Jul
6
5:00pm
Bombing Friends and Fellow Citizens: Moralising the Aerial Bombing of France in 1944
By RAF Museum
At 6.00pm on Thursday 6 July 2023, Dr Karine Varley will explore how British and French officials and military officers thought about civilian casualties in the SWW. This lecture will be live-streamed via Crowdcast.
This free lecture is part of the RAF Museum's Research Lecture Programme. If you'd like to support the RAF Museum, you can make a donation at: https://support.rafmuseum.org/Donate-Now.
Talk Outline
Over 57,000 civilians died from Allied aerial bombing campaigns in France during the Second World War. While the morality of Allied aerial bombing has long been the subject of scholarly and public debate, the focus has overwhelmingly been on the bombing of Germany. This lecture aims to explore the justifications for bombing France as a ‘friendly’ occupied state whose population largely supported the Allies. By examining the use of violence by the British and the Free French provisional government in pursuit of strategic military objectives, it seeks to provide new perspectives on debates about the conduct of the Second World War.
The lecture will explore two central questions:
1. How did British and French officials and military officers think about civilian casualties in occupied France and how did they justify the violence against civilians inflicted by the bombing campaigns?
2. In what ways did those responsible for the bombing itself, namely the British and French air crews and airbase staff, address issues related to civilian casualties in occupied France?
The first part of the lecture will focus on how British policymakers conceived of Nazism as being so great an evil that it overrode concerns about violence against friendly non-combatants. It will investigate how the moralisation of violence drew on established tropes about military sacrifice, with civilian losses being presented not as ‘collateral damage’ but as ‘sacrifices’ for the liberation of France.
The second section will explore operations during the 1944 Normandy landings, focusing on the role of British and French squadrons based at Bomber Command Station RAF Elvington. It will examine how French crews sought to deal with the moral dilemmas of bombing their own nation by conducting raids at lower altitudes, despite the greater risk to themselves.
About Dr Karine Varley
Dr Karine Varley is Lecturer in French and European History at the University of Strathclyde. She is an expert on French experiences of conflict since 1870. Her latest book, Vichy’s Double Bind: French Collaboration between Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War (Cambridge University Press: forthcoming July 2023), proposes a significant new interpretation of collaboration under the Vichy French regime. She has developed international projects on Fascist warfare between 1935 and 1945 and on the Franco-Prussian War and has published widely on these subjects. Her new project, funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, explores the moralisation of violence in the British and French bombing of occupied France. Her previous research on Franco-British relations during the Second World War led to collaborations with the British Embassy in Paris and the French Embassy in London. Her media engagement includes the BBC, Netflix and international television productions.
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