SFFP, you are a mere youngester. At least I got out of training and on to proper flying pay a good year ahead of many of those that took the 23 Gp route.

In those days proper aircraft even had wireless operators and throttle jockeys as well as pilots, airframe.

Bomber Boys
 

Comments on the inaccuracy of early raids I can believe. Prior to GEE and H2S, navigation would have been by visual , Astro and dead reckoning. Forecast winds could have been way out. I trained as Navigator in early 1950s on mainly wartime aids. Astro in turbulent skys could be very inaccurate

In some navs' hands it wasn't always that brilliant in dead smooth conditions :O

Chugalug2

I'm well aware of the fact that the Norden couldn't put a bomb in a pickle-barrel from 30,000 feet -- in fact (I think I mentioned this before), it wasn't even particularly useful over 20,000 feet.

Regardless, as I understand it the CEP at the start of the war was around 400 yards, another source said their bombs generally landed within an area of either 600 feet or 600 yards.

Yeah, but as I understand it, the USAAF (at least from 1942-1944) generally tried to nail factories, railway yards, bridges, stuff like that; The RAF from what it appeared, simply hit targets that they thought would set off huge blazes that would burn a whole city down.

I would say that I believe the USAAF or RAF committed war-crimes when they purposefully targeted civilians (which did happen on both sides). In some respects, the USAAF might have done something the RAF didn't (not sure here) -- using low-altitude fighter attacks to strafe civilians.You'll note the statement demoralize the German population was used -- not the German military -- that means strafing civilians as well as military targets. It's one thing to strafe military targets, and accidentally get a civilian here and there if it's an accident -- when it's deliberate -- it's a war-crime.

So you think it's right to live in constant fear of annihilation?


Pontius Navigator

Well, I think it would be more correct to say that collateral damage was the goal, and the military target was a bonus :}

Also, it probably makes the idea of bombing cities off the map and boiling away a couple of million people in a mushroom cloud somehow seem more palatable.

I know after 1944 when Doolittle took command of the 8th AF, they simply switched to area-bombing. Strangely the CEP was about 900 feet at this point.


[b]Tankertrashnav[/b

Perhaps you should continue to read it now that you're in a better mood -- maybe you could learn something useful.


hval

Yes it was. It really amazes me how no matter how good an argument another person makes somebody always has to throw out the "Total War" trope as if it was some kind of trump-card that always wins the argument and makes any atrocity acceptable?

Fact is, targeting civilians was a war-crime even back then. It was since 1907 with the Hague Conventions. It's one thing when civilians die as a result of collateral damage, it's another when they are actually a target.

Sounds like a good argument except for the following facts

• The RAF, and some personalities within the USAAS/USAAC wanted to bomb civilian centers and terror bomb civilian populations into submission long before WW2 even started.
• This was largely due to the combination of ideas from people such as Giulio Douhet (Italy), Hugh Trenchard (UK), and Billy Mitchell (US)
• UK's experiences with Zeppelin bombing and unrestricted submarine warfare in WW1
• As I understand it, Germany didn't impose total war until early 1943, a couple of months after the UK imposed an area-bombing policy.

The desire to wage all out war on noncombatants existed long-before WW2 even started.


R.C.

Of course targetting civilians takes two forms.

There is the strafing of a refugee column with the sole purpose of creating mayhem and blocking a road; of shooting then population of a village pour encourager les autres; of torpedoing a passenger ship taking POW and civilians away from the war zone.

There is the collateral killing where the civilians happen to be in a target area; where civilians are crewing ships carrying war materials.

In the former the victims had no choice and no chance.

In the latter the civilians had free choice. Merchant seamen could have opted out; civilians could have evacuated the target areas.

In the former civilan deaths was NOT collateral damage; in the latter it was deliberate to a point but still technically collateral.

SFFP
 

My first choice was nav! So there!

As I once explained to PN, having seen 'Dr Strangelove', where it was obvious the nav was the cool dude in the B52 and the captain was a raving idiot - remember him waving his hat,sat astride the nuke leaving the bomb bay?

TTN

With you on 2 counts - even with a periscopic sextant my astro could be crap! Did find Gan on a few occasions though; 700 mile range NDB helped.

Some of the posts on this thread make me want to slash my wrists. Having in my short flying career flown with lots of guys who had fought in WW2 ,I will never criticise what they did,not only for our country, but to save western Europe too.We could have just pulled down the shutters and sat there after the BofB. If Hitler hadn't been so stupid as to declare on the USA it's debatable whether they would have ever entered the European War.

