The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945

by Richard Overy

  For the societies that suffered the bombing during the war there was only one reality that mattered: ‘The bomber will always get through.’ The famous remark by the British deputy prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, on the eve of his departure for the Geneva Disarmament talks in November 1932, that the man in the street ought to understand there was no power on earth yet available to stop him from being bombed, has usually been taken for deliberate hyperbole, to scare delegates at Geneva into accepting a ban on bomber aircraft. Yet though it proved possible during the war to detect aircraft with radar and to intercept them by day and increasingly by night, and to inflict high-percentage rates of loss on an attacking force, in the context of the Second World War, Baldwin was right. Most bombers did reach the approximate target area and disgorge their bombs with limited accuracy on the ground below, turning wartime civilian society into an effective front line. That this would be so was widely expected by the 1930s among the populations of the world’s major states, who saw bombing fatalistically, as something that would define future conflict. ‘It is the height of folly,’ wrote the British Air Minister, Lord Londonderry, to Baldwin in July 1934, ‘to imagine that any war can be conducted without appreciable risk to the civil population.’39 Brought up on a diet of scaremongering fiction and films, subject by the 1930s to regular drill or instruction or propaganda for air-raid precautions, civilian society came to take it for granted that it would become an object of attack, even that there might be some degree of democratic legitimacy in bombing if all of modern mass society had to be mobilized for war. The British pacifist Vera Brittain, writing in 1940 at the height of the Blitz, observed that in the First World War there had grown up a ‘barrier of inconceivable experience’ between the soldiers on the Western Front and the civilians at home in Britain. During the current conflict, she continued, ‘both suffering and suspense are universal in England herself … There is no emotional barrier between men and women, parents and children, the old and the young, since the battle is shared by all ages and both sexes.’40

  The concept of civilian society, primarily urban society, as a new front line in war was in reality a novel, indeed unique, phenomenon in the context of the modern age. It gave to the strategic bombing war a second political dimension because it raised the problem of maintaining social cohesion and political allegiance in the face of extreme levels of direct military violence against the home front. The survival of positive ‘morale’ became central to the concerns of those governments whose populations were subject to attack. Morale as such was poorly defined at the time, was difficult to measure in any meaningful way and subject to a great many other pressures besides the effects of bombing. A British Air Ministry report in autumn 1941 confessed that since ‘morale is itself a thing of opinion and not of fact, there is no likelihood even of experts agreeing on the matter’.41 Yet it was the bombing war in particular that was popularly believed by rulers and ruled to have a fundamental impact on the war-willingness and psychological state of the population and it featured regularly in home intelligence reports on the public mood in Britain, Germany, Italy and Japan. This was an equally difficult assessment to make for those doing the bombing. They tried to estimate with some precision what effect their attacks might have on the state of mind of those they bombed, but the answers were more often than not contradictory or confused. The JIC report on the bombing of Bulgaria, produced in January 1944, highlighted social effects that were ‘out of proportion’ to the modest scale of attack, but still concluded that the political results had been negligible.

  There can be little room for doubt that the experience of bombing was deeply demoralizing for many of those who survived it, though it could also provoke sudden moments of exhilaration, or induce a profound apathy, but the difficulty in drawing any clear causal links between bombing and popular response is simply that the response was as varied, irregular, unpredictable and diverse as the society that made it. The social reaction to bombing is often treated as if it must be uniform, but it differed widely between states and within communities. This was a reality seldom appreciated by those doing the bombing for whom ‘Germans’ or ‘Italians’ or even ‘Bulgarians’ became simply a generic description of the human target. One of the key questions still debated about the bombing war is why the bombed societies did not collapse at once under the impact, as conventional wisdom before 1939 suggested they would. This is too simple an approach. Bombing did place enormous strains on local communities, and some did experience a cumulative or temporary social breakdown as a result, but it was always a long step from local social crisis to the complete collapse of a war effort. To understand why ‘morale’ did not collapse in Britain or Germany in the sense of a political upheaval is to engage with complex issues of social cohesion defined by regional difference, the intensity of the bombing experience, the nature of the prevailing state and local administration, the peculiar structures of local society and the cultural impact of propaganda. Any narrative of the bombing war has to address the psychological, social and cultural response as well as the conventional military reality: the view from below as well as the view from above. This dual approach has featured only rarely in the existing history of the bombing campaigns, yet it is the one sure way to assess just what effects bombing actually had on the target communities, and to suggest what those effects might be in any future war.

