we'd be capable of doing it.
It wasn't what heavy bombers were designed for.
In any case, as far as Harris was concerned, German cities were what we were after, not little targets on the ground somewhere else.
But, much to his surprise, we got off very well.
The bombers' main targets were the railways that kept German forces supplied and the guns and radar stations on the coast, which they hit by day with devastating accuracy, Fighters flying from their bases in England kept the German defences at bay, On D-Day itself, June 6th, part of Bomber Command pulverized the landing sites in advance of the armada, Other planes flew diversionary raids to fool the Germans into thinking that the invasion was going to be further up the coast, After D-Day, they were put to the ultimate test, bombing German positions just in front of their own men, We sometimes operated within 800 yards of the forward troops, which is not very much when you're bombing from 10 and 12,000 feet.
We felt sorry for them.
They weren't gonna get bacon and eggs and clean sheets to sleep in.
Bomber Command's contribution to Operation Overlord had been a huge success, After years of trial and error, it had finally become what it was supposed to be, a precision fighting force.
Casualties were down, too, halved since the Battle of Berlin.
The great irony for Bomber Harris was that his force's finest hour came when it was being used in what he regarded as a sideshow.
In September 1944, Bomber Command returned to Harris's control and he resumed his personal crusade, Germany's defences were now crippled by lack of fuel and outgunned by new long-range Allied fighters, In the last three months of 1944, more bombs were dropped than in the whole of 1943, The campaign reached its climax on 13th February 1945 with Dresden, Churchill asked Harris to destroy the city because it lay in the path of the advancing Russians, This would show Stalin that the Western Allies were still vigorously prosecuting the war, In terms of area bombing, it was the perfect raid, Forty square miles of the city blazed in a firestorm that outburned even Hamburg, Some 50,000 people are thought to have been killed, Harris had delivered his terrible whirlwind, Faced with the horrors of Dresden, Churchill now questioned the area-bombing campaign, As the Germans seized the propaganda opportunities of massive civilian casualties, including hospital patients and refugees, he penned an official minute to the Chiefs of Staff.
He wrote "It seems to me that the moment has come "when the question of bombing German cities "simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, "should be reviewed, "The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing," Harris was insulted and his written reply to Churchill questioned the Prime Minister's change of heart, His words demonstrate his extraordinary commitment to total war.
"Attacks on cities are strategically justified "insomuch as they tend to shorten the war "and so preserve the lives of Allied soldiers.
"I personally do not regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany "as worth the bones of one British grenadier," Under pressure from the Chiefs of Staff, Churchill withdrew his original critical minute, but the area-bombing campaign against Germany was over, No one said anything.
I mean, I don't think we ever discussed the raids amongst ourselves.
An odd comment here and there, but I don't think we ever settled down and talked about it.
I think the fact that we'd been there and got back was quite enough.
After the war, Harris was not offered a suitable RAF appointment and left Britain for South Africa, He and his men became and remain the target of fierce criticism concerning the morality of their campaign, We knew we were probably killing a lot of civilians but, I mean, when you've been on the receiving end of a lot of bombs and you've seen fires and people blown to pieces and death and destruction, the feeling was that we've got to give them the same.
You were on your way home, you'd done what you were supposed to do and you never thought about what was happening on the ground.
I mean, if you did and and you thought about it deeply, then you couldn't do the job.
I I know it sounds heartless and cruel, but war is.
There are still dozens of long-abandoned airfields like this with nature gradually reclaiming runway and perimeter track, They provide enduring evidence of the great effort that went into the bombing campaign, but what did it achieve? There's no easy answer, It didn't close down German industry, whose production peaked in 1944, But the bombing did prevent it from rising to even greater heights and forced the diversion of massive military resources to the defence of the Reich, The air offensive also lifted British morale at a time when there was no other way of taking the war to Germany.
It helped pave the way for the Allied invasion of Europe.
Yet the cost was enormous, in both materials and men, 55,000 aircrew died, almost half of those that flew, In weighing success and failure, we sometimes forget that the young men who risked and so often lost their lives did it for us.
Dangerous at the time, controversial ever since, no specific medal was awarded for the bombing campaign, highlighting the ambivalence surrounding the young men who risked their lives nightly, heroes to some, "terror fliers" to others.