Jane-Doh:
Please Miss, PPRuNe just ate all my Homework! So here goes again:
The best USAAF got was a radius of 2 miles by day. BC started out at 5 miles and got it down to 3 miles by night. I would place 400 yd "CEPs" and 600 yd "areas" in with Danny's Fairies!
The USAAF started out with the pre war concept of long rang bombers (B-17s) sinking enemy naval targets (Japanese warships) with high level precision bombing (Norden bombsight). In reality of course that task was carried out by carrier borne Torpedo and Dive Bombers. The B-17s were sent to Europe for the much easier task of bombing land-locked strategic military targets. The loss rate was so horrific that they withdrew until long range fighters evened the odds. Their success in precision bombing thereafter is quoted above. They may well have:
the reality was that, like the RAF, they flattened cities and killed civilians. So on the one hand the Brits flattened cities at night, killed civilians, and are guilty of war crimes. On the other hand the USAAF aspired to bomb precision targets by day, resulting in flattened cities and killing civilians, but are not? Yer 'avin a larf, aintcher? Either that or you must be a lawyer. As Brian 48Nav says, they both saved Western Europe, as well as in all likelihood their own nations, and the freedom of people like you to count the number of Fairies on pin heads!

Chug, I posted the 400 yard CEP figure. This was in our 540 on 35 Sqn when they were a Pathfinder sqn so is completely accurate and unbiased, same as the sqn that sank the Tirpitz.

For the uninformed, the CEP is the radius in which HALF of the bombs separately aimed at the target landed. So for 100 that landed within 400 yards 100 could have landed anywhere in Germany or beyond!

Thanks PN, but that makes it all the more disingenuous of Ms Jane-DoH to quote it in a discussion about main force accuracy. It was the efforts of the PBI of main force and their toggleteering USAAF counterparts that we were talking of. Those of the pathfinders such as your own 35 Sqn were of a different order, though Colin McGreggor's 617 might claim an even better one vis a vis the Tirpitz;-) Oh, sorry I forgot, please don't mention the Tirpitz! I just did but I think I got away with it....

Try the Bielefeld Viaduct. 30yds.

The Saumur tunnel. In the hole - front AND top.

Dortmund Ems canal - bingo!

The Brest U-boat pens. One Grand Slam right in the middle, might not have been on a sixpence but half a crown might be fair. :E

But.........the bomb sight was an absolute beauty and they bombed from 20,000 feet, which gave the Grand Slam its optimum effectiveness.

All breathtaking really. It would be true to say that our star bomb aimers were the creme a la creme.

PRRuNe Pop, excellent examples of daylight precision bombing by precision bombing specialists. But the vast majority of main force and 8th USAAF were not, and main force had the disadvantage of night bombing to boot. That is why I do not understand the ambivalent attitude of the modern RAF to the WWII RAF's Bombing Campaign. It is not enough to simply applaud the veterans while disowning the campaign itself, either disown both or stand by both. Jane-DoH is typical of those that even in war-time challenged the campaign while suggesting no other viable war winning strategy (specific targets such as oil, transportation, ball bearings, etc, were often proposed by the "precision specialists" but as often as not still involved the bombing of cities or otherwise very heavily defended targets, such as Ploesti that resulted in unsustainable losses). The RAF Bombing Campaign (and that of 8th USAAF) was a war winning one. Others will contest that I know, but without it I am convinced we could not prevail. That is why it was necessary and that is why the modern RAF should stand up and be counted in support of it.

But not by night.

The imagery also shows that one hit needed an awful lot of misses.

On the FI thread there is mention that Mike Beavis said it would require 50 Vulcans to neutralise Stanley airport. That would equate to 75 Lancasters.

Remember too that the precision attacks in AFG are conducted in a largely benign environment.

Nothing to do with mass bombing of civilian areas, but can I suggest reading up on Operation Bulbasket?

I get heartily fed up with the argument that bomber crews took off with the sole objective of killing civilians. My reading of books from the 50's and 60's suggest that each crew had a specific military or industrial target. They made their own way there, and later in the war when better navigation aids became available, were given a specific time over target, so as to minimise the risk of collisions and maximise the bomb concentration.

Has anyone asked the veterans if they went out to deliberately kill civilians or to bomb military/industrial targets?

Good afternoon Airborne was that comment linked to my questions if so then that Operation took place in 1944 and must surely fit into the category of:

Your post refers to a despicable act but it does not do anyone any favours to open up these wounds. It was not the first example of how our commando units\Special Forces were treated in that way, but I will NOT post any links as it is now just a very sad part of a distasteful period.

labrador pup,

You are so wrong in your assertion. Do the most basic research into Bomber Command operations, particularly the latter half of the war, and you will see that you in fact have no grounds whatsoever for being so 'heartily fed up.'

Each crew did not have a specific military or industrial target. The crews in fact had very little involvement in what they were actually bombing, that came from the Air Ministry and Bomber Command headquarters and was based on target reconnaissance coverage of previously bombed targets. They were targeted at unburnt and unbombed areas of the cities, individual facilities did not come into it.

