'Tonight you are going to the Big City. You will have the opportunity to light a fire in the belly of the enemy that will burn his black heart out.' The message from Commander-in-Chief of RAF Bomber Command Sir Arthur Harris to the men who were to fight the Battle of Berlin was clear. Thousands of aircrew lost their lives lighting that fire.
Author Sean Feast asks, 'Was the Battle of Berlin worth the high rate of casualties inflicted on Bomber Command?'
From the moment Sir Arthur Harris became Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command in February 1942, he had his eyes firmly fixed on the Nazi capital Berlin.
At a Conference in Casablanca, the Combined Chiefs of Staff had agreed a Directive for air power with a very clear objective: ‘the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.’
(Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris)
The Directive mentioned Berlin by name as a desired target which should be attacked ‘when conditions are suitable for the attainment of specially valuable results unfavourable to the morale of the enemy or favourable to that of Russia’.
Harris knew that once Overlord, and the opening of a Second Front, assumed top priority, a substantial part of his marked independence in command would cease. In a sense it was ‘now or never’, prompting the bomber chief to declare: ‘We can wreck Berlin from end to end if the USAAF will come in on it. It will cost us between 400 – 500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war.’
Between 18 November 1943 and 31 March 1944 – and the period known as the Battle of Berlin – Bomber Command mounted 35 major raids of which 16 were on the capital. The rest were against other cities including Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Leipzig and most famously, Nuremburg, where Bomber Command suffered its greatest losses of the war.
Which leads to the key question: was the Battle of Berlin a success?
Comparing the Battle of Berlin to the Battle of Hamburg
Harris, a master of understatement when it suited, states in his book Bomber Offensive that the Battle of Berlin ‘did not appear to be an overwhelming success’. He was comparing Berlin to the success his force had previously enjoyed over Hamburg, and which had convinced him that further successes were possible. With more sorties and more bombs, however, he had achieved less and suffered far greater casualties.
But the comparison is not necessarily a helpful one. In Hamburg, incendiaries could wreak terrible damage and did. The attack on Hamburg was made with the benefit of Window being used for the first time, small strips of aluminium foil which rendered the bombers virtually invisible to enemy radar and dramatically reduced the loss rate. It was also a city that reflected well on the H2S ground scanning radar screens of the Pathfinders.
Everything about Berlin was different. It’s more modern construction and planning reduced the amount of damage a single bomb or incendiary could cause, and the paucity of prominent geographical features meant even the most skilful H2S set operators had difficulty in determining what lay below. The sheer size of Berlin made its destruction virtually impossible, and again not comparable to other targets. The folly of the Battle of Berlin, if that is not too strong a word, was in the thinking that its destruction was possible in the first place.
That is not to say, however, that considerable damage was not achieved. Berliners would regularly emerge from their shelters and gaze upon the terrible destruction around them. Very approximately, 5,200 acres – or more than a quarter of all of the city’s built-up areas – was destroyed by Bomber Command in the Battle of Berlin. Within those built-up areas, many important factories were hit, some seriously, but none of the largest manufacturers were ever out of action for long. Probably of greater real impact was the damage done to the smaller factories for whom one direct hit could spell disaster and rob the larger manufacturers of an important link in the supply chain.
(Avro Lancaster B Mark I, R5729 'KM-A', of No 44 Squadron, Royal Air Force runs up its engines in a dispersal at Dunholme Lodge, Lincolnshire, before setting out on a night raid to Berlin. Air Historical Branch)
The progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military
Albert Speer, the Nazi Armaments Minister, is most often cited as vindication for those who point to the real victory achieved by Bomber Command as being the impact on the production of guns, tanks, aircraft and ammunition so desperately needed to sustain the German military on the front line. Some impressive numbers are quoted: even before the Battle began, at the start of 1943, Speer estimated that the bombing had deprived the German army on the Eastern Front of 10,000 heavy guns (of 75mm or over) and 6,000 medium-heavy and heavy tanks. Because of the unpredictability of where the next strike would occur, anything up to 20,000 dual-purpose anti-tank/anti-aircraft guns had to be kept away from the armies at the front and stationed all over Germany together with vast stockpiles of ammunition and hundreds of thousands of men to fire them.
The counter to the war production argument, however, comes from the same man who promoted the bombers’ achievements. As the minister responsible for overseeing Germany’s war production, Speer exceeded every target his Führer set. At the beginning of 1943, 760 tanks a month were rolling off the production lines; by the end of the year, and at the height of the Battle, that figure stood at 1,229, which rose to a staggering 1,669 by the summer. In terms of aircraft production, the story was much the same. The German war machine manufactured 15,288 aircraft of all types in 1942; this figure shot up to 25,094 in 1943 and 39,275 in 1944. Total weapon production increased two and a half times between January 1943 and December 1944. Statistics can, of course, be used to argue for or contradict any point of view, but since ‘the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system’ was a key objective of the Battle, it seems on face value not to have worked.
Undermining the morale of the German people
Another key objective was ‘the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened’. By this measure, the success of the Battle appears to be similarly in doubt. Webster and Frankland say as much in the official history: ‘Berlin, though wounded, was still a going concern, and Hamburg – though partly killed – had made a remarkable recovery.’ John Terraine agrees: ‘As for morale, the story is the usual one. It did not collapse’. To that end, he argues that not only was the Battle of Berlin a failure, but that the whole three-year assault on German morale was destined to fail.
