Did aerial battle in World War II cause significant damage on the ground?

Factual Questions
1

The TV series Master of the Air on AppleTV+ follows the missions of a squadron of B17 bombers in Europe during WWII. There are many scenes of our heroes flying through thick flak. There are other scenes when German fighters engage the bombers and bullets are flying. Of course, most rounds fired don’t actually hit a target but they don’t wink out of existence, either.

So, what was it like for the civilians on the ground? When they saw the bombers overhead, did the people in the countryside run for cover even though they were not the targets of the bombers? Did bullets fall like rain when there was a battle overhead? What about when a plane was shot down? I don’t imagine that there was a lot of time to attempt to point the falling aircraft at any empty field while also attempting to bail out. And that empty field might be someone’s crop.

So what was it like under the bombers, while not being the targets of the bombs?

2

Ask Dresden.

3

Certainly in The Battle of Los Angeles

More Americans died than when they took Puerto Rico from Spain

4

OP was specifically not about the bombs.

5

That’s not what the OP is asking. Dresden was the TARGET of a bombing, not an incidental landing spot for flak bits and aircraft weapon fire.

It was very much a thing that people were sometimes hit and hurt by falling shrapnel, bullets and spent casings. I don’t know if there’s an official number on that but it obviously was a pretty small fraction of casualties; even in Europe there’s a lot of room, and that stuff got scattered about.

6

Figures for civilian casualties from flak fired at enemy bombers aren’t easy to come by, but there was a lot of metallic debris falling back to earth from such ordnance.

If civilians were in shelters for most of that bombing, the splinters etc. probably killed few in comparison to enemy bombs, which were far more destructive.

7

A weather balloon caused air defenses in Los Angeles to open fire three months after Pearl Harbor. Fatalities were not due to falling shell fragments.

Several buildings and vehicles were damaged by shell fragments, and five civilians died as an indirect result of the anti-aircraft fire: three were killed in car accidents in the ensuing chaos and two of heart attacks attributed to the stress of the hour-long action.

8

This sounds like a stunning amount and it kinda is, but it should be borne in mind that A) Despite the way this is worded it’s likely the crap fell in a much larger area than that - bombers often couldn’t even get themselves above the city they were aiming at, or necessarily even within a few miles of it, and the aerial battle and bullets didn’t stay within city limits, and B) London is big.

If we take current greater London as our battlefield for a good sized aerial battle, which honestly may be on the SMALL side, that is an area of 1.5 billion square meters. These things can range in size a lot - a 20mm cannon shell that fails to hit its target weighs four and a half ounces and would definitely hurt if it bonked your noggin, while some flak shrapnel could be small enough to not hurt much at all. Spread out though it’s very unlikely you’ll be hit by a bullet, casing or flak bit big enough to hurt you, and during an air raid, very few people are outside. Men and women whose duties required being outside wore helmets sufficient to deflect most falling crap.

Your real concern in terms of falling debris would be actual pieces of airplane. A crashing He-111, or a significant portion thereof, is a terrifyingly destructive thing.

9

Battle of Los Angles involved no bombers at all.
As I understand, even the balloon story is dubious.
Just paranoid army leadership; that covered it up for years.

10

According to the National Park Service on the December 7th Attack on Pearl Harbor, of the 49 Hawaiian civilian deaths during the attack only 7 are attributed to Japanese causes, the other 42 are from unexploded AA shells from the ground defenses falling back to Earth into civilian areas and exploding or causing fires.

11

The answer to the OP’s question is a resounding yes.

It is almost impossible to hit a fast-moving aeroplane with artillery, and the shells which did explode rained down hundreds of thousands of heavy chunks of metal.

These caused many deaths, but even worse was the fact that many of the shells had defective timing mechanisms. This meant that instead of exploding 10,000 feet overhead, they plunged to earth and exploded there.

One expert working at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory estimated that half the shells exploded at ground level and that they killed as many people as the German bombs.

If true, this would mean that the British army and their artillery were responsible for over 25,000 deaths in Britain during the Second World War.

Beginning on Sunday, 8 September 1940, when an artillery shell landed outside a café near Kings Cross, killing 17 people, the death toll from anti-aircraft fire was constant and unrelenting.

Nor were the deaths limited to London. On 14 September 1940, members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service were sitting down to dinner at the hotel in Lee-on-Solent where they were billeted.

A shell fired by artillery in Portsmouth flew through the window of the dining room and exploded, killing 10 of the young women.

In some areas of the country, there is no doubt that more people were killed by shells than bombs.

