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

by Richard Overy

During the summer and autumn of 1940 the population viewed the war differently from the embattled British under the German Blitz; buoyed up by the sense of a historic victory and expecting Britain soon to abandon the war, they did not seem to view the bombing with the same sense of battle.

The air-raid legislation of September 1, 1939, promised payment of 90 percent of wages lost, but this had not anticipated the long periods of alarm when there were no attacks. One solution was to change the alarm system to ensure that as little time as possible was lost from productive work, and eventually the two-tier system of general alarm, followed by all-clear, was changed in favor of a series of step alarms in which the local civil defense would be notified first, followed by a “raid possible” siren, then a general alarm. Industries were expected to work through the general alarm until a final six-minute warning was sounded to give workers time to get to the shelters.

In the summer of 1940 it was decided that the 90 percent wage compensation should be changed into an obligation to work extra time to make up for lost production or to help in repair and debris clearance after a raid, to make sure that workers were being paid for actual work. But this decision produced many anomalies and provoked working-class resentment, as had other restrictions on pay introduced with the onset of war.40 Salary earners, for example, were paid 100 percent loss of earnings, while in February 1941 the Ministry of Labor agreed that porters and ancillary staff were also entitled to pay during alarms, but could not be expected to make up lost time for nonproductive work. By contrast, it was decided that home workers were entitled to nothing since they could work extra hours when they chose.41 The consequence was that some workers were paid compensation for doing nothing, whereas others were paid nothing and made to work extra hours. It was evident that the escalating air attacks in 1941 made working-class morale a critical issue. A meeting in October between the Labor Ministry, the giant Labor Front union (representing 26 million workers), the Propaganda Ministry, and the Party Chancellery concluded that morale was more important and insisted that the Labor Ministry find ways of improving compensation and assistance for workers who faced increased travel costs or short-term unemployment as a result of bombing, though not before the Labor Ministry representativ...

A decree in December 1940 instructed all local labor offices to ensure that no compensation for loss of earnings would be paid to Jewish workers, on the grounds that the war “to a not inconsiderable extent can be traced back to the influence of World Jewry.”44 A second order on July 23, 1941, excluded German Jews or Jewish-owned businesses from making any claim for damage compensation under the “War Damage Order.”45 Efforts were made from early in the RAF campaign to help the bombed-out (Obdachlose) by housing them in apartments owned by German Jews. In the Rhineland city of Soest the decision was taken in the late autumn of 1940, and although the Interior Ministry highlighted the possible legal problems with doing so, the policy of replacing Jewish householders with “Aryans” became established by the time of the heavy raids in the spring of 1942.46 In Cologne the Jewish occupiers were removed to crude barracks while Jewish houses and apartments were redistributed. The Party Chancellery confirmed in April 1942 that if British raids continued, “we will pursue this measure completely and clear out all the Jewish homes.”

A few weeks before the “Immediate Program,” Hitler had also ordered the construction of six vast “Flak-towers” in Berlin. The extraordinary scale of the buildings appealed to his sense of the architecturally gigantic, like the plans for the rebuilding of the capital. Their solid design, modeled on a towered Gothic castle, was deliberately intended to express both grim defiance and grotesque physical power, a blend of function and ideology, “like a fantastic monstrosity,” one eyewitness wrote, “from a lost world, or another planet.”61 They were planned to provide not only enhanced antiaircraft fire but protection for up to 20,000 people, artworks, museum collections, essential defense services, hospitals, and a Gestapo office. Towering above the surrounding Berlin townscape, coated in green paint to make them less visible from the sky, the colossal towers were prestige buildings. Their cost in labor and resources was prodigious, the “Berlin-Zoo” tower consisting of almost 200,000 tons of concrete, stone, and gravel. The first was completed by April 1941, the second by October, and the third by the spring of 1942. Hitler approved two more tower sets to guard the port in Hamburg; one was finished by October 1942, a second just before Operation Gomorrah, in July 1943. Between them they could hold 30,000 people. Two more tower pairs were built in Vienna in 1943 and 1944, capable of holding not only the cultural treasures of the city, but at least 40,000 of its inhabitants. The ...

