The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

30. Andreas Huyssen, ‘Air War Legacies: From Dresden to Baghdad’, in Bill Niven (ed), Germans as Victims (Basingstoke: 2006), 184–9; Peter Schneider, ‘Deutsche als Opfer? Über ein Tabu der Nachkriegsgeneration’, in Lothar Kettenacker (ed), Ein Volk von Opfern? Die neue Debatte um den Bombenkrieg 1940–1945 (Berlin: 2003), 158–65.

31. Mark Connelly, Stefan Goebel, ‘Zwischen Erinnerungspolitik und Erinnerungskonsum: Der Luftkrieg in Grossbritannien’, in Jörg Arnold, Dietmar Süss, Malte Thiessen (eds), Luftkrieg: Erinnerungen in Deutschland und Europa (Göttingen: 2009), 55–60, 65.

32. I am grateful to Professor Dobrinka Parusheva for supplying me with information on the Bulgarian protests.

Acknowledgements

This book owes much to the generosity of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and to the Leverhulme Trust, the first for funding a major research project on ‘Bombing-States and Peoples in Western Europe’ in the years 2007–10, which I helped to direct at the University of Exeter, the second for funding a year of research leave in 2010–11 to allow me to complete most of the archive research and begin writing. I would also like to thank the University of Exeter for allowing me a number of semesters of leave to work on the bombing project. I owe a particular debt to the support and help given by the team on the AHRC project – Claudia Baldoli, Vanessa Chambers, Lindsey Dodd, Stephan Glienke, Andy Knapp, Marc Wiggam – and I hope they find that the end product has been worth all our many brainstorming sessions. I would also like to thank Claire Keyte for all her unstinting assistance in helping us manage the AHRC project and its aftermath.

Over the course of the preparation and writing of this book I have relied on the help, advice and criticism of a great many people. I owe a particular debt to those who have helped me find archive material or have translated what I couldn’t read. Dr Matthias Uhl devoted many hours to searching out and organizing material from the German and Soviet archives deposited in Moscow. To him and his anonymous assistants I owe a large debt of thanks. The Russian material has been rendered into English for me by Olesya Khromeychuk and Elena Minina, for which I am also deeply grateful. The Bulgarian account of the bombing of Bulgaria was made accessible to me thanks to the help of Professor Dobrinka Parusheva in Sofia and Vladislava Ibberson, who did the translation. Material on the Soviet bombing of Finland was very kindly supplied by Dr Anu Heiskanen from Helsinki and, for the bombing of Rotterdam, by Major Joris van Esch during his time at the US Military Academy. Pieter Serrien was generous in providing information on the bombing of Belgium. As ever I am indebted to the assistance given in the many archives I have visited, with the exception of the American National Archive at College Park, Maryland, which astonishingly still remains a researcher’s nightmare.

Many other people have contributed in one way or another in helping to get this book finished and providing material, information or advice: in particular Martin Alexander, Monika Baar, Maria Bucur, Nicholas Chapman, Sebastian Cox, Jeremy Crang, Juliet Gardiner, Jim Goodchild, Hein Klemann, Sergei Kudryashov, James Mark, Phillips O’Brien, Anna Reid, Matthias Reiss, Laura Rowe, Nick Terry, Martin Thomas and Richard Toye. I would also like to offer a general thanks to all my students at Exeter who have taken my course on the history of bombing over the last five years and made the teaching so enjoyable. They have often made me think about issues differently, or reassess things I took for granted. I hope they will see some of that intellectual conversation reproduced here. For any remaining errors I have only myself to blame.

To my agent Gill Coleridge and her assistant Cara Jones my grateful thanks for their enthusiastic support. I am indebted as ever to the team at Penguin Press – Simon Winder, Richard Duguid, Penny Vogler – and to my copy-editor, Richard Mason, for all their help in turning the manuscript into its final polished form.

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