[back] Bombing of German civilians World War II

TERROR BOMBING: THE CRIME OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

by Michael Walsh

1st AUGUST 2001

"In terms of personal success, there has been no career more fortunate than that of Winston Churchill. In terms of human suffering to millions of people and destruction of the noble edifice of mankind there has been no career more disastrous." -- The European and English Journal. Source. American Manifest Destiny and the Holocausts. P.176

"The most uncivilized means of warfare that the world had known since the Mongol invasions."

February 13/14 1945: Holocaust over Dresden, known as the Florence of the North. Dresden was a hospital city for wounded soldiers. Not one military unit, not one anti-aircraft battery was deployed in the city. Together with the 600,000 refugees from Breslau, Dresden was filled with nearly 1.2 million people. Churchill had asked for "suggestions how to blaze 600,000 refugees". He wasn't interested how to target military installations 60 miles outside of Dresden. More than 700,000 phosphorus bombs were dropped on 1.2 million people. One bomb for every 2 people. The temperature in the centre of the city reached 1600o centigrade. More than 260,000 bodies and residues of bodies were counted. But those who perished in the centre of the city can't be traced. Appr. 500,000 children, women, the elderly, wounded soldiers and the animals of the zoo were murdered in one night.

This autumn the British Broadcasting Corporation will be releasing a £2 million two-part drama called ‘Night and Day’. It purports to be a true account of RAF Bomber Command’s monstrous conflagration of Europe. It will in fact be a crude one-sided attempt to launder a series of British and American war crimes equalled only by Josef Stalin and Ghenghis Khan’s grotesque ‘scorched earth’ policies which reduced eastern Europe to ashes and decimated its population.

Doubtless, the same programme makers would be able to find similar justification for the equally evil ‘hidden holocaust’. This occurred when Josef Stalin’s British equipped Red Army in 1945 turned northern Germany into a wasteland upon which was scattered the remains of four million Germans, mostly women and children. Not even animals were spared.

The BBC’s Night and Day programme will be a carefully edited ‘account’ of RAF Bomber Command’s air war against Germany; a glorification of what the eminent British war historian Captain Sir. Basil Liddell Hart declared as being "the most uncivilized means of warfare that the world had known since the Mongol invasions." (1)

‘ABSOLUTELY CONTRARY TO INTERNATIONAL LAW’
Night and Day will certainly fail to mention, as did Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, that England’s bombing policy "was absolutely contrary to international law." (2). The Prime Minister, before being ousted in a Winston Churchill coup, told a packed House of Commons in London: ‘His Majesty’s Government will never resort to the deliberate attack on women and children and other civilians for the purpose of mere terrorism.’ (3).

The slick an’ sick ‘Day and Night’ docudrama will undoubtedly trot out the usual canard summed up by Bomber Command’s Bill Reid, VC of Crieff in Perthshire who said: "In 1942 the bombing of Germany was the only way we had of hitting back." (Daily Mail, 7 February 2001). Note the key words: ‘Hitting back!’ You will hear it time after time during this programme.

This lends spurious credence to the ‘Britain at Bay’ lie that suggests that Britain had no other means of defending herself against the Nazi onslaught. It will of course fail to point out the since proven facts. All German air attacks against Britain were in retaliation against Britain’s air war. As Britain’s most illustrious historian A.J.P Taylor reminded us, it was Germany that was at bay.

Another myth peddled by the victor nation’s ‘palace journalists’ is that Germany gave as good as it got. Hardly!

During the war, more bombs by weight were dropped on the city of Berlin than were released on the whole of Great Britain during the entire war.

All German towns and cities above 50,000 population were from 50% to 80% destroyed. Dresden with a population larger than that of Liverpool was incinerated with an estimated 135,000 civilian inhabitants burned and buried in the ruins. Hamburg was totally destroyed and 70,000 civilians died in the most appalling circumstances. Cologne with a population greater than Glasgow's was turned into a moonscape. As Hamburg burned the winds feeding the three-mile high flames reached twice hurricane speed to exceed 150 miles per hour. On the outskirts of the city trees three feet in diameter were sucked from the ground by the supernatural forces of these winds and hurled miles into the city-inferno, as were vehicles, men, women and children.

