Between 1939 and 1945, nearly 600,000 European civilians were killed by aerial bombardment. The assault from the skies represented a terrifying – and morally questionable – development in warfare, one that brought unprecedented levels of destruction in its wake, turning home fronts into battlefields.
The various aerial campaigns of the Second World War – chiefly the Blitz and the Allied bombing of German cities – have been treated in several disparate accounts. What has been lacking is a far-reaching, comparative account aimed at a general readership.
Richard Overy’s The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945 fills this void admirably. One of the leading scholars of the Second World War era, Overy, the author of Why the Allies Won, Russia’s War and several other notable works, brings a complete mastery to the subject. Using a range of German, Russian and English archives and a vast array of secondary sources, Overy covers every aspect of the bombing campaigns – the technical and operational details of the missions, the political endgames that often dictated who and what got bombed, the emergence of strategic bombing as a military doctrine, the horrific cost to both victims on the ground and the aircrews trying to kill them. He ranges widely, also outlining civil defence protocols in Britain, Germany, Russia and Italy. This is a view of aerial warfare from the ground up.
Overy’s book delivers up many fresh and forgotten aspects of the bombing campaign. For example, Malta, whose port was vital to Britain, was attacked 3,303 times by Germany and Italy between 1940 and 1944; it became “the most bombed place on earth”. The Allied bombing of occupied France and Italy each caused more casualties than the Blitz: trying to free Europe from Nazi rule, the Allies bombed large portions of the continent to smithereens. And Overy devotes a chapter to the German air force’s campaign in Russia, a theatre of the European war that is more known for its titanic land battles.
Not all readers will find his mass of details and statistics easy going; but they are a measure of the cool, even clinical, dispassion Overy brings to a side of the Second World War that remains controversial. The Allied bombing campaigns over Germany and the fire-bombings of Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945 have provoked much emotional debate about Germans as victims. Some have suggested that Arthur Harris, the chief of the RAF Bomber Command from 1942-1945, is culpable of war crimes; Overy avoids such histrionic finger pointing, even if his verdicts on what bombing actually accomplished are damning.
Aerial attacks on civilians, Overy writes, “signified an acceptance, even by the victim populations, of shifting norms about the conduct of war; what had seemed unacceptable legally and morally in 1939 was rapidly transformed by the relative ethics of survival and defeat”.
“It is easy to deplore the losses and to condemn the strategy as immoral, even illegal – and a host of recent bombing accounts have done that – but current ethical concerns get no nearer to an understanding of how these things were possible, even applauded, and why so few voices were raised against the notion that the home front could legitimately be a target of attack. The contemporary ethical view of bombing was far from straightforward, often paradoxical … Issues that seemed black and white before the war and do again today were coloured in many shades of grey during the conflict.”
The author’s reach is far – his book has every claim to being a definitive benchmark for generations to come. His account of Allied bombing strategy is must-reading for any student of the Second World War. It is one of the toughest, but scrupulously documented, audits of how the Allies fought that I have ever read. Overy calmly dispenses with several myths about the Battle of Britain, when the German air force tried, and failed, to take out the RAF before a planned (but never attempted) invasion of England. Sentimental histories prate on about plucky little Britain taking on the Nazis. Rubbish: as Overy points out, Germany fatally underestimated RAF strength, which increased as the battle wore on, with British factories producing twice as many fighter aircraft between June and October 1940. “This was never the contest of the Few against the Many,” he quips dryly.
Overy’s account of the evolution of Bomber Command’s role is even more startling – and disturbing. Here, Churchill and the British come off as even more pitiless than Hitler. The British bombing offensive, Overy reminds us, began before the Blitz began, not after, as is commonly understood. For the British, “the argument for attacking Germany came to be based on pre-emptive retaliation. Even before war, the RAF had taken for granted that the German air force would be bound by no scruples and would be ‘ruthless and indiscriminate’ when the time came for a knockout blow”.
It was the British who began to bomb indiscriminately. (Overy suggests that “British cities might have been spared the full horrors of the winter of 1940-41”, had Bomber Command not began to press its long-range attacks in the summer of 1940.) Churchill was under enormous political pressure to show the people of occupied Europe that Britain meant business – after the fall of France and the retreat of Dunkirk, the RAF was virtually the only weapon Churchill possessed to strike back at Germany.
Overy details the escalation of bombing attacks from limited strikes to the all-out obliteration of German cities and towns. Overy quotes Sir Richard Peirse, Harris’s predecessor at Bomber Command, who admitted to a sympathetic audience in late 1941 that the air force had been attacking “the people themselves”. He offered this explanation “because”, he explained “for a long time, the government for excellent reasons has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call military targets … I can assure you, Gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples”.
Yet Bomber Command was limited in what it could accomplish. Targeting issues – no bombing force ever achieved a high level of accuracy – mechanical problems, German fighter attacks, anti-aircraft fire and weather all combined to limit what Bomber Command could achieve. Under Harris, Bomber Command solved some of these issues – the introduction of the Lancaster bomber in 1943 was a crucial development – and it ramped up its use of incendiaries against German industrial cities and working-class neighbourhoods. They were deployed to devastating effect in the raids on Hamburg in July 1943, which killed 37,000 people, “the single largest loss of civilian life in one city throughout the whole European war”. Winds, “acting like a giant bellows”, fuelled conflagrations that burnt at 800°C.
The historian shuns the charged rhetoric that swirls around Harris, but he still remains shocking in his callousness. He was convinced that strategic bombing would shorten the war and spare the United States and Britain a protracted land campaign; it did not. He was convinced that targeting German cities would break the morale of the people and destroy German’s war-making capacity; it did not.
