The violence is not difficult to explain. Official propaganda had always described Allied bombing as ‘terror-bombing’ and the aircrew as gangsters or air pirates. The word ‘vengeance’ had become part of the public vocabulary of the air war. On 27 May 1944 Goebbels published a widely read article in the Party newspaper calling for ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ in subjecting Allied flyers to German ‘self-justice’, echoing views expressed by Hitler as early as autumn 1942.275 Many of the cases of lynching were associated with Party members or SA men, or policemen, who expected not to be punished. Spontaneous popular violence was rarer, though again explicable by the level of destruction and casualties imposed in the last years of war. What is surprising is that the violence was not more widespread given the increasingly lawless character of German justice. Reports after Goebbels’ article indicated public concern that killing captured Allied aircrew would result in the killing of captured German airmen too in retaliation. The uniformed services would not endorse the killing and Allied survivors attested to the intervention of soldiers or policemen in saving them from angry crowds. In the aftermath of heavy bombing violent reaction against its perpetrators seems often to have taken second place to the relief at having survived and concern for others. Hans Nossack observed in Hamburg in the days after Operation Gomorrah that ‘no-one comforted himself with thoughts of revenge’; the enemy was at most, Nossack continued, ‘an instrument of unknowable forces that sought to annihilate us’.276
Somehow the German civilian population survived under the sharply deteriorating conditions of daily life, in a milieu that became progressively abnormal. The civil defence structure built up and renewed over the course of the war proved in the end sufficiently flexible to continue the task of combating the raids and coping with their consequences. ‘Self-protection’ is evident in the hundreds of photographs that survive of civilians forming human chains to supply water or to remove rubble, of volunteer firemen and salvage workers struggling to contain the flames. After the heavy raid on Stuttgart in July 1944, one girl recalled how her father had saved their home: ‘our row of houses only remained standing because my father had dread of being installed just anywhere after the loss of his house. His view was: “If I cannot save my home, I have nothing left in life.” So during the raid he stayed up on top so that he could throw the incendiary bombs straight onto the street.’277 Waltraud Süssmilch found herself with other classmates after each all-clear joining a long human chain passing buckets filled with water or sand by hand to the next person, or in school hours packing parcels for the bombed-out, or visiting the wounded.278 Throughout 1944 advice on firefighting and training for self-protection continued to be published and distributed; blackout regulations were insisted upon and air-raid instructions issued for areas where until late 1944 there had been very little air action and little familiarity with the pattern of air-raid crises.
Right to the very last days of the war, air-raid protection continued to function. The record of two of the air force Air Protection Regiments, mobile units designed to bring immediate assistance to bombed cities, even at considerable distance, illustrates the extent to which positive efforts continued to be made to combat or ameliorate the effects of remorseless daily bombing. Regiment 3, based in Berlin, in action almost every day, travelled 190 kilometres in response to the bombing of Magdeburg on 5–6 August 1944. One company tackled the damaged Krupp-Gruson plant. It succeeded in extinguishing the blazing coal bunkers, rescuing the machinery, putting out the large fires threatening the material stores, and saving cellars full of military supplies. A second company worked in the burning city, extinguishing five small fires where the bombs fell, six roof fires, 11 storey fires, 14 ‘total fires’ (preventing them from spreading), six burning provision stores and five larger conflagrations. It handled 63 civil defence first-aid cases, 402 civilian injuries, sent 138 off in ambulances, recovered 38 buried bodies and 33 people still alive.279 Two weeks later Regiment 3 sent three companies to Stettin, where the raid had devastating effects. They rescued 501 people alive, and dug out 53 dead, extinguished 127 smaller house fires, 29 ‘total fires’, fought 12 industrial and commercial blazes, and prevented 18 fires from spreading any further. The narrow streets in Stettin made it difficult to get equipment into the heart of the blaze, and only after three hours was it possible to create a corridor covered with water jets to get through to the shelters. There they found 50 dead near the shelter entrance who had tried to escape through the fire by their own efforts, their corpses ‘completely carbonated’. In the last weeks of bombing in 1945, Regiment 7 reported a gruelling schedule of operations starting with a major fire-raid on Nuremberg on 20–21 February, where the unit extinguished 119 small and 60 major fires, and extracted 36 bodies from the rubble, followed by summons to a further 17 raids between 27 February and 21 March.280 As the military fronts contracted, so it proved possible for technical troops from the armed forces to be deployed more extensively in trying to protect the surviving urban areas, working side by side with the remaining civil defenders.
