Original subtitles

I don't think many of the aircrew

knew what strategic bombing really meant.

As schoolboys, we joined the air force,

cos there was a war being fought

and there was a bit of glamour attached to the air force.

If you couldn't get the Kraut in his factory,

it was just as easy to knock him off in his bed.

If old Granny Shickelgruber next door got the chop, that's hard luck.

There are a lot of people who say that bombing can never win a war.

Well, my answer to that is that it has never been tried yet, and we shall see.

After the Battle of Britain,

the Royal Air Force had cause to celebrate.

Fighter Command had shown how difficult it was to destroy a country

which could defend its own air space.

A lesson the air staff, apparently, neglected to teach itself.

Lord Trenchard had founded the service as a force of strategic bombers.

Fighters for defence were secondary.

Long-range bombers, it was argued,

could win wars without costly land battles.

They would bomb the industrial heart out of an enemy

and totally demoralise his civilian population.

In 1939, the RAF was not really equipped to put this thesis to the test.

But after Dunkirk, it was the only force capable of attacking Germany.

And the British public desperately needed an attack.

The British Empire is building up a bomber force

designed as the offensive air weapon to smash the heart of Germany.

The first daylight raids were disastrous.

Bombers fell easy prey to the Luftwaffe.

Still the RAF persevered, though losses mounted.

Heavy casualties forced Bomber Command to start flying at night.

OK, chaps, here we go.

Taxi out and take off.

Do you see what I see, skipper?

What do you see, my Scottish friend?

Fog. Dirty, yellow, stinking fog.

For aircrews trained to attack in daylight,

night flying had its problems.

To find a target in Germany,

in the dead of night,

in any average weather conditions,

was quite far beyond the task

of any bomber crews.

We're over the Dutch coast. Too much cloud to see where.

Patriotic films had no difficulty in giving the impression

that determination and a diet of raw carrots

could overcome the law saying you cannot see in the dark.

- Can't see anything else but the Rhine. - I hope it's not the Danube.

Keep on going. You might be able to pick up something with lights on.

If you could get visual pinpoints en route,

you could get within five or seven miles of the targets.

- Bomb doors open. - Steady.

Once the target was reached, it was a piece of cake...

Bombs gone.

...provided you were just blowing up a studio model.

I hope we haven't kept you waiting, sir.

Good Lord, no. Come and sit down.

- How did you get on? - Caused a hell of a great big fire.

Buckets of smoke. Visible, ooh, 50 miles away.

Well, old boy, how about some bacon and eggs?

The truth was different.

In fact, in those days, and it's been proved since,

three bombs in every 100 got within five miles of the aiming point.

In diesem Schlafsaal wurden neun Kinder getötet und fünf schwer verletzt.

Inaccurate bombing could be embarrassing.

The German propaganda ministry quickly capitalised

on the destruction of this children's hospital.

Das sind die Opfer der britischen Mordbuben,

die dieses gemeine Verbrechen ganz bewusst begangen haben.

Es wird unerbittlich gesühnt werden.

But the war cabinet's view was that Germany had to be bombed.

And this was the only strategic bombing Britain could then undertake.

Coventry and Liverpool indicated German industry would suffer

if its workers were bombed out.

Professor Lindemann told Churchill that de-housing a third of German workers

would bring industrial production to a halt.

And there was popular pressure to avenge the Blitz.

We ask no favours of the enemy.

We seek from them no... compunction.

On the contrary,

if tonight the people of London were asked to cast their votes

as to whether a convention should be entered into

to stop the bombing of all cities,

an overwhelming majority would cry:

"No, we will mete out to the Germans

the measure and more than the measure they have meted out to us."

But the Germans were now meting it out to the British bomber.

By the end of 1941, Britain had lost 700 aircraft.

The navy and the army were demanding bombers for the Atlantic and the desert.

Bomber Command stood to be put out of business.

In the face of mounting losses,

the cabinet ordered bombing operations to be cut down,

to save the bomber force.

During the respite in February 1942,

Sir Arthur Harris took over as Commander-in-Chief, Bomber Command.

He was determined to succeed with new tactics and new bombers.

The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion

that they were going to bomb everybody else

and nobody was going to bomb them.

