The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945

by Richard Overy

  The three air offensives against the war economy achieved much less than had been expected and much less than the limited intelligence had suggested. The British war economy was reduced by an estimated 5 per cent against a rapidly rising production trend. The German economy lost an estimated 3–5 per cent of its potential armaments output in 1943, 11 per cent in 1944, but again against a graph of steeply rising output. The German bombing of Soviet targets hardly dented the remarkable expansion of Soviet war production and there is good reason to think that even a far more coordinated campaign would have been absorbed by an economy used to improvisation and managing chaos with little effect on the upward trajectory of production. By the time the bombing of Germany did have observable effects on economic performance, there were many other factors inhibiting further expansion, not least the fact that the Allied armies, east and west, were now at the borders of Greater Germany and in occupation of much of southern and south-eastern Europe. Only in Italy did bombing have some effect in reducing economic performance, but the Italian war economy suffered from a whole range of problems endemic to its mobilization and not only or even principally from bombing.

  The second dividend widely expected from bombing was the impact on the bombed population. Pre-war expectations about the potentially insupportable impact of bombing on civilian communities conjured up lurid images of social breakdown. Cities in particular were expected to become sites of anarchic chaos. Yet this, too, was a potential strategic gain for which there was not much practical evidence and a great deal of speculation. One British scientist in the mid-1930s thought it might be enough just to drop leaflets on German workers threatening to bomb them for there to be mass strikes and sabotage, or acts of political desperation among the relatives of ‘murdered and tortured workers’.23 In reality, the wartime bombing offensives began as campaigns of economic warfare, in which any moral consequences might be regarded as a bonus. The German bombing of Britain evidently had profound effects on the (chiefly) working-class city areas where the bombs fell, while the issue of how to monitor ‘morale’ and cope with its possible deterioration exercised the British authorities a good deal. But for all the anxieties, and the exceptional level of casualty, British society absorbed the bombing, continued to work, adjusted to temporary moments of social crisis, mourned losses, but did not in any meaningful sense break down. In 1941 Churchill surveyed the gap between illusion and reality in a letter to Portal:

  Before the war we were greatly misled by the pictures they [the Air Staff] painted of the destruction that would be wrought by Air raids. This picture of Air destruction was so exaggerated it depressed the Statesmen responsible for pre-war policy … Again the Air Staff, after the war had begun, taught us sedulously to believe that if the enemy acquired the Low Countries, to say nothing of France, our position would be impossible owing to Air attacks. However, by not paying too much attention to such ideas, we have found quite a good means of keeping going.24

  Portal replied that the air staff had simply been prudent.

  The RAF, by contrast, soon abandoned conventional economic warfare in favour of deliberately attacking the German civilian workforce and their urban environment. This was done not simply because night-time bombing was so inaccurate – and continued to be throughout the war – but because the bombing of a city or urban quarter was deemed to be an effective economic target. Killing workers, destroying their houses and amenities, and reducing their willingness to work were designed in the long run to reduce German war production in many rather than a few factories. In a people’s war, ‘the people themselves’, as Sir Richard Peirse put it, became a legitimate objective. This meant particular people, those living and working in industrial cities, where the population was attacked indiscriminately. The campaign against people also carried with it the possibility that ‘morale’ in a broader sense might disintegrate and the German dictatorship be challenged by its own population. Nothing like this occurred despite an escalating level of urban destruction and losses that greatly exceeded those in the Blitz. ‘I think their endurance,’ wrote Slessor in 1947, ‘was the greatest marvel of the war.’25 At the time it was assumed that the British population would not have withstood a similar level of damage and this judgement justified persisting with the strategy regardless of the absence of firm evidence of its effects. Lord Cherwell defended his argument in favour of ‘dehousing’ and killing Germans by suggesting that studies of the bombing of Hull and Birmingham showed that even this level of raiding, spread over a whole country, ‘would be catastrophic’.26 Slessor recalled that the bombing of Liverpool was believed at the time to have had a ‘devastating effect on morale’.27 These speculations about fragile social endurance were projected onto the German urban population even though the real fruit of the research conducted by the Ministry of Home Security in 1941 and 1942, including studies of Birmingham and Hull, showed that ‘morale’ withstood the effects of the Blitz well. After the war, cities quickly rebuilt their physical environment and social function.28

