Group Captain John 'Joe' Collier DSO, DFC and Bar: The Authorised Biography of the Bomber Commander, Air War and SOE Strategist and Dambuster Planner by Sam Gooch

Author:Sam Gooch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / World War II
ISBN: 9781473850996
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2015-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

This mixed success was followed by 1,000 USAAF planes ‘and practically every fragmentation bomb they had left in this country’ (reckoned Bufton), being dropped, triggering General Patton’s sweeping advance from St Lo to cut off the Cherbourg Peninsula. Subsequently heavy bombers were used to pulverize the German garrisons holding out in French ports stranded by the Allied advance and, claimed Bufton: ‘After one saturation bombing raid these garrisons would surrender without casualty to our troops.’

For John Collier these ‘immense displays of air power’ gave ‘great moral uplift… to our armies’ and ‘despair… to the enemy troops’. The awesome power of OBOE Box bombing achieved, in a confined area, what Harris had grandly foretold for Germany as a whole: a vengeful scourging from the skies. Also, rather disturbingly, it seems like a foretaste of modern warfare’s ‘shock and awe’.

The Warsaw Uprising

While the RAF and USAAF were ‘causing hell’ in Germany and enabling the Allied armies to break out from Normandy, on the Eastern Front the rapid advance of the Red Army brought them to within sight of Warsaw. On 1 August 1944 the Polish Home Army rose up against the German occupiers, but the Russians, who had been checked by fresh German divisions, were content to sit on the east bank of the Vistula and regroup. They did not want to get involved in street fighting, Stalingrad-style, and had problems of supply after their 450-mile dash. During the two months of the Warsaw Uprising they did not make even a token move to assist this non-Communist revolt, which can be ascribed to some extent to these practical difficulties, but more plausibly to Stalin’s cynical calculation, especially as Radio Moscow had initially called on the citizens of Warsaw to rise up. For their part, since the discovery in April 1943 of the 4,000 murdered Polish officers in Katyn Forest, the Polish government-in-exile in London had had nothing to do with the Soviets, so co-operation at the highest level was non-existent.

John Collier and his colleagues followed events, and what he described as ‘one of the most tragic, but heroic and hopeless incidents in the war’, and agonized over how they could assist the patriotic Poles. He revisited the fraught discussions in B Ops 1 in his memoir:

It was not long before we received the first requests for aid. Air supply of arms was the main call, and desperate the call. The texts of the [radio] messages were passed on to us, with instructions to study the problem and advise as to what help could be given. Specific dropping areas were described in the messages passed from Warsaw, and we hastened to try to identify them. This proved no easy matter for the directions were not clear, but the mention of a large wood adjoining the city was the chief guide. Warsaw lay some nine hundred miles in direct flight from England and was well out of the range of all but our latest heavy bombers. The C-in-C Bomber Command said that even so

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