Without doubt the most controversial aspect of the Battle of Berlin, and the principal reason it is remembered, is for the appallingly high casualty rate inflicted by the Germans on Bomber Command aircrew. Harris warned the Battle would cost the Allies (i.e Bomber Command and the USAAF) between 400 and 500 aircraft. He claims the Battle actually cost the RAF 300 aircraft, a loss rate of 6.4% ‘which could not be considered excessive’. The real figure, however, when all attacks are considered, is more than double that. To put these figures into context, Bill Chorley in his RAF Bomber Command Losses estimates Bomber Command lost, at least, the equivalent of 24 Main Force squadrons during the Battle. Making good these losses was a constant strain.
(A WAAF intelligence officer, Section Officer P Duncalfe, questions Warrant Officer H Blunt, the pilot of a 49 Squadron Avro Lancater B.III, JB362/EA-D, on their return to Fiskerton, Lincolnshire, from a raid on Berlin on 22/23 November 1943. On their next sortie to Berlin, five days later, Blunt and his crew were shot down in 'D-Donald' and killed. Air Historical Branch)
But it wasn’t just the number that was alarming, it was also the quality and seniority of aircrew who were posted missing. Main Force lost at least 48 officers of the rank of squadron leader or above, men Harris could ill-afford to lose. But if the losses in Main Force were alarming, the casualties suffered by Pathfinder Force, which was at the vanguard of every raid, were truly catastrophic. Their leader, Donald Bennett, described the Battle as ‘the bitterest part of the war’ and with good reason, for he lost a high proportion of very experienced crews. In a single month one group captain, eight wing commanders and more than 20 squadron leaders failed to return.
Re-organised nightfighter and ground defence tactics
The losses were so high because Harris chose to launch his offensive just at the very time that the German defenders were in the ascendancy.
Any temporary advantage the RAF had gained through Window quickly dissolved. The Bomber ‘stream’, which used to be the RAF’s protection, now became its Achilles heel as German night fighter controllers provided a running commentary that enabled its pilots to intercept an attacking force on its way in and out of its airspace, without having to know in advance its intended target. Once fed into the stream, the Luftwaffe pilots could move relatively easily from one bomber to the next. And the British bombers had to cover a distance to and from Berlin of more than 1,100 miles.
The first six months of 1944 proved so successful that Luftwaffe officers truly believed that the night-time air Battle had been won. Not only were their new tactics working, but they also had better aircraft, that were available in greater numbers and were more heavily armed.
The Germans had also reorganised their ground defences. Their previous tactic of ‘sector’ defence gave way to the concept of larger batteries (Grossbattieren) concentrated around large and important targets. The size of each battery was also enlarged, and the calibre of guns upgraded. Shortages in manpower were compensated by recruiting more women and students into the ranks of the Luftwaffe flak divisions. Not surprisingly, the increase in defences and reorganisation of the night fighter force led to a steady increase in bomber losses.
(Berlin 1939-1945 War Cemetery. The cemetery contains 3,595 Commonwealth burials of the Second World War, 397 of them unidentified. The majority are airmen killed in air raids over Berlin and eastern Germany)
The Official History and post‑war historians have tended to characterise the Battle of Berlin as an abject failure. The attacks on the German capital had not cost Germany the war, as the C‑in‑C had so famously promised, and in the operational sense, the Battle was more than a failure; it was a defeat. The conditions of unbroken cloud, which so often prevailed over Berlin and many other targets between November 1943 and March 1944, coupled with the exceptionally heavy gun and searchlight defences over the city as described, made it almost consistently impossible for Bomber Command to concentrate its attacks on the correct aiming point, nor were the Pathfinders wholly convinced that their marking was entirely accurate to begin with.
Dudley Saward, Harris’ first biographer, dismisses the official verdict: ‘The Battle of Berlin was no failure’ he writes. He quotes extensively from Swiss Intelligence reports compiled during the period about the damage being achieved including one from December 27 that lists 45 factories covering a variety of industrial production, precision engineering, electrical instruments, chemicals, locomotives, aero engines and tanks as being entirely or partially destroyed. ‘The Swiss did not think that Germany would collapse with the bombing of Berlin,’ he concedes, but they did regard the Battle of Berlin ‘as the final onslaught that would produce the beginning of the end of Germany.’
Max Hastings and Martin Middlebrook tend to focus not so much on the damage caused to Germany, but more the casualties inflicted on Bomber Command, and whether the sacrifice was worth the effort. Whereas Middlebrook is content to agree that the Battle must of course have contributed to the ultimate victory, and that every pane of glass broken was a tiny drain on the German economy, the extent of the achievements was not sufficient either to satisfy the aims of the Battle or to justify the casualties.
This is an interesting point; Bomber crews would have been killed throughout the winter of 1943/1944 even had the Battle not taken place. The question that lies hanging is whether the casualties would have been lower and could more have been achieved had Harris directed his efforts elsewhere, and especially the industrial heartland of the Ruhr where Germany’s true industrial might was to be found?
Henry Probert, a more recent biographer of Harris, perhaps offers the most balanced view. While he admits that Bomber Command had clearly come off ‘second best’ in the battles over Germany, that did not mean that their sacrifices were in vain, nor that the campaign was futile. True they had not knocked Germany out of the war, but they had been obliged to devote huge resources to its air defence to an extent that ‘it would ensure the success of the Normandy invasion and of other campaigns in the later stage of the war’.