  The story of the civilian front line in the air war is an aggregate story of loss of extraordinary proportions: an estimated 600,000 killed, as many seriously injured, millions more less severely hurt; millions dispossessed through bomb destruction; 50–60 per cent of the urban area of Germany obliterated; countless cultural monuments and works of art irreparably lost. It is only when these costs are summarized that the unique character of the bombing war can be properly understood. The dead were not accidental bystanders but the consequence of a technology generally incapable of distinguishing and hitting a small individual target, and which all sides knew was incapable of doing so with the prevailing science. This raises a number of questions about why the states involved never reined back campaigns with such a high civilian cost and in particular why Britain and the United States, liberal democracies which self-consciously occupied the moral high ground during the war, and had both deplored bombing before 1939, ended up organizing strategic bombing campaigns that killed around 1 million people in Europe and Asia. These seem obvious questions seventy years later but they can only be properly answered by understanding the terms in which the moral imperatives of war were perceived at the time. The assault on civilians signified an acceptance, even by the victim populations, of shifting norms about the conduct of war; what had seemed unacceptable legally or morally in 1939 was rapidly transformed by the relative ethics of survival or defeat.42

  It is easy to deplore the losses and to condemn the strategy as immoral, even illegal – and a host of recent accounts of the bombing have done just that – but current ethical concerns get no nearer to an understanding of how these things were possible, even applauded, and why so few voices were raised during the war against the notion that the home front could legitimately be a target of attack.43 The contemporary ethical view of bombing was far from straightforward, often paradoxical. It is striking, for example, that among those who were bombed there was seldom clear or persistent hatred for the enemy; there was a sense that ‘war’ itself was responsible and ‘modern war’ in particular, as if it enjoyed some kind of existence independent of the particular air fleets inflicting the damage. There could even be a sense that bombing was necessary to purge the world of the forces that had unleashed the barbarism in the first place, a blessing as much as a curse. A young German soldier captured and interrogated in Italy early in 1945 told his captors: ‘In the long run your bombings may be good for Germany. They have given her a taste, bitter though it may be, of what war is really like.’44 The moral response to bombing and being bombed was historically complex and sometimes surprising. Issues that seemed black and white before
the war and do so again today were coloured in many shades of grey during the conflict. Nonetheless, the figures on death, injury and destruction are shocking, just as the other forms of mass death of civilians in the Second World War. The grisly consequences of the bombing war would have outraged opinion in the 1930s just as they have attracted current opprobrium among historians and international lawyers.45 Exploring how it was possible to legitimize this scale of damage in the brief span of total war between 1940 and 1945 forms the fourth and perhaps the most important element in The Bombing War, alongside the political context that shaped the development of the aerial conflict, the military operations that defined its precise character and extent, and the administrative, social and cultural responses that determined the limits of what bombing could actually achieve.

  Part One

  GERMANY’S BOMBING WAR

  1

  Bombing before 1940: Imagined and Real

  In 1938 the American critic Lewis Mumford, well known for his unflattering views on the modern giant city, explored the rise and fall of what he called ‘Megalopolis’ in his book The Culture of Cities. He described ‘a vast pus-bag of vulgar pretense and power’ in which civilization became year by year more fragile and insecure until the day when the air-raid sirens sound: ‘Plainly, terrors more devastating and demoralizing than any known in the ancient jungle or cave have been re-introduced into modern urban existence. Panting, choking, spluttering, cringing, hating, the dweller in Megalopolis dies, by anticipation, a thousand deaths.’ A humane civic life, Mumford argued, was no longer possible in modern cities during a bombing war. The end result of the destruction was a city of the dead, ‘Nekropolis’, ‘a tomb for the dying … flesh turned to ashes’.1

  Mumford was one of hundreds of Europeans and Americans whose powerful imaginative writing helped to define the popular idea of what a bombing war would be like long before it became a possibility or a reality. The most famous of them all was the English novelist H. G. Wells whose The War in the Air, published as far back as 1908, set the pattern for all subsequent literature, fiction and non-fiction, that addressed the possible effects of a bombing war. In the novel, a fleet of malevolent German airships destroys New York in a matter of hours, ‘a crimson furnace from which there was no escape’. The worldwide war that develops engulfs civilization, whose misplaced sense of security and progress is blotted out more rapidly than the fall of any earlier civilized order: ‘And this was no slow decadence that came to the Europeanized world; those other civilizations rotted and crumbled down, the Europeanized civilization was, as it were, blown up.’2 Wells used the book to highlight a theme that he returned to regularly in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War: that the application of modern science to war was fraught with danger. The destruction of New York in the novel was, he suggested, ‘the logical outcome’ of this unfortunate marriage. In a less well-known sequel, The World Set Free, written five years later in 1913, Wells anticipated the nuclear age, in which 200 of the world’s great cities are destroyed in the ‘unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bomb’.3 Like Mumford, Wells saw urban life as both defining the modern age (‘gigantic cities spreading gigantically’) and uniquely susceptible to obliteration by the very science to which it had given birth.4

