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

by Richard Overy

On May 10, 1940, the first bombs fell on the south German city of Freiburg im Breisgau, killing fifty-seven people, including thirteen children. The German press deplored the evidence of Allied butchery, but the town had been bombed in error by three German aircraft that had lost their way on a flight to attack the French town of Dijon on the first day of the German offensive. Freiburg was later bombed twenty-five times by Allied aircraft.32 It was the following night, on May 11, that the first British bombs fell on the Rhineland; from then on across the summer months bombs fell on a German urban target almost every night. Since the raids were small and the bombing was scattered, the principal effect was to trigger the alarm system over wide parts of western Germany, compelling the population to seek shelter. In Münster in Westphalia there were 157 alarms in 1940, lasting a total of 295 hours, all but 7 of them at night.33 The onset of bombing did not, however, signal the onset of a frontline mentality. Bombing was geographically restricted and distributed in small packets over villages as well as major cities. German propaganda immediately began to condemn the attacks as simple terror bombing, but this was also the view of the German Air Force, which assumed on the basis of the random pattern of the bombs that the British object must be to terrorize the population rather than attack the war economy. This thinking dominated German perception of the Allied offensive for muc...