According to The Official History of the Royal Air Force, on the 4th of September 1940, Hitler said:
The British drop their bombs indiscriminately and without plan on civilian residential quarters and on farms and villages. For three months I did not reply because I believed they would stop, but in this Mr Churchill saw only a sign of our weakness. The British will know that we are now giving our answer night after night. We shall stop the handiwork of these night pilots.
Three days later, the Luftwaffe began bombing London.
Is it true that Germany did not target civilians before then? Is it true that the British were already targeting civilians? If so, when did the British start deliberately bombing civilians and why?
Thanks to /u/Bigglesworth_ and his very kind answer to my previous question, I am now researching my wife's grandfather's career before his capture.
He was in No. 7 Squadron of Bomber Command, flying in Sterling heavy bombers as a Navigator (which I understand also involved duties as Bomb Aimer). He flew on two sorties then failed to return from his third. The first was to Hanover on 14th July 1941, the second to Cologne on 30th July, and the last to Berlin on 2nd August.
According to the squadron records, both of the first two sorties included dropping incendiary devices and starting fires. Would he have been targeting military/industrial sites, or civilians?
Richards, D., Official History of the Royal Air Force 1935-1945 — Vol. I — Fight at Odds, Pickle Partners, 2014.
The first year of the war saw what Richard Overy puts rather well as "the slow erosion of any relative moral constraints that might have acted to limit the damage to civilian targets" (The Bombing War: Europe, 1939-1945, very well worth picking up on both Allied and German bombing offensives and the military and civil defence responses).
In September 1939 there was great caution in the use of British bombers. Leo Amery, an early proponent of bombing Germany, recorded in his diary that: "... our Air Force are still not allowed to bomb Essen or even set fire to German forests. In the coffee room I tackled Kinglsey Wood [Secretary of State for Air] on this. He was very stuffy and evidently has been responsible for all this". A later, possibly apocryphal, account has Wood responding to the question of why the Black Forest wasn't being bombed with "Are you aware that it is private property?" Bomber Command was restricted to German naval targets, but still not even permitted to bomb ships in dock for fear of missing and hitting civilians.
May 1940 saw Chamberlain, who had always opposed bombing urban targets, replaced with Churchill, historically a supporter of independent strategic bombing; Churchill's deputy Clement Attlee was also strongly in favour of raids on Germany. On 15th May the Cabinet approved strategic bombing of German targets where civilians might be casualties as long as the objective was military.
The early employment of the Luftwaffe was fundamentally operational, against targets in connection with land forces, but there were heavy civilian casualties in Warsaw and Rotterdam in 1939 and 1940, both bombed while under siege. There is debate over whether civilians were intentionally targeted to affect morale, or if civilian casualties were an inadvertent but inevitable result of the inaccuracy of bombing at the time (see, for example, Bas von Benda-Beckmann's A German Catastrophe? German historians and the Allied bombings, 1945-2010 that includes accounts of historians arguing the legality of Luftwaffe operations compared to the RAF). Likewise the Blitz of 1940-41 against London and other industrial cities was primarily aimed at military and economic targets, but with large volumes of incendiary bombs and proximity of workers housing to docks and factories heavy civilian casualties were again inevitable, easily perceived as the objective of the attacks.
Bomber Command, meanwhile, had much greater problems with accuracy; never mind distinguishing between factories and nearby housing, with much longer ranges to cover and fewer navigational aids just getting within five miles of a target was a rarity (a famous report of 1941 found that, over Germany, three out of four bombers failed to find their targets; on moonless or hazy nights fourteen out of fifteen). Although, in theory, they were aiming at military and industrial targets, from the German perspective they were indeed indiscriminate attacks on "residential quarters and farms and villages" (or more often open countryside); the first attack on Berlin on the night of 25th/26th August destroyed a wooden summer house in a suburban garden and slightly injured two people, more bombs fell in surrounding farms leading Berliners to joke "Now they are trying to starve us out."
Both sides framed their own efforts as precision attacks on purely military targets and enemy action as indiscriminate terror bombing of civilians, backed up by historical precedent (in Britain the long-range bomber and Zeppelin attacks of the First World War, the actions of the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War, and Warsaw and Rotterdam; in Germany the naval blockade of the First World War and seemingly random bomber attacks). Bomber Command steadily widened the definition of military and military-economic targets; in September 1940 they suspended the policy of returning to base or jettisoning bombs if a primary target could not be hit in favour of bombing any target of opportunity, finally in October with the Blitz in full swing Bomber Command were authorised to attack, in addition to military-industrial targets, "enemy morale" through "heavy material destruction in large towns", though they were scarcely in a position to undertake such an effort until 1942 as they learned from Luftwaffe attacks and started to use heavy concentrations of aircraft, large high explosive bombs and substantial quantities of incendiaries. German efforts against Britain almost completely tailed off after the Blitz, later attacks were more efforts at retaliation for the ever-heavier Allied attacks (tip-and-run fighter-bomber attacks on the south coast, the 'Baedeker Blitz' of 1942, V-weapons from 1944).
March 1941 saw Bomber Command diverted to focus on naval targets, with the Battle of the Atlantic at a crucial period, until July when they were were allowed to return to what they saw as their main task, attacking the German transportation system and the morale of the civil population. The Bomber Command War Diaries has the target of the 14th/15th Hanover mission as "a rubber factory and the city centre". The 30th/31st mission to Cologne was in bad weather, thunderstorms and icing were encountered, Cologne was "believed hit"; German records show 6 buildings were damaged, no casualties.
It's a little lightweight (and entirely neglects other aircraft in favour of the Lancaster) but the BBC did a documentary a few years back, [Bomber Boys] (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01byv2g), with the McGregor brothers where (as I recall) Ewan acted as a navigator, if that might be of interest, it might be available on YouTube.
No, that is not true. In the "Weisung Nr. 17 für die Führung des Luft- und Seekrieges gegen England" ^[1] from August 2, 1940 Hitler already ordered the Luftwaffe to prioritise the carpet bombing of cities over air-to-air combat and specificially included "Terrorangriffe" against civilians. Germany had also used similar tactics in Poland, in the very first months of the war.
The british strategic bombing campaign that included "morale bombing", i.e. deliberately bombing cities to damage the morale of the German population started in 1942, after the so-called "dehousing paper", written by Frederick Lindemann, was sent to Churchill on March 31 and then discussed and ultimately ratified by the parliament.
The idea that Germany was only reacting to british morale bombing is a myth spread by Hitler himself on numerous occasions. A famous example is the accidental bombing of Freiburg in May 1940 by German bombers that Hitler used as "proof" of "terrorist" attacks started by Churchill^[3].
[1] Walther Hubatsch: Hitlers Weisungen für die Kriegführung 1939–1945
[2] Norman Longmate: The Bombers. The RAF offensive against Germany 1939-1945
[3] Freiburger Zeitung, December 11, 1940 (https://fz.ub.uni-freiburg.de/show/fz.cgi?cmd=showpic&ausgabe=03&day=11&year=1940&month=12&project=3&anzahl=12)