Dan Snow's History Hit - The Bombing War

Episode Date: March 1, 2020

75 years ago this Spring, the aerial assault on Germany was reaching a crescendo as city after city was devastated by British and American bomber fleets. History Hit TV have just launched a major documentary to mark this anniversary featuring veterans and historians like Max Hastings and Victoria Taylor. In this podcast one of our contributors, the hugely popular James Holland, joins me to talk about why and how the bombing reached such catastrophic levels and whether it actually shortened the Second World War.From the earliest days of the war when the RAF confined themselves to dropping propaganda leaflets to the murderous bombing on Pfrozheim in late February 1945 which utterly destroyed most of the medieval city and killed a third of its population, James talks me through what both sides hoped to achieve from aerial bombing and how they went about it.For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about the bombing war featuring James Holland and other historians, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod6' at checkout for six weeks free.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm really proud of this podcast today because this podcast is part of a really ambitious project we got. We've commissioned one of our most expensive and best documentaries yet on the bombing war in the Second World War. This month marked the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Pforzheim, less well known about but even more devastating, even more deadly per capita than the assault on Dresden. So we want to look at the bombing war right the way through from 1939 with its leaflet drops. We filmed in Coventry to talk about the German blitz against that town in 1948 years ago this year and all the way up to 1945. What did the bombing do? What did it achieve? Did it help to bring the war to a conclusion quicker than might have been the case otherwise? We've got some big hitters in this documentary. We've got James Holland, we've got Max Hastings,

we've got Paul Beaver, we've got Victoria Taylor, we've got Victor Gregg talking about Dresden, we've got all sorts of people. So I'm really, really proud of this documentary, proud of the whole team for getting it out.'t been easy this podcast is accompanied that this is the unedited and brilliant James Holland talking to me at length about the bomber war and it was excerpts from this interview that we then incorporate into our documentary this is James Holland he's been on the pod many times he's the boss of the Chalk Valley History Festival the Glastonbury for history here in the UK. His best-selling book on D-Day was on everybody's Christmas list last year, and he is currently punching out a new book this time

on the battle for Sicily. But he took time out very kindly to talk to me about the bomber offensives of the Second World War, strategic bombing in the Second World War. You can watch the documentary if you go to historyhit.tv. If you go over there, it's like Netflix for history. You sign up, little subscription, but you get to avoid that subscription if you use the code POD6, P-O-D-6, and then you get six weeks for free. So you can watch whatever you like, free of charge. If you don't like it, you don't subscribe after that.

So please head over there and do that. Use the code POD6. In the meantime, here is the brilliant James Holland. James Holland, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Always a joy. Always, that's freaky. I think you've got the most numbers of visits ever, actually. So thank you for that.

What is it with bombers in between the walls? Everything's bombers. The cinema, they're talking about bombing. The politicians, the planners, Everything's bombers. The cinema is all about bombing, the politicians, the planners. Everyone's obsessed with bombing. Well, bombing really comes into form right at the end of the First World War in 1918. Well, before that, there's other bombers. But there is a bomber, strategic bomber force that the RAF developed in the summer of 1918,

which goes far into Europe and attacks. And suddenly there is this new new technology that planes that aircraft are developing very rapidly and suddenly you have this means of dropping a comparatively large amount of ordnance deep behind your own lines or deep behind enemy lines and so that is um very intoxicating and frightening for people and in the in in between the wars what you get is lots of people writing about this so you get sort of you know a duhet who is uh an italian kind of big thinker on this stuff you get uh um various there's a sort of whole school of kind of sort of bombing strategizing in the united states um ditto in germany they're thinking about it too and of

course in in in the rf here in britain So, you know, it's just how do you stop bombers? And what people haven't really worked out is what exactly the shape of bombing war is going to happen. We all know that if there is another conflict, bombers are going to be involved. And there is a doomsayer, you know, like Stanley Bulwood famously saying that bombers will always get through. And there are others who go, well, no, you know, I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. You know, what you need is to develop a really good fighter force and all the rest of it. And out of that, in the case of Britain, for example, develops the world's first coordinated air defence system developed by Dowding,

known as the Dowding system, begun when he's still in charge of research and development, but then sort of furthered when he becomes first commander-in-chief of Fighter Command in 1938. So, you know, people are just really thinking about it. But bombing is absolutely the forefront. I think mainly just because it just seems so ghastly. It seems so awful. And then, as if anyone was doubting it, you have Guernica,

which seems to kind of prove all the doomsayers and all that they're saying. And Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. I mean, obviously, the circumstances are that it's this small town in northern Spain, which is very, very poorly defended. And, of course, the bombers can run amok. And, of course, when people are looking at it, they're sort of going, oh, my gosh, how awful, how terrible. Look what's going to happen. This is the future of warfare. But, of course, over Guernica, there's literally no defence whatsoever.

And what that does, I think, is accelerate thinking about how you defend against bombers but you know bombing is absolutely part of in the case of britain and america it is absolutely part strategic bombing and what i mean by strategic bombing is bombing where your bomber force is operating independent of any other forces so independent of the navy independent of ground forces that bomber force um is absolutely key to western allied thinking and allied strategy because they see it as a means of crippling your enemy without having to throw a whole generation of young men into the furnace of of frontline action which was obviously the kind of nightmare of the First World War.

So when war breaks out in 1939, what about the first bit of the war that we always seem to overlook? What was the British RAF and the French Air Force doing in terms of strategic? Were they doing any strategic bombing up until May 1940? Yeah, so what happens is they start off,

the RAF sends over bomber command on the 3rd of September. And actually one of the people involved in that is Guy Gibson, later commanding the dams raid in May 1943. And they do go and drop some bombs near Wilhelmshaven. But then they decide actually they're not going to drop bombs, they're just going to drop leaflets. Which is, in retrospect, a really kind of odd decision. So they spend a lot of the first months of the war just flying over Germany, risking life and limb. Dropping leaflets going, I wouldn't get involved in this war if I were you.