According to yet another Hitler decree published in August 1943 after Operation Gomorrah, the aim of all the new emergency arrangements for coping with air raids was “the restoration of normal life as quickly as possible.”85 Though this was not easy in the few major cities where repeated heavy bombing began in 1943, the object of the new “action culture” was to make sure that one way or another the problems of welfare, compensation, rehousing, damage repair, and evacuation allowed an adequate community life to continue. A good example of how this worked was the post-raid activity in the Berlin suburb of Schöneberg, bombed heavily on March 1–2, 1943, leaving 11,000 temporarily homeless. They were gathered first in the seventy-one emergency rest centers, with room for between 25,000 and 40,000 people in converted cafés, schools, restaurants, and boardinghouses.86 There they were given food, spirits, cigarettes, substitute ration cards, and a provisional sum, in cash or vouchers, for the most urgent replacement clothing and household goods. Those who could not be placed with friends or relatives at once could be found substitute housing, particularly former Jewish homes, with priority for families with children whose houses had been completely destroyed. Evacuation was recommended only in exceptional circumstances, and then to areas if possible within the same urban region, or the same Gau. Over 7,000 were rehoused within two days. The salvaged goods had to be left in the str...

Hamburg was not unprepared for its ordeal, but the scale of the three nights of attack on July 24–25, 27–28, and 29–30 overwhelmed the thousands of trained personnel. After declaring a state of emergency, the Reich defense commissar, gauleiter Karl Kaufmann, called in mutual assistance from outside the city from as far away as Dresden. At the height of the crisis there were 14,000 firefighters, 12,000 soldiers, and 8,000 emergency workers, but although they were able to achieve limited containment of the fire area, the conflagrations soon grew out of control, consuming everything in their path.104 The firestorm caused by the second raid fed on the oxygen in the thousands of cellars used as “air-protection rooms,” where people sat slowly asphyxiating from carbon monoxide poisoning or were burnt so completely that doctors afterward had to estimate the number of dead by measuring the ash left on the floor. Others died with apparently no external injuries because their body temperature rose above 42 degrees Celsius (107.6 degrees Fahrenheit), causing the body’s natural regulator to collapse from “over-warming.”105 By the end of the year it was estimated that 85 percent of deaths in German cities were caused by fire rather than high-explosive bombs.

There were strong demands that the dead in bombing raids should be marked in the newspapers with an iron cross, like the military dead. The Propaganda Ministry approved of the idea in December 1941, but it was overturned by Hitler in January 1942 (who did not want women to be honored that way) and rejected by the armed forces, who thought that it would diminish the value of the symbol for the military dead.

In some ways bombing actually created a safety valve for popular disaffection. Rumors could represent a surreptitious challenge to prescribed public discourse without amounting to serious dissent. In the shelters it was sometimes possible for the small communities that inhabited them to complain about their hardships or to satirize the regime without fear of punishment. In one Berlin bunker, Hitler was always referred to as “The Hitler,” an intentionally less flattering epithet than “our Führer.” The local warden turned a blind eye both to this and to harsher complaints directed at the dictatorship.167 For the bombed-out, the opportunity to let off steam could also be tolerated. One generic story, cited by a number of observers, told of a hysterical woman evacuee challenging the police to arrest her for some trivial offense because at least she would have a roof over her head. In each version of the story, the police do nothing.168 The SD reports noted a widely circulating rumor in August 1943 that the Allies had promised to stop the bombing if the government was changed; this was a brave rumor to pass on, but it was overheard in towns as far apart as Innsbruck and Königsberg.169 It was also evident that the anxieties and fears generated by bombing in particular affected not only the home front but the fighting front as well. Censors intercepted letters giving painful details of the effects of heavy raids; soldiers on leave could see these effects for themselves. An SD rep...