In point of fact they were most usually aiming for specific target markers dropped by the target marking force and guided onto the relevant colours by the Master Bomber. He would move the aim point from, say, red to green target markers, or "bomb south of the green" or bomb to the east of the red" according to the areas of the city not on fire.

On the Dresden raid industrial and military areas were not even marked on the crews maps, they were merely aimed at zones of the city. The point at which the marker flares were aimed was a wooden sports stadium in the middle of the city. The railway marshalling yards, perhaps THE most militarily and industrially important target in the whole of Dresden, were not even in the target area.
The target was the city and the population of Dresden.

Harris was no war criminal, he was merely wrong. He was convinced, and made the statement many times, that strategic bombing of cities would win the war, it didn't. It certainly contributed massively to it, but that wasn't the claim made by Harris, he claimed that there was NO NEED for the D-Day landings or the Battle of the Atlantic, that strategic bombing alone would win the day. It didn't.

Prior to the Battle of Berlin he made the claim. "I will wreck Berlin from end to end. It will cost me 500 bombers, it will cost Germany the war."
He was wrong on both counts. It cost him 1500 bombers, Berlin was never wrecked from end to end, and it never cost Germany the war. The Battle of Berlin was lost by Bomber Command and it didn't cost the Germans the war.

He was also opposed to panacea targets, and in this he consistently argued and fought with CAS and Director of Bomber Operations at the Air Ministry. He didn't want to concentrate on oil or ball bearing targets, as proposed by the Americans, he even opposed the Dams raid. He was totally focused on a campaign of dehousing and destruction of CITIES.

At the end of the war German industrial output was still rising and there was no shortage of material or equipment. What there WAS was a massive shortage of oil and ball bearings. The Americans were right, Harris was wrong.

Total War
 

Re post 164: please define your understanding of the term "Total War".

Harris would have argued that his bomber offensive was diverted from his aim. You might argue that without D-day Harris might have had 2,000 bombers. IIRC a figure of 5,000 was mentioned. All I would say is that you cannot deduce Harris was wrong.

A classic application of some of the principles of war - selection and maintenance of the aim, concentration of force and economy of effort.

Harris did not, I believe, set the aim but certainly attempted to maintain it hell or high water.

There are a couple of points worth making in this argument, which so far no-one has pointed out

1) the "civilians" in the bombed city were to a large extent the workforce of the target factories, and therefore legitimate targets themselves. BY bombing the cities, you destroy or harass the workforce, and destroy much of the infrastructure which makes the work possible: the roads, buses, trams, power and water supplies
2) much of this derbate seems to assume that german industry was built in discrete isolated industrial sites. That wasn't the case. Just as in the UK, the industrial development of the 1800's had brought manufacturing into the towns, with houses filling the gaps in between. Go into a British town like Widnes, or Manchester, and see how the metal-bashing and chemical plants were cheek-by-jowl with the housing. OK, there were some dedicated plants e.g. the Ruhr steel works, but in the main, most German industrial production took place withing the cities, alongside the workforce. You could not destroy one without destroying the other
To attempt to suggest that bombing could be kept to "industrial targets only is pure nonsense. The towns and cities WERE the manufacturing factories, there was no way not to hit them. Any pretence otherwise is just muddled thinking by modern bleeding hearts liberals who have never taken the time to actually look at the history of manufacturing industry and the industrial revolution

pr00ne, you can quote Harris all you like, but it isn't what he said that counts so much as what he did, and that was to carry out the directives of the Air Board. Dowding believed he could communicate with his deceased pilots, so what? He ensured that Fighter Command won its decisive battle. Harris's battle lasted years, not months, and had to be fought by night. Try taking out ball bearing factories, critical railway junctions, or isolated oil facilities by night in WWII, it would result merely in wasted bombs and wasted crews. BC wasn't exactly going to make a point of the fact that the only target it could be relied on to find and hit was cities, so it was dressed up as a virtue in its own right, de-house and de-moralise the population and you disrupt war production. Of course you did, and it was worth it for that alone, but it would have been better of course to target the factories, rail junctions, warehouses, fuel storage tanks, etc etc specifically. He couldn't, but at least there was a fair chance of hitting a lot of those if he went for the cities anyway. By putting in so many attacks, night and day, the Allied Bomber Offensive tied down huge German resources to defend the cities which could otherwise be sent East. In that way alone they ensured Russian success there. As for the old canard of German Wartime Production rising, that was scarcely surprising, the factories initially worked one 12 hour shift. They only had to make that 24 hours to double production. They only had to mobilise women to increase it still further. They only had to transport large numbers of people from the occupied territories as slave/guest workers to push it up even more. They only had to work concentration camp prisoners to death for yet higher output still. The limited and unbalanced increased output that Speer did manage is a result of, not a failure of, the Bomber Offensive. As Danny 42C rightly says, Harris and BC would have prefered a rapier. They were handed a club, but wielded it to great and devastating effect. We should commend them, not only for their courage but in ensuring that success in the East and the West, and hence Victory, was possible. Like all aspects of Air Power, that is not immediately to be seen, but should be upon reflection, and certainly by those whose profession it is.

