Dietmar Süss - Death from the Skies: How the British and Germans Endured Aerial Destruction in World War II

DEATH FROM THE SKIES

HOW THE BRITISH AND
GERMANS SURVIVED BOMBING
IN WORLD WAR II

DIETMAR SSS

Translated by Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes

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First published in German as Tod aus der Luft. Kriegsgesellschaft
und Luftkrieg in Deutschland und England
By Dietmar S
2011 by Siedler Verlag, a division of Verlagsgruppe
Random House GmbH, Mnchen, Germany.

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften
InternationalTranslation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences
from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the
German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT,
and the Brsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels
(German Publishers & Booksellers Association).

in this English translation Oxford University Press 2014

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First Edition published in 2014

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It is a pleasure to thank those who have supported me generously in the writing of this book. Many peoplemore people than I can thank individuallyhave given me their time, pointed me in the right direction, and discussed this project with me. It is one of the great myths about academic research that it inevitably leads to isolation.

The origins of this book lie in the air-war group, of which Barbara Grimm, Nicole Kramer, and Hans Woller were also members, at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. I discussed with them the initial drafts and much more besides.

In Jena Norbert Frei offered me the opportunity to continue working on the air war. He supported the project energetically and constantly spurred me on to ponder the subject afresh. What more could one wish for?

This study was accepted in the summer semester of 2010 as a second doctorate (Habilitation) by the Philosophical Faculty of the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. The Habilitation scholarship awarded me by the Bavarian State Ministry for Education and the Dilthey Fellowship I was given by the Volkswagen Foundation enabled me to complete the work free from material concerns.

The Department of History at the University of Exeter very kindly acted as my host during my stay in the UK. As a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation I spent an unforgettable year working with Jeremy Noakes in Exeter. I am very grateful to the Foundation and to my wonderful host. He taught me many things that cannot be found in the archival documents and yet are so important to anyone writing about another country.

Richard Overy provided me with the opportunity to present and discuss my research at the Universitys Centre for the Study of War, State, and Society from which it greatly benefited. I am also grateful to all the British and German archives I used for their assistance. Jrg Arnold, Neil Gregor, Christiane Kuller, Armin Nolzen, Kim Christian Priemel, Sybille Steinbacher, and Malte Thiessen sacrificed a great deal of time to give me critical comments. I made particularly heavy demands in this respect on Daniel Maul and on my brother Winfried.

Katja Klee and Mathias Irrlinger were very a great help with the final edit. Siedler, the German publisher, and its managing editor Tobias Winstel, supported the project from an early stage, for which I am also very grateful.

I completed the German text in October 2010 and have only been able to incorporate a few references to more recent literature in the English edition. The translation was made possible with the generous aid of Geisteswissenschaft International and I would like to thank the two translators, Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes, for their excellent translation.

Rosmarie Scheidhamer-Sss is familiar with all the highs and lows in the history of this piece of work. It is dedicated to her.

Augsburg, 2013

For me the air war conjures up memories of football. Although I am no longer certain, it must have been during the World Cup semi-final between England and Germany in 1990 that I first heard the song There were ten German bombers in the air, though as a 16-year-old schoolboy on a language course I did not grasp its meaning fully. I only knew that the atmosphere in the pub suddenly changed and we realized we would do well to keep our delight about the missed penalties strictly to ourselves.

I was reminded of this many years later when, some ten years ago, controversy over the air war raged for months in the press on both sides of the Atlantic. My first tentative thoughts about this project date back to that time, but the weightiness of the topic did not come home to me until I first read extracts from Jrg Friedrichs The Fire in the German newspaper Bild, the equivalent of The Sun, and the heated responses to it in the British press.

The arguments surrounding the legitimacy of the air war and Churchill himself as an alleged war criminal produced a fair amount of intemperate comment and since then the German extreme Right in particular has repeatedly referred in emotive terms to the Allied bombing holocaust and attempted to mobilize its supporters on the anniversaries of the bombing raids. This still goes on and thus the history presented in this book is one with an open ending.

The controversy regarding the taboo subject of the air war and the legitimacy of Allied tactics did not, however, come from nowhere but was rather connected to a boom in literature about the air war, which from the mid-1990s onwards gave increasing prominence to the perspective of the victims and to the history of German suffering in the Second World War. This book is therefore not only about the war as a set of past events but also about the new Germany that arose after reunification and about BritishGerman relations almost seventy years after the end of the war. While almost every British crime series is shown on German television, one of the most popular and (in the authors view) most wonderful British series about the Second World War has never appeared on German TV, namely