The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

There were nevertheless strategic gains to be made from the bombing campaign, which Hitler also recognized. The bombing kept up consistent pressure on the British war effort and always carried the possibility that Britain’s war willingness would decline to the point of abandoning the struggle. It is also possible to read the bombing as a warning to the United States not to support Britain or to intervene in the conflict. President Roosevelt received regular reports on the course of the air war and it was some months before either he or the United States military leadership were confident enough of Britain’s survival to send aid without the risk that it would fall into German hands.¹⁹⁰ The bombing also supported German strategy in other parts of Europe. During the latter part of 1940 Hitler became increasingly concerned with the Mediterranean and Balkan theatres, not only because of Italian difficulties in the war with British Commonwealth forces in North Africa and the Italian invasion of Greece, launched on 28 October 1940, but because he feared that Britain might intervene militarily in the Balkans, opening up the possibility of a third front, as had happened in the First World War.¹⁹¹ Bombing was one way to ensure that large resources would have to be kept in mainland Britain rather than be diverted to other theatres, weakening the British position in the Mediterranean, Middle East and South-East Asia, where small numbers of obsolete aircraft would prove no match for the German and, later, the Japanese air forces. In spring 1941 the British were expelled from Greece and Crete, unable to contest German air superiority, and the way was open for Hitler’s invasion to the east.

Above all the bombing was intimately linked with the decision to invade Russia in 1941. The two strands of Hitler’s strategy are usually described as if they were separate, but they were complementary: first because bombing would persuade Moscow that the war in the west was Hitler’s priority; second because it would limit any help that Britain might be able to give the Soviet Union once Barbarossa was under way. The German air campaign certainly convinced Stalin that Hitler intended to finish Britain off first and contributed to his conviction that Germany would not attack the Soviet Union in 1941. The Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky, confirmed in his memoirs the Soviet view at the time that Hitler did not just want to use bombing as pressure on Britain to negotiate, but as a prelude to the physical conquest of the British Isles.¹⁹² It is not by chance that the German Air Force indulged in a final heavy flourish against Britain in the weeks just before the launch of Barbarossa. Moreover, the war against the Soviet Union would have presented a greater element of risk if Britain had been allowed the luxury to arm and prepare for military intervention or increased bombing of Germany once German forces were occupied in the east, as a German wartime analysis of the bombing later suggested:

In general the 10 months of uninterrupted attacks on the British Isles were of considerable importance in the subsequent unfolding of events. Even if this purely strategic air offensive did not force any decisions, the damage to enemy supplies and economy was nevertheless great… It was two years before the RAF was able to deal any effective counter blows. Thus the time when the Reich would have come under heavy attack had been delayed. Our flyers had assured that the Russian offensive would not be undermined from the rear.¹⁹³

When the invasion of the Soviet Union began in late June 1941, Goebbels observed in his diary that the RAF had ‘by and large not exploited the situation’ beyond a handful of unsuccessful raids. German bombing had pushed Britain onto the defensive at a critical juncture for German strategy.¹⁹⁴