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  There was also another important reason for pursuing daylight bombing. Spaatz wanted the Eighth to operate independently of the RAF. He did not want them playing second fiddle to the British or to be sharing assets. Moreover, he, Arnold and others in the USAAF were determined not to sing to the RAF’s tune before testing their own carefully thought-through doctrine. As coalition partners with their own doctrine, this approach was entirely fair. More to the point, it meant that at some stage in the not-too-distant future, they would be able to deliver round-the-clock bombing, with the RAF bombing by night and the USAAF by day. For the Germans, there would simply be no let-up.

  On paper, that all seemed a reasonable, clear and sensible approach to protracting the strategic air campaign against Germany. By the beginning of 1943, however, a rather dramatic divergence of doctrine and aims was emerging between the American air chiefs and the man in charge of British strategic bombing, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris. These were fundamentals about precisely what it was that such a campaign was attempting to achieve and how best it should be done. The stakes could hardly have been higher: the success or failure of the planned invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe and, with it, the swift conclusion of the war.

  CHAPTER 5

  Learning the Hard Way

  WHILE THE EIGHTH was getting pummelled over Germany, RAF Bomber Command continued to bomb targets well within the Reich almost every night. Kassel, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Hanover, Bremen and even Leipzig, deep in central Germany, were all targeted in October 1943. All were large cities with their own industrial areas and every one of them was involved in war work of some kind. On the night of Friday, 22 October, the target was Kassel for the second time that month. Kassel lies about 100 miles north of Schweinfurt and was a major base for the Henschel company, which made tanks, not least the fearsome Tiger, as well as railway locomotives. The German railway, the Reichsbahn, was very much the glue that kept the German war effort together; most arms, men, equipment – and, of course, Jews – were transported by railway, so locomotive factories and railway works were a good target. The aircraft manufacturer Fieseler also had a factory in Kassel, and the city was home to the regional military headquarters for Wehrkreis – Military District – IX. In other words, Kassel was a more than justified target for Bomber Command.

  Among those flying that night were George and Bill Byers. Identical twins, they were both captains of Halifax heavy bomber crews in 429 ‘Bison’ Squadron in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and part of Bomber Command’s 6 Group. Although both now had two missions under their belts as second pilots, the attack on Kassel was to be their first operation with their own crews.

  The twins were born in Vancouver in March 1921. Their mother’s first husband had been killed in the last war and then she had met their father, who was working in lumber. When the twins were about six, they moved to Burbank in California, but after a few years returned to British Columbia.

  Bill and George were inseparable. ‘Our thoughts were often identical,’ said Bill. ‘Whether it was some kind of telepathy I don’t know, but if we thought about some problem, we’d be sitting there looking at each other and both get the same idea at the same time.’1 Both were practically minded and cared little for academic work, so left school when they could and undertook a course in aeronautics. When war broke out, the brothers signed up as ground crew.

  Kept together, they were posted to Saskatoon and then to Manitoba. Around that time, it had been decided that ground crew should sometimes fly in the aircraft they were working on. Both the Byers enjoyed this, so Bill suggested to George that they ask to retrain. To get in they had to pass an IQ test, which they did easily and in half the time allowed. Their subsequent medicals revealed they had perfect twenty-twenty eyesight and, after scraping through algebra and geometry tests, they were sent off to begin training as pilots. By December 1942 they had both passed their wings examinations but were told they had been earmarked to become instructors. This was a major disappointment, as they both wanted to go to England. ‘We were gung-ho,’ Bill admitted. However, two Australians who had trained with them had fallen in love with Canadian girls and were desperate to stay in Canada, so they were allowed to swap places.

  George and Bill sailed to England in January 1943 and were finally split up when Bill fell ill with appendicitis. However, when he had recovered, George was still stuck at the holding camp in Bournemouth and so, reunited, they were posted together once more, this time to RAF Pershore for further training. Here they were put in a large room along with navigators, bombardiers, flight engineers and radio operators and everyone was told to sort themselves into crews. Incredibly, this ad hoc method of crewing up worked surprisingly well, and the brothers had soon teamed up, although not without confusion: the twins really were identical and it took a while for their respective crews to work out which was which.

