The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945
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Bombing Friends, Bombing Enemies: Germany’s New Order
In early 1944 the US Eighth Air Force published a widely circulated publicity booklet, Target Germany. It purported to tell the story of the first year of the American bombing of the German enemy, ‘raining havoc and destruction on the Nazi war machine’. The inside covers show a map of Europe where the force’s bombs had fallen: there are 19 German targets but 45 in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. For much of the first year the apprentice American force took the short route across the Channel to bombard military-economic installations working for the German war effort. Most of the photographs in the richly illustrated text are of raids made on France and the Low Countries. The first raid on German territory finally took place late in January 1943, but more accessible European objectives were still seen as a useful way to get the crews to cut their teeth on combat.1
The bombing of European targets outside Germany and Italy was in reality more complex than this and was large in scale. The occupied territories of western and northern Europe – France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Norway and Denmark – absorbed almost 30 per cent of the bomb tonnage dropped by the American and British bomber forces. The occupied or satellite countries in eastern Europe and the Balkans absorbed another 6.7 per cent.2 Well over one-third of all Allied bombs dropped on Europe fell on the German territorial New Order, making the experience of bombing in the Second World War a European-wide experience. The purpose behind these bombings, and their consequences for the populations caught in the coils of German expansion, are seldom treated as systematically as accounts of the bombing of Germany, yet they cost at least 70,000–75,000 lives, most of them among peoples sympathetic to the Allied cause. The majority of those losses, and most of the bomb tonnage that caused them, occurred in western Europe, principally France. These areas were near enough to reach and, in 1944, provided the territorial springboard for the Allied invasion of the western half of the German empire. Much of the bombing in the later period was in a loose sense tactical, intended to achieve a direct military end for the ground forces; but much of it was long-distance and heavy, designed to nibble away at war production for Germany in occupied territory, but also to promote wider political aims. According to the British Political Warfare Executive, set up in 1941, bombing of occupied areas promoted both ‘morale breaking’ and ‘morale making’. Collaborators and Germans would be demoralized by the experience; those who did not collaborate would be encouraged at the prospect of liberation.3 To be bombed in order to be free now seems paradoxical, but the policy governed much of the bombing that spread out across the entire European Continent between 1940 and 1945.
DISORDERING THE ‘NEW ORDER’
The rapid German victories between 1939 and spring 1941 brought most of Continental Europe under German control. Neutral states were compelled to work with the changed balance of power while those states that were allied with Germany – Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, Bulgaria – were satellites of the powerful German core. In Berlin the sudden transformation in German fortunes brought a flood of plans and projects for a European New Order which would secure Germany’s permanent political and economic hegemony. The conquered states became involuntary participants in this larger project, compelled to provide economic resources, finance and labour for the German war effort, and doomed to be the battlefields on which the enlarged German empire would defend its borders. Right to the end of the war there were still German forces fighting in The Netherlands, Italy, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, alongside the defence of the German homeland.
It was inevitable under these circumstances that Britain, and later the United States, would have to engage the enemy on the territory of occupied or satellite states where German forces were dispersed. Until the Western states were in a position to mount a major land invasion, air power was regarded as the principal means available to attack Axis military resources across Europe and to undermine the extended war economy established throughout the German New Order. Because of the problem of aircraft range and the danger of flying for long periods over heavily defended territory, it was only possible in the first years of war to attack targets in western and northern Europe. Eastern and south-eastern Europe were only struck regularly from late 1943 onwards, chiefly by the American Fifteenth Air Force based in southern Italy. An alternative was to rely on local resistance and sabotage, and throughout the period in which air forces bombed targets in New Order Europe, the Allies tried to encourage the occupied peoples to take a hand in their own liberation even while subject to regular bomb attacks. Throughout the war period this resulted in awkward decisions for the Allies about the level of damage that should be inflicted on targets situated among potentially friendly civilian communities forced to work for the German war machine or, in some cases, voluntarily collaborating with it. The erosion of ethical restraints on bombing German industrial cities was a simpler issue than the moral dilemma of causing civilian casualties among those held hostage by German military success.
The debate about bombing friends as well as enemies began as soon as Britain was expelled from the Continent and France defeated. In July 1940 the War Cabinet agreed that any military target could be bombed in the northern and western parts of France occupied by German forces (though not in the unoccupied zone ruled from the new government seat at Vichy).4 The problem was to decide what counted as a military target since it was already assumed that in the German case this meant industry, utilities and worker morale alongside more evidently military objectives. On 17 August Air Intelligence provided a list of what were defined as ‘Fringe Targets’ around the edge of occupied Europe which could be subjected to air attack. The fringe included targets up to 30 miles inland in Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium and France. In Scandinavia there were 25 targets, consisting chiefly of oil installations and airbases (but including the Norwegian port of Kristiansund, already heavily bombed by German aircraft); in the Low Countries 61 targets were identified, ranging from electricity-generating stations to iron and steelworks; in France 31 targets were listed around the coast from Dunkirk to Bordeaux, including an aero-engine works at Le Havre, a power station at Nantes and a marshalling yard at Lille, a little over 30 miles from the coast.5 Over the course of the autumn additional target information was processed and detailed target maps supplied. The list for France expanded to 58 objectives located in the 30-mile zone: 9 oil installations, 8 chemical plants, 11 aircraft works, 7 blast furnaces/steel mills, 11 shipbuilding firms and another dozen smaller targets. The targets were given star ratings to indicate their importance, three stars for the highest priority, of which there were 77 by spring 1941.6 In May 1941 it was agreed that the RAF could undertake attacks on ‘deep penetration targets’ where these could be reached easily by day without excessive risk.7 Conscientious anxieties played little part in these early raids. Escalation was soon built into the process of deciding what could be hit and under what conditions.
