The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

Paris might have suffered something of the same fate as Rotterdam if the French Army and government had insisted on defending the French capital to the last. A number of military targets were bombed around Paris on 3 June, in the later stages of the campaign in the West, but on 11 June it was declared an ‘open city’ by the French commander-in-chief, Maxime Weygand, and evacuated by the government and military high command.²⁷ The bombing that took place in France between 10 May and French surrender on 17 June was almost all of it tactical bombing, in support of the German offensive, or to prevent the evacuation of Allied (mainly British) troops in late May and the first half of June, or to destroy the French Air Force and its sources of supply. In the process, substantial damage was done to the towns and their civilian populations in the path of the oncoming German forces. Other places were declared ‘open cities’ to avoid the devastation of the First World War, including the cathedral town of Rheims. Once the Dunkirk pocket was eliminated, the German armies turned south towards Paris to complete the destruction of French military power. At this point German aircraft were free to roam over French territory; they were directed to attack rail communications, the aircraft and aero-engine industry and oil depots. Between 1 and 3 June long-range attacks destroyed the major rail links between Paris and most of the rest of France. During the first four days of June attacks were also mounted against the port areas at Marseilles (where there were oil storage tanks), Le Havre and the docks at the mouth of the River Rhône. On 3 June German bombers also hit nine French airfields and aircraft factories around Paris at Villacoublay, Les Mureaux and the Citroën works, killing 254 people, 195 of them civilians.²⁸ The bombing began a panic, accelerating the growing movement to abandon the capital; on 8 and 9 June ministry personnel were evacuated. But the bombing was not resumed and Paris’s status as an ‘open city’ was respected for reasons that are still not entirely clear.²⁹ German forces concentrated on the direct support of their own operations against what remained of the French Army and its Air Force. The German Air Force ended the era of rapid conquests as it had begun in Poland, clearing the way for the army to roll forward and secure final victory.

THE ‘ENGLAND-PROBLEM’

The exercise of German air power between September 1939 and June 1940 reflected a particular conception of ‘strategic’ air warfare in which victory was a combined achievement of the air forces and the army. The use of bombing was essentially tactical, even when targets distant from the actual front line were the object of attack. Although some German Air Force commanders thought that this form of force projection signified a new age of independent air warfare, and revelled in its novelty and power, there was a great difference between a campaign launched to support a major ground offensive and a campaign in which aircraft were working entirely on their own. The possibility in June 1940 that the German Air Force might be used to strike at Britain opened up for the first time the prospect of a genuinely independent bombing campaign, but it was by no means a certainty. In the summer of 1940 there were no plans for an air campaign against Britain that would last almost a year, though that is eventually what happened.