Table 9.1 British Leaflet Distribution from Aircraft over Europe by Year and Territory, 1939–45 (’000s)
Source: Calculated from TNA, FO 898/457, ‘Annual Dissemination of Leaflets by Aircraft and Balloon 1939–1945’.
By the end of 1941 these military and political considerations combined to push the RAF towards a more vigorous and less discriminate bombing strategy for the occupied regions. At a War Cabinet discussion in November 1941, the Air Minister pressed for permission to begin night-time raids against industrial targets across occupied Europe, including the major Renault works at Boulogne-Billancourt in Paris. Churchill insisted on postponing any decision until the political outcome was properly evaluated, but following RAF representations early in 1942, which claimed that the morale of the occupied population was better in areas that had been bombed than in those so far neglected, Churchill finally agreed to allow general bombing of European targets and the Cabinet confirmed the change at its meeting on 5 February 1942.27 The RAF scarcely needed to be prompted. The Air Ministry in November 1941 had already discussed the use of incendiary bombs in attacks on industrial targets in occupied Europe to achieve maximum damage and ‘to gladden the hearts of all men and women loyal … to the Allied cause’.28 In April 1942 Bomber Command was instructed to bomb targets in France, the Low Countries and Denmark (‘knock them about’), so that local people would demand proper protection and hence disperse the German anti-air defences.29 The PWE reached an agreement with the RAF to ensure that political considerations would play a part in target planning. The link between political propaganda and bombing policy became institutionalized and remained throughout the war a central element in bombing all the areas under German control.30
FRANCE: BOMBED INTO FREEDOM
The long arguments over whether or not to bomb targets in Paris were finally resolved by the decision in February 1942 to allow raids against important industrial targets throughout Europe. The raid on the Renault works became a test case of the dual strategy of economic attrition and morale-making. On the night of 3–4 March Bomber Command sent off 235 bombers, the largest number yet for a single raid. Flying in to bomb from between 2,000 and 4,000 feet with no anti-aircraft fire to distract them, 222 aircraft dropped 419 tons on the factory and the surrounding workers’ housing. Much of the factory area was destroyed, though not the machinery in the buildings, at the cost of only one aircraft lost. No alarm had sounded and casualties among the local population were high: French civil defence first reported 513 killed and more than 1,500 injured, but the Paris prefecture eventually confirmed 391 dead and 558 seriously injured, more than twice the number inflicted so far by the RAF on any one night over Germany. An estimated 300 buildings were destroyed and another 160 severely damaged.31
The works were bombed not only for the potential damage to German vehicle output in the plant, but also to test how French opinion might react to an escalation of the bombing war. Leaflets were dropped beforehand ‘To the populations of Occupied France’, explaining that any factory working for the Germans would now be bombed and encouraging workers to get a job in the countryside or to go on strike for better protection; a BBC broadcast warned French people to stay away from collaborating businesses.32 The PWE wanted to find out as soon as possible after the raid how French workers had reacted ‘because it is the workers who have been killed, the workers who “go slow” and sabotage’.33 Although the French authorities orchestrated elaborate public funerary events, the British soon received indications that the reaction had not been as adverse as the public outcry might have suggested. A report from Roosevelt’s special emissary in the new French capital at Vichy, William Leahy, explained that the propaganda campaign fostered by the regime with German support had been ineffective and that there was little evidence of anti-British feeling either in Paris or in the rest of unoccupied France. Eden, who had been anxious about the political effect, was pleased with the results of a ‘well-executed blow’, which he believed evoked ‘admiration and respect’ among the people who suffered it. He was now willing to support further raids.34 In Paris itself the operation was welcomed by many as a sign that liberation might be one step nearer. ‘Nobody was indignant,’ wrote one witness. ‘Most hid their jubilation badly.’ Blame was directed much more at the French and German authorities for failing to sound the alert, or to enforce the blackout effectively, or to provide adequate shelters.35 Rumours quickly circulated outside Paris that the Germans had deliberately locked the workers inside the factory or had barred entry to the shelters. It was said that Parisians called out ‘Long Live Great Britain!’ as they lay dying.36 The raid itself had limited results. Reports reached London in June that only 10 per cent of the machine tools had been lost as a result of the bombing and that the Renault works was operating at between 75 and 100 per cent of its pre-raid capacity.37
The heavy bombing of French targets between 1942 and 1944 by Bomber Command and the Eighth Air Force was undertaken in the hope that casualties could be kept to a minimum to avoid alienating the French population, while serious damage was done to Germany’s western war effort. It was unfortunate for the French people that heavy bombers were seen as the necessary weapon for a number of very different strategic purposes for which they were far from ideal.38 From 1942 onwards bombers were used to try to destroy the German submarine presence on the French west coast by bombing the almost indestructible submarine pens and the surrounding port areas; in 1943–4 bombers were directed at small V-weapons sites which were difficult to find and to damage; in the months running up to the invasion of Normandy, the ‘Transportation Plan’ similarly directed all Allied bomber forces (including the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy) against small rail targets, many of them embedded in urban areas; finally the months of campaigning across France in the summer of 1944 led to regular calls from the ground forces for heavy-bomber support, producing some of the most devastating raids of the war against French towns defended by German troops. The result was to strain popular French support for the bombing of the enemy in their midst.39 Although anti-German sentiment was not reversed by the air campaign, there was a widespread belief that a less damaging strategy could have been found to achieve the same end.
