The Butt Report – Nadir of the RAF – The Bomber War Episode 3

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In this episode, the Butt report, what happened next and the arrival of Bomber Harris. Despite this being more than 50 minutes, I’ve skipped some detail e.g. The Singleton report which basically said ‘eh – bit difficult this bombing thing’ nor Tizard’s rubbishing of Cherwell’s Memorandum, nor really the detail of the Cherwell Memorandum. You’ll live. However if you want more on the subject then I recommend the Ofical History of Bomber Command to get into more the civil service fire fights.

Selected Internet Sources
The Butt Report – Transcript from 2014 – https://etherwave.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/butt-report-transcription-tna-pro-air-14-12182.pdf
The Cherwell Memorandum – https://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/reading/Bombing/cherwell.htm
Target for Tonight (1941) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0QOKuGejSU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Blackett – Admiralty Professor in opposition to Bomber Command
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_bombardment_and_international_law#:~:text=In%201977%2C%20Protocol%20I%20was,of%20civilians%20and%20civilian%20objects – International Law pertaining to Ariel Bombardment in 1939…eg there was none
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butt_Report
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_bombing_directive
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casablanca_directive

Selected Bibliography
America’s Pursuit of Precision Bombing 1910-1945, McFarland
Absolute War – Chris Bellamy
Absolute War – The Firebombing of Tokyo
Big Week – James Holland
Black Snow- James M Scott
Bomber Boys – Kevin Wilson
Bomber Command – Max Hastings
Bomber Offensive – Sir Arthur Harris GCB, OBE, AFC
Bomber Command’s War Against Germany, An Official History – Nobel Franklin et al.
The Bomber Mafia – Malcolm Gladwell
Dresden – Sinclair McKay
Dresden; Tuesday….. – Fredrick Taylor
Undaunted and Through Adversity (Vol 1 &2) – Ben Kite
United States Strategic Bombing Survey (European War) (USSBS) Sept 1945 – Var. – https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101634748-bk

A challenge for many dictatorships is that the person who Rises to the top of the pile is often the person most willing to exercise extreme violence on anyone around them if your political leadership is dogmatic or geriatric downright Psychopathic or all three this is very bad news for military commanders

Generally speaking in despotic regimes run by utter loonies there are perks to senior posts like a nice house all the bribes that you can collect and a naty uniform with many many medals but the downside is that the Glorious leader is likely to apply all their creative imagination to killing you your family

And everyone you’ve ever known if you give them bad news at the wrong moment and since being a military commander in a dictatorship is a blood sport in and of itself there are no easy outs now the best case you get demoted and then the

Next F in the post is going to spot all the crimes that you committed and make themselves look good in the Glorious Leader’s Eyes by exposing you retirement is really a shortcut to death this circle of fear is compounded in Wartime if say you’ve been a point pointed to

Your post because of your political reliability but have exactly no clue how to run your branch of the military or what any of those flashing lights do in such circumstances there is a tendency to try and put in front of the leader some manui to distract them don’t worry

That your troops are freezing to death sir and no of course the enemy doesn’t outnumber is 10 to1 Focus instead on who gets to we the goldenen balls at official suppers and how many RS should be in the magazine it’s all very satisfying but it does very little to

Actually win the conflict or address hard truth and this means that serious problems never really get questioned strategic failures never get properly examined and the system does not learn anything like as quickly as it should and if you don’t believe me simply read goal and shar’s original Diaries in

Tandem or look at him’s pathetic 5 minutes charge as a military commander at the front happily for those of us in Democratic countries we get to enjoy watching some santimon and pompers who was our leader being ejected from office on a regular basis better yet we can Comfort ourselves that our Sharden FR

Isn’t just us being vindictive a-holes it’s actually good for the country with democracy in action making politician redundant on a regular basis is a good idea nothing motivates one quite like the thought of being kicked out of office by the voting public moreover a sensible politician under pressure from

The country’s population will seek a variety of opinions they need clever informed and able advisers who’ll be able to offer a diverse set of ideas and create a discussion and a dialogue this process can still be very painful with lots of internal politics and dead ends but combine it with vital and strong

Leadership and with democracy and more often than not those ideas will be well beating and evolved very very fast or put it in simpler terms democracies have a much better chance getting good than autocracies of whatever flavor in 1941 and 42 at the lowest point of Britain’s

War with defeat and Retreat on almost all fronts things could not really have been going any worse for the men and women of RAF bomber command and it is to them today we will turn as they start to get good well hello there hello there for those of you that haven’t been here

Before my name is Lord hard Thrasher founding member of the movement to bring back indentured servitude for poor people and the reason that no one in the labor party can own a pair of red trousers before we begin a couple of quick Parish notices firstly if you hear

Banging and crashing going on in the background I can only apologize Jenkins and our local blacksmith one Burk hold bloody stupid Johnson are putting the finishing touches to a statistical analysis device that later secondly be mindful that I will use the odd naughty word I mean personally I think if you

Find discussions of area bombing millions of civilians acceptable but you find the word offensive you’ve got your priorities wrong but whatever there might be young people around so you have been warned this is part three in a series of indefinite length on the bomber War you don’t need to have

Watched the other episodes for it to make sense but they might help provide some context so you may want to go back and have a watch lastly if you enjoy this please do feel free to do all the usual things you know like And subscribe

And so forth and if you really like it then please do feel free to come and check out my patreon the details of which are in the description a quick recap for those new arrivals amongst you I realized there’ll be a number of members of the survivors

Club who won’t need to listen to this bit you might want to just going put a cup of tea on for the next couple of minutes and come back in our first episode we observed that really without noticing that they were even in a fight the Germans were winning the bomber War

Hands down in 1939 to 1941 Britain had too few pilots flying aircraft whose defensive Firepower was about as effective as a purity pledge during spring break moreover night flying was an almost alien concept to pre-war Pilots as a whole there were some exceptions Whitney Pilots did train to