VOLCANIC FLAMES 5,000 FEET HIGH
The volcanic flames ensuing were thrown five times the height of New York’s Empire State Building, with gases as high again caused meteorological reaction as high as the stratosphere. Likewise Frankfurt and scores of other cities like them. Middle Europe, the cradle of civilization, was incinerated along with its inhabitants.

Between 1940 and 1945, sixty-one German cities with a total population of 25 million souls were destroyed or devastated in a bombing campaign that was unquestionably initiated by the British government.

Destruction on this scale had no other purpose than the indiscriminate mass murder of as many German people as possible quite regardless of their civilian status. It led to bombing retaliation that result in 60,000 British dead and 86,000 injured.

Indiscriminate bombing was internationally outlawed. The Washington Treaty (1922) expressly forbade the use of bombing against civilian populations. Although not ratified by the Geneva Convention ‘it was still universally agreed that terror bombing (of civilians) would not be employed. As with all other promises they were torn up and discarded at will.

Adolf Hitler alone, a man whom Lord Rothermere said: "There is no human being living whose promise on important matters I would trust more readily", remained within international law, refusing steadfastly to repudiate it.

"BOMBING – AN ILLEGAL BARBARITY"
The German leader was resolute: "The construction of bombing airplanes would soon be abandoned as superfluous and ineffective if bombing as such were branded as an illegal barbarity. If, through the Red Cross Convention, it definitely turned out possible to prevent the killing of a defenseless wounded man or prisoner, then it ought to be equally possible, by analogous convention, and finally to stop the bombing of equally defenseless civil populations. I owe it to my position not to admit any doubt as to the possibility of maintaining peace. The people want peace. It must be possible for governments to maintain it. We believe that if the nations of the world could agree to destroy all their gas and inflammatory and explosive bombs it would be a much more useful achievement than using them to destroy each other." (4)

English warlord Winston Churchill however rejected this. "His enthusiasm for behind the lines destruction of civilian populations could be traced back to his comment: ‘The air opened paths along which death and terror could be carried far behind the lines of the actual enemy; to women, children, the aged, the sick, who in earlier struggles would perforce have been left untouched.’" (5) This alluded to England’s air war against Persian tribes’ people.

ENGLAND INITIATED TERROR BOMBING
J.M Spaight, CB, CBE, Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry (RAF) conceded that "Hitler only undertook the bombing of British civilian targets reluctantly three months after the RAF had commenced bombing German civilian targets. Hitler would have been willing at any time to stop the slaughter. Hitler was genuinely anxious to reach with Britain an agreement confining the action of aircraft to battle zones." (6)

The first breach of international law occurred very early on in England’s war against the German nation. As the noted jurist, F.J.P Veale surmised. "This raid on the night of May 11th 1940, although in itself trivial, was an epoch-marking event since it was the first deliberate breach of the fundamental rule of civilized warfare that hostilities must only be waged against the enemy’s combatant forces, Their flight marked the end of an epoch which had lasted for two and one-half centuries." (7)

Again the first 'area air attack’ of the war was carried out by 134 British bombers on the German city of Mannheim on the 16th December 1940. The object of this attack, as Air Chief Marshall Peirse later explained, was, 'to concentrate the maximum amount of damage in the center of the town.'" (8).

DELIBERATE GOADING OF GERMANY
As early as 1953 H.M Stationery Office published the first volume of a work, The Royal Air Force, 1939 - 1945, The Fight at Odds.p.122. This tome is recognized as being 'officially commissioned and based throughout on official documents. It has been read and approved by the Air Ministry Historical Branch. Its author, Dennis Richards, reveals that: "If the Royal Air Force raided the Ruhr, destroying oil plants with its most accurately placed bombs and urban property with those that went astray, the outcry for retaliation against Britain might prove too strong for the German generals to resist. Indeed, Hitler himself would probably lead the clamor. The attack on the Ruhr was therefore an informal invitation to the Luftwaffe to bomb London."

England’s Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry agreed: "We began to bomb objectives on the German mainland before the Germans began to bomb objectives on the British mainland."

He added: "Because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic bombing offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May 11 1940, the publicity it deserves." (9).