At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and half a hundred other places,

they put that rather naive theory into operation.

They sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

I put them onto the north German ports in the Baltic,

because, having flown quite a bit at night myself,

I realised that the easiest targets to get hold of, of course,

were always the ones on the coastline.

Because if you can see anything, you can see a coastline.

If you can see a coastline with its odd shapes,

you can find your way along to ports and recognise them.

Lubeck and Rostock were the first major targets.

As ports, they were easy to find.

And they burnt well.

In March 1942, 230 bombers destroyed half Lubeck.

In April, Rostock was bombed into flames.

The style was set: night area bombing.

This was to become the pattern for the next three years.

It was terrifying, it was indiscriminate,

but as far as Bomber Command was concerned, there was no alternative.

How many occasions,

looking out of the window, or walking out in the garden,

could you see up to 18 or 20,000 feet?

Maybe on two or three days at most.

On how many occasions can you guarantee if you see up to it here,

that you could see down to it 500 miles away,

in the other end of Europe?

That was the situation.

There's no possibility of hitting the individual targets,

consistently small targets,

until we got the navigational electronic aids

that would show those targets up in the dark or through clouds.

The first electronic aid to navigation now came into service.

It was called GEE.

Three radio transmitters in England sent an invisible grid of signals

across western Europe.

By monitoring the signals and plotting them on a map,

a navigator could tell where his aircraft was.

GEE was first used at Cologne.

Here, Harris threw in every bomber he could scrape up

for a monumental prestige attack.

In your hands lie the means of destroying

a major part of the resources by which the enemy's war effort is maintained.

Press home your attack. If you individually succeed,

you will have delivered the most devastating blow

against the very vitals of the enemy.

Let him have it right on the chin.

Send that message to all groups and stations.

I was trying to show them what could be achieved

with something approaching an adequate force,

and that it would be achieved without abnormal casualties.

The dark hours over Hitler's Germany are about to be made hideous.

The men of Bomber Command know well what they have to do.

A calm, moonlit night, everything ready and waiting,

from planes to carrier pigeons.

They seem to know the ops are on. Come on, fellas, get cracking.

Round the clock with the RAF.

At station after station, there are heavies, including Lancasters,

the heavy bomber of the moment, ready for tonight.

For tonight is going to be very, very interesting -

a thousand-bomber night.

On that night, May 30, 1942,

1,046 bombers took off for Cologne.

Wir hörten auch gleich kurz darauf das Brummen

der anfliegenden Bomber.

We heard the drone of the approaching bombers

and guessed that it was a heavy formation.

And soon after, the first bombs fell around us.

We were all shaking with fear. Some people nearly fainted.

Many of the patients were crying.

The roaring and crashing came closer and closer.

We really thought all hell was breaking loose.

Our part of the city was in flames.

People were running out of cellars and out of houses.

Some were buried in the rubble.

Others were caught by the falling masonry.

Many people actually caught fire, running around like living torches.

We really didn't expect, in '42, that such a heavy raid would take place.

We were only used to smaller attacks,

and when I got the news that about 1,000 bombers were attacking Cologne,

it was incredible.

The morale of the people was not shattered too much.

It was more like a short shock which passed away.

German industry remained resilient, although the industrial Ruhr

was under attack throughout 1942.

Damage was extensive, but there was some slack in the economy

to be taken up in more war production.

The Nazi war machine was skilled at orchestrating civilian morale.

Flugzeuggeräusch.

Bitte mal die Geschwindigkeit von 02:15 Uhr nachmessen.

The Germans could give as well as take.

The Luftwaffe was acutely aware of the lesson radar-controlled RAF fighters

had taught it during the Battle of Britain.

Air defence chief General Kammhuber evolved a most efficient system.

Across the North Sea coast

stretched an early-warning radar grid, the Kammhuber Line.

This grid was divided into boxes.

In each box was a night fighter, waiting like a spider for the fly.

We overtook the plane on the side, so he thought, "Ah, he hasn't seen me."

He still did some corkscrewing or waving.

I just banked slightly to give the gunners a good view underneath.

I moved off maybe ten degrees to port and starboard during this manoeuvre,

but it wasn't violent in any sense at all.

