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

by Richard Overy

The bombing of Rome was neither the occasion nor the cause of the overthrow of Mussolini, but a symptom of a state in the final throes of disintegration. In a body racked with ailments, it is not always easy to identify the precise cause of death. Moreover, the fall of the dictator brought neither peace to the Italian people nor an end to the bombing. Indeed, a better case can be made for the argument that bombing accelerated the decision of Mussolini’s successor, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, togeth...

The difference between a tactical and a strategic raid often made little difference to the population around the target, but the distinction was maintained in air force records. Out of 124,000 tons dropped on Italian targets in the first five months of 1944, 78,700 were deemed to be strategic, the rest tactical.

From 1943 to the end of the war, American heavy bombers stationed in the Mediterranean dropped 112,000 tons on Italian targets and 143,000 tons on Greater Germany and German-occupied central Europe; tactical bombers dropped a further 163,000 tons on Italian targets, a grand total by Allied air forces on Italy of 276,312 tons.

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.

American bomber losses in 1944 and 1945 were largely due to antiaircraft fire or accident, 1,829 against 626 credited to fighter interception.107 Not for nothing was Joseph Heller’s antihero in Catch-22, a novel of the American air experience in Italy, afraid of the “goddam foul black tiers of flak . . . bursting, and booming and billowing all around.”

In contrast to the British attitude, Washington recognized that it was politically expedient to preserve Italian culture from unnecessary damage in order to limit accusations of Allied barbarism. On August 20, 1943, Roosevelt gave his approval for the establishment of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in Europe. The commission was advised by an academic working group set up by the American Council of Learned Societies, which produced 160 detailed maps of Italian cities using the Italian Baedeker guide, with most cultural monuments clearly marked. These were sent to MAAF and added to the dossiers for briefing officers when organizing an operation.109 In April 1944 a list was distributed to all Allied air forces in Italy, listing cities in three categories for bombing purposes. The first category comprised Rome, Florence, Venice, and Torcello, which could only be bombed with specific instructions from the high command; the second category of nineteen historic cities, including Ravenna, Assisi, Pavia, Parma, and Montepulciano, were not regarded prima facie as militarily important, but could be bombed under circumstances of military necessity; the third category was made up of twenty-four cities, most with architecturally outstanding city centers, such as Brescia, Siena, Pisa, Bologna, and Viterbo, which were deemed to contain or be near military objectives. These could be bombed freely “and any consequential damage accep...

The bombing of Rome continued despite the persistent efforts by the papacy, the Badoglio government (now based in southern Italy in the Allied zone), and even Mussolini’s new Salò regime to get the Allies to accept the status of open city for the capital. Roosevelt, with a large Catholic minority in the United States, was more inclined to discuss the possibility, but Churchill worried that if Rome were made an open city, it would hamper Allied military efforts to pursue the Germans up the western side of the peninsula. The Combined Chiefs discussed the issue in late September but remained deadlocked.115 Then on November 5 four bombs were dropped on the Vatican, causing serious damage to the Governatorato Palace, the seat of Vatican government. The first reaction from the British ambassador to the Vatican, Sir Francis D’Arcy Osborne, was to blame the Germans for the raid as a propaganda stunt, but a few days later investigations showed that one American aircraft, bombing at night, had lost contact with the rest of the force and dropped bombs in error.116 Roosevelt once again tried to revive British interest in the demilitarization of Rome, but the British remained adamant that it would place too many restrictions on the Allied ground campaign, and on December 7, Roosevelt finally conceded that it was “inadvisable” to pursue the matter any further.117 Rome continued to be bombed and over 7,000 Romans died in the course of the year from the first bombing in July 1943 to the A...

