The Bombing War: Europe, 1939-1945

by Richard Overy

The ultimate history of the Blitz and bombing in the Second World War, from Wolfson Prize-winning historian and author Richard Overy

The use of massive fleets of bombers to kill and terrorize civilians was an aspect of the Second World War which continues to challenge the idea that Allies specifically fought a 'moral' war. For Britain, bombing became perhaps its principal contribution to the fighting as, night after night, exceptionally brave men flew over occupied Europe destroying its cities.

The Bombing War radically overhauls our understanding of the War. It is the first book to examine seriously not just the most well-known parts of the campaign, but the significance of bombing on many other fronts - the German use of bombers on the Eastern Front for example (as well as much newly discovered material on the more familiar 'Blitz' on Britain), or the Allied campaigns against Italian cities.

The result is the author's masterpiece - a rich, gripping, picture of the Second World War and the terrible military, technological and ethical issues that relentlessly drove all its participants into an abyss.

Reviews:

'Magnificent ... must now be regarded as the standard work on the bombing war ... It is probably the most important book published on the history of he second world war this century' Richard J Evans, Guardian

'Monumental ... this is a major contribution to one of the most controversial aspects of the Second World War ... full of new detail and perspectives ... hugely impressive' James Holland, Literary Review

'This tremendous book does what the war it describes signally failed to do. With a well-thought-out strategy and precision, it delivers maximum force on its objectives ... The result is a masterpiece of the historian's art' The Times

'It is unlikely that a work of this scale, scope and merit will be surpassed' Times Higher Education

'What distinguishes Mr Overy's account of the bombing war from lesser efforts is the wealth of narrative detail and analytical rigour that he brings to bear' Economist

'Excellent ... Overy is never less than an erudite and clear-eyed guide whose research is impeccable and whose conclusions appear sensible and convincing even when they run against the established trends' Financial Times

'Hard to surpass. If you want to know how bombing worked, what it did and what it meant, this is the book to read' Times Literary Supplement

About the author:

Richard Overy is the author of a series of remarkable books on the Second World War and the wider disasters of the twentieth century. The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia won both the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hessell-Tiltman Prize. He is Professor of History at the University of Exeter.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War II, Military History, War, Aviation, Germany

821 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 26, 2013

About the author

Richard James Overy is a British historian who has published extensively on the history of World War II and the Third Reich.

Educated at Caius College, Cambridge and awarded a research fellowship at Churchill College, Professor Overy taught history at Cambridge from 1972 to 1979, as a fellow of Queens' College and from 1976 as a university assistant lecturer. In 1980 he moved to King's College London, where he became professor of modern history in 1994. He was appointed to a professorship at the University of Exeter in 2004.

His work on World War II has been praised as "highly effective in the ruthless dispelling of myths" (A. J. P. Taylor), "original and important" (New York Review of Books) and "at the cutting edge" (Times Literary Supplement.)[

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

“For the societies that suffered the bombing during the war there was only one reality that mattered: ‘The bomber will always get through.’ The famous remark by the British deputy prime minister, Stanley Baldwin…that the man on the street ought to understand there was no power on earth yet available to stop him from being bombed, has usually been taken for deliberate hyperbole…Yet though it proved possible during the war to detect aircraft with radar and to intercept them by day and increasingly by night, and to inflict high-percentage rates of loss on the attacking force, in the context of the Second World War, Baldwin was right. Most bombers did reach the approximate target area and disgorge their bombs with limited accuracy on the ground below, turning wartime civilian society into an effective front line. That this would be so was widely expected by the 1930s among the populations of the world’s major states, who saw bombing fatalistically, as something that would define future conflicts. ‘It is the height of folly,’ wrote the British Air Minister, Lord Londonderry, to Baldwin in July 1934, ‘to imagine that any war can be conducted without appreciable risk to the civil population…’”
- Richard Overy, The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945


Approximately 500,000 to 600,000 European civilians were killed by bombs during the Second World War. This number includes not only the Germans in their firebombed cities, or the British during the Blitz, but noncombatants in places like France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Bulgaria, which were either occupied by Nazi forces, or allied with them.

This is an unimaginable number of fatalities. Yet in keeping with the cataclysmic theme of World War II, this tally represents only a fraction of total deaths. Tens of millions of civilians were killed in other ways: with Zyklon B in the gas chambers; by bullets in the killing fields of the east; by artillery shells, fired in their millions; by being worked to death in a slave labor camp; or by malnutrition or disease.

Though it was not a leading cause of death, the war’s bombing campaigns – especially those waged by the United States and Great Britain – has become a lightning rod of criticism, and a focus of intense analysis. Hamburg and Dresden have been used to undercut the legitimacy of the Allied cause, while photos of ruined cities have become among the most iconic images of the conflict.

In The Bombing War, Richard Overy provides a massive overview of the strategic bombing of Europe, from the perspectives of both the bombers above, and the civilians below. On the plus side, this is comprehensive, erudite, and nuanced in its conclusions. On the downside, it favors statistics over experiences, and often exudes less passion than the instructions for putting together furniture from Ikea.

***

This is a big book, one that sits in your lap like a brick, and is genuinely, physically uncomfortable to read. It has 642 pages of text, along with enough sources and endnotes to push the grand total to 851 pages.

In short: this is long.

To manage the voluminous material he’s gathered, Overy divides The Bombing War into three large sections. The first covers Germany’s bombing war against Great Britain during the Blitz, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain again, when Adolf Hitler unleashed his vengeance weapons, the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 ballistic missile.

The second, far larger section discusses the Allied bombing of Germany, Italy, and German-occupied countries such as France (where more civilians were killed by “friendly” bombs than died during the Blitz).

The third – and shortest – part is a brief meditation on whether Allied bombing was successful, based on what it set out to do, and whether it was necessary, given that at least some of bombing’s purposes could be accomplished by other means.

***

It’s briefly worth pointing out that in America, The Bombing War was published as The Bombers and the Bombed. For some reason – perhaps cost-savings, perhaps cultural condescension, perhaps both – the U.S. edition is missing the entire first section, consisting of three chapters and approximately 200 pages.

Knowing this, I went out of my way to get the United Kingdom-published version, which contains the full scope of Overy’s ambitions.

