The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945

by Richard Overy

  Neither in Germany nor elsewhere in Europe were the heavily bombed and depopulated cities abandoned. In France there was a move to keep the ruined peninsula of the Channel port of St Malo as a memorial to the bombing and to relocate the town on the mainland, but tradition prevailed and St Malo was rebuilt on the existing site. The only place to be moved as a result of bombing was the Italian town of Cassino. The ruins on the mountainside were declared a national monument and a new and larger town was built on more level ground a mile away from the original site. City centres, where much of the damage had occurred, were also generally restored with the exception of Bristol and Kiel, where there was sufficient bomb damage to allow the relocation of the centre to a more geographically convenient quarter.21 In Germany the reconstruction was slower than elsewhere but here too the cities were restored on their original sites despite the exceptional level of destruction. This strong sense of belonging, even to a ruined landscape, was explained by a senior German officer to his fellow prisoners of war early in 1945:

  If there is such a thing as existence in spirit or will alone, without body or matter, that is the life of the German cities. Only their sentimental appeal still holds them together. Cologne has been evacuated time and time again, but the inhabitants still manage to drift back to the heaps of rubble simply because they once bore the name ‘home’. Past associations are so much more powerful than the necessities of war that the evacuees resent leaving and rush back again long before the danger is over.22

  Nevertheless, German cities were remodelled after the bombing, while their demographic geography changed. By 1950, cities with more than 100,000 people made up 27 per cent of the population in West Germany, whereas they had constituted one-third in 1939; the population of communities with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants increased from 53 per cent to 59 per cent over the same period. Hamburg, where the damage and depopulation had been among the most extensive, almost recovered its pre-war population level by 1950, but experienced a substantial relocation of population within the city limits. The inner zones housed 850,000 people in 1939, but by 1950 only 467,000; the outer zones increased from 848,000 to over 1 million.23

  The geographical relocation was typical of much of the post-war reconstruction, since the destruction of older urban environments presented an opportunity to build modern residential housing with less congestion and more amenities. Wider roads and open spaces were regarded by town planners as desirable improvements to old-fashioned and inconvenient urban structures. ‘The Blitz has been a planner’s windfall,’ wrote the British scientist Julian Huxley. ‘It is the psychological moment to get real planning in our towns.’24 In reality the expense involved and the persistent arguments between local authorities and architects about what was desirable or expedient left many of the plans on the drawing board. A survey of 100 British cities in 1952 by Charles Madge, one of the founders of Mass Observation, discovered that out of the planned 59 nursery schools only one had been built, out of 50 community centres only four had materialized and out of 33 health centres not one.25 The American social scientist Leo Grebler investigated 28 Western European cities from four countries in 1954 and found that in general there was little radical urban rebuilding and strong pressures for continuity. The actual amount of damage, even in heavily bombed cities, was less than the immediate images of smashed streets and housing suggested. In Plymouth, one of the most heavily bombed British cities, only 9 per cent of the housing stock was destroyed. In London the same percentage of bomb-damaged area was available for new construction, leaving 91 per cent of the capital as it was. The temptation for municipal authorities all over Europe (who needed to restore local tax revenues) was to use what was still standing as fully as possible and to rebuild around it rather than engage in further demolition.26 In Germany the extent of the problem of homelessness was amplified by the large-scale refugee problem as Germans expelled from Eastern Europe arrived in the western zones of occupation. This forced migration encouraged the rapid rebuilding and repair of existing structures alongside cheap standard housing built on existing foundations. By 1961, 3.1 million houses had been restored or rebuilt.27 In no case did Grebler find evidence that the threat of nuclear bombing influenced city planning or house design, a discovery that he attributed partly to ‘improvidence or defeatism’ in the face of the nuclear menace, but principally to the willingness to take high risks for the sake of restoring what had been temporarily sacrificed in wartime.28

