The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

This joint effort was the core of what later came to be called ‘Blitzkrieg’ and it was used to devastating effect in all the German land operations of the first two years of war (and would have been used in southern England, too, if German forces had got ashore in the autumn of 1940). Yet it is difficult to reconcile the idea of a German Air Force tied flexibly but surely to the land campaign with the popular recollection of the German bombing of Warsaw in September 1939 and of Rotterdam eight months later. Long before the onset of the ‘Blitz’, the Western world had come to assume that the German Air Force, for all its vaunted support of German armies, was an instrument for perpetrating aerial terror, as it was widely believed to have done at Guernica in April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. A British wartime account claimed that Germany’s earlier bombing would go down in history ‘as an outstanding example of depraved conduct… murder on a scale that Christendom had never before experienced’.⁸ So powerful is this conventional view of German bombing atrocity (which helped to legitimate the heavy bombing of German cities later in the war) that it is worth looking in greater detail at the story of German city-bombing before the onset of the campaign against Britain in September 1940.

The German aggression against Poland which began on 1 September 1939 was a model of the modern exercise of air power. On that day the 397 aircraft of the Polish Air Force, including 154 mainly obsolete bombers and 159 fighters, faced two German air fleets, Air Fleet 1 under General Albert Kesselring and Air Fleet 4 under Lt General Alexander Löhr, with a total of 1,581 aircraft including 897 bombers and 439 fighters and fighter-bombers. Polish combat aircraft were outnumbered by more than four to one. During the first three days of the campaign waves of German bombers and dive-bombers attacked airfields, rail centres, military depots and radio stations. So rapidly was the Polish Air Force overwhelmed that resistance almost entirely disappeared; half their planes were lost in combat and those that remained flew on 17 September to bases in Romania rather than risk destruction or capture. From 4 September the German air fleets were able to concentrate attacks on communications to slow down the Polish army as it tried to re-form in the Polish interior. Between 6 and 13 September air attacks spread out further east towards the Vistula River and targets in Praga, the part of Warsaw on the far bank of the river. Resistance was light but the military targets which German aircraft were told to hit were obscured by smoke and haze and suffered little in the preliminary attacks. As the German armies closed the ring around Warsaw and the nearby fortress at Modlin, the air forces were ordered to bomb enemy troop concentrations in and around the city, but not to attack ‘the streaming columns of refugees’ on the roads leaving the Polish capital.⁹ On 16 September the Polish commander in Warsaw was given six hours to surrender. He refused, declaring the capital to be a ‘special military zone’, and as a result German planes dropped leaflets warning the population to leave. As Warsaw was a defended city, it was legitimate for German air forces to join the German Army artillery in the siege. On 22 September Hitler ordered the final liquidation of Polish resistance in Warsaw, including air strikes on important military and economic targets, as well as buildings housing the military and political authorities.¹⁰ The German Foreign Office requested that the air force make every effort to avoid damaging the Belvedere Palace; Hitler ordered special care to be taken not to hit the Soviet diplomats leaving the city after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland on 17 September.¹¹ On 25 September there was extensive incendiary bombing and heavy damage to the centre of Warsaw in an attack which dropped some 632 tonnes of bombs, the largest air attack made by any air force until then. Troops of the German Third Army were killed when German aircraft strayed too far into areas already occupied by German forces, and on 26 September all bombing ceased. The following morning Warsaw surrendered.¹²