Milo Mindbender,

Not sure what your point is but I do basically agree with most of your salient facts. Though is has to be pointed out that it is partly disingenuous to describe the civilian population of a city as "the workforce" and therefore legitimate targets. Those 'civilians' certainly included the workforce, but they also consisted of millions upon millions of children, old age pensioners, the sick, the ill and the infirm and those many folk engaged on non warlike activities. The German economy was extremely late and lax in its mobilisation to a total war economy and was still turning out consumer goods in 1944.

Your industrial area point is also valid but I would suggest more so in that very emotional city that we all like to use as a justifier, Coventry. (my home town)
Coventry was unique as an industrial city in that its progression from silk weaving, through watch manufacture to cycle manufacture, motor cycle manufacture and on to automotive, aircraft and general metal bashing produced an entirely unique industrial environmant. As so much of the very early manufacturing in Coventry was in skilled workers houses and extended watch makers premises, the development of later manufacturing led to the actual Medieval heart of Coventry being extremely industrialised.

Thus, when it was raided in November 1940 the Luftwafe WAS aiming for individual industrial targets and used its elite target marking and pathfinder force to lead the raid.
The Coventry blitz was no indiscriminate raid, it was a precision raid, or as near as you could get to precision with 1940 technology.

Undoubtedly there were similar towns and cities in Germany but there were also huge totally industrial area: Essen, Krupps, Wuppertal to name just a few.

But where you really lose it is in the use of the ridiculous phrase

"Muddled thinking by bleeding heart modern liberals"

WHAT does that mean?

There was wide spread opposition to the mass bombing as early as 1943. It was raised in the House of Commons and it was raised in the House of Lords. It was raised by the Church of England and it was raised by certain Bomber Command crews.

You can be proud of what those young crews went through, you can be proud of their sacrifice and their heroic and stoic endurance. I find it inconceivable that anyone can be proud of what they actually did.

IT WAS the way to hit back in the early 1940's and there was a place for it in the Allies strategy.
By late 1944 it was ineffective, not needed, counter productive and plain WRONG.

Two wrongs do not a right make.

My point is simple - that all the previous comments trying to differentiate between industrial and civilian targets is just plain claptrap. In the main - at the time - the two were one and the same, with the exception as you noted of the Krupps and similar plants. But - as with your comment re Coventry - most of the manufacturing capacity was integrated into the towns and cities. Differentiation of targets was not possible, so claiming it was is a total misrepresentation.
As regards "Muddled thinking by bleeding heart modern liberals", in view of your comments regarding complaints at the time, I'll change that to "Muddled thinking by bleeding heart liberals".
With the exception of the children, those people living in the cities were living in a valid target area. Even if they were not directly employed in munition work, they would have been supporting those that were: working on transport, catering, offices. If they didn't want to be bombed they had the choice to get out. Many did

Remember ot was Goebbels who said ""TOTALER KRIEG — KÜRZESTER KRIEG"

Pr00ne:
It was frequently raised indeed by Bomber Command's Head Chaplain, and it is a tribute to Harris, IMHO, that he allowed him to do so instead of having him replaced by someone more amenable. But none of the worthies that you mention said what should be done with BC in place of the Night Bombing Offensive. Aspirations are all well and good, but practicalities dictate what can and cannot be done. I repeat, BC Main Force bombed cities by night because it could. In doing so it paved the way to Victory and, perhaps more importantly for Western Europe, frustrated Germany doing the same thing. It was a terrible and awful thing to do, but not doing it would have been worse. We would all (possibly even including the USA) be living under tyranny to this day.

Squadron Leader Iveson DFC
 

I had the great pleasure of meeting Squadron Leader Tony Iveson a few years ago at his home, I was repairing his television if i remember correctly.At the time he was doing a talk for the Imperial War Museum I think, regarding his wartime experiences,he asked whether I could make quite a few tape copies of the talk for him which I happily did on the understanding could I keep one for myself,he agreed. A fascinating man to listen to and a true gentleman I hope he and all involved get the recognition they deserve. Sadly during a house move the said tape was lost a great pity. Stu holland

Gufar
these by any chance?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysuWN2G6cPg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8ne...eature=related

Thank You Sir :)

"Freedom is not for free". Simple words that demand such a terrible price. Thank you M&M (if you'll permit me ;-). Good to see Robin Gibb at the dedication ceremony. The RAF should honour him in some way, as he has ensured that its 55,573 fallen are to be honoured at last.

