YUGOSLAVIA: THE COST

Chetniks pose with German soldiers

The Partizans had the organizational strengths the Chetniks lacked. The need for secrecy and strict obedience to orders under conditions of pre-war illegality led to the quasi-militarization of the Communist Party, which proved adept at mobile guerrilla warfare. Tito’s forces crossed and re-crossed Bosnia several times during the war, whereas the Chetniks were able to break out of their local strongholds only on the coat tails of Axis offensives. Party discipline, expressed in a puritanical code of personal conduct, was constantly reinvigorated by purges, keeping local commissars responsive to Central Committee orders even when the Partizan movement expanded in numbers far beyond its core of Communist cadres. On the run from the Axis, the Party set up in every liberated enclave the rudiments of civil administration, embodied in ‘Regulations’ establishing Peoples’ Committees, and set the presses to work publicizing the Partizan cause. In addition to the Party newsheets, such as Borba and Proleter, the Communists took over a pre-war title, Woman Today, and made it the official organ of the Women’s Anti-fascist Front, founded in December 1942. The mobilization of women turned out to be a remarkable success. Between 15 and 20 per cent of Partizan fighters were women – the Chetniks called them ‘whores’, in the true voice of patriarchal Serbia.

German reprisals drove thousands of young men and women into the arms of the Partizans. A Wehrmacht directive ordered that 100 hostages should be shot for every German soldier killed, 50 for every one wounded. The readiness of the German commanders to obey (they included many senior officers formerly in Habsburg service), led to one of the most notorious war crimes to capture the popular imagination of the Serbs after the war. Failing to find enough grown men in Kragujevac, the death squads rounded up the older boys of the town gymnasium (there was only one) and shot them (22 October 1941), together with their elderly schoolmaster.

Partizans and Chetniks reacted to total war in quite different ways. The Partizans left the uncommitted civilian population to take their chances, as a way of discouraging collaboration, and attacked the occupying forces wherever they could. Chetnikoperations against the Axis started later, were less frequent, and inflicted fewer casualties. The Italians used the Chetniks as a buffer in their own zone of occupation, allowing them to protect Serbs against Ustasha terror attacks and to maintain some kind of civil order. This policy, compounded by the Party’s early blunder of ‘left deviationism’ (that is, mass terror), explains why the Partizans made no headway at all in Montenegro until the spring of 1943. In the areas of the Independent State of Croatia controlled by Italy, Chetniks (about 20 000 of them) actually fought as auxiliary forces, in an anti-Communist militia armed by the Italians and owing notional allegiance to the NDH. Serbia remained a Chetnikstronghold for all but the last few months of the fighting. The Germans oscillated between attackand truce in their dealings with the Chetniks, depending on the fluctuating military situation. They allowed the Chetniks far less rope than the Italians, but Mihailoviç’s men were obviously useful for keeping the Partizans busy and out of the German zone.

After perfunctory initial attempts to organize combined operations against the occupation forces, Partizans and Chetniks settled, from the beginning of 1942, into a struggle to eliminate each other, with the Slav Muslims caught in the middle. The Chetniks recruited exclusively among Serbs and Montenegrins. Serbs from Bosnia and Croatia, young men fleeing from Ustasha killings, also formed the backbone of the early Partizan formations, but the movement did attract support from other nationalities in the later stages of the fighting.

The Independent State of Croatia became the main slaughterhouse of war. Deaths of Yugoslavians from all causes attributable to war numbered 1.027 million, 80 000 of whom died abroad. Of the 947 000 deaths which occurred on Yugoslav soil, 587 000 (62 per cent) were deaths suffered on the territory of the NDH. Most of the remaining victims are accounted for by the 273 000 deaths in Serbia (29 per cent), 250 000 of them in the Vojvodina and Inner Serbia. Montenegro (37 000), Slovenia (33 000) and Macedonia (17 000) complete the territorial distribution of deaths within the borders of Yugoslavia.

