RAF Bomber Command

RAF Bomber Command was the organisation that controlled the RAF's bomber forces. It was formed in 1936 and absorbed into the new Strike Command in 1968.

It found fame in two eras, under the leadership of Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris during World War II, when its aircraft destroyed many German cities, and in the 1960s, when it was at the peak of its postwar power, with the V force of Valiant, Victor and Vulcan nuclear bombers, and a supplemental force of Canberra light bombers.

When Bomber Command was formed, "The bomber will always get through" was the mantra of the day, said by Stanley Baldwin (from Giulio Douhet). Until advances in radar technology in the very final couple of years before war broke out, this statement was effectively true. Bombers attacking could not be detected early enough to assemble defending fighters to prevent them getting through. Some damage might be done to the bombers by AAA guns, and by fighters as the bombers returned to base, but that was not the same as a proper defence. Consequently, the early conception of Bomber Command was in some ways akin to its later role as a nuclear deterrent force. It was seen as an entity that threatened the enemy with utter destruction, and thus prevented war. However, in addition to being made obsolete by technology, even if the bomber did always get through, its potential for damage to cities was massively overrated.

The problem was that the British Government was basing its data on a casualty rate of 50 per ton of bombs dropped. The basis for this assumption was a few raids on London in the later stages of World War I, by Zeppelins and Gotha bombers. It, and indeed the general public thus viewed the bomber as a weapon far more terrible than it really was.

At the start of WWII, Bomber Command was hampered by three problems. The first was simple lack of size. Bomber Command was not large enough to effectively attack the enemy. The second was rules of engagement. At the start of the war, the targets allocated to Bomber Command were not wide enough. in scope. The British Government did not want to violate international law by attacking civilian targets, and the French were even more concerned lest Bomber Command operations provoke a German bombing attack on France. Since the Armée de l'Air had almost nothing in the way of modern fighters, and no defence network comparable to the British chain of radar stations, France was effectively prostrate before the threat of a German bombing attack. The final problem was lack of good enough aircraft. The main Bomber Command workhorses at the start of the war were the Battle, Blenheim, Hampden, Wellesley, Wellington and Whitley. None of them had enough range or ordnance capacity.

Bomber Command was further reduced in size after the declaration of war. No. 1 Group, with its squadrons of Fairey Battles, left for France to form the Advanced Air Striking Force. This was for two reasons; to give the British Expeditionary Force some air striking power, and also to allow the Battle to operate against German targets, since it lacked the range to do so from British airfields.

The Sitzkreig (or Phoney War) mainly affected the Army. However, to an extent, Bomber Command was not properly at war during the first few months of hostilities either. Bomber Command flew many operational missions, and lost aircraft, but it did virtually no damage to the enemy. Most of the missions either failed to find their targets, or were leaflet dropping missions. The attack in the west in May 1940, changed everything.

The first bomber aircraft to go fully to war were the Battles of the Advanced Air Striking Force. They were partially disabled by German strikes on their airfields at the opening of the invasion of France. However, far from all of the force was caught on the ground. The Battle proved to be horrendously vulnerable to enemy fire. Many times, Battle forces would set out to attack, and be almost wiped out in the process. This was somewhat ironic given the fact that due to French paranoia about being attacked by German aircraft, during the Sitzkrieg, the Battle force had actually trained over German airspace at night!

Bomber Command itself soon fully joined in the action. With the immensely quick collapse of France, invasion seemed a clear and present danger. As its part in Battle of Britain, Bomber Command was assigned to pound the invasion fleets assembling in the Channel ports. This was much less high profile than the battles of the Spitfires and Hurricanes of Fighter Command, but still vital work.

Bomber Command was also indirectly responsible, in part at least, for the switch of Luftwaffe attention away from Fighter Command itself to bombing civilian targets. A German bomber on a raid had got lost due to poor navigation. It bombed London. Churchill consequently ordered a retaliatory raid on the German capital of Berlin. The damage caused was minor, but the raid sent Hitler into a rage. He ordered the Luftwaffe to level British cities, thus precipitating the Blitz.

Like the Americans later in the war, Bomber Command had first concentrated on 'precision' bombing in daylight. However, when several raids were cut to pieces by German defences, a switch to night attack tactics was forced upon the Command. The problems of enemy defences were then replaced with the problems of finding the target. It was common in the early years of the war for bombers relying on dead reckoning navigation to miss entire cities! One of the most urgent problems of the Command was thus to find technical aids to allow accurate bombing.

