Richard Overy’s purpose in writing The Bombers and the Bombed was to present the “first full narrative” of Allies’ bombing campaign in Europe during World War II. Overy acknowledges that this field is chock-full of outstanding works already, but suggests none present the full range of the bombing efforts in all of Europe, the larger strategic and political context of the bombing, and the response of the Axis and the occupied nations that were bombed. By offering the perspectives of the bombers and the victims, Overy has created parallel narratives. This allows the reader to contrast the strategy of the Allies’ bombing offensive with the lived reality of the people on the receiving end of that strategy, many of them allies in occupied France, Holland and Belgium. This dual approach enables the assessment of, as Overy points out, “the issues of effectiveness and ethical ambiguity” of strategic bombardment, both longstanding controversies. The author’s second purpose is to more than summarize his impressive bibliography of well-known archival and new primary sources. By triangulating official accounts of the RAF and USAAF with the private records of individuals and institutions, Overy challenges established myths, questions strategic assumptions, and corrects long-held misrepresentations.
Overy anchors The Bombers and the Bombed with a discussion of the origins of Great Britain’s and the United States’ strategic bombing doctrine. The author strikes the familiar chords of air power advocates like Generals Guilio Douhet, Billy Mitchell, and Air Marshall “Boom” Trenchard. However, in keeping with his commitment to challenge assumptions, Overy digs deeper. He notes that Great Britain’s Air Ministry knew, in 1938, that daylight bombing was only 3% accurate, that strategic bombing would cause massive civilian casualties, and there was no intellectual foundation to support the idea that bombing would so demoralize populace that they would demand an end to a war. Given this less than solid footing, it is significant that Britain would commit to strategic bombing early in WWII.
Chapter two chronicles Britain’s bombing failures between 1941 and 1943. During this period, nothing went right for the RAF other than the old adage that “the bomber will always get through.” Poor doctrine, as noted above, was abetted by the obsolete airplanes, poorly trained air crews, feckless senior leadership, inadequate navigation and bombing aiming technology, and poorly conceived area bombing tactics. So, while the bomber always got through, they rarely hit their target and thousands never got back. Overy notes a pivotal 1941 study which reported only one in five aircraft dropped their bombs within five miles of the target. Yet, in the face of unrelenting political pressure to simply do something against Nazi Germany, the RAF soldiered on with area bombing. In late 1942, the United States’ 8th Air Force arrived and began to execute the doctrine of strategic daylight precision bombing.
In the following chapters, Overy recounts the joint bombing effort against Germany with the Americans precision bombing by day and the British area bombing by night. By 1944, the Allies hit their stride. The RAF was inflicting enormous civilian casualties and massive municipal destruction, and the USAAF was annihilating the Luftwaffe and German oil production and transportation networks. In the author’s final analysis, however, it was USAAF’s evolving strategy of targeted destruction that made the difference. The British area bombing doctrine, while understandable given the circumstances early in war, was static, ineffective and disproportionate, particularly so by March 1945 when Germany was clearly on the ropes.
The second half of Overy’s work, which could be a stand-alone volume, tells the largely untold story of the bombed. It is no wonder that German morale did not collapse given the Nazi’s extraordinary efforts to mitigate municipal bomb damage and care for those left homeless. German citizens suffered mightily; but, like the British during the Blitz, they were remarkably resilient. The Italians, on the other hand, with no such support structure, collapsed under the weight of American bombing almost immediately.
In the “Bombed into Freedom” chapter, Overy recounts the deaths of over 70,000 French, Dutch and Belgians from Allied bombing in 1944-45. While these casualties were in the bombing of legitimate military targets, it is not unreasonable to expect that Allied planners should have exercised more common sense when, for example, they targeted The Hague in March 1945. In this raid, over 500 Dutch civilians were killed when British bombers missed the target. Here again, late war Allied bombing was rote and indiscriminate, or as Overy describes it “bomb happy.”
If there is a miss in Overy’s work (and it’s not a big one) it is not in his well-written, thoroughly researched narrative. It is instead when this book is compared with his prior work– Why the Allies Won. In a chapter titled Bombers and Bombing, Why the Allies Won heralds the Allied bombing effort as “…one of the decisive elements in the Allied victory” (133). In Bombers and the Bombed, Overy argues that “Bombing in Europe was never a war-winning strategy” (xi). It would be interesting to hear the author’s thoughts on what a careful reader might view as an apparent contradiction in conclusions.
The Bombers and the Bombed was important read and it challenged every one of my pre-conceived notions about WWII. The modern lesson I took from this book is that every innocent life lost when the United States goes to war diminishes our cause and diminishes us as a nation.
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Well written and comprehensive
An interesting angle about the bombing campaigns of a war that left millions dead and cities, villages and countries reeling. It leaves one hoping that this will add to the many lessons mankind has to fall back on to know that avoiding war is of the utmost importance.