In no instance was strategic bombing a war-winning game changer. It certainly brought misery, death and destruction to those – English, Italian, French, German, Polish – who had to endure it. “Bombs belonged to my life,” mused one German schoolgirl. But it was a futile pursuit. “Long-range bombing in the Second World War was a crude strategy,” Overy observes, “a wasteful use of resources, since most bombs did not hit the intended target, even when that target was the size of a city centre. Strategic bombing proved in the end to be inadequate in its own terms for carrying out its principal assignments and was morally compromised by deliberate escalation against civilian populations.”
Matthew Price's writing has been published in Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and the Financial Times.
In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
Denmark: PKK one of two terrorist groups along with Iranian separatists ASMLA to raise “two-digit million amounts”
Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
The specs
Engine: 3.0-litre six-cylinder turbo
Power: 398hp from 5,250rpm
Torque: 580Nm at 1,900-4,800rpm
Transmission: Eight-speed auto
Fuel economy, combined: 6.5L/100km
On sale: December
Price: From Dh330,000 (estimate)
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Kumulus Water
Started: 2021
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
Based: Tunisia
Sector: Water technology
Number of staff: 22
Investment raised: $4 million
A MINECRAFT MOVIE
Director: Jared Hess
Starring: Jack Black, Jennifer Coolidge, Jason Momoa
Rating: 3/5
Short-term let permits explained
Homeowners and tenants are allowed to list their properties for rental by registering through the Dubai Tourism website to obtain a permit.
Tenants also require a letter of no objection from their landlord before being allowed to list the property.
There is a cost of Dh1,590 before starting the process, with an additional licence fee of Dh300 per bedroom being rented in your home for the duration of the rental, which ranges from three months to a year.
Anyone hoping to list a property for rental must also provide a copy of their title deeds and Ejari, as well as their Emirates ID.
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Starring: Jamie Foxx, Angela Bassett, Tina Fey
Directed by: Pete Doctor
Rating: 4 stars
The smuggler
Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.
Khouli conviction
Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
For sale
A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.
- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950
Formula Middle East Calendar (Formula Regional and Formula 4)
Round 1: January 17-19, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 2: January 22-23, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 3: February 7-9, Dubai Autodrome – Dubai
Round 4: February 14-16, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 5: February 25-27, Jeddah Corniche Circuit – Saudi Arabia
Jeff Buckley: From Hallelujah To The Last Goodbye
By Dave Lory with Jim Irvin
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
The biog
Name: Mariam Ketait
Emirate: Dubai
Hobbies: I enjoy travelling, experiencing new things, painting, reading, flying, and the French language
Favourite quote: "Be the change you wish to see" - unknown
Favourite activity: Connecting with different cultures
Dubai Bling season three
Cast: Loujain Adada, Zeina Khoury, Farhana Bodi, Ebraheem Al Samadi, Mona Kattan, and couples Safa & Fahad Siddiqui and DJ Bliss & Danya Mohammed
Rating: 1/5
'Midnights'
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COMPANY PROFILE
● Company: Bidzi
● Started: 2024
● Founders: Akshay Dosaj and Asif Rashid
● Based: Dubai, UAE
● Industry: M&A
● Funding size: Bootstrapped
● No of employees: Nine
The specs
Engine: 1.5-litre turbo
Power: 181hp
Torque: 230Nm
Transmission: 6-speed automatic
Starting price: Dh79,000
On sale: Now
Director: Laxman Utekar
Cast: Vicky Kaushal, Akshaye Khanna, Diana Penty, Vineet Kumar Singh, Rashmika Mandanna
Rating: 1/5
Real estate tokenisation project
Dubai launched the pilot phase of its real estate tokenisation project last month.
The initiative focuses on converting real estate assets into digital tokens recorded on blockchain technology and helps in streamlining the process of buying, selling and investing, the Dubai Land Department said.
Dubai’s real estate tokenisation market is projected to reach Dh60 billion ($16.33 billion) by 2033, representing 7 per cent of the emirate’s total property transactions, according to the DLD.
The specs
Engine: 3.9-litre twin-turbo V8
Power: 620hp from 5,750-7,500rpm
Torque: 760Nm from 3,000-5,750rpm
Transmission: Eight-speed dual-clutch auto
On sale: Now
Price: From Dh1.05 million ($286,000)
Scores in brief:
Boost Defenders 205-5 in 20 overs
(Colin Ingram 84 not out, Cameron Delport 36, William Somerville 2-28)
bt Auckland Aces 170 for 5 in 20 overs
(Rob O’Donnell 67 not out, Kyle Abbott 3-21).
Fixtures
Tuesday - 5.15pm: Team Lebanon v Alger Corsaires; 8.30pm: Abu Dhabi Storms v Pharaohs
Wednesday - 5.15pm: Pharaohs v Carthage Eagles; 8.30pm: Alger Corsaires v Abu Dhabi Storms
Thursday - 4.30pm: Team Lebanon v Pharaohs; 7.30pm: Abu Dhabi Storms v Carthage Eagles
Friday - 4.30pm: Pharaohs v Alger Corsaires; 7.30pm: Carthage Eagles v Team Lebanon
Saturday - 4.30pm: Carthage Eagles v Alger Corsaires; 7.30pm: Abu Dhabi Storms v Team Lebanon
Learn more about Qasr Al Hosn
In 2013, The National's History Project went beyond the walls to see what life was like living in Abu Dhabi's fabled fort:
