Reaching for the Stars: A New History of Bomber Command in World War II (review)

The author's stated intention is to analyze the British strategic bombing campaign itself, and, in parallel, the way it was perceived and portrayed by the British public and the media both at the time and now.

On the second of these themes Connelly argues cogently that, although there was a concerted attempt by officialdom at the time to distort the reality of the offensive, much of the truth emerged in any case. He shows that simply by revealing the extent of the destruction being wrought in Germany it was possible to divine the outlines of the campaign and the essential fact that official claims to be attacking purely military targets were simply untrue. Connelly brings out very well the way in which the British newspapers covered the bombing, and the way in which film, whether newsreel, documentary or drama, was used to inform and encourage the British public. He concludes, surely correctly, that the British people were firmly behind the offensive, and did not have much time for those who raised moral objections. The British press, whatever their moral stance in more recent times, were also far from ambiguous. Thus the Daily Mirror editorial of September 1940: "The air war is no time for . . . chivalry. . . . People killed are, in tens of thousands, useful workers." Later in a seemingly ever expanding and never ending war ever more bloodthirsty leaders appeared, e.g. the Sunday Dispatch: "Hundreds of German civilians who exulted in the sufferings of Rotterdam . . . exult no more. They are dead." At this time six in ten Londoners gave unqualified approval to bombing Germany and only one in ten thought it unjustifiable.

In his final chapter Connelly also produces a well-crafted and thoughtful analysis of how the postwar view of the offensive has become badly distorted by inaccurate, poorly informed writings, by journalists and historians alike, abetted by the successful attempts of politicians to slough responsibility onto others, principally Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris.

Sadly, the book is marred by just the careless hyperbole familiar in modern journalism. The author writes of the desire to avoid more Passchendaeles being a principal factor behind the offensive, but believes that in the mid-war period "that is exactly what the campaign had become." Bomber Command's 47,000 combat deaths in six years are indeed sobering, but cannot be compared with the 20,000 British dead on 1 July 1916, or the subsequent attrition on the Western Front. He boldly writes of each Lancaster bomber in 1943 absorbing 5,000 tons of hard aluminium, costing £42,000 and requiring radar and radio equipment equivalent to a million domestic radio sets. He quotes no source for these remarkable statistics; indeed, sloppily, he quotes no sources for anything but direct quotations. Some accurate 1943 figures: total U.K. virgin aluminium supply, 208,000 tons; fabricated aluminium, 270,000 tons; Lancasters delivered at 1,848 tons—the author's sums do not add up. The actual unit cost of the very first Lancaster was £22,000, by 1944 it was £15,000. The figure regarding the Lancaster's relatively unsophisticated radio/radar suite is simply preposterous.

Those seeking to learn about the media and war 1940s style, and war in memory might profitably read this book, although it is depressing to contemplate the wealth of entrenched misunderstanding and misperception over the bomber offensive despite a wealth of recent scholarship.