  By the end of the summer they and their crews had been posted to Croft-on-Tees, a Heavy Conversion Unit outside Darlington in North Yorkshire, where they were joined by the last members of their seven-men crews and converted to flying the large, lumbering four-engine Handley Page Halifax. It was quite a jump, as a four-engine aircraft was a lot more to handle than one with two engines. Then, on 29 September 1943, they were posted to 429 Squadron, based at Leeming, near Thirsk, also in North Yorkshire.

  By this time, they had already formed strong bonds with their crews. Both Bill and George were sergeant pilots rather than commissioned officers and so did not mess separately from the rest of their crew. In fact, the twins ended up sharing a room together, because on arriving at Leeming they were allocated a married quarters house along with Dick Meredith, Bill’s wireless operator. ‘They were so much alike, you could barely tell them apart,’ recalled Meredith.2 ‘And so close. They never said, “Where’s my shirt or socks?” but “Where’s our shirt?”’

  Neither the twins nor their new crews knew much about what to expect. Like most young men, their horizons were narrow and they were both ignorant and naïve about what lay in store. They had thought little about wider strategy or whether endless night-time bombing was actually achieving very much. Rather, they had joined Bison Squadron simply eager to get on with the job in hand and to do their bit.

  Unlike American bomber crews, the RAF did not have second pilots, but did send up new men in such a role in order to show them the ropes and to ensure that when they flew as a crew for the first time they at least had some idea of what to expect. Bill and George Byers flew their first combat missions on 3 October – coincidentally also to Kassel – and both returned early with mechanical trouble. They were sent out again the following night, to Frankfurt, two bombers of just over four hundred in what was the first major attack on the medieval city. Bill and his adopted crew reached the target unscathed and, with good visibility, dropped their bombs on the red flares of the bomb markers. George’s plane, on the other hand, came under repeated attack by a German night-fighter on the way to the city. They only just managed to escape, having flown into the sphere of the enemy anti-aircraft guns with one engine knocked out and two of the fuel tanks holed. There had been fires on board and the electrics on the bomb-bay doors had been damaged, so they had opened them manually, which took time and caused them to delay releasing their bombs. Where the bombs landed was unclear, but the crew managed to avoid further attack on the return leg despite flying with just three engines, which made them both slower and more vulnerable.

  Before they reached Leeming, however, it became clear they no longer had enough fuel to get them home. What’s more, their landing gear had been shot up and was now inoperable. Once over the English coast, the pilot, Flight Lieutenant Pentony, gave the order for them all to bail out. Six, including George, managed to do so safely, but two of the crew, the bomb-aimer and flight engineer, did not and were killed when the Halifax crashed into the ground. As a first full mission, it had been quite an eye-opening ordeal.

  Now, on the night of 22 October, both brothers were piloting their own c
rews for the first time and were among some 247 Halifaxes and 322 Lancasters targeting Kassel. Bill was airborne by 4.55 p.m. – one advantage of the coming winter was that they could get under way sooner – and George thirty-five minutes later. Bomber Command did not fly in formation like the Americans, but in what was called a ‘bomber stream’. Crews would be given a route to follow – one that avoided known flak concentrations and included a number of turns and dog-legs – but were left to follow that route on their own. Both brothers reached the target unscathed and, with the marker flares accurately dropped, Bill and his crew managed to drop their bombs without any hitches. George’s crew again had some technical problems with the bomb-bay doors and were forced to jettison their load later, but both then made it back to Leeming safely, Bill touching down twenty minutes after midnight after being airborne for seven and a half hours, and George a short while later.

