The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The concept of civilian society, primarily urban society, as a new front line in war was in reality a novel, indeed unique, phenomenon in the context of the modern age. It gave to the strategic bombing war a second political dimension because it raised the problem of maintaining social cohesion and political allegiance in the face of extreme levels of direct military violence against the home front. The survival of positive ‘morale’ became central to the concerns of those governments whose populations were subject to attack. Morale as such was poorly defined at the time, was difficult to measure in any meaningful way and subject to a great many other pressures besides the effects of bombing. A British Air Ministry report in autumn 1941 confessed that since ‘morale is itself a thing of opinion and not of fact, there is no likelihood even of experts agreeing on the matter’.⁴¹ Yet it was the bombing war in particular that was popularly believed by rulers and ruled to have a fundamental impact on the war-willingness and psychological state of the population and it featured regularly in home intelligence reports on the public mood in Britain, Germany, Italy and Japan. This was an equally difficult assessment to make for those doing the bombing. They tried to estimate with some precision what effect their attacks might have on the state of mind of those they bombed, but the answers were more often than not contradictory or confused. The JIC report on the bombing of Bulgaria, produced in January 1944, highlighted social effects that were ‘out of proportion’ to the modest scale of attack, but still concluded that the political results had been negligible.

There can be little room for doubt that the experience of bombing was deeply demoralizing for many of those who survived it, though it could also provoke sudden moments of exhilaration, or induce a profound apathy, but the difficulty in drawing any clear causal links between bombing and popular response is simply that the response was as varied, irregular, unpredictable and diverse as the society that made it. The social reaction to bombing is often treated as if it must be uniform, but it differed widely between states and within communities. This was a reality seldom appreciated by those doing the bombing for whom ‘Germans’ or ‘Italians’ or even ‘Bulgarians’ became simply a generic description of the human target. One of the key questions still debated about the bombing war is why the bombed societies did not collapse at once under the impact, as conventional wisdom before 1939 suggested they would. This is too simple an approach. Bombing did place enormous strains on local communities, and some did experience a cumulative or temporary social breakdown as a result, but it was always a long step from local social crisis to the complete collapse of a war effort. To understand why ‘morale’ did not collapse in Britain or Germany in the sense of a political upheaval is to engage with complex issues of social cohesion defined by regional difference, the intensity of the bombing experience, the nature of the prevailing state and local administration, the peculiar structures of local society and the cultural impact of propaganda. Any narrative of the bombing war has to address the psychological, social and cultural response as well as the conventional military reality: the view from below as well as the view from above. This dual approach has featured only rarely in the existing history of the bombing campaigns, yet it is the one sure way to assess just what effects bombing actually had on the target communities, and to suggest what those effects might be in any future war.