But Ira Eaker was a member of the Bomber Mafia. He wasn’t about to give up so easily.
In Eaker’s words:
I said, “General, that makes no sense at all. Our planes are not equipped for night bombing; our crews are not trained in night bombing. We’ll lose more crews coming back into this fog-shrouded island in the darkness than we will attacking German targets in the daytime.” I said, “If they’re going to make this kind of a mistake, count me out. I won’t play.” Well, he said, “I suspected that would be your reaction…I know the reasons you’ve outlined as well as you do. But…since you feel so strongly about it, I’ll see if I can make a date for you to talk to the prime minister tomorrow morning.”
Eaker went back to his quarters and stayed up half the night drafting a response for Churchill. Everyone knew that Churchill wouldn’t read a document longer than a page. So the briefing had to be really brief. And convincing.
So when I reported in, the old PM came down the stairway—the high glass windows and the sun was shining through the orange groves—and he came down resplendent in his air commodore’s uniform. He had a penchant, which I knew of—when he was seeing a naval person, he wore his naval uniform; air, air [uniform], and so forth. Well, he said, “General, your General Arnold tells me you’re very unhappy about my request to your president that you discontinue your daylight bombing effort and join Marshal [Arthur] Harris and the RAF in the night effort.” I said, “Yes, sir, I am. And I’ve set down here on a single page the reasons why I’m unhappy. And I have served long enough in England now to know that you will listen to both sides of any controversy before you make a decision.” So he sat down on the couch and took up this piece of paper, called me to sit beside him, and he started reading. And he read like some aged person, with his lips, half audibly.
So what did Eaker write? The most basic argument he could come up with. “I’d said that if the British bombed by night and the Americans by day, bombing them thus around the clock will give the devils no rest.”
When he got to that point of the memo, Churchill repeated the line to himself. As if he were trying to understand the logic. Then he turned to Eaker.
He said, “You have not convinced me now that you are right, but you have convinced me you should have a further opportunity to prove your case. So when I see your president at lunch today, I shall say to him that I withdraw my objection and my request that you join the RAF in night bombing, and I shall suggest that you be allowed to continue for a time.”
The Americans got a reprieve. By the skin of their teeth.
2.
Put yourself in the shoes of the Bomber Mafia at this moment: Ira Eaker, Haywood Hansell, Harold George, Donald Wilson, all the others from the Air Corps Tactical School. They have been working side by side with their closest ally to defeat the Nazis. And yet their ally seems incapable of comprehending the conceptual advance they have made in waging war.
When he first got to England, Eaker lived at the home of his counterpart in the Royal Air Force, Arthur Harris, otherwise known as Bomber Harris. They would drive together every morning to bomber command headquarters, at High Wycombe.
As historian Tami Biddle explains:
It’s very odd. Ira Eaker and Arthur Harris have doctrines of bombing that are 180 degrees out from one another, completely different. Yet they become fast friends. They really genuinely like each other. In fact, at one point, Harris tells Eaker, if anything happens to [my wife] Jill and me…we’d like you to have [our daughter] Jackie. We’d like you to be her godfather. It’s quite the interesting relationship, but they are operating in completely different ways.
Marshal Harris’s steadfast belief in the power of “morale bombing” must have offended Eaker. Or at the very least baffled him. Because what had the British just been through? The Blitz. The Blitz was a textbook example of area bombing. On September 4, 1940, Hitler had declared: “The hour will come when one of us will break, and it will not be the National Socialist Germany!” And in the fall of 1940, he sent German bombers thundering across the skies above London, dropping fifty thousand tons of high-explosive bombs and more than a million incendiary devices.
Hitler believed that if the Nazis bombed the working-class neighborhoods of East London, they would break the will of the British population. And because the British believed the same theory, they were terrified that the Blitz would cost them the war. The British government projected that between three and four million Londoners would flee the city. The authorities even took over a ring of psychiatric hospitals outside London to handle what they expected to be a flood of panic and psychological casualties.