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High impact … Hamburg's working-class districts were targeted by bombers in 1943 so as to damage war production. Photograph: Erich Andres
High impact … Hamburg's working-class districts were targeted by bombers in 1943 so as to damage war production. Photograph: Erich Andres

The Bombing War: Europe 1939‑1945 by Richard Overy – review

This article is more than 10 years old
The bombing campaigns were startlingly inaccurate - and this is the most important book on the second world war published this century

Between the wars, Richard Overy tells us, European city dwellers were terrified at the prospect of being bombed. Alarmists predicted millions of dead in London in a single, devastating attack. The city would be entirely destroyed by explosive and incendiary bombs, and its population annihilated by poison gas dropped from the air. Civilisation would come to an end. In 1908, HG Wells, in his book The War in the Air, had prophesied that New York would be reduced in a matter of hours to "a crimson furnace from which there was no escape". These fears were underlined dramatically by the obliteration of the Basque town of Guernica by German bombers during the Spanish civil war and by the Italian air force's use of poison gas to destroy their opponents' armies on the ground during the invasion of Ethiopia.

Yet the reality, when it came, was very different. In 1939, it was almost universally accepted that air power was best used in conjunction with land invasion, to neutralise enemy air forces and disrupt military communications on the ground. No combatant nation went into the war with a fully developed fleet of heavy bombers. The military men had won out over those who had wanted air forces to act independently. There were hesitations about breaking agreed and, in effect, legally binding international sanctions against the use of air power to attack civilians. Hitler explicitly ruled out "terror bombing" and deployed the Luftwaffe to clear the way for the invasion of the British Isles by destroying the RAF – and then, when the job was done (as the Germans wrongly thought it had been by mid-September), to weaken the British economy in support of the blockade.

If the blitz was the first independent strategic bombing offensive, it was followed soon by a much larger offensive on the part of the British, where, exceptionally, military doctrine favoured the independent use of bombers. The strategy was developed following attempts to suppress colonial uprisings, where long distances and poor communications had made it difficult to deploy ground forces effectively. Bomber Command, above all under Arthur Harris, became, in Overy's words, a "sorceror's apprentice", whose activities eventually far outran the control of its political masters.

Here, too, the targets were supposed to be military and economic; even in the hugely destructive raids on Hamburg in 1943, Harris aimed at the working-class districts of the city because the elimination of workers would damage war production. The raids continued to the end of the war owing to fears in the allied high command that the Germans might regain air superiority with the aid of new devices such as ground-to-air missiles (one of which, the Waterfall, was at an advanced stage of development) and jet fighters (the Me 262 was in action well before the end of the war). Yet Harris went beyond this to attack civil society in Germany itself, hoping that the devastation of its cities would lead to a popular uprising against the regime. He boasted regularly of the total destruction of German towns and cities by Bomber Command and its American allies, and his deputy called the D-day landings "an unnecessary 'boating expedition'" in the light of the imminent collapse of the enemy under the weight of the bombing raids.

It is one of the many achievements of this book to show that almost all expectations were confounded: air force commanders consistently overestimated the damage their aeroplanes caused. Although millions of gas masks were distributed to the populations of Britain and Germany, no gas attacks were ever undertaken; both sides feared the consequences too much, despite elaborate preparations, including the fact that the two countries, particularly the British, had built up massive stocks of gas and chemical weapons by the end of the war. Germans were not driven to rise up against Hitler by the bombing campaign; the raids, especially those of Operation Gomorrah against Hamburg in 1943, caused widespread demoralisation and disillusion with the regime. But just as British society had held together under the blitz, so German society endured to the end, though under an increasingly draconian regime of threats and punishments from the Nazi party.

