Short Finals

A half century later, above the humid skies of North Vietnam the pilots of the US Navy and Air Force suffered equally at the hands of out of touch Pentagon and White House· strategists. Don’t bomb this, don’t bomb that, egress here, ingress there and all the time not being able to eliminate the grade one threats to their own survival. No way to fight a war and certainly, as history records, no way to win a war. In fact, at one point in 1968 General Westmoreland was noted as stating that “If the US had fought the Third Reich the way we are fighting North Vietnam, then we would still be bombing Europe”!

Between these two great conflicts there occurred World War 2.

It is easy of course in hindsight to criticise and I don’t wish to be accused of that. However, during WW2 there occurred a situation that has rarely ever been repeated in military history.

The recognised theory of weapon evolution is that every weapon system, no matter what it is, attracts a counter weapon. That is the natural course of weapon evolution and coincidentally the very thing that eventually helps decide the ultimate winner in a battle, or even a war:

However, during the first four years of World War 2 the only practical weapon that Britain had with which to strike back against Nazi Germany was Bomber Command. During the early years of the war Bomber Command persevered against great odds with periodic and mostly highly ineffective night bomber raids against targets in western Germany and occupied Europe using aircraft that were barely effective for the arduous task required. In fact, so lacking in performance were the two first heavy RAF bombers, the Halifax and Stirling, that they were officially withdrawn from service for a period in order to remedy (without success) their operational deficiencies and very high attrition rate.

This of course is nothing new though it is interesting to re-read history as written by the men who actually made it. One such book that more than adequately catalogues the problems that Bomber Command faced during those dark years was “Lancaster to Berlin”, by Walter Thompson. Thompson was a Canadian who against the odds survived his 45 mission tour, much of it in the legendary Pathfinders, to win the DFC and tell it how it was, warts and all.

Thompson recalls that despite the pasting that the RAF’s heavies were getting every night, at no time in this period (up till 1943) did the RAF seriously consider providing the bombers with a long-range radar equipped escort fighter or for that matter even developing a long-range day fighter that could provide the necessary protection to the bomber force. This was eventually left up to the Americans and their excellent P-51D Mustang, an aircraft that was able to eventually turn the course of the European long-range air war with the winning of the crucial Battle of Germany in 1944. When the RAF did finally provide a night fighter, they modified the Beaufighter which performed almost uselessly in the role. Indeed during the June to September 1943 period when 141 Squadron operated the aircraft, its Serrate Al radar recorded 1180 enemy contacts of which only 20 resulted in combat with 13 confirmed kills. The much better Mosquito followed, but never in the number required to achieve some reasonable measure of security for the ‘sitting duck’ bomber crews.

To replace the relatively ineffective Stirlings, Halifaxes and Wellingtons, the RAF funded a four engined development of the unsuccessful twin engined Manchester bomber. This then became the genesis of the Lancaster which as every schoolboy remembers was more than just a superb aircraft. But was it?

History, unfortunately, records that the poor old Lane was perhaps not what it was often made out to be. A fine design as it originally was, it, like so many instruments of military strategy before it, fell victim to an out of touch high command that failed abysmally to equip it adequately for the highly dangerous task it was destined to perform for more than three long years.

Specifically, the Lancaster lacked the very assets that it required to perform its mission with some form capability to survive. The fact that less than a quarter of all Bomber Command aircrews survived a tour signifies the death trap that the Lancaster became once the Luftwaffe had developed a suitable counter for its nocturnal assaults.

Quite simply, the Lancaster lacked in several areas. It primarily lacked an underbelly turret, the aircraft generally being equipped with a rear, upper and front turret. History records that the two latter positions were almost never used while the rear four gun turret was of little value (apart from freezing its occupant) due to its inability to traverse low enough to hit at inbound night fighters who nearly always attacked from behind and well beneath the bomber.

And why did they do this? Because the Lancaster had no downward firing underbelly gun position. This very fact was to cause the Luftwaffe to equip its vast night fighter force of Ju-88s and Me 110s with upwards firing 20mm and 30mm Schrage Musik cannon. The night fighters would simply stalk the main bomber stream via the then sophisticated German primary radar systems, then employ their own Freya and SN-2 onboard radars to lock onto the emissions of the Lancaster’s H2S target acquisition and tracking radar. The battle of the beams had begun and the RAF had totally failed to alter its battle tactics to accommodate this new and critical factor. Even though the High Command realised that their bomber force was being decimated each night over Germany, they totally refused to modify the Lancaster for adequate self defence.

The Lancaster was additionally hampered by the use of near WW1 vintage . 303 Brownings while the Americans used the significantly heavier and more effective 50 calibre machine gun. And while the Germans wisely used tracer-less cannon, the British persisted in hosing the night sky with ineffective and high visible . 303 tracers at an unseen foe. They stood no chance. And finally when the battle was over, the ship doomed, the crew had to bail out through escape hatches that were too few and designed too small for the average fully equipped crewman to pass through.

For Bomber Command the cloak of darkness was well and truly lifted as early as 1943. During the period of Walter Thompson’s tour, March to December ’43, Bomber Command rarely had more than 1000 bombers available, yet hull losses in those nine months were an astronomic 2227, or about three times the regular active inventory. In all, a total of 55,539 men lost their lives while serving in Bomber Command, 4,050 of them Australians. Given a little more intelligence from their superiors. maybe a lot of these highly talented and skilled young men could have survived to have enjoyed the fruits of their efforts.

And so to today, have we really learnt anything? Unfortunately I think not. In Australia our defence force is slowly being eroded away by politicians and bureaucrats who simply don’t care when it comes down to the final eq·uation.

What, for instance is being positively done about the debilitating attrition rates within the Services – nothing. All that has emanated from Defence Central and its political heirachy is a waffling of words that “they are looking into it” The problems are well known, have been well known for years yet nothing tangible is being done to arrest them.

If we ever have to go to defencd our sovereignty in the foreseeable future then perhaps the lessons of the Lancaster should be remembered, as unfortunately the same level of thinking exists today through the higher levels of Defence as it regrettably did in London back during the dark nights of Bomber Command’s Bloodletting over Europe.