The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Read online

  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 which 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 and the Soviet Union. 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 which touched thousands more, whether aircrew fighting the elements and the enemy at great physical and psychological costs, 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 crew and the bombed could be traumatized by their experience. Looking at the bombing war from the distance of 70 years, this paradox will, I hope, strengthen the resolve of the developed world never to repeat it.

  Richard Overy

  London, January 2013

  Prologue

  Bombing Bulgaria

  The modern aerial bomb, with its distinctive elongated shape, stabilizing fins and nose-fitted detonator, is a Bulgarian invention. In the Balkan War of 1912, waged by Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Montenegro (the Balkan League) against Turkey, a Bulgarian army captain, Simeon Petrov, adapted and enlarged a number of grenades for use from an aeroplane. They were dropped on a Turkish railway station on 16 October 1912 from an Albatros F.2 biplane piloted by Radul Milkov. Petrov afterwards modified the design by adding a stabilized tail and a fuse designed to detonate on impact, and the 6-kg bomb became the standard Bulgarian issue until 1918. The plans of the so-called ‘Chataldzha’ bomb were later passed on to Germany, Bulgaria’s ally during the First World War. The design, or something like it, soon became standard issue in all the world’s first air forces.

  Petrov’s invention came back to haunt Bulgaria during the Second World War. On 14 November 1943 a force of 91 American B-25 Mitchell bombers escorted by 49 P-38 Lightning fighters attacked the marshalling yards in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. The bombing was spread over a wide area, including three villages. The raid destroyed some of the rail system, the Vrajedna airfield and a further 187 buildings, resulting in around 150 casualties. A second attack 10 days later by B-24 Liberator bombers was less successful. There was poor weather across southern Bulgaria and only 17 of the force reached what they hoped was Sofia and bombed through cloud, hitting another seven villages around the capital.1 The attacks were enough to spread panic through the city. In the absence of effective air defences or civil defence measures, thousands fled to the surrounding area. The Royal Bulgarian Air Force, though equipped with 16 Messerschmitt Me109G fighters supplied by Bulgaria’s German ally, could do little against raids which, though not entirely unexpected, came as a complete surprise when they happened.2

  The raid in November 1943 was not the first attack on a Bulgarian target during the war, though it was the heaviest and most destructive so far. Bulgaria became a target only because of the decision taken in March 1941 by the Bulgarian government, after much hesitation, to tie the country to Germany by signing the Tri-Partite Pact, which had been made between the principal Axis powers, Germany, Italy and Japan, the previous September.3 When in spring 1941 German forces were based in Bulgaria to attack Greece and Yugoslavia, the RAF sent a force of six Wellington bombers to bomb the Sofia rail links in order to hamper the concentration of German troops. A British night raid on 13 April made a lucky hit on an ammunition train, causing major fires and widespread destruction. Further small raids occurred on 23 July and 11 August 1941, which the Bulgarian government blamed on the Soviet air force. Although Bulgaria did not actively participate in the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, it gave supplies to Germany and allowed German ships to use the major ports of Varna and Burgas. On 13 September 1942 a further small Soviet raid hit Burgas where German ships, laden with oil-drilling equipment, were awaiting the signal to cross the Black Sea to supply German engineers with the materials they would need to restart production once the Caucasus oilfield had been captured. The Soviet Union was not at war with Bulgaria and denied the intrusions in 1941 and in 1942, for which it was almost certainly responsible, but the attacks were of such small scale that the Bulgarian government did not insist on reparations.4

  The handful of pinprick attacks in 1941 and 1942 were enough to make Bulgaria anxious about what might happen if the Allies ever did decide to bomb its cities heavily. Bulgaria’s position in the Second World War was an ambiguous one. The Tsar, Boris III, did not want his country to be actively engaged in fighting a war after the heavy territorial and financial losses Bulgaria had sustained in the peace settlement of 1919 as a punishment for joining with Germany and Austria-Hungary in the First World War. Only with great reluctance and under German pressure did the prime minister, Bogdan Filov, declare war on Britain and the United States on 13 December 1941. Aware of Bulgaria’s vulnerability, the government and the Tsar wanted to avoid an actual state of belligerence with the Western powers, just as the country had refused to declare war on the Soviet Union. Bulgaria’s small armed forces therefore undertook no operations against the Allies; instead they were used by the Germans as occupation troops in Macedonia and Thrace, territories given to Bulgaria after the German defeat of Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941. By 1943 it was evident to the Bulgarian government and people that they had once again backed the wrong side. Much of the population was anti-German and some of it pro-Soviet. In 1942 a left-wing Fatherland Front had been formed demanding an end to the war and the severing of links with Germany. Partisan movements in the occupied territories and in Bulgaria itself became more active during 1943 and in August that year they launched a major recruitment drive. The partisans were chiefly communist and campaigned not only for an end to the war but for a new social order and closer ties with the Soviet Union. In May 1943 and again in October, Filov authorized contacts with the Western Allies to see whether there was a possibility of reaching an agreement. He was told that only unconditional surrender and the evacuation of the occupied territories could be accepted.5

