Chastise: The Dambusters Story 1943. Max Hastings. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Max Hastings
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Жанр произведения: Историческая литература
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780008280543
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viewed soldiers with the disdain due to their serial record of defeats.

      Harris waged a further ongoing struggle with the Air Ministry, of which much would be seen in the debate about Germany’s dams. The C-in-C of Bomber Command was an elemental force, single-minded in his conviction that he, and he alone, could contrive the defeat of Nazism through the systematic, progressive destruction of Germany’s cities. Alan Brooke, chief of the British Army, recorded characteristic Harris testimony at a chiefs of staff meeting: ‘According to him the only reason why the Russian army has succeeded in advancing is due to the results of the bomber offensive! According to him … we are all preventing him from winning the war. If Bomber Command was left to itself it would make much shorter work of it all!’

      Though Harris became the foremost exponent of ‘area bombing’, which has ever since been inseparably identified with his name, he was not its begetter, merely its obsessive implementer. It was widely believed, especially by soldiers and sailors, that Bomber Command’s C-in-C achieved an intimacy with Churchill, by exploiting the proximity of Chequers to his headquarters at High Wycombe, to secure support for his purposes. This view seems unfounded. The prime minister after the war described the airman as ‘a considerable commander’. He rightly judged that Harris instilled in the bomber offensive a dynamic, a sense of purpose, which it had previously lacked. He valued the airman’s skilful exploitation of public relations, conspicuously manifested in his May–June 1942 ‘Thousand Bomber raids’, of which the most famous, or notorious, was directed against Cologne.

      He experienced a lunatic moment in January 1943, when he became so incensed by the incidence of venereal disease among aircrew that he issued an edict, without consultation, that every diagnosed sufferer should be obliged to restart from scratch his tour of thirty ‘trips’ to Germany. This monstrous threat, rooted in a notion that shirkers were inviting infection in order to escape from operations, was withdrawn only in June, following the intervention of Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air, who overruled the C-in-C.

      Nonetheless, at a time when many others to whom Churchill entrusted high commands – for instance Dill, Wavell, Auchinleck – had proved weak vessels, despite their impeccable manners, Harris, a four-letter man in the eyes of most of his peers, possessed qualities that the prime minister valued. He said long afterwards of Bomber Command’s chieftain, in conversation with his last private secretary: ‘I admired his determination and his technical ability. He was very determined and very persuasive on his own theme. And the Prof. [Lord Cherwell] backed him up. You must remember that for a long time we had no other means than Bomber Command of hitting back. The public demanded action and rejoiced at our counter-blows at German cities after Coventry and so many other towns … Large numbers of German aircraft and vast resources of manpower and material were tied up in their air defence.’

      Instead, in 1938 he married another very young woman, twenty-three-year-old Therese Hearne, a strong-minded Catholic always known as Jill, who gave birth to a daughter, Jackie, the following year. Thus, through the years during which Harris directed Britain’s bomber offensive from his High Wycombe headquarters, at his official residence in nearby Springfield House a wife more than twenty years his junior entertained a procession of Allied warlords while rearing a small child.

      During the year since the new C-in-C assumed direction of Britain’s strategic air offensive, he had transformed Bomber Command from a transport service dumping ordnance almost indiscriminately around the German countryside into a serious weapon of war. Sceptics, some of them within the RAF, sustained doubts about whether burning cities was doing anything like as much as Harris claimed to advance Allied victory. Sir Wilfred Freeman, Portal’s able vice-chief, wrote to the CAS on 16 September 1942 deploring the grossly exaggerated claims made by some commanders: ‘in their efforts to attract the limelight, they sometimes exaggerate and even falsify facts. The worst offender is C-in-C Bomber Command.’

      Nonetheless, the RAF’s publicity machine made much of ‘Bomber’ Harris, as he was nicknamed by the press, and of the devastation that his aircraft inflicted nightly upon Germany. In 1940 Bomber Command dropped just 13,033 tons of bombs on enemy territory; in 1941, 31,704 tons. Thereafter, under Harris’s command, in 1942, 45,561 tons fell; in 1943, 157,457 tons; in 1944, 525,718 tons. By the war’s end, Bomber Command was capable of raining upon Hitler’s people in a single twenty-four-hour period as many bombs as the Luftwaffe dropped