Many of the early raids around the fringe were tactical bombing operations carried out to forestall the possibility of German invasion and to hit at targets that supported the German air-sea blockade. They were carried out not only by Bomber Command but also by Coastal Command aircraft; in 1941, once the invasion threat had receded, Fighter Command also attacked coastal targets in large-scale fighter sweeps – the so-called ‘Circus’ operations – planned to lure the German Air Force into combat and undermine air force organization. The strategic assault of economic and military targets nevertheless remained limited at first, partly from concern over the political implications, partly from the military risks of attacks in daylight (night-bombing had not yet been approved for non-German targets) against the large German air forces stationed across north-west Europe. The reaction of the communities subjected to fringe bombing was mixed. There was evidence that the occupied peoples positively wanted the RAF to bomb the military and industrial targets in their midst. A Dutch request arrived in August 1940 to bomb the Fokker ai
rcraft works in Amsterdam and a munitions plant at Hemburg (‘working full capacity. Please bomb it’).8 A long letter from a French sympathizer forwarded to the Foreign Office in July 1941 claimed that many people in occupied France wanted the RAF to bomb factories working for the Germans: ‘The bombardments not only have a considerable material effect, but are of primary importance for the future morale of the anglophile population.’9 More letters arrived via Lisbon from Belgian sources explaining that the failure to bomb collaborating factories was attributed in Belgium to British ‘decadence’. A Belgian Resistance newspaper, Le Peuple, published a report of an informal referendum on bombing taken among workers in factories exploited by the Germans. ‘Not a single discordant voice,’ ran the report. ‘They all wish for the destruction of plants which work for the enemy.’10
Alongside this more positive evidence, there were regular protests from the localities which were the object of the early fringe bombing and concern expressed by the governments in exile in London (Dutch, Belgian, Norwegian) as well as the Fighting French led by General Charles de Gaulle. The Dutch government-in-exile wanted assurances in 1940 that bombing would not harm Dutch civilians or civilian property.11 The objections from French sources were a response to the regular small raiding that occurred throughout 1940 and 1941, a total according to French records of 210 raids in 1940 and 439 in 1941 in which 1,650 people were killed and 2,311 injured.12 In May 1941 the mayors of the coastal towns of Dieppe, Brest, Lorient and Bordeaux protested through the United States Legation at Vichy about heavy bombing of residential areas. The British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, asked the Air Ministry to take every care to minimize damage to civilian property and civilian casualties, but the raids continued nonetheless. Intelligence information suggested that the French population still believed that the RAF bombed only the military targets, while it was the Germans who bombed residential districts to try to stoke up popular hatred of the British.13 In August the Vichy regime made a formal diplomatic protest to the British government via the British Embassy in Madrid about the inaccuracy of British bombing, followed by further representations in September about the continual bombing of the Channel port of Le Havre, where it was claimed that British aircraft had attacked the town 55 times in a year (it was, indeed, a regular RAF target), scattering bombs all over the residential quarters, and killing 205 people. The Municipal Council of Le Havre recognized that the port was ‘on “the front” in the war between Germany and England’ but also pointed out that ‘no state of war between France and England exists’.14 The Air Ministry declined to reply to the French protest, but instead told the Foreign Office that accuracy was impossible when operations had to be carried out under indifferent weather conditions and the German habit of generating a smokescreen as soon as the bombers were sighted. The Bombing Directorate suspected that the protests were part of an orchestrated German plot to compel the RAF to reduce their offensive against French targets.15
A number of factors explain the escalating scale and lethality of bomber attacks on non-German targets from late 1941 onwards. The military situation brought increasing pressure to bomb targets in occupied Europe which served the German submarine and air blockade. The prime targets were to be found in the ports of western France and the airfields and bases across the Channel in northern France and the Low Countries. It was also soon evident that armaments, aviation and shipbuilding firms in the occupied zones were being utilized by the Germans, either directly taken over or the result of a collaborative agreement.16 The Ministry of Economic Warfare considered these to be necessary targets for air attack, not only because they were more accessible than most targets in Germany, but because their destruction might reduce the willingness of occupied populations to work for the extended German war effort. On 23 June 1941 the War Cabinet approved the bombing of factories throughout occupied France, but only by daylight, to ensure a better level of accuracy, though the RAF still held back on political grounds from bombing targets far inland, including Paris. Small raids on German shipping at Brest had begun in January 1941, but the first heavy raids against Brest and Lorient, including in this case night attacks, started later in the spring, though these too remained intermittent and ineffective until the War Cabinet recommended a sustained campaign in October 1941 to reduce the dangerous threat to the Atlantic sea lanes, which it failed to do.17 At the same Cabinet meeting Churchill agreed to attacks on goods trains in northern France, which were assumed to be carrying supplies or ammunition for German forces. Step by step the military imperatives for bombing targets in occupied Europe pushed the RAF across the thresholds established in 1940.
