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

by Richard Overy

Whatever Churchill’s misgivings, British city bombing continued in ways that were evidently punitive in nature and excessive in scale. Just ten days after Dresden, Bomber Command attacked the small town of Pforzheim. The marking worked well and the bombers dropped their loads from just 8,000 feet (instead of 18,000–20,000 feet on raids against defended targets); the subsequent conflagration consumed 83 percent of the city area, until then the worst in any raid of the war, and killed an estimated 17,600 people, though the death toll, the third highest in the European bombing war, has never had the publicity accorded to Dresden. The ruins of Cologne, hit by more than 250 wartime raids, were raked over again by a massive Bomber Command attack on March 2 by over 700 Lancasters, just four days before it was occupied by American forces. Essen suffered the same fate on March 11, with a macabre finale by over 1,000 bombers dropping 4,661 tons on a desolate landscape only hours before it fell to the advancing army.