The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

None of these British assessments took sufficient account of the costs to Britain’s war effort of maintaining large active air defences and an army of civil defence and emergency personnel, as later assessments of the cost of bombing in Germany have always done. The most significant strategic effect of bombing was the diversion of very substantial military and civilian resources to anti-aircraft defences and civil air-raid precautions. The personnel cost was high, and had to be sustained throughout the war. British Anti-Aircraft Command had 330,000 men by the summer of 1941 and went on to recruit 74,000 women from the Auxiliary Territorial Service.²⁰⁴ The civil defence services in June 1941 employed 216,000 full-time and 1,233,800 part-time personnel (ARP, casualty services, auxiliary police force).²⁰⁵ The fire services at the end of 1940 employed 85,821 full-time and 139,300 part-time, but were supported by the wartime Auxiliary Fire Service, which supplied an additional 67,024 full-time and 125,973 part-time.²⁰⁶ This totalled almost 700,000 full-time and 1.5 million part-time men and women, who would otherwise have been engaged in different wartime activities. The cost of sustaining this ‘civil defence economy’ – uniforms, equipment, provisions, welfare aid, coffins, shelters and so on – was a major item of national and local government expenditure.

The diversion of military resources was also very large. Fighter Command expanded its units in mainland Britain from 58 daytime squadrons in July 1940 to 75 day and night squadrons in January 1941 and 99 by September. As a result it proved impossible to send significant reinforcements of the most advanced fighters overseas. The Middle East and Far East were reinforced with growing numbers of technically inferior or obsolete British and American aircraft.²⁰⁷ Anti-aircraft guns, shells and equipment, and the growing radar network, all diverted production away from any offensive military effort. Defence of Britain was the priority. These many demands on Britain’s war effort as a result of the German bombing campaign represented a large net diversion of resources, regardless of whether the physical damage from German attacks was effective or not. In this sense German Air Force claims were right: Britain’s offensive war effort was curtailed in 1940 and 1941 by the bombing campaign and the expectation of its renewal.

‘HIGH SCHOOL FOR BOMBERS’: GERMAN BOMBING 1941–5

On 14 February 1944 a German Air Force Academy lecturer explored the many phases of the German bombing of Britain since 1941. For eighteen months, he told his audience, there had been no major inland attacks on England. Thanks to a solid and effective defence the only prospect for German bombers and fighter-bombers stationed in France was to undertake small hit-and-run raids on England’s south coast. Even these operations had fallen from an average of 15 a month in 1942 to 5 or 6 a month by late 1943. The risks for the pilots, he continued, were considerable. The raids on England were a kind of ‘high school for bombers’: pilots either learned their trade or they died. The average crew survived no more than 16 to 18 missions. ‘It’s plain to see,’ he concluded, ‘that in this way England’s war economy and morale cannot be hit in any war-decisive way.’²⁰⁸