***

As might already be apparent, Overy arranges things in a hybrid manner, both topically and chronologically.

For instance, in the first section, Overy devotes a chapter to a survey of all of Germany’s strategic bombing efforts against Great Britain, from beginning to end. When that is finished, he loops back to look at those same efforts through the eyes of the bombed, discussing fighter interdiction, antiaircraft barrages, and civil defense programs to shelter the populace, put out fires, and clear rubble.

With regard to the Allies’ aerial missions, Overy has two chronological chapters, one covering Great Britain’s Bomber Command, and the other the Combined Bomber Offensive in which Britain and the United States performed their round-the-clock exercises: British area bombing at night, American “precision” bombing during the day. After that, there are thematic chapters on German civilian responses (which was resilient), the bombing in Italy, and the bombing of occupied, anti-Nazi countries.

***

In terms of style, Overy can be dense. He loves statistics, and these pages are filled with numbers, percentages, and tables. This is all well and good, but he makes little attempt to liven the proceedings. There are no biographies of leadership figures, there are only minimal technological descriptions, and there are surprisingly few first-person accounts by either airmen or civilians. If you are looking for a visceral narrative about what it was like to live in Dresden when the air turned to fire, this will be disappointing.

***

Instead of dramatic set pieces or vivid descriptions, Overy does a really good job of cleanly parsing the arguments regarding the efficacy and – to a lesser extent – the morality of bombing. He does not stake out a specific position, or find a hill upon which to die. Rather, by shifting his viewpoints, examining decisions based on contemporary knowledge, and discussing the intended and unintended consequences of waging an all-out bomber offensive, Overy is able to provide a clear-eyed, balanced critique.

For instance, Overy states that even though Germany arguably broke the ice on bombing civilians, they were really bad at it. Mainly this was a function of not having a serviceable heavy bomber. While Hitler’s minions showed an early ability to use close air support to devastating effect, their strategic strikes against Great Britain and the Soviet Union failed to produce any advantage.

The record for the Allies is a bit harder to describe.

In terms of damage to Germany’s economy, Overy notes that the Allied bombing offensive underperformed its expectations, mainly because it overestimated Hitler’s readiness for war, and underestimated Germany’s slack capacity. Though not the decisive knockout blow, Allied bombloads certainly put a ceiling on German production, as one can only imagine what it could have accomplished had it – like the United States – been able to undertake manufacturing without having to repair, disperse, and go underground.

The main Allied successes came – according to Overy – from the oft-maligned Americans. This did not stem from operational competence, better planes, or the overblown legacy of the Norden bombsight, but from sharply defined objectives. Giving a lot of praise to General Carl Spaatz – in overall command of the U.S. Air Force in Europe – Overy credits American forces for going after oil refineries, a commodity for which there was no substitute. Had oil been an earlier focus, it might have drastically shortened the war. Once the U.S. developed a long-range fighter, Spaatz also promoted counterforce missions, essentially using the bombers as bait for German fighters. By the time the Allies hit the shores of Normandy, much of the Luftwaffe had already been destroyed trying to protect its cities.

***

Successful or not, the cost of aerial bombing was mostly paid by ordinary people caught in events far beyond their control. The bombs fell upon the just and unjust alike. When a British 4lb incendiary device or American M43 500lb standard demolition ordinance exploded in someone’s kitchen, it did not discriminate between young or old, man or woman, fervent Nazi or passive resister. The bomb did not care if you were an SS executioner home on leave, a war worker, a retired pensioner, or an infant in a crib.

The most surprising thing about the bombings – mentioned here and elsewhere – is that it was not enough to break civilian morale, foment a political uprising, or otherwise change a person’s mind. In the end, the human capacity for cruelty could not overcome the human ability to endure.

[Dimitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

It delivers what it promises: bombing throughout Europe. A good two-thirds is still devoted to the Blitz over England & Germany. Italy benefits most of Overy's pan-European ambition, while Western Europe more or less gets attention in descending order of damage. The section on Eastern Europe felt too short. I am not (yet) qualified to judge the strategical bombing of the Soviet Union in the context of Barbarossa. It's supposedly seldom separated from the tactical air war in the East. The conclusion and epilogue form an excellent synopsis of the book’s main themes, but they are shining through the facts throughout so that the reader has a good sense of structure.

The popular image of non-stop swarms of untouchable airplanes soaring menacingly over burning cities is thoroughly debunked. It never left the realm of 1930's SF or war games. Bombers were envisioned to wreck utter an instant devastation on an almost nuclear scale, and not seldom through gas or biological agents. Society's morale was expected to plummet as fast as its architecture, helpless in the face of a bomber that "always got through". Without this lengthy exposition, it is impossible to grasp the mentality of decision making throughout 1940-1945.

The existing bomber technology was simply incapable of delivering results in accordance with pre-war expectations. The impact on the enemy war economy was limited, especially once dispersal programs gave the attacker a myriad of targets to choose from. The chief benefit was forcing the other side to invest in massive AA defense, manned by a mass of hands sorely missed in factories or at the front. In relation to this, the necessary air supremacy of the bomber fleet in enemy airspace was very hard to assert without an expansion of the fighter arm, resulting in a large-scale aerial duel that was not foreseen in the interbellum. Aditionally, the range of fighter escorts virtually determined the range of the bomber offensive. The progress made in aircraft construction on this point is perhaps the best measurement of how the psychological impact of bombing spread until it affected entire countries.

Finally, the unity of the people was strengthened rather than weakened in the face of aerial attack, since the current powers-that-be were the main source of rescue and assistance. Ironically, pre-war fears had stimulated initiatives of nationwide civil defense. Britain comes off best among the democracies, while there was a direct correlation among the dictatorships between the degree of totalitarian mobilization and preparedness. This is best illustrated by looking at the sturdiness of the public and/or private bomb shelters and their effect on morale. It scales down the story to the human level better than casualty statistics can.
Plus, both the UK and the USA spent half the war building up their bomber force. It is an arm that demands a lot of industrial resources, uses spacious infrastructure & requires a lot of maintenance manpower. No war in history has enough to go around. The imminent invasion in Normandy, moreover, threatened to direct the whole air force to tactical support. In the end, it helped to blur the distinction between the two levels. It also obscured at the time an important fact: Stalin’s much-desired Second Front had been in existence since 1942, thanks to the bombers that vided for the strength of the Eastern Front.