In Max Hastings' book on the campaign (which is in storage so i can't refer directly) he reminds us that BDA for the raids was done using houses destroyed or acres of housing destroyed as the metric.

That, to my mind, puts paid to the line that industry was the target.

not really
they just needed an easily available metric. Houses are a constant of reasonably uniform size and distribution so easy to measure. Given that industry would be dispersed within the housing (or more accurately, housing provided the infill between factories) then using the standard house as a unit of destruction seems reasonable.
Think what the London east end was like prior to the war with the warehouses surrounded by back-to-back terraces

500N

But the motives for why the bombing was carried out play a big role in determining the justifiability/criminality/heinousness of the attack.

From what it appears, regardless of death-toll, Dresden was a far more heinous attack due to the fact that it was not done to hit targets of value, but simply to smash and burn a city down and kill lots of people. That's why Dresden has been much more of controversy than say Hamburg.


Pontius Navigator

From what it seems, that happened in Dresden...

What does pour encourager les autres mean? I don't speak French.


Chugalug2

You're just giving me numbers -- I could throw around numbers. Where are you getting your numbers from.

What goes into factoring criminality into an act isn't just the act itself, but the intention of the act. If the intention was to flatten cities and kill civilians -- then it's a war-crime. If the intention wasn't to -- it isn't. It's the same reason that manslaughter gets a lighter sentence than say premeditated murder.

The RAF's aim was to flatten cities and, uh, "de-house the working population" which was basically a pretext for attacking civilians. Of course, any time the USAAF was operating with the intention of flattening cities and killing civilians en masse -- then it would too be a war-crime.

I'm not a lawyer, but I suppose you'll probably think I have the mindset of one. Of course there's a difference in that I'm not simply out to win the argument -- I'm simply pointing out the difference in intent and result.


Pontius Navigator

I saw that number elsewhere as well, but I failed to take into account regardless that it means that half the bombs fall within that figure.


pr00ne

Yeah, it was just a mission to kill huge numbers of civilians under the idea that it would terrorize the German people into rising up against their government and replacing it with one that would end the war. That didn't happen.

In fact I'm not even sure that happened with the nuclear-bombing against Hiroshima or Nagasaki -- if I recall the government simply surrendered.

No, he was. A war-crime is a violation of international law. The Hague Conventions (1907) specifically forbid the targeting of civilians.

He basically believed that if he smashed enough cities to rubble and killed enough civilians they'd rise up in terror and in an effort to preserve themselves, would overthrow their governments and replace them with one that would terminate the conflict.

Of course, the problem was that Harris was so convinced (and one could argue deluded) that this was the way to win, that even when it didn't work -- he simply figured they next time it would.

Winston Churchill basically felt that Germany's Prussian militarism, which was around since the 1700's had to be completely uprooted. So, he was fine with Harris bombing city after city off the map.

Correct

Yeah, and there are still people who hail him as a hero.


R.C.

"At the end of the war German industrial output was still rising"
How on earth can you claim that? At the end of the war Germany was smashed.. Its industrial output was minimal - thats why we were able to beat them. They rebuilt quickly after the war, mainly due to the investments of Marshall plan
As for the rest of your diatribe, its full of rubbish
They bombed what they could using the technology available. With a very few exceptions of the Ruhr chemical and steel plants, German manufacturing was embedded within the cities with housing filling in the gaps. Most towns and cities did not have defined industrial areas - there were no separate trade or industrial zones.
To bomb the site of production you had to bomb the whole city
Theres was no middle way - you either bombed or didn't, and you took what tragets you could

As to the question about the french phrase, read the wiki page on Admiral Byng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Byng
Napoleon coined the phrase when he heard of Byng's execution for the failure to defend Minorca.. Roughly translated, what he said was "The English, they execute an Admiral every now and then to encourage the others (to fight)"

Strange that no one has mentioned the V word yet.

Correct, it's French, Google, from Voltaire Candide.

