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History, Memory, and the Representation of Britain’s Experience of Strategic Bombing in
Survey Textbooks
Stephen Heathorn and James Byrne
Perhaps the most familiar images of Britain during the Second World War are those associated
with the home front during the desperate year and half in 1940–41 when Britain faced the Axis
powers “alone.” These are the images of the “little boats” saving the army at the “miracle” of
Dunkirk; of fighter planes wheeling across the sky during the Battle of Britain; of cities bombed
mercilessly during the Blitz; of the enduring resolve in the communal air-raid shelters; of children
evacuated to the safety of the countryside; of Winston Churchill’s inspirational oratory; of the
smoke from bombed central London obscuring all but the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral; of Vera
Lynn singing “We’ll meet again.” It is these images and symbols of the “People’s War” (as the
conflict came to be known in Britain), that have become the staple of documentary and feature
film, literature and museums exhibits, heritage tourism, and all forms of popular history.i
Recently, historians have become interested in how and why these particular images
continue to resonate within the popular imagination about the war as opposed to the myriad of
other possibilities.ii One of the concepts that has been usefully employed in this analysis is that of
“collective memory.” Memory in this sense refers not to the personal reminiscences of individuals
who recall actual experience, but to the more general process of constructing a coherent narrative
of the past, one that while accepted, may not have ever been directly experienced.iii Some
historians have suggested that the term “myth” better encapsulates the meaning accorded to
“memory.”iv Yet “myth” is a word loaded with latent suggestions of error, and the spectre of
purposeful deceit, self-inflicted or otherwise. “Collective memory” avoids such connotations.

Stephen Heathorn is an associate professor in the Department of History at McMaster
University and an Editor at the Bertrand Russell Research Centre; e-mail:
[email protected]. He has published a number of articles and a monograph For
Home, Country and Race: Constructing Gender, Class and Englishness in the Elementary School,
1880–1914 (University of Toronto Press, 2000) -- on national identity in late Victorian and
Edwardian schoolbooks. He is now writing on the popular memory of war and martial heroes in
20th-century. Britain.
James Byrne is a Ph.D. candidate in History at McMaster University. He is working on a
dissertation on aspects of international politics and justice in 20th Century Europe.
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While admittedly as much imagined as remembered, the past recalled in collected memory is
assembled from a series of verifiable facts, real images, and actual memories. While the resulting
assemblage may exaggerate some and omit other, inconvenient, facts, unsettling images and
events, the result is not pure fiction, but rather one coherent story out of many possibilities.
Collective memory is a useful term because although remembrance of the past is located
within the minds of individuals, memory is not the creation of one or more individuals. It is the
product of individual memories shaped by social forces, culture, and politics.v Thus there can
never be just one collective memory, because there are always many self-defined groups present in
any given society. Still, some recollections resonate with greater intensity in the imaginations of
people than do others, and so have substantial social implications.vi There are, moreover, different
forms of collective memory. For instance, “official” memory might be the term that best describes
a vision of the past sanctioned by the state and/or influential public institutions. This kind of
memory tends to find form in rituals and specific sites: days of national commemoration and
memorial anniversaries; the physical shrines dedicated to recalling the past, such as military
monuments, cenotaphs, public buildings, roadway names, and the like. Such sites form the anchor
points for memory and are essential elements in the construction of a usable past. For this reason,
they are subject to powerful contemporary political, social, and economic forces; for beyond the
conventions usually linked with professional historical practices and methods, the construction of
a specific view of the past often serves contemporary political goals.vii In contrast, “popular”
memory evokes an image of a less directed, if no less purposeful, recollection. Popular memory
draws its material mostly from representations of the past produced through cultural expressions in
literature, poetry, film, individual narrative, and spontaneous acts of remembrance driven by
private emotion.viii For such selected images of the past to appear as the past in the public realm
then they must at least appear familiar to the majority of people and find some resonance with
private memories of the events represented. Popular memory is thereby formed from the
intersection of private remembrance with public representations of the past.ix But the specific
formulation of popular memory, like professional historiography, is conditioned by the social
requirements and conventions of the times in which it is expressed, “changing colour and shape
according to the emergencies of the moment.” As such it is “stamped with the ruling passions of
its time.”x Popular memory is frequently contested by those who choose to forget or recall specific
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details about a particular past event, or reinterpret its significance in the light of current events;
popular memory is therefore never totally fixed, but always remains open to reworking and
reinterpretation to suit the needs of each succeeding generation.
This article seeks to examine the relationship between professional historiography and
popular memory regarding the British home front, and in particular the experience of the Blitz as
opposed to the 1942–45 Royal Air Force (RAF) bomber offensive against Germany. We have
sought to examine this relationship be comparing the treatment of these two interrelated events in
Western Civilization and 20th Century British history textbooks with specialized historiography
about these events. We do this not in an attempt to discredit these textbooks: we understand the
difficulties involved in synthesising a vast amount of scholarly literature in readable form, and it is
not our intention to chastise the authors of survey textbooks for not sufficiently exploring one
particular issue in books that must cover hundreds. However, it is our contention that because
textbooks, even the very best, are situated in a liminal position between professional
historiography and commercial publishing, they combine public and popular collective memory as
well as scholarly practice. Such books are in a unique position in the curriculum of many North
American universities. These texts are often the only history that many students ever read. In
requiring and compiling textbooks for broad, often mandatory “Western Civ” surveys,
professional educators are indicating what they think is important for their own society to
remember and to understand. xi Conversely, such decisions also select what is to be forgotten.
When it comes to contentious issues like World War II bombing, textbook authors may not
just be a few years behind the scholarly consensus, their accounts often, probably unconsciously,
replicate the dominant popular memory rather than challenge it.
The suffering of British civilians as victims of aerial bombardment receives plenty of attention,
while the perpetration of bombing against the enemies of the Allies, however it was justified at the
time, is ignored, or more insidiously, made to seem an entirely natural development: a
dispassionate military activity so divorced from human consequences that it requires no
justification whatsoever. This amnesia with respect to the Allied bomber campaign not only
evades the difficult ethical and moral issues that the strategic targeting of civilians raises, it
downplays the historical context of those decisions and the huge efforts and sacrifices made by the
Allies to conduct a strategic bombing campaign.
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While acknowledging that our discussion is far from systematic, we demonstrate this
tendency by examining two classes of survey texts published over the past decade or so: Western
Civilization textbooks that cover the 20th Century, and history texts designed for introductory
surveys of 20th Century Britain. The first class of book represents the only kind of European
history many university students in North America will ever read. The second represents the more
focused, but nonetheless still quite general, books used extensively in North American British
history surveys. Before we analyse the treatment according bombing in these texts, however, we
ought to first briefly outline the contemporary disjuncture between professional historiography
and the representations of collective memory about these events.
I.
In Winston Churchill’s often repeated words, the Second World War was Britain’s “finest hour”; a
last glimpse of world-historical greatness. It is not surprising then that the Second World War
remains for the British, and for much of the British Commonwealth, a potent symbol of validation
for all shades of political opinion in British life and a benchmark for that nation’s cultural heritage
and identity. In spite of, or perhaps in atonement for, British appeasement policy of the mid-1930s,
once Britain declared war on Germany on September 3rd, 1939, the conflict quickly assumed the
heroic overtones of the timeless crusade of good against evil. The war became a collective struggle
in which all shared the deprivations and sacrifices, and the entire population became potential
victims of Nazi aggression. Consequently, the predominant popular collective memory of the
Second World War is that of national unity in a time of adversity.xii With the nation mobilized as
never before, and civilians taking the brunt of the casualties during the first two years – particularly
during the Blitz – the conflict in Britain soon came to be seen as the “People’s War.”