  The physical rebuilding of Europe after 1945 was bound up with the way bombed populations came to terms with the human costs of the bombing war. The psychological impact was difficult to gauge after 1945 and little effort went into analysing the scale or nature of the traumatic impact on those who experienced air raids. The longer-term effects on civilians have been little studied in comparison with the post-war psychological damage done to soldiers as a result of the stresses of combat. The memory of bombing as an expression of collective public awareness of the victims (though not of the survivors) was also much less developed than the public memory of military losses. Much of that public memory was linked to religious monuments as symbols of the injury to Europe’s Christian values in the vortex of total war. In Britain part of Coventry Cathedral was kept in its ruined state as both a local and a national monument; in Germany the Frauenkirche in Dresden was a standing indictment of the firestorm until its rebuilding in the early twenty-first century as a symbol of reconciliation and a final settlement of post-war accounts.29 The Nicholas Church in Hamburg and the Kaiser Wilhelm Church in the centre of Berlin were also left in their ruined state as a visible reminder to the German people of the cost of war against the home front. In Germany the memorializing of the dead from the bombing has been a process shot through with evident ambiguities. For years the memory was suppressed or subdued because of the difficulty of seeing Germans as victims rather than the collective perpetrators of a barbarous European war. The publication in 2002 of Jörg Friedrich’s best-seller, Der Brand (The Fire), opened up a new wave of debate over the extent to which the victimhood of ordinary people in the bombing war can be reconciled with a persistent collective guilt for the crimes of the Hitler regime.30 Outside Germany, the memorialization of victims of bombing has been unevenly applied. In Britain there is still no collective monument to the victims of the Blitz and there are relatively few local memorials. Established habits of remembering the fighting man have prevailed over public acknowledgement that in total war civilians are as likely to be victims as soldiers.31

  The ambiguities have also extended to the way in which those who carried out the bombing have been remembered after 1945. The United States Air Force established a major monument at Madingley, outside Cambridge, where thousands of American aircrew were buried. But Bomber Command was for decades after 1945 denied a collective monument to the dead. The erection of a statue to Harris in 1992 outside the RAF church on London’s Strand provoked widespread criticism, protest and demonstrations. A memorial to the dead of Bomber Command was finally erected and dedicated only in 2012, in London’s Green Park, but once again it provoked renewed debate about whether those who inflicted such damage on civilian communities ought to be remembered in the same spirit in which the ‘Few’ of the defensive Battle of Britain have been lionized in British public history. This is not the only example of a surviving tension in the way the bombers and the bombed are remembered. In Bulgaria, almost a century after the serendipitous invention of the modern bomb by the Bulgarian army captain, Simeon Petrov, the United States authorities chose in October 2010 to erect a modest stone monument in the grounds of the American Embassy in Sofia to the 150 American airmen who lost their lives flying over Bulgarian territory or bombing Bulgarian targets. The event was marked by protests from Bulgarian political parties at what was regarded as an unjustifiable celebration of a murderous policy that resulted in widespread Bulgarian deaths. A demonstration organized on 18 December 2010 carried placards that read ‘No to the monument of shame!’ A Facebook pro
test group was organized dedicated ‘to remove the monument to American pilots who bombed Sofia’.32 Nevertheless the monument still stands. It performs the conventional function of honouring the military dead who contributed to the well-known history of European liberation – yet it is also a ready reminder that the price of that liberation was not only the death of 1,350 Bulgarians, but of over half a million other European civilians.

  Illustrations

  1. A crashed Junkers Ju88 medium bomber on an airfield in northern France, autumn 1940. Accidents took a high toll on German aircraft during the Blitz in the difficult winter weather.

  2. During the campaign against Britain, German airmen take a break with organized sports. Air force psychiatrists also recommended three weeks at a winter sports spa to overcome combat fatigue.

  3. ‘Britain Can Take It’. A British pub somewhere in the Midlands after a bombing raid, still serving beer to the rescue squad. Pictures like this helped to sustain the popular image of British stoicism in the face of peril.

  4. Here the photographer has managed to capture the moment during a Blitz raid when a large building collapses on the corner of Deansgate and St Mary’s gate in Manchester, which was raided heavily in December 1940.

  5. Civil defence workers scramble to rescue Londoners trapped under rubble during a daylight raid on London in the autumn of 1940. More than 43,000 people died in the bombing in 1940–41.

  6. Class war. A cheerful civil defence team helps a banker rescue files from a bombed business in the heart of the City of London, which was hit dramatically on 29 December 1940.

  7. A funeral procession in London for thirty-one schoolchildren killed in a hit-and-run raid on London in January 1943. Such raids were small and few, but still deadly, long after the Blitz.

  8. Soviet medical students from the Ivan Pavlov Medical School in Leningrad form an emergency civil defence first-aid team during the bombing and shelling of the city in the siege that began in September 1941.

  9. People in Stalingrad running for their lives during the bombing of the city by the German Air Force Fourth Air Fleet in August 1942. An estimated 4,000 were killed in a month of heavy bombing.

  10. Political warfare leaflets are loaded onto an RAF bomber for delivery over occupied Europe and Germany. During the war more than 1.4 billion leaflets were dropped by aircraft in the propaganda war, and a further 95 million by balloon.

