Why VE Day in France will entail much bitterness against Britain

The British killed more French people during the Second World War than the Germans did.

The above photograph is not of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped, but rather of the French city of Le Havre, after the British had finished with it during the Second World War. The celebration of VE Day on May 8th is likely to evoke some grim memories in France, because the British killed more of their citizens during the Second World War than the Germans.

In Europe, the first few decades following the end of the Second World War were poisoned by the memory of the destruction wrought by the German armed forces. In Britain, the Blitz and attacks by V Weapons caused bitter feelings against the German nation as a whole. In 1966, when Britain beat Germany at football in the World Cup final, the victory was tinged with a revival of wartime animosity and the feeling that Britain had somehow got one over a hated enemy. This undercurrent of anti-German feeling was not of course limited to Britain. During the occupation of Amsterdam, German soldiers sometimes asked locals for directions. The invariable answer was that their destination could be reached by walking straight ahead. In Amsterdam of course, walking in a straight line for far enough in any direction will end in falling into a canal! This unhelpful advice was still being given to German tourists in the city as late as the 1970s.

One can sympathise with the animosity felt towards Germany by many of those who lived in Britain during the Second World War. It is hardly surprising that when, over a period of four or five years, your country has been subjected to a devastating assault from the air, in which tens of thousands of tons of bombs were dropped on your cities and over 60,000 people killed, one should feel a little jaded about the country which has carried out these attacks. In Coventry, one of the worst affected cities, 75 per cent of the buildings were destroyed. The British experience of the Blitz is still a potent collective memory and subconsciously colours the relations between Britain and Germany to this day.

France suffered far more destruction from air raids than Britain; about eight times as many tons of bombs being dropped on that country as fell on Britain during the same period, which is to say 1940-1945. The destruction of French cities was also considerably worse than anything which befell the British. Coventry may have lost 75 per cent of its buildings, but in some French towns such as St Nazaire, not a single building was left standing by the end of the air raids there. Photographs of some of France’s cities and towns show whole districts reduced to rubble, with almost all the buildings destroyed. The percentage of destruction in various French towns makes horrifying reading; 100 per cent of St Nazaire, 96 per cent of Tilly-la-Campagne, 95 per cent of Vire, 88 per cent of Villers-Bocage. These terrible attacks, some of which would almost certainly be classified today as war crimes, were not however carried out by the Luftwaffe, but by the RAF and United States Air Force. They too were cases of ‘collateral damage’ or friendly fire, which killed as many civilians as died in the Blitz on Britain.

The mental image which many of us have of France after the D-Day landings in 1944 is of French civilians welcoming their liberators with smiles and throwing flowers to those who had come to save them from the German occupation. The reality is very different, although seldom mentioned today. A large part of France was invaded and occupied by the Germans in 1940 and this resulted, over the next four years, in many civilian deaths. That the German army was responsible for some of those deaths will surprise nobody; the two countries were, after all, at war. The shocking thing though is that tens of thousands of men, women and children were also killed by Britain and America, two countries who were supposedly allies of France and working to save the country from occupation. The worst casualty toll in Britain during the Blitz was that inflicted during the last major raid on London, which took place on the night of 10 May 1941. In a 24 hour period 1,436 Londoners were killed. In France, the highest number of deaths in one day from air raids was more than double this. On 27 May 1944 a total of 3,012 French civilians were killed by bombing. The difference was of course that in the case of Britain, the air raids were being carried out by an enemy. France however was being bombed by Britain and America, who were supposedly her staunch allies.

To make any kind of sense of the dreadful number of civilian deaths in France from friendly fire, it will be necessary to look a little at the history of the first year of the Second World War. Britain’s traditionally parochial and isolationist perspective often causes people there to view events in France in 1940 only in the context of the evacuation of British forces from Dunkirk, but for the French, that year is notable for seeing the dismemberment of their country.