Turning to the ethnic distribution of the total number of 1.027 million war dead, Serbs, Croats and Bosnia’s Muslims together accounted for 81 per cent of Yugoslavia’s war losses (825 000 dead). Serbs bore the brunt of the killing, with 530 000 deaths (52 per cent of the total number of war victims), followed by 192 000 Croats (19 per cent) and 103 000 Bosnian Muslims (10 per cent). Jews and Gypsies suffered the most grievous proportional losses. Four out of every five of Yugoslavia’s Jews were killed (57 000 of them), and a third of the Gypsy population (18 000 deaths). The remaining losses are accounted for by the 42 000 Slovenes, 28 000 ethnic Germans, 20 000 Montenegrins, and 18 000 ethnic Albanians who lost their lives.

About 300 000 Serbs perished in Bosnia-Hercegovina and Croatia – one in six of the Serb population, and 56 per cent of the total number of Serbs killed in the war. Paveliç’s Ustasha followers treated the Serbs as the Nazis treated the Jews, as vermin to be exterminated. This was not a task imposed by the occupying forces, but sprang out of the Ustashas’ own ideology, which incorporated a conception of Croats as a pure Aryan race. The Serbs were classed as racial enemies, and made to wear armbands carrying the letter ‘P’ for Pravoslavac, ‘Orthodox’. The Ustasha commanders carried out their grisly work in the villages and small townships where their control was unrestricted by Axis authority. Their trademark was to descend at night on dazed and defenceless Serbs, who were massacred in their homes, in pits, in forest clearings and in burning churches. Orthodox priests were killed in their hundreds. No attempt was made to keep the killings secret: on the contrary, knowledge of them was intended to instil fear and compliance in the Serb population. Only lack of means prevented the Ustashas from carrying out their genocidal mission by Nazi methods. Although they set up death camps like the infamous Jasenovac, there was no Eichmannesque bureaucracy, no detailed railway timetables or inventories of rolling stock, no neat blueprints of gas chambers. The NDH was run as an economic satellite by the Germans, who were unwilling to divert precious war resources to killing Serbs, and were for this reason opposed to state terror being applied against the Serb population. Powerless to murder all the Serbs, Paveliç decreed that the remainder should be forcibly converted or driven into Nediç’s Serbia, where they found asylum of a sort until the Germans sealed the borders in the autumn of 1941.

The National Liberation Struggle also claimed the lives of 192 000 Croats, 172 000 of them in the NDH. It has been estimated that 12 000 Ustasha core members were active when the state was proclaimed in April 1941, and that the Ustasha movement eventually comprised 40 000–50 000 men enrolled in the militias and gendarmerie. Even if we make the simplifying assumption that all of them were killed, 120 000 Croat deaths remain to be explained. There were 170 000 Croatian troops under German command, and they must account for the bulk of deaths during the bitter fighting on the Srem front and in Communist reprisals. But Croats fought on both sides, and by the end of the war made up a third of the Peoples’ Liberation Army. Croats joined the ranks of the Partizans, not just for opportunistic reasons when the Communists seemed to be gaining the upper hand, but because the ideal of Croatian statehood had been irretrievably compromised, both morally and politically, by the criminal character of Ustasha rule. The Communists’ promise of a federal state seemed to many Croats the best offer available – the Allies were not going to present them with an independent successor state to the NDH when the war ended.

Those who died included ‘left’ members of the Croatian Peasant Party; others were rounded up because they had criticized the Ustashas before the war, or simply because they were in the way at a random moment. To his credit, Macek refused to accept office in the Ustasha government and was sent to a concentration camp before being released into house arrest, while a third of the CPP leaders nominated to serve in the Zagreb Sabor in 1942 declined the honour. But Macek nullified the effect of his personal stand by publicly advising Croats not to resist the Ustasha government. The attitude of the Catholic clergy was equally ambivalent. With a few honourable exceptions, they mostly took their lead from Cardinal Stepinac, whose ‘blood and soil’ patriotism prompted him to welcome the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia in glowing terms. Stepinac is credited with a deepening sense of private unease and with behind-the-scenes interventions that saved many lives, but his public utterances gave no sign of this repentance.