Bomber Command was made up of a number of Groups during the war. It began the war with Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 Groups. No. 1 Group was soon sent to France, as indicated above. It was, however, returned to Bomber Command control after the evacuation of France, and reconstituted. No. 2 Group remained part of Bomber Command until 1943, when it was removed to the control of Second Tactical Air Force, to form the light bomber component of that command. Bomber Command also gained two new Groups during the war. No. 6 Group was activated on 1 January, 1943. It was unique in that it was entirely made up of Royal Canadian Air Force crews and aircraft. No. 8 Group was actived on 15 August, 1942. It was a critical part of solving the navigational problems referred to in the previous paragraph.

The navigational problems of Bomber Command were solved by two methods, technical aids to navigation and Pathfinders. The technical aids to navigation took two forms. One was external aids, as exemplified by Gee and the later Oboe systems. The other was the H2S radar, which was carried on the bombers themselves. The Pathfinders were a group of elite crews who flew lighter aircraft ahead of the main bombing forces, and marked the targets. No. 8 Group controlled the Pathfinder squadrons.

Bomber Command was increasing massively in size. In the early days of the war, it was commonplace for raids to consist of a few tens of aircraft. By late 1941, raids into the hundreds of aircraft were being regularly mounted. However, in mid-1942, the new Air Officer Commanding in Chief, Sir Arthur Harris, wanted a spectacular propaganda effort. By scraping together virtually every aircraft in Bomber Command that could fly, including those from the more advanced training units, a raid was mounted on Cologne that consisted of 1,000 aircraft. This was an effort that could not be repeated routinely in 1942. However, by 1944, Bomber Command did have a genuine operational capability to put 1,000 aircraft over a target without out of the ordinary efforts.

Along with an increase in the size of the Command came a massive increase in the capability of the aircraft it was using. In 1942, the main workhorse aircraft of the later part of the war came into service. The Halifax and Lancaster made up the backbone of the Command, and had a longer range, higher speed and much greater bomb load than the earlier aircraft. The classic aircraft of the Pathfinders, the Mosquito, also made its appearance.

One of the most controversial aspects of Bomber Command during WWII was the mass bombing of cities. It is often argued that this constituted a war crime. However, it must be remembered that navigational technologies of the day, even late in the war, did not allow for much more precisely targeting than a town or city, or a the very smallest an area of a city, by night bombing. The two single most destructive raids in terms of absolute casualties were those on Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945. Both caused a firestorm and left tens of thousands dead. Both cities contained important industrial areas, and so were legitimate targets for attack by that measure.

In the aftermath of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was clear that the world had changed. In addition, the coming of the jet presaged an equally important change. In order for Bomber Command to keep up technologically in the early postwar years, B-29 Superfortresses were pressed into service as the Boeing Washington. However, they, and the Avro Lincoln, were only stopgap measures until the first of the new jet aircraft could come into service.

That first jet was the Canberra light bomber, some of which remain in RAF service in 2004 as photo reconnaissance aircraft. The Canberra proved to be an extremely successful aircraft, being exported to many countries, including, unusually, the United States. The next to enter service was the Valiant, the first of the V bombers.

The V bombers were conceived as the replacement for the wartime Lancasters and Halifaxes. Three aircraft were developed, which many argue was a waste of resources. They contend that one design should have been pursued, enabling a larger production run. The V bombers became the backbone of the British nuclear forces. The Valiant, Victor and Vulcan were classic designs of British aviation.

1956 saw the first operational test of Bomber Command since WWII, and its last major action in anger. The Egyptian Government nationalised the Suez Canal during that year, and the British Government decided to take military action. During the Suez Crisis, Bomber Command Canberras were deployed to Cyprus and Malta and Valiants were deployed to Malta. The Canberra performed well, but the Valiant had problems. Since the Valiant had just been introduced into service, this was hardly surprising. The Canberras were also vulnerable to attack by the Egyptian Air Force, which fortunately did not choose to attack the crowded airfields of Cyprus (RAF Akrotiri and RAF Nicosia holding nearly the whole RAF strike force, with a recently reactivated and poor quality airfield taking much of the French force).