Historians generally agree that it was the German bombing campaign of London and other
British cities during the fall and winter of 1940-41, that first forged this collective memory of
British wartime experience, even though the Blitz was only directly experienced by a minority of
the population, and its impact was extremely varied for those that did.xiii As Angus Calder and
others have demonstrated, much of the popular memory of the war years, and much that passes for
history, is actually based on a mythic narrative surrounding the Blitz experience that also
incorporates the other dramatic events of 1940. A predominating element of the “necessary myth”
of the Blitz are the oft-related tales of “keeping up spirits” and of social solidarity that existed in
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the large community shelters – particularly the London Underground tube (subway) stations –
during the winter of 1940-41. Recollections of these events, while clearly based in real experience,
turn out to be a rather partial picture of the British experience of German bombing.xiv A shelter
census of London taken in November 1940, for instance, found that just 4% of Londoners used the
tube stations as shelters, and another 9% used other public shelters, but the remainder stayed in
private family shelters, left the city entirely, or (the vast majority) felt no need for shelter at all.xv
Further, drawing on published and unpublished sources, Steven Fielding et al, in ‘England Arise’,
concluded, “even for the minority who used communal shelters, social harmony [within them] was
fragile.”xvi The post-war memory of the collectively shared experience of the Blitz gives no voice
to the nature of social encounters that were in fact the norm. Given that the vast majority of people
forced (by socio-economic deprivation) to use public shelters came from the same social
background, the cross-class solidarity experienced in the big public shelters turns out to have been
a very rare experience.xvii
Although bomb damage inflicted on prominent landmarks affected everyone, the greatest
destruction was visited upon working-class districts surrounding industrial areas; the suburban
areas, home to the middle-class, suffered considerably less.xviii Furthermore, the popular image of
the communal relationship between working-class evacuees from the bombed-out cities and their
involuntary middle-class hosts in the countryside turns out to be a rather exaggerated view of a
much more varied, and off-times less charitable, social response.xix The number of official
complaints by hosts to the government, and to the volunteer agencies running the evacuation
program, evidence that class prejudices retained all their vigour even at the height of the Blitz.xx
By investigating examples like those discussed above, historians and other commentators
have shown that the British social consensus narratives dominating public discussion in the
immediate post-war period were largely the product of propaganda-aided collective memory.xxi
While historians now question the substance of those memories, official rendering of the war
experience has not significantly changed, as evidenced by current popular representations of the
Blitz. Lucy Noakes demonstrates the central importance of the Blitz in British popular memory in
her discussions of London’s two most popular heritage museums: ‘The Blitz Experience’, part of
the renovated Second World War exhibit at The Imperial War Museum (opened in 1989), and the
Winston Churchill’s Britain at War Theme Museum (opened in 1992).xxii Although the first of
these two museums is state-funded and the second is a commercial venture, in their Blitz exhibits
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both represent the lived experience of the “People’s War” rather than explain diplomatic, political,
or military sides of the conflict. In both cases, exhibit visitors “enter” the world of the Blitz, and
experience the sights, sounds, and smells of London in 1940-41 through full-scale mock-ups and
interactive multi-media displays. Significantly, while both museums seek to attract foreign
tourists, their websites and promotional literature especially target domestic audiences: the Britain
at War Theme Museum, for example, offers special rates for school groups including “dress-up
parties” in which children assume the roles of Blitz survivors.
In her analysis of these two exhibits, Noakes demonstrates how both conform to, and
further help shape, collective memory of the war experience, but misrepresent the realities of life
experienced by most Britons during the war. The exhibits present a sanitized form of the Blitz as
an egalitarian time when everyone helped each other, where the principal emotions were
comradeship and determination, while class-consciousness and other social divisions were
forgotten. Despite not-so-recent revisions to the historical record, these museums, and popular
cultural depictions of the Second World War period in general, emphasise the conventional rather
than the supportable. There is little recognition in popular memory that the Blitz fell more heavily
on the less privileged working-class districts than on the wealthy residential areas. Rather, these
exhibits focus on one (albeit real) memory of the Blitz, universalize it, and present it as the public
memory of the events. This presentation endures mainly because it resonates with wartime and
post-war representations that the nation spontaneously overcame internal divisions and aligned
itself behind fundamental, shared values.
The myth of the Blitz and its framing within the narrative of British resistance during 1940
are not deliberate “lies” which need to be exploded as patent falsehoods, but rather are frameworks
of belief upon which popular memory about the war largely rests. Since the supposed shared
values that emerged as a result of the Blitz and overall war experience, the so-called social
consensus, were used by post-war politicians to legitimise their ideas of the modern British state,
popular memory of the “People’s War” took a powerful hold on post-war conceptions about
British heritage and national identity. As Malcolm Smith suggests, a “super truth” contained
within the myth of the Blitz is that the “moral authority of a people, virtually defenceless against an
indiscriminate and brutal attack” survived. This sense of moral authority – of being victims first –
made it “much easier to contemplate visiting the same fate on the enemy.” Germany cities were to
suffer much worse than the British, but it would be “difficult to make the British believe that their
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bombing had not been the first and therefore the more heroic, and the more spiritual, stand.
Eventual victory ‘proved’ that Britain could take it and Germany could not.”xxiii
Indeed, when it comes to issue of “repaying in kind” popular inclination is to forget the
Allied bomber offensive almost entirely, because unlike the narrative of the Blitz, this other story
is still pregnant with unresolved political, moral, and ethical issues. The actions of British Bomber
Command and its aircrew – who in terms of fatalities outnumber by two-to-one the civilians killed
in the Blitzxxiv – cannot be incorporated into the myth of the Blitz even though their actions later in
the war were intimately connected, precisely because that myth is about the victims of terror
bombing, not about its perpetrators.xxv What is popularly remembered by the British is the
collective experience of being bombed, not that of preparing for and engaging in bombing. Yet,
arguably the reality of staging the strategic bombing campaign was just as central to the actual
lived experience of the population as was the experience of the Blitz, for Britain’s air effort against
Germany was one of the most prolonged and extensive endeavours in the nation’s military history.
Immense resources were diverted from other war efforts, and entire industries were given over to
the design and production of heavy bomber aircraft, radio navigation aids, ground-mapping radar,
electronic countermeasures, and huge amounts of ordnance, all necessary to undertake the
campaign. To sustain this military effort a vast industrial infrastructure was required, and entire
segments of Britain’s engineering plant and workforce were given over to planning, testing, and
building the weapons needed. Some 1.4 million workers – about 42 percent of the total workforce
in military production during the war – laboured on Ministry of Aircraft production, with a further
400,000 producing support equipment and ordnance for the campaign. The bombing campaign
required the building of dozens of massive airbases, hundreds of miles of concrete runways and
metalled taxi-strips, together with control towers, hangars, and maintenance shops all across
Britain. The construction effort was a significant drain on the wartime budget. It is estimated that
the cost of the industrial plant constructed solely to provide for the bomber offensive was some
£425 million, the aircraft another £400 million, and that the total financial outlay on the campaign
was over £10 billion.xxvi In all, the effort consumed approximately a third of Britain’s total
wartime expenditures and accounted for nearly the entire foreign debt owed at the end of the war.