The Slav Muslims suffered war losses totalling 100 000; three-quarters of them lost their lives in Bosnia-Hercegovina, a further 15 000 in Serbia, 4000 each in Montenegro and Macedonia, and 2000 in Croatia. Some historians have spoken of Chetnik genocide against the Muslims, and certainly not just the numbers alone, but the bestiality of the killings (flaying, boiling alive) convey an intensity of ethnic hatred which suggests a will to exterminate the entire Slav Muslim people. Judgement about Mihailoviç’s personal responsibility for war crimes is complicated by the possibility of forgery in the case of a key document, but the scale of the killings is not a matter of dispute. During the course of a single night, 13 February 1943, 8000 women, children and old men were butchered by the Lim-Sandzak Chetnik forces, a deed recorded laconically in the commanders’ own reports. Massacres occurred along the entire line of the borders of Bosnia-Hercegovina with Serbia, Montenegro and the Sandzak, and the roll call of place-names is an all too familiar one: Srebrenica, Visegrad, Gorazde, Rogatica.

The Ustasha onslaught on the Serbs initiated the cycle of inter-ethnic butchery, but once it took hold causes and effects intermingled. The presence of some Muslims in Ustasha units could be advanced as a pretext for retaliatory killings which drove even more of them into the arms of Paveliç, but the Muslims generally by no means favoured the Ustasha regime. The official revival of Starceviç’s old claim that the Muslim Slavs represented the purest stream of Croatian nationhood was a sinister compliment, and attempts to absorb the leadership of the Yugoslav Muslim Organization into the government of the NDH were rebuffed. In their struggle for survival, the Muslims did not conform to any dominant pattern of collaboration or resistance. Early in the war, some members of the Muslim clergy protested vigorously against the ill-treatment of Serbs and Jews, as well as defending their own community from the lawlessness and brutality of the regime. By 1943, others were encouraging their young men to enlist in the Muslim SS division then being formed. Individual Muslim leaders were prepared at times to cooperate with the Chetniks against the Ustashas; sometimes Muslim guerrillas were numerically strong enough to fight without allies, yet others chose to join the Partizans.

Bombing Bulgaria I

The Bombing of Sofia in World War II, 1944.

The modern aerial bomb, with its distinctive elongated shape, stabilizing fins, and nose-fitted detonator, is a Bulgarian invention. In the Balkan War of 1912, waged by Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, and Montenegro (the Balkan League) against Turkey, a Bulgarian army captain, Simeon Petrov, adapted and enlarged a number of grenades for use from an airplane. They were dropped on a Turkish railway station on October 16, 1912, from an Albatros F.2 biplane piloted by Radul Milkov. Petrov afterward modified the design by adding a stabilizing tail and a fuse designed to detonate on impact, and the six-kilogram bomb became the standard Bulgarian issue until 1918. The plans of the so-called Chataldzha bomb were later passed on to Germany, Bulgaria’s ally during the First World War. The design, or something like it, soon became standard issue in all the world’s first air forces.

Petrov’s invention came back to haunt Bulgaria during the Second World War. On November 14, 1943, a force of ninety-one American B-25 Mitchell bombers escorted by forty-nine P-38 Lightning fighters attacked the marshaling yards in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. The bombing was spread over a wide area, including three villages. The raid destroyed some of the rail system, the Vrajedna airfield, and a further 187 buildings, resulting in around 150 casualties. A second attack ten days later by B-24 Liberator bombers was less successful. There was poor weather across southern Bulgaria, and only seventeen of the force reached what they hoped was Sofia and bombed through cloud, hitting another seven villages around the capital. The attacks were enough to spread panic through the city. In the absence of effective air defenses or civil defense measures, thousands fled to the surrounding area. The Royal Bulgarian Air Force, though equipped with sixteen Messerschmitt Me109G fighters supplied by Bulgaria’s ally Germany, could do little against raids that, though not entirely unexpected, came as a complete surprise when they happened.