Inaccuracy continued to plague all air forces until the end of the war, in spite of considerable technological advancement in the field of (night) radar. No matter how strict the assigning of targets of proven military value, collatoral damage in civilian residential areas was the inevitable consequence. In a way the decimation of the enemy labour force was counted as a compensation, but the population was never an official prime target of bombing for neither side.

The Allies did step up the numbers by perfecting the mix of high explosive & incendiary to create 'firestorms' in German cities whose medieval centers were notoriously flammable. One of the neat details in the book is the studies undertaken by amongst others the emigrated founder of the Bauhaus movement to determine which ordnance combination would work best on Germany and Italy, respectively.

In a weird way, reality vindicated the critics of Douhet: his prophesized collapse of national spirit only came true with Italians, who were prone to crack easily. While the British Blitz spirit is exaggerated in the mythology of WWII, Italian morale did plummet faster. In their defense, bombing on the peninsula didn’t get heavy until after the landings at Anzio & the overthrow of Mussolini. By then the German occupation with its harsh reprisals had them caught between a rock and a hard place. The story of bombing by Italy is interesting in a ‘what if ?’ way. The Italian Air Force’s experience in smaller wars such as Spain and Abyssinia had already shown the optimism of Il dominio dell'aria to be ill-grounded. The country’s small industrial base prohibited an appropriate evolution in aircraft design. The persistent but inadequate bombing of Malta and the airborne assault on Crete might have been replaced with the invasion of the former and the cutting of Allied supply lines in the Mediterranean, with severe consequences for the North African front.

A similar possibility surfaced during the Blitz on Britain, where the Few in actuality met the Many in fairly comfortable numbers and more likely in a Hurricane than a Spitfire. There was an active discussion of the use of both fighters and bombers in either the counteroffensive, or as part of the fight to keep the island’s supply lines open in the Battle of the Atlantic. This subject takes me back to the Atlantic charter and could’ve used more depth. The rest of the Blitz story holds few surprises, except the preparedness of the British government to use gas in retaliation if necessary. This would resurface with the 15th US Air Force in Italy, and remains a rather curious restraint in a war where ‘retaliation’ often served as an excuse for escalation.

The Germans knew the Battle of Britain was a lost cause even before it officially began, but kept it up to lull the USSR. After 1941 their side of the story plays second fiddle to the Allies’, but as the ‘victims’ their development of countermeasures, even to the infamous ‘Window’ metal strips, invites a comparison with the situation on the British homeland. It is never clearly made. We do get good capsules of famous raids: Hamburg, Dresden, Sweinfurt… and Berlin, which got raided less than you’d think.

There is sometimes an overemphasis on the inter-Allied disputes over designated targets, especially towards the end, where the liberated countries of Western Europe pass the review. The pendulum had irrevocably swung in favour of more indiscriminate bombing by late 1942, no matter how vehemently Resistance movements and governments-in-exile lamented. It is almost impossible to pose a moral verdict on the strategic bombing campaign over Europe, and Overy thankfully arguments rather than judges. Personally, I tend to side with Arthur Harris, because war has a momentum of its own.

[Perato · Rating 5 out of 5]

Turns out, I don't know as much about strategic air war in Europe that I used to think I knew.

Goes into the top 10 book's about WW2 for me at least for now. There's just so much information in this book that I wished I'd read it a bit earlier. I would say it should be a necessary reading for anyone who plans to dive into World War 2.

The book's focus is strategic air warfare during World War 2 in Europe, so Overy omitted the whole Pacific War. Overy writes about the obvious 'Blitz' and the 'Combined Bomber offensive against Germany' but also a lot about other fronts as well including bombing of the Soviets and minor Axis nations and nations occupied by Germans&Italians. Only thing omitted from European side of the war seems to be Soviet bombing of Finnish cities in Winter war. Also the book focuses solely on the strategic warfare leaving out most of the tactical and close air support. He manages to also cover lot of the people and organisations trying to survive the bombing, so it's not just about the military side of it.

The style of the book is very "text book" and most of the quotes from anyone is usually in form of "wrote one civilian/bomber crew". There's very little of personal anecdotes, so one might say it's in that way somewhat old fashioned military history. Then again fitting all this information in just 640 pages seems to argue that having personal stories there would've lengthened the book unnecessarily. Yet without the personal stories Overy manages to portray quite comprehensive image of both the bombers and the bombed.

I liked Overy's arguments and how he tried to see all possible angles for all the nations involved. How he covered the prewar preparations and thought processes was just splendid. Also I liked very much how much he dived into the "whys" of the campaigns as in he tried to make it understandable why the war was waged as it was and how effective it was in terms of that particular reasoning. It might be argued that the bombing was effective in some way, but Overy always likes to point out if that was more of an accident than intent.

All in all it's just very comprehensive book about the whole strategic bombing in Europe during World War 2 and might be the only book you need about the subject.

Also I must mention a bit of warning, there exists a shortened version of this book "Bombers and the bombed" that lacks quite a lot of the depth the book offers, so I would avoid that version if possible. It's just clipped version of the book, lot of the contents just cut right out.

[Emmanuel Gustin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title and the monumental size of this book somehow suggest a definitive, comprehensive history of the strategic bombing campaigns during WWII. But that is an enormously complex subject with a substantial body of literature already discussing it. Among these, Overy's book is a worthy contribution, but not exceptional. It is a thorough study of the politics and strategy of the bloody bombing campaigns of WWII, as dry and unemotional as such a study could be. But most of this material is not new.

The greatest merit of "The Bombing War" is its discussion of Civil Defense, that is, the various measures the involved states took, before and during the war, to protect their population, infrastructure and industry from the consequences of the enemy bombs. This is a grim subject that I have not seen elsewhere described in such detail, and it is Overy's major contribution to the topic. It gives us a different view of the bombing campaigns, as seen from the perspective of the bombed.