Fly at night but they really were few and far between and navigation was universally useless amongst RAF Pilots it was job that would been given to observers there wasn’t a rank of Navigator yet which meant that the RF was missing some of its targets by entire countries worse the British

Strategic planning had all the focus of someone with ADHD after a party pack of Smarties with at least seven contradictory War plans running in near parallel they’d lost about 50% of their pre-war Crews by the middle of 1941 but they thought it was all worthwhile because they were apparently striking

Devastating blows against Germany who as we mentioned a moment ago literally hadn’t noticed much was happening if you turn your head and take a deep Swig of Earl gry and then squint a little bit you might be able to console yourself with the idea that the bombs when they

Did hit were very effective and that new bomber models were coming on stream albeit very slowly nonetheless for the first few months of 1941 bomber command had been forced to turn its entire Focus towards the submarine pens of France and gardening that is laying Minds off the

European Coast for fear of being wiped out if it did otherwise before returning to Germany in June of 1941 we’ve also examined in the past the American theory of precision bombing we did it last time and we concluded that there were fewer navigational issues because of the whole

Let’s go in by day thing but also that they were proposing to use a theory of precision bombing using a site that was as much a product of fraud as it was of science carrying too few bombs with too little hitting power to the wrong targets which they couldn’t hit anyway

Oh and of course they were proposing to do this in an aircraft which would prove to have the defensive skills of a lettuce leaf in a rabbit hutch and of course in 1941 the United States was still trying to fish its Fleet off the bottom of Pearl Harbor and hadn’t yet

Started to ramp up production much less get to Europe in fact I’m jumping ahead a bit here but the usaaf wouldn’t get numbers to the United Kingdom till July 1943 for reasons that we will look at in the future and that means for today we’re going to focus back on the RAF

We’ll look firstly at the butt report the response to it why the job at hand was so damned hard and then some of the Practical steps that the RAF took to write the ship the annuals of British campaigns are staffed full of vicious fights read in tooth and Claw Jutland Trafalga

Minden the Nile Quebec Quon Bay the Som I could go on and on and on but few campaigns can match the Ferocious nature of the one that has been fought by the British civil service for over 200 years to assert in no uncertain terms that it is they not the elected politicians who

Run the United Kingdom um for those of you that might not be familiar with what I’m talking about the Civil Service in the UK is the administrative part of government there to actually well technically speaking help bring government’s policy to action they do the thing of working out legalities and

Logistics and money and so forth if the government wants to make every citizen wear a jelly on their head each Tuesday then technically speaking the civil service is there to make that happen technically speaking in reality it is there to make damn sure that that kind of stupidity is never allowed to occur

And it has been fighting a highly effective and successful Guerilla action against politicians trying to do stupid things since it was formed in the 1860s according to the civil servant a politician’s primary use is to be there to carry the can when it goes wrong but

Govern I think not it is a universal truth that all political careers end in Failure whereas a canny civil servants career ends in a nice final salary pension aged about 55 all of which may make it sound like the British system is somehow broken but oh cont My Sweet

Summer child this is a self-healing self-teaching system with carefully balanced creative tension between political classes and the civil servants and all of this is true today it was true back in 1860 when the Civil Service was first formed and it was true in 1941 and it was a fact that was well

Understood by Churchill and his cross-party government that the civil services approach to a global war of annihilation would be to try and do as little as possible as slowly as possible something that drove Churchill utterly mad he therefore resolved to press the nuclear button and bring in a number of

External advisors to speed things up and inject some much needed urgency amongst these was his longtime friend Frederick Linderman whom he appointed as Chief Scientific Advisor to the cabinet in 1940 the problem was that trying to get new advisor the clout that they needed to get [ __ ] done fortunately for a prime

Minister in a hurry there was and is indeed is a quick fix simply en Noble them um for those again less familiar with the British parliamentary system enement um how do I describe this well basically that is you make them a member of Britain’s Upper House the House of

Lords and it’s a bit like the US Senate only they’re unelected and up until the early 2000s many of them inherited their seats the House of Lords gets to oversee any legislation passed by Parliament and he can refuse to pass it sounds utterly archaic and it is but it also kind of works

Look it’s a whole thing we don’t really have time we’ll come back to it another day and look at it properly but for now just accept the fact that to be part of the House of Lords gives you a degree of Cloudy control that you wouldn’t otherwise have whilst bypassing any need

To do things like get elected to a seat in the in the parliament so Churchill made his mate Linderman a lord thus Frederick Linderman became Lord cherwell in 1941 this gave him instant access and sufficient clap to sort the problems out as he saw fit whilst bypassing a whole

Bunch of red tape in one KN stroke Linderman is a hugely controversial figure he was a colossal [ __ ] possessed an absolutely first class mind and had no discernable human emotions whatsoever a te Toler and a vegetarian and an antisocial man he somehow became one of Churchill’s longest standing

Friends and he could read Churchill like an open book he took complicated scientific ideas and bowled them down to their Essentials he removed any vacillations or doubt with firm statements he kept his reports short and to the point and coded them with a strong sprinkling of mathematical justif

Ification and appeals to Empire and this approach appealed to church of Like Cocaine drops appeal to a toddler the now Lord cherwell was ideally suited to government he enjoyed political infighting plotting scheming power plays and revenge oh lordy lordy me how he loved Revenge Henry tizard who was

Responsible in part for the discovery of radar was made cherwell’s bunny for more than a decade cost him his job his teaching post his government trust and his post-war reputation don’t get me wrong T was quite capable of being a colossal ass too so he don’t feel too

Badly for but he was one of the brightest minds of his or any other generation and lindman took pains to [ __ ] him over repeatedly for years as Chief Scientific Advisor to the cabinet cherwell got his own Department responsible for statistical analysis which allowed him to produce reams of

Statistics on a plethora of government policies during the war not least around the bombing campaign so when in 1940 the first proper photographs of the British bombing effort began to emerge showing disturbingly little impact Linderman’s curiosity was peaked but at the time he lacked the authority to act after his

