Dan Snow's History Hit - Pathfinders: Bomber Command's Elite

Episode Date: July 26, 2021

The Pathfinders were ordinary men and women who transformed the efficiency of the Allies' air campaign over mainland Europe and helped deliver victory over Nazi Germany. Journalist and bestselling author Will Iredale joins Dan on the podcast to tell the incredible story of the team who transformed RAF Bomber Command. Find out how the air force was created, how bombing accuracy was improved, and how Pathfinders put their lives at risk to carry out the raids.Will’s book, The Pathfinders: The Elite RAF Force that Turned the Tide of WWII, is out now and includes exclusive interviews with remaining survivors, personal diaries, previously classified records and never-before seen photographs.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about an elite force in bomber command in World War II, a spearhead unit that tried to solve the fundamental problem with strategic bombing, that it was very hard to actually hit anything, and particularly almost impossible to hit anything accurately at night. Throughout the years of the Second World War, the accuracy of British bombing slowly improved until it was actually very effective by 1944-45. And one of the reasons for that is the creation of a new pathfinder force, an elite that would go ahead, light up the target, stay over the target to help coordinate the bombing of the other bomber formations. A truly extraordinary tale, a tale that has just been written up in a book by Will Iredale. It's a great

new book and for me it fills in a big kind of gap in my knowledge of the Second World War. So I hope that you guys enjoy this interview as much as I did. We have interviewed a Pathfinder on the podcast before. If you go back and search in the archive, Dan Snow's History Hit, you can do that by subscribing to History Hit.

You go to historyhit.tv, where you get all the back episodes of the podcast, including our Pathfinder episode. And then you also get hundreds of hours of history documentaries. The Air War, World War II Air War, featuring luminaries like James Holland and Victoria Taylor, is one of our more popular documentaries, and that is on very similar terrain to this interview here,

so you might enjoy that. So head over to historyhit.tv and check it out. You get a month for free if you sign up right now. In the meantime, everyone, enjoy this conversation with Will Iredale. Will, great to have you on the podcast. Lovely to be here, Dan. Thanks very much for inviting me. Will, you've done that thing that brilliant historians do, particularly in the Second World War, it seems.

You've brought the story into much wider prominence of a whole new branch, a whole new section of the armed forces, with all the kind of characters and innovation and drama that we've come to expect when we're talking about, you know, other things, the SOE or Bletchley or commandos. And here we are, the pathfinders. Yeah, look, it is fascinating because, you know, look, Bomber Command, let's face it, if I had a penny for every book that's been written on Bomber Command, I'd be a very wealthy

man, right? But actually, the genesis of this book was quite interesting because I wasn't necessarily looking to write a book about Bomber Command. I came across a fascinating recording online of a recording made in 1942 of a nightingale singing in a Surrey garden. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but there was a cellist called Beatrice Harrison. And in the early 20s, she used to play her cello in the garden of her Oxford home in Surrey. And it was surrounded by woods. And she realised that when she used to play in the early summer, the nightingales would start singing along. And so the BBC did one of their first ever outside broadcasts in, I think it was 1922 or 1923. And it became something of a kind

of tradition. So every year they'd set up their equipment, she'd start playing and the Nightingales would be singing and it would be broadcast live. Well, of course, by 1942, they were planning to do the same thing. And for millions of listeners, it would have been a lovely sort of you know relief from the sort of misery of war and the BBC technicians were setting up their equipment they started recording but it hadn't actually transmitted live yet she hadn't started playing so all you could hear was this nightingale but then in the distance there's a steam train a distant steam whistle, but then you hear a solitary aeroplane engine. And then before you know it, within about two or three minutes, the sky is full. The sound, the whole is full of engines and hundreds of bombers flying overhead whilst this nightingale is still singing away. And I thought to myself, where were the bombers going? Who was

flying them? What was the sort of drama behind that mission that night? And I did a bit of research and I found out it was a raid to Mannheim in Germany. And I found out that the raid itself was a bit of a disaster, that they didn't really bomb anything of significance. Most of the bombers felled around, not really finding their target, and they came back. And I thought to myself, you know, we all know that Bomber Command later in the war, we hear about some of those devastating but successful raids, and we know the support they gave throughout the, you know, after the D-Day invasion, all that sort of stuff. And I thought, well, what transformed

Bomber Command? And that's when I came across the story of the Pathfinders. And I kind of dug a little deeper, and I really wanted to try to tell the story of the people behind the Pathfinders, and the kind of drama involved, and this unit that was established to help Bomber Command see in the dark. So that's a kind of genesis behind the book, I guess. What was the challenge that Bomber Command faced when attempting to turn bombing into a tool that could actually have a strategic impact, could actually change the course of the war? Well, I think the main challenge they faced is the fact that they couldn't see in the dark. So you've got to remember that really the idea when the war started was that bombing and the flying generally, as treated well, would take place in daylight.