I don't believe in hindsight at all.
We did what we did at the time.
It had to be done.
If you dwelt on it on a personal basis, then you couldn't do a job at all.
Up until the Second World War, Britain's bombers had been lulled into a false sense of superiority, They'd mainly flown against undefended targets, In 1939, Bomber Command saw itself at the cutting edge of modern war, the "cavalry of the clouds" who would strike straight at the enemy military machine virtually unopposed but they were in for a terrible shock, Flying by day, the British bombers were an easy target for German defences, When they first encountered enemy fighters, on two raids in December 1939, 21 out of the 36 bombers and their crews failed to return, These loss rates were unsustainably high and daylight raids were immediately abandoned, From now on Bomber Command would fly by night, a task for which it was totally unprepared, It was tough.
We were pioneering.
We were thrown in at the deep end.
Nobody knew, really, what was happening.
We had no sophisticated radar aids.
Our navigation was done by looking over the side of the aircraft to try and see where we were.
If it was ten tenths cloud, that obviously was no good.
Consequently, you finished up miles away from where you intended to be.
At first, difficulties in the air were overshadowed by the dramas unfolding elsewhere in the war, But the British Army's expulsion from Europe in the summer of 1940 left Bomber Command as the only force capable of taking the war directly to Germany, Now the pressure was really on.
The whole country looked to the bombers for success.
Night after night, anything up to 200 planes set out for Nazi Europe, Their targets were precision military and industrial objectives such as oil plants, railway yards, aircraft factories and docks, The industry of the Ruhr Valley was singled out for special attention, Despite the difficulties of night flying, the campaign appeared to start well and the propaganda films proclaimed Bomber Command's success, Yes, it was a smasher.
Right onto it.
Caused a hell of a big fire.
Buckets of smoke.
On the first anniversary of the outbreak of war, Churchill expressed confidence to his Cabinet, saying, "The bombers alone provide the means of victory," Such confidence didn't last, This is the Cabinet Room in Churchill's underground headquarters beneath Whitehall.
By 1941, doubts about how well Bomber Command was really doing had begun to emerge down here.
Germany had not merely failed to collapse.
It was so healthy that it had gone on to invade Russia.
Reconnaissance photographs suggested that much of the bombing propaganda might be rather wide of the mark.
German bombers, on the other hand, were definitely hitting their targets, Britain had suffered terribly in the Blitz and the nation burned, The Government was worried, Germany seemed to be winning this war of aerial destruction, Lord Cherwell, one of Churchill's key scientific advisers, commissioned a civil servant named DM Butt to examine over 600 target photos taken during the summer of 1941, For a campaign supposedly based on precision bombing, his criteria were absurdly loose, Butt counted a dropped bomb as a hit if it fell within five miles of the target, Even by Butt's generous standards of what could be called a hit, the results were truly appalling.
Over Germany as a whole, only one in four planes had hit their targets.
In the crucial Ruhr Valley, centre of German industrial production, that proportion fell to as low as one in fifteen.
All this failure had been at a cost of some 700 British bombers and their crews, The first time I lost a good pal, I went out into York determined to get absolutely blotto.
I can't remember how much I drank but I remained horribly stone-cold sober.
But after that, you just You just said "Well, that's tough" and forgot them.
You had to.
I mean, each aircraft that didn't come back, that was seven people missing.
I mean, the night I was shot down we lost six aircraft from our squadron.
42 people straight out, like that.
It's You can't bother to think about people who went.
Those who survived to fly again each found their own way of warding off fate, We had a mascot, of course, in the aircraft.
I had a personal one.
I had a little a little pink stuffed horse, which I kept in my pocket.
And you found every member of the aircrew had something which they carried.
I even knew one chap who used to carry a pair of his girlfriend's knickers in his pocket.
You never thought you wouldn't come back.
It would never happen to you.
To the other bloke, not you.
You had confidence in the rest of the crew.
And you knew very well that you you would come back.
