Will the RAF change its target?

Sir Charles Portal enters 1942 confronted with statistics that shatter his assumptions. The Butt Report, compiled by civil servant David Bensusan-Butt, has established that on recent missions barely 1 bomber in 3 dropped its bombs within 8 kilometres of the target; over the Ruhr, shrouded in industrial haze, that figure fell to 1 in 10. Crews were not coming home unscathed either: daylight formations were being slaughtered by German fighters, while night precision bombing had proved an illusion that the darkness itself made impossible. Meanwhile Stalin was demanding an immediate second front, and Churchill needed to show that Britain was striking the enemy on his own soil.

Portal knows that in this winter Bomber Command is the only British force capable of reaching the Reich directly. Three paths lie before him, each carrying its own weight of consequence. He can break with the precision doctrine and order night bombing of Germany's major cities — targeting their urban fabric, their dispersed industry, the morale of the workers feeding the armament factories; it is a brutal calculus, but perhaps the only honest use of the weapon at hand. He can instead maintain pressure on identified industrial targets — refineries, steelworks, rail junctions — and absorb heavy losses in the hope that navigation technology will improve quickly enough. Or he can abandon the strategic offensive altogether and redeploy his squadrons where the admirals and generals need them most: the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the defence of convoys.

Each option commits the future of an entire arm of service, the fate of thousands of German civilians, and the credibility of an ally whose only way of fighting is its refusal to stop.