  The German air defence system, however, had correctly tracked the bomber stream and its night-fighters were ready and waiting. Forty-three bombers were shot down that night – not far off the number of American bombers lost over Schweinfurt – but this was only 7.6 per cent of the attacking force rather than nearly 20 per cent, and well over five hundred bombers accurately hit the heart of Kassel, which was gutted by a massive and horrific firestorm. That night of devastation, the city lost 63 per cent of all its living accommodation – either destroyed or damaged – leaving up to 120,000 people homeless. In addition, 155 industrial buildings were destroyed or severely damaged. Three Henschel aircraft factories were badly damaged, the railway was seriously hit and some 5,599 people were killed. As Bill Byers recorded, ‘It appeared to be a good raid.’3

  By October 1943, Bomber Command was not only hitting Germany very hard, it was doing so with the kind of accuracy that had been unachievable just a short time earlier. This was massed bombing on a scale that was also out of all proportion to what had been witnessed by either side early in the war. It had been a long and difficult road for the British, and had been achieved by a considerable degree of trial and error and by learning the hard way.

  In fact, such lessons had early on persuaded both the British and the Germans to abandon daytime bombing in favour of night operations. They had quickly accepted that daylight bombing was unsustainable because bombers did not have the speed, agility or defensive power successfully to fend off much faster and more manoeuvrable fighter planes. Claire Chennault had been absolutely right. Nor, in those early years, had bomber fleets brought the kind of Armageddon predicted by Douhet, Trenchard and Mitchell, despite the German destruction of the Basque town of Guernica in 1937, or the devastation wreaked on Warsaw in September 1939 and Rotterdam in May 1940.

  Since those heady days, the Luftwaffe’s fortunes had suffered. They made an entirely unsuccessful attempt to destroy the British Air Force in the summer of 1940, only ever managing to knock out just one of the RAF’s 138 airfields for more than twenty-four hours. Nor had they even remotely brought the country to its knees during the sustained Blitz upon Britain between September 1940 and May 1941. Rather, Britain had continued to build ever more factories at breakneck speed and to produce rapidly increasing numbers of tanks, guns, ships and, most of all, aircraft. In fact, the greatest cost of the Blitz to Britain was in the defensive measures prompted by the Luftwaffe’s bombing rather than in actual damage done.

  By the time of the Blitz, the Luftwaffe had largely given up daylight attacks, preferring the comparatively increased safety of night-time raids. Of course, bombing by night meant less accuracy, but then again, daylight bombing had not proved particularly accurate either. The Germans had no bombsight comparable to the Norden and this was one of the reasons they had put so much emphasis on dive-bombing earlier in the war. The theory was that dive-bombing ensured bombs were dropped closer to the target, which meant they would be more accurate. This, in turn, ensured less ordnance was required and so fewer aircraft. As the first year of war demonstrated, however, dive-bombers were only really effective against large fixed targets and with air superiority over the battle space. The moment the Luftwaffe did not boss the skies, their Junkers 87 Stukas were shot down in droves. By that time, however, they had already got a twin-engine dive-bomber, the Ju88, lumbering into production and, incredibly, despite the evidence, they were developing a four-engine dive-bomber too, the Heinkel 177.

  In all, the Luftwaffe lost some 2,200 aircraft in its attempt to subdue both the RAF and Britain, which amounted to 100 per cent of the force with which it started, and although every one of the 41,000 British civilians killed in the Blitz was a personal tragedy, all those lives, all that effort, and all the diversion of resources into such a sustained aerial assault achieved little more than inconvenience to Britain’s war machine. It did not bring about a collapse of British morale, did not stop Britain from continuing dramatically to increase its production of war materiel and, most importantly, did not provide the tactical or strategic victory Nazi Germany so desperately needed. The Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 with not only Britain still very much in the war, but with fewer aircraft in the Luftwaffe than when they had launched the invasion of France and the Low Countries the previous year. The Luftwaffe’s defeat at the hands of the RAF in 1940 had proved catastrophic.

