The dehousing paper had been delivered to Prime Minister
Winston Churchill at a time of mounting criticism about the RAF Bomber offensive. Criticism was coming from other branches inside the
War Ministry and was becoming public. It had started with a report initiated by Cherwell and delivered on 18 August 1941 by
D. M. Bensusan-Butt, a member of the War Cabinet Secretariat. The report based on analysis of
aerial photographs concluded that less than a third of
sorties flown had gotten within of the target. As Bensusan-Butt did not include aircraft that did not bomb because of equipment failure, enemy action, weather or getting lost, the reality was that about 5% of bombers setting out bombed within five miles of their target. Senior RAF commanders argued that the Butt report's statistics were faulty and commissioned another report, which was delivered by the
Directorate of Bombing Operations on 22 September 1941. Working from a damage analysis inflicted on British cities, a bomber force of 4,000 aircraft was calculated to be able to destroy the 43 German towns with a population of more than 100,000. The
Chief of the Air Staff, Sir
Charles Portal argued that with such a force
RAF Bomber Command could win the war in six months. Not all were convinced, and when Churchill expressed his doubts, the Air Staff said that even if Germany was not knocked out of the war, it would be weakened sufficiently to allow British armed forces back into Continental Europe. With that compromise between the armed services, Bomber Command was allowed to keep its planned allocation of war
materiel. That did not stop those outside the
Chiefs of Staff from questioning the strategic bombing policy. A particularly-damning speech had been delivered in the
British House of Commons by the
Member of Parliament for the
University of Cambridge, Professor
A. V. Hill who pointed out, "The total [British] casualties in air-raids – in killed – since the beginning of the war are only two-thirds of those we lost as prisoners of war at Singapore.... The loss of production in the worst month of the Blitz was about equal to that due to the Easter holidays.... The Air Ministry have been... too optimistic.... We know most of the bombs we drop hit nothing of importance". Thus, the
Secretary of State for Air, Sir
Archibald Sinclair and Sir Charles Portal were delighted by the dehousing paper, as it offered support to them in their battle to save the strategic bomber offensive, which had been under attack from others in the high command, who thought that the resources put into Bomber Command were damaging the other branches of the armed services with little to show for it. Portal and Sinclair still expressed their reservations that it could be met. On reading the dehousing paper, Professor
Patrick Blackett, the newly-appointed civilian Director of Naval
Operational Research, wrote that the paper overestimated what could be achieved by 600%. The principal advocate for the reduction of RAF Bomber Command in favour of other options was Sir
Henry Tizard. He argued that the only benefit to strategic bombing was to tie up enemy resources defending Germany and that they could be tied up with a far smaller bombing offensive. He wrote to Cherwell on 15 April to query the facts in the paper and warned that the War Cabinet could reach the wrong decision if it based it on the paper. Tizard had several doubts: that the stated bomber force could be achieved with only 7,000 bombers, not the 10,000 expected; that new navigational aids that would get the aircraft to the targets would not be ready before 1943; and that it was unlikely that more than 25% of the bombs would land on target. As such, the strategy would not work with the resources available, and a far larger effort would be required. In reply to Tizard, Cherwell stated the calculations were for the Prime Minister's benefit, not for statistical analysis, and that despite a difference between the numbers and what was really achieved, there would be catastrophic effects. In his
Bomber Command,
Max Hastings characterised the debate between the two sides as not being whether bombing could "raze [Germany] to the ground" but whether it was the most effective allocation of resources.
Mr. Justice Singleton, a High Court judge, was asked by the Cabinet to look into the competing points of view. In his report, delivered on 20 May 1942 he concluded: In the end, thanks in part to the dehousing paper, this view prevailed, but
C. P. Snow (later Lord Snow) wrote that the debate became quite vitriolic, with Tizard being called a defeatist. It was while the debate about bombing was raging inside the British military establishment that the
area bombing directive of 14 February 1942 was issued, and eight days later,
Arthur "Bomber" Harris took up the post of
Air Officer Commanding (AOC) of Bomber Command. The study of the effects of bombing on Hull and Birmingham was published on 8 April by Professors
Bernal and
Zuckerman after Cherwell's paper had been presented. Their work, the "Hull and Birmingham Survey", had actually found that although there was anxiety as a result of the raids, there was no mass anti-social behaviour and "no measurable effect on the health of either town". == See also ==