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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is an inadequate word to describe Harris’s style of command. He considered himself to have been entrusted with a vast responsibility, and resisted any interference, criticism or even interrogation about his manner of fulfilling this. He regarded with contempt the Directorate of Bomber Operations, a cell within the Air Ministry which provided Portal with in-house advice that often ran counter to the convictions of Harris and his staff, few of whom dared to think for themselves, far less speak out. He especially loathed Gp. Capt. Syd Bufton, who had successfully championed the 1942 creation of an elite Pathfinder force – what became Bomber Command’s No. 8 Group – against the opposition of the C-in-C. ‘Morning, Bufton,’ he once greeted that officer on arriving at the Air Ministry for a meeting. ‘And what have you done to impede the war effort today?’

      Among the terms of abuse Harris heaped upon his critics, that of ‘panacea merchant’ was intended to be the rudest, embracing Bufton, sometimes Portal, even the prime minister. The words meant that a given individual was advocating means of defeating the Axis, or more especially of bombing Germany, which did not require the systematic demolition of its urban centres. The relationship between Harris and Portal was extraordinary. Bomber Command’s C-in-C frequently defied direct instructions from the Air Ministry, and sometimes from Portal himself, to divert aircraft from attacking cities towards alternative objectives, of which dams came to be among the most contemptuously regarded, alongside ball-bearing factories, V-weapon sites, French railways, synthetic-oil plants, aircraft factories and U-Boat pens.

      The head of the RAF was subjected to barrages of invective from his nominal subordinate, to which he was often driven to respond in the language of a headmaster rebuking an errant pupil. In April 1943 there was a characteristic Harris explosion, about a pamphlet circulating widely in British cities and allegedly also at some bomber stations, headed ‘STOP BOMBING CIVILIANS’, together with a demand from the C-in-C for the identification and indictment for treason of its authors, essentially for highlighting inconvenient truths.

      Nobody in high places was sufficiently assured of the superior merit of any alternative strategy, or of any more effective commander at High Wycombe, to remove Harris. Later in the war, extraordinary though it may seem when hundreds of bombers continued to fly forth nightly to broadcast death and destruction, the prime minister lost interest in the air offensive: it is striking how little mention Bomber Command receives in the final volumes of Churchill’s memoirs. Once the great land campaigns got under way, armies and the fate of nations entirely eclipsed air forces as the focus of his attention. In the early months of 1943, however, Harris was near the zenith of his fame and importance. He was playing a role more conspicuous than that of any other British commander towards encompassing the destruction of Nazism. Without Harris, without Bomber Command, until June 1944 there would have been only Gen. Sir Bernard Montgomery and his Eighth Army, the North African and thereafter Italian ‘sideshows’.

      In the event, no ‘combined’ offensive took place; instead, there was a competition between the US and British air forces. Sir Arthur Harris paid mere lip service to Casablanca’s emphasis on refined targeting. His aircraft continued to heap fire and destruction on Germany’s cities by night, while in daylight the USAAF claimed to pursue precision bombing of identified weak points in the Nazi war economy. Because, in reality, American bombing proved highly imprecise, especially in poor weather, hapless German civilians saw little distinction between the rival strategies. Moreover, intelligence about enemy industry remained a weakness of the strategic air offensive from beginning to end.

      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.