As in Britain, a program of camouflage and decoy sites was set up to confuse bombers trying to identify industrial targets in difficult nighttime conditions. The largest and most effective site was at Essen, where the vast Krupp works was reproduced in effigy in the countryside outside the city and sustained, according to German Air Force estimates, around three-quarters of the bombing attacks aimed at the real plant. Decoy sites outside Stuttgart and Karlsruhe attracted well over half of all bombs in 1941.179 In Berlin elaborate efforts were made to disguise the government quarter to avoid the danger of bombing. The Brandenburg Gate was reconstructed along with mock ministries farther from the center while prominent landmarks were concealed. The east-west axis road in the center of Berlin was covered with a canopy of wire netting and green gauze, while lampposts were covered with green material to look like trees. A lake in west Berlin was covered with green netting with a length of gray material laid across it to resemble a road.180 Outside the city, sixteen major dummy industrial sites were set up, which attracted British bombs throughout the war. When firebombing became the principal RAF method, the German Air Force set up fire sites in small walled enclosures to mimic the appearance of blazing buildings. These too proved highly effective for much of the war. To accentuate the disruptive effect of industrially generated smog, the air force also introduced artificial sm...

Productive performance was held back as much by poor planning as by potential resource bottlenecks, which only really inhibited war production in Germany at the end of 1944 when bombing, the collapse of the economic New Order, and the disruption of trade finally reduced German access to key materials.

Factories that had been bombed but were still able to function were told not to put on a new roof but to construct a black cover below roof level to simulate an empty building; fire-damaged external walls were kept in place to make it look as though the plant had been abandoned. Other undamaged buildings had camouflage damage painted on the sides.

The result was that even in cities badly hit, it was still possible to maintain a large proportion of pre-raid production. In Augsburg, for example, where industry was among the most heavily damaged, the average value of monthly production was 964,000 RM in the last five months of 1943; in the five months of heavy raiding in 1944 the average was 814,000 RM. In Hagen, hit by four heavy attacks in 1943, the pre-raid average value was 5.2 million RM, the post-raid value 5.17 million. Much of any loss was absorbed by cutting consumer production and concentrating on war-essential products.

Yet in the end the greatest incentive for workers to remain at work was the need for regular wages to support them and their families, and the fear that defeat would usher in a return to the Depression days of high unemployment and short-time working and the possible dismemberment of Germany. Bombing gave them no incentive to give up.

Bombing forced the German productive system to become more flexible and improvisatory in ways that the Allied air forces had not anticipated.

The output of aircraft and tanks, which relied extensively on ball bearings, was affected hardly at all thanks to design changes. By the time ball-bearing supply was back to its pre-raid level, aircraft production was 58 percent greater, tank production 54 percent.

The whole dispersal policy ensured that aircraft output would reach a peak of almost 40,000 aircraft in a year when 1 million tons of bombs were dropped on German and German-occupied targets. Bombing might have prevented higher output, but the aircraft industry would anyway have faced limitations from raw materials and labor supplies in trying to produce more, with or without bombing.

Women constituted more than 50 percent of the total German workforce by the end of the war.

The assumption for Allied planners was that urban destruction would create a growing problem of absenteeism, which would contribute to undermining armaments production. Yet the statistics show that bombing contributed only a small proportion of lost hours in 1944. According to records compiled by the Economics Ministry, in October 1944 only 2.5 percent of hours lost nationally were attributed to air raids. Absenteeism was a result of illness, leave, truancy, or workplace problems—a total of 16 percent lost work hours—but was not directly caused by bomb attack.

One explanation is that the large proportion of foreign, prisoner of war, and concentration camp workers made it possible to use coercion to keep them working. At the Ford works in Cologne, absenteeism was a problem only among German workers. In 1944 it was estimated that 25 percent of the German workforce was absent on average over the year, whereas the figure for the eastern workers (Russians, Poles, Ukrainians) was only 3 percent. German workers either absented themselves permanently—a total of 1,000 at Ford in 1944, two-thirds of them women—or returned slowly after a raid, one-tenth after one to two days, two-thirds after two weeks.213 For the German war economy one of the major advantages of exploiting captive labor on a large scale in 1944 and 1945 was the possibility of controlling their work effort even in the adverse conditions imposed by heavy bombing.