In a grim testimony to the adage that the nice guy never wins: "Air Marshall Tedder made every effort to be a worthy pupil of his warlord leader Winston Churchill. The Marshall told high British officers that Germany had lost the war because she had not followed the principle of total warfare." (10)

"Retaliation was certain if we carried the war into Germany... there was a reasonable possibility that our capital and industrial centers would not have been attacked if we had continued to refrain from attacking those of Germany," added the triumphant Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry. He went on to admit: "The primary purpose of these raids was to goad the Germans into undertaking reprisal raids of a similar character on Britain. Such raids would arouse intense indignation in Britain against Germany and so create a war psychosis without which it would be impossible to carry on a modern war." (11)

GLOATING THAT THE ENGLISH PEOPLE WERE LIED TO
In his groundbreaking analysis of England’s bombing war, F.J.P Veale summed up. "It is one of the greatest triumphs of modern emotional engineering that, in spite of the plain facts of the case which could never be disguised or even materially distorted, the British public, throughout the Blitz Period (1940 1941) remained convinced that the entire responsibility for their sufferings it was undergoing rested on the German leaders. Too high praise cannot, therefore, be lavished on the British emotional engineers for the infinite skill with which the public mind was conditioned prior to and during a period of unparalleled strain." He added: "The inhabitants of Coventry, for example, continued to imagine that their sufferings were due to the innate villainy of Adolf Hitler without a suspicion that a decision, splendid or otherwise, of the British War Cabinet, was the decisive factor in the case." (12).

WORKING CLASS TARGETED FOR HIGH KILL RATIOS
As the air war against National Socialist Europe developed the civilian populations of Germany, Austria, Hungary and other European cities and towns, were increasingly targeted as a means of causing maximum bloodshed and instilling outright terror. This began on 11 March 1942 with the adoption of the Lindemann Plan by the British War Cabinet.

This genocidal policy continued with undiminished ferocity until the end of the war in May 1945. "The bombing during this period was not as the Germans complained indiscriminate. On the contrary it was concentrated on working class houses because, as Churchill’s Jewish key advisor, Professor Frederick Lindemann maintained, a higher percentage of bloodshed per ton of explosives dropped could be expected from bombing houses built close together, rather than by bombing higher class houses surrounded by gardens." (13)

"I am in full agreement (of terror bombing)." added Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary for Air (RAF). "I am all for the bombing of working class areas in German cities. I am a Cromwellian - I believe in 'slaying in the name of the Lord."

WOMEN AND CHILDREN TO BE SLAUGHTERED FIRST
"They, the British Air Chiefs drawn almost exclusively from the English upper class public school system, argued that the desired result, of reducing German industrial production, would be more readily achieved if the homes of the workers in the factories were destroyed. If the workers were kept busy arranging for the burial of their wives and children, output might reasonably be expected to fall." (14)

Even Churchill, hardly renowned for timidity in war blanched and thought twice. "It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed." (15)

"In the course of the film showing the bombing of German towns from the air, very well and dramatically done, W.C (Winston Churchill) suddenly sat bolt upright and said to me: 'Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?'" (16)

AN RAF AIRCREW MEMBER CONFESSES
"On 13th February 1945 I was a navigator on one of the Lancaster bombers which devastated Dresden. I well remember the briefing by our Group Captain. We were told that the Red Army was thrusting towards Dresden and that the town would be crowded with refugees and that the center of the town would be full of women and children. Our aiming point would be the market place.

I recall that we were somewhat uneasy, but we did as we were told. We accordingly bombed the target and on our way back our wireless operator picked up a German broadcast accusing the RAF of terror tactics, and that 65,000 civilians had died. We dismissed this as German propaganda.

The penny didn't drop until a few weeks later when my squadron received a visit from the Crown Film Unit who were making the wartime propaganda films. There was a mock briefing, with one notable difference. The same Group Captain now said, 'as the market place would be filled with women and children on no account would we bomb the center of the town. Instead, our aiming point would be a vital railway junction to the east.

I can categorically confirm that the Dresden raid was a black mark on Britain's war record. The aircrews on my squadron were convinced that this wicked act was not instigated by our much-respected guvnor 'Butch' Harris but by Churchill. I have waited 29 years to say this, and it still worries me." (17)

COWARDS ATTACKED DEFENSELESS TARGETS
Nobody knows for sure just how many people innocent civilians were bombed and burned to death in Dresden. What is beyond dispute was that its destruction was of no military significance whatsoever. It did not shorten the war by as much as a minute, nor was it intended to. The war by February 1945 was to all intents and purposes won. The city itself had no military, political or industrial significance. The British Government was well aware that Dresden and indeed all other German cities were defenseless. Its 600,000 population was swollen by an estimated further 500,000 refugees fleeing from the Red Army.

