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

by Richard Overy

There was evidence that the occupied peoples positively wanted the RAF to bomb the military and industrial targets in their midst. A Dutch request arrived in August 1940 to bomb the Fokker aircraft works in Amsterdam and a munitions plant at Hemburg (“working full capacity. Please bomb it”).8 A long letter from a French sympathizer forwarded to the Foreign Office in July 1941 claimed that many people in occupied France wanted the RAF to bomb factories working for the Germans: “The bombardments not only have a considerable material effect, but are of primary importance for the future morale of the anglophile population.”9 More letters arrived via Lisbon from Belgian sources explaining that the failure to bomb collaborating factories was attributed in Belgium to British “decadence.” A Belgian Resistance newspaper, Le Peuple, published a report of an informal referendum on bombing taken among workers in factories exploited by the Germans. “Not a single discordant voice,” ran the report. “They all wish for the destruction of plants which work for the enemy.”