The origins of this campaign have received considerable attention from military historians
and need not be recounted here.xxvii It is sufficient to note that the British had pegged its continued
international independence upon the untried concept of strategic bombing during the 1930s, and
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yet was ill-prepared to meet its stated objectives at the outbreak of war in 1939. Early RAF
daylight attacks on German shipping and strategic military targets proved exceptionally vulnerable
to German aerial defences and exploded the intellectual bankruptcy embodied in pre-war
aphorisms such as “the bomber will always get through.”xxviii Operational losses manifested the
RAF’s materiel inadequacies and forced a hasty rethinking of British aerial strategy, but while
daylight “precision” bombing was abandoned in 1940, strikingly, the idea of strategic bombing
was not. Once the German air force, the Luftwaffe, began night attacks on London and other
British cities during the Blitz, British thinking shifted towards launching its own bomber attacks
against Germany under cover of darkness.xxix British impotence after Germany’s conquest of
France in June 1940 is usually cited as the main impetus for this evolution in the strategic bombing
campaign, and Air Marshall Sir Arthur Harris is the RAF officer most closely associated with the
bomber offensive. Although a strident advocate for strategic bombing before the war, Harris was
only appointed to head RAF Bomber Command in February of 1942, long after British politicians
and the military command had already decided upon the nature of the bombing campaign against
Germany.xxx In particular, Churchill’s main scientific advisor, Lord Cherwell, had determined that
the German civilian population ought to become the main target of British attacks.xxxi
The military effectiveness of the RAF bomber offensive continues to be hotly debated.xxxii
For instance, considerable academic (and military) interest focuses on the final decision by the
RAF to adopt “area” bombing – targeting built-up urban areas rather than specific buildings or
industrial complexes – during night-time raids, rather than continuing with a “precision” daylight
campaign against identifiable targets as later conducted against Germany by the United States
Army Air Force (USAAF).xxxiii These decisions were reached after consideration of technological
limitations inherent in aircraft capabilities and bomb-aiming, European weather patterns,
demonstrated German defensive capabilities, and pre-war conceptions of the capabilities of
bombing.xxxiv Debates over the relative effectiveness of the British compared to American
bombing aims and tactics still rage, but recent scholarship has demonstrated that the
much-heralded distinction between “area” and “precision” bombing is ultimately quite
meaningless, since the bombing accuracy of both forces over the course of the war was roughly
the same.xxxv Nonetheless, the origins and significance of the British decision to pursue
indiscriminate bombing have remained points of contention between those who argue for an
ideological development in British bombing policies and those who emphasise the pragmatic and
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desperate necessity of those decisions. Much of the more acrimonious discussion focuses on the
RAF decision to continue area bombing after Germany had been effectively defeated and that
country was nearing the point of military collapse.xxxvi In this latter debate, the joint RAF–USAAF
decision to fire-bomb Dresden over the course of several consecutive days in February 1945, and
the appalling loss of civilian life (the actual numbers of casualties is still undetermined) that this
occasioned, has been foremost.
The origins, aims, methods, efficiency and duration of the bomber offensive all remain
controversial issues, but there is little argument about its catastrophic impact on Germany’s
civilian population and its infrastructure. Conservative estimates place the number of German
civilians killed in Allied bombing attacks at no less than 570,000 (at least 100,000 of them under
the age of 14) and the number of Germans made homeless at more than 10 million.xxxvii These
figures are an entire order of magnitude higher than the British civilian losses due to German aerial
bombardment. Over the course of the three-year campaign, RAF Bomber Command attacked
more than seventy German cities and major towns at least once. Official bomb damage
assessments indicate that twenty-three of these cities had more than two-thirds of their built-up
areas completely destroyed while the remaining centres had as much as 50% of their urban areas
devastated.xxxviii In the words of the official history of the British Royal Air Force, the “destruction
in Germany was by then [1945] on a scale which might have appalled Attila or Genghis Khan.”xxxix
The potential political liability of the bomber offensive, specifically the deliberate
targeting of civilians, became a significant political issue even before the end of hostilities. There
is considerable evidence that the British government did not want the actions of Bomber
Command to be subjected to close scrutiny post-war,xl nor was the greatest aerial campaign ever
waged given a prominent place in Britain’s official commemorations of the war effort. Harris, as
commanding officer of RAF Bomber Command, formally complained during the campaign about
misrepresentations of the bomber offensive’s aims and methods to the public.xli Harris remained
an unrelenting and unrepentant advocate of the strategy of area bombing by night throughout the
entire campaign and thereafter, seeing “de-housing”xlii of civilians and destruction of urban areas
as the quickest, and therefore ultimately the least brutal, method of ending the war. He saw no
reason to disguise these aims and methods from the public at large. Senior political and military
officers outside of RAF Bomber Command did not share Harris’s sanguine views, and as
knowledge the effects of the campaign became more widespread a growing sense of unease
10
developed about the public’s reaction to the indiscriminate area bombing of German cities.xliii
Indeed, during the campaign criticism and concerns about the ethics of the offensive were only
publicly voiced by a few civilians, amongst them noted British military theorist Basil Liddell-Hart.
Liddell-Hart wrote in early 1942 that: “It will be ironical if the defenders of civilization depend for
victory upon the most barbaric, and unskilled, way of winning a war that the modern world has
seen… We are now counting for victory on success in a way of degrading it to a new level – as
represented by indiscriminate [night] bombing.”xliv Liddell-Hart’s views are significant because
he had been an influential party to the extensive interwar debates regarding legitimate use of aerial
weapons. A debate that had been, and remains, greatly complicated by the ambiguous position of
civilians in modern war.xlv
Indeed, at the end of the war Churchill, together with prominent politicians of both major
political parties, clearly wished to downplay the bomber offensive and thereby diminish the
wartime role of RAF Bomber Command. The bomber offensive, despite its length, the massive
numbers of civilians producing for it, and the huge toll on the lives of aircrew, was the only major
military operation not granted its own campaign medal by the British government. Churchill’s
victory speech made no mention of it, or of RAF Bomber Command’s role, and there is little
discussion of it in Churchill’s six-volume History of the Second World War.xlvi The final report of
RAF Bomber Command, written by Harris, has the distinction of being the only final report of a
wartime service ever to have an official rebuttal issued by a government ministry. Harris, who held
Churchill personally responsible for slighting a service that had successfully conducted a pitiless
military campaign in the face of tremendous odds and at a terrible price in lives, was not offered
the civil honours accorded the heads of all the other armed services as part of the victory
celebrations (though this was later corrected).xlvii
The post-war behaviour of the British government seems to support the observation that
officialdom, whether political or military, did not wish to delve too deeply into the wartime
activities of RAF Bomber Command. An official inquiry into the military effectiveness of the
bomber offensive was only begun after repeated calls from within the RAF on its operational
necessity for post-war planning. However, even when finally instituted, the resources assigned to
the RAF British Bombing Survey Unit (BBSU) were miniscule when compared with those
assigned to the American equivalent, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS). In
contrast to the more than 1000 personnel assigned to the USSBS, the field component of the BBSU
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sent to Germany consisted of just one dozen observers.xlviii The final report of the BBSU arrived at
mixed conclusions about the campaign’s efficacy.xlix The official history of the bomber offensive,
published in 1961, was thorough but cautious in its assessment of RAF Bomber Command’s
activities. While the official history stressed that RAF Bomber Command had made a crucial
contribution to the defeat of Germany, it nonetheless criticized the practice of area bombing,
especially in the last year of the war, as indiscriminate and ineffectual. This latter view was
echoed, in even more disparaging terms, in the official history of the Royal Canadian Air Force –
Canadian crews had made up a significant portion of the British effort – some 30 years later.l
Since the end of the war a great number of studies, both popular and academic, have been written
criticizing or defending the conduct of RAF Bomber Command while under Air Marshall Harris’s
command. It is important to note that many of these studies have tried to rehabilitate the reputation
of Harris who, it is justly argued, has become the vilified symbol for an official government policy
adopted prior to his assuming command.li
II
The history of the Second World War, quite understandably, features strongly in the texts
written for Western Civilization courses. Whether political, social, or cultural themes drive the
narrative in a particular work, usually the Second World War is covered in its own chapter, and
military and diplomatic events often sit side by side with social, economic, and political issues. As
the primary market for “Western Civ” texts is North America these books are generally intended
for North American readers and the United States’ role in the conflict unsurprisingly looms large.
