Page 428 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

428 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

February 1945. By July 1940 Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in contrast to his attitude as
Munitions Minister during the First World War, was convinced that: „Nothing will bring the
29
German to his senses or to his knees except an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack
by over-heavy bombs from this country against the Nazis‘ home territory“. 30
On the night of 24/25 August 1940 the Luftwaffe accidentally bombed London for the
first time. This led to a British counter-attack on Berlin the next night, soon to be followed
by further air raids. On 7 September 1940 Hitler ordered targets in London to be attacked.
Until then neither the RAF nor the Luftwaffe had indulged in indiscriminate bombing. In
fact, where British bombers had been unable to make out their targets they had brought back
their bombs However, there was no technical means of preventing bombs from dispersing,
especially at night. This meant that henceforth all bombing attacks, in Germany and Eng-
land, seemed like a sort of act of terror, even before they were actually intended as such.
Thus several bombs had already hit towns in west and north Germany by the time the British
war cabinet approved the first real „terror attack“ by Bomber Command on a German town,
namely Mannheim. This took place as part of Operation „Abigail“, justified in British eyes
by the German attacks on Coventry - the city was 80% destroyed on 14/15 November by
German bombers - and Southampton. After the attack on Mannheim, and the way the bombs
tended to disperse, measures were introduced to concentrate a certain number of bombers
into a „bomber stream“ over the target and to improve target identification by marking it in
advance with special luminous colouring.
Many more British attacks on German towns followed, for example on Cologne, Essen,
Bremen, and of course Berlin. Places of cultural value were hit more or less as collateral
damage, but were not specifically targetted. Basically, once the British realised that precision
bombing was not viable and concentrated on area bombing instead, it became much more
productive for Bomber Command to aim at town centres, which tended to be the most built-
up and the most heavily populated. In turn, these British raids led to the so-called “Baedeker
Raids” by the Luftwaffe on historic English towns like Bath, Canterbury, and York etc.
Let me end this paper with a quotation: This is what Thomas Mann wrote in his diary in
May 1942 in California, when he heard of the bombing of Lübeck, his home town: “The old
town of Lübeck is the victim of the latest British bombing raid on Hitler’s Germany. It affects
me it is my hometown. The harbour and sites of war industry have been hit. But there have also
been fires in the town and I don’t like to think that the Marienkirche and the marvellous renais-
sance town hall or the Schiffergesellschaft building may have been damaged. But then I think
of Coventry - and cannot but accept the lesson that there is a price to pay for everything”. 31

29 In October 1917 Churchill had written: “It is improbable that any terrorization of the civil population which
could be achieved by air attack would compel the Government of a great nation to surrender...In our own
case we have seen the combative spirit of the people roused, and not quelled, by the German air raids. No-
thing that we have learned of the capacity of the German population to endure suffering justifies us in assu-
ming that they could be cowed into submission by such methods, or, indeed, that they would not be rendered
more desperately resolved by them...Any injury which comes to the civil population from this process of
attack must be regarded as incidental and inevitable” Jones, The War in the Air, Vol. Appendices, Appendix
iV, 19.
30 John Coleville, The Fringes of Power. Downing Street Diaries 1939-1955. London [etc] 1985, 186.
31 Thomas Mann, Zeit und Werk. Tagebücher, Reden und Schriften zum Zeitgeschehen. Berlin 1956, 655.