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

by Richard Overy

The politicians, Churchill included, generally understood morale in political terms: heavy pressure from bombing would induce a social and political collapse, perhaps even a revolution. The German attacks on morale were more clearly economic in intent. In May 1941 the Ministry of Economic Warfare, which had been monitoring the ineffective impact of Bomber Command on precise economic objectives in Germany, sent a memorandum recommending that the RAF abandon military targets and focus instead on economic warfare against major industrial concentrations or “whole cities.” The idea stemmed from the effects of German bombing on the British workforce: “British experience leads us to believe that loss of output . . . through absenteeism and other dislocation consequent upon the destruction of workers’ dwellings and shopping centres is likely to be as great as, if not greater than the production loss which we can expect to inflict by heavy damage.”84 Although the hope for a political dividend from bombing was not abandoned entirely, particularly by Churchill, the Air Ministry came to view morale as a barometer of productive performance rather than political outlook. The same term was used to cover both, but by the time morale became a specified objective in July 1941, it was used as a description of economic attrition—a form of “industrial blockade”—in which the working-class population was attacked as an abstract factor of production whose deaths, disablement, or absence would hav...