Allied bombing was at its most dangerous in 1944 when it targeted large capital projects in oil and chemicals that could not easily be moved or substituted, unlike ball bearings or aircraft.

German fuel supply relied in the end on being able to repair quickly enough the damage to the existing plants.217 The problems posed by trying to repair damage and supply replacement components were critical in explaining the final collapse of the German war economy under the remorseless punishment inflicted in the last months of the war. Even before the onset of the transportation bombing in September 1944, random interruption to an overstretched communications system led to regular holdups in getting damaged plants repaired, machines replaced, or vital components and equipment supplied. The weekly reports on economic conditions produced by the Economics Ministry throughout 1944 reiterate the problems presented by interrupted rail lines and damaged rolling stock.

Given the artificial concentration on war production at all costs, the chronic stress on the workforce laboring sixty to seventy hours a week, and the rapid contraction of the European supply base, there were limits to how far the German war economy could be pushed, even without the effects of bombing. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith, drafted to assess the German economy at the end of the war, judged that in 1944 German production, bombing or not, was approaching “what might be called a general bottleneck.”221 The weight of attack from September 1944 on a taut economic structure confirmed that the German war economy had reached its limit. There was a sudden increase in the number of firms reporting air-raid damage. In July there were 421, of which 150 were totally or severely damaged; in September there were 674, with 253 in the worst categories; in November 1944, 311 out of 664 firms had suffered total or severe loss.222 The economy kept going during the last eight months of war using accumulated stocks to compensate for the slow decline in the supply of basic materials—steel, iron, aluminum, machine tools—and the cumulative effect of the loss of rail and water transport for the supply of coal. As a result, peak wartime production for artillery, armored fighting vehicles, and fighter aircraft was actually reached in the last three months of 1944.223 After that, production collapsed rapidly as the encircling armies and the enveloping air fleets tightened their noose a...

Bombing critically affected the German productive economy only during the last months of the war, but even though a ceiling was placed on further expansion, war production continued to increase until the crisis provoked by the loss of territory, the failure of the dispersal schemes, and the collapse of the repair cycle. A combination of effective work protection, control of the workforce, concealment and deception, dispersal of key production, and insistent policies on concentration and rationalization had succeeded in limiting the damage that air attack could inflict on industry, though not on the cityscapes and urban populations that surrounded it.

Hans Rumpf, chief inspector of the German fire service, later observed that the dismantling and reparation regime established by the Allies in the occupied zones of Germany after the war’s end took a much higher proportion of German industrial capacity than the fraction destroyed by bombing. Of German engineering capacity, 20 percent was destroyed from the air, 70 percent by Allied requisitioning.

In the last seventeen months of the war three-quarters of all bombs were dropped and approximately two-thirds of all bombing deaths were caused. In Munich, 89 percent of bombs on the city fell in 1944 and 1945; in Mainz, 93 percent of the deaths from bombing occurred in the same two years.228 By the spring of 1945, no part of the contracting German empire remained untouched. Bombing by day and by night did not affect every area simultaneously, and many towns were bombed just once. But bombing and its social and cultural consequences came to dominate the daily lives of millions of Germans, a majority of them female. One young schoolgirl in Berlin, Waltraud Süssmilch, subject to compulsory civil defense training and playground demonstrations, surrounded by bombed areas of the city, straining to distinguish the different rush and explosion of each type of bomb, later recalled the bizarre wartime world in her memoir: “Bombs belonged to my life. I was confronted with them daily. I could not do otherwise. . . . I was no longer a child.”

City dwellers were encouraged to move away from city centers, where the majority of deaths from fire were caused. In an ironic reversal of the RAF zoning system, Himmler ordered local authorities to move people away from the inner zone, with its narrow, tightly packed streets, to the less densely populated outer zones, the commuter suburbs, and the farthest “weekend commuter” belt; the priority was to ensure that most evacuees stayed close to the cities they had left.

