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, which cover both Italian antiaircraft defenses and the bombing of Italy from the island of Malta. I would like to record my thanks to Stephen Walton for making these records freely available to me.
My second purpose has been to reexamine the established narratives on the bombing war, chiefly British and American, by looking again at archive sources in both countries. For a long time the official histories have shaped the way the story has been told. Although the British history by Charles Webster and Noble Frankland published in 1961 is among the very best of the British official histories of the war (later dismissed by Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris as “that schoolboy’s essay”), the four volumes reflected the official record in the National Archives and focused narrowly on the bombing of Germany rather than Europe. The American seven-volume official history by Wesley Craven and James Cate also follows closely the operational history of the U.S. Army Air Forces, of which the bombing campaign was only a part. Since this work was written in the 1950s, the sources used reflected the official record, now deposited in National Archives II at College Park, Maryland, and the Air Force Historical Research Agency, in Maxwell, Alabama. However, much of the history of the bombing campaign and the politics that surrounded it can only be fully understood by looking at private papers of individuals and institutions, or at areas of the official record not directly linked to bombing operations or that were originally closed to public scrutiny because they raised awkward questions. The extensive preparations for gas and biological warfare, for example, could not easily be talked about in the 1950s (and many of the records remained closed for far longer than the statutory minimum), nor could intelligence, whose secrets have gradually been unearthed over the past thirty years.
On the experience of being bombed there is less of an official voice. For most European societies there is no official history (though the volumes on the home front produced by the semiofficial Military History Research Office [Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt] in Potsdam serve the same purpose very successfully), but there is a plethora of local studies on bombed cities in every state that was subjected to raids. These studies supply an invaluable source on local conditions, popular responses, civil defense performance, and casualties; without them it would have been impossible to reconstruct the history of the bombed societies in France, Italy, the Low Countries, and Germany. Where possible these studies have been supplemented by national records deposited in Berlin, Freiburg im Breisgau, Rome, Paris, and Malta.
It is necessary to say something about the use of statistics throughout the book. Many wartime statistics are known to be deficient for one reason or another, not least those that have survived from the popular beliefs of the wartime period about levels of casualty. I have relied in the text on figures for the dead and injured from what is available in the archive record, though with the usual caveats about reliability and completeness. I have tried as scrupulously as possible to allow for reasonable margins of error, but there are nevertheless wide differences between the statistical picture presented here and many of the standard figures, particularly for Germany. In most cases figures of bomb casualties have had to be scaled down. This is not intended in any way to diminish the stark reality that hundreds of thousands of Europeans died or were seriously injured under the bombs. The search for more historically plausible statistics does not make the killing of civilians from the air any more or less legitimate; it simply registers a more reliable narrative account of what happened.
In a book of this scale it has been difficult to do full justice to the human element, either for those doing the bombing or for those being bombed. This is, nonetheless, a very human story, rooted in the wider narrative of twentieth-century violence. Throughout these pages there are individuals whose experiences have been chosen to illuminate an issue that touched thousands more, whether aircrew fighting the elements and the enemy at great physical and psychological cost, or the communities below them who became the victims of a technology that was never accurate enough to limit the wide destruction of civilian lives and the urban environment. It is one of the terrible paradoxes of total war that both the bomber crews and the bombed could be traumatized by their experience. Looking at the bombing war from the distance of seventy years, this paradox will, I hope, strengthen the resolve of the developed world never to repeat it.