In Europe

method of eliminating the enemy by destroying his centres of population. The bombardments of Germany were therefore not a reaction to the German bombings of London, Coventry and other British cities, but part of a strategy that had been drafted long before that. Coventry was not an immediate cause, merely a justification.
    Generals, as the old saw goes, always tend to win the war that's over, and this was no different in 1939–45. The losing strategists of the First World War, the Russians and Germans, looked back on the struggle as a missed opportunity. They had ‘almost’ won, and with bigger and better-equipped armies the same large-scale attacks would, in their eyes, succeed this time.
    The victors, the French, British and Americans, remembered 1914–18 primarily as an unparalleled massacre of their own young people, a repetition of which was to be avoided at all costs. Hence the bold campaign in Germany in May 1940 and the similar Russian strategy in spring 1945.And hence, too, the French Maginot Line and Eisenhower's caution. Hence too the enormous investment by the British – almost a quarter of their entire war budget – in the ‘strategic bombardments’.
    So arose the Allied variation on the war's ‘radicalisation’. In the eyes of Harris and others, German citizens were not merely hapless souls who accidentally got in the way, but were in fact their principal target. Their strategy of ‘moral bombing’ assumed that the death of as many German civilians as possible would shorten the war, because it would cause morale on the home front to collapse much more quickly.
    It should not be forgotten, as the British military historian John Terraine puts it, that the term ‘moral’ in a bombing directive means the reality of ‘blowing men, women and children to bits’. In the archives, Terraine came across a memorandum from RAF Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal in which he detailed the ‘production possibilities’ for his superiors. Within the next two years, he boasted in November 1942, he would be able to drop almost 250,000 tons of bombs on Germany, destroying 6 million houses and a corresponding number of industrial installations, killing 900,000 Germans, badly wounding a million and leaving 25 million homeless. Terraine: ‘What is one to think of the calm proposal, set down in a quiet office, to kill 900,000 civilians and seriously injure a million more? One thing emerges, with absolute clarity: this was a prescription for massacre, nothing more nor less.’
    This ‘moral bombing’ did indeed take place on a massive scale. For every ton of bombs that landed on London, Coventry and a few other places, the British and the Americans dropped more than 300 tons back on Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Nuremberg and other German cities. The Allies knew what they were doing: one of the most powerful bombs, weighing over 2,000 kilos, was normally referred to as ‘the Cooker’, because, as people said:‘it literally brings the folks on the ground to boiling point’.
    The bombardment of civilians became a special science. Although the British bombed more or less at random in 1940–1, from 1943 the targeted districts were first studied carefully on aerial photographs. A pronounced preference arose for residential neighbourhoods, as being most susceptible to ‘demoralisation’. Specialists calculated which bomb could best be used to destroy which building, how a firestorm could be created byfirst using a blockbuster to blow out all doors and windows, how a house could quickly be set alight by adjusting a bomb to explode only after it had first crashed through three floors. To kill firemen and other helpers, time bombs were dropped that went off only 36, 72 or 144 hours after deployment.
    Ironically enough, it was the Germans themselves who had done the pioneering work in these developments. They had evaluated their own bombardments of Warsaw (25 September, 1939) and Rotterdam (14 May, 1940), and applied their findings to the Luftwaffe's bombardment of Stalingrad (23 August, 1942). In the firestorm created in that city, more than 40,000 people were killed within a few days, a number equal to that in Hamburg.‘The report from
Luftflottenkommando 4
[concerning Warsaw] reads like a recommendation for Bomber Command,’ writes Jörg Friedrich in
Der Brand
, his impressive account of the bombing war against Germany. He cites the Luftwaffe specialists: ‘The explosive bomb paves the way for the