Although France declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, the same day as the British declaration of war, nothing much happened for the next eight months; the period of the so-called ‘phoney war’. On 9 April, Germany invaded Norway and Denmark and then, after a lull of a month, a furious assault was unleashed upon western Europe. On 10 May, German forces swept towards Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and France. In the Blitzkrieg or ‘lightning war’ which followed, all these countries were defeated. Belgium and Holland were occupied by the German army and France was split in two, with the northern part occupied by Germany and a rump state led by collaborationists established in the south. Because Paris was now in the hands of the Germans, the capital for this supposedly independent French state was established at the spa town of Vichy.

The invasion of France in 1940 posed a great problem for Britain. Apart from the loss of a valuable ally, the entire Atlantic coast of France, including the channel ports of Calais and Boulogne, was now in the possession of the German army. This was of great significance, because it was from this area that the Germans might launch an invasion of Britain. Crossing the English Channel at this point and ferrying over an army was of course how the previous two invasions of Britain had been carried out; by the Romans in 43 AD and the Normans a thousand years later. That part of France could, from this point of view, now be regarded as enemy territory.

Even in ideal circumstances, landing a bomb dropped from an aeroplane in one particular spot is no easy matter and when a location is heavily defended by anti-aircraft guns and fighter planes, it is all but impossible. There is, under such circumstances, no real difference between the strategic bombing of a purely military target and the carpet bombing of a territory. So it was than as soon as the RAF began to fly over France to attack German positions, it was inevitable that there would also be civilian casualties.

The channel ports, where the invasion of Britain was being prepared in the summer of 1940, were an early and obvious target for British bombs. For those living in the area, there can have seemed little to choose between the bombing by the Luftwaffe during the German invasion and the bombing by the RAF a few months later. These early raids caused few civilian casualties; that was to change as France’s industrial capacity began to contribute seriously to the German war effort. Just as during the Blitz on Britain, bombing factories, which are legitimate strategic targets, results invariably in the destruction of nearby homes and the death of workers and their families. In practice, air raids against German military bases and French industrial centres both caused casualties among those living nearby.

The government in the part of the country run from Vichy made great capital of the allied bombing raids, reminding their citizens that it was Britain, rather than Germany, which was the historic enemy of the French people. Reference was made to the burning of Joan of Arc and the battles of Agincourt and Waterloo, to show that these attacks on France were the latest manifestation of a pattern of enmity going back at least five centuries. Allied air raids certainly provided sufficient ammunition to fuel this propaganda campaign by the puppet government in Vichy. In April 1942 the American air force bombed the Renault factory on the outskirts of Paris. The factory had been commandeered by the Germans and was being used to aid the war-effort and so was a perfectly proper strategic target. The bombs dropped on the factory though fell all across the area surrounding the factory, including the metro station at Pont-de-Sevre and the Longchamps race course. In all, 327 civilians were killed and another 1,500 injured.

Quite apart from the very real strategic aims of Britain and America in bombing targets in France, there was another purpose behind the air raids which were conducted on that country; one which to modern sensibilities might seem more than a little callous. France was used, in effect, as a training ground for allied pilots. Before new pilots were sent on missions above the heavily defended skies of Germany, they were sent to bomb French targets, as a way of getting them used to the whole business of carrying out air raids. They were in fact ‘blooded’ above France and only when they had had the opportunity of practicing the dropping of bombs on relatively lightly defended positions in France were they ready for the tougher prospect of attacking the real target, Germany. That this is so may be seen from the fact that for the first five months of its operations in Europe, from August 1942 to January 1943, the US 8^th Air Force only struck targets in France. Once they had become used to the procedure, then they were ready to go over Germany.

During the First World War Germany made good use of submarines, blockading Britain and trying to starve the country into submission. Because it is an island, Britain is peculiarly vulnerable to such a strategy. Napoleon Bonaparte also attempted a blockade of eh British Isles in the early nineteenth century under the name of the Continental System. It was therefore inevitable that during the Second World War, the Germans should try again to strangle Britain in this way; preventing shipments of food, military equipment and troops from the North American continent from crossing the Atlantic. The submarines used during this war did not operate alone but followed a method devised by the Germans, which they called Die Rudeltaktik; the wolfpack tactic. They hunted in packs of eight or nine.

