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

by Richard Overy

The raids of the autumn of 1943 provoked a mixture of outrage and incomprehension in France. Total deaths from bombing in 1943 reached 7,458, almost three times the level of 1942. A French report on public opinion, which reached the Allies early in 1944, highlighted the damaging effect of persistently inaccurate high-level bombing on a people “tired, worn out by all its miseries, all its privations, all its separations, unnerved by too prolonged a wait for its liberation.”61 The French Air Force, reduced under the armistice terms with Germany to a skeleton organization, tried to assess what object the Allied raids could have. Raids on Paris and against the Dunlop works at Montluçon (this time by Bomber Command) puzzled French airmen, who assumed there must be some secondary purpose behind the pattern of scattered bombing that they had not yet worked out.62 Since the French Air Force could not do its own bombing, much time was spent in 1943 and 1944 observing Allied practice in order to understand the techniques and tactics involved as well as the effects of bombs on urban society, industrial architecture, and popular morale.63 Many of the reports on individual raids highlighted the sheer squandering of resources involved in a bombing operation when three-quarters of the bombs typically missed the target: “The results obtained,” ran a report on the bombing of St.-Étienne, “have no relation to the means employed, and this bombardment represents, like all the others, a waste ...