However, Britain’s part in the conflict is often a close second. With the exceptions of the nature of
Nazi ideology and discussions of the Holocaust, only rarely do internal developments in Germany
or Japan during the war receive as much attention as do developments in Britain.
While some of the “Western Civ” surveys that we examined acknowledge the existence of
an ethical and moral debate surrounding strategic bombing, this is usually connected to the
dropping of the atom bomb on the Japanese. Rarely is the evolution of aerial bombardment as a
military or political weapon, or the ideological developments on which this evolution rests,
commented on, much less discussed. lii Indeed, conventional strategic bombing receives little or
no comment in most accounts, despite the size of the effort that went into the conventional
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campaigns and the clear connection between the military and political logic governing both
conventional and nuclear bombing. Moreover, in stark contrast to either disregarding or
normalizing allied bombing activities, the experience of Britain during the Battle of Britain and
Blitz consistently received considerably more textual and visual attention.
Most books examined provided a similar quantity of textual coverage to the Second World
War, usually a chapter of 20–30 pages, and offered far less discussion of strategic bombing by the
allies against Germany than of the German bombing of Britain. For instance, in three separate
texts, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, and the Blitz each received approximately one-half page of
textual discussion, accompanied by photographs depicting British fighter planes and German
bombers, British subway shelters and/or damage caused to London.liii In these texts, however, the
allied strategic offensive and the bombing of civilians are either not mentioned,liv or are referred to
only in a brief and indirect manner. One text notes: “Material destruction was great. Axis and
Allied cities, centres of civilization and culture, were turned into wastelands by aerial bombing.
The Germans bombed Rotterdam and Coventry. The British engineered the firebombing of
Dresden.”lv While another proclaims: “The RAF struck Berlin with nine hundred tons of bombs in
March 1943, then concentrated on the industrial Rhineland. The bombing of Essen cut the output
of the Krupp armaments complex by 65 percent.”lvi Here discussion of the practice of bombing
evades fundamental questions regarding its ethics and its escalation at the hands of the allies. The
reasons why the British and the Americans both believed it necessary to bomb civilian areas are
not mentioned; indeed the issue itself is not even raised. Reasons behind the selection of area
bombing over precision bombing are not discussed and the distinction between the two approaches
is rarely broached.
A particularly instructive counter-example to the kind of treatment bombing usually gets in
“Western Civ” texts can be found in the 7th edition of the book The Western Heritage (Vol. 2,
2001) by Donald Kagan, Donald, Steven Ozment and Frank M. Turner. While the entire Second
World War is covered in a chapter of just 21 pages of text and illustrations (exclusive of notes and
supplementary reading lists) this text offers more than the usual amount of coverage to bombing
issues.lvii Within this chapter, the events in Britain in 1940 – Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain –
receive half a page of text, and the Blitz receives another half-page of textual coverage.lviii Of the
bombing of British cities the text notes 30,000 civilian causalities were suffered, but “terrible as it
was, this toll was much smaller than the number of Germans killed by Allied bombing in the war.”
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No figures, however, are provided.lix The text does provide a total of about one-quarter of a page
devoted to discussion of the strategic bombing campaign. This coverage touts the American use of
“precision” bombing and the British belief that such a method was impossible and useless: instead
the British “preferred indiscriminate ‘area bombing’ aimed at destroying the morale of the German
people; this kind of bombing could be done at night.” Later again the text goes on to note:
Terror bombing continued, too, with no useful result. The bombardment of Dresden in
February 1945 was especially savage and destructive. It was much debated within the
British government and has raised moral questions since. Whatever else it accomplished,
the aerial war over Germany did take a heavy toll of the German air force and diverted vital
German resources away from other military purposes.lx
The form of argument taken with respect to conventional bombing in this text parallels the
later discussion of the use of atomic weapons; a use justified with reference to the million Allied
military casualties projected in consequence of an invasion of Japan. However, although noting the
controversy over the bomb’s use since, the section ends with the comment, “The bomb was a way
to end the war swiftly and save American lives. The decision to use it was conscious, not
automatic, and required no ulterior motive.”lxi On the face of it, it seems that the authors have
made efforts to acknowledge the existence of troubling ethical questions about the role of bombing
in the war, but the arrangement of material and the comments made about these ethical issues are
not left open-ended, or with any suggestion that these issues are still being debated. Rather, the text
closes off any such possibility with statements about the ultimate efficacy of the strategic
campaign (“the heavy toll on the German air force” and the diversion of “vital German resources
away from other military purposes”). Yet, there is neither mention of the heavy toll on Allied
bombing crews nor of the huge diversion of scarce Allied resources into the bombing campaign.
There is no sense that there may actually be debate over why the bombing offensive was
undertaken, or over the choices (or lack thereof) facing the British, and later the Americans,
between pursuing a “terror” bombing campaign and one focused on minimal enemy civilian
casualties.
Those texts that devote even smaller amounts of space to the Second World War still
manage to provide significant coverage to the British experience of being bombed while supplying
far less to the economic, political, and military questions surrounding the allied bombing
campaign. Margaret King’s Western Civilization: a Social and Cultural History, Vol. 2, provides
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just nine pages of text and illustrations on World War II,lxii and yet manages to devote a full
half-page to the Battle of Britain and to the Blitz.lxiii A full page is given to the dropping of the
atomic bomb, but the strategic-bombing offensive against Germany is summed up in one sentence,
carefully positioned to follow on from her graphic description of the destruction of the English city
of Coventry:
Later in the war, strategic bombing by the Allies was to destroy great swathes of the
German cities of Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden, whose churches were reduced to
scarred debris, and whose ‘unavoidable’ civilian casualties included the elderly and infirm,
women and children.
She provides no statistics or discussion of the bombing issues, although she does go on to state in
her discussion of the use of nuclear weapons that: “No war tribunals gathered to judge the
scientists and politicians who unleashed the power of the atomic bomb on the human race. They
believed the use of the weapon was justified.”lxiv
Similarly, Robert Lerner, Standish Meacham, Edward McNall Burns in their Western
Civilizations: Their History and their Culture, Vol. 2, devote only about eight pages to the entire
war, but still manage to devote nearly one-half page to Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the
Blitz.lxv Their comments on allied strategic bombing are as follows:
The allies proved to be fully as ruthless and even more efficient than the axis powers in this
regard. After some debate, British and American strategists abandoned pinpoint bombing
in favour of the night-time aerial bombardment of entire cities. The result was the
deliberate fire-bombing of civilian populations, climaxing in Europe in early 1945 with the
brutal obliteration of Dresden, a German city without significant industry and filled with
refugees. These attacks were equalled by the German bombing of French, Belgian, Dutch,
Russian and British cities and civilian populations.”lxvi
Finally, the Houghton Mifflin company’s text devoted to a social narrative of the west,
McKay, Hill and Buckler’s A History of Western Society, provides one paragraph on the Battle of
Britain and Blitz amongst its nine pages of coverage of the war, and sums up the bombing
offensive in one line: “Although British and American bombing raids killed many German
civilians, these raids were surprisingly ineffective from a military point of view.”lxvii However,
this last text, rare amongst those surveyed here, does also make the explicit connection about the
evolution of civilian terror bombing over the course of the war by linking it with the bombing of
15
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “Mass bombing of cities and civilians, one of the terrible new practices
of WWII, had ended in the final nightmare – unprecedented human destruction in a single blinding
flash.”lxviii
Only two of the “Western Civ” texts surveyed explore the question of civilian bombing in
more than two or three sentences. The Houghton Mifflin text Western Civilization: The
Continuing Experiment, devotes the usual half-page of text and accompanying photos of the
damage caused during the Blitz, but also provides a photo of bombed-out Berlin together with the
following comments:
From the start of the war, some, especially among British military leaders, insisted that
bombing could destroy the economic and psychological basis of an enemy’s ability to
wage war. Beginning in 1942, British led bombing attacks destroyed an average of half the
built-up area of seventy German cities, sometimes producing huge firestorms. The
bombing of the historic city of Dresden in February 1945 killed more than 135,000
civilians in the most destructive air assault of the war in Europe. But despite this
widespread destruction, such bombing did not undermine morale or disrupt production and
transport to the extent expected…. The more precise targeting favored by US strategists
proved more effective. Though its proponents consistently overestimated its value,
strategic bombing made a significant contribution to the Allied war effort by the end.lxix
Some of the statements presented as fact in this passage remain debatable (the number killed in
Dresden, for instance, is contested, as is whether the bombing techniques of US Army Air Forces
were, in effect, really more “precise” in their effect than those of the RAF), but the passage does at
least suggest the evolution of the practice. Significantly, it notes, correctly, that strategic bombing
was debated/advocated long before the British experience of the Blitz. Lastly, although the final
sentence introduces a note of finality to the question, the passage does offer points of contention
that might spark classroom debate.