There was nevertheless nothing accidental about the most controversial raid of all, against the fourteenth-century Benedictine abbey on the mountaintop overlooking the small town of Cassino on February 15, 1944. The building dominated the Liri valley position where the Allied armies were attempting to unhinge the German defenses along the so-called Gustav Line, which stretched from the coast north of Naples to Ortona on the Adriatic coast. On November 4, 1943, Eisenhower wrote to the Allied Fifteenth Army Group that the Monte Cassino abbey was a protected building; the pope asked both the Germans and the Allies to respect its sacred status. When Eisenhower was replaced by Wilson as supreme commander in January 1944, the principle that historic buildings would only be hit under conditions of “absolute necessity” still prevailed, though it did not prevent the bombing of the papal estate at Castel Gandolfo on February 11, which destroyed the convent and killed twenty-seven nuns.118 At Cassino all attempts to dislodge the German forces from the small town or the hilltop had failed, and it is not difficult to understand why frustration with the slow progress of the campaign and the likelihood of high casualties encouraged the local army units to ask for air assistance. There were strong rumors (but no hard evidence) that the abbey was already occupied by German forces. On February 11, the 4th Indian Division, planning its assault, made a request for “intense bombing” of the hil...

The destruction was welcomed by the troops on the ground, who were seen to cheer as the bombers flew in, but the results of these raids (and attacks by Kittyhawk and Mustang fighter-bombers during the two days that followed) were mixed. The vast abbey walls remained intact, in places to a height of thirty feet, making the gutted building ideal for the German forces who now obligingly occupied it as a hilltop fortress from where they repelled the Indian and New Zealand efforts to dislodge them. The operation suffered from the usual bomb pattern, some bombs destroying the headquarters of the local Eighth Army commander, General Oliver Leese, three miles from the abbey, and the French Corps headquarters twelve miles away.121 The publicity surrounding the destruction, much of it hostile, forced the chiefs of staff to investigate who had ordered the bombing and why. On March 9, Wilson replied that the abbey building was undoubtedly “part of the German main defensive position” and had to be eliminated to ensure success.122 Slessor, Eaker’s deputy, recalled in his memoirs that no one among the troops would have believed for a moment that the Germans were not using the building as a for...

On April 16, 1944, Slessor wrote to Portal to complain about how counterproductive heavy bombing was on the battlefield itself: “We hamper our own movement by throwing the debris of houses across roads and making craters that become tank obstacles . . . we are inevitably bound—as we did at Cassino—to cause casualties to our own people.”

The destruction of bridges and viaducts proved more effective than the assault on marshaling yards, which could be used for through traffic even when there was extensive damage. A disappointed evaluation by the MAAF Analysis Section showed that repairs were quickly carried out on rail centers in northern Italy and through tracks reopened. “Military traffic was not hindered to a significant degree by these attacks,” the report concluded. Nor did they cause “complete internal economic collapse.”131 Kesselring, when interviewed in August 1945 after the end of the war, confirmed that the transport plan had not been a great success. Bridges were quickly replaced by pontoon bridges, camouflaged in some way; urgent countermeasures had been taken to restore road and rail links. An air strategy exclusively centered on cutting off supplies, Kesselring concluded, was not likely to be effective.

A number of committees were established to oversee the transition of Italian industry to German orders, but the priority was the exploitation of the Italian aircraft industry. Four companies made parts for Focke-Wulf, Heinkel, Messerschmitt, and Junkers, while Alfa Romeo, Fiat, and Isotta Fraschini produced the Daimler-Benz DB605 and the Junkers Jumo 213 aero-engines. Once it was evident that production could be continued rather than have the machines and labor transferred to Germany, Italian producers cooperated with the German occupiers; workers, though in general hostile to both the Germans and the new Mussolini republic, had little choice but to work or face unemployment or deportation.

Heavy raids were made in the spring and summer of 1944, hitting a total of 420 plants, particularly in the armaments, engineering, and steel sectors, and Italian oil depots at Trieste, Fiume, and Marghera.135 Extensive damage was done to industrial buildings, but a regular toll of Italian civilian lives was exacted with each raid, including deaths from low-level strafing of workers. One of the worst was the raid on Milan on October 20, 1944, which resulted in some of the aircraft dropping their bombs in error on residential districts, killing 614 people, including 184 pupils and 19 teachers at the Francesco Crispi school, more than three times the number killed in all the other seventeen raids on the city in the course of the year.