And, you know, whatever you do, don't drop bombs. And of course, it's completely ineffective. But one of the reasons for this is because the French are really against it, because the French are absolutely terrified of the Luftwaffe. And the Luftwaffe have done this incredibly brilliant thing of completely throwing the wool over the eyes of the head of the Army of the Air, which is the French Air Force. So this guy, I can't remember his name, it's come off the top of my head, but I can't remember his name, but he goes over in 1938 to visit Germany.

This is the head of the French Air Force. And he's taken around by Erhard Milk, who is the sort of number two of the Luftwaffe by this stage. And Milk takes him to this kind of fighter airfield where there's a whole row of messerschmitt 109 single engine fighters lined up and he goes well that's all jolly impressive and milk sort of goes well i want to take you to another airfield so they go to another airfield and while they've been driving to the next airfield all the messerschmitts were taken up and lined up again on the second airfield

so by the time um uh the french commander-in-chief of the air force gets back to france he just goes oh my god you know we must never go to war with with germany because we'll our air force will be absolutely annihilated the luftwaffe is so huge of course it's absolute lie i mean he's just had the wall completely pulled over his eyes um and one of the reasons why the french do so badly when they finally do go into the air war in 1940 is because they've split up into separate commands. And although they've got parity with the Germans in terms of actual numbers of aircraft, they think the Germans have got kind of four times the size. So they're on the back foot already. They've got this sort of inferiority complex.

Secondly, the structure of where the French Air Force is set up, they're set up in these different compartments, these different areas. And they're not sort of coordinated at all so that one area has complete control in that one area and has nothing to do with the next one so of course what you're doing is you're dividing your force into effectively penny packets where they're least effective whereas the germans and they have absolute french have absolutely no air defense system whatsoever i mean it's literally just just standing patrols, see if you spot the Germans. Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is a sort of, you know, absolutely hopeless. And of course, the Germans who are the aggressor can choose when to attack and they can attack en masse.

You know, that's very much the kind of always been the German way of war. There's nothing new about Luftwaffe tactics. You know, the Schwerpunkt, this kind of idea that you concentrate your forces in one area. So they hurtle over and just literally take out one airfield at a time and destroy them all on the ground because obviously all the french and indeed the rf component can't possibly know when they're coming so they can't be on the ground you know they can't be in the air doing sort of just hoping they bump into the luftwaffe in the air kind of patrols all the time and that's how they get destroyed but it's not because the luftwaffe is manifestly superior in strength and size I mean the thing about the Luftwaffe is the Luftwaffe

grows organically very much as a as a what we would now call a tactical air force i.e. there to support ground operations ground operations in the German way of war is absolutely centered to their military thinking it's why their navy's so rubbish basically but it's also why the Luftwaffe is just not geared up for a strategic air force it was a very very brilliant guy he was the chief staff the luftwaffe died in 1936 in a flying accident ironically called general viva and general viva um was a massive proponent of strategic of creating a strategic air force a heavy bomber force for for the luftwaffe but then he learned to fly wasn't very good at it, crashed in his Heinkel 111

and killed himself, ironically. And with him died the idea of a strategic air force. And instead, Ernst Udet, who'd been in this amazing fighter race and the first one was basically Goering's mate, he was put in charge of procurement. And a guy called General Yashonic was made the chief of staff.

And Yashonic and Udet were both very much sort of cut from the same cloth. And their bag was absolutely dive bombing. And the theory behind dive bombing is quite a good one. Because if you dive bomb, you can be more accurate. Because the point of release is closer to your target than it would be before you started your dive. Therefore, you can be more accurate, which means you need less ordnance to do the damage and all trials of dive bombers and obviously i'm talking about stukas and you know the ju-87 seem to look really good and you know these pilots are getting these amazing levels of

accuracy the problem with it is that you absolutely have to have command of the sky for it to work because the moment your stuka comes out of its dive, it's basically standing still in the air. As it comes out of its dive, the air brakes are off and it's slowly trying to go. Because it's a big old beast. It's a single-engine plane. I don't know if you've ever seen one,

but they're pretty chunky for a single-engine plane, which means their rate of climb is incredibly slow. And their course is unbelievably predictable. Yes. So as they come down, as they come out. So if you're a waiting hurricane or Spitfire, you're like a kind of Kestrel kind of homing down or a sparrow hawk on a sparrow.

And, you know, they're easy meat. And, of course, this is what happens over Dunkirk when the Luftwaffe are sent in to kind of destroy the BEF and make sure they don't get home. I mean, you have any number of people who were sort of, you know, on a destroyer going back to Dover. Oh, yeah, Stukas came down. I saw columns of water 1,000 feet in the air.

But the point is, they lived to tell the tale, which is why 338,000 of them got home. You know, hardly any ships were sunk by air attack. I mean, literally almost none in the Dunkirk evacuation. And that's because it's incredibly difficult to move a moving target, because, know when you're starting to dive at 6 000 feet it looks like a pencil sort of wobbling around the sea but secondly because they're being pounced on by by the raf and so that's the big problem with dive bombing as a strategy the problem for the luftwaffe is they put all their eggs in one basket and they were developing this very fast, long range, medium bomber called the Junkers 88, the Junkers 88. And they suddenly decided, well, you know,

let's give this dive bombing capabilities too. So they put dive bombing capabilities on it and the good folk at Junkers sort of go do lots of teeth suck and go, well, you know, we can, but it's gonna cost you. You know, and it's gonna cost you in terms of time, money, development, and it's not gonna be the plain new original you can see. It's gonna be much slower, and it's not going to be the plane you originally conceived it's going to be much slower because it's heavier and all sorts of stuff then i mean just bonkers um they go well we're developing this four engine bomber the heimkuhl 177 let's

give that dive bombing capabilities how cool would that be you know the people at heimkuhl are sort of going do you know what's really not cool at all it's a really really bad idea i think the lift rover loses something like 32 of their finest test pilots, test fighting this absolute dog of an aircraft that never really gets going. And it puts the whole long-range bomber force sort of strategy completely on the back burner. And they never really develop a heavy bomber or a strategic air force as a result. Which is a problem because in the summer of 1940,

the German Luftwaffe finds itself fighting a campaign using strategic air power against Britain, right? Yes, so the whole point about the Luftwaffe in 1940 is it is fighting a battle which it is absolutely not equipped to fight. I mean, you know, it is not prepared for it. It's never expected to. It's not designed to do that. It's got a commander-in-chief whose tactics are absolutely woeful, who is completely

dependent on an intelligence picture which is basically what he wants to hear rather than the reality so the intelligence is bad by this stage in the summer of 1940 aircraft production the luftwaffe is really not impressive at all um britain is doing at the very least double the amount of uh of aircraft production that the the luftwaffe is doing. You know, the best ratio, I mean, it's very interesting. You take July 1940, for example. 496 Spitfires and Hurricanes made that month in Britain. 240 Messerschmitt 109s. So that's less than half.

