The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

For the historian the judgement is more complex. Bombing almost certainly contributed to the collapse of any pro-German consensus and strengthened the hand both of the moderate centre-left in the Fatherland Front and of the radical partisan movement. But in the end this did not result in a complete change of government until 9 September 1944, when the Soviet presence produced a Fatherland Front administration dominated by the Bulgarian Communist Party (a political outcome that neither Churchill nor Eden had wanted from the bombing).³⁰ Moreover, other factors played an important role in Bulgarian calculations: the crisis provoked by Italian defeat and surrender in September 1943; the German retreat in the Soviet Union; and fear of a possible Allied Balkan invasion or of Turkish intervention.³¹ Where Churchill saw bombing as a primitive instrument for provoking political crisis and insisted throughout the period from October 1943 to March 1944 that this was the key to knocking Bulgaria out of the war, the American military chiefs continued to give preference to the bombing of Italy and Germany and were less persuaded that a political dividend was certain. For them the bombing fitted with the strategy of wearing down Germany’s capacity for waging war by interrupting the supply of vital war materials and forcing the diversion of German military units from the imminent Normandy campaign. There was also a price to pay for the bombing. In September 1944, following the Bulgarian surrender, some 332 American Air Force prisoners of war were sent by air shuttle to Istanbul and then on to Cairo; some had crashed bombing Bulgaria, others on their way to or from attacks on Romanian targets. An American report suggested that the prisoners had been badly treated. Two air force prisoners were killed by the Bulgarian police, and an estimated 175 American war dead were presumed to be on Bulgarian territory, although only 84 bodies could be located.³²

The bombing of Bulgaria recreated in microcosm the many issues that defined the wider bombing offensives during the Second World War. It was a classic example of what has come to be called ‘strategic bombing’. The definition of strategic bombing is neither neat nor precise. The term itself originated in the First World War when Allied officers sought to describe the nature of long-range air operations carried out against distant targets behind the enemy front line. These were operations organized independently of the ground campaign, even though they were intended to weaken the enemy and make success on the ground more likely. The term ‘strategic’ (or sometimes ‘strategical’) was used by British and American airmen to distinguish the strategy of attacking and wearing down the enemy home front and economy from the strategy of directly assaulting the enemy’s armed forces.