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

by Richard Overy

To abandon the principle that killing civilians from the air was wrong owed a good deal to the British perception of the German enemy. The legal issue involved was sidestepped by two arguments: first, that the Germans had begun unrestricted bombing and would do it again, given the chance; second, that Hitler’s Reich represented such a profound menace to Western civilization that the greater moral imperative was to use every means available to destroy it. The view that the Germans were responsible for bombing civilians first had a long pedigree, stretching back to the Zeppelin and Gotha raids of the First World War, which many RAF commanders had experienced as young officers just over twenty years before. During the 1930s, popular prejudices revived about German science and the German military conniving to produce lethal weapons of mass destruction to be unleashed from the air on an unsuspecting opponent.41 The bombing of the Basque town of Guernica in April 1937 by the German Condor Legion was popularly regarded in the West as evidence that the Germans had once again abandoned any pretense of civilized behavior. The campaign in Poland was scrutinized for evidence that German bombers were deployed for terrorizing and murdering civilians. Although the evidence was ambiguous, since it was understood that the German raids were directed at military targets as part of a combined-arms ground campaign, the RAF preferred to assume that the Germans had bombed indiscriminately. A rep...