And that is the best ratio at any point in the Battle of Britain for the Luftwaffe. And also, they don't have a civilian repair organisation like we do. And, of course, because our airfields are spread out all over England and southern England, where there's a concentration in southeast England, they're much easier to get that repair network done because they haven't got very far to go. If all your fighter airfields are in a clump in the Pas-de-Calais, then you've got a massive problem trying to repair them because all your infrastructure is back in Germany. You've got to get it a call away across france so their their ability to kind of keep up with

the pace of losses in the battle of britain the luftwaffe that is is really really bad whereas ours is really good so we start the battle of britain with whatever it is 640 single engine fighters at the beginning of july 1940 and by the end of october 1940 we're kind of you know knocking 800 whereas germany in the beginning of July has 740 single-engine fighters, but only about 200 by October 31st. Just briefly, what was the German plan in the Battle of Britain? Well, the plan of the German Battle of Britain is to destroy the RAF, and they're so far short of achieving that.

It's tragic. I mean, it's not for us it's really good news but i mean you know it's just absolutely astonishing how bad they do you know anyway i mean i remember talking to hanzeker bob who was a kind of you know great german fighter race and he sort of goes i tell you james you know it was a draw it wasn't you know you had your ass as whip make i mean you absolutely did. I mean, you know, it was hopeless. I mean, their intelligence picture was terrible. They had no concept that we had three, you know, four commands. I mean, they had no idea that there was a difference

between coastal command, bomber command and fighter command. You know, so on day one of, you know, Eagle Day, the 13th of August, 1940, they go off and they sort of go, yeah, you know, we've hit Watchford and, you know, we've attacked, destroyed, you know, X number of Spitfires. They didn't even go anywhere near a Spitfire airfield. I mean, it's just, it's absolutely hopeless. They've got the world's most sophisticated radar and they don't use it because they're owned by the Navy.

There's no joined up thinking whatsoever. You have in Germany, you have the OKW, which is this combined services general staff, which is an inherently good idea. But it's not used as that it's just used as hitler's mouthpiece so there's kind of no joined up thinking you know the plan for operation sea lion which is the proposed um invasion of britain i mean it's just bonkers i mean it's absolutely insane so after his big triumph in in berlin at the beginning of july following the fall of france and the low countries um hitler retreats to the burkoff which is in itself incredibly unhelpful because it's very difficult to get to it's in the bavarian alps down there

near salzburg on the austrian border um and you know he gets his naval guys to come along and they say okay so what's the plan for invading britain they go well my theory you know what we think is a you know we should be attacked on a on a really narrow front somewhere kind of you know 30 yards either side of deal and he goes okay well you go off and do your plans and then the army turn up and they go well my fury you know what we think is we should attack on a kind of 90 mile front from lime regis to deal uh he goes we'll often go and do your plans and you know then goring turns up and he says well my fury you know we're just going to smash the raf i mean i mean it's it's insane um you know there's gonna they're gonna use but they haven't got enough they haven't got any kind of invasion barges they haven't got landing craft as such so they're going to take

barges from the rhine but not enough of them are motorized so they're going to couple three together one with the leading one will have an engine the other two won't i mean what happens when you actually hit the beach i mean how does that work i mean i mean can you imagine i mean it's just it's hopeless is it also just at this point quite hard to deliver enough munitions to the, enough ordnance to a desired target on the ground? A hundred percent, yeah. I mean, you know, I mean, this is thinking, because the Germans are the aggressors, because they're starting it, really.

Although, I mean, I still haven't answered your original question about what the RAF was doing in terms of bombing in the first part of the war, which I'll come back to you down, I promise. But, I mean, twin-engine bombers delivering about a payload of about a tonne of ordnance, just, you know, they just don't have enough bombers. I mean, you know, if you really want to destroy a city, send over three and a half thousand heavy bombers, you know, when the winds are favourable over some consecutive nights, you know, and you will destroy a city, particularly if your anti-aircraft defences aren't up to much.

You know, sending over kind of, you know, a hundred twin-engine Heinkel 111s and Dornier 17s, of course it's gonna cause damage, but it's not, you know, it's very, very difficult to knock out an airfield. So their plan is, they just think, they didn't understand that Britain has a coordinated air defence system. They didn't realise that the RAF can see them coming

and take off from their airfields and be ready for them and be higher in the sky than they are and use the sun and vultures of height and pounce down on their fighter escorts. They don't get any of that. They don't understand the capabilities or how the RAF is structured and organised. So they assume that what they're going to do is kind of maraud over just as they did in France a month or two earlier. And everything will be tickety-boo. And of course, when they get over,

the airfields are empty of fighter planes because we know they're coming. And also, all the airfields, they're not all clamped together. They're all grass. And actually, to destroy a 100-acre greenfield site where you don't have runways, actually, it's really

difficult and because we've kind of predicted what will happen we've also got control rooms sort of three miles in a village shop you know hidden in a village sort of somewhere away from the effort because you don't actually need to strictly speaking to be on the airfield as well and we've also kind of prepared huge piles of soil and scalpings and stuff so that if there are many bomb craters you just fill them in and put a steamroller over them and you're good to go again. I mean, I remember talking to Tom Neill. I mean, you know Tom, or did know Tom.

Sadly, no longer with us. But I remember him sort of saying, you know, that he took off from North Weald, Airfield, just north of London, right on the corner of the M11 and the M25, as it is now, on the 3rd of September, 1940. And he said, you know, I looked down and there was North Weald, hopeless, covered in smoke. And he said, you know, I looked down and there was North Wales

hopelessly covered in smoke. And he said, and I thought, how am I ever going to get back down again? And I said, well, you obviously did. He said, oh, yes, yes, we all did, actually. We just got down and dodged potholes. One airfield knocked out for more than 24 hours out of 138 in the entire battle run. I mean, that's not good.

