When Charles Williamson named his infant community Bath in 1793, he established a connection between the raw new hamlet and an elegant city that was already ancient before the Romans discovered its charms. Assuming that the mineralized water was also medicinal, they named it Aquae Sulis. The more prosaic conquering Saxons called it Bath.
*Modern-day Saxons and Romans made war on their distant cousins from 1939 to 1945, and on April 25 through 27, 1942, they brought the war direct to Bath with three lengthy attacks from the air. Each attack lasted for hours — “raid” doesn’t do justice, suggesting as it does a quick or small attack. German bombers attacked Bath with explosives and incendiaries. They even flew back, once they’d dropped all their bombs, to massacre civilians with machine-gun fire.
*This was not because the people of Bath represented any particular military threat, but simply because Germany had decided to destroy Britain’s cultural treasures. With typical Nazi tone-deafness to public relations, a German official crowed that they would bomb anything that got three stars in the Baedeker travel guide.
*Bath paid for its heritage in those April nights. The attackers killed 417 people, and wounded a thousand more. They destroyed or seriously damaged 1100 buildings, and also damaged 18,000 more. True to the “mission statement,” damage and destruction engulfed many structures of cultural and historical significance, including most of the city’s churches.
*It would be 1960 or so before all the war damage was dealt with. Last May workers found an unexploded 500-pound bomb under a playground. The neighborhood had to be evacuated while the Royal Army removed the bomb and detonated it safely.
*In their internal communications, German leaders such as Goebbels referred to these attacks as terror raids, but in public they sternly announced that the attacks were retaliation for an earlier British bombing of the cultural center of Lubeck.
*True enough. And also true that by this time both sides, including the United States, were making war on the enemy population, trying to destroy their “will to fight,” and both sides were failing, and neither side would ever succeed. It’s true as well that both sides turned to this expedient because neither one was good enough at bombing military targets to make a strategic difference. Cities, just as they had in World War I, made a relatively easy target to hit.
*The Germans were incensed when the British bombed their cities, and portrayed themselves as put-upon people only responding in kind to provocation. This completely ignored all the attacks they had already made on British cities, and all the British non-combatants they had killed.
*It also highlights a warp in the Nazi psyche. When the British bombed German cities, Nazi leaders took that as an unwarranted escalation of the war. But this ignored the terrific air attacks on cities such as Warsaw, when the war was only a few days old. To the Nazis that didn’t really count. The Poles were largely Slavs and thus, to the Nazi mind, not human anyway. They could be tortured for entertainment, and so bombing them was nothing that needed to concern civilized and Germanic countries. The British, to them, seemed quite unreasonable to get worked up about that sort of thing.
(Germany had included civilian massacres as part of their war plans BEFORE the First World War, and implemented them in that war too, long before there were any such things as Nazis.)
*Bath was devastated… and pointlessly devastated, when evaluated from the viewpoint of wisely allocating military resources. But though Hitler tried to break the people of Bath, he failed. They dug out. They cleared rubble. They put out fires. They found and cared for the wounded, they found and buried the dead.
*After six weeks or so, even such fantasists as Hitler and Goebbels faced the fact that they weren’t accomplishing anything worthwhile, and the campaign largely petered out. A fourth of all the deaths had been in Bath, where the toll was far higher than that in any other city attacked in the “Baedeker Raids.”
*Bath’s Calvary took place 75 years ago this week — April 25-27, 1942. Against the backdrop of that gargantuan war, historians might pass it by with nary a mention. But from our own Bath safe over here, we might well raise our hats to the unbeaten people of endangered Bath over there, whom Adolf Hitler tried so hard to break. And failed.