The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945

by Richard Overy

  The Allies, on the other hand, needed to present to the French population a clear justification for the bombing as the key to eventual liberation. This message worked well early in the war when there was hope that RAF raids signalled the possibility of an early invasion, but less well after years of waiting and in the face of rising casualties. The Allies tried to combine the bombing with direct support for the French Resistance movement, but at the same time to avoid operations that would undermine the credibility of resistance and push the French population towards grudging support for Vichy. Broadcasts from the BBC, which were widely listened to in France, encouraged the French population to see resistance and bombing as two sides of the same coin.95 The leaflet war was designed to offer clear warnings to the areas scheduled for raiding as well as justification for attacks on German targets or collaborating businesses. Millions of propaganda notices and news reviews were dropped throughout the period, reaching a climax in 1943–4. The RAF dropped 155 million leaflets in 1942, 294 million in 1943, the great majority from aircraft, some from balloons sent with the prevailing winds.96 The Eighth Air Force began leafleting operations in late 1942 only after the initial effects of American raids had been assessed to see what kind of political message should be delivered. A special force of 12 B-17 and B-24 bombers was set up in 1943 tasked with distributing leaflets over the occupied territories as well as across Germany.97 By February 1944 the Americans had dropped 41 million items, including the French-language paper America at War which was used to explain the course of the conflict and the necessity for bombing French targets. In spring 1944 the quantity increased substantially to 130 million in March on the eve of the transportation campaign against French railways, and more than 100 million each month until D-Day. So heavy was the bombardment of paper that the German authorities in France organized leaflet-squads with sharpened sticks to collect them before they were picked up by the local population.98

  The impact of the leaflet and broadcasting campaign was difficult for the Allies to assess since almost all the public media in Vichy France treated the bombing as an unmitigated crime. Allied intelligence was faced with a barrage of information showing that the bombing was defined by its ‘terror character’. One newspaper, the Petit Parisien, following the bombing of Paris in September 1943, claimed that ‘the barbarians of the West are worthy allies of the barbarians in the East’.99 The Mémorial de St Étienne asked ‘Will this destructive Sadism have no end? One is appalled before this mounting barbarity, this barbarity behind the mask of civilization.’ The Allies recognized that the French reaction was not as simple as that, but there was increasing evidence that even among pro-Allied circles the mixed results of bombing raids provoked anxiety and hostility without at the same time undermining the acknowledgement that German targets were both legitimate and necessary.100 This ambiguity was evident from the reaction to two raids on Toulon on 7 March 1944. The first killed or injured an estimated 900 German soldiers and won wide approval; the second four days later missed the target and killed 110 French civilians to widespread complaints. One of the American crews shot down on the second raid was black, prompting racist comments about the quality and competence of American airmen.101 American bombing was identified in information from the French Resistance as the major source of resentment because of its apparently ‘careless and casual’ attitude to the communities being bombed: ‘The Americans make it a sport,’ ran one report, ‘and amuse themselves by bombing from such altitudes.’102 In May 1944 the French Catholic cardinals sent an appeal to the Catholic episcopate in Britain and the United States asking them to lobby the air forces to bomb military objectives with greater care and avoid the ‘humble dwellings of women and children’. The Archbishop of Westminster replied that his government had given every assurance that casualties would be kept to a minimum.103

  There was nevertheless widespread resistance or non-compliance prompted by the bombing campaign as well. The Resistance took the view that those killed in Allied bombings were in some sense not victims, but combatants in a war for the liberation and salvation of the nation.104 Those who chose to operate networks for the escape of Allied airmen certainly ran the risks of any combatant if they were caught. The death penalty was introduced in a decree on 14 July 1941 for helping Allied airmen, but an estimated 2,000–3,000 British and American servicemen were smuggled out of France and back to combat. In cases following heavy bombing, as at Lorient in 1943, some airmen were surrendered to the Germans, but Allied intelligence found that in many cases the Resistance distinguished between the regrettable effects of a heavy bombardment and their view of Allied aircrew as liberators.105 The Resistance also regarded bombing as complementary to forms of active opposition to the occupiers, though it was seldom integrated as closely as it could have been despite their insistence that sabotage could often be a more effective tool than bombing.106 There also existed many lesser levels of protest or non-compliance derived from the bombing war. The funerals of Allied aircrew killed in action attracted large crowds despite German efforts to obstruct them; wreaths were laid by the graveside dedicated ‘To Our Heroes’ or ‘To Our Allies’ or ‘To Our Liberators’ until seized or destroyed by the occupiers. There were numerous public demonstrations under the occupation, 753 in total, some orchestrated by Vichy to protest against bombing, but hundreds directed at shortages of food or adequate shelter.107 The police reports from the provinces in 1943 found that despite, or because of, the bombings, the population talked openly of their hope for Allied invasion and the horrors of occupation: ‘No-one,’ ran a report from Charente in north-west France, ‘believes any longer in a German victory.’108