  The British had also suffered in those first years of the war in the air. Entire bomber squadrons had been decimated during the Battle of France. Number 18 Squadron, for example, had lasted just ten days in France. During that time they had set off on one bombing mission after another, but by 20 May, when they were posted back to Britain, they had just four crews left out of twenty. A day later, they lost another while operating from England.

  Meanwhile, RAF Bomber Command had begun bombing targets within Germany from the middle of May 1940, but had swiftly realized that if they were to have any chance of survival they needed to focus on night-time operations. When they bombed Berlin four times in August and early September 1940, they did so at night. Their accuracy was woeful, although these raids achieved a small psychological victory in that they infuriated and humiliated the Nazi leadership and proved to the German people that the war was still far from over. None the less, whether the benefits outweighed the downsides is questionable.

  The RAF did learn from the Luftwaffe, however. The German attack on Coventry in November 1940, in which the heart of the medieval city was destroyed, demonstrated the benefit of attacking in waves, in clear moonlit skies and with a light breeze, and of dropping a mixed ordnance of high explosives and incendiaries. Those conditions, of course, were not something anyone could rely on, but they certainly set the bar. The British also learned that a few hundred twin-engine bombers capable of delivering a ton or so of bombs were simply not enough. For bombers to be decisive, there needed to be hundreds, if not thousands, of aircraft and preferably bigger, four-engine ‘heavies’ capable of carrying a much greater payload.

  One of the men who had watched the Blitz with bitter interest was Air Marshal Arthur Harris, who had been at the Air Ministry in 1940. By February 1942 he had become commander-in-chief of Bomber Command and was, like his boss, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of the Air Staff, an avowed believer in the power of the bomber and in bringing Nazi Germany to its knees by pulverizing its cities and industrial infrastructure.

  Despite Portal’s support and despite factories in Britain producing more and more aircraft, faith in his new command was at an all-time low at the point Harris took over. The previous year, in August 1941, the Butt Report had been published, an independent investigation into the accuracy of Bomber Command’s bombing effort. The killer statistic was the claim that only one in three bombers had been managing to drop their bombs within 5 miles of their target. This had been a devastating blow to Bomber Command and there were many who had questioned the ongoing bombing strategy, which was, after all, using up a considerable amount of effort and resources, not to mention young men’s lives; even at night, bombing remained perilous.

 
There was to be no change of heart, however. Portal persisted in his conviction that strategic bombing would dramatically shorten the war and save the lives of many British servicemen. More importantly, Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister, was also certain that air power was key to ultimate victory. In any case, British factories were, by 1941, producing more aircraft than any other country in the world. It was simply too late, mid-war, to reverse this strategy.

  Furthermore, new, bigger aircraft were on their way. Some of the finest minds in Britain were dedicated to pushing the country’s aviation industry to new levels of sophistication and technological advancement – not only aircraft, but also scientific instruments. On its way was the four-engine Avro Lancaster, capable of carrying a staggering 10 tons of bombs. Also in development were sophisticated new navigational aids.

  Thus, despite the fallout of the Butt Report, the British remained committed to both air power and bombing, with more aircraft, more bombs, and even greater research and development. And, until bombs could be dropped with greater accuracy, RAF Bomber Command – and the air chiefs – accepted they would simply continue to strike at Germany with whatever means available.

  It was very bad news for German civilians, but collateral damage was not something that weighed on the minds of many of Britain’s war chiefs at this time – not with parts of London in ruins, with tens of thousands dead thanks to the Luftwaffe, and with Britain committed to an attritional and brutal war that was not of their making. Towards the end of 1941, Air Marshal Sir Richard Peirse, C-in-C of Bomber Command before Harris took over, told an audience in London’s Thirty Club that for a year British bombers had been quite intentionally targeting German civilians. ‘I mention this,’ he told them, ‘because for a long time, the Government, for excellent reasons, has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call Military Targets … I can assure you, gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples.’4 No one could claim the Nazis had a monopoly on cold-hearted ruthlessness.