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

by Richard Overy

There can be little room for doubt that the experience of bombing was deeply demoralizing for many of those who survived it, though it could also provoke sudden moments of exhilaration, or induce a profound apathy, but the difficulty in drawing any clear causal links between bombing and popular response is simply that the response was as varied, irregular, unpredictable, and diverse as the society that made it. The social reaction to bombing is often treated as if it must be uniform, but it differed widely between states and within communities. This was a reality seldom appreciated by those doing the bombing, for whom “Germans” or “Italians” or even “Bulgarians” became simply a generic description of the human target. One of the key questions still debated about the bombing war is why the bombed societies did not collapse at once under the impact, as conventional wisdom before 1939 suggested they would. This is too simple an approach. Bombing did place enormous strains on local communities, and some did experience a cumulative or temporary social breakdown as a result, but it was always a long step from local social crisis to the complete collapse of a war effort. To understand why “morale” did not collapse in Germany in any meaningful way, but evidently declined in Italy prior to surrender in 1943, is to engage with complex issues of social cohesion defined by regional differences, the intensity of the bombing experience, the nature of the prevailing state and local admin...