The findings of the Butt Report forced Churchill to halt all raids on Germany at the end of 1941, Whitehall was in crisis, The one weapon that the British had to take the war to the enemy was virtually useless, As the crews rested, the politicians debated their future, The Army and Navy argued that Bomber Command's men and resources should be redirected to them, and for a time it looked as if they might win the day, But Lord Cherwell had a new role for the "cavalry of the clouds", Cherwell had studied the effects of the Blitz on Britain and concluded that Bomber Command should give up trying to hit the factories and military bases of the German war machine.
Its new target should be the German people.
Bomber Command itself had independently come to the same grim conclusion and was already gearing up for the new offensive, This was area bombing, the priority targeting of whole cities, and specifically their populations, in the hope of breaking German morale, It was the only policy that in 1942 Bomber Command had any hope of delivering, Yet its real aims remained vague, There were those who hoped for a moral collapse, while others believed that German industry would fold as its workforce was progressively dehoused.
Underlying it all was the conviction that something vital would eventually collapse under the sheer weight of bombs, Churchill restarted the bombing campaign early in 1942, Bomber Command would still have to fly occasional precision raids, but area bombing of cities was the real goal, Whatever the target, getting bombs to Germany was a daunting task, You had to be an idiot If you didn't appreciate that it was dangerous to fly in a military aeroplane, apart from operating against an enemy.
If you just take a bomber you're getting into an Aeroplane that's loaded with high-octane aviation fuel, a mass of bombs, plus a lot of oxygen bottles with compressed oxygen in.
The first time you did it you might be a bit apprehensive, but I think my main concern always was "Don't let the other chaps down.
" It was the same with everybody.
Whatever we were thinking we kept to ourselves and we didn't show it.
As well as a new policy, Bomber Command also had a new boss, Arthur Harris was appointed in February 1942, He embodied the latest ideas, believing the bomber to be a blunt weapon of war only suitable for hitting large-scale targets, Eventually he would earn the nickname "Bomber" Harris, There cannot be a more controversial statue in the whole of London, Then, as now, Harris was a man who inspired extremes of emotion.
He had something of the swaggering ruthless manner of an Elizabethan buccaneer, with a dry wit and a very short fuse.
His critics found him unrefined and rude, lacking in sensitivity, impatient, and almost totally inflexible, Yet he was regarded with great affection by his men, who identified with his earthy directness and his iron sense of purpose.
He possessed the unwavering belief that heavy bombing of the enemy's cities could, and would, win the war, Cometh the man, cometh the hour.
Harris was the man with the resolution, the courage, the guts, to drive on and build Bomber Command up into the tremendous force that it eventually became.
He was the best commander that we ever had.
He was a super chap and his first concern, and his last concern, was for us.
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 and London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put that rather naive theory into operation.
They sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.
War in the air was dominated by technology and the Germans had taken the lead in this arms race in which small advances in equipment could make the difference between victory and defeat.
Fortunately for Harris, his force had been given priority for research and development after Dunkirk and the new equipment was just beginning to come on line, It was a bomber that was built for the job.
It was the best bomber we had by a long way.
Beautifully designed.
Most pilots, I think, would tell you that it was a pilot's dream.
It was easy to fly.
Even the engineers could fly it, so it had to be.
Harris called it his jewel in the crown.
His sword, his flaming sword, I think he called it.
The Lancaster was the best of the New generation of four-engined heavy bombers and quickly became the workhorse of Harris's force, It was capable of carrying huge bomb loads, eventually up to ten tons, and taking more enemy fire without falling out of the sky if you could get the fully loaded plane off the ground to start with, On take-off the pilot usually operated the throttles himself and opened them up almost to full power.
The engineer's hand would be behind him and then he would let go.
The engineer pushed it up the rest of the way so that he had both hands to haul the thing off.
It was all brute force and and hard work.
I've spent most of my professional career walking about battlefields, but this is altogether different, What really strikes me is how difficult it would have been to bail out, especially if the aircraft was on fire or out of control.
The main escape hatch is down there by the bomb aimer's position.
It would have been a real scramble to get there, especially for the radio operator and the navigator.
The men sitting up here at least had one another's proximity to sustain them, But they had one very Ionely comrade.
Tail-end Charlie sat uncomfortably in the front line of Harris's war, He wore twice as much clothing as his companions, eventually electrically heated, because the outside temperature often fell to as little as -40 degrees centigrade.