Advantage was taken of the extensive road tunnels and caves available in northern Italy. Work on parts for the Me262 turbojet fighter continued in the first months of 1945 in tunnels around Bolzano; the Fiat works moved production to a stretch of tunnel between Riva and Gargnano on the coast of Lake Garda, where 1,300 laborers continued to work until April of that year; Caproni produced parts for the V-weapons and the Me262 in a hydraulic tunnel between the River Adige and Garda. Of the twenty-eight sites chosen for underground dispersal, only ten actually reached the stage of production.

As in Germany, Allied air forces by the end of the war possessed a good deal of excess capacity for which there were no longer suitable objectives.

The effect on German efforts to extract additional war production in northern Italy has been estimated at a loss of 30 percent in productive performance due to absenteeism and regular alarms. The overall loss of capacity for Italian industry has been estimated at 10 percent, since most industry was not an object of bombing; the loss for war-related industries was much higher, one-half for naval production, 21 percent for the metallurgical industries, 12 percent for machine engineering.139 By contrast, the textile sector lost 0.5 percent, the electrical industry 4 percent, and the chemical industry 6 percent of capacity. Damage to housing, though heavy in particular cities, has been estimated at only 6 percent of total housing stock. The chief target was the Italian transport system, where two-fifths of the rail network was destroyed along with half the rolling stock and an estimated 90 percent of all Italian trucks. The five years of war reduced Italian national income by 1945 to one-half the level of 1938.140 This mainly affected not the German occupiers but a large part of the Italian civil population, which endured widespread losses of housing and possessions, unemployment, and food shortages until well after the end of the conflict.

Most of the casualties from bombing occurred in the period after the armistice, since airpower was the one thing the Allies could project easily into the occupied zones.

Throughout the campaign the political necessity of defeating Germany overrode any political considerations toward the population held hostage on the battlefield.

There is no doubt that the long experience of bombing did strain Italian support for their imminent liberation. Iris Origo noted in her diary in the summer of 1944 how much British propaganda was resented, with its “bland assumption that peace at any price will be welcomed by the Italians.”145 Corrado Di Pompeo, a ministry official in Rome, recorded in his diary in February 1944 that at first his heart rejoiced “when American aircraft passed overhead,” but after regular raiding and the routine sight of blood-smeared corpses, he changed his mind: “Americans are zero; they only know how to destroy and how to kill the defenseless.”146 Nevertheless, the prospects for widespread rebellion against the authority of the Salò Republic or the German armed forces were unrealistic, and throughout the period acts of violent resistance were met by the Germans with atrocious reprisals.147 Under these circumstances rumor and superstition increased in importance as a mechanism for coping with the real dilemmas of occupation. The most remarkable was the claim, widely repeated, that Padre Pio, the Apulian monk (and now a saint), had safeguarded the region where he lived by rising in the air to the level of the bombers and staring the pilots in the eye until they turned back to base, their bomb loads still on board.148 In numerous cases, appeals were made to city saints or Madonnas to safeguard buildings and family from bomb damage. The Catholic Church also encouraged a mood of consolation an...

On the evening of December 2, 1943, a small raid by thirty-five German aircraft on the crowded dock at Bari led to widespread devastation and, unknown to the local population, the release of a toxic mix of oil and liquid mustard gas. The presence of this deadly mixture was suppressed by British authorities in the post-raid communiqué but was evident on the wounded men taken from the water and tended in the local hospital, where the staff were only notified that gas burns were to be expected when the symptoms were already well established and patients dying.161 Unknown to the Italian population, the Allies held large stocks of chemical weapons in Italy, ready to be used at a moment’s notice. Since Mussolini had been responsible for using gas in Italy’s war in Ethiopia, the prospect of a desperate act by the enemy in Italy was not entirely out of the question, but Allied chemical resources in Italy dwarfed the quantities used by Italians in Africa. By 1945, American forces had over 10 million pounds of mustard gas and 3 million pounds of other gases in the theater, to be used principally by the air forces, which had 110,000 gas bombs in store.162 The air force was ordered to keep on hand sufficient weapons to be able to carry out at least forty-five days of continuous gas warfare from the air, aimed at enemy ports and military installations. In the event of a chemical attack by German or Italian forces in Italy, the Mediterranean Tactical Air Forces were ordered to use gas w...

