The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The difficult task was to be able to gauge with any degree of certainty exactly what effect bombing had had on Britain’s supply of essential food and materials or on British aircraft production. Unlike the British and Americans at the end of the war, the German Air Force was never able to carry out its own bombing survey. In general, its view was over-optimistic about the degree of damage. The aggregate picture of the campaign, the first of its kind, suggested to the Germans the possibility of really debilitating effects. (Details of the location and weight of bombs dropped on major night raids are in Table 2.3.) Nevertheless, the only material the air force had to go on to assess damage were pilots’ reports, photo-reconnaissance and occasional foreign news reports or accounts by neutral observers. Such intelligence could be frustratingly ambiguous, as British and American assessors were to discover later in the war. The photo-reconnaissance of Coventry and Birmingham after the major raids in November 1940 was inhibited by smoke and cloud over the chief target areas, and conclusions had to be extrapolated from the condition of the visible area.¹⁹⁵ The observations of neutrals could be read a number of ways. The American report cited earlier on the long-term damage to London’s infrastructure also contained the author’s opinion that the one important thing evident in the capital among all classes was ‘a mood of remarkable courage, phlegm, an element of “aprés nous le deluge”’. As a result, he continued, ‘the majority of Londoners are firmly convinced that despite everything, England will win’.¹⁹⁶

Table 2.3: Major Night Raids on the British Isles and Weight of Bombs (Tonnes), 12 August 1940–26 June 1941

City	HE Bombs	Incendiaries	Number of Attacks
London	14,754	1,135	79
Liverpool	2,796	304	14
Birmingham	2,057	225	11
Bristol	1,237	248	10
Plymouth	1,125	207	8
Portsmouth	1,091	180	5
Southampton	971	88	7
Coventry	797	69	2
Glasgow	748	176	4
Manchester	703	106	4
Sheffield	587	70	3
Hull	474	57	3
Swansea	363	103	4
Cardiff	273	63	3
Belfast	180	25	2
Others	550	60	–
Total	28,706	3,116	159

^{Source: BA-MA, RL2 IV/27, Bechtle lecture, appendix, ‘Grossangriffe bei Nacht gegen Lebenszentren Englands in der Zeit 12.8.1940–26.6.1941’.}

Air force conclusions were necessarily based on an extravagant and generous interpretation of what had been done. Exaggeration was built into air force estimates of achievement in this, as in most other bombing campaigns during the war. The sight of a blazing city below, the gutted ruins spied from the air a day or so later, suggested complete devastation. All bombing forces assumed that a bombed factory was a destroyed factory, when in reality it meant a factory that needed repairing or dispersing. Ships claimed as sunk by pilots, who could only briefly watch the plume of water or the fires on deck after the bombs fell, might just as easily limp to port hours later. Records show that German pilots regularly reported around four times the number of enemy aircraft actually shot down. In most of these cases there was no way of verifying the claims, though knowledge of the gap between published RAF claims and actual damage to German units ought to have raised serious doubts. And indeed air intelligence used the evidence of physical damage to the British aero industry to try to assess RAF capability over the course of the Blitz rather than rely on pilot reports, though this too was largely conjectural. It was calculated that the output of British combat aircraft fell from a peak of 1,100 in July 1940 to a low of 550 by April 1941. A figure of 7,200 was suggested for total output in 1941. In fact, production in April alone was 1,529, and for the whole year, 20,094.¹⁹⁷