The other exception to the general treatment accorded bombing in these texts is that
provided by Jackson Spielvogel. Unlike the other narratives examined above, Spielvogel treats the
Blitz, the Allied Bombing offensive, and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan in one
combined but discrete section, thereby acknowledging the progressive evolution of terror bombing
as one of the defining features of the war.lxx While saying little about the impact of the strategic
offensive on domestic priorities in Britain, Spielvogel’s treatment leads the reader into questions
16
about the nature of the war as a whole and the place of aerial bombardment of civilians in “total”
war. Spielvogel’s treatment of the bombing of Britain, Germany and Japan – while noting the
important differences of scale – implicitly questions the assumption, found so often in other texts,
that the practice of strategic bombing does not require explanation and analysis: he does not treat it
as an “natural” component of 20th Century warfare. Indeed, his discussion provides an entrée for
comparison and student debate of such issues.
Unlike “Western Civ” texts which, regardless of their methodological foci, tend to treat the
Second World War in its entirety as an important sequence of events for understanding the “West,”
the treatment accorded the war in surveys of 20th Century Britain tend to very much mirror the
thematic focus of the text as a whole.lxxi For this reason it is difficult to compare them one to
another or to the treatments of “Western Civ” books. Indeed, the themes that are the subject of this
article get a wide variety of treatment in this species of texts. Still, there is some value in pointing
to the relative paucity of coverage on the subject of allied bombing in these texts, designed as they
are, to provide a comprehensive survey of British history.
The fourth volume of one of the most popular general series of texts (at least in North
America), the Houghton Mifflin Company’s Britain Yesterday and Today: 1830 to the Present
provides one chapter – entitled “The Age of Churchill” – of some 20 pages devoted to the war.lxxii
The chapter’s narrative and division of space offers significantly less discussion of the allied
bombing campaign than do the “Western Civ” texts. Churchill’s accession to becoming prime
minister and the collapse of France and Dunkirk occupy the first three pages. There follows
two-and-half pages on the events of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz (plus the requisite
photograph of Churchill surveying bomb damage). Four-and-half pages are devoted to the
organization of the British war economy. However, the British involvement in the strategic
bombing campaign is summed up in an extended sentence towards the end of the chapter:
By then [D Day] Allied bombers had become increasingly effective in disrupting the
German industrial and transportation system; in the course of the war, Britain’s Bomber
Command was to drop almost a million tons of bombs over Germany, mostly in night-time
raids, and in the process to lose 8,000 bombers and 46,000 [sic] airmen.lxxiii
Earlier mention is made of the decision not to bomb the gas chambers, and a later mention is made
of the British contribution to the Manhattan project and the million casualties saved by the atomic
bombing of Japan.lxxiv Although there is extensive discussion of military strategy and the events of
17
the war overseas, there is no mention in the discussion of the British economy of the pre-eminent
place held by bomber production; no discussion of the evolving debate at the time and since about
the necessity/morality/ethics of the campaign.
Similarly, both wide-ranging or narrowly focused texts that include coverage of the 20th
Century have found room to detail the heroic memory of 1940-41 and considerably less, or no
space at all, to exploring the more ambiguous bomber offensive: Roy Strong’s The Story of
Britain: A Peoples History (1998) devotes some one-and-half pages out of the five on the war to
Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, and the Blitz, but gives just 35 words to the bomber campaign.lxxv
Martin Pugh’s 1994 survey of politics and society between 1870 and 1990 has a limited discussion
of the war – some 15 pages – but contains no mention of the bombing campaign at all.lxxvi In the
long-term survey of Britain edited by Kenneth Morgan, The Oxford History of Britain (1993
edition), the war is treated in 13 pages, of which the Battle of Britain and Blitz together get nearly
a page, but not one word is written on the allied bombing campaign.lxxvii The text edited by Paul
Johnson, 20th Century Britain: Economic, Social and Cultural Change (1994) positioned as an
alternative to textbooks dominated by political narrative, contains a chapter on attitudes towards
war and the peace movement and another on the wartime economy, but attitudes towards bombing
and economic issues arising from the bomber offensive receive no mention whatsoever.lxxviii The
extensive treatment of the war accorded by Alfred Havinghurst in his Britain in Transition in the
Twentieth Century, contains some eight pages devoted to the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, and
two pages to the allied counter-bombing.lxxix Havinghurst does point to the importance of
Churchill’s scientific advisor and bombing advocate, Lord Cherwell, in the evolution of British
strategic thinking, and acknowledges,
the Blitz was a trifle compared to the terrific punishment meted out to German cities
toward the end of the war. For the allied high command had decided that, in the interest of
an early end to hostilities and total victory, civilian areas must suffer as much as
industrial.lxxx
Some accounts do recognize, although usually briefly, some of the questions that the RAF
and Combined bomber offensives raised. In an older classic, R. K. Webb’s Modern England (2nd
edition, 1980, reprinted since), the war is covered in about eight pages, the events of 1940-41
receiving more than two of these and the bomber offensive is given one line, noting “that it has
been much criticized for its inhumanity and the disproportion between its cost and result.”lxxxi
18
More recently, Peter Clarke’s Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–1990 (1997) provides 35 pages of
coverage on the years 1939–45, including two long paragraphs on the Battle of Britain and Blitz,
and has two sentences on bombing, but manages to note that the bombing “squandered resources”
and the destruction of Dresden “posed a disturbing moral dilemma.”lxxxii A similar line is taken by
Thomas W. Heyck’s The Peoples of the British Isles (2002), wherein the bomber offensive
receives a paragraph amongst the 20-page discussion of the British war effort. Heyck notes that the
aerial campaign raised moral questions during the war and ever since, and was conducted “at a
terrible price,” but nonetheless contributed significantly to the war effort.lxxxiii As with Clarke,
there is no elaboration of what the moral dilemma about the bombing campaign might be.