It leads Overy to a valuable insight: If the proponents of the bombing of enemy "morale" (for which to read: cities and civilians) expected the bombed-out people to rise against their governments or at least call for an end to the war, they often achieved the opposite. Deprived of their homes and possessions, suffering the death of friends and relatives, the bombed civilians of WWII became only more dependent on the state for support and survival. In the heavily bombed cities of Germany, the Nazi party sought to become the major provider of assistance to the needy, and thus its power and grip on the German people were strengthened rather than weakened by enemy bombing. Similar patterns emerged elsewhere, with Italy perhaps being the one significant exception.

It is a lesson that is still valid and important today for those who seek to enforce "regime change", by bombing or by less bloody means.

This is a valuable contribution to the study of air warfare during WWII. It takes time to read but is informative, and worth the effort even if you think that you already know a lot about this topic. For those who still believe that the Allied bombing campaigns targeted military targets and civilians suffered only as the result of "collateral damage", it will be an eye-opener.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every time I walk past the statue 'honouring' the aircrews of Bomber Command in Green Park, I taste something unpleasant in my mouth.

I can imagine a decent German feeling much the same if Berlin had a major monument to the Eastern Front war dead of the Wehrmacht.

Yes, both sets of men were courageous and died for the sins of their leaders but both sets of men were complicit in appalling atrocities under orders that specifically targeted civilians.

This remarkable, well evidenced and well written book is about the use of bombing and its effects in Europe during the Second World War - at least that is its primary purpose. It is, in fact, a book about evil.

Half a million Europeans were murdered from the air either indirectly as part of the prosecution of war or directly as a deliberate strategy of area or political bombing by air power advocates.

The book is dense in places. Overy does not put statistics into foot-notes but makes sure you have them to hand when you read of this raid or that campaign - whether deaths or tonnage of bombs.

He does not go into too much detail of effects - just enough for us to be clear what bombing involves - because his interests (and ours) are the policies that led to these horrors.

This is one of those books where the complexity of issues requires that we do not try an easy summary. Overy is fair-minded. He seeks to understand and not condemn. There is no emotion here.

The final conclusions are measured and pointed. He also provides a useful coda that suggested that nothing was fundamentally learned from the experience.

He rightly points out that the area bombing of Bomber Harris - who must be the very epitome of the banality of evil if you have a soul - was of its time and could not be repeated.

He then stops any sigh of relief at this point by pointing out that these maniacs (my opinion, not his) did not need to repeat it because they soon had nuclear weaponry. We have been lucky so far.

Half a million dead over five years could now become 80million Russians in a few hours. The strategy of total war would dictate first strike in the forlorn hope of limiting the effect at home.

One should continue to think on this as a bunch of war loons try to convert crises in the Middle East or over local self-determination in the Ukraine into confrontations with well armed nuclear powers.

The point is that the area strategy was not a general one amongst the combatants but a specifically Anglo-American - indeed British one - based on the thinking of an Italian proto-fascist, Douhet.

The irony of this is not lost on Overy who points out that Allied bombing of Italians (while their Government was an ally) cost more lives than the Blitz.

One gets a shock to the system when one discovers just how evil the British as a war state had become in what was clearly an existential struggle of constant escalation with no quarter given.

Let us start by noting something uncomfortable. Although air power advocates promoted independent bombing strategies, the general view in the 1930s was that civilian bombing was a horror.

Neither the Soviets nor the Americans adopted civilian bombing as a policy directive and (surprise!) it was Hitler who attempted to outlaw it and chemical and gas weapons at the beginning of the conflict.

Of course, this does not gainsay Hitler's villainy against first the Jews and the mentally disabled and then anything that got in his way of a civilian nature in the East or in terms of reprisals.

But facts are facts. And probably because he still had a residual notion that the West Europeans were a basically civilised people, Hitler seems to have thought it uncivilised to bomb people in war.

There is, as well, multiple room for misunderstandings, sometimes wilful, in international relations with deeply unpleasant political warfare operatives muddying the truth at every opportunity.

Overy, somewhat embarrassingly, places Guernica, Warsaw and Rotterdam in their military context and draws the critical line between what we call 'collateral damage' and deliberate terror.

This is central because we need to understand that the British not only had a strategy of terror (the only nation to do so) but, with the Americans, banked up gas bombs in Italy ready to use in the last days.

Biological weapons may have been in their infancy but it seems (from Overy's coda) that the next total war contemplated by the air power loons included advocacy of bacteriological warfare to retain assets.

So what is going on here? Certainly Churchill was troubled by the strategy of terror though unafraid to use any resource to meet political ends. As we will note, we can still see his point.

Similarly, not only the Germans and the Soviets but also the Americans may have been ruthless though happily held to the notion of tactical use of air power where civilians were unfortunate collateral damage.

The secret of evil seems to lie in its true source - the corporate mentality. The RAF was a new arm of state force and competed for budgets and resources. It positioned itself as the future.

Its chief, Bomber Harris, somewhere ceased to be a human being and became the pure will of his force. He had done a common thing, lost himself in the task and ceased to be more than the task.

Edgerton has written persuasively that last century air power was associated with the technological right and he has pointed out the ideology underpinning Liberal Militarism.

Overy does not go down this route but we should remind ourselves that the driver for techno-war was the protection of one's own people by mustering massive power targeted at the population of the other.

This reversion to a Mesopotamian attitude to the cities of your enemy also held a sub-text of fear that democracy (actually the hold of the liberal elite) could not survive another general call-up.

The solution - tanks on the front and planes in the sky - neatly converged with the institutional aspirations of the RAF to an equal or dominant role in war strategy.

Since fighters and fighter-bombers by definition were always going to be ancillary to armies fighting blow by blow across country and naval forces defending trade routes, this meant bombing.

The justification of bombing however was not easy. Aiming was poor, air crew losses were high and the equipment was very expensive. To be more than ancillary required a 'result'.

What these callous men offered was one or both of two possibilities, one taken up more reasonably by the Americans and the other - fanatically - by Bomber Harris.

The first was to claim that bombing raids directed at aeroengine works, transportation and oil facilities (and so on) could degrade the economy of the other side so that his war capacity would fail.

Naturally, given the weakness of bomb aiming equipment and the constant pressure on air crews of fear, this meant serious collateral damage to the civilian population.

Needless to say, this is what happened not only in the Blitz (which was always military in purpose in terms of economic warfare) but also in many of the major raids on Germany and all those in allied states.

Overy plausibly demonstrates that this sort of airpower was far less effective than the bombers claimed but he (and we) can give the men of the time the benefit of the doubt here.

