Bombing of Dresden--and for what?

Martin, my friends

I do not wish to outsmart anyone.I only wish to make more information available. If Irving says something that is different to what he said before I don´t think I am responsible for that. And what comes to Harris:"Here I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself, and that if their judgment was right the same arguments must apply that I have set out in an earlier chapter in which I said what I think about the ethics of bombing as a whole." as he said earlier in my messages.

In Finland many Generals were named "Bloody" because they were famous for killing many Finns in battles in WW2. One Colonel even said in a phone call " Ok,if that´s what you want we can as well die here .." to one General.And the colonel died as well for that. I don´t think that was fair. And I don´t think it was fair for the Ju 87 men to die for Germany in 1940 for Goering or if it should be the case, for many English and Canadian people or Germans to die for one man, Sir Harris in 1941-1945 for the attack plans, if they were considered not so working. The same goes for Mr Churchill who tried to save his neck by the messages after the reactions by the press in 1945.

No Vendetta-ideas Martin. Simply that if bombing cities did not give results then why continue as both parties were hammered? Pride? I do think BoB showed that bombing cities is not effective?? Yes, in a way I am blaming these bosses but for making unlogical strategies with maximum losses on both sides. Is that bad??

 

Sorry, Kai - didn't mean to lose my temper !

I just feel that Harris is 'scapegoated' to a very large degree ( nowhere more so than in this country ) for what is now felt to be 'politically incorrect' policy.

As we've discussed before, the bombing of civilians was militarily ineffective ( even counter-productive ). But when the policy was set in motion ( 1941/42), it was all that Britain could do that was offensive as opposed to defensive - the resources were not available to do anything else. Harris was in many ways an unimaginative man who was given the 'job'. Cruel and ultimately regrettable this policy was - maybe - but as discussion on the forum agreed before, the bombing force shortened the war.

But two points which maybe are not for this thread : -

It is strange but true that Harris cared for his men ( his 'old lags' as he called them ) deeply and sometimes emotionally. And the men of Bomber Command felt ( and the survivors still feel ) a strong attachment to 'the Butcher'.

And, for a policy that all agree was wrong, what's the first thing the democracies think of doing today ? That's right - 'bomb Baghdad, bomb Kosovo, etc...'

( And don't tell me 'smart' bombs don't hit civilian targets ! ). But here I'm getting O/T !

And as for Irving - the problem with Irving, and what has led to his disgrace, is that he does for sure keep changing his mind, and his sources, and his quotations, to support whichever revisionist idea he is trying to promote at any given time. He relies ( or relied ) on people not having the interest or resources to back-check. That's why it's dangerous to use him as a source.....
( And here I should say that I have all his books in my collection - some signed by Irving - but I'm very careful before quoting them here and I always make it clear if I'm citing his work ).

 

I agree completely. There is a very good book on this that was released in 2001, "The Bomber War" by Robin Neillands. Neillands feels the same way and sets out to dispel a few myths about Harris, not neccessarily new information, but a very good overview.

And here's perhaps one of them.

According to Neillands, Harris had been nicknamed "Butch" much earlier, and the name stuck. Not the "The Butcher", and it's not a short form of "butcher", or anything like that. This seems to be another case of assigning a more sinister theme to Harris and Bomber Command.

 

Time for a few more Harris quotes. It's not like he was a squemish man. Like Max Hastings points out, "Unlike some of his service and political masters, he was no disembler or hyporcrite. He gave unequivocal notice of his intentions."

---

"We are going to scourge the Third Reich from end to end. We are bombing Germany city by city and ever more terribly to make it impossible for her to go on with the war. That is our object, we shall persue it relentlessly."

"When this storm bursts over Germany they will look back to the days of Lubeck, Rostock and Cologne as the man caught in the blasts of the hurricane will look back to the gentle zephyrs of last summer."

"In the House of Commons he [Air Minister Sinclair] should have been more forthright then he was....There was nothing to be ashamed of, except in the sense that everybody might be ashamed of that sort of thing that has to be done in every war."

[ 25. October 2002, 01:52 AM: Message edited by: Heartland ]

 

On a quoting spree today...