Among those who remained were a rising proportion of non-Germans, or of German workers transferred from other industrial sites, but a shrinking number of young and middle-aged men. This was the population that suffered the high casualty rates of the last eighteen months of the war.

This record was used by the United States Bombing Survey after the war to estimate German casualties. The total number of dead for 1943 and 1944 from Air Protection Staff records was 100,107 in 1943, 146,300 for 1944, and 13,553 for the month of January 1945. The overall figure for those injured is 305,455. No further aggregate statistics are available for the last three months of the war. Using the same proportions as November 1944, it can be estimated that of this 259,960 total, approximately 80 percent were German civilians.260 There are also archive records to show deaths from bombing in the years 1940 to 1942, a total of 11,228, of whom 6,824 died in 1942 and approximately 4,000 in 1941.261 Based on these archive sources, the figure for those who died from May 1940 to January 1945 comes to 271,188. No doubt this does not include all those who were killed or died of wounds, but it does include uniformed personnel, POWs, and foreign workers, and it applies to the whole of the Greater German area, including those territories incorporated from March 1938 onward.

In 1956, Hans Sperling published in the German official statistical journal Wirtschaft und Statistik (Economy and Statistics) a detailed account of his reconstruction of the dead from bombing. His total of civilians killed came to 570,000 for the wartime German area. Together with 23,000 uniformed dead and an estimated 32,000 POWs and foreign workers, his sum reached 625,000, the figure commonly quoted today for the total killed in Germany by Allied bombing.262 Sperling’s figures rested on speculations about the number of German civilians and foreign workers who died in the last four months of war, and in particular on the number of refugees fleeing westward into the path of the raids. He guessed that 111,000 of them died between January 1945 and the end of the war, including the greatly inflated figure of 60,000 dead in Dresden. This would mean that around 300,000 people were killed in Germany in the final flourish of bombing, a statistic that has no supporting evidence. In 1990 the East German historian Olaf Groehler published revised figures. Although acknowledging the speculative nature of some of his own calculations, particularly for those who died in 1945, Groehler suggested a much lower figure of 420,000 for all categories of victim and for the enlarged German wartime area.

If it is assumed that the figure of 271,000 dead by January 1945 is a realistic, if not precise, total (and there are archive figures that suggest a lower sum), it is possible to extrapolate from the last five months of heavy raiding for which records exist (September 1944 to January 1945) in order to find a possible order of magnitude for deaths in the last three months of the war. The average death toll for these five months was 18,777, which would give an aggregate figure for the whole war period of 328,000, though it would not allow for the exceptional casualty level at Dresden, confirmed by the latest research at approximately 25,000. Adding this would produce a total figure of approximately 353,000, representing 82,000 deaths in the last months. Detailed reconstruction of deaths caused by Royal Air Force bombing from February to May 1945, though incomplete, suggests a total of at least 57,000.264 If casualties inflicted by the American air forces are assumed to be lower, since their bombing was less clearly aimed at cities, an overall death toll of 82,000 is again statistically realistic. In the absence of unambiguous statistical evidence, the figure of 353,000 gives an approximate scale consistent with the evidence. It is a little over half the figure of 625,000 arrived at in the 1950s.

What bombing did do was to increase the dependence of the population on both the state apparatus and the party organizations responsible for welfare, reducing even further the space for more serious dissent. Survival depended on not challenging the system. Throughout the heaviest period of bombing, both state and party, assisted increasingly by the armed forces stationed in the Reich, were able to sustain the supply of replacement goods, the distribution of food and water, planned evacuation, and rehabilitation, though transport difficulties and the declining access to European food supplies meant that living standards continued to fall throughout 1944.271 Indeed, for most of the urban population official sources were the only ones available. The risks from black marketeering and looting grew greater as the war drew to a close, and the terror more arbitrary for the German people; military policemen shot or hanged those they caught on the spot. Even in Berlin in the last days before the Russians arrived, hungry survivors were able to find supplies of food dispensed by whatever authority was still functioning.

