High Road to Hell

The air offensive against Germany and Axis Europe is suffering from understatement. The objective is not merely to destroy cities, industries, human beings and the human spirit on a scale never before attempted by air action. The objective is to defeat Hitler with bombs, and to do it in 1943.

Two men in Britain share a conviction that it can be done and the responsibility for trying to do it. They are Air Marshal Chief Sir Arthur Travers Harris, chief of the R.A.F. Bomber Command, and Major General Ira Clarence Eaker, commander of the U.S. Eighth Air Force. They have assured their military superiors, who in turn have passed the word to Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, that Germany can be bombed out of the war this year--on one condition. The condition is that nothing whatsoever--whether it be a second front in Europe, expanded action in the Pacific or a Burma-China campaign--be allowed to reduce the forces recently allocated to the bombardment of Germany.

Winston Churchill indicated the scope of the assurance and the nature of the condition. He also stated the reaction of the global strategists when he said: The experiment is well worth trying, so long as other measures are not excluded. Although this was a qualified statement, it may be assumed that the allocation to the European air campaign in the European theater had been made with due regard to "other measures."

Since the experiment is definitely to be tried, Harris, Eaker & Co. can reasonably expect to get enough planes, men and bombs for an all-out trial. Mr. Churchill, Mr. Roosevelt and the heads of their armies and navies are duty bound to rate the air offensive as an uncertain experiment. They must assume that it will fail to knock out Germany, and that the bombers over Europe are hammering out a prelude to victory by invasion. But the airmen doing the bombing are under no such compulsion. It is now their business, and their inclination, to bomb for a knockout.

If that knockout is delivered from the air this year, its chief author will be Air Chief Marshal Harris. Except perhaps in the last rounds, the chief instrument will be his Bomber Command. His friend and poker foe, General Eaker, is just as much of an airman, and he had a great deal to do with presenting and championing the airmen's proposition. But, in comparison with the R.A.F., the Eighth Air Force and its Bomber Command are still small and young. American bombers first attacked Occupied France last August, first flew into Germany last Jan. 27. The American force is growing fast; the effectiveness of its blows has lately been out of all proportion to its numbers; and Harris himself has often said that the final, crushing weight of Allied air power would come from America. But during the greater part of 1943 most of the bombers and bombs thrown at Germany from Britain will be R.A.F. bombers and bombs.

So Bloody Inhuman. A hackneyed remark about Sir Arthur Travers Harris is that he has "a gentle face and a furious tongue." At home with handsome Lady Harris (his second wife, whom he married in 1938) and their four-year-old daughter Jackie, he can indeed be gentle. But men who serve with him learn sooner or later that his gentle face is a sort of booby trap, luring the unwary to the lash of his tongue.

His R.A.F. subordinates usually esteem his quality of directness. "Oh, we love him," one of them said recently; "he's so bloody inhuman." In the first bomber unit which he commanded, between World Wars I & II, he was reputed to be the rudest man in the R.A.F. He was also an effective commander: he developed the "pacification by bombing" which kept unruly Indian border tribes more or less under control. When soft-hearted folk protested, Harris' friends explained that he always gave a village a full day's warning before his bombers destroyed it.

"When I speak to people," says blunt Sir Arthur, "I know my ideas. What I want to hear is theirs." This self-estimate makes his friends smile. Off duty, and particularly with Americans whom he wishes to cultivate, Sir Arthur can be quietly charming. Once he gets to know them, he can also be aggressive and contentious: they are never long in doubt as to what Sir Arthur thinks about any given subject.

A forthright aversion to walking drove Harris into the air. He was 22, spending a happy interlude on a family friend's tobacco farm in Southern Rhodesia, when World War I broke out. Arthur Harris enlisted in the First Rhodesian Regiment of Infantry, served first as a bugler, and (as he later told it) walked across Africa to fight the Germans. Swearing that he would never walk again if any other form of locomotion was available, he went back to England and joined the R.A.F.'s predecessor, the Royal Flying Corps, in 1915. He won the Air Force Cross, remained in the R.A.F. as a squadron leader after the war. He qualified as a pilot of every type and size of military plane, and he still prefers to fly himself when he is in the air.

