Book review: The Bombers and the Bombed, by Richard Overy

by Richard Overy
Viking Adult
3.5 stars
James Ash

Writing to US president Franklin Roosevelt in 1943 about a recent Allied bombing of the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, British prime minister Winston Churchill said: "If the medicine has done good, let them have more of it."

Bulgaria was on the Axis side at the time, and an enemy of Britain and the US. But as British historian Richard Overy shows, the Allies also dished out plenty of their harsh medicine to the conquered European countries on their side.

In his survey of the American and British bombing campaign in Europe during the second world war, Overy breaks new ground by revealing that almost a third of the bombs the Allies dropped on the continent were on occupied countries that they were trying to liberate.

There was some justification for attacking certain targets in France, the Netherlands and Norway, since the Nazis had converted industry in these countries for their own use. But Overy shows that the wildly inaccurate heavy bombers of the period were too blunt an instrument for "surgical strikes", and ended up killing 75,000 civilians in countries that were on the Allied side.

This tragedy was repeated on a larger scale in the Axis nations, where the US and Britain paid lip service to the idea of bombing only "strategic" targets, but knew perfectly well that the goal was to raze whole cities.