The raid in November 1943 was not the first attack on a Bulgarian target during the war, though it was the heaviest and most destructive so far. Bulgaria became a target only because of the decision taken in March 1941 by the Bulgarian government, after much hesitation, to tie the country to Germany by signing the Tripartite Pact, which had been made among the principal Axis powers, Germany, Italy, and Japan, the previous September. When in the spring of 1941 German forces were based in Bulgaria to attack Greece and Yugoslavia, the RAF sent a force of six Wellington bombers to bomb the Sofia rail links in order to hamper the concentration of German troops. A British night raid on April 13 made a lucky hit on an ammunition train, causing major fires and widespread destruction. 

Further small raids occurred on July 23 and August 11, 1941, which the Bulgarian government blamed on the Soviet air force. Although Bulgaria did not actively participate in the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, it gave supplies to Germany and allowed German ships to use the major ports of Varna and Burgas. On September 13, 1942, a further small Soviet raid hit Burgas, where German ships laden with oil-drilling equipment were awaiting the signal to cross the Black Sea to supply German engineers with the materials they would need to restart production once the Caucasus oilfields had been captured. The Soviet Union was not at war with Bulgaria and denied the intrusions in 1941 and 1942, for which it was almost certainly responsible, but the attacks were of such small scale that the Bulgarian government did not insist on reparations.

The handful of pinprick attacks in 1941 and 1942 were enough to make Bulgaria anxious about what might happen if the Allies ever did decide to bomb its cities heavily. Bulgaria’s position in the Second World War was an ambiguous one. The tsar, Boris III, did not want his country to be actively engaged in fighting a war after the heavy territorial and financial losses Bulgaria had sustained in the peace settlement of 1919 as punishment for joining with Germany and Austria-Hungary in the First World War. Only with great reluctance and under German pressure did the Prime Minister, Bogdan Filov, declare war on Britain and the United States on December 13, 1941. Aware of Bulgaria’s vulnerability, the government and the tsar wanted to avoid an actual state of belligerence with the Western powers, just as the country had refused to declare war on the Soviet Union. Bulgaria’s small armed forces therefore undertook no operations against the Allies; instead they were used by the Germans as occupation troops in Macedonia and Thrace, territories given to Bulgaria after the German defeat of Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941. By 1943 it was evident to the Bulgarian government and people that they had once again backed the wrong side. Much of the population was anti-German and some of it pro-Soviet. In 1942 a left-wing Fatherland Front had been formed, demanding an end to the war and the severing of links with Germany. Partisan movements in the occupied territories and in Bulgaria itself became more active during 1943, and in August of that year they launched a major recruitment drive. The partisans were chiefly communist and campaigned not only for an end to the war but for a new social order and closer ties with the Soviet Union. In May 1943 and again in October, Filov authorized contacts with the Western Allies to see whether there was a possibility of reaching an agreement. He was told that only unconditional surrender and the evacuation of the occupied territories could be accepted.

It is against this background that sense can be made of the Allied decision to launch a series of heavy air attacks on Bulgarian cities. Knowing that Bulgaria was facing a mounting crisis, caught between its German ally and the growing threat of a likely Soviet victory, Allied leaders were encouraged to use bombing as a political tool in the hope that it might produce a quick dividend by forcing Bulgaria out of the war. The idea that bombing was capable of a sudden decisive blow by demoralizing a population and causing a government crisis had been at the heart of much interwar thinking about the use of airpower. It was the logic of the most famous statement of this principle, made in 1921 by the Italian general Giulio Douhet in his classic study The Command of the Air (Il dominio dell’aria). The principle was also a central element in the view of airpower held by the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who had previously applied it to both Germany and Italy. It was not by chance that in a meeting with the British chiefs of staff on October 19, 1943, it was Churchill who would suggest that in his view the Bulgarians were a “peccant people to whom a sharp lesson should be administered.” Their fault was to have sided once again with the Germans despite, Churchill claimed, his efforts to get them to see sense. Bombing was designed to undo the cord that bound Bulgaria to her German patron.

