Richard Overy - The Bombing War

19. Jeffry Diefendorf, In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II (New York: 1993), 14–15.

20. LSE archive, Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom papers, 2009/52/3, Mary Phillips (Women’s International League), ‘Germany Today: Report on Visit to British Zone May 9 to 27 1947’, 2–3, 5.

21. Leo Grebler, ‘Continuity in the Rebuilding of Bombed Cities in Western Europe’, American Journal of Sociology , 61 (1956), 465–6.

22. LC, Eaker papers, Box I.30, MAAF Intelligence Section, ‘What is the German Saying?’, recording ‘G’.

23. Fred Iklé, The Social Impact of Bomb Destruction (Norman, OK: 1958), 213–15, 218–20.

24. Cited in Tiratsoo, ‘The Reconstruction of Blitzed British Cities’, 28.

25. Ibid., 36.

26. Grebler, ‘Continuity in Rebuilding’, 467–8.

27. Steven Brackman, Harry Garretsen, Marc Schramm, ‘The Strategic Bombing of German Cities during World War II and its Impact on City Growth’, Journal of Economic Geography , 4 (2004), 205, 212.

28. Grebler, ‘Continuity in Rebuilding’, 467.

29. Nicola Lambourne, ‘The Reconstruction of the City’s Historic Monuments’, in Paul Addison, Jeremy Crang (eds), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 (London: 2006), 151–2, 156–60.

30. Andreas Huyssen, ‘Air War Legacies: From Dresden to Baghdad’, in Bill Niven (ed), Germans as Victims (Basingstoke: 2006), 184–9; Peter Schneider, ‘Deutsche als Opfer? Über ein Tabu der Nachkriegsgeneration’, in Lothar Kettenacker (ed), Ein Volk von Opfern? Die neue Debatte um den Bombenkrieg 1940–1945 (Berlin: 2003), 158–65.

31. Mark Connelly, Stefan Goebel, ‘Zwischen Erinnerungspolitik und Erinnerungskonsum: Der Luftkrieg in Grossbritannien’, in Jörg Arnold, Dietmar Süss, Malte Thiessen (eds), Luftkrieg: Erinnerungen in Deutschland und Europa (Göttingen: 2009), 55–60, 65.

32. I am grateful to Professor Dobrinka Parusheva for supplying me with information on the Bulgarian protests.

This book owes much to the generosity of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and to the Leverhulme Trust, the first for funding a major research project on ‘Bombing-States and Peoples in Western Europe’ in the years 2007–10, which I helped to direct at the University of Exeter, the second for funding a year of research leave in 2010–11 to allow me to complete most of the archive research and begin writing. I would also like to thank the University of Exeter for allowing me a number of semesters of leave to work on the bombing project. I owe a particular debt to the support and help given by the team on the AHRC project – Claudia Baldoli, Vanessa Chambers, Lindsey Dodd, Stephan Glienke, Andy Knapp, Marc Wiggam – and I hope they find that the end product has been worth all our many brainstorming sessions. I would also like to thank Claire Keyte for all her unstinting assistance in helping us manage the AHRC project and its aftermath.

Over the course of the preparation and writing of this book I have relied on the help, advice and criticism of a great many people. I owe a particular debt to those who have helped me find archive material or have translated what I couldn’t read. Dr Matthias Uhl devoted many hours to searching out and organizing material from the German and Soviet archives deposited in Moscow. To him and his anonymous assistants I owe a large debt of thanks. The Russian material has been rendered into English for me by Olesya Khromeychuk and Elena Minina, for which I am also deeply grateful. The Bulgarian account of the bombing of Bulgaria was made accessible to me thanks to the help of Professor Dobrinka Parusheva in Sofia and Vladislava Ibberson, who did the translation. Material on the Soviet bombing of Finland was very kindly supplied by Dr Anu Heiskanen from Helsinki and, for the bombing of Rotterdam, by Major Joris van Esch during his time at the US Military Academy. Pieter Serrien was generous in providing information on the bombing of Belgium. As ever I am indebted to the assistance given in the many archives I have visited, with the exception of the American National Archive at College Park, Maryland, which astonishingly still remains a researcher’s nightmare.

Many other people have contributed in one way or another in helping to get this book finished and providing material, information or advice: in particular Martin Alexander, Monika Baar, Maria Bucur, Nicholas Chapman, Sebastian Cox, Jeremy Crang, Juliet Gardiner, Jim Goodchild, Hein Klemann, Sergei Kudryashov, James Mark, Phillips O’Brien, Anna Reid, Matthias Reiss, Laura Rowe, Nick Terry, Martin Thomas and Richard Toye. I would also like to offer a general thanks to all my students at Exeter who have taken my course on the history of bombing over the last five years and made the teaching so enjoyable. They have often made me think about issues differently, or reassess things I took for granted. I hope they will see some of that intellectual conversation reproduced here. For any remaining errors I have only myself to blame.

To my agent Gill Coleridge and her assistant Cara Jones my grateful thanks for their enthusiastic support. I am indebted as ever to the team at Penguin Press – Simon Winder, Richard Duguid, Penny Vogler – and to my copy-editor, Richard Mason, for all their help in turning the manuscript into its final polished form.

Let the conversation begin…

Follow the Penguin Twitter.com@penguinukbooks

Keep up-to-date with all our stories YouTube.com/penguinbooks

Pin ‘Penguin Books’ to your Pinterest

Like ‘Penguin Books’ on Facebook.com/penguinbooks

Find out more about the author and discover more stories like this at Penguin.co.uk

ALLEN LANE

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, Block D, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North, Gauteng 2193, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

First published 2013

Copyright © Richard Overy, 2013

The moral right of the author has been asserted

The epigraph is from John Betjeman, Collected Poems , copyright © 2006 the Estate of John Betjeman, reproduced by permission of John Murray (Publishers). The quotations from Vera Brittain England’s Hour are reproduced by permission of Mark Bostridge and T. J. Brittain-Catlin, literary executors of the estate of Vera Brittain, 1970.

Front cover: View of the City of London taken from the roof of St. Paul’s Cathedral showing the devastation and burning buildings following the Blitz of the 29th December 1940. (Photograph © Mirrorpix / The Bridgeman Art Library)

All rights reserved