Ennoblement in July 1941 and his new Department he was able to order his private secretary that’s a British for chief civil servant to look into the RAF bomber commands accuracy records and publish a report on the subject and so on the 18th of August 1941 David bezan

Butt submitted what became known as the butt report now look no sniggering at the back please come on come on you’re not children let’s all grow up he examined something like 633 strike photographs reporting to show targets that have been bombed between June and July 1941 which mostly proved to show

Very surprised cows cities which were not the targets Railway yards that turned out to be lakes and so on and so forth his final report showed three key things one only one in three aircraft that claimed to have attacked a Target were actually getting within five miles

Of that Target two more than 60% of aircraft on a given raate were not even attacking the named Target but admitted to trying to attack something else instead instead and three once navigational errors technical failures Etc were taken into account not more than 5% of sorties were actually finding

The Target that they were aiming at never minding hitting it there was some variance in these findings in that for example Targets in coastal France were easier to find on account of being able to just follow the coast on and hit them and Targets in the roar were almost

Always covered in Haze and therefore actually they were missing them by but by begger margin but we’re kind of playing with semantics here the RAF was like a man driving on a night along an unfamiliar road with their lights off their eyes shut and throwing petrol bombs out of the window essentially at

Random and like a man doing that they were dying for their trouble the problem with reports is that once they’ve been written some [ __ ] is going to go back trying to read them and my God was the butt report read Churchill the chiefs of the Imperial general staff opposition

MPS the admiralty all of them began to get the knives out from the drawers and sharpen them on the wetstone of the butt report but he not like portal chief of the air staff who was responsible ultimately for all aspects of the RAF had a new bom a fleet just stuffed down

The back of the sofa you can’t just flip a switch and turn on a strategic bombing campaign massive investments in money and people were needed and that in meant massive government budgets for a campaign that was on the very cusp of being proved useless moreover even with

An infinite supply of money the most important resource was time time to train Crews time to bring on new planes time to adopt new technologies and in the meanwhile bomber command was at the very real risk of collapse under the Dual weight of losses and mixed expectations the butt report had laid

These issues bare for all to see reality bit hard bombing operations were massively stepped down and whiteall went into a bit of a huddle the future of the bombing campaign was under serious question the right honorable G Jones MP prominent labor member of government shocked Everyone by asking open

Questions in Parliament in January of 1942 suggesting that the bomber offensive was a colossal waste of resources and citing the report itself sir Stafford Crips Lord privy seal and pillar of the establishment asked similar questions in the Upper House the ab’s favored son scientist Professor Patrick blackit took the butt report and

Argued that all the resources should be given to the Navy to protect the Atlantic net that the Americans were going to show up the British prime minister’s Faith was clearly rattled too and he increasingly asked for more data more papers more reports and more substance from bomber command the path

That Britain and the Empire might take hung in the balance and with all of these responses to the reported commission lindenman was actually a little bit shocked about what he’d found and very shocked about the reaction he hadn’t really banked on the adaly in the Army coming out so hard and so fast

Never mind asking questions in Parliament it took him nearly 6 months but by mid 1942 the now Lord cherwell issued what had became known as the cherwell memorandum a simple two sides of A4 outlining the urgent need to reinforce bomber command to bomb German cities and produced a number of

Mathematical formula to back it up before his memorandum Churchill vacillated in his support for bomber command after it he ordered all the resources that were necessary to be made available as quickly as possible and so over the next 18 months gave AR Harris everything he asked for and thus did

Frederick Linderman claim to be the father of area bombing many cultures around the world venerate their Elders as fonts of knowledge as storytellers and as sources of wisdom as I get older I increasingly think of this as brilliant idea that all young people should adopt of course the

Slight hitch with such cultures if the every now and again it turns out that Gramps has become a reactionary old [ __ ] who no same person should listen to stage right then on his walking frame and dribbling slightly from the corner of his mouth Lord vicount trenchard founder of the RAF by this point

Trenchard was basically the ARF cile old Granddad you know the swort he’s the one that the family Christmas who after one or two ports will start to bang on about how immigrants have ruined this country or about how there are too many foreigners in football these days he’ll

Chuck racial slurs around like a knifethrower at a circus meanwhile the whole family sits around in awkward silence and prays that he won’t sexually assault anybody or we on himself on the table or any combination thereof trenchard might have been getting on a bit but he was still full of fogam and

Hangam energy in April 41 he submitted a frankly jawdropping paper to well basically everybody in his not inconsiderable address book it said that Britain should stop producing absolutely everything except the new types of heavy bombers like the Sterling the Halifax and the Manchester and it read something

Like this yeah Dear Sir feeding the population is softness of the worst kind who needs civilians anyway those buggers in the Army are asking for more guns I understand but all they do is run away and leave them behind sir waste of money and effort the Navy have plenty of boats

To do whatever the hell they do at Sea and they’re probably all homosexual anyway no sir make more bombers thousands of them send them over to Germany and give the H what for what bomb every city and crout land back to the bloody Stone AG is what I say build

7,000 of those big bombers and a the Germans and kill I don’t know what three and a half 5 and a half million something like that you’ll break the bastards quickly enough yes yes all right Catal is on our side will be a little bit High I reckon you probably

Lose about 70% of your air crew in just a few days but you can’t make an omet without breaking a few eggs what what and as for Jerry well he’ll get the kind of thrashing he’ll not forget in a hurry and surrender in time for Christmas you

Marck my words yours vicount trench art appear Pi did I mention that I invented the Royal Air Force no well I did so do what I bloody say under normal circumstances this kind of outburst might well have ended with grandpa being hurriedly shuffled into the living room

Whilst Somebody went and got his special sleepy time pills the problem was with lindaman’s pet rot Vier going through the bins Portal had a bit of an issue knowing full well just how bad the butt report was likely to be and also knowing that Churchill respected the offensive

Spirit in his commanders portal took trenchard’s paper from the filing cabinet marked politely ignore blew the dust off and got to work on his counterpunch in August 41 portal was a well brought up boy so he toned down trenchard’s kill them all bits to say that the RAF should aim at manufacturing

