Month: January 2021

Lancaster by Leo McKinstry, 592pp
a long book which has enough space to get into everything to do with the Lancaster bomber, from its manufacture, to the heroics of the aircrew, to the still-controversial area bombing of German cities. Certainly Arthur Harris was determined to area bomb all German cities as thoroughly as he could manage, but at the time almost everybody agreed with him. It was only after Dresden that politicians started to distance themselves from this strategy and point the finger of blame at Harris.  Few books go into the detail of the disagreements between Harris and his superiors in the Air Ministry, but this one does.  Harris was clearly a difficult man and the bosses had great difficulty in getting him to do anything he didn’t want to do.    He refused to attack  point targets even after his force demonstrably had developed the capability to do so. He was an enthusiast for the Lancaster and repeatedly demanded that production of all other heavy bomber types be wound down.

Surprising facts: 1) While in 1939 the RAF bombers  had difficulty in bombing within 5 miles of the target, by 1944, using the best bombsights and electronic aids, they could achieve a degree of accuracy that would be thought not bad even in 2010.  It was quite good enough to demolish individual factories, bunkers and troop concentrations.   2) The Lancaster could carry a slightly greater bomb load than the USAAF’s huge B29, and with its single bomb bay could accommodate a much longer bomb. Hence it was briefly considered for use in dropping the atom bombs on Japan.  3) 10% of Lancaster crew fatalities occurred during training.

I was sufficiently impressed with this book to order the paperback for my library after reading the public library’s hardback.

B-17’s Over Berlin: Personal Stories from the 95th Bomb Group by Ian Hawkins (424pp)

Personal accounts of the men who served in the USAAF’s 95th Bomb Group, based in East Anglia, UK, during WW2. By skilful selection of personal accounts, Hawkins reveals what it was like to be several miles above Germany, freezing cold and being shot at, as well as how the air bases affected life in Norfolk and Suffolk, and how the men and planes were moved from the US to the UK. There are accounts from ground crews, and from men who were shot down and who evaded the Germans or were captured.  Particularly memorable, apart from the high loss rate on some bad missions, are the frequent losses from causes other than enemy action. Take-off crashes and mid-air collisions while forming up were a daily occurrence. One young man had both feet amputated because of frostbite, just because the electric heating of his flying boots failed at altitude.  Crew losses in the USAAF air war were in the tens of thousands. Many of these brave young men now lie in the American cemetery at Madingley, Cambridge.

Crews often fought gun battles with German fighter planes, and shot down many of them.

This is an excellent book which paints a remarkably complete picture of the 95th Bomb group operations.

I found that it whetted my appetite for a work describing the American air war in WW2 in strategic terms, and for comparisons with the British effort.  The B-17 was designed to fly in defensible formations, and had larger caliber guns than British bombers, more guns, and more gunners. American bombers sometimes returned with the floors covered in thousands of spent shell cases, while British bombers might not fire a single shot.  Despite this, the USAAF  bombers required fighter escort to make their missions survivable.  Lancaster pilots often struggled to pull their plane out of a high-speed dive, wheras no B-17 pilot in Hawkins’ book mentions this.  There are many accounts of all ten crew baling out of a stricken B-17, but few of all 7 crewmen bailing out of a Lancaster, where the narrow escape hatches were a cause of complaint.  The B-17 had an autopilot which was of great help during a bail-out.  Mainly because of its heavy armament, the B-17’s bomb load was no greater than that of the smaller and lighter two-engined DH Mosquito, and much less than the maximum load of a Lancaster.

The Dead Hand by David E Hoffman, Icon Books, 577pp, 2010.

The Dead Hand gives us the untold story of the cold war arms race and the efforts made to clear up the Soviet arsenal after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Its opening chapters relate the efforts made by Reagan and Gorbachev to negotiate away their nuclear arsenals. Ronald Reagan was vehemently anti-Communist but was shaken by a presentation in which officials showed him what would happen to the USA in the event of a nuclear attack.  Consequently he became determined to eliminate the threat of nuclear war, either by getting rid of the weapons or by constructing an impenetrable anti-missile shield, the SDI or “Star Wars” project.  Mikhail Gorbachev had similar ideals. Unfortunately, in the prevailing atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion, civil and military officials on both sides did not share their leaders’ ambitions. Reagan, encouraged by his officials, clung to his dream of SDI (a project which was, and remains, entirely imaginary) and this is why Reagan and Gorbachev came within a whisper of abolishing strategic nuclear weapons but in the end accomplished little.  With the paranoia, the false alerts and the brinkmanship, it seems largely a matter of luck that we’re all still alive today.  The USA and Russia even now have enough nuclear weapons targeted on each other to destroy everybody several times over.

The Soviet military-industrial complex was nothing like as technically advanced as American officials believed.  The Soviets had a Star Wars program to make space-borne lasers, but it never worked. What they were able to do, was to keep making missiles and warheads and weapon systems in an unstoppable stream. There was, literally, no way of scaling back the production, and they had so many missiles it didn’t even occur to them to use cheap dummies instead of fully functional missiles for launch training.

The Soviet “Doomsday machine” was real. It was called “Dead Hand” and was a semi-automatic system for enabling the launch crews to launch their missiles should the central command be destroyed.

In the 1970’s the Soviets and the USA renounced chemical and biological weapons and agreed to dispose of all stocks, which the USA duly did. The paranoid Soviets didn’t believe this, and during the 1980’s and the 1990’s, they continued a massive, totally secret, and illegal CBW program, employing thousands of people and costing billions of roubles.

With the fall of Gorbachev and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the USA was faced with a new headache. The Soviet empire was disintegrating, but known to be armed to the teeth with huge quantities of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that were not secured and could fall into the hands of who knew what rogue state or terrorist group.  The production of nuclear weapons stopped only when the USSR collapsed and the money stopped, but the CBW programs were even more difficult to stop, and were still running even after Russian president Boris Yeltsin tried to have them cancelled.

The Iranians, North Koreans and others made efforts to acquire experts and weapons technology from the collapsed USSR, but a program headed by American visionaries was largely successful, at the cost of a few billion dollars, in removing stockpiles to safety, providing money for desperate Russian experts, and encouraging the suspicious Russians to improve their terrifyingly rudimentary storage procedures.