In the Bombing War, Richard Overy gives the first full narrative account of the aerial devastation of the European continent during the Second World War. From Stalingrad to the ports of the French west coast, from Clydeside to Malta, bombing was experienced by millions of ordinary Europeans. Why the bombing was undertaken and how the bombed societies survived are the two key questions answered in this remarkable book. Before 1939 there were exaggerated ideas about what a bombing war could achieve, with Europeans prepared for a nightmarish and immediate war of obliteration. Bombing was supposed to shorten wars by destroying industry and paralysing the enemy will. These expectations proved false. Bombing was a long drawn-out affair, failed to undermine morale and imposed only limited economic damage. Yet the more bombing failed to deliver the expected knockout blow, the more effort went into attacking cities and their civilian populations, eroding any legal or moral contraints that had operated at first for the German, British, and American air forces. Once the campaigns had started, the momentum for escalation became irreversible, with terrible consequences. The assault on the home front contributed little directly to the outcome of the war, but it did distort the strategy of both sides by creating a new sphere for military combat which absorbed huge resources. It was this military dimension of the bombing war that really affected how Britian or Germany or the United States won or lost by 1945. This book brings together strategy, politics, technology, combat and social policy to understand the real experience of both bombing and being bombed. It strips away the many post-war myths and shows how quickly bombing came to be taken for granted on all sides, and how the established rules of war, even for liberal democracies, were replaced by a moral expediency.

List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgements -- Maps -- Abbreviations in the Text -- Preface -- Prologue: Bombing Bulgaria -- 1. Bombing before 1940: Imagined and Real -- Part One Germany's Bombing War -- 2. The First Strategic Air Offensive, September 1940 to June 1941 -- 3. Taking it? British Society and the Blitz -- 4. The Untold Chapter: The Bombing of Soviet Cities -- Part Two 'The Greatest Battle': Allied Bombers over Europe -- 5. The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Bomber Command 1939-42 -- 6. The Combined Bomber Offensive: Germany 1943-5 -- 7. The Logic of Total War: German Society under the Bombs -- 8. Italy: The War of Bombs and Words -- 9. Bombing Friends, Bombing Enemies: Germany's New Order -- Part Three 'The Greatest Miscalculatin'? -- 10. The Balance Sheet of Bombing -- Epilogue: Lessons Learned and Not Learned: Bombing into the Post-War World -- Bibliography and Sources -- Notes -- Index.