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

by Richard Overy

In late 1942 the Italian Air Force had only forty-four serviceable night fighters, most of them biplanes incapable of effective intervention.104 The opposition from Italian antiaircraft and fighters disappeared in autumn 1943, to be replaced with a large concentration of German antiaircraft artillery around key targets. But the overwhelming air superiority enjoyed by Allied forces following the Axis defeat in Africa and the conquest of Sicily meant that by 1943 there was little effective fighter opposition from the German Air Force, with the result that higher levels of accuracy were possible than could be achieved over Germany. Bomber Command raids in summer 1943 using H2S radar dropped between 70 and 87 percent of bombs within three miles of their target, while most raids on Berlin at the same time could only achieve 30 percent—not precise by any standard, but more concentrated and hence more destructive.