The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945

542 Pages·2014·24.27 MB·English

by  Richard Overy

Also by Richard Overy The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between
the Wars
1939: Countdown to War
Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945
Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet Effort, 1941–1945
The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Third Reich
The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia
The Battle of Britain: The Myth and the Reality
Why the Allies Won

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First published in Great Britain as The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd.
Epigraph from Collected Poems by John Betjeman. Copyright 1955, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1968, 1970, 1979, 1981, 1982, 2001 the Estate
of John Betjeman. Reprinted by permission of John Murray (Publishers).
Excerpts from England’s Hour by Vera Brittain. Reprinted by permission of Mark Bostridge and T. J. Brittain-Catlin, literary executors
of the estate of Vera Brittain, 1970.
Illustrations are courtesy of the RAF Museum, Hendon (1, 2, 5), the Imperial War Museum, London (3, 4, 6, 9, 13, 14, 17, 18, 21, 31,
32), Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16), Hamburg Staatsarchiv (19, 20, 22), Stadtarchiv Kassel (24),
Archivio di Stato di Brescia (25), Archivio Storico della Città di Torino (27), Archivio di Stato di Genova (28), Archivio Fondazione
Micheletti, Brescia (29), Santuario Basilica della Consolata, Turin (30), Archivio di Stato di Napoli (33). I am grateful to all the
archives involved for kind permission to reproduce these images.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Overy, R. J.
The bombers and the bombed : Allied air war over Europe, 1940–1945 / Richard Overy.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-69815138-3
1. World War, 1939–1945—Aerial operations, Allied. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Europe—Aerial operations, Allied. 3. World War,
1939–1945—Aerial operations, Allied—Moral and ethical aspects. 4. Bombing, Aerial—Europe—History—20th century. 5. Bombing,
Aerial—Social aspects—Europe—History—20th century. 6. Civil defense—Social aspects—Europe—History—20th century. 7.
Bombing, Aerial—Germany—History—20th century. 8. Bombing, Aerial—Europe— Public opinion. 9. Public opinion—Europe. 10.
World War, 1939–1945—Europe. I. Title. II. Title: Allied air war over Europe 1940–1945.
D785.O92 2013
940.54’4—dc23
2013018405
Version_1
Oh bountiful Gods of the air! Oh Science and Progress!
You great big wonderful world! Oh what have you done?
—John Betjeman, “1940”
CONTENTS
ALSO BY RICHARD OVERY
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
EPIGRAPH
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MAPS
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE TEXT

Prologue
Bombing Bulgaria
Chapter 1
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Bomber Command, 1939–42
Chapter 2
The Casablanca Offensive: The Allies over Germany, 1943–44
Chapter 3
The “Battle of Germany,” 1944–45
Chapter 4
The Logic of Total War: German Society Under the Bombs
Chapter 5
Italy: The War of Bombs and Words
Chapter 6
Bombing Friends, Bombing Enemies: Germany’s New Order
Epilogue
Lessons Learned and Not Learned: Bombing into the Postwar World