"We have to be clear about one thing. Namely that the method of the English and Americans of bombing the inner city and its civilian population, a lesson they likely learned from our attacks against their cities, in the long run affects production more than an attack against the factory itself. We have to counter this stubborn English strategy by trying to reduce such absenteeism. Often, even eight days after an air raid, only 20% to 30% of the employees are reporting for work."
--- Albert Speer

 

We could go on and on arguing the ethics of bombing.

The sorry fact is that WWII was total war, with nations fighting for their very existence against an evil tyranny.

I just feel that it is too simplistic to point a finger at Harris.

When quoting, it's useful to have the context. Don't forget he took over Bomber Command when morale was absolutely rock-bottom; in fact many wished to disband the Command for use elsewhere. He had to restore an esprit-de-corps very quickly - and he did this brilliantly.

His pronouncements were aimed as much at his own aircrews as anyone else. Listen for instance to 'Hamish' Mahaddie in the famous 'World At War' documentary. With total honesty he quoted a message from Harris being read out at a briefing for a difficult raid to the effect that ' Tonight Bomber Command would bomb the black heart out of Germany'.

Mahaddie admits that 'after that you could have filled the crews' pockets with bombs and they'd have flown over without aircraft'.

Agreed, to us, today, that sounds naive and bloodthirsty. But we weren't there.........

 

Thanx Martin!

Yes, the ethics of bombing is not easy to discuss, probably impossible.They did what was looked as necessary evil at the time and that´s about it.Victory above all and with all means possible.I had actually very little knowledge on Harris previously so I don´t make judgements on him by previous knowledge.I do understand that he was under massive pressure, and Churchill was one of them. And politicians have a way of escaping when those in charge are being looked for when something "not-so-nice-who´s-guilty" kind of things happen.

And thanx for the info on Irving. I´ll keep that on mind now!

 

True. Although if people are not aware of this, it is worth pointing out that this "documentary" is created in very much the same vein as the work done by David Irving. That is, riddled with factual errors, quotes out of context, opinions presented as facts, etc.

The show recieved severe complaints from both the Senate Committee that investigated it and the Ombudman appointed to give an unbiased review. Indeed, the Ombudsman brough in six military historians for the review, three of them chosen by the show's producers, and not even those historians would support the thing. Ouch!

 

Andy- I was under the impression that it was first the germans who used the idea of "total war" in russia. Where did the allies start this idea?
I'm still learning about the bomber campaign- was the idea of total war brought up in 42 by the allies in reference to the bomber war?

 

OK - my last posting in this ! ( I hope )

I agree with your point, Andy. For me this is one of WWII's lessons ( which seems to be forgotten or overlooked to a frightening degree ) ; the War seemed to develop an obscene momentum of escalation. It is not simply a case of 'They were bad and we were good'.

Nazi oppression was evil and had to be defeated ( I hope we all agree ) but awful things were done to achieve this. This is the lesson that I keep in mind for today ; that war should be the absolute final resort .

The war that Bomber Command ( and the 8th ) waged was terrible for all concerned. I often re-read Len Deighton's novel 'Bomber', a superb anti-war book describing a raid from the point of view of all concerned - the RAF, the Luftwaffe, the FLAK crews, the civilians - and it is a miserable and terrifying experience for all of them.

Let us all sincerely hope that we will never 'need' another Harris, Spaatz or Eaker.

 

Crazy, Andy

I am afraid the original idea was brought by the Germans. That is the BoB. The later on bombings were mostly revenge kind?? Mostly prepared by Churchill and his staff.Anyway that is **** as we knew from BoB that killing people in the cities was not getting positive results!So the initial idea of killing people in the cities was more or less prolonging the war I think. S
Harris only took the idea on ( UNFORTUNATELY )

 

Sorry the messsage was broken...

and made it happen. I am happy I never was there to decide for all these things as the cruelsome bombing of Germany was still there to be faced...I think I would have said "GO" anyway ....

 

Eye to Eye, Teeth to Teeth. It's very easy to say that.

I think that the bombing on Dresden wastn't necessary at all. It happened on 13th February 1945, just 3 months befor the end of the war.

