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

by Richard Overy

Two raids, one on St.-Étienne on May 26, 1944, and one on Marseille the following day, resulted in heavy loss of civilian life. At St.-Étienne the alert sounded in good time; the 150 B-17s attacked in waves from around 13,000 feet, and half the bombs fell in the zone around the rail links. But there were too few proper shelters for a population unused to the air threat and more than 1,084 were killed. The effect on rail traffic was limited. Rail lines remained open and the damage, such as it was, could be overcome in just four days. The attack on Marseille on May 27, flown at an estimated 20,000 feet, against stations at St.-Charles and Blancarde, both situated in the heart of the city’s residential area, scattered bombs over ten of the city’s quarters, destroying 500 buildings and killing 1,752 people. Again Passive Defense observed the “insouciance” of a population hit by an air raid for the first time and the absence of effective civil defense training. The stations were unimportant (one was a railway cul-de-sac), but the effect of the raid was to create a crisis of public morale and strong hostility to the air forces that carried out the attack.127 The scale of the raiding and the damage inflicted brought protests from the French Resistance and the French authorities in London. The French Commissariat for Foreign Affairs warned the Foreign Office in early May that the raids were having a damaging effect on French opinion; in early June a resolution from the Resistance ...