Matters weren't improved by the practice of taking out of one of the Perspex panels, to improve visibility.
The one advantage with being back here is that it was easy to bail out, always assuming that the turrets still worked and that he had time to put on his parachute.
All tail-end Charlie had to do was to spin his turret round and to fall backwards into the abyss.
Armed with his new weapon, and the policy for its use, Harris decided to open his campaign with a soft target.
He explained later, "It seemed to me better to destroy a town of moderate industrial importance "than to fail to destroy a large industrial city.
"I wanted my crews to be well blooded, as they say in fox-hunting, "and to have the taste of success for a change.
" The blooding took place on 28th March 1942, over the ancient coastal city of Lubeck, which had few defences, The wooden buildings burnt easily, destroying most of the old city centre, 312 people were killed and over 15,000 lost their homes, Another similar soft target, Rostock, was next to burn, further stoking the growing reputation and morale of Bomber Command, The main reason why Lubeck and Rostock burnt so brightly was a step forward in the arms race.
Harris had seen the value of fire while watching the Blitz himself, and from now on the bulk of each bomb load consisted not of high explosive but of incendiaries like this, little fire bombs, packed with phosphorus and scattered in their thousands.
Between them, these bombs set fire to buildings and burst inside them to spread the flames ever more widely.
The job now was to get as many as possible to the heart of Germany, The biggest force that Bomber Command had sent out on a single raid so far had been 234, Harris now risked everything on one extraordinary raid, to prove that bombing was THE weapon of war, Hamburg had been the first choice but was cloudy overhead.
The people of Cologne, on the other hand, had enjoyed a fine spring day under clear skies.
Their city had been the second option after Hamburg.
Now it was to be the target of the greatest air raid the world had yet seen.
1,046 bombers would fly together from 52 airfields, It was a huge gamble, If it went wrong, Harris could lose much of his force and Bomber Command would be ruined for good.
The briefing officer said that a very experienced man had done a lot of sums and he had come to the conclusion that there would only be two aircraft destroyed in a collision.
Someone at the back said, "Yes, but which two?" And there was a roar of laughter at that.
Light, medium and heavy bombers, every available plane that could fly did fly, Many novice crews were plucked prematurely from their training units to make up the numbers, Only an hour from base, they approached the continent, It's the stress factor that you can't imagine now, that you had then, crossing the enemy coast.
From then on, you were at risk.
You just kept looking all the time.
Your your head kept going round.
You did it on trains very often, without thinking.
You sort of automatically, if you were drifting away, your head kept going round as though you were doing a search.
The 1,000 bombers were packed together, to burst through the defences and shorten the time over the target, You obviously felt the aircraft fly very, very close.
You felt the draught as they went across the top of you, for instance.
Without actually seeing them, you just felt that an aircraft had flown very, very near to you.
There were three aiming points at Cologne, each a mile apart, to ensure that a huge area of the city would be obliterated, Now the propaganda films had something real to boast about, The aircraft from which these were taken arrived halfway through the attack, The incendiaries have begun their work well, Large fires are burning, It is difficult to judge how great the fires are, taken from 20,000 feet, but the area is about six square miles, You can judge from that how big some of those fires would be on the ground, Hitler, fearing the effect the devastation could have on the nation's morale, ordered Cologne's inhabitants not to mention the raid outside the city, on pain of death, Remarkably, as predicted, only two planes collided, In total, 40 aircraft were lost, We may now shrink from such stark arithmetic but at the time that was not a bad result for German casualties, of 469 killed, over 5,000 injured and more than 45,000 made homeless.
Yet, even then, there were those who argued that such methods were morally unjustifiable.
The strategist Basil Liddell Hart called them barbaric and unskilled, Later, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, argued that there should be a better balance between means employed and purpose achieved, Harris himself was unabashed, When the storm bursts over Germany they will look back to the days of Lubeck and Rostock and Cologne as a man caught in the blasts of a hurricane will look back to the gentle zephyrs of last summer.
There are 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.
Harris now intensified the offensive, sending hundreds of crews out to pound Germany night after night, Each man had to do a standard tour of 30 raids, before time off as an instructor, but, with loss rates at around five per cent per trip, the odds of making it through were hardly favourable, There had never been a campaign quite like it, Aircrew didn't fly every evening and on stand-down nights enjoyed themselves in the pub with games and singsongs, and sometimes with girls who found it hard to say no to a boy who might be dead a day later.