That's not a good race of success. What is the sort of approximate size of the German bomber force during the Battle of Britain? It's only about a thousand and that thousand is not going to be capable of they're not capable of sending over a thousand bombers at any one time, because they're not all serviceable and combat ready at any one time, so really

the amount of times single raids of over a hundred bombers are sent over is literally a cow on one hand. I mean, you know, Battle of Britain Day, 15th of September, 1940, the biggest raid of the day, there's two big raids on South East London. Biggest raid of the day comes at about 3.30 in the afternoon and, you know, 300 aircraft, of which 100 are bombers,

200 are ME110 twin-engine fighters and one single engine 109s against them are 335 spitfires and hurricanes so this idea that we're kind of you know massively outnumbered is just rubbish you know and when when churchill's standing next to next to keith park in the uxbridge bunker with his unlit cigar says where are all the reserves and and you know it's always sort of there are none in this kind of sort of portentous way what he's saying is but he's not saying it in a portentous way he's just saying all the reserves? And, you know, it's always sort of, there are none in this kind of sort of portentous way. What he's saying is, but he's not saying it in a portentous way. He's just saying all the reserves,

you know, there aren't any reserves because I've sent all my squadrons up. What he doesn't say is there's another 400 single-engine fighters elsewhere in the country that we've chosen, you know, we've just chosen not to concentrate them all in South East England. So it's nothing like as bad as everyone makes out.

So the airfield, the attack on the airfield isn't working in the RAF. Is that why Hitler, does Hitler, in frustration, why did they turn on London? Why do we see this transition to bombing of cities, the beginning of the blitz? Well, what happens is... Okay, so this takes us back to your original point about what is Bomber Command doing.

Well, Bomber Command... So let me just answer that very quickly. So Bomber Command, the French are really nervous because they've got this huge inferiority complex about the size of the Luftwaffe, which is completely mistaken. They are very nervous about Britain and indeed French bombers going over and bombing German targets in case they get tit for tat raids. Which, you know, the last thing the French want is, I don't know, Toulouse or Paris to be obliterated. So they're really nervous about this.

So they're going, please, please, please, don't go and bomb Germany. So as part of our alliance, we go, okay, fine, we'll drop leaflets then. So that's hence one of the reasons why we have all the leaflet dropping. The flip side of that is what it does do is give a lot of people in Bomb and Command

a chance to kind of build up hours and experience and all the rest of it. So it's not entirely wasted effort. I think it's the night of the 17th of May, if I remember rightly, is when British bombers go and attack German targets for the first time in Germany with bombs since the very first day of the war. And that is because at this stage, you know, France is losing and France's ability to kind of sort of argue the case for not for bombing German targets has gone.

And so we start literally every night after that, the weather is up for it. Bomber command is going over and attacking targets in Germany. And by the beginning of the 4th of September, we have bombed Berlin four times. So it is, you know, it true that the luftwaffe accidentally drop a few one bomber drops a few bombs on on london on the whatever it was night of the 23rd 24th of august uh um but that was accidental the tit for tat that the bomber command do is these four raids on on berlin now it doesn't cause a huge amount of damage to berlin but it's still a massive shock to the German people,

and particularly the people in the capital, who assumed that the war was largely over after the fall of France. You know, this isn't the rhetoric. You know, this is what we've been told. And so Hitler has to retaliate. Now, you'd have thought, you know, a sort of concentrated weekend of bombing of London, and, you know, kind of honour has been salvaged as far as he's concerned but not a bit of it you know they start on Saturday the 7th of September they keep going till the middle of May 1941 with a policy and a strategy that frankly makes no sense whatsoever

and only makes the life of fighter command much easier because the moment they turn away from the fight to fight for airfields when you're attacking airfields because of the dispersed nature of RAF airfields in southern England, you can't really concentrate your force on one. You have to send over smaller forces to attack Tangmere and Hawking and North Weald at the same time. And that, of course, splits the effort of Fighter Command trying to defend it. It's also harder to predict which airfield they're going for. You can see the raids building up on radar and radar and stuff you can't quite tell where they're going to go until the last minute which means it's much harder you can make sure you're off the ground

but actually effectively attacking that attacking force in turn is much harder the moment though there's a huge great raid going to london it's absolutely blindingly obvious where they're going to go and so you can organize your fighter defense much more effectively because you know you can predict where they're going to go so actually those daylight raids on london in september they're really easy for keith park to predict which means that he can just peck away at them all the way from the moment they cross the kent coast there's pairs of squadrons um hurricane squadrons attacking the bombers spitfire squadrons attacking the fighters who are able to because they know what's going to happen they can they can get up quickly they've got a greater rate of climb than the hurricane so they can get up to kind of 28 000 feet which means they've got the twin advantages

of height and maneuvering yourself so that you've got the sun behind you which is you know two of the kind of key things you want when you're doing air-to-air combat and attacking another um and so the whole strategy is just a total mess and it's kind of desperation and it kind of you know the blitz is just sort of right okay well these bastards you know we haven't got them on the ground so we'll show them you know we'll show them what it's like you know they think they can come and attack the right we'll we'll we'll browbeat them with with bombing but they're just not equipped for this and you know the rate of all the level of orders is just not enough so it's a it just doesn't work and all they're doing is expending vast numbers of bombers which they're

going to need like billiard when there goes to the invasion of soviet union achieving not very much um using vast amounts of fuel and ordnance which frankly could be better used elsewhere um and it's just it's just a title sham of a strategy conducted with poor tactics and operationally makes no sense whatsoever. So throughout that winter of 1940-41 it doesn't effectively impair Britain's ability to make war? Not really, no. Or loosen Churchill's grip on power?

No, all it does is teach us valuable... I mean, obviously when I say all it does it kills 42 000 british civilians you know that's a huge number you know that's more than has ever been killed in a civilians that have been killed in a british conflict before um outside of the civil war you know that that's that's a tragedy and it's terrible and obviously certain factories are here and that's a bit of a pain in the backside. But in terms of our industrial output, our industrial output actually increases massively over the winter of 1940-41. Doesn't really have too much effect on us at all.