Capability and morale by targeting both facilities that made stuff and the workers that manned those facilities this this meant that the targets were big enough to hit and also there was a reason to hit them all very clever he then went on to acknowledge trenchard’s suggestion of starving the Army and Navy

Of resources might be very gratifying but perhaps not in the interests of the state instead he recognized the age-old military Maxim that attack is the best form of defense and so he asked for 4,000 machines to get the job done or to put it differently to expand RAF bomber

Command by at least five times as quickly as possible and continuing in that vein he began to look at how to push for the new types of aircraft like the Sterling the HFA and the Manchester which were already in the pipeline finally he spiced up his new report with

A little touch of Vengeance for what those [ __ ] in Berlin had done to London and Plymouth and centry and Hull and clydeside and Glasgow and Liverpool and many other cities besides let’s see how those Nazi [ __ ] like having their civilians killed was the subtext with

Luck it would do more than feel good it would help to break Jerry entirely there is a certain irony here portal was bulking at the idea of losing 70% of air crew and trenchard’s prediction that it would cost around 35,000 men because such numbers were considered to be too

Extreme in reality of course we know now that bomber command as a result of what happened next was about to lose 53,000 dead and 20,000 captured that’s about 73% of all the men that flew and the Americans would lose almost exactly the same numbers but in just 18 months of

Serious operations in all over 140,000 men would be killed and captured during the bomber War back in late 1941 it was obvious to bomber command that daylight bombing had proved as dangerous as poking a hornet nest with one’s John Thomas so all of this meant night bombing and that would

Mean a laser focus on navigation and blind bombing which was going to be absolutely critical and so for the first time the official role of Navigator replaced second Pilots or observers and became a job that officers could and indeed should hold and thus portal prepared his defense for the upcoming

Butt report by innovating by speeding things up and by preparing for a reshuffle of his cards it couldn’t fix all things fast but it might just work and as unpleasant as the B report was for the RAF and for the government it was a vital learning moment if you are

By any chance ever tempted to use the but report to justify opposition to the bomber campaign do bear in mind that this was 1941 and not 1944 or 45 I I mentioned this for no reason at all and not because the comment section of my B7 video isn’t a model of decorum and

Balance obviously sorry where were we ah yes Portal’s plan there is also a strong theme that runs through much of the historiography of the second world war and that indeed of the Cold War II a feeling that the best way to get a task done is to define the broad parameters

Of that task and then trust your subordinance to get on with it and get it done without defining the task in too much detail this is sometimes referred to as akan tactic or in modern speak and NATO speak it’s Mission command it’s commonly held to be a German invention

The reality is of course much more complicated than that and the idea if not the name was known to large sections of the British High command in in the 1940s the Royal Navy by necessity had been doing this kind of thing since at least the 1640s portal was an

Experienced practitioner of the concept give a chap a job and let him get on with it it is also held by most armchair generals to be a universally good idea and that all armed forces should attempt to adopt it see the thing is it’s not actually as great as it sounds sure you

Will get flexibility you will encourage creativity in your subordinates and most of the time that is better than detailed orders which inevitably Fall Apart when the enemy does something unexpected as they are prone to do but what few folks who profess this view realize it’s also an absolutely superb way to set somebody

Up for a fall imagine the call upstairs after a failed operation can go something like this yes sir I trusted them to do the job sir and they [ __ ] it up sir yes sir of course I fired them now sir and I’ve given it to a more

Capable chap sir oh another obbe no thank you sir I’m trying to give them up so I kind of feel pretty sorry for the air officer commanding obac command Richard pit very often in history and especially in the history of the Second World War a commander will be appointed at exactly

The right moment to take advantage of all the learnings that have gone on before as tactics improve and Equipment comes on stream and the enemy is weakened by hard fighting yeah not so much for Richard piss he truly got the shitty end of the stick and was then

Beaten with that stick to a fine pulp probably the best thing that one can say about his 13-month tenure of Obama command is that both he and it are largely forgotten today the problem before Pierce as the official history put it was to define a new program for bomber command which

Could be carried out by a force which was small in size inaccurate in AIM and blind in the dark and this was before the butt report dropped as we have seen when the report was published all hell broke loose as the man in the ultimate seat naturally the chop probably should

Have fallen on the shoulders of Charles Peter portal he after all had been the man in charge but he’d also just won the Battle of Britain well at least according to park and ding’s Replacements who he had swn unceremoniously and speedily put in place so he had had a bit of credit in

The bank and within a week he was reporting back to Churchill rather than obtica or denying or trying to sidestep he set his chin to it and his report to the PM basically said yes navigation is a massive [ __ ] problem we need to do something about it immediately please

See attached a set of projects including Direction finding known as G along with several other promising developments that should be ready over the next 8 to 12 months to help us look at these shiny new aircraft prime minister reckon we could build a boatload of them oh look here’s Lord trenchard’s paper bit

Bloodthirsty isn’t it but you know what he’s not totally wrong oh and I prepared a report on that report too what is that Lord CH well yes I totally agree we should absolutely add science to the program in fact the Telecommunications research establishment or TR and the operational research section or ORS will

Now be charged jointly with developing new aids to navigation and Target selection and damage assessment and naturally we need photographs of that damage so we’re going to set up the photograph reconnaissance unit or pru and the Damage assessment service under the ORS toot site uh yes prime minister

I quite agree prime minister heads do need to roll prime minister a vice Marshall Pierce could you step into my office now please well this feels like an appropriate moment to check up on the contraption that Jenkins and Johnson have knocked together as I think we’re

Probably going to need it you see with the operational research section now up and running they’re going to start making assumptions and churning out statistics and where assumptions and statistics meet we can insert the mark1 Pam or plucked from my arom meter it’s a highly tuned bit of gl’s finest

Engineering once loaded with coal and a small hamster called Boris it will determine if a statistical analysis is useful or if someone has been naughty hang on let me find switch it on here there we go it measures the normal background levels of BS thusly and you can hear