And they very quickly found out with pretty obsolete aircraft that wouldn't be sustainable with the sort of losses that they were getting. So they had to very quickly bomb at night. But of course, bombing at night, in Northern Europe, you've got the weather, you've got, as I say, the fact that you can't actually see in the dark. And you had the fact that the air crews just weren't really adequately trained for it. They realised very quickly, well, reasonably quickly, certainly by 1941, that bomber command wasn't finding its targets. And so Winston Churchill, his scientific advisor, Professor Lindemann, he decided to

investigate why. And he got a young economist called David Butt to examine around 650 photographs taken by bomber command. They're night photographs, so taken on ops. Butt found that one in five RF bombers sent on ops to Germany and France got within five miles of their target on moonless nights, that proportion fell to one in 15. So it was dynamite really, because they knew there was a problem, but they didn't realise it was that bad. And the solution was the Pathfinders. And the Pathfinders was established in August 1942. As you point out in the book, there was a heck of a turf battle, wasn't there? A proper Whitehall fight.

It seems very obvious now, but it was very contested at the time. Yeah, it was. It's ironic, isn't it, that the man who was asked to command the Pathfinders was an Australian called Don Bennett, who was a kind of no-nonsense Australian from the wild and woolies of Australia, as Arthur Harris said. And he was appointed by Harris, right, because he was, as Harris said, he was the most efficient airman I've ever met. He was, by the mid-1930s, he was really seen to be one of the best aviators in the world,

not just at flying the thing, but also critically at navigating. But ironically, whilst Harris chose what he thought to be probably the best airman to lead the path on is Harris himself was actually against the whole idea of a separate group he liked the idea of perhaps having you know the most experienced airmen perhaps with the best equipment in each group itself even in each squadron he didn't like the idea of all the squadrons being having their best men creamed off into kind of cord elite you know so there was quite a big row and he batted so many times against this but really pushed by Sidney Bufton he was obviously higher than the air ministry

in the end Harris was defeated and the Pathfinders came into existence as a separate group eight group and initially it was only made up of five squadrons. And Bennett had to make do with what he had. It was only later on, and we'll talk about that in a moment, I'm sure, that technology came through that enabled him to be able to actually deliver the goods. But the first Pathfinder raid in mid-August 1942, not only did they not get the right tower, they actually ended up bombing in the wrong country. They ended up bombing in targets in the south of Denmark. It was a pretty

sort of an auspicious start for them. Yeah, that was almost a heartbreaking part of the book. I was roosting for them against their many enemies within officialdom. So yes, let's break it down. On that first raid and immediately after, they were just good pilots and navigators. They had no special edge over the rest of the bombing force. When does technology come in that starts to make their role particularly effective? I mean, let's think about it, right? So what was the Pathfinders' role? It was to fly ahead of the main force, locate the targets, and let the force behind know where the aiming point is, right?

And so you're absolutely right to start with they really were just relying on their experience but the results were quite slow and it's only really by the end of 42 the beginning of 43 and into the battle of the Ruhr that you begin to see all these ingredients come together that makes them more effective and I suppose number one to that or primarily is the fact that central to the Pathfinder's success was the pioneering technology. And that was created by a team of British boffins up in Malvern. So the most accurate was a device called OBO, which used radio pulses to help guide mosquito bombers to the target. And that was from two ground stations in Britain.

The problem with that is that OBOe only had a range of around 270 miles, so it was fantastic for targets in the Ruhr, but it was no good for any targets on beyond that. So the pathfinders also used something called H2S, which was a sort of airborne radar, I guess, which scanned the ground. And the returning echoes from this piece of equipment on the bottom of the fuselage created a shadowy map for the terrain below that appeared on a cathode ray tube which was housed in a set in the fuselage meaning that the navigator could in theory identify the aircraft's location. The reality is that actually because it was very good you could sort of tell where the coastline was so it was brilliant for the targets like Hamburg. It wasn't so easy for, say, for example, big targets like Berlin, where they just didn't have so much of a success.

