The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Read online

  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).

  Abbreviations in the Text

  ADD aviatsiya dalnego deystviya (Long-Range Aviation, USSR)

  AI Airborne Interception (British night-fighter radar)

  AON aviatsya osobovo naznachenya (Strategic Air Reserve, USSR)

  ARP Air Raid Precautions

  AWPD Air War Plans Division

  BBC British Broadcasting Corporation

  BBSU British Bombing Survey Unit

  BMW Bayerische Motorenwerke

  CBO Combined Bomber Offensive

  CCS Combined Chiefs of Staff

  COSI Comité Ouvrier de Secours Immédiat (Committee for Workers’ Emergency Assistance)

  DBA dalnebombardirovochnaya aviatsiya (Soviet Long-Range Aviation)

  DiCaT Difesa Contraerea Territoriale

  Do Dornier

  Fw Focke-Wulf

  GAF German Air Force

  GHQ General Headquarters (USA)

  GL-1 Gun-Laying radar

  He Heinkel

  JIC Joint Intelligence Committee (UK)

  JPS Joint Planning Staff

  Ju Junkers

  LaGG Lavochkin-Gorbunov-Gudkov

  LMF lack of moral fibre

  MAAF Mediterranean Allied Air Forces

  MAP Ministry of Aircraft Production

  Me Messerschmitt

  MEW Ministry of Economic Warfare

  MiG Mikoyan & Gurevich

  MO Mass Observation

  MP Member of Parliament (UK)

  MPVO mestnaia protivovozdushnaia oborona (Main Directorate of Local Air Defence, USSR)

  NCO Non-commissioned officer

  NFPA National Fire Protection Association

  NFS National Fire Service

  NKVD narodnyy komissariat vnutrennikh del (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, USSR)

  NSV Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (National Socialist People’s Welfare)

  ORS Operational Research Section

  OSS Office of Strategic Services (USA)

  OTU Operational Training Unit

  PVO protivovozdushnaia oborana strany (National Air Defence, USSR)

  PWB Psychological Warfare Branch (USA)

  PWE Political Warfare Executive

  RAF Royal Air Force

  R&E Research and Experiments Department (UK)

  RFC Royal Flying Corps

  RLB Reichsluftschutzbund (Reich Air Protection League)

  RM Reichsmark

  SA Sturmabteilung (literally ‘storm section’)

  SAP Securité Aérienne Publique (Public Air Protection)

  SD Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service – Germ
an secret home intelligence)

  SHAEF Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force

  SIPEG Service Interministériel de Protection contre les Événements de Guerre (Interministerial Protection Service against the Events of War)

  SNCF Societé nationale des Chemins de Fer Français (French National Society for Railways)

  SS Schutzstaffel (literally ‘protection squad’)

  T4 Tiergarten-4 (cover name for German euthanasia programme)

  TFF Target-Finding Force (UK)

  UNPA Unione Nazionale Protezione Antiaerea (National Union for Anti-Air Protection)

  USAAF United States Army Air Forces

  USSBS United States Strategic Bombing Survey

  USSTAF United States Strategic and Tactical Air Forces

  VNOS vozdusnogo nablyudeniya, opovescheniya i svyazi (Air Observation Warnings and Communication, USSR)

  VVS voyenno-vozdushnyye sily (Military Air Forces, USSR)

  WAAF Women’s Auxiliary Air Force

  WVS Women’s Voluntary Services for Air Raid Precautions (UK)

  Yak Yakovlev

  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 immediately after the end of the war wandering through the devastated urban wastelands the most obvious question was to ask 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 in the late 1930s; 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 centres of the consumer boom released by the post-war economic miracle. Walking along the boulevards and shopping precincts of modern cities in Germany, Italy or Britain, it now seems inconceivable that only 70 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, culled still in the most part from the official histories and post-war 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 which 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 in Europe. This is a resource still lacking after almost seven decades of post-war scrutiny. Three things distinguish this book from the conventional histories of bombing. First, it covers the whole of Europe. Between 1939 and 1945 almost all states were bombed, either deliberately or by accident (and including neutrals). 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 and Bulgaria by the Allies, and the German bombing of Soviet cities, is almost invisible in accounts of the conflict. These elements of the bombing war are all included in what follows.

  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 inter-service rivalry which could limit what ambitious airmen wanted to achieve. Whatever claims might be made for air power 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. 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. 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 narrative range. Not everything can be given the coverage it deserves. This is not a book about the post-war 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, fuelled 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 1939 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 two new sources from the former Soviet archives. These include German Air Force documents covering the period of the Blitz, about which remarkably little has been written from the German side. There is also a rich supply of material on the Soviet air defence system and the civil defence organization, and the first statistics on Soviet casualties and material losses caused by German bombing. These can be found in the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA) in Moscow and the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence 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 two important but 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 anti-aircraft defences and the Italian bombing of Malta, the most heavily bombed site in Europe in 1941–2. I would like to record my thanks to Stephen Walton for making these records freely available to me.

  M
y second purpose has been to re-examine 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 Marshal Harris as ‘that schoolboy’s essay’), the four volumes reflected the official record in The National Archive 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 United States Army Air Forces, of which the bombing campaign was only a part. Written in the 1950s, the source base also reflected the official record, now deposited in National Archives II at College Park, Maryland, and the Air Force Historical Research Agency, 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 which 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 30 years.

  On the experience of being bombed there is less of an official voice. Only in Britain did the civil series of official histories cover civil defence, production and social policy. These are still a useful source but have been superseded in many cases by more detailed and critical historical writing. I have used less well-known local records to supplement the central archive. Particularly useful were the civil defence papers deposited at the Hull History Centre, which tell the story of a city subjected to bombing from summer 1940 to the last recorded raid on Britain, in March 1945, and the records covering the north-east deposited at the Discovery Museum in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. For other European societies there is no official history (though the volumes on the home front produced by the semi-official 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 defence 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 on Malta (which has a useful civil defence archive positioned not many miles from Malta’s beautiful beaches).