The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

For the first months of the bombing campaign the principal target was London, which was attacked for 57 nights in a row and occasionally by nuisance raids during the day. Between 7 September and 31 October, 13,685 tonnes of high explosive and Flammenbomben and 13,000 incendiary canisters were dropped on the capital.¹¹⁹ Unlike the early planning in the British and American bombing campaigns, the German Air Force did not draw up a list of vulnerable industrial target systems but relied more on the geographical pattern of British trade and distribution as a guide to blockade priorities, which explains the particular attention devoted to London. The one exception was the aircraft industry, and in particular the aero-engine industry, which was singled out as the priority industrial target, whose destruction would undermine RAF expansion and fighting capability. On 7 November 1940 Göring issued a new directive for the bombing campaign which left London as the principal target, but instructed the air fleets to undertake operations against the industrial region in the Midlands and Merseyside to destroy the British aircraft industry. The directive specified operations against Coventry (‘Moonlight Sonata’), Birmingham (‘Umbrella’, after Chamberlain) and Wolverhampton (‘All One Price’, a confusion for the popular Woolworths stores).¹²⁰ Raids were carried out on the night of 14–15 November against Coventry and for three nights from 19–20 November against Birmingham. The raid against Wolverhampton was not attempted. For the Coventry raid 503 tonnes of bombs were dropped, including 139 1,000-kg mines, the heaviest available, and 881 canisters of incendiary bombs. The aiming point was a cluster of 30 aero-engine and component factories, including the Daimler and Alvis works. The German post-raid assessment was made difficult by the presence of cloud and smoke, but at least 12 works were identified as severely damaged and a further 8 were presumed to have suffered the same level of destruction. The close proximity of workers’ housing to the 30 aiming points resulted, according to the German raid report, in ‘considerable destruction to the residential areas’, but this was not the principal object of the attack. The raids against Birmingham totalled 762 tonnes of bombs, including 166 of the 1,000-kg and 1,563 incendiary canisters. Here again post-raid images showed that fire had destroyed much of the residential centre, and the few visible industrial targets, particularly the Rover Motor Works, were also seen to have sustained heavy damage. German estimates suggested that 60 per cent of Birmingham’s armaments production had been hit in the raids. The overall assessment of the damage sustained in the attack on Midlands industry painted an optimistic image of German successes: ‘The most important foundation of the British aircraft industry is for the present to be regarded as severely shaken.’¹²¹

The raids undertaken in November represented an escalation of the air war against inland targets. The destruction of residential districts produced high levels of civilian casualties as it had already done in London. Between September and November 1940, 18,261 people were killed in German raids.¹²² German estimates of damage to London reported the aerial evidence that around 50 per cent of the residential area immediately north of the docks (described in the report with the English word ‘slums’) had been rendered uninhabitable. British morale was described as ‘seriously damaged’ now that bombing was no longer confined to strictly military targets.¹²³ Although housing as such was not a specific target and terror-bombing not its particular purpose, the tactical changes initiated in bombing attack – the use of heavy high-explosive bombs, the dropping of mines on land targets, the increased proportion of incendiaries to around half the bombload, regular nuisance raids to maximize the air-raid alarm times and provoke anxiety and fatigue – all contributed to raising the threshold of civilian disruption and casualty. But the chief reason was the declining accuracy of the bomber force under difficult night-time conditions, often in poor weather. The British Meteorological Office produced a report on aimed bombing which showed that on average there were favourable bombing conditions over Britain for only one-quarter of the year; from 20,000 feet there was reasonable visibility for only one-fifth of the year.¹²⁴