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

by Richard Overy

The destruction was welcomed by the troops on the ground, who were seen to cheer as the bombers flew in, but the results of these raids (and attacks by Kittyhawk and Mustang fighter-bombers during the two days that followed) were mixed. The vast abbey walls remained intact, in places to a height of thirty feet, making the gutted building ideal for the German forces who now obligingly occupied it as a hilltop fortress from where they repelled the Indian and New Zealand efforts to dislodge them. The operation suffered from the usual bomb pattern, some bombs destroying the headquarters of the local Eighth Army commander, General Oliver Leese, three miles from the abbey, and the French Corps headquarters twelve miles away.121 The publicity surrounding the destruction, much of it hostile, forced the chiefs of staff to investigate who had ordered the bombing and why. On March 9, Wilson replied that the abbey building was undoubtedly “part of the German main defensive position” and had to be eliminated to ensure success.122 Slessor, Eaker’s deputy, recalled in his memoirs that no one among the troops would have believed for a moment that the Germans were not using the building as a fortress, “so the Abbey had to go,” but he was critical of what the bombing actually achieved given that it took more months to capture the hilltop, now fully occupied by the enemy.123 A War Office investigation in 1949 into the circumstances of the bombing finally confirmed that there had been no evid...