And what it does is teach us invaluable lessons on how to effectively bomb other cities. I mean, you know, the classic case of that is, of course, is Coventry in November 1940. And what the Luftwaffe do and do very effectively on that particular night is come in two waves. So you drop your high explosives start off with the old timber buildings in the center of center of Coventry it's light wind lots of moons so you can see your target very clearly you then come down with a second wave of lots of incendiaries

and the incendiaries then fan the flames that have been created by the high explosives in the first wave and the wind just sort of gently kind of sort of pushes it all in the right direction. Suddenly you've got a firestorm and you've got the centre of Coventry gutted. You know, those precise tactics were turned on to Hamburg in end of July 1943. And, you know, famously, Bomber Harris, who wasn't Bomber Harris at that point, but was Air Vice Marshal, Arthur Harris, working at the Air Ministry, stood on the roof in Whitehall, watching the fires on the East End and said, you know, you will reap what you sow,

and made that solemn vow there, and boy, did he deliver. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week.

There are new episodes every week. Yeah, speaking of... I mean, was Coventry an important moment, particularly in British policymaking, or was it just a whole of... Yeah, I think it was. I think it really is. I think it was really shocking. And I think, you know, what was shocking about it

was that suddenly you've got this very old medieval city, which is, you know, which was, by all accounts, a very beautiful city. And it's completely gutted. And although the numbers of lives lost is, in a big scheme of things, it's hundreds rather than thousands. I mean, it's comparatively small. It's still a real shock.

I mean, everyone sort of goes, oh my God, okay, this is what can happen. But I think what it does is stiffen the resolve. I mean, OK, this is how you do it. And if you really want to kind of have a big effect, you need to destroy entire cities. I mean, that's the effect it has on the RAF, particularly those at Air Ministry, those who are kind of running the RAF's war effort, and particularly those at Bomber Command. RAF war effort and particularly those at Bomber Command. So when does Britain shift, when does Britain begin that policy of trying to eradicate German cities? Pretty much in the word go.

Ludwell Hewitt is the head of the Bomber Command and then it's Sir Richard Pearce and Sir Richard Pearce does this sort of Chatham House rules meeting with a whole load of sort of city bigwigs i think in late 1941 if i remember and he makes a comment he said he said and i'm paraphrasing but it's worth the fact of um you know people think that we're just hitting german industrial targets and that we we worry about um killing german civilians i just want to assure you that we have no such worries at all. And to destroy the German war effort, it means flattening entire cities. That's what we're going to do.

And the problem we have is at the start of the war, we just can't bomb accurately. Bomb sites are in their infancy. The Americans have developed the northern bomb site in the early 1930s, but at this stage of the war, they're not prepared to give the technical data to us to develop ourselves so we're having to develop our own and we do this becomes a blackett site known as the number 14 bomb site which is every bit as good as the northern really um and very effective but it doesn't that's not

kicking in in 1941 you know we've got mainly twin engine aircraft um short sterlings and and halifaxes are just coming in. But the Halifax is sort of hurried into production because there is felt there is this need for a heavy bomber. And to start off with, it's a bit of a dog. And so there's all sorts of teething issues in terms of kind of strategic bombing in 1941. And then there is the butt report for summer of 1941, where it is proved that despite the claims of the bomber crews, the reality is that hardly any bombs are falling within a matter of five miles of their target, let alone right on the barrel.

And this is a huge blow for Bomber Command, for Bomber Command's morale. And there's lots of stuff in the press about it and conversations in Parliament. And, you know, really, is this the right strategy? We put so many of our eggs in one basket with bomber command. You know, we put so much money and time and effort into developing this bomber force. But and for all for very, very good reasons, you know, because it's a bombers are a false multiplier. You know, they're a means of saving the lives of those on the ground. You know, strategy of Britain is to have as few people as you possibly can in the front line and the actual bare coalface of war on the ground. That's the strategy.

You know, we are not going to have the slaughter of the First World War again. That's not going to happen. We're going to use science, modernity, global reach, technology to do a lot of those hard yards. And absolutely integral to that is bombing. So suddenly at the end of 1941, it's all looking a bit kind of, okay, so this isn't quite working. So then the policy is the internal policy,

not the public policy. And the internal policy is why Richard Pearce is making comments in this sort of Chatham House Rules meeting is, okay, well, we're going to say we're going to hit marshalling yards and targets, but actually what we're really going to do is just pace them and flatten them. Because actually, by destroying civilians, you're destroying the workforce, by destroying towns, you're destroying nodal points,

you're reducing Germany's ability to actually man and operate those factories. So that's almost as good as doing the factories, isn't it? You can see how they convince themselves. But of course, technology doesn't stand still. And vast amounts of effort are put into research and development within Bomber Command, within the RAF. And things start to advance. And Bomber Harris takes over from Pearson in February 1942.

And at that time is when the Lancasters are starting to come in. Of course, Lancaster, to a certain extent, is a miracle weapon, you know, because it can carry, well, proves it can later carry 10 tonnes, but it can carry comfortably kind of four tonnes of ordnance, which is so much more than anything else. It's pretty fast. It can fly, it can, if it really needs to, fly kind of nearly 300 miles an hour.