But there's no doubt, Dan, that this technology enabled them to be able to begin to see much better results. The other crucial factor, which I think is always overlooked with so many histories of strategic bombing over Europe, is the target indicators. These were essentially pimped up fireworks, brightly coloured flares made with the help of Britain's firework industry. I mean, a contract with one fireworks company was worth the equivalent of £28 million today. It was led by a guy, a boffin called Wilfred Coxon. I say in the book, he was a boffin of fireworks. He was a chemistry lecturer at Regent Street Polytechnic before joining the Air Ministry. And he found ways to be able to produce these bombs, these kind of target indicators that could be used in different types of weather. But they became absolutely crucial to the success of the Pathfinders and to Bomber Command because they were able to allow a big bomber stream to close up and to become far more effective in

terms of the weight of bombs it was dropping. So these innovations, they start to improve accuracy. We'll come on to accuracy in a second, because obviously it lies at the heart of this story. But just quickly, I love that anecdote you gave about Hermann Göring, the chief of the Luftwaffe, German Air Force, visiting Hitler and basically instructing his staff to lie to the Führer about British capability. Yeah, quite. I mean, that was a story I picked up from the archives at the Imperial War Museum. And, you know, I can't verify it independently,

but it is fascinating, isn't it? That they were clearly, I think they were rumbled by Oboe. They were rumbled by the technology and they didn't quite know whether or not to tell Hitler the truth because I don't think at that stage they really knew how to counter it. Yeah, I mean, according to your source, it was Hitler actually asked if he thought the RAF had this capacity and Goering assured him that they didn't.

So nothing was done to kind of counter it, to interdict it for months. Just, you know, as if we needed extra evidence, it highlights the drawbacks of extraordinary concentrations of power in eccentric, flawed, crazy individuals. Yeah, absolutely. And it surely underlines the fact that we've known before, which is that Hitler really wasn't, he wasn't an airman, was he? Okay, let's go on to accuracy. The Brits were so keen to measure it.

They would send over photo-reconstance aircraft to see what the damage had been done the following day. What do we learn about accuracy as the war goes on? Yeah, look, I mean, it is interesting. I think it's as much about the efficiency of the bombing as the accuracy of the bombs right because i mean you know there are stats available showing for example that mosquitoes fitted with oboe were able to kind of often bomb their targets within two or even one football pitch length of you know in terms of accuracy now if you think the

butt report was saying that one in 15 wasn't getting within five miles of their target you can see that's an astonishing improvement you know also what's important is that I don't think bomber command the pathfinders ever completely conquered the elements to deliver full proof accuracy and I think it would be wrong to say that but what was Dan, was the fact that it was the efficiency of the bombing as much as the accuracy of the bombs. So the pathfinders were able to squeeze the bomber stream behind so that the number of planes passing over a target rose from 40 per hour in 1941 to 35 per minute by the end of 1943. And that's an astonishing difference. The danger of these conversations, they can get quite sterile.

What is the effect of all this on the ground? I uncovered the raid on Castle on the 22nd and 23rd of October 1943. And I'll be honest with you, I wasn't familiar with this raid. You know, there were so many, weren't there? But Castle stood out for me because proportionally, it caused more damage than the raid on Hamburg. It created a firestorm that killed 6,000 people. But it also did a huge amount of damage because Castle was actually, as well as being an odd medieval town, which had lots of winding streets, making it perfect to create the kind of environment for a firestorm. It also was a military target. Tiger tank was made there, fighters, the V1 flying bombs. It had a big railway sidings as well, and it supplied

locomotives for Wehrmacht as well. Now, the ability of the pathfinders to lead something like 670 bombers in, where the target marking was so accurate, and then the bomber stream going over was so accurate, that it created very quickly this firestorm, and it caused a huge amount of damage. And of course, in a sense, although I suppose it wasn't sort of pinpoint accuracy, it wasn't like a laser guided bomb, it was getting back to what I talked about just now, which is the sheer weight of bombs over a small area, which caused a great deal of damage. Now, the other end of the scale, I suppose, is we can look at some of the gun placements that were targeted on D-Day. And a number of squadrons were involved with targeting those and in the days afterwards.