When not on patrol the German submarines stayed in what are known as ‘submarine pens’; vast structures a little like garages. These had walls and ceilings made of reinforced concrete, to protect them from attack from the air. Submarine pens of this sort were to found during the Second World War not only in Germany itself, at Bremen, Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, but also on the French Atlantic coast at Lorient, Saint-Nazaire and Brest. By 1942, submarines operating from these bases were sinking half a million tons of allied shipping a month and tackling this threat was a top priority. Locating and neutralising the submarines at sea was not always easy, but it was thought that if they could be attacked in their bases then not only could the submarines themselves be put out of commission, but their facilities on shore could also be wrecked at the same time. The US Air Force was given the task in the autumn of 1942 of dealing with the submarine pens at Saint-Nazaire. This mission would not entail the America aircraft flying above occupied Europe and should provide a relatively safe introduction to future bombing raids against targets in Germany. In fact, America losses were much heavier than expected, but these were as nothing to the effect that such operations had on Saint-Nazaire itself.

During the nineteenth century Saint-Nazaire had grown from being a small village to a large, industrial town. At the time of the American air raids at the end of 1942 50,000 people lived in the town. This meant that any bombs which missed their targets, which were of course German military installations, had a fair chance of landing on civilians and their homes. The submarine pens were formidable structures, with walls which were 11 feet thick and ceilings 16 feet thick, made of heavily reinforced concrete. The engineers who had designed them claimed that they were capable of withstanding bombs of 7,000 lb (3,175kg); far greater than anything which the American Air Force was using at that time. There were not only submarine pens at Saint-Nazaire; it was also a major hub of the French railway system. For that reason, it was also bombed in order to try and disrupt the movement of military supplies by rail.

The results of the air raids on Saint-Nazaire were, in retrospect, inevitable. Because they were heavily defended by both anti-aircraft batteries and fighters, the American bombers were forced to fly high and release their loads under less than ideal aiming conditions. There was inevitably what is sometimes known in military circles as ‘spillage’; that is to say death and destruction were not limited to the designated area, but spilled over elsewhere. In Saint-Nazaire, this meant that the homes of the French people living in the town were blown up and those living in them killed. In all, over 500 civilians were killed by the American bombs; more than died at Guernica during the German air raids.

The damage to the town caused by the high-explosive bombs dropped on Saint-Nazaire at the end of 1942 was as nothing when compared with what was to come. Since high-explosives had proved ineffective, the decision was taken by the allies to use incendiaries. For three days in early 1943, British and American bombers dropped leaflets, urging the civilian population to flee the area. This advice was, in the main, heeded. At the end of the three days, the bombers returned in force, dropping not leaflets but incendiary bombs. Most civilians had left the town, but some had remained. These people died when the entire town was burned to the ground. Photographs taken after some of the bombing raids on towns like Saint-Nazaire show scenes of utter devastation, with not a single building left standing. Such images are indistinguishable from those of Dresden and Hamburg, after they too had been subjected to the mass-dropping of incendiaries. The difference is of course that Dresden was in Germany, an enemy nation with whom Britain and America were at war. France was supposedly an ally.

The destruction of the town of Saint-Nazaire might have been complete, but one place was left unscathed. This was the submarine pens. So solidly built were they, that not only were they not destroyed by the fire-bombing, they have weathered the test of time and are still standing to this day. The only structures which are still standing in the area from before 1945 are the submarine pens. The town was razed to the ground and hundreds of the citizens massacred, all for nothing.