The sharp lesson was to be a heavy bombing attack on Sofia. Churchill justified the operation on political grounds: “Experience shows,” he told the meeting, “that the effect of bombing a country where there were antagonistic elements was not to unite those elements, but rather to increase the anger of the anti-war party.” Others present, including Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, chief of the air staff, and the chief of the imperial general staff, General Alan Brooke, were less keen and insisted that leaflets should be dropped along with the bombs explaining that the Allies wanted Bulgaria to withdraw its occupation troops and surrender (in the end leaflets were dropped with the curious headline “This is not about Allied terror, but about Bulgarian insanity”). But the idea of a “sharp lesson” quickly circulated. The American military chiefs thought that Sofia was so low a military priority that an attack was scarcely justified, but they were impressed by the possible “great psychological effect.” Both the British and American ambassadors in Ankara urged an attack so as to interrupt Turkish-German commercial rail traffic. On October 24 the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff directed General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander in the Mediterranean, to give such a lesson as soon as this was operationally practical. The Turkish government approved, hopeful perhaps despite neutrality to profit from Bulgaria’s discomfiture in any postwar settlement. 

Churchill wanted Stalin’s say-so as well, because Bulgaria was clearly in the Soviet sphere of interest, and on October 29 the British foreign minister, Anthony Eden, who was in Moscow for negotiations, was able to report back Stalin’s comment that Sofia should certainly be bombed, as it was nothing more than “a province of Germany.”

The Bulgarian government had expected bombing for some time. While the regime struggled to come to terms with internal dissent, the Soviet presence in the east, and Allied demands for unconditional surrender, it also sought ways to appease the Germans in case they decided to occupy Bulgaria. In the course of 1943 the deportation of Jews from the occupied areas of Thrace was completed, and despite the hostility of the tsar, the German authorities in Sofia persuaded the Bulgarian government to deport native Bulgarian Jews as well. It was agreed that they would first be transferred to twenty small towns in the hinterland around Sofia, and in May 1943 some 16,000 Jews were taken at short notice from the capital and parceled out among eight provinces. The Filov government linked the Jewish policy with bombing. When the Swiss ambassador asked Filov on humanitarian grounds to stop sending Thracian Jews to Auschwitz, Filov retorted that talk of humanity was misconceived when the Allies were busy obliterating the cities of Europe from the air. Moreover, when he failed to take up a British offer in February 1943 to transport 4,500 Jewish children from Bulgaria to Palestine, he feared that Sofia might be bombed in retaliation. Once the Jews of Sofia had been deported to the provinces, anxiety revived again in Bulgaria that the Allies would now no longer hesitate to bomb for fear of killing Jews. In the end the Jews of Bulgaria escaped not only deportation to Auschwitz but also the bombing, which left much of Sofia’s Jewish quarter in ruins.

Bombing Bulgaria II

Dimitar Spisarevski (19 Jully 1916-20 December 1943) was a Bulgarian fighter pilot known for taking down an American bomber by ramming it during the bombing of Sofia in World War II.

It was not the Jewish question that invited Allied bombing in November 1943, though many Bulgarians assumed that it was. The first raids seemed to presage an onslaught of aerial punishment, and the population of the capital gave way to a temporary panic. Yet the first two attacks in November were followed by two desultory operations the next month and nothing more. Some 209 inhabitants in Sofia had been killed and 247 buildings damaged. The “sharp lesson” was not sharp enough for the Allies, because it did little to encourage Bulgaria to seek a political solution, while the military value of the attacks was at best limited, hampered by poor bombing accuracy and gloomy Balkan weather. On Christmas Day 1943, Churchill wrote to Eden that the “heaviest possible air attacks” were now planned for Sofia in the hope that this might result in more productive “political reactions.” On January 4, 1944, a large force of 108 B-17 Flying Fortresses was dispatched to Sofia, but with poor visibility the attack was aborted after a few bombs were dropped on a bridge. Finally, on January 10, 1944, the first heavy attack was mounted by 141 B-17s, supported during the night of January 10–11 by a force of some forty-four RAF Wellington bombers. This attack was devastating for the Bulgarian capital: there were 750 dead and 710 seriously injured, with widespread damage to residential housing and public buildings. The air-raid sirens failed to sound because of a power cut. This time the population panicked entirely, creating a mass exodus. By January 16, 300,000 people had left the capital. The government abandoned the administrative district and moved out to nearby townships. It took more than two weeks to restore services in the capital, while much of the population abandoned it permanently in fear of a repeat attack. On January 23 the German ambassador telegraphed back to Berlin that the bombing had changed completely the “psychological-political situation,” exposing the incompetence of the authorities and raising the danger of Bulgarian defection. The government ordered church bells to be pealed as an air-raid warning, in case of further power cuts.