The anti-submarine campaign exemplified the many contradictions that plagued the decisions to bomb France more heavily. When Bomber Command was directed to attack German naval targets on the French west coast, the orders were to attack only the dock areas and in conditions of good visibility. In April 1942 Harris wrote to Portal suggesting that the best way to slow down the German submarine war and to drive fear into the French workforce was to carry out ‘real blitzes’ on Brest, Lorient, St Nazaire, La Rochelle and Bordeaux.40 Portal demurred since this was still contrary to government policy; in October 1942 guidelines were issued to Bomber Command to ensure that the air force would understand that only identifiable objectives in clear weather could be bombed and only if it was certain that heavy loss of civilian life would not result.41 But when the Atlantic battle reached its climax in late 1942, the Anti-U-Boat Committee, under pressure from the Admiralty, finally recommended abandoning all caution by destroying through area attacks the towns that involuntarily hosted the German submarines. The War Cabinet approved the decision on 11 January 1943 and although by now Harris no longer wanted operational distractions from his attacks on Germany, his desire for ‘real blitzes’ on the French ports could now be fulfilled.42 Harris described the French interlude in his memoirs as ‘one of the most infuriating episodes’ in the whole bomber offensive and an evident ‘misuse of air power’.43 He blamed the Admiralty for the change in priority, and there is no doubt that the driving force behind the change was the chief of the naval staff, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, who in this case was able to persuade Churchill and Eden to swallow their scruples over bombing civilians for the sake of the survival of British sea traffic.
There had already been more than 20 attacks on the ports since 1940, which had served to encourage the Germans to take every prec
aution to protect submarine operations.44 In the summer of 1942 a British propaganda campaign had been launched from the air against coastal towns from Dunkirk to St Nazaire warning the populations to evacuate: ‘we must carry on a war to the death [guerre à l’outrance] against the submarines’.45 Most evacuation did not occur until the bombing started in earnest. The heaviest raiding was reserved for Lorient where nine major attacks by Bomber Command in January and February dropped 4,286 tons of bombs (including 2,500 tons of incendiaries) with the specific purpose of burning down the town. On one raid the bombers carried 1,000 tons of bombs, the same quantity dropped a few months before by the German Air Force in the major raid on the city of Stalingrad.46 The French report following the bombing described the raids as an example of a new RAF strategy of ‘scorched earth’; not a building in the town remained standing or unscathed, a ‘dead city’, except for the submarine pens undamaged by the rain of bombs. In a 30-kilometre radius from the town thousands of village buildings had been destroyed and farms incinerated.47 The PWE published an uncompromising statement following the bombing that the innocent must inevitably suffer with the guilty: ‘The violence and frequency of attacks involving hardship to civilians must increase.’48 Naval Intelligence assessments were nevertheless unimpressed by Bomber Command’s strategy ‘of the bludgeon’, which failed to halt the rate of submarine operation significantly in any of the major targets, despite Pound’s earlier insistence that it would. In April Harris was instructed to stop and to turn once again to Germany.49 The submarine threat was defeated in spring 1943 by using aircraft to attack submarines at sea rather than in their concrete pens. The pens themselves became vulnerable only after the development of two giant bombs – ‘Tallboy’ and ‘Grand Slam’ – both the brainchild of Barnes Wallis, the engineer who designed the bomb used to breach the Ruhr dams. But the first 5-ton Tallboy was used against Brest only on 5 August 1944, and Lorient a day later, while the 10-ton Grand Slam was available only for the last weeks of the war.50
Bomber Command was joined by the Eighth Air Force for the submarine campaign and the round-the-clock bombing gave the local population, most of whom had been evacuated or had sensibly evacuated themselves, no respite from the raiding. Daylight bombing was carried out from a considerable height by crews who were still learning their way. The wide spread of bombs dropped from high altitude and the rising casualty rates that resulted provoked a sudden change in French attitudes during the course of 1943. A French Resistance worker who arrived in Britain in April 1943 warned his new hosts that the population was deeply hostile to high-level American raids, which threatened to undermine irretrievably ‘the friendly feelings of the entire French population towards the Allies’.51 This shift in opinion coincided with the decision to spread the bombing over all French territory following the German occupation of the southern, unoccupied zone in November 1942. On 21 December the Air Ministry was informed by the Foreign Office that raids on southern French cities were now legally permitted, and on 29 December the BBC broadcast the same warning to the population living there to stay away from military and industrial targets that had been given to the occupied north earlier in the year.52 The guidelines issued in October 1942 on the conduct of raids now applied to the whole of France but they were not binding on the Eighth Air Force, and when the Renault works in Boulogne-Billancourt were bombed again on 4 April 1943 by 85 B-17 ‘Flying Fortresses’, the results were very different from a year before. Just under half the bombs hit the industrial complex, but the rest were scattered over a wide residential area. One bomb penetrated the métro station at Pont-de-Sèvres; 80 corpses were identified and the unidentified human remains put into 26 coffins.53 There was little anti-aircraft fire or fighter pursuit and only four aircraft were lost. The alarm had sounded only one minute before the bombs began to fall, giving the population out on the streets in the hour after lunch little chance to find shelter. The civil defence counted 403 dead and 600 injured; 118 buildings were destroyed and 480 heavily damaged.54 A few days later, René Massigli, the French ambassador (representing the provisional government in London), met Eden to complain about the ‘feeling of exasperation’ in France caused by civilian losses from careless American bombing. In Brittany, he claimed, the reaction of the population was to cry out ‘Vive la R.A.F.!’, but also ‘À bas l’Américain Air Force’.55