One waits with anticipation to see how the BBC’s ‘Night and Day’ will excuse the incineration of Dresden where the strafing of columns of refugees by both American and British fighter planes was par for the blood crazed course. In Dresden, "Even the huddled remnants of a children’s' choir were machine-gunned in a street bordering a park." observed historian David Irving.

The British Press for the large part described the needless massacre of tens of thousands of refugees as ‘an unexpected and fortunate bonus.’ (18)

THE FIRESTORM OF HAMBURG
Whilst Dresden and occasionally Hamburg are referred to in regard to what became known as ‘saturation bombing’, never to be forgotten or forgiven are the sixty-one German cities, scores of towns and indeed other towns and cities across Europe devastated by allied bombing attacks. Germany was not by any means alone in suffering from allied air attacks; it is a little known fact that allied air attacks on France alone resulted in far more deaths and injuries than from German attacks. Sisley Huddleston was scathing: ""One town I know (in Normandy) had 2,000 inhabitants killed or wounded out of a population of 5,000, and hardly a house was left standing." – Petain, Patriot or Traitor, Dakers, p.202.

It is a grim fact that British soldiers, occupying France after the Germans had been driven out, unlike the German troops, were confined to barracks for their own safety.

Let the maritime city of Hamburg then speak for all of those who perished beneath the wings of Bomber Command. The story of Hamburg illustrates the full horror of the cowardly English-inspired air war that the British Broadcasting Corporation with equal infamy today seeks to whitewash.

The Police President of Hamburg spoke after the initial bombing raids: "Its horror is revealed in the howling and raging of the firestorms, the hellish noise of exploding bombs and the death cries of martyred human beings as well as the big silence after the raids. Speech is impotent to portray the measure of the horror, which shook the people for ten days and nights and the traces of which were written indelibly on the face of the city and its inhabitants.

GRUESOME SCENES OF HORROR
No flight of imagination will ever succeed in measuring and describing the gruesome scenes of horror in the many buried air shelters. Posterity can only bow its head in honour of the fate of these innocents, sacrificed by the murderous lust of a sadistic enemy...."

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan’s only two Christian cities come first to mind when one considers total incineration from the air but the destruction of those great cities, along with their inhabitants, pale into relative insignificance when compared with the greater and more sustained destruction of middle Europe’s great cities. American Martin Caidin, one of the world’s foremost experts on the effects of bombing said, "Neither Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffering from the smashing blows of nuclear explosions could match the utter hell of Hamburg." (See end notes on Martin Caidin).

Coventry of course is always thrown up when apologists seek to justify the saturation bombing of European cities. Notwithstanding the fact that it has since been proved that the bombing of Coventry, like the sinking of the Lusitania, was deliberately set up as 'a means to an end', it might be remembered in terms of proportion that Coventry lost 100 acres through bombing. In just ten terrible days in the summer of 1943 British bombers gutted more than six thousand acres of Hamburg.

During the entire course of the war a little over 300 people in Coventry lost their lives. In just ten days an estimated 70,000 citizens of Hamburg were killed.

Martin Caidin was furious at the wanton loss of life: "The fire and horror lasted ten full days. This is what makes Hamburg - and the loss of some seventy thousand men, women and children - stand out as the worst of the disasters visited upon civilization during the insanity of World War 2."

THE CHILDREN
"Of the children these dreadful nights, what can be said? Their fright became horror and then panic when their tiny minds became capable of grasping the fact that their parents could no longer help them in their distress. They lost their reason and an overwhelming terror took over. Their world had become the shrieking center of an erupting volcano from which there could be no physical escape. Nothing that hell offered could be feared more.

By the hand of man they became creatures, human in form but not in mind. Strangled noises hissed from them as they staggered pitifully through the streets in which tar and asphalt ran as streams. Some of these tiny creatures ran several hundred feet. Others managed only twenty, maybe ten feet. Their shoes caught fire and then their feet. The lower parts of their legs became flickering sticks of flame. Here were Joans of Arcs, thousands of them. All who had perished unjustly on the fires of the Middle Ages were as nothing when compared with what was happening that night.

