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

by Richard Overy

This is one of the most important paradoxes raised by the fact of the Anglo-American bombing war. Both were liberal states committed in the 1930s to trying to keep the peace, both were states in which there was widespread public condemnation of bombing civilians, whether in Ethiopia, China, or Spain, yet in both the idea of destroying the “vital centers” or the “social body” was most fully elaborated. Part of the explanation lies in the geopolitical and military realities confronted by both states. Force projection for both had seldom involved a large army, and the army remained, even after the Great War, a component of the defense establishment rather than its driving force, as it was in France, Germany, or the Soviet Union.