Over 100 Bomber Command aircraft took part in operations against Egypt. By WWII standards, the scale of attack was light, but it did the job at hand.

Suez was the last major operational test of Bomber Command, but it was far from its last operation. During the following twelve years, Bomber Command aircraft frequently deployed overeseas to the Far East and Middle East. They were particularly used as a deterrent to Sukarno's Indonesia during the Konfrontasi. A detachment of Canberras was also permanently maintained at Akrotiri in Cyprus in support of CENTO obligations.

As the remaining V bombers came into service in the late 1950s, the British nuclear deterrant was gaining notice. The first British atomic bomb was tested in 1952, with the first hydrogen bomb being exploded in 1957. Operation Grapple saw Valiant bombers carrying out drops of hydrogen bombs over Christmas Island.

Nuclear annihilation came dramatically to world attention during 1962. The Cuban missile crisis was one of the nearest brushes with nuclear conflict the world has seen. During that tense period, Bomber Command aircraft maintained continuous strip alerts, ready to take off at a moment's notice. Heavy bombers were effectively doing what Fighter Command had done in 1940 in terms of reaction time. However, at no time did the Prime Minister take the decision to disperse the Bomber Command aircraft to satellite airfields, lest that be viewed as an aggressive step.

By the early 1960s, doubts were surfacing about the ability of Bomber Command to pierce the defences of the Soviet Union. The shooting down of a U-2 spyplane in 1960 confirmed that the Soviet Union did have surface-to-air missiles capable of reaching the heights that bombers operated at. Since WWII, the philosophy of bombers had been to go higher and faster. That found its ultimate expression in the XB-70 Valkyrie, developed for the USAF. With the deprecation of high and fast tactics, the new mantra became ultra low level attack. However, since the Bomber Command aircraft were not designed for that kind of attack profile, problems were caused. Those problems were primarily airframe fatigue. The Valiant was the first to suffer. Severe airframe fatigue meant that all Valiants were grounded in October 1964, and permanently withdrawn from service in January 1965. Low level operations also reduced the lifespan of the Victors and Vulcans.

Bomber Command's other main function was to provide tanker aircraft to the RAF. The Valiant was the first bomber used as a tanker operationally. Trials had been carried out with air to air refuelling using Lincolns and Meteors, and had proved successful, so many of the new bombers were designed to be able to be used in the tanker role. Indeed, some Valiants were produced as a dedicated tanker variant. As high level penetration declined as an attack technique, the Valiant saw more and more use as a tanker. With the introduction of the Victor B2, the earlier models of that aircraft were also converted to tankers. The withdrawal of the Valiant from service caused the conversion of many of the Victors to tankers to be greatly speeded up. The Vulcan also saw service as a tanker, but not until a improvised conversion during the Falklands War. Ironically, in the tanker role, the Victor not only outlived Bomber Command, but also all the other V bombers by nine years.

In a further attempt to make the operation of the bomber force more safe, attempts were made to develop stand-off weapons. With a stand-off capability, the bombers would not have to penetrate Soviet airspace. However, efforts to do so had only limited success. The first attempt was the Blue Steel missile. It worked, but its range meant that bombers still had to enter Soviet airspace. Longer range systems were developed, but failed and/or were cancelled. This fate befell the mark 2 of the Blue Steel, its replacement, the American Skybolt ALBM and the ground-based Blue Streak program.

However, attempts to develop a stand-off nuclear deterrent were eventually successful. The American Polaris missile was procured, and Royal Navy submarines built to carry them. The modern form of the British nuclear force was thus essentially reached. Royal Navy submarines relieved the RAF of the nuclear deterrent mission in 1969. However, by that point, Bomber Command was no more.

In the postwar period, the RAF slowly declined in strength, and by the mid-1960s, it was clear that the home command structure needed rationalisation. To that end, Fighter Command and Bomber Command were merged in 1968 to form Strike Command. Coastal Command also followed shortly thereafter.

Bomber Command had a successful period of existence. Its early potential was at first not realised, but with the development of better navigation and aircraft, it carried the war to the enemy in spectacular fashion. Postwar, it carried Britain's nuclear deterrent through a difficult period, and continued the fine traditions existing in 1945.

External links

• RAF History Timeline
• RAF Battle Honours