The sounds of many were unintelligible and undoubtedly many more called for their parents from whom they were parted by death or by accident. They grasped their tortured limbs, their tiny burning legs until they were no longer able to stand or run. And then they would crash to the ground where they would writhe in the bubbling tar until death released them from their physical misery." Such was the description provided by Martin Caidin.

A FLIGHT CREW MEMBER REMINISCES
"It was murder in the city. I knew that the firestorms that came later were terrible, and unlike anything that ever happened. But the fires in the city were as bad as anything I'd ever seen in the war so far - and I had been on a goodly portion of the major attacks.
    A few of the Lancs (Lancaster bombers of Bomber Command) got caught in the flue of superheated air as they passed over the city at 16,000 feet, and it was as if they were nothing more than wood chips in a storm at sea. They were thrown about by the heat and even flipped over on their backs. Everything sort of went to hell until the Lancs managed to get free of the severe turbulence. We howled with glee as we listened in on the Jerry wireless and heard them going crazy," admitted a pilot of RAF Bomber Command.

PHOSPHOROUS - THE OUTLAWED TERROR WEAPON
The use of phosphorous bombs, by the British government on raids against Germany, was outlawed under international law because its use has no other purpose than to strike terror in its means of causing death and injury. It is a napalm-like chemical which when alight cannot be extinguished:

America’s Life Magazine (19 June 1944) described its effects: "The shower of molten burning particles that sprays up from a phosphorous shell burst sears its victims with agonized burns. Used against pill boxes, the flame not only burns occupants, but also suffocates them."

One again assumes that Britain’s premier broadcasting network will drop all reference to the use of phosphorous just as indiscriminately.

The exploding phosphorous bombs sprayed their contents indiscriminately and clothing caught fire and had to be torn free from the body quickly otherwise the wearer would suffer terrible nightmarish burns. When the liquid splattered on to people’s hair, the victim was doomed. There was no chance to cut off the hair. The chemical globules, like a burning jelly, burned fiercely setting aflame the entire head and indeed, the head itself burned.

EVEN THE MYTHICAL GAS CHAMBERS WOULD HAVE BEEN PREFERABLE
These terrified and pain-wracked people were seen to leap about in a frenzy, dashing their heads against the ground in blind panic - anything to douse the flames.

One can extinguish an ordinary fire by smothering it with clothes but such methods are useless against phosphorous. It continued to burn and set afire any material that was thrown over it. Such people in these circumstances could only be left to their sad fate amidst the terrifying background glow of the streets in flames.

They writhed in the rubble-strewn roads with their bodies partially ablaze. Others were nearer to the River Alster and dozens of these shrieking demented souls, trailing tongues of flaming smoke and fire, dashed madly to the water to fling themselves into the lifesaving liquid. Men, women and children too, ran hysterically, falling and stumbling, getting up, tripping and falling again, rolling over and over. Most of them managed to regain their feet and made it to the water. But many of them never made it and were left behind, their feet drumming in blinding pain on the overheated pavements amidst the rubble, until there came one last convulsing shudder from the smoking 'thing' on the ground, and then no further movement.

THE GRIMMEST DEATH CHOICE
Those who made it to the water found the safety they had sought so desperately - but incredibly, some faced a choice that stuns the mind with horror. Water prevents phosphorous jelly from burning because it denies the chemical the one thing it needs to burn; oxygen. Those with the blazing chemical on their arms, legs and their bodies were able to douse the flames by submerging the burning areas. But many had the blazing phosphorous jelly on their faces and heads. Certainly the spluttering chemicals went out as the victims ducked their heads beneath the water, but the moment they brought their heads up again to break the surface and take a breath of air, the phosphorous burst into flames again immediately. And so the victims were faced with the choice. Death by drowning or death by burning; men, women and children. While others watched sick and despairingly, the victims of phosphorous on faces and heads thrashed wildly in the brackish waters, screaming with pain and frustration. Spluttering and choking, they alternatively burned or drowned.

The American scientist and expert Martin Caidin spent many years trying to get details on the use of phosphorous by both the allies, and in his own words he has 'met with less than the success required by the historian to include the episode in a documentary book.' He noted:

"Perhaps the solution to the total absence of any reference in official (post war) German documents is explained in the story told to me by a U.S. Army officer, who learned that portions of the documents on the after effects of the Hamburg attacks were ordered to be destroyed, and that all reference to the surviving victims of phosphorous bombs stricken forever from the records."

