The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The term was also coined in order to separate independent bombing operations from bombing in direct support of the army or navy. This differentiation has its own problems, since direct support of surface forces also involves the use of bombing planes and the elaboration of target systems at or near the front whose destruction would weaken enemy resistance. In Germany and France between the wars ‘strategic’ air war meant using bombers to attack military and economic targets several hundred kilometres from the fighting front, if they directly supported the enemy’s land campaign. German and French military chiefs regarded long-range attacks against distant urban targets, with no direct bearing on the fighting on the ground, as a poor use of strategic resources. The German bombing of Warsaw, Belgrade, Rotterdam and numerous Soviet cities fits this narrower definition of strategic bombing. Over the course of the Second World War the distinction between the more limited conception of strategic air war and the conduct of long-range, independent campaigns became increasingly blurred; distant operations against enemy military, economic or general urban targets were carried out by bomber forces whose role was interchangeable with their direct support of ground operations. The aircraft of the United States Army Air Forces in Italy, for example, bombed the monastery of Monte Cassino in February 1944 in order to break the German front line, but also bombed Rome, Florence and the distant cities of northern Italy to provoke political crisis, weaken Axis economic potential and disrupt military communications. The German bombing of British targets during the summer and autumn of 1940 was designed to further the plan to invade southern Britain in September, and was thus strategic in the narrower, German sense of the term. But with the shift to the Blitz bombing from September 1940 to June 1941, the campaign took on a more genuinely ‘strategic’ character, since its purpose was to weaken British willingness and capacity to wage war and to do so without the assistance of German ground forces. For the unfortunate populations in the way of the bombing, in Italy or in Britain or elsewhere, there was never much point in trying to work out whether they had been bombed strategically or not, for the destructive effects on the ground were to all intents and purposes the same: high levels of death and serious injury, the widespread destruction of the urban landscape, the reduction of essential services and the arbitrary loss of cultural treasure. Being bombed as part of a ground campaign could, as in the case of the French port of Le Havre in September 1944 or the German city of Aachen in September and October the same year, produce an outcome considerably worse than an attack regarded as strategically independent.

In The Bombing War no sharp dividing line is drawn between these different forms of strategic air warfare, but the principal focus of the book is on bombing campaigns or operations that can be regarded as independent of immediate surface operations either on land or at sea. Such operations were distinct from the tactical assault by bombers and fighter-bombers on fleeting battlefield targets, local troop concentrations, communications, oil stores, repair depots, or merchant shipping, all of which belong more properly to the account of battlefield support aviation. This definition makes it possible to include as ‘strategic’ those operations that were designed to speed up the advance of ground forces but were carried out independently, and often at a considerable distance from the immediate battleground, such as those in Italy or the Soviet Union, or the aerial assault on Malta. However, the heart of any history of the bombing war is to be found in the major independent bombing campaigns carried out to inflict heavy damage on the enemy home front and if possible to provoke a political collapse. In all the cases where large-scale strategic campaigns were conducted – Germany against Britain in 1940–41, Britain and the United States against Germany and German-occupied Europe in 1940–45, Britain and the United States against Italian territory – there was an implicit understanding that bombing alone might unhinge the enemy war effort, demoralize the population and perhaps provoke the politicians to surrender before the need to undertake dangerous, large-scale and potentially costly amphibious operations. These political expectations from bombing are an essential element in the history of the bombing war.