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What were the strategic effects of bombing, and was it moral?
good questions.
As ever, I am indebted to the assistance given in the many archives I have visited, with the exception of the U.S. National Archives at College Park, Maryland, which astonishingly still remains a researcher’s nightmare.
When the Swiss ambassador asked Filov on humanitarian grounds to stop sending Thracian Jews to Auschwitz, Filov retorted that talk of humanity was misconceived when the Allies were busy obliterating the cities of Europe from the air.
The temptation to reach for airpower when other means of exerting direct violent pressure were absent proved hard to resist. Bombing had the virtues of being flexible, costing less than other military options, and enjoying a high public visibility, rather like the gunboat in nineteenth-century diplomacy.
When it came to thinking about what the bomb or bombs might be used for, RAF leaders continued to rely on unverifiable assumptions about the social fragility of the enemy.
The story of the civilian front line in the air war is an aggregate story of loss of extraordinary proportions: an estimated 600,000 killed, a million seriously injured, millions more hurt less severely; millions dispossessed through bomb destruction; 50–60 percent of the urban area of Germany obliterated; countless cultural monuments and works of art irreparably lost.
This raises serious questions about why the states that endorsed bombing never reined back campaigns with such a high civilian cost and in particular why the major liberal democracies, Britain and the United States, ended up organizing strategic bombing campaigns that killed around 1 million people in Europe and Asia during the course of the war.
If the German people were “discouraged, disillusioned and bewildered,” as intelligence reports suggested, they still appeared to have a fear of state terror more powerful than the fear of further bombing.220 “Even when public morale is desperately low,” remarked Portal’s deputy, Norman Bottomley, in a speech in the spring of 1944, “general collapse can for a long while be staved off by a ruthless and desperate party system and a corps of brutal Gestapo hangmen and gangsters.”221 These projections were, as it turned out, broadly correct. The bombing made the German population more rather than
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On March 16–17, 1,127 tons of bombs were dropped on the small medieval city of Würzburg, killing between 4,000 and 5,000 people and destroying 89 percent of the city, a wartime record.
Bombing, as Speer recognized, really did come to constitute a “Second Front” by 1943, preventing German military leaders from using airpower effectively at the fighting front as they had done in all the campaigns from 1939 to 1941. Failure in Russia, in the Mediterranean theater, and against the Allied invasion of France owed a great deal to the fact that German fighter aircraft, guns, ammunition, and radar equipment were tied up in the Reich.
The costs were modest compared with the 9 million Soviet military dead and 5 million German dead, reflecting the priority of both Western Allies to avoid repeating the losses of the Great War for publics likely to be less tolerant of the escalating human cost to themselves than were populations under dictatorship.
From October 1943 they could be subject to compulsory mobilization, and by autumn 1944 an estimated 275,000 female firefighters, aged between eighteen and forty, took their part in combating Allied incendiarism.128 The popular myth that German women did nothing more than guard hearth and home during the war is demonstrably untrue for this most dangerous of activities.
The central problem facing the German war economy in the last years of war was not the bombing but the escalating loss rates at the fighting front.
This record was used by the United States Bombing Survey after the war to estimate German casualties. The total number of dead for 1943 and 1944 from Air Protection Staff records was 100,107 in 1943, 146,300 for 1944, and 13,553 for the month of January 1945. The overall figure for those injured is 305,455.
Altogether 2,212 were severely wounded and 13,718 lightly, but the death toll was much higher. By mid-March the police president reported that 18,375 dead had been accounted for, but estimated the final figure as likely to be 25,000, the number recently agreed as the upper limit by a historical commission set up by the mayor of Dresden in 2004. The bodies were collected in large pyres and those not already incinerated were burned quickly to avoid a health crisis.
The town itself was not hit, an outcome that local people treated as a miracle, apparently evidenced, as one young eyewitness later wrote, by the sign of the cross visible in the sky. She was puzzled by this: “Why of all places should He protect Berchtesgaden, when all of Europe was in ashes?”
The effect of bombing was not, in the end, as the Allies hoped, to drive a wedge between people and regime, but the opposite, to increase dependence on the state and the party and to prompt willing participation by civilians in structures designed for their own defense with a remarkable degree of social discipline.
Air Marshal Sir Douglas Evill, told Churchill that it was the fault of the Italian population for continuing to live near bombing targets.
