The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

On the other effects of bombing there was more reticence. No effort seems to have been made to calculate the number of deaths and the area of housing damaged. The eventual death toll of 43,384 from June 1940 to June 1941 was far in excess of the deaths inflicted on the German population by British bombing, which in 1940 numbered only 975. In the absence of any published statistics, it is unlikely that the German side could possibly have guessed how heavy the toll of civilians was. The population was not a specified target, though civilian deaths were to be expected. The high level of casualty was a result not only of the growing inaccuracy of German bombing already noted, but also of the congested nature of the working-class quarters around the major port areas that were bombed and the poor level of shelter provision generally available in inner-city precincts. What interested the German High Command more was damage to the British war effort, which shaped their view of what bombing was supposed to achieve. Throughout the campaign it was stressed how extensive must be the cost to British military output and the supply of military personnel. In a daily briefing to the air force in May 1941, Göring assured his crews that German attacks had achieved ‘enormous damage to the point of complete destruction’ of British armaments capacity. A later summary of the bombing campaign by the air force historical branch in July 1944 continued to assert that ‘many armament factories and ports in England were destroyed and their reconstruction delayed due to the possibility of further attack’. All this was so much guesswork.

Fortunately for the historian, the British authorities undertook their own statistical surveys of German bombing. From October 1940 careful records were kept of all forms of casualty and damage to housing and industry. Estimates of the impact on production were derived from calculating fluctuations in the aggregate supply of electric power to bombed cities. By December there were calculations of the extensive average damage of one ton of German bombs on London: 6 people killed, 25 wounded, 35 rendered homeless, 80 made temporarily homeless, 10 houses destroyed, 25 temporarily uninhabitable, 80 slightly damaged.¹⁹⁸ These proved to be exceptional figures from the early heavy raids. Over the whole course of the German offensive, according to the government scientific adviser Patrick Blackett, German bombs killed 0.8 persons per ton (about four times the rate of RAF killing of Germans in 1941), a total of 44,652 people throughout 1940 and all of 1941. An additional 52,370 were seriously injured. Damaged housing totalled over 2 million, though most were quickly repaired.¹⁹⁹

The impact on the economy was much more modest. Official estimates suggested a loss of just 5 per cent of current production. Studies of the effects of bombing on urban activity rates, measured by electric power consumption, confirmed that except for the single exception of Coventry, which took six weeks to recover from the attack in November 1940, most cities suffered only a temporary loss of 10, 15 or 25 per cent of activity, and they made good that loss at an average of 3 percentage points a day, or between three and eight days.²⁰⁰ Railways, it was observed, ‘continued to maintain nearly normal service’ throughout the Blitz. In most cases temporary repairs and re-routing resulted in no more than a day’s delay. The longest reported interruption to the water supply in 1941 was 24 hours. The grid system for electricity and gas supply meant that industry was little affected by sporadic attacks on sources of energy. Only 0.5 per cent of oil stocks were lost as a result of air raids.²⁰¹ The blockade was similarly unimpressive. The Ministry of Home Security calculated that the bombing destroyed only 5 per cent of British flour-milling capacity, 4 per cent of the production of margarine, 1.6 per cent of oilseed output and 1.5 per cent of the capacity of cold-storage facilities. At no time was the London docks outer basin unserviceable and bombing had ‘no appreciable effect’ on food supply to the capital.²⁰² The measurement of morale was a more challenging task. In a comprehensive survey of the Blitz, produced in August 1941 by British Air Intelligence, it was concluded that ‘no town in England has suffered a breakdown in morale’, though it was admitted that it was not known at what scale of attack, if any, morale actually would collapse.²⁰³ The overall conclusion from the many assessments of German bombing was that it achieved high levels of civilian death and damage to housing, but on the critical issues of war economic performance, air force fighting power, food supply and civilian morale its effects were limited and temporary.