Harris acknowledged the many dissenters: those who believed it was morally wrong to bomb strategic cities rather than focus on purely industrial and military targets. He was also acutely aware of the toll his strategy was taking on his young crews. But he knew too that since the Luftwaffe had killed thousands of civilians and destroyed vast swathes of London, Coventry, Liverpool and Bristol, the opposition to area bombing had become less strident.
Even though Harris’s tactics were by no means universally popular, and despite the enormous losses they were suffering on a daily basis, the remarkable young men whose duty it was to carry out his orders had great faith in their Commander-in-Chief. To them he was always ‘Butch’ and never ‘Bomber’ Harris. Dick Starkey, a Lancaster pilot, remembers a lecture he gave at a local school after the war: ‘One of the children asked me if I regretted what I did. I said that I was proud of my contribution. I regret the death and the suffering, but I’m not sorry. I think the criticism of Bomber Command is terrible, because we were doing a job that had to be done at the time and there was nobody else to do it. We were fighting the Nazi enemy when no one else could.’6
Ever since Dunkirk, aerial bombardment was one of the ways Britain could signal to its allies and its own citizens that she intended to stay in the fight and carry it to the Germans. But by the winter of 1943 Harris was no longer interested in sending signals. He finally had the technology and fire-power at his disposal that he believed would bring hostilities to an end, in the shape of an aircraft designed to transport vast amounts of explosive over long distances while offering its crew hitherto unavailable levels of protection: the Avro Lancaster.
In 1942 Harris had inherited 400 front-line bombers, nowhere near enough to carry out his planned offensive. He increased production immediately and within a few months could call on a new range of four-engine heavy bombers such as the Stirling and Halifax, with a far greater range and ordinance than their twin-engine predecessors. But it was the arrival of the Lancaster that convinced Harris he could now press for a decisive victory.
The Lancaster boasted a 33-foot bomb bay which enabled it to carry the 4,000-pound ‘cookie’ bomb, capable of creating a shockwave that could devastate large areas of buildings. With further modifications, it would hold the 12,000-pound ‘Tallboy’, capable of penetrating 100 feet into the ground before exploding, and, by the latter stages of the war, the 22,000-pound Grand Slam, the most destructive weapon available before the invention of the atomic bomb.
The Stirling, in the process of being phased out of frontline service, could only carry a 14,000-pound bomb load. After overcoming some early concerns about its performance, the destructive power of the Halifax was still hampered by its sectional bomb bay. And despite its huge payload, the Lancaster handled much more easily than its unwieldy predecessors, a telling advantage over heavily defended targets or when evading night fighters, especially for inexperienced personnel.
Lancaster crews felt they could rely upon their aircraft more than any other. The Mark I and Mark II Halifax had a tendency to go into uncontrollable spins at low speeds through a lack of rudder response, and though the Mark III was a fine aircraft, much loved by those who flew it, a new Lancaster was definitely a step up. The Lancaster offered reassurance. ‘It was a beautiful aircraft to fly,’ Dick Starkey says, ‘a pilot’s aeroplane. It handled very lightly, could reach 22,000 feet fully loaded, and even maintain height on two engines … It had no vices, except for a slight swing to port on take-off, and was nearly impossible to stall.’
Rusty Waughman, a pilot with 101 Squadron, called the aircraft the Queen of the Sky. ‘If the Lanc looked somewhat menacing and clumsy on the ground, she was quite a different picture in the air. Compared with modern machines she was rather crude, but efficiently laid out … Aircrew, particularly the pilots, had every faith in the Lanc; very seldom did anything go drastically wrong due to faulty design. In fact, she was often flown in states of damage that were, I’m sure, beyond imaginable limits.’7
They were also equipped with the latest navigational aids, essential for deep, penetrative raids over heavily guarded German territory. Before the introduction of the Ground Electronics Engineering (GEE) system, navigators had to depend on ‘dead reckoning’ – following a set course and compensating periodically for the disrupting effect of the wind. But as wind speed and direction were often inaccurately forecast and fluctuated wildly during an operation, they regularly found themselves some distance from their intended target. The GEE system picked up electronic signals pulsed from England and displayed them on a small, black cathode-ray screen on the navigator’s table. Though the curvature of the earth rendered the reading less accurate the further they got from base, interpreting these blips and entering them into specially created GEE charts allowed a navigator to fix their current position with greater accuracy.
At the briefing before his first operational flight with XV Squadron Mildenhall, Chick Chandler was told to ‘throw out Window one-a-minute, then two-a-minute 40 miles from the target’. When he asked what ‘Window’ was, one of his engineers showed him the thin strips of foil designed to ‘bugger up the enemy’s radar’.8 The metallic strips were designed to reflect German radar signals, disrupting the picture the operators received on their screens and making the bombers more difficult to track.
Once his Lancaster was high above the channel en route to Mannheim, Chick started to carry out what he took to be his instructions, but didn’t realise that ‘one a minute’ meant one bundle. Instead he threw out one solitary strip – not even enough to register a single blip on the enemy screens, let alone turn them into an incomprehensible snowstorm, under cover of which the bomber stream could approach the target without detection.
And in order to concentrate the maximum amount of firepower in the shortest possible time, the bombers would leave their bases across eastern England and form up over the North Sea. They were each given a height and a time slot designed to minimise the chances of collision. The entire stream, once assembled, could be anything up to 70 miles long.
As January 1944 dawned, despite only having completed a third of their tour, flight engineer Jack Watson’s crew was the second most experienced on XII Squadron. This was a bad omen: on recent raids the crew with the second highest number of ops to their name had gone missing. This sense of foreboding might explain why, as the snow crunched beneath Jack’s feet on his way to a briefing in Wickenby for a raid on Stuttgart, he experienced ‘the most uncanny feeling I have ever experienced in my life. I knew that if we didn’t leave XII Squadron, we wouldn’t survive. We went into the briefing, we did the trip, we got back and the next morning we were called into the flight office. The Flight Commander said, “You have got two options: you can either volunteer for the Pathfinder Force or we will send you,” so we volunteered. From then on I was quite convinced that all the time I was with that crew we were safe.’9
To enhance the accuracy of the bomber stream, a special force had been created to find and mark the target. Manned by crews of the calibre of Jack Watson’s, the Pathfinders flew ahead of the main force in Lancasters and Mosquitoes. Their very existence was initially a source of tension within Bomber Command. Harris feared that they would drain his squadrons of their best men, and thus also drain their morale – and he believed his bombers were accurate enough without them. His protests, however, failed to dent the determination of the forthright Australian, Air Vice Marshal Donald Bennett.
Bennett was a former operational pilot who had been shot down while trying to bomb the Tirpitz, the iconic German warship, but had escaped from Norway and returned to England to continue his war. His desire to be in the thick of it never deserted him. Even when he was appointed the Pathfinder chief, he sometimes waved his crews off and then took to the skies himself to orbit the target. When they returned from a raid to be debriefed, he would be waiting for them, often more aware of what had happened than they were.
Bennett’s candour was as renowned as his brilliance as a pilot and navigator. Harris, who knew a thing or two about blunt speaking, once said of the Australian: ‘[He] could not suffer fools gladly, and by his own high standards there had been