One of the cities in need of urgent aid in 1945 was the Saxon capital at Dresden, destroyed in a firestorm on the night of 13–14 February. Dresden had already experienced two American daylight raids, on 7 October 1944 and 16 January 1945, which had killed 591 people. Little effort had gone into constructing adequate public shelters and one witness recalled that the sirens failed to sound that night. The day before the February raid was, according to Victor Klemperer, a German-Jewish philologist who had survived in Dresden married to a non-Jew, one of ‘perfect spring weather’.281 By a strange historical quirk, Klemperer was among the small population of surviving Jews in Dresden who that same day had been ordered to turn up 72 hours later to be transported away for ‘outside labour duty’. When the main raid began in the middle of the night he ran at once to the Jewish shelter but scrambled on through the fires and bombs when the shelter became too hot. He managed to get down to the Elbe River, battered by the wind of the firestorm, slipping on the black rain that fell from the condensation caused by the rising column of hot air. He joined the flow of refugees the following morning with his wife, who had been saved only because someone had pulled her from the Jewish into the ‘Aryan’ shelter below their apartments:
Fires were still burning in many of the buildings on the road above. At times, small and no more than a bundle of clothes, the dead were scattered across our path. The skull of one had been torn away, the top of the head was a dark red bowl. Once an arm lay there with a pale, quite fine hand, like a model made of wax such as one sees in barbers’ shop windows … Crowds streamed unceasingly between these islands, past these corpses and the smashed vehicles, up and down the Elbe, a silent, agitated procession.282
Klemperer was fortunate to survive. He was treated by first-aid workers that morning as American aircraft returned to bomb what was left of the city. By the evening food arrived and then water. The following morning the refugees were moved to the nearby towns of Klotsche and Meissen, where there were plentiful bowls of soup. Klemperer tore off the yellow star all Jews were required to wear and survived the war.
Klemperer’s story is a reminder that the system being bombed still practised its lethal racism to the very last weeks of the war, though it also demonstrates that even wearing the star he could get medical attention and food and emergency accommodation. Dresden became for the authorities a major emergency. The General of Technical Troops, Erich Hampe, was sent from Berlin on the morning of 14 February to supervise the re-establishment of rail communications over the surviving railway bridge. He found the burnt-out area of Dresden utterly deserted, except for a llama escaped from Dresden zoo. Within only two days an emergency rail service had been set up and the wounded could be moved to hospitals in nearby cities.283 Altogether 2,212 were severely wounded and 13,718 lightly, but the death toll was much higher. By mid-March the police president reported that 18,375 dead had been accounted for, but estimated the final figure as likely
to be 25,000, the number recently agreed as the upper limit by a historical commission set up by the mayor of Dresden in 2004. The bodies were collected in large pyres and those not already incinerated were burned quickly to avoid a health crisis.284 Out of 220,000 homes in Dresden, 75,000 were totally destroyed and 18,500 severely damaged; there were 18 million cubic metres of rubble. By the end of February Dresden, a city formerly of 600,000, housing an unknown number of refugees from the east, had only 369,000 inhabitants left. It was submitted to two further heavy attacks by 406 B-17s on 2 March and 580 B-17s on 17 April, leaving a further 453 dead.285
By this stage of the war the bombing had to compete with fear of the oncoming Soviet forces, whose offensive the bombing of Dresden had been supposed to serve. Victor Klemperer noted in his diary, once he was safe in emergency housing, that he shared with those around him fear of bombing but also their profound fear of the Russians, confirmed by the long trails of refugees in carts and buggies making their way westward against the tide of German forces moving the other way. Another survivor wrote two weeks after the firestorm: ‘Why are we still living? Only to wait until the Russians come.’286 Other diaries show that growing horror at the thought of Soviet occupation, fuelled by grim rumours of the primitive behaviour of Soviet soldiers, put into perspective the bombing, whose dimensions and effects were more familiar. ‘Masses and masses of fugitives are crossing the Oder,’ wrote one eyewitness in February 1945. ‘Dead people have been temporarily buried in the snow. The Russians are coming! Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow must have been child’s play by comparison.’287 The Berlin schoolgirl, Waltraud Süssmilch, was fascinated and horrified by the stories brought by the tide of refugees from the east that flowed into Berlin in the last weeks of war. One story of the sadistic murder of a pregnant woman by Red Army soldiers filled her with complete dread, even though almost every day bombs were exacting a brutal physical toll all around her.288 In the last week before the end of the war Berliners stayed in their shelters which doubled as protection from Soviet shelling, since here, as over most of Germany, the bombing had ceased, in order to prevent the bombers from hitting Allied forces by mistake. The Berlin diarist found the population of her shelter still agitated and nervous, as though they were waiting for a bombing raid. Some of them speculated that the Russians might not be as bad as German propaganda had painted them. A refugee from the east, camped out in the shelter, began to shout: ‘Broken sentences – she can’t find the right words. She flails her arms and screams. “They’ll find out all right,” and then goes silent once again.’289
One of the final raids of the war touched a small town that had been spared the bombing, despite its notoriety. Berchtesgaden, where Hitler had his Bavarian headquarters and retreat, was bombed by British aircraft on 25 April 1945 with considerable accuracy, leaving behind ‘a chaotic brown-and-black mess’ in place of the pretty Alpine woods and the smart modern villas of the Party elite. The town itself was not hit, an outcome that local people treated as a miracle, apparently evidenced, as one young eyewitness later wrote, by the sign of the Cross visible in the sky. She was puzzled by this: ‘Why of all places should He protect Berchtesgaden, when all of Europe was in ashes?’ Her neighbours expected Hitler to arrive at any moment to make his operatic last stand.290 But Hitler was cut off in Berlin, amidst the ruins of his new Chancellery building. Thousands of Berliners crowded into the vast Flak-towers for safety from the battle going on around them, though the bombing of the capital was over. Waltraud Süssmilch and her family had taken shelter in one tower but had to leave when it began to fill with water. The sight of the ruined city, even after years of bombing, struck her as extraordinary. Like General Anderson, former commander of Eighth Bomber Command, who toured the bombed cities later that summer, she thought the bombed-out houses, burning roofs and broken windows looked like the picture of Pompeii in her school history book.291
The bombing imposed on Germany exceptional demands for organizing the home front, quite different from the experience of the First World War. The dictatorship relied on sustaining a high degree of participation, willing or otherwise, in the organizations and institutions that were supposed to bind together the new ‘People’s Community’. Any explanation for the capacity of German society to absorb bombing destruction and levels of casualty on this scale must include the willingness of millions of ordinary Germans, in addition to all the other pressures of wartime work and survival, to participate in schemes of self-protection, civil defence work, first-aid organization and welfare provision, without which the consequences of bombing could not have been sustained, however coercive the regime or however narrow the space within which social protest could operate. The effect of bombing was not, in the end, as the Allies hoped, to drive a wedge between people and regime, but the opposite, to increase dependence on the state and the Party and to prompt willing participation by civilians in structures designed for their own defence with a remarkable degree of social discipline. The experience of being bombed did indeed create widespread anxiety, demoralization, social conflict and limited political criticism, but it was balanced in the end by the capacity of the dictatorship to exploit racial policy unscrupulously to its advantage (redistributing Jewish apartments and furnishings, using camp and foreign labour to clear up debris, etc.), while ensuring that minimum levels of social provision, flexible propaganda, administrative competence and targeted coercion would prevent anything like collapse.
