We had to strike back and in 1940 the RAF's bombers were all we really had

ONE night, at the height of the Blitz, senior RAF officer Arthur Harris stood with several colleagues on the roof of the Air Ministry and watched with appalled fascination as the Luftwaffe's bombers pounded the East End of London. With the flames lighting up the night sky and the sound of explosions echoing across the capital, Harris felt moved to quote from the Bible. "They are sowing the wind, and they will reap the whirlwind," he said defiantly.

- 

Those words may have sounded like an empty boast in December 1940, when Britain was under relentless aerial attack from the Reich, but the prophecy of Harris was to be dramatically fulfilled.

During the last three years of the conflict the RAF mounted a campaign of ever greater ferocity against Nazi Germany, destroying its industrial capacity, wrecking its transport networks, obliterating its cities and demoralising its population.

Harris himself, who became head of Bomber Command in February 1942, played a central role in the ruthless use of strategic bombing to achieve the Allied victory. Never squeamish about his mission, he told the Air Staff: "What we need to do, in addition to the horrors of fire, is to bring masonry crashing down on top of the Boche, to kill the Boche and to terrify the Boche."

In December 1940, however, Britain lacked the planes and weaponry for the task. The RAF had neither a four-engined bomber, nor practical navigation aids, while its explosive shells were prone to detonation failure. The irony of this catalogue of chronic inadequacy was that the air establishment had always clung to the theory that strategic bombing was the real purpose of the RAF, not Army cooperation or maritime support or fighter defence.

"Our belief in the bomber was intuitive, an article of faith," wrote Sir John Slessor, the RAF's Director of Plans. Yet the politicians and air chiefs had failed to will the means to achieve this end. The weakness of Bomber Command was highlighted in a crucial report commissioned by Downing Street in mid-1941 which found just a tenth of Bomber Command's sorties came within five miles of their target - and half of their bombs fell in open countryside.