It's got long range. And it's a pretty effective bomber for 1942 what he doesn't have is navigational aids that you need but they're improving haven't got hasn't kind of honed the techniques but in the summer of 1940 comes into the pathfinder force which is this sort of force that goes ahead of the main bomber force and and and is better trained for accurate bombing they're the ones that have all that you know as new navigational techniques like h2s and oboe are coming in those tech those those bits of equipment are given to the pathfinder force so that they can kind of you know be the vanguard they can market with flares the target and that improves accuracy um and the accuracy of the bomber force

by the spring of 1943 by march 1943 which is is when Harris finally feels he's ready to launch his all-out strategic air war against Germany. You know, quite late in the war, in the big scheme of things, in the last two years of the war. You know, we just think that kind of bomber command emerges kind of fully formed. It doesn't. It's this incredibly long, treacherous process of starting from kind of almost nothing to becoming this force of Lancasters

and heavy bombers that it is by the sort of middle of 1943, one that can destroy Hamburg in July 1943. It's quite a process. And Harris always says right from the word go, you know, from the moment he takes over in February 1942, this is going to take a year. I need a year. And also don't forget this time in the summer of 1942, we've got the embryonic eighth air force from the americans coming in they've now joined the war you know so airfields need to be handed over to them they've got heavy bombers they've got b24s and b17s flying fortresses which again don't have the payload of of um of the lancasters but they're going to be operating it by day so they need to be better armed that causes more drag improves you know worsens the weight um so that's why they're not carrying quite so

much ordnance as a lancaster which is operating at night and doesn't need doesn't think it needs to be quite so well protected at the time and so they've got to have airfields as well so that eats into the kind of heavy airfields that you would need for you know with proper concrete run race that harris needs for his heavy bomber force so you know it just takes time and there's all these navigational aids um and it's only really by 1944 that you've got a bomber force which is 100 heavy bombers apart from the mosquitoes which are flying ahead and pathfinding and all the rest of it um and and has the accuracy to kind of bomb pretty precisely by 1940 standards on any target that it wants to. But in 1943, what does Harris go for first? The Ruhr?

Yeah, so it's the Ruhr. And that might make perfect sense because, first of all, it's in Western Germany. So it's quite close to Britain comparatively. And that is the industrial heartland. It's on the Rhine. It's near where all the coal fields are. That's where the big industrial centres are. We're talking about Dortmund, Essen,

Dusseldorf, these kind of places. And they are just absolutely hammered. I mean, hammered. I mean, the Germans literally do not know what's hit them. And it's only going to get worse because you have Operation Gamora, which I've already mentioned, the attack on Hamburg. And Hamburg is just, it's the single most horrific bombing sequence of raids in Western Europe in the war, I think. I mean, you know, 42,600 people killed in Operation Gamora in Hamburg. You know, when you think the whole of the Blitz, that number is, so that is greater than the total number of British civilians killed in the entire Blitz in the war, in the whole war. You know, so that is the than the total number of British civilians killed in the entire blitz, in the war, in the whole war.

So that is the scale of it. I mean, it is 80% of Germany's second city is destroyed. I mean, that's like 80% of Manchester being eradicated, just like that. I mean, it is horrendous. 1.2 million displaced. I mean, it is horrendous. 1.2 million displaced. I mean, this is on a scale that is just off the radar compared to what the Luftwaffe is doing in London and elsewhere and Portsmouth and Liverpool in 1914, 1941. Did it work, though? I mean, was Harris just trying to kill Germans and mess the place up?

Or was he trying to reduce arms production, shake the grip of the Nazi government? I mean, by any of the metrics, is it actually working? Yeah, I think it is, and I think it works a lot more effective. It's much more effective than the Nerses would have us believe. I mean, if you just think about it, OK, you know, Essen is where the crookworks are. OK, crookworks are just hammered and hammered and hammered and the the plants are progressively destroyed so you know they go from sort of 100 efficiency to 80 to 60 to 40 to 30 you know progressively

just think about just that one city essen if. If that city is 75% destroyed, how effective do you think that city is going to be in producing tanks and aircraft and U-boats and all the rest of it? It just physically can't be. What's the net result of that? The net result is that Germany is going to have to disperse. Germany's already got a massive transport problem. It doesn't have enough fuel,

so it's completely dependent on railways and coal. And the coal that it does have is massively overused. You're using coal to make synthetic fuel because that's the only way you can do it. That is an incredibly expensive process and completely counterproductive. So dispersing your industrial effort your war armaments effort is really not helpful at all and you're killing lots of civilians and morale is really bad and you're affecting all sorts of day-to-day things like electricity running water and so on and so forth so yes it absolutely is i mean i think the thing the thing is, when one is considering Nazi Germany in the Second World War, you have to think about why people surrender or sue for peace in most wars.

And usually it's because they can't afford it and they're not going to win. That is absolutely the case for Germany in November 1918. They've run out of cash. They're completely broke. Everyone's starving. Everyone's fed up. And they're not going to win. By that reckoning the nazis should have sued for peace in november 1941 at the absolute latest i mean if not end of october 1940 but they don't because it's hitler because they're nazis

because you know there's the fear of armageddon because they've unleashed this absolutely apocalyptic kind of wave of violence in the eastern front where it is an ideological war as well as a kind of traditional war and they know that they're going to reap what they sow and so what's the alternative the alternative is to fight on Hitler's a kind of black and white kind of guy you know it's a thousand year reich or it's Armageddon you know it's up to the will of the German people. It's as simple as that. There's no grey area whatsoever. So they keep going. They just keep going.

By anyone's reckoning, the kind of the effects of bomber command should have done what Harrison predicted. What Tuohy Spots, you know, and Hap Arnold and Ira Aker, you know, the US Air Force strategic bomber chiefs, Air Force chiefs. What they all predict that bombing should be enough. And it should have been enough. But it isn't because it's Nazi Germany, because it's Hitler in charge. But yeah, the damage is absolutely enormous. I mean, just imagine what it must have been like going through Europe in second half of 1945.

I mean, city after city just destroyed. I mean, have you seen those photos of Berlin in 1945? I mean, it's unbelievable. It's just the whole of the Tiergarten smashed, just whole blocks just totally destroyed, this sort of skeletal shells of buildings, rubble covering every single room. This is the capital of Germany. It's just, it's incomprehensible. It's so far removed from what we expect today, what we can comprehend today. And yet it took till 1945. But I think what is interesting is if you accept

that strategic bombing is not effective until the earliest, the spring of 1943, two years' worth of heavy bombing on Germany, it really delivers. Was the plan for 1944 even the same as 1943, but just more of the same? More of the same, really. I mean, there's more specific plans. 43 but just more of the same more of the same really i mean there's more specific plans so obviously there's a whole trying to get rid of trying to kind of rest control of airspace over northwest europe in the first part of of 1944 because that's an absolute 100 prerequisite for any invasion cross-channel invasion and you know obviously i'm talking about d-day and operation overlord in june 1944 you know you cannot do that unless you control the skies.