The second factor was political. During the course of 1941, as it became clear that the war was to be a long drawn-out conflict, the conduct of political warfare assumed a larger place. The Ministry of Economic Warfare, under the Labour politician Hugh Dalton, was at the heart of the indirect strategy laid down in 1940 to use bombing, blockade, propaganda and subversion as the means to undermine German control of occupied Europe. In the summer of 1941 the Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken, proposed setting up a separate organization, the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), jointly run by the Foreign Office and the Ministries of Information and Economic Warfare, to coordinate the political initiatives directed at occupied Europe. It was formally constituted in the late summer under Robert Bruce Lockhart, with the journalist Ritchie Calder as Director of Plans and Propaganda.18 The PWE directors immediately saw the connection between British bombing strategy and political propaganda. The Joint Planning Staff in June 1941 had already indicated that active armed resistance in Europe would never work ‘until bombing has created suitable conditions’.19 Calder began to lobby for a bombing policy governed not only by military and economic considerations, but by political calculation. He was impressed by the apparent enthusiasm for being bombed expressed in contacts with the occupied populations. The Norwegians wanted to feel that they were still part of the war. Bombing, he thought, would ‘prove British interest in Norway’; Air Intelligence confirmed that Norwegians were ‘puzzled and bewildered’ by the absence of raiding.20 In a memorandum for the Foreign Office on ‘The RAF and Morale-Making’, Calder recommended bombing as a way to show the occupied populations that even if Britain could not invade, the German occupiers would not be immune from attack. On the other hand, he continued, ‘lack of British activity creates the impression that we have “abandoned” the Occupied Territories’. Calder thought that ‘demonstration raids’, as he called them, would counter a mood of ‘listlessness and despair’, and invigorate militant forces among the occupied peoples.21
The weapon of political warfare was the leaflet rather than the bomb. Throughout the conflict the political warfare and intelligence establishment remained convinced that propaganda from the air was worthwhile, and millions of small sheets, or pamphlets or newsletters, were jettisoned over the target populations, both enemy and ally. Aircrews seem to have been less persuaded of the value and the PWE directed some of its propaganda effort to instilling confidence among them that leaflets – or ‘nickels’ as they were known – were just another, and equally effective, tool in the Allies’ armoury. ‘They are a weapon aimed not at men’s bodies,’ ran one training manual, ‘but at their minds.’22 The task of drafting, translating, printing and distributing the material was enormous. The statistics of RAF leaflet drops are set out in Table 9.1; the wartime total was 1.4 billion.
Each piece of aerial propaganda had to be discussed in terms of the current political and military situation, and the language adjusted accordingly. It also had to be considered that for many of those who risked picking up and reading the material, this was the only way they could get news of what was happening in the wider war. Allied confidence in the effects of leafleting was sustained by regular intelligence about the popular demand for more. In Belgium it was reported that children sold the leaflets they picked up for pocket money; French peasants concluded that if the RAF could waste time dropping leafle
ts, it ‘must be very strong’.23 On the actual effect of leaflet drops the evidence remains speculative. In Germany and Italy it was a crime to pick them up at all.
There is little doubt that the PWE greatly exaggerated the political effects likely to be derived from a combination of propaganda and judicious bombing. Like the optimistic assessments of imminent social crisis in Germany in 1940 or 1941, every straw of information was eagerly clutched. Violations of air-raid precautions were particularly highlighted. It was reported that 17 Dutchmen had been heavily fined in the summer of 1941 for staying out on the street during a raid singing ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?’ News from Denmark suggested that 20,672 prosecutions for blackout irregularities had been pursued in 1941.24 British political warfare assumed that the working class would be the most likely to challenge the occupiers because they were by definition supposed to be anti-fascist. Directives to the BBC European Service in early 1942 asked broadcasters to ‘take absolutely for granted the workmen in enslaved countries are unhesitatingly behind our bombing policy, and will do all they can to help it’.25 Bombing was supposed to suggest that liberation was close behind it and to encourage hatred of the German enemy. The leaflet campaign was deliberately designed to reflect this two-pronged argument. In spring 1941 messages to Belgium were to be divided into ‘Hope – 45%’, ‘Hatred – 40%’, ‘Self-interest – 10%’ and ‘Self-respect – 5%’. Propaganda aimed at The Netherlands had ‘Certainty of Allied Victory’ top of the list with 35 per cent. In between the leaflet drops, the idea was to bomb intermittently to keep such hopes alive. In 1941 this appeal was possible. A Belgian woman who had escaped to Britain in October 1941 claimed the raids ‘were the best propaganda the British had done’.26 The years of apparent inactivity that followed undermined confidence in occupied Europe and dampened the hopes of Britain’s political warriors.