  The German occupiers found regular evidence of dissent among the French officials and servicemen organizing the air defence system. The slow introduction of French anti-aircraft units in the summer of 1943 was blamed by the German Air Force on the existence of a network of Freemasons among the French officials involved. French anti-aircraft personnel were made to sign a ‘declaration of duty’ not to reveal military secrets, and both anti-aircraft units and the French emergency services were monitored by the German Security Service (SD) for their alleged sympathies with de Gaulle and the Free French.109 In August 1943, 15 anti-aircraft servicemen abandoned their posts and could not be found; the following month another 15 men from the Air Force Security School took two cars and a lorry and absconded to the Massif Central to join the partisan Resistance. In November 1943 a group of SAP soldiers were caught listening to French broadcasts from Britain; on the wall of their common room a poster was found proclaiming ‘Vive les Gaullistes! Vive l’U.R.S.S! Vive de Gaulle!’110 German Air Intelligence found that by the autumn of 1943 Allied success in the Mediterranean had changed the attitude of the French population to one of anxious longing for the moment of Allied invasion and celebration of every German defeat. ‘The expected Anglo-American landing in France,’ concluded a report in August, ‘is now the daily topic of conversation.’111

  Allied planning for the liberation of France was indeed far advanced by the autumn of 1943, but from the Allied point of view it was bound to cause high casualties and perhaps compromise at the last moment the sympathies of the French people for the Allied cause. Churchill remained continually anxious, as he told the War Cabinet in April 1944, that pre-invasion bombing might create an ‘unhealable breach’ between France and the Western Allies.112 The principal issue was the decision to use the heavy-bomber forces, including the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy, to attack the French transport system before invasion and to support the army as it consolidated its position on the bridgeheads in Normandy in June and July 1944 and, a month later, in southern France. To this was added the decision to use Allied bomber forces in the ‘Crossbow’ operations against German V-weapon sites across northern France. Neither Harris nor Spaatz was enthusiastic about using the bomber force this way, since it was not what the bombing was supposed to be for, while the aircraft had not been designed for use against small tactical targets. In
January 1944, following an order to intensify raids on V-weapon sites, Harris rejected the use of Bomber Command to attack ‘Crossbow’ targets as ‘not reasonable operations of war’.113 His reaction to the idea that bombers should support the ground offensive was just as negative. Bombers used for ground support would, he argued, ‘be entirely ineffective’, leading ‘directly to disaster’ for the invasion force.114 Spaatz objected to Eisenhower that support for invasion was ‘an uneconomical use’ of the heavy-bomber force and preferred to leave the operations to the large tactical air forces assigned to the Allied Expeditionary Air Force under Air Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, whose fighter-bomber and light-bomber aircraft were intended to attack small targets and could react quickly and flexibly to battlefield requirements.115 Both bomber forces wished to be able to concentrate on Pointblank operations against Germany as a more strategically valuable way to limit the German response to invasion. Arnold told Spaatz in late April 1944, after the decision had already been taken to focus on the French railway system, that Pointblank should ‘still be pressed to the limit’.116 The arguments put forward in favour of the ‘Transportation Plan’ by Tedder and his scientific adviser, Solly Zuckerman, have already been discussed. Zuckerman’s paper produced in January 1944 on ‘Delay and Disorganisation of Enemy Movement by Rail’ formed the basis of the eventual pre-invasion plan. On 25 March in a long and hotly debated meeting, Eisenhower finally came down in favour of using the bomber forces, under his own direct command, to attack the French railway system and other strategic targets both before and during the invasion period.117