Some crews drank and womanised furiously, driving off to Lincoln, Nottingham or even London for serious binges, From best bitter to fighters and flak, all in a long day's work.
It was a sort of Jekyll and Hyde existence, really.
It was funny to be if you weren't on the night following, to be able to just ride your bike among the fields and think, "It's not many hours since we were in another completely different world altogether.
" You had to have two caps, one to enjoy yourself and one to get serious.
You were As a crew you were like a family.
You were together the whole time, you were very intimate in everything you did.
Each other's life was in your hands, as it were.
You all worked together as a team.
And that's why you survived.
The ultimate test of a crew was in the last few minutes before they dropped their bomb load, The bombing run was one of the only times that you flew straight and level for a set period of time.
It was the most nerve-racking part part of the journey.
To fly towards a target which was literally ringed with cones of searchlights and the flak going up into where they all met, it was quite scary.
You had to forget everything else except that little red spot down on the ground in front of you and don't listen to anything, just ignore everything.
It was just between you and the pilot now.
You just guided the pilot with curt orders, either "Left, left"or"Right"or"Keep the darn thing steady" or something like that until your cross wires hit the actual marker that you were aiming at on the ground.
Then away went the bombs.
Then you have to continue for a further period while the photograph is taken.
An on-board camera photographed where the bombs hit, illuminated by a huge flash charge dropped at the same time, Without this photo, the raid would not count towards the 30-trip tour and the crew would have to go again, It was the most intense period during the whole trip.
It was the ultimate thing that we had to do.
I mean, that was it.
It's what we were there for, to get that particular spot on the map.
Once everything had gone and the flash had gone it was usually the rear gunner who said, "Let's get the hell out of here!" It was a sort of a ritual that you did.
And that was it.
While bombers and bombs had been improving, navigation technology lagged behind, Now the boffins came up with new radio and radar systems to help the bombers find their targets even in bad weather, The crews were improving, too, From August 1942, an elite force called the Pathfinders was sent ahead to lay markers on the target or above the clouds that covered it for the main force to aim at, Some of the Pathfinders used this plane, the DeHavilland Mosquito, perhaps the only bomber to be held in higher affection than the Lancaster.
What was special about the Mosquito is that it was made almost entirely of wood, bonded together in strips using a revolutionary secret glue.
While most of Britain's factories were hard at work making conventional metal bombers the country's furniture and joinery shops could help make the Mosquito, It was just like getting out of a truck into a sports car.
It was gorgeous.
It was fast, manoeuvrable, I mean, good gracious! What could catch them? As well as path-finding, Bomber Command's Mosquitoes specialized in reconnaissance and nuisance raids, High-flying and fast, they suffered few losses unlike the heavy bombers, whose casualties were increasing as the Germans improved their defences, Stretching across northern Germany was now a formidable line of interconnected radar stations, searchlights, flak guns and night-fighters, In most cases we got them by surprise.
We came from the dark below and then if you realise that it is an enemy plane so, as a night-fighter, you had to be very fast, look, see, shoot.
It was within split seconds.
Then get away.
If you could see a fighter first and fire on it first invariably I say invariably, but probably eight times out of ten, it would clear off, it wouldn't attack you because they wanted a sitting duck and they were no more heroes than we were.
If that didn't work, the only option was gut-wrenching aerobatics, The order came from somebody, and it could be from anybody in the crew who spotted the fighter, wherever he was, "corkscrew port" or "starboard, go".
And immediately you went right over, on a wing over, till your wings were almost vertical, and straight down as hard as you could go.
When the airspeed reached somewhere around 350, 400 The wings were supposed to drop off at 300 but they never did.
You rolled off the other way and then climbed as steep as you could up on your tail until you were almost stalling and round again and down again.
So you went through the sky like a corkscrew.
However good the crews were becoming Bomber Command's losses were now surpassing 10,000 men per year, Britain desperately needed another breakthrough in the arms race, The next step forward was simple but ingenious.
Thousands of strips of aluminium foil, Codename Window, were released from bombers.