And then I was shooting this way and diving directly,

or with a - what we said - schräge Musik,

two two-centimetre cannons,

the same, only flying underneath,

and waiting, moving very easy.

We did the same parallel to the other one, shooting.

Between the motors you had about 5,000 litres of gasoline,

and that was burning very easily.

The advent of the Kammhuber Line, and all that went with it,

was a startling sort of thing to be confronted with,

because the German night defences took a terrible toll of British bombers.

But now the RAF was no longer alone.

Hiya, fellas. There's your birdseed for Hitler. Come and get it.

Throughout 1942, the US Eighth Army Air Force

had been building up in England.

The American air chiefs believed they could succeed in daylight

without suffering the losses the British had done.

They were convinced they could bomb accurately by day.

Charlie's doing his twirl again.

Wish I had something like that.

You guys wouldn't know what to do with it.

Took six months to teach you how to pull a trigger.

Can the small talk. You need to come home.

Their aircraft were very heavily armed. Some carried up to 12 machine guns.

And they were trained to fly in close formation.

Formation flying was really the name of the game

as far as the Eighth Air Force was concerned.

There was never anything like it happened before or since.

They actually were sort of making their own rules up as they went along,

because it was just a brand-new concept.

You made it possible to have a more concentrated firepower

from the gunner's positions of all your aeroplanes.

The fact that you could depend on good formation, tight formation,

not only helped you in defence of fighter attack,

it made your chances of achieving good bombing results much better.

Because if you're bombing, a squadron of aeroplanes was bombing,

and the pattern was a good, tight pattern,

your results were bound to be good.

Bombs away.

Early raids into France bore out American optimism.

Later, over Germany, it was a different story.

They found at first, yes, the bombers

could cope pretty well with the fighters

and take acceptable losses,

if penetrations were not too deep,

if they kept good formation and they had supporting fire, one from the other.

But the Germans were learning too.

They learned how to make their attacks and penetrate formations.

And they started the head-on attacks, to try to get the leader

and spread the formation.

Once they got the formation spread out,

then they could pick the bombers off at will. More or less, anyway.

But it was too early to admit defeat.

At night, the British bombers flew on, hundreds at a time, but each on its own.

We used to see them go over in the early evening, one by one in trail,

I would not have changed places for them.

I'd much rather have the close formation, the firepower,

than go over the way they did.

Flying with the RAF, you were Single Charlie.

Just after we'd crossed the Dutch coast,

I felt a terrific bang in my face.

The windscreen was shot away and I'd been wounded in the forearm,

the shoulder and the head. The plane went out of control temporarily.

I didn't see any sense in saying that I'm wounded,

in case they all thought, "He's going to pop off any minute now."

Again, the gun exploded in the front of the plane beside us

and the shell hit the engineer who stood beside me in the forearm.

And I had bits in my leg and they sort of skinned the skin off my hand.

The port elevator had been shot off-

it keeps the plane straight, on each side of the tail,

and the port one had been shot off.

This meant that you had to hold the stick back, right back,

as if you're going to climb like this, to keep the plane straight and level.

The bomb aimer had to help push it back because this hand was pretty weak,

my shoulder had been hit

and it was keeping the stick back by holding my hands in front.

And the engineer held it with his other hand, his good arm.

So we held it, combined, back, to keep the plane straight and level.

It wasn't a "press on regardless" feeling,

it was just a fact that the four engines were still flying.

If we'd had any engine cut, I'd have thought,

"Well, we can't get any further."

But another factor here was, had I turned back,

we'd have another 700 planes that are more or less on the same track,

and spread something like eight or ten miles broad

and maybe four to six thousand feet deep.

And you're turning back right into them, heading through this lot to get back.

And then again, had I turned off, say at 90 degrees, to try and avoid them,

you're still turning across quite a number of them.

Then I watched the target indicators and opened the bomb doors

and kept the plane steady as I could on the target indicators, and level.

This is one of the things they made a fuss about,

that we'd a picture of the target after all this.

But as soon as we'd a picture taken, I turned to head for base.

One of the things I remember feeling on this trip

was that we had to get back, because I knew we were wounded.

None of the other members could fly it, even on normal straight and levels,

so to fly it at night with one elevator gone,

and having the stick in your belly and no instruments, as it were,

would've been pretty well impossible.