  This decision still left unresolved the political anxieties about possible levels of casualty. Portal informed Churchill after the meeting of 25 March that there were bound to be very heavy casualties as a result of the decision to hit 76 key points in the French railway network. Bomber Command suggested a figure of between 80,000 and 160,000 casualties, partly to confirm Harris’s argument that heavy bombers were the wrong weapon.118 Zuckerman calculated on the basis of damage done to British targets earlier in the war a more modest casualty figure of 12,000 dead and 6,000 seriously injured. In a discussion with the Defence Committee on 5 April, Churchill deplored a strategy that might result in ‘the butchery of large numbers of helpless French people’, but despite his reservations and the opposition of Eden and General Brooke, chief of the general staff, the campaign was allowed to start on the understanding that casualty levels would be carefully monitored over the weeks that followed and warnings sent to French communities to evacuate the threatened areas.119 By mid-April casualties from the first nine raids were estimated at 1,103, well within the limits set by Zuckerman’s estimate. The Defence Committee was supplied with the outraged French reports (‘In Anglo-American eyes, to be European is enough to be wiped off the list of the living’) and Churchill hesitated to give the campaign full approval.120 Zuckerman and the RE8 department of the Ministry of Home Security continued to monitor reports on a daily basis and by late April the available evidence suggested that casualties had been approximately 50 per cent lower than anticipated.121 Only after Roosevelt had insisted that there should be no restriction on military action if Operation Overlord were to succeed, did Churchill finally on 11 May give his full approval to the campaign.122 For the four weeks before D-Day a furious crescendo of bombing descended on the French railway system and the unfortunate housing that surrounded its nodal points.

  Zuckerman’s calculations in fact underestimated French casualties by a wide margin because transport targets were only part of what Allied air forces were expected to bomb in the weeks leading to invasion. French civil defence officials counted 712 dead in March, 5,144 in April, 9,893 in May and an estimated 9,517 in June. The total of 25,266 over the four months was almost certainly not complete, given the difficulty of constructing exact records in a dangerous war zone; nor did all the casualties come from attacks on rail targets, but also against bridges and military installations, and German forces.123 They nevertheless represented the overall human cost of the decision to use bombing as the means to reduce the capacity of the German Army and Air Force to oppose the landings in Normandy. The high casualties resulted chiefly from the wide dispersion of bombs against relatively small targets and the large tonnage employed. The 63,636 tons dropped on transport targets exceeded the entire tonnage dropped by the German Air Force during the Blitz on Britain. The French air defence counted 71,000 high- explosive bombs between January and March 1944, but 291,000 from April to June.124 Some attacks achieved a high level of precision, but in many cases bombs were scattered over a wide area. The attack on the rail centre at St Pierre des Corps on 11 April struck the whole area of the town; the raid on Lille on 10 April hit an area of 32 square kilometres; that on Noisy-le-Sec on 18 April covered 30 square kilometres; on Rouen a day later, the area was 24 square kilometres.125 In May the French authorities counted a total of 1,284 raids in which bombs fell on 793 different localities, 630 of them along the northern coast and the area north-east of Paris. Only 8 per cent of the attacks were undertaken at night, which ought to have increased the possibility of more accurate raiding, but many of the daylight raids were carried out at heights of 3,000–4,000 metres (10,000–13,000 feet). In some cases, high casualties resulted from what the Passive Defence called ‘imprudence’ – people standing at their windows to watch the bombing, others out in the street, or in their gardens. In a raid on Nice on 26 May, 438 people were killed, two-thirds of them on the street, one-third in their houses. The shelters, for the most part either trenches or converted cellars, had uneven fortunes during the raiding; some stood up well even to direct hits, others, like one at Rouen on 30 May, were blown apart and most of the occupants killed.126