  It is against this background that sense can be made of the Allied decision to launch a series of heavy air attacks on Bulgarian cities. Knowing that Bulgaria was facing a mounting crisis, caught between its German ally and the growing threat of a likely Soviet victory, Allied leaders were encouraged to use bombing as a political tool in the hope that it might produce a quick dividend by forcing Bulgaria out of the war. The idea that bombing was capable of a sudden decisive blow by demoralizing a population and causing a government crisis had been at the heart of much interwar thinking about the use of air power. It was the logic of the most famous statement of this principle made in 1921 by the Italian general, Giulio Douhet, in his classic study The Command of the Air (Il dominio dell’aria). The principle was also a central element in the view of air power held by the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, who had previously applied it to both Germany and Italy. It was not by chance that in a meeting wit
h the British chiefs of staff on 19 October 1943, it was Churchill who should suggest that in his view the Bulgarians were a ‘peccant people to whom a sharp lesson should be administered’. Their fault was to have sided once again with the Germans despite, Churchill claimed, his efforts to get them to see sense. Bombing was designed to undo the cord that bound Bulgaria to her German patron.

  The sharp lesson was to be a heavy bombing attack on Sofia. Churchill justified the operation on political grounds: ‘experience shows,’ he told the meeting, ‘that the effect of bombing a country where there were antagonistic elements was not to unite those elements, but rather to increase the anger of the anti-war party’.6 Others present, including Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, chief of the air staff, and the chief of the general staff, General Alan Brooke, were less keen and insisted that leaflets should be dropped along with the bombs explaining that the Allies wanted Bulgaria to withdraw its occupation troops and surrender (in the end a leaflet was dropped with the curious headline ‘This is not about Allied terror, but about Bulgarian insanity’).7 But the idea of a ‘sharp lesson’ quickly circulated. The American military chiefs thought that Sofia was so low a military priority that an attack was scarcely justified, but they were impressed by the possible ‘great psychological effect’.8 Both the British and American ambassadors in Ankara urged an attack so as to interrupt Turkish-German commercial rail traffic.9 On 24 October the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff directed General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander in the Mediterranean, to give such a lesson as soon as this was operationally practical.10 The Turkish government approved, hopeful perhaps despite neutrality to profit from Bulgaria’s discomfiture in any post-war settlement. Churchill wanted Stalin’s say-so as well because Bulgaria was clearly in the Soviet sphere of interest. On 29 October the British Foreign Minister, Anthony Eden, who was in Moscow for negotiations, was able to report back Stalin’s comment that Sofia should certainly be bombed as it was nothing more than ‘a province of Germany’.11

  The Bulgarian government had expected bombing for some time. While the regime struggled to come to terms with internal dissent, the Soviet presence in the east and Allied demands for unconditional surrender, it also sought ways to appease the Germans in case they decided to occupy Bulgaria. In the course of 1943 the deportation of Jews from the occupied areas of Thrace was completed and, despite the hostility of the Tsar, the German authorities in Sofia persuaded the Bulgarian government to deport native Bulgarian Jews as well. It was agreed that they would first be transferred to 20 small towns in the hinterland around Sofia and in May 1943 some 16,000 Jews were taken at short notice from the capital and parcelled out among eight provinces. The Filov government linked the Jewish policy with bombing. When the Swiss ambassador asked Filov to stop sending Thracian Jews to Auschwitz on humanitarian grounds, Filov retorted that talk of humanity was misconceived when the Allies were busy obliterating the cities of Europe from the air. Moreover, when he failed to take up a British offer in February 1943 to transport 4,500 Jewish children from Bulgaria to Palestine, he feared that Sofia might be bombed in retaliation.12 Once the Jews of Sofia had been deported to the provinces, anxiety revived again in Bulgaria that the Allies would now no longer hesitate to bomb from fear of killing Jews. In the end the Jews of Bulgaria not only escaped deportation to Auschwitz but also escaped the bombing, which left much of Sofia’s Jewish quarter in ruins.

