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June 8 - June 23, 2025
During the course of the conflict a staggering estimate of around 600,000 European civilians were killed by bomb attack and well over a million more were seriously injured, in some cases physically or mentally disabled for life.
Most of the history written about the bombing offensives in Europe focuses on two different questions: What were the strategic effects of bombing, and was it moral? The two have been linked more often in recent accounts, on the assumption that something that is strategically unjustifiable must also be ethically dubious, and vice versa.
For the British public, during the difficult year that followed defeat in the Battle of France, bombing was one of the few visible things that could be done to the enemy.
A young German soldier captured and interrogated in Italy early in 1945 told his captors, “In the long run your bombings may be good for Germany. They have given her a taste, bitter though it may be, of what war is really like.”
When pacifist clergy lobbied the archbishops of Canterbury and York in 1940 to condemn the British use of bombing, they received the following reply: “The moral issue involved in the victory of the allies is of greater importance than the harsh fact of fighting by methods that one deplores.”
Later in 1941, when calculations were made of the ratio between weight of bombs and expected deaths among German workers, the measurements were given as “1 Coventry,” “2 Coventries,” and so on; an attack on the scale of “4 Coventries” was expected to yield 22,515 German deaths.87 It is important to recognize that the emphasis on killing German workers and destroying their milieu was deliberate, not an unintended consequence of bombing factories.
Harris had two important prejudices that colored his entire period as commander in chief. He held an exceptional hostility to the Germans, which made it possible for him not only to run a campaign of city bombing with high civilian casualties in mind, but also to relish, in his own choice of words, “this lethal campaign.” Harris was known to see the First World War as unfinished business, and he had an instinctive hostility to totalitarian systems, right or left. But neither perhaps explains sufficiently why he regarded the death of ordinary Germans as something to be sought in its own right.
He concluded from this that daytime bombing with the Norden bombsight was ten times more accurate than RAF night bombing.
Harris and Spaatz were both fortunate that bombing was still required in the summer of 1942 as a means to placate the Soviet Union over the failure to open a second front.
Postwar calculations in the United States Bombing Survey suggested a loss of potential overall production of 2.5 percent due to British bombing, or roughly half the impact of the German Blitz on Britain. During the course of 1942, 4,900 Germans had been killed, two for every bomber lost.237 The one solid achievement was to compel the German enemy to divert aircraft, guns, and ammunition to defense against bombing, when they could have been used for the fighting fronts in North Africa and Russia.
The preamble to AWPD-42 stipulated that the offensive was “a combined effort” of the two air forces, the Eighth Air Force concentrating on destroying precision objectives by day, the RAF on night bombing of areas to break down morale.
the RE8 division and the Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW) on the estimated economic damage already done and the potential economic gains from further destruction. This had allowed Portal in November 1942 to present the chiefs of staff with the grisly prediction that Bomber Command in eighteen months could kill 900,000 Germans, seriously injure another million, destroy 6 million homes, and dehouse 25 million people.32 The MEW drew up a detailed list of all the important industrial and commercial targets in the so-called Bombers’ Baedeker (after the famous German tourist guides). Each
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American commanders rejected the idea of city bombing and were skeptical of the claim that morale attacks would diminish the German war effort or create a widespread crisis.
A Special Service Study found that only 2 percent of the American airmen had actually visited a British home.
General Josef Kammhuber had around 400 night fighters, double the level of the previous year, organized in five wings. There were around 500 day fighters in the Western theater protecting the Reich against daylight incursions.
“You bombed a target and got the hell out and got home, there wasn’t much glamour about it,” remembered another. Their primary loyalty was to the other crews about them. “I never worried about the people down below,” said one pilot. “I was more concerned with the ones in the air.”
The American statistical record described those who had finished their tour of thirty operations and returned to the United States as “Happy Warriors”; they were certainly lucky warriors, constituting less than one-fifth of the crews sent to Europe.
American political intelligence was in general dismissive of the idea that bombing alone could generate a German collapse. Spaatz rejected entirely the value of popular war willingness as a target: “Morale in a totalitarian society is irrelevant so long as the control patterns function effectively.”
The high loss rates could not easily be made good by the flying schools, which were under intense pressure to supply crew to every combat theater. The result was a sharp reduction in the length of time devoted to training, which was exacerbated by the careful use of fuel. The hours devoted to training for a new German fighter pilot fell from 210 in 1942 to 112 by 1944; operational training was reduced from 50 hours to 20, and crews could be sent to squadrons with only a few hours’ training on the frontline aircraft they were to fly in combat.
These contrasts were reflected in rates of operational readiness and rates of loss. During the Battle of Britain the peak loss rate for Fighter Command reached 25 percent in September 1940. German Air Force monthly fighter losses were already 30 percent of the force in January 1944 and more than 50 percent by May
Out of 250,000 goods wagons available, almost half were inoperable by late November. Total rail freight traffic fell by 46 percent from September 1944 to January 1945.
Bomber Command losses fell dramatically from the high point of the summer when attacks were still suffering average losses of 6–7 percent. Over the last months of the war, loss rates dropped to an average of 1.5 percent.
