Comments on: Dresden, 60 years on

By: theorajones

theorajones — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 00:46:32 +0000

What I find interesting is that the Germans did not paint themselves as victims after these bombings. Certainly, they could have made a case. But they did not appear to seriously try. Perhaps such talk was unacceptable, because they had just lived through the society that results when you see yourselves as the victim of historic wrongs, and do not consider the objective morality of your actions but instead justify “anything goes” in pre-emptive strikes or revenge against your enemies. Nazism was born out of a sense of persecuted and aggreived victimhood, and I can see how Germans of that era would be wary of induging in that particular vice twice. Also, do you think the Geneva conventions came about simply because people were horrified by what the Germans had done? They were horrified by what THEY had done. Of course the other guys were more evil. But the mark of civilization is first admitting that even though the other guys were eviler, you were pretty evil too; and second, attemting to set up some sort of institutional barrier against such actions in the future (obviously, without sacrificing your legitimate need for self-protection). So, kindly spare us all the little justifications as to why one horror or another was acceptable. They simply aren’t. They may have been necessary, but that doesn’t make them any less a horror, or make the human suffering they caused any more acceptable. Once should never look upon Dresden or Hiroshima and walk away with a sense of moral justification. Down that path lies far, far worse than Abu Ghraib.

By: Jim

Jim — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 04:03:34 +0000

BadJim writes: “Dropping the bomb on Hiroshima may well have shortened the war, but if, as I believe I’ve read, negotiations were already underway for a cessation of hostilities, with the status of the emperor being a sticking point, there might have been other routes to the same end.” It has been a few years since I last read “Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire” (by Richard B. Frank), but my recollection is that Frank examines records of the discussions at the highest levels of Japan’s wartime government, as well as the Japanese diplomatic communications that the US had intercepted and decrypted. From these he concludes that the handful of (mostly) military officers running Japan had no interest in negotiating peace from a position of Japanese weakness. Instead, Japan’s strategy was to let the US invade and then inflict as much carnage as possible upon the invading armies to force the US to negotiate a peace that left the warmongers in charge in Japan. In other words, the sticking point was not the status of the emperor, but the desire of Japanese leaders to retain at least the status quo ante bellum. The US military made several estimates of the expected casualties from an invasion. The low was of order 50,000 (K/W/M) the high was of order 200,000 (K/W/M). Historically, Japanese casualties were several times those of the US in the PTO, with a larger fraction of Japanese KIA. In addition, in Aug. ‘45 the US was set to start targeted bombing of the Japanese transportation infrastructure. The Japanese were projecting very low harvests that year (of order 1400 calories per person per day). As it was, only US food stocks and US transport stave of widespread hunger in the winter of ‘45-’46. Had the war continued, the added disruption of Japan’s rail / road / sea routes would have made famine in the cites quite likely. Finally, it is estimated that of order 100,000 to 200,000 civilians were dying each month in Japanese occupied territories because of the occupation. These deaths would continue at least as long as the hostilities with Japan. These factors, in aggregate, to me, are sufficient to justify the atomic attacks.

By: David

David — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 03:55:53 +0000

Live by the sword, die by the sword. There is no ambiguity in this, moral or otherwise. If you didn’t want your cities bombed, then you shouldn’t have bombed ours. You brought this upon yourselves. Simple. Now I realise this reasoning may not appeal to the more intellectually inclined amongst you, but it is how most of us feel. It therefore has a genuine resonance that your moralistic musings lack. “From now on we shall bomb Germany on an ever-increasing scale, month by month, year by year, until the Nazi regime has either been exterminated by us or—better still—torn to pieces by the German people themselves.” Churchill. Payback, as ever, is a bitch.

By: Bob B

Bob B — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 22:02:05 +0000

Even in the last year or so of the war, there were debates, at least among the upper echelons of the war establishment in Britain, about not just the morality of wide area bombing of Germany but about whether the priority accorded to it made good strategic and economic sense in the context of other alternatives. Churchill expressed his reservations in writing but the strategic commitment continued nonetheless. Harris’s fixation with area bombing prevailed. That it did despite the widely expressed reservations is hugely significant. The triumph of the will? Vested interests in making heavy bombers? Surely not implacable clamour from heavy bomber crews who had to withstand the high casualty rate?

By: Jussi

Jussi — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 20:28:22 +0000

Detlef, “How were the Nazis going to transfer a meaningful number of troops with their equipment from Norway to Berlin or Dresden?” They weren’t, at least not many. Quite apart from the logistic difficulties you point out, a lot of the “Norwegian” resources were still engaged, fighting against the Finns.

By: david g

david g — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 16:38:01 +0000

sorry about the double post; I got an “error – page not found” message on the first try.

