R DEATH F OM THE SKIES DEATH R F OM THE SKIES how the b itish and r germans survived bombing in world war ii R DIETMA SÜSS Translated by Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries First published in German as Tod aus der Luft. Kriegsgesellschaft und Luftkrieg in Deutschland und England By Dietmar Süß © 2011 by Siedler Verlag, a division of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH, München, Germany. The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International–Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT, and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association). © in this English translation Oxford University Press 2014 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2014 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2013940850 ISBN 978-0-19-966851-9 Printed in Italy by L.E.G.O. S. p. A.–Lavis TN Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. Acknowledgements It is a pleasure to thank those who have supported me generously in the writing of this book. Many people—more people than I can thank individ- ually—have given me their time, pointed me in the right direction, and discussed this project with me. It is one of the great myths about academic research that it inevitably leads to isolation. The origins of this book lie in the ‘air-war group’, of which Barbara Grimm, Nicole Kramer, and Hans Woller were also members, at the Insti- tute for Contemporary History in Munich. I discussed with them the initial drafts and much more besides. In Jena Norbert Frei offered me the opportunity to continue working on the air war. He supported the project energetically and constantly spurred me on to ponder the subject afresh. What more could one wish for? This study was accepted in the summer semester of 2010 as a second doctorate (Habilitation) by the Philosophical Faculty of the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. The Habilitation scholarship awarded me by the Bavarian State Ministry for Education and the Dilthey Fellowship I was given by the Volkswagen Foundation enabled me to complete the work free from mate- rial concerns. The Department of History at the University of Exeter very kindly acted as my host during my stay in the UK. As a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation I spent an unforgettable year working with Jeremy Noakes in Exeter. I am very grateful to the Foundation and to my wonder- ful host. He taught me many things that cannot be found in the archival documents and yet are so important to anyone writing about another country. Richard Overy provided me with the opportunity to present and discuss my research at the University’s Centre for the Study of War, State, and Soci- ety from which it greatly benefited. I am also grateful to all the British and German archives I used for their assistance. Jörg Arnold, Neil Gregor, Christiane Kuller, Armin Nolzen, Kim Christian Priemel, Sybille S teinbacher, vi acknowledgements and Malte Thiessen sacrificed a great deal of time to give me critical com- ments. I made particularly heavy demands in this respect on Daniel Maul and on my brother Winfried. Katja Klee and Mathias Irrlinger were very a great help with the final edit. Siedler, the German publisher, and its managing editor Tobias Winstel, sup- ported the project from an early stage, for which I am also very grateful. I completed the German text in October 2010 and have only been able to incorporate a few references to more recent literature in the English edi- tion. The translation was made possible with the generous aid of ‘Geisteswis- senschaft International’ and I would like to thank the two translators, Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes, for their excellent translation. Rosmarie Scheidhamer-Süss is familiar with all the highs and lows in the history of this piece of work. It is dedicated to her. Augsburg, 2013 Preface to the English Edition For me the air war conjures up memories of football. Although I am no longer certain, it must have been during the World Cup semi-final between England and Germany in 1990 that I first heard the song ‘There were ten German bombers in the air’, though as a 16-year-old schoolboy on a lan- guage course I did not grasp its meaning fully. I only knew that the atmos- phere in the pub suddenly changed and we realized we would do well to keep our delight about the missed penalties strictly to ourselves. I was reminded of this many years later when, some ten years ago, con- troversy over the air war raged for months in the press on both sides of the Atlantic. My first tentative thoughts about this project date back to that time, but the weightiness of the topic did not come home to me until I first read extracts from Jörg Friedrich’s The Fire in the German newspaper Bild, the equivalent of The Sun, and the heated responses to it in the British press. The arguments surrounding the legitimacy of the air war and Churchill himself as an alleged ‘war criminal’ produced a fair amount of intemperate comment and since then the German extreme Right in particular has repeatedly referred in emotive terms to the ‘Allied bombing holocaust’ and attempted to mobilize its supporters on the anniversaries of the bombing raids. This still goes on and thus the history presented in this book is one with an open ending. The controversy regarding the ‘taboo’ subject of the air war and the legitimacy of Allied tactics did not, however, come from nowhere but was rather connected to a boom in literature about the air war, which from the mid-1990s onwards gave increasing prominence to the perspective of the victims and to the ‘history of German suffering’ in the Second World War. This book is therefore not only about the war as a set of past events but also about the ‘new’ Germany that arose after reunification and about