In Naples the destruction of the church of Santa Chiara by fire was only intensified by the protective covering outside, which increased the internal temperature.

In the end the survival or otherwise of cultural treasures was arbitrary, dependent on where the bombs were strewn, or the intelligence of the curators who guarded them, or the attitude of the local German officials of the Kunstschutz (art protection) organization. In Turin some thirteen churches had protected status, but only six survived relatively unscathed. In the convent of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan, Leonardo’s fresco of The Last Supper survived a direct hit by a miracle, as the rest of the refectory that housed it was demolished.166 Among the other providential survivals was Botticelli’s Primavera, spotted by two journalists sent to interview Indian soldiers in a villa outside Florence in sight of German tanks, the painting unboxed on the floor among the men brewing tea.

Opposition to the German occupiers certainly did not need bombing as a spur. Indeed, some case can be made to show that bombing actually harmed the prospects for the resistance and alienated potential supporters of the Allied cause.

Strikers at the Fiat works in November 1943 cited bombing as one of the reasons for running the risk of German intervention and Fascist brutality. The risks were substantial. In Turin a German deputy, sent to calm down the social protests, executed the protest leaders and deported 1,000 workers to Germany.168 In the summer of 1944 further large-scale protests against dispersal plans brought so many workers out on strike that the German authorities were unable to cope. In December 1944 a strike crippled Milan’s factories. Among these workers were some who risked acts of sabotage to accompany the bombing, while many workers who refused to be deported to work in Germany disappeared into the mountains to join the partisans. The partisan movement had close contacts with the Allies from 1944, and used these channels to explain that the poor accuracy, high flying, and inadvertent damage caused by Allied bombing alienated potential resisters, particularly as many of the areas hit were working class and anti-Fascist.169 Partisan protests in late 1944 highlighted many examples where tactical bombing hit neither the Germans nor an evident military target, making a “tragic situation” for the population all the harder. For the Allies this ran the risk, as intelligence information made clear, that the population might turn to supporting Soviet communism rather than continue to identify with the forces responsible for killing them. D’Arcy Osborne, in one of his dispatches from Vatican Ci...

Damage to buildings, the loss of artworks, deaths and injuries were caused not only by bombing but by artillery fire, rockets, fighter aircraft, and even by naval fire along the coastline, and from both sides, Allied and Axis. The 8,549 deaths in Sicily before the armistice, for example, were the result of all forms of military action, whereas the 7,000 in Rome were due almost entirely to bombing.171 The postwar statistical record drawn up to show the cause of deaths as a result of the war indicated a very precise total of 59,796, though other categories of “poorly specified” or “poorly defined” or “various acts of war” count a further 27,762, some of whom were almost certainly bombing victims.172 The total number of seriously injured has not been recorded. In cases where urban records provide a list of injured—for example in Bologna—the number is around the same as those killed, in this case 2,000. The number of those injured, whether severely or lightly, is not likely to be less than the figure of around 60,000 killed. Of the number of dead, about 32,000 were men, 27,000 women, a reflection of the extent of female evacuation and the compulsory requirement for men to carry on working in the cities on German orders or to help with post-raid rescue and clearance. That the level of casualty was not much higher, given that the weight of bombs dropped in Italy was almost six times the weight dropped on Britain during the Blitz, may owe something to the fact that many of the ob...

The occupied territories of western and northern Europe—France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark—absorbed almost 30 percent of the bomb tonnage dropped by the American and British bomber forces. The occupied or satellite countries in eastern Europe and the Balkans absorbed another 6.7 percent.2 Well over one-third of all Allied bombs dropped on Europe fell on the German New Order, making the experience of bombing in the Second World War a European-wide one.