Byng, executed 1757
Candide, published 1759 ( talking about Byng)
How well did Napoleon know Voltaire? I've seen the attribution to Napoleon several times

Jane-DoH:

What a pathetic position to take. Even Nuremberg convicted on actions taken or orders given rather than announced grandiose intent. If you think that defence would have counted (not that any would have of course) in a War Crimes trial conducted by the victorious Nazis you would have been very much in error. The announced policy of the USAAF Strategic Bombing Campaign of precision bombing flew in the face of what it actually did as exampled in the figures that you query, which appear on p321 of "The Bomber Offensive" by Anthony Verrier, pub Batsford 1968. For goodness sake, what kind of precision are you going to get with all but one bomber in a group releasing their bombs after they see the lead bomber drop its? Get real about USA dropping accuracy and get real about the real world. You keep quoting the Hague Conventions of 1907 as though they restricted the conduct of war thereafter. Submarines began their operations by inviting the crews of Merchant Ships to abandon them prior to sinking by shellfire. The real world soon put paid to that nicety. WWII was indeed total, ie it directly involved the mobilisation of entire populations be they civil or military, not because Douhet or Uncle Tom Cobbley had forecast it, but because technology made it possible. That is the real world that we live in now. You asked me if I was content to live in a world faced with instant annihilation. No, of course not, but I am realistic enough to realise that unlike 1907 that is where we are now. Just because wars post WWII have been limited ones, it does not mean that we are finished with total ones. Time will tell. Let us all pray that we are spared that, but conventions certainly wont do it, only the balance of power (a pretty way of saying MAD) will. You may be sickened by the way WWII was won by us, personally I am simply sickened by war period. If it cannot be avoided, you fight hard from the start to finish it as soon as possible and do not let up until you have won. That is how Harris fought the Bombing Campaign. Supposing he had eased off in 1944, because " the war was obviously won", and Hitler had been able to get the V5 and even later vengeance weapons operational, not against the Allied Armies, or even England, but against the US East Coast cities which were their target? Would you still be sure that Harris was now right instead of condemning him for fighting to the end? To my mind that would have been the real war crime, but hey, they're your cities not mine.

Jane-Doh

Everything you are pontificating about is nothing short of one eyed blindness.

I seem to recall on the nights that we were being bombed that the Luftwaffe were intent on bombing large areas of London that included an immense amount of civilians. Then they bombed Coventry which had NO strategic value, other cities too. Civilian casualties were high but then again you weren't here were you. That was a deliberate and murderous act.

This country was the subject of a battle which we alone had to defend, it was called the Battle of Britain, have you heard of that? Daily unprovoked attacks and our RAF defended England alone. It is true that several nationalities came to our aid, including Americans, but they were still RAF.

What you appear to be doing is deliberately 'choosing' your subject for effect. Dresden for example. It was the Germans that put up figures of civilians killed as a minimum of 60k but likely to have been 100k. That was just propaganda. After the war, long after, the true number given was 26k but even then it was changed to a lower figure much later.

Then you refer to war crimes by bombing. What was Germany doing to us then? Germany committed war crimes that amounted to millions NOT thousands. Have you not thought, while you were writing about the Hague Conventions how many times a day the German 'broke the rules?' All you are doing is mixing up the numbers to suit any argument you fancy without thought, and ignoring the reality of the time.

Harris was not a war criminal, and it is stupid to say he was. For example: would you have him not do any bombing? Also a stupid thought. His thoughts of Germany reaping the 'whirlwind' was just what WE over here wanted. If you were to suffer the nighttime raids for 18 months you would not be wasting your time in trying to justify bombing. The bombing we did was in response to that we received - just as we the sufferers wanted. Oh, there were people like you around even then but they were ridiculed as you are now. By the way, Harris thought of as a hero.

Of course, we don't forget Pear Harbour, when the Americans started to get a taste of what we got - well Hawaii did. But then again the Luftwaffe didn't bomb America every night - and as matter of fact neither did the Japanese.

Then America joined the war and they bombed Germany, killings civilians, which was, put simply, just a result of war. Are you excusing the Americans too? Le May used his bombers with the intention of killing civilians, he like Harris had no other choice. So, American attacks killed thousands of civilians and that is war. Conventions are almost null and void at times as a result.

I suggest you re-think your attitude and understanding because it is clear that many on this thread think you need to - including me.

I'd argue that Coventry WAS a valid target in view of its long history of precision engineering, much of which was carried out on a cottage industry basis - see pr00ne's last post above.
However what were clearly civilian oriented terror attacks were the later so-called Baedeker raids. This alleged quote (taken from Wiki) is telling::
"The cities were reputedly selected from the German Baedeker Tourist Guide to Britain, meeting the criterion of having been awarded three stars (for their historical significance), hence the English name for the raids. Baron Gustav Braun von Stumm, a German propagandist is reported to have said on 24 April 1942 following the first attack, "We shall go out and bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide."[3]"


PS sorry about all the embedded hyperlinks but I don't have the time or patience to edit them all out
And before blaming Harris for the direction of the campaign take a look at the Wiki page regarding the Area Bombing Directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_bombing_directive
Note
"The Area Bombing Directive was a directive from the wartime British Government's Air Ministry to the Royal Air Force which ordered RAF bombers to attack the German industrial workforce and the morale of the German populace through bombing German cities and their civilian inhabitants......
" The objective of the directive was "To focus attacks on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular the industrial workers. In the case of Berlin harassing attacks to maintain fear of raids and to impose A. R. P. measures".......
"The day after the directive was issued (on 15 February), the Chief of the Air Staff Charles Portal sought clarification from the Deputy Chief of Air Staff Air Vice Marshal Norman Bottomley who had drafted it: "ref the new bombing directive: I suppose it is clear the aiming points will be the built up areas, and not, for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories where these are mentioned in Appendix A. This must be made quite clear if it is not already understood."

