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

by Richard Overy

Later in 1941, when calculations were made of the ratio between weight of bombs and expected deaths among German workers, the measurements were given as “1 Coventry,” “2 Coventries,” and so on; an attack on the scale of “4 Coventries” was expected to yield 22,515 German deaths.87 It is important to recognize that the emphasis on killing German workers and destroying their milieu was deliberate, not an unintended consequence of bombing factories. In November 1940 a memorandum on bombing policy, almost certainly penned by Harris, asked whether the time had not come to strike in full force “against the people themselves.” In May 1941 the director of Air Intelligence welcomed an attack on “the livelihood, the homes, the cooking, heating, lighting and family life of that section of the population which, in any country, is least mobile and most vulnerable to a general air attack—the working class.” The chiefs of staff in June finally endorsed morale attacks that induced “fear of death and mutilation.”88 The idea of collateral damage had been turned on its head: instead of the death of workers and the destruction of their housing being a side effect of hitting factories, damage to factories was a collateral effect of destroying working-class neighborhoods.