According to the British Political Warfare Executive, set up in 1941, bombing of occupied areas promoted both “morale breaking” and “morale making.” Collaborators and Germans would be demoralized by the experience; those who did not collaborate would be encouraged at the prospect of liberation.3 To be bombed in order to be free now seems paradoxical, but the policy governed much of the bombing that spread out across the entire European continent between 1940 and 1945.

There was evidence that the occupied peoples positively wanted the RAF to bomb the military and industrial targets in their midst. A Dutch request arrived in August 1940 to bomb the Fokker aircraft works in Amsterdam and a munitions plant at Hemburg (“working full capacity. Please bomb it”).8 A long letter from a French sympathizer forwarded to the Foreign Office in July 1941 claimed that many people in occupied France wanted the RAF to bomb factories working for the Germans: “The bombardments not only have a considerable material effect, but are of primary importance for the future morale of the anglophile population.”9 More letters arrived via Lisbon from Belgian sources explaining that the failure to bomb collaborating factories was attributed in Belgium to British “decadence.” A Belgian Resistance newspaper, Le Peuple, published a report of an informal referendum on bombing taken among workers in factories exploited by the Germans. “Not a single discordant voice,” ran the report. “They all wish for the destruction of plants which work for the enemy.”

Allied confidence in the effects of leafleting was sustained by regular intelligence about the popular demand for more. In Belgium it was reported that children sold the leaflets they picked up for pocket money; French peasants concluded that if the RAF could waste time dropping leaflets, it “must be very strong.”23 On the actual effect of leaflet drops the evidence remains speculative. In Germany and Italy it was a crime to pick them up at all.

There is little doubt that the PWE greatly exaggerated the political effects likely to be derived from a combination of propaganda and judicious bombing. Like the optimistic assessments of imminent social crisis in Germany in 1940 or 1941, every straw of information was eagerly clutched at. Violations of air-raid precautions were particularly highlighted. It was reported that seventeen Dutchmen had been heavily fined in the summer of 1941 for staying out on the street during a raid singing “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” News from Denmark suggested that 20,672 prosecutions for blackout irregularities had been pursued in 1941.24 British political warfare assumed that the working class would be the most likely to challenge the occupiers because they were by definition supposed to be antifascist. Directives to the BBC European Service in early 1942 asked broadcasters to “take absolutely for granted the workmen in enslaved countries are unhesitatingly behind our bombing policy, and will do all they can to help it.”25 Bombing was supposed to suggest that liberation was close behind it and to encourage hatred of the German enemy. The leaflet campaign was deliberately designed to reflect this two-pronged argument. In the spring of 1941 messages to Belgium were to be divided into “Hope—45%,” “Hatred—40%,” “Self-interest—10%,” and “Self-respect—5%.” Propaganda aimed at the Netherlands had “Certainty of Allied Victory” top of the list, with 35 percent. In between the leaflets, t...

The raid on the Renault works became a test case of the dual strategy of economic attrition and morale making. On the night of March 3–4, Bomber Command sent off 235 bombers, the largest number yet for a single raid. Flying in to bomb from between 2,000 and 4,000 feet with no antiaircraft fire to distract them, 222 aircraft dropped 419 tons on the factory and the surrounding workers’ housing. Much of the factory area was destroyed, though not the machinery in the buildings, at the cost of only one aircraft lost. No alarm had sounded and casualties among the local population were high: French civil defense first reported 513 killed and more than 1,500 injured, but the Paris prefecture eventually confirmed 391 dead and 558 seriously injured, more than twice the number inflicted so far by the RAF on any one night over Germany. An estimated 300 buildings were destroyed and another 160 severely damaged.

