More bombs were dropped on Germany in the last three months of 1944 than in all of 1943. Two- thirds of the entire weight of bombs dropped on Germany during the war were dropped in the 11 months from D-Day to VE Day. In this last phase there were no great industrial cities like Hamburg or Essen left, and so scores of smaller towns of no conceivable military or industrial importance were obliterated, like Darmstadt or Wurzburg, razed on 11 September 1944 and 16 March 1945 respectively.How did this happen? Like most historical events, it was a product of design and accident together. The RAF was the first independent air force created by any great power, instituted with the purpose of winning wars by aerial bombardment. Bombing gained in prestige when a tribal uprising in Iraq was bombed into submission and when rebellious Arab villages in Palestine were held down by ‘air pin’.

The officer in command in both cases was Arthur Harris.The outbreak of war in 1939 found the RAF equipped with a large fleet of bombing aircraft; it was supposed that, in Baldwin’s words, they would ‘always get through’, flying unopposed in daylight to bomb precise targets at will. But in 1939-40 Bomber Command discovered that the bomber did not get through in daylight: its squadrons were torn to pieces by the newly-developed monoplane fighter. So it turned to night bombing, for which it was quite unprepared technically. In August 1941, an independent survey for the War Cabinet discovered that only one bomber in nine was bombing within five miles of its intended target. More RAF aircrew than Germans had been killed, and the offensive was broken off.But it was renewed in 1942 with far greater resources. Accepting that it could not hit precise targets, Bomber Command developed ‘area bombing’: large forces dropped quantities of high explosives and incendiaries to set whole cities alight Harris did not invent this policy.

When he arrived at Bomber Command, he found a directive from the Air Ministry: ‘the primary object of your operation should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civilian population and, in particular, of the industrial workers’. But he applied it with a relish.Up to his death in 1984 Harris always defended the campaign but his defence fails on its own terms. He had claimed in 1942 that Bomber Command would win the war single-handed within two years. Yet the Germans were still fighting in the rubble of their cities in the spring of 1945.