The economic effects of bombing were hugely exaggerated on all sides: German production was dented but not destroyed. The relocation and dispersal of arms factories to safer areas; the camouflage of manufacturing sites (for example, by painting walls and roofs black to look as if they had been damaged by incendiary attacks); and the rapidity with which key sites, such as the ball-bearing factory at Schweinfurt, were reconstructed after an attack, all helped ensure that Geman arms production peaked quite late on in the war, in 1944, under the impact of arms minister Albert Speer's economic rationalisation programme. As for the blitz, despite the bombing of London's docklands, no more than 5% of production was affected by the raids. The military effects of the campaign on the German war effort were far more important, with significant resources in manpower and equipment being diverted from the eastern front to try and deal with the attacks from the air.

Bombing was surprisingly inefficient. As Overy shows, poor visibility, the sudden deterioration of weather conditions, malfunctioning equipment, outdated and slow-moving aircraft, pilot inexperience or crew exhaustion, and enemy action varying from anti-aircraft batteries to night-fighters or the jamming of navigation beams, all reduced the effectiveness of bomber fleets. Aircraft crashed, ran out of fuel or suffered engine failure with astonishing frequency. In its raids on Britain from January to June 1941, for example, 216 German bombers were lost and 190 damaged; 282 of these were as a result of flying accidents. The death rate among bomber crews was appallingly high (crew members in Bomber Command had a one-in-four chance of surviving their first tour of duty, and a one-in-10 chance of surviving their second) but not all of it was as a result of enemy action. At the end of 1941 Bomber Command reckoned that it was losing six aircraft to accidents for every one shot down by the enemy. The British and especially the Americans could make good these losses, and more besides; in the end, Germany's smaller resources meant that the German air force was increasingly outproduced.

Above all, bombing was staggeringly inaccurate. Bomber fleets had to fly high to avoid anti-aircraft fire from the ground, so even if the weather was clear, they were often unable to locate their targets effectively. On one mission, Robert Kee, a bomber pilot who later became a successful historian, "bombed some incendiaries at what we hoped was Hanover" but mostly dropped his bombs on searchlight concentrations because that was all he could see through the cloud. One report, compiled in September 1941, reported that only 15% of aircraft were bombing within five miles of their target. In the last three months of 1944, it was reckoned that only 5.6% of bombs fell within a mile of the aiming point if there was cloud, despite the use of electronic navigation aids. One raid on a major oil plant saw 87% of the bombs missing their target entirely, and only two actually hitting the buildings.

In 1944, during the controversial bomb attacks on the Italian monastery of Monte Cassino, used by the Germans as a military and communication base, the headquarters of general Oliver Leese, three miles from the abbey, were destroyed, as was the French corps headquarters 12 miles away. It took another three months before the strongpoint was taken. A raid on the V-2 rocket production site in a large park north of The Hague dropped 67 tons of bombs on a residential area on 1 March 1945, largely because the briefing officer had got the map coordinates wrong. Carpet bombing of cities was, in the end, virtually the only way to destroy the economic and military targets they contained.

Under such conditions, the idea of bombing the railway lines to Auschwitz to stop the extermination of  the Hungarian Jews shipped there in 1944 was little more than a fantasy; any attack would most likely have inflicted major casualties on the inmates of the camp itself. It was only in the last months of the war that allied air supremacy was so secure, and allied military production so superior to that of the Germans, that really serious damage was inflicted – three-quarters of the entire bomb load dropped on Germany fell during this final period. German industry survived in sufficient strength, however, to eventually provide the basis for the country's "economic miracle" after the war was over.

On this and its other topics, Richard Overy's magnificent survey, based on extensive research into the archives of a large number of countries, must now be regarded as the standard work on the bombing war, not just in Britain and Germany, but in the rest of Europe, too. It is probably the most important book published on the history of the second world war this century, and historians will have to revise many of their long-accepted facts and figures in taking account of it. Unlike other authors writing on this subject, Overy is cautious about making moral judgments; but he has provided the indispensable source of knowledge for those who are not.

Richard J Evans's The Third Reich at War is published by Penguin.

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