By: david g

david g — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 16:34:12 +0000

Alfred Coppel wrote an alternate history of the end of the war with Japan about 20 years ago called, I think, “The Burning Mountain”. In this book, the original bomb test in New Mexico fails, so the U.S. has to begin invading the Japanese Home Islands. Nine months and over a million more dead Americans and Japanese later, a new a-bomb test succeeds. Truman decides to use the bomb on Japan, since obviously the Japs aren’t giving up, and final victory would be infinitely more bloody. In the final scene, a Japanese fighter pilot just fails to shoot down the Superfortress carrying the bomb to Hiroshima, because his fuel runs out. He plunges to his death thinking “How beautiful is the land of Yamato, and how tragic.” Dresden was the ultimate “shock and awe” raid, and it’s easy 60 years later to condemn it and much of the whole anti-civilian RAF Bomber Offensive as immoral or a violation of just war principles. I have read horrendous, heart-rending testimonies from the summer 43 Hamburg raids; they, and many others, were as bad as Dresden. The RAF dropped over 20 times as much explosive on Germany as the Luftwaffe (which never acquired 4-engine bombers) did on Britain. Still, there was a war on. It is not easy to sit today and say, I would never have approved that raid, or, Churchill and Harris shouldn’t have ordered it. They wanted to destroy Germany (and not, of course, to save victims of Nazi rule, that is another ex post rationalization), and they did. They were not squeamish about the means. It’s anachronistic and ahistorical to apply simple blanket judgments so many years later. “Should” and “shouldn’t” are moral, not historical, categories. Best just to understand what happened, which was a tragedy.

By: david g

david g — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 16:33:40 +0000

By: Bob B

Bob B — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 11:19:15 +0000

This and much else on the web page provides illuminating perspectives on the fanatical obsession with “area bombing” of Bomber Harris, head of the RAF’s Bomber Command from 1942 on. ” . . A corollary of the Trenchard Bomber Doctrine was that defense was useless because, as Stanley Baldwin reminded Parliament in 1932, ‘the bomber will always get through.’ Although the British devoted few funds to research and development for the RAF during the inter-war period, the government was shocked when the C-in-C of Bomber Command, Sir Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt, informed his superiors in July 1939 that their front-line bombers had been made obsolete by the development of monoplane fighters armed with cannons and machineguns. British bombers lacked speed, adequate defensive armament, bombs large enough to sufficiently damage targets, and navigation equipment to enable planes to locate targets hundreds of miles away. After the outbreak of hostilities it was discovered that British bombers tended to burn easily when attacked by enemy aircraft. . .” – at: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v01/v01p247_Lutton.html The Mosquito was one of the most astonishing new bombers to emerge as a result of that bleak assessment shortly before the outbreak of WW2: http://www.aviation-history.com/dehavilland/mosquito.html http://www.aviation-central.com/1940-1945/aeg70.htm http://hsfeatures.com/mosquitoprototypesb_1.htm Various sources report that even during the war it was recognised that the Mosquito, although a light, twin-engined bomber with a crew of only two, was significantly more accurate than the heavy bombers and suffered a lower casualty rate on missions. Nevertheless, Harris remained fixated on use of heavy bombers committed to “area bombing” at night because heavy bombers were so inaccurate – a sort of classic variation on: Catch 22 – and that despite the high casualty rates of RAF bomber aircrews and the economic costs to Britain’s war economy of making heavy bombers rather than the light Mosquitos, made mainly of wood!

By: Thomas Palm

Thomas Palm — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 09:51:06 +0000

Both Jet and Jean Lepley seems to think that Brittish bombing of Germany started as a response to the Blitz, but it didn’t. Churchill ordered the first bombing attacks on German railway stations and similar targets May 11th 1940, which given the inaccurace of bombs meant civilians were killed too. June 20th the targets were extended to any industrial target, including the housing for the workers. This was still several months before the Blitz started. The ruthlessness of the Brittish bombing campaign wasn’t surprising. They had learned everything about terror bombing in India, Iraq and other colonies where it was routine to destroy villages of rebelling natives from the air. It was in India Harris developed the perfect mix of explosive and incendiary bombs to maximize damage.

By: Sandals

Sandals — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 08:57:04 +0000

if one is to draw any precedent from the Nuremburg trials, the aircrews certainly could be considered culpable. That simply does not jive with the lack of prosecutions of german Blitz aircrews. The precedent re: Nuremburg is that it is not prosecutable as a war crime, not that it is.

By: D ave F

D ave F — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 08:45:14 +0000

if one is to draw any precedent from the Nuremburg trials, the aircrews certainly could be considered culpable. In addition, it was dubious even then that area bombing of concentrations of civilians – later to become a defined offence under the Geneva conventions—constituted legal prosecution of war. Obeying an illegal order is no defence. The difference between Dresden and the camps is the matter of genocide, of course. But that should not weaken the principle of legality.

By: Sandals

Sandals — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 01:11:43 +0000

Detlef; Doubtless both motivations were present. This Wikipedia article documents the military reasoning of the Allied commanders rather extensively with quotes and supporting material.

By: Jean Lepley

Jean Lepley — Sun, 13 Feb 2005 22:59:02 +0000

Sorry about that garbled first sentence—it should have read “in his book Disturbing the Universe, physicist Freeman Dyson put . . .

By: Jean Lepley

Jean Lepley — Sun, 13 Feb 2005 22:48:49 +0000

Some years ago, in his physicist Freeman Dyson put “strategic bombing” (including the atom bomb) in a prespective that made compelling sense to me. As one closely involved in the program, he saw it as a political necessity —what else could any British PM have done, with Londoners under nightly attack?—but a strategic failure, nonetheless (with mounting loss of crews and planes.) A terrible time…