The Withered Garland: Reflections and Doubts of a Bomber
The Withered Garland: Reflections and Doubts of a BomberBy Peter Johnson.
An autobiographical account by Peter Johnson, who was an RAF pilot during the inter-war period and a reservist at the outbreak of the Second World War. He was drafted back into service as an instructor before requesting transfer to a bomber group. After flying a tour of duty he became commander of a small airfield. After the war was over he was posted to an intelligence group assessing the impact of the British bombing on the German military machine. He is quite the critic of the pre-war international order and is deeply disappointed with the League of Nations response over the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. As the war goes on he becomes disillusioned with the strategic bombing offensive. He notes their poor accuracy and limited strategic use, especially when compared with the huge number of innocent civilians it either kills or displaces. He concludes that the Luftwaffe, RAF and USAF were all equally guilty of war crimes...
posted by Benjamin Nakizo at 4:26 PM
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Born in Portsmouth, his father died in the RN during WWI. Grew up during WWI and developed a hatred for ‘the hun’.
He was advised not to join in the interwar period because what with the Wall Street Crash and the pacifist leanings of the days politicians it was almost certain the armed forces would face large cut backs, beginning with the RAF as the newest and less established of the forces.
Yet the romantic appeal of the RAF drew him in.
In his early days he met, and organized the refueling of Harold Getty and Wiley Post, as they landed unannounced in Liverpool on the first leg of their round the world trip. And felt great grief when he heard of the crash of airship 101, the Royal Air Force’s answer to Germany’s Hindenburg. Which, perhaps thankfully, ended RAF interest in developing airships.
He talks of his first solo flight, the extreme solitude it offered in a day before radios and radar.
Despite destroying two planes in training he passed.
He was posted to an airfield to the west of London and loved it. Money, flying and the London night life. Things were good.
Despite saying that at the time he was very little interested in politics he sows his narrative with numerous comments about political and international rumblings, obviously retrospectively. For instance he notes the ‘no war for ten years’ rule that crippled the RAF’s funding and kept the pilots flying graceful, but antique aircraft with little actual combat training. The inter war pilots learnt how to fly on feel, which was entirely possible in the slower biplanes, and without reference to their instruments. Yet when the new single wing aircraft were introduced they had to adapt quickly to the new speeds and new methods of flying.
Johnson obviously moved in the right circles, taking his girlfriends on holiday to the South of France where they would sail and play tennis.
He remembers answering a survey distributed by a League of Nations sponsored campaign called the ‘Peace Ballot’ to determine what degree of public support the League had throughout Europe.
He holidayed in Spain in the summer of 1935. Crazy guy.
The Abyssinian question was a difficult one. He says that popular opinion was that the Italians should be allowed to invade and play their part in civilizing a part of Africa. But the problem was that Abyssinia was a full member of the League. And hence had the right for a full blown economic and military campaign against its Italian aggressor by its League brothers. The League was about to be seriously tested.
P67: “In the great harbour under the dim shadow of the rock you were conscious, even in the dark, of the reinforcement of British power, with the blackened out shapes of battle cruisers, battleships, aircraft carriers and destroyers all with steam up. What had seemed a flight of imagination suddenly became a reality. We, the British forces with those magnificent toys we had been given to play with in peacetime, were not playboys anymore. We had become pieces on the international chessboard, units of pressure, to be moved, deployed, perhaps ordered to fight, our lives at the disposal of players who did not know that we, as individuals, existed.”
He talks of the sense of purpose the troops moving out to deploy against Italy had. They believed that it was going to be a ‘good’ fight, after which the international order of the League, and the rule of law, would never again be questioned. Another war to end war. It was not to be.
Rather as the politicians failed the world Johnson and his wife would ride the horses of the newly arrived Punjabi cavalry regiment up and down the beaches. On hearing of the truly atrocious deal Britain and France had struck with Italy, which destroyed the whole premise of the League of Nations Johnson was “horrified that my country could be so devious”.
“The Americans had weakened the League of Nations when they abandoned their own creation. The French had been undermining it for years. But it was my country which now administered the fatal blow which killed the League and its ideals stone dead”.
He leaves the RAF (and joins instead the reserves) and gets a nice job in the city and spends time with his young family. He is happy and free from worry. But the news from Guernica brought the danger of world war home to him and re-ignited his hatred for all things German.
He notes how almost everyone seemed to like Chamberlain after the Munich conference and most were thankful to him that he had averted war. Only in retrospect did the conference become a ‘dirty word in British history’. HOWEVER. Munich, intentionally or not, allowed the RAF to get up to speed. By postponing war Britain was far better placed to face it when it did finally come in September 1939,
…And he goes away to the channel Islands for a cricket tournament – and gets laid! Despite his wife and child at home. Cheeky bastard.
He expresses real hatred for the Germans when he hears they have invaded Holland. He had always kept his hatred in check, ever since he was a child and his father was killed at their hands, but for some reason their entry into Holland was the last straw and he exploded into fury.
He is posted as an instructor and in the next airfield is based a bomber group. He goes over to see their commander and is struck by their boisterous behaviour.
Given all the disasters he saw that Bomber Command played a very large part in the morale and image of the country, it was the only way in which Britain was fighting back. It was the only operational theatre in which they could talk of some success.
He was proud of his work in Training Command where he had literally written the manual as well as devised a new method of nighttime training that was now in wide use. But he was eager to move on. But not before having an affair with yet another young girl. I assume that at this time he has split with his wife…
He notes that the bombs were very un aerodynamic and hence their accuracy was horribly difficult to predict. This was much like the nazis had experienced when bombing London. “The Nazis had sown the wind. This was the start of the whirlwind they were to reap.”