The bombers in these cases seem to have killed a lot of people, including allied citizens to the increasing frustration of the resistance, but there was at least a theoretical case for action.

It could be reasonable in an escalating existential crisis to accept this massive collateral damage if it brought the hell to a faster end - this is the dark justification, of course, for Hiroshima.

This sort of bombing is just - just - on the right side of morality for most people: we say again, that which reasonably might be considered to be the lesser evil in an existential struggle.

Strategic area bombing of civilians to inspire terror in the dubious and unevidenced belief that this might cause panic and bring down a regime is another kettle of fish however.

There are cases where regimes were brought down by terror bombing - Italy seems to be an example - but nearly all countries appear to have adapted and even seem to have seen the regime strengthened.

The fact of bombing and disruption exposed weak and poor regimes like Mussolini's but it enabled a narrative of resistance and a politically-led popular organisation to emerge elsewhere.

Just as general tactical asset bombing oddly tended to increase production through reorganisation, substitution and determination so area bombing tended to strengthen political legitimacy.

In the first case, it might be very reasonable for strategists not to have understood that this would be the case but in the second we are faced by two new factors.

The Blitz itself should have provided sufficient evidence that regimes strengthened on existential threat while what we have here is something different - the deliberate targeting of workers.

Ah, I seem to have slipped into the unforgivable here - the values-driven business of morality!

The point is that Bomber Harris was no different from Himmler in this - the destruction of persons deliberately because of their nature, in this case as German workers, in Himmler's as Jews.

The argument that the Jews were 'innocent' and the German workers were 'guilty' is specious. To Nazis, the Jews were as 'guilty as hell' as origins of the war (yes, absurd but believed culturally).

German workers, many of whom voted social democratically in the 1932 and previous elections and who were led no less than workers anywhere by malign elites, were suffering here from collective punishment.

The deliberate firestorming of Hamburg and other cities was a war crime that the Allies knew to be so when they decided not to prosecute the Nazis at Nuremburg for their bombing atrocities.

The most notorious case, Dresden, ironically probably falls into the milder category of tactical warfare bombing in support of the Soviet push to the East. Overy is good at revising our preconceptions.

The lessons of all this are largely academic, on the old mafia saying that 'that was then and this is now'. The conditions were peculiar and unrepeatable - new atrocities entirely are for our time.

However, we can draw some lessons about the human condition, about the blind and unaccountable nature of institutional forms operating in unevidenced ways and doing bad things under unrestrained leaders.

To be fair, Churchill was a man under severe pressure to whom bombing remained a tool-at-hand and a sideshow and, though committed absolutely to success, he was neither stupid nor psychopathic.

What is worrying is that, under conditions of existential crisis, power to do great evil can be delegated so easily. This story raises very uncomfortable thoughts about other war leaders.

And not just Stalin and Hitler but Cameron and Obama. The post-war Presidents, for example, appear to have had some reasonable grip over their forces through acceptance of their authority. Are we so sure now?

One question is what happens when the 'fuhrerprinzip' sends down the line vague generalities alongside instructions that can be interpreted brutally because they were stated brutally (the Hitler/Stalin model).

But another question is what happens when a Leader is not working on full information and makes false or 'bad' judgements on the claims of the institutional pressure groups who claim to serve him.

There are signs on several occasions in this story that Bomber Command lost the ability to do two things under Bomber Harris: think beyond the interests of itself; and have reasonable moral boundaries.

The British were far from alone - the Soviets were restrained only because they were fighting a different sort of war - and the Americans soon descended into hell themselves with the Tokyo firebombing.

But bombing itself was over-egged as tool - strategic bombing in the battlefield could lead to the 'friendly fire' errors that we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan as well and often did more harm than good.

It may - given existential struggle and acceptance of the 'just war' (ho, hum!) - have had some important function in degrading the flow of materiel to the enemy front and redirecting production.

What strikes me as unconscionable, especially with political motives of pure populist revenge, is to continue with a campaign of total war against civilians long after it is clear that it is just murder.

Almost every civilian death could be justified by some rational explanation based on the struggle for existence by the end but, by that time, everyone has lost the moral plot.

The great lesson of all this is that war has its own remorseless logic in which (as Overy wisely notes) political conditions eventually block the chance to do the right thing.

However, you can make up your own mind. Overy is detached and clinical. The facts are all there in his book. I urge you to read it and ask where you think the boundaries of death-dealing should lie.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent narrative of the history of bombing during World War 2. It is not merely a survey of existing secondary literature, as the author heavily relies on archival sources. Notwithstanding the book's length, it does not feel unduly bloated. It would be hard for the impartial reader to peruse this volume and conclude that there were no serious questions about much of the Allies' conduct.

[Bfisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

The version of the book that I read was the original version, published by Allen Lane (Penguin) as “The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945”. From what I understand, the U.S. version, published by Viking as “The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945” (as indicated by the title) does not include the original version’s account of the German bombing campaigns. This is a grave weakness; in its absence, a reader of the lesser book may not fully appreciate the Allies’ political and military leadership failures as the Allied bombing campaigns developed.

It took me a very long time to read this book. It is a well-written book, but the subject matter is grim. I started to read this book in September 2014, but I could not force myself to read much of it until making a concerted effort this week, which was not coincidently the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and shortly after the 70th anniversary of the Dresden bombings (Feb 1945). Coincidentally, it was the same week as the passing of the last Dambusters pilot, Les Munro.

Those events are significant to this book. Only with the passing of time and of the participants in the struggle of WW2 was it possible to produce and publish an objective history of the bombing war in Europe, 1939-1945. I believe that this book is that objective history, and that there are great lessons to be re-learned from it.

[GrandpaBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing book.

This exhaustive, and exhausting, history solely focusing on the bombing war in Europe from its beginnings in 1939 through to 1945 and beyond is a must have and read for anyone interested in the history of World War II. The author focuses on the three major air forces in the war, the Germans, British, and Americans, and peels away all of the misconceptions, forgotten history and heroics that have over the decades built up over the actual facts of the ultimate uselessness that the bombing by all of combatants provided to the outcome of the war. Highly recommended.

The Bombing War, Europe 1939-1945 is the British edition; avoid the American edition titled The Bombers and the Bombed.

