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

by Richard Overy

It has sometimes been remarked that the French failed to exhibit the “Blitz spirit” evident in Britain, and later in Germany, in the face of bombing. In a great many ways the opposite is true. The French population faced an inescapable dilemma that made it difficult to know how to respond to the raids: they wanted the Allies who were bombing them to win, and they wanted the Germans who protected them to lose. Since they were not themselves at war, the sense that they represented a national “front line” against a barbarous enemy could not as easily be used to mobilize the population as it could in Britain and Germany. The bombing was not part of an orchestrated offensive against French morale, and civilians were not supposed to be a target; nor was bombing experienced either regularly or over a wide area, except for the bombing of northern France during the Allied invasion. French towns and cities were nevertheless caught between two dangerous forces, the German occupiers and Vichy collaborators on the one hand, and the Allied air forces (including the B-24 “Liberator”) on the other. Resisting the Germans by helping Allied aircrew or sabotaging what had not been bombed meant running the risk of discovery, torture, and execution that no one in Britain’s Blitz was expected to face. Lesser infractions—deliberate refusal to observe the blackout, or absenteeism from a civil defense unit—could be interpreted by the occupiers not simply as an act of negligence but as an act of res...