And they were often led by low-level mosquitoes. Now you have to remember this was obviously much much nearer the UK so oboe could be extraordinarily accurate and you had mosquitoes able to fly over and as I say they were able to really you know get their bombs in the pickle barrel in many cases. So there's sort of two examples there of how on the one hand it's the sheer weight of volume over a small area that can cause a lot of damage. And on the other hand, you've got kind of smaller numbers of bombers led by oboe-fitted mosquitoes that were able to hit smaller targets. Yeah, the mosquito comes across as a pretty essential bit of kit, doesn't it? But of course, so were the men that flew it. And as for the casualties, for bomber command,

they were terrible. And for pathfind casualties, for Bomber Command, they were terrible. And for Pathfinders, it makes for difficult reading. Yeah. So I think interestingly, I mean, look, we all know clearly that the casualty rates for Bomber Command generally were eye-watering, weren't they? And in fact, in terms of the Pathfinders, I mean, around 3,700 Pathfinder airmen were killed in around 50,000 sorties, an actually percentage rate that was marginally less than the main force. But of course, there's no doubt whatsoever that there were certain elements of the Pathfinders that were extraordinarily dangerous. For example, the master bombers, which became such a key part of so many of the raids, where you had an experienced Pathfinder crew who would fly in first over the

target and they would act as a sort of master of ceremonies via radio dictating and conducting the main force as it came in and they would often be the last to leave so for example in the raid on Peenemunde the flying bomb base over on the Baltic coast in August 1943. 83 squadron pilot called John Searvey was the master of ceremonies, the master bomber for that raid. And he flew something like seven times over the target in the space of 50 minutes to ensure that the raid went well. And he was the first to fly in and he was the last to fly back. And so it was an extraordinarily dangerous role. And in raids later on, Dan, in some of the more complex raids, you know, one raid, there's something like eight master bombers involved in one raid. So it became quite a complex organisation later on in terms of each specific raid.

You listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about the pathfinders britain's bomber command elite more after this romans gods spartans the wars of alexander the great successors in incredible entirely necessary detail the ancients podcast it's kind of like dan's show except it's just ancient history. We've got the leading experts. We've got the big topics from ancient Vietnam to the fall of Rome. Subscribe to the Ancients on History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Land a Viking longship on island shores.

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which I'm very glad that I have never had to apply for or do. They all knew it was so dangerous. They told loved ones that they didn't expect to survive. I wanted to try to interview a number of veterans for this book. As we know, they're a dwindling number now, and it's important to get their testimonies. And, you know, the youngest are what, in their mid-90s. But I think as, with the greatest respect, as we all know, as one gets very old, you know, one's memory can be sort of frayed at the edges. And I think therefore it's important to try to get as much sort of contemporaneous material as possible. And I've got to be honest, I'm still flabbergasted by how much stuff there is out there, if you really dig about, that's kind of new.

And I was lucky enough to come across quite a lot of letters and diaries and that sort of thing written at the time and let's face it there is a vibrancy right on kind of listening to the first-hand account of a man in his late 20s or even a teenager there is just a certain drama about it which you kind of don't get necessarily with kind of veterans testimonials, as great as they can be. So yeah, I was surprised by how many of the guys even back then were aware of their kind of immortality, but they just cracked on with it. Many of them die, I learned from your book, on the way back home. Why was the journey back so dangerous? The stream, the bomber stream, obviously going to a target, know concentrating on getting there often you were not only would the pathfinders actually mark the target when you were there but they would also

lay down route markers along the way so they drop flares to keep things nice and tight it's only natural if you go over a heavily defended target where you've got flack and perhaps bad weather and night fighters lurking waiting it's only natural that once you've dropped your bombs, not only is the bomber stream going to disperse slightly, but I think also you've kind of achieved what your objective was, right? You've got to the target and you've dropped your bombs. And as much as one tries to still be alert and this, that and the other, it's only human instinct to kind of let your guard down slightly.

So I think that's one of the things i think secondly the german fighters would wait and they'd try to pick off the returning bombers knowing that the bomber stream was kind of less dense you know and there may be for example bombers that had been hit by flak that weren't flying as well they may have one or two members of crew that were out of action in other words often they were more vulnerable to attack and And of course, sometimes the bombers would fly off track. And before you know it, they'd fly over a heavily defended town that wasn't anything to do with the actual raid, but found themselves suddenly being coned in searchlights or attacked by enemy fighters. Yeah, so I found it fascinating that a number of different sources revealed that the

casualty rate or rather the bombers being shot down two to one on the way back than to the target so you were twice as likely to be shot down on the return trip home than you were on the way there i met a pathfinder once interviewing for this podcast who was on the raid the infamous raid against dresden and he said he was flying so low target that he actually had to pull up to a church tower at one point. I mean, right towards the end of the war now in early 1945, just how effective were these bombers? Interestingly, I mean, in terms of actual kind of basic facts, when Pathfinders was formed in August 1942,