[Susan Paxton · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's vital in this case to find and read the British edition. The American version is very extensively and poorly edited.

[Carlos · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best adjective for this book is "comprehensive". It explains the war from the perspective of the aggressors as well as the victims. It is a definitive and complete work. The main lesson is that the British were the only ones that focused on the bombing of civil population as a main goal. They were the ones that used terror as an intrinsic part of their bombing strategy, while Americans and Germans still tried to focus on targets that were related to the war or war production. Of course, given the technology of the time, the instrument was too blunt for the task and collateral damage was usually greater than the damage to the main objective itself. The author does a good job on explaining how moral standards loosened as the war went on and as aggression escalated.

[Rich Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

So it took me a year to read this book - a little at a time. Obviously it is no page turner. It is, as you would expect from Overy, painstakingly researched and an extremely thorough account. The focus is on the less told tales - the civilians under the bombs, the strategies for civil defense and to a lesser extent the grand strategies of the offensive forces. Whilst an impressive and worthwhile historical text it just wasn't that interesting to read...

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really fascinating and accessible book on all levels of bombing in Europe during ww2, including the lead up, the events, and finishing with the overarching shadow this period had on subsequent modern history. Very informative and clearly well researched

[David Warner · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this sobering study of the strategic bombing campaigns of the Second World War and their effects upon the bombed peoples and economies, Richard Overy provides a convincing case for the ineffectiveness of strategic bombing as a means of achieving military victory or of shortening the duration of conflict. On all three criteria used to justify what came to be known as area bombing - the intentional bombing of highly populated urban areas - so as to produce, one, a crippling reduction in economic output, two, a deleterious effect upon popular morale and thereby reduce willingness to prolong the fighting and increase pressure upon governments to surrender, and, three, to retard military capability through the destruction of armament supply and logistical capacity, the bombing campaigns of the three countries that pursued independent, strategic air campaigns must be judged a military failure. In addition, while strategic bombing was ineffective compared to the claims of its advocates, its costs were disproportionately high in the numbers of civilians killed, around 600,000 across Europe, the attrition rates upon aircrew and aircraft, with RAF Bomber Command alone losing 58,000 dead, and economically, in that around 40% of war spending went upon the costly development of technology, the manufacture of aircraft and weapons, and the training of crews. Simply put, the crude argument that strategic bombing could win the war was proven false by its ineffective results because the bombing campaigns, due to technological and logistical limitations, were too crude a weapon with the majority of bombs dropped considerably off target.
With the onset of war in 1939, there were two main problems faced by air force planners in the UK and Germany (and from 1942, in the USA): firstly, that in spite of previous policy decisions made in support of strategic bombing, more so in the RAF than the Luftwaffe, there was insufficient materiel and technology to make such a policy effective, and, secondly, bombing was incredibly inaccurate. In Britain, under Chamberlain's war coalition there was a reluctance to put into action area bombing and a repugnance at the bombing of civilians during the Phoney War, but that changed in 1940 with the fall of France, the premiership of the more belligerent Churchill, and particularly with the evolution of the German air campaign from the counter-force objectives of the Battle of Britain to the attacks upon military-industrial plants and infrastructure of The Blitz, and with it the dramatic rise in civilian casualties. To be sure, in 1940-1, the Luftwaffe did not prosecute a designated area bombing campaign, and thereafter was incapable of so doing due to the war with the USSR and the growing need for home defence against the RAF and later USAAF, but due to the wild inaccuracy of bombing at night against cities defended by flak emplacements and fighters, the effect was much the same. However, as Overy establishes, the bombing of civilian populations in order to reduce morale and industrial output was never a specific objective of Germany, but from 1941 onwards it did become so of the western allies, and for the very reason that the Blitz had failed - bombing was simply too inaccurate to degrade economic output sufficiently to achieve the military defeat of the enemy by targeting industrial plants and equipment alone, and so, by default, it was necessarily expanded to urban areas as a whole and their resident inhabitants. However, it might be claimed that the failure of The Blitz in 1940-1 actually revealed the ineffectiveness of area bombing, as despite the deaths of 55,000 civilians and the destruction of buildings across nearly every British city and many towns, neither the will to carry on the war nor industrial production nor military effectiveness were significantly impeded.
And yet, both the RAF and USAAF were committed to a strategic bombing campaign from 1942 onwards, whose aim, as far as the air force planners were concerned, was to bring about the defeat of Germany by air power, even though they knew the Luftwaffe had been unable to defeat the RAF in 1940 or bomb Britain into surrender in 1940-41. Why was this so?
To begin with, there was a narrative, developed in the inter war years, that bombing was an effective means of attaining military victory, which encouraged planners to assume strategic bombing would work so long as the technology was sufficient and enough bombs could be dropped on the right targets. So, for the staffs of Bomber Command and the US Eighth Air Force, the task was to develop more destructive bombing strategies on the basis that the more that was destroyed the more likely that Germany was to collapse or surrender, but not to consider whether strategic bombing could actually achieve this, while aircraft and aero-engine manufacturers sought to build larger bombers with greater payloads and longer ranges, and armaments companies worked upon bigger and more destructive bombs. The assumption of the effectiveness of strategic bombing was never questioned in spite of the evidence of its military limitations and its disproportionate human and financial costs.
Overy is not especially critical of senior airforce officers, although readers may draw their own conclusions from their quoted words, and this is in accord with the rather impersonal approach of this book, but he does record situations where they were correct. Importantly, both Harris and Spaatz were opposed to the use of strategic bombers in support of the Overlord campaign, where, indeed, they proved ineffective, and to the Transportation strategy championed by Arthur Tedder, which had only limited impacts upon rail hubs, and very little upon tracks and bridges. It can also be argued that the uses of strategic bombing in support of ground force objectives at Monte Cassino in 1943 and at Caen in 1944, as with the Luftwaffe's flattening of Stalingrad in summer 1942, were counterproductive, in that the rubble created provided improved protection for the defenders and seriously impeded the progress of mobile armoured forces.
As regards the controversial figure of Arthur Harris, the narrative conclusively reveals how his adamantine belief that strategic bombing could win the war was severely flawed. However, Harris was not alone in this, with Charles Portal as Chief of the Air Staff from 1940 to 1945 being a firm advocate of area bombing within the Combined Chiefs of Staff, as was his US counterpart Hap Arnold, as well as other commanders such as Spaatz, Eaker, and Doolittle, although the Americans never endorsed the RAF policy of targeting civilian populations around industrial centres, even if the effects of this differentiation were minimal in actuality. As easy as it is to criticize Harris, a major fault with Bomber Command was its operational independence from the Air Ministry, which limited the supervision Harris was under, particularly with Portal in his corner, and resulted in a disjunction between bombing operations and their targeting and staff policy on overall strategy, research, and operational analysis. And while there were attempts to place RAF Bomber Command and US 8th Air Force under a single supreme command, these were unsuccessful for political reasons, which meant that while both conducted complimentary operations, they retained operational independence, so that when the Americans shifted effectively in 1944 to the targeting of oil installations, the RAF and Harris continued to hit cities. From Harris' viewpoint, once strategic bombing had been agreed upon, firstly by the War Cabinet before the US entry into the war, and then by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, it was up to his command to determine how to put the policy into operation, which is what he did. On the whole, however, Overy argues that the USAAF was more effective than Bomber Command, particularly with its successful campaigns against oil installations which did have a direct impact upon industrial production, while, as Speer wondered after the war, it remains unclear why neither force targeted aerospace engine production, which even with the dispersal of aircraft factories and multiple production streams would seriously have degraded German aircraft capacity. It may simply be a failure of intelligence, which as John Slessor said in 1947 was 'rotten'. Indeed, had intelligence been more effective and related to photographic reconnaissance, it is probable that the ineffectiveness of strategic bombing with regards to military and industrial output would have been apparent, which may well have led to changes in Allied air policy. Instead, it was assumed that strategic bombing was considerably more effective than it was, and so was therefore pursued. It was only the post-war bombing surveys and the interrogation of important officials like Speer and Saur and of Luftwaffe commanders like Göring and Kesselring that revealed how ineffective strategic bombing had been. It is no surprise that after 1945, and in a nuclear age, strategic bombing was abandoned as a military policy. 1939-45 will likely be the only Bombing War.
