The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The story of the civilian front line in the air war is an aggregate story of loss of extraordinary proportions: an estimated 600,000 killed, as many seriously injured, millions more less severely hurt; millions dispossessed through bomb destruction; 50–60 per cent of the urban area of Germany obliterated; countless cultural monuments and works of art irreparably lost. It is only when these costs are summarized that the unique character of the bombing war can be properly understood. The dead were not accidental bystanders but the consequence of a technology generally incapable of distinguishing and hitting a small individual target, and which all sides knew was incapable of doing so with the prevailing science. This raises a number of questions about why the states involved never reined back campaigns with such a high civilian cost and in particular why Britain and the United States, liberal democracies which self-consciously occupied the moral high ground during the war, and had both deplored bombing before 1939, ended up organizing strategic bombing campaigns that killed around 1 million people in Europe and Asia. These seem obvious questions seventy years later but they can only be properly answered by understanding the terms in which the moral imperatives of war were perceived at the time. The assault on civilians signified an acceptance, even by the victim populations, of shifting norms about the conduct of war; what had seemed unacceptable legally or morally in 1939 was rapidly transformed by the relative ethics of survival or defeat.⁴²

It is easy to deplore the losses and to condemn the strategy as immoral, even illegal – and a host of recent accounts of the bombing have done just that – but current ethical concerns get no nearer to an understanding of how these things were possible, even applauded, and why so few voices were raised during the war against the notion that the home front could legitimately be a target of attack.⁴³ The contemporary ethical view of bombing was far from straightforward, often paradoxical. It is striking, for example, that among those who were bombed there was seldom clear or persistent hatred for the enemy; there was a sense that ‘war’ itself was responsible and ‘modern war’ in particular, as if it enjoyed some kind of existence independent of the particular air fleets inflicting the damage. There could even be a sense that bombing was necessary to purge the world of the forces that had unleashed the barbarism in the first place, a blessing as much as a curse. A young German soldier captured and interrogated in Italy early in 1945 told his captors: ‘In the long run your bombings may be good for Germany. They have given her a taste, bitter though it may be, of what war is really like.’⁴⁴ The moral response to bombing and being bombed was historically complex and sometimes surprising. Issues that seemed black and white before the war and do so again today were coloured in many shades of grey during the conflict. Nonetheless, the figures on death, injury and destruction are shocking, just as the other forms of mass death of civilians in the Second World War. The grisly consequences of the bombing war would have outraged opinion in the 1930s just as they have attracted current opprobrium among historians and international lawyers.⁴⁵ Exploring how it was possible to legitimize this scale of damage in the brief span of total war between 1940 and 1945 forms the fourth and perhaps the most important element in The Bombing War, alongside the political context that shaped the development of the aerial conflict, the military operations that defined its precise character and extent, and the administrative, social and cultural responses that determined the limits of what bombing could actually achieve.

Part One GERMANY’S BOMBING WAR

1 Bombing before 1940: Imagined and Real

In 1938 the American critic Lewis Mumford, well known for his unflattering views on the modern giant city, explored the rise and fall of what he called ‘Megalopolis’ in his book The Culture of Cities. He described ‘a vast pus-bag of vulgar pretense and power’ in which civilization became year by year more fragile and insecure until the day when the air-raid sirens sound: ‘Plainly, terrors more devastating and demoralizing than any known in the ancient jungle or cave have been re-introduced into modern urban existence. Panting, choking, spluttering, cringing, hating, the dweller in Megalopolis dies, by anticipation, a thousand deaths.’ A humane civic life, Mumford argued, was no longer possible in modern cities during a bombing war. The end result of the destruction was a city of the dead, ‘Nekropolis’, ‘a tomb for the dying… flesh turned to ashes’.¹