Wings by Patrick Bishop

Author:Patrick Bishop [Bishop, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857899811
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd

Chapter 11

Flying Blind

In Churchill’s famous speech of 20 August 1940 there is a passage that no one now remembers. While praising the fighter pilots, he also emphasized that ‘we must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their attacks, often under the heaviest fire, often with serious loss, with deliberate careful discrimination, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power.’

Almost every assertion in this statement was untrue. The RAF’s navigational ability was embryonic and targets were located as much by luck as judgement. The aiming of bombs was rudimentary and the damage they inflicted trifling. Only the parts of the Prime Minister’s speech referring to the regularity of operations and the losses suffered were correct.

For most of its short life, bombing had been the RAF’s raison d’être. When the campaign was finally launched at the start of the Battle of France it was a severe disappointment and continued to be so for another two years. Culpability lay not with the crews but with the aircraft they flew and the navigational devices, bomb sights and bombs available to them. The senior officers who had talked up bombing as a war-winning device must also take some of the blame.

The start of the Blitz generated a hatred of Germany that had previously been latent or absent. On 14 November 1940 the city of Coventry was devastated with more than 40,000 homes destroyed or damaged, 554 people killed and nearly a thousand seriously injured. The attack created an upsurge in popular pressure for retaliation and revenge. Before Coventry there were some – perhaps many – who felt it was unwise to provoke the Germans. Afterwards most shared the view of the young man who told a Mass Observation reporter: ‘We’re fighting gangsters, so we’ve got to be gangsters ourselves. We’ve been gentlemen too long.’1 From now on the bombing of Germany had the backing of the nation, even when everybody knew what that meant for the townsfolk of Cologne, Hamburg and the Ruhr, names that soon became very familiar from the radio and press bulletins.

Bombing also satisfied another need. It showed that Britain could still do something, even when it had no soldiers in the field to face the enemy. Allied armies would later pursue German armies through North Africa, Italy, France and the Lowlands. But for much of the war the Strategic Air Campaign, as it became known, was the only way of striking directly at the enemy’s territory.

It was generally accepted that Germany would have to be defeated at home if the Nazi plague was to be eradicated. Bombing was a good – and for the time being the only – way to start. Churchill summed it up in a phrase: ‘The fighters are our salvation, but the bombers alone provide the means of victory.’

Some of the flood of young men clamouring to join the RAF were glad to be channelled off to Bomber Command.

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