The RAF & USAAF knew that there were few soldiers in the city. Instead there were a few thousands civilians in the city, trying to escape for the advancing Russians.

A very interesting study:
Dresden 1945
The Devil's Tinderbox
by Alexander McKee. New York: E.P. Duffon, Inc., 1982, 1984,
reviewed by Charles Lutton

The destruction of the virtually undefended German city of Dresden by bombers of the Royal Air Force and U.S. Army Air Force, in mid-February, 1945, remains one of the most controversial episodes of the Second World War.
In 1963, British historian David Irving published a pathbreaking study on this topic. Another widely-published British military historian, Alexander McKee, has produced a new account of the Dresden bombing, based in part upon an examination of official records recently declassified, as well as interviews from survivors of the attack and Allied airmen who flew in the raids.

McKee had doubts about the efficacy of area bombing when, as a soldier with the 1st Canadian Army, he witnessed the results of the Allied bombing of "friendly" French towns. Following visits to the cities of Caen and Lisieux, he wrote in his personal war diary:

Lisieux and Caen are examples of the inflexibility of the four motor heavy bombers: it cannot block a road without bringing down a city. I'm not surprised that our troops advancing between Caen and Lisiel=c were fired on by French civilians. No doubt many Frenchmen found it hard to be liberated by a people who seem, by their actions, to specialise in the mass murder of their friends.

McKee was an eye-witness to the final destruction of the towns of Emmerich and Arnhem. He related that, "In Emmerich I saw no building whatever intact .... This process, when the town was an Allied one, we referred to with bitter mockery as 'Liberation.' When you said that such-and-such a place had been 'liberated,' you meant that hardly one stone still stood upon another."

The bombing of urban areas which might contain targets of military importance was a policy advocated by leading British air strategists long before the outbreak of the war. McKee reviewed the writings of the air power theorists of the 1920s and 30s, observing that "retreading them now is like browsing through a British Mein Kampf. The horror to come is all there between the lines. What they are really advocating is an all-out attack on noncom- batants, men, women, and children, as a deliberate policy of terror.

After sifting through the evidence, the author refers to these proferred justifications as the "standard white-wash gambit." There was a military barracks in Dresden, but it was located on the out skirts of the "New Town," miles away from the selected target area. There were some hutted camps in the city-full of starving refugees who had fled from the advancing Red Terror in the East.

The main road route passed on the west outside the city limits. The railway network led to an important junction, but this, too, passed outside the center of the "Old City," which was the focal point for the bombing attacks. No railway stations were on the British target maps, nor, apparently, were bridges, the destruction of which could have impeded German communications with the Eastern Front. And despite the claims of U.S. Air Force historians, writing in 1978, that "The Secretary of War had to be appraised of ... the Russian request for its neutralization," the author has unearthed no evidence of such a Soviet request.

What the author has discovered about the attack is that:

By the end of Summer, 1944, "there is evidence that the Western Allies were contemplating some terrible but swift end to the war by committing an atrocity which would terrify the enemy into instant surrender. Without doubt, the inner truth has still to be prised loose, but the thread of thought can be discerned."

"The bomber commanders were not really interested in any purely military or economic targets .... What they were looking for was a big built-up area which they could burn .... The attraction Dresden had for Bomber Command was that the centre of the city should burn easily and magnificentlv: as indeed it was to do."

At the time of the attacks on February 13/14, 1945, the inhabitants of Dresden wore mostly women and children, many of whom had just arrived as refugees from the East. There were also large numbers of Allied POWs. Few German males of military age were left in the city environs. The author cites the official Bomber Command history prepared by Sir Charles Webster and Dr. Noble Frankland, which reveals that "the unfortunate, frozen, starving civilian refugees were the first object of the attack, before military movements "
Dresden was virtually undefended.

Luftwaffe fighters stationed in the general vicinity were grounded for lack of fuel. With the exception of a few light guns, the anti-aircraft batteries had been dismantled for employment elsewhere. McKee quotes one British participant in the raid, who reported that "our biggest problem, quite truly, was with the chance of being hit by bombs from other Lancasters flying above us."