The second major raid, of January 10, did pay political dividends. While Filov tried unsuccessfully to persuade a visiting German general, Walter Warlimont, deputy for operations on Hitler’s staff, to mount a revenge attack on neutral Istanbul—the consequences of which might well have been even more disastrous for Bulgaria—most Bulgarian leaders had come to realize that the German connection had to be severed as soon as possible and a deal struck with the Allies. The bishop of Sofia used the occasion of the funeral for the victims of the bombing to launch an attack on the government for tying Bulgaria to Germany and failing to save the people from war. That month an effort was made to get the Soviet Union to intercede with the Western Allies to stop the bombing, but instead Moscow increased its pressure on Bulgaria to abandon its support for the Axis. In February the first informal contacts were made with the Allies through a Bulgarian intermediary in Istanbul to see whether terms could be agreed upon for an armistice. Although hope for negotiation had been the principal reason for starting the bombing, the Allied reaction to the first Bulgarian approach following the raids was mixed. Roosevelt wrote to Churchill on February 9 suggesting that the bombing should now be suspended if the Bulgarians wanted to talk, a view shared by British diplomats in the Middle Eastern headquarters in Cairo. Churchill scrawled “why?” in the margin of the letter. He was opposed to ending the bombing despite a recent report from the British Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which observed that the first bombing in November 1943 had achieved no “decisive political result.” He had already authorized the bombing of the Bulgarian ports of Burgas and Varna, which were added to the list of priority targets, subject to political considerations. 

In January 1944 the British War Cabinet, in the event of a German gas attack, considered the possibility of retaliatory gas bomb attacks against Germany and its allies, and included Bulgaria on the list. On February 12, Churchill replied to Roosevelt that in his view the bombing had had “exactly the effect we hoped for” and urged him to accept the argument that bombing should continue until the Bulgarians began full and formal negotiations: “If the medicine has done good, let them have more of it.” Roosevelt immediately wired back his full agreement: “Let the good work go on.”

Some of the evidence coming out of Bulgaria seemed to support Churchill’s stance. Intelligence reports arrived detailing the rapid expansion of both the communist partisan movement and the Fatherland Front. The partisans contacted the Allies through a British liaison officer stationed in Bulgaria, encouraging them to keep up the bombing in order to provoke the collapse of the pro-German regime and help expand support for the resistance. The partisans sent details about the central administrative area in Sofia, bordered by the recently renamed Adolfi Hitler Boulevard, which they said was ripe for attack; at the same time, partisan leaders asked the Allies not to bomb the working-class districts of Sofia, from which most of their recruits were drawn. By March the partisans were finally organized by the Bulgarian communists into the National Liberation Revolutionary Army. As a result of the evidence on the ground, the Western Allies, with Stalin’s continued though secret support (the Soviet Union did not want Bulgarians to think they had actively abetted the bombing), accepted Eden’s argument that by “turning on the heat” on Bulgarian cities it might shortly be possible either to provoke a coup d’état or to batter the government into suing for peace. On March 10, Sir Charles Portal told Churchill that he had ordered heavy attacks on Sofia and other Bulgarian cities as soon as possible.

