The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The air attacks on Warsaw were designed to speed up the capitulation of the armed forces defending the city, but no more than that. When Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, designated ‘Air Leader for Special Tasks’ (Fliegerführer zur besonderen Verfügung) and a veteran of the Guernica bombing, requested annihilating attacks on the whole urban area, the German Air Force chief of staff, Colonel-General Hans Jeschonnek, refused.¹³ Nevertheless, the impression made on the Polish population and those foreigners unlucky enough to be caught in the path of the bombing was of deliberately random attack. A Polish doctor, Zygmunt Klukowski, drove through Lublin on 4 September, where he saw his first evidence of the bombing: ‘three completely destroyed apartment buildings. Many buildings had broken windows and collapsed roofs.’ Five days later he survived eight raids on Lublin in one day: ‘Practically everyone prayed,’ ran his diary. ‘Some civilians were shaking with fright.’ Klukowski observed that he had experienced nothing quite like this in the First World War.¹⁴ Chaim Kaplan described in his diary the hell in Warsaw, worse than ‘Dante’s description of the Inferno’; everyone ran to shelter in ‘dark holes’, full of hysterical women.¹⁵ An unlucky strike hit the American ambassador’s residence outside Warsaw on 2 September.¹⁶ The gap between the air force orders, which specified economic, military and administrative targets, and the reality on the ground, reflected the overwhelming air power German forces were able to bring to bear, but above all the problems faced in achieving a high degree of accuracy even when dive-bombing from low altitude, a problem that characterized almost all bombing operations throughout the war. German post-operational research showed that two aircraft factories at Mielec and Lublin, reported by the pilots who bombed them as destroyed, were untouched. Trains were seen steaming along tracks described by pilots as ‘wrecked’ shortly before.¹⁷ A post-operational assessment made by General Hans Speidel in November highlighted the particular importance that had been attached to destroying sources of power (electricity, gas), but since many of these installations were located close to residential zones, the raids inevitably involved civilian casualties.¹⁸ A final figure for the dead in Warsaw from bombing has never been calculated with any certainty. Many were the victims of artillery fire rather than bombing; Chaim Kaplan thought shelling to be the greater menace to the civilian population.¹⁹ The claims that between 20,000 and 40,000 died is certainly an exaggeration, for fatalities on this scale would have required a firestorm on the scale of Hamburg in 1943 or Dresden in 1945, and of that there is no evidence, nor was the German Air Force at that stage capable of creating one. Current estimates suggest around 7,000 dead, on the assumption that casualty rates per ton of bombs might have equalled the Dresden raid, but a casualty rate equivalent to the Blitz on London would mean around 2,500 deaths on the basis of the limited tonnage dropped.²⁰

The German Air Force itself made the most of its contribution to victory in Poland and in doing so helped to nurture the myth of Warsaw’s destruction from the air. The propaganda arm produced the film Baptism of Fire (Feuertaufe), a documentary deliberately designed to present to the German public and to foreign audiences the image of awesome aerial power exerted against the unfortunate Poles. In November 1939 the new Reich Commissar of the Polish ‘General-Government’, Hans Frank, hosted neutral diplomats and military attachés formerly accredited to Warsaw at a reception in the former capital. In his address he asked them to examine closely the extensive bomb damage in Warsaw (it was claimed that out of 17,000 buildings only 300 had escaped unscathed); as a result of their observations he suggested they should ‘recommend to their respective Governments to intercede for peace’.²¹ By February 1940 Mussolini was openly talking of the 40,000 Poles who he claimed had died in the ruins of Warsaw, though only 12 per cent of the city had been destroyed or seriously damaged, and not all of that was due to bombing.²² The Hitler regime was happy to make political capital out of the bombing, just as the German Air Force clearly exploited the Polish campaign to enhance its own political weight and strategic status alongside the German Army. Yet the fact remains that the air campaign in Poland was a model of the operational air warfare elaborated before 1939, with air forces closely supporting the land campaign by destroying (with a wide margin of error) military, industrial and infrastructure targets designed to weaken Polish military resistance – and not an example of ruthless Douhetism.