Targets of genuine military significance were not hit, and had not even been included on the official list of targets. Among the neglected military targets was the railway bridge spanning the Elbe River, the destruction of which could have halted rail traffic for months.

The railway marshalling yards in Dresden were also outside the RAF target area. The important autobahn bridge to the west of the city was not attacked. Rubble from damaged buildings did interrupt the flow of traffic within the city, "but in terms of the Eastern Front communications network, road transport was virtually unimpaired."

In the course of the USAF daylight raids, American fighter- bombers strafed civilians: "Amongst these people who had lost everything in a single night, panic broke out. Women and children were massacred with cannon and bombs.

It was mass murder." American aircraft even attacked animals in the Dresden Zoo. The USAF was still at it in late April, with Mustangs strafing Allied POWs they discovered working in fields.

The author concludes that, "Dresden had been bombed for political and not military reasons; but again, without effect. There was misery, but it did not affect the war."

Some have suggested that the bombing of Dresden was meant to serve as a warning to Stalin of what sort of destruction the Western Powers were capable of dealing. If that was their intent, it certainly failed to accomplish the objective.

Once word leaked out that the Dresden raids were generally viewed as terrorist attacks against civilians, those most responsible for ordering the bombings tried to avoid their just share of the blame. McKee points out that:

In both the UK and the U.S.A. a high level of sophistication was to be employed in order to excuse or justify the raids, or to blame them on someone else. It is difficult'to think of any other atrocity-and there were many in the Second World War-which has produced such an extraordinary aftermath of unscrupulous and mendacious polemics.

Who were the men to blame for the attacks? The author reveals that:

It was the Prime Minister himself who in effect had signed the death warrant for Dresden, which had been executed by Harris [chief of RAF Bomber Command]. And it was Churchill, too, who in the beginning had enthusiastically backed the bomber marshals in carrying out the indiscriminate area bombing policy in which they all believed. They were all in it together. Portal himself [head of the RAF, Harris of course, Trenchard [British air theorist] too, and the Prime Minister most of all. And many lesser people.

An aspect of the Dresden bombing that remains a question today is how many people died during the attacks of February 13/14, 1945. The city was crammed with uncounted refugees and many POWs in transit. when the raids took place. The exact number of casualties will never be known. McKee believed that the official figures were understated, and that 35,000 to 45,000 died, though "the figure of 35,000 for one night's massacre alone might easily be doubled to 70,000 without much fear of exaggeration, I feel."

Alexander McKee has written a compelling account of the destruction of Dresden. Although the author served with the British armed forces during the war, his attitude toward the events he describes reminds this reviewer of McKee's fellow Brit, Royal Navy Captain Russell Grenfell, who played a key role in the sinking of the battleship Bismarck, but who, after the war, wrote a classic of modern Revisionism, Unconditional Hatred: German War Guilt and the Future of Europe (1953). Likewise, Dresden, 1945, deserves a place in any Revisionists' library.

 

I still fail to see the importance to the Allies by bombing this noble city. What was of strategic importance to be bombed by the RAF as well as the US bomber formations ?
I have two interviews of Luftwaffe night fighter pilots sent out on this night. The problem was not fuel but they were totally fooled by the RAF as there were several routes taken and tons of window(Düppel) dumped in the air this night. The German night fighters left their bases late and followed "ghost shadows", watching Dresden burning.

E

 

Eye to Eye, that's exactely what happened between 1939 and 1945. You harm me, I harm you twice as much. In 1944/45 there was not much room for chivalry and moral thoughts on any side: The Red Army Soldiers took revenge for what they saw on her way back, the Germans fought in the belive to fight for their very existance ("terror" bombing of towns, Morgenthau-plan and the reckless Soviet warfare were clear proofs to them), the U.S. fought almost a genocidal war against the "Japs" (to the average U.S. american, a "jap" wasn't considerered to be much more than a monkey,I guess), the Brits had no axe to grind, as they faced the abyss of total defeat back in 1940, short: The proportionality in war was pretty much set out of action after 5 years of escalating fighting. Flatting a mid-size town with 50,000 people living in it just to put out a small optical factory was as valid as letting thousands of russian women die in digging a single tank ditch.