25% of aircraft reached three miles of their aiming point and by 1945 by the end of the war 95% of the aircraft were reaching within three miles of their aiming point now you might think well three miles that's a long way but again you have to remember some of these raids were big raids with hundreds of heavy bombers and in terms of the smaller raids I mean again I've come across stats where you know mosquitoes were able to drop bombs within 200 feet of the smaller raids I mean again I've come across stats where you know mosquitoes were able to drop bombs within 200 feet of the target so it really depended on the size of the target what aircraft was being used the sort of navigational technology how near they were to obviously if you're flying four hours to Berlin. Berlin was never really properly dealt with, Dan. It's a huge city. It's covered in

a, most of the time, in a thick soupy cloud. It's one of the most heavily defended targets on earth. And with the greatest will in the world, the Pathfinders were never really able to take the bomber stream in there and properly deal with it. It just was an ask too far. But if you look at some of the other targets, like I've talked about Castle, and a number of kind of by the end of the war, they were sort of almost bombing at will. Now, of course, the opposition was negligible by then, naturally it was. But I think that the technology, there's no doubt whatsoever, the technology and the experience combined with this ability to drop these target markers, all meant that Bomber Command had just

become a far more accurate tool. Here we are talking about accuracy and statistics, but of course, actually what we're referring to here is a gigantic campaign of violence that led to death, destruction, trauma on a massive scale. Some modern apologists for Hitler, some sort of neo-Nazis even go as far as to claim that the bombing campaign was analogous with the Holocaust, sort of similar levels of criminality. Clearly, that's kind of grotesquely offensive Nazi propaganda. But where did you come down on the bombing, on the role? How effective was it? Did you go into the morality of it? I think that there was no one means of winning the war. And I think the Pathfinder's contribution to the air offensive ensured that Bomber Command,

alongside the Americans, obviously played a significant role in the eventual Allied victory. And I think that the casualty rate sustained by the Bomber Command airmen in the air prevented far greater numbers of casualties, Allied casualties on the ground, right? Of course, the idea now of area bombing towns and cities is grotesque. Of course it is in 2021. It's just, you know, we wouldn't dream of doing it. But it's equally dangerous for us to use hindsight to try to somehow judge what was deemed the best thing 80 years ago, right? We have to remember, judge what was deemed the best thing 80 years ago, right? We have to remember, Hitler had taken over the whole of most of mainland Europe. Britain had been bombed horribly.

They knew they had to get rid of this guy. And there are a number of ways of doing that. And they deemed at the time that bombing and this sort of bombing, area bombing, was part of the ingredients that was the way to do that. And, you know, look, even by kind of near the end of the ingredients that was the way to do that. And, you know, look, even by kind of near the end of the war, there were one or two targets, Potsdam, for example, that I think Churchill was really rather squeamish about. I think I say in my book, why did you end up blowing down Potsdam? There were one or two targets, like he felt, well, this is a raid too far. But at the same time, you know, the public was still behind the bombing raids, the airmen, certainly, most of them are still behind it. You know, so I feel that I think it was the right thing to behind the bombing raids. The airmen certainly, most of them, were still behind it. You know, so I feel that I think it was the right thing to do at the time.

I think they felt it was the right thing to do at the time. Of course, as I say, to us now, it's a horrific, grotesque thing. But back then, it seemed to them to be the only solution. It's funny, I've actually just been to National Archives today, and I've been looking at Stalin and Churchill's telegrams in 1941-42, and the bombing looms very large as Britain's answer to Stalin's repeated pleas for the Allies to do more to take pressure off the desperate Soviets. He's begging them for a second front, and Churchill's replying, we can't do a second front, but look, we've got North Africa and the bombing. And again, I mean, look, you have to remember as well that when Arthur Harris took over

Bomber Command in, what, early 42, and there was a danger, you know, I mean, even before the 1,000 bomber raids, there was a danger that, you know, Bomber Command was just going to be kind of dismantled. And, you know, it wasn't really doing the job it should do. But by then, you know, the lanks were coming off the production more and more. There was Churchill had really already put his kind of weight behind the bombing campaign. It was too late to turn around, really. There was too much of a force in that direction.

They had to really just crack on with it. It was a big beast. And I think that there was no way they could really change their sort of strategy in that respect. They had to follow it through. Well, Will, thanks very much for coming on. What is the book called? So it's called The Pathfinders, and I hope you enjoy it. Good luck with it.

Many thanks, Oliver. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks. You've made it to the end of another episode. Congratulations. Well done, you. I hope you're not fast asleep. If you did fancy supporting everything we do at History Hit,

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