In 1943 a Lancaster bomber had lasted on average for twenty-two combat sorties, whereas by 1945 the figure was sixty.
The capacity of the Red Army to complete its victory on the Eastern Front was regarded as more imponderable than it should have been. These uncertainties help to explain the decision that led on the night of February 13–14 in the Saxon city of Dresden to a third major firestorm, which killed approximately 25,000 people in a few hours. No other raid of the war, not even Operation Gomorrah, has generated so much critical attention.
All of these raids, and not just the attack on Dresden, were undertaken in the full knowledge that these cities were filled with civilian refugees from farther east, and that their destruction was likely to cause not just dislocation but high casualties as well.
Recent estimates from a historical commission in Dresden have confirmed that the original figure suggested by the city’s police president in March 1945 of approximately 25,000 dead is the best available estimate. Out of 220,000 homes, 75,000 were destroyed.135 The firestorm, like the Hamburg conflagration, left bodies mummified or reduced to ash, making the final count difficult. A further 1,858 skeletons were unearthed when the city was slowly rebuilt after 1945.
Harris was told of the document by Bottomley, who suggested that Churchill might have been worried about the shortage of German building materials, but Harris was outraged. He replied that city bombing had always been strategically justified because it would shorten the war and save the lives of Allied soldiers, an assertion difficult to reconcile with the five long years of British bombing.
The index of armaments output showed that German production increased threefold between 1941 and 1944, despite all the bombing; some individual categories of weapon expanded more than this, fighter aircraft by a factor of thirteen, tanks by a factor of five, heavy guns by a factor of four.167 As a result of the conquest of much of continental Europe, Germany had access to large resources beyond her borders.
In early 1943, 59 percent of German fighters were in the Western theater facing the bombing; in January 1944, 68 percent; by October 1944, 81 percent.
The antiaircraft service absorbed 255,000 people in 1940, but 889,000 at its peak in 1944; the 14,400 heavy and 42,000 light guns by 1944 required production of 4,000 new guns a month, and antiaircraft units consumed one-fifth of all ammunition, half the production of the electronics industry, and one-third of all optical equipment.
Towering above the surrounding Berlin townscape, coated in green paint to make them less visible from the sky, the colossal towers were prestige buildings. Their cost in labor and resources was prodigious, the “Berlin-Zoo” tower consisting of almost 200,000 tons of concrete, stone, and gravel. The first was completed by April 1941, the second by October, and the third by the spring of 1942.
By the end of the year it was estimated that 85 percent of deaths in German cities were caused by fire rather than high-explosive bombs.
Albert Speer famously recalled in his memoirs his claim at the time that after six more Hamburgs, Germany would be finished.
After 1933, with the new regime’s emphasis on military and economic rearmament, conscious efforts were made to disperse industry away from the more exposed industrial regions behind the western frontier and to place it in relatively bomb-safe areas in central, southern, and eastern Germany, a process known as Verballung, literally, breaking up the industrial “ball.”
As in Britain, a program of camouflage and decoy sites was set up to confuse bombers trying to identify industrial targets in difficult nighttime conditions. The largest and most effective site was at Essen, where the vast Krupp works was reproduced in effigy in the countryside outside the city and sustained, according to German Air Force estimates, around three-quarters of the bombing attacks aimed at the real plant. Decoy sites outside Stuttgart and Karlsruhe attracted well over half of all bombs in 1941.179
which would give an aggregate figure for the whole war period of 328,000, though it would not allow for the exceptional casualty level at Dresden, confirmed by the latest research at approximately 25,000. Adding this would produce a total figure of approximately 353,000,
Unlike National Socialist Germany, Fascist Italy failed to mobilize a large mass movement for voluntary civil defense.
The Air Ministry told Sinclair that the lives of Allied soldiers should not be placed in jeopardy for the sake of a sacred edifice—“are we to place the monuments of the past before the hopes for the future?”—and two days before the operation to attack the marshaling yards Sinclair told Archbishop Temple that the Allies could not refrain from bombing a military objective even if it was near old or beautiful buildings.
There were disagreements not only over what to bomb, but what not to bomb. In contrast to the British attitude, Washington recognized that it was politically expedient to preserve Italian culture from unnecessary damage in order to limit accusations of Allied barbarism.
The occupied territories of western and northern Europe—France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark—absorbed almost 30 percent of the bomb tonnage dropped by the American and British bomber forces.
The only place to be moved as a result of bombing was the Italian town of Cassino. The ruins on the mountainside were declared a national monument and a new and larger town was built on more level ground a mile away from the original site. City centers, where much of the damage had occurred, were also generally restored, with the exception of the heavily bombed British port of Bristol and the German port at Kiel, where there was sufficient bomb damage to allow the relocation of the center to a more geographically convenient quarter.
The publication in 2002 of Jörg Friedrich’s bestseller Der Brand (The Fire) opened up a new wave of debate over the extent to which the victimhood of ordinary people in the bombing war can be reconciled with a persistent collective guilt for the crimes of the Hitler regime.