From The Fairly low-level pinging noise that it’s working obviously in a world that contains Nel farage Donald Trump The Daily Mail and Ben Shapiro we’ve had to put it down in the basement otherwise it would instantly explode right so let’s see what the O has got up to in

These last few months of 1941 following the butt report I hope that Boris has had his weps or his little legs get struggle with this one portal having called the ORS into existence now as was his style left them to get on with the task for good or for real being young

Men who had just a short ter ago been either at school or in a job on civvy street they of course actually had no one to learn from so they had to sort of roll their sleeves up and start from first principles their first job was to compare luffer numbers of bombers in

Blitz attacks with weight of bombs dropped on the UK which was relatively easy to measure because there were holes in the ground and then cross that with drops in production post raid from British cities that got hit and from this they created something called the activity index which they confidently

Predicted would tell bommer command how many bombers would be needed to cut industrial output from a town by how much for how long with perfect Precision the pman seems to be getting a bit excited I I can’t imagine why anyway they thought what why stop there and why

Indeed take centry for example uh that had seen a drop off of roughly 30% in activity and Recovery had taken about 35 days Ergo hit centry say six times in a month you definitely reduce the output to nil and put it Beyond any hope of

Recovery hang on we just need to put a little bit of water on the plucked from my arer there before she gets too hot there we go there we go lovely lovely lovely so let’s transpose this then onto yep you’ve guessed it the principal cities of the RO say 43 TS because

That’s where 80% of German war production is assumed to be happening by the way it was wasn’t and then like a financial Guru packaging a subprime mortgage to a naive investor circus 2007 the buffins of the OS did more assumptive maths on top of their wildly assumptive math which said that about

25% of L faffer bombers found their targets in Britain and thus 25% of British bombers would find their targets in Germany ignoring entirely kabine woden and the other radio navigation tools that the Germans had had with which bomber command was only just starting to develop they then said that

For reasons entirely unexplained it took one ton of bombs to displace or kill 800 head of population and oh dear I think Boris has died uh oh well we we better carry on and miraculously almost as if it was planned in some way when you put all of those numbers together it turns

Out that you need a force of 4,000 bombers which happens to be by pure fluke I’m sure exactly the same number that Charles Portal had put forward to the Prime Minister and which with cherwell would shortly be including in his paper to the Prime Minister and thus

He had three pieces of paper all of which were marked 4,000 bombers this approach would then underpin British thinking on bombing throughout the war and it was flawed throughout the war the Americans as we have seen did their own version of this mass and were equally miles off base but this was a

Peculiarly British problem there was actually another department in British government part of the home Securities Ministry called re8 who said that the task of bombing Germany was impossible but no one wanted to listen to those moaning minis i8’s assessment of bomb damage and subsequent production losses for the entirety of the war was

Remarkably accurate Landing plusus 10% pretty much consistently but equally they were pretty much consistently ignored because the numbers that they gave were far lower than anybody wanted to hear so whilst I said at the beginning of this democracies tend to learn they don’t learn universally all of us at some point or

Another during the course of our lives have made serious mistakes my brother aged all of about five once rode his bike into a fence and somehow managed to cut his old chap his mistake was trusting his widely grinning El the brother TW it me who merrily handed him

Over a plaster to put on it as if I was being helpful his second mistake was attempting to remove said plaster and discovering certain laws of elasticity as they pertain to the male form when working in conjunction with Superglue imagine what happens to a rubber band that stretches and suddenly loses

Tension and you are approximating the understanding that my brother came to a little bit late experien is after all knowledge gained 5 minutes after you needed it from 1938 to 1946 the Allies made serious and fun FAL mistakes in their assessment of Germany’s ability to resist huge amounts of punishment and

Equally a complete failure to understand where their bombing offensive might be having a real impact they were wrong albeit in different ways pre-war confounded during it and confused after it and part of the problem was a constant failure throughout the whole of the war to understand how Germany’s economy worked applying an activity

Index as the or was trying to do which used the British economy as its starting point was never going to work they didn’t know that they were fighting a country which until the string of disasters at the end of 1942 and then through 1943 simply hadn’t really considered the possibility of losing the

War and therefore didn’t give overriding political priority to economic production inside of Germany until the start of 1943 it was virtually impossible to know that there was a war on in Britain though at the same time everybody’s lives have been turned utterly upside down almost from the

First days of the conflict the reality certainly for this period that the video covers today of 1941 to early 194 43 was civilians in Nazi Germany only had a very limited amount of rationing production of Civilian Goods really hadn’t slowed down very much and most women in fact the vast vast majority of

Women never went to go and work inside the German economy whereas in Britain something like half of all women were involved indeed once the invasion of Britain was abandoned in November of 1940 until about June of 1941 many men were demobilized from the Army and returned to manufacturing jobs and jobs

In the Civil sector basically to build up for Barbarosa when Albert Spear took over as Armament minister in February of 1942 the verak was being supplied with all manner of useless dross from piano cords to electricity meters to hundreds of kilometers of spare belts to Jungle

Uniforms for the step of Russia and so on all whilst Pierce was convinced that his bombers had reduced German production capacity by at least 30% for many observers and frankly until quite recently including me this was one of the trickiest bits of trying to understand the war or if you are of a

Certain bench you might say this was just down to the Germans will to resist you might cite examples used by for example gobl and his diary a factory workers moving their workbenches into the Frozen streets of a German winter and carrying on working in 1944 fighter production rocketed up with over a

Thousand machines a month being built at its peak German women as we mentioned a minute ago never made up a significant percentage of factory workers for fear of impacting the troops morale if it happened German civilians were never hungry until the very last days of the war German troops had sufficient amounts

Of small arms ammunition right up until May 1945 there are some obvious things that one can point to Innovation definitely played a part the extensive use of easily moved machine tools also had an impact which if they weren’t destroyed during an initial bombing were