It is hardly to be wondered at that there are those in France today who remember with some bitterness the allied actions against towns such as Saint-Nazaire. This was not though the worst of the actions taken against French territory during the Second World War. The town was levelled, but most of the inhabitants escaped with their lives. Houses can be rebuilt and the death toll ran to hundreds, rather than tens of thousands. It was the year following the attacks on Saint-Nazaire that most of the French casualties inflicted by allied bombing and shellfire occurred. In Britain, the Normandy landings on D-Day are remembered as an heroic action which launched the liberation of Europe from the Nazis. For France, the case is slightly altered. They recall not only the liberation of their country from the Nazis, but also death and destruction on a scale which dwarfed anything which the Germans had inflicted upon their country.

In June 1944, four years after they had been ignominiously chased from France by the German army, leading to the evacuation of Dunkirk, the British army was ready to return. This time, they would not be alone. The Americans had entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbour and together the two countries felt that they were in a position to drive the Germans from the territory which they had seized and ultimately to march on Berlin itself and destroy the Nazi regime. Modern books about the landings on the French coast at Normandy, which we now know as D-Day, tend all too often to gloss over the appalling number of casualties, both military and civilian, who were killed by friendly fire during the operation. Here are one or two typical quotations from a book published over 40 years later.

The article about the invasion of Normandy in The Encyclopaedia of Twentieth Century Warfare, edited by Dr. Noble Frankland, tells us that, ‘heavy air and naval bombardments preceded the amphibious landings.’ We are also told that, ‘The British and Canadians had a bitter struggle to capture Caen…’ Conspicuous by its absence is any mention of the fact that although 3,000 allied soldiers died on the first day of the landings, just as many French civilians were also killed and that they died at the hand of the British and American forces who had come to ‘liberate’ them. Let us consider first the destruction of the ancient city of Caen.

The British had of course been to Caen before 1944; something which would have been known to the inhabitants of the city. In 1346 Edward III, King of England, seized the city and massacred 3,000 of those living there. He also burned a large chunk of it to the ground. The British returned 70 years later, this time under Henry V, who also killed some of the people living there. For this reason, it may be assumed that the arrival of another British army in 1944 might perhaps not have been greeted with unalloyed joy. On the first day of the invasion, the British decided that the best way of preventing the Germans from rushing reinforcements to the beachheads being established on that part of the coast would be to demolish the bridges over the river Orne. The American Air Force were assigned the task of taking out the bridges but, with their customary lack of precision, missed them entirely and instead razed to the ground a large part of the centre of Caen; killing around 600 French civilians in the process.

After the Americans had failed to bomb the correct targets, the British decided to have a go. They too found it easier to hit the city than they did the bridges. And they too reduced to rubble swathes of Caen, perhaps bringing to mind for those living there those earlier visits from the British. By the time that the bombing was finally over, three quarters of the city had been razed to the ground, combined with the death of 2,000 civilians. As if that were not bad enough, the allies found that all their efforts had been counter-productive. The fields of rubble made it very hard for the British and American vehicles to advance and also provided perfect cover for the German troops who were defending the city against the allied advance. It was to be almost two months before Caen finally fell.

To be fair to the Americans and British, they were not only killing French men, women and children with their air raids; they were also, at about the same time, accounting for many of their own soldiers in the same way. Seizing and holding the Normandy beaches had proved to be the easiest part of the invasion of Europe. The hope had been that once they saw the strength of the united British and American forces facing them, the Germans would crumble and perhaps flee in terror. They did not. They dug in and prevented the allies from breaking free of the beachheads and sweeping into the open country beyond the coast. Having learned nothing from the failed tactics used at the Battle of the Somme during the First World War, the allies decided that the best way of crushing and demoralising the troops facing them would be to pound them mercilessly with high-explosives. If enough bombs and shells were used, then the Germans would either be killed or emerge from their shelters as gibbering wrecks; incapable of opposing the advance of the allied forces. This did not work in 1916 and it did not work in 1944 either.

