In September 1940 the bombing began in earnest. For a week the RAF pounded the city: “Not only had British aircraft demonstrated their ability to reach the city, but they had shown themselves able to bomb almost at will and take the lives of Berlin’s civilians. The myth of the capital’s inviolability — which had been shared by all sections of the city’s society — had been irrevocably shattered.” Yes, the city had ample air-raid shelters and “three enormous flak towers,” making it “the best defended and best-protected city of the war,” but that was hardly enough. Then in March 1943 the RAF delivered “the largest tonnage of high explosives that had yet been dropped in the air war — a payload of over 900 tons that was twice the amount the Luftwaffe had dropped on London in their largest raids of the Blitz in 1941.” One Berliner wrote in her diary:
“The city and all the western and southern suburbs are on fire. The air is smoky, sulphur-yellow. Terrified people are stumbling through the streets with bundles, bags, household goods, tripping over fragments and ruins.”
” Roger Moorhouse’s “Berlin at War,” reviewed by Jonathan Yardley