On March 16 and then on March 29–30 the Allies launched the most destructive attacks of all on Sofia, as well as subsidiary attacks on Burgas, Varna, and Plovdiv in the interior, designed to disrupt rail communications and sea traffic for the Turkish trade with Germany. The attacks were aimed predominantly at the administrative city center of Sofia and carried a proportion of incendiaries, 4,000 in all, in order to do to Sofia what had been done so effectively to German targets. The raid of March 16 burned down the royal palace; the heavy raid of March 29–30 by 367 B-17s and B-24s, this time carrying 30,000 incendiaries, created a widespread conflagration, destroying the Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, the National Theater, several ministries, and a further 3,575 buildings, but killing only 139 of the population that had remained. The last major raid, on April 17 by 350 American bombers, destroyed a further 750 buildings and heavily damaged the rail marshaling yard. During 1944 the death toll in Sofia was 1,165, a figure that would have been considerably higher had it not been for the voluntary evacuation of the capital. The incendiary attacks hastened the disintegration of Bulgarian politics and increased support for the Soviet Union, whose armies were now within striking distance. But only on June 20, 1944, several months after the bombing, did the new government of Ivan Bagryanov begin formal negotiations for an end to Bulgarian belligerency, still hoping to keep Bulgaria’s territorial spoils and avoid Allied occupation. By this time the Allies had lost interest in bombing Bulgaria, which slipped further down the list of priority targets as the bombers turned their attention to Budapest and Bucharest in the path of the oncoming Red Army.

By the summer of 1944 the Allies had other preoccupations, and it seemed evident that Bulgarian politics had been sufficiently destabilized by the bombing to make further attacks redundant. Nevertheless, the final assessment of the effects of the bombing was ambivalent. In July the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff prepared an evaluation of the Balkan bombings which suggested that the psychological effects desired had largely been achieved; the report nevertheless suggested that the enemy had sustained an effective propaganda campaign about the high level of civilian casualties, which had undermined the prestige of both the United States and Britain in the eyes of the Bulgarian people. The chiefs directed that in the future any attacks in the region had to be confined to “targets of definite military importance” and civilian casualties minimized. The British chiefs of staff rejected the American claim, and, in defiance of what they well knew to be the case, insisted that only military targets had been subject to attack, even if this had involved damage to housing and civilian deaths. Their report concluded that Allied bombers ought always to be able to act in this way and that operations “should not be prejudiced by undue regard for the probable scale of incidental casualties.” This was a view consistent with everything the RAF had argued and practiced since the switch to the deliberate bombing of German civilians in 1941.

For the historian the judgment is more complex. Bombing almost certainly contributed to the collapse of any pro-German consensus and strengthened the hand both of the moderate center-left in the Fatherland Front and of the more radical partisan movement. But in the end this did not result in a complete change of government until September 9, 1944, when the Soviet presence produced a Fatherland Front administration dominated by the Bulgarian Communist Party (a political outcome that neither Churchill nor Eden had wanted from the bombing). Moreover, other factors played an important role in Bulgarian calculations: the crisis provoked by Italian defeat and surrender in September 1943; the German retreat in the Soviet Union; and fear of a possible Allied Balkan invasion or of Turkish intervention. Where Churchill saw bombing as a primitive instrument for provoking political crisis and insisted throughout the period from October 1943 to March 1944 that this was the key to knocking Bulgaria out of the war, the American military chiefs continued to give preference to the bombing of Italy and Germany and were less persuaded that a political dividend was certain. For them the bombing fitted with the strategy of wearing down Germany’s capacity for waging war by interrupting the supply of vital war matériel and forcing the diversion of German military units from the imminent Normandy campaign. There was also a price to pay for the bombing. In September 1944, following the Bulgarian surrender, some 332 American air force prisoners of war were sent by air shuttle to Istanbul and then on to Cairo; some had been shot down while bombing Bulgaria, others on their way to or from attacks on Romanian targets. An American report suggested that the prisoners had been badly maltreated. Two air force prisoners were killed by the Bulgarian police, and an estimated 175 American war dead were presumed to be on Bulgarian territory, although only eighty-four bodies could be located.