We were shot at a few times on the way back, but we weren't hit again.

Eventually, we came over England, when I saw these beacons flashing.

As it touched down, the legs of the undercarriage collapsed.

We went along on our belly for maybe 50 yards or so.

And came to a stop. Switched off engines to keep the fire hazard down.

It was then only, that I knew the navigator was killed,

because he'd slid forward beside me.

About how many enemy fighters did you see?

I couldn't keep track, but I counted about 65.

I stopped trying to count when I got to 50, sir.

I think it was generally understood

that the combat tour was 25 missions,

because you'd be dead by the end of that time,

so there wasn't any point in asking you to stay around any longer.

Bomber crews lived a curious war.

One day in action, the next on the town.

When our group wasn't flying,

they'd usually go into London.

Spend the day in London.

And sometimes, if they had some money left,

they'd call up to find out if there was a mission going the next day,

and if not, they'd stay over.

Flak will be heavy, probably accurate,

but you've been through worse before.

Remember that your biggest enemy still is single-engine fighter planes.

I recall one evening in the officers' club.

Our operations officer was pouring Scotch into a one-armed bandit,

you know, these things that you put quarters in,

trying to persuade the machine to deliver a jackpot.

But... I guess it was a kind of an eat, drink and be merry sort of life.

The going's gonna be rough.

You'll have to pull your necks in there and stay in there and pitch, every man.

I think that flying is so impersonal,

that is to say combat flying,

that you don't get that intimate sense of loss

if you see an aeroplane get shot down

that you'd have if your buddy on a battlefield

had his head blown off right within arm's length.

Men came from Britain, America, Occupied Europe,

and the British Commonwealth

to fight and die in the most determined air offensive yet.

In January 1943, at Casablanca, Churchill and Roosevelt

decided to combine the British and US bombing efforts

in preparing Nazi Europe for D-day.

U-boat yards, aircraft plants...

...armament factories,

oil installations and transport,

were deemed priority targets for round-the-clock precision bombing.

But precision bombing at night was still impossible for Harris.

An attempt to pick off the Ruhr dams with specially designed bombs

was only partially successful,

and cost the lives of some of the best aircrews.

Though the raid led to improved accuracy later on, not all the dams were hit.

Ruhr arms production was unaffected.

Harris believed that only the mounting onslaught of night area bombing

would crush German industrial capacity.

At this time, we were getting better aircraft.

The Lancaster was coming out in great numbers.

We were losing the less efficient Stirling and the Halifax.

We were getting better radar devices.

And we had extremely good navigators, selected navigators.

And this was the essence of the whole thing.

And these navigators were able to get much closer to an aiming point

than we had previously.

Then we laid great lanes of flares, hundreds of flares.

Even if we missed the aiming point,

we would identify some very positive feature on the ground,

like a lake or a bend in the river.

And from there, we could then creep on to the target

and put flares down, different coloured flares.

And then later on, we got target indicators.

And these were... Just imagine a great bunch of incandescent grapes

falling from 2,000, 4,000, wherever we wanted them to detonate from.

At the end of July 1943,

Harris deployed his improving technology with devastating effect on Hamburg.

The effectiveness of the first Hamburg raid

was due to us at last getting permission

to use something we'd had in the bag for a long time,

which was known as "window",

which was the dropping of clouds of aluminium paper strips,

which completely upset not only the German location apparatus,

but also their gun-aiming apparatus.

None of us, neither civilians nor firemen,

knew what happened on this night.

It was a very heavy raid,

but we had almost the same one year before.

We were not prepared for the fire storm

which broke out half an hour after the raid.

The effect of the bombing, combined with a heat wave,

was to create a man-made tornado of flame.

A fire storm.

Und diese ganze Gegend wurde von Kanälen...

I went to this area near the docks.

It was crossed by canals.

People tried to leap down into them out of the flames,

but the water was on fire.

It's difficult to explain why the water was burning.

There were many ships, small ships, moored in the canals.

They had exploded, and burning oil had been released onto the water.

And the people, who were themselves on fire, jumped into it.

And they burnt, swam, burnt and went under.

Most people were killed by the fierce heat,

not burnt or suffocated or poisoned by carbon monoxide.