In his 35-page discussion of the war, Arthur Marwick’s A History of the Modern British
Isles, 1914–1999 (2000), provides a more balanced coverage of the Blitz and of Allied bombing,
giving almost half as much time to the allied bombing as to the impact of German bombing.lxxxiv
Still, his discussion of the Blitz follows an extended, six-page discussion of the importance of
Dunkirk. Marwick – a well-known British historian of war’s impact on society – provides some
context for the campaign and is mildly critical of it, noting: “The waste of resources and of men is
certainly a charge which can be levied against Churchill; but, in a total war, the reasons for
carrying out bombing raids were not altogether negligible.” However, the specific reasons that
Marwick alludes to are not exposed to the reader’s scrutiny, and neither the scale of the British
industrial effort required to sustain the offensive, nor the militarily-beneficial effects of the
campaign on German capabilities are discussed. Marwick notes that Harris has become an
easily-pilloried figure, but seems to miss the point of objections since raised about the bombing by
suggesting, sardonically, that “the American Eighth Air Force, based in England, followed the
perhaps more ‘moral’ policy of daytime attacks on selected industrial targets” and by concluding
that “practically half the air crew who served with Bomber Command (and this is the truly
horrifying statistic) were killed.” lxxxv In effect, he absolves the Allies over the moral issues
relating to aerial bombardment on basis of the sacrifice made by those ordered to conduct it.
In contrast to the above accounts, Trevor Lloyd’s many times revised and reprinted text for
the Oxford Short History of the Modern World series, Empire, Welfare State, Europe: English
history 1906–1992 (1993) provides one example as to how the bomber offensive might be more
profitably treated in survey textbooks. As early as the 1979 edition, Empire to Welfare State:
English History 1906–1976, Lloyd devoted considerable space to discussing both the bomber
19
campaign and issues that arose out of it. Although his coverage is fragmented throughout the
chapter, the Battle of Britain and Blitz receive about two pages of coverage while discussion of the
bombing campaign amounts to nearly four pages out of thirty pages in total.lxxxvi Interestingly,
Lloyd starts his discussion of the bombing offensive not with any particular raid or with the ideas
of Cherwell, Portal, Churchill, or Harris, but with the advent of the Lend-Lease agreement: “One
use made of this flood of Lend-Lease material has been questioned: about half the total British
production of war material went into making aeroplanes, and a great deal of this aircraft
production was devoted to the bombing offensive against Germany.”lxxxvii He goes on to note the
propaganda value of early bombing raids in getting US support and keeping up British morale, and
only then devotes time to the issue of accuracy and the decision to use ‘area’ bombing:
The British high command did not care to give up the independent air offensive, although it
was now becoming something quite different from what had been originally intended. The
decision was taken to use aeroplanes for ‘area’ bombing, which meant that they would try
to knock down German cities. This involved some questionable judgments: the air
commanders believed that German morale was less good than British, so that an attack like
the bombing of London would destroy the German will to fight. The calculations also
assumed that the German economy was already under heavy strain, so that it would be
likely to crack if extra burdens were placed upon it….lxxxviii
Lloyd goes on to question both the effectiveness and morality of the air offensive, pointing to the
waste of industrial capacity, and the huge losses, both of human life and resources, caused by the
simple need to bring aviation fuel into Britain during the battle of the Atlantic.lxxxix Cherwell’s
own underestimation of the costs of the bombing offensive is scrutinized, as is the problem (and
philosophy) of providing suitable fighter escorts, and Harris’s comments about the “panacea” of
bombing specific German industrial targets – such as oil-production facilities.xc Lloyd provides
the rationale and context of the offensive, but concludes his discussions by opening up the question
of whether bombing was the best way to use allied resources, especially in the last year of the war
(although the Dresden raid is not mentioned by name).xci What is most striking about Lloyd’s
treatment is not that he is mildly critical of the bomber offensive, but that he recognizes the
centrality of the offensive to the British effort throughout the war, and raises the ethical/moral
questions not as an afterthought of political correctness, but because they go to the heart of the
20
mental conception-military practice-industrial mobilization nexus that is the basis of the idea of
“total war.”
III
The coverage of World War II bombing in recent Western Civilization and British history survey
textbooks, taken as a whole, tend to replicate collective memory rather that the consensus of
professional historians. Social historians of warfare and military historians have long debated the
efficacy and the ethics of the evolution of bombing tactics, but this debate is rarely acknowledged
in survey textbooks, nor are the origins of either the German or Allied campaigns detailed.
Strategic bombing was an expression of a new ideology of war that deliberately targeted civilians.
This ideology was formulated before the experience of strategic bombing was visited on the
British themselves. Ultimately, the decision to use aircraft to bring destruction to civilian areas and
populations was not so much a military or technological decision but a political one, arguably
founded on the long-term consequences of late-19th Century mass nationalism. It is the belief that
war is a conflict between entire populations (nations) and not just the military instruments of state
policy that underpinned 20th Century notions of total war. Nineteenth-century nationalism
reversed what had been the movement to limit warfare to the manoeuvring of small professional
armies and navies under generally accepted “gentleman’s” rules. To be sure, the practice of
military conduct prior to the 19th Century was often more brutal and unprofessional than
contemporary custom suggested it ought to be, and the “rules” generally applied to Europeans and
not to populations living in other parts of the world. Still, what overturned this trend was the rise of
nationalism and the modern nation-state. Ironically, the 19th Century – a period for Europeans in
which a key concept was “progress” – saw the simultaneous development of both mass, conscript
military forces and the technological leaps of the industrial revolution. What made these
developments sinister was the shackling of these forces to the ideological development of
nationalism. Thus even before 1914, despite codifying the rules of warfare into such documents as
the Geneva Conventions, the concept of the enemy state as an organic whole, every part of which
was a legitimate military target, was coming to be accepted as necessary.
21
The development of aviation in the early 20th Century and its application to mass warfare
was the logical continuation of this political ideology, not an inevitable development of
technology itself, as the treatment in many general “Western Civ” texts tends to imply. Moreover,
there is a clear link between the evolution of conventional allied bombing campaigns during the
Second World War and the use of the atomic bomb. The difference between the two, after all, was
merely one of the scale of destruction; the building of the bomb relied on further technological
innovation, but the decisions to develop and use it were based on the same general political
considerations already operative in the conventional bombing conducted against Germany (and
Japan). From the end of the Second World War through until the end of the Cold War this ideology
continued to dominated strategic military and geo-political thinking, albeit it with weapons of a
much higher order of destructive capability, in the ideas of nuclear deterrence. Even after the
demise of the Cold War and the development of “smart” munitions, a shadow of this ideology
persists in the (not exclusively) American belief that it is better to risk civilian “collateral damage”
through bombing than risk large numbers of military lives. The issues raised from examination of
the German bomber offensive of 1940 and the Allied offensive of 1942–45 are thus clearly
applicable to today’s world, while the horrors visited upon civilian populations in the Second
World War are but a dim outline of the fate that awaits a future generation, should total war ever
occur again. Western Civilization and British history survey texts, however, prefer to replicate the
comfortable collective memory of the war that celebrates British courage under the stress of
bombing, and minimizes the uncomfortable facts that the British and the Americans were
themselves also captive of an ideology that perpetrated the horrors of strategic bombing on civilian
populations.
i
On the post-war rise of popular heritage museums, sites and tourism, see Patrick Wright, On
Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985);
Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen,
1987).
22
ii
Malcolm Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (London:
Routledge, 2000); Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Pimico, 1991); Clive Ponting,
1940: Myth and Reality (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1990).
Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, “Setting the framework,” in their edited collection War
iii
and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 6.
Samuel Hynes, “Personnal Narrative and Commemoration” in Winter and Sivan, War and
iv
Remembrance, pp. 205–220.
v
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992), p. 53.
vi
Jacques Le Goff, Histoire et mémoire (Paris, 1988); Paul Connerton, How Societies
Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); David Middleton and Derek
Edwards, Collective Remembering (London: Sage, 1990); Tzvetan Todorov, Les abus de la
mémoire (Paris: Arléa, 1995); Noah Gedi and Yigal Elam, “Collective Memory – What Is It?”