PHOTOGRAPHS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES
INDEX
PREFACE
Between 1939 and 1945 hundreds of European cities and hundreds more small
townships and villages were subjected to aerial bombing. During the course of
the conflict a staggering estimate of around 600,000 European civilians were
killed by bomb attack and well over a million more were seriously injured, in
some cases physically or mentally disabled for life. The landscape of much of
Europe was temporarily transformed into a vision of ruin as complete as the
dismal relics of the once triumphant Roman Empire. To anyone wandering
through the devastated urban wastelands immediately after the end of the war,
the most obvious question to ask was: How could this ever have been agreed to?
Then a second thought: How would Europe ever recover?
These are not the questions usually asked about the bombing war. That
bombing would be an integral part of future war had been taken for granted by
most Europeans and Americans in the late 1930s after watching Japan’s war in
China and air operations in the Spanish Civil War; it would have seemed almost
inconceivable that states should willingly forgo the most obvious instrument of
total war. Technology shapes the nature of all wars, but the Second World War
more than most. Once the bombing weapon had been unleashed, its potential
was unpredictable. The ruins of Europe in 1945 were mute testament to the
remorseless power of bombing and the inevitability of escalation. Yet the
remarkable thing is that European cities did indeed recover in the decade that
followed and became the flourishing centers of the consumer boom released by
the postwar economic miracle. To anyone walking along the boulevards and
shopping precincts of modern cities in Germany, Italy, or Britain, it now seems
inconceivable that only seventy years ago they were the unwitting objects of
violent aerial assault. In Europe only the fate of Belgrade at the hands of NATO
air forces in 1999 is a reminder that bombing has continued to be viewed as a
strategy of choice by the Western world.
Most of the history written about the bombing offensives in Europe focuses
on two different questions: What were the strategic effects of bombing, and was
it moral? The two have been linked more often in recent accounts, on the
assumption that something that is strategically unjustifiable must also be
ethically dubious, and vice versa. These arguments have generated as much heat
as light, but the striking thing is that they have generally relied on a shallow base
of evidence, still culled in the most part from the official histories and postwar
surveys of the bombing war, and focused almost entirely on the bombing of
Germany and Britain. There have been some excellent recent studies of the
bombing war that have gone beyond the standard narrative (though still confined
to Allied bombing of Germany), but in most general accounts of the air
campaigns established myths and misrepresentations abound, while the
philosophical effort to wrestle with the issue of its legality or morality has
produced an outcome that is increasingly distanced from historical reality.
The purpose of the present study is to provide the first full narrative history
of the bombing war as it was conducted by the Allied powers—Britain, the
British Commonwealth, and the United States—against targets across
continental Europe. There is no shortage of books on aspects of the campaign, or
on the operations of either the RAF or the U.S. Army Air Forces against
Germany, but a general history covering all aspects of the Allied bombing war,
including the response of the societies that were bombed and the lessons learned
from German practice in the Blitz on Britain, is still lacking. Three things
distinguish this book from the conventional histories of bombing. First, it covers
the whole of Europe. Between 1940 and 1945 almost all continental European
countries (including neutrals) were bombed by the Allies, either deliberately or
by accident. The broad field of battle was dictated by the nature of the German
New Order, carved out between 1938 and 1941, which turned most of
continental Europe into an involuntary war zone. The bombing of France and
Italy (which in each case resulted in casualties the equal of the Blitz on Britain)
is scarcely known in the existing historiography of the war, though an excellent
recent study by Claudia Baldoli and Andrew Knapp has finally advertised it
properly. The bombing of Scandinavia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Romania,
Bulgaria, and eastern Europe by the Western Allies is almost invisible in
accounts of the conflict. This wider geographical range raises important
questions about what British and American commanders were seeking to
achieve.
Second, bombing has all too often been treated as if it could be abstracted in
some way from what else was going on. Bombing, as the account here will
show, was always only one part of a broad strategic picture, and a much smaller
part than air force leaders liked to think. Even when bombing was chosen as an
option, it was often by default, always subject to the wider political and military
priorities of the wartime leadership and influenced by the politics of interservice
rivalry that could limit what ambitious airmen wanted to achieve. Whatever
claims might be made for airpower in the Second World War, they need to be put
into perspective. Bombing in Europe was never a war-winning strategy, and the
other services knew it.
Third, most accounts of bombing deal either with those doing the bombing or
with the societies being bombed. The Bombers and the Bombed is a title chosen
deliberately to give weight to both sides of the history. Though links between
these narratives are sometimes made, the operational history is all too often seen
as distinct from the political, social, and cultural consequences for the victim
communities: a battle history rather than a history of societies at war. The
following account looks at bombing from both perspectives—what bombing
campaigns were designed to achieve, and what impact they had in reality on the
populations that were bombed, both enemy peoples and those waiting for their
liberation from German rule. Armed with this double narrative, the issues of
effectiveness and ethical ambiguity can be assessed afresh.
No doubt this is an ambitious project, both in geographical scope and in
narrative range. Not everything can be given the coverage it deserves. This is not
a book about the postwar memory of bombing, on which there is now a growing
literature that is both original and conceptually mature. Nor does it deal with the
reconstruction of Europe in the decade after the end of the war in more than an
oblique way. Here once again there is a rich and expanding history, fueled by
other disciplines interested in issues of urban geography and community
rebuilding. This is a history limited to the air war in Europe as it was fought
between 1940 and 1945. The object has been to research areas where there is
little available in the existing literature, or to revisit established narratives to see
whether the archive record really supports them. I have been fortunate in gaining
access to new sources from the former Soviet archives. These include German
Air Force (Luftwaffe) documents covering the period of the Allied air offensive,
and in particular the Air Force Operations Staff. These can be found in the
Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (TsAMO),
Podolsk. I am very grateful to Dr. Matthias Uhl of the German Historical
Institute in Moscow for obtaining access to these sources, which make it
possible to reconstruct neglected aspects of the bombing war. I have also been
fortunate in finding a large collection of original Italian files from the Ministero
dell’Aeronautica (Air Ministry) in the Imperial War Museum archive at Duxford,