In the Midlands district of Tipton, 23 civilians were killed during air raids during the Second World War. 11 of these deaths were caused by German bombs, but 12 died during an incident on 21 December 1940, when a wedding party was taking place in a pub in the village of Tividale.

An artillery shell weighing 28 lb (12.7 Kg) was fired from nearby Rowley Hills and sailed down the chimney of the building where the party was being held. The bride was killed, the bridegroom lost both legs and 11 other guests died.

The strange thing is that during the war, the number of injuries and deaths from anti-aircraft fire was common knowledge and widely reported in both national and provincial newspapers, despite the censorship. On 29 March 1944, for example, the Western Mail reported that:

Anti-aircraft shells, one of which exploded in a crowded factory, killing 12 people, including seven women, and injuring as many more, were the chief cause of damage during activity over the South Wales coastal area on Monday night.

How Thousands of Civilians Were Killed by British Shells in the London Blitz | History Hit

12

There were also indirect casualties, such as at Bethnal Green, where a crowd spooked by the unfamiliar sound of a new AA weapon met insufficient safety rails while descending into the underground station for shelter

13

I was really sort of thinking about the ordinary farmer in the French or German countryside. What did he and his family experience when they saw bombers overhead, even though those bombers weren’t heading to his house.

But the “friendly fire” casualties in London during the Blitz is interesting. Since the heavy toll that AA fire was having was known, was there popular sentiment among the British to protest this? What options did London’s defenders have? Of course, the best option would be to prevent the German bombers from reaching London at all. But given that some were going to get through, what could they do? Would London have been better off not throwing flak or AA artillery into the air? Would damage have been lessened if they had let whatever bombers made it through simply do their thing and go home?

14

Apparently, the military doctrine initially was that the only defence against such an offensive was to launch counter-attacks on German cities.

This left Londoners feeling that the government was doing nothing to protect them. The government was afraid that there would be a mass flight into the countryside, which would disrupt the war effort by removing workers from the factories.

15

The sheer scale of the war, combined with the fact that it’s on the flight path between Britain and Northern Germany, resulted in an astounding number of aircraft crashing in the Netherlands, estimates are 5,500-6,000.

List of aviation accidents and incidents in the Netherlands - Wikipedia

During World War II around 6000 airplanes crashed in the Netherlands, both on land and in the water.[1] In September 2019, a special multi-year project started, to recover dozens of plane wrecks with missing crew members. The Royal Netherlands Air Force is leading the recovery operation. The Salvage and Identification Service of the Royal Netherlands Army collects as many remains as possible and tries to identify them. The Defense Explosive Ordnance Disposal Service is present to secure weapons, ammunition and bombs. It was planned to recover 3 wrecks per year.

During the Second World War approximately 5,500 aircraft were lost over the Netherlands. The wreckages of some 400 aircraft may still contain human remains. In 30 to 50 of these wreckages, the likelihood of finding human remains is very high. These are the results of research by the Dutch Study Group Air War 1939-1945 (SGLO), which provides the basis for the National Programme for Aircraft Recovery (in Dutch). The programme began in September 2019 with the wreckage recovery of 2 aircraft.

A lot of these were Commonwealth heavy bombers either going to or coming back from performing nighttime bombing of German cities.

16

Recovering three wrecks per year, when there are six thousand of them in total, doesn’t sound like a very practical goal.

17

You can’t really do that for a couple of reasons.

First, you have to disrupt the enemy planes. If there weren’t any AAA, bombers could come in significently lower and bomb more precisely.

Second, AAA reduces the number of enemy planes, which has a cumulative effect.

Third, although civilians are the ones getting hurt, not fighting back kills morale, as @bob_2 notes, you can get a mass departure of civilians, which means that you lose the all -important workers.

18

Of course, there were also barrage balloons. More “Friendly” aircraft than “hostile” were actually downed by them, but they forced the bombers to fly higher. They were also a major deterrent to dive bombers, especially when fitted with armed cables triggered by the shock of an enemy bomber snagging the cable. The shock caused that section of cable to be explosively released, complete with parachutes at either end, bringing down the aircraft with the combined weight and drag.

A bomber, seeing balloons would also assume that they were defending a valuable target, so they were used at fake airfields and even fake towns.

19

My grandfather’s Tempest was one of them. Wasn’t on a strateic bombing raid though.

He survived and thereafter served with the Dutch resistance.

20

Bear in mind that the bombing of London was during the Blitz, not the Battle of Britain. During the Blitz the Germans attacked almost exclusively at night, and Britain had little to no ability to intercept bombers at night; most fighters aircraft in WWII had no nighttime capability.