22 Hitler took a special interest in the construction of a new Hamburg, but his plans were never completed. See Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich(London, 1970), p. 407. Illustrations of the architect’s models can be found in Johe, ‘Im Glanz der Macht’, pp. 13–25.

23 Between 1925 and 1939 he came here no fewer than thirty-three times. In the last three years before the war he made six visits. See ibid., p. 13.

24 The Robert Leywas originally launched as a Kraft durch Freude(the Nazi leisure organization ‘Strength through Joy’) ship, but it was so constructed that it could easily be converted into a troop carrier, as it was in 1939. See ibid., pp. 15–16.

25 Speech quoted in the Hamburger Tageblatt, 14 February 1939. See also ibid., p. 23.

5    Hamburg Prepares for War

1 Bertolt Brecht, ‘To Those Born Later’, from Poems 1913–56(London, 1987).

2 See Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–1945:Nemesis(London, 2000), pp. 200–221. Kershaw quotes, for example, William Shirer, an American correspondent in Berlin, who wrote at the end of August 1939 that he doubted the Nazis would actually go to war ‘with a population so dead set against it’.

3 Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg, On the Other Side, trans. and ed. Ruth Evans (London, 1979), p. 27.

4 These figures and the accompanying description of air-raid precautions in Hamburg are taken from the Hamburg Police Report, UK National Archives, AIR 20/7287, p. 2.

5 Ibid., pp. 1–12.

6 Ibid., p. 99.

7 Eva Erna Coombes interview, IWM Sound Archive 16789/2.

8 Joseph Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries, trans. and ed. Louis P. Lochner (London, 1948), 16 May 1943, p. 301.

9 Wolff-Mönckeberg, On the Other Side, p. 37. Despite the many warnings, there had only been seventy raids up to this point; see Hans Brunswig, Feuersturm über Hamburg(Stuttgart, 2003), p. 451.

10 For the conscription of women, restriction of vacations and longer working hours see Earl R. Beck, Under the Bombs: The German Home Front 1942–45(Lexington, 1986), pp. 40, 45; and Goebbels, Diaries, 25 January and 11 December 1942, pp. 15, 178.

11 Goebbels, Diaries, 23 April 1942, p. 131.

12 Wiebke Stammers interview, IWM Sound Archive 9089/07.

13 Ibid.

14 Else Baker interview, IWM Sound Archive 18582.

15 Hannah Kelson interview, IWM Sound Archive 15550/5.

16 Goebbels, Diaries, 17 April 1943, pp. 258–9.

17 Beck, Under the Bombs, p. 53.

18 For example, when the Americans and British defeated Rommel and turned their attention to Sicily, Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg expressed the hope that the British and Americans would hurry up and win the war: On the Other Side, p. 66.

19 Between July 1942 and July 1943 there were only fourteen raids on the city; most were merely nuisance raids performed by a handful of bombers. See Brunswig, Feuersturm, pp. 453–4.

20 Hamburg Police Report, pp. 1, 97. It is possible that the chief of police wanted to deflect any blame from himself and those acting under him but (with a few exceptions only) the air-raid protection measures in Hamburg were exemplary. See Brunswig, Feuersturm, pp. 165–86.

21 Fredy Borck, ‘Feuersturm über Rothenburgsort 1943’ in Kerstin Hof (ed.), Rothenburgsort 27/28 Juli 1943(unpublished booklet, produced by Stadtteilinitiative Hamm e.V.), p. 11. Although I have not found any British record of a mission to drop such leaflets on Hamburg, many other German accounts attest to it. Such propaganda leaflets were regularly dropped all over Germany, and it is likely that the people of Hamburg only imbued them with portentious qualities after the event.

Part Two

6    A Brief History of Bombing

1 Primo Levi, ‘Give us’, Collected Poems(London, 1988), p. 68.

2 H. G. Wells, The War in the Air, and Particularly how Mr. Bert Smallways Fared While it Lasted(Leipzig, 1909), p. 312.

3 Ibid., p. 186.

4 Gustaf Janson, ‘A Vision of the Future’, in I. F. Clarke (ed.), The Tale of the Next Great War 1871–1914:Fictions of Future Warfare and Battles Still-to-come(Liverpool, 1995), p. 279.

5 See the many examples in Clarke, Next Great War; Michael Paris, Winged Warfare: The Literature and Theory of Aerial Warfare in Britain 1859–1917(Manchester, 1992); and Lee Kennett, A History of Strategic Bombing(New York, 1982).

6 See Kennett, Strategic Bombing, p. 14.

7 In 1899, at the first Hague Peace Conference, Britain’s Lord Wolseley refused to agree to a motion to ban aerial bombing because he believed it would shorten future wars and so reduce the total numbers of casualties in any conflict. Not only that, but fear of the effects of bombing would make nations hesitate about going to war in the first place. (See Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, trans. Linda Haverty Rugg (London, 2001), 58.) These claims were repeated eight years later by American commentators, such as Major George Squier of the US Signal Corps, who claimed that once politicians realized that aircraft could bypass the battle zone altogether – that the politicians could now become the target – they would be deterred from going to war in the first place. See Major George Squier, ‘Present status of military aeronautics’ (1907), reprinted in Flight, vol. 1, no. 9 (27 February 1909), p. 304. See also Paris, Winged Warfare, p. 164.

8 B. H. Liddell Hart, Paris, or the Future War(London, 1925), pp. 45–6.

9 Quoted in Andrew Boyle, Trenchard: Man of Vision(London, 1962), p. 229.

10 Quoted in the New York Times, 14 October 1917.

11 Boyle, Trenchard(London, 1962), p. 312.

12 Quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command(London, 1979), p. 46.

13 Leon Daudet, La Guerre Totale(Paris, 1918). Daudet is reputed to have coined the phrase ‘total war’.

14 Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Dino Ferrari (London, 1943), p. 151.

15 Cicely Hamilton, Theodore Savage(London, 1922), p. 75.

16 Desmond Shaw, Ragnarok(London, 1926), p. 349.

17 J. F. C. Fuller, The Reformation of War(London, 1923), p. 70.

18 Douhet, Command of the Air, p. 52.

19 See Kennett, Strategic Bombing, p. 38, for a description of the air-raid scares in Ottawa and New York in 1918; and Sir Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive(London, 1947), pp. 65–6, for the scares in 1942.

20 J. M. Spaight, Air Power and the Cities(London, 1930), p. 162.

21 Sir Malcolm Campbell, The Peril from the Air(London, 1937), pp. 54–5.

22 For the reader who is interested in how the international community has tried to restrict the use of various weapons and military practices, I strongly recommend Michael Howard (ed.), Restraints on War(Oxford, 1979). See also James Brown Scott (ed.), The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907(London, 1915).

23 For a brief description of this international conference, see Philip S. Meilinger, ‘Clipping the Bomber’s Wings: The Geneva Disarmament Conference and the Royal Air Force 1932–34’, War in History(1999), vol. 6, no. 3. See also Lindqvist, Bombing(London, 2001), pp. 116 and 140.

24 See Richard Bessel, Nazism and War(London, 2004), whose main thesis is that ‘The ideology of Nazism was an ideology of war, which regarded peace merely as a preparation for war’ (p. 1).

25 UK National Archives, AIR 41/40, Appendix 4, Roosevelt message, 3 September 1939.

26 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s speech to the House of Commons, 14 September 1939.

27 See Hastings, Bomber Command, p. 59.

28 Quoted in Robin Neillands, The Bomber War(London, 2001), p. 41.