The Americans have never had a very good reputation where bombing from the air is concerned. They seem to have an uncanny knack for killing their own troops as readily as those of the opposing side. Despite this, a plan was formulated that would see the American Air Force delivering hundreds of tons of bombs onto the German lines near the town of St Lo, where the American troops were being held up by stiff resistance from the Germans. The only difficulty was that this would require surgical strikes from the American planes, because the two sides were so close to each other. Operation Cobra, as it was called, was felt to be vital. If something was not done, then the allies would never be able to leave the area of their first landings and move out into the open countryside beyond.

The aeroplanes which were to be used for the precision bombing of the German positions were 1,584 B-17s and B-24s, and the heavy bombers would be flying at 15,000 feet. This was the kind of bombardment which was traditionally carried out by artillery, which could of course be more accurately aimed. The Americans though were growing impatient. It was approaching the end of July, almost eight weeks after the Normandy landings, and they were still stuck a few miles from the Normandy coast. They simply couldn’t understand why they were unable to advance further.

Even before the bombing began, there were those who could foresee disaster. The gap between the American and German lines was so narrow, only a mile or two, that it would be almost impossible to achieve the desired accuracy. The senior officer who demanded the raids, General Omar Bradley, simply could not understand why the US Air Force seemed so determined to put problems in his way. His rank meant that ultimately, he was bound to have his own way and the first bombing raid took place on 24 July 1944.

One of the worst friendly fire incidents involving allied troops now unfolded with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. The omens for the full-scale bombing, which was to take place on 25 July were anything but auspicious. For one thing, the cloud cover was lower than expected, at 14,000 feet. This meant that the planes would be flying at a different height from that which had been planned and this in turn meant that all the calculation relating to the optimum time to release their loads would have to be carried out again. A cloud of smoke also obscured much of the ground, making it very difficult to spot landmarks. Despite this, the order was given to go ahead. Over 4,000 tons of bombs were dropped, with of course the intention of systematically obliterating the German defences.

Just as during the previous day’s attack, two of the lead bombardiers, misjudged their positions and released their bombs early. And also, just as on the previous day, the aeroplanes in their group followed suite; bombing not the German, but the American lines. The 30th Infantry Division, which had borne the brunt of the friendly fire the day before, was hit again, with the loss of 61 men. In all, 111 American soldiers were killed by their own side that day, including the highest ranking American soldier to die in Europe during the Second World War; General Leslie McNair. Eyewitness accounts of the effect of the bombing by their own planes are almost unbelievably gruesome. One man wrote;

My outfit was decimated, our anti-tank guns blown apart. I saw one of our truck

drivers, Jess Ivy, lying split down the middle. Captain Bell was buried in a

crater with only his head visible. He suffocated before we could reach him.

Apart from the terrible, self-inflicted casualties, the whole business bore an uncanny similarity to the attempt during the First World War to crush the Germans with overwhelming explosive power and then simply walk up to the demoralised and bewildered survivors to seize their positions. It didn’t work at the Somme in 1916 and nor did it work at Normandy. The Germans had, unlike the Americans, dug in well in fox holes and as soon as the barrage was over, they just came out of their hiding places and began machinegunning the approaching American troops.

The bombing of Caen had largely demolished the town and caused thousands of deaths. A similar fate befell Le Havre, three months after D-Day. There though, the destruction was even more comprehensive than it had been at Caen. The above illustration shows Le Havre after France’s allies had finished with it. This could easily be a photograph of Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb; the ruin is complete.

By August 1944, Paris had been liberated and much of France was no longer under German occupation. Le Havre, a major port in Normandy, which lay on the estuary of the Seine, was still in German hands. The German army knew that a battle would soon take place for control of the town and, to their credit, advised civilians living there to leave for safety. Few people though were inclined to abandon their homes and become refugees. They knew that with Paris in allied hands, it could be only a matter of time before the Germans were themselves forced to flee from France. On 3 September, the British army, commanded by General Crocker, surrounded Le Havre and laid siege to it. Word was sent to the Germans that now might be a good time for them to surrender; an offer which was peremptorily refused. To reduce casualties on their own side, the British decided to bomb the town and see if that would break the German resolve.