They were picked up by German radar and fooled it into thinking that the aluminium cloud was another bomber.
Window was simple, cheap to produce and it gave the British a decisive edge, It was first used in July 1943 on Hamburg and the defence was hopelessly confused with a mass of bombers, some real and some illusory, When we got there I couldn't believe what I saw, because the searchlights were aimlessly waffling about.
Some of them were even shining parallel to the ground.
So we knew immediately that this bloomin' simple stuff, Window, was working.
I could see Hamburg, I could see the immense fire, and I also could see, closer to me, two, three, four, five, four-engined planes.
I told my controller, "Please let me go.
" He did not have any reception, he did not have any radar reception.
So I wanted to go there.
"No, you cannot go there, you have to stay here.
" I ask him again.
"Ask Berlin! I see them, I see them.
" Well, I wasn't allowed to go.
All the radars, by all the controllers, including the anti-aircrafts, were seriously jammed by Windows.
With the enemy rendered defenceless, the 800 bombers enjoyed an easy run to the target, The damage was so severe that the Germans coined a new word, firestorm, It was a freak condition caused by the dry summer and the closeness of the buildings, in which a vortex of fire swept the city, annihilating everything in its path, Not only were key industrial targets destroyed but some 30,000 civilians perished, At last, Harris's policy of area bombing had reached its full terrible potential, Albert Speer, the German armaments minister, wrote, "Six more Hamburgs and the war's over," Harris believed that he was bringing Germany to its knees.
His next, and he hoped final target, would be Berlin.
He bragged that once he destroyed the capital of Hitler's 1,000-year Reich, the war would be won.
The battle for Berlin began on 18th November 1943, But it was immediately clear that it was going to be no Hamburg, I think I can say that it was the Berlin ones which were the worst, because of the distance and of the enormity of the target and of the defences.
Berlin is more than 600 miles away from Britain, half as far again as Bomber Command's normal targets, The German defences were also learning how to unscramble the confusion caused by Window, And the winter of 1943-44 was one of the coldest on record, We had icing problems on our aircraft.
Out over the North Sea we were picking up ice.
Once you start to get ice on your wings it gets thicker and thicker.
You can almost see it building.
Once it reaches a certain stage, of course, it destroys the lift on your aircraft.
Down you go.
Those who eventually reached Berlin found that it was the most heavily defended place on earth, Flak towers like this bristled with guns, given radar direction from another tower nearby.
They were virtually indestructible.
This one has survived the bombing, Russian attacks at the war's end and postwar attempts at demolition.
Flak gave a terrifying greeting to the bombers' stream over the German capital.
There was barrage flak over a target, which could hit you or not hit you.
And there was predicted flak.
Now, the predicted flak was connected to their radar, as was their master beam.
They were blue as opposed to the others, which were yellow.
They just went up and stood still.
Then they just flicked straight on to an aircraft.
If that locked on to you, you knew you were in for trouble.
But you cannot fly straight and level for any length of time, covered by searchlights, and get away with it.
You're their target now.
They're rubbing their hands.
Everything is pointing at you now.
The radar's on to you and they can't miss.
You got a small flash.
Not like you see on the movies, a big bang.
A small flash and then the smoke.
But, of course, out of that smoke you've got hundreds of chunks of hot metal, some of which I still have inside me.
In ten seconds you can get cut to ribbons by shrapnel, I can tell you.
That's how we met our demise.
I should imagine that's how everybody who was shot down met their demise or because the aeroplane was totally destroyed.
I've seen them just fall out of the sky.
Great chunk of metal, bits falling off it, and searchlights following it to the ground.
That was the way of things.
The battle of Berlin was turning against the British, Devastation here on the ground was severe, but the weather and the layout of the buildings meant that there was no firestorm.
Although one fifth of Berliners lost their homes, their will was not broken, Far from it, As with Britain during the Blitz, air attack largely stiffened their resolve, Salvation for Harris, and for Bomber Command over Berlin, came from an unlikely quarter.
Early in 1944, Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Europe, was nearly ready.
General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, wanted bomber support.
He pulled Bomber Command off Berlin and sent it to join its American counterpart, the US Army Air Force, over occupied France.
