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  • Tod aus der Luft: Kriegsgesellschaft und Luftkrieg in Deutschland und England by Dietmar Süß
  • Peter Fritzsche
Dietmar Süß. Tod aus der Luft: Kriegsgesellschaft und Luftkrieg in Deutschland und England. Munich: Siedler, 2011. 720 pp. €29.99 (Hardcover). ISBN 978-3-88680-932-5.

“It is a remarkable fact,” writes Telford Taylor in Munich: The Price of Peace, “that Munich was the only victory of strategic proportions that the Luftwaffe ever won.”1 The widespread fear that “the bomber will always get through,” as British prime minister Stanley Baldwin suggested in his 1932 speech, “A Fear for the Future,” paralysed British and French policy makers in September 1938 and led them further down the road to appeasing what seemed to be the unassailable power of the Third Reich. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the European press was littered with ominous prophecies of mass destruction as a result of aerial bombardment, something H. G. Wells had already portrayed in his 1908 novel, War in the Air. The lessons of the First World War, in which the catastrophic effects of military engagement bore no relationship to the political causes behind the initial declaration of the war, were remembered when Neville Chamberlain warned in 1938 against British involvement in a “quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.” Appeasement was designed to avoid the “horrible, fantastic, incredible” gap between virtuous reaction and unintended consequences that had made the “Great War” so deeply ironic (Chamberlain, qtd. in Taylor 884–85). Yet at the outset of the war, when it came in September 1939, the bombers did not in fact come, and gas did not spread, a fact which added to the initial “phoniness” of the war. And when “war in the air” was waged between Britain and Germany beginning in 1940, the destruction was alarming but not Wellsian, and the offensive campaigns of both countries rested [End Page 131] on a broad consensus that “total war” had placed civilians on newly drawn battlefronts in which the economic infrastructure and civilian morale of the belligerent nations could be regarded as permissible targets. Air war was thinkable after all. Both Britain and Germany premised the strategic bombing of enemy cities on the confidence that the social bonds they continuously and with remarkable success fastened at home could be eroded abroad. Ultimately, both sides simply tried to inflict maximum damage in a spiral of revenge that cost the Germans far more than it did the British; by 1942 the Luftwaffe was hardly a threat – Munich in 1938 and, to some extent, Warsaw in 1939 and Rotterdam in 1940 were its only strategic victories. Hamburg alone suffered more damage and more loss of life than most British cities put together, notes Süß (20). The British public was well aware that Royal Air Force operations resulted in “burning cities, destroyed houses, fleeing people” but believed the Germans had it coming (108). Whether the deaths of about 200,000 German civilians through the end of 1944 were worth the lives of some 50,000 British airmen (and about 50,000 American airmen) is a question that was not debated during or after the war and is not sufficiently discussed in Süß’s excellent analysis. (About 200,000 more Germans died in the bombing campaigns in the first four months of 1945; in Great Britain, total civilian casualties from bombings numbered about 60,000 [15]).

Süß, in his superb, sharply observed, and, it should be said, very deftly written analysis, argues that war morale stood at the centre of the air war. Already before the war, Germany strengthened the ties of the Volksgemeinschaft, or “people’s community,” by organizing air defence. Indeed, Nazis asserted that an authoritarian regime was best suited to protect and mobilize civilians in the rigours of “total war.” They were right inasmuch as British authorities had done remarkably little when it came to air defence, perhaps misled by Baldwin’s claim that the “bomber will always get through.” Yet when the Battle of Britain was under way, civilians proved resilient and the authorities sufficiently capable to give legitimacy to the British notion of the “People’s War.” Although the celebrated little...

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