The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

770 Pages·2013·7.66 MB·English

by  Richard Overy

Richard Overy
THE BOMBING WAR
Europe 1939–1945
Contents
List of Illustrations
Maps
Abbreviations in the Text
Preface
Prologue: Bombing Bulgaria
1 Bombing before 1940: Imagined and Real
PART ONE
Germany’s Bombing War
2 The First Strategic Air Offensive, September 1940 to June 1941
3 Taking It? British Society and the Blitz
4 The Untold Chapter: The Bombing of Soviet Cities
PART TWO
‘The Greatest Battle’: Allied Bombers over Europe

5 The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Bomber Command 1939–42
6 The Combined Bomber Offensive: Germany 1943–5
7 The Logic of Total War: German Society under the Bombs
8 Italy: The War of Bombs and Words
9 Bombing Friends, Bombing Enemies: Germany’s New Order
PART THREE
‘The Greatest Miscalculation’?
10 The Balance Sheet of Bombing
Epilogue: Lessons Learned and Not Learned: Bombing into the Post-War World

Illustrations
Bibliography and Sources
Notes
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Oh bountiful Gods of the air! Oh Science and Progress!
You great big wonderful world! Oh what have you done?
John Betjeman, ‘1940’
List of Illustrations
1. A crashed Junkers Ju88 bomber during the Battle of Britain
2. German aircrew take an athletic break from the bombing campaign
3. A British Midlands pub still doing business despite the bombing
4. A building in Manchester crashes onto the street during a Blitz raid
5. A civil defence rescue team in London hunts for survivors
6. A British businessman and civil defence personnel rescue office files
7. A funeral procession in East London in 1943 after a hit and run raid
destroyed a school
8. Students of the Ivan Pavlov Medical School in Leningrad form a First Aid
squad during the bombing of the city
9. Inhabitants rush for shelter during the heavy bombing of Stalingrad in
August 1942
10. Leaflets from the political warfare campaign are loaded onto an RAF bomber
11. 500-lb bombs being stored during the early stages of the bombing of
Germany, 1940
12. A dinner for the American and British commanders of the Combined
Bomber Offensive, 1943
13. An American crew on an RAF bomber base scrawl messages on a bomb
destined for Germany
14. Two RAF crewmen show the strain of the operation on their safe return to
base
15. A B-24 Liberator bomber hit by anti-aircraft shells and on fire during an
operation
16. A German fighter crashes in the German countryside during the 1944 ‘Battle
of Germany’
17. The Fieseler aircraft works at Kassel, Germany, destroyed during the
campaign against German aircraft production, 1944
18. Two elderly German women escaping the bombing of Ebenfurth in
September 1943
19. A young girl in the German BDM helping the civil defenders during the
bombing of Düsseldorf, July 1943
20. A British artist’s impression of a Lancaster raid over the Ruhr emphasizes the
effort to hit ‘military targets’
21. A farm destroyed by a bomb during a raid on the industrial city of Dortmund
in May 1943
22. Two circus elephants help to move a wrecked car following the firebombing
of Hamburg in July 1943

23. Concentration camp workers used to clear up the debris in Hamburg after
Operation Gomorrah, August 1943
24. Joseph Goebbels visits the German city of Kassel after the firebombing of
October 1943
25. A row of carbonated bodies and body parts in Kassel as a result of the
firestorm in the city in October 1943
26. Boys gather to collect fresh water from a well in the Maltese capital of
Valletta during the aerial siege of the island in 1942
27. The ruins of a railway marshalling yard in Rome after the bombing of the
Italian capital on 19 July 1943
28. Workers watch the FIAT factory at Lingotto in Turin in flames after a raid in
March 1944
29. An ex voto painting put up in the Basilica della Consolata, Turin, to thank
the Madonna for saving a family from the bombs
30. An American high-level raid against Paris during the campaign to hit
transport and industrial targets in German-occupied Europe
31. The ruins of the French port of Le Havre after it was obliterated by Allied
bombing
Illustrations are reproduced courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London
(pictures 1–7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 18–22, 26, 30, 31), the Society for Cooperation in
Russian and Soviet Studies, London (8, 9), the RAF Museum, Hendon (12), the
Library of Congress, Washington DC (15–17), Hamburg Staatsarchiv (23),
Stadtarchiv Kassel (24, 25), Archivio Storico della Città di Torino (28), and
Santuario Basilica della Consolata, Torino (29).