A copy of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey does however concede that "Phosphorous burns were not infrequent." An a ‘British source’ (The Night Hamburg Died, Martin Caidin) added: "Phosphorous was used "because of its demonstrated ability to depress the morale of the Germans."

GENOCIDE FROM THE AIR
The distinguished American journalist Henry T. Gorrell gave a searing account of the storm of fire unleashed upon beleaguered German countryside:

"A cataclysmic blast of exploding, splintering steel rent the earth before us and it seemed like the world was coming to an end. The Americans were blasting out a path for a forward drive. Man and beast shuddered in their tracks. Whole towns were disintegrating. Life seemed to disappear from the scene. It was the most terrifying destructive force of warfare Germany has ever seen.
".... and for an hour and a half more than 2,000 bombers and hundreds of guns pounded the German countryside, making the earth dance before this mighty man-made force... minefields went up as though touched by an electric switch. Near the end we were using 11-tonners (bombs) which crews said caused their bombers to bounce up over 500 feet when the huge 25-foot missiles were released," reported the Chicago Daily News on November17th1944.

United States General Bradley gloated to the Associated Press over a month after the war’s end: (June 11 1945) "I can tell you that Germany has been destroyed utterly and completely." The notoriously evil German-hating General Dwight D. Eisenhower in the same review observed smugly, "I just wouldn't know where to begin to rebuild Berlin."

Eddie Gilmore of the Associated Press based in Berlin on June 9 1945 said: "The capital of the Third Reich is a heap of gaunt, burned-out, flame-seared buildings. It is a desert of a hundred thousand dunes made up of brick and powdered masonry. Over this hangs the pungent stench of death. It is impossible to exaggerate in describing the destruction. Down town Berlin look as like nothing man could have contrived. Driving down the famous Frankfurt Alee, I did not see a single building where you could have set up as business of even selling apples."

CHURCHILL’S JEW GIVES A SURPRISING ANALYSIS
Professor Frederick Lindemann, the Chief Advisor to Winston Churchill and the inspiration and architect of the air crucifixion of Germany was in a reflective mood after the war.

"Towards the end of his life the Prof.' (Lindemann) made a remark on more than one occasion with such an air of seriousness that he seemed to regard it as his testament of wisdom, and I accordingly feel it incumbent upon me to record it here, although not in perfect sympathy with it.

'Do you know,' he asked, 'what the future historians will regard as the most important event of this age?"' Well, what is it? 'It will not be Hitler and the Second World War, it will not be the release of nuclear energy, it will not be the menace of Communism.' These negatives seemed very comprehensive. He put on an expression of extreme severity and turned down the corners of his lips. 'It will be the abdication of the White man.' Then he nodded his head up and down several times to drive home his proposition." (19)

GERMAN AND BRITISH LOSSES
The RAF and USAF terror bombing offensive cost not only the lives of over a million German civilians and brought about the total destruction of many of Europe's finest and most historical cities. For Britain alone it also cost the lives of 58,888 RAF aircrew, nearly the same number of British junior officers during the First World War. The great irony of this historical blunder is that it had the opposite effect. German morale rose, as did production.

"This lesson was lost on the British Air Force," admitted British General J.F.C Fuller, "which continued to hold that 'strategic bombing' was the all and end all of air power. This fallacy not only prolonged the war, but went far to render the 'peace' which followed it unprofitable to Britain and disastrous to the world in general."

He afterwards surmised: "In effect, there is no doubt that in ordering the destruction of large enemy cities, which represented an important part of the very basis of European culture and civilisation, the Allied political leaders have incurred a dire responsibility before the bar of history." (20)

WORLD CONDEMNATION
Condemnation of England’s (and America’s) bombing strategy straddled the world. Major General H. Bratt, Royal Swedish Army said, "Even the senseless and highly culture-destroying terror acts, against for example, Lubeck and Dresden, carried out by the Allied pilots, should have been investigated and brought before a proper court of justice." (21)

Hon. Lydio Machado Bandeira de Mello, Dr. Juris. Brazilian Professor of Criminal Law; author of more than 40 works on law/philosophy spoke for thousands of world figures.

