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Hundreds of flak guns are roaring away … The air is humming with many aircraft engines. There are innumerable searchlights wandering around the sky. It’s raining shrapnel … There are five enemy aircraft caught in a searchlight cone; they fly towards us, are furiously shot at, and fly past above us. Later we see an aircraft going down in flames. The whole thing goes on for an hour and a half … In the west the sky is red … Long convoys of trucks come through the town, laden with all kinds of household goods. Distraught people sit beside their few belongings. Refugees are arriving at the main station. They stand there with their fire-blackened faces, owning nothing more than they stand up in. It’s total misery. The mood in the town is dire. Everywhere there’s the question being asked: when will it be our turn?

In June 1943, a citizen of Mülheim wrote: ‘Our Führer ought now to give the order to destroy the big cities in England, too.’ Hitler would certainly have done this if he could, but the Luftwaffe was incapable of returning to finish what it had left off in May 1941. A few thoughtful Germans feared that the growing havoc visited on their land represented a judgement on the Nazis’ crimes: on 20 December 1943, the Protestant Bishop of Württemberg roused Berlin’s ire by writing to the head of the Reich Chancellery to suggest that his flock were ‘often feeling that the suffering they were having to endure from the enemy bombing raids was in retribution for what was being done to the Jews’. He was sternly enjoined to show ‘greater reticence in such matters’.

As bombing intensified and civilian morale slumped, oppression and compulsion were employed ever more ruthlessly to sustain Nazi hegemony. In 1943, the courts passed a hundred death sentences a week on citizens deemed guilty of defeatism or sabotage: two branch managers of Deutsche Bank and a senior executive of an electricity combine were among those executed for expressing gloom about the war’s outcome. To maintain output, the aircraft industry adopted a seventy-two-hour working week. As slave labour became increasingly important, Milch urged ever more draconian measures to increase its productivity. He wrote of foreign and PoW workers: ‘These elements cannot be made more efficient by small means. They are just not handled strictly enough. If a decent foreman would sock one of those unruly guys because the fellow won’t work, then the situation would soon change. International law cannot be observed here. I have asserted myself very strongly … I have very strongly represented the point of view that prisoners, with the exception of the English and the Americans, should be taken away from the military authorities. Soldiers are not in a position … to cope with these fellows … If [a prisoner of war] has committed sabotage or refused to work, I will have him hanged, right in his own factory.’ Hitler’s ‘wonder weapons’, the V1 flying bomb and V2 rocket, were produced by slaves in conditions of appalling hardship and brutality. Industrial output was sustained only by ruthless exploitation of captive manpower. The commitment to high-technology ‘revenge weapons’, estimated to have cost the Reich around one-third of the resources expended by the Allies on the Manhattan atomic project, represented a massive and futile burden on a shrinking war economy.

Though the RAF inflicted huge damage on Germany, it was left to the USAAF to achieve the most important victory of the air war, in the early months of 1944, by means which surprised its own commanders. The Mustang long-range fighter, capable of escorting Flying Fortresses and Liberators all the way to Germany and outfighting any opponent when it got there, became available in large numbers. The USAAF embarked on a major campaign against aircraft factories, pounding them for six consecutive days of ‘Big Week’ in February, and forcing the Luftwaffe to commit every available fighter to their defence. It quickly became plain that the ground destruction achieved by the bombers was less significant than the startling success of American