  The United States Air Force did not consider morale, in either its political or economic sense, as a worthwhile target in its own right, even though by 1944 bomber crews were instructed to attack urban targets through cloud and haze in which civilian casualties and house destruction were likely to be extensive. Reports from Germany on the mood of the population, supplied by the Office of Strategic Services, gave mixed messages about the social and political effects of the offensive. A report from the Stockholm station in August 1943 from a source regarded as reliable claimed that German labour was ‘discontented and disinclined to work’ and the home front as a result ‘endangered’. But a report a month later from the same station cited a source that indicated little prospect of an upheaval in Germany: ‘The people see little difference between Churchill and Stalin and their present rulers.’29 A report from the Bern station in November 1943 suggested that there were 10 million bomb refugees in Germany, many of whom ‘have grown strongly sympathetic to Bolshevik ideology’, while a second report in December argued the opposite, that bombing may even have given rise to a momentary improvement in morale ‘through sheer gratitude at being saved’.30 The American Air Force generally took the view that this information was too unreliable to base a strategic commitment on it, but the British intelligence agencies continued throughout this period to suggest that bombing must in the end produce serious social, economic or even political consequences. After the war Norman Bottomley, deputy chief of the air staff for most of the period of the bomber offensive, picked out intelligence as the key failure of the campaign: ‘the machinery which existed before and throughout the war for the acquisition and the proper assessment of economic, industrial and social information concerning our enemy was certainly inadequate’. Slessor put it more bluntly: ‘It was rotten.’31

  ‘Morale’ as a target failed to fulfil the expectations of those who sought to undermine it and was little understood at the time. Despite unprecedented levels of civilian casualty – over 600,000 civilian dead – no European society collapsed under the impact of bombing. War-willingness depended on a wide variety of variables; it fluctuated a great deal over time and in response to changing circumstances; it was carefully monitored by every warring regime and adjustments were made, where possible, to ensure that a temporary crisis of morale would not become more socially or politically corrosive. The experience of being bombed was demoralizing and terrifying, not only for civilians but for soldiers in the field. Fear was a primitive but rational response, although the evidence suggests that with repeated bombing the psychological reaction became less marked, in much the same way as infantrymen became adjusted to the rigours of an artillery bombardment. Bombing also induced moments of widespread panic. In Clydebank, Hull, Rostock, Turin, Stalingrad, Sofia and many other cities, bombing could induce a sudden and chaotic flight, rather like the image of panicked refugees popular in the pre-war literature on the vulnerability of the urban crowd. But in almost all cases the population returned
to work, found accommodation outside the city when necessary, and tried to re-establish elements of pre-raid normality. Even in Stalingrad, inhabitants returned in spring 1943 to live in cellars and dugouts in familiar ruins despite the decision of the regime not to begin rebuilding the residential areas until after the war.32

  A number of factors played a part in preventing these moments of panic from having more profound consequences. Bombing raids had the effect of increasing the dependence of the population on authority, whether national or local. Where the state, or the party, was sufficiently competent and responsive (and occasionally ruthless), it was possible to create a compact between authority and people in which welfare, rehabilitation and evacuation were organized on their behalf in return for continued labour, civil defence participation, voluntary welfare work and social peace. In cases where that competence was lacking, as in Italy for most of the war period, bombing could have more serious consequences. Coping mechanisms, both public and private, broke down in Italy, undermining allegiance to the regime and prompting widespread reliance on traditional family networks and religious faith in place of a failed state and a corrupt and inept party machine. Italy proved the exception in a number of ways, not least the failure to mobilize a substantial proportion of the urban population for its own defence. In Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union and to a lesser extent France, local volunteers from the threatened and bombed cities played a vital part in combating the effects of raids and protecting their own property and neighbourhoods. In Germany and the Soviet Union there was pressure from the National Socialist movement or the Communist Party to join the mass organizations for civil defence, but the core of the civil defence network lay in the civilian ‘self-protection’ units in Germany and the ‘self-defence’ groups in the Soviet Union, which were trained to a higher level and were supposed to play a lead in raids, even to the extent of staying out of the shelters while raiding was going on. In Britain the civil defence system relied more on a genuine voluntarism, but did not want for volunteers. Millions of householders and workers across Europe found themselves in uniform, often little more than an armband and a helmet, performing the entire range of civil defence activities from first-aid to heavy rescue work. Without the participation of urban populations in their own defence, the consequences of bombing would have been far more serious.

  With hindsight, the mass participation of European civilians in dangerous and exposed activity, constantly subject to the threat of death or injury, coping with unprecedented scenes of material destruction and mutilated human remains, requires explanation beyond the obvious pressures of collective social responsibility and state inducement. The way in which future war was represented and defined in the 1930s played an important part in shaping the response of civilians to mobilization on the home front. The prevailing discourse of total war, or totalitarian war, as it was sometimes called in Britain, presented European populations with an entirely novel way of viewing future warfare, in which all the social, material and psychological resources of a nation at war would have to be mobilized in its defence and, by extension, become objects of potential attack and disablement. The home front in the First World War was understood to have been perhaps decisive in its eventual outcome, following the collapse of the Russian, Austrian and eventually the German war effort. By the 1930s the assumption was widespread that thanks to bombs, gas and even germ warfare, the means existed to turn even a distant home front into a battlefield; all through the rearmament of the 1930s it was expected that future war would once again be a war of mass armies, like 1914–18, which would need to be resourced by domestic industry and agriculture, making the home front at once a critical element in determining survival and, hence, a critical element to assault. By the time the war broke out, civil defence was already prepared, turning the home front into a potential front line manned by ordinary people in their own defence. Rather than see this as fundamentally illegitimate, many civilians came to accept that it was the inevitable consequence of the way war had developed in an age of modern science and mass democracy. The British Red Cross Society changed its statutory role in 1940 from helping sick and wounded soldiers in the field so that it could also meet the demands of ‘wounded, injured and even mentally-distressed civilian victims’ which had arisen ‘as a consequence of modern warfare’.33

