The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

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.

My 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.