The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

Revenge for the Berlin raids certainly played a part in explaining the timing of the campaign against London, but the issue is more complicated. The decision to attack London was taken against a long background of British raids on urban targets in Germany. The first raid, on Mönchen-gladbach in the Ruhr, had been made on 11 May. Throughout the period from mid-May to the Berlin raids, British bombers attacked German targets on 103 days, mainly on the North Sea coast or the Ruhr-Rhineland area. The raids were seldom heavy and involved comparatively few casualties but they had the effect of forcing the German population into air-raid shelters for many hours over wide areas not directly affected. During most of August the number of night-time sorties flown by the RAF over Germany was approximately double the number flown by the German Air Force against Britain.⁸⁸ So inaccurate was the British bombing that the German authorities had great difficulty in working out the rationale behind it. After the first raids, the local civil defence units were warned to get everyone into air-raid shelters when the alarm went because enemy bombers ‘drop their bombs planlessly just anywhere’.⁸⁹ By July the apparent aimlessness of attacks, even against small villages or farmsteads, forced civil defence alerts in remote rural areas. The civil defence authorities assumed from repeated attacks on residential districts that British pilots had been given the single task of ‘dropping bombs only to do damage to the civilian population’.⁹⁰ The result of the regular raids on civilian targets in western Germany was to provoke a good deal of public anxiety and demands for retaliation, which grew louder as the British bombing expanded in scale. The Security Service report for 2 September summed up the growing impatience of the population: ‘It is high time that something serious was done about measures of revenge threatened for months.’⁹¹

The possibility of mounting retaliatory attacks against enemy cities in response to enemy attacks was part of German Air Force doctrine and had been repeated in the instructions in July, subject only to Hitler’s personal approval. London was kept in abeyance as a target perhaps to maximize the impact on the population when attacks finally began, but also to shield Berlin from the possibility of retaliation in turn. But given the pressure of popular opinion after four months of repeated British operations against German urban and rural targets, and the very public failure of the German air defence system to protect the capital, Hitler was compelled to make a gesture to meet public expectations. The attacks on Berlin seem to have affected him particularly: ‘a calculated insult’, according to his air force adjutant von Below, which required a response in kind.⁹² There were no moral or legal qualms about the attack on cities, since the RAF raids were widely regarded as evidence that the enemy had already shown a deliberate disregard for civilian casualties in prosecuting the war. This was not mere special pleading. The view of British ruthlessness went back to memories of the wartime naval blockade, which were deeply embedded in the generation now in command of Germany’s war effort. ‘The British are realists,’ Hitler told his dinner companions later in the war, ‘devoid of any scruple, cold as ice.’⁹³ Once again Britain had declared an economic blockade on the day war broke out. Early air force wartime planning documents assumed that Britain might resort to ‘terror measures’ against German cities. Papers found after the defeat of France on Franco-British plans to bomb Soviet oilfields to cut off German oil supplies were used to show just how unscrupulous the British could be.⁹⁴ The operation carried out on 7 September was in this broader sense a ‘revenge attack’, designed to strike a powerful blow to satisfy German domestic opinion, to shock the population of London out of its enthusiasm for war, and perhaps bring RAF bombing to a halt.