Many rose to senior rank, with three-figure operations’ tallies others died as junior officers or senior NCOs before their true potential had been realised or achieved. Nor was there any specific standard of sortie totals, or multi-decorations, to identify a baron. Those barons varied widely in character and background, seldom conforming to any lay image of the hero of romantic fiction indeed, not all were necessarily popular in the social context. Such men became familiarly dubbed ‘bomber barons’ by their contemporaries – the cream of Bomber Command in the eyes of their fellow fliers. Within RAF circles, however, many men with comparably notable careers achieved unsought, and unpublicised, high reputations among their peers on the bomber grapevine as superlative examples of those undefinable qualities of rare courage and instinctive leadership individuals who unconsciously inspired total confidence and trust in all with whom they flew to war.
While the wartime lay public quickly became familiar with names and deeds of a host of fighter pilots, only rarely did a bomber ‘boy’s’ name appear in headlines two prime exceptions to such anonymity were Wing Commander Guy Gibson, VC, DSO, DFC, and Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, VC, OM, DSO, DFC, whose truly outstanding flying careers were widely broadcast both during and since the war years. For all the machinations of the chairborne strategists and hierarchies, it fell to the ordinary bomber crews to fly into enemy-held skies by night and by day to pursue that offensive – and to place their young lives in dire jeopardy each time they set out on an operational sortie. My purpose in this book is not to pontificate about any final analysis of the RAF’s bombing offensive during 1939–45, but simply to bring together within the limited parameters of one pair of covers descriptions of a tiny handful of the sort of men who were tasked with implementing that aerial assault at the ‘sharp end’. To judge any particular generation’s morals, actions, or behavioural standards by the mores of later (or earlier) generations is not only illogical, but can only produce a misleading and distorted set of conclusions. Nearly all have made oracular judgments of the ultimate effectiveness of RAF Bomber Command’s offensive indeed, a few appear to have set out simply to ‘prove’ how inefficient and purposeless that offensive was in the final analysis, thereby – albeit unwittingly on occasion – denigrating the actions of the crews who participated, and by inference the men themselves. Some have been academic studies by learned authors, some – relatively few – have been autobiographical, offering an individual participant’s view of the offensive from a singular viewpoint, while certain more recent tomes have emerged as merely sensation-seeking diatribes by journalists and novelists plainly jumping on the aviation history wagon. The aerial bombing offensive against (mainly) Germany and Italy by Royal Air Force Bomber Command during the years 1939–45 has been the subject of many published works in the years since that fateful conflict. Only the bomber forces could have a true overall strategic impact and influence on the course and eventual outcome of the war, albeit necessarily closely interlocked with all other air arms within their air forces for protection, close support, intelligence, et al. Nevertheless, it should be firmly recognised that the prime weapon of aerial offensive warfare had to be the bomber. I would be the last to minimise in any manner the vital and enormous contribution to the air war made by fighter, maritime, reconnaissance, or other air and ground crews throughout 1939–45. If, for instance, the chosen criterion was the acreage of media exploitation and fulsome plaudits given to the deeds of fighter pilots – a continuing near-obsessive facet of ‘research’ which I personally term the ‘ace cult’ – then any objective reader would be presented with an entirely false, unbalanced picture of the aerial conflict of World War Two, and for that matter of its earlier counterpart of 1914–18.
It follows, therefore, that in any overall view of the aerial warfare of 1939–45, for example, to single out specific roles as being more important than others is to pursue a rutted, biassed outlook on recording history. To attempt to define courage alone involves myriad variables of circumstance, opportunity, ability, and individual motive and determination. Comparisons are always invidious, particularly in the contexts of human courage and endeavour.