British– German relations almost seventy years after the end of the war. While almost every British crime series is shown on German television, one of the most viii preface to the english edition popular and (in the author’s view) most wonderful British series about the Second World War has never appeared on German TV, namely Dad’s Army. This fact may well be of more than just anecdotal interest. The controversy over The Fire has since died down and it has become even more evident how far memories of the air war have been adjusted to fit the present, thus becoming freshly relevant and acquiring new meanings in relation to current controversies. This was shown when NATO forces intervened in Libya. Are air raids effective in preparing for the deployment of ground forces? How can ‘collateral damage’ be avoided? And is this pos- sible, in any case? And, whether intentionally or unintentionally, are these weapons systems not always directed against the civilian population? As in Britain, where for many years the overarching ‘myth of 1940’, which was created for propaganda purposes, obscured the deep divisions in wartime society, in Germany the air war fed into the construction of a new national identity that was meant to reflect the Germans’ past not only as the perpetrators of the war but also as its victims. In spite of the vast quan- tity of books on the history of the Second World War, in spite of the many studies of the Blitz, there have up to now been few attempts to give an account of the air war as part of the history of violence in Europe in the modern era and thus to investigate the shared and distinctive experiences of war on the part of the civilian populations. For many decades this per- spective was at odds with the established traditions of national historiogra- phy; it was at odds also with the public and private narratives of the past. In addition, there are reasons why this kind of comparative project is problematic. The asymmetries of the war are, of course, one problem: the differing levels of destruction caused by the air war and the differing phases of the war in which the raids took place. On first consideration, given the images of Dresden and Hamburg that have become fixed in the collective memory, a comparative study of urban life seemed an unproductive approach. From autumn 1944 the Allied air forces’ command of the skies gave them greater and greater power to inflict damage, for the Americans and British could now attack German towns and cities at will by day and night. The US air force concentrated on targeting German industry, while the RAF con- tinued with its strategy of night-time area bombing. The Ruhr in particular experienced a new intensity of bombing from September 1944 onwards, in the course of which industrial plant, fuel depots, and large parts of the road and rail network were seriously damaged. Fairly small and medium-sized towns were now the targets of Allied raids, which, apart from destroying the preface to the english edition ix infrastructure and industry, were supposed to create widespread fear and panic in the population in order to destabilize the regime and at the same time support the advance of ground troops in the west after the Normandy landings. At the latest from 1943/4 onwards the raids completely disregarded the already hazy boundaries between military and civilian targets. From the start of the war to the spring of 1945 British Bomber Command was able to quadruple its total of bombers and increase tenfold the quantity of explo- sives they carried. At the same time the Allies could mobilize greater and greater economic and technical resources, with the result that they could significantly increase their number of operations and have long-range fight- ers accompany their bombers. So while the German daytime and night- time anti-aircraft defences, hitherto so dangerous, were slowly being paralysed, the Allies, boosted also by their advance in Italy, were able con- stantly to extend the range and precision of their raids. Anyone wanting to find out more about Allied strategies or about the Luftwaffe may well find this book a disappointment, for its focus lies else- where, namely on day-to-day life during the war, on the experiences of those who went through it and the attempts of both nations to deal with this new threat from the air and its dire consequences. This is therefore a book about wartime morale, about ideas of the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to respond to war situations, about populations’ powers of endurance and the daily struggle to cope with crisis. Hence it is also a history of the fear of ‘death from the skies’. In spite of the gulf between democracy and dictatorship, the story of this sense of threat determined the reactions of both nations and their responses to it showed both similarities and fundamental differences. This book is not therefore concerned with the long-running conflict between Germans and the British over ‘guilt’ and ‘expiation’, nor does it aim to pass judgement on the issue of the legitimacy of the air war, as other studies, including most recently some by British writers, have done. British involvement in Iraq has left its mark on this debate and at the same time contributed to a change in perspective on the past. This book is concerned with something else: by prob- ing what lies beneath the terms ‘national community’ and the ‘People’s War’ we may reach an understanding of those ambivalent forms of social organiza- tion that characterized both societies at the time of the air raids. Such a com- parison reveals even more clearly than hitherto what distinguished the German ‘national community’—a divided and unequal, increasingly extreme society based on violence—so fundamentally from other forms of social organization of the inter-war and war periods.