The works were bombed not only for the potential damage to German vehicle output in the plant, but also to test how French opinion might react to an escalation of the bombing war. Leaflets were dropped beforehand “To the populations of occupied France,” explaining that any factory working for the Germans would now be bombed and encouraging workers to get a job in the countryside or to go on strike for better protection; a BBC broadcast warned French people to stay away from collaborating businesses.32 The PWE wanted to find out as soon as possible after the raid how French workers had reacted, “because it is the workers who have been killed, the workers who ‘go slow’ and sabotage.”33 Although the French authorities orchestrated elaborate public funerary events, the British soon received indications that the reaction had not been as adverse as the public outcry might have suggested. A report from Roosevelt’s special emissary in the new French capital at Vichy, William Leahy, explained that the propaganda campaign fostered by the regime with German support had been ineffective and that there was little evidence of anti-British feeling either in Paris or in the rest of unoccupied France.

In Paris itself the operation was welcomed by many as a sign that liberation might be one step nearer. “Nobody was indignant,” wrote one witness. “Most hid their jubilation badly.” Blame was directed much more at the French and German authorities for failing to sound the alert, or to enforce the blackout effectively, or to provide adequate shelters.35 Rumors quickly circulated outside Paris that the Germans had deliberately locked the workers inside the factory or had barred entry to the shelters. It was said that Parisians called out “Long Live Great Britain!” as they lay dying.

The raid itself had limited results. Reports reached London in June that only 10 percent of the machine tools had been lost as a result of the bombing and that the Renault works was operating at between 75 and 100 percent of its pre-raid capacity.

It was unfortunate for the French people that heavy bombers were seen as the necessary weapon for a number of very different strategic purposes for which they were far from ideal.38 From 1942 onward, bombers were used to try to destroy the German submarine presence on the French west coast by bombing the almost indestructible submarine pens and the surrounding port areas; in 1943–44 bombers were directed at small V-weapons sites that were difficult to find and to damage; in the months running up to the invasion of Normandy, the Transportation Plan similarly directed all Allied bomber forces (including the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy) against small rail targets, many of them embedded in urban areas; finally, the months of campaigning across France in the summer of 1944 led to regular calls from the ground forces for heavy bomber support, producing some of the most devastating raids of the war against French towns defended by German troops. The result was to strain popular French support for the bombing of the enemy in their midst.39 Although anti-German sentiment was not reversed by the air campaign, there was a widespread belief that a less damaging strategy could have been found to achieve the same end.

The wide spread of bombs dropped from high altitude and the rising casualty rates that resulted provoked a sudden change in French attitudes during the course of 1943. A French Resistance worker who arrived in Britain in April 1943 warned his new hosts that the population was deeply hostile to high-level American raids, which threatened to undermine irretrievably “the friendly feelings of the entire French population towards the Allies.”51 This shift in opinion coincided with the decision to spread the bombing over all French territory following the German occupation of the southern, unoccupied zone in November 1942. On December 21 the Air Ministry was informed by the Foreign Office that raids on southern French cities were now legally permitted, and on December 29 the BBC broadcast the same warning to the population living there to stay away from military and industrial targets that had been given to the occupied north earlier in the year.52 The guidelines issued in October 1942 on the conduct of raids now applied to the whole of France, but they were not binding on the Eighth Air Force, and when the Renault works in Boulogne-Billancourt were bombed again on April 4, 1943, by eighty-five B-17 Flying Fortresses, the results were very different from a year before. Just under half the bombs hit the industrial complex, but the rest were scattered over a wide residential area. One bomb penetrated the metro station at Pont-de-Sèvres; eighty corpses were identified there and the...

The French aircraft industry, much of it sheltered in the unoccupied zone until November 1942, produced 668 aircraft for Germany in 1942, 1,285 in 1943, many of them trainer aircraft to free German factories for the production of combat models. German manufacturers used French capacity for their own experimental work, away from the threat of bombs on Germany.57 As a result, French industry became a military priority for the American air force even at the risk of inflicting heavy casualties on the population.