  11. An RAF bomb store in October 1940. Rows of 500-lb bombs are waiting to be loaded onto Bomber Command aircraft for another night raid against Germany after five months of almost uninterrupted operations against German targets.

  12. The Combined Bomber Offensive at work. The picture shows British and American air leaders at dinner in 1943. Seated facing the camera from left to right are Carl Spaatz, Charles Portal, Frederick Anderson, Ira Eaker (standing), Arthur Harris and James Doolittle. In the centre foreground is Trafford Leigh-Mallory.

  13. Though relations between the RAF and the US Eighth Air Force could be strained, publicity stunts, like this one at an RAF base, were designed to ease the tension. Here US aircrew write messages on a British bomb destined for Germany.

  14. Two RAF crewmen after their return from a combat mission. The strain is evident from operations that resulted overall in the death of almost half the men who flew. Fear was the emotion most commonly remembered by those who survived, and courage their chief characteristic.

  15. The dangers faced by bomber crew came from enemy fighters, anti-aircraft fire and the weather. Here a stricken B-24 ‘Liberator’ bomber from the US Eighth Air Force, on fire and damaged by anti-aircraft shells, struggles to keep flying.

  16. The ‘Battle of Germany’. The US strategic air forces aimed to destroy German aircraft production and defeat the German fighter force in the air. Here two German officials survey the smoking ruins of the Fieseler aircraft plant at Kassel.

  17. A rare image of a fighter ‘kill’ in the air battle over Germany. A German fighter crashes into fields, photographed by the pursuing aircraft. By May 1944, German fighter-pilot losses were running at more than 50 per cent a month.

  18. Two German women wander through the haze and devastation of a raid on Ebenfurth in September 1943, surrounded by civil defence personnel and fire engines. Nine million Germans eventually joined the stream of evacuees from the stricken cities.

  19. Women and girls played a large part in the German civil defence effort. Here a young member of the German Girls’ League (BDM) works alongside civil defenders during a raid on Düsseldorf in July 1943.

  20. An artist’s impression of RAF Lancaster bombers flying low over the Ruhr city of Essen to destroy industrial targets. The caption claimed that this would ‘ensure accuracy’. In reality raids were made from safer heights against whole cities rather than just factories.

  21. The reality of inaccurate bombing can be seen in the ruins of this farm, bombed during a raid on the Ruhr city of Dortmund on 23–24 May 1943. German farmers were also under instructions to douse lights at night and to keep civil defence equipment at hand.

  22. Two circus elephants recruited in the aftermath of Operation Gomorrah against Hamburg help to move a car destroyed in the bombing, which killed an estimated 37,000 people over a week of heavy bombing in July 1943.

  23. Concentration camp workers, wearing the familiar striped suits, work to clear the piles of rubble left in the aftermath of the bombing of Hamburg. Prisoners came to play an important part in the emergency repair services and the clearing of debris. By summer 1944 there were over half a million camp prisoners in Germany.

  24. In his role as coordinator for air-raid emergencies Joseph Goebbels, the Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, visits the ruined city of Kassel after the firestorm of 22–23 October 1943.

  25. The grisly aftermath of the Kassel firestorm. Incinerated bodies and body parts are laid out among the ruins. An estimated 6,000 died in the raid, a higher proportion of the city population than in the heavy raids on Hamburg in July 1943.

  26. Among the bomb rubble in the Maltese capital of Valetta, children wait to collect fresh water from a roadside well. Malta became ‘the most bombed place on earth’ in 1941–2, but survived the siege.

  27. The ruins of a railway marshalling yard in Rome after the American raid of 19 July 1943. Though the damage was extensive, rail communications were soon re-established and Rome did not fall to the Allies for almost a year. The Fascist Party symbol can clearly be seen on the front wall of the ruined station.

  28. Workers watch as the Fiat plant at Lingotto goes up in flames in March 1944. Although Italy had surrendered in September 1943, the bombing of the German-occupied north continued against industry and communications.

  29. One of many ‘ex-voto’ paintings put up in Italian churches to thank local saints or the Madonna for having helped the population survive a raid. This one from the Basilica Madonna della Consolato in Turin dates from just before the end of the war, 28 April 1945.

  30. French opinion turned against the bombing of urban targets in France in 1943–4 because of high flying and inaccurate raiding. This image of bombs falling on Paris shows the impossibility of hitting a small target with any accuracy.

  31. An ironic image from among the ruins of the French port city of Le Havre, devastated by heavy raids in September 1944. The monument to the dead of the First World War stands still erect between lamp posts decorated with the flags of the Allies from the Second World War.