We think that in some places,

the temperature reached 1,000 degrees centigrade.

The British night attacks and American day raids

lasted nearly a week.

30,000 died.

In Hamburg, we really found out the first time

that the morale of the German people can be shattered so much

that work for industry,

the work in the armaments industry, would collapse.

At the time, Speer said

six more raids like that would have finished the war.

The Allies did not have that capacity.

The shock passed.

At the same time, the Eighth Air Force

had stepped up the intensity of its daylight raids.

Next group will bomb from an altitude of 13,000 feet.

We feel that this low altitude

will be equalised by the element of surprise which is with us.

Two weeks after Hamburg, they planned to deal their knockout blow

against German industry.

Lights, please.

This group of buildings here is your target.

This building will be the aiming point.

If your bomb pattern is concentrated in this area,

it should very effectively knock out the factory.

The target was the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt,

producing a major part of Germany's needs.

The attacking force was to be split into two.

The first wave would fight to a secondary target,

the Messerschmitt aircraft plant at Regensburg.

Then it would fly on unhindered to North Africa.

The second wave, ten minutes behind the first,

would then arrive at Schweinfurt,

whilst the German fighters were on the ground refuelling.

Their battle would be during the trip home.

I went in without any fighter escort at all,

and flew clear across Europe without fighter escort,

with about 125 aeroplanes that I had in the division at the time.

German air defence staff plotted the path of the first wave

as it flew further and further into Germany.

They could not tell the plan was going wrong.

British weather helped to upset the Americans' careful plans.

Unexpected low cloud delayed the takeoff of the second wave.

The result: the Luftwaffe, refuelled and re-armed,

was waiting for them.

Well, we didn't expect an attack

coming that far into the country without fighter escort.

And we were all very astonished.

Null. Anfrage Viktor.

Schweinfurt was the result of very good conditions in favour of German fighters,

and the fact we could bring all our fighters

into operation to intercept the bomber stream.

This altogether has favoured our results.

21 Flying Fortresses were lost

before the first bomb fell on Schweinfurt.

The first division, coming in later, had heavier losses,

because they had to go back out in addition to coming in.

I think we wound up the day by losing about 60 aeroplanes,

which didn't make anybody very happy.

Ich kam dann noch mal hoch und bin von unten ins Ziel und...

hat dann prima hingehauen.

The cost was high.

But ball-bearing production was disrupted for six weeks.

When you hit Schweinfurt first,

it was a nightmare getting true.

But then, I had a very good representative, Kessler,

and he did with all means, not only the repair,

but also the replacement of ball bearings with other devices

which could do the job,

not as good as a ball bearing, but it could be done.

In the two-wave attack,

over 120 aircraft were lost or damaged beyond repair.

To prove their point at Schweinfurt, the Americans would have to go back.

Naturally, I was keenly disappointed,

largely because in sending my crews back,

I knew they would sustain additional losses.

If we had done the job right in the first place,

we could have avoided these losses.

But nobody who fires a gun hits his target every time.

We went back because we got good weather

and it was our highest priority target.

That's why we returned.

On 14th October, some 300 bombers were marshalled over England.

There were aeroplanes climbing all over England.

England was just an airport.

And this, I think, was real difficult.

It took some time

to group a large number of heavy bombers into a tight formation.

These complicated manoeuvres gave warning to the Luftwaffe

of the strength and direction of an attacking force.

Two thirds of all German fighters

were now concentrated against the Eighth Air Force.

The fighter was the boogie man.

The fighter had eyes and, in a great many instances,

the fighter had a pretty competent fella at the controls.

And when he latched on to you, you were in trouble lots of times.

I was that close that I could really see the rear gunner.

I saw him as frightened as I was.

They'd call the positions of the fighters out over their intercom.

Sometimes they'd get so frightened

that they'd continue to hold the microphone down,

and keep hollering into the microphone.

And they started at 1,000 metres, almost,

with their tracing ammunition, in order to frighten us.

And I told my younger pilots, who had no experience,

to close their eyes, attacking from behind.

There wasn't much time to think. You just put that gun sight on

and kept waving your head around looking for enemy fighters

and kept the gun sight on 'em.

Pilot to navigator, what's the word?

We're making the run.

