In February 1943, Harris stood on the brink of a new campaign to deploy almost the entire resources of his Command against the industrial cities of north-west Germany, which would become known as the Battle of the Ruhr. The enthusiasm of others – within the Ministry of Economic Warfare, the Air Ministry, the Admiralty and even Downing Street – for more selective targeting roused his scorn. Portal, Bufton and some other airmen regarded extremely seriously the Casablanca Directive: they strove to identify and attack choke points in the German industrial machine. Any such proposals, however, encountered savage resistance from Harris’s headquarters at High Wycombe to the diversion of aircraft from ‘area bombing’. Until the last weeks before Guy Gibson and his men set forth on what would become the most applauded operation of Bomber Command’s five-year campaign, its commander-in-chief wanted ‘his’ aircraft, ‘his’ offensive, to have nothing to do with it.
3 THE ‘PANACEA MERCHANTS’
As far back as October 1937, RAF planners identified Germany’s water resources – dams and reservoirs – as a vulnerability in the Nazi industrial machine. Bomber Command initially focused on nineteen Ruhr power stations and twenty-six coking plants, which its staff believed could be destroyed by three thousand bombing sorties. This would allegedly bring Nazi war production to a standstill, in return for an anticipated loss of 176 British aircraft. Then the Air Targets Sub-Committee of Major Desmond Morton’s Industrial Intelligence Centre took a hand, highlighting the dependence of electricity generation, mining and coking activities upon water supply. Morton’s cell urged that the mere breaching of two dams, the Möhne and the nearby Sorpe, could achieve the desired outcome, a prospective war-winner, for far less expenditure of effort.
It was meaningless, however, for planners to focus upon any target system unless means existed to attack it, which they certainly then did not. Destruction of the Möhne, composed of almost a million cubic feet of masonry, was admitted to be ‘highly problematic’ at a time when the RAF’s heaviest aircraft, the Heyford, carried only 500-lb bombs. In March 1938 it was agreed that the significance of the dams made it worth exploring ‘newly-developed weapons’ with which they might be attacked. But, as the engineer Barnes Wallis often later complained, while the RAF was doctrinally committed to strategic bombing, its planners gave negligible attention to the ballistic challenges involved in the demolition of large structures.
Britain’s airmen were imbued with a faith that the mere fact of subjecting an enemy nation to bombing would cause its people, and even perhaps its industrial plant, to crumble before them. ‘In air operations against production,’ wrote Gp. Capt. John Slessor, a future head of the RAF, in 1936, ‘the weight of attack will invariably fall upon a vitally important, and not by nature very amenable, section of the community – the industrial workers, whose morale and sticking power cannot be expected to equal that of the disciplined soldier.’ The intention of Britain’s airmen to play a decisive and independent role in achieving victory over Germany relied for fulfilment more on expectations of the havoc that terrorisation of civilians would wreak than on any rational analysis of the weight of attack necessary to cripple the Nazi industrial machine.
In the cases of the Möhne and the Sorpe, experts at the Air Ministry’s research department at Woolwich warned: ‘If the policy to attack dams is accepted, the [Ordnance] Committee are of the opinion that the development of a propelled piercing bomb of high capacity would be essential to ensure the requisite velocity and flight … Even then its success would be highly problematical.’ Subsequent debate concluded that, given the low standard of aiming accuracy achieved by RAF bomber pilots in peacetime, before they were even exposed to enemy fire, a successful attack on Germany’s dams was impracticable.
Yet British planners continued to nurse this dream, which was mirrored by a German nightmare. On the eve of war, 29 August 1939, Justus Dillgardt, chairman of the Ruhrtalsperenverein organisation responsible for regional water resources, suggested that a succession of bombs exploded sub-aquatically within a hundred feet of the base of his dams, the effects multiplied by the water mass – a scientific phenomenon identified by the British only three years later – might prompt dam collapses. If the Möhne was breached, Dillgardt warned that ‘this entire industrial area … would be completely paralysed … not only would the population of four to five millions be without water, but all mines and coking plants would suddenly cease work owing to lack of industrial water supply’.
Through the early war years, both the Air Staff and British economic warfare researchers sustained enthusiasm for striking at the enemy’s water resources. The Ruhr and its industries accounted for a quarter of the Reich’s entire consumption, much of this derived from the Möhne reservoir. The Air Targets Sub-Committee was told that its destruction would create ‘enormous damage’, affecting hydro-generating stations. The ‘low-lying Ruhr valley would be flooded, so that railways, important bridges, pumping stations and industrial chemical plants would be rendered inoperative’.
In June 1940, amid the crisis of the fall of France, Bomber Command groped for means of striking back at the victorious Nazis. Its senior air staff officer, Gp. Capt. Norman Bottomley, again urged the merit of breaching enemy dams. On 3 July, Portal, then Bomber Command’s C-in-C, wrote to the Air Ministry pinpointing a key target. Surely, he said, ‘the time has arrived when we should make arrangements for the destruction of the Möhne Dam … I am given to understand that almost all the industrial activity of the Ruhr depends upon [it].’ He suggested a possible torpedo attack by Hampden bombers, or high-level bombing attack against the ‘dry’ side of the Möhne’s wall.
But what realistic prospect could there be of such an operation’s success? Throughout the wars of the twentieth century, again and again it was shown that strategy must follow technology, and also required mass, whether in the matter of landing-craft for amphibious operations; radar to negate prime minister Stanley Baldwin’s warning – correct when it was delivered in 1932 – that ‘the bomber will always get through’; or attacks on German dams. It was useless to identify a purpose unless means to fulfil it existed, or might be created, as they certainly could not have been in 1940, when Bomber Command was weak, and Britain’s war effort was focused upon averting defeat.
The weapons available to pursue the airmen’s ambitions remained inadequate in quality as well as quantity. The Hampden bombers mentioned by Portal could carry nothing like heavy enough ordnance to dent, far less breach, the Möhne. A December 1940 study of German bombing of the UK concluded, a trifle ungrammatically: ‘comparison of the Results … with that obtained by [RAF] General Purpose bombs against similar enemy targets left no doubt as to the inefficiency of our bombs’. GP bombs contained too little explosive, yet until the end of the war Britain’s airmen continued to risk and sacrifice their lives to drop more than half a million of them. The 4,000-lb HC – High-Capacity – bombs introduced in 1941, and known to aircrew as ‘cookies’, were relatively efficient wreckers of urban areas: sixty-eight thousand were dropped in the course of the offensive. They were useless, however, against such huge structures as dams.
It was noted that during the Spanish Civil War, Nationalist forces with direct access to the Ordunte and Burguillo dams had failed in attempts to destroy them, using charges laid by hand. Winston Churchill urged the American people: ‘Give us the tools and we will finish the job.’ Where, now, were to be found tools such as might collapse the enemy’s dams? The Deputy Chief of Air Staff responded to Portal’s proposal to target the Möhne that to breach its concrete mass would require dropping a barrage of a hundred mines on the reservoir side, together with a huge bomb exploded on the ‘dry’ side. ‘The practical