So there you have it Harris was not making policy, he was following direct orders from the Air Ministry

First, thank you Chugalug2 (#145), and others for your kind words.
(Chugalug, I accept your strictures with good grace).

Before I put my oar into this thread again, I had better make my locus standi
clear, otherwise you good people may ascribe an authority to me that I don't possess.

From late 42 to early 46 I was in "far away places with queer sounding names"; the European War was a long way from our daily concerns. So I know little more about the Bombing campaign than an informed civilian back home. My "ops" were relatively safe, most folk did their 60-80 sorties without a scratch. Much of my knowledge is derived from the many BC veterans who served with me post-war.

To business: the question seems to centre on the legality and morality of the area bombing policy. Oddly, only one of the Posts so far (#178 from Pontius Navigator) refers to the "Principles of War". There were ten of them, No.2 was "Maintenance of Morale", as I recall.

Churchill said: "Hitler knows he has to break us in these islands, or lose the War - he meant break our Home morale. (Hitler didn't break us, and he lost the War).

If it was vital to keep up our civilian morale, then clearly it was equally essential to destroy theirs any way we could. The only way found so far was to kill as many of their civilians as possible. Our leaflet-dropping was ineffective. They had no success with Lord Haw Haw. They couldn't invade us, we couldn't invade them (until 1944). We couldn't starve them out, they couldn't starve us out. Anyone with a better idea? It had to be mass bombing - that didn't work in practice either - on both sides, civilian morale held up till the final military collapse - but it was all we had at the time.

Of course it was official policy on both sides! How could it not be? No one made any bones about it at the time. And it fitted in nicely with our capability. Civilians live in cities, so hit the city. Most industrial units work in cities, so hit the city. Most War production takes place in the cities, so hit the city. What is the only thing big enough (in the circumstances) for our Navigators to find, and too big for our Bomb Aimers to miss - a city! It was a "no-brainer", wasn't it?

Now we come to the difficulty of the 1907 Hague Convention. What had the delegates of those days in mind? I rather think it was of bayoneting civilians one by one - the "Frightfulness" which we attributed to the Germans in Belgium in 1914. Things had moved on. We were now prisoners of our own technology, we had to do our killing wholesale. We knew about all the other international agreements to which we had committed ourselves in times of peace.

Nothing less than our survival was now at stake. We did what had to be done.


I was a bit puzzled by prOOne (#176)

Quote: "Harris.......was convinced, and made the statement many times, that strategic bombing of cities would win the war. it didn't".

True as regards Europe. But although it was not of his doing, his idea was vindicated at Hiroshima. Emperor Hirohito threw in the towel ten days later, on 15th August 1945 - much to my relief and that of thousands of others!

Danny42C

Dresden was a legitimate target. As the war closed in, it was the strategic location of Dresden along rail and road lines of communication that determined its fate.
By Feb. 2, 1945, the Russians were near Frankfurt, but Moscow’s drive now formed a bulge 400 miles long at its base with northern and southern flanks over 100 miles deep. This salient was vulnerable to flank attacks from areas still held by the German Army. Dresden was a major rail junction controlling German movement on that front.
At Yalta on Feb. 4, 1945, Gen. Alexei Antonov, Red Army chief of staff, briefed Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill on the Russian offensive and asked for US and British help. He wanted them to speed up the advance in the west, crush the Ardennes salient once and for all, and weaken German ability to shift reserves east.
The Russians wanted to begin a new phase of advance in February. To do so, Antonov wanted air forces to pin down German forces in Italy and to paralyze junctions in eastern Germany. That meant Leipzig, Berlin, and Dresden.
According to historian Fredrick Taylor, Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) Jan. 21, 1945, report put it bluntly: Germany might be able to reinforce the Eastern Front with up to 42 divisions. The JIC recommended “that any assistance which might be given to the Russians during the next few weeks by the British and American strategic bomber forces justifies an urgent review of their employment to this end.”
Thus, it was a race between Russian offensive operations and the arrival of German reinforcements. Half a million men pouring eastward was the last thing the Allies wanted. More alarming, the JIC laid out a timetable predicting the Germans could complete the reinforcements by March 1945. The JIC’s research was backed up by Enigma-code intercepts.
All told, Bomber Command dropped 1,477 tons of high-explosive bombs and 1,181 tons of incendiaries on Dresden on the night of Feb 13. Pathfinders dropping flares from 800 feet marked the targets accurately.
The tonnage was not high by Bomber Command standards. For example, Cologne, Hamburg, and Frankfurt-am-Main had all been bombed with mixes including 3,800 to 4,100 tons of incendiaries, more than triple Dresden’s totals. The total of 7,100 tons of bombs of all types dropped on Dresden during the war hardly compared to the 67,000 tons of bombs that fell on Berlin or the 44,000 tons on Cologne.
The next day, Feb. 14, 1945, 316 bombers from Eighth Air Force attacked Dresden’s marshaling yards outside the city center. The mix was 487 tons of high-explosives and 294 tons of incendiaries. Another 200 bombers of Eighth Air Force returned to hit the same target the next day.
When Dresden was bombed, the Russian salient was only 70 miles from the city. Russian positions were still vulnerable to German counterattack, and, indeed, counterattacks elsewhere on the Eastern Front cost the Russians very heavy casualties. There was no way the Allies could let the Dresden rail and communications nodes open the gates for German reinforcements.