During most of the peacetime years Harris was on staff duty in London, rising steadily in the clannish, highly selective "permanent force" of the R.A.F. In these years, and after World War II began, he never hid his views on the potentialities of air power and the stupidities of the older services. He was fond of saying that all the Army wanted in the way of airplanes was something which would eat oats and make noises like a horse. More recently, he has said that the only role of land forces in Europe will be to occupy the Continent after bombing has defeated Germany. In his outspoken opinion, London's Metropolitan Police Force would be better than the Army for this purpose.

In June 1941 Harris headed an R.A.F. mission to the U.S. Although he had been in America on an earlier purchasing trip, the change from warring Britain to the half-out, half-aware U.S. of mid-1941 shocked him. But the abrupt transition after Pearl Harbor deeply impressed him, and left him with an appreciative estimate of American productive capacity.

Sir Arthur was 49, and just about to turn 50 (in April), when he got the chance for which he had been schooling himself all his adult life. In early 1942 Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal (a year younger) offered Harris the R.A.F. Bomber Command. On Feb. 25, at a secluded headquarters somewhere near London, he took command. Just six days later, on March 3, the Germans learned that the R.A.F. also had a new bombing policy.

So Bloody Slow. On that night some 200 R.A.F. planes attacked the Renault truck and tank works at Billancourt, near Paris. It was a "saturation raid" of a type soon to become familiar to the Germans in the homeland. What Harris had done was to mass bombers on a scale never at tempted by his predecessors. He was soon to do it on a scale never possible to the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain.

When Sir Arthur took command, the R.A.F. was gradually replacing its two-engined bombers with longer range, higher load, four-engined Halifaxes, Stirlings, Lancasters. The effective loads of these planes were often exaggerated (the Lancaster, for instance, usually hauls about four tons instead of its theoretical eight), but they added mightily to the Bomber Command's power. Recently the Air Ministry released the first picture of a Halifax bomb bay, "bombed up" with one heavy, several smaller high-explosive bombs, and incendiaries.

The world's press soon concluded that the R.A.F. was out to defeat Germany with bombs in 1942: Cologne, Essen, Bremen flamed under 1,000-plane raids and upwards of 1,000 tons of bombs. Harris had to tell Britons and Americans that such raids could not then be sustained: "That time will come. It may not be long delayed." The raids dropped in weight, but they were still tremendous, and more & more of the bombers were four-engined Halifaxes, Stirlings and the new Lancasters. The first Americans arrived in Britain, and Harris took the air to tell the Germans in their language: "Soon we will be coming over every night, every day -- rain, flood or snow -- we and the Americans." In that broadcast, he also gave the Germans a historically frank and brutal definition of his policy:

I will speak frankly to you about whether we bomb military targets, or whole cities. Obviously, we prefer to hit factories, shipyards and railways. It damages Hitler's war machine the most. But those people who work in these places live close by them. Therefore, we hit your houses and you.

Much public breath and some official energy was wasted on a dispute between R.A.F. night mass bombing v. U.S. daylight precision bombing. Gradually both the public and the two services realized that one method complemented the other. And the list of flaming cities grew; the R.A.F. in 1942 dropped 37,000 tons of bombs on German targets, probably three times the weight dropped on Britain in 1940 and early 1941.

But if the Axis war machine faltered, the Red Army seemed to deserve more credit than the bombings. The Allied land forces and navies already doubted that bombing could be decisive; the public began to share the doubts. Was "the easy way" of bombing really effective, even as a harassment, much less as a decisive instrument?

The record of 1942 did not shake Sir Arthur's faith in bombing. In his opinion and that of all like-minded airmen, it actually supplied the proof that bombing could be decisive. If so, it also supplied ample evidence that bombing is not "the easy way." It is a tough, slow way, easy only by comparison with a vast campaign by land and naval forces.

