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

by Richard Overy

The wide spread of bombs dropped from high altitude and the rising casualty rates that resulted provoked a sudden change in French attitudes during the course of 1943. A French Resistance worker who arrived in Britain in April 1943 warned his new hosts that the population was deeply hostile to high-level American raids, which threatened to undermine irretrievably “the friendly feelings of the entire French population towards the Allies.”51 This shift in opinion coincided with the decision to spread the bombing over all French territory following the German occupation of the southern, unoccupied zone in November 1942. On December 21 the Air Ministry was informed by the Foreign Office that raids on southern French cities were now legally permitted, and on December 29 the BBC broadcast the same warning to the population living there to stay away from military and industrial targets that had been given to the occupied north earlier in the year.52 The guidelines issued in October 1942 on the conduct of raids now applied to the whole of France, but they were not binding on the Eighth Air Force, and when the Renault works in Boulogne-Billancourt were bombed again on April 4, 1943, by eighty-five B-17 Flying Fortresses, the results were very different from a year before. Just under half the bombs hit the industrial complex, but the rest were scattered over a wide residential area. One bomb penetrated the metro station at Pont-de-Sèvres; eighty corpses were identified there and the...