Bob C

pr00ne

Correct

Entirely accurate.

It's just a nice way of trashing those who disagree with him.

I never knew there were Bomber Command aircrews that objected to the bombings…

Oh, and you'll be wrong…


Chugalug2

I never read that book, and until you just mentioned it, I didn't even know it existed.

No, but I can state that violations of those conventions are war-crimes…

That isn't what I said at all. If you actually read what I wrote, you'll note that I said once more accurate means of bombing and navigation came into existence they should have been used more liberally to help hit specific targets rather than to firebomb cities off the map.

There were various targets which Harris rejected as being of any value such as

• Oil-refineries
• Ball-bearing plants
• Dams

He also felt that there was no need for the D-Day landings


Surrey Towers

And we recognize these acts as being wanton acts of mass-destruction, terrorist-acts, and war-crimes. Why is that?

Wrong

Yes, I've heard of the Battle of Britain

Well, if I recall correctly the initial estimates were in the 20,000 figure, which the Germans inflated to 200,000 for propaganda purposes. Somewhere along the way there was a figure of 135,000 which I think came from the USAAF.

In the early 1980's a British author (Alexander McKee?) talked about the figures most likely being around 25,000 to 35,000, but speculated that it could easily be about twice that judging by the fact that the city had a lot of refugees in it.

We all agree that Germany committed war-crimes in it's bombing attacks on Germany -- that's obvious. We all know that.

Of course, there was the Holocaust; the Germans also systematically exterminated Russians as they plowed into the Soviet Union.

No it's not. A war-criminal is a person who violates international laws which govern the conduct of war. He violated them, therefore he's a war-criminal. Now you can argue whether his actions were necessary, but he did violate the laws.

Didn't say that

I'd like to note that the justifications are kind of shifting around all over the place.

1.) It was the only way to strike at Germany: An argument which makes the act a necessity under the circumstances.
2.) It was revenge: That's a different scenario entirely -- it's one thing to protect yourself and stop an opponent -- revenge though is about making them feel the pain and suffering and terror that you experienced.

I'll just sit back and let you spin all over the place trying to justify the act. In the U.S. we had (probably still have) a major issue with torture apologists and somebody even wrote a chart about it showing all the arguments that were made. The arguments were always made from a conclusion -- the person already had made up their mind they were right and were not interested in facts so the arguments basically formed descending denials.

It often flowed along these lines
1.) What we did was not torture
2.) Even if it was torture, it was legal
3.) Even if it was illegal, it was necessary
4.) Even if it was unnecessary, it wasn't our fault.


Danny42C

Which is a war-crime…

I can't argue with you there. The Luftwaffe did it pretty much from the get-go, the RAF did it after '42; and the United States is the first and only nation in history to drop a nuclear bomb on another country in anger.

I should note that the policy under this logic only had a 50% success rate…

Well, he did throw in the towel, but the whole idea of bombing enemies into submission didn't exactly work the way people like Douhet figured it would -- the civilians would rise-up, and overthrow their government and replace it with one who'd end the war.

That didn't happen -- Japan simply surrendered. Nuclear bombing didn't win by terrorizing the civilian population -- it won by causing so much destruction so quickly that it demoralized the enemy government into surrender. Later on it would also be used to deter other nations from war by using the fear of utter annihilation to keep the leaders of the nations in line.

There is a difference.


Robert Cooper

Maybe you should read this page, and the few pages proceeding it -- I explained why it was not a legitimate target.


R.C.