Fairly easy to set up in a new Factory a good Railway Network within Germany proper helped a great deal too because it was relatively simple to tear down factories and move them further east and south if you needed to but none of these factors are sufficiently comprehensive

In an explanation there were some clever little tricks which were used by the German state which helped as well things like for example if you were a German worker who was bombed out if you returned back to your shift within 48 Hours you got more help than if you

Didn’t in fact actually you got help if you didn’t go back you didn’t get helped at all and production targets and prizes and holidays and all manner of other things were offered too but this really ultimately was marginal stuff and the question remains how did this economy survive and indeed Thrive under the

Biblical levels of Destruction coming from the air in 1942 43 44 were the Nazis somehow better did they believe their ideology more strongly were they somehow superum were the gods of old reborn um no no not really the answer to these questions is actually quite simple short-term economic fixes combined with

The industrialization of human suffering among subject peoples in the west the economies of France and Holland and Belgium and Denmark and Norway and many other places were stripped bare Italy was bled White even as an ally when it had surrendered to the Allies it was considered a turn coat and it was

Absolutely exploited to the maximum in the East the approach was purely genocidal working starving men and women and children to death to support the living standards and war production within the r itself the systematic leeching of occupied territories was as much political as anything else the r

Must be maintained now the war will be short thus we do not need to take a long-term view resistance can be crushed without fear of retr ution because after all we are the master race and we will be here for a thousand years manufacturing capability that could have

Contributed far more to the Nazi war effort if it had been left in place was instead broken up and shipped back to Germany workforces were turned into forced labor Russians were slashed for civilians outside of the r agricultural products were taken directly to Germany whilst the locals teet on the edge of

Starvation France for example had three times as many cars on its roads as Germany did in 1939 something like one and a half million but by 1942 it had less than 100,000 the rest having been taken to Germany in 1939 France had the capacity to build a vast amount of stuff

Something like 250,000 Vehicles something like 3,000 aircraft 10,000 Arrow engines 2,000 tanks and so on and so on and so on by 1942 almost all of this capacity with the exception of the huge Reno plant at Buon bellacor which was basically largely intact that’s a whole other story but during the whole

War It produced something like 38,000 vehicles for the r which was a drop in the ocean at potential capacity anyway the Renault Factory and a couple of others were basically left behind but the vast majority had gone and these moves were highly inefficient and disruptive but they benefited Germany

And Germany alone in the short term even where the Nazis didn’t move equipment they became the primary customer by force and for all production they paid with script and promisory notes and not with currency which preserved the res limited reserves of hard currency in total France exported something like

990,000 vehicles to the third during the whole of the war and got paid almost nothing in exchange this was a recipe for disaster of the French economy as the war dragged on but shortterm ensured that Berlin Housewives didn’t go hungry 109’s got made and the bombed out in

Germany got looked after if they were German and Aran of course elements of the Holocaust also helped for example during the course of the war 85,000 fully loaded trains carried confiscated items from Jews back into Germany from across Europe and the Soviet Union their possessions from table lamps to Pi to

Garden furniture were distributed to those who been bombed out the mass use of slave labor meant that there was no need to bring German women into the workforce when women from the occupied territories mostly Ukrainian and polish could do the work and Jews from across Europe could be worked to death on

Production lines I can’t do the Holocaust contribution to the German economy Justice here but I may try to tackle another another time it was not insignificant before the final solution became the final solution putting aside the Holocaust and the death camps the composition of the labor force itself was completely

Extraordinary and Beyond the wildest imaginings of the Allies for most of the war laborers were sought from within the occupied territories initially voluntarily but when less than 1% of workers stepped forward the Germans immediately reverted to force drafts and mass arrests to make up the shortfall

After the war sh claimed that he had no idea where the SS was getting its 400,000 workers that he demanded to boost production in 1944 from a claim that beggar belief but we’ll come back to sh another day in reality in 1942 Poes albanians Greeks Czechs slovenians yugoslavs ukrainians Romanians lithuanians estonians latvians

Hungarians Dutch French Norwegians Danes Italians and other nationalities besides were shipped in worked for 10 to 12 hours a day fed just enough to keep them alive and treated like cattle with the threat of being shot or imprisoned in a concentration camp if they bucked the

System in all some 6 and a half million Force workers worked in Germany during the war and perhaps as many as 1.3 million of them died as a result and all of this is before we start to consider the situation with the prisoners of War there was something like 2.2 million

Soviet Powers inside of Germany just 30% of them would survive to go home 10% of the male French population some 1.8 million men became prisons of war in June 1940 and most were pressed into service whilst being held as hostages as guarantees of the vishi regime’s good

Behavior the sorted and Sid details of the deals done by the vishi regime to get their men back are worthy of a video in its own right deals for expelling Jews for volunteering their own workers to go to Germany the establishment of free worker schemes from amongst the

Poers themselves are just some of the low lights of the system of blackmail that the Nazis established over vishi France and it was all for not because the Germans occupied France in 1942 anyway and held the remaining PS for the rest of the war as forced labor and

There is an irony in the Nazi State here one which prided itself after all on racial Purity but became involuntarily incred incredibly Multicultural as the war went on when it surrendered some 11 million people scattered from its borders across Europe and the Soviet Union in the largest migration ever seen

In human history and unfortunately tens of thousands of them died in the process of trying to get home in short then the combined United States and RF bomber commands were and would be trying to bomb not Germany but the entire Continental European means of production enhanced by slave labor on an

Unimaginable scale Little Wonder it did didn’t work in London politically speaking the idea was fairly simple they had seen how the blockade of Germany in 19418 in the first world war combined with Battlefield defeat had led to a revolution within Germany’s border and a swift surrender to assume that the same

Results might be possible through bombing especially given the pre-war predictions of people like trenchard is understandable they failed to realize not just the economic factors but also the political ones practical political resistance within Germany had been rendered next to Impossible almost from the moment that Hitler took power

Certainly from about 1936 it was Impractical to conduct largescale resistance of any kind a combination of gapo surveillance the effective subversion of Law and due process the use of fear as a weapon which crushed all but the weakest of Uprising during the war and even had people wanted to

