The RAF raid of 7–8 November

Many lists record under 7 November 1941 heavy RAF night raids on Berlin, the Ruhr and Cologne, bought at the price of heavy losses. What is meant is the night of 7–8 November. British strategic bombers – Bomber Command – sent 392 aircraft that night against Germany and the occupied coast, the largest number in a single night since the beginning of the war. Thirty-seven of them failed to return, or about 9.4 per cent. According to British studies this rate was more than twice the previous worst figure for night operations. This popular description needs correcting on one point. The third target that night was not the Ruhr but Mannheim in Baden, on the Rhine and the Neckar, a few hundred kilometres south of the Ruhr. Cologne, too, lies in the Rhineland, outside the industrial basin proper.

A command under pressure

Since October 1940 Bomber Command had been led by Air Marshal Sir Richard Peirse, successor to Charles Portal, who had then become Chief of the Air Staff. Peirse expanded his forces and became one of the best-known faces of the British air offensive; he even appeared in the 1941 propaganda documentary Target for Tonight. By the autumn of 1941, however, his position was growing weaker. Even before the raid on Berlin of 7 September, the Butt Report of August had shown, on the basis of photographs from aircraft cameras, that only about one in three crews claiming to have attacked had dropped their bombs within five miles (eight kilometres) of the target, and over the Ruhr even fewer. Losses were rising because the Luftwaffe was building up a belt of night-fighter zones stretching from Denmark to France, in which ground radars guided fighters onto individual bombers.

The command was also under pressure from other quarters. In the spring the bombers had been sent mainly against ports and shipyards as part of the struggle against the U-boats; in the summer the directive of 9 July turned them against German railway junctions and the morale of the urban population. After the German attack on the USSR, raids on the Reich also had political significance: they were the only way in which Britain could strike Germany directly while Stalin was demanding a second front and the Wehrmacht stood before Moscow. In September, however, Winston Churchill had replied sceptically to Portal’s plan for a force of four thousand bombers. According to British historians, Peirse wanted to show with a large, successful raid on the capital of the Reich that his crews could find and destroy a target. Berlin, some thousand kilometres from the airfields of eastern England, was also the most difficult target: it required a long flight over the North Sea and over the night-fighter zones, and back again before dawn. The largest raid on the city so far, on the night of 7–8 September, had involved 197 aircraft and cost fifteen.

A decision against the forecast

The forecast for 7 November was bad. The meteorologists predicted dense cloud, storms, hail and severe icing over the North Sea and Germany, and a strong headwind on the way home. Peirse nevertheless stuck to his decision to attack. It was opposed by the commander of No. 5 Group, Air Vice-Marshal John Slessor, who believed his aircraft had no chance of reaching Berlin and returning in such conditions. According to British studies, Slessor lodged a formal objection and obtained permission to send his group against the nearer target of Cologne.

In the end the force was divided between three main targets. 169 aircraft flew to Berlin: chiefly twin-engined Wellingtons and Whitleys, together with four-engined Stirlings and Halifaxes, which were then only just entering service. No. 5 Group’s Hampdens and new, unreliable Manchesters were sent to Cologne, and several dozen Wellingtons – about 55 aircraft according to operational records – to Mannheim. The remaining aircraft flew smaller operations that night, among others against the ports of the occupied Channel coast. According to the British tally, the operation as a whole involved 160 Wellingtons from all the squadrons flying the type, 61 Hampdens and 42 Whitleys, together with a smaller number of four-engined bombers.

Night over Germany

The weather proved as bad as forecast. The crews struggled through thick layers of cloud in which the aircraft iced up and lost height and speed, while navigation by compass, watch and forecast wind failed even more than usual. Over Berlin, according to British figures, only 73 of the 169 aircraft sent there dropped their bombs (some accounts give 79), and even they scattered their loads over a wide area. Damage in the city was slight. The attack on Mannheim had equally meagre results, and the raid on Cologne caused only minor damage.

The real reckoning came on the way home. Some bombers were shot down by night fighters and anti-aircraft fire, but many others fell victim to the weather: to icing, mechanical failures and, above all, lack of fuel, as the strong headwind lengthened the return flight. Further aircraft ditched in the North Sea or crashed on landing in England. Twenty-one aircraft failed to return from the Berlin raid, or 12.4 per cent; from the Mannheim raid seven out of about 55, an even higher proportion. Slessor’s group, which flew to the nearer target of Cologne, suffered the lightest losses. In all, Bomber Command lost 37 aircraft that night, almost half of all the machines it lost in the whole of November. Some crews were taken prisoner, but according to one British study about 160 airmen were killed. Bomber Command’s ranks at that time included Britons, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, and Poles flew Wellingtons in four Polish bomber squadrons.

Inquiry and an order to conserve forces

The disaster provoked a sharp reaction in London. Peirse submitted a report in which he attributed the losses chiefly to unforeseeably bad weather, icing and strong winds. The Air Staff investigated and, according to the available studies, concluded that sending so large a force against so distant a target in defiance of the forecast had been a mistake. This judgement was to weigh on the commander’s fate. The prime minister is credited with remarking that there was no need to fight the weather and the enemy at the same time.

On 13 November 1941 the Air Ministry, carrying out the wishes of the War Cabinet, instructed Bomber Command to restrict operations during the winter months and to conserve its forces. Large raids were no longer to be sent against distant targets in bad weather; above all, the command was to rebuild and expand its strength in preparation for an offensive in the spring of 1942, when new heavy bombers and radio-navigation aids would reach the squadrons. The ban remained in force until February 1942. Until then British bombers flew over Germany less often and in smaller numbers, and they did not return to Berlin for many months. Mannheim, as the British press noted, did not experience another raid until 11 February 1942.

Place in the war

The night of 7–8 November 1941 closed the first stage of the British bombing offensive, in which small, dispersed forces of bombers searched at night for individual industrial targets, navigating almost blind. It was the high point of that stage’s ambitions and at the same time its most painful failure: after the first raids on Berlin in 1940 and the operations of the spring and summer of 1941, it showed that even nearly four hundred bombers could not do Germany serious damage in bad weather, yet could lose in a single night as many aircraft as several squadrons possessed.

For Richard Peirse it was the beginning of the end of his time in command. In January 1942 Portal removed him from Bomber Command and sent him to the Far East, where he took command of Allied air forces in the short-lived ABDA Command, and later of the air forces in India and South-East Asia. On 14 February 1942 a new directive lifted the restrictions of 13 November and named as the main objective the morale of the population of German cities, and especially of industrial workers. Eight days later Arthur Harris, an advocate of area bombing, took over the command. New radio-navigation aids, four-engined Lancasters, the “bomber stream” and target-marking units changed the character of the offensive in the years that followed: instead of scattered raids such as that of November 1941, hundreds of aircraft dropped their bombs on a single city within a quarter of an hour or so. The first great demonstration of this change was the thousand-bomber raid on Cologne on the night of 30–31 May 1942. Berlin, whose defences had cost Bomber Command so dearly in November 1941, became the target of Harris’s great offensive in the winter of 1943–1944, when losses again proved very heavy.