The more surprising result of the bombing was the absence of sustained popular hatred directed toward those who were carrying it out. A long report on popular attitudes to the enemy produced in February 1944 indicated occasional evidence of anger directed at British aircrew, but concluded that “hatred against the English people in general cannot be spoken of.” The Soviet people were feared rather than hated, driven by “an alien and incomprehensible mentality.” Paradoxically, wide popular hostility was reserved almost exclusively for the Italians for betraying Germany in 1943 by surrendering to the Allies.273 There were, nevertheless, acts of spontaneous violence directed by the bombed population against aircrew who were caught after they had to bail out and land on German soil. The number of airmen who became victims of “lynch murder” has been estimated at between 225 and 350, a small fraction of the total of air force prisoners of war. The first recorded incident was during Operation Gomorrah on July 25, 1943, when two American airmen were killed. The pressure from above for people to take the law into their own hands increased during 1944 after Hitler endorsed popular vengeance against pilots guilty of strafing civilians, trains, or hospitals. The peak of popular lynching occurred in March 1945, with thirty-seven killings.

Official propaganda had always described Allied bombing as “terror bombing” and the aircrew as gangsters or air pirates. The word “vengeance” had become part of the public vocabulary of the air war. On May 27, 1944, Goebbels published a widely read article in the party newspaper calling for “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” in subjecting Allied fliers to German “self-justice,” echoing views expressed by Hitler as early as the autumn of 1942.275 Many of the cases of lynching were associated with party members or SA men, or policemen, who expected not to be punished. Spontaneous popular violence was rarer, though again explicable because of the level of destruction and casualties imposed in the last years of war. What is surprising is that the violence was not more widespread given the increasingly lawless character of German justice. Reports after Goebbels’s article indicated public concern that killing captured Allied aircrew would result in the killing of captured German airmen too in retaliation. The uniformed services would not endorse the killing, and Allied survivors attested to the intervention of soldiers or policemen in saving them from angry crowds. In the aftermath of heavy bombing, violent reaction against its perpetrators seems often to have taken second place to the relief at having survived and concern for others. Hans Nossack observed in Hamburg in the days after Operation Gomorrah that “no-one comforted himself with thoughts of revenge”; the enemy wa...

Klemperer’s story is a reminder that the system being bombed still practiced its lethal racism to the very last weeks of the war, though it also demonstrates that even wearing the star he could get medical attention and food and emergency accommodation.

The general of technical troops, Erich Hampe, was sent from Berlin on the morning of February 14 to supervise the reestablishment of rail communications over the surviving railway bridge. He found the burnt-out area of Dresden utterly deserted, except for a llama escaped from the Dresden zoo. Within only two days an emergency rail service had been set up and the wounded could be moved to hospitals in nearby cities.283 Altogether 2,212 were severely wounded and 13,718 lightly, but the death toll was much higher. By mid-March the police president reported that 18,375 dead had been accounted for, but estimated the final figure as likely to be 25,000, the number recently agreed as the upper limit by a historical commission set up by the mayor of Dresden in 2004. The bodies were collected in large pyres and those not already incinerated were burned quickly to avoid a health crisis.284 Out of 220,000 homes in Dresden, 75,000 were totally destroyed and 18,500 severely damaged; there were 18 million cubic meters of rubble. By the end of February, Dresden, a city formerly of 600,000, housing an unknown number of refugees from the east, had only 369,000 inhabitants left.