The raids of the autumn of 1943 provoked a mixture of outrage and incomprehension in France. Total deaths from bombing in 1943 reached 7,458, almost three times the level of 1942. A French report on public opinion, which reached the Allies early in 1944, highlighted the damaging effect of persistently inaccurate high-level bombing on a people “tired, worn out by all its miseries, all its privations, all its separations, unnerved by too prolonged a wait for its liberation.”61 The French Air Force, reduced under the armistice terms with Germany to a skeleton organization, tried to assess what object the Allied raids could have. Raids on Paris and against the Dunlop works at Montluçon (this time by Bomber Command) puzzled French airmen, who assumed there must be some secondary purpose behind the pattern of scattered bombing that they had not yet worked out.62 Since the French Air Force could not do its own bombing, much time was spent in 1943 and 1944 observing Allied practice in order to understand the techniques and tactics involved as well as the effects of bombs on urban society, industrial architecture, and popular morale.63 Many of the reports on individual raids highlighted the sheer squandering of resources involved in a bombing operation when three-quarters of the bombs typically missed the target: “The results obtained,” ran a report on the bombing of St.-Étienne, “have no relation to the means employed, and this bombardment represents, like all the others, a waste ...

Mobile emergency units for air protection were sent from Germany to help with firefighting and rescue work alongside the residual French passive defense organization. They found the French attitude at times lackadaisical. German firemen fighting a blaze in Dunkirk in April 1942 were astonished at the lack of discipline among French colleagues who “stood around on the corners smoking.”

The Italian Armistice Commission insisted that Vichy impose a blackout throughout the area abutting the Italian-occupied regions to avoid giving British bombers an easy aid to navigation against Italian targets, but even when the French Air Force agreed, it proved difficult to enforce.69 In November 1941 the German Armistice Commission in Wiesbaden complained that British aircraft regularly flew over the unoccupied zone without any blackout below: “The contrast between the occupied zone, plunged into darkness, and the unoccupied zone, where the blackout is up to now only intermittent, nicely indicates to enemy planes the frontier of the two zones.”70 The German Air Force demanded complete blackout every night along a cordon 100 kilometers from the occupation zone, and effective blackout over the whole of unoccupied France when aircraft were sighted. French officials regarded the request as “inopportune” and prevaricated for months until August 1942, when the French government finally accepted a blackout of the frontier zones.71 A German aerial inspection a few weeks later showed that many houses had not bothered to take blackout measures; vehicles could be seen driving with full headlights; in Lyon the blackout occurred only after the antiaircraft artillery had begun to fire.72 The long delay reflected a more general reluctance on the part of the French military leadership to comply with German demands. Failure to observe the blackout was also a simple way to express nonco...

It has sometimes been remarked that the French failed to exhibit the “Blitz spirit” evident in Britain, and later in Germany, in the face of bombing. In a great many ways the opposite is true. The French population faced an inescapable dilemma that made it difficult to know how to respond to the raids: they wanted the Allies who were bombing them to win, and they wanted the Germans who protected them to lose. Since they were not themselves at war, the sense that they represented a national “front line” against a barbarous enemy could not as easily be used to mobilize the population as it could in Britain and Germany. The bombing was not part of an orchestrated offensive against French morale, and civilians were not supposed to be a target; nor was bombing experienced either regularly or over a wide area, except for the bombing of northern France during the Allied invasion. French towns and cities were nevertheless caught between two dangerous forces, the German occupiers and Vichy collaborators on the one hand, and the Allied air forces (including the B-24 “Liberator”) on the other. Resisting the Germans by helping Allied aircrew or sabotaging what had not been bombed meant running the risk of discovery, torture, and execution that no one in Britain’s Blitz was expected to face. Lesser infractions—deliberate refusal to observe the blackout, or absenteeism from a civil defense unit—could be interpreted by the occupiers not simply as an act of negligence but as an act of res...