Resist the reality of being bombed out as so many millions have were is that you became entirely dependent on the state to survive the process of bombing people bound those people to the government in a way that had been completely unforeseen by London or Washington and it’s a fact worth bearing mind

Today at the same time the appeals to nationalism of the likes of gobl did work you know the defeat of 1918 had supercharged things when they started to win in 1939 to 1940 and the apparent success of the opening phase of Barbarosa meant that many Germans genuinely believed that their state was

Going to win and they were willing to suffer a huge amount of privation for it more however many people had benefited directly from German conquests with you know new furniture or a new job or new domestic services or new apartments or better pay for those who didn’t stop to

Think about how this has been done which honestly most people didn’t during the privations of being bombed the combination of Pride and coercion and direct personal benefit from the war meant morale was Far Far stronger than it had been in 14 to18 and it would endure to the bit Bitter

End there was then a further complicating Factor here too as we’ve observed briefly earlier neither the United States Army Air Force nor bomber command really realized exactly how much damage they were or weren’t doing to the enemy damage assessment techniques in both Services were to useless throughout

The wall roofs that had been destroyed meant that the building had been destroyed but obviously it hadn’t you just need to put a new roof on it roads that were pop marked with bombs were considered to be severed but they could be up and running within a matter of

Hours with enough forced labor factories hit by a bomb or two were assumed to be out of action where they just weren’t and around all of this a vast pool of forced labor could be harnessed to rebuild incredibly quickly from any damage that had been done there were obviously a plethora functions and

Processes which were supposed to properly assess damage and to check what they they’ found and to consistently look at what was going on but they failed throughout the war at least in part because of bad weather which impacted not just bombing accuracy but also the ability to do things like

Proper reconnaissance uh for an example during the Battle of Berlin in November 1943 to February 1944 the first damage assessment photographs couldn’t really be taken until January and even when there were photographs and the assessments had some realistic pictures gained there was a serious pressure to

Show that the RF and the eth Air Force were in fact winning no one wanted to present bad news upwards to the gruff hard even bullying leaders who didn’t want to hear that their strategy was failing just as horrific casualty reports were crossing their desks each day and of course amongst the political

Classes on both sides of the Atlantic there was this overriding need to see payback on the vast Investments that had been made in the campaign so if the air staff said that they had done something or would do something they were believed well at least until about mid 1944 and

Dday all that meant the RAF and the United States Air Forces when they did hit something vital didn’t know that they’d done that either and so it was that the oil plan and the trans plans which eventually struck the crippling blows to Nazi Germany which did

Effectively knock it out of the war only accounted for 15% of sorties between mid 1944 and early 1945 had they been pressed home with the full weight of both commands who knows what might have happened in short the bomber campaign as we will see did huge damage to Germany

And it did play a vital role and strategic role in the war but at no point was a view in London or Washington an accurate one and many of the outcomes we will discuss were unintended or missed consequences or simply assumed impossible I’m skipping ahead I’m going

To the end here we will return now to 1942 and the suddenly unemployed Richard Pierce exiting the building and the response of the butt report Crossing Churchill’s desk for Approval and so it was with fighting still raging in whiteall over the but report that on the 14th of February 1942 the Secretary of State for air Warfare sir Archie Bal Sinclair issued directive s. 46368 d111 it said that henceforth bomber command should focus attacks on the morale of the enemy civilian

Population and in particular on industrial workers eight days later the air officer commanding bomber command air Vice Marshall Richard Pierce was given an exciting new job far far away as AOC of Southeast Asia and one air marshal Arthur Travis Harris was promoted in his place and thus like so much of Harris’s

Career over the next 1,176 days of his command someone else had to come up with an idea which har would have to implement whether he agreed with it or not Harris was not the originator therefore of area bombing he was not even its architect he was merely its enthusiastic implementor Harris has

Been accused of being a war criminal a butcher a blundering fool and many other things besides he was aloof pigheaded stubborn blunt and very straight talking he made few friends in government and he didn’t understand the political game he knew he didn’t understand it and he didn’t give a [ __ ] he completely lacked

Self-doubt in a way that made some very very unnerved and others respond to him as a God on Earth he was right everyone else was wrong end off however he was utterly focused on protecting his men’s lives as best as possible and on winning the war and doing so in that order he

Focused on area bombing because every week some bright spark would come up with a new plan there were now eight before he took over for those that are keeping count and he was highly reluctant to change course believing that Focus was the key he was a man who

Even if he disagreed with an order or an idea having argued his case would follow through with that idea to the best of his ability if he’d lost and it was forced to be implemented when confronted by fed comple on the dams raid for example he threw his whole weight behind

Making it work having lost the argument for the Pathfinder squadrons to be in each group and not as their own separate Force he then gave them every resource and every chance of success that he could he insisted on being driven very short distances at high speeds in His

Official Bentley he was well aware of his reputation as a butcher The Story Goes that one evening he and his driver were pulled over by a police polican who upon opening the window said you can’t drive like that sir you’ll kill someone to which Harris responded young man I

Kill thousands every night Harris did not suffer fools never mind gladly he was a man who got things done he was a leader who inspired huge confidence amongst his Crews because he was decisive direct and utterly clear on his objectives at all times and his men feared and respected him in equal

Measure he observed in later years that an admiral might fight a major engagement in which he would risk the whole Fleet maybe once or twice during a war that an army Commander might fight a campaign once every few months at most but Harris had to fight a major action

Committing 90% or more of his available resources almost every single night for three years and he took 70% casualties in the process and carried on a man you asked to do a job like that has to be as hard as [ __ ] nails and Harris was certainly that Harris’s biography was as

With so many of his contemporaries a product of Empire an industrial scale Slaughter of World War I he was born in cheltam in 1892 moved to India as a young boy he was then returned to England aged about 10 for education and then moved to Ria six years later with