Any explanation for the capacity of German society to absorb bombing destruction and levels of casualty on this scale must include the willingness of millions of ordinary Germans, in addition to all the other pressures of wartime work and survival, to participate in schemes of self-protection, civil defense work, first-aid organization, and welfare provision, without which the consequences of bombing could not have been sustained, however coercive the regime or however narrow the space within which social protest could operate. The effect of bombing was not, in the end, as the Allies hoped, to drive a wedge between people and regime, but the opposite, to increase dependence on the state and the party and to prompt willing participation by civilians in structures designed for their own defense with a remarkable degree of social discipline. The experience of being bombed did indeed create widespread anxiety, demoralization, social conflict, and limited political criticism, but it was balanced in the end by the capacity of the dictatorship to exploit racial policy unscrupulously to its advantage (redistributing Jewish apartments and furnishings, using camp and foreign labor to clear up debris, etc.), while ensuring that minimum levels of social provision, flexible propaganda, administrative competence, and targeted coercion would prevent anything like collapse.

As many Italians were killed by bombing as died in the Blitz on Britain; more tons were dropped on Rome than on all British cities put together. Moreover, the damage to Italy’s ancient heritage filled two volumes when it was investigated by a British committee in 1945, set up to preserve for future generations the “artistic wealth” that Allied aircraft had been busy bombarding only months before.

The bulk of the Italian population was the object of air attack first as an enemy people, then as a population waiting to be liberated. The only constant in the Italian experience of war was the threat from the air.

On June 11 a dozen Wellington bombers arrived, but the French military authorities were now opposed to any bombing of Italy that might provoke retaliation against French cities, and they parked trucks on the runway to prevent takeoff. Only after days of inter-Allied argument did a force of eight aircraft set off on the night of June 15–16 to bomb the port of Genoa, but only one found it; the following night six out of nine managed to locate and bomb Milan. Then the order came to evacuate following the French surrender and the 950 men of Haddock Force left on ships from Marseille on June 18, leaving all their stores and equipment behind.6 Only on the eve of the armistice between France and Italy did French aircraft attack Italian targets in Sicily on June 23 and 24, killing forty-five people in a gesture of pointless defiance.7

From the outset it was assumed that Italian morale under Fascism was likely to be a more brittle target than German society under Hitler. Bombing could hence be justified by the expectation of rapid and significant political consequences rather than slow economic attrition. The first raids on northern Italy carried out by Bomber Command from British bases in June and August 1940—three in all involving only seventeen aircraft—were reported to have had “a ‘stunning’ effect on Italian morale.”8 Intelligence fed to the RAF leadership suggested that Italy was “the heel of Achilles” in the Axis war effort, short of resources and with a population unhappy about having to fight Mussolini’s war.9 Since Italy was difficult to reach from British bases or from bases in Egypt with existing aircraft, heavy bombing was not yet an option. But since Italy was regarded as politically fragile, a leaflet war was mounted to try to persuade the population to give up the fight; a total of 4,780,500 leaflets were dropped between 1940 and 1942.

Indeed, detailed research by the RE8 department for the Air Ministry showed that Italian architecture was less prone to either lateral or vertical fire damage than German because of the extensive use of stone and marble, the solid stone flooring, the thickness and mass of the walls, and the wide courtyards and streets.

In Milan in February 1943, German antiaircraft guns opened up on four Italian fighters, forcing them to abandon their operation. When the local Italian commander complained, the German antiaircraft unit told him that as far as they were concerned Italian fighter pilots flew at their own risk.

The German side took the view that if they helped Italy, they would be assisting a potential competitor when regular commercial activity restarted after the war.

The psychological and physical shock to the Italian population was much greater, as the British had hoped. Secure from the bombing war since the small raids in late 1940, the home front had not developed the infrastructure for civil defense or the mind-set to cope with sudden heavy raiding. Much of the damage was done to residential areas, since these were intended to be area raids. In Turin some 3,230 residential buildings and forty-six schools were destroyed or heavily damaged in the November raids. The local prefect of Turin, whence some 400,000 had fled by December 1942, reported that the demoralized population was “depressed, nervous, irritable and alarmed” not only by the bombing but by a general “sense of exhaustion at the length of the war.”54 Evacuees made their way out to the surrounding countryside or more distant provinces. Iris Origo, an Anglo-American married to an Italian marquis, recorded in her diary the sight of families arriving in Tuscany from Genoa after living for weeks in tunnels under the city “without light, without sufficient water, and in bitter cold,” displaying a “healthy, elementary resentment” against those dropping the bombs but a profound anger at the incompetence and mismanagement of the Fascist system that had exposed them to bombing in the first place.55 The failure to prepare for or to oppose the raids was regarded as a standing indictment of the Mussolini regime. The workers who stayed behind in Turin, according to one report, had calm...

