The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

Only in the spring of 1941 did tactical instructions to German bomber units begin to take the threat of British night-fighters seriously The danger that British fighters might try to use the German radio beams to guide them to the bombers led to instructions to make irregular zigzag courses to confuse the enemy, to approach on a broad front, rather than grouped together, to fly at lower heights or, in some cases, to employ single aircraft to fly in very low at 200–300 metres.¹⁶⁷ In July 1941 it was finally admitted that German tactics would have to change to cope with the mounting evidence that RAF night-fighters could track incoming aircraft and find them over the target. Bomber units were instructed to mount decoy flights with weak forces on widely distant targets to shield the true destination of the main attacking force (a tactic soon adopted by the RAF over Germany). The main force was instructed to attack on a very broad front, flying from numerous different directions towards the chief objective, particularly on clear and moonlit nights, even though the effect of this and other tactical changes was to disperse German bomb attacks even more and to reduce the prospect of a heavy, concentrated blow.¹⁶⁸

The exposure of Britain’s cities and industries to heavy bomb attack with feeble defences provoked widespread anxiety in Whitehall. For much of the bombing campaign, the size of the German force continued to be greatly exaggerated. Air intelligence estimated that on 1 November 1940 the German Air Force had 1,800 bombers and 1,900 single-engine and twin-engine fighters, when the true figures for late October, unknown in London, were 833 serviceable bombers and 829 serviceable fighters.¹⁶⁹ When Churchill was told in December that the German Air Force was two and a half times larger than the RAF, he asked for the figures to be investigated. Understanding the size of the German force was, he thought, ‘of capital importance to the whole future picture of the war’.¹⁷⁰ Lindemann discovered that air intelligence had been assuming a figure of 12 aircraft for each German squadron, plus reserves, when the available intercept intelligence suggested only 9 per squadron, with a reserve of 3. In January 1941 he was able to demonstrate that the German bomber force had 1,200 aircraft, which was closer to the reality than any previous estimates, and a better reflection of the actual impact German bombing was making.¹⁷¹

Churchill nevertheless remained apprehensive about German intentions. He expected the German Air Force to make a ‘far more serious attempt’ in the spring and early summer of 1941 to defeat Britain from the air. Intelligence from a Swiss source suggested that Germany had been conserving thousands of aircraft for a single supreme blow, an ‘air banquet’, to be mounted in the spring for a genuine knockout blow from the air and, improbable though this was, Churchill asked the air staff how many aircraft Britain could reply with if a banquet was prepared with every available plane. He was told by a sceptical Portal in the spring of 1941 that Germany could probably send 14,000 planes, but the RAF could retaliate with only a feeble 6,500, including 2,000 trainers and 3,000 reserves.¹⁷² Churchill was just as anxious about the possibility of an overpowerful German Air Force resorting to gas to finish the war quickly. In November 1940 he asked his de facto deputy, the Labour Party leader, Clement Attlee, to make sure that British stocks of poison gas reached at least 2,000 tons of available chemicals; the air staff informed Churchill that existing gas supplies could be used for four or five days of concentrated gas attack on German cities, or for two weeks if gas and high explosive were dropped together.¹⁷³ Concern over the supply of gas bombs had already arisen in the summer of 1940 when it was evident that there were not enough containers for the gas. Beaverbrook was instructed to accelerate production of gas bombs and spray canisters for mustard gas for the moment, as Sinclair put it, ‘when gas warfare commences’, and by October he could promise to meet the air staff requirement for a minimum of 200,000 gas bombs. By the spring of 1941, in anticipation of a more extensive and deadly bombing campaign in the winter of 1941–2, the RAF was primed to conduct a gas war against the German homeland.¹⁷⁴