History & Memory, 8: 1 (Spring/Summer 1996): 30–50; Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, 2d
ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).
vii
David William Cohen, The Combing of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994) is an excellent introduction to this topic.
viii
See David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985).
ix
Lucy Noakes, War and the British: Gender, Memory and National Identity (London:
Routledge, 1998), pp. 12–13.
x
Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994), p. x.
23
xi
Michael W. Apple & Christian-Smith, Politics of the Textbook (London; Routledge, 1991),
xii
Noakes, War and the British, p. 23; Jose Harris, “War and Social History: Britain and the
p. 4.
Home Front during the Second World War.” Contemporary European History, 1:1 (1992), p. 17.
xiii
Noakes, War and the British, pp. 27–28; Tom Harrison, Living Through the Blitz
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).
xiv
Harrison, Living Through the Blitz, p. 111; Calder, Myth of the Blitz, pp. 121–140.
xv
See T. H. O’Brien, Civil Defence (London: H.M.S.O., 1955), p. 508.
xvi
Steven Fielding, Peter Thompson, and Nick Tiratsoo, “England Arise!”: The Labour Party
and Popular Politics in 1940s Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 25.
Harrison, Living Through the Blitz, p. 311; Fielding et al, “England Arise!” discuss this
xvii
issue, pp. 23–26.
xviii
xix
O’Brien, Civil Defence, pp. 508–509, 681.
Geoffrey Field, “Perspectives on the Working-Class Family in Wartime Britain, 1939-45,”
International Labor and Working-Class History 38 (1990), pp. 7–12; J. Macnicol, “The Effect of
the Evacuation of Schoolchildren on Official Attitudes to State Intervention,” in Harold L. Smith
(ed.), War and Social Change (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), pp. 3–31; Travis
Crosby, The Impact of Civilian Evacuation in the Second World War (London: Croom Helm,
1986); Bryan S. Johnson, The Evacuees (London: Gollancz, 1968).
xx
T. Harrison and C. Madge, War Begins at Home (London: Routledge, 1940), pp. 296–309;
R. Padley and M. Cole (eds.), Evacuation Survey (London: Routledge, 1940).
xxi
Harris, “War and Social History,” pp. 17–35. For the debate on the existence, nature and
duration of the social consensus, see Stephen Brooke, Labour’s War (Oxford: Oxford University
24
Press, 1992); R. Lowe, “The Second World War, Consensus, and the Foundation of the Welfare
State,” Twentieth Century British History, 1:2 (1990); K. Jefferys, “British Politics and Social
Policy During the Second World War,” Historical Journal, 30 (1987) and The Churchill Coalition
and Wartime Politics, 1940–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991); Ben Pimlott,
“Is Postwar Consensus a Myth?” Contemporary Record, 2:6 (1989), pp. 12–14; H. Jones and M.
Kandiah. The Myth of Consensus. New Views on British History, 1945–64 (London: Macmillan,
1996).
xxii
Noakes, War and the British, pp. 30–47.
xxiii
Smith, Britain and 1940, pp. 89–90.
xxiv
Over the course of the war 7,122 British bombers were lost and nearly 56,000 RAF
personnel were killed on operations, approximately 8,000 additional died in non-operational flying
or ground accidents or took their own lives; while a further 9,800 were taken as prisoners of war.
See Max Hastings, Bomber Command (New York: Dial Press, 1979), p. 1 and Mark Wells,
Courage and Air Warfare (London: F. Cass, 1995), pp. 101, 127.
xxv
Calder, Myth of the Blitz, p. 43.
xxvi
Norman Longmate, The Bombers: The RAF Offensive Against Germany, 1939–1945
(London: Hutchinson, 1983), p. 363.
xxvii
Sir Walter Raleigh and H. A. Jones, The War in the Air, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1922–37); Malcolm Cooper, The Birth of Independent Air Power (London:
Allen & Unwin, 1986); Phillip S. Meilinger, “Trenchard and ‘Morale Bombing’: The Evolution of
Royal Air Force Doctrine before World War II,” Journal of Military History, 60:2 (1996):
243–270; Malcolm Smith, “A Matter of Faith: British Strategic Air Doctrine before 1939,”
Journal of Contemporary History, 15:3 (1980): 423–442 and British Air Strategy Between the
25
Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Scot Robertson, The Development of RAF
Strategic Bombing Doctrine, 1919–1939 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995). See also the
bibliographic essay by Stephen Harris and Norman Hillmer, “The Development of the Royal Air
Force, 1909–1945,” in Gerald Jordan (ed.) British Military History: A Supplement to Robin
Higham’s Guide to the Sources (New York: Garland, 1988).
xxviii
xxix
Hastings, Bomber Command, p. 17.
John Terraine, A Time for Courage: The Royal Air Force in the European War,
1939–1945 (New York: Macmillan, 1985), p. 262.
xxx
Tami Davis Biddle, “Bombing by the Square Yard: Sir Arthur Harris at War, 1942–45”
International History Review, 21:3 (1999), pp. 626–664; Sir Charles Webster and Nobel
Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany, 1939–45 (London: H.M.S.O., 1961).
xxxi
Webster and Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive, Vol. I, pp. 322–324. The directive
setting out the strategy that concentrated on the area bombing of cities using incendiaries when
appropriate is provided in Ibid, Vol. IV, pp. 143–148.
xxxii
See Solly Zuckerman, “Strategic Bombing and the Defeat of Germany,” Journal of the
Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, 130:2 (1985), pp. 67–70; Melden E. Smith,
“The Strategic Bombing Debate: The Second World War and Vietnam,” Journal of Contemporary
History, 12 (1977): 175–191; and Richard Overy, “The Bombing of Germany: A Reappraisal,”
Modern History Review, 10:4 (1999): 29–33. Overy, in his Why the Allies Won (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1993), pp 130–133; and Gerhard Weinberg in his A World at Arms: A Global History of
World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 773–774, both credit the effect
of the combined strategic bombing offensive as critical to the eventual victory by the allies, even if
they are skeptical of the area bombing aims propounded by Harris.
26
Gian Peri Gentile, “Advocacy or Assessment? The United States Strategic Bombing
xxxiii
Survey of Germany and Japan,” Pacific Historical Review, 66:1 (1997): 53–79.
Practical considerations in the RAF’s decision to move to night-time area bombing is
xxxiv
documented in Webster and Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany, Vol. 1, pp.
167–187, 190–257 and Bereton Greenhous, Stephen J. Harris, William C. Johnson and William
G.P. Rawling, The Official History of the Royal Canadian Air Force, Vol. III, The Crucible of War
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 528–586. For the ideological and historical
considerations (although she eventually siding with the pragmatists) see Tami Davis Biddle,
“British and American Approaches to Strategic Bombing: Their Origins and Implementation in
the World War II Combined Bomber Offensive,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 18:1 (1995):
91–144.
xxxv
W. Hays Parks, “‘Precision’ and ‘Area’ Bombing: who did which, and when?” Journal of
Strategic Studies, 18:1 (1995): 145–174.
xxxvi
Max Hastings, Bomber Command, pp. 383–392, is scathing in his criticism of the
continuation of the area bombing policy after mid-1944.
xxxvii
John Ellis, Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War (New
York: Viking, 1990), pp. 526–527.
xxxviii
xxxix
Sir Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive (London: Collins, 1947), p. 288.
United Kingdom, Royal Air Force 1939–1945 (London: H.M.S.O., 1953), p. 271.
xl
Longmate, The Bombers, p. 350.
xli
Biddle, “Bombing by the Square Yard,” p. 641.
27
xlii
“De-housing” – a euphemism for bombing residential areas – was first used by Churchill’s
primary scientific advisor, Lord Cherwell, in March of 1942. See Solly Zuckerman’s critique of
Cherwell in his From Apes to Warlords (New York: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), pp. 140–148.