Raids over the summer by both air forces were reined back. The Eighth Air Force was asked to confine raids just to the submarine bases and to try to find an operational pattern that would reduce French civilian deaths. Arnold objected to British requests to restrict what American air forces could do and an agreed list was drawn up of objectives in France that could be attacked after a warning to the population. Massigli was told by Eden that the American air forces would only bomb certain selected targets and would try to do so with greater care, but by the autumn Eaker was keen to extend the Pointblank attacks to aircraft industry targets in France.56 The French aircraft industry, much of it sheltered in the unoccupied zone until November 1942, produced 668 aircraft for Germany in 1942 and 1,285 in 1943, many of them trainer aircraft to free German factories for the production of combat models. German manufacturers used French capacity for their own experimental work, away from the threat of bombs on Germany.57 As a result, French industry became a military priority for the American Air Force even at the risk of inflicting heavy casualties on the population. On 3 and 15 September 1943 Eighth Air Force raids on factories in Paris spread damage once again across residential streets packed with workers and shoppers and killed 377 civilians.58 The raids on the western port city of Nantes on 16 and 23 September exacted the highest casualties so far from bombing in France. The targets included a German naval vessel, a French locomotive works and an aircraft factory, which was hit heavily. On 16 September 131 B-17s hit the town with 385 tons of bombs; on 23 September 46 out of 117 B-17s despatched to Nantes in the morning dropped a further 134 tons in poor weather, followed by a less accurate raid by 30 aircraft in the evening.59 In the first raid the bomb pattern once again spread out over a wide area of the city, destroying 400 buildings and severely damaging another 600. The civil defence authorities counted 1,110 dead and 800 severely injured. While the local emergency services struggled to cope with the damage, they were hit by the two attacks on 23 September, which not only struck the ruins but spread out over an area of more than 500 hectares. Because much of the centre of the city was already abandoned, deaths from the second two raids were 172, but a further 300 buildings were completely destroyed. This time the population panicked entirely and 100,000 abandoned the city. The raids on Nantes resembled completely the pattern of raids on a German city, with the exception that Eighth Air Force losses were modest, a total of seven aircraft on 16 September and no losses a week later.60
The raids of autumn 1943 provoked a mixture of outrage and incomprehension in France. Total deaths from bombing in 1943 reached 7,458, almost three times the level of 1942. A French report on public opinion, which reached the Allies early in 1944, highlighted the damaging effect of persistently inaccurate high-level bombing on a people ‘tired, worn out by all its miseries, all its privations, all its separations, unnerved by too prolonged a wait for its liberation’.61 The French Air Force, reduced under the armistice terms with Germany to a skeleton organization, tried to assess what object the Allied raids could have. Raids on Paris and against the Dunlop works at Montluçon (this time by Bomber Command) puzzled French airmen, who assumed there must be some secondary purpose behind the pattern of scattered bombing that they had not yet worked out.62 Since the French Air Force could not do its own bombing, much time was spent in 1943 and 1944 observing Allied practice in order to understand the techniques and tactics involved as well as the effects of bombs on urban society, industrial architecture and popular morale.63 Many of the reports on individual raids highlighted the sheer squandering of resources involved in a bombing operation when three-quarters of the bombs typically missed the target: ‘The results obt
ained,’ ran a report on the bombing of St Étienne, ‘have no relation to the means employed, and this bombardment represents, like all the others, a waste of material – without counting the unnecessary losses in human life that they provoke.’64 The air force worked out the pattern of bombing accuracy to show just how wide the dispersion of effort was. In raids against Lille the area in which bombs fell was a rectangle 8 by 4 kilometres; against Rouen 8 by 3 kilometres; a raid on the railway station at Cambrai in 1944 covered an area 3 kilometres in length and 1.5 kilometres wide. The impact varied from raid to raid, but studies showed that many raids covered an area of between 200 and 400 hectares, which explained the escalating losses of life and property. The French Air Force was impressed most by low-level dive-bombing and rocket attacks using the American P-47 ‘Thunderbolt’ and the Hawker 1-B Typhoon, which achieved their object with much greater operational economy, and matched French strategic preferences before 1939.65
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 76