8
Italy: The War of Bombs and Words
Italy was bombed for only a month less than Germany during the Second World War. Yet the story of the bombing of most of Italy’s cities failed to attract the attention of the wider world in 1945 and has remained on the margins in most narratives of the conflict ever since. As many Italians were killed by bombing as died in the Blitz on Britain; more tons were dropped on Rome than on all British cities put together. Moreover, the damage to Italy’s ancient heritage filled two volumes when it was investigated by a British committee in 1945, set up to preserve for future generations the ‘artistic wealth’ that Allied aircraft had been busy bombarding only months before.1
Italy’s part in the bombing war was more complex than that of any other European state. For at least three years, from 10 June 1940, when Benito Mussolini declared war on Britain and France, the Italian Air Force (Regia Aeronautica) had carried out an active bombing campaign: briefly against targets in France (before the French sued for an armistice in June 1940), against England in the late autumn of 1940, and throughout the Mediterranean and North Africa until final defeat there in May 1943. Some of this air activity had been carried out in loose collaboration with German air forces. Throughout this period, though not continuously, Italian territory was itself bombed by the RAF, from bases in England as well as bases in Malta and North Africa. On 8 September 1943, following an Italian request for an armistice, the Italian state ceased to be an Axis enemy and became, after a short interval, a co-belligerent with the United Nations and an enemy of Germany, whose forces now occupied two-thirds of the Italian Peninsula. For the next two years, the few Italian pilots and aircraft remaining in the area not occupied by the Germans were used to attack German forces in the Balkans and the Ionian Islands, the first raids taking place against targets on Corfu and Kefallonia as early as September 1943.2 Meanwhile in the occupied zones of central and northern Italy a new government under Mussolini was set up under German protection in what was now called the Italian Social Republic, and here a small Italian contingent, the National Republican Air Force (Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana) fought in German aircraft against the Allies.3 Since German forces were in occupation, northern and central Italy remained a target for Allied bombing up until the very last days of the war, while the southern liberated zone was subject to occasional German air raids. The bulk of the Italian population was the object of air attack first as an enemy people, then as a population waiting to be liberated. The only constant in the Italian experience of war was the threat fro
m the air.
FAREWELL TO DOUHET: ITALY’S BOMBING WAR
The Italian Fascist regime was from the start strongly committed to the belief that promoting air power would be a triumphant manifestation of Fascist strength, technical capability and military elan. The daring pilot became a symbol of the Fascist ‘new man’, pushing human endeavour to the limits. Fascism shared with the Italian Futurists, and particularly the founder, Filippo Marinetti, a fascination with modern technique and violent speed. Italian aircraft regularly won the Schneider speed trophy in the late 1920s and early 1930s; the Air Minister, Italo Balbo, famously led a flight of seaplanes in 1933 across the Atlantic to New York and Chicago. Mussolini, first prime minister in 1922, then from 1926 effective dictator, helped to shape the identification of Italian aviation with the values of the new Fascist state. In 1921 he was enthusiastic enough to take flying lessons, though he failed to qualify. Later, in power, Mussolini was often photographed in the open cockpit of an aircraft, though always in the co-pilot’s seat. In the mid-1930s he began flying again and in January 1937 it was announced that he had been awarded his military pilot’s licence.4 The myth of Mussolini, the Italian superman, was served by the image of Mussolini the courageous and intrepid flyer, and he did nothing to deflate it. He evidently enjoyed flying. In 1942 the Air Ministry was asked to provide a complete list of all Mussolini’s flights since December 1938, both inside Italy and abroad, and the final tally was 117, some to Libya and Russia, most of them short-haul journeys to Italian cities.5 There was a cruel irony in his enthusiasm. In August 1941 his son Bruno, who had joined the air force and flown in Ethiopia and Spain, was killed test-flying the new four-engine Italian bomber, the Piaggio P.108, one of a number of modern Italian aircraft designs plagued with development defects.
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 66