  Neither the alleged fragility of the modern city nor the fears for the end of civilization were realized in the war that broke out in August 1914, yet they remained dominant tropes in the thirty years that separated Wells’ early predictions from the reality of mass city bombing after 1940. Aircraft in the Great War were in their technical infancy. Although the war did witness the origins of what came to be called by its end ‘strategic bombing’, the scale of such bombing was tiny and its direct impact on the warring states subjected to it was negligible. The first major raids were mounted by dirigibles, as they were in Wells’s novel. The German Navy approved long-range attacks by Zeppelin airships against British port cities and, eventually, against targets in London. The first of 52 raids was made on the night of 20–21 January 1915. Altogether during the war airships dropped 162 tons of bombs, mostly haphazardly, and killed 557 people.5 Attacks by aeroplanes away from the front line began on 22 September 1914 when a handful of aircraft from the Royal Naval Air Service, on the orders of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, attacked Zeppelin sheds in Cologne and Düsseldorf, followed on 23 November by a raid on the city of Friedrichshafen, where Zeppelins were built. The first German aircraft to bomb Britain did so in retaliation on 24 December. There were small raids by German, French and British units for the next two years but they achieved almost nothing until the German Air Force formed an ‘England Squadron’ in late 1916, commanded by Captain Ernst Brandenburg, to begin a series of day and night attacks against British ports, including 18 raids on London. The first raid was made on Folkestone on 25 May 1917, the last a year later, on the night of 19–20 May against London. The mixed force of Gotha-IV and R-Gigant multi-engine bombers dropped 110 tons in 52 raids, killing 836 and wounding 1,982. The original object had been to destroy ‘the morale of the British people’ to such an extent that the British government might consider withdrawing from the conflict. But the weight of attack failed entirely to support what was at best a speculative strategy. Small German raids were also made on French industrial targets in Paris, killing 267 Parisians, but achieving little. The offensive petered out in spring 1918 following mounting losses.6 Its principal achievement was to provoke the British into retaliation.

  The German bombing, sporadic and limited though it was, helped give birth not only to an integrated air defence system, but also to what would have been the first strategic air offensive. The first anti-aircraft guns were in place across south-east England by spring 1915. The air defences were established formally as the Air Defence of Great Britain. At the heart of the system was the London Air Defence Area, set up in July 1917 under Maj. General Edward Ashmore. By the summer of 1918 the defence boasted 250 anti-aircraft guns (based on artillery developed on the Western Front), 323 searchlights, eight fighter squadrons for day-and-night interception and a personnel of 17,000. To track incoming aircraft, observer cordons were set up some 50 miles from vulnerable areas, manned by soldiers and policemen.7 In the threatened cities a primitive civil defence structure was established in 1917, with improvised shelters, air-raid wardens and policemen armed with whistles for sounding the alarm. The system was seldom needed over the last two years of war, and not at all after the last raids in May 1918, but it created a precedent that was later revived in the 1930s when lessons from the Great War were needed for British air-raid precautions planning. The raids gave rise to moments of panic in the bombed towns; in the east coast port of Hull, an easy Zeppelin target, a portion of the population trekked out of the city to the surrounding countryside, as they were to do during the next war. In London, estimates of those who sought shelter in the Underground ranged from 100,000 to 300,000.8

  The air raiding was widely condemned as a vicious and cowardly attack on the innocent. The final death toll of 1,239 from all Zeppelin and bomber raids included 366 women and 252 children. Bombing represented, according to The Times, ‘relapses into barbarism’, a language regularly applied to aerial bombing for the next twenty-five years.9 There were widespread appeals for retaliation, using much the same language of moral justification that would later be used during the Blitz, and there followed a number of deliberate reprisal raids. The government, however, wanted a more systematic response. An Air Board, appointed in 1916, planned to create a separate, independent air force and, with the government’s approval, to use it to undertake a systematic long-range bombing offensive against German military and economic targets within the limited range of the existing aircraft. In July 1917 the South African soldier and politician, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, visiting London during an Imperial Conference, was invited by the prime minister, David Lloyd George, to produce recommendations for organizing Britain’s air effort. Smuts suggested the es
tablishment of a separate air ministry and air force and also endorsed the idea of long-range attacks against the enemy home front.10 The idea was accepted and an initial bombing plan was drawn up by Lord Tiverton, a senior Royal Flying Corps staff officer, at the request of the first chief of the newly created air staff, Sir Frederick Sykes. The industrial plan picked out German iron and steel, chemicals, the aero-engine and magneto industries as the key objectives, and from October 1917 the RFC VIII Brigade, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Cyril Newall (the future chief of the air staff in the late 1930s), began a limited assault on the cities that housed them.11