The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

It is against this background that sense can be made of the Allied decision to launch a series of heavy air attacks on Bulgarian cities. Knowing that Bulgaria was facing a mounting crisis, caught between its German ally and the growing threat of a likely Soviet victory, Allied leaders were encouraged to use bombing as a political tool in the hope that it might produce a quick dividend by forcing Bulgaria out of the war. The idea that bombing was capable of a sudden decisive blow by demoralizing a population and causing a government crisis had been at the heart of much interwar thinking about the use of air power. It was the logic of the most famous statement of this principle made in 1921 by the Italian general, Giulio Douhet, in his classic study The Command of the Air (Il dominio dell’aria). The principle was also a central element in the view of air power held by the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, who had previously applied it to both Germany and Italy. It was not by chance that in a meeting with the British chiefs of staff on 19 October 1943, it was Churchill who should suggest that in his view the Bulgarians were a ‘peccant people to whom a sharp lesson should be administered’. Their fault was to have sided once again with the Germans despite, Churchill claimed, his efforts to get them to see sense. Bombing was designed to undo the cord that bound Bulgaria to her German patron.

The sharp lesson was to be a heavy bombing attack on Sofia. Churchill justified the operation on political grounds: ‘experience shows,’ he told the meeting, ‘that the effect of bombing a country where there were antagonistic elements was not to unite those elements, but rather to increase the anger of the anti-war party’.⁶ Others present, including Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, chief of the air staff, and the chief of the general staff, General Alan Brooke, were less keen and insisted that leaflets should be dropped along with the bombs explaining that the Allies wanted Bulgaria to withdraw its occupation troops and surrender (in the end a leaflet was dropped with the curious headline ‘This is not about Allied terror, but about Bulgarian insanity’).⁷ But the idea of a ‘sharp lesson’ quickly circulated. The American military chiefs thought that Sofia was so low a military priority that an attack was scarcely justified, but they were impressed by the possible ‘great psychological effect’.⁸ Both the British and American ambassadors in Ankara urged an attack so as to interrupt Turkish-German commercial rail traffic.⁹ On 24 October the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff directed General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander in the Mediterranean, to give such a lesson as soon as this was operationally practical.¹⁰ The Turkish government approved, hopeful perhaps despite neutrality to profit from Bulgaria’s discomfiture in any post-war settlement. Churchill wanted Stalin’s say-so as well because Bulgaria was clearly in the Soviet sphere of interest. On 29 October the British Foreign Minister, Anthony Eden, who was in Moscow for negotiations, was able to report back Stalin’s comment that Sofia should certainly be bombed as it was nothing more than ‘a province of Germany’.¹¹

The Bulgarian government had expected bombing for some time. While the regime struggled to come to terms with internal dissent, the Soviet presence in the east and Allied demands for unconditional surrender, it also sought ways to appease the Germans in case they decided to occupy Bulgaria. In the course of 1943 the deportation of Jews from the occupied areas of Thrace was completed and, despite the hostility of the Tsar, the German authorities in Sofia persuaded the Bulgarian government to deport native Bulgarian Jews as well. It was agreed that they would first be transferred to 20 small towns in the hinterland around Sofia and in May 1943 some 16,000 Jews were taken at short notice from the capital and parcelled out among eight provinces. The Filov government linked the Jewish policy with bombing. When the Swiss ambassador asked Filov to stop sending Thracian Jews to Auschwitz on humanitarian grounds, Filov retorted that talk of humanity was misconceived when the Allies were busy obliterating the cities of Europe from the air. Moreover, when he failed to take up a British offer in February 1943 to transport 4,500 Jewish children from Bulgaria to Palestine, he feared that Sofia might be bombed in retaliation.¹² Once the Jews of Sofia had been deported to the provinces, anxiety revived again in Bulgaria that the Allies would now no longer hesitate to bomb from fear of killing Jews. In the end the Jews of Bulgaria not only escaped deportation to Auschwitz but also escaped the bombing, which left much of Sofia’s Jewish quarter in ruins.