Right before we hit the target was the worst part.

We got picked up by fighters, were taken into the target and they left,

and we dropped the bombs and they picked us up after the target.

More than 60% of all ball-bearing production

at Schweinfurt was destroyed.

The Americans had lost more than 60 Flying Fortresses.

If you would have repeated those raids shortly afterwards,

it wouldn't have given us the time to rebuild.

Then it would have been a disastrous result.

Could you take the losses the forces took

when you didn't know if you'd accomplish it?

When you thought ball bearings were coming in from Sweden and Switzerland?

You didn't know. You don't go on with those things.

So the strategy swung back from pinpoint targets like Schweinfurt

to another night area offensive: Berlin.

With American support, Harris believed he could wreck Berlin in six months

and win the war.

But the depleted Eighth Air Force were not now able to join him.

He sent the most amazing signals. And one that I'll always remember -

and this is the sort of thing you read out to your crews at briefing -

this one went on to say:

"Tonight you go to the big city." That's Berlin.

"You have the opportunity to light a fire in the belly of the enemy

and burn his black heart out."

Well, crews, after they stopped cheering a thing like that,

they didn't want aircraft.

You could just fill their pockets with bombs

and point them towards Berlin and they'd take off on their own.

Bomber Command had to go on on its own.

It was a long way, and the weather at the end of 1943 was particularly bad.

But each night, the bombers fought their way to Berlin

and other cities deep in Germany.

Harris' crews wrought terrible damage.

Berlin is getting a real taste of total war.

The terrific weight of RAF assaults on the capital of Naziland

has set the Hun reeling.

How he must regret the ruthless attacks he made on Warsaw, Rotterdam,

Belgrade, London, Coventry and the rest.

The day and night of reckoning is here.

And what do you think of it, Keith?

Jerry definitely had it this time. It certainly was a wizard prang.

Yet many of Berlin's offices and factories managed to go on working.

In my experience, people rather got numb.

They were going through the streets like shadows.

But they were still working like automats.

We had very little trouble in getting there,

but one thing I did notice

was the vicious way in which every German town

now seems to throw up flak indiscriminately.

The technological advantages

which prevailed over Hamburg no longer applied.

The German air defence had leapfrogged ahead once more.

Berlin looked as if it would indeed remain Berlin.

By early spring, 1944, Harris had not totally destroyed the city.

Bomber Command had been savagely mauled by the Germans.

In those four months, in raids against Berlin and other targets,

1,000 aircraft, the Command's first-line strength, were lost.

But Harris did not, and does not, concede defeat.

The casualties in the Battle of Berlin

were no more than we would have suffered

if we'd gone anywhere else in Germany, deep into Germany.

People seem to forget that Bomber Command

fought 1,000 battles during the war.

You can't succeed in every one.

I'm not saying the Battle of Berlin was a defeat or anything like a defeat.

I think it was a major contribution towards the defeat of Germany.

There were thousands of heavy anti-aircraft guns,

millions of ammunition for them,

and hundreds of thousands of soldiers,

which were torn away from our fight in the Eastern Front.

So I should say, with air attacks on Germany,

you had, in an early stage, from '43 on,

really a so-called second front.

Despite all the devastation, the Germans carried on.

German industry was still supplying

the armies fighting fiercely in the east and in Italy.

The strategic bombing thesis remained as yet unproven.

The lessons of Schweinfurt had been well learnt by the Americans.

Re-equipped, they joined the RAF over Berlin in March 1944.

But now they were escorted by the Mustang,

a remarkable aeroplane which was to change everything.

It had a bomber's range and a fighter's performance.

The German day fighter had now met its match.

By the end of spring 1944, the German day fighter had lost

where the Spitfire and Hurricane had won.

The Americans had finally beaten the Luftwaffe over daylight Europe

with their long-range fighters.

We had nothing of the same effort.

And I think they frightened us quite a bit.

I think the main concern

was the quantities in which they were showing up.

The Germans had lost control of their air space in daylight.

From now on, the Allies would be able to launch day raids over Germany at will.

But, in March 1944,

both bomber forces were placed under Eisenhower's overall command

to prepare for D-day.

There would be six months' respite

before the Allied bombers could set out once more,

to break the will of the German people.