On 5 September, 350 British bombers flew over Le Havre, dropping a combination of high-explosive bombs and 30,000 incendiaries. Every building in the centre of the town was blown to pieces and set alight. Ironically, the only structure which was left intact by the end of the day was the solidly build memorial to the 1914-1918 war. The following day, six waves of bombers dropped nearly 1,500 tons of bombs, together with another 12,500 incendiaries; flattening and reducing to ash eastern part of the city. On 12 September, the Germans surrendered and Canadian forces entered the town.

Le Havre had been bombed before by the allies, in 1941, and civilians had been killed on that occasion too. In total, bombing by their allies had led to the deaths of over 5,000 of the inhabitants of Le Havre by the time the war ended.

The question which is perhaps being asked at this point by readers is why they have never heard about any of this. Even modern sources such as Wikipedia underplay the dreadful events which led to such massacres. After all, carpet-bombing a city in this way and turning it to a wasteland of rubble and ash would certainly be treated as a war crime, and yet nobody, even the French, appear to want to talk about this. What would a young person, eager to find out about the history of Le Havre find, for example, if he were to read the Wikipedia article on the town? Merely this;

Largely destroyed during the Second World War, the city was rebuilt according

to the plans of the architect Auguste Perret between 1945 and 1964. Only the

town hall and the Church of Saint Joseph (107m high) were personally designed

by Auguste Perret. In commending the reconstruction work UNESCO listed the

city of Le Havre on 15 July 2005 as a World Heritage Site.

‘Largely destroyed during the Second World War…’, with not the least mention of who or what it was which did the destroying! The answer to this baffling silence on the subject of a series of war crimes is rather curious.

The Vichy regime which was set up in southern France after the German invasion of the country in 1940 was pro-German and anti-British. When the British began bombing targets in the occupied part of France, the Vichy propaganda machine reminded their citizens of the historic enmity which had existed for centuries between Britain and France. This was a popular prejudice which was not difficult to stir up and not a few people in France began to regard the allied aircraft which were bombing their country as the enemy. A direct line was drawn between the modern situation and such events as the execution of Saint Joan by the British, five hundred year earlier.

After the liberation of France by the allies in 1944, a wave of fury swept the nation against all those who had collaborated with the Germans or even been part of, or associated with, the Vichy government. It is estimated that as many as 9,000 summary executions were carried out in the first months after the liberation of suspected traitors and those thought to have had dealings with the Germans. A natural consequence of this was that nobody wished to be heard supporting any of the views expounded by those who had been in charge at Vichy. This is hardly surprising, since the government there had been complicit in, among other things, the deportation of 76,000 Jews to the extermination camps in Poland. Since one of the things that Vichy had been so vociferous in denouncing had been the allied bombing raid against targets on French soil, this too became a taboo opinion to hold. At a time when thousands of people were being hunted down and shot on the merest suspicion of having either collaborated with the Germans are supported the Vichy regime, it is not hard to see how anxious people must have been in the aftermath of the occupation not to be heard parroting pro-Vichy sentiments.

Avoiding the topic of the friendly fire massacres of French civilians was a habit which lingered on long after the fear of being brought to trial as a collaborator had ended. However, although nobody spoke of such things out loud, any nation which has had over half a million tons of bombs dropped on it, killing over 60,000 civilians in the process, is bound to harbour some resentment against those responsible. This was certainly the case with Britain, many years after the Blitz ended and it happened in France too.

It must always be borne in mind that it was not just Britain, but also America which caused so much death and destruction to France and this has had a malignant influence upon British relations with Europe after the end of the Second World War. When, in 1961, Britain first tried to join the European Union, or Common Market as it was then called, the request was firmly rejected by the then leader of France, Charles de Gaulle. The reason for de Gaulle’s refusal was simple; he believed that Britain was not truly committed to the idea of being a part of Europe and preferred to be part of the American sphere of influence. It was not until 1973, nearly 40 years after the events which followed the Normandy landings, that Britain finally entered Europe.