Why do you need that? Well, because you need to be able to destroy bridges and marshalling yards and totally put a spanner in the works of the Germans' ability to get to Normandy quickly. You know, you've got to race. You've got to get your own material, men and material across the channel, which is quite a slow process. You've got to get your own material men of material across the channel which is quite slow process you've got to you know do that by ships um germany on paper it should be much easier for them to reinforce the bridgehead in normandy because they're already on land so what you want to do is slow them up and you do that by bombing bridges and railways and all the rest of it um but to do that you really do need low-level bombers and to do that you have to have command of the skies otherwise for the same reasons that spitfires are pouncing on stukas in 1940 um you know they're

going to get shot down by meshesmiths and fucker wolves and all the rest of it so you have to clear those skies so that is absolutely essential that means destroying all the infrastructure of the luftwaffe aircraft factories um augsburg um leipzig uh brunswick and all this where we're fucker wolf and measure yeah that's big week um so week. So you want to make sure that you've done that and that is achieved. There is also kind of a further transportation plan, which is you're using strategic bomber forces to hit really big marshalling guards.

There's a huge great railway hub at Ham, for example, in Western Germany. So you want to do that and you're using the heavies of strategic air force to do that. Then there is the problem with the V sites, V1s and V2s, which are being developed now. You know, we have intelligence on this. We know that these are these missiles are going to be sent over. So we are targeting those sites as well. Very difficult to hit. But heavy bombers are involved in that.

But what is really interesting is the whole reason why we're attacking at night is because it's very dangerous to attack by day because of fighter you know fighters can see you whereas night fighters are not so effective and flak actually is not very effective at all you might have 15 000 heavy anti-aircraft guns in the in within germany defending its skies but actually the chance of a flag shell hitting your your lancaster or your halifax is about 0.002 percent whereas you know if you're attacked by a fucker wolf um your chances of being hit are quite high so it is fighters that pose the biggest threat to to um to to to bombers so if you can negate that by attacking at night, then that's a good thing,

because you'll lose less bombers. But what happens is Germany wises up to the need for an air defence system and wises up to kind of improving its night fighter defence. And by the end of 1943, following the big attacks on Hamburg in July 1943, then suddenly their fighter defence is much better. Their night fighting capability is much improved.

They've got many more. They're using ME-110s, which used to be day fighters as night fighters. They've got sort of some form of radar which enables them to home in on bombers. And they've got, they're absolutely sort of bristling with weaponry. And they've developed this particularly gruesome thing

called Schrager Music, which is where you have a sort of 30 millimetre cannon, which is a big old shell, pointing, you know, pointing upwards. So what you do is you fly underneath the lancaster where it has absolutely no protection whatsoever has a dorsal turret but doesn't have a ventral turret underneath so it's got no weaponry underneath the underneath the lancaster and you just so the lancaster is kind of here you're you're one at 110 or your yunca's 88 night fighter goes straight underneath it its guns are pointing upwards press the fire button, it's just good night Charlie to that Lancaster or that Halifax.

You know, that is the biggest threat. So the advantages in terms of safety of your force are disappearing by attacking by night by the end of 1943, beginning of 1944. Whilst at the same time, Bomber Command's ability to attack precisely is not really there's not really much difference between how precise you can be whether you're attacking by day or by night such are the seismic shifts and the ability to bomb accurately with the development of navigational aids and bombing techniques and all the rest of it which are coming into play by the beginning of 1944 so so harris's thing is, the only thing we can really do effectively is just paste cities and paste them by night.

So by night, you're losing accuracy, but it's safer, and you're not very accurate, so you might as well just smother all these cities. That's the thinking behind it. But by the beginning of 1944, that argument is sounding a bit hollow, because actually, Bomber Command has the capability to attack much more precisely, But by the beginning of 1944, that argument is sounding a bit hollow, because actually Bomber Command has the capability to attack much more precisely, and it is not much safer to be attacking by night as it is by day. Whereas what the Americans are saying, their argument is,

well, yes, okay, but if we attack by day, we can be much more precise. We can hit proper industrial targets rather than civilian targets. We can be much more accurate but again those considerations are kind of sort of blurring by the beginning of 1944 and what actually the reason they continue doing the way they do is less to do with issues of accuracy it's more okay you do your bit then so you can do do that and we'll do our bit now and and you know the americans don't really want to be kind of sort of working quite so hand in glove with the British that they're all operating at night, for example.

And similarly, there is an advantage for kind of attacking round the clock. So you never let up the Germans. You know, you think about those poor anti-aircraft gunners. You know, they're on kind of watch all the time. You know, if you've got to be on it 24-7, you've got to have double the amount of people to to man those guns because you know people can't just be marrying them 24 hours of the day they've got to get some kip so that poses a whole greater strain on the german people and just imagine how debilitating it is if every time you're about to go to the factory suddenly the air raid siren goes off again and off you tramp and you know day and night so there is continued

advantages of attacking around the clock and the americans attacking know day and night so there is continued advantages of attacking around the clock and the americans attacking by day and the and the british attacking by night but the original advantages of attacking by night are have gone by 1940 yeah it's interesting i always think the debate about bomber command but the bomb is very interesting because on one yes it doesn't it doesn't shake hitler's grip on power. German munitions production, aircraft production goes up. We all know those stories. But in its offensive against the V weapons or in marshalling yards and transport before and during and after D-Day,

it's a phenomenal success. Yeah, and there's the oil plan as well, which is Spots' idea. And to his spots is the US.S. commander of strategic U.S. U.S. commander of strategic air forces in Europe. So he's overall in charge of strategic air effort in Italy and from Britain and obviously in France as well. And of course, there are the post Normandy. There are the tactical air forces which are increasingly operating from northwest Europe as well. and it's his idea to do the oil plan, and that is just targeting synthetic fuel plants and attacking oil targets. The only source of actual oil that the Germans have

is from Ploesti in Romania, and that is just hammered time and time and time again, mainly by 15th Air Force, which is operating in southern Italy. And that materially affects germany's ability yeah completely yeah totally i mean they haven't got much fuel anyway i mean it's very interesting it's from 1944 um britain's domestic use is something like 21 and a half million gallons of fuel just in britain alone germany's use full stop in 1944 is four and a half million so we are using four times the amount of fuel domestically than germany is using in its in total war effort i mean and that's just

britain so that doesn't include what allied forces are doing in the eta you know in europe in northwest europe in 1944 i mean it's just insane i I mean, they're so behind the game, it's not true. The Germans are, that is. Just quickly, Dresden. Yes. Was it necessary? Was it a crime? Yeah, completely. War target?