"A nation which spreads over another a sheet of inevitably deadly gases or eradicates entire cities from the earth by the explosion of atomic bombs, does not have the right to judge anyone for war crimes; it has already committed the greatest atrocity, equal to no other atrocity; it has killed - amidst unspeakable torments - hundreds of thousands of innocent people."
"As for crimes against humanity, those governments which ordered the destruction of German cities, thereby destroying irreplaceable cultural values and making burning torches out of women and children, should also have stood before the bar of justice," added Hon Jaan Lattik, the Estonian statesman, diplomat and historian. (22)

THE WORK OF ‘SAVAGES’ SAYS U.S. EXPERT DEATH TOLL PUT AT TWO MILLION
"It was the indiscriminate bombing of civilians by the so-called strategic air forces during the Second World War which culminated in the destruction of Dresden (a wholly non-military objective) in February, 1945, that completely pulverized the code of civilized warfare and returned the treatment of military opponents and civilians to the level of the primary warfare that had prevailed among the savages, the Assyrians, and the medieval Mongols. On the basis of the most authoritative British sources, Mr. Veale demonstrates clearly that it was the British and not the Nazis who introduced indiscriminate strategic bombing, despite the efforts of Hitler to avert this reversion to barbaric practices." (23)

America’s leading revisionist went on to say: "There are no final figures on the number of civilians killed as a result of the mass-bombing, but 2,000,000 would be a very restrained figure (estimate)."

"Kassel suffered over 300 air raids, some carrying waves of 1,000 bombers; British by night, American by day. When on April 4th 1945, the city surrendered, of a population of 250,000, just 15,000 were left alive," reported Jack Bell, Chicago Daily News Foreign Service, Kassel. (May 15th 1946).

Douglas Botting the writer and journalist agreed. "Countless smaller towns and villages had been razed to the ground or turned into ghost towns - like Wiener Neustadt in Austria, which emerged from the air raids and the street fighting with only eighteen houses intact and its population reduced from 45,000 to 860." (24)

THE REAL HEROES
"One closes these volumes feeling, uneasily, that the true heroes of the story they tell are neither the contending air marshals, nor even the 58,888 officers and men of Bomber Command who were killed in action. They were the inhabitants of the German cities under attack; the men, women and children who stoically endured and worked on among the flaming ruins of their homes and factories, up till the moment when the allied armies overran them."

- London Times reviewer on the British Official History of the Strategic Air Offensive.

EVEN THE APOLOGISTS FEEL SHAME
The following comment is made by Dr. Christopher C. Harmon, former Foreign Policy Advisor to a member of the House Armed Services Committee who served since 1988 as an associate professor of strategy at the Naval War College. As a notorious apologist for Churchill’s policy of ‘area bombing’ Europe his conclusion carries even greater weight than that of the critics of allied bombing policy:

"The end-of-war review of the strategic air campaign by the British Bombing Survey Unit makes no mention of Dresden, later the ‘bloody shirt’ waved by critics who thought the strategy a national shame. Nor is there any reference to questions of the legitimacy of the strategy used since 1942, which so contravened the customs of war.
A sense of national embarrassment about the dark side of a ‘virtuous war’ may be the explanation for the British Bombing Survey Unit’s silence. Such a sentiment may account for the disdain in which ‘Bomber Harris’ was sometimes later held. Perhaps it even explains the near silence about area bombing in the six-volume war history by Winston Churchill."

– Are We Beasts? Churchill and the Moral Question of World War 11 ‘Area Bombing’ Christopher C. Harmon, Naval War College Newport, Rhode Island. USA