However, it is also the case that from 1940 to 1942, Bomber Command was the only force taking the war to Germany directly, and until June 1944, strategic bombing remained the only means the western allies had of degrading, however ineffectually, Germany's military capability and of supporting Soviet military endeavours in the East. The biggest criticism that can be made of Harris and the other strategic air commanders is that once the the invasion of Europe had begun in summer 1944 they should have diverted from strategic to tactical bombing, and that while Allied air supremacy by 1944 over Germany made strategic bombing easier to effect with less attrition, conversely it became less necessary. More bombs were dropped on Germany in 1944-5 than in the previous five years in an air campaign that had effectively been won. One gets the feeling that the bombing continued and increased not because it was needed but simply because it was possible. However, ease of target does not imply a greater justification to bomb, particularly when the economic effects were limited, the human costs exorbitant, and the process of post-war reconstruction further retarded. The political leaders of the democracies and the Combined Chiefs of Staff should have adjusted strategy following the successful landings in Normandy and limited bombing operations to tactical targets at the front and in the rear which had a direct connection to German military efficacy. If they had done so, not only would many German civilians have been spared but so too the lives of many in occupied territories. At the very least, bombing of targets of opportunity should have been prohibited, while bombing of built up urban areas avoided in favour of communication hubs and links and oil installations. What justification area bombing and the uses of incendiaries had before D-Day was much reduced once the outcome of the war was to be determined by land forces on both west and east.
Allied strategic bombing did have some military effectiveness, but only indirectly through the measures Germany had to take in its defence through the allocation of manpower and materiel to anti-aircraft defence and the diversion of airplane production for home fighter defence, but these were collateral benefits of a strategy that by it's own objectives failed. So, yes, strategic bombing did have a positive effect upon the war, although it remains difficult to evaluate how much, and there is evidence that the RAF campaign over Germany in 1941-2 led to limitations in the airpower that could be deployed on the Eastern Front, although such a benefit was but a by-product of a strategy that did not prevent German military output continuing to expand right up to 1945, even if at a slightly reduced rate than otherwise (although, of course, allied military production was affected in turn by the huge productive resources diverted to strategic bombers and away from more effective military equipment).
If strategic bombing was a failure, what were the alternative air policies available? Basically, there were two: counter-force and tactical bombing. Counter-force is the deployment of forces to destroy an enemy's offensive and defensive military capabilities in battle, which with regards to military aviation predominantly means the utilisation of fighter and fighter-bomber aircraft to destroy enemy fighters and airfields in order to achieve air supremacy. The first part of the German air campaign over England in 1940, the Battle of Britain, is a prime example of a counter-force strategy, which was intended to wipe out the RAF's fighter screen so as to ease the Luftwaffe's bombing of military-industrial targets and make possible a seaborne invasion. That the Germans failed was not because the strategy was wrong, but because they had insufficient weaponry and too high an attrition rate to succeed, particularly as they considerably underestimated the strength of RAF Fighter Command and the effectiveness of UK aircraft production, while their fighter losses were so great as to force them to move to a night bombing policy with medium bombers before air supremacy had been achieved. Similarly, it was the effectiveness of the fighter campaigns in 1943-4 against the Luftwaffe, and the tactical interdiction of logistics and aircraft production, that made possible the D-Day landings and the subsequent North West Europe campaign undertaken under complete Allied air supremacy.
In opposition to strategic bombing which seeks to obtain military objectives solely through the projection of air power and munitions, tactical bombing is that which operates in support of other arms, mostly land forces. The purpose of tactical bombing is to target military forces at the battlefront or near rear and not the military-industrial substructure deep behind enemy lines that Bomber Command and the Eighth Air Force were tasked with primarily attacking in 1942-5. Tactical bombing's results have an immediate impact upon the battlefield, while strategic bombing's effects are more indirect and attritional, and, accordingly, the military needs are different, with tactical forces utilising figher-bombers and light bombers rather than the medium and heavy bombers of strategic air forces. It was tactical bombing that was implemented successfully in the German Blitzkriegs in Poland in 1939 and in France and the Low Countries in 1940, in the opening advances of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, and in support of the Allied land campaigns in Italy in 1943-5 and North West Europe in 1944-5. In all these campaigns, local air supremacy was essential and was achieved, so that counter-force and tactical bombing operate in tandem in support of land forces with no need of an independent strategic bombing campaign. It is noticeable that the Soviets never developed a strategic bombing capability, relying almost entirely upon counter-force fighters and fighter-bombers, while by 1943 the Germans had abandoned the development of heavy bombers, depending instead upon fighters for home defence and light bombers for tactical attacks at the battlefront. Of course, the Soviets had less need to develop a strategic airforce because they could rely upon the British and Americans to bomb Germany and its industry on their behalf, but, even so, only the RAF and USAAF developed and maintained a strategic bombing capability throughout the war.
The biggest strength of this book is not only that it covers the strategic bombing campaigns across all of Europe, including fascinating sections upon Malta, and the little known campaigns in Italy and in Eastern Europe in 1944-5, but also that it integrates the military operations with their civilian effects. Of particular interest is the attention paid to civil defence and the systems developed by the UK, Germany, and the USSR to counter bombing, both through military and protective means, which provides a useful perspective and social comparisons. The weakness in Overy's approach lies in the absence of the human factor, with the focus overridingly upon the big picture of air commands, strategy, policy, and high commanders, with little upon the men who actually carried out the bombing campaigns, and not much more upon individual experiences of being bombed. Strategic bombing was a product of modern industrial societies organised into large military formations, but it was carried out by very young men in dangerous conditions under enormous physical and psychological stress, over half of whom died in the process, and resulted in the deaths of 600,000 Europeans and the injury and homelessness of millions more. It was a military strategy whose analysis benefits from the cool objectivity of this book, but it was only possible through the bravery of pilots and aircrew and the industriousness of ground crew, aircraft workers, and munitions makers, and was pursued at an enormous human cost, which was not proportionate to any benefit accrued. Overy covers both the bombing of Hamburg in 1943 and of Dresden in 1945 in some detail, and, whatever one's ethical position, it is undoubtedly true that both attacks were militarily ineffective, while the necessity of the latter appears minimal in the face of the Soviet advance and the lack of a Soviet request for such an attack. In the end, as with these two cities, strategic bombing was a failure, paid for in human lives unnecessarily lost in the air and upon the ground.

