The Gen

[Moggy]

Did Lancaster bombers that killed 600,000 in German cities deliberately target civilians? A new book says YES...

By Leo Mckinstry
Last updated at 9:13 AM on 29th September 2009

To the RAF aircrews, the sight of the eastern German city ablaze looked like a terrifying vision of hell. As the vast stream of 796 four-engined Lancaster heavy bombers swept over Dresden on that night of February 14, 1945, almost 2,000 tons of explosives and incendiaries were dropped onto the inferno.
One Lancaster pilot recorded in his diary: 'The glow could be seen 50 miles away. The target area was almost like day. Down below, the town was a mass of flames, a pool of fire. It was awe-inspiring.'

The scenes in Dresden were Biblical in the scale of devastation. The merging of the fires sucked oxygen from the air and created a ferocious, howling tornado. Trees were pulled from their roots, buildings destroyed and people flung through the air like ragdolls.

Fearsome: A Lancaster bomber in action during the Second World War
Soaring temperatures turned the asphalt streets into a deadly, molten quagmire. Thousands suffocated or burned to death in the cellars of their homes. As the blaze intensified, huge crowds made for the city's reservoir and dived into the water.

But the sheer numbers, combined with the roaring heat and the lack of oxygen, made the place unbearable. People desperately tried to clamber out, yet the smooth cement edges made it impossible. Far from being a refuge, the reservoir turned into a sweltering graveyard.

The raid on Dresden is one of the most notorious episodes of Britain's war effort, a symbol of the ruthlessness of the RAF's strategic bombing offensive.

It has been estimated that around 25,000 people were killed that night - compare that to the 568 deaths in the assault on Coventry by the Luftwaffe in November 1940, by far the worst individual raid that any British city endured during the Blitz.

Yet, for all its infamy, the attack on Dresden was by no means the most savage of the RAF's bombing campaign. In July 1943, a series of raids on Hamburg killed at least 45,000 people in a gigantic firestorm.

Little more than a week after Dresden, 362 Lancasters dropped 1,551 tons of bombs on the small town of Pforzheim in 22 minutes. The central area became a blazing crematorium, with the death toll reaching 17,600, a quarter of the population.

In total, at least 600,000 civilians are thought to have lost their lives in the RAF's remorseless pounding of German cities. Because of the epic slaughter, the campaign has always provoked controversy.

During the war, the urban bombing had its detractors, not just from pacifists but even from figures within the Government itself, such as Tory Minister Lord Salisbury, who warned in 1943 that 'we are losing some of our moral superiority to the Germans'.

In the decades since 1945, the debate has continued to rage. Some have accused the British Government of war crimes. Others have drawn an emotionally charged parallel between the urban firestorms and the horrors of the Nazi gas chambers.

Defenders of the bombing offensive have long argued that such criticism is a gross injustice. The aim of the RAF, they maintain, was to destroy German industry and the military infrastructure. Civilian deaths were a regrettable consequence of this strategy, not its central goal.

The town centre became a blazing crematorium

'We have always adhered firmly to the principle that we attack none but military objectives,' declared Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Air Secretary, in the Commons in October 1943.

In one post-war lecture, Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of the Air Staff throughout the campaign, said it was 'a fallacy that our bombing of the German cities was intended to kill Germans, and that we camouflaged this intention by the pretence that we would destroy industry. The loss of life was purely incidental'.

The truth is that such claims were dishonest. Unpublished papers I have unearthed for my new book on the Lancaster bomber reveal that the mass, indiscriminate killing of Germany's urban population was indeed the key goal of the RAF's campaign.

During my research on the Lancaster - the heavyweight plane that enabled the RAF to mount the bomber offensive - I uncovered a wealth of archival material which exposes the truth about the Government's policy.

Typical was one paper from the Air Ministry, written in August 1941, which urged that the focus of attacks must be 'the people in their homes and factories'.

Warming to this theme, the Directorate found inspiration in the Luftwaffe's bombing of Coventry, 'one of the most successful raids carried out by the German Air Force on this country', with a ton of incendiaries for every 800 citizens.

'If Bomber Command could carry out a raid on the Coventry scale every month, the result would be a complete state of panic in the industrialised west of Germany', and 'considerable loss of life'.

Another 1941 Ministry report called for 'saturation by incendiaries' to break 'the morale of the population' and leave the German people 'conscious of constant physical danger'.

At the same time, the RAF's chief Sir Charles Portal privately promised Winston Churchill that a significant expansion in the heavy bomber force would ultimately bring about 'the destruction of six million homes' and 'civilian casualties estimated at 900,000'.

Indeed, senior RAF planners did not hesitate to use the term 'terror-bombing' to describe some of their raids.

The most passionate enthusiast of the strategic offensive was, of course, Sir Arthur Harris, head of Bomber Command from 1942. 'What we want to do is to bring masonry crashing down on top of the Boche, to kill the Boche and to terrify the Boche,' he said.

So relentless was his determination to hit the German cities that he regarded any other operations as a distraction. He even regarded the famous Dambusters Raid of May 1943 as a waste of time, privately claiming that it 'achieved nothing' >>>>

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Moggy
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[Moggy]

The endless debate. Someone has a book to sell. He "discovers" documents that have actually been known to every other serious historian since year dot.

The stratiegic bombing initiative had as its aim the collapse of the industrial pre-conditions of modern life. Its broad aim was the destruction of cities, therefore the destruction of industry, workers' homes, and infrastructure. The collapse the will, or failing that, the ability of the enemy to continue the fight.

If the civilians remained in the cities this inevitably meant the killing of civilians.

How many civilians died in the face of the clearly expressed and warned intention of the RAF night bomber campaign is a function of the active defence (night fighters and flak etc), and passive defence (ARP, evacuation).

Dresden was a target since it was an administrative centre, a transport hub, and had numerous war industries. Beyond that it was plainly "a city" and therefore plainly and inevitably subject to the RAF campaign. The number that died there (significantly less than Hamburg, and far far less than died in the Tokyo fire raids) was a function of removed defences and badly disorganised ARP.

The RAF also targeted Italian cities, but the Italians voted with their feet and took shelter each night in the countryside beyond.

Yes, modern industrial "total" war is horrible. Best not to start one.
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Moggy
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