IN REMEMBRANCE OF OTHER SILENCED CITIES
Berlin, Hamburg, Dortmund, Essen, Dresden, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Dusseldorf, Hanover, Bremen, Wuppertal, Vienna, Duisburg. Munich, Magdeburg, Leipzig, Mannheim, Stuttgart, Kiel, Gelsdenkirchen, Bochum, Aachen, Wurzburg, Darmstadt, Krefeld, Munster, Munchen Gladbach,, Braunschweig, Ludwishafen, Remscheid, Pforzheim, Osnabruck, Mainz, Bielefeld, Gieben, Duren, Solingen, Wilhelmshafen, Karlsruhe, Oberhausen, Heilbronn, Augsburg, Hamm, Knittelfeld, Luneburg, Cuxhaven, Kulmback, Hagen, Saarbrucken, Freiburg, Graz, Koblenz, Ulm, Bonn, Bremmenhaven, Wanne-Eickel, Woms, Lubeck, Schweinfurt, Kleve, Wiener Neustadt, Wiesbaden, Paderborn, Bocholt, Hanau, Hildesheim, Emden, Siegen, Pirmasons, Hale, Bayreuth, Kreuznach, Witten, Aschaffenburg, Kaiserlautern, Gladbeck, Dorsten, Innsbruck, Neumunster, Linz, Klagenfurt, Reutlingen, Recklinghausen, Reuel, Regensburg, Homberg, Elmshorn, Wetzler, Vilach, Hamelin, Konigsburg, Moers, Passau, Solbad Hall I.T, Coburg, Attnang-Puchheim, Friedsrichhafen, Frankfurt-Oder, Danzig, Bozen, Chemnitz, Rostock, Schwerte, Plauen, Rome, Bad Kreuznach, Neapel, Genoa, Mailand, Turin. Also many Norwegian, Danish, Belgian, Dutch, French, Hungarian, Romanian and other countries cities.

Note: Martin Caidin, heavily quoted in 'A Most Uncivilised Means of Warfare' is one of the world's leading authorities on military-science subjects, with a world-wide reputation as an expert in fields that cover military and civilian aviation, rockets and missiles, astronautics, and the effects of conventional and nuclear weapons.
He is a foremost authority on atomic warfare and his research findings are referred to throughout the world. Positions held include Atomic Warfare Specialist, N.Y. State Civil Defence Commission, Intelligence and Public Information, U.S. 5th Air Force, Consultant to the Commander of the U.S. Air Force Missile Test Center. He is the author of over 20 books, has worked at Cape Canaveral and Patrick Air Force Base, and is the winner of the James J. Strebig Memorial Trophy, awarded by the Aviation Writers Association.

Index

1. B. Liddell Hart. The Evolution of Warfare. Baber & Faber, 1946, p.75
2. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.
3. 14th September 1939, Neville Chamberlain, House of Commons
4. Advance to Barbarism, F.J.P Veale. Mitre Press, London.
5. The Great War. Vol.3 P1602
6. Bombing Vindicated, p.47.,
7. F.J.P Veale, Advance to Barbarism, p.172
8. The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany. (H.M Stationery Office, London, 1961.
9. Bombing Vindicated. J.M. Spaight, CB., CBE., Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry
10. New York Times, January 10th 1946
11. Dennis Richards, The Royal Air Force, 1939 - 1945; The Fight at Odds. H.M Stationery Office
12. Advance to Barbarism, P.168. Mitre Press, London. F.J.P Veale, British Jurist
13. Advance to Barbarism, F.J.P Veale, British Author and Jurist
14. Advance to Barbarism, F.J.P Veale, British Author and Jurist
15. Winston Churchill to Chief of Air Staff, Sir. Charles Portal, March 28th1945
16. Personal Experiences, Lord Casey. Constable. London, 1962
17. A. Williams, Nottingham; The Observer, August,8th,1984
18. Unconditional Hatred, Captain Russell Grenfell, Royal Navy. Devin-Adair Company, N.Y. 1958
19. ‘The Prof’.R.F Harrod, McMillan, 1959. Page 261/2. A biography of F.A Lindemann (Lord Cherwell), Chief Scientific Advisor to Winston Churchill.
20. General J.F.C Fuller, The Second World War, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1948
21. Doenitz at Nuremberg: A Reappraisal. Amber Publishing Co. N.Y
22. Doenitz at Nuremberg: A Reappraisal. Amber Publishing Co. N.Y
23. Professor Harry Elmer Barnes, Ph.D. American historian

Bibliography
Advance to Barbarism, F.J.P Veale. Mitre Press, London.
The Night Hamburg Died. Martin Caidin. Ballantine Books, New York. 1960.
Doenitz at Nuremberg: A Reappraisal. Amber Publishing Co. N.Y
Unconditional Hatred, Captain Russell Grenfell, R.N. Davin-Adair Company, N.Y. 1958.
For Those Who Cannot Speak, Michael McLaughlin. Historcal Review Press, Brighton, UK
Death of a City, Michael McLaughlin. Historcal Review Press, Brighton, UK
History of the Second World War, Captain B.H Liddell Hart, Cassell, London.

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