The impact of the leaflet and broadcasting campaign was difficult for the Allies to assess since almost all the public media in Vichy France treated the bombing as an unmediated crime. Allied intelligence was faced with a barrage of information showing that the bombing was defined by its “terror character.” One newspaper, the Petit Parisien, following the bombing of Paris in September 1943 claimed that “the barbarians of the West are worthy allies of the barbarians in the East.”99 The Mémorial de St. Étienne asked, “Will this destructive Sadism have no end? One is appalled before this mounting barbarity, this barbarity behind the mask of civilization.” The Allies recognized that the French reaction was not as simple as that, but there was increasing evidence that even among pro-Allied circles the mixed results of bombing raids provoked anxiety and hostility without at the same time undermining the acknowledgment that German targets were both legitimate and necessary.100 This ambiguity was evident from the reaction to two raids on Toulon on March 7, 1944. The first killed or injured an estimated 900 German soldiers and won wide approval; the second four days later missed the target and killed 110 French civilians to widespread complaints. One of the American crews shot down on the second raid was black, prompting racist comments about the quality and competence of American airmen.101 American bombing was identified in information from the French Resistance as the major sour...

Allied intelligence found that in many cases the Resistance distinguished between the regrettable effects of a heavy bombardment and their view of Allied aircrew as liberators.105 The Resistance also regarded bombing as complementary to forms of active opposition to the occupiers, though it was seldom integrated as closely as it could have been, despite the insistence of the Resistance that sabotage could often be a more effective tool than bombing.106 There also existed many lesser levels of protest or noncompliance derived from the bombing war. The funerals of Allied aircrew killed in action attracted large crowds despite German efforts to obstruct them; wreaths were laid by the graveside dedicated “To Our Heroes” or “To Our Allies” or “To Our Liberators” until seized or destroyed by the occupiers.

For the four weeks before D-Day a furious crescendo of bombing descended on the French railway system and the unfortunate housing that surrounded its nodal points. Zuckerman’s calculations in fact underestimated French casualties by a wide margin because transport targets were only part of what Allied air forces were expected to bomb in the weeks leading to invasion. French civil defense officials counted 712 dead in March, 5,144 in April, 9,893 in May, and an estimated 9,517 in June. The total of 25,266 over the four months was almost certainly not complete, given the difficulty of constructing exact records in a dangerous war zone; nor did all the casualties come from attacks on rail targets, but also against bridges and military installations, and German forces.123 They nevertheless represented the overall human cost of the decision to use bombing as the means to reduce the capacity of the German army and air force to oppose the landings in Normandy. The high casualties resulted chiefly from the wide dispersion of bombs against relatively small targets and the large tonnage employed. The 63,636 tons dropped on transport targets exceeded the entire tonnage dropped by the German Air Force during the Blitz on Britain. The French air defense counted 71,000 high-explosive bombs between January and March 1944, but 291,000 from April to June.124 Some attacks achieved a high level of precision, but in many cases bombs were scattered over a wide area. The attack on the rail cent...

Two raids, one on St.-Étienne on May 26, 1944, and one on Marseille the following day, resulted in heavy loss of civilian life. At St.-Étienne the alert sounded in good time; the 150 B-17s attacked in waves from around 13,000 feet, and half the bombs fell in the zone around the rail links. But there were too few proper shelters for a population unused to the air threat and more than 1,084 were killed. The effect on rail traffic was limited. Rail lines remained open and the damage, such as it was, could be overcome in just four days. The attack on Marseille on May 27, flown at an estimated 20,000 feet, against stations at St.-Charles and Blancarde, both situated in the heart of the city’s residential area, scattered bombs over ten of the city’s quarters, destroying 500 buildings and killing 1,752 people. Again Passive Defense observed the “insouciance” of a population hit by an air raid for the first time and the absence of effective civil defense training. The stations were unimportant (one was a railway cul-de-sac), but the effect of the raid was to create a crisis of public morale and strong hostility to the air forces that carried out the attack.127 The scale of the raiding and the damage inflicted brought protests from the French Resistance and the French authorities in London. The French Commissariat for Foreign Affairs warned the Foreign Office in early May that the raids were having a damaging effect on French opinion; in early June a resolution from the Resistance ...