Harris fiercely resisted this move away from Germany, He was convinced that the invasion of Normandy was unnecessary and his men not up to the job of precision support, Harris didn't think we'd be capable of doing it.
It wasn't what heavy bombers were designed for.
In any case, as far as Harris was concerned, German cities were what we were after, not little targets on the ground somewhere else.
But, much to his surprise, we got off very well.
The bombers' main targets were the railways that kept German forces supplied and the guns and radar stations on the coast, which they hit by day with devastating accuracy, Fighters flying from their bases in England kept the German defences at bay, On D-Day itself, June 6th, part of Bomber Command pulverized the landing sites in advance of the armada, Other planes flew diversionary raids to fool the Germans into thinking that the invasion was going to be further up the coast, After D-Day, they were put to the ultimate test, bombing German positions just in front of their own men, We sometimes operated within 800 yards of the forward troops, which is not very much when you're bombing from 10 and 12,000 feet.
We felt sorry for them.
They weren't gonna get bacon and eggs and clean sheets to sleep in.
Bomber Command's contribution to Operation Overlord had been a huge success, After years of trial and error, it had finally become what it was supposed to be, a precision fighting force.
Casualties were down, too, halved since the Battle of Berlin.
The great irony for Bomber Harris was that his force's finest hour came when it was being used in what he regarded as a sideshow.
In September 1944, Bomber Command returned to Harris's control and he resumed his personal crusade, Germany's defences were now crippled by lack of fuel and outgunned by new long-range Allied fighters, In the last three months of 1944, more bombs were dropped than in the whole of 1943, The campaign reached its climax on 13th February 1945 with Dresden, Churchill asked Harris to destroy the city because it lay in the path of the advancing Russians, This would show Stalin that the Western Allies were still vigorously prosecuting the war, In terms of area bombing, it was the perfect raid, Forty square miles of the city blazed in a firestorm that outburned even Hamburg, Some 50,000 people are thought to have been killed, Harris had delivered his terrible whirlwind, Faced with the horrors of Dresden, Churchill now questioned the area-bombing campaign, As the Germans seized the propaganda opportunities of massive civilian casualties, including hospital patients and refugees, he penned an official minute to the Chiefs of Staff.
He wrote "It seems to me that the moment has come "when the question of bombing German cities "simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, "should be reviewed, "The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing," Harris was insulted and his written reply to Churchill questioned the Prime Minister's change of heart, His words demonstrate his extraordinary commitment to total war.
"Attacks on cities are strategically justified "insomuch as they tend to shorten the war "and so preserve the lives of Allied soldiers.
"I personally do not regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany "as worth the bones of one British grenadier," Under pressure from the Chiefs of Staff, Churchill withdrew his original critical minute, but the area-bombing campaign against Germany was over, No one said anything.
I mean, I don't think we ever discussed the raids amongst ourselves.
An odd comment here and there, but I don't think we ever settled down and talked about it.
I think the fact that we'd been there and got back was quite enough.
After the war, Harris was not offered a suitable RAF appointment and left Britain for South Africa, He and his men became and remain the target of fierce criticism concerning the morality of their campaign, We knew we were probably killing a lot of civilians but, I mean, when you've been on the receiving end of a lot of bombs and you've seen fires and people blown to pieces and death and destruction, the feeling was that we've got to give them the same.
You were on your way home, you'd done what you were supposed to do and you never thought about what was happening on the ground.
I mean, if you did and and you thought about it deeply, then you couldn't do the job.
I I know it sounds heartless and cruel, but war is.
There are still dozens of long-abandoned airfields like this with nature gradually reclaiming runway and perimeter track, They provide enduring evidence of the great effort that went into the bombing campaign, but what did it achieve? There's no easy answer, It didn't close down German industry, whose production peaked in 1944, But the bombing did prevent it from rising to even greater heights and forced the diversion of massive military resources to the defence of the Reich, The air offensive also lifted British morale at a time when there was no other way of taking the war to Germany.
It helped pave the way for the Allied invasion of Europe.
Yet the cost was enormous, in both materials and men, 55,000 aircrew died, almost half of those that flew, In weighing success and failure, we sometimes forget that the young men who risked and so often lost their lives did it for us.