The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945

by Richard Overy

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 less dependent on the state and the party. Like the Blitz, Allied bombing created largely passive responses to the problem of survival.