Just5 in his pocket and not a clue what to do next at various points he was a sheep farmer a gold miner and a land Speculator at just 22 in 1914 he joined the redian regiment and once had to walk nearly 500 miles across the Kalahari Desert an experience which led him with

A deep and pathological hatred of having to walk anywhere hence the Bentley posted to the Western front in 1915 he joined the Royal flying Corps as fast as humanly possible and ended the war as a major in the RAF he spent the interwar period initially in Syria Iraq and in

Egypt and he did a short stin in the United States in 1938 before returning to Britain at the outbreak of war and taking over bomber command’s number four group he was then promoted to number five group fairly rapidly the core of bomber command and in 1941 he was

Transferred to the RAF delegation to the United States where he met Hap Arnold Ira AKA and car spartz and and many other luminaries of the United States Army Air Force he was exposed to United States thinking on Precision bombing these were critical facts for his later on cooperation with the United States

And these bombs bonds would last the whole of the war and whilst he did think that the Americans were fundamentally misguided in terms of strategy he respected their tenacity and guts and organization and capability he worked with the United States commanders when they arrived in the United Kingdom

Providing Grand Crews and bases and as much support as he could possibly spare to bring the eighth for Air Force in into the fight as quickly as he could and whilst there was absolutely professional rivalry there he consistently went out of his way to ensure smooth relations even though he

Was attempting at pretty much all times to try and dictate strategy to the United States including long after they were done listening as we will see just short of his 50th birthday when he was handed the Reigns of bomber command in 42 he had long since come to conclusion

That the war could be won by bombing but to do it he needed a far larger force with a much better ability to hit everything he did subsequently was in his his eyes to try and bring the war to a close as fast as possible potentially without even needing a land Invasion

Famously he was asked to give a few comments to a news rule in mid 1942 to which he said there are those who think that the war cannot be won by bombing to which I say it has never been tried and we shall see the task before Harris in 1942 was

An incredibly difficult one he had few resources and he had a command which was beginning to suffer with morale the butt report had hit hard he needed to rapidly show results he needed to rapidly show the Germans that the British were serious and he also needed to Marshal

His resources so to do this he organized a isolated set of 1,000 bomber raids in May and June the first raid code named Operation Millennium was on cologne and it was utterly devastating more than 1,700 fire started destroying 13,000 buildings as perhaps as many as 135,000 people were made homeless and another

3/4 of a million fled the city two further raids after cologne were organized the First on Essen which was a bit of a wash out the second however on Breman was a sign of things to come as it marked the first operational use of the G system that is a navigational

Radio system which allowed longrange blind bombing but these raids to one side Harris saw 1942 more as a year of refreshing his force and rebuilding it into something for 1943 in point of fact he would go into 43 with the same number of aircraft he’d gone into 42 with but

The types were radically different the technologies that he pushed and driven and poked into existence would come to the four now and slowly oh so slowly the US eth Air Force would begin to arrive in the European theater of operations I started this episode by saying that democracies are better able

To weather the stor of failure than autocracies before spending a good deal of time in this video detailing how Britain and to a lesser extent the United States screwed things up the reality of war and this is an absolute truth is that the winner is rarely the

Side that performs the best but rather the side that [ __ ] up the least and is able to correct when [ __ ] UPS occur and this is what makes democracy so bloody deadly and protracted Warfare they will as all countries will royally [ __ ] things up but they will learn at a

Frightening Pace it is simply impossible to imagine a situation in which Germany or Japan would have commissioned a report like the butt report equally even if such a thing had been written it’s completely impossible to imagine that it would ever have been seen by the leader

Much less debated in public as the but report was this wasn’t a comfortable experience for anybody involved but it resulted in a radical rethink and it forced portal to innovate and bring Harrison who turn would deliver the blow that we will look at next time in 1943

For all its flaws The Vault fast involved is radical and profound and shouldn’t be underestimated it would be so easy to point and laugh at the commanders of 1941 to 43 or at the system and accuse it all of having failed and yet I think to look at it

This way is to completely miss a fundamental point the process of action criticism change Innovation action criticism and change again set a pattern for bomber command throughout the war it wasn’t a bug it was a feature it is what in the the end drove them to better

Results and outcomes at least from their point of view and it is completely impossible to manage anything like this cycle happening under a dictatorship anywhere this is ultimately the story of democracy fighting a war however imperfectly and getting more and more deadly over time faster and faster and

Faster which when combined with the truly prodigious production capabilities of the United States and of the empire were bound to ground down and aify the stolid luffer and so it is in 1943 that we will pick things up next time with the fire and fury of Hamburg the dams the Hur and

Berlin well thank you dear viewer for once again making it to the safety of the survivors Club at the end of what has been an inordinately long video and I thank you for taking the time out to get through the whole damn thing please

Do feel free to take a weed Ram from the side or perhaps have a nice cup of ear gray bought to you by Jenkins just ring the bell he’ll be through shortly if you would like to send me a comment please do feel free to do so you can obviously

Put it below and you can do the usual things like liking and subs subcribing and so forth but you might want to send me an email with in which case do do that uh my email address is Lord Harrer gmail.com if you enjoyed this and I’m assuming because you got to this point

You must have enjoyed it a little bit please do feel free to join up with my patreon where you’ll get access to my super secret Discord and you can shout at me on a daily basis um this script took an inordinately long time to write

As I kind of struggled with how to break the story down and the next one in all truth will be more complicated again so there’s likely to be a bit of a break I want to look at 1943 there are some episodes within it which I call out at

The end there which you know I think are about worth looking at but there are also some pieces that i’ quite like to do a single episode Deep dive on for example the Dam’s raid the raid on schweinf for the key aircraft probably all of those things need handling

Separately so they will kind of roll out in time the main body of this will be 1943 as I say next time and then hopefully an episode 5 which will wrap both campaigns up in 1944 45 looking at how the LT buffer Was Defeated how the eth Air Force really became the dominant

Air Force in Europe and what happened the BAC command in the immediate postwar era so look until next time my lords my ladies and my lovelies I bid you our dear and good night thank you