  It was not the Jewish question that invited Allied bombing in November 1943, though many Bulgarians assumed that it was. The first raids seemed to presage an onslaught of aerial punishment and the population of the capital gave way to a temporary panic. Yet the first two attacks in November were followed by two desultory operations the following month and nothing more. Some 209 inhabitants in Sofia had been killed and 247 buildings damaged. The ‘sharp lesson’ was not sharp enough for the Allies because it did little to encourage Bulgaria to seek a political solution while the military value of the attacks was at best limited, hampered by poor bombing accuracy and gloomy Balkan weather. On Christmas Day 1943, Churchill wrote to Eden that the ‘heaviest possible air attacks’ were now planned for Sofia in the hope that this might produce more productive ‘political reactions’.13 On 4 January 1944 a large force of 108 B-17 Flying Fortresses was despatched to Sofia, but with poor visibility the attack was aborted after a few bombs were dropped on a bridge. Finally, on 10 January 1944 the first heavy attack was mounted by 141 B-17s, supported during the night of 10–11 January by a force of some 44 RAF Wellington bombers. This attack was devastating for the Bulgarian capital: there were 750 dead and 710 seriously injured, and there was widespread damage to residential housing and public buildings. The air-raid sirens failed to sound because of a power cut. This time the population panicked entirely, creating a mass exodus. By 16 January, 300,000 people had left the capital. The government abandoned the administrative district and moved out to nearby townships. It took more than two weeks to restore services in the capital, while much of the population abandoned it permanently from fear of a repeat attack. On 23 January the German ambassador telegraphed back to Berlin that the bombing changed completely the ‘psychological-political situation’, exposing the incompetence of the authorities and raising the danger of Bulgarian defection.14 The government ordered church bells to be pealed as an air-raid warning, in case of further power cuts.15

  The second major raid, of 10 January, did pay political dividends. While Filov tried unsuccessfully to persuade a visiting German general, Walter Warlimont, Deputy for Operations on Hitler’s staff, to mount a revenge attack on neutral Istanbul – whose consequences might well have been even more disastrous for Bulgaria – most Bulgarian leaders had come to realize that the German connection had to be severed as soon as possible and a deal struck with the Allies.16 The Bishop of Sofia used the occasion of the funeral for the victims of the bombing to launch an attack on the government for tying Bulgaria to Germany and failing to save the people from war. That month an effort was made to get the Soviet Union to intercede with the Western Allies to stop the bombing, but instead Moscow increased its pressure on Bulgaria to abandon its support for the Axis.17 In February the first informal contacts were made with the Allies through a Bulgarian intermediary in Istanbul to see whether terms could be agreed for an armistice. Although hope for negotiation had been the principal reason for starting the bombing, the Allied reaction to the first Bulgarian approach following the raids was mixed. Roosevelt wrote to Churchill on 9 February suggesting that the bombing should now be suspended if the Bulgarians wanted to talk, a view shared by British diplomats in the Middle Eastern headquarters in Cairo.18 Churchill scrawled ‘why?’ in the margin of the letter. He was opposed to ending the bombing despite a recent report from the British Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) which observed that the first bombing in November 1943 had achieved no ‘decisive political result’. He had already authorized the bombing of the Bulgarian ports of Burgas and Varna, which were added to the list of priority targets, subject to political considerations.19 In January 1944 the British War Cabinet, in the event of a German gas attack, considered the possibility of retaliatory gas bomb attacks against Germany and its allies, and included Bulgaria on the list.20 On 12 February Churchill replied to Roosevelt that in his view the bombing had had ‘exactly the effect we hoped for’ and urged him to accept the argument that bombing should continue until the Bulgarians began full and formal negotiations: ‘if the medicine has done good, let them have more of it’.21 Roosevelt immediately wired back his full agreement: ‘let the good work go on’.22

  Some of the evidence coming out of Bulgaria seemed to support Churchill’s stance. Intelligence reports arrived detailing the rapid expansion of both the Communist partisan movement and the Fatherland Front. The partisans contacted the Allies through a British liaison officer stationed in Bulgaria, encouraging them to keep up the bombing in order to provoke the collapse of the pro-German regime and help expand support for the resistance. The part
isans sent details about the central administrative area in Sofia, bordered by the recently renamed Adolfi Hitler Boulevard, which they said was ripe for attack; at the same time partisan leaders asked the Allies not to bomb the working-class districts of Sofia, from which most of their recruits were drawn. By March the partisans were finally organized by the Bulgarian Communists into the National Liberation Revolutionary Army.23 As a result of the evidence on the ground the Western Allies, with Stalin’s continued though secret support (the Soviet Union did not want Bulgarians to think they had actively abetted the bombing), accepted Eden’s argument that by ‘turning on the heat’ on Bulgarian cities it might shortly be possible either to provoke a coup d’état or to batter the government into suing for peace.24 On 10 March Sir Charles Portal told Churchill that he had ordered heavy attacks on Sofia and other Bulgarian cities as soon as possible.25