Biddle, “Bombing by the Square Yard,” p. 649; Laurie Peloquin, “A Conspiracy of
xliii
Silence? The Popular Press and the Strategic Bombing Campaign in Europe,” Canadian Military
History, 3:2 (1994), pp. 22–30; David Ian Hall, “‘Black, White and Grey’: Wartime Arguments
For and Against the Strategic Bomber Offensive,” Canadian Military History, 7:1 (1998): 7–19;
Louis A. Manzo, “Morality in War Fighting and Strategic Bombing in World War II,” Air Power
History, 39:3 (1992): 35–50; Mark A. Clodfelter, “Culmination Dresden: 1945,” Aerospace
Historian, 26:3 (1979): 134–147; p. 68; M. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic
Books, 1977): 251–263.
xliv
Brian Bond, Liddell-Hart (London: Cassell, 1979), quoted in Stephen A. Garrett, Ethics
and Airpower in World War II: the British Bombing of German Cities (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1993), pp. 105–106.
xlv
Uri Bialer, The Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air Attack and British Politics, 1932–9
(London: Royal Historical Society, 1980); T. D. Biddle, “Air Warfare,” in The Laws of War, ed.
M. Howard, G. Andreopoulos, and M. Shulman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994),
pp. 140–159.
xlvi
Twelve pages of Churchill’s 4,361-page The Second World War (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1948–53) are devoted to the efforts of Bomber Command: Volume 4, The Hinge of Fate,
p. 245; Volume 5, Closing the Ring, pp. 442–450; Volume 6, Triumph and Tragedy, pp. 462–463.
xlvii
Biddle, “Bombing by the Square Yard,” p. 657.
28
xlviii
Harris, Bomber Offensive, pp. 259–60. Although many others were seconded to prepare
the eventual report.
xlix
The Strategic Air War Against Germany, 1939–1945 (London: H.M.S.O., 1998),
introduction by Sebastian Cox.
l
Stephen Harris, in Greenhous et al, Crucible of War, pp. 865–867.
li
Dudley Saward, Bomber Harris (New York: Doubleday, 1985); Charles Messenger,
Bomber Harris and the Strategic Bombing Offensive, 1939–45 (New York: Arms and Armour,
1984); Denis Richards, Hardest Victory: RAF Bomber Command in the Second World War
(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1994); Henry Probert, Bomber Harris: His Life and Times
(London: Greenhill Books, 2001).
lii
In all cases the texts examined are currently in print and, with the exception of Spielvogel
(see note 35 below) are the full as opposed to the “brief” editions that are sometimes options for
each set.
liii
Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, Patricia O’Brien, Civilization in the West , Vol. II (3rd
edition, New York: Longman, 1998); pp. 963–964; Steven Hause and William Maltby, Essentials
of Western Civilization, Comprehensive Edition (Belmont CA: Wadsworth, 2001), pp. 582–84,
589; Marvin Perry, Myrna Chase, James Jacob, Margaret Jacob, Theodore Von Laue, Western
Civilization; Ideas, Politics & Society, Vol. II (6th edition, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp.
835, 847–848.
liv
Perry, Chase, Jacob, Jacob, Von Laue, Western Civilization; Ideas, Politics & Society. This
text devotes one half of a page to the Battle of Britain and Blitz, never mentions allied bombing of
Germany at all, and devotes four lines to the dropping of the A-Bomb on Japan.
lv
Kishlansky, Geary, O’Brien, Civilization in the West, p. 988
29
lvi
Hause & Maltby, Essentials of Western Civilization, p. 590.
lvii
Kagan, Donald, Steven Ozment, Frank M. Turner, The Western Heritage, Vol. Two (7th
edition, Upper Saddle River NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001), pp. 1004–1025.
lviii
Kagan, Ozment, Turner, Western Heritage, pp. 1006, 1022.
lix
Kagan, Ozment, Turner, Western Heritage, p. 1033.
lx
Kagan, Ozment, Turner, Western Heritage, pp. 1015–1016.
lxi
Kagan, Ozment, Turner, Western Heritage, pp. 1018.
lxii
Margaret L. King, Western Civilization: a Social and Cultural History, Vol. 2 (1st edition,
Upper Saddle River NJ; Prentice Hall, 2000), pp. 857–866.
lxiii
King, Western Civilization, p. 857.
lxiv
King, Western Civilization, p. 866.
lxv
Lerner, Robert E., Standish Meacham, Edward McNall Burns, Western Civilizations: Their
History and their Culture , Vol. II (13th edition, New York: Prentice Hall, 1998), pp. 1027–1035.
lxvi
Lerner, Meacham, Burns, Western Civilizations, p. 1031.
lxvii
John McKay, Bennett Hill, John Buckler, A History of Western Society, Vol. II (6th
edition, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 987.
lxviii
lxix
Ibid.
Thomas Noble, Barry Strauss, Duane Osheim, Kristen Neuschel, William Cohen, David
Roberts, Western Civilization: The Continuing Experiment Vol. II (2nd edition, Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1998), p. 1055. The photo of Berlin is on p. 1059.
lxx
Jackson Spielvogel, Western Civilization: A Brief History (New York: West, 1999), pp.
596–598. Spielvogel’s treatment may be more sensitive to these issues because he is, by training,
an historian of Nazi Germany.
30
lxxi
Recent texts have focused on such issues as the relationship between the various national
groups within Britain – for instance Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 edition) – or the development of a common
British identity – Keith Robbins Great Britain: Identities, Institutions and the Idea of Britishness
(London: Longman, 1998). Such thematic foci result in the Second World War receiving relatively
little attention. Consequently, such thematic texts have not been considered in this survey.
lxxii
Walter Arnstein, Britain Yesterday and Today: 1830 to the Present (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 2001), pp. 338–359.
lxxiii
Arnstein, Britain Yesterday and Today, p. 355.
lxxiv
Arnstein, Britain Yesterday and Today, p. 354, 358.
lxxv
Roy Strong, The Story of Britain: A Peoples History (London: Hutchinson, 1998), p. 500.
lxxvi
Martin Pugh, State and Society: British Political and Social History, 1870–1997
(London: Arnold; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 223-36.
lxxvii
K.O. Morgan, ed, The Oxford History of Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993), pp. 621–634; the Blitz is covered on p. 623.
lxxviii
Paul Johnson, ed., 20th Century Britain: Economic, Social and Cultural Change
(London: Longman, 1994).
lxxix
Alfred F. Havighurst, Britain in Transition in the Twentieth Century (4th edition, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 303–309, 314–316, 338, 345, 359.
lxxx
Havinghurst, Britain in Transition, pp. 299, 359.
lxxxi
R.K. Webb’s Modern England (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), pp. 565–573; the
quotation is from p. 568.
31
lxxxii
Peter Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–1990 (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1997), p.
lxxxiii
Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles: A New History, Vol. 3, From
201.
1870 to Present (Chicago: Lyceum, 2002), p. 207.
lxxxiv
Arthur Marwick, A History of the Modern British Isles, 1914–1999 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), pp. 145–148 (Battle of Britain and Blitz), 153–154 (bombing of
Germany).
lxxxv
Marwick, A History of the Modern British Isles, p. 154.
lxxxvi
Trevor Lloyd, Empire to Welfare State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp.
217–219; 220, 224, 231, 232, 234, 239, 241.
lxxxvii
Lloyd, Empire to Welfare State, p. 220.
lxxxviii
Lloyd, Empire to Welfare State, p. 224.
lxxxix
Lloyd, Empire to Welfare State, pp. 231, 232.
xc
Lloyd, Empire to Welfare State, pp. 226, 232, 234.
xci
Lloyd, Empire to Welfare State, p. 239.