  Some of the heaviest losses of life occurred in targets in the former unoccupied zone, which were hit by American aircraft of the Fifteenth Air Force operating from bases in Italy. For the crews involved, the bombing of precise railway targets with a view to reducing damage to civilian lives and property was very different from the long-range raids against Pointblank targets in southern Germany, which had been the main activity of the force since its formation in November 1943. Two raids, one on St Étienne on 26 May 1944 and one on Marseille the following day, resulted in heavy loss of civilian life. At St Étienne the alert sounded in good time; the 150 B-17s attacked in waves from around 13,000 feet, and half the bombs fell in the zone around the rail links. But there were too few proper shelters for a population unused to the air threat and more than 1,084 were killed. The effect on rail traffic was limited. Rail lines remained open and the damage, such as it was, could be overcome in four days. The attack on Marseille on 27 May flown at an estimated 20,000 feet, against stations at St-Charles and Blancarde, both situated in the heart of the city’s residential area, scattered bombs over 10 of the city’s quarters, destroyed 500 buildings and killed 1,752 people. Again Passive Defence observed the ‘insouciance’ of a population hit by an air raid for the first time and the absence of effective civil defence training. The stations were unimportant (one was a railway cul-de-sac), but the effect of the raid was to create a crisis of public morale and strong hostility to the air forces that carried out the attack.127 The scale of the raiding and the damage inflicted brought protests from the French Resistance and the French authorities in London. The French Commissariat for Foreign Affairs warned the Foreign Office in early May that the raids were having a damaging effect on French opinion; in early June a resolution from the Resistance Group Assembly was passed on by Massigli, calling on the bomber forces to change their tactics and for an active propaganda campaign ‘to dissipate the growing ill-feeling’ among the victim populations.128 An OSS report from Madrid relayed the Resistance view that the French population now believed their situation to be no better than ‘the Nazis in Germany’.129 This knowledge made little difference to Allied operations. In June, however, the bombing reached its high point as Allied forces poured ashore on D-Day and spread out into the Normandy countrysid
e.

  The results of the ‘Transportation Plan’ were the subject of keen argument both at the time and since. French investigations showed that by the beginning of June rail traffic was down to around half the level in January 1944, and in the key regions of the north and west, down to 15 and 10 per cent. There were 2,234 cases of damage to rail lines between January and June 1944, but as in Britain or Germany or the Soviet Union, these were relatively easy to repair.130 Much damage was also done by sabotage, which the Resistance thought was a more effective way of achieving the same end, and with fewer losses to the French population, particularly the railwaymen, who were regarded as key Resistance workers.131 Between January and July bombing and strafing destroyed or severely damaged 2,536 French locomotives, sabotage a further 1,605. But according to the SNCF (the French national railway), sabotage accounted for 70,000 goods wagons compared with 55,000 from air attack.132 In the three months from April to June there were 1,020 bomb attacks on the rail network, but 1,713 acts of sabotage.133 Of these the two most significant causes of delay to traffic were the attacks on repair depots, which created a cumulative backlog of repair to the rolling stock hit by raids or sabotage, and the attacks on rail bridges. Many of these were carried out by the tactical air forces using fighter-bombers and light bombers, and they proved decisive in cutting the key regions off from rapid German reinforcement. Most rail centres could be made operable again in an average of seven days, but bridges took from 10 to 16 days.134 The German authorities made strenuous efforts to keep the rail system going and succeeded for much of the period of the transport campaign. By suspending almost all civilian traffic and helped by persistent poor weather for bombing, it proved possible to maintain military through-traffic up to June (when 535 loaded troop trains could still be deployed), but a slow decline set in from July. Total German ton-kilometres were 300 million for the month to mid-March, 400 million for each of the next three months, but 150 million in July, by which time the loss of raid traffic had compromised the possibility of effective German defence.135 The argument from the French viewpoint, however, was not whether German fighting power was affected, but whether the high cost in civilian lives and buildings could not have been avoided by wielding an aerial weapon that was less blunt. French authorities found that major raids by heavy bombers placed between half and four-fifths of the bombs outside the target area; in this sense Harris and Spaatz had been right to insist that large formations of heavy bombers were not the most suitable means to achieve the aim of precise destruction and limited French losses.