Sir Arthur, General Eaker and the airmen working with them never intended 1942 to be decisive; they intended it only to be a test. The measure of this test was the extent and nature of the German target--a scattered conglomeration of cities, varying from the industrial concentrations of the Ruhr to the ports of Hamburg and Bremen, the naval bases of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven. The R.A.F. and the U.S. Air Forces have calculated the minimum damage necessary to bring a decision. This calculation is secret. Unofficially, the view of airmen is that one-third to one-half of Germany's industrial establishment must be destroyed.

In 1942 and early 1943 the R.A.F. bombings seriously affected less than 10% of the German target, and much of the hurt has been repaired. If last year's bombings had a permanent effect, it was largely from one of the least noticed phases of the air offensive--the attacks by fighters and bombers on Axis rail equipment. Short of locomotives and freight cars when the war started, now needing them as never before the Germans by early 1943 were losing upward of 150 railway engines and many more freight cars each month.

Just as the blitzed cities of Britain had done, the bombed cities of Germany demonstrated an amazing capacity for recovery. The Air Ministry's extraordinarily efficient intelligence service supplied the evidence time & again. In detail, this evidence is secret, but the public can read the facts in the record of cities heavily bombed, then bombed again & yet again--evidently the R.A.F. still considered them worthwhile targets.

It was also clear by last week that Germans, individually and in the mess, reacted to bombing pretty much as the British did in the fall of 1940 and the spring of 1941. They died by the thousands; they suffered; they moaned to their soldiers at the front. In the target cities they lived in a hell worse than London's worst. But, up to this week, there has been no substantial evidence that the German people have yet been brought to the cracking point.

Even the Italians stiffened when bombing brought the front line to them. The R.A.F. first bombed northern Italy in June 1940, but did not attempt a real campaign there until last October. Between then and Dec. 2, the British poured some 1,500 tons on Milan, Genoa, and Turin (where most of Italy's motor vehicles are made). Damage and panic were impressive, but in the long run the bombings got the Italians' backs up, intensified their hatred of the British. Lately Italy has been hit principally in the south, by American bombers from North Africa, and the effects have been similiar: more demands on Hitler for defensive fighters and ack-ack, considerable damage, and growing hatred of Americans, which may well mean a stiffer resistance to invasion.

So Bloody, So Fierce. If the R.A.F. alone can keep up the tonnage records of 1943's first months, Germany in 1943 will get several times 1942's 37,000 tons. In February, March and April the R.A.F. dropped an average of at least 10,000 tons of bombs on German objectives each month. In the last week of May, in four raids on Dortmund, Duesseldorf, Essen and Wuppertal, the R.A.F. dropped about 6,500 tons. Said Sir Arthur after Dortmund got its packet of 2,000 tons: "In 1939 Goering promised that not a single enemy bomb would reach the Ruhr. Congratulations on having delivered the first 100,000 tons on Germany to refute him. The next 100,000, if he waits for them, will be even bigger and better bombs, delivered even more accurately and in much shorter time."

The U.S. tonnage dropped on Germany is still less than one-tenth of the R.A.F. tonnage. But the American contribution will surely increase as more and bigger bombers arrive in Britain. Last week the Americans staged their biggest offensive yet against St. Nazaire, Rennes and La Pallice. The number of planes in the raid was unannounced. (The highest previous announced total was 133 planes.) And, according to U.S. testimony, the precision bombing of the American forces is more effective, ton for ton, than the saturation bombing of the R.A.F. Another, perhaps more important factor: the phenomenal bags of German fighters (American bombers operating from Britain claimed 928 between Aug. 17, 1942 and May 22, 1943) are bound to affect not only the Luftwaffe's aircraft strength, but the morale of its pilots.

On straight arithmetic, the probable increases in bomb tonnages might raise the damage to the disaster point which Sir Arthur is shooting at. But he and General Eaker do not count on straight arithmetic; they count more on precise planning, based in turn on incredibly detailed study and knowledge of the German industrial base, and upon the cumulative effects of heavier & heavier bombings.

In mid-1942, Sir Arthur said: ''It may take a year. It may take two, but for the Herrenvolk the writing is on the wall." The bet now is that if he and his American friends are given the promised planes and men, it may take them another seven months.

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