The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945. By Richard Overy. Allen Lane; 852 pages; £30. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

THERE are many paradoxes associated with the European bombing campaign of the second world war. In the 1930s it was an article of faith that aerial bombing would transform the nature of war. Not only would the “bomber always get through”, as Stanley Baldwin, then Britain’s de facto prime minister, lamented in 1932, but when it did, the assumption was that it would visit so much destruction on city populations and national economies that any country on the receiving end would quickly be forced to surrender.

Yet when war broke out in 1939 no air force was capable of such devastation. Nor did the general staffs of the main protagonists have plans to use what passed for heavy bombers at the time to carry out such attacks, seeing them as adjuncts to ground warfare rather than forces intended for independent operation. Nearly four years later, even when allied bombers with the range and payload to do serious damage had become available in numbers, only the most blinkered disciples still believed claims that they could deliver a “knockout blow”. The bombing campaign in Europe had become a Western Front of the air: a costly, grinding war of attrition with no clear-cut end and a yawning gap between ambition and outcome.

Yet, as Richard Overy points out in his new book, “The Bombing War”, by 1945 more than 500,000 Europeans had been killed by aerial bombardment and large parts of their urban heritage had been razed to the ground through the calculated use of incendiaries. The war’s great battles were won primarily with tanks, artillery and tactical air power. But the London Blitz, the firestorm that engulfed Hamburg killing 37,000 civilians and, right at the end, the seemingly wanton destruction of Dresden remain among the most powerful symbols of a total war that put civilians in the front line and was fought on all sides with little ethical compunction. 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, not least in studying what it was like for those on whom the bombs fell.

The failure of Germany’s first big bombing campaign against Britain, following the allies’ unexpectedly sudden collapse in France in 1940, was in some ways typical of what came later in confused ends and inadequate means. Two things above all ensured that all the early attempts at strategic bombing (whether by the Germans, the British or the hopelessly ill-equipped Italians) were far less effective than anyone had expected.

The first was the near impossibility, given the technology then available, of landing a meaningful concentration of bombs near any target other than a large city; in 1941 only one in ten Royal Air Force (RAF) bombers got within five miles of their targets in the Ruhr valley. The second was the unforeseen resilience of well-organised societies to withstand bombing without suffering either moral or economic collapse. Shelter was found for people who had lost their homes, repairs to infrastructure were quickly made and industrial production temporarily shifted if necessary. Although more than 40,000 people died during the eight months of the Blitz and in London about 1m homes were damaged or destroyed, there were no riots and war production increased steadily. People suffered, but the majority got used to it.

Despite this experience, Britain’s Bomber Command under the brutally single- minded Arthur Harris, never doubted that “area bombing”, a euphemism for attacking cities indiscriminately. And he never lost his belief that if you killed enough German workers you would win the war. Yet even when the RAF in 1942, closely followed by the US Army Air Force, began to put together the famous “thousand bomber” raids that were supposed to “knock Germany out of the war”, German war production continued to ramp up and the Nazi regime never came remotely close to losing political control.

Unlike the British, the Americans held on to the figleaf that there was a military logic to their bombing beyond killing Germans and destroying their cities. But even when the advent of long-range fighter escorts made it possible to resume daylight bombing over Germany, their targets were not all that different from Harris’s RAF and were not much more useful in defeating the enemy. Only in 1944, when the American emphasis turned to establishing air superiority, did it become possible to do real damage to Germany’s ability to wage war by hitting oil facilities and rail hubs. However, many of the most effective strikes were carried out by low-flying fighter bombers rather than the high-flying Lancasters and B-17s.

What is still surprising, in retrospect, is how successful combatant air forces were in commanding valuable resources while their achievements were so hard to quantify. It was understandable that the British, with no other means of striking back at Germany in the early stages of the war, were prepared to devote such a huge effort to making bombing a success. However, the 40% of the armed forces’ direct military budget that was consumed by the proponents of air power during the war, together with the diversion of skilled technical and scientific manpower that went with it, looks like poor value for money now. Harris’s boss, Charles Portal, was thrilled to learn in 1944 that a single Lancaster bomber had eliminated more German man- hours on its first sortie than the number of British man-hours required to build it, suggesting that all subsequent sorties would be “clear profit”.

Mr Overy’s final verdict, however, is damning. He argues that “strategic bombing proved in the end to be inadequate in its own terms for carrying out its principle assignments and was morally compromised by deliberate escalation against civilian populations.” Nor has it left any real legacy. It was rapidly rendered redundant by the overwhelming but (since 1945 at least) unusable destructive power of nuclear weapons. More recently, bombing has come full circle. Precision-guided munitions now allow Western air forces to hit military targets while leaving even nearby civilians often largely unscathed—the precise opposite of what prevailed during the second world war.