  The changing perception of war as something waged collectively, by the people, for the people, was not confined only to the collectivist German and Soviet dictatorships. The nature of the apparent threat posed by fascism to the future of Western civilization turned Britain’s war effort into a collective ‘people’s war’ (a term first widely used in 1940). Many of the diaries and letters from the time show that civilians saw the sacrifices imposed by the bombing war as something that gave them the opportunity to participate in a practical way in fighting a war no longer confined to soldiers, in which work for the community provided a shared wartime identity and the opportunity to display the courage, comradeship and discipline usually associated with the military. It is striking how much of this home-front effort was owed to women, who played a major part in coping with bombing as the young and middle-aged men left the cities for the armed forces. Women donned civil defence uniforms in every European country. They were disproportionately targeted by the bombing war and disproportionately active in the vast welfare, feeding, evacuation and first-aid campaigns dictated by bomb destruction. Women were also disproportionately responsible for trying to salvage the household and keep families together. When Hans Nossack walked past the ruined apartments in Hamburg days after the firestorm of July 1943, he was struck by the scenes of ruined domesticity around him. ‘Everything that men have to say about this is a lie,’ wrote Nossack. ‘It is not permissible to talk about it except in the language of women.’34

  The very nature of civil defence for both men and women defined the wide boundaries of the collective social endeavour: the blackout had to be observed by every household, throughout the war, even in remote rural areas; every street and block of houses was monitored and reported on by local air-raid officials, in Germany the ‘block warden’, in the Soviet Union the ‘house committee’, in Britain the corps of air-raid wardens; fire-watching became a compulsory obligation in all bombed cities. Individuals who failed to observe the rules or refused to participate, of which there was always a fraction, were regarded as outsiders who had failed the collective. They could be, and often were, punished on behalf of the community for failing to value its collective protection. Looters were shot or imprisoned; MPVO officials who abandoned their posts were court-martialled; blackout infringements brought a statutory fine, or worse; pacifists in Britain who refused fire duty were sent to jail. This ideal of civilian community as a collective front line was captured in the award of the George Cross, the highest British civilian award for bravery, to the entire island population of Malta in 1942. Civil defence established a different relationship between home front and fighting front from the one that existed in the First World War, one in which each was tested to the limits of endurance, and in which each played a part in sustaining the war effort.

  The community imperatives provoked by bombing did not exclude a wide range of popular individual responses when trying to cope with its violent consequences. Some of those responses were conditioned by the authorities, who could use bombing as a means to sustain commitment to war or to mobilize hatred of the enemy. Propaganda in all the major states subject to attack focused on the barbarous nature of the enemy and, by implication, the civilized and decent nature of their own society. The theme of barbarism seemed to match the destruction of cities and the loss of cultural treasures that resulted, and possessed a deep historical resonance. The term ‘barbarian’ helped to emphasize the difference between the threatened community and racial alien or outsider: in Italy the American pilots were portrayed in propaganda images as black men; in Germany it was the Jews who were said to pull the strings of Allied bombing; in Britain the term ‘Hun’ served several p
urposes at the same time, both reducing all Germans, whether supporters of Hitler or not, to a shared harsh identity and signalling that Germans were by definition barbarians. One of the wartime critics of British bombing, the MP Richard Stokes, complained in a speech that the RAF might ‘outbarbarian the Huns’, but the Air Ministry publicity department made persistent and persuasive efforts throughout the war to contrast decent British bombing with the enemy’s mindless terrorism.35

  Nevertheless, the evidence in most bombed communities suggests that sustained hatred for what the enemy was doing was not easily prompted by propaganda or widely shared, and was more common among communities where there had been little or no bombing. Those subject to heavy bombing had too many other primary concerns – the search for welfare and accommodation, and anxiety about the private sphere of family life and possessions – to contribute to public clamour for revenge. They sought more immediate means for coping with the psychological and social consequences of bombing: sometimes through superstition or a rediscovered religiosity, sometimes with consoling rumours or, more rarely, through literature or art. In many cases, what popular public criticism existed was directed against the authorities rather than the enemy. A captured German soldier, in a bugged conversation recorded in November 1944, told his companion what he had recently seen when on leave in Berlin: ‘I was able to see how the people behaved after a big air attack. You should have heard them shouting “Down with Hitler! He is a criminal against the German nation!” and see them chalking it up in big letters.’36