The Fascist press issued its own leaflet accusing the Americans of using black airmen, “the worst men . . . the new tribes of savages.”

Rome was the heart of the Catholic world, home to the neutral Vatican City, whose neutrality had to be respected or risk worldwide condemnation from Catholic communities. It was the heart of the classical Roman Empire, taught to generations of British schoolboys, including those who now commanded the wartime RAF, as a model for the greater British Empire. It was also a primary center of European culture, packed with treasures from the classical world to the age of the high baroque. “Liberal opinion,” complained Sinclair to Churchill in December 1942, “regards Rome as one of the shrines of European civilization. This liberal opinion is a bit sticky about bombing.”

A good case can be made that the sudden intensification of bombing in 1943 provoked a people already tired of war and fearful of its consequences to reject twenty years of Fascism and to hope for peace. The bombing from the winter of 1942–43 was on an unprecedented scale, 1,592 tons in 1942 but 110,474 tons in 1943, twice the tonnage dropped in the Blitz on Britain.84 From modest losses in the early raids, the destruction of housing escalated dramatically, 122,000 buildings by March 1943.85 Most of the operations were now carried out by American air forces that flew high and bombed with poor accuracy. The small town of Grosseto, for example, was largely destroyed when twenty-four B-17s were sent to attack an air force base but hit the residential districts instead, leaving 134 dead. Attacks on the airbase at Foggia, near the east coast, provoked an extraordinary crisis when bombs destroyed the town. After the raid on May 31, some 40 percent of the population fled, leaving shops and factories without manpower and services in disarray. The prefect reported that his city was a spectacle of desolation, “infested by the fumes from putrifying bodies not yet recovered.”86 The ports of the south were heavily bombed in anticipation of the Allied invasion of Sicily: forty-three raids on Palermo; thirty-two on Messina; forty-five on Catania. Naples was struck repeatedly throughout the war, small raids at first from Malta, but from the first heavy raid on December 4, 1942, there were ...

In the spring of 1943 at the Fiat works in Turin spontaneous strikes erupted between March 5 and 8 in protest at the failure to provide an indemnity for all bombed workers, not just for those “evening” evacuees who went back and forth to their families in the countryside. Mingled with protest at rising prices and poor food distribution, the strike movement spread to other factories and eventually as far as Genoa and Milan, until they petered out in April. In Genoa protests against the lack of shelters had already followed the first raids, when crowds of angry women tried to storm the bunkers belonging to the rich.89 During 1943 a stream of reports reached Rome from provincial prefects indicating the growing demoralization and hostility of the population, though only some of this was due to bombing and much to do with Italy’s ineffective war effort. A report from Genoa in May 1943 indicated that “public morale is very depressed” due to food shortages and the complete incapacity of the Italian military effort, as well as the material and morale damage caused by the bombs. From Turin it was reported that workers could no longer see any point in working for a failed system but displayed instead “apathy and indifference.” Palermo, hit repeatedly by bombing in 1943, reported in May that almost all civilian activities were paralyzed, the population terrorized and the streets deserted. Even the reports from Rome, not yet bombed, indicated a population that was now “mistrustful and...

Ordinary Italians turned to religion or superstition to help cope with the dilemma of being trapped between a remorseless bombing and a failed state. In Livorno (Leghorn) the absence of bombing until late May 1943 was attributed to the protection of the Madonna of Montenero (though it was also rumored that Churchill had a lover in the city, which explained its immunity). In Sardinia a prayer was composed against the bombing: “Ave Maria, full of grace, make it so the sirens do not sound, the aeroplanes do not come. . . . Jesus, Joseph, Mary, make it that the English lose their way.”