The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

On the experience of being bombed there is less of an official voice. Only in Britain did the civil series of official histories cover civil defence, production and social policy. These are still a useful source but have been superseded in many cases by more detailed and critical historical writing. I have used less well-known local records to supplement the central archive. Particularly useful were the civil defence papers deposited at the Hull History Centre, which tell the story of a city subjected to bombing from summer 1940 to the last recorded raid on Britain, in March 1945, and the records covering the north-east deposited at the Discovery Museum in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. For other European societies there is no official history (though the volumes on the home front produced by the semi-official Military History Research Office [Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt] in Potsdam serve the same purpose very successfully), but there is a plethora of local studies on bombed cities in every state that was subjected to raids. These studies supply an invaluable source on local conditions, popular responses, civil defence performance and casualties; without them it would have been impossible to reconstruct the history of the bombed societies in France, Italy, the Low Countries and Germany. Where possible these studies have been supplemented by national records deposited in Berlin, Freiburg im Breisgau, Rome, Paris and on Malta (which has a useful civil defence archive positioned not many miles from Malta’s beautiful beaches).

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.