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

by Richard Overy

In the last seventeen months of the war three-quarters of all bombs were dropped and approximately two-thirds of all bombing deaths were caused. In Munich, 89 percent of bombs on the city fell in 1944 and 1945; in Mainz, 93 percent of the deaths from bombing occurred in the same two years.228 By the spring of 1945, no part of the contracting German empire remained untouched. Bombing by day and by night did not affect every area simultaneously, and many towns were bombed just once. But bombing and its social and cultural consequences came to dominate the daily lives of millions of Germans, a majority of them female. One young schoolgirl in Berlin, Waltraud Süssmilch, subject to compulsory civil defense training and playground demonstrations, surrounded by bombed areas of the city, straining to distinguish the different rush and explosion of each type of bomb, later recalled the bizarre wartime world in her memoir: “Bombs belonged to my life. I was confronted with them daily. I could not do otherwise. . . . I was no longer a child.”