He has a crisis of conscious and this comes to a head when he buys a book in London of a collection of sketches done by a Pole in London during the blitz. The images make him realise what hell he and the rest of Bomber Command must be causing for their mostly innocent targets.
He also dwells on the prospects of a German secret weapon being developed that could tip the war in their favour once more. He remembers frequently being told they were looking to bomb production and launch sites for the Nazis new V rockets.
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After being pilot, retiring after five years, being an instructor for the reserves, being a full time instructor with much success, then being a commander of Lancaster bombers and serving for six months on active bombing runs he then was made Station Commander of a small airfield. Here he would oversee the sending off of other bomber crews. He felt very bad about this, “I had no faith in the attacks on Berlin, and it was one of the least rewarding tasks of my RAF life to be continually despatching these young men on missions which I thought reminiscent of the Charge of the Light Brigade in military significance”.
Later 617 squadron (after their Dam Busters fame) were based at Johnsons base. Over the years they pioneered new low level marking techniques that greatly increased accuracy and they were introducing a new, better quality, bomb site which also helped. Johnson came to warm towards the usefulness of the bomber now, believing it could now be a war winning weapon and not a hit or miss, high casualty exercise.
While he often has doubts (the word even appears in the title) he keeps them to himself, only ever writing down his thoughts once and the person it was intended for never got it because she had been killed in bombing. He never suggests that anyone else shares his anxieties and never tells anyone, so its hard to judge if his own doubts were widespread but it was likely that others had noticed the irregularities in their orders also, it was just that their was not the environment to discuss such matters.
He supported the fire bombing of Dresden since he believed it would directly assist the Russians, who had been crying out for Western military support.
Yet as the war drew to a close he became increasingly uncomfortable that so many civilian targets were being chosen.
He said that he frequently had to deal with aircrew unable to continue, they would state that it was because they felt no longer capable of carrying out their work well and were afraid they were a danger to the rest of the crew. Although Johnson believed that it was more a case of them losing their nerve, unable to face the ordeal of flying over enemy territory and seeing friends going down.
HOWEVER, never once did Johnson encounter someone who objected to his work on moral grounds, never did anyone object to the bombing of women and children
Based in Brussels he wins the affections of a pretty local who before he lives gives him a bottle of champagne, thanked him for his efforts in liberating her country and gave him an all mighty kiss.
I swear he is making this up.
Later he had to trouble his own mind by going on an inspection flight whereby the ground crews were to be taken up so they could see the results of their years of work. Flying low over the shattered cities and ghost towns proved difficult for Johnson who seemed to notice only broken residential zones and little industrial damage.
In the immediate aftermath of the war he is posted to Bomber Command Bombing Research Unit to investigate the effects of British bombing. The Americans had of course their own larger and since more publicised unit which produced lots of historically vital reports.
He drove threw destroyed cities and saw the starving masses and the confusion caused by displaced persons. Every business person he met admitted that they had to pay fees to the Nazi party simply to stay in operation but all denied taking active part in party activities. He became depressed when he heard of the Germans resilient, much like demonstrated by the British during the blitz, that had kept factories working and production going despite the heavy bombing. He felt all his work had been in vain, Bomber Command had not succeeded in greatly disrupting German economic output.
The idea that the Nazis had only been a small group at the top that had somehow tricked the German nation into compliance was reinforced by occupation troops who began to enjoy fraternizing with the local girls and by the locals themselves who found this myth a lot easier to buy into than the notion of widespread compliance.
He had an interesting development in his mind, as he grew up he realised that his previous distrust for the nazis and their underhand ways (sinking his dads ship from a U-boat) was ill placed and that the act was in fact legitimate. By circling above German cities and indiscriminately dropping explosives perhaps he had to change his perceptions of what was, and what was not, fair in warfare.
He accepted that the Germans were guilty of war crimes, but he had great trouble wrestling therefore with his own. He found he could not blame the Germans for what they did without first accepting what he had done.
He went on leave to Cannes for a while where the occupiers were using coffee and cigarettes as currency with the locals and having a great time with their women.
His work on the investigation team continually disappointed him, he received numerous stories of the ineffectiveness of de-housing the German cities in order to reduce man hours in factories. Conditions in Germany had been far better than he believed they had been (although this was during the war, not after it when starvation became a real possibility).
He found himself reading a document produced by the prosecuting Allies against the Germans and seeing clearly that if it was he who was on trail, if it was the British being tried, then they would qualify as having committed horrendous war crimes also.
In the last chapter, his ‘personal assessment’ he notes enthusiasm for area bombing among the highest spheres, especially Churchill, He believes the bad press Bomber Command got in the early days of the war about their lack of bombers and their shoddy accuracy made them determined to change things, to invest in many more bombers and refine techniques. In this process the idea of area bombing became so seductive that it could ignored no longer. He notes failings that no one did any work into the effect of German bombing on Britain to determine just how effective it was at disrupting industrial production. He believes that the costly ‘Battle of Berlin’ which saw the British send wave after wave of bombers against heavily defended capital at great loss to aircrew was simply done to satisfy the egos of Britain and its leaders who wanted payback for the blitz on London. He bemoans that bombing was seen as an end itself and was not directed towards preparing for an Allied advance into France. It was not very strategic. And if going for economic targets then why was the production and distribution of oil, the Germans Achilles heel, was not more directly focussed upon.
He concludes that both the RAF, the USAF and the Luftwaffe were guilty of war crimes because more effective alternatives to area bombing were available and widely known, but not used.
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