[Stephen Morrissey · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the 20th Century, mankind fulfilled an ironic and tragic destiny: building up cities with buildings that scarped the sky, cars that motored great distances, all underneath a sky dotted with airplanes moving to and fro across the continents; alongside that, bombs were developed, tested, manufactured at mass scale, and dropped on those meccas of industry, commerce, and learning, obliterating urban areas so that city centers resembled the ruins of Ancient Rome more than modern places for people to dwell, eat, and live.

Richard Overy presents a full-scale history of the bombing of Europe in the Second World War, from the perspectives of bombers and the bombed, and how each of the societies at war adapted to the reality of strategic bombing. Overy's analysis of the development of strategic bombing (i.e., bombing at long distances from the infantry front-lines and for purposes beyond the immediate tactical considerations of ground commanders) is exhaustive and illuminating, beginning with the writings of Douhet and through to the British, German, Russian, and American militaries of the 1940s.

Overy does much to dispel long-held myths about the bombing campaigns, including a thorough analysis of Germany's more limited bombing campaign over Great Britain and the Allied response, particularly focusing on British Bomber Command's decision to unleash death and destruction on civilians in urban areas as a strategy. No sane person doubts the ruthlessness and terror of the Nazi Regime, but the Allied bombing campaign carries its own moral qualms, including the destructive bombing of Hamburg, Dresden, and other German cities that resulted in little tactical or strategic gains. In fact, Overy asserts that the Allied bombing campaign reaped marginal dividends for the war effort, and was only effective towards 1944-45, when American bombers targeted oil, gas, and transportation networks that spoiled the German war machine.

Bombing did not win the Second World War for the Allies, but it set the stage for the collective anxieties of the postwar era, including the potential horrors of atomic war, mass casualty strikes on civilians, and the oft-told lesson that war almost always reaches to the lowest, most destructive forms to achieve the ends of victors.

[Lysergius · Rating 4 out of 5]

This massive tome looks at aerial warfare in its offensive from from every angle, leaving no stone unturned. Beginning with the bombing campaign of WWI it moves through the Spanish Civil War to address every aspect of the bombing campaigns of the British, Americans and the German air forces.

The conclusion is pretty much what you would expect, strategic area bombing is an extremely blunt object that fails miserably to deliver any of its objectives, economic, psychological or political. Why then was it pursued with such ferocity by the participants? Why was the emphasis not placed on tactical strikes under battlefield conditions?

These are some of the questions that Overy sets out address in the course of the 880 pages in the book.

[Andy Horton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent thorough scholarly work on the bombing war in Europe, looking at how the Allies and Axis prosecuted the war and how they defended against and endured bombing. Looks in depth at how and why strategic bombing happened snd what - or how little - it achieved.
Avoids over-emphasising things like the “dam busters” raid (covered in a couple of paragraphs) in favour of thoughtful, in-depth coverage of campaigns from perspectives of bombing and targeted countries.
Well worth reading for a balanced, nuanced view of this aspect of WWII.

[John Podzamsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Examining the impact of bombing

The author has done a magisterial job of describing the physiological and philosophical impact of mass bombing upon the the bombed and the bombers. It is striking that the generals and the heads of governments were reluctant to attack civilians while many of those civilians

[Roger Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very long and thorough study of the bombing war beginning with the Spanish Civil War and ending with the defeat of Germany in 1945. While I learned a great deal about the surprising ineffectiveness of heavy bombing, it would have helped to have learned more about the actual experiences of Allied bombing crews and their experiences.

[Stephen Gill · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very well researched and insightful study of the contentious issue of aerial bombing.

[Jesper Jorgensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heavy on facts this book takes you 'behind the scenes'. A very valid supplement to the more 'pure' air power accounts.

[Wojciech Markos Markiewicz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Chyba nawet szkolne lektury mnie nie wymęczyły tak jak ta książka.

[Christopher Rizzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

95

[Ipswichblade · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very detailed book about bombing and the consequences during the second world war. Particularly interesting was the chapter about Italy which I had not read about before.