As for bombing Dresden "just 3 months before the end": This is hindsight par excellance. On Feb. 13, 1945 everybody with half a brain knew that the Allies will win, but noone knew if in three months or one year. Dresden was just another town, and many other german towns like Wuerzburg, Dessau, Swinemuende, Nuernberg etc faced exactely the same fate as Dresden did earlier in 1945.

European cemeteries are full of soldiers who have been promised that they will be back home by Christmas. The war is over when one side surrenders or stop fighting. As easy as that.

As for "total war", Germany made first changes into that direction as late as in early 1942, at a time when the Brits, the Soviets and the U.S. were already on "total war" footage. "Officially" Goebbels declared "total war" as late as in 1944 (IIRC).

Cheers,

[ 26. October 2002, 08:03 AM: Message edited by: AndyW ]

 

[ 30. October 2003, 05:16 PM: Message edited by: General der Infanterie Friedrich H ]

 

No flame intended?! My ass! That is a post in which you are directly calling me a bloody neo-nazi with the same uppish attitude that you show in nearly all your posts. People like you, who believed that were superior to other people and aho acted that way were men as Kaltennbruner, Mengele, Höss, Mohnke, etc. And yes, I suposse I am a bloody skinhead who goes around beating Jews and other undesirable people all around the place... No, I would never be part of any of those groups of ignorants!

</font>[/QUOTE]I don't call you a neo-nazi, I asked if you would consider yourself being one. You don't have to anwer my question, if you don't want, that's O.K.

I asked this after reading statements made by you like "You complain about Auschwitz, we complain about Dresden!!!" (29. July 2002), after seeing you "arguing" with "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,Über alles in der Welt." (in the "Atomic Bomb: Justified?"-threat), after seing you calling the July 1944-plot an act of "traitor" made by "fools" and "thank God it didn't suceed!" (Oct. 1st, 2002), after offending other forum members by using "Sieg Heil!"-signatures or looking on your Adolf Hitler avatar (ironically now with the underline "Legendary Hero") on every of your post. All this gets me under the impression that you might be a neo-nazi (but not a skinhead) or an germanophobe ultra-nationalist, that's why I asked. I don't pull that out of my arse.

But I take your answer as that you consider yourself not being one. Also thank you for clearing up that the term "we" you're using many times isn't meant for "the" Germans now and then, but for you and your Grandpa.

Where did I bloody said that?! .</font>[/QUOTE]"We would have won!!!

That is precisely my point: if Moscow was taken and reinforced all the Eastern front would have been secured as well as all the most important strategic level-general situation. Then, our tactics and technology could have smashed the rest of our enemies. But just then. We must remember that wars are won or lost because of strategy, not because of tactics, and technology is a tactic."

"General der Infanterie Friedrich H" on July 29, 2002

"I hate to imagine a 90-year-old veteran being hanged by things that happened 60 years ago... It is idiotic. Would the killed be alive again? No. The wisest man in Greece, Socrates said: "We must not pay injustice with more injustice". And if the old man is sent to jail. How long is he going to be there?! Please!

Whatever would have happened at Malmédy, Jochen Peiper had to know what his men were doing. If the American POWs were shot or not, doesn't matter. Whatever his men did, good or bad, he was responsible for it.

Andy, whose side are you?"

"General der Infanterie Friedrich H" on October 4, 2002

As for your "Auschwitz"-post, just scroll up on this very threat.

Will that do it?

Cheers,

[ 27. October 2002, 05:28 AM: Message edited by: AndyW ]

 

Guys, PLEASE can we keep the temperature down a little here ?

I know that a thread such as 'Dresden' wil cause people to get 'het up' ( even me, above ! ) but let's not get into personal arguments.

We should not 'hi-jack' this thread.

This topic should be discussed as it is one of 20th Century warfare's most controversial subjects and is relevant today - we should be able to debate without causing offence to each other.

 

Yeah lets calm down. Friedrich H. is not pro-Nazi.
The end.