Legitimate target? Totally legitimate target. I mean, I think... Okay, so what I want to understand is, first of all, Dresden is an absolute hotbed of Nazism. And actually, I've just been recently looking at footage of Dresden's Jews being kicked out and packed off and being booted out of their homes

and amateur filmmakers are filming this for fun so I'm kind of massively sympathetic and there is no question that the vast majority of German people knew what was going on and I'm not saying that a 19 yearyear-old soldier at the front in Italy knows about the death camps or anything like that. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt

and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. But most Germans know there is something bad going on in the East. You know, and it's sort of, it's almost implied by Goebbels in his Sports Palace speech in February 1943,

where he goes, you know, we're in this now. We're all in it together. We're up the creek. You know, we have to have total war. Are you up for it? And everyone sort of goes, you know, see Carl and all the rest of it. I mean, you know, so there is this kind of sort of Faustian pact. You know, you are, you're guilty too. You backed us backed us you were in on this we're all in it together and you know

if you don't pull your weight we are absolutely screwed and and and so there is you know and if you have if you have lots and lots of people making amateur taking amateur photographs of atrocities in the east and taking cine footage of things going on in the east and sending them back to germany to be developed those developers are going to see that because they're developing it and he's going to talk to his mate and he's going to talk to his mate people are going to know they just they just are so they're all in there they are up to their necks in it and dresden has something like 127 factories doing war work. It hasn't been bombed very much.

So the air defences in Dresden are very poor. And the public shelters have been woefully starved by the Nazi go-lighter and his acolytes in in dresden so they're just it's just not fit for purpose and that is their problem you know that is their fault for not organizing that it's also a big railway hub and it's actually the russians that ask us to bomb it because that railway hub is feeding troops into the southern eastern front it's also feeding troops into northern italy so it is a it is a kind of a big nodal point so as a military target is as justified as any where there is a sort of moral question mark is did they need to target but the target is on the center of the

city you know what's wrong with hitting the marshalling yards what's wrong with actually hitting those huge barracks kind of you know a mile and a half to the north of the city you know what's wrong with hitting the marshalling yards what's wrong with actually hitting those huge barracks kind of you know a mile and a half to the north of the city why not there um they don't they hit they hit the centre of it and i think that is the only real question mark i mean you know the firestorm happens um goebbels makes huge play of it you know 120 000 killed it wasn't anything like that it was you know i say only in inverted commas 25 000 20 to 25 000 it's still a lot but it's one in 20 rather than you know one in two or whatever well you know um 80 percent is which was basically what gerbils was saying um you know we and why do we keep focusing about dresden i mean i mean you know four fine was was hit 10 days later

and one in four were killed in the firestorm in that. You know, Würzburg was destroyed, I think, in early March or very end of February. You know,

80% destroyed. Würzburg really didn't have any factories in it at all. It was just flattening it. And this was, and I think what you also have to say is be very careful not to put

kind of third decade of the 21st century sensibilities onto something that happened you know nearly 80 years ago it's nearly 75 years ago you know it's a different world then you can only do what you can do with the kit you've got and although um levels of ability to bomb accurately are much greater by 1945 than they are in say 1942 or even 1943 even so you know britain has been in that war a long time has expended a huge amount of effort lives and everything in trying to bring germany to heal germans have argued well you know you accused us of the holocaust but you know you were doing a holocaust on us by bombing all our cities there's a massive difference of course

is that the moment the war ends we'll stop bombing the cities whereas the moment the war ends in favor of germany the killing will continue until there's no jews and gypsies and all the rest of it left anywhere in europe so it's a completely different scenario and it's not comparable at all and i think if there is if there is a kind of level of frustration going on in the kind of in the viciousness of the bombing by RAF bomber command in the early part of 1945, I do think it's sort of understandable, if not entirely justified. So last question. So you think the strategic bombing campaign over Europe shortened the war? A hundred percent.

Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, the RAF alone dropped very nearly a million tonnes of bombs on Germany. You know, the effect that has. I mean, you know, when you start sort of breaking down the Nazi economy and you start breaking down actually what is happening, their ability to fight is just being degraded all the time by this kind of war over the air. You know, it is absolutely the kind of the fifth front.

And the abilities of the Germans to kind of of to keep going is just it's just being made harder and harder and harder i i think i think there is um yeah i think i think the bombing war definitely has a has a massive effect massive massive effect i mean you you just you just can't function properly when you're being hammered every two minutes james holland you want another tour de force from you you got various books that you've got your smash hit bestseller out at the moment d-day normandy 44 normandy rather yeah um but people can go and check out your book on big week i mean you've written lots of books well big weeks big weeks quite nice well it was fun to do and although i take a kind of quite short period of time from kind of the summer of 1943 through to the end of

february 1944 it does sort of go it does do the backstory so it is you can you can really you know if you if you want to find out about the bomber war that that will tell you kind of pretty much all you need to know and then your battle of britain is brilliant i'm very much enjoying that book yeah and then you've got um a big you're smash it you're in smash it podcast now that's you and Al Murray. Yeah, yeah, me and Al, we're doing our stuff. We have ways. We have ways of making you talk.

That's right. And then, you're right, I always, I mean, I just despair. You've got another book coming out soon, haven't you? Yeah, Sicily in the Autumn. God. Got to write it first, though. Congratulations. Well, I'm sure knowing you, you're churning through it.

Thanks very much, buddy. Yeah, the keyboard's on fire. Cheers, Dad. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. but if you could just do me a favorites for free go to itunes or wherever you get your podcast if you give it a five star rating and give it an

absolutely glowing review purge yourself give it a glowing review i'd really appreciate that it's tough weather that law of the jungle out there and i need all the fire support i can get so that will boost it up the charts it's so tiresome but, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. you