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

by Richard Overy

For the four weeks before D-Day a furious crescendo of bombing descended on the French railway system and the unfortunate housing that surrounded its nodal points. Zuckerman’s calculations in fact underestimated French casualties by a wide margin because transport targets were only part of what Allied air forces were expected to bomb in the weeks leading to invasion. French civil defense officials counted 712 dead in March, 5,144 in April, 9,893 in May, and an estimated 9,517 in June. The total of 25,266 over the four months was almost certainly not complete, given the difficulty of constructing exact records in a dangerous war zone; nor did all the casualties come from attacks on rail targets, but also against bridges and military installations, and German forces.123 They nevertheless represented the overall human cost of the decision to use bombing as the means to reduce the capacity of the German army and air force to oppose the landings in Normandy. The high casualties resulted chiefly from the wide dispersion of bombs against relatively small targets and the large tonnage employed. The 63,636 tons dropped on transport targets exceeded the entire tonnage dropped by the German Air Force during the Blitz on Britain. The French air defense counted 71,000 high-explosive bombs between January and March 1944, but 291,000 from April to June.124 Some attacks achieved a high level of precision, but in many cases bombs were scattered over a wide area. The attack on the rail cent...